“Shut the fuck up.”
“Beautiful word. Shut the fuck up. More.”
“Fuck it all. Fuck everything.”
“Yes, fuck it all. Fuck everything and fuck everybody. Fuck the world till it cannot fuck me anymore. See, I learn fast. In America I would be a famous writer like you. You are afraid to fuck me. Why is that? Why do you write this book about fucking that makes you so famous if you are afraid to fuck somebody? You hate fucking everybody or just me?”
“Everybody.”
“He is kind to you, Olga,” Bolotka says. “He is a gentleman, so he doesn’t tell you the truth because you are so hopeless.”
“Why am I hopeless?”
“Because in America the girls don’t talk to him like this.”
“What do they say in America? Teach me to be an American girl.”
“First you would take your hand off my prick.”
“I see. Okay. Now what?”
“We would talk to each other. We would try to get to know each other first.”
“Why? I don’t understand this. Talk about what? The Indians?”
“Yes, we would talk at length about the Indians.”
“And then I put my hand on your prick.”
“That’s right.”
“And then you fuck me.”
“That would be the way we would do it, yes.”
“It is a very strange country.”
“It’s one of them.”
Mr. Vodicka, pink with excitement, is dragging the boy through the room. Everything excites Mr. Vodicka: Olga dismissing him like a bothersome child, Bolotka addressing him like a whipped dog, the indifferent boy weary already of being so cravenly desired. The stage-set splendors of Klenek’s drawing room — velvet burgundy draperies, massive carved antiques, threadbare Oriental carpets, tiers of dark romantic landscapes leaning from the paneled oak walls — evoke no more from the boy than a mean little smirk. Been everywhere already, seen the best in brothels by the time he was twelve.
Mr. Vodicka is fastidious with the introductions. Bolotka translates. “He is saying to Olga that the boy has never seen a woman. That’s how Mr. Vodicka has got him in from the street. He promised he would show him one. He is telling Olga that she has to show it to him, otherwise the boy will go.”
“What do you do now?” I ask Olga.
“What I do? I show it to him. I have you to fuck me. Mr. Vodicka has only dreams to fuck. He is more frightened of everything than I am.”
“You’re doing it out of sentiment.”
Placing my hands over her breasts, Olga says, “If it weren’t for sentiment, Zuckerman, one person would not pass another person a glass of water.”
Czech exchange. Bolotka translates.
Olga says to Mr. V., “First I want to see his.”
The boy won’t hear of it. Plump, smooth, dark, and crueclass="underline" a very creamy caramel dessert.
Olga waves her hand. The hell with it, get out, go.
“Why do you want to see it?” I ask her.
“I don’t. I have seen too many already. Mr. Vodicka wants to see it.”
For five minutes she addresses the boy in the softest, most caressing Czech, until, at last, he shuffles childishly toward the sofa and, frowning at the ceiling, undoes his zipper. Olga summons him one step closer and then, with two fingers and a thumb, reaches delicately into his trousers. The boy yawns. She withdraws his penis. Mr. Vodicka looks. We all look. Light entertainment in occupied Prague.
“Now,” says Olga, “they will put on television a photograph of me with his prick. Everywhere in this house there are cameras. On the street someone is always snapping my picture. Half the country is employed spying on the other half. I am a rotten degenerate bourgeois negativist-pseudo-artist — and this will prove it. This is how they destroy me.”
“Why do you do it then?”
“It is too silly not to.” In English she says to Mr. V., “Come, I’ll show it to him.” She zips the boy up and leads him away, Mr. Vodicka eagerly following.
“Are cameras hidden here?” I ask Bolotka.
“Ktenek says no, only microphones. Maybe there are cameras in the bedrooms, for the fucking. Bui you go on the floor and turn the light out. Don’t worry. Don’t be scared. You want to fuck her, fuck her on the floor. Nobody would take your picture there.”
“Who is the lover who wants to kill her?”
“Don’t be afraid of him; he won’t kill her or you either. He doesn’t even want to see her. One night Olga is drunk and angry because he is tired of her, and she finds out he has a new girl friend, so she telephones the police and she tells them that he has threatened to murder her. The police come, and by then the joke is over and he is undressed and sorry about the new girl friend. But the police are also drunk, so they lake him away. The whole country is drunk. Our president must go on television for three hours to tell the people to stop drinking and go back ‘ to work. You get onto a streetcar at night when the great working class is on its way home, and the great working class smells like a brewery.”
“What happened to Olga’s lover?”
“He has a note from a doctor saying he is a psychiatric case.”
“Is he?”
“He carries the note to be left alone. They leave you alone if you can prove you are crazy. He is a perfectly reasonable person: he is interested in fucking women and writing poems, and not in stupid politics. This proves he is not crazy. But the police come and they read the note and they take him to the lunatic asylum. He is still there. Olga thinks now he will kill her because of what she did. But he is happy where he is. In the lunatic asylum he is not required to be a worker all day in the railway office. There he has some peace and quiet and at last he writes something again. There he has the whole day to write poems instead of railroad tickets.”
“How do you all live like this?”
“Human adaptability is a great blessing.”
Olga, who has returned, sits herself on my lap.
“Where is Mr. Vodicka?” I ask her.
“He stays in the loo with the boy.”
“What did you do to them, Olga?” Bolotka asks.
“I did nothing. When I showed it to him, the boy screamed. I took down my pants and he screamed, ‘It’s awful.’ But Mr. Vodicka was bending over, with his hands on his knees, and studying me through his thick glasses. Maybe he wants to write about something new. He is studying me through his glasses, and then he says to the boy, ‘Oh, I don’t know, my friend — it’s not our cup of tea, but from an aesthetic point of view it’s not horrible?”
Ten-thirty. I am to meet Hos and Hoffman in a wine bar at eleven. Everyone believes I am visiting Prague to commiserate with their proscribed writers when in fact I am here to strike a deal with the woman full of touha on my lap.
“You have to get up, Olga. I’m going.”
“I come with you.”
“You must have patience,” Bolotka says to me. “Ours is a small country. We do not have so many millions of fifteen-year-old girls. But if you will have patience, she will come. And she will be worth it. The little Czech dumpling that we all like to eat. What is your hurry? What are you afraid of? You see — nothing happens. You do whatever you want in Prague and nobody cares. You cannot have such freedom in New York.”
“He does not want a girl of fifteen,” says Olga. “They are old whores by now, those little girls. He wants one who is forty.”
I slide Olga off my lap and stand up to leave.
“Why do you act like this?” Olga asks. “You come all the way to Czechoslovakia and then you act like this. I will never see you again.”