BRATISLAVA REARED UP like a concrete graveyard on the horizon. I followed a Lada in on the approaches and suffered flashbacks from my previous visit. I remembered a giant motorway on stilts running through the center, past the castle. Check-in at our refurbished mental-asylum hostel had taken us an hour and twenty minutes—and we were the first in line. When I’d asked the school matron at reception if the hostel had kitchen facilities, she’d made some phone calls before answering, “We might do.”
Yes, Bratislava. The most exciting thing to happen here was the assassination of a Mafia boss in 1997. A hitman wounded his target outside a hotel, then returned two weeks later to finish the job. He scaled a hospital roof with a ladder and pumped twenty-four bullets into the guy in his bed. At the thought of this I got out my milkman’s calendar and decided to head straight for Slovakia’s cricket capital.
Forty minutes later I signaled off the Slovak D1 and pulled onto a grassy verge. In front of a warped house with a wooden hayloft, a rosy-cheeked young man was holding out his thumb. As he crept round to my passenger door, he wore a look of terror.
“I-I saw car with no driver!” his voice wobbled as he climbed in. “Wh-where are you from?”
“Scotland.”
His expression changed to a broad beam. “Ahhh! You here to play cricket! We all expecting you! You look for Vladimir, my neighbor, yes? I take you now!”
As fortune would have it, I’d just scooped up the twenty-year-old chairman and marketing and media manager of Slovak cricket. Lubos was returning from his job manufacturing Korean computer stands. He was a supervisor, earning two euros an hour. Cricket was infinitely more exciting to him, he said. He liked nothing more than to sit down with a beer and watch highlights of the ’99 World Cup. His sporting duties had seen him star on every Slovak breakfast TV show. “The presenters’ breasts made me nervous,” he confessed, as we entered his home village of Hajske.
Headscarved babushkas were cycling around the square, holding rakes and hoes over their shoulders. We passed a chocolate-biscuit factory, the town hall—whose doors were bricked up—and the local Co-op. Lubos got me to stop outside a large red gate. Goats were grazing on a lawn in front.
“Vladimir lives here,” said Lubos, opening the gate and leading me through. On the other side stood a beautiful thatched garage and a garden so immaculate it looked to be straight out of a Pottery Barn showroom. I could hear hens clucking and saw, over a fence, geese gobbling on grass cuttings. Lubos knocked on the door of the house. The double of a young Gabriel Byrne and a lovely looking blonde appeared. Lubos spoke to them in Slovakian before turning to leave.
“Welcome!” burst out the couple in chorus.
“We were just getting ready for your visit,” said the lady, looking a little nervous. “Please, come in.”
“I’m sorry. I’m a day early. I couldn’t face check-in in Bratislava.”
“No problem, my friend,” said Vladimir, smiling. “Please, you will stay with Anna and me.”
“Would you like some tea?” asked Anna. “I can make you English tea. I’m sorry we’re not more organized for your visit.”
We hurried through to the newly decorated kitchen and sat at the table under a wooden beam. Anna put a pot of water on to boil while we exchanged pleasantries.
Vladimir was a manager in a fertilizer factory. He was a fan of skiing, ice hockey, tennis, Liverpool FC, and cricket. His passion for the latter began in 1997, when he traveled to the village of Frampton in Gloucestershire to study English for a year. He joined the local soccer club, and when it came to summer, the soccer players turned to cricket. Anna, meanwhile, had learned English as an au pair in London, Vienna, and Nice. Now she worked in envelope seals and was secretary of the Slovak Cricket Club. She excused herself to fetch something from the garden.
“Everyone grows their own food here,” she explained ten minutes later, a little breathless, presenting me with a plateful of peas, peppers, and tomatoes, and a mug of English brew.
“Thank you,” I said, adding sugar to my cup and stirring.
“No!” cried Anna. “This is salt! I will boil another pot for you.”
I apologized and turned to Vladimir.
“So how did cricket start in Slovakia?”
“I learned the game from the Frampton footballers,” he explained. “They took me on their end-of-season tour to Majorca. When I returned to Slovakia I couldn’t believe there was no cricket here! So I decided to set it up myself.”
