Bernardo turned and saw the shock on my face. He clenched his teeth and shook his head as he spoke:
How could we have been so gullible? What a gang of serious fools. We were walking along the rim of an abyss without knowing it. Guzman’s mother knew. That’s why she told my father to get me out of the country so quickly. Guzman dressed in the persona of David Bowie’s Thin White Duke. We thought it stylish. The Thin White Duke was Bowie’s fascist phase, the period when he said that Britain could do with a fascist leader. Worse still . . . I think the figure bound and gagged in the cellar was not a dummy.
There was a click in Bernardo’s throat.
I think it was Alfredo Gonzales, our classmate.
I stayed where I was on a chair by the table as he continued.
Felipe Guzman’s name figures in many of the torture reports. He was quoted saying, ‘Yes. We threw them out just to see if they would bounce.’ When the military dictatorship was over they arrested him, but he was released on a technicality. After that there was no trace of him. Then came news of his death. A letter, written by him, was discovered. A suicide note. His parents built a memorial to him in the grounds of their estate and gradually the memory of him has slipped into the past.
Bernardo had the same earnest look in his eyes that I remembered from our schooldays.
The reason I’m here is because word has it that Felipe Guzman is not dead at all. He is in England. That’s why I’ve come to you. I have an address. We need someone who could recognise him.
My stomach churned. I wanted nothing to do with all this. I wanted to get on quietly with my work.
I can’t just turn up and knock on a door. What would I do then?
All we want is someone to identify him for certain. We tracked him to Japan. And some years later he spent time in Australia. Then he vanished. It seems he’s re-appeared in London. I’m told that he now owns a popular Latin American restaurant. This man, if it is him, spends nearly every night there. You wouldn’t have to knock on any door. You would just need to go there and take a look. Verify that it’s him.
Who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about?
Bernardo started packing up the tapes and equipment.
Just me and someone who has an interest in tracking down those people.
What will you do if it is him? Why don’t you just report it to the British police or Interpol or somebody?
I want to be absolutely sure that it’s him. That’s why. Then maybe . . . we’ll tell the police. Will you do it?
My heart sank.
Well, I’ll see. I’ll try. But it’s a long time ago. Over thirty years. He might not look the same. Perhaps he’s changed. Perhaps he’s reformed.
People don’t change.
Bernardo was ready to leave. He grasped my arms:
Try. Will you at least try?
Ok.
We embraced and he went downstairs. I watched from the window as he made his way down the street. From where I stood I could see the roof of the Naval Mechanics School in the park, a colonnaded building, the white top just visible over the waving ocean of dark trees.
I went to sit at my desk away from the window. Working on my paper seemed the only way to blot out what I had just heard and seen. I took out my laptop and concentrated. The work was not original research on my part. It was a matter of evaluating the latest experiments in the search for the dark photon. The trouble is that no-one has been able to discover this particle. Over many years experiments have been undertaken, often underground where there is less interference; in a deep mine in South Dakota; in a tunnel beneath mountains in northern Italy; in a huge subterranean structure beneath the South Pole: even in the CERN Hadron Collider. The search continues. After all, the Higgs-Boson particle eventually allowed itself to be revealed.
It was a relief to work late into the night. My concluding paragraphs illustrated the fact that all the experiments had so far proved fruitless. Something we cannot see and maybe cannot know is at work. Dark matter. Dark energy. An invisible force. Whatever we choose to call it. I finished the paper by explaining that we are none the wiser as to the dark photon. The current state of play is that we are unsure that it even exists. I ended with a joke about known unknowns.
It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when I finished my paper and shut the laptop. I was tired but pleased to have put some distance between myself and Bernardo’s visit. Something had been achieved, at least. For some reason I remembered that day in Bernardo’s house when he asked me to go with him to deliver pamphlets and I turned him down. I don’t doubt that it is a form of cowardice that I recognise in myself. I have always been wary of sticking my neck out and in my heart of hearts I knew, almost as soon as he asked me, that I would not carry out Bernardo’s request when I returned to England.
A FABLE OF TALES UNTOLD
I am now in my eighties and still trying. Lucky to be here at all, I suppose.
Then, I was thirteen and near to tears. My mother was attempting to lengthen my short trousers. She sat on the bunk with pins in her mouth undoing the hems of the trouser legs and fretting over where she could find enough material to make them into full length trousers. No-one in the dormitory below had been able to provide her with enough suitable cloth. The trousers looked ridiculous. But it was not only because of the trousers that I was tearful. My voice had broken. Overnight my voice had become gruff, squeaky and unreliable and I had been thrown out of Bundibar, the children’s opera. The opera was popular. Sometimes we were even filmed – for propaganda purposes, I learned later. We used to perform regularly to packed houses and I loved being in it. But I could no longer sing. That meant that I would not qualify for the extra rations given to the children’s choir. Worse, from my point of view, I would be cut off from my friends. Particularly Iveta. I had a crush on her and fell asleep every night imagining I rescued her from unspeakable dangers. Of course, I did not know of the real dangers that surrounded us. I’m not sure that any of us children fully understood. Although we knew enough to dread the arrival of the guards with a slip of paper that meant you and your family were on the transport list and would be transferred to goodness knows where, our fragile friendship networks torn apart.
