Republic Of Whores

by Josef Skvorecky

  Maňas had put a lot of stock in that military simile, but he had thought it up long before Hospodin had found someone for the role, and the apt comparison brought a roar of laughter from the audience. The woman blushed deeply and her reply, “Oh horsefeathers, you flatterer!”, could scarcely be heard over the noise. The following lines were more audible:

  “And where were you last Sunday, Honza? I was waiting for you.…”

  “I couldn’t come, Márinka. I had guard duty at the ammunition dump — you know, the one over there among the birch trees, where that big triangulation point is; the one you can see from town, about fifty metres due west of the wayside cross.”

  With miraculous ease, the girl extracted from him a precise account of every sentry’s sector, the rotation times, information about each unit’s location in the camp, the battalion’s emergency plan, the names of the commanders all the way up to the head of the division, the daily food consumption, technical details about the tank engines, standing orders on how soldiers were to behave on leave, and the minister of defence’s birthday. Having done so, she gave him an exemplary dressingdown for his lack of vigilance. In other words, no one was left in any doubt as to what the play symbolized — not even Major Sádlo, who was notoriously prejudiced against lack of clarity in works of art.

  Both political officers, glancing sideways at the major’s expressionless face, applauded wildly. The woman, whose face was now raspberry-red, ran off to the thunderous applause of the men to join her two friends from the local Youth Union, and into the centre of the room stepped Corporal Pískal and Sergeant Kobliha, with a guitar, to sing several “songs for two voices”.

  By now the battery of bottles on the officers’ table was almost half empty, and the men could bring out the rest of their hidden supplies and put them right on the table in front of them. Luckily, the amount of alcohol consumed by the officers was greater than their measure of judgement. To the clinking of glasses, Sergeant Kobliha began to strum his guitar and the duo launched into a song that, fortunately, none of the officers except First Lieutenant Pinkas (who by now was too drunk to care) recognized as coming from the very bosom of the imperialist West:

  Oh, give me a hoooome where the buffalo rooooam,

  Where the deeeer and the antelope plaaaay.…

  Kobliha’s lewd tenor provided a special contrast to the castrato descant of Corporal Pískal. They held each note to the limit and beyond, and as the plaintive melody and the slow strumming of the guitar rose above the hum of conversation, soldiers and officers alike fell silent and listened. The song carried above the cigarette smoke, above the alcoholic vapours, above the heads of the political officers, and rose to the heights of the mess hall, where the stone-faced portraits stared down, draped in colourless crêpe paper. High on the wall, a sign in blood-red letters proclaimed:

  FORWARD TOWARDS OUR HIGH IDEALS!

  FORWARD FOR OUR COUNTRY!

  NOT A STEP BACKWARD! ONWARD TO SOCIALISM!

  Where seldom is heeeeard a discouraging woooord

  And the skiiiies are not cloudy all daaaay,

  sang Pískal in his falsetto, while Kobliha strummed at his roughly tuned strings and the inner being of the assembled men was filled with emotion. The foul-mouthed First Lieutenant Kámen (a depleted bottle of Chartreuse in front of him) even began to cry, and the moment the song was over, he applauded with loud, explosive claps. Before the Pygmy Devil could respond, the duo began another song, devised in the cultural workshops of the border guards but with the lyrics adjusted for the tank division. Swayed by the response to their first number, they stretched the vowels even more, adding strange guttural noises wherever a short syllable fell on a long note. This added to the ballad’s hypnotic charm, and the soldiers’ hearts were overcome. Not even the hard heart of Captain Matka was excepted.

  Where the Vltava’s siiiilver waaaaaters floooow

  A young tank driiiiver staaaaands on guaaard,

  A stout machiiiine-gun iiiin his haaaand,

  To guaard the peeace of ow-er fa-haiir laaaand.

  In webs of cuuuunning and deceeeeeit

  Our moooother-land is held in thraaaall,

  Our tankist bra-havely faces west,

  Against our enemi-hies he stands taaaall.

  His iron fiiiist comes cra-hashing down

  To crush the traaaaitor i-hin his lair,

  He fears not daaanger, to-hoil nor woe

  Nor e’en to dea-heth his brea-hest to baaare.

  A mob of dirty handkerchiefs trumpeted, and moist tears dampened the stubble on many a cheek. Růžička leaned over to Major Sádlo in the storm of aplause that followed and remarked that the soldiers had their hearts in the right place, and that the right kind of song had the power to move them strongly, just as another kind of song could inspire them to greater achievements and nobler deeds. Major Sádlo didn’t reply, being no longer in control of his tongue. The songsters went on:

  And when at la-hast, his du-huty done,

  He wends his weeeary homeward wa-hay,

  Where maiden faaair waits patientleeee,

  And by his siiiide she’ll fo-hondly staaaay.

