by Philip Roth
Prague, Feb. 5, 1976
THE phone awakens me at quarter to eight.
“This is your wife-to-be. Good morning. I am going to visit you. I am in the lobby of the hotel. ! am coming now to visit you in your room.”
“No, no. I’ll come down to you. It was to be lunch, not breakfast.”
“Why are you scared for me to visit you when I love you’?” asks Olga.
“It’s not the best idea here. You know that.”
“I am coming up.”
“You’re going to get yourself in trouble.”
“Not me,” she says.
I’m still doing up my trousers when she is at the door, wearing a long suede coat that might have seen her through trench warfare, and a pair of tall leather boots that look as if she’d been farming in them. Against the worn, soiled animal skins, her white neck and white face appear dramatically vulnerable—you can see why people do things to her that she does not necessarily like: bedraggled, bold, and helpless, a deep ineradicable sexual helplessness such as once made bourgeois husbands so proud in the drawing room and so confident in bed. Since I am frightened of everything, it is as well to go in one direction as the other, Well, not only is she going, she’s gone: she is reckless desperation incarnate.
I let her in quickly and close the door. “Prudence isn’t your strong point.”
“This I have never heard. Why do you say this?” she asks.
I point to the brass chandelier suspended above the bed, a favored place, Sisovsky had already told me back in New York, for the installation of a bugging device. “In your room,” he warned me, “be careful about what you say. There are devices hidden everywhere. And on the phone it is best to say nothing. Don’t mention the manuscript to her on the phone.”
She drops into a chair beside the window while I continue to dress.
“You must understand,” she says loudly, “that I am not marrying you for your money. I am marrying you,” she continues. gesturing toward the light fixture, “because you tell me you love me at first sight, and because I believe this, and because at first sight I love you.”
“You haven’t been to sleep,”
“How can I sleep? I am thinking only of my love for you, and I am happy and sad ail at once. When I am thinking of our marriage and our children I do not want to sleep.”
“Let’s have breakfast somewhere. Lei’s get out of here.”
“First tell me you love me.”
“I love you.”
“Is this why you marry me? For love?”
“What other reason could there be?”
“Tell me what you love most about me.”
“Your sense of reality.”
“But you must not love me for my sense of reality, you must love me for myself. Tell me all the reasons you love me.”
“At breakfast.”
“No. Now. I cannot marry a man who I have only just met” —she is scribbling on a piece of paper as she speaks—”and risk my happiness by making the wrong choice. I must be sure. I owe it to myself. And to my aged parents.”
She hands me the note and I read it. You cannot trust Czech police to understand ANYTHING, even in Czech. You must speak CLEAR and SLOW and LOUD.
“I love your wit,” I say.
“My beauty?”
“I love your beauty.”
“My flesh?”
“I love your flesh.”
“You love when we make love?”
“Indescribably.”
Olga points to the chandelier. “What means ‘indescribably,’ darling?”
“More than words can say.”
“It is much better fucking than with the American girls.”
“It’s the best.”
In the hotel elevator, as we ride down along with the uniformed operator (another police agent, according to Bolotka) and three Japanese early-risers, Olga asks, “Do you fuck anybody yet in Czechoslovakia?”
“No, Olga. I haven’t. Though a few people in Czechoslovakia may yet fuck me.”
“How much is a room at this hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course. You’re so rich you don’t have to know. Do you know whv thev bug these big hotels, and always above the bed?”
“Why?”
“They listen in the rooms to the foreigners fucking. They want to hear how the women are coming in the different languages. Zuckerman, how are they coming in America? Teach me which words the American girls say.”
In the lobby, the front-desk clerk moves out from behind the reception counter and crosses the lobby to meet us. Politely excusing himself to me, he addresses Olga in Czech.
“Speak English!” she demands. “I want him to understand! I want him to hear this insult in English!”
A stocky gray-haired man with formal manners and a heavy unsmiling face, the clerk is oblivious to her rage; he continues unemotionally in Czech.
“What is it?” I ask her.
“Tell him!” she shouts at the clerk. “Tell him what you want!”
“Sir, the lady must show her identity card. It is a regulation.”
“Why is it a regulation?” she demands. “Tell him!”
“Foreign guests must register with a passport. Czech citizens must show an identity card if they go up to the rooms to make a call.”
