Czech Defence: a sequence in which pawn is
matched with pawn but the queen’s bishop
tips the balance.
Monday, October 21st
If anyone ever decided to illustrate Hans Andersen with photographs he would start in Prague. The heights of the city are a fairy tale of spiky spires; Hradcany castle and the steeple of St Vitus stare down to where the fourteenth-century Karluv bridge tucks the Three Ostriches tavern under its arm before crossing the calm blue Vltava. The older parts of the city are a maze of tiny twisting streets illuminated by gas lights and so hilly that a careless driver can find himself tobogganing down steep stone steps. It was twilight and the city looked like a dusty Christmas tree. I parked my hired Skoda car and walked back towards the Three Ostriches tavern. The steps were worn to a glassy smoothness and the inside was like
something whittled three lessons before Pinocchio. The overhead beams were painted with red and green vine leaves and varnished with about five hundred years of tobacco smoke. A tiny radio balanced over the tiled stove was beating out ‘Walking my baby back home’ with enough violence to make the potted geraniums quiver. The tables were as crowded as a Stakhanovite work schedule and merry groups of men shouted for slivovice, borovicka or Pilsner Urquell, and the waiters kept a tally of their progress by marking each man’s beer-mat with strange pencil marks.
Harvey was sitting in the corner drinking and talking. Harvey was a typical Foreign Service officer. He changed his shirt three times a day and used talc with a masculine perfume. He was a short, thickset, city-bred American, his arms a little too long and his hair cut short enough to disguise his receding hairline. His skin was nearer to olive than to any other colour. His face followed every syllable of the conversation and would grow serious or flash a sudden smile in response to the mood of the talking. It was this animation of his face muscles that made him good-looking—not handsome—but definitely good-looking.
‘Less viable than the Munich project,’ he was saying as I reached his table. He nodded to me to sit down. He didn’t introduce me.
The man with him nodded and removed a signet ring from his finger and put it back again with considerable skill.
Harvey said, ‘But I’d opt for it just the same.’ He had that soft Boston accent that Americans acquire when they work for the State Department.
When the other man spoke it was in a light whisper. He said, ‘Wages escalate, Harvey. You’d think that would make it better but it doesn’t. It’s counter-productive. I’ll advertise again.’ He turned to me. ‘So long,’ he said. Then he said, ‘So long’ to Harvey and drifted through the door like a smoke cloud.
‘What was all that New Frontier jargon, Harvey?’ I asked.
Harvey swept a small glassful of slivovice over his tonsils. ‘We all talk like that now,’ Harvey said. ‘It’s so the British won’t understand.’
‘We never understood before,’ I said. When the waiter had brought two tall, ice-cold Pilsen lagers. Harvey said, ‘You know, I thought I knew this town once. My old man was always telling me about the old country and even before I stepped on the boat to Europe I thought of Americans as aliens. But the longer I stay here, the less I understand.’ Harvey laid his hand limply face up on the table in a supplicating gesture. ‘I need a maid: check?’
‘Check,’ I said.
‘For three weeks I’m trying to get a local girl to help with work around the apartment. It’s not hard work but can I get one? No, sir. They tell me that no one does domestic work any more—“only in capitalist countries”, they tell me. Today
I said to one, “I thought the function of the communist state was to dignify labour, not to denigrate it.”’
‘Did you get the girl to work for you?’
‘Negative,’ Harvey said.
‘You should take a lesson from European diplomacy,’ I said. ‘The purpose of political debate is to achieve results, not to win arguments.’
Harvey sank his lager in one long draught. Outside there was the constant noise of tram-bells and traffic-cop whistles. ‘Slivovice,’ said Harvey. ‘How about a slivovice before I take you to see him?’
‘None for me, Harvey, and none for you. Let’s go. I’m starved.’ Harvey wanted his slivovice but I knew the danger signs. Harvey was determined to get very drunk. We left Harvey’s new Dodge where it was under the trees in Na Kampe, and took my Skoda which gave me a better excuse for insisting that I drive. We drove out through the dusty area of rebuilding with Harvey slouched well back in his seat saying ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ and ‘Straight on’ every now and again.
