The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  Klaudie I liked at once just as intensely as I disliked her brother-in-law. She was a medical student who had come from her hometown in Slovakia to attend Charles University in Prague a few years earlier, when Czechoslovakia still existed and Prague was the capital of her country. Then came the “Velvet Divorce”—the breakup of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia—and in the middle of her studies she lost her rights of citizenship and became a foreigner.

  There was a kind of immediate intimacy between us. Klaudie was unusually expressive, and from the first day we met I understood her well.

  From Klaudie I learned much about the medical profession—and the postcommunist economy. That year doctors and nurses were contemplating a strike: in the Czech Republic, as in the other postcommunist countries, educated professionals received poverty-level salaries. To control inflation, the state had frozen state-sector wages. Czech teachers, too, were threatening a strike. Galina told me that in Domažlice the headmaster had called a meeting of the faculty, making it understood that he would not tolerate their taking part in any such thing.

  “And they really were afraid of him,” Galina wrote of her fellow teachers.

  For Klaudie, the financial crisis in the medical profession was only the most recent chapter in a life that was not—and had not been—easy. A single woman in her late twenties with no money and an exhausting course of study, she had for years sustained a long-distance relationship with a man twenty years older, a Slovak émigré who was a professor in Basel. He telephoned every day but came to visit only rarely.

  Despite all difficulties, Klaudie had enormous energy and a peculiarly vivacious spirit. She was full of joie de vivre. Her eyes sparkled and she dyed her hair a glimmering red. When she returned late at night after assisting in some difficult surgery, her face would be glowing. She was extraordinarily resilient. And principled.

  IT WAS VLASTA, who at Stanford had taught Czech to both me and Amanda, who called me one afternoon to tell me that Oskar had committed suicide.

  “He wanted to come home,” Vlasta said, “but for him there was no home here.”

  The morning mass Amanda had arranged in the church tucked behind Old Town Square was followed by lunch at the pub that was the favorite meeting place of Oskar’s friends. In Massachusetts Amanda and Oskar’s son, an anti–domestic violence activist and a counselor for men who beat their wives, had written a eulogy for his father. Vlasta had translated it into Czech so that today Amanda could read it to Oskar’s friends.

  “I’m told,” Oskar’s son wrote, “to focus on the positive, but I can’t help but be bitter.”

  It didn’t have to happen this way.

  It had everything to do with being raised male.…

  Who was there to listen to his disappointment when he returned to a country poisoned by the cheap mediocrity and plastic that seems to inevitably come with capitalism?

  This could have been a time of great promise, of great change in him. I was happy that he was finally confiding how he felt. But it didn’t happen, it was cut short by this curse called “masculinity.”

  And this kind of thing has gone on for generations but it can go on no longer. I pledge that it will stop with me.… I pledge to fight against these inhumane male roles, because they hurt gentle, dear men like my father and because they have killed him, and I wasn’t done loving him yet.

  Vlasta was the perfect translator, but this was not the perfect audience—these middle-aged Czech men who did not understand why a twenty-eight-year-old man would criticize masculinity. Amanda wanted desperately to talk to them about what had happened to Oskar. But Oskar’s friends did not understand why Oskar—who had long ago abandoned them for a freer and more luxurious life in the West, who had not suffered through those last two decades of communism as they had—should be pitied. They did not understand what this American woman who had aged so well, who was so much more beautiful than their own wives, wanted from them at all. As Amanda appealed to them and Vlasta interpreted, one by one Oskar’s friends walked out of the pub.

  IT WAS ALREADY close to dawn when I left Amanda and returned to Paní Prokopová’s apartment. A few hours later I had to be at the train station. I was going to Ústí nad Orlicí, to visit Jarmila’s grandmother.

  Paní Bendová had written to me often throughout the year, always worried about her granddaughter. She suspected Jarmila was hiding something and implored me to tell her if I knew anything more. I always answered her letters, but I told her nothing of her granddaughter’s stay in the hospital. I was loyal to Jarmila, who wrote me warm letters, telling me not to fear people’s whispers and not to fear making mistakes. “And when you feel alone,” she said, “you can always write to me. Anything.”

  That entire year I’d been in the Czech Republic Jarmila had spent in and out of the hospital in Vermont. The military college expelled her and revoked her scholarship. She had no insurance to pay for the psychotropic medications the doctors said were essential to her survival. They’d diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, whose origins lay in her secret police interrogations before the revolution and in the bullying she faced in the American military afterward. She never told me exactly what had happened to her in the army—or exactly what had happened to her during the interrogations. In her letters there were only dark allusions.

  Jarmila wanted to study again, to return, now as an American, to the life of a young intellectual she had begun in Prague. She had, though, no money and no scholarship. Without a scholarship she could not enroll at another university, and without student status she could not renew her visa. Above all she feared deportation. She loved the United States with the passion of a revolutionary and was deeply convinced that she deserved to be there. Moreover, she did not believe she would be able to cope in the Czech Republic: she would go back only as a last, desperate resort.

