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SYLVA

“In Russia, you will meet Tsvetayava. How I envy you, Andrei.”

You were going back to your country, despite your protests, I had got my way. I wanted to follow you, and live peacefully far from Prague where people were making my life impossible.

“Tsvetayava? That would be difficult,” you interrupted me, “she killed herself a few years ago, not long after her return to Russia.”

Finally! We would live together, far from this poisonous city.

“Then you’ll meet Babel, Mandelstam . . .”

“But Sylva, do you really not know that both of them have died in the forced labor camps?”

I had managed to impose my own will, my desires.

“All right, what I mean is, you’ll be able to meet important artists and poets, maybe even Anna Akhmatova, and musicians, who knows, maybe Shostakovich, why not?” I told him. I prattled on, talking endlessly just to give myself something to do. “What a great adventure, Andrei! How I envy you!”

I talked my head off to make my inner voice shut up. The voice that had been speaking to me since last night.

Yesterday in the middle of the night I had heard the phone ring. I hadn’t woken up. I wasn’t asleep. In silence, I picked up the phone.

“I know it’s you,” said a woman’s nervous voice, “You who have Andrei in her power.”

“Me?” I’d said, “But Andrei’s free to do as he pleases.” Silly though it might seem, I felt flattered. The woman’s voice was trembling.

“You who do just as you please with Andrei, you who are spinning your little web just the way you want it.”

Irritated, I said, “You’re the one doing as she pleases, how come you’re calling people up at this time of night?” The woman’s voice hadn’t reacted to my words, she was beside herself: “You’re playing with him like a chess player would a pawn. And now you’re doing your best to send him to Siberia.” “Andrei wants to go back to Russia,” I said, and wanted to add, “Of his own free will,” but my voice had dried up. So I remained silent, as usual. It was better that way! I didn’t have to justify myself. “Pardon me, Madame von Stamitz, for being so forthright. But please, do think things over, there is still time!” The woman was imploring me. Her entreaties made me feel good. “Talk to him, let him have second thoughts,” she went on, “You know that he’s ill. If he goes to Russia, he’s done for. It’d kill him!” In the chill of the night, I felt so cold I was shivering. I had to sit down. “I beg of you,” I heard the receiver say. Such hysterics! I told myself, although I knew full well that the woman on the other end of the line was worried sick, that she was desperate. “I beg of you, in the name of your mother, who died in a concentration camp because she wanted to follow her husband even there. Please Madame Sylva, in the name of everything that’s sacred, talk to Andrei, he’ll listen to you.”

I hung up. I felt cold and wanted to get back into my warm bed.

Andrei was sleeping peacefully. I didn’t wake him up. There was no reason to. I wouldn’t have woken him up for anything in the world, least of all to make him think twice about his trip. And for other reasons, including the fact that I knew perfectly well which woman I’d just been dealing with.

All the same, there was still time . . .

So I talked incessantly, Andrei, just to get rid of the silence that had fallen between us, and to get rid of the phantom thoughts that kept telling me you were going back to Russia because I had willed it, against your own better judgement. I talked and prattled on so much that I managed to convince myself that this trip of yours was a wonderful, enviable thing, that it was a great adventure.

Your return to Russia. To the Soviet Union. The return trip organized by the Soviet embassy. In other words, Stalin himself.

The voice of that woman on the phone went through my mind again and again. She had called to convince me that it would be a fatal mistake if Andrei went back to Russia. But I knew that. I’d known it even before that woman called me.

How had she found out about my mother? Or that I’d asked Andrei to make this trip?

Whatever the case, it was too late to go back. I wouldn’t give that neighbor the satisfaction of following her advice. In a short while, Andrei would board a train for Russia. Now that I’d heard how desperate that woman was, I was convinced that Andrei absolutely had to go.

Was it really too late now to backtrack? No . . . there was still time!

On the platform, you looked at me so calmly.

The desperation in the neighbor’s voice . . . would I be capable of such deep compassion?

There was still time . . . I had to tell you . . .

Your silence weighed heavily on me, Andrei. It weighed on me, even though you weren’t nervous then, and were simply looking at me.

“Are you looking forward to going back home, Andrei?”

“I’m looking forward to meeting up with you again.”

“But not to going back home? We each only have one country we can call our own.”

“Why? What does home mean to you?”

“It’s something you value. The thing you value most.”

“You are my home. I have no other.”

“That’s a wonderful thing to say, but I’m talking about fields, forests, scents, and colors.”

“I’ve spent the last twenty-two years in the forest, among animals and Gypsies and trees and small flowers. I was happy there, even more so when you came along.”

“But Andrei, surely—”

My persuasive chatter broke off. Shattered by the quick movement of the little red flag. By the shriek of the whistle.

Yet there was still time!

You got onto the train, together with other faces that were familiar to me from the party at the Soviet Embassy. Carrying your favorite canvases, you boarded the train, Andrei, too tall and too burly for that narrow door, too elegant for those bureaucrats from the embassy, who made you go deep into the inside of the train; you were too free and too natural—like a creature of the forest—for that prison on wheels.

Andrei, when you got onto that train, I couldn’t see you any longer. I just saw a free man who was walking into a cell, it could as easily have been a monasterial cell or a prison cell. A place too dark and narrow for your longings, for your sense of freedom.

You leaned out of the window.

There was still time! I had to tell you . . .

“Andrei, get out,” I said in a near whisper.

You burst out laughing, you thought I was joking.

“Andrei, we’ll have a child, you’ll be by my side.”

“Yes, yellow butterfly, I mean Blue Butterfly, of course we’ll have children! Of course we will!”

He didn’t get it. Yes, we’d have children, because I was already expecting.

I’d put on my sky blue dress, which must have been at least fifteen years old by then. I wanted you to see me like that, in your memories. Dressed in sky blue.

In your memories? Why, we’d be together again very, very soon! And our child would be born there, in those new surroundings where the insufferable atmosphere of Prague wouldn’t weigh upon me so. Hatred. Hatred against me, against the mother of Andrei’s child.

Lots of people on the platform were crying, and some of those who were leaning out of the windows also had moist eyes. Many others were laughing and waving their handkerchiefs and blowing kisses or arguing and raising their voices—a usual enough scene before the departure of any international train. A feverish atmosphere.

Only you then, Andrei, with your white shirt unbuttoned at the neck, you who had argued against making this trip and had refused to make it, you, who had started at the idea of it like a forest creature when it spots a hunter, only you were looking confident.

You were looking confidently at me. Confident in my correct choice.

Your confidence, your devotion was . . .

I wasn’t able to finish the thought. The train moved.

“Andrei, get off the train!”

You didn’t hear me. The train was making a lot of noise. I paid no heed to the hiss of steam from the locomotive, nor to the stationmaster’s whistle, nor to the shouts and wails and kisses. All I saw was my own desire, which had appeared before me as clear and prominent as a palm tree in the desert.

I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Andrei, get off the train!”

At that very moment, perhaps too late, my desire was clear.

“Andrei, get off the train!”

Waves of handkerchiefs, waves of tears.

And in the middle of all this hustle and bustle, you whispered.

I heard you through the din of the revolving red and black wheels, through the flames of the women’s cries. You were upright in the train, by the window, you didn’t feel all those bodies pressing against you. You said, simply, quietly, “Blue Butterfly.”

I got off the tram in the Prague neighborhood of Vinohrady. I was dragging Jan along by the hand.

Jan, who had just turned five, was looking at the shops on Francouzská Avenue. Unlike our impoverished neighborhood of Malá Strana, here there were long rows of display windows. The shops opened their empty mouths. But the eyes of a child could find, even in that desert, sparkling treasures from lost Pacific Islands.

I pulled Jan away from each one of those temptations; in my left hand I was carrying two heavy bags; in them were Beethoven’s quartets, Brahms’s sonatas for violin and Mahler’s lieder, Janáček’s music for piano and Smetana, everything by Smetana. And the Russians, that was something new: Shostakovich’s piano trios, Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring and Orpheus. And, especially, the song of the angels with golden hair and white wings who carried a flute in their hands—the old liturgical chants—and also contemporary ones, the ones by Balakirov.

I pulled Jan well away from a window displaying caps, of the type normally worn by building workers. The sign hanging above the caps read: “Throughout our country echoes the voice of hatred and scorn for the gang of spies and traitors in our midst. Death to the agents of imperialism!” I pulled Jan away from the shop windows with my right hand, in my left I was carrying two heavy bags full of records. This music had survived the war declared on me by my first husband, and on the racket made by the Nazi planes and their orders shouted in penetrating voices, like the kicks given by military boots, and now it had survived the shouting of the new leaders of today, the Communists who had taken over by means of a coup d’état. These records had survived the phony euphoria of the workers’ festivals with their parades: Schubert and Chopin, Purcell and Schnittke, Martinů and Palestrina . . . Giovanni Pierluigi of Palestrina . . . just his name was music to my ears. In those two shopping bags I carried all my worldly goods, all my treasures.

