Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  Yes, Wolf was around—he had seen him this morning. He had complained of not sleeping. Yes, he knew who Wolf was. Wolf was out and about a lot; he was still ‘active’, perhaps. My own son, he said, was with Charter 77.

  Did Wolf look well?

  He didn’t look so bad.

  We deliberated. Alžběta was for waiting; then for leaving a note. I was unsure. This would be the second note from a stranger on his door in twenty-four hours. I was beginning to think that the truth of the matter was that, whatever Wolf was doing now, he did not want intrusion; perhaps he should be left alone. And I was beginning to question my persistence in seeking him out—the whole absurd folly of a Western visitor trying to find an elusive Czech dissident. Was I not conducting a grotesque parody of the ‘protective surveillance’ that, for all I knew, Wolf was still subject to? I had got carried away with the detective-hunt element of things and had somehow pushed to the back of my mind the terrible facts that had provoked my interest in the first place. As though merely finding him mattered.

  Alžběta left a note, this time giving her phone number as a further point of contact. We walked back to the metro in a subdued mood. I would probably not see Alžběta again before I left. She was sorry that with all our efforts we had not met with success. The search had led us only to mutual self-searching.

  At the hotel there were no messages. Igor was due shortly. I looked forward to his arrival. I had called him from Prague at a point when I illusorily believed that my task would be accomplished by Saturday afternoon: the time would be free. I would have to explain what had happened, but I felt the situation was essentially unchanged: I had done all I could. Just before I met Igor, Miloš phoned, as promised. No further news. I explained that I had been to Wolf’s address myself and that my feeling now was that Wolf was a man who wanted to keep to himself.

  ‘No, no,’ said Miloš, with some emphasis, ‘my information about him is that he would not find this intrusive, he would be ready to meet.’

  I wrote a note for the reception desk, saying that if I had any callers or visitors, especially a Mr Wolf, I would be back at six. Then I waited in the lobby for Igor. He showed up, wearing the badge of Civic Forum’s Slovak sister movement, People Against Violence, and we went off to a cafe on the Old Town Square. We intended to take a walk across the river to Hradčany, but the weather was bitter and, with much to talk about, we were still sitting there at five.

  Igor’s presence was a reminder of the elementary fact that Czechoslovakia is a federation of two states, the Czech and the Slovak. The negotiations to reform the government, going on even as we spoke, involved a good deal of juggling of Slovak against Czech as well as communist against non-communist representation. The Slovaks are proud of their Slovakness—in Igor’s company you learn not to use the word ‘Czech’ to apply to the country as a whole. But Igor was generally sceptical of the notion that political changes might lead to an awkward upsurge of Slovak nationalism.

  Events in Bratislava appeared to have run a parallel course to those in Prague, with the Bratislavs having the particular excitement of being suddenly allowed to travel freely across the Austrian border, less than five miles away. In practice, Czechs and Slovaks are still restrained from foreign travel by the lack of foreign money. But here was a chance to to-and-fro across a ghostly Iron Curtain just for the sake of it, East-Berliner style, several return trips a day.

  Were there any problems peculiar to Slovakia?

  Yes, eastern Slovakia was a notoriously ‘remote’ part of the country and the spread of information from the capital had proved difficult, meeting with confusion and distrust. (Vaculík and Kriseova had made the same point about the rural areas generally.) The authorities seemed to have colluded in the problem, since there was a remarkable incidence of power cuts at the same time as opposition broadcasts. But not all Igor’s stories raised laughter. There was the one about the Russian soldier (the Soviet army was still there, of course, keeping a very low profile) found hanged near a railway station. Suicide? Or something else?

  At five-thirty we walked back to the hotel. Igor was good company. My pensive mood of the morning had lifted and I was now sanguinely resigned to the fact that I would not meet Wolf. When we entered the lobby I could see there was a message for me next to my key. It said: ‘I am tall with bushy hair and glasses. I am waiting in the lounge. When you read this Mr Wolf will probably be waiting too. Miloš.’

