Foreign Faces

by V. S. Pritchett

  Sitting over a glass of Pilsener, I used to speculate about this as I watched the crowds go by in the wide Wenceslas Square, the Václavské náměsti, the principal street of the city. They belonged to the most prosperous, the most bourgeois of the five satellite states. Heavy beer-drinkers, like the Germans, the passers-by were in the main a weighty, broad-shouldered, healthy, solid people, with heavy square-cut jaws and a great many had the fine, widely-set fair blue eyes of the Slavonic races. The thin ones looked brisk and keen. Here was a nation brought up on plain food, beer, pork dumplings and sauerkraut, where handsome youth is brief and thickens quickly into solid or worried middle age. They did not dress well, nor did they seem to care. If one saw a well-dressed person, man or woman, it turned out that they were foreigners—East Germans, Argentines or elderly American ladies. The most striking group in Prague were three or four beautifully dressed men and women from the French Cameroons—Kings and Queens, I do not doubt, who carried themselves with a distinction that showed up the drabness of the city. (They had come to study Czech co-operatives.) Eastern Europe is inelegant. It has become Puritan. Elegance is a sin of the corrupt past and the decadent West and although it is true that the Belgians—with whom the Czechs are often compared —are far from being the best-dressed people in Europe, one glance at the Brussels crowd packing the stations in the rush hour will show the enormous difference in wealth and style between average West and average East.

  Yet if the crowd puts use before elegance, if the old smart hotels and restaurants are now grubby and slack, there are many signs of a new, bright popular life. Prague was always a city of small restaurants; it now has its popular up-to-date cafeterias and snack bars. There are dishes of the famous Prague ham, there are galantines, the salmon and lobster aspics, the herrings, anchovies and eggs in mayonnaise. These places are always packed. Large numbers of married women earn their livings in offices and factories and families go out to eat. There are no luxury shops; the jewellery is poor and so are the perfumes and cosmetics; women’s handbags and shoes are shoddy, mass-produced and out of fashion. Heels are low. It is incredible, but Russian women queue up in Moscow for Czech shoes! There are innumerable good bookshops, with the usual stress on the European classics which have a large sale; modern foreign literature appears erratically—the students protested in May 1956 against the prohibitory Index of foreign authors—one can get, for example, Kingsley Amis, Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck, and Graham Greene’s Quiet American, but not his best work. There are no books by the Czech emigres. The average Czech wants his radio, his television set and his modern kitchen equipment and these are becoming plentiful. The shops of Prague, and all Czecho-Slovakia, are better stocked than the shops of any other Eastern European country, but they cannot compete with Düsseldorf.

  A more dramatic difference is the relative lack of traffic in Prague. One does not hear the warm hammering and droning of a modern city by day or night. By night Prague is still and footsteps sound a long way off in the streets. On my first night in Prague I even thought there were no cars at all. It was a Sunday and there is a regulation that officials must not use their cars at the week-end. Later, I saw there were a certain number of cars about, though never enough to make a traffic jam; they trickled by sparsely in twos and threes and I got careless about crossing the Wenceslas Square. By ten o’clock at night the traffic lights went out and one heard that lonely, delightful, old-fashioned sound of the last trams miauling at the corners of the streets of the old town, under the trees by the river. Prague goes to bed very early and gets up early too. Like the Germans the Czechs work hard for long hours. You eat to live; you live to work; you work till you sleep; you wake up to work. This is not a pleasure-loving people.

  I used to walk down through beautiful old Prague, and stand on the Charles Bridge among the dramatic and mournful religious statues which line its balustrades, and listen to the river going over the low weir and to the quacking of the ducks. I would stand on the bridge trying to get Czecho-Slovakia into my mind. In Prague one is pretty well at the dead centre of Europe, in one of its historically stormy cities, 750 miles from London, 846 miles to Rome, nearly 1,400 from Athens and 1,600 from Moscow. The country is shut in by mountains on all sides. It has no sea coast—except the one invented by Shakespeare: in A Winter’s Tale “a desert country near the sea”. Its northern frontier is entirely Polish. In the west it runs with East Germany and West Germany; on the south it is bound by Austria; at Bratislava it has a common frontier with Hungary and in Slovakia its borders run for fifty miles with the Ukraine.

