5/ IN THE DOGHOUSE
For my mother, the 1970s was the graveyard of all hopes. She wasn’t allowed to publish, she wasn’t allowed to study, she wasn’t allowed to travel abroad. Or was it just – she couldn’t?
But why such a sad beginning, Son? What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. So say the optimistic cretins. But it’s different here, comrades: What doesn’t kill us at least cripples us. And then for the rest of our lives we boast that it’s being crippled that has made us so wonderfully strong, that is so wonderfully becoming: like the scar of Count de Peyrac, so beloved of Angélique, Marquise des Anges. And I was also loved full of scars, full of angels. That’s the worst thing about the 1970s: they were shit – and yet they were the best years of my life.
I don’t have any reliable accounts of her life up to the mid-1970s. Surprisingly, she was allowed to continue working as a guide at Špilberk Castle, even though it involved contact with the public, and she frequently changed addresses and probably lovers as well. Not even the State Security archives contain records on her: she was just a small fish stuck in a small puddle after the first flood waters had retreated.
So once more: What doesn’t kill us cripples us.
So once more: Everyone fucked everyone else.
So once more: You’ll never take us sober.
And that was the whole of the 1970s for me, you crybaby.
What’s worse, almost none of her prose manuscripts have survived: some of them obviously fell victim to the great burning of the witches, as she called her later attempt to destroy all of her writings in the yard of her teacher’s flat in Předmost. Others she may have destroyed earlier during her regular fits of rage, while some were simply lost during her frequent changes of address in Brno.
We all know that there were no photocopiers back then, right? No printers. Just authorized sites with a strictly guarded mimeograph, whose numbered hymen stank of pure alcohol, as did the numbered authorized comrades who could use it, as did the majority of numbered citizens. Back then, though, I didn’t stink too much of pure alcohol yet, my prince, I wasn’t a blurred copy of myself yet. I had to make do with carbon paper, which was even rarer than office paper, and we used it until it disintegrated. When you lifted up the used carbon paper to the light, it looked like the night sky, except there were letters instead of constellations. I think about that shortage of paper every morning when I wipe my bottom with metres of bog roll, which would be enough for a small collection of poetry or a slim book of short stories – genres which this generation wiped its fat squishy arse with long ago.
Not even the full manuscript of her first novel has survived – and, unfortunately, she doesn’t even have a copy of it. The whole edition was sent off for pulping, along with most of the people from the regional publishing house; those who remained were too cowardly even to do something so infinitesimally compassionate as to save one proof, one copy, from the printer’s for her.
Well, yes, at least I saw the proofs. When I was going over them it was the happiest time in my life. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the world could compare with that feeling when I first saw my writing in print, when it was almost like reading something by a person who was both a stranger and yet at the same time close to you, or when you read a new book by your favourite writer, with both hope and anxiety… I saw all of the book’s mistakes and shortcomings, but also the beauty in places, and I no longer had to play the game of false modesty – the most revolting trait I know.
I took a sickie from Špilberk, shut myself up in my rented flat in Královo Pole and focused entirely on my writing, filled with happiness as well as fear – that what I didn’t correct now would remain as it was forever. As a twenty-year-old writer, I was naturally thinking about eternity, not just a temporary stay. One week for 517 pages. I took it word by word, sentence by sentence. I experienced it all as though it was by me but also by a stranger. Shove all that talk about masturbation up your arse – this was love. I never left that flat! I had a loaf of bread and I drank the water from the wash-hand basin. As well as washing there, I even urinated into it, because the shared toilet was all the way at the other end of the courtyard balcony, so I’d got used to doing it this way –who’d want to keep having to get dressed after making love? – although it required some acrobatics from a woman. These days I piss into a nappy.
I remember Bart whimpering at the door one evening for me to let him in for a bit, just long enough to warm his hands, and I did hesitate slightly that time. “I’ll do it to you like a God,” whined Bart from the other side of the door, and I was immediately ashamed of my weakness. His words had reminded me that another form of communion awaited me, even though at the time I still didn’t know who was, at least sometimes, guiding my hand. Just forget about it, Bart shouted at me through the door and left for some other man/woman – delete as applicable.