  I am still confused as to how this small miracle occurred: whether Wolf and Miloš converged on the hotel by mutual arrangement or by some remarkable coincidence. Even after later hearing Miloš’s account, I am not entirely sure of the exact sequence of events.

  I walked, with Igor, round the corner into the lounge. There was Miloš, as described. There, introduced by him, was Wolf. And there was a third man, who spoke English and gave his name as Weiss. We moved to another part of the lounge which could accommodate us all, and the whole strange, short encounter began.

  The first element of strangeness was the setting. To repeat, this was one of Prague’s big hotels. It was a Saturday evening. The lounge was busy and hung with Christmas decorations. We might have gone to my room, or somewhere else—the choice was Wolf’s—but we were sitting down to talk in a place that only recently would have been quite unsafe, and perhaps still was. I was conscious throughout that people were listening to us (who would not have eavesdropped?). I vividly recall the young waiter, with the face of a bespectacled sixth-former, who brought our drinks and stared boggle-eyed, transfixed by what Wolf was saying.

  The second element of strangeness was the air of feverish, if businesslike, haste. From the moment he sat down, Wolf launched into a monologue, interrupted almost exclusively by Miloš’s disciplined translations. There were no questions put to me about the nature of my interest and no opportunity for me to explain it voluntarily. Nor was there much opportunity for me to ask questions. The nearest thing to small talk came from Weiss, who was the third element of strangeness. I had not anticipated a mystery companion, though such a figure should not have been so unexpected. It became plain that Weiss was not just there for his English; he was looking after Wolf in some way. He said of Wolf at one point: ‘He is part of my family now.’ It emerged that Weiss had been a prisoner too, for several years, some of them in Valdice.

  The contrast between Weiss and Wolf could scarcely have been more pronounced. Whereas Wolf was all contained nervous energy and concentration, Weiss was relaxed, smiled a lot and was ready, when he could, even to joke and digress. He apologized for his teeth, which had been damaged in prison, but the defect hardly marred a kindly, avuncular face. Weiss was dressed in a casual cardigan; Wolf in a suit and tie which, if it were not for a general dishevelment (the tie was quickly loosened), might have been called dapper. The clothes had been sent from America.

  In the space of an hour, I learned a little about Weiss, the man: that his passion was aeroplanes; that he had a library of eight thousand books. I learned very little about Wolf. When Wolf said that his wife had divorced him because she did not wish to be married to a criminal, there was no emotion and the remark was made almost incidentally. Weiss chipped in that his wife, too, had divorced him when he was a prisoner, but, on his release, they had met up again and married for the second time; and he was evidently delighted to repeat the story. It was as though Weiss was there to give the picture of a man who had been a prisoner yet was restored to a benign, rounded humanity.

  Wolf was short, with the sort of slight frame that often suggests an intense mental life. Afterwards, when I asked myself the question, ‘If you hadn’t known who Wolf was, what would you have taken him for?’ I answered: I would have taken him for some distrait chess-player, an obsessive academic, a mathematician. His face was distinctly Jewish, and I wondered how this may have affected the treatment he received from prison guards. He blinked a lot, with a twitch to his cheek, a definite tic. He sat on my right, with Miloš to my left. He spoke rapidly, a little breathles
sly, mostly looking straight ahead or at Miloš, but now and then turning to me with a sort of uncertain smile, which I rightly or wrongly took as a seeking of reassurance. His hands were in contrast to the rest of him: thick, blunt fingers, with very little spare nail.

  What did he say? In one sense he said what I had already heard, since the substance of the monologue, elaborated and extended, was similar to the dossier I had read on him and covered much the same ground. It was the third-person, case-history Wolf of the dossier, rather than the direct, first-person, intensely pitiable Wolf of the prison writings. There was, of course, something utterly new and strange in hearing facts already half known issuing from the lips of the man himself. But I confess to more than once having the absurd urge to stop him and say, ‘I think I know this. Tell me about yourself.’

