by Philip Roth
“They are strong on nothing,” says Eva. “It is that I am so weak. That I am stupid and cannot defend myself against all of these bullies! I cry, I shake, I cave in. I deserve what they do. In this world, still to carry on about a man! They should have cut my head off. That would have been justice!”
“And now,” says Sisovsky, “she is with another Jew. At her age. Now Eva is ruined completely.”
She erupts in Czech, he replies in English. “On Sunday,” he says to her, “what will you do at home? Have a drink, Eviczka. Have some whiskey. Try to enjoy life.”
Again, in Czech, she pleads with him, or berates him, or berates herself. In English, and again most gently, he says, “I understand. But Zuckerman is interested.”
“I am going!” she tells me—”I must go!” and rushes from the living room.
“Welt, I stay…’’ he mutters and empties his glass. Before I can get up to show her out, the door to my apartment is opened and slammed shut.
“Since you are curious,” says Sisovsky, while I pour him another drink, “she said that she is going home and I said what will you do at home and she said, ‘I am sick of your mind and I am sick of my body and I am sick to death of these boring stories!’”
“She wants to hear a new story.”
“What she wants is to hear a new man. Today she is angry because she says I bring her here with me only to show her to you. What am I to do—leave her alone in our room to hang herself? On a Sunday? Wherever we go now in New York and there is a man, she accuses me of this. ‘What is the function of this man?’ she says. There are dramatic scenes where she calls me a pimp. I am the pimp because she wants to leave me and is afraid to leave me because in New York she is nobody and alone.”
“And she can’t go back to Prague?”
“It is better for her not to be Eva Kalinova here than not to be Eva Kalinova there. In Prague, Eva would go out of her mind when she saw who they had cast to play Madam Arkadina.”
“But here she’s out of her mind selling dresses.”
“No,” he says. “The problem is not dresses. It’s Sundays. Sunday is not the best day in the émigré’s week.”
“Why did they let the two of you go?”
“The latest thing is to let people go, people who want to leave the country. Those who don’t want to leave, they must keep silent. And those who don’t want to leave, and who don’t wish to keep silent, they finish up in jail.”
“I didn’t realize, Sisovsky, that on top of everything else you were Jewish.”
“I resemble my mother, who was not. My father was the Jew. Not only a Jew, but like you, a Jew writing about Jews; like you, Semite-obsessed all his life. He wrote hundreds of stories about Jews, only he did not publish one. My father was an introverted man. He taught mathematics in the high school in our provincial town. The writing was for himself. Do vou know Yiddish?”
“I am a Jew whose language is English.”
“My father’s stories were in Yiddish. To read the stories, I taught myself Yiddish. I cannot speak. I never had him to speak it to. He died in 1941. Before the Jews began even to be deported. a Nazi came to our house and shot him.”
“Why him?”
“Since Eva is no longer here, I can tell you. it’s another of my boring European stories. One of her favorites. In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night. My father was horribly shy of people, even of his students. But because he believed that my mother and my brother would be protected if he was courteous with the officer, he went whenever he was called. And they were protected. All the Jews in the town were huddled into the Jewish quarter. For the others things got a little worse every day. but not for my family. For more than a year nobody bothered them. My father could no longer teach at the high school, but he was now allowed to go around as a private tutor to earn some money. At night, after our dinner, he would leave the Jewish quarter and go to play chess with the Gestapo officer. Well, stationed in the town there was another Gestapo officer. He had a Jewish dentist whom he was protecting. The dentist was fixing all his teeth for him. His family too was left alone, and the dentist was allowed to continue with his practice. One Sunday, a Sunday probably much like today, the two Gestapo officers went out drinking together and they got drunk, much the way, thanks to your hospitality, we are getting nicely drunk here. They had an argument. They were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist’s house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him. This enraged the other Nazi so much that the next morning he came to our house and he shot my father, and my brother also, who was eight. When he was taken before the German commandant, my father’s murderer explained, ‘He shot my Jew, so I shot his.’ ‘But why did you shoot the child?’ ‘That’s how God-damn angry I was, sir.’ They were reprimanded and told not to do it again. That was all. But even that reprimand was something. There was no law in those days against shooting Jews in their houses, or even on the street.”
“And your mother?”
“My mother hid on a farm. There I was born, two months later. Neither of us looks like my father. Neither did my brother, but his short life was just bad luck. We two survived.”
“And why did your father, with an Aryan wife, write stories in Yiddish? Why not in Czech? He must have spoken Czech to the students at the high school.”
“Czech was for Czechs to write. He married my mother, but he never thought he was a real Czech. A Jew who marries a Jew is able at home to forget he’s a Jew. A Jew who marries an Aryan like my mother has her face there always to remind him.”
“He didn’t ever write in German?”
