Улбойтпчбойе: солп умбчб (вйвмйпфелб fort / Da)
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2It was a program about the Czech emigration, a montage of private conversations recorded with the latest bugging devices by a Czech spy who had infiltrated the emigre community and then returned in great glory to Prague. It was insignificant prattle dotted with some harsh words about the occupation regime, but here and there one emigre would call another an imbecile or a fraud. These trivial remarks were the point of the broadcast. They were meant to prove not merely that emigres had bad things to say about the Soviet Union (which neither surprised nor upset anyone in the country), but that they call one another names and make free use of dirty words. People use filthy language all day long, but when they turn on the radio and hear a well-known personality, someone they respect, saying "fuck" in every sentence, they feel somehow let down. "It all started with Prochazka," said Tomas. Jan Prochazka, a forty-year-old Czech novelist with the strength and vitality of an ox, began criticizing public affairs vociferously even before 1968. He then became one of the best-loved figures of the Prague Spring, that dizzying liberalization of Communism which ended with the Russian invasion. Shortly after the invasion the press initiated a smear campaign against him, but the more they smeared, the more people liked him. Then (in 1970, to be exact) the Czech radio broadcast a series of private talks between Prochazka and a professor friend of his which had taken place two years before (that is, in the spring of 1968). For a long time, neither of them had any idea that the professor's flat was bugged and their every step dogged. Prochazka loved to regale his friends with hyperbole and excess. Now his excesses had become a weekly radio series. The secret police, who produced and directed the show, took pains to emphasize the sequences in which Prochazka made fun of his friends—Dubcek, for instance. People slander their friends at the drop of a hat, but they were more shocked by the much-loved Prochazka than by the much-hated secret police. Tomas turned off the radio and said, "Every country has its secret police. But a secret police that broadcasts its tapes over the radio—there's something that could happen only in Prague, something absolutely without precedent!" 134
"I know a precedent," said Tereza. "When I was fourteen I kept a secret diary. I was terrified that someone might read it so I kept it hidden in the attic. Mother sniffed it out. One day at dinner, while we were all hunched over our soup, she took it out of her pocket and said, 'Listen carefully now, everybody!' And after every sentence, she burst out laughing. They all laughed so hard they couldn't eat." 3He always tried to get her to stay in bed and let him have breakfast alone. She never gave in. Tomas was at work from seven to four, Tereza from four to midnight. If she were to miss breakfast with him, the only time they could actually talk together was on Sundays. That was why she got up when he did and then went back to bed. This morning, however, she was afraid of going back to sleep, because at ten she was due at the sauna on Zofin Island. The sauna, though coveted by the many, could accommodate only the few, and the only way to get in was by pull. Luckily, the cashier was the wife of a professor removed from the university after 1968 and the professor a friend of a former patient of Tomas's. Tomas told the patient, the patient told the professor, the professor told his wife, and Tereza had a ticket waiting for her once a week. She walked there. She detested the trams constantly packed with people pushing into one another's hate-filled embraces, stepping on one another's feet, tearing off one another's coat buttons, and shouting insults. 135
It was drizzling. As people rushed along, they began opening umbrellas over their heads, and all at once the streets were crowded, too. Arched umbrella roofs collided with one another. The men were courteous, and when passing Tereza they held their umbrellas high over their heads and gave her room to go by. But the women would not yield; each looked straight ahead, waiting for the other woman to acknowledge her inferiority and step aside. The meeting of the umbrellas was a test of strength. At first Tereza gave way, but when she realized her courtesy was not being reciprocated, she started clutching her umbrella like the other women and ramming it forcefully against the oncoming umbrellas. No one ever said "Sorry." For the most part no one said anything, though once or twice she did hear a "Fat cow!" or "Fuck you!" The women thus armed with umbrellas were both young and old, but the younger among them proved the more steeled warriors. Tereza recalled the days of the invasion and the girls in miniskirts carrying flags on long staffs. Theirs was a sexual vengeance: the Russian soldiers had been kept in enforced celibacy for several long years and must have felt they had landed on a planet invented by a science fiction writer, a planet of stunning women who paraded their scorn on beautiful long legs the likes of which had not been seen in Russia for the past five or six centuries. She had taken many pictures of those young women against a backdrop of tanks. How she had admired them! And now these same women were bumping into her, meanly and spitefully. Instead of flags, they held umbrellas, but they held them with the same pride. They were ready to fight as obstinately against a foreign army as against an umbrella that refused to move out of their way.
4She came out into Old Town Square—the stern spires of Tyn Church, the irregular rectangle of Gothic and baroque houses. Old Town Hall, which dated from the fourteenth century and had once stretched over a whole side of the square, was in ruins and had been so for twenty-seven years. Warsaw, Dresden, Berlin, Cologne, Budapest—all were horribly scarred in the last war. But their inhabitants had built them up again and painstakingly restored the old historical sections. The people of Prague had an inferiority complex with respect to these other cities. Old Town Hall was the only monument of note destroyed in the war, and they decided to leave it in ruins so that no Pole or German could accuse them of having suffered less than their share. In front of the glorious ruins, a reminder for now and eternity of the evils perpetrated by war, stood a steel-bar reviewing stand for some demonstration or other that the Communist Party had herded the people of Prague to the day before or would be herding them to the day after. Gazing at the remains of Old Town Hall, Tereza was suddenly reminded of her mother: that perverse need one has to expose one's ruins, one's ugliness, to parade one's misery, to uncover the stump of one's amputated arm and force the whole world to look at it. Everything had begun reminding her of her mother lately. Her mother's world, which she had fled ten years before, seemed to be coming back to her, surrounding her on all sides. That was why she told Tomas that morning about how her mother had read her secret diary at the dinner table to an accompaniment of guffaws. When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp? Almost from childhood, Tereza had used the term to ex- 156
137 press how she felt about life with her family. A concentration camp is a world in which people live crammed together constantly, night and day. Brutality and violence are merely secondary (and not in the least indispensable) characteristics. A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy. Prochazka, who was not allowed to chat with a friend over a bottle of wine in the shelter of privacy, lived (unknown to him—a fatal error on his part!) in a concentration camp. Tereza lived in the concentration camp when she lived with her mother. Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts. 5 The women sitting on the three terraced benches were packed in so tightly that they could not help touching. Sweating away next to Tereza was a woman of about thirty with a very pretty face. She had two unbelievably large, pendulous breasts hanging from her shoulders, bouncing at the slightest movement. When the woman got up, Tereza saw that her behind was also like two enormous sacks and that it had nothing in common with her fine face. Perhaps the woman stood frequently in front of the mirror observing her body, trying to peer through it into her soul, as Tereza had done since childhood. Surely she, too, had harbored the blissful hope of using her body as a poster for her 138
soul. But what a monstrous soul it would have to be if it reflected that body, that rack for four pouches. Tereza got up and rinsed herself off under the shower. Then she went out into the open. It was still drizzling. Standing just above the Vltava on a slatted deck, and sheltered from the eyes of the city by a few square feet of tall wooden panel, she looked down to see the head of the woman she had just been thinking about. It was bobbing on the surface of the rushing river. The woman smiled up at her. She had a delicate nose, large brown eyes, and a childish glance. As she climbed the ladder, her tender features gave way to two sets of quivering pouches spraying tiny drops of cold water right and left. |