Modern Czech Classics

Josef Jedlička

Midway Upon

the Journey of Our Life

Translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker

Karolinum Press

Josef Jedlička

Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life

KAROLINUM PRESS, Ovocný trh 3–5, 116 36 Prague 1, Czech Republic

Karolinum Press is a publishing department of Charles University in Prague

www.karolinum.cz

ebooks@karolinum.cz

© Karolinum Press, 2016

Text © Josef Jedlička – heirs c/o Dilia, 2016

Translation © Alex Zucker, 2016

Afterword © Rajendra A. Chitnis, 2016

Translator’s Note © Alex Zucker, 2016

Illustrations © Jiří Grus, 2016

Cover by Zdeněk Ziegler

First English edition

Translated with the support of the Banff International Literary Translation

Centre (BILTC) at The Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada.

ISBN 978-80-246-3127-1

ISBN 978-80-246-3128-8 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-3351-0 (epub)

ISBN 978-80-246-3352-7 (mobi)

I

WE CAN BEGIN AND END anywhere, for we have not made a pact with victory, but with struggle. In the old days they began with childhood — yet how many mass graves have they filled in since then! What a terrible burden of vigilant loyalty has accrued to us over the years, what an effort we make to bear its weight, so we may still be capable of hope and love today, and, perhaps, again tomorrow!

But I am writing a book: Somewhere in the middle of life comes a moment when a man must take his fate into his own hands. For it comes to pass that the young woman we hope for from birth and remember to our final hour marries and gives birth to a child. You kissed her just once, in the rain, on a street corner, with the perfume of heroic lilacs still in the air. The child of course is a boy. And he looks like you, he looks like you! — your spitting image. And it comes to pass that they kill a poet before your eyes and a weary policeman, a gentle soul, brings home a sheet of paper from an unfinished piece of writing, folded into a fortune teller for his children. And then it comes to pass one day that tender young seamstresses, their doll-like busts working in graceful rhythm, put in overtime to mend the red banner of the revolution using the finest thread. And that is that moment. It usually comes before sunup, and from that point on, lyricism is done for.

LYRIC POETRY — as everyone knows — differs from epic poetry in that it doesn’t tell stories: its stories are hidden. But even back then I yielded to it only as a vice, in those first years after February, encased in wooden scaffolding — while she was still asleep . . . Afterward you end up with a pounding headache, sick to your stomach, but to miss out on your first love is something that stays with you all your life. So there can be no more lyricism. The essence of lyricism is the decanonization of themes, in other words, a muddle. Freedom, they say! But who will be our witness when the day comes, who, when we are completely and definitively alone?!

As for method, the method of prose is deceleration and the method of poetry is semantic reversal. Thus men slow down and women want to be done as quickly as possible. But that’s just it, there’s not enough freedom. We live in a man’s world, the methodological and semantic context of prose, established and reestablished over and over, ad nauseam, by way of awkward digressions. Of course. There were women who trained to be locksmiths and train engineers, so nobody writes prose on a whim. No one knows how it will all turn out. And in prose, you can end anywhere: “So that, when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s –” The end. Or he dies.

I WILL BEGIN, THEN, with my state of siege. Every two hundred yards along the road that leads from the Stalin Works to the Collective House in Litvínov, there is a date inscribed in the concrete. Behind the old slaughterhouse, amid a group of unplastered brick buildings constructed by French POWs during the war, worn by rain and sticky with sulfurous ash from the factories and open-pit mines, is the date 18. II. 1948. A little higher up, in the direction of the future, a child’s bare footprints are pressed into the concrete.

Long before they took us prisoner here in these model family homes, there was nothing beyond this but fallow land, pitted with bomb craters, and a few lone huts of rotting black plank, some forgotten groves of birch, barbed wire, tissue paper roses dotting the grass pink and blue — and on the site where my bookshelf now stands, a wild rabbit had its nest.

Back then we still walked the streets of Prague quietly singing an old Russian revolutionary song into the night, the one Lenin supposedly whistled, leaning against the ledge of the open window that misty November morning in the hush of the long pause before the Aurora fired off its famous shot. Someone had adapted it to local circumstances, changing the refrain to “Lidice–Most–Litvínov . . .”

