“A tank! Tonight! I will steal a Russian tank and I will shoot myself with it tonight!”
Bolotka occupies a dank room at the top of a bleak stairwell on a street of tenements near the outskirts of Prague. I visited him there earlier in the day. He reassures me, when he observes me looking sadly around, that I shouldn’t feel too bad about his standard of living — this was his hideaway from his wife long before his theater was disbanded and he was forbidden to produce his “decadent” revues. For a man of his predilections it really is the best place to live. “It excites young girls,” Bolotka informs me, “to be fucked in squalor.” He is intrigued by my herringbone tweed suit and asks to try it on to see how it feels to be a rich American writer. He is a sloop-shouldered man, large and shambling, with a wide Mongol face, badly pitted skin, and razor-blade eyes, eyes like rifts in the bone of his skull, slitted green eyes whose manifesto is “You will jam nothing bogus into this brain.” He has a wife somewhere, even children; recently the wife’s arm was broken when she tried to prevent the police from entering their apartment to impound her absentee husband’s several thousand books.
“Why does she care so much about you?”
“She doesn’t — she hates me. But she hates them more. Old married couples in Prague have something to hate now even more than each other.”
A month earlier the police came to the door of Bolotka’s hole at the top of the stairwell to inform him that the country’s leading troublemakers were being given papers to leave. They would allow him forty-eight hours to get out.
“I said to them, ‘Why don’t you leave? That would amount to the same thing. I give you forty-eight hours.’”
But would he not be better off in Paris, or across the border in Vienna, where he has a reputation as a theatrical innovator and could resume his career?
“1 have sixteen girt friends in Prague,” he replies. “How can I leave?”
I am handed his robe to keep myself warm while he undresses and gets into my suit. “You look even more like a gorilla,” I say, when he stands to model himself in my clothes.
“And even in my disgraceful dressing gown,” he says, “you look like a happy, healthy, carefree impostor.”
Bolotka’s story.
“I was nineteen years old, I was a student at the university. I wanted like my father to be a lawyer. But after one year I decide I must quit and enroll at the School of Fine Arts. Of course I have first to go for an interview. This is 1950. Probably I would have to go to fifty interviews, but I only got to number one. I went in and they took out my ‘record.’ It was a foot thick. I said to them, ‘How can it be a foot thick, I haven’t lived yet. I have had no life — how can you have all this information?’ But they don’t explain. I sit there and they look it over and they say I cannot quit. The workers’ money is being spent on my education. The workers have invested a year in my future as a lawyer. The workers have not made this investment so I can change my mind and decide to become a fine artist. They tell me that I cannot matriculate at the School of Fine Arts, or anywhere ever again, and so I said okay and went home. I didn’t care that much. It wasn’t so bad. I didn’t have to become a lawyer, I had some girl friends. I had my prick, I had books, and to talk to and to keep me company,! had my childhood friend Blecha. Only they had him to talk with too. Blecha was planning then to be a famous poet and a famous novelist and a famous playwright. One night he got drunk and he admitted to me that he was spying on me. They knew he was an old friend and they knew that he wrote, and they knew he came to see me, so they hired him to spy on me and to write a report once a week. But he was a terrible writer. He is still a terrible writer. They told him that when they read his reports they could make no sense of them. They told him everything he wrote about me is unbelievable. So I said, “Blecha, don’t be depressed, let me see the reports — probably they are not as bad as they say. What do they know?’ But they were terrible. He missed the point of everything I said, he got everything backwards about when I went where, and the writing was a disgrace. Blecha was afraid they were going to fire him — he was afraid they might even suspect him of playing some kind of trick, out of loyalty to me. And if that went into his record, he would be damaged for the rest of his life. Besides, all the time he should be spending on his poems and his stories and his plays, he was spending listening to me. He was getting nothing accomplished tor himself. He was full of sadness over this. He had thought he could just betray a few hours a day and otherwise get on with being National Artist, Artist of Merit, and winner of the State Award for Outstanding Work. Well, it was obvious what to do. I said, ‘Blecha, I will follow myself for you.! know what I do all day better than you, and I have nothing else to keep me busy. I will spy on myself and I will write it up, and you can submit it to them as your own. They will wonder how your rotten writing has improved overnight, but you just tell them you were sick. This way you won’t have anything damaging on your record, and I can be rid of your company, you shitface.’ Blecha was thrilled. He gave me half of what they paid him and everything was fine — until they decided that he was such a good spy and such a good writer, they promoted him. He was terrified. He came to me and said I had gotten him into this and so I had to help him. They were putting him now to spy on bigger troublemakers than me. They were even using his reports in the Ministry of Interior to teach new recruits. He said, ‘You have the knack of it, Rudolf, with you it’s just a technique. I am too imaginative for this work. But if I say no to them now. it will go in my record and I will be damaged by it later on. I could be seriously damaged now, if they knew you had written the reports on yourself.’ So this is how I made a bit of a living when I was young. I taught our celebrated Artist of Merit and winner of the State Award for Outstanding Work how to write in plain Czech and describe a little what life is like. It was not easy. The man could not describe a shoelace. He did not know the word for anything. And he saw nothing. I would say, ‘But, Blecha, was the friend sad or happy, clumsy or graceful, did he smoke, did he listen mostly or did he talk? Blecha, how will you ever become a great writer if you are such a bad spy?’ This made him angry with me. He did not like my insults. He said spying was sickening to him and caused him to have writer’s block. He said he could not use his creative talent while his spirit was being compromised like this. For me it was different. Yes, he had to tell me — it was different for me because I did not have high artistic ideals. I did not have any ideals. If I did I would not agree to spy on myself. I certainly would not take money for it. He had come to lose his respect for me. This is a sad irony to him, because when I left university, it was my integrity that meant so much to him and our friendship. Blecha told me this again recently. He was having lunch with Mr. Knap, another of our celebrated Artists of Merit and winner of the State Award for Outstanding Work, and secretary now of their Writers’ Union. Blecha was quite drunk and always when he is quite drunk Blecha gets over-emotional and must tell you the truth. He came up to the table where I was having my lunch and he asked if everything is all right. He said he wished he could help an old friend in trouble, and then he whispered, ‘Perhaps in a few months’ time … but they do not like that you are so alienated, Rudolf. The phenomenon of alienation is not approved of from above. Still, for you I will do all that I can…” But then he sat suddenly down at the table and he said, ‘But you must not go around Prague telling lies about me, Rudolf. Nobody believes you anyway. My books are everywhere. Schoolchildren read my poems, tens of thousands of people read my novels, on TV they perform my plays. You only make yourself look irresponsible and bitter by telling that story. And, if I may say so, a little crazy.’ So I said to him, “But, Blecha, I don’t tell it. I have never told it to a soul.’ And he said, ‘Come now, my dear old friend — how then does everybody know’?’ And so I said, ‘Because their children read your poems, they themselves have read your novels, and when they tum on TV, they see your plays.’ ”
Prague, Feb. 5, 1976 The phone awakens me at quarter to eight.
“This is your wife-to-be. Good morning. I am going to visit you. I am in the lobby of the hotel.! am coming now to visit you in your room.”
“No, no. I’ll come down to you. It was to be lunch, not breakfast.”
“Why are you scared for me to visit you when I love you’?” asks Olga.
“It’s not the best idea here. You know that.”
“I am coming up.”
“You’re going to get yourself in trouble.”
“Not me,” she says.
I’m still doing up my trousers when she is at the door, wearing a long suede coat that might have seen her through trench warfare, and a pair of tall leather boots that look as if she’d been farming in them. Against the worn, soiled animal skins, her white neck and white face appear dramatically vulnerable — you can see why people do things to her that she does not necessarily like: bedraggled, bold, and helpless, a deep ineradicable sexual helplessness such as once made bourgeois husbands so proud in the drawing room and so confident in bed. Since I am frightened of everything, it is as well to go in one direction as the other, Well,
