by Marci Shore
I thought it was scandalous: students kept all day in a freezing building, no one responsible for fixing the heat. Public opinion, though, reached a different consensus: I was the one who was scandalous. What right did I have to suspend the shoe-changing rule? The headmaster was very angry. I was ostracized by the other teachers—for my audacity, for not respecting hierarchy, for believing I was above the rules.
I didn’t apologize, I was too mystified—and in some way indignant: I felt protective of my students. I knew Tereza’s mother a bit, and when I next saw her I began to tell her the story of the broken stove and the shoes and the headmaster’s wrath. But she already knew; Tereza had told her. She’d even gone to the school board and put in a formal request: given that the heat was not working, perhaps the headmaster could formally suspend the shoe-changing rule until the stove was repaired. And the school board had responded: it was impossible to do this right away. The proposal would be considered at the next meeting, which would take place in a few weeks.
“But that’s absurd,” I said.
“Of course,” Tereza’s mother said, “but here we’re used to that.”
In the communist years, Tereza’s father later told me, Czechoslovakia was called Absurdistan. Around 1970 time had stopped; afterward there was no movement, only stagnation. He had never believed he would live to see a way out. People suffered in different ways, he explained, but the worst thing was the feeling of powerlessness: the obligation to take part in elections with only one candidate, to perform the empty rituals. He and his family did not go to May Day parades; every year he and his wife asked that their children be excused because the family would be away in the countryside. One year the teacher appointed one of his son’s classmates to spy on them: she suspected they had not really left town.
Someone who didn’t live here, who didn’t have these experiences, would never understand, Tereza’s father told me. And it was true. I didn’t really understand.
My older colleague Jitka, who had been teaching at the school for so many years, was both sympathetic toward me and terribly distressed by the headmaster’s anger; she wanted me to understand the context for the shoe-changing rule, and she tried to explain: “Everything is impossible here. It is impossible to make copies, because only the secretary is allowed to make them, and sometimes she’s in a bad mood. It is impossible to argue with the headmaster. It is impossible to fix the lights, to allow a student to take a history class this year if a year ago she thought she wanted to study languages.”
The realm of the not possible was expansive: it included the new, the uncommon, the difficult, as well as the vaguely inconvenient, the previously unconsidered, that which someone was not in the mood to do at the moment. And nothing could be done without the proper rubber stamp. To acquire the proper stamp it was usually necessary to acquire a series of them, each a prerequisite for the next. A given stamp was generally in the hands of a single person, a local bureaucrat who had been made inordinately powerful by such a possession and who might prove to be capricious, or greedy, or resentful—or simply absentminded, or ill, or lazy, or indefinitely on vacation.
My colleagues’ wariness of me—a foreigner, a single woman—had become active distaste. Now, though, the students in that class trusted me, they talked to me. Among them I became a kind of heroine. It was not deserved: for I was a heroine only by virtue of a lack of acculturation.
AFTER SOME TIME my impudent suspension of the shoe-changing rule gave way to more exciting news: a team of American scientists had discovered new evidence disproving Darwin’s theory of evolution—and they had written to the headmaster announcing their willingness to include Domažlice on their European lecture tour. The headmaster was extremely proud—and vindicated in his sense of superiority: certainly it was not by chance that prominent American scientists had chosen his school.
The headmaster had not himself been able to read the letter, which was written in English. Jitka and Galina, though, had read the letter; and I asked to see it. I’d already guessed who the “scientists” were: American Christian missionaries were ubiquitous in postcommunist Eastern Europe.
I read the letter. And I insisted to Jitka and Galina that these were not scientists and that this had to be explained to the headmaster. They were being exploited, made fools of: these alleged American scientists understood perfectly well they would never be given a platform at a school in their own country. But I had no authority to correct the headmaster’s impressions. He had already canceled classes for the day of the scientists’ visit and announced the lecture to the entire town. All of the students would be required to attend; the public would be invited as well.
