Occupation

_­Occupation

To this day, really, I don’t know what my occupation is. I should have decided, gosh, it’s getting late and the day is coming to a close. If I figure it out, it’ll give me some joy – maybe – and if not, I won’t care.
The totalitarian system created within me – smoothly, without any problem – something like internal claustrophobia. Although I haven’t condemned the ideas of socialism and equality for all, it was highly suspicious to me from the start.
In life one goes through a great number of phases, when one change follows another. Often I didn’t know anything about it, but often I did. There were the feverish times during my years of study, when instead of the pool I drank up at the University library, where I sat for days on end, my nose buried in the direction of discovering what I hoped might excite me a little bit. I was mostly studying paintings, sculptures, and architecture. Sometimes I had the feeling that I wasn’t living in this century, I remember precisely Giovanni Botticelli’s “Nativity”, where Botticelli is somewhere in the right-hand corner, and with an expression so lecherous, curious, and juicy that I realized how this century is light as a feather, that really everything is NOW – that is, the appetite to live and to express oneself personally. This was on the one hand invigorating and on the other a destructive force that I sweated through like the flu – but I couldn’t back away from it, I was inside, it couldn’t be done. Besides that the librarian, who trusted me, lent me books that were banned then, Voltaire, for example. And others, I can name many others. Voltaire in part made me angry, but then again, on the other hand, from him I picked up navigation, observing the era I live in with a full cold and unexcited distance, in order to understand that it was all a matter of the crimes and interests of power, so that I wouldn’t succumb to panic from the behavior of professors and other classmates who caught the wind in their nostrils after ’48 and, with appropriate rationality, acted accordingly. It bowled me over and frightened me, but then I found within myself reserves, not unlike cynicism, of distance from the present, and internally – despite the weariness that it brought with it – expertly sneered at all that that kept growing and growing all the time. The wheels were set in motion and those who helped it roll were people around me. It was quite horrible, but also something to laugh at.
Finally I left Brno for Prague, where I essentially had nothing to live off of, because I wasn’t able to support myself just like that off what was offered to me, and the rationality I had picked up from my comforting Voltaire totally failed across the board. It wasn’t a matter of figuring out rationally how and off what to live, that simply didn’t work, because nothing at that time had a whiff of rationality, everything was crazy and derailed, fanatic, like the terrifying scenes from Florence during the rule of Savonarola. It really reminded me of children who went on his instructions to various homes and everything that they pointed to with a little pious Catholic Christian finger was destroyed by fire – antique marble sculptures as well as books, the fire even consumed Leonardo da Vinci’s “Leda and the Swan” – and that era reeked of sanctifiedidiocy, the same madness, the same ability of people to go crazy again every time and destroy, destroy, destroy – and get rich doing it.
Ugh. It was complicated, I considered suicide, but hidden forces that I essentially have no idea about stopped me. It didn’t have any ethical significance, not committing suicide – it wasn’t about rationality for me, and even though I didn’t want to live in the time I lived in, it was more that I wanted to sleep, to fall asleep and know nothing, not to die completely with all the mystery of death. Once I sliced my left arm with a razor blade at the wrist – the scars were there for quite a long time – but when I saw the spurting blood, it hit me like thunder and lightning together, I wrapped up my arm firmly, it’s a wonder it didn’t fall off and it took on quite a blue color, but I didn’t have to go to the doctor and psychiatrist, why, you, such a young woman, what reasons could you have? How your grandfather died etcetera.
But there was an unending pain in me, unending, ceaseless. I felt disemboweled, I stayed up through the nights and binged through the days – and for some reason I didn’t emigrate. You can’t evaluate it in any way. That’s just the way it had to be.
Then on top of that was that dramatic opus, the Slánský trial,¹ and by then I had all but totally thrown up. Dramatic, amateurish, in no way covering up its theatrical amateurism and fraud, created by the hands of the powers that be and some little asshole acting like a procurator. Horrifying, even if they had been putting on Sleeping Beauty like that it would have been horrifying – and here there were gallows at stake. You could split your sides laughing.
So at last I pulled myself out of my horror and fear that I was living on this planet and in this country and went to what was then the National Committee² office – and there I found an office labeled Work or Volunteers for the Border Region or something like that and told some office workers that I wanted to work in the parts of Bohemia where nobody wants to go. They exchanged looks of significance – meanwhile the procurator’s voice roared from the radio and the voices of the accused trembled, which the administrative administration listened to the whole time without going crazy – and they made out a document saying I was going to this and this place. It was in Southern Bohemia, Kaplice District.
The Šumava³ is really big, and so one day I found myself among a group of people I’d never thought about before – but I was there and I adapted.
It brought me great happiness. I was on the lowest rung on the ladder, this suited me not out of masochism, which I’m no good at, but because at the lowest rung I could do what I wanted. I could think, reflect, consider things in accordance with my spirit, which nobody can or ever could replace with a career. The nights were marvelous, never in my life since have I seen so many stars, shining so brightly in the sky, all of the constellations I was able to discover thanks to my attraction to astronomy shined brilliantly night after night before my eyes. The Great Draco, Cassiopeia, Delphinus, Corona, and the milky way with the Pleiades – this was a great liberation from the hardships I was going through. Through this I connected myself to old, dignified cultures, and I myself thus became dignified.
