by Pavel Mandys
PART III
Shadows of the Past
The Life and Work of Baroness Mautnic
by Kateřina Tučková
New Town
That building left on people strolling along the promenade the impression of an unsettling inappropriateness. At first sight, something about it was off—something on it was crooked, something was missing somewhere, or, on the contrary, there was too much of something—devil knows what. It emanated disharmony. One’s vision became overwhelmed, as if one was looking into the distorted mirrors in the nearby Petřín Labyrinth. Passersby on the promenade usually looked at it searchingly—twice or even thrice—but then they gave up. After all, on the other bank of the Vltava, there opened in front of them the panorama of the Prague Castle that draws one’s eyes so naturally that it cannot be resisted.
Therefore, only a very few deciphered that the apartment house in the shadow of the National Theatre seemed strange because each window on it was different. Each window had a slightly different stylized form: some were perpendicular, others had a semicircle or a triangle at the top, still others were divided by columns, but some windows were also doubled or tripled. In addition, each was surrounded by a unique ornamental decoration. But the difference was—and this was what was so confusing—in the details. The windows changed gradually, from one floor to another, sometimes broken off by a dormer window or a balcony which only contributed to the overall bewilderment of its disposition. That’s why the building left the impression of disarray, disproportion, and discrepancy without anyone realizing the source of the impression.
The house was the work of the architect Gustav Papež, but more so than his invention, it reflected the builder’s wish. Baron Mautnic, the last descendant of a family of industrialists, had a reputation as a man whose visions transcended his time, with a spectacular imagination and courage bordering on exhibitionism.
Twenty years before the birth of the future little artist and visionary Stowasser—and fifty years before he introduced himself in Vienna as Hundertwasser with his Musty Manifesto Against Rationalistic Architecture—Baron Maxmilian Albert Mautnic built a house about which he proclaimed: “It will be a building that will overwhelm the eyes of many, and the mouths of many will howl in enthusiasm or revulsion; it will be the most absurd building in Prague, the most celebrated in all of Bohemia, and the most talked-about in the entire monarchy!”
* * *
And now the house is theirs again. After almost half a century, they have it in black-and-white; the decision about the restitution of their property is glued to the front door to spite all the current tenants who, during all those years, behaved toward them as if they were mangy.
“Look, has destitution taught hard work to even Miss Baroness?” they laughed at her, as on hands and knees she trudged from one floor to another, hunched over a pail with a rag, cleaning the stairs of pink travertine. Nobody scoured them, or kept them up, except Hedvika and her mother. Even if the tenants were supposed to maintain and clean the property—which at the moment of nationalization became their commonly owned house—they all knew that if they didn’t do their work, if they didn’t wash the floors, didn’t dust the original stucco, didn’t polish the art nouveau lamps and forged banisters, the two women would not be able to bear it. And the following Sunday, they would trudge through the house and put everything in order that had to be put in order, wearing head scarves and sweatpants.
“A squad of baronesses,” they laughed at them, instead of thanking them as the tenants returned from their afternoon card games.
Their wives, smirking, would add: “Serves them right—otherwise, they would never know what real work tastes like.”
As if they didn’t know that she and her mother were no baronesses; that the title could be inherited only in a direct line which died off with the uncle and then definitely became extinct with the death of the aunt in 1974. They ignored it even if after the founding of Czechoslovakia, noble titles had been invalidated and she herself had a completely different name. Nevertheless, it was as if the hallmark of the Mautnic family was sealed on her forehead—and if not there, then definitely in her files where the personnel committee wrote: Incompetent to study natural sciences at university.
Thus, to experience what real work tastes like was something she certainly had plenty of opportunities to do. In the mideighties, she couldn’t get into any other high school except an agrarian vocational school, and once she’d finished her studies in floristry she got exactly one job offer—at a crematorium. For five years she arranged flowers in the ceremonial hall, but also cleaned, moved chairs around, and, together with the eulogizer, moved coffins onto the catafalque when one of the staff responsible for cremation had nursed a bottle of schnapps instead of working, and left the freshly grieving family and friends impatiently shuffling outside the door. Then, during the first couple of post-revolution years, she held quite a few jobs: warehouse worker; miserly paid night watchwoman at a women’s dormitory (when she thought she could attend university during the day); and postwoman, which is the job she still has today.