The day came. Five or six American born-again Christians appeared at the school with dozens of colored slides and an enthusiastic interpreter of moderate competence from a nearby town. There were hundreds of people in the room. The presentation began: the slides of chimpanzees and orangutans, the slides of human beings, the slides outlining the differences between apes and human beings. Students and teachers and local adults listened with rapt intensity—and at a certain moment I realized that even the smartest among them, listening in Czech to the interpreter, could not hear what I could hear painfully clearly in English: that these were not educated people. Even had the claims not been so ridiculous, the pretext for visiting Domažlice so improbable, among English speakers their language would have given them away.
Then the slide show was over and it was time for questions. I raised my hand, and began to speak—first in Czech, through the interpreter, then—flushed, enraged—in English, directly to the visitors: how dare they? They had no right to come here to manipulate my students—my students who, after years of communist propaganda, were just learning to think for themselves, and now these fanatics had come here to trick them. Why didn’t they just tell their audience who they really were? Why didn’t they just say they were Christian missionaries who had come to talk about God? How dare they pretend to be scientists? This was a lie.
The visitors were disturbed. They hadn’t expected to encounter another American. They defended themselves: after all, if these were my students and I really cared about them, did I want them to go through their lives believing they’d been descended from barbaric apes?
By now we were shouting at one another. The atmosphere of reverence was broken. I had ruined what should have been one of the headmaster’s proudest moments. He—and my colleagues—would now resent me as much as I resented the missionaries.
I regretted that I had done this to Jitka, who was so long-suffering, and so good, and who could not entirely believe that the American visitors were impostors. I pleaded with her, with Galina, with my students to trust me.
By then it was already December, and the town square was covered with snow—and full of fish sellers: baking fresh carp was a Czech Christmas tradition. The peddlers slaughtered the carp on the spot, at the moment of purchase, and the white snow on the town square was saturated with the fresh blood of fish.
I knew I had to leave. And in January 1995 I did, having failed to understand the provinces and failed to find any place for myself there. I knew that I would see Galina and her daughter, Mara, again. Perhaps someday we would talk about the missionaries. The students whom I had allowed to wear their shoes bought me presents: chocolate and a stone charm of a silvery blue. Tereza’s friend, the fourteen-year-old girl who had described her heartbreak over her boyfriend’s betrayal in an essay, gave me a goodbye card: “It’s sad, that you must leave Domažlice. If I could I would say to you—‘Marci, please don’t go’, but I know, that it is not possible, that you must go.…—Life is cruel.… Bye and remember sometimes to your students from Domažlice.”
Pornography in Prague
I left Domažlice for Prague, where I moved into a room in an elderly couple’s apartment. Pan Prokop and Paní Prokopová had been retired for some time; the inflation that followed communism’s collapse had made their pensions now worth almost nothing. They
could not pay their rent without taking in a boarder, and they could not imagine leaving their home of so many years: a small two-bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchen, some thirty minutes from the city’s center in a district called Vokovice filled with identical housing blocks, the uniform gray concrete standing for a socialist aesthetic of equality. Just fifty feet from their building was Evropská ulice, the main thoroughfare leading from the end of the metro line to the airport. Just ten minutes by foot in the other direction, behind the complex of apartment blocks, the city ended and the woods began.
Pan Prokop and Paní Prokopová looked like so many other gray-haired couples in a country where youth passed quickly. Theirs was an ageless agedness: they might have been anywhere between sixty and eighty. As a couple, they were neither happy nor unhappy. Their relationship seemed harmonious if not affectionate, and they suffered most from boredom. They no longer worked, nor did they have the money to go to restaurants or concerts. During the days they watched television. American sitcoms from the 1980s now were aired with Czech dubbing, and they also followed Dallas intently: did I know who shot J.R.? If I’d once known, I no longer remembered. They spoke to me with great patience and attentiveness. Nearly every day we talked about Prague. The city had changed, and not in a way that Paní Prokopová liked. The new Prague frightened her. Under communism the streets had been completely safe. The Czechs remained unused to crime; once—not so long ago—there had been almost none. Time and time again Paní Prokopová warned me to be careful: the city had become threatening, there were thieves, gangsters, violent men who would steal my purse and perhaps assault me as well.
