by Philip Roth
Customs a breeze—my possessions combed over so many times while still in the dresser at the hotel that my bags are put right on through at the weigh-in counter and I’m accompanied by the plainclothesmen straight to passport control. I have not been arrested, I will not be tried, convicted, and jailed; Dubèek’s fate isn’t to be mine, nor is Bolotka’s, Olga’s, or Zdenek Sisovsky’s. I am to be placed on board the Swissair flight bound nonstop for Geneva, and from there I’ll catch a plane for New York.
Swissair. The most beautiful word in the English language.
Yet it makes you furious to be thrown out. once the fear has begun to subside. “What could entice me to this desolate country,” says K.., “except the wish to stay here?”—here where there’s no nonsense about purity and goodness, where the division is not that easy to discern between the heroic and the perverse, where every sort of repression foments a parody of freedom and the suffering of their historical misfortune engenders in its imaginative victims these clownish forms of human despair—here where they’re careful to remind the citizens (in case anybody gets any screwy ideas) “the phenomenon of alienation is not approved of from above.” In this nation of narrators I’d only just begun hearing all their stories; I’d only just begun to sense myself shedding mv story. as wordlessly as possible snaking away from the narrative encasing me. Worst of all. I’ve lost that astonishingly real candy box stuffed with the stories I came to Prague to retrieve. Another Jewish writer who might have been is not going to be; his imagination won’t leave even the faintest imprint and no one else’s imagination will be imprinted on his, neither the policemen practicing literary criticism nor the meaning-mad students living only for art.
Of course my theatrical friend Olga. for whose routine I have been playing straight man. wasn’t necessarily making Prague mischief when she disclosed that the Yiddish author’s war was endured in a bathroom, surviving on cigarettes and whores, and that when he perished it was under a bus. And maybe it was Sisovsky’s plan to pretend in America that the father’s achievement was his. Yet even if Sisovsky’s stories, those told to me in New York, were tailored to exploit the listener’s sentiments, a strategically devised fiction to set me in motion, that still doesn’t mitigate the sense of extraneous irrelevancy I now feel. Another assault upon a world of significance degenerating into a personal fiasco, and this time in a record tony-eight hours! No, one’s story isn’t a skin to be shed—it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die. the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you. To be transformed into a cultural eminence elevated by the literary deeds he performs would not seem to be my fate. A forty-minute valedictory from the Minister of Culture on artistic deviance and filial respect is all I have been given to carry home. They must have seen me coming.
I also have to wonder if Novak’s narrative is any less an invention than Sisovsky’s. The true Czech patriot to whom the land owes its survival may well be another character out of mock-autobiography, yet another fabricated father manufactured to serve the purposes of a storytelling son. As if the core of existence isn’t fantastic enough, still more fabulation to embellish the edges.
A sleek, well-groomed, dark-eyed man. slight, sultry, a Persian-looking fellow of about my own age, is standing back of the passport desk, alongside the on-duty army officer whose job is to process foreigners out of the country. His hourglass blue suit looks to have been styled specially for him in Paris or Rome—nothing like the suits I’ve seen around here, either in the streets or at the orgies. A man of European sophistication, no less a ladies’ man. I would guess, than Novak’s whoremaster Bolotka. Ostentatiously in English he asks to see the gentleman’s papers. I pass them to the soldier, who in turn hands them to him. He reads over the biographical details—to determine, you see, if I am fiction or fact—then, sardonically, examining me as though I am now utterly transparent, comes so close that I smell the oil in his hair and the skin bracer that he’s used after shaving. “Ah yes,” he says, his magnitude in the scheme of things impressed upon me with that smile whose purpose is to make one uneasy, the smile of power being benign, “Zuckerman the Zionist agent,” he says, and returns my American passport. “An honor.” he informs me. “to have entertained you here, sir. Now back to the little world around the corner.”
About the Author
Philip Roth was born in New Jersey in 1933. He studied literature at Bucknell University and the University of Chicago. His first book. GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, won the National Book Award for Fiction in I960. He has lived in Rome London. Chicago, New York City, Princeton, and New England. Since 1955, he has been on the faculties of the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he is now Adjunct Professor of English. He is also General Editor of the Penguin Books series “Writers from the Other Europe.” Recently he has been spending half of each year in Europe, traveling and writing.
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