But even there, my social standing was not easy. In the first village I worked in – village is a theoretical word for it, after the expulsion of the Germans the area was later occupied exclusively by scoundrels, the buildings didn’t have windows, everything was falling apart, run-down cattle, the main village green had mud up to the knees or even higher based on how much it was raining. It looked more like a village that barbarians had passed through – so after a very short time there I got into a conflict with a guy who, according to the manners of the time and the political fashion, was called the Administrator. God knows what he administered, but he surely, certainly gained some benefit from it, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it. A primitive idiot like that in rubber boots, always whipping one of his boots with some kind of twig – it struck me that this was probably an imitation of the so-called nagaika that administrators used in Czarist Russia to beat their subjects, it probably was – and that idiot – his name was Papoušek,⁴ he didn’t deserve such a nice and innocent name – and every morning, in a disguised, overheard, or educated voice, the leader of the colonies instructed him on where we would be working. He was a repulsive guy, but it’s true that people were afraid of him, except for me, unfortunately. I hated him with all my soul and looked down on him with all the naïveté of powerless intelligence.
As we worked in the fields, all sorts of senior citizens who had been dying of hunger and thus signed up and two prostitutes and some students complained in unison about how bad our food was. I said that yeah, it’s really quite awful, and the next day – it was morning – Papoušek told me on that muddy village green: you’re not going anywhere today, I called the En Es See⁵ on you. And he whipped his rod into the air and – I would say – had at me. The bystanders quickly disappeared, but I caught the twig with both hands and because I knew that one of my roommates had ratted me out about the food, I said, why, because he’s cheating volunteers of their food? Papoušek stiffened up a bit and then shouted that I would see, and he wanted to leave, but I informed him – again the naïveté! – that I was greatly looking forward to the police visit and that I’d recruit witnesses among the people who were hungry both at noon and in the evening. Well, in short, the police never came, but still, that same day, I rode in a vehicle which had loaded on it a weight for calves, straight to the boogieman of what was then the border region, his name was Kozel,⁶ that guy. There, in a sense, animals met with one another in the form of the administrators’ names.⁷ They called him the Red Slave-Driver, he hated gypsies, of which there were many in the area, and he was very irritable, an albino with pink whites in his eyes and thick glasses, so things didn’t really add up with the term Farmer. As I found out later, he was an interesting brawler, altogether quite clever, he’d murdered someone and signed an agreement that he’d get pardoned if he went to work for ten years in the border region. So he signed it and became the Red Slave-Driver.
Even at the very first beginning of our contact, he tried to examine me. He poured rum into a glass, invited me to see him in the kitchen in the building where I was living too, it was a former German school. In an altogether acceptable way, he pressured me to drink, but at that time I wasn’t in the mood for alcohol. We talked, he asked who I am and what I am and why I’m here, if I didn’t have money or politics, I ducked around the corner and what emerged was the rather proper phrasing that I loved nature, that I was sick and wanted to refresh myself. When he found out that I had a whiff of painting about me, he started, in his rough, rasping voice, to call me Painter. As Painter I didn’t have it bad. A few weeks later he came to me and sent me to the fields and added that I could paint there. He probably assumed that I painted watercolors of landscapes, but he was also satisfied with what he dug out of his bedside table and showed to well-known hunters. I thus became a star.
One night I was waiting with him for the last wagon carrying away the hay that had been dried. The stars were shining, he lay a couple of meters away with his head on one of the last bales of hay and suddenly he asked me if I smoked and when I said I did, tossed me a cigarette and matches. By some sort of hidden gleam, I understood that the guy even wanted to be polite, and I was curious what would happen next. I wasn’t scared of getting raped, he was paralyzed by my intelligence and my approach to everything around me. He started to ask me what and how and why I’m here, really, and also asked me my first name, which he pronounced El Esle. I answered him, to have my cake and eat it too, I would have loved to confide in him, he always treated me well, but I knew that there was no chance so I lied in accordance with the circumstances and I pulled it off. Then I asked him why he, who wears such thick glasses, wasn’t doing different work, whether the constant sun and wind wouldn’t damage his eyes. Invited to talk about himself, he told me that he didn’t give a shit. [But that he’d murdered a waitress in a pub, from a pub, where.]⁸ But that he was suspected of murdering a pub waitress, where he worked as a waiter, that he was a trained butcher but that he liked being a waiter better. Then that the police found the corpse after the war and pinned it on him because he used to go out with her and they loved each other and were going to get married. And that the whore all the same fooled around with German soldiers and Gestapo officers and that he had a friend that he had to settle accounts with, who accused him, saying that he saw him burying the dead waitress in the garden.
His tempo and psychological rhythm, which quickly transformed from allegedly unfair conviction to mortal hatred at the waitress’s betrayal, told me enough to know that he killed her. So we lay and smoked, I asked him whether the friend didn’t help him bury her. The war was nearing its end and at that time where was no lack of strangely buried corpses. He went quiet and sighed deeply. I said: –So did you kill her or not? – He sat up and shouted – but his voice was shaking, it was clear that he wasn’t a professional killer but a murderer out of jealousy – he shouted: –Did I ask YOU about any details? – I’ve stepped in it again, I thought to myself, but other than that we waited for the last hay wagon to arrive in complete silence and friendly contentment. But my head was spinning, worried that I’d gone too far and the next day he’d pick me up in a tractor on the road with the chasm on one side of it and dump me there. He didn’t, he behaved timidly to me, he wanted paintings for the hunters from me, but most of the time he was drunk, because he made those enticing offers to me exclusively in the evening, when he entered into the room where I slept. A few times, just to be sure, I escaped out the window and slept in the forest in a blanket that I always kept on hand.