Jan’s treasures consisted of everything he saw in those badly lit shop windows: a wooden train set and a monkey in the toy shop, a string of greenish sausages in a butcher’s, a little pot of sickly violets in a florist’s.

There were no roses anymore. Roses yellow as sand, roses the color of custard, like the arms of a baroque plaster angel, roses white as clouds in the spring sky. Oh, roses! The color of my Pink Palace in the Malá Strana, which was no longer pink and no longer mine, it was gray and the State had taken it over. Roses red as sealing wax. Roses! You couldn’t bring them to me as gifts now, Andrei, those roses in those trembling fingers of yours. What are roses like, those long-stemmed flowers? What do they look like? Jan was eyeing a couple of bluish Vienna rolls in a baker’s window. One was covered in rock salt, the other in cumin, and the cumin was green. In the lady’s wear shop they were displaying overalls of the kind electricians wear, blue ones: they were puffed up with pride, like the flag of this new era. I looked inside the shop: apart from four sets of electricians’ overalls, there were some navy tracksuits, another sign of the new era.

But Jan was dragging me over to the display in the paper shop, where there were only a few rolls of toilet paper, nothing else. A paper shop, a trunk full of enigmas! Jan asked for a notebook to draw in. As soon as we entered, around me, on all the shelves and on the counter, as in a nightmare, all I could see were rolls of toilet paper. The sales assistant shook his head. “No, we don’t have any notebooks. Not one, no. Not white ones, or ones with lines, or little squares. I can give you toilet paper, kid,” he said to Jan, “it just came in.”

“I’m not blind,” Jan replied, but coming from a child it didn’t sound provocative. The sales assistant added, “Or maybe you’d like some sandpaper, little man? We’ve also got some of that.”

Chuffed by the success his verbal skills had had, Jan answered, “You’re offering me sandpaper in case your toilet paper doesn’t work, right?”

I took Jan away, apologizing profusely, but the old sales assistant laughed out loud and gave Jan a sweet wrapped in silver paper, “If you were older, I’d buy you a big jug of beer for answering me like that. So now you know: in a few years’ time, it’ll be here waiting for you!”

We continued walking along the row of poorly lit displays, and in each shop window there was a kind of red flying carpet with gold letters on it: “With the Soviet Union for eternity. The Soviet Union is the guarantee of world peace. The Soviet Union is the model to follow. The Soviet Union is our future. Together with the Soviet Union, toward a brilliant future.”

With Jan’s little palm in my right hand, and both heavy bags in my left, I entered house number five on Slovenská Street. That is where they had sent us after taking the Pink Palace away from me, even the very apartment I lived in, as a punishment for spending my childhood in a Renaissance chateau. I only lived in one part of the building, though, which I shared with my grandmother, I had said by way of a defense, and they laughed in my face and took over the Pink Palace, as well as the Renaissance chateau. They didn’t punish me for becoming a citizen of the Reich before the war. During the war my neighbors had made my life impossible with their contempt; after the war, they broke my windows and once, one night in Kampa Park, they beat me up with their fists and sticks. To the new authorities, the Communists, I had become a class enemy, an undesirable being, someone against whom it was necessary to fight until I learned how to share what I had with the people.

Moving house, going to live in a neighborhood that wasn’t in the city center, all of this forced on me by the new Communist Party government, was, when all was said and done, a break, a relief for me, even though I was moving to a house that was worse than the last one. More than worse. I knew I was now going to live in poverty. I entered the corridor of the house at number five Slovenská Street, and breathed in the coal-cellar smell. The concierge blocked our path with her fists on her hips, wearing one of those navy-blue tracksuits, which hung in spectacularly loose fashion from her prominent knees and elbows. The concierge, all skin-and-bones, with her head covered in little metal curlers and a checkered apron tied over her tracksuit, stared at me with little eyes that went straight through me. I introduced myself, and I offered my hand; she didn’t shake it.

Jan and I walked into an empty apartment. I felt calm, at peace with myself: nobody knew me here, I could go to the baker’s and the butcher’s and the cobbler’s with a clear conscience. Deep inside me I felt Andrei saying in his low voice, “You know, Sylva, when you’re in a period of calm, it’s easy to make the right decisions. When the going gets rough, on the other hand, it’s difficult to see things clearly and it’s easy to make mistakes that you will later regret for the rest of your life.” I felt a tremendous sense of inner tranquility.

“Where’s the furniture, Mama?” Jan asked. “They’ll bring it all tomorrow,” I replied. I sized the place up: Would there be enough space for the piano? It would have to go next to the window. The records, my treasures, I placed carefully in a dark corner; they stood there in a multicolored column. In my mind’s eye I worked out where the Renaissance suits of armor and the knights’ helmets from the Hussite period, and the swords and the lances—those memories of my parents and my childhood—would go. I told myself they would go with the old Chinese tea service, the one from which, as a girl, I had drank hot chocolate, while sitting on a baroque chaise longue. I would place some ornaments on the table, in memory of my grandmother. In this new apartment, I wanted to have a memory of each and every one of my dead. I would carry in Andrei’s paintings personally, and put them under my bed.

In the evenings, instead of a lullaby, I read Jan the memoirs of a famous traveller who had crossed the ocean on a raft. Several animals had accompanied the man on that improvised Noah’s ark of his, including a monkey so nervous that he padded up and down on the raft. The traveller had tried all kinds of tricks to calm the animal down, all in vain. In the end it occurred to him to build it a little house right there on the raft. Only then did the monkey calm down: what it needed was to feel protected.

“Like a dog needing a kennel,” said little Jan, sleepily. He wanted to go on, even as his eyes were closing, “It doesn’t matter that we don’t have any furniture. We’ve got a little house just to ourselves, haven’t we, Mama?”

Everything changed. Everything got twisted around. It was like the chaos before the creation of the world. Teachers worked in factories and quarries and sewers. People who often didn’t have any qualifications whatsoever, had chairs at the universities. Everybody had to live where the State told them to. There was work for everybody, but you couldn’t refuse the work they gave you. There were free schools for children everywhere, but they all went to the same type of school, in which the builders of tomorrow’s socialism were trained and indoctrinated. The prisons were filled with innocent people: again. The prisons were chock-full, crammed, bursting at the seams, and their walls eventually collapsed, so thousands of guiltless prisoners were sent into forced labor, to the uranium mines: those who entered even once didn’t live past forty. Deep inside me that old voice began to echo, that timeless voice, the voice at the gates of hell, hoarse from repeating the same words so many times . . . For me you will go to the city of suffering, for me you will undergo everlasting pain, for me you will go with the lost people . . . Before me, nothing eternal was created, and I will last forever. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here . . .

Caught up in the maelstrom, my life changed too: I’d lost the Jewish and German pupils who had come to learn to play the piano, I’d lost the possibility of renting an apartment. I found myself, along with little Jan, without any income. Jan had to eat, but there was little food in the shops, and especially little fruit and vegetables, which all children need.

After standing in long queues in front of dozens of offices, in the end they gave me a job: I would work as a librarian in a little library next to the Water Tower in the Vinohrady neighborhood. That political maelstrom also swept away a lot of books: whole truckloads and trainloads took away tons of books that were now banned, reflecting as they did the bourgeois mindset, or showing bourgeois or capitalist or feudal settings, or relaying pessimistic messages. Those trucks carried off the classics of world literature and of Czech literature, and the poets of the international Surrealist movement and Czech poetism, because they were decadent; the Nazis hadn’t liked these books, and the current leaders didn’t care for them much either. They would permit only works that reflected a spirit of future optimism, and past and present class hatred. If the other lot, ten years ago, had built up their impossible German ideals imagining a world without Jews or Gypsies or intellectuals or artists, the current lot were more or less doing the same thing.

The shelves of the library where I worked were full of the works of new writers, essayists, critics, poets such as František Branislav, Pavel Kohout, and Rudé Pravo.

For two months I walked past the library shelves, pressing my palms against my favorite classics, trembling at the thought that they too might end up in the recycling bin. For two months I caressed those favorites of mine with my fingers; they had so far escaped the eye of the censor, but tomorrow they might be candidates for liquidation. Balzac and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Flaubert, Turgenev and Stendhal . . .

And then one day they came. Again, there were two of them: one in a brown suit, the other dressed in gray. These two had puffy faces from all the beer they drank, Slavic faces with high cheekbones. They were even a little more crude and gross than the previous ones. They didn’t talk about philosophy or music. “Come and see us,” they said, by way of a farewell, “in the Ministry of the Interior!” they added, from the doorway of the library.

I didn’t go, but I was troubled by the whole business. During the day I would cross those wide avenues when the traffic light was red; the cars, which barely managed to brake in time, would toot their horns, frantically and furiously.

They came back. “Why didn’t you turn up? Aren’t you one of us? Aren’t you on our side? Do not fail to come and see us. Whoever is not with us, is against us.”

I didn’t go.