I kicked up a fuss about my short trousers. If I am no longer a child, I want long trousers, I yelled at my helpless mother. I mooched about the camp. Eventually my mother managed to swap turnips and potatoes from the kitchen garden where she worked for cuttings from the leather workshop. She cut and stitched and sewed as best she could. There was no light from our small attic window because it was covered with blackout paper, so she worked by candlelight. Eventually, she held up the patched leather trousers in triumph and I graduated into long trousers.
The camp at Theresienstadt was a showcase concentration camp, if such a thing can be imagined. Terezin was a fortress town about thirty miles from Prague with a walled garrison. The camp was designed to fool the Red Cross as to how well we were being treated. And, indeed, when the Red Cross came they thought it was a self-regulating Jewish community. Jewish scholars, professionals, artists and musicians were sent there. It was part camp, part ghetto. Propaganda films announced that Hitler had given the Jews a city to themselves. In some ways it did resemble any other Jewish ghetto – apart from the guards, of course. There were armed guards. SS guards watched as musicians played in a bandstand in the square. There were lectures where the guards dozed at the back. There was a central library and cultural performances with guards always in attendance. My family was privileged because my father was a well-known mathematician. So my parents, my sister and I were allocated a cramped but private cubby-hole in the attic above a dormitory which housed about forty people.
It turned out that my exit from the children’s opera was a blessing. I spent time in the library. There I found my vocation. I wrote stories and discovered that I wanted nothing else than to be a writer, a conviction that stays with me to this day. I wrote tirelessly in lined exercise books. I proudly signed
each story: Max Ginz. The books were scarce so I wrote in tiny writing all over the pages, round the edges and up and down the margins. Of course, the stories mainly featured Iveta and involved a lot of sorcerers and spells but over the next couple of years I began to write descriptions of the life around me too, the black rotten potatoes we ate, the mouldy bread, the meagre rations and the transport lists, those disappearances that left a neighbouring room previously full of a noisy family suddenly empty with a few scattered belongings discarded because they would not fit into the one suitcase permitted.
The day came when my father climbed the wooden stairs to our attic quarters pale and breathless.
Max, what is in these notebooks of yours?
I had left my exercise books in a pile on a shelf under the library window because there was too little space in our attic cubby-hole. I looked at my father’s worried face.
Just my stories. I write stories.
The guards have found your stories. He bent down and took my hands in his. His eyes were anxious behind those precious glasses that I noticed now had a cracked lens.
Max. Soon we hope the war will be over and then you will be able to write all the stories you want. But for now you must stop. The guards threaten to put us on the list. I’m sorry, but this has to stop.
I was horrified and frightened. I never set foot in the library again. At night I continued writing in my head. In May, 1945 the camp was liberated. One day the SS guards just disappeared. We hardly realised and continued for a day or so with the normal routine until the Soviet Army turned up and then we understood that we had indeed been liberated. We emerged dazed into the outside world and returned to Prague, lucky to be alive.
My father was right. Under the Soviet occupation I was able to write all the stories I wanted. But I could not get them published. For twenty years my writing remained a parallel life to the one in which I graduated, married, worked and fathered a son. I wrote at night in our shabby apartment in Zizkov. In the daytime I taught at a school in the neighbouring district of Vinohrady. To secure that job I had been obliged to join the Communist Party. Manuscript after manuscript was submitted to the state-controlled publishers. They were always sent back with the same note saying they did not fit in with the publisher’s editorial policy. In an attempt to find the root of the problem I managed to secure an interview with one of the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Culture. The middle-aged woman sitting behind the desk had a round face smooth and white as fungus with a few brown spots. A shaft of light from the high window behind her made the crown of her chestnut hair shine. To my surprise she seemed sympathetic.
I’m sorry. I read it and liked it very much. She sighed and closed the folder with my latest submission. Then she pushed it across the desk towards me and pointed to the handwritten note attached to it. The words ‘We find this work harmful to socialism’ were scrawled across it.
She shook her head and shrugged to show that there was nothing she could do. I smiled and tried to persuade her otherwise.
You know literature shouldn’t really serve any ideology. It touches what is in each one of us, what makes us resemble one another. It resists all systems. Isn’t there anyone else in authority who could—?
But the woman had closed up and was gathering her papers together.
Several years later the Prague Spring provided unexpected hope. Even after it was crushed something in us had changed. Suddenly we found the shrill government propaganda, which nobody believed, hilarious. Quite often we were reduced to tears of laughter at the official optimism on television as smiling tractor drivers and prize-winning factories appeared on the screen. We writers found the courage to pass round samizdat copies of our work. Small groups of us gathered in secret to read them. For the first time I had some response to my efforts. People were enthusiastic. My work was popular and highly praised. Word spread and I had requests from several groups to come and read at their gatherings.
