Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (11 page)

“It’s out of fear,” he says.

“Fifty years on? Nowadays, when they shouldn’t be afraid of anything?”

“All the people you met are about eighty. The last fifteen years of independence are just an episode in their lives. Too short a time for them to be sure that it’s a permanent state of affairs and can’t change.”

Prague’s monument to Stalin does exist.

In the summer of 2006, I get an e-mail from an employee of the archive at the Czech Ministry of Internal Affairs. He writes that he has finally managed to find a file inscribed “Suicide of the artist Švec.”

When the Security Service investigators and agents broke down the door (double locked, with the keys on the inside) of Švec’s apartment, the sculptor was lying on the same sofa bed as his wife had been when she poisoned herself (and so he had not found her dead in the bathtub, as rumor had it).

The blinds were down. They could smell gas in the air.

On the table, he had left a letter to a notary called Dr. Dvořák.

The letter began with the sentence: “I am going after my wife Vlasta, and I am leaving my entire property, including the final installment for the Stalin monument, to the rank-and-file soldiers who lost their sight in the war.” He asked for his body to be cremated using money left in the house, and for his car to be sold.

He didn’t write a word about what had compelled him to commit suicide.

The investigators tracked down the notary. He turned out to be a friend of Švec’s. “Vlasta did a good thing by poisoning
herself,” the sculptor had said to the notary. “At least she won’t grow old. Why should I bother unveiling the monument if she’s not here?”

He had apparently complained to the notary that he had dreamed of being appointed a professor, but hadn’t been. He had also expected to be given a State Prize, but hadn’t been awarded one.

A sculptor who worked with Švec on the monument told the investigators that “without a doubt, the specialists’ comments on his work had an influence on his death.” Additionally, Švec had heard people saying that he was too costly an artist, and that for the money assigned to his monument they could have built two housing estates for workers.

The sculptor also said that Švec was worried that the hill underneath Stalin was too weak, that it should be reinforced with concrete fill, and that it might collapse under the colossus he had designed.

The cleaning woman who looked after his apartment had noticed “the master” was nervous. Apparently, he had told her that lately Minister Kopecký “had come to hate him for some reason and no longer paid him as much attention as before, and that Vlasta had shown him the way.”

Second Lieutenant Kraus, who conducted the inquiry, conveyed the following official explanation to his superiors: “Otakar Švec’s suicide was brought about by the death of his wife, loneliness, and critical comments about his work which were made by some experts.”

Among his documents, prescriptions for anti-depressants were found, and “photographs of several highly placed people from the USA.”

The militia broke into the sculptor’s apartment on April 21, 1955 (nine days before the monument was unveiled). He had committed suicide on March 3—that was the date on the letter, and that was the conclusion the inquiry came to. (Later on—for reasons unclear to me—dictionaries and encyclopedias gave the date of his death as April 4.)

Otakar Švec was lying dead in his apartment for fifty days. All that time, the gas was escaping.

And so for fifty days, in the run-up to the unveiling of the largest Stalin on the entire planet, nobody was actually interested in the whereabouts of its creator.

It’s 2004.

We’re noisy, casually dressed. We’ve come from the West and we’re striding the streets with patent insatiability.

We’ve already got mugs with Kafka on them.

We’ve got Kafka T-shirts.

We’ve got matchboxes.

We’ve got cartoon versions of his life story tucked under our arms and a 177-page summary of all his works. We’re hanging out in the Jewish district, which is mainly a fake version of itself.

Over a hundred years ago, all the houses here were demolished, and the holes in the ground were covered in disinfectant. Once the Jews had been removed, bourgeois Germans and Czechs put up their grand tenements. Now we’ve stopped outside the house where he was born, though it’s not the same house, but a different one, a fake version of it.

We’re studying the menu displayed at the entrance, listing the dishes on offer at the Franz Kafka restaurant. Although this place was only established in 2003, and just looks like a restaurant from a hundred years ago.

Then we move a few hundred yards further on, down Široka Street. To the Café Franz Kafka, which, though it was opened in 2000, is also doing a perfect job of posing as a hundred-year-old café. On the wall hangs a photograph of the
kind he could have absentmindedly left here: it’s of him and his beloved sister, Ottla. The one who, in his opinion, was better off than he was both in health and self-confidence.

Now we’ve got sachets of sugar with Kafka on them (!) and at last we can feel satisfied. Even if it all turns out to be fake.

The most sophisticated among us come here in spring or fall. Maybe they’ve read somewhere that “Prague requires mist,” and that in those seasons there’s a chance of seeing the streets glistening with moisture, the lamplight muffled by fog, and the mood of mystery we demand when we think of Kafka in Prague. Summer, sunshine and hot weather deprive the city of its metaphysical element.

We have no idea that five floors above us his niece is still alive.

Věra S., Ottla’s daughter.

She is eighty-four and she is not a fake.

For eight years, she could see “the world’s largest statue of Stalin” from her window; her house was the first in line, standing directly opposite it. Now she can see the Hotel Intercontinental. And if she were to go downstairs today, she would find out that on the ground floor of her building, there are ladies’ denim jackets hanging on display, at a sale price of two hundred Euros.

Right now, she is sitting at home in a red sweatsuit.

