Philip Roth - The Prague Orgy

“Is he?”

“He carries the note to be left alone. They leave you alone if you can prove you are crazy. He is a perfectly reasonable person: he is interested in fucking women and writing poems, and not in stupid politics. This proves he is not crazy. But the police come and they read the note and they take him to the lunatic asylum. He is still there. Olga thinks now he will kill her because of what she did. But he is happy where he is. In the lunatic asylum he is not required to be a worker all day in the railway office. There he has some peace and quiet and at last he writes something again. There he has the whole day to write poems instead of railroad tickets.”

“How do you all live like this?”

“Human adaptability is a great blessing.”

Olga, who has returned, sits herself on my lap.

“Where is Mr. Vodicka?” I ask her.

“He stays in the loo with the boy.”

“What did you do to them, Olga?” Bolotka asks.

“I did nothing. When I showed it to him, the boy screamed. I took down my pants and he screamed, ‘It’s awful.’ But Mr. Vodicka was bending over, with his hands on his knees, and studying me through his thick glasses. Maybe he wants to write about something new. He is studying me through his glasses, and then he says to the boy, ‘Oh, I don’t know, my friend — it’s not our cup of tea, but from an aesthetic point of view it’s not horrible?”

Ten-thirty. I am to meet Hos and Hoffman in a wine bar at eleven. Everyone believes I am visiting Prague to commiserate with their proscribed writers when in fact I am here to strike a deal with the woman full of touha on my lap.

“You have to get up, Olga. I’m going.”

“I come with you.”

“You must have patience,” Bolotka says to me. “Ours is a small country. We do not have so many millions of fifteen-year-old girls. But if you will have patience, she will come. And she will be worth it. The little Czech dumpling that we all like to eat. What is your hurry? What are you afraid of? You see — nothing happens. You do whatever you want in Prague and nobody cares. You cannot have such freedom in New York.”

“He does not want a girl of fifteen,” says Olga. “They are old whores by now, those little girls. He wants one who is forty.”

I slide Olga off my lap and stand up to leave.

“Why do you act like this?” Olga asks. “You come all the way to Czechoslovakia and then you act like this. I will never see you again.”

“Yes you will.”

“You are lying. You will go back to those American girls and talk about Indians and fuck them. Next time you will tell me before, and I will study my Indian tribes and then we will fuck.”

“Have lunch with me tomorrow, Olga. I’ll pick you up here.”

“But what about tonight? Why don’t you fuck me now? Why are you leaving me, if you like me? I don’t understand these American writers.”

Neither, if they could see me, would my American readers. I am not fucking everyone, or indeed anyone, but sit quietly on the sofa being polite. I am a dignified, well-behaved, reliable spectator, secure, urbane, calm, polite, the quiet respectable one who does not take his trousers off, and these are the menacing writers. All the treats and blandishments, all the spoils that spoU are mine, and yet what a witty, stylish comedy of manners these have-nots of Prague make out of their unbearable condition, this crushing business of being completely balked and walking the treadmill of humiliation. They, silenced, are all mouth. I am only ears — and plans, an American gentleman abroad, with the bracing if old-fashioned illusion that he is playing a worthwhile, dignified, and honorable role.

Bolotka offers Olga a comforting explanation for why she is no longer in my lap. “He is a middle-class boy. Leave him alone.”

“But this is a classless society,” she says. “This is socialism. What good is socialism if when I want to nobody will fuck me? All the great international figures come to Prague to see our oppression, but none of them will ever fuck me. Why is that? Sartre was here and he would not fuck me. Simone de Beauvoir came with him and she would not fuck me. Heinrich Boll, Carlos Fuentes, Graham Greene — and none of them will fuck me. Now you, and it is the same thing. You think to sign a petition will save Czechoslovakia, but what will save Czechoslovakia would be to fuck Olga.”

“Olga is drunk.” Bolotka says.

“She’s also crying,” I point out.

“Don’t worry about her,” Bolotka says. “This is just Olga.”

“Now.” says Olga, “they will interrogate me about you. For six hours they will interrogate me about you, and I won’t even be able to tell them we fucked.”

“Is that what happens?” I ask Bolotka.

“Their interrogations are not to be dramatized,” he says. “It is routine work. Whenever someone is questioned by Czech police he is questioned about everything that he can be asked. They are interested in everything. Now they are interested in you, but it does not mean that to be in touch with you could compromise anybody and that the police could accuse people who are in touch with you. They don’t need that to accuse people. If they want to accuse you, they accuse you, and they don’t need anything. If they interrogate me about why you came to Czechoslovakia, I will tell them,”

“Yes? What will you say?”

“I will tell them you came for the fifteen-year-old girls. I will say, ‘Read his book and you will see why he came.’ Olga will be all right. In a couple of weeks Klenek returns home and Olga will be fine. You don’t have to bother to fuck her tonight. Someone will do it, don’t worry.”

“1 will not be all right,” Olga cries. “Marry me and take me away from here. Zuckerman, if you marry me. they must let me go. That is the law — even they obey it. You wouldn’t have to fuck me. You could fuck the American girls. You wouldn’t have to love me, or even give me money.”

“And she would scrub your floors,” says Bolotka, “and iron your beautiful shirts. Wouldn’t you, Olga?”

“Yes! Yes! I would iron your shirts all day long.”

“That would be the first week,” Bolotka says. “Then would begin the second week and the excitement of being Mr. Olga.”

“That isn’t true,” she says, “I would leave him alone.”

“Then would begin the vodka,” Bolotka says. “Then would begin the adventures.”

“Not in America,” weeps Olga.

“Oh,” says Bolotka, “you would not be homesick for Prague in New York City?”

“No!”

“Olga, in America you would shoot yourself.”

“I will shoot myself here.”

“With what?” asks Bolotka.

“A tank! Tonight! I will steal a Russian tank and I will shoot myself with it tonight!”

Bolotka occupies a dank room at the top of a bleak stairwell on a street of tenements near the outskirts of Prague. I visited him there earlier in the day. He reassures me, when he observes me looking sadly around, that I shouldn’t feel too bad about his standard of living — this was his hideaway from his wife long before his theater was disbanded and he was forbidden to produce his “decadent” revues. For a man of his predilections it really is the best place to live. “It excites young girls,” Bolotka informs me, “to be fucked in squalor.” He is intrigued by my herringbone tweed suit and asks to try it on to see how it feels to be a rich American writer. He is a sloop-shouldered man, large and shambling, with a wide Mongol face, badly pitted skin, and razor-blade eyes, eyes like rifts in the bone of his skull, slitted green eyes whose manifesto is “You will jam nothing bogus into this brain.” He has a wife somewhere, even children; recently the wife’s arm was broken when she tried to prevent the police from entering their apartment to impound her absentee husband’s several thousand books.