THE THIRTY-NINTH
‘Little white horse / They haven’t killed you, of course.’ Those two lines formed the refrain of a long-forgotten poem written by Martin Vrána sometime in those dark seventies, when Ostrava was indeed a dirty city, both inside and out, so to speak. Back then, on account of the dirt, those little white horses on the logo of the transportation authority couldn’t be made out at all on the sides of those legions of buses, buses and buses that one took from the housing estates to work and to school. Back then, it was cloudy even when the sun was shining. Today, when the decrementally wide-spread and dusted-off factories are barely breathing and fish have returned to the rivers, what’s chiefly left behind is grime on the undersides and undercuts of thoughts and deeds, just like
