Rajská Zahrada => Černý Most

It’s no Garden of Eden, and there are no tomatoes – at least not as far as I can see. The station is nautically themed: a blue and white colour scheme, portholes, a ventilation shaft built to resemble the bridge on a ship and rust.

All around beyond the licorice assortment styled paneláks, the vegetation is a dry autumnal brown. The colour reminds me of summers back home.

A couple of years back I wrote a poem based on the station’s ambiguous name. It was influenced by the poetry of Karel Plíhal. Plíhal’s poems are concise and often based around witty homophonic pairings. My attempt doesn’t exactly employ this technique, but I took inspiration from his approach. Here it is, my first poem in Czech:

Rajská zahrada
Byl jsem na Rajské zahradě.
Eva nedala Adamovi rajče.

In English it doesn’t work so well:

The Garden of Eden
I was in the Garden of Eden.
Eve didn’t give Adam a tomato.

The ambiguity arises from the fact that the word ‘rajský’ can be the adjective for both ‘paradise / Eden’ or ‘tomato’. ‘Rajksá zahrada’ is ‘Garden of Eden’ and ‘rajská polevka’ is ‘tomato soup’. Another amusingly ambiguous adjective is ‘masový’. It can mean ‘meat’ as in ‘masová koule’ (meat ball) or ‘mass’ as in ‘masový vrah‘ (mass murderer).

I circle the tiny block where the station is locate. I had a sleepless night last night. Maybe this is influencing my perceptions but I find little of interest. There is nowhere to sit and few people to watch. The train tunnel snakes from the station. On the top is a footpath. I decide to follow it to Černý Most to at least keep awake.

The path takes me high above the traffic. It is wide and devoid of people. I wish I had a skateboard. I wish I knew how to ride one. About halfway along and I am almost level with the large shop signs. I found them unsettling when travelling this way at night – great luminous words suspended in the dark. It was as if the bus had entered some flat textual world.

I know Černý Most as well as Florenc. It was the other station I came to on my weekly trips from Mladá Boleslav. I reach the station only passing two young women and their children and two police officers telling some teenage girls to get down from the railing.

The station has remained faithfully lodged in my memory. There is no unsettling sense of the familiar and the new that I have experienced when returning home. I wonder if I’ll see anyone I know. Unlikely. All the teachers I worked with are gone and the students would be leaving for the weekend - so set are the routines of people there.

Despite these comments, I’m looking forward to going back to Mladá Boleslav tonight. Partly it’s to catch up with an old friend. Also I’m curious to see how a place I called home for four years may have changed.


Many fond moments happened there: nights at the film club when the the gawky bespectacled president would give lenghty introductory speeches about the movies, sometimes on any topic he pleased; the camaraderie of playing badminton; the post-hike beers; dinners and music nights.

From the footbridge I can see the sun melting away through the haze. It resembles a vast peach – something Dahl would conjure up – and it’s making the smog blush.