The Drowning Of A Goldfish (3 page)

Sorrow killed his wife. His son, my grandfather, moved into a shack formerly reserved for farm laborers, so shabby that even the estate executor did not want to seize it. He got married. Teeth gritting, he sired children, future helping hands. He worked the fields. Instead of a cow, he yoked his wife. He spared the cow. He needed her milk for sale.

He saved money and bought fields. The soil was poor and stony. The children picked rocks and made a wall. He protected his property and made it grow. He had no time to waste. One can die before striking it rich.

He would lose patience. In vents of rage, he would beat his wife and children with the iron chain he used to tie his dog. The dog would not profit from this moment of freedom. He would coil up. His turn would not fail to come.

Some children died. They were replaced. What else is a woman's belly for?

The children went to school only if the weather was too foul to work the fields. The way was long. It rained. It snowed. It froze. One would not squander money for shoes. The skin cracked and bled, then hardened and healed.

In spite of all that, my father would become the best pupil in his school. He pursued his dream: to end his poverty and become a “gentleman.”

Secretly, at night, in the dim light of a candle he had made from waxy drippings collected at the parish church—he never would steal anything—he did his homework. Learning the texts by heart, he devoured books.

At fourteen, he left for the city. If he failed, he had no place to go back to. The farm would, one day, be passed on to his younger brother.

Father worked during the day and studied at night. He ate sparingly and saved his money.

He entered a banking establishment belonging to two Jewish brothers. Working diligently and endlessly he became indispensable and irreplaceable, so the brothers offered him a partnership. He accepted and became one of the most influential men on the Prague Stock Exchange.

At eighteen he earned his first million. He could afford to marry my mother, the fair princess of his dreams.

When, after nine years of marriage, a girl was born, he was not disappointed. He held his mother, who was superior to his father in every way, in high esteem.

He expected that I would love him, that I would understand him, that I would surpass him.

I was a peculiar blend, in looks resembling my granfather, but ethically like my father. Intellectually, I was indebted to both of them. Convinced of our equality, if not my superiority, I was a good disciple of my grandfather's and did not see why I should make my father's ambitions mine. I was an explosive mixture, a bolt out of the blue. A charming little girl I could never be.

In 1945, the banks were nationalized. My father's career was finished.

During the Nazi occupation, he became a member of the Resistance, and his combat friends did not forget him. They offered him several interesting and advantageous opportunities in the socialist business world, provided that he, like them, would become a member of the Communist Party. Most of them did not believe in communism, but they considered it reasonable to adapt to the new conditions of life.

Father was more honest than reasonable.

In 1939, he had refused, for the same reason, to emigrate to Switzerland in order to pursue his banking career with the eldest of his partners. Richard had been farsighted enough to imagine the life of a Jew in Czechoslovakia under the Nazi regime. Emil, the younger brother, and my father remained in Prague. Only the rats jump from a sinking boat.

Emil did not consider himself a Jew; he was as Czech as my father. The Germans had another opinion. In 1942, we were informed that it was no longer necessary to send parcels to Mauthausen—a concentration camp in Austria—as the recipient had died from a “heart attack.”

In 1948, the Communists took power in Czechoslovakia.

In 1949, my father was imprisoned along with other “enemies of the people,” he, who always voted for the Social Democrats, persuaded that every human being has the right to work and to be educated.

He was accused of sequestering an arsenal in his villa in Senokosy with the intention of supporting an insurrection against the “progressive forces” of his own country.

This “arsenal” consisted of two revolvers, offered to him by his Soviet friends.

In 1945, Father had put our house in Senokosy at the disposal of the Red Army. He was convinced that without the sacrifices of the Russian people, the West could never have overcome Germany. I was raised to love the Russians. How beautiful it was on May 9, 1945, the day the Red Army arrived in Senokosy.

From that moment on, I shall try to understand …

Chestnut trees, with leaves supporting pyramids of blossoms, slit their veins, and the scarlet daggers pierce the whiteness of fleshy calyxes.

