Republic Of Whores

by Josef Skvorecky

  The notebook contained something he’d been working on for almost a year. He was immensely proud of it. It was in the nature of a military/pedagogical treatise and service handbook, and bore the title A Training Course in Bullying, and the subtitle The Art of Chewing Out, for Officers of the Czechoslovak Armed Forces. The first page displayed a motto: “A soldier without a sense of humour is a mercenary — J.V. Stalin.” (The tank commander had made this up in case the opus fell into the unauthorized hands of an officer.) The next page was a table of contents dividing the material into a number of sections: “Bellowing”, “Chewing Out”, “Bullying”, and so on, and each of these sections was in turn divided into chapters. At the end of each chapter was a brief summary modelled on The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik).

  The tank commander read his work fondly, lingering over the concise but apposite chapter headings. The first, “An Historical Introduction: The Origins and Development of Bellowing”, promised information about “Julius Caesar and His Importance for the Classical Theory of Bellowing”, and those that followed examined the theme throughout various historical eras, paying detailed attention to “Bellowing in Feudal Armies”, with a special subsection on “Bellowing at Mercenaries”, then “Bellowing in the Capitalist Armies”, and finally “Bellowing in the Red Army and the Czechoslovak People’s Army”. Next came an analytical passage that looked at “Bellowing Classified by Types”, where a good deal of space was devoted to “Bellowing in Churches”, with subsections on bellowing in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches (“with special emphasis on the peaceful mission of the Orthodox Church”), and in synagogues (“with special emphasis on the reactionary essence of Zionism”), and finally, to round it off, “Bellowing in Atheistic Shrines, Prayerhouses, and Churches”.

  This was followed by “Reflections of Marx–Engels–Lenin–Stalin on Bellowing”, interspersed with many unknown quotations; an instructive article called “Soviet Bellowing — Our Model”; a legal-cum-philosophical treatise called “The Dialectics of Bellowing: Can One Bellow at One’s Superior Officers? The Consequences of Same”; and, in conclusion, a brief recapitulation with a message: “How to Be a Better Bellower”. Other sections of the work analysed such complex issues as “Bellowing at Privates, NCOs, and Officers in the Women’s Army Corps” and “Bellowing at Service Animals”.

  There was a well-researched historical essay (“Hannibal and the Decline of Bellowing in the Carthaginian Armies”); the author’s class approach to the material was always correct, as in “Spartacus — the Father of Democratic Bellowing”; the intellectual aspect was of a high calibre (“Bellowing as an Instrument of World Peace”), and the breadth of material testified to the author’s erudition and to his sense of the practical side of things (“Hints on How to Be Decorated for Exemplary Bellowing”).

  The tank commander leafed through the notebook a while longer, making some changes, additions, and improvements, but he was soon overcome by exhaustion. He lay down on the couch by the opposite wall and fell asleep. He dreamed that officers behaving in precisely the spirit of his treatise had dragged him in front of a drumhead court and there, using his handbook as evidence, had condemned him to death for betraying military secrets.

  * * *

  In the main cell of the guardhouse, where the dusty overhead light had long ago been extinguished, the men were still awake, sitting on the wooden benches around the walls and chatting in the dark. By this time, a sentimental mood had overtaken them.

  “It’s been two and a half years, gentlemen!” Sergeant Vomakal sighed reproachfully.

  “What’d they chuck you in here for tonight, Bohouš?” said a voice from the darkness.

  “Same as you, man,” said Vomakal. “I got pissed in The Hedgehog and Apple.”

  “Now, how could you do a thing like that, Bohouš?” said a voice belonging to Private First Class Dr. Mlejnek.

  “You’d of done the same fucking thing, man, if you’d been stinking up the joint for two and a half fucking years like I have.”

