Republic Of Whores

by Josef Skvorecky

  In any case, after the unexpectedly positive evaluation, by the division commander himself, of the recent disastrous manoeuvres, the captain was in a genuinely good mood, the glow of which enveloped even the Fučík Badge candidates and their foggy knowledge. Pressing them (in his mind) to his valiantly plump breast, he granted them absolution. The test ended in general satisfaction with the exception of Lieutenant Prouza, and he’d wormed his way into this situation at his own risk. The captain rose — Lieutenant Hospodin quickly took advantage of his good mood and asked for two days’ leave for family reasons — and the candidates rushed noisily out of the room, their heads dancing with pleasant visions of thin metal stars on their tunics to dazzle the girls back home. The committee walked along the alley of yellowing chestnut trees over to sick bay, where they sat around the hot stove with tin cups of cooling tea in their fingers and amused themselves with gossip about the officers. The seance was headed by the gynecologist Lieutenant Dr. Sadař, who had started studying black magic and was preparing, during the next officers’ training session, to serve a black mass for the death of First Lieutenant Pinkas, for he lusted excessively after Pinkas’s pretty wife.

  * * *

  But Dr. Sadař, that vessel of longing, was not a member of the Fučík committee that evening, so he wasn’t in the political department when the sun went down and the first cool autumn breeze wafted through the treetops in the dusky park. It was his loss, because Mrs. Pinkasová was there in all her rather remarkable beauty; like a precious stone, she adorned the shabby company of Captain Matka, First Lieutenant Kámen, Lieutenant Hezký, and several other lieutenants. The only one missing was Lieutenant Prouza, who had excused himself to attend to some mysterious business in Prague. (Sergeant Kanec concluded that he had gone to get drunk.) She was sitting there with melancholy eyes, with bright lipstick on her lips, wearing a tight-fitting yellow sweater. Rumour had it that her overworked husband was unable to satisfy her sexually. Frequently, Captain Matka would ask the poker-faced first lieutenant to stand in for him during staff exercises that could last for days at a time, and this conscientious self-made man would then spend many nights in the secret map room (instead of in his flat in the married officers’ quarters on Zephyr Hill, which commanded a scenic view of the tank shooting range), poring over maps, orders, and battle plans with working-class diligence. Despite his dedication, he had never been promoted. Years before, as a young boiler-maker’s apprentice, he had escaped from the German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and had a series of unwanted adventures in western Europe which no one (except for a few foolish young people) now envied him. After France fell to the Nazis, he hid for a while in Vichy France and then managed to escape in a motor launch; a storm came up and they capsized, but a Portuguese merchant ship rescued him and set him ashore on the east coast of the United States. Suspected of being a spy, he was interned, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor he found himself in an American uniform, caught in enemy crossfire on the beach at Okinawa. Wounded and decorated with several imperialist medals, he finally made it back to the Czechoslovak units in England and spent the end of the war on the Western Front as the driver of a Cromwell tank, which, because you could only get out of it when the turret was in a certain position, was a fiendishly efficient crematorium for anyone unlucky enough to be caught inside when it was hit.

  These colourful adventures had caused the first lieutenant’s curly hairline to recede considerably, and further years of service in the People’s Democratic Army had changed its natural brown to a neutral grey, and turned his face into a mask of iron. Dr. Mlejnek might make fun of him, but Danny sometimes wondered if this mask, unlike the masks worn by other officers, was not in fact a genuine mirror of Lieutenant Pinkas’s soul.

  No one, however, knew anything about the real nature of the sexual service he rendered to his wife, and naturally that beautiful young lady never talked about it. In fact, Mrs. Pinkasová was unusually silent, and only her black eyes spoke as she waited in her yellow sweater, evening after evening, under the chestnut trees just outside the battalion perimeter, holding the lieutenant’s first offspring by the hand. She would ask the sentry to enquire as to whether her husband was coming home that evening. The sentries always complied with unusual alacrity and precision. Usually, however, they had regretfully to inform her that Comrade First Lieutenant Pinkas was tied up and that she wasn’t to wait up for him. In a sad little voice the lovely lady would thank the sentry and walk off down the alley of chestnut trees, watched by the wide-eyed soldiers, who would crowd around the windows until the yellow sweater had vanished among the shadows cast by the spreading treetops. Unlike the rumours surrounding the wife of Bobby Kohn, and other wives who were objects of untrammelled erotic mythology, the rumours about the melancholy Mrs. Pinkasová didn’t say whether she had ever acted upon her alleged dissatisfaction — at least in the manner longed for by Dr. Sadař, who was resorting to demonology in his shyness, rather than exploiting his charms as a gynecologist.

  * * *

  Since Tank Commander Smiřický was often entrusted with important duties in battalion headquarters, he was frequently called upon to supply the first lieutenant’s wife with that depressing information about her husband’s workload. In the course of doing so, he also had the opportunity to look into the black depths of her melancholy eyes — and they were black, so black that it was scarcely possible to read anything in them about the woman and the life she led in the flat above the shooting range. Still, the tank commander was convinced that behind that amorous anthracite lay smouldering sparks that needed only the warmth of human breath to fan them into flames.

