I began to sink my nails into the sofa, then my whole hand, until it hurt, as if physical pain could throttle a different kind of agony. I thought about Jan, about Andrei, about my mother, about all those noble, feeble beings . . . The torturers had surely never loved anybody, I thought, otherwise they could not carry out their tasks.
“You must be exaggerating, Petr . . . ” I said in a muffled voice.
Petr stopped talking. I looked at the signs of pain on his face. He was looking at a corner of the room.
“Innocent people, all of them innocent, I know them, there are thousands of innocent people,” he murmured, “What could they be guilty of? The Communists’ power is based on making others illegal. They invent guilty charges if and when it suits them. And those affected have no rights, they’re completely helpless.”
I was only half listening to him. My thoughts were with Jan, I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I told Petr how anxious I was.
“That’s simple enough,” and he picked up the phone.
He told me that during one interrogation he’d met an old school friend who was now a high-ranking member of the secret police.
“This man still has some scruples left; he felt ashamed in front of me. As if to atone for what he’d done, he told me to call him if I ever had any problem . . . anything specific. He almost begged me to do so, as if I would be doing him a favor; I reckoned he needed it, as a sign of forgiveness. He was red faced and sweating. I wouldn’t do this for myself, I’d find it repugnant. But I’ll call him for little Jan, and for you, too: if they’ve started with him, then you’re in danger as well.”
That evening, after about two hours, Jan came home. He ran into Petr in the doorway.
“Is this man . . . my father?” he asked, timidly.
“He’s an uncle,” I told him, taking a firm hold of him, “Uncle Petr.”
Before saying goodbye, Petr invited me to a party to celebrate the death of Stalin, which was going to be held in the cellar of a house in a small village near Prague.
I told him I wouldn’t be going. “I don’t believe anything’s going to change. I just don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“I don’t believe anything will either. I don’t believe in anything at all.” Petr said, closing the door behind him.
He started down the stairs, his back bent.
I suddenly remembered something and ran after him. I caught up with him in the street. Jan was running behind me.
“Petr,” I said, out of breath, “in a period of calm it’s easy to make the right decisions. But when the going gets rough, it’s difficult to see things clearly and it’s easy to make mistakes that you’ll regret for the rest of your life. But you haven’t made any, Petr.”
With my son beside me, I flew back up to our sixth floor apartment, happy because Jan was back home, alive, and because I’d just met Petr again, alive, and because Petr had forgiven me for the business with the Nazis. I was so pleased that through it all Petr had remained himself.
Jan ate twenty potato rissoles, even though he had a fever. On the advice of a psychologist friend, I didn’t ask my son any questions, so that he might forget what had happened like it was a nightmare and so that it might not turn into a traumatic stumbling block for the rest of his life. I put Jan to bed and in a quiet voice I told him a folktale about Ivan, the son of the czar, and the bird of fire. Jan slept fifteen hours straight that night.
One day, some five or six years after losing Jan and finding him again with Petr’s help, I received a letter with Soviet postmarks and Russian lettering on it. This was a time when I no longer trusted or believed in anything at all.
My heart jumped, but only for a fraction of a second. At first glance, I saw it wasn’t Andrei’s handwriting.
A friend of his had written to me, a certain Semyon, a fellow inmate in the Siberian gulag.
Almost as soon as he arrived in the USSR, Andrei had been condemned to forced labor.
He must have died in the camp.
Semyon hadn’t seen him die with his own eyes, but when he left the camp Andrei was near the end.
When they had said goodbye to each other, Andrei said just one thing to Semyon, “Human life is like foam on the water . . . empty. I have lived for so many decades in the river of life and now, at the end, I am throwing off the burden of skin, of the body. And for the last time I will watch the red circle of the sun, in the west, disappear over the horizon.”
Semyon told me in his letter that he would never forget those parting words. Andrei’s last wish, the last word he said to Semyon, was this, “Write to Sylva. Write and tell her that she is always with me, day and night. Address it, do not forget this, to the ‘Blue Butterfly!’”
Semyon gave me more and more details about Andrei’s life in the USSR. He told me several stories in his letters that passed through the hands of the censor. I didn’t find out the whole of these stories until I met Semyon in person, in Moscow. Jan and I took advantage of the 1968 reforms to make the journey that would bring us closer to finding the clues that Andrei had left for us in his wake. So that we might know about his eventual fate.
As soon as his train arrived at Moscow station, Andrei was arrested, as were all the other émigrés who had gone back to their country at the invitation of the Soviet ambassador. They housed them in some provisional lean-tos. After a few days they took Andrei off for his interrogation, blindfolded.
When they removed the blindfold, Andrei found himself in a luxurious, carpeted office. He was welcomed by a young man.
“My name is Nikolai Bragin, an art and literature specialist employed by the NKVD, the political police.” When he saw where he was, Andrei felt the world collapse around him.
