NEUILLY
(excerpts)
(Translated by Káèa Poláèková Henley)
I’ve got to say – even though they’d tell me that if I write about it, it’ll sound like I invented it – that Jarka was incorrigible. He was a chronic stud, right out of Kundera, a veritable jackhammer, I’m not certain just when he started hammering but it must have been, good God, back in the sixth grade, because it wasn’t till grade nine that I figures out why he cracked up when as sixth graders, we walked past the familiar convex OLLA RUBBER!!? ad in Mr. Èernoch’s drugstore window, which I’d been wondering about for a long time, probably on account of the question mark, because I usually paid no attention to advertisements. “Y’know, I’d really like to know what OLLA RUBBER!!? means,” I remarked pensively, and Jarka nearly burst a gut laughing, but he would never divulge the secret of the ad to me. And by that time, I was in love with girls already, Ichka, the one I would help administer an artificial pneumothorax to, ten years later. The way I found out about it all was the way most children of the bourgeoisie did, since they were kept in the dark about these things at home: I read it on the wall of the boys’ toilet at the Sokol Theatre. It was right there, in the movie house that I experienced the revelation of maturity, and because this is not a novel, where it just isn’t done to discuss such things, at least so the righteous sages say (just as we know that Anna Karenina must have used the toilet, and yet we won’t find a single mention of it in Leo Nikolayevich’s novel, the word is never so much as mentioned, even though it is a commonly used one...), so because this isn’t a novel but a pathobiography, I will quote the graffiti verbatim:
Prick in cunt makes baby!
A milestone towards maturity. I can’t help it, that’s what was scrawled there, among all the usual doggerel, and that’s how I found out. It didn’t get through to me, somehow, at the time, though, maybe I’d never encountered a milestone before, it didn’t move me forward one little bit. That wasn’t what girls meant to me, neither Irena, nor Marie. I was apparently a little slow. Sure, I begged for it. But if I’d have gotten what I’d been begging for, anything I’d have known about what to do with Ichka would have been pure theory. That was what our (my?) wonderful youth was like in that wonderful town of Kostelec.
Of course, Jarka knew what the question mark was all about. Jarka the jackhammer, kept on hammering, and then there he was at my place again, sitting there a second time, beside the window that opened onto the minor basilica, and he said, “No, not THAT kind of trouble again. This time it’s worse trouble.” The only possible alternative that occurred to me that could have been worse than extramarital paternity was venereal disease (Dr. Eichler used to threaten us with it whenever the curriculum called for Instruction on Sex; so that in mind, sex was not associated with plums like Irena or Marie, but with the terrible ailments one could pick up in places like the Bend in the Road. That was why I fled like a coward the time all of us in the band went there together about a year after the doctor had enlightened us. One prostitute came outside, grabbed Lexa, and meanwhile, I took off. Seems to me that Lexa didn’t catch any disease. In fact, later on, he even survived the notorious Bitýz concentration camp.) “I’ve got a friend who’s a doctor,” I said, trying to console Jarka, but it turned out that a doctor wasn’t at all what he needed. The thing was, he had gone on a business trip to Zelený Hradec, everything was arranged and set, his colleague (female, married) took a separate room, indeed, in those days of the weary executioners, that was the way to sin against the catechism: ten minutes after she signed in at the reception desk, Jarka picked up his key, but he went right upstairs to her room, that was how extramarital affairs were conducted in that era of the weary executioners and the housing crisis. Then came a brief round of those ludicrous calisthenics (the same kind that years before had thrust on him the Sisyphean task of eighteen years of child-support, earned and expended in secret, in order that his wife should never know), and as the acoustic aspect of this physical exertion was about to culminate, it occurred to him that the banging on the hotel room door was probably that of an indiscreet hotel guest, disturbed by the noise. He was soon disabused of this misapprehension: “Open up! Police!” There ensued a reverse striptease, followed by the entry of two men demanding identification booklets. They were civil, they were cool, they were matter-of-fact, the only comment they made was (upon glancing at Jarka’s ID), “You are supposed to be in Room Twelve, Comrade!” They were gone, and with them all appetite for calisthenics. That night was followed by two weeks of Jarka stewing in his own juice, a telephone call, and then a meeting with two men in a small office. A discourse on the classic theory of secret policedom: “Reactionaries don’t interest us. Neither do progressives. The ones we’re interested in are the ambivalent, the indecisive, unreliable ones. What we’re asking of you is to support our way of helping them. We can’t give them any effective help if we don’t know them well enough, if we don’t have enough information about them.” A classical theory of modern pedagogy. Followed by the equally classical: “You have a week to think it over. Of course, if you’re not interested, your wife may be interested in what you were doing two weeks ago in a hotel with someone else’s wife.”