  “I understand,” said Dr. Mlejnek. He was not one of those who had to serve six additional months. An unfortunate accident had landed him in the army despite a weak heart, which of course made him even more bitter than the others. Correctly guessing that his political profile wasn’t much of an advantage, he had decided to make a good impression on the draft board by uttering the politically correct greeting “Honour to work!” when he appeared before them. When he didn’t know, and could not have known, was that the chairman of the board was the former owner of a highly profitable abortion clinic which, after the Communist takeover, had been subsumed by a public health centre in Prague. The chairman and his fellow draft-board member, a young doctor from a good bourgeois family, had decided to apply a remarkable set of criteria to declare a draftee fit or unfit for service. If the future defender of the nation greeted the board with the Communist greeting, he would be declared “fit with no restrictions”. On the other hand, anyone who mumbled something vague, suggesting that he could neither bring himself to utter the politically correct greeting nor say anything expressly reactionary, would be classified as “fit for service, but not to bear arms”. Finally, bourgeois greetings like “Good morning” or even expressly Christian greetings like “Praise be to Jesus Christ!” would earn the classification “unfit for military service”. Poor Dr. Mlejnek, who had just managed to squeak through his final examination on The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik), which marked the academic apogee of his legal studies, had thus become the author of his own misfortune.

  “Two and a half years, gentlemen!” This time it was Sergeant Mácha who broke the silence. As kitchen inspector, Mácha had taken a floor rag, breaded it, and fried it to a golden brown so that it looked like a piece of wiener schnitzel, and then put it on a plate near the kitchen door from which First Lieutenant Kohn regularly stole a few pieces for his Sunday dinner. For this he’d been given three nights in the guardhouse. Now he was lying here waxing sentimental. “Two and half years, gentlemen, and it’s all vanished up the asshole of time.”

  “Did you say ‘up the asshole of time’?” said Sergeant Krajta in his raspy voice. “Up the asshole of time, boys. Do any of you know the Tale of the Mysterious Asshole?”

  “No,” came several voices at once.

  “Tell it, man,” said Vomakal.

  Krajta lit a cigarette and leaned back comfortably against the bent legs of a private lying behind him. Krajta was a chemical engineer and he’d made a name for himself as the organizer of an unusual form of mass activity which sometimes took place on long Sunday afternoons. As soon as it got dark, the soldiers would turn out the lights, pull their pants down, and lie face down on their beds. Soldiers who were ready would give the order “Fire!”, and Sergeant Krajta would hold a lighted match as close as he could to their rears. The resulting explosion and blast of flame as they passed wind was remarkably like the cannonades on Victory Day — especially since, to produce the longest, clearest flame, the participants would eat as much warm bread, onions, and garlic as they could steal from the mess-hall at Sunday lunch. On the activity schedule of the political department, this amusement appeared as “Organized Free Time”, although there was no mention of it in the moving description of “A Tankist’s Sunday”, from the pen of Sergeant Maňas, printed in The Defence of the People.

  Now Krajta stretched his legs out on the wooden bench in front of him and, in his pleasantly rusty voice, began to tell the story of the Mysterious Asshole.

  “Once upon a time,” he began, “ten thousand years after our present era, the axis of the earth shifted, making the evenings long, dark, and boring. Granny would gather all her grandchildren around her and the grandchildren would say, ‘Granny, tell us a story, Granny!’ ‘Well then, what story should I tell?’ Granny would ask. And the children would reply, ‘The one about the mysterious bum, Granny, the one about the mysterious bum.’ ‘Very well, then, I’ll tell you the sto
ry about the bum,’ said Granny, nodding her wise old head. ‘But as a matter of fact, it was a very, very, very big bum, so it wasn’t really a bum at all, was it, children?’ ‘No!’ cried the children. ‘No, indeed,’ said Granny, ‘it was —’ ‘An asshole!’ the children shrieked in delight, ‘the mysterious asshole. Tell us the story, Granny!’ And Granny would pull her shawl around her shoulders and begin to tell the tale.