Vladimir had carved some sticks from the wood and persuaded a topless three-hundred-pound gypsy to stand in the middle of the soccer field while he bowled at him.
“He was so fat you couldn’t see the wicketkeeper, let alone the stumps. When he ran it was like an earthquake. There were four of us. I taught them to bowl with a straight arm. At first the ball flew ten feet over and ten feet wide. No one believed it was possible to hit the stumps, even without a batsman! Spectators were shouting at us from the side, ‘Get off the field and go work in the garden!’”
In a tireless recruitment drive, Vladimir knocked on the doors of all thirteen hundred villagers. Slowly, the numbers at training grew, as girls and boys turned out to explore this new sport, and each other.
“There were some heated meetings on the pitch in the beginning,” said Vladimir. “The football officials didn’t want to lend us the ground for cricket. They thought we were stealing players. I pointed out that football training was on Wednesday and cricket training was on Monday and Tuesday. In the end they saw sense.”
Within three years Vladimir had forged a unit that was to topple Poland. That famous first victory came on a camping tour to Prague. “We were helped by plum brandy at drinks break,” said Vladimir.
Now the village celebrated Cricket Day every May 1. One hundred and thirty fans had turned out this year, including three ambassadors.
“For the future, who knows?” shrugged Vladimir. “Tomorrow our wicketkeeper has his bus driving test, so maybe he can take us on tour to Russia.”
I was staggered. With a budget of 120 euros a year, Vladimir had achieved a sporting miracle. I thought of small U.K. clubs spending £15,000 a year for an Aussie pro and an overseas amateur and yet their playing memberships dwindled. Here, with an average player age of twenty, Slovak cricket looked set to accelerate.
“But our cricket is still in nappies,” put in Anna.
Vladimir led me through the house. He showed me a cricket bat on his bookshelf, signed by Michael Vaughan’s England team. Then he led me upstairs to the guest bedroom.
“I’m afraid the lights don’t work at the moment. The electrician is weird. He’s my best friend, but when he fixes the power in the garage, it goes off in one room in the house. He will come tomorrow. Will candles be okay for you?”
“Perfect.”
“Okay. I will let you get ready for training now.”
WE WERE ASSEMBLED on the village soccer field, nineteen of us. A revolution had occurred in Hajske. Cricket training had more attendees than soccer training, making it the number one sport in the village. I got the impression some of the players were there on dates.
Vladimir wheeled out a green plastic shower mat from the clubhouse hut, then he and Chairman Lubos unrolled it on the grass. This Flicx pitch, awarded by the European Cricket Council, would tame some of the demons in the ground.
Vladimir lined up six newcomers and hauled me over. “If you can teach them the batting basics, I will translate,” he said.
The Slovaks took naturally to gripping the bat; mainly, I guessed, because of their tree-cutting and ice-hockey experience. When the newbies were judged ready, Vladimir quickly formed a game of tip-and-run.
Though most of the villagers had never seen televised cricket, they were utterly transfixed. The batsmen worked the ball into gaps and pounded down the wicket; the fielders cheered them on. Even when Vladimir announced fielding drills there was a clap. In a place so far removed from the world game, these Slovaks carried none of the prejudice that hampered cricket’s development in its homeland.
“You have a lot of left-handers,” I said to Vladimir, one of the rare right-handers, as we locked the shower mat back in the clubhouse.
“Yes. Seventy percent of the squad bat left-handed,” he said. “I think this is because of ice hockey.”
We left the field and entered the village pub. Puff Daddy was playing on the stereo. Three silent old men looked up from the foosball table. The cricketers shuffled out the back and sat down on benches with beers and ice cream.
I asked Vladimir about the makeup of the squad. Seventy percent were gardening and/or politics students, he said, and all were native. But the most startling statistic leapt out from the Slovak team sheet. Australia may have had the Waugh brothers, but Slovakia had four Juríčeks, three other sets of brothers, and two cousins.
“Their mothers are very proud,” said Vladimir.
Former Pakistan teenage prodigy Hasan Raza could take a step backwards too. The junior Juríček debuted against Poland at age twelve, making him the youngest ever internationalist by two years.