I’ve thought about him a lot. He was an imposing fellow over two meters tall, and the albinism, the white eyebrows and eyelashes and the almost white hair and his albino skin reddened from the sun that never tanned made him somehow distinguished, as did the gleaming glasses and the eyes made smaller behind them. His intelligence was stood out among that bunch of people around him, he was able to be polite, almost chivalrous. He invited me to go to the pantry and take as much food as I wanted, you’re all skin and bones, Painter.
I think I gave him the odd impression that he was searching for who I was, just as I was searching for who he really was. His innate intelligence collided very often with the brutality that unsettled me. Once, when half-feral dogs tore apart a ram grazing by the forest, he led me to the dying and bleeding animal and asked whether I didn’t want to paint it and laughed like sadists do, disgusting, red, pale-eyed. When I made friends with two geese from the yard who sat on my lap or untied the laces on my sneakers with their beaks and I pet and caressed them, he invited me to dinner so that, as he said, you could taste the meat of your friend. He put the finishing touches on his work by kicking a drunk old gypsy who was sleeping during his work hours in a field as wide as it was long and shouted –I’ll beat it out of you, you black-mouthed fucking gypsies! I threw a pitchfork at him, it missed, and I gave my one-hour notice. He accepted it with scorn, made many insulting statements that I don’t remember, and why?
For in the mountains lived a Roma family. They were named Drveňák. I sat whole evenings and nights with them by the fire in front of the broken-down building where they lived, we gossiped, kids full of cold sores climbed all over me and gave me many smacking kisses, Aran and Ďulo made love next to me, little Arpo cadged cigarettes off me. Little Arpo used to walk me part of the way back from the fire when I went back to Radčice or Rapotice, I don’t know. The two names are connected for me. Papoušek lived in one of the villages and Kozel in the other. But it was near Terčives, where there were already border guards with dogs and at that time it was forbidden territory. Whenever I got up from the big fire where I felt fantastic with these kind, simple, and essentially distrustful people, the old mother warned me not to go anywhere because there were spirits in the forest that would kill me, that people in the area were dying and that they’d kill anyone who got within reach. When the trees beat against one another in a windstorm and I went all the same, they warned me, couldn’t I hear it, it’s a sign not to go in the dark, to stay by the light, which every evil spirit fears. My thoughts about the atavism and ancient culture of this race were close at hand, not theoretical, I saw simply offered an unknown, yet at the same time somehow comprehensible, line of thought different from the European. I was fascinated by it, in contrast to the variety show of political trials, here was fresh, millennia-old water, pure as an angel’s wing. Once when the old mother read my palm and said mournfully that I was going to have a really, but really difficult life, I pounced on her words and asked her for the interpretation of the lines on my palm. She didn’t know the first thing about chiromancy, for she was a clairvoyant and accompanied examples from my palm with words and phrases that were truly deeply knowledgeable. As if she had taken in some information and through my hand – like a crystal ball – informed me of what she knew about me. It seemed as though something was shining out from her, something like ultraviolet light or something. Everyone in that family had such black eyes that you couldn’t tell their pupils from their irises. All of their eyes gleamed and everyone in that family had hair like a forest of rooks, shining, beautiful hair. And the features of all their faces were noble, beautiful, sensual mouths, teeth like the highest quality of porcelain. I loved them all, the whole family, with their primitive and animal love they gave me a Non-Europe in exchange for the fucked-up, awful, and murderous Europe riddled with fascism. They warmed me up, caressed me. I wasn’t just grateful towards them, that’s too little, as far as gratefulness goes, I can’t entirely serve my masters, they gifted me their traditions, their nationality. They stole hens and stole in general, and whatever they found, they had no problem crossing national borders and whistled at one another across the Šumava gap about whether they were ready to go home or not. There they gathered strawberries, blueberries, and mushrooms, and also stole, yeah, and Arpo, he was my little guide when I went home from them, he taught me to whistle perfectly with two fingers. It’s a whistle that damages your hearing organs, but he taught me in a short time. At that time, their daughter Žofa was expecting a child, as the family said almost with pride, “with a Czech”. Who that Czech was, I didn’t know and it didn’t interest me, either. One day I sat at midday in front of the former German school where I inhabited what was evidently a former classroom furnished with beds with straw mattresses and I see – I had just eaten goulash from a can, thanks to Kozel my patron – a row of Drveňáks approaching me. All of them had tall black hats on their heads, they were dressed in black clothes that could be characterized in various ways according to their place in society and this time it wasn’t just men dignified as members of the Sicilian Mafia. In that last light of day, they were blacker than night, elegant, nimble, though barefoot. The old apo – that’s the father of the family – stepped up to me, took the strange frippery, the hat, off his head, then his sons did the same – because the delegation was composed exclusively of men – he bowed deeply and his sons at the same time and said to me in a ceremonial voice that the family had decided in a familial resolution to come to request that I stand as godmother to their daughter Žofa – that is, to her child. I swiftly wiped my lips with my hand, it was as though the king of England had invited me to a reception, I stood up ceremonially and with a handshake confirmed this honorary role. They left in silence. They left just as ceremonially as they had come.
