It’s only natural that you refuse to be pitied because of tkis alleged law [that everything has to be paid for].
As for me, I believe in your law, but I do not believe that it governs your life so cruelly, exclusively and definitively; true, it’s an experience you’ve had along the way, but the way is endless….
—KAFKA, BRIEFE AN MILENA
In the summer of 1926, the younger members of Manes, the Creative Artists’ Association, went on an excursion to Zbraslav. Milena was invited. The rallying point was the new Manes building, a cultural center with exhibition rooms, a restaurant, and a café with a large terrace overlooking the river.
That summer day the party embarked on the Primator Dittrich, an asthmatic little excursion steamer. Slowly the city disappeared from sight until nothing could be seen of it but the huge silhouette of the Hradcany and on the opposite bank the green, bushy Petfin Hill. The air was balmy, the water as smooth as glass. On one side, the legendary Vysehrad, with its memories of Princess Libusa, glided past on its rocky hill. Then the banks leveled out, and the new housing developments of the expanding city alternated with ugly industrial sites. Soon both banks became more countrified. The little hilltop church of Zlichov hove into sight and a cleft in the chain of hills opened up a view deep into the back country.
The steamer chugged past the old inn at Chuchle, a popular excursion site. Milena gives a loving description of one such garden restaurant in the days before the First World War. “There are bushy chestnut trees in the garden; Japanese lanterns rock in the wind, the band of some infantry regiment is playing and the thud of bowling balls is heard in the distance…. Workmen are sitting at wooden tables with their wives and daughters. Young salesmen arrive in patent-leather shoes and heavily padded shoulders to dance on the covered wooden floor in the garden. It’s almost unbelievable how well they dance, with what concentration and devotion; they hold their fingers stiffly at the proper distance from their partner’s waist, so as not to soil her dress with their sweaty hands. Mark after mark is made on the beer mats under the glasses, until the sun sets behind the chestnut trees, the lanterns are lighted and the stars appear over the treetops….”*
The river grew wider, and rich meadows spread out on both sides as far as the mouth of the Berounka, a tributary of the Vltava, bordered by willows and alders and twining its way through a chain of wooded hills.
The excursionists make merry and dance to the music of a raucous gramophone. At length the great baroque facade of Zbraslav castle comes into view. The steamer pulls up at the dock, where the excursionists are welcomed by Dr. Vaniura, the local doctor, who was executed by the National Socialists some years later. Instead of visiting the castle and the town, the excursionists take the primitive ferry to the hospitable Závist tavern with its lovely garden shaded by linden trees. Here most of the party settle down to beer and sandwiches. But a small group, Milena among them, goes exploring. A path leads upward through dense foliage to a large, shady park. Peering through the low branches of a big copper beech, the explorers discover the long, graceful, beautifully proportioned pink facade of the Archbishop’s Palace, an edifice built in the seventeenth century. From there they look down on a broad panorama of rich fields and flourishing villages, lakes and roiling meadows, against a background of blue, wooded hills.
At length they go back and join the others at the tavern. Milena had several good friends among the artists, one of them being Sataša’s friend Hoffmeister, a caricaturist who was then working with Sataša on a little book called Happy Journey. But as Milena had been away for years, she was meeting most of them for the first time; one of these was Karel Teige, the leading theoretician of a group of talented young architects, several of whom were now present. Nearly all were supporters of the Bauhaus in Dessau. The most gifted of them all was Jaromir Krejcar.
Everyone soon noticed that Jaromir had eyes and ears only for Milena. Of course he knew who she was. Everyone in Prague had heard of her, the new star of the Národní Listy. He had read her articles, particularly those on interior decoration. He knew they had similar tastes. They both favored a return to simplicity, and this was the first link between them. The years she had spent abroad gave Milena an aura of mystery. She talked about Vienna and Dresden. Jaromir listened, captivated by her beauty and intelligence. Afternoon turned to evening. The party took the last boat down the river. Songs were sung in the cool, starry night. After the Zlichov church the first lights of Prague appeared. On landing, the whole party went to the usual cafe of the Manes group, near the somber Mill Tower, which protrudes into the Vltava like the prow of a ship. There was a chill in the air, and most of the excursionists ordered grog. But Milena had no need of a drink, she was drunk with happiness. She had fallen in love with Jaromir.
It was late when the party broke up. Jaromir took Milena home. Milena was afraid of a new love affair. But mightn’t she for once do what everyone else did, toy with him, grant him “just this one night”? That proved impossible. Love crashed over them like a great wave. She married Jaromir in 1927 and the best years of her life followed. In his company, a new world opened up to Milena. Almost all the outstanding architects of the day frequented her house as well as leading figures of the modern movements in art and literature. Milena loved Jaromir’s work. She was filled with enthusiastic interest in the revolutionary ideas of modern architecture.
Jaromir Krejcar, the son of a forester from Hundsheim in Lower Austria, had learned his profession from the bottom up. On completing his training as a mason, he attended secondary school in Prague, then building trades school, and finally the school of architecture at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied the work of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Oud, Loos, Peret, Hannes Meyer, and many others. In 1922 he edited Zivot (Life), the first journal of modern architecture to appear in Czechoslovakia. He took a special interest in Le Corbusier, whose greatness he can be said to have recognized sooner than his French compatriots. In 1923 Krejcar executed his first major project, the Olympia building, an eight-story reinforced-concrete structure. It was the first building of its kind in Prague and served as a model for many others. The Czech pavilion which he designed for the Paris Exhibition in 1937 and the Trencin-Teplitz sanatorium in Slovakia earned him a worldwide reputation.
