by Ivan Klíma
When he was recovered he had moved to Karlovy Vary in the frontier zone and worked there collecting scrap vehicles for some fellow who had been diddling him so much that they had quarrelled and parted. How old had he been at the time? Not very. Eighteen or thereabouts. Then they had persuaded him to go and work as a mechanic in a lace factory. There had been lots of German girls working there at the time. They had included some good-looking ones and he had been able to choose whichever he fancied, as they had thought they would be allowed to stay if they managed to hook him. But none of them had. Anyway he had always kicked them out afterwards. Then the wife of the national administrator had fallen for him in a big way. The husband had almost shot him with a rifle when he found him in his bedroom. But his administrative career had come to an end as well, and he had already spent more than a year in prison, as someone had exposed in time the way he was administering national property.
And what about the wife? Plach made a dismissive gesture. He had already forgotten her name, though not the name of the cognac she had feted him with.
Oddly enough, in his stories, no one was ever mentioned as being close to him in any way. As if he had no friends, as if no one had conceived him or given birth to him, and he had been thrust alone into the world by impassive forces, and had had no option from the very start but to fight for survival.
There was one person, however, he did refer to rather more favourably – although I might have only imagined it: his master mason. The old gaffer, as he called him, still lived not far from Plach’s house in the direction of Košíře. When they had confiscated his workshop two years earlier, he had used his age as an excuse – he had been over seventy then – and ostensibly given up the trade, but in fact, my friend declared, he was still carving stone angels in a toolshed in the backyard of his house.
As the exam season approached, we were joined by Josef Nimmrichter. He had never shown any interest in me before, but I had not noticed him to have much contact with anyone else either. He never had anything to say for himself during seminars. If he was directly asked a question, he would slowly stand up, turn his small head, surmounting gorilla-like shoulders, first to one side then to the other, his low, pale brow would wrinkle and his little grey eyes would stare into space; then, in a high falsetto voice, he would start to weave an endless, convoluted sentence whose sense would sooner or later elude even the most attentive listener. It was impossible to either agree or disagree with him. Nor could one take up from where he left off; what he said had the merciless finality of death. People preferred not to ask him for any explanation.
He would arrive in the garret room with a shabby shopping bag containing a notepad and at least half a dozen bottles of beer. He would join us at the table and watch us as we indicated things on the map to each other. Now and then he would have a swig of beer from the bottle and not utter a word. In a little while, as if weary from observing us, he would withdraw into himself and his attention became fixed on something unspecified outside his present surroundings. Once he had finished his last bottle he would emerge from his gloomy taciturnity and start to ask questions. Where was he to find the Arctic? Why wasn’t the Arctic next door to the Antarctic, seeing they had the same climate? Why did they call Nero a cruel barbarian? Wasn’t he right the way he dealt with the Christians? Had we noticed that the economics professor smiled in a queer way when he was talking about the Five-Year Plan? He could do with a couple of press-ups too!
That was his cherished fantasy. All those who had done something to earn his displeasure would be lined up in a row and he’d start giving the orders for press-ups: down, two, three, up, two, three, down . . . until at last they broke down, softened and recognised their depravity, the error of their ways and the blindness of their attitudes.
