“What’s the point then?”
“With Klenek the point is to spy not on politics but on sex. The house is bugged everywhere. The secret police listen outside and look in the windows. It’s their job. Sometimes they even see something and get excited. This is a pleasant distraction from the pettiness and viciousness of their regular work. It does them good. It does everybody good. Fifteen-year-old girls come to Klenek’s. They dress up like streetwalkers and come from as far away as a hundred miles. Everybody, even schoolchildren, is looking for fun. You like orgies, you come with me. Since the Russians, the best orgies in Europe are in Czechoslovakia. Less liberty, better fucks. You can do whatever you want at Klenek’s. No drugs, but plenty of whiskey. You can fuck, you can masturbate, you can look at dirty pictures, you can look at yourself in the mirror, you can do nothing. All the best people are there. Also the worst. We are all comrades now. Come to the orgy, Zuckerman — you will see the final stage of the revolution.”
Klenek’s is a small seventeenth-century palazzo on the Kampa, a little residential island we reach by descending a long wet stairway from the Charles Bridge. Standing in the cobbled square outside of Klenek’s, I hear the Vltava churning past the deep stone embankment. I’ve walked with Bolotka from my hotel through the maze of the ghetto, passing on the way the capsized tombstones of what he informs me is the oldest Jewish cemetery left in Europe. Within the iron grating, the jumble of crooked, eroded markers looks less like a place of eternal rest than something a cyclone has tom apart. Twelve thousand Jews buried in layers in what in New York would be a small parking lot. Drizzle dampening the tombstones, ravens in the trees.
Klenek’s: large older women in dark rayon raincoats, young pretty women with jewels and long dresses, stout middle-aged men dressed in boxy suits and looking like postal clerks, elderly men with white hair, a few slight young men in American jeans — but no fifteen-year-old girls. Bolotka may be having some fun exaggerating for his visitor the depths of Prague depravity — a little cold water on free-world fantasies of virtuous political suffering.
Beside me on a sofa, Bolotka explains who is who and who likes what.
“That one was a journalist till they fired him. He loves pornography. I saw him with my eyes fucking a girl from behind and reading a dirty book at the same time. That one, he is a terrible abstract painter. The best abstract painting he did was the day the Russians came. He went out and painted over all the street signs so the tanks wouldn’t know where they were. He has the longest prick in Prague. That one. the little clerk, that is Mr. Vodicka. He is a very good writer, an excellent writer, but everything scares him. If he sees a petition, he passes out. When you bring him to life again, he says he will sign it: he has ninety-eight percent reason to sign, and only two percent reason not to sign, and he has only to think about the two percent and he will sign. By the next day the two percent has grown to one hundred percent. Just this week Mr. Vodicka told the government that if he made bad politics he is sorry. He is hoping this way they will let him write again about his perversion.”
“Will they?”
“Of course not. They will tell him now to write a historical novel about Pilsen beer.”
We are joined by a tall, slender woman, distinguished by a mass of hair dyed the color of a new penny and twisted down over her forehead in curls. Heavy white makeup encases her sharp, birdlike face. Her eyes are gray cat-eyes, her smile is beckoning. “I know who you are.” she whispers to me.
“And you are who?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even feel I exist.” To Bolotka: “Do I exist?”
“This one is Olga.” Bolotka says. “She has the best legs in Prague. She is showing them to you. Otherwise she does not exist.”
Mr. Vodicka approaches Olga, bows like a courtier, and takes her hand. He is a little, unobtrusive man of sixty, neatly dressed and wearing heavy spectacles. Olga pays him no attention.
“My lover wants to kill me,” she says to me.
Mr. Vodicka is whispering in her ear. She waves him away, but passionately he presses her hand to his cheek.
“He wants to know if she has any boys for him,” Bolotka explains.
“Who is she?”
“She was the most famous woman in the country. Olga wrote our love stories. A man stood her up in a restaurant and she wrote a love story, and the whole country talked about why he stood her up. She had an abortion and she told the doctor it could be one of eleven men, and the whole country debated whether it could actually be so many. She went to bed with a woman and the whole country read the story and was guessing who it was. She was seventeen, she already wrote a bestseller, Touha. Longing. Our Olga loves most the absent thing. She loves the Bohemian countryside. She loves her childhood. But always something is missing. Olga suffers the madness that follows after loss. And this even before the Russians. Klenek saw her in a café a tall country girl, her heart full of touha, and he took her here to live with him. This is over twenty years ago. For seven years Olga was married. She had a child. Poor child. Now her husband runs off with the other famous woman in our country, a beautiful Czech actress who he will destroy in America, and Olga. Klenek looks after.”
“Why does she need looking after?”
“Why do you need looking after?” Bolotka asks her.
“This is awful,” she says. “I hear stories about myself tonight-Stories about who I fuck. I would never fuck such people.”
“Why do you need looking after. Olga?” Bolotka asks again.
“Because I’m shaking. Feel me shaking. I never stop shaking. I am frightened of everything.” Points to me, “I am frightened of him.” She flops down onto the sofa, in the space between Bolotka and me. I feel pressing against mine the best legs in Prague. Also believe I feel the touha.
“You don’t act frightened,” I say.
“Since I am frightened of everything it is as well to go in one direction as the other. If I get into too much trouble, you will come and marry me and take me to America. I will telegram and you will come and save me.’’ She says to Bolotka, “Do you know what Mr. Vodicka wants now? He has a boy who has never seen a woman. He wants me to show it to him. He is going into the street to get him.” Then, to me: “Why are you in Prague?
Are you looking for Kafka? The intellectuals all come here looking for Kafka. Kafka is dead. They should be looking for Olga. Are you planning to make love to anybody in Prague? If so, you wilt let me know,” To Bolotka: “Kouba. There is Kouba! I cannot be in this house with that Kouba!” To me: “You want to know why I need looking after? Because of stupid communists like Kouba!” She points to a short man with a bald head who is animatedly entertaining a circle of friends in the center of the milling crowd. “Kouba knew what the good life was for all of us. It has taken the Koubas twenty years to learn, and they’re still too stupid to leam. All brains and no intelligence. None. Kouba is one of our great communist heroes. It is surprising he is still in Prague. Not all of our great communist heroes who were in Italy with their girl friends when the Russians invaded have bothered to come back from their holiday yet. Do you know why? Because when the Russians occupied Prague, at last they were free of their wives. Some of our greatest communist heroes are now with their girl friends teaching Marxism-Leninism in New York. They are only sorry that the revolution fell into the wrong hands. Otherwise they are like Kouba — still one hundred percent sure they are right. So why do you come to Prague? You are not looking for Kafka, none of our heroes in New York sent you, and you don’t want to fuck. I love this word fuck. Why don’t we have this word, Rudolf?” To me again: “Teach me how to say fuck. This is a good fucking party. I was really fucked. Wonderful word. Teach me.”