by Marci Shore
That August at Central European University I took a seminar with Arnošt Lustig, a Czech Jew who alone among his family had survived Auschwitz. As a teenager, he had escaped from the camps and gone on to fight with the communists against the Nazis. I knew him from his novels, almost all of them set during the Holocaust. A certain motif ran through them: a beautiful woman—often a prostitute—in the midst of Nazi hell. Arnošt loved women; he wrote of sex as if it were redemptive. In his novel The Unloved, written from the perspective of a prostitute in the Theresienstadt ghetto, the heroine’s eclectic earnings served as an almost musical refrain:
August 28. Three times. Two phonograph records. An eighth of a loaf of rye bread. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A travel manicure set. Twice during the night. A hot-water bottle. Four ounces of powdered sugar.
August 29. Twice. A sheaf of pink stationery. A nail file.
August 30. Five times. A collection of postcards from the most beautiful European cities and spas. An eighth of a loaf of rye bread. Two potatoes. Fifty marks in ten-mark notes. A leather frame for photographs. Once. A hand-knit woolen ski sweater.
In the seminar we read Aristotle’s Poetics. Arnošt liked to talk about Aristotle. He was full of good humor and countless anecdotes. His eyes twinkled. There was a kind of joie de vivre in him.
One day Arnošt told us the story of his affection for prostitutes, which was also a story of his father. In the Theresienstadt ghetto, awaiting their turn on the transport, his father had understood they would be going to their deaths. And he had a preoccupation: he did not want his son to die a virgin. Every night he would ask Arnošt if he had been with a woman. And every night Arnošt would say no—until one day the teenage boy lost his virginity to a prostitute in Theresienstadt. It was precisely on that night that Arnošt’s father ceased to ask—and so Arnošt never told him. Soon afterward they were deported, and his father was gassed in Auschwitz.
Arnošt was not a dark person. He knew that people could be cruel—but also that people could be beautiful.
“Everything I know about people,” he said, “I learned in the camps.”
In Arnošt’s seminar there was a Czech woman named Dorota, a student at the drama faculty. One day she told Arnošt that he used the word beautiful too much when he spoke English. Arnošt, who had been in Auschwitz.
Dorota was young and pretty and talented. She had won an English-language writing contest for Czech authors with a short story whose narrator was a young Czech man. The story opened: “I like meat, sex, riding trams, and like most Czechs, I don’t believe in God.” Some two years earlier, when she’d been working at one of the postrevolution McDonald’s, she’d met an American tourist. Bret was in his midthirties, older than she by fourteen years. He was a geologist, or rather had been a geologist. He was also married, or rather had been married. He had left behind in California not only a good job but also a wife and two children. He was tired of geology and wanted to be a writer. Rainer Maria Rilke was his favorite poet; Rilke’s stories had brought Bret to Prague.
It was Dorota who kept him there. She sold him french fries, and Bret became her first lover. He stayed in Prague, and they moved into a tiny flat in the same building where Dorota had lived with her parents. He wrote poetry and drank beer and made love to her. She studied at the drama faculty, and cooked and cleaned and ironed. She learned English extremely well, and she did everything for him: after two years of living in Prague, Bret still understood nothing in Czech. He seemed not to mind. Dorota took care of him. She loved him very much.
On Sunday nights Dorota and Bret would go out for beer and Czech crepes called palačinky at a below-street-level café called Barbar, not far from Na Kampě park and the John Lennon Wall, and it was there I met their American friends, nearly all men. One of them was a talented black American jazz singer who was sometimes harassed by the Czech police for no reason at all. Another was a thirty-year-old French major–turned–English teacher, “a tragic figure,” Dorota called him. He was kind and loyal but also bitter and resentful toward a world that had not appreciated him—and above all toward women who had not loved him. A third friend, Scout, was older, perhaps in his midfifties, a hippie-turned–computer engineer from Berkeley who wore his long hair tied back in a ponytail and smoked too many cigarettes. He was fairly short and a bit heavy and always spoke emphatically, with his hands, with no concern for decorum, but also with no ill will.
