“And your mother?”
“My mother hid on a farm. There I was born, two months later. Neither of us looks like my father. Neither did my brother, but his short life was just bad luck. We two survived.”
“And why did your father, with an Aryan wife, write stories in Yiddish? Why not in Czech? He must have spoken Czech to the students at the high school.”
“Czech was for Czechs to write. He married my mother, but he never thought he was a real Czech. A Jew who marries a Jew is able at home to forget he’s a Jew. A Jew who marries an Aryan like my mother has her face there always to remind him.”
“He didn’t ever write in German?”
“We were not Sudeten Germans, you see, and we were not Prague Jews. Of course German was less foreign to him than Czech, because of Yiddish. German he insisted on for my brother to be properly educated. He himself read Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, but his own father had been, not even a town Jew like him, he had been a Jew in the farmlands, a village shopkeeper. To the Czechs such Jews spoke Czech, but in the family they spoke only Yiddish. All of this is in my father’s stories: homelessness beyond homelessness. One story is called ‘Mother Tongue.’ Three pages only, about a little Jewish boy who speaks bookish German, Czech without the native flavor, and the Yiddish of people simpler than himself. Kafka’s homelessness, if I may say so, was nothing beside my father’s. Kafka had at least the nineteenth century in his blood — all those Prague Jews did. Kafka belonged to literature, if nothing else. My father belonged to nothing. If he had lived, I think that i would have developed a great antagonism to my father. I would have thought. ‘What is this man so lonely for? Why is he so sad and withdrawn? He should join the revolution — then he would not sit with his head in his hands, wondering where he belongs.’”
“Sons are famous the world over for generous thoughts about fathers.”
“When I came to New York and wrote my letter to you, I said to Eva, ‘1 am a relative of this great man.’ I was thinking of my father and his stories. Since we have come from Europe, I have already read fifty American novels about Jews. In Prague I knew nothing about this incredible phenomenon and how vast it was. Between the wars in Czechoslovakia my father was a freak. Even had he wished to publish his stories, where would they have appeared? Even if he had published all two hundred of them, no one would have paid attention — not to that subject. But in America my father would have been a celebrated writer. Had he emigrated before I was bom, had he come to New York City in his thirties, he would have been discovered by some helpful person and published in the best magazines. He would be something more now than just another murdered Jew. For years I never thought of my father, now every minute i wonder what he would make of the America I am seeing. I wonder what America would have made of him. He would be seventy-two. I am obsessed now with this great Jewish writer that might have been.”
“His stories are that good?”
“1 am not exaggerating his excellence. He was a deep and wonderful writer.”
“Like whom? Sholem Aleichem? Isaac Babel?”
“I can tell you only that he was elliptical, humble, self-conscious, all in his own way. He could be passionate, he could be florid, he could be erudite — he could be anything. No, this is not the Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem. This is the Yiddish of Flaubert. His last work, ten little stories about Nazis and Jews, the saddest commentary I have ever read about the worst life has to offer. They are about the family of the Nazi commandant he played chess with at night. About his visits to the house and how charmed they all were. He called them ‘Stories about Chess.’”
“What became of those stories?”
“They are with my books in Prague. And my books in Prague are with my wife. And my wife does not like me so much anymore. She has become a drank because of me. Our daughter has become crazy because of me and lives with her aunt because of me. The police will not leave my wife alone because of me. I don’t think I’ll ever see my father’s stories again. My mother goes to ask my wife for her husband’s stories and my wife recounts for her all of my infidelities. She shows my mother photographs of all my mistresses, unclothed. These too I unfortunately left behind with my books.”
“Will she destroy your father’s stories?”
“No, no. She couldn’t do it. Olga is a writer too. In Czechoslovakia she is very well known for her writing, for her drinking, and for showing everybody her cunt. You would like Olga. She was once very beautiful, with beautiful long legs and gray cat-eyes and her books were once beautiful too. She is a most compliant woman. It is I alone whom she opposes. Anything another man wants, Olga will do it. She will do it well. If you were to visit Prague, and you were to meet Olga and Olga were to fall in love with you, she would even give you my father’s stories, if you were to go about it the right way. She loves love. She does anything for love. An American writer, a famous, attractive, American genius who does not practice the American innocence to a shameless degree — if he were to ask for my father’s stories, Olga would give them to him. I am sure of it. The only thing is not to lay her too soon.”
At Klenek’s every Tuesday night, with or without Klenek in residence, there is a wonderful party to go to. Klenek is currently directing a film in France. Because he is technically still married to a German baroness, he is by Czech law allowed to leave the country half of each year, ostensibly to be with her. The Czech Film industry is no longer open to him, but he continues to live in his palazzo and is permitted to associate with his old friends, many of whom the regime now honors as its leading enemies. No one is sure why he is privileged — perhaps because Klenek is useful propaganda, somebody the regime can hold up to its foreign critics as an artist who lives as he wishes. Also, by letting him work abroad, they can continue to tax his large foreign earnings. And, explains Bolotka, Klenek may well be a spy. “Probably he tells them things,” says Bolotka. “Not that it matters. Nobody tells him anything, and he knows nobody tells him anything, and they know nobody tells him anything.”