Though most of the players had passed their English exams only a week ago, it was a struggle to get anything more than “hello” out of them. Vladimir graciously acted as a buffer, while the rest sat poised on the edge of their seats for his translations.
“These guys,” said Vladimir, pointing at two teammates, “recently applied to Nitra University. Everyone must sit entrance exams unless they are a member of a Slovak national sports team. Nitra University approved their applications based on them playing cricket. But guess what? They have batting averages of two and zero. One of them has never scored a run in his life!”
The successful applicants giggled and nodded when they saw I understood. Cricket had transformed people’s lives here. It gave them opportunities. It kept people in the village when they might otherwise have fled to the cities.
I asked Vladimir about his proudest moment.
“It was meeting the British minister of sport at the Embassy in Bratislava,” he said. “There were gold-medal Olympians at the reception. Out of forty guests that evening, thirty were from Hajske. I gave the British minister the ball from our first win over Poland. He said he would put it in the Long Room at Lord’s.”
I asked Vladimir if there had ever been any trouble in his games. Vladimir consulted with the others. After some minutes he answered, “On our first tour to Prague, we didn’t have enough cars, so the village mayor had to drive us.”
Everyone laughed. Another player leaned forward and whispered something. “Oh, yes,” said Vladimir. “We had a match in Vienna. We started the game with only four players because the rest were lost driving around the city. They arrived four hours late, during the second-last over. All our batsmen had to keep going in again and again.”
Another story was passed forward, and Vladimir nodded.
“Once we had a foreigner playing. He used to tell the boys he was going skiing with Steve Waugh and Sourav Ganguly in the Tatras each weekend. They know who Ronaldo is. They don’t know who Steve Waugh is. This guy, he wanted to restart a tournament after being bowled for zero. And he tried to stage a team walkout in Vienna when a leg before wicket appeal was turned down. I said, ‘No. What are you doing? Let’s play the game.’ He left fourteen players to get home in two cars.”
Such actions proved incompatible with the Slovak spirit.
This foreign troublemaker was dismissed from the club without the chance to add to his tournament duck.
“This is the last sport with fair play,” said Vladimir, “and I’m determined to keep it that way.”
THE NEXT MORNING Anna took the day off work to show me around Hajske. The village was founded in the thirteenth century during fighting with the Ottomans. The Hungarian-Slovak soldiers were camped on one side of the river Váh; the Ottomans stationed themselves opposite. The Ottomans had cows, while the Hungarian-Slovaks had little to eat. The Slovak captain got hold of a bull and kicked it till it mooed in the night. By the morning, every Ottoman cow had crossed the river to mate. The Ottomans were left hungry and defeated. For his brilliance, the Slovak captain was given the title Count the Thief. Centuries later, said Anna, another count in the village was bitten to death by fleas.
Anna took me to a shrine where miracles were said to have occurred. A lame man had famously thrown down his crutches on site. Next we walked down a Roma street.
The Romas, sometimes called gypsies, were believed to have migrated to Europe from India in the eleventh century. Slovakia had faced a hammering in the press and from the E.U. over its modern-day treatment of Romas. One glance at this street revealed major problems. Families of ten were living in collapsing brick huts that looked as though they’d been built by a man on crutches in the night.
I approached a group of tattooed smokers leaning idly on a red Lada.
“Watch out,” whispered Anna, three steps behind.”They don’t know you. They might throw a piece of scrap metal at you or something.”
Anna walked up to ask if I could take some photos. The Romas nodded and posed proudly. Anna said something else to them.
“I just asked why they aren’t working,” she told me. “They say they are not so poor that they have to work.”
As we walked down a parallel street, where every house had a prizewinning rose garden, military music burst across the village. It came from PA systems fixed on telegraph poles.
“Are those from the communist days?”
“Yes,” said Anna. “They announced meetings for the workers. Now the town hall uses them for other notices. They tell us if planes will be applying fertilizers on the fields that day, so we can put our bees inside. When it was Cricket Day, they announced the event for a whole week!”
“Why military music?”
“It means, ‘Put your pot aside, come outside and listen.’”
“Do they play other music?”
“Sometimes traditional, sometimes eighties.”
