The Drowning Of A Goldfish Read online

  The face of the beauty, gleaming with happiness, fills the screen to excess. The wedding veil wafts in the breeze, while she enters a large white house, surrounded by immense park-like grounds, acquired for her by her dear spouse. The children will surely arrive soon after, implying maternal bliss for the lady. As the flesh of the bourgeoisie is not immortal, this is their only way to defy death.

  My mother brought me into the world for social reasons. All her friends had children and she would have felt deprived of “something,” if she were childless.

  My birth was a chic one: I was born in an elegant maternity ward and delivered by the hands of a trend-setting professor, surrounded by courteous assistants and starched nurses.

  So as not to undergo any discomfort, Madame was administered anesthesia.

  A baby is cumbersome. It cries, it messes itself, it wants to be fed.

  It was not Mother’s fault that I never tasted her milk. She did not have any. I was spoon-fed, bottles not being fashionable in her social class at that time.

  Days and nights, I would scream with hunger. No one took me in their arms to comfort me; it was not hygienic. And what is more, a child could become dependent on love—a serious handicap for future social success.

  Upset by my shrill cries, Father would push my buggy in the moonlit countryside of Senokosy or the deserted streets of Prague, while my mother and my nurse rested in the warmth of their eiderdown beds.

  Grandmother only considered me later on when I became presentable and enviable in the eyes of her friends, who were deprived of little girls as cute and desirable as myself. She would buy me charming outfits, created by well-known stylists so that I would learn how to be elegant; she would tie pastel colored ribbons around my curly locks, where not a single hair had the impertinence to resist her will; she would lead me through delightful places. We would savor ice cream in shaded gardens, carry biscuits to the snow-white swans floating on artificial ponds, admire the multicolored birds displaying their splendor in ornate cages.

  I enjoyed this world, which evidently existed only to please me. I was its very reflection. My wellbeing depended upon my ability to adapt, upon my protective mimicry.

  It was not me, but her image of me, which Grandmother cherished. She would let me know what she expected of me through these insipid movies, where all human activity was reduced to sipping champagne, bubbling in rainbow-colored glasses.

  As for me, I felt hungry, I was thirsty, I had to blow my nose and go to the bathroom. If I were caught having these needs, and that would surely happen one day, I should be chased like a bad smell out of this embalmed paradise. For nobody would associate such lowly and vulgar things with gracious ladies even if they are a fact of life.

  If I was living in a world of lies and cheating, could all these lovely ladies be false? Who, in fact, was the imposter?

  Was it I?

  On leaving the movie theater, I would no longer be dazzled. American movies and the civilization they portrayed would seem a synonym of deceit and crookedness. I deeply mistrusted the very existence of these beautiful women, limited to the social function of their husbands. Their way of life, being ersatz, was totally unacceptable to me.

  I wanted to become myself, independent and free, and I was prepared to pay the price.

  I discovered the Soviet movies around 1946. I would realize later that they were just the same lies; only their make-up was crude and their make-believe was humanitarian.

  They used the collective “we” instead of “I,” one gave all one’s thought for the good of the people, not for individual success; one got killed so that the principle would live forever.

  I would leave the theater dazzled.

  Next to me, Grandmother’s seat would stay empty—as was the rest of the theater. People did not like these disturbing and unpolished films. They preferred to be captivated by the flamboyant American version of war, which conformed better to their unfulfilled fantasies of being heroes.

  I felt that my unshared truth was right and socialism seemed to me, without any doubt, superior to capitalism.

  I was very pleased when, in 1946, the year of our first and last free elections, the left became victorious.

  I remember this day very well; its feverish atmosphere, thick with anxiety.

  In the street, people conferred in tight groups. For the first time since 1939, the time of the German occupation, they felt like actors in a drama whose outcome seemed to be in their control. But these poor clowns with their red painted faces, wearing their ridiculous costumes, placed on a historical stage, were the mere shadows of a great director.