She has white hair and a slightly olive-skinned, slender face, which now that old age has altered its features, looks like
a man’s face. The man in her looks exactly as he does in the pictures we know from the covers of his books.

She has never given an interview. She consistently refuses; not even American television was able to buy her confessions.

And she could tell some interesting stories.

Not necessarily about Kafka, whom she may not remember, as he died when she was three years old, but about her mother, Ottla, for instance. Her mother divorced her husband when persecution of the Jews began in the Protectorate. She did it first and foremost for her daughters, who would then be associated with their Catholic father, and not with their Jewish mother. In this way she saved their lives. She herself was transported in 1942 to the camp at Terezín, and from there, as an escort for 1,196 Jewish children from Białystok, she arrived in Auschwitz, where they were all sent straight to the gas chamber.

Věra S.’s husband was an eminent translator of Shakespeare who drowned in the sea while on vacation in Bulgaria. She herself was an editor at a publishing firm and a translator from German.

Sometimes Věra S. used to lend out her surname.

It was borrowed from her by her fellow translators who had fallen from grace and were not entitled to publish. In Czechoslovakia, this way of doing your colleagues a good turn was called “covering.” A
pokrývač
is a roofer, who covers roofs, but also a creative artist whose name is not proscribed, and who lends it to others whose names are proscribed. However, a piece of work signed by a
pokrývač
didn’t give either side proper satisfaction. In the event of success, neither the owner of the name nor the real author could fully enjoy it.
The former pretended to be pleased about work that wasn’t his, and the latter couldn’t accept the acclaim.

The woman sitting next to Věra S. is her neighbor, and the visitor from Poland is standing.

Trying to fool the enemy didn’t work. Anyone who calls Mrs. S.’s number from the phone book, and is lucky enough to have someone pick up at the thirty-fourth attempt, will find out that it’s her grandson’s number. Her grandson will give them a different number, at which nobody ever picks up the phone. If, a year later, they succeed in calling the grandson again, he will say he’s terribly sorry, but he got two of the figures in his grandmother’s phone number mixed up, he can’t think why. So what if he gives them a new one? The number with the right figures is never answered either. The colleague who sent me to Kafka’s niece because he’s writing a book about people in Kafka’s circle
^*
had spoken to the son of another of Kafka’s sisters. The son lives in Great Britain and asked him to send an e-mail, but gave him the wrong address, so the message came back a couple of times. Through trial and error, my colleague found the right address. He sent various questions, to which Kafka’s nephew replied: “Please expect to receive an answer in the next fourteen days.” And broke off the correspondence.

So the only advice I can give about the niece in Prague is that the visitor must stand at the gate of her house in person.

But there is never anybody named “S” at home.

You need luck, and thus you need to think of pressing the doorbell of the neighbors below to make inquiries. And then, unexpectedly, she is the one who answers what is apparently somebody else’s intercom: “In this situation I’m not going to pretend I’m not here.”

And so Věra S. is sitting in the spacious hall. At a round wooden table with no cloth, between blank white walls.

“Please explain to Mrs. S. what has brought you here,” the neighbor begins.

“My colleague would very much like to have a conversation with Mrs. S., and I am his emissary. He has been trying to call you with no luck for two years.”

Now Věra S. replies in a gentle tone: “Please ask your friend to send me a letter with his questions. I shall reply within a suitable time-frame.”

I shift from foot to foot.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” she says.

“It’s a pity I can’t ask you any questions myself,” I admit regretfully.

“What question would you have for me?”

“Well, for instance—how do you feel in the twenty-first century?”

“Please send me a letter about it. I shall reply within a suitable time-frame.”

It was getting harder and harder to bury someone. Suddenly burial had become unbelievably complicated.

Some people couldn’t be buried at all. Josef S.’s family kept his urn at home. They had made several attempts to bury it, none of which had succeeded. Someone came up with the idea of doing it abroad, but the urn was unmasked in the express train to Vienna. It had been badly hidden in the restroom, between the toilet bowl and the wash basin.

Those who could be interred were also allowed to have their death announced in the newspaper, on one condition: the time of the funeral was not to be given.

Those who were allowed to publish the time only seemed to be better off. In fact, they were complicating the lives of their friends and acquaintances. This was lucidly explained by Reiner Kunze, a German poet who lived in Czechoslovakia:

Although not all funerals took place at such appealing times of day. Not only was notice of the cremation of a certain biologist, a member of the Academy of Sciences, given at the last moment, the information also came with the cruel twist that it would be at 6:30 a.m. A famous philosopher was cremated at 7 a.m., and there was no possibility of changing the time.

A large number of funerals were set for the evening. When the mourners came out of the crematorium, they would be unable to see anything. The cemetery lighting would have been switched off. However, Reiner Kunze noticed there was an established custom that, if darkness had fallen, and the road was on a slope, with occasional steps, anyone who came to a step would stop and say: watch out, there’s a step. And nobody ever fell over.

The cemetery in the Motol district is like a country graveyard: small and cozy. It lies on a hill, among the trees, and when you turn your back on the small chapel, you can easily forget there
is a city with a population of one and a half million stretched out below.

The manager of the cemetery and the gravedigger all in one was in the middle of his supper when a man and three women knocked at the door of his tiny cottage, not much bigger than a tomb. It was dark. He must have been surprised: who comes to look for a grave plot at that time of night?