In the evenings, I made an effort to pretend that everything was OK. Little Jan looked at me suspiciously. He knew I was suppressing something, but he didn’t ask any questions and stayed on his best behavior. He cut out human shapes from the potato peel, and on Saturday evening he performed a play with potato puppets, just for me.

I couldn’t sleep, not even after drinking a tea of lime tree leaves or a cup of chamomile, not even after an unbelievably tiring day, or with sleeping pills. I read Balzac. I’d finished The Woman of Thirty, yet couldn’t have said what it was about.

The third time, they didn’t turn up in person. They sent me a letter. It was an order: Come to the Ministry of the Interior, Day: May 11, at ten o’ clock in the morning.

I would have to go, as I’d known I eventually would.

There were two portraits on the wall: one of Gottwald, and the other, of Stalin.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here . . .

There was a saucer with some biscuits on the table. “Do help yourself.”

They sat me down in front of the saucer. They both sat on the other side: the gray one and the brown one. A character with peroxide blonde hair placed a gilt coffee cup in front of each of us.

Deep inside me, that voice was echoing . . . For me you will go to the city of suffering, for me you will undergo everlasting pain . . . Abandon all hope . . .

“So you finally came, did you? At last.”

“Yes.”

“You took a hell of a long time to do so, didn’t you, Comrade Stamitz?”

“Well . . .”

“Had to make an effort.”

“Well . . .”

“The important thing is that you’re here with us.”

“Yes, with us, and that’s why we’ve invited you here,” the gray one added after the brown one had said his piece, gleefully rubbing his hands.

“You are Czech, are you not?” asked the brown one, with a smile.

“Czech?” I asked, playing for time, “Only on my mother’s side.”

“We know that,” said the brown one.

“That’s good enough,” the gray one interrupted him, speaking in a serious tone, “That’s good enough for you to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.”

“Who, me? Why?”

“Yes, you. That you are Czech is good enough for you to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, without that entailing any further obligations,” the gray one explained, without smiling, his face serious.

“Well, with just one tiny little obligation, so little that it’s hardly worth mentioning.”

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“It’s nothing, don’t get alarmed. What I mean is, should you see anything, by pure coincidence, by chance . . .”

“Nothing to it,” said the brown one in a nasal voice, “Like falling off a log.”

“This way, it’d be easier for you to improve your standing, Comrade Stamitz.”

“You see, Comrade, you’re in the doghouse.”

“During the war, and before it . . . you know what I’m talking about . . .”

“What are you referring to?” I asked in a faint voice, because I knew exactly what he was referring to. And I also knew that now they were going to air my dirty laundry in public.

“You’re keeping mum.”

“Well . . .”

“Everybody should get what they deserve.”

“You went over to the Nazis.”

“And you did it even before the war started, that’s a fact!”

“And as if that wasn’t bad enough, you had been the wife of a tycoon, in other words, an exploiter of the workers.”

“That was back then, a long time ago,” I tried to say in my defense.

“That doesn’t matter. What matters isn’t the time, it’s the fact in itself,” the gray one said.

“You were the wife of an important diplomat, a representative of the bourgeois republic.”

“You have aristocratic origins.”

“In your family, there hasn’t been a single representative of the working class.”

“Or of the peasantry.”

“So if you want to keep out of trouble . . .”

“Big trouble . . . ”

“It’d be very easy for you to improve your standing, Comrade Stamitz. Your current standing is nothing to boast about, you should bear that in mind.”

They paused.

The gray one cut to the chase.

“Do you regret all that, Comrade Stamitz?”

“Yes.”

I remembered how, fifteen years ago, I had accepted Reich citizenship as if it was a foul communion wafer.

“If you’re sorry about having done it, you could make amends.”

“Atone for it.”

“In a nutshell, make up for it, if you want to.”

“How?” I asked, then fell silent.

“Do you want to or don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll be easy, Comrade.”

The brown one rubbed his hands.

“Your head can be held high and your heart be cleansed,” said the gray one, finishing his coffee. I didn’t touch mine. I was thinking how Andrei, seven years ago, hadn’t touched those delicacies provided by the Soviet Embassy.

The brown one cleared his throat.

“And don’t look so sour faced. There’s nothing to it! You know the other employees at the library, and what’s more you’ve made friends with lots of people who go there to take out books. Very well, this is what your job will consist of: very occasionally, say once a month, you will have a friendly meeting with my colleague,” he pointed at the gray one, “and you will tell him that everything is in order at the library. And everything probably will be in order, I’m sure it will, but if there should ever be anything that isn’t in order, then you’ll let him know, in a friendly manner. In this way, you’ll improve you own standing and you’ll help others.”

“Help?”

“Yes, you’ll be helping those who stray from our common path.”

“Building up a socialist motherland isn’t easy, Comrade Stamitz, so we all have to do our bit and report those who wish to see it harmed.”

“Do you accept?”

“No.”

“Think it over very carefully. You don’t have to give us a definite answer today. Think it over and come back here in three days’ time.”

When I’d already stood up to leave, he continued speaking, “You have a son, don’t you?”

“Think it over carefully, Comrade Stamitz,” said that Greek choir as I headed for the door.

In the library, I watched the people who, exhausted after a full day’s work, came looking for books, put them in shopping bags, and took them home. I was starting to get to know them.

When three days had gone by, I didn’t go back to the Ministry of the Interior.

They summoned me there a month later; I refused to collaborate with them. They didn’t pay much attention to my refusal and recommended that I think it over some more.

I was afraid. Really afraid. Jan was having problems at school, and not only there. One day he was attacked in the park. I was sure that they were behind it all; them, the gray one and the brown one. Was I right to be so sure? I really didn’t know.

Seven years. For seven years, I’d been knocking on the doors of different ministries, asking for news, a snippet of any news, for me, the beggar of news.

For seven years I’d been asking: Where is Andrei?

I was heading toward the sky again.

I was going up the New Castle Stairs right up to the sky, to that foul, evil, abominable sky. At the upper end of the staircase I came across some black stone figures at a gate, figures that were arguing, beating each other, making war. In a mortal embrace they stabbed each other with gold daggers.

I avoided the figures and proceeded to walk up the street, up and ever up, infinitely higher, until a magnificent palace of white stone blocked my path, a gigantic, white arch, resting on dozens of classical columns. Before I was swallowed up in its dark bowels, I was able to read a poster that hung at the entrance, announcing that this was the Černín Palace, headquarters of the Foreign Ministry.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!

I stopped to catch my breath. How many times had I already knocked on this door: Please, can you tell me where he is? Tell me, please, I beg of you! Don’t shut the door on my hopes, give me just one word of news! Where is he? What’s become of him? What have they done to him? Where has he ended up? Where has he disappeared to?

Where is the father of my son? Where is Andrei? Where is Andrei Ivanovich, whose father’s name, Jan, I gave to my son? Where is Polonski, the painter?

For seven years I’d been knocking on this door and begging. I beg of you, please tell me, please. That is how I implored them, I, my mother’s orchid, I who she wanted to turn into a chocolate cup made of Meissen porcelain.

Is he alive? Just tell me that, nothing else, I just want to know if I can live with some hope. Some hope, no matter how little!

Tell me he’s alive.

Tell me he’s alive and I will put on iron shoes and I will fill my pockets with iron bread, and I will travel around the world in search of him.

Is he ill? Like Psyche, I will accomplish four impossible tasks. Just tell me that he is ill, and then I’ll know he’s alive and I’ll go to Tartarus, to the kingdom of the dead, to bring him, as Psyche did, the elixir of life.

For seven years I’d been waiting for a letter from Andrei. For seven years I’d been checking my letterbox five times a day to see if there was a letter from him. Seven years. From the moment when Andrei had left, I hadn’t received a single line from him. Silence. Nothing. Seven years of silence. Seven years, seven times three-hundred-and-sixty-five days with nothing to do except wait.

Svidenii ne imeem, we don’t know, they’d told me at the Soviet Embassy when, three months after Andrei’s departure, I’d gone there to ask for some information about him. We don’t know anything about him.

We don’t know, the Soviet consul told me four months after Andrei’s departure. And after five, six, and seven months he said the exact same thing: Svidenii ne imeem. My letters to Moscow, to the Foreign Ministry, and then to the Ministry of the Interior, had gone unanswered.

A letter to Stalin: To the Most Distinguished Mr. Stalin.

No answer.

Another letter, a desperate one this time: Comrade Stalin!

No answer. Not a single word.

I found myself standing in front of the door that had just been closed behind me. In front of the door of the palace of ice. The door of the Černín Palace, the headquarters of the Foreign Ministry.

Just one thing was echoing in my head, the one thing they’d told me, a single rosary made up of a single sentence repeated as if it were a litany, “We don’t know anything. We recommend that you desist from seeking Polonski, the painter, for your own good, although, I repeat, we don’t know anything.”

The day after my visit to the palace of ice, I received an urgent certified letter informing me that I was to go to the Ministry of the Interior on a matter of the greatest urgency. The brown one and the gray one were waiting for me there.

