34
WHAT I DISCOVERED IN VLADA’S WORDS TO me is that history, especially one’s own history (five weeks in Pankrác Prison), often feels like a series of rooms through which one is compelled to pass. Some are more like prison cells, constricted inner landscapes of the mind, while others, given to wide, spacious windows, offer more sanguine views of the parading landscape of our days. Vlada described his nine months in solitary confinement that way: rooms and mindscapes he painstakingly canvassed for his fantasy novel about his six months in America and an alternate life forgone. One passes through such rooms as dreams pass through us: furniture fading at the touch, artifacts a feathery weight in our palm, the varnish-darkened faces eluding our embrace, while we, often in free fall or sprinting in quicksand, seek to find a comforting lodgment. Max likened such rooms to his “memory points,” moments of intense emotion set like the jeweled Pleiades in the darkened quiet of our minds: the crucial stepping-stones of life-enhancing moments that mark our path and so plot our place in the world. But such rooms, too, are contingent memories we share with others; and so, if we fail to embrace those other lives, throw the windows wide to the light—the life we shared—those memories will shrink and fade and avail us little: a life of barren ruins that will chill your bones with aged regrets. For we are those rooms, the landscapes through which we pass. That is why the clues are never where you expect to find them . . . until your eyes have adjusted to the prevailing light, until you’ve thrown the windows wide and listened deeply—oh, ever so deeply.
Even now I must stare fixedly out my window over the lake to catch the phantom of Vlada’s rapt face against the rainy night, where he sat beside me as we drove back to the Staré Město, where one of the only five people in the world he trusted awaited us at an obscure working-class beer parlor—so he assured me. His hair was matted with the damp, his thrusting chin dangling a cigarette—a warrior’s face, not unlike one of those supercilious Nordic gods that presided from the murals above the dance floor of the previous evening. How many such proud portrait faces have I glimpsed in darkened galleries, or in daguerreotypes of uniformed figures, mere flecks of silver nitrate on glass—those oh so steadfast abolitionists posed before Union pup tents. . . who saved a nation’s soul, whose sacrifices, like their fragile images, are doomed to fail and fade like frost on a sunlit windowpane, lest we welcome them as our own.
It was Vlada’s curse that first alerted me. At the farthest reach of our high beams we saw a car barricading the boulevard. A soldier with an AK-47 at the ready and a flashlight waving us down. More soldiers stood off to the side with capped heads bowed to the rain. Vlada’s hand went to my knee, tight.
“Don’t worry. Play the tourist. You speak only English. Don’t answer if they question you in German.”
I was braking gingerly. The front wheels skidded and caught and we slowed. The car across the road was a decrepit Škoda in camouflage green, a wreck, something that could be sacrificed to a speeding crash. There were more cars along the side of the road. Two large searchlights suddenly flared, screaming light in our eyes.
“Remember”—and I felt Vlada’s hand again on my knee—“shake your head, tremble, act frightened and confused, like a lost child. Give them fear.”
“They—who are ‘they’?” I squinted into the harsh beams of light and could make out the lines of soldiers in pea green uniforms, their faces just hidden beneath the dripping visors. The vodka made me braver than was probably good for me. “Just as well it’s not a DUI stop; I’d fail a Breathalyzer.”
“Let me do the talking. If you must speak, look them in the face, in the eyes, and show them how confused and scared you are.”
I was confused by Vlada’s tone suggesting I play the buffoon. What had happened to the belligerent cynic of minutes before?
In the explosion of light around us, that line of security police looked like a slightly ridiculous chorus out of Aeschylus. Then another car came up behind us, its headlights adding to the drama unfolding on all sides.
A flashlight tapped my window and shone in my eyes. The door was pulled open.
“Mr. Alden, you will please get out.”
The toneless pronunciation of my name made me want to piss my pants. I panicked when I remembered I hadn’t even had a chance to get my passport back from the clerk at the hotel.
Hands grabbed me and took over the task of hastening my exit from the Land Rover. I was aware of a few curses in Czech from Vlada before he, too, was manhandled out of the car. I was led off to the curb by a young soldier, just to the edge of the most intense illumination. Vlada was held by two soldiers next to the Land Rover, where an older man in a dark raincoat stood waiting. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or saddened not to be center stage with Vlada. As the man in the raincoat and hat began interrogating Vlada, the Land Rover was attacked by a team of men in civilian garb. Within moments, everything not screwed down was on the tarmac. Experienced hands searched every nook and cranny of my clothes and then some. I could smell humid bodies and cheap cologne. A rifle barrel bumped me in passing. My wallet and change and watch were removed. I felt strangely light-headed, as if I might float away if released, and I breathed deeply to try to rid my system of the vodka.
