Invalidovna (Prague Metro)

Walls of yellow pressed metal arch over the train tunnel at Invalidovna. The Russians built the metro for the Czechs, maybe as compensation for reclaiming the country in 1968. The authorities called it normalisation. But unlike Moscow, where the Communists constructed underground stations to rival the conquered Romanov palaces, in Prague it was state-of-the-art functional. Through the arches we find the escalators beckon at the end of the hallway. Escalators rattle at top speed as we step lightly and quickly onto the next offering. Their steps click-clack woodenly, their ascent is sharp. Light that must come from the sky is visible up above: it could be Dante by Doré. It’s the weekend in Karlin and no one is in the streets. Long grass barely moves in the stillness of the fields around housing complexes. Grass flowers with prickly leaves dandle in the air. Clever weeds link in to the footpaths. We walk towards what the map says is the hotel but there is no one in sight and summer heat increases. At last, near a chained-up premises stands a policeman, not doing much, what with everyone being asleep or in one of the parks or swimming at the pool. The name of the hotel is on a card. He reads the card and points down the street about one hundred yards. Invalidovna itself is nowhere to seen in this landscape of closed down ruins, commission housing and new hotels. It was Prague’s hôtel des invalids, built in the 1730s as a hospital and dormitory for war veterans. The hotel brochure helps: “Only a ninth of the original design was ever completed. At most, about 1200 inmates lived there. In 1935, all inhabitants moved to another "invalidovna" and the building was used by the Czech army. After this, it was used as an army archive. The building was damaged by a large flood in 2002, and most of the archive materials was destroyed. The building currently awaits an expensive reconstruction. One possible future use is as a part of the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University.” On a pillar in the hotel lobby is a plaque with a blue line, showing where the floodwater reached; it is about the height of the reception counter. Slowly the scene comes into our minds, as we imagine it from the upstairs window, after booking in. The Vltava broke its banks at Karlin, the most vulnerable low-lying inner suburb of Prague. It damaged irreparably the lines of nearby shops. They have all been razed and a ‘park’ of unchecked trees grows for a kilometre between the hotels and the river. The water flooded everything in Karlin, so much of the place had to be rebuilt. The water saturated the soil, turning it into a quagmire. The floodwaters raced everywhere as they rose, pouring down into every drain and crevice. Most particularly, the vast escalator shaft that takes us down into the station of Invalidovna. The waters poured inexorably into the underground, making infernal streams and bringing everything down there to a stop. Karlin recovers after ten years. But memory is a trickster. Unlike the other stations on the line, there are no pressed metal arches over the tunnel walls at Invalidovna. That is how it would be remembered, but only the colour is right, when we google image it, home in Australia.