From that moment they called me GODMOTHER. Once when I found a little tree frog by a puddle and wanted to drink from the puddle – it was really a mini-lake – they ran over to me shouting terribly that since there was a frog there, I wasn’t allowed to drink from that place. They showed me how they drank. They drank very cleverly, with a stalk of wheat. The Šumava is really a rare land. You step into the soil, wait a moment, and in a moment it fills up with water. Then you take the grain and stick it lightly just under the surface. And then you drink. And once when gathering flax at dawn I touched the back of a sleeping adder. It’s interesting that one has no idea what a snake tastes like, but as soon as I touched the snakeskin, I jumped two meters backwards, which made me fall over. I take a look and see that it’s a coiled-up mountain adder waking up, beautiful as God without a religion. Its skin silver-grey, the elegance of its body coiled up into a ball, an oval, really. The adder woke up and had a pink gleam in its eyes from the rising sun. I don’t know what sort of unknown information this reveals about me, but from the first moment I was so enchanted that I crawled on my belly a little bit towards it and spoke to it, quietly, in a whisper I said that I couldn’t help it, that I didn’t want to do anything bad to it, and it looked at me with a fixed gaze, it always closed its eyes and opened them again – really as though it were blinking from still waking up – I noticed that it was closing its lower eyelids, that it didn’t have upper ones. And at the same time, without a single movement of its raised head, its body slowly unfolded, so quietly, so uniquely, like I imagine for example what Johannes Kepler’s observation was like, just as perfect a universe lay a meter away from me and I didn’t breathe from the excitement and sympathy towards this animal, such a unique work of God. This so unique work of the mystery of life, which we don’t know shit about and only pretend that we know something about it. Then the adder slowly started to leave, looking at me the whole time, and somehow I KNEW that it wasn’t afraid of me. In the grass at the edge of the field it stopped and looked me over substantially. I smiled at it with my whole – how would I say it – well, with my heart, but it was a greater realization, it was a vision from an unknown planet that I live on without knowing that I live there, it was a miracle.
When I told this to my friends the Drveňáks, they got frightened. Oh godmother of ours! – why didn’t you kill it? – they shouted. Their advice implied unhappy experiences with adders, nothing more. It sounds strange, but they were clean and defended themselves from evil nature, which undoubtedly includes the adder. How could anyone hold it against them? When they aren’t dealing arms, but justifiably fearing adders? When they aren’t making political deals with trials, but are afraid of snakebites? Ah well. It’s really something, this life. May the Devil take it all away. Why is the animal venomous? Why? Why and why and why – there were all these marvelous moments when I ambled through the forests of the Šumava – once I nearly drowned in some innocent-looking green grass that had a peat bog underneath it – it was a low blow, but you know what, there was still a tree there, I caught onto its trunk and then slowly pulled my legs back, brownish legs, legs that were really ugly and sticky and stinky and wet. Supposedly in those parts groups of people had drowned, people yearning to emigrate who crossed the border, the hunters and natives who knew the area later told me. Well, they must have split their sides laughing. To escape from the communists and drown here in the bog. I’ve ruminated on fate for quite a long time, but I’ve never reached any sensible conclusion. At any rate, I’m not equipped for dogma, so it doesn’t make a difference what our lot is called, whether it’s the wisdom of providence or coincidence. Really, it doesn’t make a lick of difference, anyhow we’ll never learn. Maybe someone will, but I won’t for sure. I’m not properly endowed for it.
Once – altogether not too far from me – a herd of boars ran by. I didn’t see them, but from the grunting and the hunter’s forewarning I was aware of what was going on, I stood among the shrubbery, there were no trees anywhere and the thudding and joint breathing was nothing to laugh at for a civilized person from the city. And so I had the chance to reexamine my original view, that is, pantheism, and I reached the view that the only people who can be pantheists are the people from offices and mystics in the jungle. The love for the adder and wonder at the shape it formed and all that I experienced, I was forced to compare all of that to the rougher features that threaten me in the desolation of nature, which has already been the subject of so much chatter that even a non-urbanite would get confused. And I also saw a doe jumping high into the air and hopping after something, a terrified fawn next to her, and then the hunter told me that it had killed an adder. You know, he says, adders are real nasty creatures. Everyone’s afraid of them. And some time later he told me how when you hunt a doe, you finish her off with a hunting knife. –The eyes, – he said and I think he had an erection – the eyes, those are eyes and a gaze you can never forget. –
The guy who came with the last wagon for Kozel and me that time was an Austrian. An old, tired fellow with sad blue eyes, giving off a whiff of poverty and sadness. He had two horses, whom he loved. Once when we went back to the village at night alone together, he stopped and the horses drank from a creek that flowed across our path. I lay on top of the hay and looked at the stars and suddenly I felt tears running down my face, running on their own accord, without any effort on my part. The world of brutality and the leaders of the world were screwed, here ruled eternity, which one rarely has the honor to get to know. And it’s no wonder. Who’s lucky enough to work in the marvelous mountains of the Šumava as an agricultural laborer? The very idea that I would have to return to Prague made me sick to my stomach. Here there was a struggle, everything had its order, some trees feared others and leaned away from them, altogether weakened, the victorious ones were brutally strong and victorious, but it wasn’t junk, it was the value of life. I noticed how even the nettles, which I loved for their scent and their enticing poisonousness, fought amongst one another for the right of the strongest – but it WAS the right of the strongest, not the right of the strongest idiot above a weaker non-idiot. Everything was clever, everything had its own basic information on how to survive.
