Milena’s home life became more and more unhappy. Krejcar’s infidelities gave rise to constant scenes. Neither he nor Milena was a very good manager. Surrounded as they were by a host of friends and hangers-on, money slipped through their fingers and they lived beyond their means, especially when Milena began to write exclusively for the Communist press, which brought in a maximum of eight hundred crowns a month. Added to all that was her drug addiction, which consumed enormous sums. Once, after a cure, she went straight from the sanatorium to the offices of the Social Democratic newspaper Prdvo Lidu, and asked to see Mr. Vanek. Milos Vanek, the editor of Prdvo Lidu was an old friend of hers. No, she could not give her name. She was still a member of the Communist party and did not want her party comrades to hear that she had been consorting with Social Democrats. After some discussion the porter let her in.
Milos Vanek was horrified at her appearance. She looked sick and unkempt, she was wearing a shabby man’s overcoat and seemed deeply dejected. “I’ve just come from a detoxification cure,” she announced. And then without transition: “Milos, would you let me write for you? Could you take …}’“ Then, changing the subject in midsentence: “Dear Milos, please could you buy me a cup of coffee?” Of course he could. A moment later they were out in the street. Milena whisked Vanek away from the big cafes and hurried him to a little restaurant in a gloomy side street. Clearly she wanted to avoid being seen. The coffee hadn’t been ordered yet when Milena changed her mind. Could she have a pair of hot sausages? Of course she could. The sausages came and Milena wolfed them down. The poor girl must have been starving, Vanek thought, and hastened to order four more pairs of sausages. Evidently MiJena had not heard him give the order, for when the sausages were set before her, she flew into a rage and screamed at Milos: “Are you trying to insult me? Have you forgotten that I’m a lady?” MitoS was only able to appease her by assuring her that he had ordered the sausages for himself.
From that time on Milena wrote for Prdvo Lidu under five different pseudonyms. As she didn’t want to be seen at the paper’s office, her articles were delivered to Van£k by little Honza, her daughter. These articles caused him a good deal of trouble. Indignant at seeing their efforts rejected, various socialist iadies with literary ambitions demanded that Van£k reveal the identity of these five mysterious contributors. But he held his tongue and continued to print Milena’s articles, which were a lot livelier and better written than those of his party comrades.
One day in 1934 Peroutka, the editor of Přítomnost, asked Milos Vanek: “What would you think of a couple who claimed that they couldn’t stay in Prague but absolutely had to move to the Soviet Union, because their child would soon be of school age, and the Prague schools were too bourgeois and corrupt?” This couple was Krejcar and Milena. Yes, they were actually planning to go to Moscow. Undoubtedly, the situation in Europe, the threat of National Socialist Germany, had something to do with it. Many intellectuals believed at the time that only the Soviet Union had the will and the power to withstand the rising tide of fascism. In their eagerness to “build socialism,” quite a few of the architect friends of Taromir and Milena had already gone to the Soviet Union, confident that they would find satisfying work. They dreamed of commissions to build housing developments, if not whole cities, and believed in the unlimited possibilities of the socialist state. Le Corbusier, Gropius, Hannes Meyer, May, and others had already gone. Krejcar received an invitation from Moscow and went there alone. At the last minute, Milena decided to stay in Prague with Honza.
The Soviet authorities commissioned Krejcar to build a convalescent home for workers and party functionaries in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus. He submitted plans. Much to his irritation he was asked to spend weeks and months discussing them with officials who knew nothing about architecture, but who kept raising two objections: Krejcar’s style was too modern and his plans did not meet the requirements of life in a socialist state. In the end they were rejected out of hand.
Krejcar soon grew disgusted with Soviet communism and wrote disillusioned letters to his friends in Prague. No one but Milena answered. All his Communist colleagues dismissed his reports as vicious lies which did not deserve an answer.