  It is a country about the size of the State of New York with a density of population just above the European average, that is to say about 300 to the square mile. One-quarter of the thirteen million Czecho-Slovaks are Slovaks who live in the eastern part of the country. The population is rising but since 1939 there has been a loss of nearly 2 million people due to the expulsion of the Germans from the western end. One hundred and forty thousand Czechs died in German concentration camps but, on the whole, Czecho-Slovakia did not suffer severely in the war. I believe only one bomb fell in Prague: the smart new Jalta Hotel stands on the site. One has to imagine a country which is one of the most heavily forested countries in Europe and in which almost every village (in the Czech provinces) has a factory chimney. Except for peasant Slovakia, it is an industrial country and with such success in recent years in building up its heavy industry that the land has been depleted of agricultural labour. The Czechs now have to import food.

  Below the weir silent couples sitting in anchored boats were fishing. In the parks couples sat modestly, occasionally holding hands. Across the river rose the narrow cobbled hill and arcaded streets of old Prague to the Gothic cathedral, massive, grey and gold glinting against the evening sky. Further over and downstream on Letna hill rose the appalling granite blob of the Stalin monument, a crude group of giant figures who seem to be marching down on the city to master it by sheer ugliness and force. All over Eastern Europe, such gross and commonplace monuments to the Russian liberation were built in the Stalin period.

  How do you explain—I asked my friend L——, a young Party member who had become a Communist after four years in Buchenwald and other concentration camps —how do you explain that a country so advanced technically as Czecho-Slovakia, so middle class, could so easily become Communist? It is the only place where Marx’s prophecy has proved correct: that Communism would come to the industrialised countries first. “It is very simple,” he said. “The Germans and the Viennese had been for centuries the tyrants against whom the Czechs had had to struggle. The Russians were our liberators, whereas in Poland, historically, they were oppressors. All Czechs speak a little German because of the Occupation and because of trade, but all Czechs can understand Russian without having to learn it because of similarities in the languages. We are in the centre of all the pressures, we have developed through centuries of oppression a sharp and subtle political intelligence. The Czechs think and talk abstract politics all day long and have traditionally thrown up acute political leaders inside Czechoslovakia, and outside it when they have emigrated. There was no sudden conversion,” he said. “When the Czech state was founded in 1918, it already had strong socialist leanings; this was the only country in Central Europe,” he said, “where the Party was allowed to operate legally all the time between the wars. The great landowners were foreigners and disappeared in 1918, so we had no feudal problems; the owners of the great industries were, very often, collaborators with the Nazis—the accusation that ‘all Czechs collaborated’ is common in Eastern Europe—we had already before 1939 a Czech Catholic Church, so that little stood in our way.”

  He was an educated man of middle-class background, in his late thirties, who knew France, Britain and the United States. In a worried way he regretted the loss of some personal freedoms, but was convinced that these were coming back. He would not yield an inch, however, about the necessity of keeping the Western Press from public sale. H
e spoke vaguely and cautiously of “the mistakes” that had been made and “the crimes” that had been committed under Stalinism, saying that he had been in a position to know more than most people and could say nothing at the time. All Czechs are irritated by the extreme difficulty—amounting to a ban—on travel in the West, but he thought the difficulties were lessening. At any rate one could usually get a visa to visit relatives in Vienna, which is regarded as paradise, especially because of the opera.

  Knowing that at the time of the May Day celebrations in 1956 the University students had presented a resolution to the Party’s Central Committee calling, among other things, for less adulation of the Soviet Union and asking questions about the ownership and management of the Jachymov mines and uranium resources—the product goes to Russia—I asked him why the protests in Czechoslovakia in 1956 had been less violent than those of Hungary and Poland.