  “ ‘Once upon a time, terribly long ago, when people still had to trade little pieces of coloured paper for things that now, in this era of real Communism, we just go to the warehouse and take home for nothing, like sausages and television sets and women and other things — in those days there were wretched, miserable people who had almost none of those pieces of coloured paper, and they went around dressed in crude clothes that all looked the same and at night they were locked up in sad-looking shacks and in the daytime they had to walk around in straight lines and drive around in stinking metal boxes that they couldn’t properly see out of. And all day long they were shouted and yelled at by stupid men with little gold stars on their shoulders, but they weren’t allowed to answer back, they had to click their heels together and say, “Yasser, yasser, yasser,” and when those mean, loud men weren’t around they said other things, but what they said has never been put down in writing. And in the evenings these poor, wretched people sat around in rooms they couldn’t leave, and thought about their loved ones, and were very, very sad.

  “ ‘Outside the settlement where they lived, there was an enormous mountain, completely bare and bald. And every month when the moon was full, these sad people in their sad uniforms would gather at the foot of this mountain and wait. They’d watch until the moon came up, and after the moon emerged like a big fisheye, they’d watch, waiting expectantly, while it moved slowly across the sky, shining down on the earth. And they’d watch it, trembling in anticipation. Finally, when the moon stood right over the mountain, the earth would begin to tremble and rumble deep inside, and the mountain would open up, and a huge bum would emerge from it and stick up into the sky. And the full moon would fall straight into the bum, and the sad people would rejoice and they’d all of them shout, as one man: “Another month up the asshole of time!” And then the bum would once more retreat inside the mountain and the sad people would return to their sad settlement and be sad once more, until a month later they returned to the mountain and there was a full moon again, and the big bum appeared again, and the moon fell into it again, and they call cried out, “Another month up the asshole of time!” and wept for joy. And all in all, children, the big bum had to emerge from the mountain twenty-four times before those sad people could leave that sad settlement and be happy once more.’ ”

  The tale was over and the room was quiet.

  “Yeah,” said Sergeant Mácha. “But in my case it had to disappear up the asshole thirty times.”

  The soldiers chuckled. Sergeant Krajta stretched out to go to sleep. Some others went on talking and telling off-colour jokes, but the evening had exhausted them and soon they too fell asleep.

  It wasn’t long before a great and just silence spread over the entire guardhouse, disrupted only by the full voice of Private Mengele from a distant cell, singing a soldier’s bedtime ballad to his three cellmates:

  It’s a da-hark and lo-honely ni-hight

  A-hand the sky-hi is black as pi-hitch

  A-hand everyone is gone to slee-heep

  Bu-hut that dirty old su-hun of a bi-hitch

  My captain.…

  But even the private fell silent, then fell asleep, and only the footsteps of the guard measured off the remaining hours of those last wonderful moments before their return to life.

  6

  A MASS CULTURAL FAREWELL TO ARMS

  The evening before the Seventh Tank Battalion held its farewell party, First Lieutenant Růžička and Lieutenant Hospodin learned that Major Borovička and Major Sádlo were to honour the event with their presence. This sent the two political officers into a feverish whirl of activity. The affair had originally been meant as an in-house event; it would now be a public test of the battalion’s mettle. The celebration, in which the soldiers would bid farewell to two (or two and a half) years of basic service, would have to demonstrate what they had learned in the moral and intellectual sense. Military songs of a mass nature, military and folk dances, recitations and artistic performances, puppet shows and storytellers and magicians would come together in a demonstration of popular creativity. It was such a display that the two political officers set about, diligently but belatedly, to cobble together.