The Youth Union brigades had begun building homes and were doing a pretty bad job of it. Most of the walls didn’t meet at a right angle, so it was difficult to set up the wardrobes and beds when we moved in one November day — by that same fatal logic that in the end always convinces you that no word and no name can be taken in vain.

They were building in a hurry. There wasn’t time.

We recited Mayakovsky to taciturn landholders, owners of an acre or half an acre, in pubs that served weak beer, and most of the girls that summer lost their sad wartime virginity — for disappointment and grief were far, far in the future, and the murky dawns were only just beginning to collect, imperceptibly, in a slender strand of the first gray hair.

The doors didn’t close properly either, and would open on their own, thudding in the draft. To this day the neighborhood resounds with muffled banging on windy days, an organic sound, like the roar of surf or the hum of a forest. The countryside has yet to adapt itself to the city. A few years ago there was a thicket of beech right behind the house, you could just pop out from the kitchen and a few minutes later be gathering mushrooms for soup among the electric cables and tin cans and baby carriage skeletons. It was no longer like that by the time we arrived, because the children had trampled down the mycelium and the forest soil had been covered over with humus after the last battle was won and people were finally authorized to have gardens.

AT FIRST THEY HAD IN MIND a uniform layout for the grounds around the blocks of flats. Back then most people still didn’t have any sense of the difference in principle between Breton and socialist realism; back then, when this housing estate was being built, we all still believed in Rilke and free love.

So any individual modifications were prohibited. Inspections, unscheduled and unannounced, threatened severe consequences for anyone who violated the public nature of the space. Yet there were still many broken bricks, planks, cables, scraps of wire mesh, and the wind, which blows where it will, sowed haphazardly an aster here, a marigold there, so there was uncertainty right from the start as to what was actually intentional and what was not. Men with armbands on their sleeves stood in befuddlement over stray clumps of purple columbine and silently beat their way through the bushes of black elder — anxiously wondering whether they might be betraying the cause of the working class.

Yet for a long time nobody dared. Only on dark, starless nights did they sneak out in front of the building with children’s shovels, glancing around in alarm at the distant whoop of drunkards and the yowl of mating cats, planting radishes, parsley, and chives in the damp corners sheltered by the brickwork terraces. The children of course pilfered it, and this violation of discipline and the collectivist spirit was the topic of frequent heated debates at plenary sessions of the Party’s local organs.

In the context of the struggle against formalism, as well as perhaps in recognition of economic necessity, people used low wire fencing to stake out household gardens in irregular rectangular plots.

Now it was time for enrichment. The earth was dry and rocky, and dug up by bulldozers, even hen and chicks barely took hold in it. People pushed baby carriages a mile and a half loaded with pails and baskets full of fertile soil. Our neighbor claimed to have trucked in seven hundred and thirty-six loads of forest dirt. He found his site in a hollow where some foxes used to have their den. The earth there was heavy, and rich in ammonia due to the rotting carcasses of baby hares and mice and golden-plumed birds, and perhaps even a man shot down on the run. The furious growth of the peonies still brings to light a fragile little white bone every now and then.

So it was that everyone settled in, growing thick and putting out branches; so it was that we moved into the city under siege.

OUR NEIGHBOR THE VIGILANT outpost works in the garden all day long, to the point that in the summer it seems he hardly sleeps. I run into him at six thirty a.m. as he returns home from the night shift.

“Good night,” I say, according to local custom, as he lays his briefcase down on a bench beneath a truncated tree and roots around in the dirt, yanking up weed sprouts.

“Good night!” he replies guardedly, and I lower my eyes so he won’t catch me, so he won’t see that I know how irrevocably, how desperately irrevocably the rosy day arising above the dark hills fills the vale of May. And as I walk away, he sinks into reverie, gazing down on his little rock garden and beds of kohlrabi and onion.

I return in the afternoon to find him hard at work. He is transplanting some delicate young plants from a hotbed he built with his own hands with the help of his late brother-in-law, and at day’s end he handles the watering hose with the meticulous precision of a calligrapher. His voice is soft, with a cultivatedly cruel diction. “The primrose,” he says, “otherwise known as the primula, comes in many varieties. One would never have imagined. So for instance you have the Primula pruhoniciana, the ‘Springtime’ primula, distinguished, as you see, by its pink notched petals, the dwarf primrose, the summer primrose, the purple . . . well, at any rate, I could go on and on, it’s something of a hobby of mine. The way some people like a drink or two out on the town. True, there’s always work to be done, but the boy does appreciate a taste of strawberries now and then, even if it’s only a few.”