One day a visitor turned up at our place. He was a fresh-faced young man with blond wavy hair who had been at one of my readings a year or so before. I remembered him because he had talked with intelligence about my writing. He explained that he wanted to be a poet and was desperate to find work that allowed him time to write and think. He admired my work and was curious to know what I had written recently. I brought out the latest sheaves of paper and we laughed together at the satirical passages about our daily life in Prague.
A week later I came home from school to find my wife shaking with fear.
The police have been here.
The Secret Police had invaded our apartment searching for illegal literature. The young man might have been a poet. He was also a police informer. My wife sat with her head in her hands. I had not meant to cause her this sort of anguish.
That same week I was expelled from the Communist Party, sacked from my teaching job and branded a class enemy of the working people. Fortunately, my wife kept her job as an administrator at the Hotel Diplomat and that kept us afloat until I could find other work. For some reason, in her quiet way, she still supported me.
Of course you must go on writing. But now we must find somewhere safe to keep your work.
I loved her for that. We knew we were probably being watched. We checked regularly for bugs planted in the house. Finally, I found a menial job in an industrial laundry that dealt with sheets and bedding from all the hotels and hospitals in the district. It meant that my hands were permanently red and wrinkled from hooking swathes of cloth out of the cylindrical boiling vats and my face had a near permanent shine from exposure to the steam. I came home with my damp clothes stinking of sweat and cheap bleach. But all the same we would embrace with affection in the evening before I sat down to eat sausage and tomatoes. Then I would go into the next room and sit in front of my typewriter. If I was too tired I would watch television with my wife and son.
My wife watched as my hair grew first grey at the temples and then white as the years passed. Occasionally I had a cull and went through my work throwing out anything I considered below standard. But I continued writing. I wrote plays that I knew would never see the light of day. I wrote poetry that no-one would ever read. I wrote novels that would never be published. I always tried to make them as good as possible. I could struggle for hours changing the word ‘the’ to ‘a’ and back again trying to find the most precise expression of what I wanted to say. It was my private pleasure.
No-one saw it coming. I certainly did not.
It was November, 1989. There had been skirmishes throughout the city and then a few days later millions of citizens took to the streets, a spring tidal flood of citizenry: medical workers in their white coats, printers, drivers, workers from the factories; this huge river of people spilled out from some unidentifiable source and poured through the streets of Prague. A new city became visible that the day before had been unseen. Truckloads of students waving our red, blue and white flags roared through the streets. Holding hands, my wife, son and I joined the jubilant crowds in Wenceslas Square. Under the grey skies we were blinking as if we had just emerged into the light of day.
After the collapse of the regime things began to look up. Within a week my son found work at the Barrandov film studios. I had reached retiring age from the laundry but my wife still worked at the Hotel Diplomat. One day, soon after our velvet revolution, she came home from work and as she prepared our supper in the kitchen she described with qualified amusement what she had observed that morning:
You should have seen them. There were noisy German business men all over the restaurant area having what they call working breakfasts. One guy was given a contract for five hundred new police stations. Another man was banging his fist on the table so that his muesli jumped up and down. He was trying to persuade some government official to give him the contract to build all the new public toilets in the city. Envelopes stuffed with money were changing hands.
She dropped some dumplings into the soup and paused.
We should warn t
he Kramars. Someone is trying to buy half the real estate in Jecna Street. They could be turfed out.
But, apart from worries about the Kramars and other friends, I found it all refreshing. Freedom at last.
Within a year numerous new publishing houses were set up. I went to see one of them. We talked in an open plan office full of light. The two editors were enthusiastic about my work. A bright girl with spiky plum-coloured hair smiled at me.
We loved it. But we have to take account of the projected sales figures. Marketing is the problem. Unfortunately, we couldn’t persuade our sales team that it was worth investing in you. They thought the work was great but wouldn’t sell. She raised her hands in despair.
It was the same everywhere. All the publishers regretted that they could not publish my work – as they would wish – because it was not marketable. This gnawed at my guts. I had survived two totalitarian systems and emerged intact. I could no longer blame the evils of fascism, the oppression of Soviet communism. This so-called freedom was just a different, more insidious form of suffocation. Now for the first time the finger of blame was pointed at me. The lack of publication was my fault, not the fault of the system. I was not up to the mark, not popular enough. It was the most cunning means of extinction. Everyone that I met was warm, friendly and enthusiastic about my work. They reminded me of the sympathetic priests who accompany a man to the execution chamber.
At home I continued to write. But now I saw life around me as a gross deception under the banner of freedom. A hideous distortion. So I wrote about that. Our democracy was not freedom at all. It was a pleasant mask over an ugly system. In those other times it was clear that we were not free. Now we believed we were free but were being deceived. Our freedom was a chimera. I was enraged.
The Master of Chaos Page 11