He hailed from a village in southern Moravia. He said his father had been a coachman on a church estate, and as a child he himself had acted as server for some dirty old fat priest up to the day when he discovered that the filthy swine was assaulting his little sister. He had told his father and his father had waylaid the priest after mass and beaten him up. But afterwards it was his father who was convicted, of course. He was only a coachman and no one could give a damn that his daughter had been shamed. His mother had almost gone off her head with shame and they had to put her in the asylum. An hour from their village there was a Premonstratensian monastery and the monks had suppliers in different towns who used to get hold of virgins for them, preferably girls from poor families, or orphans whom no one was looking for, and the monks would thrust them into underground dungeons without windows so not a sound could escape and no one could hear the screams of the poor victims whom they chained to iron beds so they could indulge their desires on them. When they chucked the monks out of the monastery after the war and opened up those cellars, they had discovered a pile of children’s skeletons with broken limbs, hands pierced with nails, fingers crushed and some of the skulls still had gags shoved in the holes where the mouths had been. My fellow-student dwelt on the ghastly details, and his almost womanish voice became even shriller as he thrust red-hot pokers and blacksmith’s tongs into women’s wombs, tearing out the flesh, and then all of a sudden he would be back with us in the present. His eyes, which during his narration seemed to float out of their sockets, would abruptly start to move again and search our faces. I would be terrified each time that happened lest he find something inappropriate in my countenance: lest he decipher from it my church membership, my insecurity or my inadequacy, for which he would exact punishment.
Of his recent past I knew very little. He said he had worked as a prison warder, but had had to leave the job on health grounds. He never spoke about it and I hadn’t the courage to ask him. All I could grasp was that he was bound by a strict secrecy which shrouded that entire area of his life.
One winter’s day, the three of us went for a walk in the direction of Košíře. At that time, rows of low tenements were still standing there, their gable-ends, which before the war were painted with enormous advertisements for Baa shoes or Neher clothes, now blank. And in between the blackened fences of yards, small factories and workshops there were some single-storey rural buildings left behind from a bygone age, with gardens, toolsheds, hen-houses and rabbit-hutches. Plach stopped in front of one of those houses and asked us if we would like to meet his master mason. We went into the yard and Plach made straight for a high shed from which the sound of hammer blows could be heard.
A little fellow with thinning hair, wearing a shabby, faded coat, was standing with his back to us as we came in. He turned round and gazed at us for a few moments as if he did not recognise any of us. He was already an old man with faded blue-grey eyes. Then he recognised Plach. They greeted each other and chatted while I rather absently-mindedly scanned the shelves on which there lay various tools, alongside doves carved from white stone, sandstone angels and stone crosses, and through the slightly open door of a large cupboard I caught sight of a bust of the first president.
Plach’s old mason took down a bottle from a shelf screened by a curtain, and poured us all a drink. I wasn’t accustomed to alcohol and was soon overcome with a drunken magnanimity that led me to declare that I found some of those sculptures really beautiful, though I had no love of angels. The old man replied that it wasn’t so important that we loved the angels, but that the angels loved us. I pointed out that I didn’t believe in angels and the old man said that belief in angels was a favour not granted to everyone. All of a sudden Nimmrichter joined in. His head, on its short neck, was thrust forward at the old man. Seeing the old man believed in angels, did he believe in the immaculate conception too, he wanted to know. And did he believe in the one who gave the order to shoot the workers, he asked, pointing through the gap in the cupboard door at the bust of old President Masaryk.
The old fellow said he believed in the things he had believed in all his life. My colleague’s voice now soared to such a pitch that it became totally effeminate, and he demanded to know
if the old man believed in raping little girls and killing children too. The mason might have said something in reply or remained silent. But I remember precisely what followed. I can see Nimmrichter approaching the cupboard and raising one of the busts above his head. There was the sharp report of stone hitting stone and he was already reaching out for another. Statues spilt on to the ground: broken wings, shattered skulls, stone laurels in detached hands, fists without arms, headless angels – and above it all the victorious yelp of Nimmrichter’s voice. Everything happened so quickly that I was unable to overcome my amazement or the sudden fear that gripped me. I looked round at Plach, who had brought us here and, to a certain extent, was responsible for our conduct. He stood leaning against one of the shelves, his arms folded and a smirk on his face.
2
That autumn saw the start of the political trials. The State Prosecutor charged recent government ministers, journalists and leading Party officials with crimes against the state. The men on trial were only known to me from the viewing stands where they stood waving to me once a year from behind a wall of power and glory. They were people of a different generation. I could have no personal feelings towards them. Having never felt any affection for them, I was not greatly shaken by what happened now.