  The guitarist’s hand swept across the strings in an elegant half-circle, suspending in the air a long, lingering, and slightly out of tune chord, sweet and honeyed … and then wild applause, cries of bravo, the clinking of glasses, the thud of bodies falling under the table, men crawling along the tabletops, yelling, crying out, weeping. The tough veteran Lieutenant Pinkas collapsed on top of the banquet table, his thinning hair floating in a pool of whisky. First Lieutenant Kámen embraced the Pygmy Devil and, in his determination to plant a kiss on his cheeks, prevented the major, who was as moved by the song as he would ever be by anything, from making any remarks. Janinka caught Tank Commander Smiřický’s eye and gave a slight nod of her head towards the door, and he slipped quickly out of the room.

  Inspired by the preceding performance and by the state of the officers, an improvised quartet consisting of Sergeant Krajta, Sergeant Vytáhlý, Private Bamza, and Corporal Střevlíček came together between the tables and began gaily singing a tune of complaint. Hospodin and Růžička, lulled into a belief that everything would turn out well, stiffened as if struck by lightning when they heard the words:

  T’was nineteen hundred and fifty-one,

  The year that I was drafted;

  I’ll kill the man who took me in,

  The dirty rotten bastard!

  Out of the corner of his eye, Lieutenant Hospodin saw the Pygmy Devil, still immobilized in Kámen’s embrace, suddenly come alert and begin to scowl. With the corner of his other eye he saw Matka prick up his ears.

  They brought me here to Kobylec,

  This shitty one-horse town,

  I wish to God we’d shelled the place

  And burned it to the ground.

  Captain Matka shot out of his chair with unusual energy, but instead of intervening like a commanding officer, he shouted:

  “Now boys, let’s sing our own song, that good Bolshevik tune. Kámen, fall in beside me!”

  Oddly enough, Kámen, who was usually slow to obey orders, released the half-choked Pygmy Devil from his grasp so that he fell with a thump onto his chair. In an instant both the officers were singing a martial song:

  We are Bolsheviks so red

  And we’re better red than dead;

  And we’ll never go to bed

  With capitalist dogs,

  No, we’ll never go to bed with capitalist dogs!

  Kobliha came up to them with his guitar and, quickly picking up the half-familiar tune, began to accompany them loyally. The officers put their arms around each other’s shoulders and joined in:

  They call us ruddy terrorists,

  The dervishes of Gottwald;

  We’ll pay them back for their attack,

  We’ll build a mighty scaffold.

  Carried away by the exuberance of their interpretation, several drunken privates joined in, and soon
after, timidly at first, the two political officers. The final verse of the song of battle — which appeared in none of the army songbooks — rang through the smoke-filled room:

  When Gottwald sends his orders

  From the castle up in Prague,

  We’ll take the bourgeois by their necks

  And throttle them like dogs.

  As most of the soldiers were aglow with excitement, and the convivial influence of the alcohol took the edge off class hatred, the performance of the officers was received with applause. But Sergeant Krajta’s quartet was not about to be upstaged. The officers’ revolutionary song had come from the pre-Communist days; they now sang one from their own era:

  The working class, they gave us guns

  And showed us how to use ’em;

  But now we sit with broken hearts

  And wish we could refuse ’em.

  It was a provocative ditty and, surprisingly, it even provoked a sense of honour in First Lieutenant Kámen. He put his arms around Captain Matka’s neck, pulled Lieutenant Hospodin close to him on the other side, stomped the floor with his riding boot to establish the beat, and then, accompanied by Sergeant Kobliha on the guitar, began to sing a fatalistic song:

  When the boys come over from the U.S.A.

  They’ll hang us all within a day,

  They won’t let nothing in their way,

  Oh, they’ll hang us all within a day.

  Sergeant Krajta’s quartet overlaid this with a sprightly, optimistic tune that had a danceable rhythm. Everyone who wasn’t too drunk joined spontaneously in the refrain:

  When we joined the army, boys,

  A song was on our lips,

  We thought no one could touch us,

  We didn’t know from shit.

  Oh, the army is a bugger

  And the army is a whore,

  The army breaks your balls and has

  You crawling back for more.

  The sharp crack of a pistol rang through the room. Everyone froze, terrified. The Pygmy Devil was standing on the officers’ table with a smoking revolver in his hand. A small cloud of white dust descended from the corner of the room, where the bullet had gone into the ceiling, and the startled singers felt bits of plaster hitting their heads. Speaking into the shocked silence, the Pygmy Devil waved his pistol and screamed: “Soldiers! Dismiss to your barracks at once!”

  He left a dramatic pause, but it was filled by a rising hum of anger. He shouted again: “I will not permit anyone to insult our working class, our country, and our People’s Democratic Army. It seems to me, comrades, that two years of political schooling has not been enough! Is this how you fulfil your responsibilities, Comrade Lieutenant?” And he turned to face Lieutenant Růžička. The politruk turned green and felt a swoon coming on.

  “This is the respect you have for the wonderful opportunities our People’s Democratic State has given you, comrades?” the Pygmy Devil went on, turning to the soldiers in the room. “This… is supposed to be an evening of farewell to the most sacred duty of a citizen of a people’s democracy? You’ve shown yourselves in fine colours, comrades. You’ve behaved like a gang of the wickedest reactionaries.”