The coachman, named Hans, was a shy fellow, bashful, deferential, a born servant that anyone could let off steam on. Somehow we became friends and chatted in all sorts of ways, he was happy when I offered that he speak Austrian – I shouldn’t have done that, he spoke in a dialect, but in the end I managed to find my way around in it – he told me simple stories about his mother and father, where they were born, that he was from the Šumava, that they didn’t expel him because he wasn’t on the side of the Nazis. His horses were named Karl and Bubi, which means little boy, small fry, something like that. At times we spoke Czech, at times German, Hans the coachman was always afraid of something, for certainty he held the head of one of his horses – either one or the other – and pressed his face to it. I mean in moments he had free when we chatted. I asked him where and how his horses have such beautiful names, Karl und Bubi? He blushed, it was difficult for him to answer. Then he informed me that his son was named Karl and he was his Bubi. And that his son had fallen at Stalingrad as a German soldier. The whole mystery of Hitler was contained in that one powerless answer. I hate Nazism like every other mysterious crime. That nice fellow should have had descendants, it would have only been to the benefit of Austrians and all others. Poor Bubi. They cut off his legs and arms while he was alive when they were frostbitten and Hitler left them to die? What about that guy, that general, who, when he went to prison with the Soviet general, asked –I’m interested, really, what does Russian makhorka taste like? – Prick. So, Bubi fell at Stalingrad. They cut off his arms or legs almost while he was still alive, when they were frozen and then they got eaten? Like goulash, when Hitler left them to die and had a memorial service held for them when they were all still alive? What about that general who, when the Russian generals took him away, coquettishly asked, as one of the soldiers heard: –Wie schmeckt überhaupt die russische Machorka? – Bastard.
Let’s say that Bubi wasn’t like his daddy. That he defied his father’s inferiority and subservience and was maybe excited to be a Nazi in the Hitlerjugend? As for the fate of the old coachman, badly speaking Czech and living among the scoundrels coming out to the Austrian borderlands in the era of victorious totalitarianism, it wouldn’t have had any effect on it. His boy was no longer alive and he was somehow living out his own life with two horses whom he petted, combed, brushed. Karl und Bubi, yeah. Oh well. It’s fucked up. That whole life, when you just notice it a little bit – not a lot, a bit is enough. You just need to notice it a bit. Due to a lack of other ways to waste time, I made portraits of local residents. Just these little sketches that I tried to make into the form of a line, a simple line. So that the portrait wasn’t just a scribble, but it would somehow, even from a distance, resemble my internal attitude towards the person. Once just like that I was drawing a little girl, her name was Františka, a skinny little girl like in a Schiele and then an older woman approached me – they were so-called “Romanian Slovaks”, that’s what they called them – and with surprise she asked me why I didn’t have a camera. She didn’t say camera, but she showed me how it’s held, how it clicks, and then there’s a photo of the person in question. She asked me because I hit the mark pretty well in putting Františka into that form and the woman didn’t understand. That I was doing it with pencil and paper. For me it was a bit of a shock. I hadn’t expected something like that, but the more I thought about it, the more I understood the gap that can separate a cultured person and an uncultured person, and it’s truly irrelevant to me whether it’s a person who is curious and asks questions, who wants to learn. She didn’t understand, she was marveling that I was making the picture with a pencil without any tool. I have to say, from that moment I really scrambled to try and make my way into the middle of this group of people.
By that time I had taken on good borderland pedigree, the administrator would send me to Malonty for candles and kerosene, the Drveňáks and their relatives wanted me to pick up some letters at the post office for them because the mail was no longer being delivered to the village due to the steep slopes and not the demolished routes. Because there were no electric lights, I undertook my silent pilgrimage to the aforementioned Malonty, gathered up the letters at the post office and bought what I needed to buy, and with a rucksack on my back I trudged along a few hours back. The so-called Romanian Slovaks also needed something or other and I, as the do-it-all girl, brought them thread, needles, and so on.
In Malonty there was a pub where the new soldiers would sit and there was an accordion playing, the beer flowed freely, the barmen ran around frantically with liquor, when it really did splash over a bit and such people sang and there I learned or remembered the song “Johnny’s horses, whose water do they drink, whose, watch out Johnny that they don’t kill you”, which was the prelude to a more serious topic, because “The Malonty pub is built from small stones, if you have no money you should just stay home. I go there though I have nothing to pay, I’ll make love with the Malonty barmaid. The Malonty barmaid has quite showy habits, on her back she had somebody paint her a rabbit. A rabbit on her back and a fox on her pussy, so the Malonty barmaid is known to all who see.” This sexually encouraging song floated around tables full of plastered locals and soldiers red with sweat. Every time I hopped into the pub for a shot while conducting my duties, every time there was a man was sitting there alone. I noticed him many times, he had a strongly, sharply cut face, he smoked a country pipe and his absent eyes were focused on nothing in particular. So I drew him, also because he had a wonderfully shaped bald head and his expression excited me. I learned from the guests that he was a swineherd. For this occupation he wore a broadcloth coat like salesmen used to wear, that astonished me, I didn’t take my eyes off him, and although I know how one look can attract another, this man didn’t react whatsoever, from his expression I figured that he must be abnormal, a feeble-minded local village idiot. I was wrong. He was a chemical engineer who had been interned for a long time in an institute for the mentally ill after he had rid himself of his wife and children through some drastic measure – perhaps an attempted murder, but as could be seen, he got out of it by being a madman and now his stiff body sat here with his intelligent head and smoked a pipe and drank beer. His isolation and loss struck me as being disgusting and horrible, worse than death, which we all fear without having a single rational reason for it.