  Imagine his joyous hope, then, when he saw that gentle flower brightening the half-circle of glum officers. Her black eyes met his, and it seemed to him that they paused slightly longer than propriety would dictate before turning to look into the unimpeachable middle distance in front of her.

  The committee was chaired by the tank commander and First Lieutenant Růžička himself; the other two, Dr. Mlejnek and Sergeant Kanec, were merely extras. Because they all knew each other, they began without the usual inspirational speeches, and as they proceeded it became clear that the officers were almost as well read as their men had been. Their answers, on the other hand, were far bolder and more inventive. Captain Matka set the tone right away when, asked about Alois Jirásek’s Hussites, Victors over the Crusaders, he declared that it was a novel about Jan Hus, who had struggled against the Jesuits because they burned Czech books and allowed German settlers to move into the border areas of Bohemia. The chairman pointed out that the burning of books by Jesuits took place “somewhat later”, but the captain waved his hand dismissively and said, “It all began back then, anyway.”

  The others, discipline aside, appeared to be trying to outdo their commander in a fair fight. First Lieutenant Kámen thought that Julius Fučík had written his Report from the Gallows for the Communist Party daily Rude Právo and had been sent to prison for it under the Nazi occupation; he was surprised to hear that it had been the other way around, but concluded that he had only got the chronological order mixed up. Then the eager-to-please Lieutenant Hezký informed the committee that, before the war, Fučík had also taken up musical composition — a fact the brochures about him unfairly omitted — and had composed “The Skater’s Waltz”. He seemed unfazed by the information that the composer was a different Fučík, maintaining that, all the same, their names were identical and they were both interested in art. The fact that Lieutenant Šlajs thought Spring on the Oder, a novel about the Soviet offensive during the Second World War, was a novel about Polish raftsmen, or that Mrs. Pinkasová mixed up the political novelist Ostrovsky with the bourgeois playwright of years earlier, seemed petty beside such sterling achievements.

  In any case, Mrs. Pinkasová added considerable lustre to the proceedings. For a long time Lieutenant Růžička was too shy to ask her anything, but he finally overcame his hesitation and asked her to comment on
a novel called The Wind Shall Not Return. When she replied, her melodic mezzo-soprano seemed to fill the empty clichés with new life. Danny was intoxicated by her charm, her muted voice with a tone colour like that of the cor anglais, her soft perfume, sweet, artificial, as artificial as those garnet lips and the pearly sheen of her teeth and the pitch-black arches of her eyebrows and the hair undulating in waves around her entrancing neck. He was struck dumb. He loved artificial things. They were created with effort, maintained with effort, and in the end they succumbed to natural decay like everything else. He was exploding with an ardour that reached out towards her, an utterly material longing that must have touched her, grasped her by the heart, for she wasn’t made of wax, after all, she was only artificial on the surface. But if his feelings touched her, the lady gave no evidence of it. She replied to the question, but the committee members were so mesmerized by her voice that no one knew what she was saying. Then the first lieutenant turned to the committee and asked if anyone had anything to add. Danny mastered himself, stood up and again looked straight into the candidate’s eyes, and asked her what she could tell the committee — a committee frozen in erotic catalepsy — about Jiří Wolker. The black eyes disappeared for an instant behind her tender eyelids and her entire face seemed to darken slightly. When she began to speak, in that quiet, oboe-like voice, the committee sighed involuntarily and the tank commander felt the gentle tickle of an electric force-field between them. He lost himself in her eyes and she no longer glanced away, nor dropped her gaze; her black, unfathomable eyes revealed only that it was here, within their depths, that he must seek the answer to the question his sudden, sharp longing had expressed.

  Jiří Wolker, she said, was a poor boy from a proletarian family who even in childhood had to do hard physical labour, and often suffered from hunger. But diligence and energy got him to university, where, at the age of twenty-four, he succumbed to the ravages of poverty and undernourishment and died of tuberculosis. The first bourgeois capitalist republic tried to suppress his poems in all kinds of ways; no publisher would publish them, and so they circulated only among circles of enthusiastic young people who loved Wolker and mimeographed his poetry and circulated it illegally. Today, however, Wolker was the poet of all young people, and his work helped us to create a new, better, and happier life for ourselves.…

  The radical proletarization of the politically correct but rather well-to-do classical poet was received by the assembly in charmed silence. And when the melancholy woman — at Danny’s request — recited something by Wolker that she knew by heart (it was a poem about a mailbox on a street corner) and her face grew darker still, the words became one with the sighing of the wind in the chestnut trees, and the Kobylec army base was wiped off the map of the world. When she finished, the assembly burst into thunderous applause, abruptly and ceremonially bringing the Fučík Badge exams of the Seventh Battalion, under the successful leadership of Captain Matka, to a close.