She had no choice—once the government returned their house to them, she had to forget her university studies and secure a regular income. The building, neglected for years and then flooded, required everything—her time, all of her money, and her full attention.
And so now, at four in the morning, she was already sorting through mail. At five she ran out for her half-marathon through the center of Prague, delivering letters and bills, so that with ten kilometers in her legs already, she could commence her next shift. From nine, she cleaned and dusted, managed workers, and, most importantly, pleaded for money which this house literally hemorrhaged . . .
Hedvika exhaled, looked tiredly around her auntie’s bedroom, one of only two in the apartment, where she had grown up with her parents.
The former private floor of Baron Mautnic was divided into two apartment units, between which they had fitted a common bathroom with a toilet. And then they moved them there—the auntie and Hedvika’s parents—into the former study room with the uncle’s collection on exhibit. The family of the functionary Knotek was moved into the salon and the smoking room—no questions asked, because back then the housing issues in Prague were solved without any discussion. After the Communist putsch, the auntie defended her property rights with great difficulty; she had no control over who would be moved into it.
And so one morning, apparently, there reverberated the rumble of jackhammers, a banging of hammers, and the ill-tempered shouts of masons, and partitions appeared in the beautifully polished hardwood and mosaic floors, dividing spacious rooms into small apartments for the needy. Those rooms with a view of the Prague Castle silhouette and the Vltava River were given to worthy revolutionaries; rooms with windows facing the courtyard were given to the no-less-worthy informers. The entire attic was taken over by Doctor Šimek—cold, taciturn, creeping through the halls like a ghost. This doctor of who-knows-what, who, in addition to having the key to his apartment, also owned the keys to the turret where, in an eagle’s nest high above the roofs of New Town, the eye was enthroned.
The eye of a telescope—which from time to time would betray itself with a flash when people returning home from work would look up searchingly into the only window on the turret—that could easily watch the goings-on down along the promenade. No suspicious movement of locals could escape the eye. No foreigner who, for example, went to see the golden chapel, let alone one of the dissidents who used to meet in the nearby Slavia coffee house, where they were plotting to bring down the regime. Above and below, only a couple dozen meters from each other; ideologically, however, there was a distance of hundreds of thousands of light-years . . .
“What should I do with this? Store it or dispose of it?” the elderly foreman of the moving company interrupted Hedvika in her thoughts. Since the morning, they had been emptying the flooded first and second floors and moving furniture into an empty apartment one floor above
, or, alternately, carrying it into the container parked in front of the house.
If there was any silver lining to the flood—which overflowed the dam on the promenade on one stormy July night and rose through the basement and the first floor, narrowly missing the windows of their apartment—then it was the fact that the restitution process sped up by weeks if not months. A bailiff delivered the notification (dated the day prior to the flood) on the second day after the disaster, thanks to which a third of the unwanted tenants had to move out.
However, the flood had caught Hedvika unprepared. She would hardly be able to finance the reconstruction of the decrepit house that had been neglected by the municipal authorities—flood or no flood. She now had to deal with the basement filled with mud, the dumpy walls on the first floor, and the mold climbing up the walls to the upper-level apartments. All the savings—hers and her mother’s—she lost in the first days after the flood to pay for the cleaning. For the reconstruction, which could not be delayed even for a few days, there was nothing left. But the bank didn’t care. Hedvika had a ridiculously small income as a postwoman, and her old mother plus a waterlogged house did not provide a sufficient guarantee to get a loan. Everywhere, the door was closed with the words: We advise you to get rid of it fast, sell it even if you have to undersell it.