I went off to the border region intending to commit suicide somewhere in peace and silence, to get lost somewhere in the forest after taking some barbiturates – it was an action taken out of hope that I would no longer suffer from everything that had wounded me. Then I thought for weeks and weeks about my intentions until my head was steaming, at first I walked in the fields silently with my eyes looking squarely down at the path ahead of me, but little by little I fell under the control of the forests and meadows that gleamed with dew in the morning like a diamond field full of my childhood images from fairy tales until I had unconsciously, without my effort or so-called strong will, completely given up on my decision. It suddenly struck me as trifling, idiotic, impolite to myself and to others, in short the idea entirely disgusted me. And this disgust, this was my strength in the unhappy future that awaited me.
When, approximately fifteen years later, an embargo was declared on me and I was forbidden from working on films and went through sleepless nights, except for one exceptionally awful night when I once again considered whether it might not be the most appropriate solution, that strength that I had acquired in the primeval Šumava forest appeared once more. With Kozel and with that engineer with the pipe in his mouth too and with the silence of the night and those stars above.
One day I set out from Radčice or Rapotice a little later than usual, there was a line at the post office and by the time I had picked up the letters and bought kerosene and candles, evening was approaching. Nevertheless, I had decided not to spend the night there, although I could have slept somewhere by the forest or perhaps even at a table in the pub, but I didn’t want to. So, with excitement, I bought a red melon that always weighs a kilo or so, but I was looking forward to cutting it open and how it would crunch and the juice would run down my chin. In short, I hit the road. When I came down from the roadway to the forest and looked at the sky, where the first stars were already shining through, I lost my courage a little. The forest was beginning to be black as only the Šumava forest can be, but then I waved it off and set off straight into the darkness and my fate. As a bad omen, a slain mountain adder lay by the path into the forest. After a few minutes I tied my hair up with a scarf so that people couldn’t tell from my silhouette that I was a woman, and because I had on pants and a jacket and a rucksack, I hoped that I would just get punched in the mouth instead of getting raped. Basically, I wasn’t being smart. At that time Americans were letting Czech teenagers loose in the border region as disruptive elements. As I knew from many accounts, they were firing shots. I didn’t have any reason to doubt the veracity of these reports, so as a female silhouette I’d have had a better chance than as a male one carrying a rucksack on my back.
Once at midday I met two of those boys when I was returning from Malonty. They had so-called western dress, striped socks on their feet, American jackets, and jeans and they asked me where Kaplice was. Their hair was sprinkled with dust from the road and their noses were burnt red – they had evidently been walking since the morning. I showed them where Kaplice was and they thanked me with an uncertain expression, full of suspicion, so it occurred to me that in exchange for this information they might shoot me from behind in a couple of minutes. They both looked like they’d be capable of it, so I risked it and said, boys, I wouldn’t go to Kaplice like that, get rid of those jackets and put those socks in your pocket – and I walked on. When I looked back, they were standing on the road, looking at me, and persuading one another to do something. You know, political power uses every tool available to run smoothly, those two boys – well, I don’t know if they survived.
So with this awareness of so-called saboteurs I walked through the forest. Something whipped against my face and I felt my hair standing on end, the goosebumps went all across my skull and I felt that my knees had swiftly gone weak. In a self-defense reflex I snatched at something and it was a branch sticking out perpendicular from a tree, so I felt extraordinary relief and when I rearranged my knees by command, I went on. Fortunately I knew the path well enough that I instead stayed alongside it, grabbing tree trunks and determining by looking up whether I was veering onto the path. It was full of deep holes, falling would have meant a fracture or basically an injury of some kind and so I managed to make it all the way to the roaring brook called Deer Brook. There was a footbridge to an old mill that was almost roofless where, as had been told to me, some of these saboteurs had taken up and so there had been a shootout where they killed the butcher’s wife or something, basically there had been some trouble. I remembered this story when I was at last smoking in warm air outside the forest and wondered whether I should go around the mill or not. Going around it meant an additional hour of walking and I was too tired for that, the load on my back was quite heavy, so I walked through the mill, it was dark as hell there, I felt along the wall to get to the opposite exit and all the time I was followed by the really Hitchockian idea that in the next moment I’d feel a spot on the wall and it would be a soft face. It’s interesting that people can imagine the greatest horrors, but when they get into a truly terrifying situation, they react with a sort of heightened intelligence and not just with a feeling of fatalism that nothing can be done.
I crawled up the steep hill on all fours, by then I was physically unable and when I made it to the school kitchen, which was at the same time the local center of social life, I found some men, absolutely blind-drunk, including the administrator who froze at the sight of me and asked where I had come from. I drank a lot of water and ate some melon – I had already told them – and prayed that I’d be lying in bed on the straw mattress already. One of the men, a “Romanian” Slovak, said to me with a shaking voice: –Don’t you know that old Margula died? – No, I didn’t know and I didn’t know old Margula, so I didn’t give a damn whether she had died or whether she’s living to this day and I went to bed.
Without any effort on my part, I had entered into the circle of those I had longed for – that is, the “Romanian” Slovaks – as a marvel and as a person who must be taught. Two young men, Karolko and Gondek, and many others I don’t remember, explained to me why there had been such a fright in the hall when I came into the fateful kitchen. Old Margula had died that night. As I certainly knew, on the night that they die, the dead will strangle anyone they can get their hands on. I was very fortunate that Margula didn’t realize that I was going through the forest, otherwise I’d now be lying in the forest drained of all color. And nobody would have awoken me. For, in the first hours after their death, the dead are awfully jealous of the living and want to have them as accompaniment. It’s easy to realize this and behave accordingly. And why are the dead jealous? Why aren’t they happy that they died? After all, she was old, that’s why they called her old Margula. Well, was the answer, nobody knows that. And they crossed themselves.