“Bon Jovi?”
“No. It might give the old ladies heart attacks.”
When the record ended, a lady began a long announcement. “She says there will be shoes, trousers, and underwear for sale in the center today,” said Anna. “The market is coming. She will read out everything that is for sale.”
The list was still droning on when Anna showed me the prospective new cricket ground. It was currently a wheat field behind Vladimir’s grandma’s house. To finally free themselves from the soccer officials, the cricketers would have to create their own terrain.
Continuing our tour, Anna announced, “This is where the count who was bitten to death by fleas lived. The communists bulldozed his mansion.” We stared at the patch of grass.
“Because of the flea infestation?”
“No. Because it was a sign of wealth.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yes. We lived two lives under communism: one in public and one in the house. If someone asked you something on the street, you had to answer differently. Vladimir’s grandfather used to line up from four in the morning to two in the afternoon to get meat. Meat was on Saturdays, ice cream on Thursdays.”
P.J. O’Rourke, in Holidays in Hell, wrote, “To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office.” I could see great parallels between this old system and modern-day Britain. Instead of lining up at the meat and ice cream shops, we did it on the phone to call centers.
Finally, Anna and I reached the much-advertised market. Tables had been set out by the roadside, with shoes and tracksuits spread across them and over a Lada’s hood. I wasn’t sure if the car was for sale too.
I asked some babushkas inspecting the goods if I could take their photo. Anna translated. “Yes,” they replied. “But we are old, and we have herpes.”
“This is terrible,” said Anna, embarrassed. “Now you will think our village is so poor!”
“No, no,” I assured her truthfully. “This is wonderful. I’d take it over Safeway any day.”
WHEN I WAS a whippersnapper, I always wanted to play international cricket. I dreamed of steaming in for England, cheeks flapping, and uprooting West Indian legend Brian Lara’s off stump. It was a sad day at school when, alas, fully grown at five foot eight, I had to ditch fast bowling and switch to gentle leg spin. I realized I was never going to make it for England. Not deterred entirely, I lowered my sights, setting them on Scotland. It was even more pathetic the day I realized I wasn’t going to cut the crust there, either. Never in my youth in the Scottish hills, however, did I imagine I’d get my first international cap for Slovakia.
“All our games are internationals,” said Vladimir as we drove to the soccer field in his red Škoda. “Tonight it’s Slovakia A versus Slovakia B. You can be captain of the A-Team, my friend.”
Captain. On debut. Of the A-Team. My cheeks flushed and my chest swelled. It was a shame my parents couldn’t be here to see this.
The Slovaks arrived by rollerblade, bicycle, and moped. The plastic pitch was again wheeled out to the center circle. Once Vladimir had broken up a minor scuffle between kids, the players gathered for the toss. In my first coin-flip as an international captain, nerves spoiled the occasion. The coin landed down my shirt. When it popped out, it showed heads and I’d lost. As so few players spoke English, I couldn’t work out which team was batting and which was bowling. I didn’t even know who was in which team.
It appeared my A-Team had been inserted first. The B-Team medium-pacers showed little mercy in their tracksuits, exploiting center-circle demons to the full. The ball kicked and spat past our openers’ heads, and in the follow-up deliveries promptly flattened their stumps.
Slovakia’s bowling attack was to be feared. During the 2004 second Test of England versus West Indies, The Guardian’s web-site commentator wrote that Slovakia’s bowlers, in their victory over Poland, “were a lot tighter than the West Indies’.”
In a recovery job England’s batsmen’s mums would have been proud of, our middle order plundered the short boundaries. Each four was cheered by players and spectators as though this was a World Cup final. Even the players’ girlfriends had turned out to clap and do the scorebook.
At the end of an over I walked down the wicket to discuss tactics with my partner. “Don’t be afraid to pick up your bat and smack it,” I said. My partner stared back, not understanding a word. I realized I’d have to resign my captaincy forthwith. There was no way I’d be able to set fields in the second innings.
