Republic Of Whores

by Josef Skvorecky

  Corporal Brynch was just opening his mouth to apologize, to explain that he hadn’t done this intentionally, when a notorious poetic hack of the Seventh Tank Battalion named Sergeant Maňas spoke up.

  “Since we’re already on the subject of the political impact of the work we heard tonight,” he began, “allow me to draw your attention to one thing. The comrade corporal here was quite correctly and justifiably taken to task because the political content of his poem was different than he may have intended in his possibly, indeed perhaps undoubtedly, sincere effort. In this regard, I should like to draw attention not so much to the first four lines, but to the conclusion of his poem, comrades.” He stopped talking and turned his eyes thoughtfully towards the ceiling, where not long ago a soldier who had been a sign-painter in civilian life had rendered a fresco of rosy-cheeked soldiers embracing rosy-cheeked miners, smelter workers, farmers, and the working intelligentsia, whom he had painted wearing white lab coats and glasses; a private in a trooper’s helmet was being given bread and salt by a rosy-cheeked but unembraced girl while, seated in a cloud, the Commander-in-Chief of the Czechoslovak Armed Forces, General Čepička, looked benignly down.

  Sergeant Maňas took a deep breath, tore his eyes away from the joyous apparition on the ceiling, and went on: “Just take the two concluding quatrains, comrades.

  You footlockers,

  When tears of rain come down

  Upon your cracked paint

  Outside the barrack gates,

  We will carry a piece

  Of life home in you,

  And autumn will swallow us

  In a grey curtain of rain.

  “This captures one thing very well, I believe,” Maňas said. “The mood of nature in autumn. But suppose we enquire after its political impact. What is the final impression? Is it happy? Optimistic? Is there a sense of pride in being a soldier? Joy at the prospect of returning to civilian life? I don’t think so. I think the basic tone of this poem is melancholy. And it is an unjustified melancholy, one that is consistent neither with the attitude of our soldier to his basic military service, nor with his attitude to his private life. In short, it’s a melancholy that has no place in the psychological armoury of our units.”

  Others now jumped into the debate. A corporal remarked that sometimes melancholy was simply one of the undeniable facts of life, to which the Song and Dance major replied that, if this was the case, then they had to struggle against it. One poetic soul declared that the feeling of melancholy carried within it a kind of vengeful power, and that all revolutionaries were melancholy. Maňas easily deflated that heresy by labelling it an idealistic error and challenging anyone to name him any melancholy revolutionaries — and if anyone did, to prove that they had been melancholy. A politruk from the tank division declared that the comrades in his units had no reason to be melancholy at all. A Sergeant Pankůrek began to develop the idea that, besides its intellectual content, a poem had values that might be called cumulative — that is, they enriched life and created a treasury of variegated emotions. To this the Song and Dance major replied that life was now rich and variegated enough without melancholy. By this time Corporal Brynych was so terrified that he no longer noticed what was going on around him.

  When the debate finally ended, in absolute victory for Sergeant Maňas and his opinions over Sergeant Pankůrek and his, the debaters suddenly remembered the person whose versified creation had started the discussion in the first place. But when they looked around, they discovered that Corporal Josef Brynych was no longer among them.

  He was on the asphalt road leading back to his barracks, and he was composing in his mind a pledge he would make that, upon completing his basic military service, he would volunteer for work as a miner in the brown-coal mines of Kladno.

  * * *

  “I still love you, Líza,” said the tank commander. When he said it, he was convinced that it was absolutely true.

  “Don’t talk nonsense, darling,” said Lizetka. “Don’t try to make a fool out of me, all right? When was the last time you were here?”

  “That has nothing to do with it. We’ve had weekend manoeuvres two weeks in a row.”

  “And how many letters have you written me?”

  He felt a pang of alarm. It was an odd thing: since that night above the shooting range he had completely forgotten his romantic correspondence with Lizetka.

  “I haven’t had the time,” he said weakly. “I was dog-tired after all those manoeuvres. But I love you, Lizetka. I always have and I always will.”