Vlada, a soldier on either side gripping an arm, had a look of utter exasperation on his face—a drill he knew only too well—as he confronted the man in the raincoat. The man wore a broad felt hat that dripped with rain. I could make out his flat nose and double chin and, when he raised his head slightly, the most impassive eyes I’d ever seen. Their conversation seemed well-rehearsed. Vlada chucked his head and rolled his eyes as if bored by the whole thing: been there, done that. Shoes jittered out the doors of the Land Rover, like something out of a comic routine, as the undersides of the seats were still being searched. And another pair of shoes stuck out from under the chassis, where someone had a flashlight flicking around. The man in the raincoat took off his hat for a moment and shook it, as if the rain dripping from the brim had been annoying him. He was nearly bald except for a strip of short gray hair that looked like the tonsure of a monk. The soldiers besides Vlada relaxed their grip, and he now began gesturing, pointing to the slick tarmac, and ticking off the imbecilities being perpetrated at his and my expense. The jowly face of the older man remained near blank of emotion, as if he, too, had been through this little charade once too often to really have his heart in it anymore. Better to get it the hell over with and out of the rain and home to his wife and a warm bath. To my untrained eyes, the fox terriers searching the car were absolutely convinced of something.
When they were done, the man in the raincoat snapped his fingers and pointed to the contents on the tarmac: maps, owner’s manual, Kleenex, tour guides, cassettes, a hair band, a box of throat lozenges, breakdown kit, first-aid kit, some of Laura’s discarded novels, Vlada’s translation of Gardens of Saturn, the jack and spare tire, and a plastic bag with the box of chocolates. A soldier handed him the translation and he opened to the frontispiece and read the inscription, tapped the cover, smiled at Vlada, and slipped the book into his coat pocket. The soldier then handed him the bag. The weight, I thought, the weight of the box would give the game away. But the man didn’t even bother to test for the weight; maybe he didn’t have to. He got out the box of chocolates and slit the cellophane with a thumbnail and spilled out the typed contents. At least a dozen pages wafted to the tarmac while he stood for a moment absorbed in the manuscript. Vlada became very still, blond hair hanging straight down and dripping, shoulders losing their lift, his eyes seeming to fade, drawing inward, as if some life force was draining from his body. I thought to myself, Surely it can’t be his only copy—the book he’d written in his mind during all those months in solitary. If there was anything offensive or dangerous or perhaps even beautiful on those pages, the man in the raincoat’s fossilized expression gave nothing away. In fact, he looked profoundly bored and fed up, and after a few minutes’ examination, he handed the thing off to the waiting soldier, who failed or didn’t bother to pick up the pages on the road.
I wanted to protest the sloppiness of leaving the neglected pages soaking in the rain—perhaps gorgeous scenes of the Grand Canyon or the exhilaration of catching a well-thrown pass—and as I leaned forward—I discovered that there was no leaning forward. Hands restrained me and tightened their grip.
A flash of violence exploded, then instantly subsided with staccato grunts. I think Vlada had taken a swing at the man in the raincoat, or what would have been a swing if he hadn’t been restrained by the two soldiers. Now they pinned his arms—hard, up behind him. A blunted cry tore from his throat. The man, the policeman, the security officer, the whatever functionary, had not even flinched—an actor onstage would have at least registered the mayhem directed at him—but simply shook his head in disgust, wearied at the judgment required of him by some immutable calculus. I tried to sort it out in my mind as Vlada had explained it to me, the pathology of oppression that held his countrymen in its grip, the death grip of the old on the young . . . a thing that shed the husk of theory as I saw the pain convulse Vlada’s face.
The man in the raincoat took a step toward Vlada, shaking his head, wiping the rain drips from his lapels, a look of relief that he could now go home and get into that warm tub. And then, as if needing to at least go through the motions of his official role for the long-suffering rain-soaked soldiers who witnessed this scene, he raised an admonishing finger to Vlada, paternal, almost solicitous. The prisoner had become very quiet, pinned under the arms by the soldiers behind. They were young men with bad acne and high Slavic cheekbones, probably recently off the farm or from distant villages and only recently brought to the city to do security work. Strong, too, the way Vlada had been strong when I had first known him. The older man, the honcho, began to speak in low, measured tones, now stamping his feet in a delicate, almost comical two-step, his brown leather shoes soaked through. He was asking questions, repeating them, for the record—a font of reasonableness. Vlada just shook his head. The older man finally shrugged and turned his head to me and smiled like a gracious host would across a crowded room upon sighting a newly arrived guest. Vlada said something. The man turned back as if he hadn’t quite heard. Vlada spoke again, in a voice deliberately low. The man bent forward, a cocked turtlehead stretched from the carapace of the raincoat.