Our own garden lies fallow.

“That’s good black earth you’ve got right there, just waiting to be dug,” he says to me sometimes with a look nothing escapes.

He was a policeman before the war. I don’t like police, I don’t like living under police surveillance.

“We saw plenty of their sort in our day,” the policeman said one evening, lighting half a cigarette in a long cherrywood holder. “Hussies! But the men on the force, we knew how to handle them. We had this little implement, the spike we called it, like this, up our sleeve. And they came with us, yes sir. They came right along, like lambs. There were times — I’m telling you — the things we saw, it was like a novel. Yes sir, a novel, only not the kind they write.” Then, having defined his poetics, he resumed: “This one time with my partner, Husárek — you remember him, hon, good-looking guy! — this one time we pulled a raid on this . . . one of these little hideaway joints. Busted in there, wham bam. You know, the usual, booze, cards — but one of the hussies, she wasn’t having it. Uh-uh, did not want to go. She bit, scratched. Little minx. So to teach her a lesson, as they say, we took her in as is. Just like that, in her birthday suit. Nothing but her high heels. That was the year of the big frost, when the trees froze over. By the time we got her to the station, she’d turned white as a ghost on us.”

Then the light went out. Power loss. That happened often. The policeman sat smoking, feeling indulgent toward the world because summer was turning to fall and he already had his crocus, hyacinth, and tulip bulbs stored away in the cellar. A cold wind was beginning to blow from Siberia, reeking of tar and the smoke of furtive fires. There were still men in concentration camps standing for night roll call. We listened tensely to the doors’ muffled banging, no one said a word. Then I went home and ate my cold dinner with my hands alone in the dark, because the shops were out of candles and it had been nine months since Christmas.

AT NINE THE ALARM CLOCKS start going off. Rise and shine for the night shift. Most of the children are already asleep. The women are coming home from the shops and canteens. In the doorway they share a fleeting kiss with their husbands, who smell of sweat, coal dust, and hydrogen sulfide.

I sit with my sticky fingers spread, watching the wintering flies settle onto them, and ponder the fact that there is barely coal for a week in the cellar. On the other side of the wall someone is playing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture on an old raspy gramophone. Suddenly the door opens and in walks a woman wearing my mother’s wedding dress, a bouquet of Parma violets pinned to her bosom, with fishnet gloves and white leather boots. In her outstretched left hand she holds a blue porcelain candelabra ablaze with sallow tapers that singe a loose red lock of her hair with a sizzling crackle.

With a single abrupt gesture, graceful yet just hurried enough that it leaves a red scratch on her throat, she opens her dress and her tanned breasts slip out of the fine Valenciennes lace.

“We brought you some coal,” she says, beckoning me to follow her.

“It’s still a week till payday,” I say.

“Not to worry, mon cher!” She presses my face to her warm, blue-veined breasts. “Poor Count de Lérouville is footing the bill, of course.”

So I walk out in front of the house and pour my last coins into the black-stained palm of the old wagonman: “Careful, friend, you don’t want to soil the lady’s dress!” The coal is deposited in front of the house: a big beautiful walnut of high heating value. The woman in the 1924 wedding dress lays the bouquet of violets on top of the heap and walks away. She walks away: “Adieu!” And as she turns to glance back one last time, the chill white of her throat shines from the furs around her neck. Meanwhile the “Marseillaise” is drowned out in the thunder of bells from the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Kremlin. And after that, nothing but silence, a whooshing void untouched by even the most distant memory of applause at the Prague Spring concert in ’48 where one of my old friends lent me an uncensored copy of The State and Revolution. Then Páleníček performed the “Appassionata.”

The door opens by itself. I am tense, as though at any moment I might be caught in the act, once and for all. And the dark stream flows on through the factory gate, the loudspeakers blare a marching tune, the punch clocks ding, a red star shines above the cooling tower, and gray buses filled with prisoners quietly drive through the gate next door. We all wake to a shapeless night with the obstinate courage of despair, as if the dawn were never to come again. The workers begin their shift.