“Man, what’ll I do?” Jarka asked (in classic fashion). It wasn’t until later (things always occur to me later) that it dawned on me what overwhelming evidence of our friendship it was, his confiding to me, and not incidentally, violating his solemn oath (“Sign here that you swear that you won’t talk to anybody about what we’ve discussed here”). Of course, I couldn’t advise him to accept their offer, and of course he didn’t expect me to. I could see only three possibilities. “Tell your wife. It’s a bad scene, but then they won’t have anything bad on you.” “I can’t!” exclaimed Jarka, totally drained. Of course, it dawned on me why, fourteen years (at the time) of secretly rolling the boulder of child-support uphill would have been all for naught. “Yeah, well, okay,” I said. “What can they do to me?” he asked. “Hard to tell. Probably nothing worse than telling your wife. And telling her about the other thing too. They must know about it, they’re probably saving it for a rainy day, and the rain clouds are gathering.” Jarka turned pale, his yellowed fingers (a heavy smoker, he stank of smoke from a distance, and yet girls were all over him, even though his kisses must have tasted like a drink of water from a bar-top ashtray) shook so hard, the burning cigarette slipped to the floor, whereupon he formulated a bit of classical pragmatism: “Either they won’t do anything, I’ll bet they try this on a lot of people, and if you wimp out, you’re in shit. Or else they’ll tell the wife”- the retrieved cigarette resumed its trembling – “and that will be the total end of me” – now the cigarette was shaking uncontrollably (I never could understand why this intense fear of his wife: she was a nice, pretty hospital nurse. I’d have said she probably wasn’t all that saintly herself. The only explanation could be that he loved her, and he didn’t want to cause her pain, but given the extent of his philandering, that didn’t seem very probable either. Still, what other explanation was there?) “I even considered signing it for them and then giving them false reports, good ones about good people and ratting on Party swines. But they’d probably figure that out, and then they’d still go to the wife.” What was left of his cigarette butt fell out of his fingers again, and he picked it up and relit it. With shaking fingers, he went to stick it into his twitching mouth, but it fell on the floor again, good thing we didn’t have a carpet. “No, I wouldn’t advise it,” I said. “You’d probably be best off trying to forget about them. There’s always a chance that they’ll forget about you.”
Which is what happened. At least...
About three months after his tremulous dilemma, I ran into him on National Avenue. He pretended not to notice me, but I wouldn’t let him. We stopped in at the Slavia Café, and he kept glancing around as if he expected Sioux warriors to leap out at us from ambush. As soon as we sat down, he lit up right away – that is, he tried to light up right away, but he couldn’t get match flame and cigarette to meet. Finally I lit it for him with my lighter. “Thanks.”
“Well?” “Well, what? – You mean THAT?” “Yes, I mean THAT.” The waiter brought him a glass of wine which Jarka immediately started to pollute with cigarette ashes. There were brown circles around his eyes, maybe it was the nicotine starting to soak through. “You told your wife, didn’t you?” “God, no!” It obviously scared him, he scanned the café again as if through a revolving periscope. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. He took a long drag of his cigarette, and the falling ashes fouled his wine beyond potability. “They... like you said they would...” “They forgot about you, right?”