I saw Vlada’s head move like the strike of a snake, and a thick gobbet of spittle slid down the man’s cheek. A spasmodic single reflex from the two young soldiers behind, two vicious upward jerks. At least one, if not two, audible cracks. A shriek. The man in the raincoat retreated a step and carefully, exactingly, wiped away the spittle from his cheek, flinging the unmentionable to the tarmac, rinsing his face with water off the lapel of his coat. This done, he gave a nod to a young soldier who carried a Kalashnikov. The soldiers behind, who had broken Vlada’s arms, lowered him slightly, and as they did, he let out another shriek of agony. The soldier with the Kalashnikov adjusted his position and with the mechanical ease of a flywheel executed a blow into Vlada’s midsection with the wooden butt, doubling him over, and then an upward blow into the side of the jaw, caving it in like a piece of rotted fruit. The soldiers dropped him facedown onto the wet cobblestones.
Something in my brain snapped. A sound escaped my lips, but a blue steel barrel thumped convincingly across my chest when I tried to move.
I began shivering in horror, as if the vodka had magically exited my system. I could only stare at the broken teeth and bloody drool from Vlada’s flaccid lips, his shattered jaw hanging agape. The blood seemed to have a life of its own, branching out in tiny reddish rivulets between the cobblestones. I couldn’t see his eyes . . . and I was desperate to see his eyes, desperate that the spark, which I loved, hadn’t been—couldn’t have been—extinguished.
The image of his sprawling body remains, like that of a rebel angel flung to earth from some unimaginable height.
When this scene of violence returns to me in dreams—which it does regularly, when I see the upward flash of that Kalashnikov butt and scream out to Vlada—something in me—a default setting of the historian’s trade—tries to fathom the causal chain of civilization’s DNA that could make such a thing possible. Had it begun with Plato’s banning of Homer in his ideal society, or Romans burning Christians, or Christians burning heretics and Jews, or Catholics burning Protestants, or—as my great-grandfather General Alden would surely insist—the lynching and destruction of black slaves and freedmen? Ideological man—bred on fear, greed, and hate’s mendacity—is the monster in our night. But this act of violence, like the insidious causal chain that killed my father—not a bullet through the brain, I would find out later— had its genesis in Lenin’s embrace of terror to protect and spread the Bolshevik Revolution, elaborated and refined by his Cheka and Stalin’s NKVD and KGB, and so made available wholesale to the fanatic anti-Semitism of the brown shirts, the SS and Einsatzgruppen, first in the gulags and then the concentration camps, the genocidal famines and killing fields, expertly refined methodologies of manipulative hatred, off-the-shelf ready-mades available to Mao and Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot, Kim Jong-il and Castro, and all their tin-pot dictatorial epigoni in every far-flung hellhole of existence . . . only to flicker out on that wet cobblestone street in Prague. Or so I once liked to think. Until, sadly, it got revved up again in various ethnic and religious guises in Kosovo, and later in a thousand nameless terrorist massacres across the globe. The hardwired ideological killer in our DNA.
It gives me some comfort to think that the spasm of punishment I witnessed, that particular strain of violence—the young soldier didn’t even grimace when he delivered the blow to Vlada’s jaw—was a final malignant twitch in that particular dying ecosystem of human degradation locked behind the Iron Curtain, which expired with the fall of the Berlin Wall. A few days later in the streets of Prague, a bunch of protesters would be badly beaten by the security police, but the demonstrations that followed in Wenceslas Square in the coming weeks, as the Velvet Revolution unfolded, were, thankfully, largely peaceful.
Vlada was one of the last casualties . . . along with my cellmate.
This I knew, of course, only in retrospect. At the time, I was just terrified. I kept thinking about when Vlada had put his finger to the back of my head and touched the bullet’s entry point. In 1971 and 1972, nothing had frightened me more than the thought of being made a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, for I knew exactly how they went about their business.