I’M NOT THE ONE CREATING the context. I’m writing an encyclopedia, giving testimony, hiding from the searching gaze of the policeman, in plain view of the world, on the second floor of this ramshackle building that any key can unlock. The point hasn’t been to interpret the world for some time now. The only thing that matters at the moment is fate. I am who I am — and you, you are the only ones I can call as my witnesses: you, men rocking a car on the clutch in the middle of a hill, you, stripped to the waist, giving a cheer as you bury gas pipe in the ground, you, women with old lady’s bellies, lining up for meat at five o’clock in the morning, you, starving, beaten, and tortured, coughing up the last drops of blood on the concrete bunkers’ moldy floors, you, drunken boasters formerly on a first-name basis with Frištenský the wrestler, you, technicians trained in the factories of Škoda and Siemens, earning a Brandenburg Concerto in a single man-hour — you, men with whom one day, it seems, one way or another, I will charge the bayonet side by side.

But who today can judge? Whose fault it is that we have forsaken each other? Who cast this spell on us that, sitting over a glass of beer, we read each other’s lips like the deaf for the lost words of fraternity and solidarity? To what beginnings previous to other beginnings must we return to rediscover a mutually intelligible code for the morning mist and the felled tree, for the swoop of a bird in flight, for the silence in a darkness teeming with little owls and barn owls?

Back in those days, in the age of innocence and hope, I lived in Prague with two sisters, the younger of whom, years later, I married. She still believed in those days that the cast-iron wheel with the handle in the operator’s cabin was what steered the tramway cars, clear evidence of how we unintentionally strip the world of its potential miraculousness with lyricism. The small flat was constantly full of people, coming and going as they pleased, since we kept the key under the mat. Cigarettes were still rationed, so we smoked them one at a time, passing them around the table and stuffing the butts into paper holders for later. We sat around the fold-up sewing machine till daylight, debating transition classes according to Marx and “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man.” Also sexual issues and monogamy. We attended lectures, as long as they didn’t start too early in the morning, and locked ourselves in the bathroom to cram before exams. Whenever we had any loose change, it went into a common pool, so every now and then we could get drunk on fruit wine, 46 old-currency crowns a bottle. Sometimes we drank rubbing alcohol with grapefruit juice: The med students supplied the spirits, the juice came courtesy of the UNRRA.

Couples went into the entryway to neck. And then sometimes, toward morning, gone soft with fatigue and the sweet and ineffable certainty of God’s just kingdom, as the blackbirds out in the courtyard began to screech, we serenaded the stain-covered wall on the building across the way with “The Internationale.”

A milkman and his wife lived in the flat next door to us. Quiet, modest, considerate folk. The wife, tiny with black eyes, was pregnant, and sometimes she would come over to ask us for an aspirin. She contributed to our debates on Bertrand Russell without realizing it by showing off her blue layette to the girls. But then late one night she ended up giving birth to a little girl while I was shooting out the window at the wall across the way with a Belgian 9mm left behind in our flat by the Germans.

They weren’t so strict about firearms licenses in those days, despite the official position that arms in the hands of the people gave rise to tensions.

EARLY FEBRUARY WAS warm, with conditions particularly favorable for sighting a white horse between the fences, legs spattered black by the surface of an autumnal lake, or Icarus thrashing among the birches in Rieger Gardens. People stood long past midnight, overcoats unbuttoned, quarreling and arguing and debating on the sidewalk in front of the Melantrich building. We opened the windows at nighttime, enjoying the cool feel of the air on our naked bodies.

During those same days, somebody spat on a Czechoslovak Communist Party display case, just up the street from the Vinohrady market hall. The neighborhood agitprop committee framed the spit in blue glazier’s pencil and wrote in big letters: this is how the enemies of the nation and the working class fight! It was clear that something had to happen, the time was ripe. Besides — we were the youth of the world.

Some of the people who came to see us in those days were Čestmír J., who went on to study medicine and I’m told now works at the psychiatric hospital in Bohnice; Miloš P., a German-looking blond with a German sense of order — for that matter he also had a German name — who even then already knew a lot about nuclear physics and relay computers; Dáša H., a very beautiful and very sad architect, whom years later I would bump into carrying blueprints for arched lintels, Corinthian capitals, and Byzantine colonnades; Vít Č., who no one yet knew would become an informer; Honza, refined and brilliant, with a personality so transparent he could barely be discerned by the naked eye, and his brother, the little boy who was ultimately destined to take the stand for Balzac, and Slávek M., the one who loaned me the uncensored edition of Lenin and who, having achieved the rank of doctor of philosophy, inherited from his father a working automobile; and Milan and a something or other Kuňa, and Irena and Božka and Fíma and Hanka and Soňa, and another ten or so whose names and faces I’m slowly forgetting . . .

