by Philip Roth
“Because I’m shaking. Feel me shaking. I never stop shaking. I am frightened of everything.” Points to me, “I am frightened of him.” She flops down onto the sofa, in the space between Bolotka and me. I feel pressing against mine the best legs in Prague. Also believe I feel the touha.
“You don’t act frightened,” I say.
“Since I am frightened of everything it is as well to go in one direction as the other. If I get into too much trouble, you will come and marry me and take me to America. I will telegram and you will come and save me.’’ She says to Bolotka, “Do you know what Mr. Vodicka wants now? He has a boy who has never seen a woman. He wants me to show it to him. He is going into the street to get him.” Then, to me: “Why are you in Prague?
Are you looking for Kafka? The intellectuals all come here looking for Kafka. Kafka is dead. They should be looking for Olga. Are you planning to make love to anybody in Prague? If so, you wilt let me know,” To Bolotka: “Kouba. There is Kouba! I cannot be in this house with that Kouba!” To me: “You want to know why I need looking after? Because of stupid communists like Kouba!” She points to a short man with a bald head who is animatedly entertaining a circle of friends in the center of the milling crowd. “Kouba knew what the good life was for all of us. It has taken the Koubas twenty years to learn, and they’re still too stupid to leam. All brains and no intelligence. None. Kouba is one of our great communist heroes. It is surprising he is still in Prague. Not all of our great communist heroes who were in Italy with their girl friends when the Russians invaded have bothered to come back from their holiday yet. Do you know why? Because when the Russians occupied Prague, at last they were free of their wives. Some of our greatest communist heroes are now with their girl friends teaching Marxism-Leninism in New York. They are only sorry that the revolution fell into the wrong hands. Otherwise they are like Kouba—still one hundred percent sure they are right. So why do you come to Prague? You are not looking for Kafka, none of our heroes in New York sent you, and you don’t want to fuck. I love this word fuck. Why don’t we have this word, Rudolf?” To me again: “Teach me how to say fuck. This is a good fucking party. I was really fucked. Wonderful word. Teach me.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Beautiful word. Shut the fuck up. More.”
“Fuck it all. Fuck everything.”
“Yes, fuck it all. Fuck everything and fuck everybody. Fuck the world till it cannot fuck me anymore. See, I learn fast. In America I would be a famous writer like you. You are afraid to fuck me. Why is that? Why do you write this book about fucking that makes you so famous if you are afraid to fuck somebody? You hate fucking everybody or just me?”
“Everybody.”
“He is kind to you, Olga,” Bolotka says. “He is a gentleman, so he doesn’t tell you the truth because you are so hopeless.”
“Why am I hopeless?”
“Because in America the girls don’t talk to him like this.”
“What do they say in America? Teach me to be an American girl.”
“First you would take your hand off my prick.”
“I see. Okay. Now what?”
“We would talk to each other. We would try to get to know each other first.”
“Why? I don’t understand this. Talk about what? The Indians?”
“Yes, we would talk at length about the Indians.”
“And then I put my hand on your prick.”
“That’s right.”
“And then you fuck me.”
“That would be the way we would do it, yes.”
“It is a very strange country.”
“It’s one of them.”
Mr. Vodicka, pink with excitement, is dragging the boy through the room. Everything excites Mr. Vodicka: Olga dismissing him like a bothersome child, Bolotka addressing him like a whipped dog, the indifferent boy weary already of being so cravenly desired. The stage-set splendors of Klenek’s drawing room— velvet burgundy draperies, massive carved antiques, threadbare Oriental carpets, tiers of dark romantic landscapes leaning from the paneled oak walls—evoke no more from the boy than a mean little smirk. Been everywhere already, seen the best in brothels by the time he was twelve.
Mr. Vodicka is fastidious with the introductions. Bolotka translates. “He is saying to Olga that the boy has never seen a woman. That’s how Mr. Vodicka has got him in from the street. He promised he would show him one. He is telling Olga that she has to show it to him, otherwise the boy will go.”
“What do you do now?” I ask Olga.
“What I do? I show it to him. I have you to fuck me. Mr. Vodicka has only dreams to fuck. He is more frightened of everything than I am.”
“You’re doing it out of sentiment.”
Placing my hands over her breasts, Olga says, “If it weren’t for sentiment, Zuckerman, one person would not pass another person a glass of water.”
Czech exchange. Bolotka translates.
Olga says to Mr. V., “First I want to see his.”
The boy won’t hear of it. Plump, smooth, dark, and cruel: a very creamy caramel dessert.
Olga waves her hand. The hell with it, get out, go.
“Why do you want to see it?” I ask her.
“I don’t. I have seen too many already. Mr. Vodicka wants to see it.”