Then they deleted me.
Expunged me.
Crossed me out.
If only they had at least burnt it. But no, they just chucked it into the paper shredder, into the paper mill. They ground it down into pulp to make new paper for new writers. To this day I can’t bear to hear that old editors’ slogan kill your darlings. Because they killed all my darlings, they murdered them like at an orphanage. The new writers wrote on parchment made from the soft skin of those orphans; from my own skin. It was stained.
She didn’t even have anyone to confide in, anyone to share that bitter cup with. She drank and was alone. She had been excommunicated from the official literature before she’d had a chance to make an impact, and she didn’t have any personal connections in the alternative scene which was just beginning to form. And so, as was the case so many times in her life, she turned to American literature, Russian vodka and Czech rock music, because her boyfriend at the time, Jiří Barták, or Bart as he was known, played the bass guitar in several rock groups.
He also played on me, on my instrument. Bart: that anti-Russian pisspot from the ramparts of Špílberk! He knew how to make me vibrate like a string; he gently pressed on my fretboard with his fingers and scratched me roughly with his plectrum. We had a few secret chords and imaginative riffs: well, don’t all girls love rock guitarists, waving their stiff guitar necks and spraying hot music God-knows-where? He wasn’t my boyfriend, he was my lover – in fact, the first who really knew how to sing my song…and I added the lyrics to his. Don’t tear at me bitterly, love me sweetly and bitterly, don’t give me coffee with sugar, I’m your bitter sugar. That’s the kind of poetry I was writing at the time: absolute rhymes, absolute rave, Absolut Vodka. (But that was only the bottle – we poured the cheap Hanácká stuff into it, and I’m not just talking about vodka).
We both worked at Špilberk Castle. I was a guide, he was in maintenance – together with the keyboard player Karlíček, whose body is still at the bottom of the 100-metre well in the second courtyard. So deep! He had hair that was longer than mine and a permanent faraway smile from weed or rohypnol. He’d spend most of the day asleep in an empty gallery somewhere, propped up against a broom or one of the female custodians. That’s what he called them: My sweet little cu-cu-custodians, he’d cluck. We were in the resistance together: when I finished my tour with a Russian Intourist group down in the casemates, I’d bang an iron pipe against a girder hanging at the entrance to the torture chamber to make sure I didn’t leave anyone in there overnight (some couples paid us to do that) – and at that point the two rockers would generally wake up and get stuck into their job of cleaning a national cultural monument. And they took the nation very seriously! Whenever a group of Soviet citizens was coming up from the castle moat to the courtyard through the long, narrow corridor, Bart and Karlíček would begin sweeping the tunnel from above. And with what vigour! And the Soviet tourists, climbing up from the historical darkness towards the sunlight, were confronted by the Czech present: a cloud of dust, sand and dog shit flew down the stairs towards them, descending on their grey suits and flowery dresses, mingling with the even-worse smell of Zhivoy Tsveta perfume – there was no escape and no redress. Any occasional complaints from the Intourist Czech guides were met with a surprisingly courageous response from the head castle administrator, who said that the comrades from maintenance were just doing their job. That was as close as we ever came to the resistance. A couple of times, the guys even poured water on the stairs in winter and let it freeze; naturally, when the previously supportive administrator broke his leg on them, they were sacked. That was a rarity in the 1970s – being fired. Karlíček quickly took refuge from an accusation of social parasitism in a madhouse, where they prescribed him such a nutritious cocktail of psychopharmaceuticals that immediately after his release he secretly returned to Špilberk, used his own secret key to unlock the grille covering the castle well, and became a part of Špilberk history forever. The very next day, Bart asked me urgently:
“Will you go away with me, my little pussy?”
It was the right question, but the wrong time. The place was apposite: the castle torture chamber at the entrance to the third section of the casemates, where we would occasionally go to sing our duets during work hours. We had just finished singing, reaching quite a crescendo – he once and I twice – God, whatever happened to those love songs? Long before Madonna, he tied me to a two-armed Helvetic cross and pulled over an extending bench so that he could really put me on the rack. Today it’s quite a corny scene, I agree, and I describe it in much juicier detail in my latest novel Temptation at Špílberk, which I recommend; but at that time we were still children.
