by Philip Roth
The waiter returns to take the order. Poached eggs for two— as pure a thing as life has to offer.
After my three cups of coffee, Olga orders me a Cuban cigar and, at 8:30 a.m. Central European Time, i, who smoke a cigar once every decade and afterwards always wonder why, oblige her and light up.
“You must finish the cigar, Zuckerman. When freedom returns to Czechoslovakia, you will be made an honorary citizen for finishing that cigar. They will put a plaque outside this hotel about Zuckerman and his cigar.”
“I’ll finish the cigar,” I say, dropping my voice, “if you give me Sisovsky’s father’s stories. The stories in Yiddish that Sisovsky left behind. I met your husband in New York. He asked me to come here and get the stories.”
“Thai swine! That pig!”
“Olga, I didn’t want to spring it on you out of the blue, but I’ve been advised not to hang around this country much longer.”
“You met that monster in New York!”
“Yes.”
“And the aging ingénue? You have met her too? And did she tell you how much she suffers from all the men at her feet? Did he tell you how with her it is never boring love-making—with her it is always like rape! This is why you are here, not for Kafka but for him!”
“Lower your voice. I’m taking those stories to America.”
“So he can make money out of his dead father—in New York? So he can buy jewelry for her now in New York too?”
“He wants to publish his father’s stories, in translation, in America.”
“What—out of love? Out of devotion?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know! I know! That’s why he left his mother, that’s why he left me, that’s why he left his child—because of all of this devoted love he has. Left us all for that whore they all rape. What’s she doing in New York? Still playing Nina in The Seagull?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“Why not? She did here. Our leading Czech actress who ages but never grows up. Poor little star always in tears. And how much did he flatter you to make you believe that he was a man with love and devotion who cared only for the memory of his beloved father? How much did he flatter you about your books that you cannot see through what both of them are? He is why you come to Czechoslovakia—him? Because you took pity on two homeless Czechs? Take pity on me. I am at home, and it is worse’”
“I see that.”
“And of course he told you the story of his father’s death.”
“He did.”
“‘He shot my Jew, so I shot his.’”
“Yes.”
“Well, that is another lie. It happened to another writer, who didn’t even write in Yiddish. Who didn’t have a wife or have a child. Sisovsky’s father was killed in a bus accident. Sisovsky’s father hid in the bathroom of a Gentile friend, hid there through the war from the Nazis, and his friend brought him cigarettes and whores.”
“I find it hard believing that.’’
“Of course—because it’s not as horrible a story! They all say their fathers were killed by the Nazis. By now even the sixteen-year-old girls know not to believe them. Only people like you, only a shallow, sentimental, American idiot Jew who thinks there is virtue in suffering!”
“You’ve got the wrong Jew—I think nothing of the sort. Let me have the manuscripts. What good do they do anybody here?”
“The good of not being there, doing good for him and that terrible actress! You cannot even hear her if you sit ten rows back. You could never hear her. She is a stinking actress who has ruined Chekhov for Prague for the last hundred years with all her stinking sensitive pauses, and now she will ruin Chekhov for New York. Nina? She should be playing Firs! He wants to live off of his father? The hell with him! Let him live off of his actress! If anybody can even hear her!”
I wait for Hrobek on a long bench in the corridor outside the railway cafe. Either because the student has himself waited and lost hope and gone home or because he has been taken into custody or because he was not a student but a provocateur got up in a wispy chin beard and worn loden coat, he is nowhere to be seen.
On the chance that he has decided to wait inside rather than under the scrutiny of the plainclothes security agents patrolling the halls, I enter the cafe and look around: a big dingy room, a dirty, airless, oppressive place. Patched, fraying tablecloths set with mugs of beer, and clinging to the mugs, men with close-cropped hair wearing gray-black work clothes, swathed in cigarette smoke and saying little. Off the night shift somewhere, or maybe tanking up on their way to work. Their faces indicate that not everybody heard the president when he went on television for three hours to ask the people not to drink so much.
Two waiters in soiled white jackets attend the fifty or so tables, both of them elderly and in no hurry. Since half of the country, by Olga’s count, is employed in spying on the other half, chances are that one at least works for the police. (Am I getting drastically paranoid or am I getting the idea?) In German I order a cup of coffee.
The workmen at their beer remind me of Bolotka, a janitor in a museum now that he no longer runs his theater. “This,” Bolotka explains, “is the way we arrange things now. The menial work is done by the writers and the teachers and the construction engineers, and the construction is run by the drunks and the crooks. Half a million people have been fired from their jobs. Everything is run by the drunks and the crooks. They get along better with the Russians.” I imagine Styron washing glasses in a Penn Station barroom, Susan Sontag wrapping buns at a Broadway bakery. Gore Vidal bicycling salamis to school lunchrooms in Queens—I look at the filthy floor and see myself sweeping it.