  On the day after Oskar’s memorial service, I arrived in Ústí nad Orlicí. Beneath the large clock at the train station stood a petite, elderly woman with fair hair, holding a large photograph: Jarmila’s U.S. Army portrait. I looked at her and smiled. When Paní Bendová saw me, she began to cry.

  We walked through the town square, which, like the square in Domažlice, was framed by arcade-style buildings painted pastel colors. Here the buildings were just a bit stockier and more robust, with curlicues and ribbons and other pieces of neoclassical ornamentation decorating the windows.

  When we reached her apartment Paní Bendová began to feed me at once. She herself was thin, but she had an obsession with food, or rather with hunger. It was impossible to eat enough to please her. She fed me with a kind of fervent compulsion, as if she feared I might otherwise perish that very day, in her small apartment.

  “But Marcelka,” she said when I tried to explain that I couldn’t eat any more, “I don’t want you to be hungry!”

  I wondered if this were an affliction of those who had lived through the war: they would never lose their fear of hunger. My landlady, Paní Prokopová, had a similar preoccupation.

  Jarmila’s grandmother brought me a box of papers. There was a picture of Jarmila as a teenage girl, looking much softer than I had known her, speaking to a handsome priest with the gentlest of gazes. There was something special about the priest—a look of such love in his eyes. As Paní Bendová talked I understood that it was he who had led this young woman—then only a girl—into the Catholic opposition, into the underground.

  In the box there were other documents as well: a Charter 77 memorial for the philosopher Jan Patočka, bulletins from the revolutionary days of November 1989, an open letter from Czechoslovak students to Communist Party leaders:

  Esteemed Comrades! Please understand that we will live in a wholly different world than the world in which your generation lived.… If the welfare of this country, this society, these nations actually weighs so much on your hearts, if the fate of your own party, the fate of socialism, of rebuilding, the fate of the young generation, that is, our fate, a
ctually weighs so much on your hearts—please go away.

  Most of the documents were Civic Forum declarations composed in November and December 1989 at the Magic Lantern Theater, where Václav Havel was then directing his greatest production. There were plans for a general strike and demands that all members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee who had collaborated with the 1968 invasion resign at once. There were calls, too, for a free press and free artistic expression, for respect for the rule of law, for adherence to international human rights accords, and for the release of all prisoners of conscience.

  “We strive,” Civic Forum wrote, “to help our country once again occupy a dignified place in Europe and in the world. We are part of Central Europe.”

  I saw a photograph of Jarmila, sitting around a table at the Magic Lantern Theater with other members of Civic Forum, once dissidents, now improvisers of the revolution. There was a Christmas note from Václav Havel dated December 1989. By this time communism had already fallen and Havel was just days away from his inauguration as Czechoslovakia’s first postcommunist president.

  That evening Paní Bendová was reluctant to let me go. I was like a messenger from another world, her proof that Jarmila had not disappeared into an abyss, that it was possible to get from there to here, that she might yet see her granddaughter again. Yet while Paní Bendová wished desperately for Jarmila to come home, it was precisely this—coming home—that Jarmila feared most. She was determined to remain in the United States, and she despaired that she would be deported.

  “I don’t know,” Jarmila wrote, “what more to do. Perhaps only to go to church and pray …”

  God was important to her.

  MY AMERICAN FRIEND Brad, who was writing a dissertation about the 1948 communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, wanted to go on a field trip: to the ghost village of Lidice. In May 1942, during the German occupation, soldiers of the Czechoslovak government in exile succeeded in assassinating Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. The Germans took vengeance. Lidice was the scapegoat: they razed the village and massacred the villagers, sending the children to be gassed at Chełmno. Lidice was just twenty miles from Prague, yet difficult to find because it no longer existed. Still, in the end we found this absence of a place.

  This was the year the Czechs celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their liberation from the Nazis. Victory Day had always been a communist holiday. Now, though, the emphasis had shifted: everyone wanted to forget the Red Army soldiers who had liberated Prague and remember instead the American troops who had liberated Plzeň, an hour and a half to the west.

  In 1936 the Czech novelist Karel Čapek had published the apocalyptic War with the Newts, a tale of the world’s takeover by hideous salamanders. At the novel’s end, the overpowered world leaders gathered for a conference.

  In a somewhat depressed atmosphere another proposal was put on the agenda: that Central China be yielded to the salamanders for inundation. In return the Newts would undertake to guarantee in perpetuity the coasts of the European states and their colonies.… The Chinese delegate was given the floor, but unfortunately nobody understood what he was saying.

  Karel Čapek’s science fiction was eerily prescient: two years after The War with the Newts’ publication, French prime minister Édouard Daladier, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain traveled to a hotel in Munich to meet with Adolf Hitler. At issue was the Sudetenland, a western region of Czechoslovakia home to many ethnic Germans. Hitler wanted it—and Neville Chamberlain acquiesced. He was certain Hitler would be satisfied now—and certain he himself had done the right thing.