“Will you go away with me, my little pussy?”
Even the way he addressed me was appropriate, because he was still in there, still moving inside of me, for the last time. Because when I told him no, I wouldn’t go, he went soft and slipped out. Out of my life, in both senses of the word.
“Why not?”
“Untie me.”
“Why not?”
“For Christ’s sake, untie me.”
But he didn’t. He pulled on his overalls, sat down on the rack and quietly spoke to my pussy, perhaps because he knew from experience that it could usually be talked around more quickly than me. I could feel his semen slowly flowing out of me, while something elemental and unstoppable also flowed out of Bart’s mouth: a desire almost as strong as the one with which he had taken me, a desire for freedom – let’s not be constantly afraid of pathos.
How many times over the past months had we gone over it! But I always gave him the same answer. The same one most Czech writers would have given at that time – to others, and especially to themselves. In sixty-nine, just as in thirty-nine and forty-nine. That I’d be lost without the Czech language – even Božena Němcová could at least speak German. What would I do out there if I couldn’t communicate? No other Czech writers had left yet. All of them were staying, hoping things would change again. And at the same time, whilst the words were flowing out of one orifice and his semen out of another, already growing cold on my naked thighs, I felt that if I really loved him, I would leave with him, language or no language.
“Yeah,” said Bart, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke where he wanted to smoke out the evil spirits from inside me. “You know it’ll change, but for the worse.”
“You’re a rocker. You’re the wandering minstrel, you can communicate with your music – but what about me? I wouldn’t even be able to write the lyrics for you.”
“You’ll end up like Karlíček. At the bottom of a deep well.”
“At least I’ll be at the source.”
“At the bottom of a dried-up well. And you’ll dry up there too, all of your inspiration as well as your juicy cunt.”
“Untie me. I can’t feel my shoulders.”
“Get used to life on a cross. Soon you won’t feel anything at all.”
With his long hair and long beard, he looked like Jesus Christ Superstar, and apparently a few years later he even performed in the musical somewhere in America. Not on Broadway, not in LA, but somewhere in Seattle, in a student production at the university where he worked in maintenance – just as he had done at Špilberk. I can imagine him lubricating and maintaining a whole harem of students, impressing them with his talk of how he pissed into a Russian tank – and showing off his resistance bazooka, which would pierce even the most rigid of hymens. I can also imagine him playing Peter or Judas – or, bloody hell, even Christ, with a horny Mary Magdalena at his feet. But that’s all just in my imagination (everything in that torture chamber is just in my imagination), and he might just have been singing and dancing in a Jewish chorus, or maybe he just moved the sets around and connected all the cables. I never saw him again. He left almost immediately, leaving me tied to that Helvetic cross, literally without metaphors and without clothes. And I’m still hanging there to this day, my motor prince; to this day I’m waiting for you to take me down from this cross.
All of her memories from the start of the 1970s are unverifiable and unreliable: all I found among her things was part of a letter protesting against her reassignment from guide in the casemates to attendant in the castle gallery. Actually, it’s just a handwritten first draft, scrawled and rewritten many times (and who knows if she ever sent a legible version to anyone), the only part of which I can decipher is this lofty and ingratiating conclusion: ..I have always tried to present the historical facts in such an accessible and colourful form that they would become firmly rooted in the hearts and souls of visitors as well as in their minds.
I don’t think I ever enjoyed any job as much – apart from writing, of course. And I had bags of time to do that at Špilberk, almost as much as those Italian prisoners two hundred years earlier: with my earplugs in, I’d write in the guides’ cloakroom in the morning, do the corrections in the afternoon, and in between I’d even do some reading for a change: it was like being a writer in residence. Most of the tourists would visit the castle in the summer; the rest of the time, the place was pretty much dead and the other guides, especially the retired teachers, practically fought over the tourists, particularly the ones from the enemy nations, who could usually be relied on to leave a decent tip.
And during the high season it was at least a good schooling in how to narrate a story – when you had to tell the same stories slightly differently each time. For example, I’d present the enlightening tale of Baron František Trenck in one way to the blowhards from the Antonín Zápotocký Military Academy (Trenck’s military successes in six wars) and then spice it up for the high-school students (Trenck’s affair with the empress Maria Theresa).
