“That isn’t Solzhenitsyn’s point of view.”
“Good for him. Why should I pay everything to try to publish another book with a satirical smile? What am I proving by fighting against them and endangering myself and everyone I know? Unfortunately, however, as much as I mistrust the way of reckless vanity, I suspect even more the way of resignation. Not for others — they do as they must — but for myself. I am not a courageous person, but I cannot be out-and-out cowardly.”
“Or is that also just vanity?”
“Exactly — I am totally in doubt. In Czechoslovakia, if I stay there, yes. I can find some kind of work and at least live in my own country and derive some strength from that. There I can at least be a Czech — but I cannot be a writer. While in the West, I can be a writer, but not a Czech. Here, where as a writer I am totally negligible, I am only a writer. As I no longer have all the other things that gave meaning to life — my country, my language, friends, family, memories, et cetera — here for me making literature is everything. But the only literature I can make is so much about life there that only there can it have the effect I desire.”
“So, what’s even heavier than the weight of the banning is this doubt that it foments.”
“In me. Only in me. Eva has no doubt. She has only hatred.’’
Eva is astonished. “Hatred for what?”
“For everyone who has betrayed you,” he says to her. “For everyone who deserted you. You hate them and wish they were dead.”
“I don’t even think of them anymore.”
“You wish them to be tortured in Hell.”
“I have forgotten them completely.”
“I should like to tell you about Eva Kalinova.” he says to me. “It is too vulgar to announce such a thing, but it is too ridiculous for you not to know. It is personally humiliating that I should ask you to endure the great drama of my doubt while Eva sits here like no one.”
“I am happy to be sitting like no one,” she says. “This is not necessary.”
“Eva,” he says, “is Prague’s great Chekhovian actress. Go to Prague and ask. No one there will dispute it, not even the regime. There is no Nina since hers, no Irina, no Masha.”
“I don’t want this,” she says.
“When Eva gets on the streetcar in Prague, people still applaud. All of Prague has been in love with her since she was eighteen.”
“Is that why they write on my wall ‘the Jew’s whore’? Because they are in love with me? Don’t be stupid. That is over.”
“Soon she will be acting again,” he assures me.
‘To be an actress in America, you must speak English that does not give people a headache!”
“Eva. sit down.”
But her career is finished. She cannot sit.
“You cannot be on the stage and speak English that nobody can understand! Nobody will hire you to do that. I do not want to perform in more plays — I have had enough of being an artificial person. I am tired of imitating all the touching Irinas and Ninas and Mashas and Sashas. It confuses me and it confuses everyone else. We are people who fantasize too much to begin with. We read too much, we feel too much, we fantasize too much — we want all the wrong things! I am glad to be finished with all my successes. The success comes to the person anyway, not to the acting. What good does it do? What does it serve? Only egomania. Brezhnev has never given me a chance to be an ordinary nobody who performs a real job. I sell dresses — and dresses are needed more by people than stupid touching Chekhovian actresses!”
“But what,” I ask, “do Chekhovian actresses need?”
“To be in the life of others the way they arc in a play, and not in a play the way they are supposed to be in the life of others! They need to be rid of their selfishness and their feelings and their looks and their an!” Beginning to cry, she says, “At last I am rid of mine!”
“Eva, tell him about your Jewish demons. He is the American authority on Jewish demons. She is pursued, Mr. Zuckerman, by Jewish demons. Eva, you must tell him about the Vice-Minister of Culture and what happened with him after you left your husband. Eva was married to somebody that in America you have never heard of, but in Czechoslovakia the whole country loves him. He is a very beloved theatrical personality. You can watch him on television every week. He has all the old mothers crying when he sings Moravian folk songs. When he talks to them with that dreadful voice, the girls are all swooning. You hear him on the jukeboxes, you hear him on the radio, wherever you go you hear this dreadful voice that is supposed to be a hot-blooded gypsy. If you are that man’s wife you don’t have to worry. You can play all the great heroines at the National Theater. You can have plenty of room to live. You can take all the trips you want abroad. If you are that man’s wife, they leave you alone.”
“He leaves you alone too,” she says. “Zdenek, why do you persecute me? I do not care to be an ironical Czech character in an ironical Czech story. Everything that happens in Czechoslovakia. they shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Pure Schweik, pure Kafka.’ I am sick of them both.”
“Tell me about your Jewish demons,” I say.
“I don’t have them,” she replies, looking furiously at Sisovsky.
“Eva fell in love with a Mr. Polak and left her husband for him. Now, if you are Mr. Polak’s mistress,” Sisovsky says, “they do not leave you alone. Mr. Polak has had many mistresses and they have never left any of them alone. Eva Kalinova is married to a Czechoslovak Artist of Merit, but she leaves him to take up with a Zionist agent and bourgeois enemy of the people. And this is why they write ‘the Jew’s whore’ on the wall outside the theater, and send poems to her in the mail about her immorality, and drawings of Polak with a big Jewish nose. This is why they write letters to the Minister of Culture denouncing her and demanding that she be removed from the stage. This is why she is called in to see the Vice-Minister of Culture. Leaving a great Artist of Merit and a boring, sentimental egomaniac like Petr Kalina for a Jew and a parasite like Pavel Polak, she is no better than a Jew herself.”
“Please,” says Eva, “stop telling this story. All these people, they suffer for their ideas and for their banned books, and for democracy to return to Czechoslovakia — they suffer for their principles, for their humanity, for their hatred of the Russians, and in this terrible story I am still suffering for love!”
“ ‘Do you know,’ he says to her, our enlightened Vice-Minister of Culture, ‘do you know. Madam Kalinova,’” Sisovsky continues, “ ‘that half our countrymen believe you really are a Jewess, by blood?’ Eva says to him, very dryly — for Eva can be a very dry, very beautiful, very intelligent woman when she is not angry with people or frightened out of her wits — very dryly she says, ‘My dear Mr. Vice-Minister, my family was being persecuted as Protestants in Bohemia in the sixteenth century.’ But this does not stop him — he knows this already. He says to her, ‘Tell me — why did you play the role of the Jewess Anne Frank on the stage when you were only nineteen years old?’ Eva answers, ‘I played the role because I was chosen from ten young actresses. And all of them wanted ii more than the world.’ ‘Young actresses,’ he asks her, ‘or young Jewesses?’”