“Have you thought our proposal over?”

“Yes.”

“Do you accept it?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Not at all, not even as an occasional proposal?”

“Not at all. I can’t go on living like this. Leave me alone.”

They had a good laugh. The brown one slapped his knees, the gray one pressed his hand to his belly.

Suddenly, they fell silent, as if someone had given them a secret signal. They became serious, as if at a funeral.

The gray one said, sadly, “You are in a pickle. Ooooh, what a horrible pickle!”

When the brown one spoke, I saw a stick beating against the table.

“You’re playing with us. You have been intimately involved with a Russian, you ask about him all over the office, as if we two here didn’t exist.”

Did they know something? Hope flared up in my brain like a flaming arrow in the darkness.

The two men fell silent.

“Where is he?” I asked; I couldn’t bear it.

They remained silent. I could barely withstand the tension. After a while, the stick hit the table once more.

“You’re . . . an enemy of the people!” the brown one said in a tone of infinite disgust.

“Enemy of the people?” I exclaimed. It was all the same to me. Only one thing mattered, “What do you know about him?”

They said nothing. And they grimaced, mixing secrecy with irony, and made sick-sounding noises.

“What do you know about him?” I asked, urgently.

“About Andrei Polonski?” said the gray one, with repugnance, “The painter of perverse scenes and Gypsy orgies?”

They looked as if they were about to throw up.

I made no attempt to disguise the suspense I felt. Nothing mattered to me. I looked at them, humbly. Like a beggar, begging for some news, a bit of information. Whatever it turned out to be.

The gray one spoke in studied tones, drawing out each syllable. That grimace of victorious, mocking superiority remained on the faces of both functionaries, “Mrs. Stamitz, you, who are not a member of the Communist party, who refuse to become one, you, a single mother, which is to say a harmful being in a socialist society, it is you who are asking us for something, and yet you are not prepared to give us anything in return? That is not fair!”

The brown one said, in a low voice, “Comrade Stamitz, whether or not you are a single mother, whether or not you were involved with a degenerate painter and enemy of the people, that doesn’t matter. All I want to tell you is that we know how to protect those people who are of service to us.”

“I can’t do what you ask of me,” I said in a faint voice.

“Do you still love him, that enemy of the people? And your son, do you love that son of yours? And does he love his mother?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“At school tomorrow, the teacher will read out to Jan’s class the story of a bad socialist, so that they may learn to despise you. It will be your story, Comrade Stamitz.”

I was choking, I couldn’t believe what I’d heard, I couldn’t believe they could blackmail me in this way.

I shut up and signed.

At suppertime, I put on a record of Orthodox Russian liturgies. I made potato rissoles. Jan, having wolfed down twenty of them, asked me, “It’s been a long time since you told me about Papa. At school they ask me what my father does and I don’t know what to say, so the kids laugh at me because of it.”

“He lived with the animals in the forest. He too, was a kind of wild creature that was afraid of people.”

“What do you mean? Isn’t he alive?”

That was the last straw. The camel’s back broke, split, cracked apart.

Jan wiped away my tears with the palm of his hand.

“Papa’s got lost in the forest, hasn’t he? When I’m grown up, I’m going to find him.”

“We’ll go together, if you want.”

“You’d be afraid. There’ll be deer, bears, and maybe even wolves.”

“I won’t be scared. If you come with me, I’ll be brave.”

The slate turntable went on turning—here we go again, and again—and filled the little, single-roomed flat with music worthy of the angels, sung by silvery feminine voices and garnet male ones. The kind of voice your father had, I mean has, Jan. Every evening we listened to the Orthodox Russian liturgies, and Jan dreamed about fighting with bears and wolves. Before going to bed, I would tell Jan, by way of a folktale or lullaby, about his father’s childhood: how once a week, his parents would take him to church. Spiritual fathers with endless white beards and black tunics that stretched down to the floor would say the words of the Mass in grave, ever-so-melodic voices. When his father left the church, he would find himself in the middle of the stunning white silence of vast Russian solitude, and he would be blinded by sun, snow, and ice.

And Jan would sleep peacefully in the middle of the chanting and the incense, as the candles made the shadows weak.

The door of the Ministry closed behind me . . . For me you will go to the city of suffering . . . Abandon all hope . . . I took a deep breath, but was short of oxygen all the same. I felt dizzy and had to sit down, but there wasn’t a chair or bench in sight. I leaned against the wall, but then I had the sensation that the building’s walls were caving in, that I’d be buried under the ruins.

I held the letter with the name of the official to whom I had to supply information, and who would instruct me as to my job. The letter bore as well the time and day of our next appointment: today, in five minutes’ time. Now!

Every day I woke up after a sleepless night, with stomach upsets caused by fear. In the library they had fired almost all my colleagues and had replaced them with new people. Why had they got rid of Jana, Jarmila, and Maruška? The rest of us lived in constant fear, like beasts awaiting their turn at the slaughterhouse. It was just like when the Nazis were here. And the meetings . . . Once they accused me of things in the most humiliating way, yet another time they praised me a little so I began to hold my head high and work with pleasure, but not long after they shamed me again and belittled me in front of all the others. They forced me to bow down, more and more until I was unable to hold my head high.

We vegetated, we existed; we weren’t living. We tried to turn ourselves into shadows, we dressed in gray, shapeless clothes. Even my hair, which I dyed golden in the summer, was hidden under an old hat. What I wasn’t going to tolerate was covering my head with the kind of headscarf used by Russian women working on the kolkhoz, or put on a blue tracksuit or overalls, those uniforms of the new era. The concierges, employed by the authorities, kept an eye out and watched everyone like a hawk and knew every step that was taken in the respective houses—they spied and wrote reports. The concierges always appeared everywhere at key moments, they entered the butcher’s after you’d been queuing for two hours, and miraculously managed to get their own sausages or half a kilo of meat, and were able to pay for it quickly.

Like everybody else, I dragged myself past the rows of houses like a shadow, so that no one would spot me, so that no one would pay any attention to me, so that no one would spy on me and write a report about me.

Our only pleasure consisted of the absence of any events. We only felt happy when some predictable mishap ended up not happening.

And now they’d asked me, too, to keep an eye on people, to closely observe those around me, to spy on them and write reports about them. That’s why they’d summoned me, that’s why I’d come to them at the Ministry of the Interior. And afterward . . . afterward perhaps they wouldn’t throw me out of my job. Maybe they would let Jan get a place at university. And above all: maybe I could find out what had happened to Andrei.

Where was it I had to go, in fact, in this huge ministry building? I asked myself, full of nausea and loathing.

“Excuse me, sir, is this where I go?” I asked a short man, a visitor like me, and I showed him the name of the official mentioned in the letter.

“Here, on the ground floor? You need to go to the third floor, that’s where the top guys are,” he said, sniffing loudly, he probably had a cold. “Down here is where you come to collect your money, once you’ve done your work. You’ll see, quite a pretty penny!” He winked at me, sniffing even louder, and added in a low voice, “Today I’ve made a small fortune!”

Having given me this information, the man felt important; he widened his stance and puffed out his chest.

At that moment I saw myself as if in a mirror; yes, that man, with his wide, orange tie, that man who couldn’t stop his loud snot-swallowing and who wet his fingers, counting greedily his banknotes, that man with his self-satisfied smile and his hoarse voice was my mirror image. That is how I was, or would be if I complied.

I didn’t pull myself together until I was back on the street, when I’d put some distance between myself and that place, striding away, fleeing as fast as my legs could carry me.

One evening, when Jan hadn’t yet returned home, I sat Andrei’s shadow down on the sofa next to me. With his absent self I could chat away as much as I wanted, tell him anything and be sure that he would listen to me, that he wouldn’t interrupt me, that he would understand me. I’d never have to repeat myself or explain anything that was inexplicable to him. His absent self would accept my stories and my opinions and my philosophy of life in the way that I wanted him to. He would argue with me, though, for sure. I knew Andrei’s replies. They were always unusual, uncommon.

As I listened to the silvery voices of a Russian mass, I told Andrei’s shadow, “They came back to the library one day, rude this time, and absolutely furious. They ordered me to go and see them. I told them my intentions: I would not go anywhere and I didn’t want to see them ever again. Then, Andrei, they moved us to a tiny cubbyhole. Now we live in an attic room, where it freezes over in winter and is stuffy in the summer. There’s a concierge in this house too; this one’s fat whereas our previous one was skinny, but as far as everything else is concerned, there’s nothing to differentiate between them.

“Jan finished his school year with results that were exaggeratedly bad. At the meetings at work they threaten me and put me down. They’ve demoted me three times over, which means my salary has been cut by half; it’s not enough to live on. My life is fear and defenselessness and terror, but Andrei, my life now really is mine! It belongs to me, to me and nobody else! I’ve learned to make three dozen different kinds of potato dishes.

“Meanwhile, Jan and I listen to Russian liturgies and plan our move to the forest to live with the deer, the bears, and the wolves. As you yourself once did, Andrei.

