“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 benches 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.