Scout was a child of the cold war—and of the antiwar movement. After 1989 he’d come to Prague because he wanted to see who—or what—it was Americans were supposed to have been afraid of all those years. And immediately upon his arrival he’d concluded: what a joke. He stayed on in Prague, working as a computer programmer for a firm that supplied information to the Ministry of Transportation. He liked his co-workers. It seemed to him, though, that no one knew how to use a computer very well and so was unlikely to have contributed to a nuclear attack.
Dorota and Bret’s friends who met at Barbar for beer and crepes were only a small part of a parallel, American Prague that numbered some twenty thousand people. They were expatriates, not tourists, because they were there indefinitely. They were not émigrés—for they might return to Boston or San Francisco, Madison or Columbus, at any moment. Few seemed to have any idea of what might come next. In the early 1990s, Prague was not expensive—one could live there for a long time on little money.
The expatriates were largely a twenty-something crowd; few were married, and most had come soon after college graduation. Flavoring the community was a certain hedonism: sex and beer and marijuana. Sellers gathered on a boat docked on the banks of the Vltava not far from Old Town Square. On tables set up on Charles Bridge and in Wenceslas Square, craftsmen and peddlers sold pipes alongside beaded necklaces and crystal earrings and cast-iron candelabras. The expatriates had degrees in English and French, history and sociology and comparative literature. They taught English and they wrote for the two competing English weeklies, Prognosis and the Prague Post. They founded literary magazines and organized poetry clubs. They sold used books and cappuccino at the Globe, and they waitressed and bartended at Radost’.
The Globe, located on an inconspicuous street in the unremarkable district of Holešovice, was an English-language used bookstore attached to a café that served lattes and absinthe. Radost’ was something else. It was a vegetarian restaurant, a bar, a lounge, and a club—all brought together in a place named “joy.” It was set in fashionable Vinohrady, and it served some of the very best food in Prague: spinach burgers and blueberry muffins and New York cheesecake. Many who worked there spoke no Czech, and the Czech clientele who did patronize Radost’ were expected to speak English. The restaurant, the bar, and the lounge were upstairs; downstairs was a club for poetry readings and dancing. Everyone was young and attractive and writing the great expatriate novel. Radost’ exuded pretentiousness. The model was self-consciously Paris of the 1930s, the Left Bank of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, of Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein.
The expatriates were partisans of postcommunist Eastern Europe, and they loved Prague. They felt both more and less sophisticated than the Czechs, and they related to the city’s native inhabitants with a simultaneous condescension and insecurity. This—Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, my own—was a wandering generation, searching for itself, unable to settle down, wary of commitment, longing for authenticity—an authenticity the expatriates hoped to reach by contiguity with the survivors of communism.
A YEAR EARLIER, in California in the fall of 1993, I had begun to study Czech. My teacher, Vlasta, had come to Stanford on a Fulbright. Her husband, Honza, had stayed behind, and she’d come to California with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Diana. Vlasta was not a teacher of Czech by profession. She was, rather, an Americanist, who taught Sylvia Plath and Edith Wharton to university students in Prague. She was also a translator of American literature. That December, her translation of Erica Jong’s 1970s feminist classic Fear of Flying appea
red. This Vlasta considered her Christmas present to Czech women.
It was in Vlasta’s Czech class, on the very first day, that I’d met Amanda. She stood out because she was beautiful, and also because she was so much older than the rest of us in that small class. She was here, Amanda told us, because she wanted to know what her Czech husband was saying when he talked to his friends and family. She disliked being excluded.
“How long have you been married?” I asked her.
“Twenty-five years,” she answered.
At the semester’s end there was a Christmas party, and this was where I met her husband, Oskar. Like Amanda, he was strikingly attractive. There was a kind of glamour about them; years earlier, they had lived in Paris. They seemed very much in love.