As usual in Soviet Russia, an interpreter had been assigned to Krejcar; she proved to be a beautiful young Jewish Latvian named Riva, who had experienced the dark side of the Soviet dictatorship and spent time in prison. Krejcar and Riva fell in love. Inevitably they told each other what they really thought of conditions in the workers’ fatherland.
After two years in the Soviet Union, Krejcar had not been able to carry out a single one of his architectural projects. All he wanted was to leave the country. He divorced Milena and married Riva, who actually succeeded in obtaining exit visas for them both, an achievement bordering on the miraculous in 1936, the year of the big Stalin purge.
Back in Prague, Jaromir Krejcar put up an impressive modern building on Palackeho Vinohrady, in which, although he and Milena were divorced, he set aside a beautiful top-floor apartment for her and Honza. A balcony ran all around it, which she decorated lavishly with flowers. The apartment soon became known as “Milena’s hanging gardens.” At first the place was appallingly bare; as there was no money for furniture, they had to make do with a mattress, a few chairs, and some crates. But little by little, the “hanging gardens” became a model modern apartment.
Soon after Krejcar went to Moscow, the Communist party gave Milena a special assignment—to minister to a party member who had come down with tuberculosis. The party’s motives were not purely humanitarian; the sick man was suspected of Trotskyism, and it was hoped that Milena would win him back to the party line. She found him lying helpless and emaciated in a dark basement room. She instantly forgot all about the party’s instructions and resolved to do everything in her power to help him get well. And then something totally unexpected happened. Her patient fell in love with her. Milena could hardly believe it; how, she thought, could anyone fall in love with an ugly, crippled woman? This love, which she soon reciprocated, restored her lost sense of womanhood and gave her the strength to surmount the deep depression from which she had suffered since her illness. She heaped her lover with attentions, her devotion knew no bounds. Thanks to her loving care, he recovered his health and found a satisfactory job.
Mitena’s Communist episode was relatively brief. It was only in a state of confusion and weakness that she needed the support of a secular religion, and wishful thinking could not blunt her critical sense for long. Fortunately, something, perhaps her work as a free-lance journalist, had saved her from degenerating into a professional revolutionary. Still, she found it hard to break with the party and hesitated a long time before taking the final step. What finally decided her was the news of Stalin’s first show trial that ended with the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev. That was in the summer of 1936.
Unlike many other Communists, Milena was not crushed by her break with the party. She did not grieve for a lost god. Quite on the contrary, she was relieved to be free from party discipline. She soon recovered her creative talent and, thanks to the political experience acquired in the last five years, became a respected political journalist.
Several of her friends who left the party at the same time were less fortunate. Especially those whose whole life had been the party felt that the ground had been removed from under their feet. It was next to impossible for them to find their way back to normal life. Unable to live without political activity, many took refuge in left- (or right-) wing sectarianism.
One dismal, rainy spring day Milena was sitting with her friend Fredy Mayer in a dark wine bar in the heart of Prague. She spoke sadly of her past, of all the men who had played a part in her life. “It’s been wonderful, it’s been interesting, it’s been exciting, but now I realize that it wasn’t what I really wanted. I never really met the right man…. They talked too much, they were too neurotic, too impractical. … So many were afraid of life, and it was up to me to bolster them up. It should have been the o
ther way around. I often dreamed of having a lot of children, of milking cows and minding geese, and having a husband who’d thrash me now and then. I’m really a Czech peasant woman at heart. The so-called intellectual strain in me is just an unfortunate accident.” Fredy Mayer tried to protest: “Really, Milena, how can you … ?” She laughed aloud. “Yes, yes,” she said, “I know that’s not the whole story. But sometimes I can’t help feeling that it is.” And she went on in the same vein. In the end Fredy suggested that her whole experience could be summed up in the refrain of a song that the Prague cabaret performers Voskovec and Werich had sung. It is the plaint of an unmarried mother about the man who has deserted her after getting her with child. Each stanza ends with the refrain: “Men ain’t human.”
When she got home late that night, Milena found a bunch of flowers waiting on the doorstep with a card saying, “Men ain’t human.”