Someone stares at me from a nearby table while I continue sizing up the floor and with it the unforeseen consequences of art. I am remembering the actress Eva Kalinova and how they have used Anne Frank as a whip to drive her from the stage, how the ghost of the Jewish saint has returned to haunt her as a demon. Anne Frank as a curse and a stigma) No, there’s nothing that can’t be done to a book, no cause in which even the most innocent of all books cannot be enlisted, not only by them, but by you and me. Had Eva Kalinova been born in New Jersey she too would have wished that Anne Frank had never died as she did: but coming, like Anne Frank, from the wrong continent at the wrong time, she could only wish that the Jewish girl and her little diary had never even existed.
Mightier than the sword? This place is proof that a book isn’t as mighty as the mind of its most benighted reader.
When I get up to go, the young workman who’d been staring at me gets up and follows.
I board a trolley by the river, then jump off halfway to the museum where Bolotka is expecting me to pay him a visit. On foot, and with the help of a Prague map, I proceed to lose my way but also to shake my escort. By the time I reach the museum this seems to me a city that I’ve known all my life. The old-time streetcars, the barren shops, the soot-blackened bridges, the tunneled alleys and medieval streets, the people in a state of impervious heaviness, their faces shut down by solemnity, faces that appear to be on strike against life—this is the city I imagined during the war’s worst years, when, as a Hebrew-school student of little more than nine. I went out after supper with my blue-and-white collection can to solicit from the neighbors for the Jewish National Fund. This is the city I imagined the Jews would buy when they had accumulated enough money for a homeland. I knew about Palestine and the hearty Jewish teenagers there reclaiming the desert and draining the swamps, but I also recalled, from our vague family chronicle, shadowy, cramped streets where the innkeepers and distillery workers who were our Old World forebears had dwelled apart, as strangers, from the notorious Poles—and so, what I privately pictured the Jews able to afford with the nickels and dimes I collected was a used city, a broken city, a city so worn and grim that nobody else would even put in a bid. It would go for a song, the owner delighted to be rid of it before it completely caved in. In this used city, one would hear endless stories being told—on bench
es in the park, in kitchens at night, while waiting your turn at the grocery or over the clothesline in the yard, anxious tales of harassment and flight, stories of fantastic endurance and pitiful collapse. What was to betoken a Jewish homeland to an impressionable, emotional nine-year-old child, highly susceptible to the emblems of pathos, was, first, the overpowering oldness of the homes, the centuries of deterioration that had made the property so cheap, the leaky pipes and moldy walls and rotting timbers and smoking stoves and simmering cabbages souring the air of the semi-dark stairwells; second were the stories, all the telling and listening to be done, their infinite interest in their own existence, the fascination with their alarming plight, the mining and refining of tons of these stories—the national industry of the Jewish homeland, if not the sole means of production (if not the sole source of satisfaction), the construction of narrative out of the exertions of survival; third were the jokes—because beneath the ordeal of perpetual melancholia and the tremendous strain of just getting through, a joke is always lurking somewhere, a derisory portrait, a scathing crack, a joke which builds with subtle self-savaging to the uproarious punch line, “And this is what suffering does!” What you smell are centuries and what you hear are voices and what you see are Jews, wild with lament and rippling with amusement, their voices tremulous with rancor and vibrating with pain, a choral society proclaiming vehemently, “Do you believe it? Can you imagine it?” even as they affirm with every wizardry trick in the book, by a thousand acoustical fluctuations of tempo, tone, inflection, and pitch, “Yet this is exactly what happened!” That such things can happen—there’s the moral of the stories—that such things happen to me, to him, to her, to you, to us. That is the national anthem of the Jewish homeland. By all rights, when you hear someone there begin telling a story—when you see the Jewish faces mastering anxiety and feigning innocence and registering astonishment at their own fortitude—you ought to stand and put your hand to your heart.
Here where the literary culture is held hostage, the art of narration flourishes by mouth. In Prague, stories aren’t simply stories; it’s what they have instead of life. Here they have become their stories, in lieu of being permitted to be anything else. Storytelling is the form their resistance has taken against the coercion of the powers-that-be.
I say nothing to Bolotka of the sentiments stirred up by my circuitous escape route, or the association it’s inspired between my ancestors’ Poland, his Prague tenement, and the Jewish Atlantis of an American childhood dream. I only explain why I’m late. “1 was followed from the train station onto the trolley. I shook him before I got here. I hope I wasn’t wrong to come anyway.” I describe the student Hrobek and show Bolotka his note. “The note was given to me by a hotel clerk who I think is a cop.”
After reading it twice he says, “Don’t worry, they were only frightening him and his teacher.”
“If so, they succeeded. In frightening me too.”
“Whatever the reason, it is not to build a case against you. They do this to everyone. It is one of the laws of power, the spreading of general distrust. It is one of several basic techniques of adjusting people. But they cannot touch you. That would be pointless, even by Prague standards. A regime can only be so stupid, and then the other side comes back into power. Here you frighten them. A student should understand that. He is not enrolled in the right courses.”