Semyon repeated the story just as it had been told to him by Andrei:
“Don’t be nervous, Mr. Polonski, why are you so scared? Stop trembling, I’m not here to chase spies. I completed my studies in the Department of Philosophy, and all I’m trying to do now is have a little conversation with you in a relaxed, friendly atmosphere, and to understand what it is you wish to do, now that you are starting a new life here.”
Andrei didn’t say a word. He found it difficult to stop shaking and was afraid he might have a seizure.
“What kind of work do you see yourself doing in our Soviet motherland?”
Andrei placed a few canvases in front of the man. He mumbled something about intending to continue along similar lines and develop his style further; he hoped that soon he would be able to have a solo exhibition in Moscow, as he had already had several in Prague, and that if people showed any interest, he could teach at the Academy of Fine Arts.
Bragin looked at the paintings coldly.
“No, this is absolutely no good to us at all. Our country doesn’t need this kind of art.”
“Why not? I would like to go on adding to what I’ve already learned from the great Russian artists: Chagall, Tatlin, Goncharova, Malevich.”
“All those painters are representatives of decadent western art.”
“Western? But they have drawn deeply from the Russian tradition.”
“They have been inspired by the bourgeois, depraved West. Many of them have ended up in exile.”
“Excuse me, but you’re mistaken, Mr. Bragin. All those artists were searching for their Russian roots and for Russian spirituality.”
“That was before the revolution. Theirs was a tradition that was not properly in tune with the Russian soul, having been imposed on them since the eighteenth century by French and German artists that the westernized czars invited to Russia so they could get fat on the sweat of our peasants. We, fortunately, have put an end to that particular tradition.”
“There is only one cultural tradition, Mr. Bragin, and it can’t just be swapped for another.”
“Yes it can. We have transformed, and I would almost say regenerated, the bourgeois and aristocratic tradition, and we have replaced the tradition of the drunken, drug-addicted poètes maudits
with the resilient spirit of the working people.”
“The Russian revolution inspired Tatlin and Malevich to create new, revolutionary work.”
“What you have just said is in ideological contradiction to the Soviet people as a whole.”
“What I have said is simply this: as a person dedicated to creative work, I need freedom.”
“If, with your art, you celebrate the freedom, faith, and progress that hold sway over the Soviet Union, then we can reach some kind of agreement.”
“I’m talking about freedom, not about ideology. For an artist, freedom is the air he breathes, without freedom, nothing at all can be created.”
“You and I are not in complete agreement. Personally, I’m convinced that an artist should not be at liberty to do absolutely anything.”
“But if he isn’t, how can his work develop?”
“An artist must not be completely free,” Bragin said firmly, “because ultimately artists exist to serve the motherland. As with any other worker, their efforts must be aimed at increasing the greatness of the Soviet Union.”
“What you are suggesting is that I put myself at the service of the powers that be?”
“The powers that be? No. Of the Motherland. And of the Communist ideal that we are building here.”
“The words Motherland and building are euphemisms for the work of powers that be. What you are offering me is a long, sharp slaughterhouse knife, housed in a sheath of fine, diamond-studded leather.”
“Your poetic metaphors are quite out of place here. All I can do is repeat that one of the greatest successes achieved by our country has been the freedom and equality of all those who live in it. And we will not allow this to be torn from our hands.”
“Freedom? Equality? Soviet jails and forced labor camps are full to the brim with political prisoners.”
“The people who end up in the jails and in the camps are those people who obstruct the creation of a truly free and equal society.”
“Freedom means, above all else, the freedom to decide. And that, in this country, is not possible. You and yours decide everything for everybody else.”
“Why have you come back, then?” asked Bragin in a low voice.
“Why? To make my country richer.”
“No, you have come to be a thorn in our side, to be an obstacle. To demolish what we are building here: our new freedom, a freedom with fair limits.”
“A freedom with limits is a prison.”
“You may say what you please, but it is a freedom designed with mankind in mind. People cannot bear any more freedom than that which we give them.”
“You underestimate mankind.”
“On the contrary, we understand mankind. You don’t understand it one little bit because you live in an ivory tower, as do so many artists, in fact.”
“I don’t know if I understand people any better or worse than anyone else, but despite everything, I keep my faith in people. But you, on the other hand—”
“It is not enough to have faith. Deep down, Mr. Polonski, you do not love mankind. That is why you want to make the people suffer by offering them something that they are incapable of understanding, something that is beyond their reach and which will only, in the end, hurt them.”
“If anybody is causing hurt, it’s you in the NKVD.”
“We only punish and banish those who are in our way when it comes to achieving our aim.”
“What aim?”
