at the beginning of the 1980s.
As a public speaker at the end of 1989.
15
It was sometime in April of that cataclysmic Prague Spring when Helena and I went to a party at Karol Sidon’s. There were many other guests in his home, most of them unfamiliar to me. As usual during this period, politics was the primary topic of conversation. However, I noticed a girl there — perfectly made up and beautiful — who was unquestionably bored. She hadn’t said a word the entire time and then proceeded into another room. I set off after her.
She was sitting on the floor paging through some illustrated magazines. I introduced myself. She said her name was Olga and added that she’d heard of me.
We talked about acquaintances, and then she started to tell me about a trip to Italy the previous year and described the dazzling sun and marvelous countryside, the wonderful and subtle wines, and the delightful slender and suntanned lads who, unlike Czechs, hardly set eyes on a girl before they try to make a move. She became quite animated as she recounted her sojourn. She had a melodic voice and spoke passionately about something in which I had no interest. I also learned she was finishing her studies in applied arts and was not married. The tall boy sitting in the next room getting drunk on crappy wine belonged to her. I understood from her stories that there were several more boys who belonged to her. I can’t explain why — most likely simply because she was appealing — I suggested we get together sometime. After a moment of hesitation and on the condition that we would talk about something other than what everyone was always talking about, she agreed.
We ended up meeting on several occasions. Unlike her, I didn’t have a lot of time. Usually we would drive outside Prague, stop somewhere, and kiss in the car. She would weave her tales of foreign lands; sometimes she would pretend to listen to what I was saying, but she obviously wasn’t paying any attention. She tried to conceal this fact by repeating my last sentence in a slightly bored tone: You really think you can change anything? Do you really want to see me again?
I knew our relationship would soon come to an end. I couldn’t imagine abandoning my wife and children, but at the same time I couldn’t tear myself away from this strange new lover.
Until then I had never been unfaithful to my wife; now I was trying to justify my actions. A year earlier, Helena participated in a Quakers’ seminar at Lake Balaton and fell in love with one of the student leaders. When she told me about it, she explained that he had saved her life. She had swum too far out and had lost her strength. He swam out to her and held on to her side until they made it back to the shallows. Later, she was so moved when he told her about his childhood and that his father, a Communist, had been locked up. She wanted to help him somehow. It was only a brief fling, she explained to me, and added that when we had met, I had already been with several girls while she hadn’t had anybody.
I could offer no reasonable justification for what I was doing, except perhaps the fact that this girl, thirteen years my junior, was different in every respect from all the other women I knew. I was impressed by the ease with which she accepted the world as a place intended for distant journeys, lovemaking, and sojourns in pleasant places (best of all where a willing servant brought you food and drink).
I understood I was only one of many. I could be replaced at any time, or I could leave anytime and would be immediately forgotten. That’s how things worked in her world — something I, perhaps prematurely, criticized about her generation. Also, and unlike my wife, she was not interested in anything that interested me.
This apparently cynical girl painted surprisingly well and as a graphic artist had a sense for detail even in her stories. I learned that as a child she’d longed to have a puppy. When her parents refused to grant her wish, she took an old shoe box, painted it, and dragged it around on a string behind her and talked to it like a real dog. She also confided in me that she had her own image of God — he was an agreeable, stout old man whom she prayed to when she was sad. I realized that all of these stories were meant to hide some kind of internal wound, perhaps an insufficiency of love during childhood. Perhaps she needed to raise her self-esteem and therefore sought out ever new declarations of love from different men.
Once I invited her to a match of the Davis Cup, and, to my surprise, she accepted. She brought along with her, however, a Dutch student whom she described as exceedingly sweet and beautifully naive. So right now she was in love with him. While I was trying to follow the action on the court, she was softly chitchatting with him and kissing him.
*
One evening I started writing a one-act play called Klára and the Two Gentlemen, which I finished by morning.
Just like my own lover, Klára longs to be happy, while her married “gentleman” dreads the situation in which he finds himself. I situated the amorous couple in Klára’s flat. In one room they are getting ready to make love. In the other, Klára’s previous lover, who has recently returned from a Communist concentration camp, is dying. Apparently absurd details and circumstances keep entering the play: A bale of barbed wire is in a linen cupboard, and the dialogue is interrupted by the ringing of a telephone, but no one is ever on the line. At the end, the protagonist, upon the wish of the dying man, barks in the place of a guard dog.
It was Olga’s words that I heard in Klára’s dialogue, which moved back and forth obsessively between lovemaking and foreign lands.
Because I’ve always had a tendency to moralize, the lovers’ desire for a moment of bliss, when they can forget all their responsibilities and the world around them, never arrives. On the contrary, they part with a feeling of emptiness and silence, within both themselves and their surroundings.
A one-act play seemed too short to offer to a theater; I needed at least one more of the same length, but I didn’t have any ideas, nor did I have the time to write anything.
Then at the beginning of August I went into a little oak forest not far from our house in Hodkovičky to see if I could find mushrooms for soup. Right on the edge of the forest, I was startled to see dozens of death cap toadstools. I’d never seen so many in one spot.
This unassuming toadstool always excited my imagination. Whereas all poisons are subject to more or less strict control, the death cap offered every mushroom hunter an abundance of one of the deadliest poisons known. (As our foremost mycologist Albert Pilát writes, just two-hundredths of a milligram of the poison, called amanitin, would kill a mouse in twelve hours. Half a gram would kill a hundred thousand mice, which, as the mycologist calculates, would create a line of mice eighteen kilometers long!)
The possibility of coming into possession of such an effective poison tempts a person at least once — at least in his thoughts — to become a killer.
I do not think the task of literature, even though it is sometimes assumed so, is to concern itself with politics. In my defense, I can only say that in my play I allowed myself to be much more skeptical than I would have in a newspaper article or a speech to people who were longing to hear some good news about a situation that was becoming increasingly strained. The plot of The Sweetshop Myriam was simple. A young couple who are trying to get an apartment are supposed to find an old homeless person and bring him to a renowned sweetshop. With the payment of a small amount of money, the forsaken man would be given some almond cookies that had been poisoned. The manager of the shop would then see to it that the young people received an apartment.
My two heroes, Petr and Julie, need a place to live. When they discover how they can acquire one, Julie hesitates slightly but her boyfriend is appalled and decides he must publicly reveal and thwart the criminal enterprise. One after the other Petr summons a policeman, a lawyer, and a minister of parliament. To his horror, he discovers that everyone not only knows about the crimes but also participates in them. Each of my characters has a good reason for his or her actions. The mushroom hunter who supplies the sweetshop with death caps explains that a person’s got to make a living somehow when he has children and is building a house. The manager of the sweetshop claims he does it so that young people can get housing. The policeman himself needs an apartment, and the lawyer says the police stand on the side of the criminals — they not only fail to investigate but directly support the malefactors.