For more than three years Hitler had been in power in Germany. In Czechoslovakia all those who were politically aware were observing developments with increasing alarm. In an article about plain people and their Sunday pleasures, Milena wrote: “One has the impression that even recreation is regimented, that people are no longer allowed to roam through the woods, tossing pine cones at tree trunks, making fires, pulling up poisonous mushrooms for the hell of it. In Germany the whole population marches out to the country on Sunday morning for their ration of fresh air and comes marching back in the evening, thoroughly out of breath. The little man from Slavland, dreamy, a vagabond at heart, humorous and disorganized, would creep into a ditch by the roadside and give way to fear like a child….”*
* Milena Jesenskä, “People in Movement.’
11
NEW TASKS
As long as you keep climbing, there will be steps, they will grow under your climbing feet.
—KAFKA, DER FÜRSPRECHER (THE ADVOCATE)
A few days after Milena was expelled from the party, a young comrade by the name of Kurt Beer, who though still a party member was plagued by doubts, came to see her. She made it clear that she still stood for something that might be called communism but had nothing in common with what went by that name in the Soviet Union and in the party. “The Communists have ruined everything,” she concluded. “Now we shall have to start all over again.”
Though much older than Beer, Milena won his confidence by speaking to him without a trace of condescension, treating him as an equal, and listening to everything he had to say. From then on he became a regular visitor. Once she and her friends were discussing criteria of masculine beauty. Someone asked her if she knew any handsome men. “Zavis Kalandra is handsome,” she said, “especially his eyes, but what would his eyes be without all the wrinkles around them? Every little line in his face is alive. That’s what makes it beautiful.”
Once in the course of a violent political argument, Milena flared up and said something deeply insulting to young Beer. His response was to walk out. He felt sure that this was the end of his friendship with Milena. That same evening she came to see him and apologized. No, “apologize” is not the right word. She had the gift of behaving in such a way that any harm she had done was not forgiven, but completely forgotten. It was not possible to “forgive” Milena. “You have a peculiarity,” Kafka once wrote her, “I think it lies deep in your nature, and others are to blame if it is not always effective … this peculiarity is that you cannot make anyone suffer.”*
In 1937 Ferdinand Peroutka, editor in chief of the liberal-democratic Pntomnost (The Present) and an outstanding journalist and man of letters, asked Milena to contribute to his journal. Both financially and in other respects, this was her salvation. Pntomnost was a political, literary, and scientific monthly, comparable in a way to the American Nation. Peroutka had known Milena for many years and thought highly of her writing ability. He thought her articles would give his rather solemn publication the light touch it needed.
Milena slowly got the feel of her new job. Her first contributions still showed traces of her Vienna fashion correspondence. Indeed, she took the opportunity to pay a belated homage to the city of Vienna, where she had spent so many difficult but also happy years. As long as she was writing for Tribuna or the NárodníListy, it would not have been possible for her to say anything pleasant about the former capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the liberal Pntomnost there was no objection.
Her first articles for Pntomnost were for the most part sociological studies full of compassion and humor, based on her thorough knowledge of Prague society. Every one of these is drawn from life. Once, while strolling through the streets, she caught sight of a sign: FRANTISEK LILIOM, GROCERIES. Memories of Molnar’s play Liliom, of Vienna, the Prater, and the days of her youth poured in on her. She went to the nearest cafe and wrote a sort of farewell to Vienna.
“If you have never been in Vienna when the chestnut trees are in bloom and the whole city is fragrant with lilac, when in the Prater one swingboat booth opens after another; if you have never seen the greenish-gray light that the electric lamps throw on the leaves of the chestnut trees in the evening; if you have never seen the giant aspens on the banks of the Danube, never seen the vast violet-studded meadows with their ash trees and silver poplars that surround the Prater for miles around and on spring nights throw a chaste mantle over loving couples; if you have never strolled through the streets of the Prater of an evening, when gold and silver tinsel hops and sways on the fair booths and swingboats; if you have never heard ten different waltzes resounding at once from ten different barrel organs, and all that under a sky whose stars pale in the presence of so much glitter—well, in that case, you can’t know who Liliom is, even if you’ve read Molnar.