After Vladimir’s tight mix of pace and spin, the B-Team used rock-paper-scissors to decide who’d bowl their final overs. By the end of our allotted twenty, the As had accelerated to 97 for five. Bearded truck driver Stalin, one of the four Juríček brothers, had unselfishly guided me to my first international 50. Tired from his 0 not out, he then had to leave to paint his room orange. A substitute was sought from the stands.
At the innings change, a storm began to whip across the field. Entrusted with the new ball by the second captain—a rarity for a leg-spinner—I suffered a haunting flashback of my first school match. Back then we played in starched white school shirts and cream cotton shorts. We wore knee-high red socks held up by garters with combs tucked into their rims. School rules dictated hair always had to be side-parted. As former England managers will testify, this is what made a good cricketer.
The wind in that first game had caused my hair to fly all over the place. I lost my side parting and my radar. I bowled 13 wides in a single over. It was a feat that saw me go from the under-twelves opening paceman to scorer for the rest of the season. As I looked at Chairman Lubos facing me now, bent over at a right angle, I had a horrible feeling my international career could meet the same fate.
I approached the wicket and released. Lubos’s leg stump was sent cartwheeling backwards. The poor lad had been up since four that morning for work.
Their favored forward defensive prods à la French cricket couldn’t save the Bs’ top three being fired out. And when they suffered two direct-hit run-outs from the boundary in two balls—the second from a lazily jogged single—it all looked to be over.
But Vladimir, relishing his captain’s role, looted the vacant legside boundary with sweeps. He gained admirable support from the player selected for university without ever having scored a run, who chose this opportunity to register his personal best. He scored 2 and received the loudest cheer of the day.
In a desperate move we tried the same bowler from each end in succession. Even this illegal ploy couldn’t stop a final stand of 40 and a loss by two wickets, with just one ball to spare.
As Vladimir was carried off the field for his winning 55, with thirty villagers cheering, he turned to say, “This was our greatest-ever game!”
I WAS CHANGING alone in the Slovak pavilion after the match. Among the old balls and worn gloves on the table was a magazine clipping. I leaned over to study it, unable to understand a word. A spectator entered the hut.
“Good game,” he said, raising his arms. “The best!”
“Thanks. Are you from the village?”
He shook his head. “I come from Bratislava, to see game.”
I held up the article. “Could you tell me what this says, please?”
The spectator took the magazine clipping, and his face adopted a grave expression.
“This is about old player,” he said gruffly. “Not here anymore. He tell magazine he was professional cricket player. He say he earn three million euros to play cricket in Scotland and Italy for season.”
“Three million euros!” I screamed. “In Italy and Scotland! That’d make him the highest-paid player on the planet more than three times over!”
My translator shook his head. “This was very, very bad player. I think he was …” He looked from side to side. “Well, I have heard he was Mafia.”
“Mafia!” I cried.
The spectator nodded. “I heard this from men in capital, Bratislava. This player, he is not from here. He no longer play.”
“What happened?”
“We see him on television. The police, they handcuff him and take him in police van.”
“That must have posed all sorts of selection problems for the weekend.”
“Yes. I think he was … smuggling illegal people. He wanted to use team for this, but he no succeed. He is gone for long time.”
I slapped my forehead. Of course! What better vehicle for trafficking illegal immigrants?! You go to the government, who aren’t going to have a clue, and present the forms requesting a wicketkeeper. Permission to enter granted! You’re into the rest of Europe.
I shook slightly at these revelations. There was indeed a dark side to Eastern European cricket. I had no reason to doubt my translator. He was every bit as innocent as the rest of these cricket-smitten villagers. This Mafia rascal and his hijacking plans had no place in a club like this. I felt contempt for him and relief he was gone. I suspected, however, this wouldn’t be the last shadowy find on my trip.
LEAVING HAJSKE IN the early morning, I was a tad misty-eyed. Anna and Vladimir had left me permanently indebted, and I doubted the elation following our game could be matched.
“You deserve a knighthood for your work, Vladimir,” I said, shaking his hand before climbing into the Škoda.
“No. No awards.” He smiled. “I just want people to hear our story. To know that we are here and that we like cricket. It’s good for the boys.”
I SET OUT east across the country on a taxing drive through heavy rain and fog. Twice I had to perform emergency stops at fifty miles an hour, when oncoming cars overtook without any gap to pull back into. Their drivers flashed their lights, making comedy of the situation.