“To conquer and hold power firmly within our grasp, so that from this position of authority we may spread happiness everywhere. As far as conquering goes, we have already achieved that, just as we also now have a firm grip on power. All that is required now is to give people what they need and to impose limits whenever it may be necessary for the people’s own good.”
“Do you know who you remind me of, Mr. Bragin? Paradoxically, your opinions are rather similar to those held by the Grand Inquisitor, that prototype of an authoritarian ruler described by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.”
“Paradoxically? Why? Any ruler worth his salt knows that if he wants to stay in power, he must offer something to the people. The Roman emperors offered bread and circuses to their subjects, and the Catholic Church offers a little more: miracles, enigmas, and moral authority. And the Catholic Church was right, that is exactly what the people need. And we will fulfill these needs of the people, following the church’s example.”
“Following the lead of the Catholic Church?”
“We must offer humanity a unique, clear vision of the world that can serve them as a solid reference in their lives. The church has known how to do that for millennia, and when it was necessary, it used the Inquisition to shore up its position.”
“But your struggle is precisely against religion and the church! Your government takes reprisals against the church!”
“Don’t interrupt me. We have offered the Soviet people the miracle of electrification, the miracle of armament—thanks to which we shall soon become a world superpower. Very soon we will give people the miracle of interplanetary flights: this country will be the first to fly through the cosmos, I promise you that.”
“To the detriment of the bread which the Romans used to go on about.”
“The Romans were wrong to do so. The people need miracles more than bread.”
“And what are the enigmas you mentioned?”
“Our representatives are enigmatic. Comrade Stalin is inaccessible, and at the same time he is everywhere; photos of him appear in all the newspapers, his image can be found on all the town squares and in all the offices. And on the first of May, you can see him high up on the tribune, flying close to heaven.”
“You mentioned the third attribute: authority. You can’t tell me, Mr. Bragin, that that also makes people happy.”
“It does so more than any of the other attributes. The people need a strong man before them, whom they may bow down to, and they need a moral authority, a moral conscience, if you will, that releases them from their own consciences. The church knew all about that, too.”
“True authority is moral authority, precisely, but I don’t agree with your view of things: each person must seek that authority within himself, and then perfect it.”
“You are a typical intellectual, Mr. Polonski. How many people are capable of doing what you say? I’m talking about the masses and their god. People need a god, and we provide them with one.”
“And what if the masses cease to believe in that god, one day? Don’t tell me that can’t happen. I would say it’s probable, even; in fact, I’d say it is absolutely definite!”
“No. If a person needs something on which they can base their existence, they grab onto it with all their might and stop asking questions.”
“Under certain conditions, the masses can free themselves of their idols—they can even end up hating them. Even the most untouchable of gods can end up being trod into the ground. Why shouldn’t the masses cultivate hostility toward their leader? If he makes the people suffer, Stalin is showing that he is no better than they are, that he is the same as them, or worse.”
“Allow me to repeat that you are a typical intellectual, Mr. Polonski. Your noble personal ethics are all right for a few select individuals; but I am talking about the masses! We are building a paradise for everybody!” He added, in a low voice, “Join our ranks, Mr. Polonski. We know how to look after the people who are of service to us.”
Andrei had nearly forgotten where he was, and after so many years he was enjoying conversing with someone in his native tongue about a subject that interested him. Maybe this is why he hadn’t noticed that for some time now, Bragin had been losing patience with him.
“So what you’re saying, Mr. Bragin, is that there are two possibilities: either freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom, just as the Grand Inquisitor himself believed. Is that right?”
“Something like that, yes,” Bragin muttered. He was now looking at Andrei again the way a judge,
in an interrogation, observes the detainee.
Andrei, by now relaxed, began to sing, with joyful irony, a song from his Soviet Communist youth days:
Of all the countries which come to mind,
I know of none other than mine
in which all can breathe freely.
At that moment, Bragin grew stern. His transformation from man into bureaucrat was complete; only professional mimes know how to change their expression so quickly.
“This subject is too serious to be made fun of,” he said in an official tone, as if he were addressing an audience of comrades. “Too many enemies are threatening our Motherland for us to be able to lower our guard and release our iron grip on the education of our Soviet people.”
That was when Andrei understood that further conversation would be pointless. Although he knew there was little hope of success, he had one last try, “Even so, I would like to work in my own particular field. I’m sure that if I did so, I could help our country.”
Bragin stood up and coldly replied, “So you say, but this interview is now over.”
Bragin’s initial friendliness had vanished without a trace.
“Perhaps the best thing I could do is take the first train back to Prague,” Andrei said, thoughtful and making an effort to control his inner trembling.
“You have returned from exile and will not be granted permission to travel. You are a citizen of the Soviet Union and the laws of this country now apply to you. According to these laws, nobody is allowed to travel without the approval of the Soviet authorities.”
The Silent Woman Page 25