The Drowning Of A Goldfish Read online

  The sound of the organ, deep and majestic, would collide with the dissonance of human voices, lamentable in their imperfection.

  The people in front of me would offer, to my wandering eyes, thick, wrinkled necks and flowered scarves.

  I sensed that we occupied a privileged position although we would be sitting, by pure chance, with the crowd. We could have been celebrating mass in the sole company of the priest. Grandfather was fluent in Latin, and I knew what was being said as he had elucidated the mystery for me.

  But to what avail was all this wisdom, all this complicity, if it did not help me to find Myšák?

  One day he disappeared without leaving a trace. I spent days searching after him, calling him, asking all the neighbors if they had not seen a black and white kitten. My nights were filled with ghosts, plaintively mewing to be rescued.

  Later I learned that Grandfather, who had seen enough of this “dirty beast,” asked my father either to take “it” to Prague with us or dispose of “it” in another manner.

  Father gave Myšák away to a man who ate cats.

  This person received Myšák from the hands of my grandmother.

  That did not pose any problem.

  The kitten trusted her blindly.

  CHAPTER II

  IRIS

  When Iris entered my life, I was playing the part of a lady-spouse.

  It was not that I had given in to the world of my grandmother; I had adapted myself to circumstances.

  My first year of high school coincided with the last years of the German occupation.

  How could I, so delicate and fragile, have passed the entrance exams, consisting mainly of physical exercises?

  I still carry within me those three days of humiliations, calculated to erase all self-esteem, when I was subjected to the howling of thick-boned Valkyries, outfitted in the loathsome brown uniforms of “Bund Deutscher Mädel” (the Nazi organization for young girls), especially brought in to present to us, the “slawischen Unterrasse” (Slavic degenerates), the Aryan ideal in its absolute form.

  I still hear the stridence of cloth ripped apart, and I still shiver at the memory of the touch of their sharpened claws tearing up my gymnastic shirt as they reached out to crush me.

  Yet, I could have avoided this affront to my dignity, this trauma, this wound forever opened, if I had been able to overcome my repulsion and the panic which engulfed me at each contact with the world of my grandmother. I could have accepted my father’s proposal to enroll me in the Vyšší dívčí, a private school for Daddy’s little girls, a breeding ground for distinguished and elegant spouses, if I had had more confidence in him, if I had been able to understand that it was a way out, not a trap.

  Vyšší dívčí was established in the second half of the 19th century as the first secondary school for girls by Eliška Krásnohorská, writer and librettist of the composer Bedřich Smetana.

  Krásnohorská knew only too well what it means to be an intelligent woman in a society which excluded her from any serious education. To make her project happen, she needed all her energy and all her courage. Labelled as a blue-stocking by these gentlemen and ladies of years gone by (the ladies and gentlemen of our time would call her “this high-flown bitch in dire need to be laid”) she was vilified as a suffragette. Grandmother, who had a very vague idea of the significance of this frightening word, explained to me that it referred to a woman who had degraded herself to such an extent that she no longer wished to care for her husband and children and having nothing better to do, would roam at night, sometimes even with men of questionable reputation. Poor as a church mouse, suffering from rheumatism which inhibited her from holding a pen in her deformed hands, Eliška Krásnohorská nevertheless succeeded in gathering around her the best minds of the nation.

  The “crème de la crème” of the Czech intelligentsia made it a point of honor to teach at her school. She knew how to win over musicians, poets, and scientists. The students were worthy of these teachers, proving as knowledgeable as men. This led to demands for equal access to education for women.

  In 1918, when equality of education had been passed as a law, Vyšší dívčí lost its raison d’être. It only offered education up to the 6th grade and thus their students were excluded from entering universities, which required eight grades.

  With time, Vyšší dívčí became a sort of finishing school, where young ladies of the well-to-do bourgeoisie received a wordly education that taught them how to entertain the distinguished and successful in their salons. I suspect that Father wanted to enroll me there because he harbored the ambition of eventually finding a son-in-law who could later become a partner in his banking business for which his daughter showed so little inclination. I am certain that my will was as strong as his though, and I would be the one to decide on a spouse.

  Vyšší dívčí, as a private school, was not directly controlled by the state, and the state, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, meant the Nazis.

  The entrance requirements were, as far as I was concerned, acceptable: I needed to have completed five grades of primary school and to pass an examination, proving that I was capable of logical thinking.

  Father needed to pay the annual fee. After my ordeal and rejection at the high school, I found this arrangement acceptable.

  In spite of myself, I became one of “them”—a student! To prefer a little to nothing is a trait of Czechs, subdued by the historical reality of being a small nation in the heart of Europe.

  I remember very little of the fifty-nine ladies with whom I had to spend my mornings. I would escape into an imaginary world; the bourgeois mentality is more contagious than the flu.

  Not to feel completely isolated, I sided with my teachers. Arms crossed behind my back, always attentive, I would diligently transfer every word from their lips into my memory. I had decided to appropriate all that was being offered, to squeeze each drop of their knowledge, and to store it as economically as possible, in my mind.