I was wedged between two soldiers in the backseat of a waiting vehicle. The soldiers were wet and smelled as if they’d been out on maneuvers for days. After the initial shock, I made a few feeble protests and uttered the necessary demands. I demanded to see a representative of the American embassy. No one paid me the slightest attention. In fact, I got the distinct impression that I was the last thing on anyone’s mind. They were all exchanging uneasy glances and jittery words. The plainclothes policeman in the front seat, next to the driver, had steam rising off his jacket and had lighted up a cigarette, cracking his window to flick out the burgeoning ash. The windows were fogged, a smear of dingy habitation rushing by as we sped into the heart of the city. I was filled with a sinking feeling, as if we’d been spilled over the edge of a whirlpool and into oblivion: the suck of air past that cracked window, the g-force of hard turns through narrow streets, hurtling into the belly of that godforsaken city.
I wasn’t even sure we’d make it. The suspension was shot and the tailpipe grated on potholes. Something dug into my side painfully. I finally reached around and found the open holster flap of the soldier beside me pressed into my hip. I felt the wooden grip of his pistol. The man was oblivious, wiping at his window as if preoccupied with the groups of figures filling the sidewalks; he looked worried by what he saw. I could have taken that pistol. I could have shot the motherfuckers. I did nothing, of course. I felt strangely neglected and in a concave of souls preoccupied with private anxieties. The guy in the front seat was wiping at his window, too, as if intent on examining the pedestrians, who seemed out in prodigious numbers compared to what I’d seen the day before. Through the fist-size peephole the soldier next to me had made in the fogged glass, I could make out the gnarled turrets and writhing Baroque facades with their stony faces, and a flaming window or two high up in an office building, but little else.
We came to a screeching halt at a barrier and checkpoint. The driver opened his window and got into an animated discussion with an armed guard, a discussion that everyone else around me craned their necks to hear. Although I couldn’t understand a word, I got the distinct impression it had nothing to do with me, but with something more general and far more compelling. A moment later, the barrier was lifted and the clanking of a garage door sounded behind us and the car was engulfed by an enormous underground garage. I detected a release of tension all around. The precipitous drive was because of something going on in the streets of Prague, and it had all these guys worried.
And they were as right to be worried as they were eager to rid themselves of me.
I was marched through a concrete bunker of a parking lot, through a red door with a blinking red light, down one interminable passage after another lined with dingy offices, then down echoing metal staircases, then into another corridor of reinforced-concrete walls and massive jail doors. Here, under strips of fluorescent lights, the smell changed from musty paper and file folders to one of unkempt bodies, stale sweat, and open latrines.
Just when I thought there could be no more down, more steps appeared, and these of concrete, as if hewn out of solid bedrock. We descended to a final corridor; this one was hung with bare lightbulbs, and the roughhewn stonework appeared like something from a road cutting or mine face. Metal brackets in the ceiling carried the ductwork and utility cables, much of it patched with electric tape. The doors on these cells seemed even more massive than the ones before, or maybe it was the thick layers of chipping paint and overlapping metal plates and rivet points that had the look of archaic machinery. Cell numbers were stenciled under the judas holes and it was clear that the numbers had been changed many times since the nineteenth century, the specters of erased figures showing through the paint, as if the accounting system for the containment of human souls had to be constantly updated.
Finally, we stopped at what felt like an exhausted pithead. A massive door bore the number III stenciled in Roman numerals, or just possibly 111. A guard sat at a table reading a newspaper and seemed annoyed at being disturbed. He gave me a cursory frisking, removed my shoelaces and belt, handed me a grimy roll of toilet paper, and a seconds later the door of the cell closed behind me.
I surveyed my domain. A pair of facing cots with folded blankets. Pewter gray walls that had been scraped at and gouged and rubbed and carved into, so much so that my archaeologist’s eye was galvanized for a second in an attempt to interpret the symbols and patterns that might be discerned. A gleaming white toilet bowl, strangely clean and even smelling of disinfectant, cleaner than the one in the Hotel Red Star. There was a ventilation duct near the ceiling by the door and a single hanging lightbulb, clear, not frosted, where a squiggle of filament did a lazy hula dance. I pictured again Vlada’s smashed jaw, which made me concerned about Laura, which got me angry at her all over again for having gotten me into this mess and lying about Vlada. The vodka was wearing off and anger and fear rose in my throat like vying riptides.