The roads out of Prague are lined with cherry trees; in the spring the blossom follows the road like smoky exhaust and in the summer it is not unusual to see a driver standing on top of his lorry munching at the fruit. Now it was autumn and the trees had just the last few tenacious leaves hanging on like jilted lovers. Here and there young girls or tiny children dressed always in trousers attended to a cow
or a goat or a few geese. High-wheeled bullock carts moved ponderously along the narrow roads and sometimes a big truck filled with mocking gesticulating girls being taken home from their work in the fields. Their clothes weren’t peasant weaves and hand-printed headscarves but hard-wearing trousers, mass-produced blouses, and plastic scarves.
Ahead of us was an ancient car with a bulbous brass radiator and landau coachwork. I overtook it only to find ahead of me a red and white diagonally striped pole with a sign ‘Objizd’ka’ on it. Diversion.
‘I thought our luck couldn’t last,’ said Harvey. ‘Now we’ll encounter something that will make the previous three miles look like the Washington Turnpike.’
I opened my mouth to speak just as we hit the first of the pot-holes. We battled against flint with rubber, and beat mud into cake-mix with our treads. We scraped a way between trees and bored a hole through a great rolling cloud of white dust. We climbed back on to the main road again like the sole survivors of a ship-wreck.
‘Do you know where you are?’ said Harvey.
‘No idea.’
‘Good,’ he said and fell back in his seat. ‘Don’t want the whole British colony to find the place.’ The road became paved. Ahead of us was a tiny group of houses.
‘What are they going to come here in—half-tracks?’ I asked.
‘You’ll love it,’ said Harvey. ‘Turn in here. Decelerate.’
I stopped the car and let one of those heavy trucks with two trailers that they call ‘road trains’ pass us, then pulled in to the side entrance. To the left a range of hills was summit-deep in mist and ahead the road curved to skirt a forest. On the corner house a vast oval-shaped traffic mirror with a red and gold frame pictured the intersection in distorted reflection. Above it, looking like something wrenched out of the HMV trademark, was a loudspeaker that spoke the words of government. Across the front of the brown stone building on the left the name of the pre-communist proprietor could still be read in the faded paintwork from which solid wooden letters had been taken down. From the first floor there hung a plastic sign. As we looked at it in the gathering dusk it was switched on. We read the words ‘State Hotel’.
At the side entrance a small boy in a pink sweatshirt was pulling open the enormous wooden doors. I drove through into the cobbled courtyard and the noise of the engine sent a flock of white geese cackling and calling in flat-footed rage to the far side of the yard where chopped logs were stacked in neat wooden honeycombs. The boy pointed to the open-sided barn and I drove under it and shook Harvey fully awake. Suspended under the roof of the barn was a huge horse-sled, spun with cobwebs and dust. The courtyard was growing dark and through the back windows of
the hotel I could see the kitchen and the dining-room lit by blue neon.
Clouds of steam rolled out of the kitchen door and tiptoed stealthily across the cobblestones, diminishing at every step like shy ghosts. The kitchen’s stone floor was shiny with moisture and plump women with handkerchiefs drawn tight around their heads stepped in and out of the noise and steam like a team of formation dancers.
From the restaurant came a heavy sweet smell of beer. The plastic table-tops supported countless leather elbows and at the counter the standard meal of one hundred grammes of goulash was being carefully and lawfully measured by a cheerful woman in a stained apron. Except for the waitresses there were no women to be seen in the dining-room. Harvey led the way right through with scarcely a falter. Upstairs there was a powerful smell of antiseptic. Harvey knocked at a door on the first floor and waved me inside.
It was a tiny room. Lenin shared the floral wallpaper with the local football team. There was a glass-fronted dresser containing mass-produced local glasswear, five uncomfortable wooden chairs that had been moved there from the dining-room after suffering minor damage, and a table. On the hand-embroidered cloth were three place-settings of plain white china with the government hotel symbol, three tumblers and two unlabelled bottles of local wine, which glowed like garnets in front of a large paraffin lamp.
At the far side of the table was the dark volelike man Harvey had brought me here to see—Jan-im-Glück—Lucky Jan. The girl brought us the roast goose and heavy dry dumpling slices almost as soon as we sat down. Harvey poured two glasses and finished the bottle himself.