“Liliom is the swingboat man. There’s something utterly unreal about the amusement park at night. Like a stage. And next to every swingboat there’s a man, a magnificent specimen from the Vienna slums, he’s wearing a striped jersey and his cap is pushed over the back of his head. Paris has its apaches, though I don’t know if they’re authentic. The Vienna swingboat man is authentic all right. With a magnificent thrust of his powerful arms he pushes the boat into the sky. In it sit pale city girls, holding each other tight, the kind who only go out with their girlfriends on Sunday…. They look with wonder and adoration at the man who is flinging them into the sky with such magnificent vigor; but then they begin to be scared, they screech, their skirts balloon, and their carefully curled hair escapes from under their hats…. But what does it matter! They are borne high on a wave of unforeseen happiness, which the poor things have paid for with their hard-earned pennies. And the hero, in whose hands the coins disappear, who calls them ‘Miss,’ and says’If you please’. The man with the glorious muscles, with the cigarette behind his ear, with the dirty hands, the flattened nose, and the crude, impudent sex appeal, the man who knows his way around and has no scruples about breaking the hearts of little housemaids and working girls—that man is Liliom.”*
Here the reminiscences of Vienna end, because her article isn’t really about the Viennese Liliom but about FrantiSek Liliom, the good Czech grocer. From that point on the article ceases to be lyrical. The Czech Liliom is a very different sort of man from his Viennese namesake. With deep sympathy and a surprising knowledge of the food industry, Milena goes on to describe the difficult and eminently useful existence of a small grocer in a big city.
In 1937 Milena asked Willi Schlamm, the editor of the Vienna Weltbuh?ie, who had moved to Prague, to contribute to Pfitom-nost. He wrote his articles in German and she translated them into Czech. Not only this collaboration, but also the many tastes they shared—for music, literature, and laughter—soon led to a close friendship. Willi Schlamm was enormously impressed by Milena’s capacity for work. She could squeeze sixty hours into a single day; she wrote, translated, did things for numerous people, kept house, and cooked for anyone who happened to be in the apartment. She never kept an appointment with Schlamm without bringing him some little present. She always had time. Busy as sh
e was, she could sit calmly with Schlamm at the Cafe Bellevue near the Charles Bridge, where Schlamm did his writing, or she would arrange to have dinner with him in some little restaurant. She would always be in a mood for talking and laughing.
By 1937 she had thrown off all trace of her Communist past and freed herself from every sort of wishful thinking. She had the courage to denounce all threats to freedom, whether from the left or the right, whether from the Soviet or the National Socialist dictatorship. This even-handed attitude brought her into conflict with many antifascist intellectuals, who were closing their eyes to the reality of the Soviet Union. Milena had a gift for political prognosis. At the very start of the Second World War she said to friends, “If the Red Army were to liberate us, I’d have to commit suicide.”
* Kafka, Briefe an Milena, pp. 151 ff.
* Milena Jesenski, “FrantiSek Liliom, Grocer,” Přítomnost, December 15, 1937.
12
POLITICAL JOURNALIST
You have penetrating perception; but that in itself wouldn’t amount to much, there are people running about the streets who invite such perception, but you have the courage of your perception and above all the courage to see beyond it, beyond that perception; seeing beyond is what matters most, and of that you are capable….
—KAFKA, BRIEFE AN M1LENA
Czechoslovakia was under increasing pressure from National Socialist Germany. In the course of 1937, the demands made by Konrad Henlein, the National Socialist leader of the Sudeten German party, became more and more exorbitant. In 1938, the crisis attained its climax when Henlein promulgated the so-called Karlsbad Program, providing for the full “legal” independence of the Sudeten German territory (northern Bohemia with its predominantly German population).
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