I was in ecstasy. I had ended up in a living surrealism, in the poetry of an opium eater, in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Unfolding all around me were marvelous, morbid flowers of fantasy, old atavisms, I was living not in the twentieth century but in another one, terrifying, full of hallucinations and visions. Yes, wills-o’-the-wisp did exist, so did the Grim Reaper walking behind travelers through the forest, and he can be identified by the fact that he’s slightly luminescent. The Reaper, by its presence, stigmatizes whoever comes to the village, so that someone there will die within three years. Yes, there is such a thing as Living Hair. It looks like a horse’s mane, like a single hair from a horse’s mane. It can be found in creeks, in meadows, you tell yourself that a horse passed by and a hair fell out of its mane but that’s a mistake. It lies in wait for its victim and woe unto anyone who, intentionally or unintentionally, brings it home in their dress or something like that. The hair comes alive and sucks out blood night after night until the person in question dies.
Vampirism caught my interest. Transylvania – Dracula – the old legends. The Living Hair fascinated me so much that, from the time I was told of it, I carefully chose a place in the forest or the field before sitting down. Once I thought that there was something in Deer Creek that could have been Living Hair, it was thin and looked like horsehair, it flopped around – in short, it was Living Hair that disappeared in the swift stream of the water because it couldn’t get onto me.
I must mention that when they warned me – they took me for a boor and wanted to give me good advice with all their heart – not once did I laugh, even internally. I asked questions, yes, but I ascertained step by step that all of the wonderfully hallucinatory things they said had a logic within them, one quite different from the logic of logical thought. In their own peculiar way, they were deciphered codes of life. It WAS the TRUTH. Why couldn’t the dead kill the living? Why couldn’t there be wills-o’-the-wisp? Why couldn’t there be a stray root? Who’s to say that we in the civilized world don’t encounter more of them than in the Šumava forest inhabited by primitive but clever people? Who’s to say that the coats of those who, for cunning reasons, joined the communist party don’t have a Living Hair caught on them? A vampire who sucked the life out of them in a different way, through a different method, sucked out their self-respect, sucked out the strength necessary for a human to deserve the name Homo sapiens? Who’s to say that stray roots and the Grim Reaper and wills-o’-the-wisp don’t exist in the city?
I was happy when they taught me things, it’s true that at the bottom of everything was primitive wildness, but who among us civilized and educated people haven’t revealed that in ourselves at critical moments?
One night an awful storm broke out, lightning flashed across the sky, as they write in novels, Administrator Kozel shook me awake saying that I had to take flax away to the barn immediately. The motor of the tractors roared, the lights shined into the empty, frightful night like in an English Gothic novel and Karolko and Gondek and I were assigned to take the sheaves of flax from the tractor drivers and place them in an orderly fashion in the barn. Goosebumps ran up my back, the tractor drivers hurled sheaves of flax at us in a frenzy and kerosene lamps shone on the walls – a few decimeters and we would all be in flames. At that dramatic moment when we all awaited the next cannonade from the tractor drivers, Karolko decided to confide something terrible to me. The group that he came with to what was then Czechoslovakia included an orphan who they took with them out of sympathy. One day, without speaking, he hanged himself on a large old oak tree that I often went by in the fields. The day after his death, Karolko walked by, and what does he see? The orphan was standing under the oak and looking at him silently. Karolko escaped on foot to the village and refused to work that day. What was worse was that a few other guys who had gone to work saw the orphan standing under the tree too. Martial law was declared, everyone prayed together for his soul. I thought about how they must have treated him or, in the best case, how the boy must have felt in an unknown land and without parents. Or was his apparition a common feeling that they had committed a bad deed together against the orphan? The orphan did not respond to prayer and stood there day after day, in broad daylight, supposedly it was like he was still alive, just watching. The villagers acknowledged that they didn’t seem to be able to solve such a complicated matter alone and called a specialist, that is a priest. He prayed at the place in question (he must have been a clever fellow) and never in his life did the orphan show up again under the oak.
As the story was being told, very quietly and haltingly, the two fellows were constantly crossing themselves. It was very interesting analyzing a thing like that. Of course I know that these things can happen, but it needs a receiver, a sensibility, the person in question who sees the apparition needs to be tuned to the right notes in order to see it. And the whole thing is connected with Christianity, exorcism through ritual.
Many years later, when I ended up in the Pacific, I wasn’t at all surprised by the tales and legends of the Polynesians. Many times I recalled that night with Karolko and Gondek, the strength of the fear and humility that radiated from them. So, as can be seen, there’s nothing new under the sun. That storm, those tractors, the urgency to share something with me, a person from the city, so that I wouldn’t think that the city is everything. On the contrary, so that I would learn about the secrets of their stretch of land and the secrets of one particular village, culture, and nation.
____

In this way, like an ectopic pregnancy, I was accepted among people who I had not only previously never thought about, but who I had also known nothing about. If I hadn’t spent part of my social life talking by the fire with the Drveňáks, sitting with the women who either were pregnant or had young kids. They sewed little pillows and duvets and blankets and I offered to draw pictures on those things that they could embroider. I drew them with a crayon on the pillow, which they called a vankůšek: a butterfly, a cat, and other silly things. They were excited, they were amazed that I knew how, they tried to draw themselves, it was quite horrible to endure, the primitiveness, the ignorance, but inside I had come to terms with it, I wanted to fill myself up on another world, other ideas.