A special meeting was convened at the faculty where the speaker yelled about filthy traitors and the dregs of human society, urging us on to still greater vigilance and loyalty to the Party and its remaining leaders. It seemed odd to me that those selfsame people he was now denouncing had been glorified by us not so long ago. But the main conclusion I drew was that one ought not to pay unreserved homage to anyone, rather than that the whole trial was simply a terrifying play in whose last act the reluctant actors were hung on a real gallows by a real executioner.
Eva, the leader of our student group, was waiting for me after the meeting. She put her arm through mine (she always did it when speaking to people, but I found it embarrassing), as if we were just planning a date, and told me that various organisations from factories and offices had requested our faculty to send them some comrades to explain at meetings how it was that such enemies had managed to get promoted even to the highest posts of authority, and in general to explain the meaning of the trials. And she thought that I too might be sent to just such a meeting.
My probationary period was just coming to an end. If I refused, they might not have accepted me as a full member of the Party. But I had no intention of refusing. I was brimming over with a need to do something. But so far I had never had a chance to voice publicly even one of my ideas about the new society and the modern world. Now they were offering me the chance, and I took it.
I was assigned to a large shoe-mending workshop in the Vršovice district of Prague and given several pamphlets to help me with my task.
I returned home with a sense of major responsibility and set about writing my speech without ado. I emulated something of Father’s scientific thoroughness and was reluctant to restrict myself to a handful of pamphlets. In the library I found some books about similar trials that had taken place in the past in Moscow. I had no idea that the censors had carefully removed any books that might have clashed with the only valid interpretation of what had happened, so my efforts to delve as deeply as possible into the question had been frustrated before I started. I read those books and discovered not merely stunning similarities but also a clear key to everything that had happened.
The enemy’s sights were always set as high as possible because he underestimated the people and overestimated the influence of personalities. He believed that if he could win over the leaders, he would have no difficulty winning control of the whole movement and entire nations. But that was where he went wrong time and again. For those who abandoned them for personal advantage or betrayed them, the people would always find replacements. I discovered a simple logic within that theatre of blood: the logic of history as I knew it from the theories we studied.
I recall the dim and dirty canteen I was taken to. On a battered, grease-stained canteen table at one end of the room there stood a rough glass of water and behind me there hung an enormous red flag above the usual portraits of the leaders. Several dozen girls crouched at the other end of the hall as far away from me as possible. I knew nothing about them, I had only caught sight of the girls on the other shift standing by tall, noisy shoe-mending machines as I made my way to the canteen down long corridors. I knew nothing of their interests, naturally, nor of what filled their minds. I was merely intent on winning them over.
I can’t remember anything of what I said there, only the fact that, in my pursuit of maximum effect, I recited a poem I had copied out of the newspaper because its final perverted tercet had etched itself on my memory:
And the mountebanks have ended
Their dance
On a rope
No doubt I repeated all the other lies they used in those days to dull people’s minds, as well as all the terms of abuse that littered public speeches and formed an amazing spectrum from criminals, gangsters and hyenas to hideous spiders and vile, shameless Judases. At the end of my half-hour address, I told my audience that I was prepared to answer any questions they might have. I gazed into the gloomy hall and waited expectantly for some sign of agreement or interest, but I waited in vain.
3
One day we had a party in Plach’s garret room. I can’t recall any more what we were celebrating but there were a lot of people there I didn’t know. They might have been Plach’s relations or former friends and colleagues. Among them was a North Korean lieutenant called Nam who was studying with us. There were tables covered in food rare at that period of ration coupons, and from a large demijohn there came the aroma of home-made plum brandy, which we all (including myself: I didn’t want to be different) proceeded to drink.
We ate and then sang. Our Korean class-mate Nam played the accordion, while Plach accompanied him on the guitar. They were mostly songs with a fighting spirit, all about wars, partisans and revolution, which provided an opportunity for yelling political slogans, such as E viva il communismo e la liberta! Viva Stalin! Everybody sang. I couldn’t sing so I shouted the slogans all the louder and clapped in time to the music. We also talked politics – or what we took to be politics.