  “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is,” the British prime minister said, “that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing!”

  It mattered little that no one understood Czech, for Czechoslovakia had not been invited to the Munich conference at all.

  And so Hitler’s Third Reich annexed the Sudetenland, and Neville Chamberlain returned to London and told the British people, “I bring you peace in our time.”

  Just a few months later, in March 1939, Hitler invaded Bohemia and Moravia, while Slovakia became a Catholic fascist state, nominally independent, allied with Nazi Germany. Then on the first of September Nazi Germany attacked Poland. The Second World War began. Neville Chamberlain had been mistaken.

  In English Chamberlain’s decision was “the appeasement at Munich.” In Czech Chamberlain’s decision had always been “zrada w Mnichově” (the betrayal at Munich). Bourgeois democracy had failed to protect Czechoslovakia from fascism. The West had sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler.

  On the night of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation I returned to the apartment to find Pan Prokop there alone. When I arrived he poured us drinks, and he began to talk about what had happened in his country a half century earlier. He had been a young man then, sent off to forced labor in Germany. We toasted the end of the Second World War.

  It was the first time he had spoken to me of the war. It was also the last. The next morning Pan Prokop left again to join his wife in the countryside. Some days later I returned home to find Paní Prokopová there unexpectedly. She said to me at once, “He died, Marcelka, he died.”

  “The Human Being Is Rather Perverse”

  In Prague I continued to teach some English classes, now at a language school for adults. More of my time that spring of 1995, though, I spent working as an intern for an ethnic conflict project at an American-funded research institute, one of the many Western NGOs that had come to Eastern Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Graduate students, mostly political scientists, passed through, but the institute was not run by researchers. The people who mattered there had come from other worlds, from politics and finance. I was assigned to do research on postcommunist Romania.

  One day the institute’s Prague director asked me to write a briefing on how best to promote bipartisan cooperation in the Romanian parliament. He was leaving the following day for Bucharest, with the intention of negotiating an agreement to provide research support to the Romanian legislature. Yet there was a flaw in the plan: there was no such thing as bipartisan cooperation in Romania. The Romanian parliament included over two dozen political parties breaking up and re-forming on a daily basis, like cliques in a junior high school. Soon afterward, the director called a breakfast meeting to determine how to create democratic culture in Eastern Europe.

  This was not, though, the kind of problem that could be resolved over pastries and orange juice. Communism—it had turned out—was not a wicked witch, after whose death all could live happily ever after. Rather, the fall of communism had opened a Pandora’s box, and ethnic conflict was just one among many demons to escape. It was true not only in what had once been Yugoslavia, where rapes of tens of thousands of women—mostly Bosnian Muslims—accompanied massacres in wars of ethnic cleansing.

  At the institute, I researched issues of language rights, cultural autonomy, and political representation concerning Romanian’s Hungarian minority—just over 7 percent of the country’s population, some 1.6 million people, most of them in Transylvania. In the twentieth century this colorful region in the Carpathian basin was passed back and forth according to the vagaries of international politics. At the century’s beginning, Transylvania had belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary, which had in turn belonged to the Habsburg monarchy. When the First World War brought an end to empires, Hungary lost Transylvania, and the beautiful wooded landscape that was home to Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, and Jews passed to Romania for the next twenty years. In 1940, during the Second World War, Nazi Germany awarded northern Transylvania to Hungary. In 1945, the Allies gave the region once more to Romania. By the 1990s, when revolutions seemed as if they might reopen territorial questions, this land of peasants had long found itself at the center of power struggles.

  I read about Romanian
history and Hungarian history, about battles over statues, about Transylvanian villagers and about the communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s personality cult, about his hedonistic indulgences and sadistic practices. Through daily news reports I followed Romanian politics: personalities and parties, their shifting policies toward minorities, their ephemeral alliances, their capricious conversions.

  Romanian politics was not simply a politics of opportunism inspired by the money and power available for the taking during the transition. More than that, it was a politics of ideological excess. Corneliu Vadim-Tudor, once Nicolae Ceauşescu’s court poet, had reincarnated himself as the leader of the Greater Romania Party, conjuring up images of Western-Jewish-Hungarian conspirators who coveted Transylvania and plotted its conquest. Nicolae Ceauşescu was dead, and communism was over, but Corneliu Vadim-Tudor retained his flair for bombastic stylization, for pushing language toward the exorbitant. He was fond of speaking of “we” and “you,” and he relished addressing enemies real and imagined.

  No trespassing, dear Hungarian irredentists and highly cherished Romanian traitors, we do not believe in your variant of the Common European Home. That’s how we are, more boorish, more primitive, we do not like being other people’s servants and grooms, we want to be our own masters in our souls’ home, you can make no headway, think better of it and rather colonize that steppe of yours or rent some lands in Siberia and Asia, but get used to the idea that Transylvania will be forever Romanian.