  Fortunately, they had Tank Commander Maňas to call on. This mythical hero of the Seventh Tank Battalion had survived his débâcle on Zephyr Hill, despite the fact that General Helebrant had demoted him on the spot by tearing off his epaulettes even as they were carrying him away from his tank on a stretcher. The general had resorted to this dramatic gesture to neutralize the unfavourable impression the tank commander’s performance had made on the Soviet general, who had sprained his ankle when he jumped off the observation platform. But the former sergeant, now a private, had resorted to an equally dramatic counter-move. When he had partially recovered in the infirmary, he sawed most of the way through a beam in the latrine, put around his neck a web belt (also mostly severed, just to be on the safe side), and hanged himself from the beam, plunging with a great racket into the toilet. Thanks to the noise, he was discovered almost immediately, and was admitted to the psychiatric section of the infirmary, where he was visited by General Helebrant. The general was merely showing due concern for a subordinate, but Private Maňas fell on his knees before him and he softened and, after a private meeting demanded by the divisional officer of the military secret police, promoted Maňas back to his former rank. This valuable soldier (and secret collaborator) then made a rapid recovery, and returned to his unit just as the two political officers were frantically searching for a program to demonstrate the results of their educational activities.

  As always, Maňas displayed a ready political awareness, and offered his services. He would, he said, recite his own poem, “Farewell to Our Second Home”, read his own humorous story, “Private Pimlas’s Accident”, and perform in a one-act play written by himself on condition that the political officers get him a co-actor and a girl to play the female lead. He was also, he said, willing to perform several card tricks (if he could remember them), organize a game called “A Test of Political Knowledge”, and, to round out the evening, perform a satirical piece called “Hypnosis and the Power of Suggestion”. This would give them a complete evening of performance, a kind of one-man show, and under normal circumstances the political officers would have been delighted to accept.

  But now, after the crushing news from division headquarters, they weren’t sure the notoriously fault-finding Major Borovička would be satisfied with Tank Commander Maňas reciting a poem by Tank Commander Maňas, reading a humorous story by Tank Commander Maňas, appearing in a one-act play by Tank Commander Maňas, and doing card tricks and a funny skit all starring Tank Commander Maňas. Thus, of all his suggestions, they accepted only his poem, his one-acter, and his story-telling act, since that was a role he traditionally played in the division. Next they set out to track down a singing circle which, in the vague memory of Lieutenant Růžička, had been formally established long ago but had never actually done anything. The trail of the singing circle was so cold as to be almost non-existent — in fact, the only trace they could find was a guitar belonging to Sergeant Kobliha — but they decided they could build an emergency group around that. Oddly enough, Sergeant Kobliha was willing to lend his art to further their aims.

  Following up on an inspired idea from Lieutenant Hospodin, they locked the mess hall just when the Seventh Tank Battalion was working its way through one of its final army meals, and Růžička called upon the trapped soldiers to form a singing group and rehearse a few songs. Resistance was fierce, but the negotiations dragged on until a compromise
was reached: all those present would learn one song, provided the whole process didn’t take more than half an hour. While this was being carried out under Růžička’s guidance, Hospodin set out to find the puppet theatre that had been donated to the unit by a local factory some time ago, when the lieutenant still had illusions about the practicability of mass cultural activity per se.

  He searched the attic of the barracks, the special room set aside for mass cultural events, the living quarters of all four squadrons, and the CO’s rooms, until finally he found the remains of the puppet theatre in the cellar, partly chopped up for kindling. As for the puppets themselves, the earth seemed to have swallowed them up. (Later, when most of the men had returned to civilian life, they turned up in a green map-case that First Lieutenant Pinkas had taken with him on tactical manoeuvres.)

  Crushed by his failure, he quickened his tempo and ran about battalion headquarters with no clear purpose in mind. On the second floor he came across Sergeant Omámený, a gunner who was famous for his extraordinary diligence in political education classes, and for the extraordinarily poor results this diligence brought him. Of Hungarian-Slovak nationality, he was the embodiment of servility; although he had been in the army for thirty months and was about to return to his native village, he saluted Lieutenant Hospodin without being reminded. This so astonished the political officer that he asked Omámený if he knew any folk dances.

  “I surely do, Comrade Lieutenant.”

  “Which ones?” asked the lieutenant quickly.

  “The one about the brigand and the cop with the federpuš,” Omámený declared, in a combination of Hana, Glatz, and German dialects.

  “You’re going to dance it tomorrow,” the lieutenant decided.