“We were not Sudeten Germans, you see, and we were not Prague Jews. Of course German was less foreign to him than Czech, because of Yiddish. German he insisted on for my brother to be properly educated. He himself read Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, but his own father had been, not even a town Jew like him, he had been a Jew in the farmlands, a village shopkeeper. To the Czechs such Jews spoke Czech, but in the family they spoke only Yiddish. All of this is in my father’s stories: homelessness beyond homelessness. One story is called ‘Mother Tongue.’ Three pages only, about a little Jewish boy who speaks bookish German, Czech without the native flavor, and the Yiddish of people simpler than himself. Kafka’s homelessness, if I may say so, was nothing beside my father’s. Kafka had at least the nineteenth century in his blood—all those Prague Jews did. Kafka belonged to literature, if nothing else. My father belonged to nothing. If he had lived, I think that i would have developed a great antagonism to my father. I would have thought. ‘What is this man so lonely for? Why is he so sad and withdrawn? He should join the revolution—then he would not sit with his head in his hands, wondering where he belongs.’”
“Sons are famous the world over for generous thoughts about fathers.”
“When I came to New York and wrote my letter to you, I said to Eva, ‘1 am a relative of this great man.’ I was thinking of my father and his stories. Since we have come from Europe, I have already read fifty American novels about Jews. In Prague I knew nothing about this incredible phenomenon and how vast it was. Between the wars in Czechoslovakia my father was a freak. Even had he wished to publish his stories, where would they have appeared? Even if he had published all two hundred of them, no one would have paid attention—not to that subject. But in America my father would have been a celebrated writer. Had he emigrated before I was bom, had he come to New York City in his thirties, he would have been discovered by some helpful person and published in the best magazines. He would be something more now than just another murdered Jew. For years I never thought of my father, now every minute i wonder what he would make of the America I am seeing. I wonder what America would have made of him. He would be seventy-two. I am obsessed now with
this great Jewish writer that might have been.”
“His stories are that good?”
“1 am not exaggerating his excellence. He was a deep and wonderful writer.”
“Like whom? Sholem Aleichem? Isaac Babel?”
“I can tell you only that he was elliptical, humble, self-conscious, all in his own way. He could be passionate, he could be florid, he could be erudite—he could be anything. No, this is not the Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem. This is the Yiddish of Flaubert. His last work, ten little stories about Nazis and Jews, the saddest commentary I have ever read about the worst life has to offer. They are about the family of the Nazi commandant he played chess with at night. About his visits to the house and how charmed they all were. He called them ‘Stories about Chess.’”
“What became of those stories?”
“They are with my books in Prague. And my books in Prague are with my wife. And my wife does not like me so much anymore. She has become a drank because of me. Our daughter has become crazy because of me and lives with her aunt because of me. The police will not leave my wife alone because of me. I don’t think I’ll ever see my father’s stories again. My mother goes to ask my wife for her husband’s stories and my wife recounts for her all of my infidelities. She shows my mother photographs of all my mistresses, unclothed. These too I unfortunately left behind with my books.”
“Will she destroy your father’s stories?”
“No, no. She couldn’t do it. Olga is a writer too. In Czechoslovakia she is very well known for her writing, for her drinking, and for showing everybody her cunt. You would like Olga. She was once very beautiful, with beautiful long legs and gray cat-eyes and her books were once beautiful too. She is a most compliant woman. It is I alone whom she opposes. Anything another man wants, Olga will do it. She will do it well. If you were to visit Prague, and you were to meet Olga and Olga were to fall in love with you, she would even give you my father’s stories, if you were to go about it the right way. She loves love. She does anything for love. An American writer, a famous, attractive, American genius who does not practice the American innocence to a shameless degree—if he were to ask for my father’s stories, Olga would give them to him. I am sure of it. The only thing is not to lay her too soon.”
Prague, Feb. 4, 1976
AT Klenek’s every Tuesday night, with or without Klenek in residence, there is a wonderful party to go to. Klenek is currently directing a film in France. Because he is technically still married to a German baroness, he is by Czech law allowed to leave the country half of each year, ostensibly to be with her. The Czech Film industry is no longer open to him, but he continues to live in his palazzo and is permitted to associate with his old friends, many of whom the regime now honors as its leading enemies. No one is sure why he is privileged—perhaps because Klenek is useful propaganda, somebody the regime can hold up to its foreign critics as an artist who lives as he wishes. Also, by letting him work abroad, they can continue to tax his large foreign earnings. And, explains Bolotka, Klenek may well be a spy. “Probably he tells them things,” says Bolotka. “Not that it matters. Nobody tells him anything, and he knows nobody tells him anything, and they know nobody tells him anything.”
“What’s the point then?”