  All was decided beforehand at the Yalta conference, without being asked, where the three carvers of the world drew the border lines of freedom outside of our territory, once and for all.

  They were snared in the hunter’s trap and I with them, mistaking, in our stunned naïveté, the prison bars for sun beams.

  One afternoon in May, when the violent fulmination of February 1948 began to ferment, I was seated beside my father in the National Theater, listening to Boris Godunov. We could hardly choose better; the ingredients of this majestically aggressive music were gliding from the stage to the street, from the street to the stage; venomous snakes, slithering beneath the sounds of the opera and the cries of the street, intertwined. The shrill hissings sneaked from their triangular heads with flickering tongues into my deafened ears.

  I trembled with fear.

  The theater echoed it back.

  I remember very little of the reprieve before that February, which lasted a year and a half.

  I attended high school, I devoured culture, I discussed politics with my father.

  Countering him and the darlings of my class, I became a “red.” But this was not my sole reason. I was spellbound by the chimeras of social justice and universal happiness, and was spitting out the flames of passionate words.

  A slight change occured in my life: I became friends with a classmate. Not because our minds matched, but only because she was a concierge’s daughter.

  In February, 1948, I went with my class to the mountains. One day we were not served lunch. In the valley below, the sirens of the textile factories started to wail. The Communist Party had ordered a general strike.

  I was sitting in a red and white deck chair, protected from the wind, basking voluptuously in the warmth of the sun. I was glad not to be obliged to get up and lose this precious moment in the dining room. For I adore the sun. Ever since I can remember …

  I stretch out on the floor. The carpet is soft, the room is cozy, the beams of a radiant sun revive the subtle movement of the animals, delicately amalgamated with flowers of faded colors in the circle of a perpetual dance on the Persian rug.

  This coat of yellow light, tamed with utmost care, is my happiness. I wrap myself in it; deeply, totally, to the bottom of my soul. I weave a luminous nest, gleaming in a mellow candor which will never end.

  In the valley, the factory sirens spit their hate against the lofty whiteness of the mountains. Suddenly, they stop. Menace pervades the air and is clotted by anguish. A grayish cloud is clinging to the sun; the view is tarnished, the landscape stretches into lunar space. A pale shiver pierces my body and I freeze, shivering in a cold fever.

  We return to Prague, city in a stage of siege. The deserted streets resonate with the footsteps of the workers’ militia, marching, shaking the world in their tightly clenched fists, while the February wind shuffles the debris of leaflets with all the frenzy of an angry brawl.

  The approach of a horrifying doom grips the city into a strangled muteness.

  Who dares speak when the people says: “Silence!”

  At school, the darlings make themselves up in red. To survive, the bourgeoisie has a never failing family recipe, which has proved its efficiency through the centuries. Their mimicry comes close to perfection.

  I and my friend, the concierge’s daughter, are the outcasts again. From “dirty commies” we are promoted
to “sodden reactionaries.” I do not even try to protest; it is quite certain that I am not one of them and my disgust is much too profound. I should never dream of compromising.

  I even refuse the helping hand of my teachers who, being more aware than I of the risks I run, ask me to found the cultural section of the Union of Youth at our school, a task which, under normal circumstances, would have given me great satisfaction. My gesture is not a proof of courage. I do not yet realize my absolute insignificance in a society that, without flinching, can crush me under its sturdy boot.

  The world around me writhes in violent convulsions. The taste of something vile rises in me and makes me sick.

  Father lives on tranquilizers.

  Mother works night shifts in a factory.

  I return to an empty, cold home.

  I shiver. I am hungry. I am alone in the world which shakes me in an angry upheaval like a rag doll.

  Father is moved to a psychiatric hospital and given electroshock therapy. Yet, he has not spent more than two weeks in a communist prison.