  The hostile buzz in the hall grew. Soudek stepped out of the crowd with a bottle in his hand. “What kind of bullshit is this, you little runt? Who the fuck are you calling reactionary?”

  “Tomorrow you report to your commanding officer!” the little major screamed. Then he stopped and corrected himself. “To the division commander! And you too, Comrade Captain!” and he turned to Matka. Matka clicked his heels together and replied in the only way he could think of: “Yes, sir.”

  “And now — dismiss!” screeched the Pygmy Devil. The tempest of voices rose, and once again Soudek’s was the loudest: “Throw him out!” he cried.

  “Kick his ass!” shouted Private Bamza. The voices grew louder, and a dangerous circle formed around the little major. Hospodin and Růžička, both of them deathly pale and almost fluorescent with fear, shielded him with their own bodies.

  But the Pygmy Devil didn’t wait for a hero’s death. He shook his fist and shouted at the crowd: “You will all bear the consequences of this!” and then turned quickly and rushed out through the corridor and into the darkness of the night.

  * * *

  When Tank Commander Smiřický found himself outside in the night air, he walked quickly across the road and into the shadow cast by a tall tree with a wide crown. Clusters of distant nebulae were shimmering in the sky, like sparkling cuttlefish swimming through an inky sea. The stars looked down on the army base, on the chestnut trees where the last leaves were rustling in the night breeze, on the network of roads radiating in all directions. On each road, somewhere near the end, stood a guard who let no one pass, though he cared not who the traveller was or what his business; he had been given his orders. The stars also gazed down on the silent training field, on the parachute landing pits filled with white sand and the high wooden towers from which the trainees jumped. A confusion of voices, snatches of song, and bursts of laughter came from the window of the mess hall. Danny leaned against the wooden wall of the equipment shed and gazed at the entrance to the dining hall, a dark rectangle in the white wall.

  Suddenly a young woman appeared in that rectangle. The faint white glow from the sky mixed with the darkness of the night to suffuse her face and flow down her black dress. On her bosom a dark green tear flashed and disappeared. She looked around and the emerald on her dress ignited again, then went out, ignited and went out.

  She stepped out onto the road, into the full light of the night, and looked around uncertainly. Several steps, a movement, as though someone in the dark of the night had whispered a favourite verse, and in his heart the lieutenant’s wife triumphed, temporarily, over the seductive aroma of civilian life and the attractions of Prague. It was as though a floodgate had opened up in him and released his river of sorrow over thwarted longings, over the weakness of longings fulfilled, over the pathetic way life was set up.

  “Janinka!” he called out quietly.

  She ran across the road and pressed herself into his arms. He looked at her.

  “Danny!” she whispered. He kissed her. The spark in the emerald went out when his shadow fell across it.

  “Come on.” He took her by the hand, and they went into the exercise field and stood at the edge of the jumping pits. She pressed against him but said nothing. He needed to speak, but in the shadow of the equipment shed, where ropes hung like nooses from an enormous gallows, he felt a constricting anxiety.

  “Let’s climb up here, Janinka.”

  She looked upwards, towards the sky, and laughed. “We aren’t monkeys, are we, Dr. Smiřický?”

  It was a poor attempt at humour, and her voice broke. “Damn,” she said, “all right. Go ahead. Go ahead, Danny. And give me your hand. It’s going to be wonderful, we’ll be right under the stars.”

  Wanting to show off, Danny swung vigorously onto the first rung of the tall ladder. It was as high as her head, and he reached down for her. She put one of her hands in his, and grabbed the rung with the other and tried to swing herself up.

  “Wait a moment,” she said. “I’m going to take my stockings off.”

  He watched as she turned around and pulled up her skirt, first on one side, then on the other. The ceremony aroused an agonizing hunger in him. Two grey clouds of smoke floated down on the white sand, and she clambered up to him, her pale knees sparkling. Then they quickly climbed up the wooden ladder together.

  It was quiet on the platform. The roads winding beyond the buildings and snaking around the exercise field looked like lines on a map, and under the phosphorescent cuttlefish in the sky rose the dark outline of Old Roundtop, theatre of such glorious tank battles. The breeze blew lightly on their cheeks. The lieutenant’s wife snuggled up to the tank commander. She crossed her bare legs and they swung in the darkness, glimmering in the night air like two lighthouses on the shores of sleep, her tender little to
es pointing towards the white landing pits.

  “So it’s the day after tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then we won’t see each other again.”

  “Sure we will,” he said. “We can meet in Prague. You’ll be able to come, won’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not? Your husband is always on duty. He won’t even know you’ve been away. You can take the morning express —”

  “Why did you have to come into my life, anyway?” she interrupted him. There was a sad desperation in her voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you show up is what I mean, damn it,” she said unhappily, and looked away, across the camp to the black mass of Old Roundtop, and past that, past the sentries pacing away the night, past the borders of her lost world named Kobylec. “There was little Honza, and the canteen and the officers and movies three nights a week, and a little flat in a new married quarters, and the boredom and the emptiness and at night the tanks on the shooting range and the beautiful tracer bullets in the air, and everything was just as it should have been. And then you came into it. Why, for the love of God, why?”