He was about to butt out his cigarette in the ashtray, but it fell on his lap instead. I didn’t want to torture him any more. He’d been through enough already. “You see?” I remarked, reassuringly, “I told you so. Everything’s all right now, isn’t it?” He made a vain attempt to sip his tainted wine, gave it up, set the glass down, and spattered his necktie anyway. “Right,” he said. I looked at my watch, and said that I had to go to an editorial meeting. I left him with his fire-resistant cigarettes, his polluted wine, and his (obviously) gloomy thoughts.
But less than a year later, their power was gone, with the arrival of the Prague Spring and Dubèek, so that it was all academic, or at least, they had other things to worry them for about a year. Jarka didn’t wait that long. Even before the engines of the invading tanks had had time to cool down, he and his wife flew the coop, straight to Sweden. As far as I heard, he is still hammering away there enthusiastically, in that land of many hammers.
But first, how political schooling can hypnotise. A dangerous thing if you’re young, undamaged, if you still feel that the most important thing is to JOIN FORCES WITH OTHERS to change the world and eradicate all the badness (when the truth is that anything you can do has to be done as an individual, only alone, and only in the range of your immediate environs or, if you’re really lucky, within the range of your readership, and then, you can’t really change the world, at best you can improve it, and even so, good people will improve, and bad ones don’t read fine literature). Dangerous indeed. I was young, already primed by Benno (if Benno does, son of a rich man, why not me, son of a white collar worker?), and there, facing us at the political schooling lecture at the lovely little hotel stood a magical hypnotist with the hands of a labourer and a canny eloquence. What was fantastic about him (and hypnotic, too), in those days of prefabricated, modular clichés, was that he spoke in his own words. He had a gift for translating hackneyed phrases into ordinary language, in fact into the local Eastern Bohemian idiom, the gift of a writer, the essence of writing. There I was young, primed by Benno, with the scruples of bourgeois kids, their social conscience overstimulated by Reverend Fathers, and I listened to that articulate ex-labourer, and that ex-labourer explained, “It’s not a matter of gossip. It’s a matter of comradely, collective help. If we want to help – and we truly do, we want to help everyone indiscriminately – we have to know, and understand. Everyone has different faces that he shows to different people, without even realising it. We need to know all those faces, and by projecting them simultaneously onto a single screen, we can assemble every comrade’s genuine, inner countenance. We’ll recognise what troubles him, where his uncertainties lie, and we’ll help.” I felt a mighty yearning for help, everything troubled me, and despite having been primed by the ingenious Benno, I was certain of nothing. “I’ll pass around some questionnaires,” said the ex-labourer, “one for each of your fellow teachers at the school. And you’ll take them and fill them out, anonymously, of course, so as not to make you feel hampered by any (absolutely groundless) fear that the comrade might find out what you have written, and you’ll put down, without reservations, the pure and complete truth, as you perceive it, that’s the only way you can help.” I took the forms he distributed, and, primed and hypnotised, wanting to help, and wanting to be helped, I penned horrible truths, item by item, without reservations. The faculty at the school where I taught, probably a typical one, consisted of a group of committedly intractable non-Marxists. Of course, for the most part everyone was a member of the Party, perhaps the only ones who weren’t were the music teacher and me. Teachers are the avant guard, they are all supposed to be in the Party and their livelihoods depend on it. Yet I was amazed by their astonishing immunity to science, in particular to the Science of all sciences. To them it was all asinine: the exploitation of the working class, the privation of the proletariat, surplus value, to each according to his need, socialism, absolutely everything. I couldn’t understand it. Today, I do, I see that it was this irrational immunity that saved us, that under (the new) broad-scale humanism, (the old) small-scale humanism had not quite died out. Perhaps. But at the time, the flames of idealism were licking at my heels, I wasn’t burning yet, just beginning to kindle: Málek, Josef, schoolteacher, I wrote. And I proceeded to mete out item after item. “A comrade without the foggiest notion of what it’s all about.” Yes, I doles it out: “He still believes in God, no, in a god. He tells political jokes.” Criminal hypnosis. Under that muddling of minds – perhaps they had put something in the hotel coffee, too – I turned into an abominable Mozorov, a phantasmagoric monster. Hypnotised as I was by the canny anti-Fascist with a working man’s hand and a gift for language, if they had come to me and handed me an application to join the Party, I would have signed up.
