Suzanne Furstner Foundation Scholarship 2010: Shortlisted Entry Number 1

Applicants who wanted to apply for the scholarship, which comprises a four-week TEFL course in San Francisco plus a language course, were asked to write a maximum of 1,000 words on the topic ‘San Francisco’, interpreted any way they choose.

The entries were assessed according to the quality of the writing, the relevance to the theme and the accuracy and variety of the language.

You can read Zusanna’s entry in full below.

San Francisco

IF YOU’RE GOING TO SAN FRANCISCO…

(FICTION)

If you’re going to San Francisco

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

If you’re going to San Francisco

You’re gonna meet some gentle people there

Today the darkness is at its deepest in the south part of Czechoslovakia. And so is communism. Mark with his two colleagues from the arms factory, Peter and Joseph, are sitting in Mark’s flat, listening to Viennese Radio. Mark can tune his radio to the Western station, as the reception on the outskirts of the capital where his flat happens to be is good. They’re risking being arrested for it, they know, yet to hell with it, they think. It’s worth it, anyway.

“What if the neighbour reports you?” whispers Mark’s mother when she catches them in Mark’s room. “You know who our neighbour is, don’t you?” Mark does know. The neighbour who lives in the flat opposite in their block of flats is a secret police agent.

“Listening to a Western radio! And to this song!” Mark’s mother points to the transistor. She first heard the “San Francisco” at the Prague Spring uprising against Soviet rule in 1968. Young people like her then adopted it as an anthem for freedom. For the same reason, the communists who suppressed the uprising later banned the song.

For those who come to San Francisco

Summertime will be a love-in there

In the streets of San Francisco

Gentle people with flowers in their hair

“We tried to stop the Russians with flowers,” says Mark’s mother quietly. “It didn’t work,” she sighs and leaves the room.

The three friends carry on listening. Today, here in the Eastern Europe, it’s raining cats and dogs but they let themselves to be transported by the vibrant music to the very West, to the beaches of San Francisco, soaring in hot air as they imagine San Francisco to be based on pictures they had seen in the geography book at school and supported by the vibrancy of the tune and the vocals of John Phillips.

“What a pity I don’t understand a word,” says Mark after the song has finished. “Next time, I’ll smuggle an English dictionary and the lyrics from Vienna and we can translate them. I met someone on the flea market the other day who can help me,” says Peter.

All across the nation such a strange vibration

People in motion

There’s a whole generation with a new explanation

People in motion people in motion

When they later translate the words, Mark wishes to move to San Francisco; to swap his country of hopeless and suppressed people for the people in motion and for the strange vibration all across their nation. How wonderful life must be there! It becomes his vision.

…

Ten years later.

It’s five years after the Velvet Revolution and many of Mark’s colleagues from the arms factory that had gone bankrupt, including his friends Peter and Joseph, have left their country to find a better future abroad. Mark fulfils his dream too and emigrates to San Francisco. He’ll live with Joseph at first who’d gone there earlier, done a TEFOL course and has now found a job for Mark in the San Francisco Military Factory. Mark comes on tourist visa he got for six months but he doesn’t intend to return. He lands in the country full of opportunities and has got a vision of a new, bright future, not loaded with heaviness of the past, he thinks. He’ll start working in the factory tomorrow, learn English like Mark and earn lots of money. However, an unexpected chain of events that starts only an hour later slightly yet essentially changes the chain of his thoughts. Nick, a friendly and outgoing guy from San Francisco and a good friend of Joseph comes to pick Mark up from the airport and doesn’t drive Mark straight to Joseph’s flat but instead he takes him to a place that takes Mark’s breath away. At the end of the day Mark finds himself in the San Francisco Columbarium – a huge posh building with thousands of urns with human ashes neatly laid in cosy pigeonholes dug into tall walls. Today an event called “Get To Know Your Neighbour” is taking place here and Nick’s grandmother is attending it with her whole family. Nick couldn’t miss. Later Mark understands that her ashes are going to be laid here too after she… Mark doesn’t want to finish the sentence, not even in his mind. 

People of San Francisco must have a great sense of humour, if they take death with pinch of salt, Mark thinks. However, when Mark is standing in the huge hall of the Columbarium and staring at all those pictures of people whose ashes are right in front of him, another thought crosses Mark’s mind like an X-ray: These people here cannot change anything in their lives anymore, as they’re dead, they cannot do anything better… But I CAN! Perhaps I won’t have to work in an arms factory for the rest of my life. Perhaps later on I could do something else, like opening my own restaurant one day. Isn’t America a place of opportunities and fulfilled visions after all? The restaurant would have to be on a beach, Mark decides.

For those who come to San Francisco

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

If you come to San Francisco

Summertime will be a love-in there

If you come to San Francisco

Summertime will be a love-in there

…

Ten years later.

Mark owns three restaurants, all near San Francisco beaches. Today his mother is coming to visit him for the first time. He’s going to welcome her at the airport with a flower. And he’ll stick it in her hair.