Republic Of Whores

by Josef Skvorecky

  The voices and faces varied; the subject matter displayed greater discipline.

  I’d rather walk with you on Petřín Hill

  And tell you of my love and my fidelity –

  But, so that you may bright and peaceful live,

  I and my gun stand guard o’er your tranquillity.

  The form was as regular as any medieval sonnet or ballad. The first two lines expressed genuine longing, and the next two lines an offering, a libation, to redeem the social irrelevance of the longing in lines one and two. The private who had just delivered this variation was so fat that he could only be guarding the tranquillity of his loved one from behind a typewriter in the office of some command post or other. He left the podium to a smattering of indifferent applause.

  The next contestant was a corporal with thick glasses, who, in a deliberate but penetrating voice, made this claim:

  A young girl’s kisses are sweeter

  Than the powder the cannon reek of;

  But the world is divided, did you know?

  And the enemy his chance does seek, love.

  The soldiers and officers gathered in the divisional auditorium listened to all this with Christian patience mixed with military restraint. They were, after all, the army’s intellectual elite. Some of them rested their foreheads in their hands, feigning intense interest in the poetry and the lessons they might derive from it and apply in their daily work. Others lounged casually on their chairs and leered at the members of the Women’s Army Chorus in their attractive, well-fitting uniforms. Some whispered comments to each other after every poem, others remained silent, fending off sleep.

  My hand is frozen hard to the steel

  And the icy frost bites into my cheek.

  For all our loved ones around the world

  I guard our border, week after week.

  These lines were murmured in a scarcely audible voice by an engineer who looked like a fly on spider’s legs. When he’d finished, an officer with two brightly polished medals dangling from his chest, the Fučík Badge and the Badge of Physical Fitness, leaned over to Robert Neumann and said, “Feeble, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Good beginning, lousy ending. No juice,” said Robert expertly, and he was saved from making further critical comment when an exhausted member of the chemical warfare unit behind him fell asleep and tumbled off his chair. The bemedalled officer turned around reproachfully, leaving Robert Neumann to his thoughts, which were coloured by a strange mixture of his habitual gloom and sudden bursts of euphoria over his own poetic triumph. But the more he listened, the more the gloom began to predominate. A triumph in this competition, he realized, would be of questionable value indeed, especially in the eyes of Ludmila. He watched the next contestant on the podium click his heels together, thrust his chest out, and begin to recite rapidly:

  You write me letters, darling mine:

  When will you come home to me?

  And I stand here on watch, and guard

  Our future and a better time.

  To Neumann, the future appeared bleak indeed. That morning he’d received an anonymous letter from a colleague of Ludmila’s, Jarmila Králová. Last week, at twelve-thirty in the morning, Králová had seen Ludmila on the steps of the Golden Well nightclub, with a man who had his arm around her waist. The man was Dr. Karel Budulínský from the Ministry of Domestic Commerce. Robert knew Dr. Budulínský. He considered him a family friend, and in Ludmila’s presence he would read him his real poetry, not the verses he composed for the army. The letter made him feel doubly bitter, for he now knew with more certainty than ever that any husband of Ludmila’s must necessarily be a man without male friends. Surrounded by masculine camaraderie, he felt oppressed by loneliness.

  This feeling remained with him even during a convivial speech delivered by the National Artist Josef Bobr, a fat novelist whose words, so full of cordial sincerity, glorified the present and, somewhat illogically, attributed to an even more glorious future a feeling of envy that it couldn’t have been that glorious past. The National Artist droned on, reading from notes, and the loudspeakers turned his voice into a hollow, soporific monotone. In the back of the hall, the body of the soldier from the chemical warfare unit fell off the chair and again crashed to the floor, and the decorated officer whirled around once more, ready to admonish.

  The National Artist went on to glorify the literature of the present, which would preserve for that happy future a truthful and undistorted picture of the breadth, depth, and colour of the age, whose palette appeared to him — again somewhat illogically — in various shades of salmon-pink.