Fortunately, Comrade Canny made a mistake. He distributed the questionnaires before lunch, to be filled out over the break, and as I sat on a bench in front of the hotel, dispensing incriminating truths, all of them absolutely truthful and all of them – though I didn’t realise it at the time – grounds for dismissal, grounds indeed for arrest and imprisonment, all of a sudden, as the hypnotic voice in my head began to fade, the hypnosis began to dwindle too, the way alcohol (maybe there really was something in the coffee) evaporates, my writing slows down, the worm of alcohol-induced (drug-induced, mass-suggested) certainty gradually spun itself into a cocoon, and the head that poked out of the cocoon was that of the beautiful butterfly princess Uncertainty, she sneezed in the sunlight, and I was overcome with the writerly need to stop for a while, to read something, a comrade happened to be walking past with copies of the latest Rudé právo, he gave me one, I opened it and – that instant of all instants, perhaps all that is left to religion: at a moment of elemental crisis or the bleakest of desperation, something happens that looks for all the world like coincidence, someone calls, a sentence on a page of randomly opened book catches your eye and deflects the crisis, a letter arrives, something happens, an absurd God working in an absurd way, creda quia ridiculum – my eye fell on the headline of Rudé právo: SUBVERSIVE GROUP SENTENCED. Members of the boy scout movement. And they doled it out, the way I had to my colleagues (Málek, Josef taught singing, and singing was probably the only quality thing taught at that awful school, the geography taught that in Canada, people spoke Canadian, but Málek’s children’s chorus sang in tune, the children’s voices of the spheres): Jarmila Ebenová, born 1932 (my moment of Temptation, even more dangerous than the Temptation of St. Aloisius, by the plump bosom of an unchaste phantasm), 15 years in prison; Jiøí Koøínek, born 1933, 20 years; Dagmar Želivská, born 1932, 10 years. The year was 1950, before I heard about the unmarked graves, the curtain had yet to rise on what was to be the bizarre vaudeville that was to be the Slánský trial. But certain events that had happened earlier, in Kostelec, events I barely registered, back then, in my youthful diffidence, they began to take shape through the fog of the imposed ideology: Ruda Mach, arrested as an army officer, sentenced to 18 years; Benda’s benign face by the swimming pool called Jericho: “Soon as I was behind bars, first thing, I got busted in the snoot!” which cast some light on that science, on that willingness to help; it was as if I had suddenly leaped out of a mud bath and stood there naked, muddy, surrounded by people with their clothes on. In fact, I actually shivered, I picked up my forms bearing my unfinished help to the comrades (help for sure, comrades indeed, but which ones, which comrades?) and left in the direction of a room that is significant in all dictatorships, i.e. the toilet, where you get rid of love letters that could land you in the clink, and foreign currency and address books, because if they were to find anything like that on you during a search, say at the border, they could turn you round and send you back, even though your trip is paid for in full and you have every possible clearance (what treasure troves the toilets in border-town taverns must be for the science of snooping; maybe they’ve even come up with a machine for salvaging soaked and flushed notebooks); I locked myself in there, surrounded myself with the last bit of privacy left in dictatorships (not even that, though, my friend Kathryn once discovered a little microphone under the rim of the toilet bowl in her room at the Hotel Kiev in Moscow. An example of the concrete music of the KGB, the only modernistic music in the USSR) and I took out some matches and set fire to my perfidious effort to help the comrades, because my formative years spent under the dictatorships aroused in me a gnawing uncertainty, I wasn’t even sure whether the Teachings, the science of sciences, hadn’t come up with a method whereby even torn up shreds of urine-soaked paper could be extracted, recombined, smoothed and deciphered, thus ensuring that despite the best efforts of paper-tearing, urinating reactionary spoiler of their helpful intentions, the comrades WOULD be helped, willy nilly, so I burned the papers to ashes, and after I had stirred up the crumbled ashes in the toilet bowl with the rolled-up Rudé právo, I pulled down my trousers