For five minutes she addresses the boy in the softest, most caressing Czech, until, at last, he shuffles childishly toward the sofa and, frowning at the ceiling, undoes his zipper. Olga summons him one step closer and then, with two fingers and a thumb, reaches delicately into his trousers. The boy yawns. She withdraws his penis. Mr. Vodicka looks. We all look. Light entertainment in occupied Prague.
“Now,” says Olga, “they will put on television a photograph of me with his prick. Everywhere in this house there are cameras. On the street someone is always snapping my picture. Half the country is employed spying on the other half. I am a rotten degenerate bourgeois negativist-pseudo-artist—and this will prove it. This is how they destroy me.”
“Why do you do it then?”
“It is too silly not to.” In English she says to Mr. V., “Come, I’ll show it to him.” She zips the boy up and leads him away, Mr. Vodicka eagerly following.
“Are cameras hidden here?” I ask Bolotka.
“Ktenek says no, only microphones. Maybe there are cameras in the bedrooms, for the fucking. Bui you go on the floor and turn the light out. Don’t worry. Don’t be scared. You want to fuck her, fuck her on the floor. Nobody would take your picture there.”
“Who is the lover who wants to kill her?”
“Don’t be afraid of him; he won’t kill her or you either. He doesn’t even want to see her. One night Olga is drunk and angry because he is tired of her, and she finds out he has a new girl friend, so she telephones the police and she tells them that he has threatened to murder her. The police come, and by then the joke is over and he is undressed and sorry about the new girl friend. But the police are also drunk, so they lake him away. The whole country is drunk. Our president must go on television for three hours to tell the people to stop drinking and go back ‘ to work. You get onto a streetcar at night when the great working class is on its way home, and the great working class smells like a brewery.”
“What happened to Olga’s lover?”
“He has a note from a doctor saying he is a psychiatric case.”
“Is he?”
“He carries the note to be left alone. They leave you alone if you can prove you are crazy. He is a perfectly reasonable person: he is interested in fucking women and writing poems, and not in stupid politics. This proves he is not crazy. But the police come and they read the note and they take him to the lunatic asylum. He is still there. Olga thinks now he will kill her because of what she did. But he is happy where he is. In the lunatic asylum he is not required to be a worker all day in the railway office. There he has some peace and quiet and at last he writes something again. There he has the whole day to write poems instead of railroad t
ickets.”
“How do you all live like this?”
“Human adaptability is a great blessing.”
Olga, who has returned, sits herself on my lap.
“Where is Mr. Vodicka?” I ask her.
“He stays in the loo with the boy.”
“What did you do to them, Olga?” Bolotka asks.
“I did nothing. When I showed it to him, the boy screamed. I took down my pants and he screamed, ‘It’s awful.’ But Mr. Vodicka was bending over, with his hands on his knees, and studying me through his thick glasses. Maybe he wants to write about something new. He is studying me through his glasses, and then he says to the boy, ‘Oh, I don’t know, my friend—it’s not our cup of tea, but from an aesthetic point of view it’s not horrible?”
Ten-thirty. I am to meet Hos and Hoffman in a wine bar at eleven. Everyone believes I am visiting Prague to commiserate with their proscribed writers when in fact I am here to strike a deal with the woman full of touha on my lap.
“You have to get up, Olga. I’m going.”
“I come with you.”
“You must have patience,” Bolotka says to me. “Ours is a small country. We do not have so many millions of fifteen-year-old girls. But if you will have patience, she will come. And she will be worth it. The little Czech dumpling that we all like to eat. What is your hurry? What are you afraid of? You see— nothing happens. You do whatever you want in Prague and nobody cares. You cannot have such freedom in New York.”
“He does not want a girl of fifteen,” says Olga. “They are old whores by now, those little girls. He wants one who is forty.”
I slide Olga off my lap and stand up to leave.
“Why do you act like this?” Olga asks. “You come all the way to Czechoslovakia and then you act like this. I will never see you again.”
“Yes you will.”
“You are lying. You will go back to those American girls and talk about Indians and fuck them. Next time you will tell me before, and I will study my Indian tribes and then we will fuck.”
“Have lunch with me tomorrow, Olga. I’ll pick you up here.”
“But what about tonight? Why don’t you fuck me now? Why are you leaving me, if you like me? I don’t understand these American writers.”
Neither, if they could see me, would my American readers. I am not fucking everyone, or indeed anyone, but sit quietly on the sofa being polite. I am a dignified, well-behaved, reliable spectator, secure, urbane, calm, polite, the quiet respectable one who does not take his trousers off, and these are the menacing writers. All the treats and blandishments, all the spoils that spoU are mine, and yet what a witty, stylish comedy of manners these have-nots of Prague make out of their unbearable condition, this crushing business of being completely balked and walking the treadmill of humiliation. They, silenced, are all mouth. I am only ears—and plans, an American gentleman abroad, with the bracing if old-fashioned illusion that he is playing a worthwhile, dignified, and honorable role.