  Finally, ogling the female comrades in the Army Chorus, he called out: “Thank you, comrades, thank you, soldiers, for the beauty and strength your poetry pours into our souls — into us, your readers. Thank you for the encouragement and the inspiration with which you endow us, poets and writers. Thank you and hurrah! Hurrah and thank you, comrades!” And the women from the Army Chorus, their nylon knees gleaming below the hems of their skirts, began to sing a song of praise for the armoured assault units, in professional four-part harmony.

  * * *

  Lizetka lived in a modest family house her parents had built during the Depression. The door was answered by her father, a stage manager at the National Theatre, who said, “Come in, Mr. Smiřický. Liduška’s not at home.”

  He led the tank commander into an overheated kitchen where Lizetka’s mother was listening to Radio Free Europe on an old console radio. The device was sputtering and squawking unpleasantly, but through a screen of mechanical noise induced by the jamming station a distant, piping voice could be heard announcing the failure of Communism to collectivize the villages.

  “Good evening,” Danny said, and the woman nodded pleasantly and flashed him a gold and white smile. For two years now, this soldier had been instigating her daughter to commit adultery. The mother’s generation might well still believe in platonic adoration, but the mother herself had sprung from the bosom of the working people, who had never seriously entertained such notions. “Please sit down,” she said, “and listen to this.”

  Danny sat down and listened. Mr. Hertl lay down on the settle under the window, put his muscular arms under his head, and began listening too, trying to follow the weak voice through the grating noise of the jamming. Sometimes the voice was drowned out altogether, but then it would become stronger, almost comprehensible. Bored by what was obviously a nightly ritual, Danny watched the restless canary in its cage. “The Communists resorted to repression,” the voice was saying. “Any farmer who did not give to the Communist authorities the quota of goods set by the Communists.…” Then the voice faded.

  Mrs. Hertlová nodded vigorously. “That’s exactly what they did with my father’s farm.”

  She looked at the tank commander and he nodded in agreement.

  The voice was now entirely submerged in background noise, and the buzzing increased until the speaker began to pulsate dangerously. Mrs. Hertlová turned down the volume. “Communist swine!” Mr. Hertl muttered from his couch.

  The jamming faded slightly. “They were defenceless,” said the voice. “Communist thugs in leather coats with revolvers in their pockets drove around the villages on motorcycles and terrorized.…” The voice faded.

  “The bastards! The sons of bitches!” came the voice from the settle.

  “A dirty business,” agreed Danny.

  “Just like in our village,” said Mrs. Hertlová.

  A loud crackle surged out of the apparatus and the voice of Radio Free Europe thundered around the room. “Did the confiscated grain end up in Czech bakeries? Was it turned into bread for the Czech people? Not at all, dear listeners at home in Czechoslovakia. The rye harvested in Hana, the wheat grown from the golden soil of Bohemia, were turned into perogies for the fat Communist cats in Soviet Azerbaijan.…”

  Another loud crackle and the radio set trembled with a new, aggressive wave of jamming. Mrs. Hertlová turned down the volume again, so
that silence framed the bitter cry from the settle: “Those Commie pigs are stuffing their faces!” The stage manager’s own face, inflamed with rage, rose like an angry moon above the edge of the table, and he stared at Danny with bloodshot eyes. “Where the hell are we living?” he roared. “Mr. Smiřický, I ask you, where are we living? Is this what we end up with? Is this what we’ve busted our gut for?”

  “They’re a bad lot,” said Danny gently.

  “They’re thieves!” cried Mrs. Hertlová. “Stealing from people — that they know how to do.”

  “Mr. Smiřický!” The stage manager’s face radiated despair. “Think about it, just think about it. Is this what we wanted? Is this what we spent twenty years building a country for? And we call ourselves a nation!” He fixed his burning eyes on the tank commander as though he were accusing him personally of the disaster that had descended upon their well-tempered state.

  “You’re right,” said Danny.