“Coming to the hotel then, he made things worse for himself—for his teacher too, if all this is true.”
“I can’t say. There is probably more about this boy that we don’t know. The student and his teacher are who they are interested in, not you. You are not responsible for the boy’s bad judgment.”
“He was young. He wanted to help.”
“Don’t be tender about his martyr complex. And don’t credit the secret police with so much. Of course the hotel clerk is a cop. Everybody is in that hotel. But the police are like literary critics—of what little they see, they get most wrong anyway. They are the literary critics. Our literary criticism is police criticism. As for the boy, he is right now back in his room with his pants off. boasting to his girt friend about saving your life.”
Bolotka is padded out beneath his overalls with a scruffy, repulsive reddish fur vest that could be the hair off his own thick hide, and consequently looks even more barbarous, more feral, at work than he did at play. He looks, in this enclosure, like one of the zoo’s larger beasts, a bison or a bear. We are in a freezing storage room about twice as big as an ordinary clothes closet and a third the size of his living quarters. Both of us are sipping slivovitz-larded tea from his mug, I to calm down and Bolotka to warm up. The cartons stacked to the ceiling contain his cleanser, his toilet tissue, his floor polish, his lye; ranged along the walls are the janitor’s buffing machine, ladder, and collection of brooms. In one corner, the corner Bolotka calls “my office,” are a low stool, a gooseneck lamp, and the electric kettle to boil the water into which to dip his tea bag and pour the brandy. He reads here, writes, hides, sleeps, here on a scrap of carpet between the push broom and the buffer he entertains sixteen girls, though never, he informs me, in so tiny a space, all of them at one time. “More than two girls and there’s no room for my prick.”
“And there’s nothing to be done about this boy’s warning? I’m relying on you, Rudolf. When you come to New York I’ll see you’re not mugged in Central Park by going to take a leak there at 3 a.m. I expect the same consideration from you here. Am I in danger?”
“I was once briefly in jail, waiting to stand trial, Nathan. Before the trial began, they released me. It was too ridiculous even for them. They told me I had committed a crime against the state: in my theater, the heroes were always laughing when they should be crying, and this was a crime. I was an ideological saboteur. Stalinist criticism, which once existed in this country until it became a laughingstock, always reproached characters for not being moral and setting a good example. When a hero’s wife died on the stage, which was often happening in my theater, he had to sob a lot to please Stalin. And Stalin of course knew quite well what it was when one’s wife died. He himself killed three wives and in killing them he was always sobbing. Well, when I was in jail, you realized when you woke up where you were, and you began cursing. You could hear them cursing in their cells, all the professional criminals, all the pimps and murderers and thieves. I was only a young man, but I began cursing too. The thing I learned was not to stop cursing, never to stop cursing, not when you are in a prison. Forget this note. To hell with these people and their warnings. Anything you want to do in Prague, anything you want to see in Prague, anyone you want to fuck in Prague, you tell me and I arrange it. There is still some pleasure for a stranger in Mitteleuropa. I hesitate to say Prague is ‘gay,’ but sometimes these days it can be very amusing.”
Afternoon. Olga’s garret atop Klenek’s palazzo. A pinnacle of Prague’s castle blurrily visible through the leaded window. Olga in her robe on the bed. W itchy, very whitish, even without the makeup. I pace, wearing my coat, wondering why these stories must be retrieved. Why am I forcing the issue? What’s the motive here? Is this a passionate struggle for those marvelous stories or a renewal of the struggle toward self-caricature? Still the son, still the child, in strenuous pursuit of the father’s loving response? {Even when the father is Sisovsky’s?) Suppose the stories aren’t even marvelous, that I only long for that—the form taken by my touha. Why am I saying to myself, “Do not let yourself be stopped”? Why be drawn further along, the larger the obstacles? That’s okay writing a book, that’s what it is to write a book, but would it be so hard to convince myself that I am stupidly endowing these stories with a significance that they can’t begin to have? How consequential can they be? If their genius could really astound its they would somehow have surfaced long ago. The author’s purpose wasn’t to be read anyway. but to write for no necessity other than his own. Why not let him have it his way. rather than yours or Sisovsky’s? Think of all that his stories will be spared if i
nstead of wrenching his fiction out of oblivion, you just turn around and go…Yet I stay. In the old parables about the spiritual life, the hero searches for a kind of holiness, or holy object, or transcendence, boning up on magic practices as he goes off hunting after his higher being, getting help from crones and soothsayers, donning masks—well, this is the mockery of that parable. that parable the idealization of this farce. The soul sinking into ridiculousness even while it strives to be saved. Enter Zuckerman. a serious person.
You’re afraid to marry an alcoholic? I would love you so, I wouldn’t drink.
And you give me the stories as your dowry.