“With Klenek the point is to spy not on politics but on sex. The house is bugged everywhere. The secret police listen outside and look in the windows. It’s their job. Sometimes they even see something and get excited. This is a pleasant distraction from the pettiness and viciousness of their regular work. It does them good. It does everybody good. Fifteen-year-old girls come to Klenek’s. They dress up like streetwalkers and come from as far away as a hundred miles. Everybody, even schoolchildren, is looking for fun. You like orgies, you come with me. Since the Russians, the best orgies in Europe are in Czechoslovakia. Less liberty, better fucks. You can do whatever you want at Klenek’s. No drugs, but plenty of whiskey. You can fuck, you can masturbate, you can look at dirty pictures, you can look at yourself in the mirror, you can do nothing. All the best people are there. Also the worst. We are all comrades now. Come to the orgy, Zuckerman—you will see the final stage of the revolution.”
Klenek’s is a small seventeenth-century palazzo on the Kampa, a little residential island we reach by descending a long wet stairway from the Charles Bridge. Standing in the cobbled square outside of Klenek’s, I hear the Vltava churning past the deep stone embankment. I’ve walked with Bolotka from my hotel through the maze of the ghetto, passing on the way the capsized tombstones of what he informs me is the oldest Jewish cemetery left in Europe. Within the iron grating, the jumble of crooked, eroded markers looks less like a place of eternal rest than something a cyclone has tom apart. Twelve thousand Jews buried in layers in what in New York would be a small parking lot. Drizzle dampening the tombstones, ravens in the trees.
Klenek’s: large older women in dark rayon raincoats, young pretty women with jewels and long dresses, stout middle-aged men dressed in boxy suits and looking like postal clerks, elderly men with white hair, a few slight young men in American jeans— but no fifteen-year-old girls. Bolotka may be having some fun exaggerating for his visitor the depths of Prague depravity—a little cold water on free-world fantasies of virtuous political suffering.
Beside me on a sofa, Bolotka explains who is who and who likes what.
“That one was a journalist till they fired him. He loves pornography. I saw him with my eyes fucking a girl from behind and reading a dirty book at the same time. That one, he is a terrible abstract painter. The best abstract painting he did was the day the Russians came. He went out and painted over all the street signs so the tanks wouldn’t know where they were. He has the longest prick in Prague. That one. the little clerk, that is Mr. Vodicka. He is a very good writer, an excellent writer, but everything scares him. If he sees a petition, he passes out. When you bring him to life again, he says he will sign it: he has ninety-eight percent reason to sign, and only two percent reason not to sign, and he has only to think about the two percent and he will sign. By the next day the two percent has grown to one hundred percent. Just this week Mr. Vodicka told the government that if he made bad politics he is sorry. He is hoping this way they will let him write again about his perversion.”
“Will they?”
“Of course not. They will tell him now to write a historical novel about Pilsen beer.”
We are joined by a tall, slender woman, distinguished by a mass of hair dyed the color of a new penny and twisted down over her forehead in curls. Heavy white makeup encases her sharp, birdlike face. Her eyes are gray cat-eyes, her smile is beckoning. “I know who you are.” she whispers to me.
“And you are who?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even feel I exist.” To Bolotka: “Do I exist?”
“This one is Olga.” Bolotka says. “She has the best legs in Prague. She is showing them to you. Otherwise she does not exist.”
Mr. Vodicka approaches Olga, bows like a courtier, and takes her hand. He is a little, unobtrusive man of sixty, neatly dressed and wearing heavy spectacles. Olga pays him no attention.
“My lover wants to kill me,” she says to me.
Mr. Vodicka is whispering in her ear. She waves him away, but passionately he presses her hand to his cheek.
“He wants to know if she has any boys for him,” Bolotka explains.
“Who is she?”
“She was the most famous woman in the country. Olga wrote our love stories. A man stood her up in a restaurant and she wrote a love story, and the whole country talked about why he stood her up. She had an abortion and she told the doctor it could be one of eleven men, and the whole country debated whether it could actually be so many. She went to bed with a woman and the whole country read the story and was guessing who it was. She was seventeen, she already wrote a bestseller, Touha. Longing. Our Olga loves most the absent thing. She loves the Bohemian countryside. She loves her childhood. But always something is missing. Olga suffers the ma
dness that follows after loss. And this even before the Russians. Klenek saw her in a café a tall country girl, her heart full of touha, and he took her here to live with him. This is over twenty years ago. For seven years Olga was married. She had a child. Poor child. Now her husband runs off with the other famous woman in our country, a beautiful Czech actress who he will destroy in America, and Olga. Klenek looks after.”
“Why does she need looking after?”
“Why do you need looking after?” Bolotka asks her.
“This is awful,” she says. “I hear stories about myself tonight-Stories about who I fuck. I would never fuck such people.”
“Why do you need looking after. Olga?” Bolotka asks again.