  “Shut your mouth, Mr. Smiřický.” Mr. Hertl scowled ferociously. “We’re all guilty! We’ve done this with the nation of Jan Hus and T.G. Masaryk and Jan Žižka! That’s the kind of whores we are. Drop the H-bomb on us. Drop the cobalt bomb on us!”

  “It’s true, we’ve gone to the dogs,” said Mrs. Hertlová. “We’ve abandoned God, and now you might as well write us off.” She sighed. “Before, when the —”

  “Do you hear that, Mr. Smiřický?” said the stage manager, interrupting his wife. “And now they’re always searching your flat to make sure you haven’t stolen anything.”

  “It’s a miserable business,” said Danny.

  “It’s a bloody crime, that’s what it is,” yelled the stage manager. “But just you wait. This can’t go on for ever. And then heads will roll, friend or foe. What, I’ll say. You say you’re my friend, I’ll say. Maybe you were once, but not any more. String him up, I’ll say. I’m a Christian, Mr. Smiřický, but without the slightest compunction whatsoever, Mr. Smiřický, I’ll hang every Commie I can get my hands on. And I know who is and isn’t a Commie. I’m in charge of dues in our Party cell, and I’ve got the goods on everyone. No one will be able to deny he was a member, and I’ll show no mercy, Mr. Smiřický, I swear I won’t.”

  “That’s exactly what they deserve. Show no pity,” said Mrs. Hertlová.

  “That’s a fact,” said Danny. “By the way, do you know when Lída’s coming home?”

  * * *

  The merciful and impenetrable Originator of All Things did, after all, grant some solace to Robert Neumann, for into the half-circle of svelte young ladies in the chorus stepped a beauty with bright green eyes. She was welcomed by spontaneous applause, for she needed no introduction; she had starred in several movies that everyone had seen, usually playing a sexy young bricklayer or lathe-operator. Now, in a honeyed voice, she announced that she was going to read the grand-prize winner in this year’s Army Creativity Contest — a poem by Sergeant Robert Neumann called “Farewell to the Army”. Neumann felt a ripple of exultation.

  His winning entry had been inspired not, as the poem pretended, by the approaching end of his army service, but by despair. The actress seemed to sense that its melancholy was of an intimate rather than socio-military nature, for she endowed the verses (Ludmila had called them “fripperies”) with a warm, moist fog of practised eroticism. Into the microphone she whispered:

  Beneath my footsteps rustle leaves

  And the bony crackling of icicles.

  Like flakes of winter, two glittering butterflies,

  Tears flutter into your eyes.

  Your tenderness silences the boys.…

  How much better, comrade, do I understand

  All that we once banished with pleasantries.

  But after we leave, and put on other garments,

  We will still and always be as once we were

  In those years when, rifle in hand,

  We stood guard for our Czech land.

  At the guardhouse, intent on our love,

  We wait, the first time without belt and badge,

  And shyly we will lead her

  Through an autumn of burnished copper:

  The earth her comely luck will yield,

  And we become her shield.

  Robert Neumann was moved to real tears by his own sentimentality. The rest of the audience was drawn to the speaker herself. Not all of them, though; during the performance, the weary member of the chemical warfare unit fell out of his chair a third time, and on orders from the decorated officer he was escorted from the hall by the soldiers on duty.

  Somewhat later, all the winners were sitting around a long green table laden with food and drink, in the small salon in division headquarters, listening to the head of the division’s cultural program.

  “And so, comrades,” said the colonel, whose name was Vrána but whom the men called Colonel Dryfart, “the artillery made an especially strong showing this year, both in the number of awards and in the number of poems submitted. And that is a special reason for joy, comrades, because our aim is to cultivate, not outstanding individuals, but a reliable collective. Our slogan was, is, and will always be ‘The masses, above all!’ ”

  A private at the end of the table shouted, “Hurrah!”, but the rest merely looked at him and his battle-cry hung in the air in an embarrassing silence. The speaker was so surprised by this unexpected interjection that he stopped talking. Everyone looked down. Finally, a lieutenant from the Army Song and Dance Ensemble said, “Wonderful! Wonderful work, cannoneers.”