  “We always do things more quietly. We are cautious. We change without fuss,” he repeated. “You must remember that the Russians were the historic enemies of Hungary and Poland in the old days, whereas the Russians were historically our friends.” The fact is that in 1940, in 1948, and in 1956 the Czechs waited to see how the cat would jump.

  Foreigners generally say that ninety per cent of the people are opposed to the regime. Naturally, this speaker did not agree. He said a majority of the older generation might be against it, but they had been made powerless; that, by now, a younger generation who knew nothing else accepted it entirely. (This is not borne out by the students’ protest.) It is general East European propaganda—it comes up in conversation everywhere with all sorts of people—that the East Germans are now as thoroughly indoctrinated as themselves. Since the building of the wall in Berlin, this seems untrue of the East Germans.

  I have summarised L——’s views and no doubt I have simplified them. In his remarks about the Church this man did not mention, for example, that forty-three per cent of the priests had been deprived of their parishes; but he was right in conveying that the Czechs had been in dispute with the Vatican from 1918 onwards and that the fight had not been a purely Communist interest.

  Prague, or more particularly old Prague, which is very large, is one of the noblest cities in Europe. Its hundred Gothic spires prick the sky, its medieval towers, its Baroque belfries and cupolas bring their graces to the city panorama. One has an impression of another Paris of the Latin quarter. The broad river curves through the tree-lined embankments. One can see from the war between Gothic and Baroque that this city is marked at every corner by historical struggle. It is a difficulty for the Czech to admire the Baroque because it is the architecture of a foreign conqueror, though some of the art historians are beginning to weaken and point out that it was also the work of Czech artisans. One could see why L——claimed that the Czechs had the highest level of political education in Europe; they have learned in the bitter school of oppression.

  It was what they call “the cucumber season” when I was in Prague, the time the opera is closed and when there are no new plays and films. Everyone who can do so gets away to the fifty-mile stretch of the Danube, to the Tatras mountains and the beautiful towns of wild, wine-drinking Slovakia. Coach-loads of tourists, some of them American, but chiefly East and West Germans, come in. There was a load or two of North Koreans.

  I spent a lot of time wandering about old Prague, diving into those arcades that lead from street to street, or into those alleys that tunnel under the old houses, open into courtyards, and disappear under the houses again. An ingenious walker can cross a good deal of old Prague under cover. On the steep cobbled hill that goes up to the cathedral there is a maze that eventually climbs by alleys, steps, and even by what seem to be private doorways and tunnels, to a pretty open-air restaurant on a ledge overlooking the city, where one might be at Saint Germain en Laye looking across to Paris. The “Well of Gold” is one of the two or three little restaurants in the old part of the city where the food is good, if in the heavy German style, and where the service is passable. Prague does not escape the general blight on catering that has spread from Russia. In the larger restaurants, waiters are few, amateur, negligent and slow. To be thirsting for a glass of beer in one of the large places is misery. A customer from the Hofbräuhaus, the well-known popular beerhall in Munich, has hardly sat down before he is served, even when the enormous place is packed and roaring; but at Flecu, the equally famous old-style beer garden in Prague, the traditional resort of all Czechs who take their beer-drinking seriously, one can sit for half an hour before the puffing wench comes round carrying a dozen heavy pint pots of beer shoulder high on her tray.

  And Czechs do not stop at a pint. Half a dozen is modest. The waiter or waitress is usually not allowed to accept money and there is one more waiting period before one can catch the wandering cashier. In many respects Communism has revived the old Austro-Hungarian bureaucratic habits; the waiters are caught up in some chit-filling system; the manager—who may be the original owner of the restaurant or one transferred from a place of his own, in order to cure him of proprietorial “errors”—has lost his authority. He is simply the representative of the restaurant-keepers’ cooperative.