Thus, Hedvika had not done well with banks, she didn’t believe in under-the-counter “fast money” loans, and she didn’t want to involve her friends. She had only one option left—to agree to the odious offer from Doctor Šimek.
That idea horrified her. She had been afraid of him her entire life. In past years, she’d unsuccessfully fought off his claws reaching to the offices of the court where the restitution of their house had been held up—and now, she should sell off half of her inheritance to his son? She recalled how he would smile at her unctuously from the depth of his wheelchair and say: “And maybe it could go further than just joint custody of the house!” She shook with disgust envisioning any closeness to Šimek Jr.—a chubby, incessantly sweating squirt, barely up to her breasts at which, during their every meeting, he impertinently gazed.
“I said, what about this?” the mover repeated. He was holding a big turtle shell, which for years had been lying on the cabinet together with other unsellable items from the uncle’s collection which, in deference to his bequest, they never threw away.
“That’s a shell from a hawksbill sea turtle, eretmochelys imbricata. This specimen of a critically endangered species was caught off of a coral reef in the Pacific Ocean. Especially interesting is the sawtooth rim with a gorgeous black and red pattern on the carapace,” Hedvika recited from the tag affixed to the abdominal plastron. As a child, she had spelled it out at least a thousand times.
The mover looked at her as if she had insulted him with the information, and then he lashed out at her impatiently: “Very well, but where should I put it?”
Hedvika felt her face redden as she stammered, guiltily, “Right . . . put it somewhere upstairs, please.” She could only imagine what he must have thought of her.
Such a fine lady, nouveau riche—a house on the promenade falls into her lap and now she lectures and hustles them. Them, the former working cadres, not so long ago the pride of the nation, as they claimed in the news, on the radio and TV; hard workers who used to work with their hands to make a very nice living that allowed them to enjoy nice holidays and cars. And now, when all the privatized businesses laid off workers, they had to plead for a little money from people like this one. A good-for-nothing, gawping, too-clever-by-half heir, whose debauched ancestors amassed houses on the Prague embankment by wringing people like him dry. Where was the fairness in that?
From the hall shared by both apartments, she could hear a disgruntled moaning and a banging of furniture as the movers were taking out one piece after another. Hedvika turned her back to this abrasiveness and peered out the window.
The turtle shell, a stuffed stoat, and a frog that looked like a dried-up apple were the only pieces from the uncle’s collection of zoological specimens which her auntie—after they had forced her in her own house into one small room—never gave to the National Museum. Her generosity back then was a virtue of necessity because the collection, consisting of many different exhibits, couldn’t fit into the small apartment. Not one of the nationalized institutions was able to buy the collection from the aunt, so in the end—grinding her teeth—she gave it to the National Museum and thus buried it in their depositories. Exactly as the upper echelons had intended to do with his wunderkammer.
To the aunt’s horror, the museum staff receiving the collection didn’t even bother to check all the valuable objects. The papers with detailed descriptions, which the auntie had copied for them from the uncle’s catalogs, ended up under a seat in the truck.
“Do you know how much of this we now have? Tons. You have no idea what those precious princes, counts, and barons had amassed, and how much junk we now collect in the interest of the people of Czechoslovakia,” the driver told her as he was closing the truck’s hull. The huge stuffed grizzly bear—which until that fated day had welcomed guests upon entering the uncle’s salon—was sticking out like a caught criminal; they secured it with ropes around its neck and paws. Auntie Magdalena later reminisced that its raised paws in the attacking gesture were rearing up like the hands of a despairing child whose wail—Don’t believe him, don’t let me go, keep me home!—died out in the roar of the truck’s engine firing up.
“Don’t worry, your stuffed things will end up in good company,” an employee of the museum called after her before he left.
Aunt Magdalena didn’t doubt that at all; she had an idea how much the state stole in those days. She doubted, however, that the state would take care of the newly amassed property as a good steward, which her husband Baron Mautnic—an amateur zoologist, botanist, and archeologist, and a passionate art and curiosities collector—certainly was.