“Except if the Czech is a prostitute! Then she does not have to show anything but money! Here—I am a prostitute. Here is your fifty kroner—leave us in peace!”
He turns away from the money she is sticking into his face,
To me Olga explains, “I am sorry, Mister, I should have told you. Whipping a woman is against the law in a civilized country, even if she is being paid to be beaten. But everything is all right if you pay off the scum. Here,” she cries, turning again to the clerk, “here is a hundred! I do not mean to insult you! Here is a hundred and fifty!”
“1 need an identity card for Madame, please.”
“You know who I am,” she snarls, “everybody in this country knows who I am.”
“I must record the number in my ledger, Madame.”
“Tel! me, please, why do you embarrass me like this in front of tny prospective husband? Why do you try to make me ashamed of my nationality in front of the man I love? Look at him! Look at how he dresses! Look at his coat with a velvet collar! On his trousers he has buttons and not a little zipper like you! Why do you try to give such a man second thoughts about marrying a Czech woman?”
“I wish only to see her identity card, sir. I will return it immediately.”
“Olga,” I say softly, “enough.”
“Do you see?” she shouts at the clerk. “Now he is disgusted. And do you know why? Because he is thinking. Where are their fine old European manners? What kind of country permits such a breach of etiquette toward a lady in the lobby of a grand hotel?”
“Madame, I will have to ask you to remain here while I report you for failing to show your identity card.”
“Do that. And I will report you for your breach of etiquette toward a lady in the lobby of a grand hotel in a civilized European country. We will see which of us they put in jail. You will see which of us will go to a slave-labor camp.”
1 whisper, “Give him the card.”
“Go!” she screams at the clerk. “Call the police, please. A man who failed to remove his hat to a lady in the elevator of the Jalta Hotel is now serving ten years in a uranium mine. A doorman who neglected to bow farewell to a lady at the Hotel Esplanade is now in solitary confinement without even toilet facilities. For what you have done you will never again see your wife or your old mother. Your children will grow up ashamed of their father’s name. Go. Go! I want my husband-to-be to see what we do in this country to people without manners. I want him to see that we do not smile here upon rudeness to a Czech woman! Call the authorities—this minute! In the meantime, we are going to have our breakfast. Come, my dear one. my darling.”
Taking my arm, she starts away, but not b
efore the clerk says, “There is a message, sir,” and slips me an envelope. The note is handwritten on hotel stationery.
Dear Mr. Zuckerman,
I am a Czech student with a deep interest in American writing. I have written a study of your fiction about which I would like to talk to you. “The Luxury of Self-Analysis As h Relates to American Economic Conditions.” I will meet with you here at the hotel anytime, if you will be willing to receive me. Please leave word at the desk.
Yours most respectfully, Oldrich Hrobek
The guests already taking breakfast watch over the rims of their coffee cups while Olga vigorously declines to sit at the corner table to which we have been shown by the headwaiter. She points to a table beside the glass doors to the lobby. In English the headwaiter explains to me that this table is reserved.
“For breakfast?” she replies. “That is a fucking lie.”
We are seated at the table by the lobby doors. I say, “What now, Olga? Tel! me what’s coming next.”
“Please don’t ask me about these things. They are just stupidities. I want eggs, please. Poached eggs. Nothing in life is as pure as a poached egg. If I don’t eat I will faint,”
“Tell me what was wrong with the first table.”
“Bugged. Probably this table they bug too; probably all are bugged. Fuck it, I am too weak. Fuck the whole thing. Fuck it all. Teach me another one. I need this morning one that is really good.”
“Where have you been all night?”
“You would not have me so I found some people who would, Call the waiter, please, or I will faint. I am going to faint. I am feeling sick. I am going to the loo to be sick.”
I follow after her as she runs from the table, but when I reach the dining-room door, my way is blocked by a young man with a tiny chin beard; he is in a toggled loden coat and carrying a heavy briefcase. “Please,” he says, his face only inches from mine—a face taut with panic and dreadful concern—”! have tried to reach you just now in your room. I am Oldrich Hrobek. You have received my note?”
“Only this minute.” I say, watching Olga rush through the lobby to the ladies’ room.
“You must leave Prague as soon as possible. You must not stay here. If you do not leave immediately, the authorities will harm you.”
