Philip Roth - The Prague Orgy

At the desk the police wait while I charge my bills to the Diners Club and then I am accompanied by them to a black limousine. One policeman sits up front with the driver and the candy box, and the other in the back with me and a bulky, bespectacled, elderly man who introduces himself gruffly as Novak. Soft, fine white hair like the fluff of a dry dandelion. Otherwise a man made of meat. He is no charmer like the hotel clerk.

Out beyond the heavy city traffic I am unable to tell if we really are on the airport road. Can they be taking me to jail in a limo? I always seem to end up in these large black cars. The dashboard says this one is a Tatra 603.

“Sie sprechen Deuisch, nicht wahr?” Novak asks me.

“Etwas.”

“Kennen sie Fraulein Betty MacDonald?”

We continue in Gennan. “I don’t,” I say.

“You don’t ?”

“No.”

“You don’t know Miss Betty MacDonald?”

I can’t stop thinking how badly this can still turn out — or, alternatively, that I could honorably have abandoned the mission once I saw the dangers were real. Because Sisovsky claimed to be my counterpart from the world that my own fortunate family had eluded didn’t mean I had to prove him right by rushing in to change places. I assume his fate and he assumes mine — wasn’t that sort of his idea from the start? When I came to New York I said to Eva, “I am a relative of this great man.”

Guilty of conspiring against the Czech people with somebody named Betty MacDonald. Thus i conclude my penance.

“Sorry,” I say, “1 don’t know her.”

“But,” says Novak, “she is the author of The Egg and I.”

“Ah. Yes. About a farm — wasn’t it? I haven’t read it since I was a schoolboy.”

Novak is incredulous. “But it is a masterpiece.”

“Well, I can’t say it’s considered a masterpiece in America. I’d be surprised if in American anybody under thirty has even heard of The Egg and I.”

“I cannot believe this.”

“It’s true. It was popular in the forties, a bestseller, a movie, but books like that come and go. Surely you have the same thing here.”

“Trial is a tragedy. And what has happened to Miss Betty MacDonald?”

“I have no idea.”

“Why does something like this happen in America to a writer like Miss MacDonald?”

“I don’t think even Miss MacDonald expected her book to endure forever.”

“You have not answered me. You avoid the question. Why does this happen in America?”

“I don’t know.”

I search in vain for signs to the airport.

Novak is suddenly angry. “There is no paranoia here about writers.”

“I didn’t say there was.”

“I am a writer. I am a successful writer. Nobody is paranoid about me. Ours is the most literate country in Europe. Our people love books. I have in the Writers” Union dozens of writers, poets, novelists, playwrights, and no one is paranoid about them. No, it isn’t writers who fall under our suspicion in Czechoslovakia. In this small country the writers have a great burden to bear: they must not only make the country’s literature, they must be the touchstone for general decency and public conscience. They occupy a high position in our national life because they are people who live beyond reproach. Our writers are loved by their readers. The country looks to them for moral leadership. No, it is those who stand outside of the common life, that is who we all fear. And we are right to.”

I can imagine what he contributes to his country’s literature: Stilt more humorous Novakian tales about the crooked tittle streets of Old Prague, stories that poke fun at all citizens, high and low, and always with spicy folk humor and mischievous fantasy. A must for the sentimental at holiday time.

“You are with the Writers’ Union?” I ask.

My ignorance ignites a glower of contempt. I dare to think of myself as an educated person and know nothing of the meaning of the Tatra 603? He says, “Ich bin der Kulturminister.”

So he is the man who administers the culture of Czechoslovakia, whose job is to bring the aims of literature into line with the aims of society, to make literature less inefficient, from a social point of view. You write, if you even can here, into the teeth of this.

“Well,” I say, “it’s kind of you personally to see me out, Mr. Minister. This is the road to the airport? Frankly I don’t recognize it.”

“You should have taken the time to come to see me when you first arrived. It would have been worth your while. I would have made you realize what the common life is in Czechoslovakia. You would understand that the ordinary Czech citizen does not think like the sort of people you have chosen to meet. He does not behave like them and he does not admire them. The ordinary Czech is repelled by such people. Who are they? Sexual perverts. Alienated neurotics. Bitter egomaniacs. They seem to you courageous? You find it thrilling, the price they pay for their great art? Weil, the ordinary hardworking Czech who wants a better life for himself and his family is not so thrilled- He considers them malcontents and parasites and outcasts. At least their blessed Kafka knew he was a freak, recognized that he was a misfit who could never enter into a healthy, ordinary existence alongside his countrymen. But these people? Incorrigible deviants who propose to make their moral outlook the norm. The worst is that left to themselves, left to run free to do as they wish, these people would destroy this country. I don’t even speak of their moral degeneracy. With this they only make themselves and their families miserable, and destroy the lives of their children. I am thinking of their political stupidity. Do you know what Brezhnev told Dubcek when he flew our great reform leader to the Soviet Union back in ‘68? Brezhnev sent several hundred thousand troops to Prague to get Mr. Dubcek to come to his senses about his great program of reforms. But to be on the safe side with this genius, he had him taken one evening from his office and flown to the Soviet Union for a little talk.”

To the Soviet Union. Suppose they put me aboard Aeroflot, suppose that’s the next plane out of Prague. Suppose they keep me here. As Nathan Zuckerman awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a sweeper of floors in a railway cafi. There are petitions for him to sign, or not to sign; there are questions for him to answer, or not to answer; there are enemies to despise, there are friends to con-sole, mail doesn’t reach him, a phone they withhold, there are informers, breakdowns, betrayals, threats, there is for him even a strange brand of freedom — invalidated by the authorities, a superfluous person with ho responsibilities and nothing to do, he has the kind of good times you have in Dante’s Inferno; and finally, to really break him on the rack of farce, there is Novak squatting over the face of culture: when he awakens in the morning, realizes where he is and remembers what he’s turned into, he begins to curse and doesn’t stop cursing.

I speak up. “1 am an American citizen. Mr. Minister. I want to know what’s going on here. Why these policemen? I have committed no crime.”

‘“You have committed several crimes, each punishable by sentences of up to twenty years in jail.”

“1 demand to be taken to the American Embassy.”

“Let me tell you what Brezhnev told Mr. Dubèek that Mr. Bolotka neglected to say while elucidating on the size of his sexual organ. One. he would deport our Czech intelligentsia en masse to Siberia; two, he would turn Czechoslovakia into a Soviet republic: three, he would make Russian the language in the schools. In twenty years nobody would even remember that such a country as Czechoslovakia had ever existed. This is not the United States of America where every freakish thought is a fit subject for writing, where there is no such thing as propriety. decorum, or shame, nor a decent respect for the morality of the ordinary, hardworking citizen. This is a small country of fifteen million, dependent as it has always been upon the goodwill of a mighty neighbor. Those Czechs who inflame the anger of our mighty neighbor arc not patriots — they are the enemy. There is nothing praiseworthy about them. The men to praise in this country are men like my own little father. You want to respect somebody in Czechoslovakia? Respect my father! I admire my ok! father and with good reason. I am proud of this little man.”