Then we move a few hundred yards further on, down Široka Street. To the Café Franz Kafka, which, though it was opened in 2000, is also doing a perfect job of posing as a hundred-year-old café. On the wall hangs a photograph of the kind he could have absentmindedly left here: it’s of him and his beloved sister, Ottla. The one who, in his opinion, was better off than he was both in health and self-confidence.
Now we’ve got sachets of sugar with Kafka on them (!) and at last we can feel satisfied. Even if it all turns out to be fake.
The most sophisticated among us come here in spring or fall. Maybe they’ve read somewhere that “Prague requires mist,” and that in those seasons there’s a chance of seeing the streets glistening with moisture, the lamplight muffled by fog, and the mood of mystery we demand when we think of Kafka in Prague. Summer, sunshine and hot weather deprive the city of its metaphysical element.
We have no idea that five floors above us his niece is still alive.
Věra S., Ottla’s daughter.
She is eighty-four and she is not a fake.
For eight years, she could see “the world’s largest statue of Stalin” from her window; her house was the first in line, standing directly opposite it. Now she can see the Hotel Intercontinental. And if she were to go downstairs today, she would find out that on the ground floor of her building, there are ladies’ denim jackets hanging on display, at a sale price of two hundred Euros.
Right now, she is sitting at home in a red sweatsuit.
She has white hair and a slightly olive-skinned, slender face, which now that old age has altered its features, looks like a man’s face. The man in her looks exactly as he does in the pictures we know from the covers of his books.
She has never given an interview. She consistently refuses; not even American television was able to buy her confessions.
And she could tell some interesting stories.
Not necessarily about Kafka, whom she may not remember, as he died when she was three years old, but about her mother, Ottla, for instance. Her mother divorced her husband when persecution of the Jews began in the Protectorate. She did it first and foremost for her daughters, who would then be associated with their Catholic father, and not with their Jewish mother. In this way she saved their lives. She herself was transported in 1942 to the camp at Terezín, and from there, as an escort for 1,196 Jewish children from Białystok, she arrived in Auschwitz, where they were all sent straight to the gas chamber.
Věra S.’s husband was an eminent translator of Shakespeare who drowned in the sea while on vacation in Bulgaria. She herself was an editor at a publishing firm and a translator from German.
Sometimes Věra S. used to lend out her surname.
It was borrowed from her by her fellow translators who had fallen from grace and were not entitled to publish. In Czechoslovakia, this way of doing your colleagues a good turn was called “covering.” A pokrývač is a roofer, who covers roofs, but also a creative artist whose name is not proscribed, and who lends it to others whose names are proscribed. However, a piece of work signed by a pokrývač didn’t give either side proper satisfaction. In the event of success, neither the owner of the name nor the real author could fully enjoy it. The former pretended to be pleased about work that wasn’t his, and the latter couldn’t accept the acclaim.
The woman sitting next to Věra S. is her neighbor, and the visitor from Poland is standing.
Trying to fool the enemy didn’t work. Anyone who calls Mrs. S.’s number from the phone book, and is lucky enough to have someone pick up at the thirty-fourth attempt, will find out that it’s her grandson’s number. Her grandson will give them a different number, at which nobody ever picks up the phone. If, a year later, they succeed in calling the grandson again, he will say he’s terribly sorry, but he got two of the figures in his grandmother’s phone number mixed up, he can’t think why. So what if he gives them a new one? The number with the right figures is never answered either. The colleague who sent me to Kafka’s niece because he’s writing a book about people in Kafka’s circle* had spoken to the son of another of Kafka’s sisters. The son lives in Great Britain and asked him to send an e-mail, but gave him the wrong address, so the message came back a couple of times. Through trial and error, my colleague found the right address. He sent various questions, to which Kafka’s nephew replied: “Please expect to receive an answer in the next fourteen days.” And broke off the correspondence.
So the only advice I can give about the niece in Prague is that the visitor must stand at the gate of her house in person.
But there is never anybody named “S” at home.
You need luck, and thus you need to think of pressing the doorbell of the neighbors below to make inquiries. And then, unexpectedly, she is the one who answers what is apparently somebody else’s intercom: “In this situation I’m not going to pretend I’m not here.”
And so Věra S. is sitting in the spacious hall. At a round wooden table with no cloth, between blank white walls.
“Please explain to Mrs. S. what has brought you here,” the neighbor begins.
“My colleague would very much like to have a conversation with Mrs. S., and I am his emissary. He has been trying to call you with no luck for two years.”
Now Věra S. replies in a gentle tone: “Please ask your friend to send me a letter with his questions. I shall reply within a suitable time-frame.”
I shift from foot to foot.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” she says.
“It’s a pity I can’t ask you any questions myself,” I admit regretfully.
“What question would you have for me?”
“Well, for instance—how do you feel in the twenty-first century?”
“Please send me a letter about it. I shall reply within a suitable time-frame.”