“Me? How do you know this?”‘
“Because they are building a case. I’m at Charles University. They questioned my professor, they questioned me.”
“But I just got here. What case?”
‘They told me you were on an espionage mission and to stay away from you. They said they wilt put you in jail for what you are doing here.”
“For espionage?”
“Plotting against the Czech people. Plotting with troublemakers against the socialist system. You are an ideological saboteur—you must leave today.”
“I’m an American citizen.” I touch the billfold that holds not only my passport but my membership card in the American PEN Club, signed by the president, Jerzy Kosinski.
“Recently an American got off the train in Bratislava and was immediately put into jail for two months because he was mistaken for somebody else. He wasn’t even the right person and that didn’t get him out. An Austrian was taken from his hotel to prison a week ago and is to stand trial for anti-Czech activities. A West German journalist they drowned in the river. They said he was fishing and fell in. There are hard-line people who want to make an impression on the country. With you they can make an impression. This is what the police have told me. Many, many arrests are going to be made.”
I hear very clearly the sound of the river splashing against the steep stone embankment outside of Klenek’s palazzo.
“Because of me.”
“Including you.”
“Maybe they are just frightening you,” I say, my heart galloping. galloping to burst.
“Mr. Zuckerman, I should not be in here. I must not be in here—but i am afraid to miss you. There is more. If you will walk to the railway station I will meet you there in five minutes. It is at the top of the main street—just to the left. You will see it. I will pretend to run into you outside the big station cafe. Please, they told my girl friend the same thing. They questioned her at her job—about you.”
“About me. You sure of all this?”
The student takes my hand and begins to pump it with exaggerated vigor. “It is an honor to meet you!” He speaks up so that all in the dining room who wish to can hear. “I am sorry I interrupted but I had to meet you. I can’t help it if I am a silly fan! Goodbye, sir!”
Olga returns looking even worse than when she left. She also smells. “What a country.” She falls heavily into her chair. “You cannot even throw up in the loo that someone does not write a report about it. There is a man waiting outside the cubicle when I am finished. He is listening to me from there all the time. ‘Did you leave it clean?’ he asks me. ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘yes, I left it clean.’ ‘You shout, you scream, you have no respect for anything,’ he tells me. ‘Someone will come in after you and see your mess and blame it on me.’ ‘Go in then, go check,’ I told him. And he did it. A man in a suit who can reason and think! He went in and inspected.”
“Has anyone else bothered you?”
“They won’t. They won’t dare. Not if I am having breakfast with you. You are an international writer. They do not want to make trouble in the presence of an international writer.”
“Then why did he bother about your identity card?”
“Because he is afraid not to. Everybody is afraid. I want to have my breakfast now with my international writer. I am hungry.”
“Why don’t we go somewhere else? I want to talk to you about something serious.”
“You want to marry me. When?”
“Not quite yet. Come, let’s go.”
“No, we must not move. You must show them always that you are not afraid.” When she picks up the menu I see she is trembling. “You must not leave,” she says. “You must sit here and enjoy your breakfast and drink many cups of coffee, and then you must smoke a cigar. If they see you smoking a cigar, they will leave you alone.”
“You put great stock in a single cigar.”
“I know these Czech police—blow a little smoke in then-faces and you’ll see how brave they are. Last night I was in the pub. because you would not fuck me, and I am talking to the bartender about the hockey game and two men come in and sit down and begin to buy me drinks. Outside is parked a state limousine. We drink, they make loud jokes with the bartender, and then they show me the big car. They say to me, ‘How would you like to take a ride in that? Not to question you, but to have a good time. We’ll drink some more vodka and have a good time.’ I thought. ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t show them you are afraid.’ So they drive me to an office building and we go inside and everything is dark, and when I say I can’t see where I’m going one of them says they cannot turn the lights on. ‘Everything,’ he says, “is observed where the lights are on.’ You see, he is afraid. Now I know he is afraid too. Probably they should not even have the car, it belongs to their boss—something is wrong here. They open a door and we sit in a dark room and the two of them pour vodka for me, but they cannot even wait for me to drink, one of them takes out his prick and tries to pull me down on it. I feel him with my hand and I say to him, ‘But it is technically impossible with this. You could never come with something so soft. Let me try his. No, his is technically impossible even more. I want to go. There is no fun here, and I can’t even see anything. I want to go!’ I begin to shout…”