  Mathematics stifles me. Blue with asphyxia, I struggle with it. The ground gives away beneath my feet and I drown in the sweat of my bottomless despair.

  I take full revenge by closing myself in. The problem is no longer that I do not understand. At this point, I DO NOT WANT TO UNDERSTAND.

  I am watching the clouds, slipping by outside the window; I am contemplating the leaves, engaged in a rhythmic dance, teased by fondling touches of wind. My life is elsewhere.

  I transform the numbers into familiar images: Eights grow pointed ears and greet me, waving their tails above their mischievous heads; sixes, idle snails, creep across the blackboard, salivating to their hearts’ content; twos, majestically swinging their long flexible necks, float in the ocean of threes; fives—capricious monkeys—hang on the branches of fours; sevens, undulating giraffes, play basketball with the nines—Indian cobras, who with sharp, hissing cries, toss zeroes around, while the ones watch this circus, whipping the dried, cracking air.

  Tamer of ferocious numbers, I smile, savoring my victory. I have discovered the secret of my life: My inward evasions render me untouchable.

  I do not find one single friend among my classmates. I scorn them and they hate me. I could not care less. I do not want to become a part of their world. I am biding my time in a first class waiting room.

  The voice of my father yells somewhere far off in space: “Idiot, idiot, idiot” … and crashes against the ramparts of my private silence. Armed with calmness, I discern the mystery that father would like to keep to himself:

  HE NEEDS ME TO BE A WINNER.

  He had defined, once and for all, the basis of our relationship with a concise statement.

  “Either you are the best or I am not interested,” a condition easy to meet at a school for Daddy’s little girls.

  I could not give a damn.

  My great-grandfather was a gambler. His passion for cards devoured all that he had: his farm, his forests, his fields, his ponds, his family.

  Sorrow kil
led his wife. His son, my grandfather, moved into a shack formerly reserved for farm laborers, so shabby that even the estate executor did not want to seize it. He got married. Teeth gritting, he sired children, future helping hands. He worked the fields. Instead of a cow, he yoked his wife. He spared the cow. He needed her milk for sale.

  He saved money and bought fields. The soil was poor and stony. The children picked rocks and made a wall. He protected his property and made it grow. He had no time to waste. One can die before striking it rich.

  He would lose patience. In vents of rage, he would beat his wife and children with the iron chain he used to tie his dog. The dog would not profit from this moment of freedom. He would coil up. His turn would not fail to come.

  Some children died. They were replaced. What else is a woman’s belly for?

  The children went to school only if the weather was too foul to work the fields. The way was long. It rained. It snowed. It froze. One would not squander money for shoes. The skin cracked and bled, then hardened and healed.

  In spite of all that, my father would become the best pupil in his school. He pursued his dream: to end his poverty and become a “gentleman.”

  Secretly, at night, in the dim light of a candle he had made from waxy drippings collected at the parish church—he never would steal anything—he did his homework. Learning the texts by heart, he devoured books.

  At fourteen, he left for the city. If he failed, he had no place to go back to. The farm would, one day, be passed on to his younger brother.

  Father worked during the day and studied at night. He ate sparingly and saved his money.

  He entered a banking establishment belonging to two Jewish brothers. Working diligently and endlessly he became indispensable and irreplaceable, so the brothers offered him a partnership. He accepted and became one of the most influential men on the Prague Stock Exchange.

  At eighteen he earned his first million. He could afford to marry my mother, the fair princess of his dreams.

  When, after nine years of marriage, a girl was born, he was not disappointed. He held his mother, who was superior to his father in every way, in high esteem.

  He expected that I would love him, that I would understand him, that I would surpass him.

  I was a peculiar blend, in looks resembling my granfather, but ethically like my father. Intellectually, I was indebted to both of them. Convinced of our equality, if not my superiority, I was a good disciple of my grandfather’s and did not see why I should make my father’s ambitions mine. I was an explosive mixture, a bolt out of the blue. A charming little girl I could never be.

  In 1945, the banks were nationalized. My father’s career was finished.

  During the Nazi occupation, he became a member of the Resistance, and his combat friends did not forget him. They offered him several interesting and advantageous opportunities in the socialist business world, provided that he, like them, would become a member of the Communist Party. Most of them did not believe in communism, but they considered it reasonable to adapt to the new conditions of life.

  Father was more honest than reasonable.

  In 1939, he had refused, for the same reason, to emigrate to Switzerland in order to pursue his banking career with the eldest of his partners. Richard had been farsighted enough to imagine the life of a Jew in Czechoslovakia under the Nazi regime. Emil, the younger brother, and my father remained in Prague. Only the rats jump from a sinking boat.

  Emil did not consider himself a Jew; he was as Czech as my father. The Germans had another opinion. In 1942, we were informed that it was no longer necessary to send parcels to Mauthausen—a concentration camp in Austria—as the recipient had died from a “heart attack.”

  In 1948, the Communists took power in Czechoslovakia.

  In 1949, my father was imprisoned along with other “enemies of the people,” he, who always voted for the Social Democrats, persuaded that every human being has the right to work and to be educated.

  He was accused of sequestering an arsenal in his villa in Senokosy with the intention of supporting an insurrection against the “progressive forces” of his own country.