* * *
* I visited Věra S. at the request of Remigiusz Grzela. His book, Bagaże Franza K. (“Franz K.’s Luggage”), (Warsaw, 2004), was my source of information about Ottla David.
LITTLE DARLING
It was getting harder and harder to bury someone. Suddenly burial had become unbelievably complicated.
Some people couldn’t be buried at all. Josef S.’s family kept his urn at home. They had made several attempts to bury it, none of which had succeeded. Someone came up with the idea of doing it abroad, but the urn was unmasked in the express train to Vienna. It had been badly hidden in the restroom, between the toilet bowl and the wash basin.
Those who could be interred were also allowed to have their death announced in the newspaper, on one condition: the time of the funeral was not to be given.
Those who were allowed to publish the time only seemed to be better off. In fact, they were complicating the lives of their friends and acquaintances. This was lucidly explained by Reiner Kunze, a German poet who lived in Czechoslovakia:
A. has died. The funeral will be at five p.m., at the Motol crematorium. Those who live in Motol set off by four p.m. They know that if somebody like A. has died, it is not advisable for everybody to leave the house at the same time. To those who live further away it is obvious that they will be late, whatever time they set off. Because the streets will be closed, and the mourners’ cars will be diverted through the suburbs and neighboring villages.
Of course the only people who know about the funeral are those whom there has been time to inform, because as soon as he died, the dead man’s family’s phones stopped working. His relatives use public phone booths. But the booths around their homes are out of order, so they drive to booths in other districts. In practice, notifying people is reduced to an anonymous informer whispering into the receiver: “Funeral today at five p.m.”
Although not all funerals took place at such appealing times of day. Not only was notice of the cremation of a certain biologist, a member of the Academy of Sciences, given at the last moment, the information also came with the cruel twist that it would be at 6:30 a.m. A famous philosopher was cremated a
t 7 a.m., and there was no possibility of changing the time.
A large number of funerals were set for the evening. When the mourners came out of the crematorium, they would be unable to see anything. The cemetery lighting would have been switched off. However, Reiner Kunze noticed there was an established custom that, if darkness had fallen, and the road was on a slope, with occasional steps, anyone who came to a step would stop and say: watch out, there’s a step. And nobody ever fell over.
MR. VÝBORNÝ
The cemetery in the Motol district is like a country graveyard: small and cozy. It lies on a hill, among the trees, and when you turn your back on the small chapel, you can easily forget there is a city with a population of one and a half million stretched out below.
The manager of the cemetery and the gravedigger all in one was in the middle of his supper when a man and three women knocked at the door of his tiny cottage, not much bigger than a tomb. It was dark. He must have been surprised: who comes to look for a grave plot at that time of night?
“I’ve been all over the city and there’s nowhere for me to bury my husband,” said the older woman.
They looked tired. Since morning, they had been to every cemetery in the city, and everywhere they had been told that no more deceased were being accepted.
The gravedigger gave them a suspicious glance. “How come you’ve been all over the city?”
They didn’t answer.
The dog began to growl, as if it could sense the tension.
“What exactly did he die of?” asked the gravedigger, surprised by their silence. (“We were as silent as children who’ve been up to no good,” one of the two younger women recalls today.)
The man who was with the women took a sheet of paper from his pocket. The gravedigger looked at it. He read the diagnosis, the patient’s age (forty-two), shifted his gaze to the printed letters of the surname, and then he knew. He sucked in air with a hiss. “I’m truly sorry,” he said, handing back the sheet of paper. “My cemetery is full to bursting …”
“O God, that’s the eighth cemetery now,” said one of the women.
He looked at her and said: “… but I do have one grave here. For myself.”
He picked up a flashlight and whistled for the dog. “Come on. I’ll show you what a lovely plot I’ve got. Under a tree. There are some very decent people buried around it. My name is Výborný [meaning ‘excellent’], so I couldn’t pick anything ugly for myself.”
The older woman cheered up distinctly, and tried to forestall his questions: “Of course I promise we won’t bury him in the daytime. And at night the funeral won’t bother anyone.”
They reached the site of Mr. Výbornýs grave.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” he asked proudly. “Not even your husband could have chosen a better plot for himself,” he said to the older woman. “Do you want it?”
“Very much,” she replied. “But what … what will you do then?”
“I’ll manage somehow. They always have to find a plot for the gravedigger. That’s the only good thing about this sad trade.”
“Writing isn’t a very cheerful trade either,” observed the man.
DIAGNOSIS
The diagnosis was bowel cancer. The deceased hadn’t suspected it. In fact, he had been convinced he didn’t have cancer at all.
All his life he had been particularly afraid of cancer, so when he had a gall bladder operation, he asked the doctors to examine his entire body to make sure there were no signs of it.
They did, and there weren’t any. He was in the best hospital in the country, they couldn’t possibly have got it wrong, his family thinks. The illness came along a month later.
He’d gone about the house in an elated mood saying: “I don’t have cancer!”