Besides me and the two sisters studying medicine, we also had a subletter in the flat and, sometimes, K. the med student. The subletter, a former nun who had run away from the novitiate, would come home around eleven at night, fill the bath with hot water, and sit there steaming, hair up in a pink net, practicing her stenography on news briefs from Tvorba, the cultural review.

K. the med student, meanwhile, would spend whole days just sitting in front of the gramophone. We didn’t have too many records: “Rue de la Gaîté” by Nezval and Burian; “Ol’ Man River,” sung by Paul Robeson; “Sentimental Journey,” which wasn’t so associated with Viktor Shklovsky yet in those days; “Kanava,” a Russian folk song; Ravel’s Boléro; part of the third movement of Mozart’s Concerto in D Minor; and the Jewish prayer “El Malei Rachamim,” recorded by a Bulgarian or Romanian cantor named Katz, the only one to be saved right out of the gas chamber. Whenever he wasn’t asleep, the med student sat by the gramophone silently, and while the rest of us argued, pacing around the little room and pounding our fists on the sewing machine that served as our table, again and again he would play that despondent Jewish prayer, which at one point breaks into an Oriental-sounding falsetto chant. As soon as the record finished, he would very slowly rewind the device, change the needle, take his allotted three drags off the cigarette, and start the record over again from the beginning.

The day the Litvínov child left his footprints in the road’s concrete, the newspapers carried the news of the government’s resignation. It turned chilly and a damp snow began to fall. We went out into the streets of Prague and walked the city, heads held high, red stars on our lapels.

On the impassioned steps of the Rudolfinum, shivering in a light spring jacket, a young girl sat folding a paper airplane. In the great auditorium of the Philosophical Faculty, a Social Democrat gave a slap in the face to a short, lewd National Socialist, who even during lectures on Husserl’s Logical Investigations slipped references to his sexual problems into the discussion.

Maybe two days later, they called a meeting of the Party’s university committee at the Slovanský dům. We were advised to be on the alert. There was talk of a general strike and they were checking people’s IDs. A young editor from the Party daily Rudé právo stood on a chair in the back of the large low-ceilinged hall, speaking with his shoulder thrust forward. His coveralls were so new they hadn’t even been washed. Someone there told me a young poet had demanded to be let on national radio to perform his poem “We Recite Death” for the people. They denied him partly on principle and partly because he couldn’t trill his r’s properly.

By the time we came home it was very late. K. the med student was listening to “El Malei Rachamim,” and sitting on the couch next to him was a miner from Most named Joska, who was courting my future sister-in-law. To judge from the way he was bragging about his motorcycle exploits and the fact that he slept with an open knife beneath his pillow, he was very much in love with her. We informed him that the revolution was probably going to start the next day.

“Is that right?” he said, giving me a slap on the shoulder. “Hey, college boy, I’ll bet you can’t even ride a moped down a flight of stairs. I can and I’ve got a big bike, we’re talking DKW 500. OHV!”

We were thrilled to have him, and I shared in the excitement, since in those difficult days even the mere presence of a true representative of the working class was encouraging. I happily settled in on an improvised bed of couch pillows, and later that night the radio announced that Gottwald was going to speak on Old Town Square the next day. Joska and my sister-in-law were still leaning out the window sharing a cigarette when I fell asleep. They were talking about the shafts and open-pit mines here in the north, where they had met, about Most and Růžodol, about Komořany and Ervěnice, about the sites of my destiny that I had yet to glimpse, about gigantic conveyors towering over a barren range of slag heaps, the artificial landscape of my life, the world in its original form or finished once and for all, little by little, bit by bit, devouring everything.

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Table of Contents

1. I

2. II

3. III

4. IV

5. Afterword

6. Translator’s Note

7. About Author

8. About Translator

1. Cover

2. Title Page

3. Table of Contents

4. Beginning