  During the Nazi occupation, Father helped, while risking our lives, Mrs. Rošická the sister of Zdeněk Fierlinger, a left-wing politician, who was living in Moscow. Mrs. Rošická’s son Evžen was murdered by the Nazis.

  After the putsch of 1948, Fierlinger became one of the leaders of the new regime, and Mrs. Rošická remembered Father’s brave help. She arranged his release from prison and saw to it that we were not removed from our flat in Prague, as was the case with many of our friends. The villa in Senokosy was not confiscated and I was not forced to leave school, where I had become a black sheep.

  My friend the concierge’s daughter detached herself from me, joined the herd, and became one of my staunchest enemies. She knew quite a lot about me and my parents. She had been our guest not only for the weekends, but also for the school vacations. She erased “the errors of her past” by becoming an informer. Thus, she started off her career as a young communist. And without any doubt, she could have gone very far, if only her proletarian origins did not render her a dangerous competitor to the darlings. They knew how to show off as a red much more facilely. So they neutralized her by labeling her as a “petit-bourgeois reactionary pig.”

  I was allowed to pass my final exams. This time, Father could have been proud of me as I finished best in my class. But all this effort was to no avail. To enter the university, I would have to pay some sort of moral concession. Father could not conceive of anything else but the nightmares of his anguish.

  I do not know if I could ever again become as miserable and despondent as I was when further studies were refused me, for a higher education represented everything I had striven for. And not just any studies. From the very start, my choice has been literature.

  Prisoner of words, I impose upon them my sovereignty. Bound by a knot of vital interdependence, we blossom radiantly. They dig their empire inside the nervous mass of my brain, metamorphosing the gray caterpillars to silky chrysolites, which, in turn, burst into butterflies of spectacular colors, directing their chaotic flight towards my suave regions.

  Nothing is left of the University that Charles IV founded in 1344 “so that his faithful sons were not obliged to go and seek the treasures of knowledge in foreign countries.”

  The edifice on the quay of the Vltava is gray, squat, hostile.

  At least, this is how I see it, since that day, when a tribunal of usurper’s henchmen, this time in blue shirts, tightened their grip on my life and reduced me to a gelatinous substance.

  Like brown fascism, red fascism draws its vigor from the same contempt of human beings.

  I remember my aching, numb feet, my sweaty hands. The flypaper, saturated with glue, is spiraling dangerously close to me.

  My nostrils fill with a putrid sweetness. The absurdity of my resistance is coated by dignity, and the notion that I have nothing more to lose makes me insensitive.

  Gritting my teeth, I drag crates at a warehouse for chemical goods. Until now, I have not yet recovered from the absence of light and warmth. The weight of crates still crushes my loins.

  I am stretching out on the burning sand, the sun is piercing me, but a dark shiver will run forever along my spine.

  One day, I collapse, just skin and bones. Worn out by overwork, I am sent to the hospital. I have pleuropneumonia.

  To be at work at six a.m., I have to get up before dawn. After returning home, I study until falling asleep, dead with fatigue. During the night, hunger wakes me up; my stomach, wrenching with pain, refuses to be appeased by the mirage of a delicious can of sardines that I keep promising it.

  I still keep under my tongue the flavor of butter, bananas, meat, remembered from my childhood. I voluptuously savor them; the pleasure is torture.

  I swallow stale bread, shaking with disgust. The dull sweetness of the apples from our garden makes me sick. My belly swells with acid bitterness; I am starving.

  There are thirty of us: women, adolescents, and even one child in a barren hospital ward. The beds, shaped like pale coffins, are aligned against the four walls, soiled by hideous stains and the smell of decay.

  I am lowered into one of the beds like a dead weight, eyes closed, body inert. If they only would stop pestering me; my death does not affect me any more.

  You, aristocrats of phtisis, wizards of Mann’s Magic Mountain, what do you know about the putrid stink of the human body, unwashed for several weeks; about itching hair, rotting in its own grease, about the sticky mugginess of crumpled sheets, clinging to a slimy skin?