  “Baloney,” she said. “This Corporal Babinčáková or whatever her name is has got your head spinning. Or is there someone else?”

  “Lizetka, I swear to you the only reason I haven’t written is those manoeuvres. I can prove it.”

  “What are you going to do, bring me a note from your CO?” she said.

  “Lizetka, get a divorce and marry me!”

  “What a catch you’d be! Besides, I can’t get a divorce.”

  “I know, the Holy Mother Church won’t allow it.”

  “Don’t blaspheme.”

  “Jesus Christ,” groaned Danny. “Are you that afraid for the state of my soul?”

  “Yes.”

  “And for yours?”

  “That too. But that’s my worry. I don’t want you on my conscience.”

  “And what if I kill myself because of you?”

  “You?”

  “Yes, me.”

  “You’re far too much of a momma’s boy for that.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “And don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. That’s a real sin.”

  “Mortal or venal?”

  “If you do it over and over again, it’s mortal.”

  “And what about you? Don’t you sin over and over again?”

  “What?”

  “You know, all those guys you keep stringing along — Maurice, Kurisu. Somebody called Budulín. And don’t forget me —”

  “I don’t want anyone to be sad. And you were the one who started it. I couldn’t turn you down, and from that time on I haven’t been able to turn anyone down. It’s all your fault.”

  “Oh, sh —” said Danny, and then caught himself in time. He wasn’t on military turf now. “You think you don’t make me sad?”

  “Do I?”

  “I sure don’t get what I want.”

  “You know I can’t do that. But I do everything I can.” She yawned. It was a cruel thing to do. “Come on, Danny. What you suffer from is foolishness. I mean, is it so important? It doesn’t matter who you do it with. You can do that with Babinčáková. The important thing is the soul — isn’t that what you always said?”

  Danny was trembling. You bloody fool, he said to himself. You stupid bloody fool. She’s damn right, and you’re a bloody fool. Isn’t it nice with Janinka? Nicer than this damn purgatory? God, God, God! God damn! But the only thing he could think to say was, “Lizeta, let me stay with you.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Take this eiderdown and go next door.”

  “Let me stay with you. I won’t do anything.”

  “No, no, darling, I want to sleep. You’d just annoy me.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, yes you would. I know you.”

  “I really wouldn’t, Lizeta. Believe me.”

  “No, no. Here’s the eiderdown. Now, go take a walk.”

  He took the eiderdown and carried it into the next room. He again remembered Janinka. My God, is this me? Am I the same guy who made love to Janinka? Fuck it! he thought — for in spirit the whole world was military turf.

  He threw the eiderdown onto the shiny couch and went back into her room. She was still in her skirt, but her jacket and blouse lay on the chair. She let him stand there while she changed into her pyjamas, using a whole array of sly disrobing techniques so that he didn’t see much of anything. Perhaps her problem was not so much frigidity as exhibitionism. It was clear that, after this striptease, his on
ly possible goal was to sleep with her.

  “One sin after another,” he said bitterly.

  “But none of them mortal,” she retorted. Her eyes were indifferent, but they were also bright with some kind of … desire? Oh God! She slipped under the covers and turned off the light. He tore off his tunic, his trousers, and his shirt, and crawled in after her.

  “No, Danny, go away.”

  “Lizeta! Let me stay with you!”

  “No. You’ll touch me and I don’t want that. I really don’t.”

  “I won’t,” he said, and he could feel her body through the pyjamas, as hot as an iron. “I won’t touch you — or if I do, just a little,” and he slipped his arms around her and felt her soft breast in his hand.

  “See how dumb you are?” she said angrily, and turned her back on him.

  “Líza!”

  “Leave me alone and go to sleep.”

  He knew nothing would come of this. He certainly couldn’t rape her — he’d tried it once and it had got him a two-week stay in the eye department of the army hospital. So he just snuggled close to her and placed his hand on her smooth, round shoulder. It can’t be any worse in that hell of hers. This heartless, indifferent body beside me will drive me mad. He heard her regular breathing. She had fallen asleep. I’ll go mad, I’ll go mad.