Paní Prokopová was preoccupied with prices: how much each item—each pot and pan, each plate, each box of kasha, each carton of milk—cost now, and how much it had cost “then”—before the end of communism. She was not devoted to communist ideology, and nothing that she or her husband ever said suggested that either of them had read Marx or Lenin. Yet they knew one thing: communism had been better for them than what existed now. What for Tereza’s parents in Domažlice had been an unbearable torpor was for Paní Prokopová a comfortable stability. In the “normalization” years after 1968, there were men and women—if only a handful—who had willingly risked their lives to speak the truth. Paní Prokopová and her husband, though, had felt no need for uncensored literature, underground rock concerts, Radio Free Europe, or even open borders. The Velvet Revolution had brought freedoms they had no use for, and in any case had not the money to enjoy. Their whole adult lives they had worked under the communist regime, and that regime had promised they would be cared for in their old age. Now the social contract had been broken. For their generation the revolution had come too late. For Pan Prokop and Paní Prokopová, it would have been better had it not come at all.
PRAGUE IN 1995 was a city in motion, transforming itself from one day to the next. Two decades of stagnation had ended, and now there was little stability and little security. Young Gypsy children playing accordions asked for money on trams and sometimes pick-pocketed. Everywhere there was new wealth and new poverty. Since 1991, refugees fleeing the bloody Yugoslav wars of ethnic cleansing had been arriving in Prague; desperate women roamed the streets, begging for money and holding their babies.
It was a time, too, when prurience was unabashed. Matchboxes, telephone cards, and plastic bags at supermarkets came decorated with pornographic pictures. In January a new billboard advertisement for Sony stereos pictured a young woman with bare shoulders, her chin resting on a pillow, a Sony stereo system beside her, and the slogan “Muži chtějí ženy, které poslouchají …” (Men want women who listen …). It was a play on words: in Czech the verb “to listen to” is the same as the verb “to obey.”
And there were the men who ceaselessly called out to women on the streets. Sexual harassment—for which there was no word in Czech—was endemic, and not considered to be in especially bad taste. That spring a literary weekly published a long interview with my former Czech teacher Vlasta. She spoke about her American students, young women who resented the way Czech men shouted at them, mocked them, propositioned them. And I knew she was speaking of me.
In the interview Vlasta spoke, too, about Fear of Flying: yes, there was a lot of sex, but—she insisted—the book was not only about sex, it was also about the way sex became a prism, a way of perceiving the world. The heroine Isadora’s escape into fantasies of the “zipless fuck” came from the feeling that she was unable to take not only her sexual life but also the whole of her life into her own hands. For Isadora, to “fly” was to act purely from her own will.
Since the book’s publication, Vlasta had been receiving letters from readers: there were Czech women who appreciated what she had done for them. Yet this was not the only reaction. To translate Fear of Flying, Vlasta had needed to invent in Czech a new sexual vocabulary for women, and there were many Czechs who were not happy to see Erica Jong’s feminist sexual explicitness imported into their culture. Among the many critical reviews it seemed to Vlasta only one had grasped the novel’s essence—and that was the one published in Playboy.
Sexual explicitness from a man was taken for granted. My former teacher Arnošt Lustig had published a new novel, and now on the metro I began to read about “Tanga, the girl from Hamburg.” The novel took place in 1943 at the prison in the Theresienstadt ghetto. There the narrator, then a sixteen-year-old boy, met the twenty-year-old Tanga, a circus artist and prostitute. Among her first words to him were: “There isn’t a woman in the world who wouldn’t like to be a whore for at least an hour a day.”