  The head doctor was once my father’s physician. In order to help me, he pretends that I am a complete stranger to him. He treats me with medication, reserved for the cherished of the regime. He prescribes a fortifying diet.

  I let myself go. Obediently, I roll over on my side for injections; diligently, I chew up all the food that is presented to me.

  I sleep, I doze, I live from hand to mouth. The ward around me rolls in a turmoil of life and death. To die, one is entitled to a private performance behind a plasticized screen; life is a public affair.

  The foul odor of feces and of decomposing bodies fills my nostrils. My own putrid miasmas buzz in search of it. My puffy face is covered with pimples and little red dots mark the place where my eyelashes used to be. When I touch my hair, it flows away like a fluffy dandelion in the autumn winds. I am not even sad. My pride is out of reach.

  Then, one day, the chaos of spots in my eyes takes shape; the blur in my ears becomes voices; the shadows around me change into human beings.

  My neighbor to the right is Jaruška. She is eight years old and has leukemia. She is put here to die without causing discomfort to her family. Her brothers and sisters are “normal” children. A little moribund sister could jeopardize their development.

  The children’s hospital is for those who strive to recover; Jaruška strives for nothing more. She is a guinea pig for the doctors. Once in a while, she is taken out on a stretcher to the operating theater. She will come back later, thickly bandaged; a piece of bone will be missing here and there. Big eyes in that fading face stare out without blinking. She remains attached to her life by the heavy braids of her hair, the anchor of her obsessional resistance, her only contact with the sweet warmth of the living. With them her day starts as brightness frees itself from the night and enters, uncertain, to the ward.

  Jaruška waits with anguish for the moment when one of the women approaches her, sits down on the side of her bed, takes a brush from the night table and begins to caress her hair with calm, long movements. The woman is interchangeable; the act is unique. Her braided hair means wakefulness, her hair loose on the shoulders, means drowsiness. Jaruška’s rhythm of life approaches the vegetative state.

  Lodged in an obscure corner of my memory, human beings are reduced to heads. All the rest hides away, crouching under the layers of crumpled blankets.

  Yet, I can still hear the voices …

  Lamenting voices, baying at death.r />
  In the end, they will all be silenced.

  The voice of my neighbor to the left is serene and reassuring. Věra is a communist, a genuine one. She believes in the dogma and the dogma protects her … until the moment when she will aspire for the truth.

  Heretics burn with a flame too bright and all precautions are taken to smother it before it is too late.

  Věra will never get very far in the Party. She shows too much concern for me and for our neighbor across the room, a weaver who fears that, losing her vision, she will also lose her work.

  Věra gives me dolls, offers me candies. She is a convalescent and has the privilege to go, once a week, to the town, from where she returns loaded with gifts. She does not believe in private ownership; everything she has she gives away.

  Věra wants the world to glow like the sunflowers in the paintings of Van Gogh.

  She brings a large, soft brush and multicolored ribbons to Jaruška. While brushing her hair, she tells her what she saw in the streets.

  For Věra, life is pure and simple.

  She is sure that Jaruška will recover. Soviet doctors are about to discover a new miraculous treatment.

  I shall be a student because after she leaves the hospital, Věra will explain to the comrade dean of the Faculty of Arts that everybody has the right to education, which was one of the first laws of the Great October Revolution.

  The weaver will be treated in a magnificent sanatorium, surrounded by a garden full of flowers, the chirrups of birds and soothing music from the world’s most gifted artists who will enthusiastically offer their talents to the service of the people.

  Jaruška will die some weeks later.

  Maybe those miraculous Soviet doctors were liquidated during one of the Stalinist purges or, siding with the torturers, they put their talents to the service of death.

  The weaver, half-blind, will be fired, without any indemnity or pension. The comrade-managers “after lengthy and mature considerations”—as the communist jargon goes—will find her unworthy “to harvest the fruits of the socialism, whose fields she did not plough.”