Now, in Prague in August 1994, I saw Vlasta and Diana again, together with Vlasta’s husband, Honza, who spoke no English but was relaxed and friendly with a playfully mocking sense of humor. He wore his hair long and played the guitar. He seemed to have none of Vlasta’s awkwardness, none of her anxieties. He reminded me a bit of Miloš: happy-go-lucky, someone for whom life was light. Vlasta had a surprise for me: Amanda and Oskar were there as well. Perhaps in some way it was a surprise for them, too, an impulsive decision to leave their light-filled house with the garden in Menlo Park, their life in California, behind. Oskar had resigned his position at Stanford. He wanted to retire in Prague. He seemed very happy, and Amanda seemed both nervous and excited. She and Oskar talked about having a Halloween party, about introducing Oskar’s Czech friends to America’s favorite pagan holiday.
The balcony of Vlasta’s Prague apartment, far from the city’s center, looked out onto a lush green park beckoning from some half mile away. That afternoon the six of us spent walking the wooded paths, which felt so removed from the surrounding city. There was a mix of disparate emotions: for Vlasta, the return to Prague from California was a difficult one; for Honza, this very difficulty was a source of his exclusion. For Oskar, coming to Prague recalled a heavy past, one he did not share with Amanda. And for Amanda, coming to Prague ushered in an unpredictable future, one in which she would now be the foreigner.
“It Was Only a Small Revolution”
I answered an advertisement for an English teacher in a west Bohemian town, some three hours away by train. In late August of 1994 I left Prague for Domažlice.
This small town of perhaps ten thousand people was not unattractive. A gate hinged upon a clock-bearing stone watchtower led into an elongated town square, which every Wednesday was the site of an open market. Around the square, covered sidewalks were framed on one side by column-supported arches; the arcade buildings were painted a potpourri of greens and peaches and pinks. This was not true of the school, though, which in the small, not so dreary town of Domažlice was housed in a large, dreary building of four floors, a characterless construction of brick and stucco. There at the school the first people I met were two other English teachers. Jitka was a kind person, perhaps in her midforties, who had taught at the school for many years—first Russian, now English. Like nearly all of the Czech women I’d met, who were so pretty in their twenties, Jitka was prematurely aged. She was beaten down by everyday life, by waiting on her teenage son and her arrogant husband—a local bureaucrat with an apartment in town for his mistress. Every day Jitka would loyally return to their home in the small village several miles away, giving her husband his space in Domažlice, living in fear that he would divorce her.
Galina was different. Unlike Jitka, she had not had a previous career as a Russian teacher. She was, however, Russian—or rather, Russian was her native language. She had come from a Russian-speaking family in Soviet Ukraine and had studied English at the university in Kharkiv. A few years earlier she’d run away from an unhappy marriage, taking her daughter, Mara. For forty years Czechoslovakia had lived under the Soviet Union’s domination. Now that had ended, but Soviet foreigners remained unwelcome among the Czechs. Galina, though, had arrived just after the Velvet Revolution, when English teachers were very much in demand. In Prague there was a surfeit of Americans and other native speakers, but it was not so in the provinces. And so Galina was given a job. By the time I met her, her Czech was fluent. The Czechs, though, could hear her accent, they knew she was from the East, and they avoided her. Her fellow teacher Jitka was the exception. She and Galina were friendly, if not close, and despite their differences felt something like affection for each other.
A few days later I walked into the classroom for the first time. The students rose at once, and above their heads I saw a large portrait of Václav Havel. They addressed me, as they did all their female teachers, as Paní profesorka (Mrs. Professor). Before the revolution, the students had said Paní soudružka (Mrs. Comrade).