  There was also the sense that what he was uttering was prepared, rehearsed, had often been repeated. He had certain things to say, then he would finish. It did not take long to surmise that Wolf had probably been doing a lot of this recently. Telling a lot of different people or groups of people, if rarely stray visitors from England, the facts. This was his work now, his task, the way in which, according to his neighbour, he was still ‘active’. It was also, at some deeper level, the way he wanted, and was able, to deal with things. Weiss later confirmed the intuition. He said, ‘We are very busy politically.’ He spoke of fears that the prisons would be slow to change, that there would be a conspiracy to destroy prison and court records, a general hushing-up.

  The repeated note from Wolf was forensic and legalistic: the attestation to accumulated injustice. He was not interested in his ‘human story’, nor in sensation, nor, save when he referred to Czechoslovakia’s ‘Gulag’, in rhetoric. When he stated that he had received ten days of solitary confinement and a halving of rations for having a loose button, and I had to ask him, in amazement, to repeat what he said, he did not dwell on the matter. When he remarked that a ‘co-defendant’ had been released after one year and was working ‘to this day’ for the state security, it was spoken without special stress or elaboration, like the reference to his divorce.

  His release on 17 May had been at the full term of his prison sentence. He had been ill for a month and was treated by a neurologist. Necessary follow-up treatment proved unforthcoming, partly because doctors were afraid of his reputation with the secret police. When fit to do so, he was required to report to the police every day. There were problems with both employment and accommodation, and there was pressure on him to leave Prague. He was held in custody twelve times after he was released that spring, with a flurry of detentions in August. Court proceedings were opened against him twice. The police entered his flat several times, sometimes at night. The last such visit was on 15 November, less than three weeks ago. In the same month, when he was working as a stoker in a boiler-room, he was visited by police who threatened to throw him into the furnace. On 17 November he was arrested at home and held till eleven that night to prevent his participation in the events of that day. Since 17 November he has refused to go to a police station, but since the seventeenth (the finality of that day), persecution of him has ceased.

  Wolf spoke of his years in prison with the intent but impersonal tone of a man in a witness box. There was little actual description. In ten years, prison rations were cut by half, but the workloads of enforced labour were increased. Prisoners were required to pay for their maintenance in prison, but because of reductions in their wages for forced labour and because of other financial penalties, the ‘bill’ could never be met. Wolf is still technically in debt to the state for 4,200 crowns for the privilege of six years’ brutal punishment.

  Conditions for political prisoners were worse than for others, one aspect of their degradation being that they were thrown in with the worst criminals (Weiss’s foreman at one time was a triple murderer). Political prisoners were selected for the worst work and were not allowed to associate with each other. They were subjected to close scrutiny of their behaviour and speech and to regular reports by warders, who were directed to destroy prisoners psychologically. All prison functionaries, medical staff as well as guards, colluded in the cover-up of breaches of law and human rights.

  Wolf was manifestly a brave man, but his readiness to endure the worst showed a staggering single-mindedness. When his half-sister asked for remission for him, Wolf refused to sign the application, on the grounds that only those who were guilty could ask for remission: accepting remission amounted to retraction. When he received his six-year sentence he also refused to appeal, on the grounds that he did not accept the legality of the verdict. He annulled an appeal made on his behalf by a lawyer. Pressure was put on him to bring an appeal, to demonstrate the fairness of the courts, and he was promised one year off his sentence. Wolf did not comply. In the twenty-two-month interval between his two stretches of imprisonment Wolf had been offered political asylum in France. He had refused on the grounds that, if he were granted asylum, all other victims should be offered the same.