  But he didn’t go mad. He fell into a light sleep, and in it he committed that sin with her. She, of course, took part immaterially, being a dream, but as far as his glands were concerned, the act was physical. He wondered why so much inconsequential stupidity surrounded something so simple to cure. He wondered if she and the sanctimonious religion she espoused were right after all: to become spiritual, to liberate oneself from.… And then he too fell asleep and became a liberated spirit and it was like a sweet death — sweet because, in his sleep, he didn’t know that from this death he would soon awaken.

  * * *

  Robert Neumann paid no attention whatever to the entire controversy. In the cluster of bodies that formed after the discovery that Corporal Brynych was missing, the actress threaded her way expertly through the crowd and addressed him in a sociable voice:

  “I wanted to congratulate you once more. Your poems read so well, did you know that?”

  He wanted to reply that he didn’t, or rather that he did — he couldn’t make up his mind which — but before he could say anything, she went on, “I’ll bet you recite them out loud as you write them, am I right? Poets don’t often do that, and that’s why their poems don’t read very well. But yours read wonderfully well. I mean it.”

  As she was taking a breath, he managed to slip in a remark. “It’s mainly because of the wonderful way you read them.”

  “Thank you, but I still think that’s how you can tell real poetry — it reads well out loud. Isn’t that so?”

  Before he could say what he thought, she went on, “Won’t you give me some more? I’d like to recite some on my road trips, with your permission, of course. You will? That’ll be superb. You know, we tour a lot to army units outside the city, and it would be wonderful if I could read some of your poems. Do you agree?”

  He could only manage a nod.

  “The air’s very close in here, don’t you think? It’s beautiful outside, almost summer weather. Wouldn’t you like to go outside?”

  He went, of course. In less than a minute (and he hadn’t committed a single sin, in thought, word, or deed) they were sitting on a bench beside the wide asphalt road, bordered by a mosaic of white stones that shone a message into the starry night: FORWARD TOWARDS AN EXEMPLARY FULFILMENT OF THE AUTUMN EXERCISES. Despite the actress’s garrulous interest in Robert Neumann’s poetry, she soon had him talking about his private life. He found relief with her — not physical relief, but the kind that, in theory, the confessional was meant to provide. The difference was an important one. In the confessional, you accused yourself. Now, without even knowing how, Neumann suddenly found himself accusing his wife, and instead of undoing the buttons on the actress’s Chinese silk blouse somewhere in the thick bushes across the road, he provided her with the unhappy history of his marriage with the much-admired Ludmila. It felt like a great miracle of compassion, like balsam on his wounds applied by a sensitive and understanding female soul.

  In fact, Alena Hillmanová was cleverly exploiting the frustration of the progressive Catholic poet to gain an interesting insight into the love-life of her far too tight-lipped cousin, Daniel Smiřický.

  * * *

  The far too tight-lipped cousin was awakened next morning, in the bed of the technically faithful Ludmila Neumannová-Hertlová, by a loud noise. It was the father greeting the new day with a shout: “Goddamned Communist swine!” But the presence of a man who had every appearance of being the lover of his married daughter didn’t bother him. Danny, however, was not Marxist enough for the world to appear to him as a simple problem, resolvable through easily graspable laws. He listened calmly to the angry door-slam that marked the stage-manager’s departure for work. Ludmila was sleeping like a baby, her fists clenched and her mouth, which seemed so sensual awake, now puckered as if ready to draw milk from a mother’s breasts. He got up, put on his clothes, and shook her gently.

  With great effort she opened one eye.

  “Lizetka, when will I see you again?”

  “Come to the office,” she mumbled, and closed her eye again.