That night, Nirnmrichter got drunk. Cumbersome, with his gorilla-like shoulders and simian brow, he started to do a cossack dance and Eva, our leader, came over to me and asked me to dance it with her. I had never learnt to dance but I yielded and gambolled ludicrously between the tables and the joists, while the rest of them clapped in time to the music and laughed. Afterwards she told me I was sweet: she had always loved bears. And she gave me a kiss. There was nothing about her I found attractive: she was small and plump with big masculine lips and unkempt, greasy hair. But now I was drunk I had received my first kiss from a woman I didn’t know.
Maybe she realised, and for that reason came and sat next to me after our dance. She declared I had shaggy hair like a dog and ruffled it with her fingers, letting her hand rest momentarily on the nape of my neck. That touch took my breath away. Just then Nimmrichter staggered over to us. He sat down on the floor at her feet and asked me if I thought someone could believe in God and still be a communist. He kept on staring at me fixedly with his bulging eyes until I became nervous and replied that it would be difficult. He agreed with me and declared that the Church had been the enemy of progress since time immemorial and it still had only one thing in mind: to spoil everything, wreck everything and turn the people away from us, but it would never get away with it again. Then he remembered a priest who had buried a rifle and other weapons in his garden. The chairman of the local council had been a one-legged man who used to ride a horse, the chairman’s wife had been the sister of the farmer who owned the pub and he had had a brother who went off to the seminary, and the two of them had decided they would print some leaflets, all clever like, so the husband wouldn’t know, or his friends, especially the treasurer who used to play card
s with him, but he had found the leaflets and set them on the trail, because everyone spills the beans in the end, and no one manages to hide what they really believe, and he could assure us of the fact, because he had been there at the time. He looked at me again, and all of sudden he crossed the boundary he’d never crossed before, at least not in our company. His narration suddenly became more coherent, as if previously he had only been groping his way through a mist in a strange land. When they arrested him, the priest told them he hadn’t buried the weapons or printed the leaflets, thinking maybe that the Good Lord would help him keep the whole criminal gang secret.
Eva declared that it was all very interesting and laughed quite irrelevantly. Then she snuggled up to me, again ruffling my hair and calling me her doggie.
Only that was where he was wrong (all the time Nimmrichter kept his eyes fixed on me) because he had fallen into his hands. He had taken him downstairs where he had a few cells that didn’t let in a single ray of light, and he’d made that fat mouse strip. What a belly! Nimmrichter actually stood up to demonstrate it to us, that enormous belly. Where had he got it from? What good had that church mouse ever done, what had it done apart from sponging off the poor and teaching them to grovel? So he had given it the order: walk! And the mouse had walked; in a funny way with its toes turned out, and Nimmrichter gave us another demonstration that made Eva start giggling again, our sides touching. The first day, my fellow-student continued, the mouse had tried to go on mumbling its prayers, but the second day it only groaned and begged him to let it sit down for a moment, saying it had varicose veins and a bad heart, it hadn’t any feeling in its feet. So he had let it do some press-ups for a while and afterwards he had allowed it to curl up on the floor and have a half-hour’s sleep, because even he, Nimmrichter, was beginning to find it tiring. But the mouse hadn’t slept anyway, but just kept on whining and even tried to threaten him with divine retribution, so he made it stand up and walk, and soon it stopped thinking about the Good Lord and started begging him instead, swearing it knew nothing, so he had made it do some more press-ups and walk again, and when it pretended it couldn’t do any more and fell down, it got a bucket of water over it, and then more buckets of water, until it started to shake all over and implore him. In the end it jumped up again and promised it would start walking again. But by now it was beginning to soften, by now it was only crawling on all fours, now it was beginning to sing as it was supposed to.