“Someone’s coming up the stairs now, Andrei, with heavy footsteps, it’s Jan, at last. That too, is a kind of happiness.”

It wasn’t Jan. My eight-year-old son hadn’t turned up all day nor that same evening.

I went to the neighborhood police station. They gave me the brush-off. “You’re not looking after your son properly, Comrade!”

That’s when I started to suspect that the people at the Ministry of the Interior had kidnapped Jan to punish me for not having agreed to work as their spy.

There was no news of Jan for two whole days.

If he doesn’t show up after two days, I thought, I’ll go to the Ministry of the Interior and sign everything they ask me to. I’ll do anything they want just as long as they give Jan back to me! To stop myself from shaking, I imagined what I’d say to him when he turned up. I’d tell him his favorite folktale; I’d read it when I was his age. It was about a prince who could only be happy in his dreams, and only then if he hadn’t previously made his princess sad. The tale finishes with a moral: He who controls the reigns of his beloved’s heart should remember that he is in a beautiful dream and should avoid being woken from it! To awake thus, is to fall from a beautiful day into the darkness of night.

Jan hasn’t come home now for three days. Where is he?

I berated myself for not having kept a closer eye on him. But I couldn’t very well walk all the way to the school gates with him! I spent all my time in the evenings and on weekends with him only, I rejected the invitations from my new women friends and from my men friends. I remembered my own childhood and didn’t want Jan to feel the way I felt then. I remembered my mother, who had often made the trip to Prague to go to a ball or to the theater or to the opera or to a concert. Back then, she would wear her blue coat for going to the theater, with white ermine on the collar and sleeves, and if she were going to a ball, she’d wear the olive lace dress, or the sleeveless pink satin one, with long gloves that stretched to above the elbow. She often didn’t even say goodbye to me, but I would wait for her under the big arch of the entrance, beyond the bridge. I used to throw myself at Maman’s neck when she reaches where I was waiting. I would smell her pompadour rose perfume and cry my eyes out, shouting at her not to go. Maman always brushed me off coldly, saying, “What a spoiled little girl! Home with you!”

Poor Maman . . .

Four days and Jan still hasn’t come home. If he doesn’t turn up this evening, I told myself, the next day I’d go first thing to look for those two men and beg them to let me be of service to them in exchange for getting my Jan back.

Monsieur Beauvisage . . . how he’d changed! That night he was sitting on my sofa at home. I’d met him at a drugstore in Zizkov, where I’d been queueing to buy laundry soap and toilet paper, mainly so I wouldn’t have to go straight back home after work and resume my exhausting wait.

He’d called out my name when I was in the queue.

“Sylva von Stamitz . . .”

I’d turned around, but hadn’t recognized the man who’d said those words, who’d startled me.

“Sylva, it’s me, Petr, you used to call me Monsieur Beauvisage.”

A man thin as a rake, with just a few white hairs left, but that smile . . . yes, it was Petr.

Now he was sitting on my sofa at home, as far as possible from the door. You couldn’t talk openly anywhere else, it would be dangerous to do so, Petr said. In a whisper, he told me his story, a persecuted writer who had spent two years in the uranium mines.

That’s why I hadn’t recognized him. It had been nine years since we’d last met.

“You know how it works, Sylva? The political trials go on and on, so people can see that the class struggle is intensifying. In recent years, this Stalinist doctrine has become the driving force behind the government regime. The secret police look for class enemies wherever they can. Be careful, Sylva. The police themselves invent conspiracies of Western imperialists or emigré traitors. That’s what happened to me. Once they’ve accused someone, they have to give him the works. I know what I’m talking about, and I also know that they use methods that are often worse than those used by the Gestapo. Nobody knows anything about it, nobody can talk about it—only we know about it, we who have been through it all. The police need confessions whether a crime has been committed or not. To obtain them, they tie a bag over your head and chain your hands and feet. Then they blind you with electric light, beat you until you faint, smash your teeth, put you in a bathtub full of excrement. They apply electric shocks to the most susceptible parts of the body, and if you’re a man they go for your testicles; this type of torture the police call the ‘howl of the calf’ or ‘tomato purée.’ The victims under investigation are made to stand for hours, their faces to the wall, or sometimes quite the opposite, when they are made to walk without stopping. Sometimes there are even fake executions, when they tell the victim to say goodbye to life. And afterward? Those wrecks are no longer human beings: they’ll confess to anything, they’ll sign whatever needs to be signed. Then they must learn their crimes by heart and recite them before the court. On top of this, they’re given drugs before they speak to the court or on the radio so that they lose touch with reality and go on and on about crimes they never committed. Sometimes they even ask for a longer sentence or the death penalty itself.”

I began to sink my nails into the sofa, then my whole hand, until it hurt, as if physical pain could throttle a different kind of agony. I thought about Jan, about Andrei, about my mother, about all those noble, feeble beings . . . The torturers had surely never loved anybody, I thought, otherwise they could not carry out their tasks.

“You must be exaggerating, Petr . . . ” I said in a muffled voice.

Petr stopped talking. I looked at the signs of pain on his face. He was looking at a corner of the room.

“Innocent people, all of them innocent, I know them, there are thousands of innocent people,” he murmured, “What could they be guilty of? The Communists’ power is based on making others illegal. They invent guilty charges if and when it suits them. And those affected have no rights, they’re completely helpless.”

I was only half listening to him. My thoughts were with Jan, I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I told Petr how anxious I was.

“That’s simple enough,” and he picked up the phone.

He told me that during one interrogation he’d met an old school friend who was now a high-ranking member of the secret police.

“This man still has some scruples left; he felt ashamed in front of me. As if to atone for what he’d done, he told me to call him if I ever had any problem . . . anything specific. He almost begged me to do so, as if I would be doing him a favor; I reckoned he needed it, as a sign of forgiveness. He was red faced and sweating. I wouldn’t do this for myself, I’d find it repugnant. But I’ll call him for little Jan, and for you, too: if they’ve started with him, then you’re in danger as well.”

That evening, after about two hours, Jan came home. He ran into Petr in the doorway.

“Is this man . . . my father?” he asked, timidly.

“He’s an uncle,” I told him, taking a firm hold of him, “Uncle Petr.”

Before saying goodbye, Petr invited me to a party to celebrate the death of Stalin, which was going to be held in the cellar of a house in a small village near Prague.

I told him I wouldn’t be going. “I don’t believe anything’s going to change. I just don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“I don’t believe anything will either. I don’t believe in anything at all.” Petr said, closing the door behind him.

He started down the stairs, his back bent.

I suddenly remembered something and ran after him. I caught up with him in the street. Jan was running behind me.

“Petr,” I said, out of breath, “in a period of calm it’s easy to make the right decisions. But when the going gets rough, it’s difficult to see things clearly and it’s easy to make mistakes that you’ll regret for the rest of your life. But you haven’t made any, Petr.”

With my son beside me, I flew back up to our sixth floor apartment, happy because Jan was back home, alive, and because I’d just met Petr again, alive, and because Petr had forgiven me for the business with the Nazis. I was so pleased that through it all Petr had remained himself.

Jan ate twenty potato rissoles, even though he had a fever. On the advice of a psychologist friend, I didn’t ask my son any questions, so that he might forget what had happened like it was a nightmare and so that it might not turn into a traumatic stumbling block for the rest of his life. I put Jan to bed and in a quiet voice I told him a folktale about Ivan, the son of the czar, and the bird of fire. Jan slept fifteen hours straight that night.

One day, some five or six years after losing Jan and finding him again with Petr’s help, I received a letter with Soviet postmarks and Russian lettering on it. This was a time when I no longer trusted or believed in anything at all.

My heart jumped, but only for a fraction of a second. At first glance, I saw it wasn’t Andrei’s handwriting.

A friend of his had written to me, a certain Semyon, a fellow inmate in the Siberian gulag.

Almost as soon as he arrived in the USSR, Andrei had been condemned to forced labor.

He must have died in the camp.

Semyon hadn’t seen him die with his own eyes, but when he left the camp Andrei was near the end.

When they had said goodbye to each other, Andrei said just one thing to Semyon, “Human life is like foam on the water . . . empty. I have lived for so many decades in the river of life and now, at the end, I am throwing off the burden of skin, of the body. And for the last time I will watch the red circle of the sun, in the west, disappear over the horizon.”

Semyon told me in his letter that he would never forget those parting words. Andrei’s last wish, the last word he said to Semyon, was this, “Write to Sylva. Write and tell her that she is always with me, day and night. Address it, do not forget this, to the ‘Blue Butterfly!’”

Semyon gave me more and more details about Andrei’s life in the USSR. He told me several stories in his letters that passed through the hands of the censor. I didn’t find out the whole of these stories until I met Semyon in person, in Moscow. Jan and I took advantage of the 1968 reforms to make the journey that would bring us closer to finding the clues that Andrei had left for us in his wake. So that we might know about his eventual fate.