Tanga herself emerged as a philosopher-prostitute figure—she was beautiful and noble, saucy and defiant. She was what was redemptive in the midst of horror. She had the power of redemption, not in spite of who she was, but because of who she was. I translated for an American literary journal a passage from the very end of the book: the narrator watched Tanga dress after they had spent their first night together. It was also their last, as Tanga had been summoned to the next transport to the East—that is, to Auschwitz.
She grew old even before she pulled the dress over her head. She fastened the buttons starting from the bottom. She was no longer looking toward the mountains. Perhaps in her mind she saw the devil. He was in her shadow, in my shadow. In the darkness that was receding. In the way she showed her teeth when she smiled; in the way I answered her with the same, short smile. In the way it grew light, even though it was still impossible to see the shadows; in the railway tracks to the east; in the hills, which—by the time morning came—she would no longer see, because she would be far away. She fastened the last button around her neck. She slipped on tall riding boots. I didn’t tell her while she was dressing how often I would think of her. She was no longer sitting up. Perhaps she felt sick. Everything that made her a prostitute had melted away. She no longer needed it. She was thinking about what the elderly think about before they die, about how long it would last. Or she was thinking about nothing. She was beautiful and indifferent and dignified.
The story was so much an expression of Arnošt: of his lasciviousness, of his ability to find the beautiful in the awful.
ONE DAY MY former student Tereza, whose grandmothers lived in Prague, came to visit from Domažlice. I decided I would take her to meet the long-haired Scout from Berkeley. When on a Saturday afternoon we appeared, unexpectedly, at his small, disheveled apartment in Malá Strana, he offered us avocados. They were terribly expensive in Prague, and they were Scout’s single Western luxury. He did not make salad or anything else with them—he ate them just as they were. They reminded him of California. I introduced him to Tereza. She wanted to know about the 1960s, I told him. She wanted to know what it was like to be in California then.
We walked to Barbar and ordered french fries. Scout began to tell stories. I looked at them: Scout in faded jeans, his long graying hair tied back in a ponytail, the aging hippie computer genius. A character from People’s Park in Berkeley, ebullient and irreveren
t. Tereza, a fourteen-year-old girl from a small Czech town with the long black hair and the flowing dress of a flower child, enraptured by his narration, by the authenticity of the encounter.
“The difference between us and you,” Scout said, “is that here you don’t protest anything. We protested everything.”
Yet the American counterculture, the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s, was a curiously resonant motif in Prague. There was a John Lennon memorial wall not far from Scout’s apartment. During the November 1989 demonstrations protesters had carried flowers. I had a picture of my Czech teacher Marcela amid the crowd on Wenceslas Square, holding a rose. In 1965 Allen Ginsberg had visited Prague, where he’d met Václav Havel, who was then a student. After the Velvet Revolution they’d renewed their acquaintance, and Allen Ginsberg was impressed by how much the new president of Czechoslovakia had been influenced by Ginsberg’s own counterculture: jazz music and the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac.
IN THE EVENINGS that winter I spent much time with Pan Prokop and Paní Prokopová. In their apartment there was a certain comfortable rhythm to the days. They looked forward, I began to sense, to my coming home. Paní Prokopová in particular was full of concern about me—because I was a vegetarian, and because I was a woman alone. Many evenings she spent explaining to me why it was important to eat meat and why it was important to find a husband. Then, when it grew warm, Paní Prokopová and her husband began to spend more and more time at their cottage in the countryside. In the summer Paní Prokopová tended their garden and pickled vegetables and canned fruits to eat throughout the year. In Prague they took on a second boarder. I met Klaudie on the day she moved into the apartment with the help of her brother-in-law, a man in his thirties who worked for a computer company. There was something distasteful about him, a certain kind of crass arrogance. And he was very ugly. Paní Prokopová and Pan Prokop were at their cottage that day, and Klaudie, her brother-in-law, and I sat down around the table. Klaudie’s brother-in-law tried to speak to me in English, which he spoke badly, barely at all. But this was not the reason I responded only in Czech. His demeanor was not subtle: he wanted to speak English with me because Klaudie could not, he wanted to show her that he was superior.