  After making this last point, Wolf brought things to an abrupt close. I had been wondering how long he would continue, whether there would be a more flexible stage in which he would be open to questions. But now he gave a quick expulsion of breath, said something which I was sure was the Czech equivalent of ‘That’s it,’ and made the knee-patting gesture of a man about to depart. I looked at Igor, who looked bemused, and at Miloš, who wore his interpreter’s mask. There was a reaching for coats, some final hand-shaking, some pleasantries from Weiss, and then the two were gone, as if hastening to some other, similar appointment, leaving behind a vacuum of bewilderment and the consciousness that all around us were eyes and ears.

  Why should I have been so stunned? Given Wolf ’s history, I had been ready for anything, so why was the reality so confounding? And why, beneath it all, did I have a perverse feeling of disappointment? I had met him; he had spoken, on his own terms, which were the only proper terms; I had listened. Why should I feel sorry that I felt I was nowhere nearer to knowing him? What right did I have to know him? If I could conceive at all of what ten years of his kind of imprisonment might take away from a man, how should I expect anything to be rendered to me in an hour?

  I had never asked him about his writing. What happened to that earlier work? Confiscated, destroyed? Did he (absurd question somehow) still want to write? It was sobering that I had met three other writers who, each with their own personal nuance, had transcended the image of the ‘suffering Czech’, yet Wolf had given it back to me in hard, annunciatory fact, as if at a press conference, with scarcely a touch of the personal.

  Miloš had to leave. I thanked him for all he had done. Igor and I had a strong desire to be out of the hotel. As we walked off, I, for one, could not resist looking over my shoulder. We began the process of analysing what we had just experienced, but this slid into the anaesthetic urge to find a restaurant that served Slovak food, to drink several glasses of vodka, followed by several glasses of wine. A radio was switched on in the restaurant. It confirmed what Kriseova had told me in the hotel corridor: a new government would be sworn in tomorrow; the President would resign. It was the end of an era.

  Walking late that night across the lower end of Wenceslas Square, I was stopped, not by a secret policeman, but by a street huckster with a small, puckered, toothless face. I thought my English would deter him, but he grabbed my hand, studied my palm and, with a confident American twang, assessed my life and character as follows: I had been a naughty boy, oh yes, a very naughty boy, and I would live to be seventy-four. This cost me ten crowns.

  My last morning in Prague—Sunday the tenth, the day communist domination would cease—bloomed brilliant and clear. A huge rally was planned for the afternoon in Wenceslas Square when the new government would be announced. But I had to be at the airport at two, and in any case had the feeling I would be an intruder at someone else’s party. On my last day I wanted to do what I had not yet done: to cross the river, to walk up to Hra
dcany, to the castle, and appreciate that Prague is beautiful. A year ago the beauty had seemed bogus, even sinister. What place did aesthetics have in politics? But now, perhaps, Prague could be truly, unashamedly beautiful again. And so it was, its valleys and crests of architecture rising out of the dazzle of the winter morning.

  Igor came with me. We crossed the Charles Bridge, seagulls squawking around us. What place did aesthetics have in politics? Seifert, whose love of Prague was as fierce as it was gentle, and who did not live, like Vaculík, to see the end of repression, wrote, with his own terrible heed of aesthetics:

  When I shall die—and this will be quite soon—

  I shall still carry in my heart

  this city’s destiny.

  And mercilessly, just as Marsyas,

  let anyone be flayed alive

  who lays hands on this city,

  no matter who he is,

  no matter how sweetly he plays

  on his flute.

  The Czechoslovak people, the guidebooks say, have always honoured their writers. The road up to the castle is named after a writer, the poet Jan Neruda, from whom Pablo Neruda borrowed his name. Hunched against the castle walls is the impossibly tiny, fairy-tale house where Kafka wrote part of The Trial. And all over Prague there were poems, of a kind, blossoming on walls and windows and statues. Someone will anthologize them, if they haven’t already. Igor translated: ‘Husak, you talked a lot, but you said nothing.’ ‘He has eyes but he does not see; he has ears but he does not hear: who is he?’