As soon as his train arrived at Moscow station, Andrei was arrested, as were all the other émigrés who had gone back to their country at the invitation of the Soviet ambassador. They housed them in some provisional lean-tos. After a few days they took Andrei off for his interrogation, blindfolded.

When they removed the blindfold, Andrei found himself in a luxurious, carpeted office. He was welcomed by a young man.

“My name is Nikolai Bragin, an art and literature specialist employed by the NKVD, the political police.” When he saw where he was, Andrei felt the world collapse around him.

Semyon repeated the story just as it had been told to him by Andrei:

“Don’t be nervous, Mr. Polonski, why are you so scared? Stop trembling, I’m not here to chase spies. I completed my studies in the Department of Philosophy, and all I’m trying to do now is have a little conversation with you in a relaxed, friendly atmosphere, and to understand what it is you wish to do, now that you are starting a new life here.”

Andrei didn’t say a word. He found it difficult to stop shaking and was afraid he might have a seizure.

“What kind of work do you see yourself doing in our Soviet motherland?”

Andrei placed a few canvases in front of the man. He mumbled something about intending to continue along similar lines and develop his style further; he hoped that soon he would be able to have a solo exhibition in Moscow, as he had already had several in Prague, and that if people showed any interest, he could teach at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Bragin looked at the paintings coldly.

“No, this is absolutely no good to us at all. Our country doesn’t need this kind of art.”

“Why not? I would like to go on adding to what I’ve already learned from the great Russian artists: Chagall, Tatlin, Goncharova, Malevich.”

“All those painters are representatives of decadent western art.”

“Western? But they have drawn deeply from the Russian tradition.”

“They have been inspired by the bourgeois, depraved West. Many of them have ended up in exile.”

“Excuse me, but you’re mistaken, Mr. Bragin. All those artists were searching for their Russian roots and for Russian spirituality.”

“That was before the revolution. Theirs was a tradition that was not properly in tune with the Russian soul, having been imposed on them since the eighteenth century by French and German artists that the westernized czars invited to Russia so they could get fat on the sweat of our peasants. We, fortunately, have put an end to that particular tradition.”

“There is only one cultural tradition, Mr. Bragin, and it can’t just be swapped for another.”

“Yes it can. We have transformed, and I would almost say regenerated, the bourgeois and aristocratic tradition, and we have replaced the tradition of the drunken, drug-addicted poètes maudits with the resilient spirit of the working people.”

“The Russian revolution inspired Tatlin and Malevich to create new, revolutionary work.”

“What you have just said is in ideological contradiction to the Soviet people as a whole.”

“What I have said is simply this: as a person dedicated to creative work, I need freedom.”

“If, with your art, you celebrate the freedom, faith, and progress that hold sway over the Soviet Union, then we can reach some kind of agreement.”

“I’m talking about freedom, not about ideology. For an artist, freedom is the air he breathes, without freedom, nothing at all can be created.”

“You and I are not in complete agreement. Personally, I’m convinced that an artist should not be at liberty to do absolutely anything.”

“But if he isn’t, how can his work develop?”

“An artist must not be completely free,” Bragin said firmly, “because ultimately artists exist to serve the motherland. As with any other worker, their efforts must be aimed at increasing the greatness of the Soviet Union.”

“What you are suggesting is that I put myself at the service of the powers that be?”

“The powers that be? No. Of the Motherland. And of the Communist ideal that we are building here.”

“The words Motherland and building are euphemisms for the work of powers that be. What you are offering me is a long, sharp slaughterhouse knife, housed in a sheath of fine, diamond-studded leather.”

“Your poetic metaphors are quite out of place here. All I can do is repeat that one of the greatest successes achieved by our country has been the freedom and equality of all those who live in it. And we will not allow this to be torn from our hands.”

“Freedom? Equality? Soviet jails and forced labor camps are full to the brim with political prisoners.”

“The people who end up in the jails and in the camps are those people who obstruct the creation of a truly free and equal society.”

“Freedom means, above all else, the freedom to decide. And that, in this country, is not possible. You and yours decide everything for everybody else.”

“Why have you come back, then?” asked Bragin in a low voice.

“Why? To make my country richer.”

“No, you have come to be a thorn in our side, to be an obstacle. To demolish what we are building here: our new freedom, a freedom with fair limits.”

“A freedom with limits is a prison.”

“You may say what you please, but it is a freedom designed with mankind in mind. People cannot bear any more freedom than that which we give them.”

“You underestimate mankind.”

“On the contrary, we understand mankind. You don’t understand it one little bit because you live in an ivory tower, as do so many artists, in fact.”

“I don’t know if I understand people any better or worse than anyone else, but despite everything, I keep my faith in people. But you, on the other hand—”

“It is not enough to have faith. Deep down, Mr. Polonski, you do not love mankind. That is why you want to make the people suffer by offering them something that they are incapable of understanding, something that is beyond their reach and which will only, in the end, hurt them.”

“If anybody is causing hurt, it’s you in the NKVD.”

“We only punish and banish those who are in our way when it comes to achieving our aim.”

“What aim?”

“To conquer and hold power firmly within our grasp, so that from this position of authority we may spread happiness everywhere. As far as conquering goes, we have already achieved that, just as we also now have a firm grip on power. All that is required now is to give people what they need and to impose limits whenever it may be necessary for the people’s own good.”

“Do you know who you remind me of, Mr. Bragin? Paradoxically, your opinions are rather similar to those held by the Grand Inquisitor, that prototype of an authoritarian ruler described by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.”

“Paradoxically? Why? Any ruler worth his salt knows that if he wants to stay in power, he must offer something to the people. The Roman emperors offered bread and circuses to their subjects, and the Catholic Church offers a little more: miracles, enigmas, and moral authority. And the Catholic Church was right, that is exactly what the people need. And we will fulfill these needs of the people, following the church’s example.”

“Following the lead of the Catholic Church?”

“We must offer humanity a unique, clear vision of the world that can serve them as a solid reference in their lives. The church has known how to do that for millennia, and when it was necessary, it used the Inquisition to shore up its position.”

“But your struggle is precisely against religion and the church! Your government takes reprisals against the church!”

“Don’t interrupt me. We have offered the Soviet people the miracle of electrification, the miracle of armament—thanks to which we shall soon become a world superpower. Very soon we will give people the miracle of interplanetary flights: this country will be the first to fly through the cosmos, I promise you that.”

“To the detriment of the bread which the Romans used to go on about.”

“The Romans were wrong to do so. The people need miracles more than bread.”

“And what are the enigmas you mentioned?”

“Our representatives are enigmatic. Comrade Stalin is inaccessible, and at the same time he is everywhere; photos of him appear in all the newspapers, his image can be found on all the town squares and in all the offices. And on the first of May, you can see him high up on the tribune, flying close to heaven.”

“You mentioned the third attribute: authority. You can’t tell me, Mr. Bragin, that that also makes people happy.”

“It does so more than any of the other attributes. The people need a strong man before them, whom they may bow down to, and they need a moral authority, a moral conscience, if you will, that releases them from their own consciences. The church knew all about that, too.”

“True authority is moral authority, precisely, but I don’t agree with your view of things: each person must seek that authority within himself, and then perfect it.”

“You are a typical intellectual, Mr. Polonski. How many people are capable of doing what you say? I’m talking about the masses and their god. People need a god, and we provide them with one.”

“And what if the masses cease to believe in that god, one day? Don’t tell me that can’t happen. I would say it’s probable, even; in fact, I’d say it is absolutely definite!”

“No. If a person needs something on which they can base their existence, they grab onto it with all their might and stop asking questions.”

“Under certain conditions, the masses can free themselves of their idols—they can even end up hating them. Even the most untouchable of gods can end up being trod into the ground. Why shouldn’t the masses cultivate hostility toward their leader? If he makes the people suffer, Stalin is showing that he is no better than they are, that he is the same as them, or worse.”

“Allow me to repeat that you are a typical intellectual, Mr. Polonski. Your noble personal ethics are all right for a few select individuals; but I am talking about the masses! We are building a paradise for everybody!” He added, in a low voice, “Join our ranks, Mr. Polonski. We know how to look after the people who are of service to us.”

Andrei had nearly forgotten where he was, and after so many years he was enjoying conversing with someone in his native tongue about a subject that interested him. Maybe this is why he hadn’t noticed that for some time now, Bragin had been losing patience with him.

“So what you’re saying, Mr. Bragin, is that there are two possibilities: either freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom, just as the Grand Inquisitor himself believed. Is that right?”

“Something like that, yes,” Bragin muttered. He was now looking at Andrei again the way a judge, in an interrogation, observes the detainee.

Andrei, by now relaxed, began to sing, with joyful irony, a song from his Soviet Communist youth days:

Of all the countries which come to mind,

I know of none other than mine

in which all can breathe freely.

At that moment, Bragin grew stern. His transformation from man into bureaucrat was complete; only professional mimes know how to change their expression so quickly.