It is stifling hot. The wings of bees whip the sticky, immobile air.

Far away, on the horizon, cannons are firing. The volley of shells explodes in my eardrums.

Still as a Siamese cat, I burn impatiently to push the door, to leave my first class waiting room, to embark on the train for life.

But it is the devil and his flock who enter with breathtaking speed; the Soviet tanks clear their way through the scenery of my childhood.

I still love them, the soldiers with their worn out faces, their eyes, reflecting the vastness of the Russian steppes, and their sensitive hands like those of accordion players.

They are my big, Slavic brothers, bold, real, powerful, saviors descended from the cross to take me in their arms.

When the Germans invaded the Don basin, to introduce the new master in all his splendor, they amused themselves by throwing old people, children, and women with babies in their arms down mine shifts.

For a long time thereafter, the air trembled, pierced by their shrill cries. The “masters” did not waste their ammunition on these Untermenschen (under-men). Thrift is considered a fundamental virtue by the German middle class, from which the Nazis were recruited.

But the Russian people, donor of warm blood, swelling the veins of the world, the lamb and the wolf, the victim and the torturer, framed in the legends of pious lies and absolute truths, how does one deal with such a paradox?

I can grasp it only through Russian intellectuals, who have always been mistreated, assassinated, expatriated by their own people and whose tongue was so often cut out.

In 1848, the Czechs, tired of their underprivileged position in the Austrian empire, sent a commission to Russia with a mandate to explore the possibility of uniting the Slavs under the Russian hegemony.

The head of the delegation was the journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský, a progressive, well-educated, and sensible man. He had just returned from his banishment in Brixen, in the Tyrolean Alps, where he had been relegated, with other revolutionaries, by Emperor Franz Josef.

Each time I pass through Brixen, I admire the beauty of its countryside as well as the clemency of this Kaiser (emperor) who had brought the conspirators to Brixen, where they were lodged and fed at his expense. Their sole duty was to present themselves once a week at the Brixen constabulary, to prove they had not escaped. The rest of the time they were among their own lot, conspiring to their hearts' content.

But moral standards change with time, and I am the child of the concentration camps era, where the significance of cruelty took on another dimension.

The delegation of Czech intellectuals returned from Russia deeply troubled. They could not help but notice the misery, the repression, the brutality of the Russian people, in whom they had put so much trust. Seeing this, they had to take into consideration the corruption and dissoluteness of czarism.

The delegation drew their conclusion and announced to their compatriots that they were mistaken, that their wild hopes of uniting the Slavs under Russian hegemony were misguided, and that the only solution to their problem was social and political reform within the Austrian empire.

The courage to admit this error deserves our respect. This attitude is also very logical, since the Czech intellectual is not a disheveled individualist perched on top of his ivory tower yelling, “Me, me me,” in the vacuum surrounding him.

He is a human being, conscious of the deficiencies of his knowledge and aware of his responsibility in front of those even less gifted.

The falsifications of some Western intellectuals regarding Soviet communism, their dangerous half-truths, their assertions knowingly contrary to reality, are also logical. The hardening of the heart entails the softening of the brains.

Hence, at the end of the 19th century, the Czechs' belief in Russia ended in disillusion.

However, during the period of the Nazi occupation, something very strange happened: the mirage had risen from the dead; the myth of the Savior, coming from the East, was reborn.

I comprehend the nature of this phenomenon. An anguished cry, heard from afar, can resemble a cheer. We all have a tendency to replace the intolerable reality with a comforting illusion.

Thus, the Liberation of 1945 became in my eyes an access to freedom. And I was happy that it was offered by Russians, and not by Americans.

Why?

I gathered my knowledge of these two countries from two sources: cinema and literature.

A kitten is born blind. Round like a ball, it nestles in the warmth of its mother cat, waiting for the moment when its eyes open and it will be able to climb up and discover the world.

