A House with No Walls by Anna Mikuskova

As a child, I listened to my father’s stories of his boyhood in 1950s Czechoslovakia, stories of adventures taking place in the narrow cobblestoned streets of his hometown or near the fields and lakes of his grandparents’ village. I never met any of his family, in life or in photographs. And by the time I was born, the streets and buildings that came alive in his descriptions were gone. They were demolished along with eighty other towns in the area to make way for expanding coal mines. With no way to connect my father’s memories to physical locations or images, the stories I heard sounded like make-believe, no more real than the tales I read in my storybooks.

Last year, wishing to fill these voids in family history and geography, I returned to the north Bohemian city of Most, where both my father and I were born, and retraced the locations of former towns. Guided by historical maps, my father’s memories, and above all by the landscape itself, I searched for clues that would reveal what was no longer there. Frequently, my father joined me on my expeditions, and as we walked or traveled by local trains and buses, he shared stories from local and personal history and geography—guiding me at once through the present and the past.

“I am not a poet, I am a city, ill-equipped to write about the affairs of people. I am a city, a new city. I cannot bear witness to the past, I can describe only what I see,” writes the Czech poet Pavel Brycz about the town of Most. A House with No Walls describes what I see and bears witness to the past with a combination of photographs, historical maps of the locations I sought,  hand-drawn routes of my walks, and text addressed to my father — a continuation of our conversations that were inspired by the landscape we explored.