I gave one class the short story Dorota had written in English, the one that began: “I like meat, sex, riding trams, and like most Czechs I don’t believe in God.” Dorota’s story was, among other things, a play on the lack of gender inflection in the English language: only in the middle of the story did the reader learn that the narrator was a man. I wanted them to see how gender identity could be concealed in English in a way it could not in Czech. I wanted them to understand, too, the different ways that these languages structured thoughts: English verb tenses emphasized time sequence, in contrast to Czech verb tenses, which emphasized consummation: an action was either complete or incomplete, fulfilled or unfulfilled. Nouns functioned differently as well. The role of a noun in an English sentence was determined not by its suffix but by its position in the sentence. In contrast, in Czech a noun like post office had seven different endings, endings whose use depended upon whether one was talking about the post office, or going toward, inside, or around the post office, or sending a package by means of the post office.
I was learning Czech as I was teaching English, and my understanding of English changed as I absorbed the very different Slavic syntax. “Fine” or “okay” or “all is well” was v pořádku—literally “in order,” which felt vaguely authoritarian. Friends greeted one another on the street with Počkej! Kam jdeš? (Wait! Where are you going?). Variations on the passive voice were the default mode of expression: human agency seemed to be obscured. Often the subject was depreciated to the position of indirect object. I was never warm or cold or well or sad—rather a nebulous “it” was warm or cold or well or sad to me. It felt as if the speaker had become the passive recipient of the world’s caprices. Life was something that happened to us, fell upon us—and we dealt with it.
A year or so earlier, pravda—truth—had been the first word I learned in Czech. To není možné had been the first phrase: it was among the many ways to say that something was not possible. The realm of the not possible was vast. Very little was possible. Now I told my students not to translate to není možné into English.
“Impossible,” I told them, “is a very strong word in English. Something has to be literally—physically, biologically—not possible.”
For my students, though, especially the older ones, it was too late—they had already internalized the realm of the not possible. They had poignantly few ambitions—in any case, ambition was a word whose connotation was pejorative. My class of senior-year students composed essays on the topic “What I Would Like to Do When I Finish High School.” The students wrote that they would like to go on to a university, they would like to study languages, or history, they would like to become lawyers or veterinarians. Yet they would cut themselves off: “But I don’t think that it will be possible.”
My students were bright—they had been accepted to the only university preparatory school in their region—but they were also passive, in some sense deadened at sixteen or seventeen. They preferred memorization and rarely expressed any opinion. Communist content had been purged from that school, but a certain totalitarian form—or rather an acute sense of the world’s restrictedness—lingered.
I worried about my students. I worried, too, about Galina’s daughter, Mara, who was
thirteen and a student at the school. From my first days in Domažlice, Galina was my only friend. Everyone else I met—the other teachers, the women wanting English lessons—seemed so reserved, in some paradoxical way so petit bourgeois in their intense concern for manners and prices and social status. Galina was open and revealing and so much less pragmatic, and our conversations were intimate almost at once. At the kitchen table in her small apartment hidden underneath the school’s dormitory, we would sit for hours, drinking tea and talking about her fear of the headmaster. The headmaster was a man tiny in stature and authoritarian in bearing, who spoke not only to me but also to Galina and Jitka and each one of his colleagues as if to a member of a lower caste. He had a plain, heavy-set wife who towered over him and a lover who was the matron of the school’s dormitory where I lived. She, too, was feared, and she reveled in being the mistress of a powerful man. The headmaster was suspicious of me—a foreigner, an American, a young woman—but he was openly hostile to Galina. A little man in a little town, the headmaster demanded unconditional obedience from her. After all, he would remind her, she was a homeless Soviet foreigner whom he had magnanimously agreed to employ.
Galina and I talked, too, about Czechs and Russians and Americans, about lost loves and sex and marriage, about languages and the ways they were so different, about how Galina had become a Christian, and about Mara.
Unlike her mother, Mara had quickly acculturated herself not only to the language but also to the accent and the mores, to the intricate local customs and social protocols. She knew who greeted whom first in public, and with what greeting, she knew when to bring cake and when to bring flowers, above all she knew how to be invisible. She was quiet and shy and possessed a kind of precocious wisdom. She wanted very much to be accepted. Yet although she did everything just as the Czechs did, she remained someone other.