“I beg you, Zdenek, I cannot hear my ridiculous story! I cannot hear your ridiculous story! I am sick and tired of hearing our story. I am sick and tired of having our story! That was Europe, this is America! I shudder to think I was ever that woman!”
‘“Young actresses,’ he asks her, ‘or young Jewesses?’ Eva says, ‘What difference does that make? Some were Jewish, I suppose. But! am not.’ ‘Well then,’ he says to Eva, ‘why did you want to continue playing this Jewess on the stage for two years, if you weren’t, at the least, a Zionist sympathizer even then?’ Eva replies, ‘I have played a Jewess in Ivanov by Anton Chekhov. I have played a Jewess in The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare.’ This convinces him of nothing. That Eva had wanted to play a Jewess even in a play by Anton Chekhov, where you have to look for one high and low, does not, in the opinion of the vice-minister, strengthen her position. ‘But everybody understands,’ Eva explains to him, “… these are only roles. If half the country thinks I’m a Jew, that does not make it so. They once said I was part gypsy too; probably there are as many people who still believe that because of the ridiculous film I made with Petr. But, Mr. Vice-Minister,’ Eva says, ‘what everybody knows, what is true and indisputable, is that I am none of these things: I am an actress.’ He corrects her. ‘An actress, Madam Kalinova, who likes to portray Jewesses, who portrays them masterfully — that is what everyone knows. What everyone knows is that no one in all of our country can portray a Jewess belter.’ ‘And if that is even true? Is that also a crime in this country now?’ By then Eva is shouting and, of course, she is crying. She is shaking all over. And this makes him nice to her suddenly, certainly nicer than before. He offers brandy to calm her down. He explains that he is not talking about what is the law. He is not even speaking for himself. His heart happens to have been greatly moved in 1956 when he saw Eva playing little Anne Frank. He wept at her performance — he has never forgotten it. His confession causes Eva lo become completely crazy. “Then what are you talking about?’ she asks him. ‘The feelings of the people,’ he replies. ‘The sentiments of the great Czech people. To desert Petr Kalina, an Artist of Merit, to become the mistress of the Zionist Polak would have been damaging enough, but to the people it is unforgivable because of your long history of always playing Jewesses on the stage.’ ‘This makes no sense,” Eva tells him. ‘It cannot be. The Czech people loved Anne Frank, they loved me for portraying her!’ Here he removes from his file all these fake letters by all the offended members of the theatergoing public — fake, just like the writing on the theater wails. This closes the case. Eva is dismissed from the National Theater. The vice-minister is so pleased with himself that he goes around boasting how he handled Polak’s whore and made that arrogant Jew bastard know just who is running this country. He believes that when the news reaches Moscow, the Russians will give him a medal for his cruelty and his anti-Semitism. They have a gold medal just for this. But instead he loses his job. The last I heard he was assistant editor of the publishing house of religious literature. Because the Czechs did love Anne Frank — and because somebody high up wants to be rid of the stupid vice-minister anyway — he is fired for how he has handled Eva Kalinova. Of course for Eva it would have been better if instead of firing the vice-minister they would restore her position as leading actress with the National Theater. But our system of justice is not yet so developed. It is stronger on punishment than on restitution.”
“They are strong on nothing,” says Eva. “It is that I am so weak. That I am stupid and cannot defend myself against all of these bullies! I cry, I shake, I cave in. I deserve what they do. In this world, still to carry on about a man! They should have cut my head off. That would have been justice!”
“And now,” says Sisovsky, “she is with another Jew. At her age. Now Eva is ruined completely.”
She erupts in Czech, he replies in English. “On Sunday,” he says to her, “what will you do at home? Have a drink, Eviczka. Have some whiskey. Try to enjoy life.”
Again, in Czech, she pleads with him, or berates him, or berates herself. In English, and again most gently, he says, “I understand. But Zuckerman is interested.”
“I am going!” she tells me — ”I must go!” and rushes from the living room.
“Welt, I stay…’’ he mutters and empties his glass. Before I can get up to show her out, the door to my apartment is opened and slammed shut.
“Since you are curious,” says Sisovsky, while I pour him another drink, “she said that she is going home and I said what will you do at home and she said, ‘I am sick of your mind and I am sick of my body and I am sick to death of these boring stories!’”
“She wants to hear a new story.”
“What she wants is to hear a new man. Today she is angry because she says I bring her here with me only to show her to you. What am I to do — leave her alone in our room to hang herself? On a Sunday? Wherever we go now in New York and there is a man, she accuses me of this. ‘What is the function of this man?’ she says. There are dramatic scenes where she calls me a pimp. I am the pimp because she wants to leave me and is afraid to leave me because in New York she is nobody and alone.”
“And she can’t go back to Prague?”
“It is better for her not to be Eva Kalinova here than not to be Eva Kalinova there. In Prague, Eva would go out of her mind when she saw who they had cast to play Madam Arkadina.”
“But here she’s out of her mind selling dresses.”
“No,” he says. “The problem is not dresses. It’s Sundays. Sunday is not the best day in the émigré’s week.”
“Why did they let the two of you go?”
“The latest thing is to let people go, people who want to leave the country. Those who don’t want to leave, they must keep silent. And those who don’t want to leave, and who don’t wish to keep silent, they finish up in jail.”
“I didn’t realize, Sisovsky, that on top of everything else you were Jewish.”
“I resemble my mother, who was not. My father was the Jew. Not only a Jew, but like you, a Jew writing about Jews; like you, Semite-obsessed all his life. He wrote hundreds of stories about Jews, only he did not publish one. My father was an introverted man. He taught mathematics in the high school in our provincial town. The writing was for himself. Do vou know Yiddish?”
“I am a Jew whose language is English.”
“My father’s stories were in Yiddish. To read the stories, I taught myself Yiddish. I cannot speak. I never had him to speak it to. He died in 1941. Before the Jews began even to be deported. a Nazi came to our house and shot him.”
“Why him?”
“Since Eva is no longer here, I can tell you. it’s another of my boring European stories. One of her favorites. In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night. My father was horribly shy of people, even of his students. But because he believed that my mother and my brother would be protected if he was courteous with the officer, he went whenever he was called. And they were protected. All the Jews in the town were huddled into the Jewish quarter. For the others things got a little worse every day. but not for my family. For more than a year nobody bothered them. My father could no longer teach at the high school, but he was now allowed to go around as a private tutor to earn some money. At night, after our dinner, he would leave the Jewish quarter and go to play chess with the Gestapo officer. Well, stationed in the town there was another Gestapo officer. He had a Jewish dentist whom he was protecting. The dentist was fixing all his teeth for him. His family too was left alone, and the dentist was allowed to continue with his practice. One Sunday, a Sunday probably much like today, the two Gestapo officers went out drinking together and they got drunk, much the way, thanks to your hospitality, we are getting nicely drunk here. They had an argument. They were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist’s house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him. This enraged the other Nazi so much that the next morning he came to our house and he shot my father, and my brother also, who was eight. When he was taken before the German commandant, my father’s murderer explained, ‘He shot my Jew, so I shot his.’ ‘But why did you shoot the child?’ ‘That’s how God-damn angry I was, sir.’ They were reprimanded and told not to do it again. That was all. But even that reprimand was something. There was no law in those days against shooting Jews in their houses, or even on the street.”