  This “arsenal” consisted of two revolvers, offered to him by his Soviet friends.

  In 1945, Father had put our house in Senokosy at the disposal of the Red Army. He was convinced that without the sacrifices of the Russian people, the West could never have overcome Germany. I was raised to love the Russians. How beautiful it was on May 9, 1945, the day the Red Army arrived in Senokosy.

  From that moment on, I shall try to understand …

  Chestnut trees, with leaves supporting pyramids of blossoms, slit their veins, and the scarlet daggers pierce the whiteness of fleshy calyxes.

  It is stifling hot. The wings of bees whip the sticky, immobile air.

  Far away, on the horizon, cannons are firing. The volley of shells explodes in my eardrums.

  Still as a Siamese cat, I burn impatiently to push the door, to leave my first class waiting room, to embark on the train for life.

  But it is the devil and his flock who enter with breathtaking speed; the Soviet tanks clear their way through the scenery of my childhood.

  I still love them, the soldiers with their worn out faces, their eyes, reflecting the vastness of the Russian steppes, and their sensitive hands like those of accordion players.

  They are my big, Slavic brothers, bold, real, powerful, saviors descended from the cross to take me in their arms.

  When the Germans invaded the Don basin, to introduce the new master in all his splendor, they amused themselves by throwing old people, children, and women with babies in their arms down mine shifts.

  For a long time thereafter, the air trembled, pierced by their shrill cries. The “masters” did not waste their ammunition on these Untermenschen (under-men). Thrift is considered a fundamental virtue by the German middle class, from which the Nazis were recruited.

  But the Russian people, donor of warm blood, swelling the veins of the world, the lamb and the wolf, the victim and the torturer, framed in the legends of pious lies and absolute truths, how does one deal with such a paradox?

  I can grasp it only through Russian intellectuals, who have always been mistreated, assassinated, expatriated by their own people and whose tongue was so often cut out.

  In 1848, the Czechs, tired of their underprivileged position in the Austrian empire, sent a commission to Russia with a mandate to explore the possibility of uniting the Slavs under the Russian hegemony.

  The head of the delegation was the journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský, a progressive, well-educated, and sensible man. He had just returned from his banishment in Brixen, in the Tyrolean Alps, where he had been relegated, with other revolutionaries, by Emperor Franz Josef.

  Each time I pass through Brixen, I admire the beauty of its countryside as well as the clemency of this Kaiser (emperor) who had brought the conspirators to Brixen, where they were lodged and fed at his expense. Their sole duty was to present themselves once a week at the Brixen constabulary, to prove they had not escaped. The rest of the time they were among their own lot, conspiring to their hearts’ content.

  But moral standards change with time, and I am the child of the concentration camps era, where the significance of cruelty took on another dimension.

  The delegation of Czech intellectuals returned from Russia deeply troubled. They could not help but notice the misery, the repression, the brutality of the Russian people, in whom they had put so much trust. Seeing this, they had to take into consideration the corruption and dissoluteness of czarism.

  The delegation drew their conclusion and announced to their compatriots that they were mistaken, that their wild hopes of uniting the Slavs under Russian hegemony were misguided, and that the only solution to their problem was social and political reform within the Austrian empire.

  The courage to admit this error deserves our respect. This attitude is also very logical, since the Czech intellectual is not a dishev
eled individualist perched on top of his ivory tower yelling, “Me, me me,” in the vacuum surrounding him.

  He is a human being, conscious of the deficiencies of his knowledge and aware of his responsibility in front of those even less gifted.

  The falsifications of some Western intellectuals regarding Soviet communism, their dangerous half-truths, their assertions knowingly contrary to reality, are also logical. The hardening of the heart entails the softening of the brains.

  Hence, at the end of the 19th century, the Czechs’ belief in Russia ended in disillusion.

  However, during the period of the Nazi occupation, something very strange happened: the mirage had risen from the dead; the myth of the Savior, coming from the East, was reborn.

  I comprehend the nature of this phenomenon. An anguished cry, heard from afar, can resemble a cheer. We all have a tendency to replace the intolerable reality with a comforting illusion.

  Thus, the Liberation of 1945 became in my eyes an access to freedom. And I was happy that it was offered by Russians, and not by Americans.

  Why?

  I gathered my knowledge of these two countries from two sources: cinema and literature.

  A kitten is born blind. Round like a ball, it nestles in the warmth of its mother cat, waiting for the moment when its eyes open and it will be able to climb up and discover the world.

  The world of my childhood was seen through the lenses of a movie camera.

  The auditorium of the movie theatre Koubek, where Grandmother and I spend our esoteric afternoons, feasting on delicious tidbits, while sitting in our red plush box, is my way of exploring the world. At first, everything dazzles me. I am the shadow of shadows; the brutal daylight makes me blind.

  Devourer of irresistible temptations, slowly, softly, I learn to draw the line between dreams and lies, between art and trash.

  The women, white and tender, the men, tanned and tough, exhaust themselves in the pursuit of the dream of success. The recipe is simple: men fight, women plot to marry.