Once our entire class arrived in a border village to help with the harvest. The trucks were arriving at the thresher, loaded with sheaves of grain. Our homeroom teacher selected four of us to pass the sheaves to a man who would toss them into the thresher. The man was a re-emigrant, a muscular farmer whose features were hidden behind a wet sponge he had attached to his face; clouds of dust poured from the thresher.
At first we took turns, but after about an hour I was the only one left with the man. I would hand him sheaves as fast as I could, but the dust bothered me so much that I started to suffocate. I was ashamed to quit, however, and leave him by himself.
My classmates considered me either a blockhead or a strikebreaker. But I was usually able to reestablish my reputation in the evening, when I would compose love letters for their absent loves, even verses.
On one brigade when we were pulling onions, I composed “Onion Blues” for our improvised jazz orchestra:
Evening falls
My hands they reek of onion.
Unspeakably tormented,
I go on day after day,
Till I myself become an onion.
Before I give up my soul on these broad fields,
I want to sing my onion blues
Into your ear, my love.
My sad, my final
My onion blues.
*
At the end of spring 1946, I came down with measles. Because of my age, it laid me out. For several days, my fever was so high I was delirious. When the illness finally passed, the doctor gave me a thorough examination and saw from the electrocardiogram that I’d had, or still had, myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle. The doctor prescribed six weeks of complete rest: lying, lying, and more lying. At most I could get up to eat at the table.
My prostration was oppressive primarily because it plunged me into solitude. I had lost all my friends during the war and so far hadn’t been able to make any new ones. It was as if I was afraid that every new attachment would end in tragedy.
I read a lot. This was actually the first time in my life that I had both the time and the opportunity. No books were to be had in Terezín. We didn’t have a lot of books at home. Those that my parents had accumulated before the war were lost during the occupation. But at an old bookbinder’s shop a few buildings down from ours, Mother purchased a buckram-bound copy of War and Peace. Finally I had something to read, something that promised to absorb me for several weeks. I read avidly, drawn into the flow of events. The translation was somewhat archaic, full of participles. But I soon stopped noticing the style. It belonged to a far-off time, full of noblemen — the somewhat awkward Pierre Bezukhov, the Rostov family, and Prince Andrei. Then there was the great conqueror Napoleon, who slogged through broad Rus, where he succumbed to defeat just like his miserable successor.
From this epic novel I came away with the conviction that greatness that cannot be measured in terms of good and evil is worthless. It’s possible to be happy in life, but whether anyone manages to or not depends primarily on his ability to detach himself from his own suffering and from his concern for things and property, because all happiness comes not from insufficiency but rather from superfluity.
During my illness I also listened to the radio a lot. Two big trials had just concluded: one in Nuremburg and the other in Czechoslovakia, which dealt with the government during the protectorate. Sometimes the second one was broadcast live. I followed it fascinated. Shortly before the beginning of the new school year, my desk mate Jirka came by to visit and promised he’d save my place next to him. Everyone in the class, he said, was looking forward to my return. I knew he was exaggerating. Then he presented me with a gift, which I opened right there in front of him. It was a wartime paperback edition of Plato’s “Phelibus.” My classmate’s visit unexpectedly brought me back to life. I started looking forward to new encounters and thinking less about my dead friends.
That very evening I read Plato’s dialogue about the truly happy life. Being used to fiction, I devoured the strange and abstruse morsels of Socrates’s arguments. To this very day, I remember that there are clean pleasures and unclean ones, higher and lower, and that the intellect is much more beneficial than pleasure for human life and happiness.
In school I quickly caught up with the little material I’d missed; I had the advantage that Father, during his brief visits to Prague, was able to explain the parts of mathematics that the teacher couldn’t, and Mother patiently helped me translate elemental Latin texts: Qui dedit beneficium, taceat, narret, qui accepit. Accipere quam facere praestat irjuriam.
My mother was a frail, silently suffering romantic and at the same time an ascetic. I never once saw her drink even a glass of beer. She never smoked, and you could not express in her presence a single word that was even a little vulgar. When she spoke about her childhood and youth, it was always memories of various miseries and injustices: hunger during the First World War, when she would stand in line for bread in the early morning darkness. The bread never arrived or only a couple of loaves were available, and she wouldn’t get one. At barely eleven years of age, she was sent by a charity organization, the Czech Heart, to some rich farmer who considered her a useless little girl, a good-for-nothing, because she couldn’t lift a full bucket of water.
She was well-read and loved Russian and French literature: Anna Karenina and Romain Rolland’s The Soul Enchanted and Jean-Christophe. The first books that came into my possession I received from her: Anatole France and Stendhal. I was later guided by her taste and purchased short stories by Turgenev and Gogol.
In Terezín I once managed to filch from the storeroom a suitcase that had been left by a dead inmate, and I found some French novel, or maybe it was a book of poetry. I don’t remember the title or the author, but it was one of the few things Mother brought home with her to Prague.
The main thing she brought back from Terezín was fear. Even after the war had ended and no one was after us, she never ceased to be afraid. She didn’t want us to attend large gatherings of people and asked us not to speak about our time in the concentration camp, especially that we had been imprisoned on the basis of race. The word “Jew” never crossed her lips.
My mother created in me the image that women were frail and vulnerable. They were sufferers who needed protection. They were a combination of beauty and inaccessible corporeality, which they would prefer to be rid of.
*
Scarcely had I returned to school after my illness when I fell in love with one of my classmates. I could admire the object of my affection only from afar. To me she seemed beautiful, smart, and virtuous, and she was afflicted with a debilitated hip joint. I didn’t dare reveal even a little of my feelings to her. I could only dream and, at least for myself, put my feelings into words. So I started writing my first novel.
It was a love story beyond compare — at first unhappy but later blessed with a happy ending — between a girl crippled in an auto accident and a poor medical student. I managed to cobble together the beginning and outline the initial complications caused by the uncomprehending parents and treacherous and scheming friends, along with the oppressive social situation of both protagonists. Then, as I couldn’t wait for the denouement, I wrote the ending in advance. I used up several school notebooks, and in the story I made it all the way to kisses and embraces. In reality I didn’t even come close to touching the object of my adoration.