My enchantment ran out. Karolko and Gondek weren’t friends like I had stupidly thought. I sat in a granary waiting for a grain delivery and was witness to an awful scene. The two arrived and as soon as they had jumped down, they started fighting. Though he was smaller, Karolko was beating Gondek with all his might, and I understood that Gondek, a somewhat feeble-minded fellow, perhaps even a mongoloid, could not match his strength – he was evidently the whipping boy of the village because he was afraid of revenge and punishment. Karolko kicked him again on the straw on the ground and went away cursing. Gondek went to work. He started to beat the two horses in the head with the handle of his whip. I had just gotten up to stop him, it was horrible watching the two horses pressing their heads to each other anxiously and trying to retreat from his blows, when Administrator Kozel rushed out and then he started to beat Gondek too. Blood was streaming from his nose and lips, he escaped the worst fate that could have awaited him – I had the feeling that the administrator was going to kill him – and the administrator approached the horses, petted them, kissed them on their face and mouth, cried and shared something with them confidentially so that they wouldn’t be afraid, nothing else would happen to them, he’d kill the bastard.
The whole time I felt was like I was a character from Turgenev, life in a Russian village, and my stomach turned. At that moment I understood how necessary culture was, I was disgusted by the crossing-over of different emotions and impulses that ran their courses freely, everything so tangled up together that the poor horses were just one rung on the social ladder on the empty and terrifying ground where all the flotsam and jetsam of human emotions and awful, disgusting deeds lay topsy-turvy. I was somewhere in Eastern Europe, Prague was a far-away, intelligent star, no matter how damaged it was.
———
Once in the field where I went to paint thanks to my supporter the administrator, I heard singing. A herd of cows and sheep was grazing nearby. The shepherd was singing, also a “Romanian” Slovak. He was singing about hair like hard chains in wells and eyes that are really the well – or something like that, but the melody and the lyrics astonished me, exhausted me, destroyed me with its beauty and depth of feeling. I went after him and asked him whether he wouldn’t sing it again, that I was leaving but couldn’t he repeat it once more? He was taken aback and embarrassed, he told me that he was composing a new song and didn’t even remember what it was. That he sings to the cows because he realized that they give more milk later. That was the end of the conversation, but our near-friendship was shown by the fact that his dog, a German shepherd, not a purebred and still almost a puppy, started coming to sleep in my room whenever Vávra – that was the shepherd’s name – retired to the village to spend the night here and there. Vávra the shepherd told me that I had to be a witch because his dog came to my room to sleep – he slept on the bed across from me and didn’t growl even when I petted him – because it was a dog who didn’t like people and he was glad that he had him.
A half-wild tomcat came over to me to sleep like to a witch, a tomcat that aroused deep distrust. When I woke up in the night, I saw his silhouette and his shining, beautiful eyes. He was a strange beast, very shy, introverted, but ultimately he resolved to live with me in peace and sometimes meowed as evidence that he knew about me, with the hoarse, sad voice of an outcast. He strangled chickens, but I didn’t tell anyone, the hunters had long set a trap for him.
I think at that time I must have radiated something like the holiness of Francis of Assisi. Probably, because one moonlit night the administrator’s cat brought three kittens in turn to my bed, and they frolicked on my body until I woke up. The cat sat at the legs of the bed and looked at me silently and significantly, with trust. She had the moonlight in her eyes and I was happy, content, strong, resolved. Once when, for about two hours, I observed a muskrat hunting trout in the creek – a unique and terrifying thing at the same time, also God without religion, order, meaningful action, cleanliness, and murder altogether – then when I finally came out, it looked at me as indifferently as if I’d been a tree and went along the stones to the other bank. It just shook itself and her fur was dry, I’d never seen that before – I really felt like Galileo when he discovered the Nova among the stars – I’ve always experienced anew that feeling that I know nothing, absolutely nothing about the planet because I’m sewn into a coat of culture and civilization like a sack and that they’d throw me into the water in it with everything like Saint John of Nepomuk, until I died I wouldn’t learn anything WHERE I lived – and now, when the muskrat crawled out, I stood up straight and said to it, hey, you over there, I’m a person, do you know that at all? Once more it looked at me with indifference and crawled out to the opposite bank in no rush, it scratched behind its ear without any sign of fear. So I went on those stones after it, I kept my distance, because until that point muskrats had never been an interest of mine and I didn’t know how it would behave if it felt threatened, whether it wouldn’t jump onto me – but nothing like that happened. It scrambled dexterously up into the basin into some stunted tree on the bank, placed itself there, and as though leaning out the window, looked at me. And I at it.
In those moments I knew that my fate was to conquer what I would want to conquer – I was the queen together with the muskrat and the creek and that forest, everything was smiling at me and calling me to the fight, to activity.
———

¹ Rudolf Slánský and 10 other people were executed in 1952 after a show trial ordered by Stalin in which they were convicted of treason against the socialist state. The trial also had a strong current of antisemitism: of the 14 co-defendants in the show trial, 11, including Slánský, were Jewish.

² The national committees (národní výbory) represented various levels of local and regional administration in Communist Czechoslovakia.

³ The Czech word Šumava refers both to a mountain range by the border with Germany and Austria – often known in English as the Bohemian Forest – and a nearby part of Southern Bohemia.

⁴ Meaning “Parrot”.

⁵ The National Security Corps (Sbor narodní bezpečnosti), the national police force of Czechoslovakia.

⁶ Meaning “Billy Goat”.

⁷ That is, Parrot and Billy Goat (see previous footnotes).

⁸ This fragment was evidently intended to be deleted.