Exactly eleven months before his death, on March 21, 1970, he was very happy. He had read in the newspaper that a program about him was being shown on television that evening. He called his friends and said: “There’s a show about me tonight.” The only thing he didn’t ask himself was: Who made the program and why didn’t he know about it before then? But he liked the idea that perhaps it was a surprise jubilee celebration of his creative work. After all, he was adored. In his country, they used the phrase “the people’s little darling.” And he knew he was one of the people’s little darlings.
The TV schedule gave only the program title: Report from on the Seine: About Writer and Screenwriter Jan Procházka.
CHAMPAGNE
They bought champagne and his wife made some fancy sandwiches. “The bottle’s on ice,” he joyfully told a friend over the phone. “It’s all very nice, and what’s more, just imagine, I haven’t got cancer,” he joked. He and his wife and three daughters settled down in front of the set. It was the so-called peak viewing time.
An hour later the program ended.
The champagne stood untouched in warm water.
No one had eaten a single sandwich, and next morning their daughter threw them in the trash can.
Jan Procházka sat dumbly in front of the television, staring at the switched-off screen. Somebody had eavesdropped on his private conversations with a friend, recorded them, and broadcast them on TV.
Nobody said a word except the confused writer who kept repeating the same words: “That was my voice … it really was my voice, but … but I didn’t say that.”
The first call came through, and his wife picked it up. A man wanted to speak to Mr. Procházka urgently. “You despicable swine,” he began. “At last we know who you really are.”
“You’re a monstrous, shameless, two-faced bastard. One for show, the other at home,” the writer learned from the next call.
It must have been then—says his daughter Lenka—that his crushed spirit sent his body a signal, and the irreversible process began.
Her younger sister, Iva, thought it was the worst day of their lives, but she was wrong.
Next day, the radio began to broadcast the secretly taped private conversations of Jan Procházka, in seven episodes over fourteen days.
With one day’s delay, the country’s biggest newspaper published them in print.
A WRITER’S HAPPINESS
He became the people’s little darling during the Spring.
It was a spring that had been prepared for the previous summer. In June 1967, the Writers Union had held a congress. The opening speech was made by the ruling Communist Party secretary for culture: “At a moment like this,” he said, “we should strengthen our alliance with the Soviet Union.”
He also expressed his expectations: “The Party expects you to formulate criteria for socialist literature.”
Despite the fact that Stalin was long since dead, the writers were yet again supposed to be making a public statement about the role of art—that it’s not about love, but about class struggle.
Nobody could have anticipated what happened next.
The first speaker was an author of novels and socialist-realist poetry, which he even went on writing after Stalin’s death, who had joined the Party when he was still in high school.
Suddenly, as if against his better judgment, he read out a quotation from a letter written by Voltaire to Hevelius: “I do not agree with what you are saying, but I shall defend to the death your right to be able to say it freely.” “That’s a wonderful remark,” said the Party writer to his colleagues, “it is the fundamental ethical principle of modern culture. Anyone who wishes to go back to the days before this principle is regressing to the Middle Ages.” (It was Milan Kundera.)
The audience—as witnesses recall—was dumbstruck, and the bald Party secretary who had demanded the alliance of literature with the USSR clenched his lips tight.
Photographs taken at the congress show more than forty writers sitting along tables in their shirtsleeves. They have taken off their jackets and are gesticulating.
At the very end, on the third day, the son of a peasant from Moravia took the floor; a farmer by education, he was an eminent screenwriter a
nd member of the ideological board of the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s Central Committee, and his name was Jan Procházka. He had such faith in communism that, shocked by his views, his parents hadn’t attended his own wedding. He had written a lot, but the critics had judged his first screenplays to be lackluster. For eight years, he had been a full-time screenwriter at the Barrandov Film Studios. There he underwent a creative metamorphosis. He discovered that not every screenplay has to be educational, and that what kills creativity is sticking to a formula. For a decade, only one of his movies had been produced each year, occasionally two. They were usually directed by Karel Kachyňa, one of the founders of the new wave in Czechoslovak cinema, who was Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s tutor at the Prague film school. “At the very same moment,” said Procházka, “the writer is happy with those who are happy, and desperate with those who are desperate.”
A murmur ran through the room.
No other member of the Central Committee was as brilliant, not even those who were involved in literature.
“We are brothers to all those who love, because our main weapon is the heart,” he added.
According to historians, the Party secretary left the congress hissing: “You’re going to muck it all up …” However, those present in the auditorium claim that the secretary had said something similar, but put in a different way:
“You’re going to fuck it all up,” he said.
SPRING, CONTINUED
That was how the ferment began, which culminated in the aforementioned Spring. The congress of writers and poets came out in opposition to the Party. The system’s own grave-diggers had evolved from within.
“In the Czechoslovak Communist Party, there was a large number of decent people who were horrified by what they had set their hands to”—thirty years later, so said the man who explained to Mr. Výborný at the cemetery that writing is just as sad as burying the dead.
Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia Page 9