The world of my childhood was seen through the lenses of a movie camera.

The auditorium of the movie theatre Koubek, where Grandmother and I spend our esoteric afternoons, feasting on delicious tidbits, while sitting in our red plush box, is my way of exploring the world. At first, everything dazzles me. I am the shadow of shadows; the brutal daylight makes me blind.

Devourer of irresistible temptations, slowly, softly, I learn to draw the line between dreams and lies, between art and trash.

The women, white and tender, the men, tanned and tough, exhaust themselves in the pursuit of the dream of success. The recipe is simple: men fight, women plot to marry.

The face of the beauty, gleaming with happiness, fills the screen to excess. The wedding veil wafts in the breeze, while she enters a large white house, surrounded by immense park-like grounds, acquired for her by her dear spouse. The children will surely arrive soon after, implying maternal bliss for the lady. As the flesh of the bourgeoisie is not immortal, this is their only way to defy death.

My mother brought me into the world for social reasons. All her friends had children and she would have felt deprived of “something,” if she were childless.

My birth was a chic one: I was born in an elegant maternity ward and delivered by the hands of a trend-setting professor, surrounded by courteous assistants and starched nurses.

So as not to undergo any discomfort, Madame was administered anesthesia.

A baby is cumbersome. It cries, it messes itself, it wants to be fed.

It was not Mother's fault that I never tasted her milk. She did not have any. I was spoon-fed, bottles not being fashionable in her social class at that time.

Days and nights, I would scream with hunger. No one took me in their arms to comfort me; it was not hygienic. And what is more, a child could become dependent on love—a serious handicap for future social success.

Upset by my shrill cries, Father would push my buggy in the moonlit countryside of Senokosy or the deserted streets of Prague, while my mother and my nurse rested in the warmth of their eiderdown beds.

Grandmother only considered me later on when I became presentable and enviable in the eyes of her friends, who were deprived of little girls as cute and desirable as myself. She would buy me charming outfits, created by well-known stylists so that I would learn how to be elegant; she would tie pastel colored ribbons around my curly locks, where not a single hair had the impertinence to resist her will; she would lead me through delightful places. We would savor ice cream in shaded gardens, carry biscuits to the snow-white swans floating on artificial ponds, admire the multicolored birds displaying their splendor in ornate cages.

I enjoyed this world, which evidently existed only to please me. I was its very reflection. My wellbeing depended upon my ability to adapt, upon my protective mimicry.

It was not me, but her image of me, which Grandmother cherished. She would let me know what she expected of me through these insipid movies, where all human activity was reduced to sipping champagne, bubbling in rainbow-colored glasses.

As for me, I felt hungry, I was thirsty, I had to blow my nose and go to the bathroom. If I were caught having these needs, and that would surely happen one day, I should be chased like a bad smell out of this embalmed paradise. For nobody would associate such lowly and vulgar things with gracious ladies even if they are a fact of life.

If I was living in a world of lies and cheating, could all these lovely ladies be false? Who, in fact, was the imposter?

Was it I?

On leaving the movie theater, I would no longer be dazzled. American movies and the civilization they portrayed would seem a synonym of deceit and crookedness. I deeply mistrusted the very existence of these beautiful women, limited to the social function of their husbands. Their way of life, being ersatz, was totally unacceptable to me.

I wanted to become myself, independent and free, and I was prepared to pay the price.

I discovered the Soviet movies around 1946. I would realize later that they were just the same lies; only their make-up was crude and their make-believe was humanitarian.

They used the collective “we” instead of “I,” one gave all one's thought for the good of the people, not for individual success; one got killed so that the principle would live forever.

I would leave the theater dazzled.

Next to me, Grandmother's seat would stay empty—as was the rest of the theater. People did not like these disturbing and unpolished films. They preferred to be captivated by the flamboyant American version of war, which conformed better to their unfulfilled fantasies of being heroes.