I passed villages in need of paint jobs, immaculately kept churches, and heavily polluting cement mills. In the town of Zwolen, I glimpsed the Gothic castle in which my Kiwi mate, Jim, who I’d played cricket with in Toronto, would shortly be getting married. If there was anywhere to stage a wedding, it was Slovakia. You could buy ten pints for £1 in the shops. Even fourteenth-century royal castles came at a bargain.
By the fourth hour I had cramps in my legs, so I pulled into the Omega Restaurant. I locked my wheel and staggered weakly through the restaurant doors in search of lunch and an overdue pee. Inside, the smell suggested a boiled pig’s face was floating in the soup du jour. The dining room had all the ambience of a Soviet gulag cafeteria, and at each table there huddled a squad of uniformed policemen. The menu was fixed on the wall with snap-on stickers. I stood for some minutes in the center of the floor, struggling to translate. The gender-bent dinner ladies scowled at me from behind their trolley.
Get out of here now, I thought suddenly. Get out!
Was this a warning from Great-Uncle Ivor? I looked at the policemen licking their greasy bowls and then at the viscous goo bubbling under hot lights. No one would understand English here, let alone “vegetariánská.” In a paranoid state I bolted from the room and raced back onto the road.
Farther east, I reached familiar territory as shantytowns sprung up in hillside gullies and ragged Romas plodded back from factories.
I first came to this region on a road trip with my brother, though our visit had been far from intentional. We’d set off from Budapest for Bratislava, along with a Cardiff social worker who we’d picked up in our hostel. Rob was a Christopher Walken look-alike, except he had a lazy eye.
We reached the Hungarian-Slovak border in the Škoda and passed through the first barrier with ease. At the second barrier, the Slovak guards asked to inspect our car papers.
“They’re in the glove compartment,” I said to my brother, Doug, who rummaged around without success. I switched off the engine and popped the trunk, but after a five-minute hunt I discovered the car papers weren’t in there, either. Every motorist behind began to honk.
We tore up every carpet and unraveled every ball of socks three times. The guards shook their heads and confiscated our passports. Coincidentally, all three of us shared the same surname, making this look even more suspicious. I feared we might soon be arrested.
“They were in here somewhere!” I screamed.
An hour went by. The guards signaled there was no way we were entering Slovakia. If we turned around and tried to reenter Hungary, we wouldn’t be allowed in there either. We were officially in no-man’s-land, suspected of driving a stolen vehicle. Until the British Ministry of Transport vouched for us, we were trapped under a canopy the size of a gas station forecourt.
I tore at my hair. Social worker Rob muttered unhelpfully, “I should’ve got the bus.” The chief Slovak guard, his mustache twitching at every honk of a horn, waved us aside.
“It’s bribe time, boys,” I said.
“Okay,” said the guard, leaning in at my window. “You came here with papers. You enter Slovakia with papers. You lose papers in Slovakia. You no mention my name.”
I floored the accelerator and realized we were now trapped in Slovakia.
Rob, who claimed to have extensive knowledge of the region, took charge. After fifty minutes, he guided us up a wooded hillside in the dark.
“We park behind that tree,” he said, “and we camp on this hill. At six o’clock tomorrow we’ll throw everything in the car, we’ll drive for one hour, then we’ll stop at a rest area. Then we’ll repack the kit properly. I don’t want any dicking around. Right, boys?” He sounded serious.
“Rob. We’re in the middle of Slovakia, population zero,” I said. “What could happen?”
“This is what we’re gonna do,” he snapped.
I felt scared. I was with a man who looked like Christopher Walken, who I’d known for one evening, on an uninhabited Slovak hillside, unable to see how we’d leave the country without car papers.
It was quarter past five in the morning. “Get up!” Rob screamed outside our tent, as though we were in the middle of a manhunt. “I can hear motorbikes across the valley!”
Doug and I dared not disobey Rob’s orders. We threw our tent in the trunk and reversed the Škoda out from behind its tree. As we rattled down a stony lane, a headscarved old lady stepped out of her farmhouse, holding a cow.