  “Yes indeed!” said the National Artist. “So the artillery muse was the most creative of all?”

  The colonel laughed. “That’s right, comrade,” he said. “Out of sixty-five poems received, thirty-eight were from men in the artillery. And of the twenty awards, twelve were given to artillery men!”

  “Including the laurel wreath of victory,” interrupted a major from the Song and Dance Ensemble, “which was won by a cannoneer as well.” He smiled at Robert Neumann as though he owed his high rank to him. “I’m particularly pleased by that since I was originally a cannoneer myself.”

  Neumann smiled too — at the major with his mouth, and at the actress (who returned his smile) with his eyes. They had been introduced after the concluding ceremonies and she was now sitting next to the prize-winning novelist. Neumann had already succumbed to the ancient fallacy that one can compensate for bad luck with one woman in the company of another woman without making matters worse.

  “And what about poetry from the armoured division, Comrade Colonel?” said a sergeant with tank corps insignia.

  “What about the engineers?” roared a large man on the other side of the table.

  The colonel examined a sheaf of papers. The prize-winning novelist looked over his shoulder while stifling a yawn with a pudgy hand. He smiled apologetically at the actress; she smiled back at him, then shifted her smile to Robert Neumann, who flashed a flirtatious smile back at her.

  He had decided that, should the opportunity present itself, he would sin that evening, at least in word and thought. He wasn’t quite ready yet, he realized, to sin in deed.

  Then someone invited the National Artist to tell them what he thought of the competition in more detail than he had been able to provide in his speech. The novelist settled into his chair like a lump of jelly and began to speak. “I must say, comrades, the level of the competition astonished me. I had certainly not expected to find such a wealth of young talent.”

  “What did you like most about the competition?” the Song and Dance major asked humbly.

  “What did I like most?” The National Artist was silent for a moment. He was the kind of writer that people in reactionary literary circles liked to call “an old whore”. He understood literature, but he didn’t place a great deal of importance on his own integrity, and therefore literature, even genuine literature, no longer gave him any pleasure. Gazing around the table, he declared in a voice of thundering authority: “The spirit of the competi
tion, comrades! What a beautiful and joyous picture this competition gave us of the spirit of our young soldiers. In that torrent of genuinely fresh young poetry — and most of it, to a certain extent, was relatively very good poetry, almost — there was not a hint or a suggestion of the self-indulgent melancholy, the despair, the lack of faith, even the disgust, that used to be the main subject of young poets in the old bourgeois times.”

  Both high-ranking officers continued to nod, and a diminutive lieutenant rescued Bobr from having to expand on that observation. “I agree, comrade,” he said. “I’ve observed that in our own unit, with every passing year, the comrades who come to us are somehow better, somehow — well, new socialist men. What I mean is, it seems that work is continually becoming, well, more and more — joyful — somehow.”

  “Yes, yes,” said the National Artist quickly. “You’ve put that well, comrade.” The lieutenant flushed with pleasure. “Work is indeed a more joyful thing nowadays, both for you in the army, and for us in the Union of Writers. When I think,” and the novelist settled his blob-like body more comfortably into his chair, “when I think of the situation in literature in this country back in the bourgeois, capitalist republic — well, it’s shameful even to talk about it.” For a moment he appeared to be dreaming, and he was — about those balmy days when, as the star writer of a private publishing house, he had been given the cushy job of editor, with the duty of working once a week for three hours and being paid three thousand pre-war crowns for the privilege. He heaved a sigh that could have been interpreted as sorrow, and went on: “The things people wrote then — and published!” He waved a paw in the air to fill his rhetorical pause. “It was vile. It was the deliberate, programmatic dehumanization of man. Poets just mucked about with feelings, and they were petty feelings at that. It was pure existentialism!” He pronounced this with the same kind of disdain Lysenko had used in denouncing the fruit-flies used in genetics experiments. “Ah, but today, in our socialist fatherland, when I hear the variety, comrades — this poem is about love, that one about work, or about standing guard — I am delighted. Truly delighted.”