Bolotka offers Olga a comforting explanation for why she is no longer in my lap. “He is a middle-class boy. Leave him alone.”
“But this is a classless society,” she says. “This is socialism. What good is socialism if when I want to nobody will fuck me? All the great international figures come to Prague to see our oppression, but none of them will ever fuck me. Why is that? Sartre was here and he would not fuck me. Simone de Beauvoir came with him and she would not fuck me. Heinrich Boll, Carlos Fuentes, Graham Greene—and none of them will fuck me. Now you, and it is the same thing. You think to sign a petition will save Czechoslovakia, but what will save Czechoslovakia would be to fuck Olga.”
“Olga is drunk.” Bolotka says.
“She’s also crying,” I point out.
“Don’t worry about her,” Bolotka says. “This is just Olga.”
“Now.” says Olga, “they will interrogate me about you. For six hours they will interrogate me about you, and I won’t even be able to tell them we fucked.”
“Is that what happens?” I ask Bolotka.
“Their interrogations are not to be dramatized,” he says. “It is routine work. Whenever someone is questioned by Czech police he is questioned about everything that he can be asked. They are interested in everything. Now they are interested in you, but it does not mean that to be in touch with you could compromise anybody and that the police could accuse people who are in touch with you. They don’t need that to accuse people. If they want to accuse you, they accuse you, and they don’t need anything. If they interrogate me about why you came to Czechoslovakia, I will tell them,”
“Yes? What will you say?”
“I will tell them you came for the fifteen-year-old girls. I will say, ‘Read his book and you will see why he came.’ Olga will be all right. In a couple of weeks Klenek returns home and Olga will be fine. You don’t have to bother to fuck her tonight. Someone will do it, don’t worry.”
“1 will not be all right,” Olga cries. “Marry me and take me away from here. Zuckerman, if you marry me. they must let me go. That is the law—even they obey it. You wouldn’t have to fuck me. You could fuck the American girls. You wouldn’t have to love me, or even give me money.”
“And she would scrub your floors,” says Bolotka, “and iron your beautiful shirts. Wouldn’t you, Olga?”
“Yes! Yes! I would iron your shirts all day long.”
“That would be the first week,” Bolotka says. “Then would begin the second week and the excitement of being Mr. Olga.”
“That isn’t true,” she says, “I would leave him alone.”
“Then would begin the vodka,” Bolotka says. “Then would begin the adventures.”
“Not in America,” weeps Olga.
“Oh,” says Bolotka, “you would not be homesick for Prague in New York City?”
“No!”
“Olga, in America you would shoot yourself.”
“I will shoot myself here.”
“With what?” asks Bolotka.
“A tank! Tonight! I will steal a Russian tank and I will shoot myself with it tonight!”
Bolotka occupies a dank room at the top of a bleak stairwell on a street of tenements near the outskirts of Prague. I visited him there earlier in the day. He reassures me, when he observes me looking sadly around, that I shouldn’t feel too bad about his standard of living—this was his hideaway from his wife long before his theater was disbanded and he was forbidden to produce his “decadent” revues. For a man of his predilections it really is the best place to live. “It excites young girls,” Bolotka informs me, “to be fucked in squalor.” He is intrigued by my herringbone tweed suit and asks to try it on to see how it feels to be a rich American writer. He is a sloop-shouldered man, large and shambling, with a wide Mongol face, badly pitted skin, and razor-blade eyes, eyes like rifts in the bone of his skull, slitted green eyes whose manifesto is “You will jam nothing bogus into this brain.” He has a wife somewhere, even children; recently the wife’s arm was broken when she tried to prevent the police from entering their apartment to impound her absentee husband’s several thousand books.
“Why does she care so much about you?”
“She doesn’t—she hates me. But she hates them more. Old married couples in Prague have something to hate now even more than each other.”
A month earlier the police came to the door of Bolotka’s hole at the top of the stairwell to inform him that the country’s leading troublemakers were being given papers to leave. They would allow him forty-eight hours to get out.
“I said to them, ‘Why don’t you leave? That would amount to the same thing. I give you forty-eight hours.’”
But would he not be better off in Paris, or across the border in Vienna, where he has a reputation as a theatrical innovator and could resume his career?
“1 have sixteen girt friends in Prague,” he replies. “How can I leave?”
I am handed his robe to keep myself warm while he undresses and gets into my
suit. “You look even more like a gorilla,” I say, when he stands to model himself in my clothes.
“And even in my disgraceful dressing gown,” he says, “you look like a happy, healthy, carefree impostor.”
Bolotka’s story.