  * * *

  But Danny wasn’t nearly as satisfied as the captain and his political officer, who, amid the clicking of heels, formed an escort for the pretty new holder of the honorary badge. Just that afternoon, her husband (representing the captain) had left for a five-day preparation for divisional manoeuvres. She had a long walk ahead of her through the dark army base to her home on Zephyr Hill, which rose in silhouette against the starry sky, and she needed protection. The officers gallantly gathered around her, opened the door, and let her walk through first, not noticing that her black eyes flashed a brief message towards Danny’s deadpan face. Then she left, and walked among the black boots and epaulettes through the alley of chestnut trees into a realm beyond recall, leaving Danny alone in the office with his longing. Because his desire for her was enormous (and he despised masturbation), he tried desperately and in vain to find forgetfulness in work, a measure, we are told, that cures everything. He started writing an outline for the political schooling of non-coms on the theme “Lysenko and Michurin’s Agro-biology: A Powerful Tool in the Hands of Czechoslovak Agriculture”.

  Lieutenant Hezký had to speak on this theme the following day, but because he was a former grocer’s apprentice who had enrolled in the training school for tank officers to escape being sent to the mines, he was unprepared for such intellectual feats. So he had made a secret deal with Danny — a bloodsucking arrangement, at that — by which, in exchange for three such outlines, he would grant the tank commander a single, one-day leave.

  Danny started work without the benefit of any textbooks. He knew nothing whatever about Lysenko and Michurin’s biology, but it was a science totally unfamiliar to the whole tank division, and no one expected the non-coms to learn anything about it anyway. All they were required to take away from the lectures was the conviction that Lysenko and Michurin’s agrobiology was a powerful weapon in the hands of Czechoslovak agriculture because it exploited the advantages of Soviet science, whereas, before, the kulaks had made all the decisions themselves and consequently the poverty of the small farmers had grown year by year.

  The tank commander worked hard. He was driven by frustrated desire and therefore he wrote with a passion. By the time he was finishing the last paragraph, the clock showed eleven, the time for lights-out. There was absolutely no connection between what he had written and the theme of the lecture, but the ideological content was just the kind of thing Růžička would like. And that time, he wrote, pouring into the text all the energy behind an unexploded charge that could hardly go off that night, is gradually coming to fruition. Despite the thousands of obstacles placed in our path by the class enemy, the enemy who sits on the boards of directors of American monopolies, the enemy who hides behind the slogans of our own party, the enemy who waits for his chance to act here among us, and who, using weapons of doubt and irrational thought, tendencies of thinking that our eyes and ears put into his hands, and the dark movement of holdovers from the ancient past, destroys and suppresses within our hearts the flame of revolutionary zeal. But no matter how violently he may rage against it, that flame is unquenchable. It burns in our nervous systems, in our hearts, it consumes our brains, its red glow veils the globe. And the time is ripening. Perhaps even tomorrow, the great conflagration shall sweep around the world, the great world-wide revolution that will consume all the filth in the world, in us and outside of us, and with an exclamation point of fire and blood will mark the true beginning of the history of mankind.

  His passion silenced and appeased, he lounged comfortably for a while in the commanding officer’s chair, gazing out at the night sky intermittently visible through the chestnut trees. Outside the gossamer night sighed and the face of the first lieutenant’s wife appeared before him and he could hear once more the duet the rustling leaves had sung with her voice. Thus it was only with a subconscious ear that he heard the voice of the sentry and the clicking of heels, that strangely atavistic sound of gallantry. What happened next therefore came with the abruptness of a shrapnel explosion.

  The door opened and in it appeared the real first lieutenant’s wife, with her wonderful mouth, her black eyes, and her sweater. She smiled at the tank commander. “Excuse me, but I think I left a basket of plums here.”

  Danny shot out of his chair as though he’d been caught doing something illicit. “Certainly — of course — please —”

  The first lieutenant’s wife walked slowly to the coat rack and, sure enough, there was a large wicker basket full of plums. When she lifted it up, it was obviously too heavy for her. But she smiled again, said good-night, and started to leave.

  By this time, Danny had almost recovered his wits. He moved to take the basket. “Wait, Mrs. Pinkasová, let me help you with that.”

  “Oh no, that’s all right, I can carry it,” she said, but she let him take it anyway. The basket was heavy but at that moment the tank commander could have carried a recoilless cannon. A mere smile from her had moved him to such a flurry of activity that he had lost his tongue.

  They walked in sile
nce through the foyer, where the sentry nimbly saluted and gave the tank commander a knowing grin, and suddenly they were outside under the stars. Her footsteps clicked on the pavement as they walked among the barracks, where only the sentries still sat on the steps of the illuminated entranceways, staring at the damp stars and mechanically turning their heads to follow the yellow sweater as it passed. The tank commander battled against a complete mental vacuum; he had turned into a tongue-tied idiot, incapable of uttering a word. The whole thing was clear. She would have to be supernaturally absent-minded to forget the basket; it weighed fifteen kilos, at least. And it was past eleven. She must have remembered it just as Matka and Růžička said good-night to her outside the married officers’ quarters on Zephyr Hill and marched off through the night to join their own wives; they would bring those ladies pleasure tonight, at least. The situation was clear, his brain was working brilliantly, logically. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of any good openings. And so it was she who, at the crossroads by the heavy machine shops, said, “It weighs a lot, doesn’t it?”