It had taken him many years to assemble his collection, and when he built his house, one floor was specifically designed for it. He devoted the floor to science and the beauty of the arts; he furnished for himself a study, a salon where important scientists, thinkers, and artists of the day used to meet; he had his wunderkammer and depository there. On the walls hung first-rate paintings and the casts of world-renowned sculptures; in the monumental shelving cabinets, of which only one piece now remained standing on Hedvika’s left, the most interesting examples of zoological rarities had their place. The giant butterfly attacus atlas from the island of Ceylon, as large as a turtledove; the arrow frog phyllobates terribilis from the jungles of South America, which in the pores of its skin hid the most potent of poisons; the genuine feathers of the mythical phoenix . . . Uncle’s collection was a shining jewel among all the Prague collections. They said that Caesar Rudolph II would himself have been envious of it.
No wonder Auntie, after all of the forced surrendering, fought fiercely until the day she died for the only thing that remained of Baron Mautnic—the family house on the promenade. She was relentless—she demanded information from the authorities who refused to provide it. She hired expensive lawyers who would go against her if she didn’t have by her side the loyal J.D. Boháček, who was once the legal advisor to Baron Mautnic, but who at the time was working as a laborer, having been promptly stripped of his law practice in 1948. Thanks to his efforts, she always learned what she had to do (even if at the last minute) to take care of the house, or what to install in it so that they did not evict them due to neglect of upkeep, as was common in those days. And then she would come up with a piece of jewelry from somewhere, an antique painting or a valuable vase, which she was able to sell through a state company for a ridiculous, extortionately small price. Still, she was always able to scrape together the money she needed.
But that is also why she didn’t escape the attention of the tenants, the national committee, and at last the state police. For a while, there was a revolving door of unexpected visitors.
&
nbsp; “How did you come to own the painting you sold on November 7, 1959, to the state company Antiques for 1,900 Czechoslovak korunas?” men in gray trench coats would ask her.
“I have a few pieces left from my husband, you know. In the confusion of the move I didn’t really know about everything he owned,” her auntie would answer and open in front of them a neatly organized home accounting book.
They quizzed, investigated, and sometimes they would bring a warrant to search the apartment. They rummaged through the basement and attic, but did not find anything. Maybe a few trinkets hung on the walls, portraits of family members, a painting of the house above the aunt’s bed, some antique furniture—things for which she had papers from the authorities confirming that she was allowed to own them.
Up to the moment when the Russians showed up, they had been satisfied with that.
But after two tanks had nestled in front of their house, on the exact spot at which Hedvika was looking right now from their apartment, each of their visits became pure hell filled with threats and intimidation.
Hedvika could not take her eyes off that place, where the riverfront promenade opened up into a small space in front of the National Theatre.
The view offered to her today was quaint. The afternoon sun was already above the castle and was shining on the surface of the river that idly flowed in its original bed as if it didn’t want to leave the promenade, with its alley colored with all shades of the incipient autumn. This view differed vastly from the one she knew from the photographs dated to the late summer of thirty years before. Thanks to them—the small, slightly blurry black-and-white images—and thanks to her father’s regular reminiscences which were de rigueur at every one of her birthday parties, she felt as if she herself had taken part in the event.
That night, just prior to August 21, 1968, both Auntie Magdalena and her father—who was supposed to bring in the newborn Hedvika from the hospital in the morning—did not sleep a wink. As if bewitched, they watched the street. With bated breath they listened to the radio where in an unending loop, an announcement was repeated: “Yesterday, on the twentieth of August around eleven p.m., the armies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Polish People’s Republic, Hungarian People’s Republic, and Bulgarian People’s Republic crossed the state border of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. This transpired without the knowledge of the president of the republic, the Bureau of the National Assembly, or the chief secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, who regard this act as contrary to all the fundamental norms of international law. However, they call on all the citizens of the republic to remain calm and not to challenge the advancing troops, because at this moment, to defend our state border is unfeasible . . .”