  But, I was told, the running of restaurants had greatly improved since the early days of Communism, when the profit target had been put too high. The disheartened manager would increase his sales of spirits in order to reach the figure quickly; the result was a serious rise of alcoholism and the State had to put a very high price on spirits in order to reduce the sale. Now many restaurants have reverted to management by old owners they are better run; but it is wiser to choose the small ones which are anxious to show the Westerner that they haven’t forgotten what a good place ought to be.

  It is quite untrue that the Czechs fear to talk to strangers; but it is not in their nature to talk incautiously. I used often to walk across the Charles Bridge to a passable tavern and have lunch at a long table with a cheerful and noisy lot of carpenters, plumbers, building labourers and clerks, who talked about their jobs, about fishing in the river and football. They ate out because their wives were working. The Voice of America programmes used to come over the radio. No one talked politics—that never happens unless one is alone with someone. It is true, again, that few Czechs will invite a foreigner to their homes and although this may have something to do with caution, it is also due to embarrassment. Houses and flats are crowded and split up because of the chronic housing shortage.

  “We have concentrated on building factories,” is one explanation of this. The other is the general movement of population from the land to the cities.

  Among the builders was a strange, gracious, lonely man who took me to his flat. Like many Czechs of his age, he had been to Belgium and France after 1930, during the slump, looking for work. Life had battered him. He looked twenty years older than he really was. “La vie difficile,” he said bleakly. He and his wife—she was in hospital at the time—lived in a two-roomed flat in one of the old, pretty streets by the river where the mill-race runs and the boys play; two rooms being the official allowance of space. The flat was like many one sees in the Latin Quarter in Paris and the rooms were made pretty in the Central European manner by indoor plants and peasant coverings on the divans. We had gone there because he could not stand the bad coffee at the restaurant and wanted to make Turkish coffee at home. This man paid a 1939 rent for his flat and he said that all through Czecho-Slovakia rents had been kept at this level and were “incredibly low”. This is true of all Eastern European states. He agreed that they were too low to cover the cost of repairs, and this accounts for the dilapidated unpainted appearance of the gloomy nineteenth-century streets in new Prague, where the plaster comes off the brick in chunks, the balustrades are decaying and the ironwork has rusted. “The old high bourgeoisie,” he said, “are finished, but for the worker and the small bourgeois, life is much better than it used to be. Wages are not high, but living costs have gone down in the last year, taxes are about three per cent
of earnings and with the social services and low rents the mass of people are secure as far as the necessities of life are concerned. The cinema, the theatre, books and amusements cost very little.”

  It is hard for a foreigner to know what the cost of living really is because the rate of exchange into Western currencies is artificial. On the tourist rate of exchange, a television set would cost about the same as it costs in London, but Czech kroner are certainly overvalued. This man’s only complaint was that of all Czechs: boredom, the virtual impossibility of travelling to the West.

  “I can go to Poland and Hungary for my holidays very cheaply. I can go to Bulgaria and the Black Sea. But all these countries are the same: they bore me. I want to see something different.”

  Like the British in the austerity period after the war, he felt a craving for pleasure, for the luxuries and plenty of life, such as the British saw, in those days, in countries like Switzerland. He also had the Czech craving for a sight of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, which are closed to them. He was not a Communist—the Party is jealously kept small in all these countries—but his political opinions were a mixture of acquiescence and a nostalgia for the period between the wars. This came out in the common reproach that the British had “lost interest” in Central Europe; if they had been firm before the war and afterwards the present situation would not exist; and in his bitter conviction that the Americans were backing the Germans and reviving the old German aggression in which Czecho-Slovakia would be the first, the traditional sufferer, as it had always been. There is little spirit of rebellion. Like all Czechs he was a keen questioner about Western politics and very acute in argument, but he was extremely surprised to hear that West Germany was far more prosperous than East Germany!