I lay down and pulled the blanket over me and stared up at the lightbulb and the fragile filament that flickered and danced like some homunculus caught in a web . . . and then went out. Darkness as absolute as anything I’d ever known engulfed me. I pulled the thin blanket to my chin. To try to staunch my fear, I began an examination of the situation with all the clarity and logic I could muster.
But the more I did so, the more troubled I became. Strange how the police in the car had ignored me, but their anxious faces and relief at depositing me in Pankrác Prison did nothing to lessen the serious charges I knew would come: attempting to smuggle state documents, a dissident’s manuscript—and they could throw currency violations in for good measure.
The 1955 ministerial letter to the Soviets, protesting the execution of my father—that really had me fucked: It could mean years, or worse.
I started shaking uncontrollably. I wanted to reach out and find Laura’s hand and tell her it would be okay, to believe my own words. But when I reached out, all I found was the cold, dank walls scratched and incised with a cacophony of indecipherable symbols, each a cry of fear or despair.
The darkness in that chamber was like embalming fluid; it had texture and weight and even a smell, a mixture of human effluvium and disinfectant, which produced a certain surcease of inherent contradiction . . . the oddly comforting and even liberating possibility of brass-bottom reality, along the lines of death and taxes, or in Vlada’s words: “Don’t worry your mind about ultimate truths; when all contradictions are overcome, as Marx would have it, and we come to rest after our long journey—you, me, like our fathers, will all be dead or in a prison cell.” His brave vodka-soaked insouciance and edgy irony, which had engendered such courage and even inspiration just an hour before, now seemed to mock me.
And worse, I felt like I deserved this fate: I’d been obsessed with such places most of my life, fascinated with walls and crypts, the gruesome pickings to be found in tombs and graves and burial chambers—the artifacts of ultimate captivity.
But what really got to me: I couldn’t help thinking along the lines, how as a toddler led along the paths of Elysium by my grandmother, staring up where the tall white pines straddled the blue sky. . . . He was here, where I am now . . . waiting and wasting and wondering.
As if I were fated to follow his footsteps. Crazy?
I think not. Some inbred instincts have an infernal logic all their own.
How to reconcile the glorious freedom of life and the mind-forged manacles of dark captivity in the same world? A question my father asked himself in his prison diary, a question Vlada’s father wrote about in his short stories of his youth in a concentration camp, and Vlada in his Pankrác Prison novel, as Max failed to do in his unfinished novel about the destruction of his mother’s Viennese family in Mauthausen. All services we tender to the memories of the dead as much as to the living: as the dead live through us, as we through them.
For who can fail to be moved by Achilles’ sigh of parting gratitude from the dark captivity of Hades as Odysseus tells him of his son’s triumphs . . . that something of his glorious flesh and blood still walked earth’s sunny uplands. Or how, in turn, Odysseus gained the strength to see his own life through, sustained by the knowledge that his own son, Telemachus, and his ever-faithful wife, Penelope, had never forsaken him.
I only hope my father glimpsed such a vision with his last labored breath.
In the summer of 1943, in the lush orchard-covered hills of western Maryland, our OSS trainers liked to put us through our paces with old school gusto and hazing. They were often British or Commonwealth ex-military, with experience gained in the far-flung corners of the empire. They had few scruples, few illusions. I remember one in particular, a British ex-police chief out of Hong Kong, who taught hand-to-hand combat, a kind of jujitsu street fighting, lethal stuff. This chap looked like a gentle professor but was fully capable of killing you in seconds with his bare hands. As a Princeton colleague put it to me after our first week of training and his third bourbon, “this is not just starting from scratch. We have to reinvent ourselves; we have to become very different people, nasty sons of bitches, as nasty, if not nastier, than our enemies. We’re learning to sell our souls cheap.” That was a terrifying thought to me. In it I heard echoes of Thucydides as he described the slow embitterment and hardening of the Athenians as expectations of a short war and easy victory over Sparta turned into a devastating drawn-out slog. I thought of the historian’s lament that war teaches only reliance on blind violence, how party ties replace those of kin and country, when the wicked are perceived to be clever and the good foolish, when the sensible is seen as weakness, when the circumspect are derided as do-nothings.
I feared in that moment, with still fresh memories of the Nazi occupation of Greece, that we had entered another dark age and could only hope it would not last as long as the Peloponnesian War—God forbid the four hundred years of darkness that descended with the fall of Mycenae and Pylos. Ten years later, my worst fears seem confirmed.
If such is the case, I am well quit of it.
—excerpt from John Alden’s Pankrác Prison diary