“She saw the number plate!” yelled Rob. “’Er husband and ’er sons’ll be after us on their motorbikes soon! Go, you idiots!”
We drove through the rain, not even stopping to repack at a rest stop as per Rob’s instructions. All I could think about was reaching the British Embassy in Bratislava and sorting out my car papers.
“How far are we from Bratislava now?” I asked Rob, who had taken possession of the map.
“Hundreds of miles!” he replied, cheerfully. He had taken us completely the wrong way.
“What?” I said in disbelief.
“Look, we’re in Slovakia. Let’s chill for a few days. You don’t want to go to Bratislava. It’s ’orrible.”
“How are we going to get out of the country?” I snapped.
“Worry about that later,” said Rob, giggling. “Look, this is a national park. You’ll like it. We’ll hang up the tents and go for a hike.”
We approached a meadow clearing surrounded by forest. There were four large concrete hotels around its edge and a busload of Slovak septuagenarians in the parking lot.
“This is where we’re staying,” announced Rob.
We checked into a hotel and began telephoning the DVL A in Swansea on Doug’s mobile. There were no options on the automatic answer service for lost car papers in Eastern Europe. Round and round we went, pressing every button, at great expense. When we at last chanced upon a human operator, he said, “If you write to us in Swansea, you should get a response within fifteen working days.”
“We’re in Slovakia! We can’t get out of the country!” said Doug.
“Then you need to arrange a U.K. courier to bring out your papers.”
“Can you fax a copy, please?” I asked.
“Okay,” agreed the operator. “If you jot down all the details and fax us, we’ll get on to it.”
Rob, Doug, and I sat down in our room to draft the fax. The wording had to be precise and effective. The headline needed to grab attention. We couldn’t afford to have this tossed in a to-do tray.
“Help! Urgent assistance required,” I marked at the top. “We are currently trapped in …”
“Where are we, guys?” I asked.
“The Hotel Relax,” answered Doug.
“Well, good for you,” I imagined them saying back in Swansea.
I STROLLED INTO the Hotel Relax alone now. It had since changed its name. Schoolkids ogled me as I wandered the corridors in search of reception. I entered the sauna by mistake.
At the front desk I was told there were no vacancies. I couldn’t believe it. This was midweek, out of holiday season, in an eastern Slovakian meadow, under pouring rain, and there were no rooms.
I tried the Hotel Trio behind. An old hag babbled at me, then slammed the door in my face. At the third hotel, a man rolled an olive-oil barrel across my path, then shouted at me to move my car. I made a sign for shelter with my hands. He shook his head.
“Right! Get the tent out!” I spat, trudging furiously across the drenched meadow. I opened my car trunk and discovered my tent had been put away wet. It now looked like it had contracted tent syphilis.
I flattened some tall grass at the meadow’s edge and spread out my groundsheet. As I pushed the first peg into the ground, I heard an angry buzzing. Looking down at my foot, I saw what appeared to be a large piece of broken puff pastry. Out of it streamed hundreds of wasps.
“Fuck!” I shrieked, sprinting through the grass. Three wasps clung to my T-shirt and stung me on the back. “Aaaaagh!” I screamed. “WHAT ON EARTH AM I DOING HERE?”
When I stopped running I noticed there was one more hotel in the meadow I hadn’t tried.
I WAS OVERLOOKING the former Hotel Relax, my car papers safely at my side, a tall glass of pivo in hand. In the adjacent dining room was a wedding party, and next to that was a kids’ disco. I took a long draw from my pint and thought about why I had returned to this place. Had I honestly just driven seven hours across Slovakia to see an old hotel with painful memories? Was it part of the healing process? Yes, yes, it probably was.
I had issues, I decided. Acknowledging this was the first step to recovery. My trip had lost focus, that was for sure. I was 185 miles away from the nearest cricket field, and though Tuesday night’s innings had propelled me to the top of the Slovak averages, it had exposed technical flaws in my game. What I needed more than anything now was a coach in my passenger seat. I needed an Australian. But where in God’s name would I find one out here?
I emptied my glass and walked into reception. A young man at the computer said, “Mate, how the fuck are we gonna get outta here?”