The main thing, though, was to make sure the students weren’t accompanied by the arsehole type of teacher who interrupted me in Trenck’s cell in a quiet and polite voice just as I was getting to the best bit:
“Excuse me, please, but…”
“Excuse you, but I’ll be taking questions at the end of the tour. Any type of question, including the colour of Trenck’s trunks.”
“This isn’t a question, just an important clarification.”
Trenck’s cell is at the start of casemate number two – the only one with daylight coming through a small window. I was standing in the dark corridor to the casemates, while the guy was beside the door, so all I could see of him was the silhouette of his head with his big ears. Between us were about thirty high-school girls: half still in sunlight, half already in the damp darkness. The pain-in-the-ass teacher had a disgustingly sober voice. And I hadn’t sobered up since Bart disappeared.
“What kind of a clarification?” I asked in a voice that was as icy as the casemates.
“It directly concerns those – as you call them – trunks.”
“I would have expected a question about trunks more from your students, comrade teacher.”
The students laughed. They still don’t know what awaits them in those trunks, I said to myself. Or did I say it out loud? Anyway, the educational supervisor laughed too – he made very sure we all heard him laughing – and then he said: “All the more reason why the students should know whether or not it’s nonsense, your story about Trenck and trunks. How did you find out that trunks were named after the famous warrior?”
“I explained it all before we entered the casemates. You might not have heard me there at the back. So, at his own expense, Trenck equipped an entire army of his Serb subjects to fight the Turks. When they were marching at a military parade in Vienna in 1788, his Pandurs wore unusual red trousers that came to above the knee, which then began to be called trunks. Doesn’t it seem logical to you?”
“Logical maybe, charming too – but is it a historical fact or just a play on words?”
“You seem to have a suspicious interest in these trunks, comrade teacher.”
All of the girls laughed. He, however, did not.
“I resent your tone. I am simply interested in history because it is the subject I teach. And I am not only interested in Baron Trenck in my capacity as a teacher. Last year I even wrote an article about him for the Teachers’ News, so I have devoted a great deal of time to studying the sources on Trenck. But I have never come across anything about trunks, which is, of course, just a detail. Nevertheless – and this is no longer just a detail, Miss – I have never found anything there about an intimate relationship between Trenck and Empress Maria Theresa, which you spoke of so engagingly. At the outset, the empress was certainly one of Trenck’s supporters, and she even saved him from execution – but an intimate relationship between the sovereign and the troublemaker Trenck is simply nonsense. In the historical sources…”
But I cut him off. I’d had more than enough of all these grandstanding guys showing off in front of us, whether it was with a stiff pointer or a deeply thrumming bass guitar. And so I said to him from the depths of the casemates as well as the bottle:
“And did you read in your historical sources that Maria Theresa was so obsessed with sex that she even did it with a horse?”
This time only one girl laughed – probably the one who didn’t get it.
“No,” said big ears by the door, “I have certainly never read that.”
“You see,” I said with faint triumph.
“I don’t see, but I can hear. And I’ve heard more than enough, believe me. Not just me, but the whole class. As I have already said, your tour has indeed been engaging, Miss. There were even moments which I enjoyed. But this is not a cabaret show, is it? This is a place where people died. Thousands of people. You can’t treat the tour like some broadside ballad – even though many such songs were sung about the prisoners.”
“I know even sadder songs about history,” I said. “By Karel Kryl, for instance. But you’re not allowed to sing his songs at your school, are you?”
“I do sing his songs. But now I am afraid that as the teacher it is my responsibility to ask for another guide.”
“Go right ahead,” I said. “Downstairs in the cloakroom are several of your former colleagues who will undoubtedly be more to your satisfaction.”
“We are not here for satisfaction, Miss, but for historical truth. And that compels me, even if perhaps I shouldn’t do so in front of my pupils, to add one more historical clarification. The sexual encounter with a horse is mentioned in relation to Catherine the Great, not Maria Theresa.”
And, of course, as taking things literally is my undoing, I added: “In that case, she was truly deserving of the name.”
Translated by Graeme Dibble