  He tiptoed out of the bedroom and the house, and spent the morning introducing himself around at a new and very large state publishing house where his cousin, the actress, had connections. He discovered that while he had been in the army, intellectual inflexibility had invaded publishing to a greater extent than he could have imagined, with disruptive results. In filling out the questionnaire for the post of editor of Anglo-American literature, he listed Hemingway among his favourite authors, but omitted to mention Howard Fast. In his final year at university, Hemingway had still been considered a progressive author whose only sin was to have crudely distorted the truth about the Spanish Civil War and vilified its real heroes. Since then, as the rather grave man who was interviewing him pointed out, Hemingway had been promoted. He was now a spy and an American intelligence agent. Danny reflected gloomily that this would probably ruin his chances for the job, but the grave man went on to inform him that everything evolves, including people and their opinions, and that no doubt he too, influenced by the female comrades in the Anglo-American “collective” (this was how they referred to editorial departments now), would develop and change. After being introduced to the comrades in question, he had no doubts about it either. One of them, a blue-eyed blonde with a round face, could single-handedly ensure his evolution in any direction she might wish.

  That afternoon Danny went to see Lizetka. She worked, or more precisely was employed, in an office called Cultural Enterprises of the Capital City of Prague; Danny never did manage to find out what the organization actually did. During his visit, an old man with the title of Head of the Chess Circle stopped by, but he was quickly swept out of the office.

  The office was located behind a glass partition in what had once been a vaudeville hall. Ludmila sat behind a large desk displaying a huge appointment book with almost nothing in it, an empty notepad, and a telephone. She shared the office with a peroxide blonde of about thirty called Mrs. Králová, whose husband was about to be appointed to the permanent Czechoslovak mission to the U.N. in New York. She was supposed to be Ludmila’s superior, but in his relatively frequent visits to the glassed-in office Danny had almost never found her in. Today was an exception, however, and perched on Králová’s desk (which had two telephones) was the third employee of the organization, a slender, pretty, impudent-looking girl by the name of Lexina. A man in a pale blue business suit slouched in the corner staring at her, but he had nothing to do with the affairs of the office. When Danny walked in, Králová was just speaking.

  “Naturally Vašek was teed off,” she said, “so he goes to the section chief, who’s fed up with h
im, but Vašek and Čepek from Security are hand in glove, and Čepek is in solid with Kopejda, so the section chief promises to arrange it for him, and before Vašek makes it back to the NV a telephone order’s already arrived that Budárek is to take over the Karlín operation. Budárek isn’t a bit pleased, and oh, by the way, Vašek set this little surprise up for him through Mikulka, so Vašek seemed to be out of the picture. Budárek doesn’t even blink, but he checks himself into the General Hospital with kidney trouble or something, because the head doctor is somebody called Šofr who Budárek once did a favour for, and now he’s waiting to see how the thing shakes out. Naturally, Vašek was teed off —”

  Whatever this outfit did, relationships between its employees were clearly very complex. It turned out, Králová said, that someone called Pecka was about to get the sack because there was ten thousand missing from the till, which under normal circumstances would have been replaced by grants, if only Hampejz hadn’t been after Pecka’s job. And Hampejz was in hot water because of those missing French originals, so he had to leave the SD though he’d only been there three months, but he’d certainly push Pecka out because Vosáhlo was keeping an eye out for Pecka, except that now they’d demoted Vosáhlo, so Pecka was up the creek and would probably end up in the DO instead of Čuříková, who got involved with Milič and the word leaked right up to the minister, who was Milič’s wife’s father.…

  As the tank commander listened to all this, the fellow in the blue suit was shamelessly eyeing Lexina, and Lexina was shamelessly letting herself be eyed, while popping chocolates into her mouth from a box on the table. Danny felt as though he’d just awakened from some idyllic, pastoral dream in which simple, uniformed shepherds were herding simple, uniformed sheep and then, two years later, driving them back into the terribly complicated world where human beings were locked in a constant struggle for good, better, and still better jobs. This complex new society was criss-crossed, it seemed, by a fine network of friendship and hostility, of favours rendered and owed, of sympathy and antipathy, of kinship and relationships that reminded him of nothing so much as a bloody family feud. He was astonished at how much mental effort went into calculating the possible combinations and estimating strengths and weaknesses, and how much depended on knowing things that might serve for blackmail. And all of this was, for some inscrutable reason, financed from the state treasury.