Harvey probably
knew
how to carve a goose but it was his co-ordination that proved such a handicap. We all got large torn pieces of hot, crisp, juicy, oily goose and we had a large plate of those breadrolls that come with great chunks of sea-salt and poppy seeds baked to the top of them. There was slivovice which Harvey liked and tiny pots of Turkish coffee of which he wasn’t so fond. We ate in greedy silence. ‘Why can’t I have American coffee?’ he asked me, and he took the oil lamp and left the room while the old man and I talked about the price of butter in England, the role of the trade unionist in US politics and what became of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When Harvey came back he was shouting ‘Obsazeno, obsazeno’.
1
He pointed a finger in no definite direction and said, ‘Why is it that in this damned god-forsaken country, where everyone is filling out small rectangular forms in triplicate, there is never any goddamned paper in the WC?’
Without smiling the old man said, ‘Because someone has filled it out in triplicate.’
‘Affirmative,’ said Harvey. He let the weight of
his fist bring it down on the table with a thump that made the dishes jump. ‘That’s right.’ And having solved the problem he put his head on his hands and went to sleep.
The old man looked at him and said, ‘If God had made the world for humans we would have alcohol that made the head clearer instead of drowsy and the tongues of men more articulate instead of slurred. For it is when a man has consumed alcohol that he has the most important things to say.’
‘What
did
God make the world for?’ I asked, ‘if not for humans?’
The old man spoke more sharply. ‘For building speculators and generals, any fool knows that.’
I smiled but the old man’s face was unchanging.
‘Did,’ I nodded my head towards Harvey, ‘tell you what I wanted to talk to you about?’
Jan-im-Glück took a slim metal case from his pocket. It was worn smooth and burnished like a flat pebble from the seashore. He prised a thumbnail into its edge and it opened to reveal a silk interior of royal purple in which the serpentine coils of a pair of spectacles nestled. He put them on.
The old man took the oil lamp with two hands, turned up the wick just a fraction of an inch, and held it near my face. The lamp illuminated the old man’s face too. The skin had the texture of a jute sack so that a small scar went almost undetected in the coarseness of the complexion. The few days’
growth of white bristles across his lower face shone silver in the light. His eyes were bright and moved quickly behind the bent spectacles that were artfully placed upon his nose to allow him to look over them when he preferred to do so. As his head turned in the lamplight, the circular spectacle glasses took turns to become silver pennies and clear again to reveal the small black eyes behind them. He nodded his way out of the spectacles and put them back into the cloth lining of the metal case.
‘It’s my job to investigate war crimes,’ I said.
Wizened was about the only word you could apply to him. He would have been tall if he ever stood upright, he would have been thin if he had ever removed the layers of black overcoat, and may have been bald under the wide-brimmed black hat of orthodox Judaism.
‘War crimes?’ he repeated. ‘What war is it that you speak of?’
‘The Second World War that finished in 1945,’ I said.
‘It finished then, did it?’ he said. ‘I wish someone had told me. I’m still fighting it.’
I nodded. He wrapped a layer of overcoat across his knees.
He said, ‘We all have to, you see. Every Jew has won a desperate battle against the world the day he is born. For a Jew, you see, just
existing
—he squeezed the word through his palate—‘just
existing
is a triumph; a victory against fascism.’
His eyes moved slowly from my shoes to my head without any sort of rudeness. ‘So they are still sending men to write legal papers so that lawyers can talk about war crimes. Every crime is a holiday if you are a lawyer, eh?’ He laughed soundlessly, his small eyes shining and his crisp little hand patting his knee.
‘I want to talk about Treblinka Camp,’ I said.
He closed his eyes. ‘Then either you have never been there,’ he paused, ‘or you are a German.’ He added hurriedly, ‘Not that I bear any ill will to Germans…’
‘Nor me,’ I said. ‘In fact many of my best friends are anti-semites.’
‘Meschugge,’ said the old man, ‘ganz meschugge.’
2
He slapped his thigh and cackled. Harvey snored. The old man turned to examine Harvey. There was a huge tuft of cotton wool poking out of the old man’s ear in a demoniacal fashion.
‘Camp Treblinka,’ I said, to prompt the old man.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They were using monoxide gas there. It’s not efficient.’ He smiled like a crack in the lino. ‘At Auschwitz they managed things better. They moved with the times. With Cyclon B they killed two and a half million at Auschwitz—they could never have done that with monoxide. Never.’