and shat on it all, using the dry part of Rudé právo to wipe myself (naturally, there was no toilet paper, which isn’t an antiquated joke, but a bare-assed reality) and then I flushed it all down the drain, which fortunately wasn’t plugged up the way it usually was. Having undergone this ritual of purification, I returned to the empty classroom, picked up a clean set of questionnaires and proceeded to fill them with personal observations about my colleagues that glowed with the uniform countenance of Exemplary Comrade with Positive Outlook, I lied like a rug, and the comrades could take it all and stick it where the sun don’t shine. As the Reverend Father Meloun once declared, taking pen in hand to forge an entry in the Parish Record about a marriage between an Aryan lad and a Jewish bride: “Under certain circumstances, an act of deception can turn into an act of Christian charity.” I had deceived the comrades, the worse comrade I. I was sure that all my colleagues had described one another the same way, with a Positive Outlook, but then, of course, I could easily be wrong. Not everyone would have happened onto the Rudé právo in the nick of time. Who knows. Who knows.
It was much, much later that my wife – hampered by a brother in prison (fifteen years, for guiding two Boy Scouts illegally across the border, he had crossed back, good scout that he was, because his father was in prison – two years for resisting officers of the People’s Police in the act of nationalising his bookstore – and because his mother was unemployed due to her husband’s resisting officers of the People’s Police), and a father who had defected to the USA after he had got out of prison – was prohibited from travelling abroad, which made her practically useless to the folk ensemble where she was employed as a singer. Someone suggested that I drop in at the Ministry of Interior and “explain” the situation to them. I still hadn’t lost my faith in the schooling of the People’s Police officers or better yet: I assumed that they appreciated a duality of countenance, the public face and the private face, and that, if I were to explain my wife to them in terms of the Teaching, they would have to respect the law (unwritten, or perhaps even written) of the society that called itself a People’s Democracy, and reassess the Person Thus Described as a Reliable Person. So I sat down with the comrade with an expressionless face – on which even his manifest professionalism (which gave it its lack of expression) failed to generate the slightest appearance of intelligence (although it did occur to me that perhaps even that was professional mimicry) – and I explained my wife, according to the Teaching, as a product of the Great World Depression, during which her father, the failed bookseller, was Unemployed, and had to place her, as an Undernourished Child, in a Home for Poor Children (I did neglect to mention the fact that the Home was named after Tomáš Masaryk), her mother supported the family by Sewing Aprons at Home, half a crown a piece – when he interrupted me: “We know all about that one, she’s nothing but an old reactionary!” And so I did a lateral shift and proceeded to explain the Mother in terms of the Teaching: daughter of a Coal Miner and a Kitchen Maid, married a man who during the Depression was Unemployed, during the Nazi occupation was a Political Prisoner, after the Victory of the People, in a Correctional Facility. She had no Education, could not Understand life was Too Difficult, in fact, she was a Proletarian Mother, how could she be expected to Understand, when in her Individual Case a Number of Accidental Coincidences, the Bitter Experiences of having an Unemployed husband, being the daughter of a Coal Miner and wife of a Political Prisoner under the Nazis, having two of her Children Perish of Malnutrition during the Depression – at which point another comrade walked in with a file folder, my confessor buried his nose in it, turning pages while I continued explaining the Mother according to the Teaching, Bourgeois Society did not Allow her an Education, she Needs our Help, she is a Potential Ally, in fact a Proletarian Wo- when the comrade stopped me cold, saying, “And so how come it says here black on white that on the Third of May, nineteen hundred and fifty eight, she was heard to say, in the Pramen vegetable market on Vítkova Street, that our Comrade President is an ass?”
He glared at me triumphantly. The Teaching collapsed, I never finished explaining her mother, and my wife didn’t get to travel anywhere that time.