“I was nineteen years old, I was a student at the university. I wanted like my father to be a lawyer. But after one year I decide I must quit and enroll at the School of Fine Arts. Of course I have first to go for an interview. This is 1950. Probably I would have to go to fifty interviews, but I only got to number one. I went in and they took out my ‘record.’ It was a foot thick. I said to them, ‘How can it be a foot thick, I haven’t lived yet. I have had no life—how can you have all this information?’ But they don’t explain. I sit there and they look it over and they say I cannot quit. The workers’ money is being spent on my education. The workers have invested a year in my future as a lawyer. The workers have not made this investment so I can change my mind and decide to become a fine artist. They tell me that I cannot matriculate at the School of Fine Arts, or anywhere ever again, and so I said okay and went home. I didn’t care that much. It wasn’t so bad. I didn’t have to become a lawyer, I had some girl friends. I had my prick, I had books, and to talk to and to keep me company, ! had my childhood friend Blecha. Only they had him to talk with too. Blecha was planning then to be a famous poet and a famous novelist and a famous playwright. One night he got drunk and he admitted to me that he was spying on me. They knew he was an old friend and they knew that he wrote, and they knew he came to see me, so they hired him to spy on me and to write a report once a week. But he was a terrible writer. He is still a terrible writer. They told him that when they read his reports they could make no sense of them. They told him everything he wrote about me is unbelievable. So I said, “Blecha, don’t be depressed, let me see the reports— probably they are not as bad as they say. What do they know?’ But they were terrible. He missed the point of everything I said, he got everything backwards about when I went where, and the writing was a disgrace. Blecha was afraid they were going to fire him—he was afraid they might even suspect him of playing some kind of trick, out of loyalty to me. And if that went into his record, he would be damaged for the rest of his life. Besides, all the time he should be spending on his poems and his stories and his plays, he was spending listening to me. He was getting nothing accomplished tor himself. He was full of sadness over this. He had thought he could just betray a few hours a day and otherwise get on with being National Artist, Artist of Merit, and winner of the State Award for Outstanding Work. Well, it was obvious what to do. I said, ‘Blecha, I will follow myself for you. ! know what I do all day better than you, and I have nothing else to keep me busy. I will spy on myself and I will write it up, and you can submit it to them as your own. They will wonder how your rotten writing has improved overnight, but you just tell them you were sick. This way you won’t have anything damaging on your record, and I can be rid of your company, you shitface.’ Blecha was thrilled. He gave me half of what they paid him and everything was fine—until they decided that he was such a good spy and such a good writer, they promoted him. He was terrified. He came to me and said I had gotten him into this and so I had to help him. They were putting him now to spy on bigger troublemakers than me. They were even using his reports in the Ministry of Interior to teach new recruits. He said, ‘You have the knack of it, Rudolf, with you it’s just a technique. I am too imaginative for this work. But if I say no to them now. it will go in my record and I will be damaged by it later on. I could be seriously damaged now, if they knew you had written the reports on yourself.’ So this is how I made a bit of a living when I was young. I taught our celebrated Artist of Merit and winner of the State Award for Outstanding Work how to write in plain Czech and describe a little what life is like. It was not easy. The man could not describe a shoelace. He did not know the word for anything. And he saw nothing. I would say, ‘But, Blecha, was the friend sad or happy, clumsy or graceful, did he smoke, did he listen mostly or did he talk? Blecha, how will you ever become a great writer if you are such a bad spy?’ This made him angry with me. He did not like my insults. He said spying was sickening to him and caused him to have writer’s block. He said he could not use his creative talent while his spirit was being compromised like this. For me it was different. Yes, he had to tell me—it was different for me because I did not have high artistic ideals. I did not have any ideals. If I did I would not agree to spy on myself. I certainly would not take money for it. He had come to lose his respect for me. This is a sad irony to him, because when I left university, it was my integrity that meant so much to him and our friendship. Blecha told me this again recently. He was having lunch with Mr. Knap, another of our celebrated Artists of Merit and winner of the State Award for Outstanding Work, and secretary now of their Writers’ Union. Blecha was quite drunk and always when he is quite drunk Blecha gets over-emotional and must tell you the truth. He came up to the table where I was having my lunch and he asked if everything is all right. He said he wished he could help an old friend in trouble, and then he whispered, ‘Perhaps in a few months’ time … but they do not like that you are so alienated, Rudolf. The phenomenon of alienation is not approved of from above. Still, for you I will do all that I can…” But then he sat suddenly down at the table and he said, ‘But you must not go around Prague telling lies about me, Rudolf. Nobody believes you anyway. My books are everywhere. Schoolchildren read my poems, tens of thousands of people read my novels, on TV they perform my plays. You only make yourself look irresponsible and bitter by telling that story. And, if I may say so, a little crazy.’ So I said to him, “But, Blecha, I don’t tell it. I have never told it to a soul.’ And he said, ‘Come now, my dear old friend—how then does everybody know’?’ And so I said, ‘Because their children read your poems, they themselves have read your novels, and when they tum on TV, they see your plays.’ ”