“This subject is too serious to be made fun of,” he said in an official tone, as if he were addressing an audience of comrades. “Too many enemies are threatening our Motherland for us to be able to lower our guard and release our iron grip on the education of our Soviet people.”

That was when Andrei understood that further conversation would be pointless. Although he knew there was little hope of success, he had one last try, “Even so, I would like to work in my own particular field. I’m sure that if I did so, I could help our country.”

Bragin stood up and coldly replied, “So you say, but this interview is now over.”

Bragin’s initial friendliness had vanished without a trace.

“Perhaps the best thing I could do is take the first train back to Prague,” Andrei said, thoughtful and making an effort to control his inner trembling.

“You have returned from exile and will not be granted permission to travel. You are a citizen of the Soviet Union and the laws of this country now apply to you. According to these laws, nobody is allowed to travel without the approval of the Soviet authorities.”

As Bragin accompanied him through the long room to the door, the trembling of Andrei’s facial muscles became more and more visible. When he was on the threshold, before they put the blindfold back on him, Andrei stared at Bragin for quite a while. The official stood his ground coolly and said, “What will happen to you after this is beyond my control.”

Still staring at him, Andrei asked in a low voice, “Tell me: Why do you do this job?”

Bragin, unmoved, answered firmly, “I am a soldier of the Communist Party and I follow its guidelines. There is no higher honor for a Soviet citizen.”

The next day, they took Andrei to the NKVD examining magistrate. When they removed the blindfold, the judge, in an ominous tone, said, “Come forward, Polonski.”

He went on, “We are quite certain that you have come here to promote ideological differences.”

Andrei realized that Bragin’s report had placed him firmly among the ranks of the enemies of the people.

The NKVD judge said, “We know perfectly well that Czech intelligence has sent you here to carry out espionage work in order to undermine our Soviet Motherland. Here is a paper and pen. Write your confession.”

Andrei was trembling visibly, “Me, a spy? This is a mistake!”

“There is only one thing that can lessen your punishment for spying against us: a confession and the names of those who sent you here.”

Andrei couldn’t stop trembling, he was beside himself.

“What are you talking about? What a load of rubbish! I’m a painter!” he cried, in vain.

“Write your confession.”

Andrei became more and more obstinate when he realized there was absolutely nothing he could do.

“Bullshit! I paint, that’s all I do!”

“So you refuse to write your confession?”

“Of course I refuse! What do you expect me to confess?”

“Well, then we shall use other methods. The choice is yours.”

Even in the state he was in, Andrei remembered that Bragin had said something very similar the day before.

The NKVD judge added, in a metallic voice, “You have just passed sentence on yourself.”

How did you manage to avoid having a fit in front of those people, Andrei? You who used to have an episode whenever you were ordered or obliged to do something that was against your will. You were always like that, since the days of the revolution and your days in the Red Army. How did you keep control of yourself in front of those NKVD thugs?

You projected your own film as you endured it. You observed those murderers with the inner eye that enabled you to transform the world around you. Semyon explained it to me as you explained it to him: you imagined them as priests with bloodstained hands, who were officiating at a cold and terrifying ceremony, priests making sacrifices to their bloodthirsty god. Things had been this way since the beginning of time. You saw men dressed in black, with somber faces. All of them with the same expression, all of them saying the same words, the same sentences. They moved through the rooms and corridors of that Palace of Terror, the Holy See of their bloodthirsty cult. You didn’t see them in the corridors because you were led along them blindfolded, but you sensed them with your inner vision there in that palace where living men turned into condemned ones, as has happened so often in the history of mankind, when some impose a single truth upon others, and, if necessary, condemn them to death.

To death: because the gulag meant almost certain death.

Semyon, who was also a painter, told me Andrei’s story, although he knew that to do so was dangerous both for the speaker and the listener.

Both painters spent ten years in the same forced labor camp in Siberia. Ten years. Semyon was sentenced to the camp for being Jewish: they accused him of cosmopolitanism. They condemned Andrei, so they claimed, for having spent twenty years working for the intelligence service of a foreign enemy.

For ten years in the camp Andrei and Semyon survived as best they could, helping each other out, more through friendship than with the meager physical means at their disposal. When in the first winter after his arrival Andrei caught pneumonia, Semyon, helped by other prisoners, loaded him onto a sled and covered him with a thick layer of fir branches. In this way, he avoided death.

Semyon said to me in a low voice, “Deep down, what saved Andrei were his visions of the Ancient World, his hallucinations of the arrival of the Sumerian ruler, Gudea.”

I encouraged Semyon to tell me more.

“‘Gudea is coming to meet me,’ Andrei whispered to me one evening when all the other prisoners were asleep,” Semyon said. “He was smiling at the unseen person who had come to meet him, and was enthusiastic about this interview. I watched him: it was clear that that conversation provided Andrei with something new, and some crucial thought that was of vital importance; some revelation, perhaps of a profound truth. The next day, Andrei woke up, energetic and full of life. That’s what he was like, Sylva: during the day Andrei suffered along with the rest of us, but unlike us, he had his nighttime life where he sought refuge.”

But his health, in the end, was affected. When he no longer had any powers of resistance, he succumbed to exhaustion and sickness. Ten years in the gulag: Andrei’s health couldn’t cope with it.

Two years after the death of Stalin, Semyon was given reparations for having been unjustly imprisoned, and he left the work camp. The authorities sent him to live in a small Siberian town. In 1957 they allowed him to leave the town, and he returned to Moscow. Then he started to look for me to give me the news of Andrei’s assumed death and to pass on his last message, “The ambitions of an entire lifetime, and all the innumerable mundane affairs: I am throwing it all away, chucking it away, into the transparent mirror of a long Siberian river.”

And a few words by way of a signing off, “You kept me company in this world, and you will keep me company in the next one, my Blue Butterfly.”

I am at the opening of an exhibition by Semyon, in Moscow. For the occasion I put on my best dress: lace and pearl white, with a skirt that reached to just above my knee. At my sixty-something years—in 1968—my hair was as blonde as when I was young, with just a few wisps of white hair making it a touch lighter. I wore my hair loose: it hung down to my shoulders.

Semyon took my arm and introduced me as a most welcome foreign guest. Jan was on my right.

Jan . . . When he was still only a little boy in Prague, he insisted that he wanted to come with me to Moscow to look for his father. Getting the visa to visit the USSR wasn’t easy at all; they didn’t give it to me until after many years of visits back and forth to the Soviet embassy. And when they did give it to me, it came with a long list of conditions: one of them was that I wasn’t to see or talk to anyone except the person who had extended the invitation.

Jan, by that time, had finished university; the political authorities hadn’t allowed him to enter the Academy of Music because of his family origins. It’s a short step from musical theory and solfeggio to mathematics, said Jan. Later, from mathematics he progressed to cybernetics. With that, he got his first job in a scientific research institute and on his first holiday from that job, he’d wanted to discover the country where his father had been born. “And where he must have died,” I was about to add, but I kept silent.

Back in Prague, Jan had insisted that I go and see him at his new job; he was proud of it. This was his first year as a professional scientist.

I entered the scientific institute where Jan worked. Most of the tables were unmanned. After glancing at me without interest, the people working in the building had bent their heads back over their work. Jan told me that just before my visit, one of the women scientists, Hana, had burst into the room to announce that in the House of Fashion, they’d received a consignment of coats made of artificial fur. If they all hurried up, maybe they could still get their hands on a few. “What an opportunity, fur coats!” Hana shouted. “It’s not often that that happens!” Immediately, eight scientists had headed off in pursuit of the coats.

Jan took me on my tour of the institute. When the eight missing scientists returned from their coat hunting, Jan tried to introduce me to his female colleagues. None paid any attention to him, though, and one of them had even shouted at him, “Are you still wet behind the ears or what? We’re busy here!” She threw herself, as did the rest of the women, at their prey, those huge packages, like hunters who managed to bag an especially large boar. Seven women unwrapping seven packages, the wrapping paper scattered all over the room, until finally they managed to remove their booty from their boxes. Seven women stared rapturously at seven coats made of obviously ersatz fur—they waved them about, so that seven coats floated over the scientific institute’s desk, each with a hood. All seven were white, not a salt-and-pepper white, not off-white or ivory, no, these coats were as white as recently drawn milk, white as hospital walls, or a bridal gown. The eighth lady, Květa, hadn’t been so lucky: there had only been seven fur coats left. Seven women of a certain age tried on the coats made of artificial fur, one of them raised up the collar or straightened the hood of one of the others, and fastened or unfastened the little hooks at the neck.

“Květa, isn’t it a bit too tight?” a plump lady with lacquered hair asked Mrs. Květa, who was standing with her hands on her hips, admiring her quicker and luckier colleagues with envy.

“No way! It’s perfect. Fits you like a glove! You look like a school girl!”

“But, Květa, aren’t I too old to wear a white coat? As you know, there weren’t any other colors—”

“Nonsense! Don’t be so soppy! This white color suits you. In that coat, you could pass for Snow White!”

“I’ll wear my white boots, then I’ll be white all over!” said the lady with the lacquered hair.

Seven women in fur coats, seven Snow Whites twirling around the desks of the Prague Scientific Institute, seven Snow Whites with not a dwarf between them, who touched each other’s coats and patted each other’s backs, and admired each other from close up and from a distance, seven Snow Whites who made decisions as to where and when they would wear their new coats and who they would surprise with this new gear.

As I was leaving, one of the seven Snow Whites flapped the wide, white sleeves of her coat by way of a farewell.

What was I thinking about before the Snow Whites made me lose track? Oh, yes, about Moscow and the opening of Semyon’s exhibition. I put on my best dress and carefully combed my hair down.

However, I had problems getting to the opening. With the high-heeled shoes I’d worn, I kept treading in the mud and getting stuck time and again. Whenever they saw that I was about to topple over and fall flat on my face, Jan and Semyon helped me to walk straight. “The Moscow outskirts are unpaved,” Semyon said, quietly. The cars parked in front of the identical blocks of flats were wrapped in newspaper and plastic.

Semyon had given me a bunch of white chrysanthemums and I attached one of them to my dress. For the whole journey, Jan never stopped watching me, inquisitively. I’d spent that afternoon alone with Semyon, and hadn’t allowed Jan to stay with us. I was hoping that Semyon would give me some further details of Andrei’s life, as well as the names of his executioners. I didn’t want Jan to hear those names; I was afraid he’d try to avenge his father, and destroy his own life in the process. As Andrei had destroyed his.

No, it was I who destroyed Andrei’s life.

“Mama,” Jan interrupted my thoughts as we made our way to Semyon’s opening, “did you find anything out about my father’s life? Where is he, in which work camp?”

I said nothing.

Jan didn’t understand. Probably, deep down, he hadn’t expected me to react differently.

“At least, do you know,” Jan asked in a strained voice, “the names of the people who sent Father to Siberia?”

“No. I don’t think there’s any way of finding that out.”

Jan accepted my lie in silence, even though he knew that I hadn’t told him the truth. He respected my wish not to give away any names and didn’t insist any further.

Semyon was walking alongside us. I got the impression that he wasn’t listening, that he didn’t understand Czech, perhaps because of the fast way we spoke. He was humming some tune.

Then he took me by the arm to lead me into the gallery and introduce me to people as his guest from abroad. Jan was on my right, maybe just half a step behind me. I was expecting a white, spacious, light-filled art gallery, like the ones I had known in Prague. On the contrary, this was a hole-in-the-wall, a kind of workshop or garage in a block of flats on the outskirts of the city, transformed for that evening into a gallery. The place was lit only by a couple of weak, flickering lightbulbs. Those present applauded us when we walked in. At that moment, I felt young again, as I had when I was twenty years old, dazzling all the men and conversing with ministers and diplomats and President Masaryk himself at receptions at the Prague Castle and in Paris.

When I’d recovered from my initial impression I realized that I’d walked into a party that was completely different from what I’d expected.

I was surrounded by human wrecks. Men and women with pale, yellowy faces, with the odd eye or ear or set of teeth and almost always the hair missing, engraved with a complex network of wrinkles and scars and marks and stigmata, from the eyes in which all hope and optimism—that is to say, life itself—had been thrust by extreme suffering; elderly creatures, these were, each with a cane or crutches, some missing a hand or an arm or a leg, with broken noses, distended bellies, with one or two stumps, with their slumped shoulders, with hunchbacks.

I sneaked a look at the paintings on display. There were drawings done with pencil and Chinese ink, and what I saw there was what I also saw around me in the gallery itself: fearful shadows dragging themselves along a barbed-wire fence.

“Semyon, this is horrible!” I said, unable to stop myself.

“No. This is my life. That is what I have seen in my life. An artist draws what he’s seen.”

“Semyon, tell me something. Did Andrei also draw these . . .” I was going to say corpses, but corrected myself in time, “people like this?”

“Andrei? He was always drawing, even though it was strictly prohibited. He took a great risk whenever he drew. In the beginning, he sketched firebirds and nymphs, princesses riding gray wolves and heroes fighting dragons; he often drew the sweetest children, who felt drawn in by monsters, and wild beings, I don’t know why. He also drew deer and squirrels, bear cubs, butterflies, and frogs, trees and bushes, clouds and mountains. He gave his drawings away to his fellow prisoners, who hid them between their blankets. It was one of the few things that made us happy there. That was at the beginning. Later . . . later Andrei too grew apathetic, listless. I could see that he was losing more and more energy every day. He concentrated on controlling his fits, but was not always successful. Only at night did he come alive again, living in his dreams where he was visited by a wise man from the Ancient World. Sometimes he talked in his sleep or when just barely awake, saying strange strings of words that sounded like poems.”

“Have any of his drawings survived?” I asked hopefully, “Could they be bought somewhere, or from somebody?”

“Survived . . . Bought . . . ? I don’t understand what it is that you’re asking,” Semyon said, taken aback.

I realized that when something horrifies us, we come up with banal comments, as if being superficial could save us from our terrifying leap into the abyss.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t think I’ve really grasped the situation.”

In order to fully understand a situation, above all if it’s a tragedy of some kind, you have to have been there in person, to have seen it with your own eyes. Just as when one hears of other people’s misfortunes, one can only feel true horror if one imagines them happening to someone close, someone loved, or oneself. Right then, I was unable to do that.

“You’re lucky,” Semyon said, “not to comprehend it. All of those who were there with us, they grasp it only too well.”

At which point, Semyon turned to greet a prematurely aged woman with red eyes and gray skin, who had come up to say hello.

I scanned the room for Jan. An elderly man with white hair had dropped his cane and Jan was picking it up off the floor and handing it back to him with a smile. The elderly man—he looked like Tiresias, the blind prophet of Greek mythology—stared at him with eyes full of sadness, as if from some shadowy tomb he had spotted a ray of sunlight. He had looked at me, too, in that same way, just a moment earlier; I’d felt his eyes on my face. Seeing that I was watching him, the elderly man lowered his gray lashes and, leaning on his cane, turned to the wall to examine some of the artwork.

Semyon invited Jan and me over to the table where there stood two solitary bottles of vodka. Jan and I remembered the openings that we’d been to in Prague, with a choice of white and red wine, and tables laden with colorful canapés and pastries.

“Semyon, you’re a great artist, why don’t you exhibit in normal galleries?”

He looked at me as if I’d spoken to him in a Chinese mountain dialect about the best way to milk a cow.

“In normal galleries? Me? The only ones who can exhibit there are the apparatchiks! I’ve been sidelined, Sylva! I’m Jewish and what’s more I used to be a political prisoner!”

How could I have asked such a stupid question! I was angry with myself, but a glass of vodka soon had me asking more questions.

“Semyon, why are there no young people at this opening? Why does everybody here look as if they’d just arrived from the depths of hell for a brief visit to Earth before going back to where they came from?”

“I can best answer you by telling you a story. When I returned from Siberia, I left my wife. I abandoned her, even though she’d waited for me faithfully for all those years.”

“That’s terrible! How could you do that?”

“When I got back, I’d changed; I’d changed completely. Day-to-day life with its day-to-day pleasures no longer meant anything to me. I can’t explain it, you have to experience it for yourself. My wife and I tried to make everything between us just the way it was before, but we lived alongside each other like two deaf-mute people. The same thing happened with our children, who I found to be like two strangers from a country whose language I didn’t speak. I hardly ever see them now, maybe just a couple of times a year to celebrate their birthdays. After what I’d been through, their concerns and interests are trivial to me.”

“Have you tried to express yourself to them?”

“I can do so, at least a little, through my drawings. Sylva, a man who has survived the gulag—or a Nazi concentration camp—ends up being incapable not only of making friends, but even of understanding anybody who hasn’t shared a similar experience. One option is to kill yourself, as a few of us have done. We survivors can only live with those who have been through the same thing, who live in the world as strange, incomprehensible beings to others. Those who have survived the gulag or any other such attempt to exterminate mankind, are scarred for life. For us, living in this world is like living in exile, and it is humiliating for us; we are permanently humiliated. And humiliation is as painful as the physical torture of interrogation, it is merely a different kind of pain. We have been exiled a second time, but now we are exiles in freedom.”

He stopped talking. I said nothing. Once again, that Tiresias with his cane turned his knowing, blind eyes to us. He was breathing fast, excitedly, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t get the words out. His eyes were shot through with pain. When he looked into my eyes, he lowered his gray lashes.

On the way back to the hotel, Jan and I were silent.

Jan didn’t feel like talking the flight back to Prague either. He stared at things without seeing them. He couldn’t imagine how grateful I was for his silence.

On that journey back to Prague, I seemed to hear what I heard more than twenty years ago; through the racket made by the wheels of the departing train, you Andrei, whispered, simply and full of confidence, “Blue Butterfly!”