Jaromir’s feeling for nature was different from Milena’s. “When we walked in the woods together,” she told me in Ravensbrück, “Jaromir became a different man, he was really a forester’s son. We avoided the beaten paths and walked across country, he in the lead; he had the supple, easy movements of a beautiful animal. The woods were his element….”
It was during her time with Krejcar that Milena attained the peak of her productivity. In addition to her routine journalistic activity, she published three books between 1926 and 1928. In addition, she and her friend Sataša edited the newly founded illustrated magazine Pestry Tyden, which they transformed into an avant-garde organ. Appearing in an unusually large format, it published excellent reproductions, ran outstanding articles on contemporary as well as historical topics, and altogether maintained a high standard. Probably too high for the general public. Sales were disappointing, and production costs rose steadily. After littie more than a year, Milena and Sataša were replaced by more businesslike editors.
Milena’s first home with Jaromir was on Spalena Street, in a dull, ugly building, where Jaromir’s widowed mother had a tiny candy shop, out of whose meager earnings she had financed her son’s studies. Milena and Jaromir transformed an unattractive apartment into a charming home. It was simple in the Bauhaus manner, but despite indispensable modern conveniences, free from ultramodern coldness. When the alterations were complete, they invited their friends to a housewarming. One of the guests knelt at Milena’s feet and declaimed, “Many thanks, Milena, for not transforming this apartment into a model of hygiene and antisepsis….”
In Milena’s memory her first years with Jaromir were a time of walking on air. Her marriage may have given her the only pure happiness she was ever to know, the happiness that comes of harmonious love.
She was expecting a child. To her that was the fulfillment of her love and life. But early in her pregnancy she felt ill and consulted a well-known physician, a colleague of her father’s. He listened sympathetically but did not think it necessary to examine her; he merely said in a fatherly, reassuring tone, “But my dear young lady, you mustn’t be such a sissy. It will pass….” Milena felt ashamed. Her condition did not improve, she was in constant pain, but she refused to see another doctor. In the eighth month of her pregnancy, Krejcar took her to a resort in the mountains, in the hope that she would recover in the bracing mountain air. To prove to Jaromir and herself that she was strong and not a sissy, she bathed in an icy mountain lake. Soon afterward she was taken with chills, fevers, and a kind of paralysis. She was brought back to Prague in an ambulance. The diagnosis was septicemia. The pain was excruciating. Krejcar notified her father, who came at once. His fears revived all the paternal love he had so long repressed. He never left her bedside, and to deaden her terrible pain he kept her constantly under morphine. A little girl was born, but Milena was too weak to take pleasure in the event. The doctors called in by her father gave her up for lost.
Milena expected to die and told her father so. After saying that Krejcar was hopelessly irresponsible and couldn’t possibly take care of a child, Jan Jesensky asked Milena to have the baby given to him, Dr. Jesensky, the grandfather, to bring up. Milena replied without hesitation: “Rather than give you this child, dear Father, to make it as unhappy as you succeeded in making me, I’d have it thrown in the Vltava.”
She did not die. She slowly recovered, but her left knee, affected by multiple metastases, gradually lost all flexibility. For fear of blood clots, the doctors hesutated to manipulate her leg. Her father, however, realizing that if more time was lost, Milena would be crippled for life, called in some specialists and suggested that they try to bend the leg under anesthetic. The experiment was successful. Jan Jesensky was so moved that he burst into tears and threw his arms around one of the doctors. When Milena awoke from the anesthetic, she couldn’t believe her eyes.
After more than a year of convalescence, Milena came home from the sanatorium with little Honza, her child. As long as she was lying in bed, she had hoped for complete recovery and had not fully realized how hard a blow fate had dealt her. Only when she began hobbling around on crutches and trying to resume a normal life, did she herself and others as well see how tragically she had changed. She had become addicted to morphine. Throughout her illness she had been treated with morphine, and now she could not do without it. She was a cripple. Before her illness, everyone had been charmed by her graceful walk; now one knee was stiff and deformed, and her walk was an ungainly limp. She had been slender and well proportioned, with fine features; now her face was bloated and shapeless.
Ten years later in Ravensbruck she looked back on those unhappy days. “What do healthy people know about the tortures that cripples go through! I couldn’t have imagined—not even in my dreams—that I’d ever have a stiff leg.” She felt that her illness and its consequences were punishment for the serene happiness of her years with Jaromir. “We have to pay for everything.”
As we were passing the Gypsy barracks, we could hear their singing. I stopped, I wanted to listen to their sentimental songs, but Milena dragged me away. “I hate Gypsy music,” she cried out. “I can’t bear it. It always reminds me of the worst thing that ever happened to me. Jaromir and I had heard about the miraculous waters at Piestany. We consulted a doctor and he thought mud baths might help my knee. So we went to PieStany, and that’s where the torture really began. After every bath they tried to bend my knee with some sort of orthopedic device. The pain was indescribable. Not only during the treatment but afterward, without interruption, day and night. To bear it, I needed more and more morphine. Jaromir, who had to buy it for me, was in despair. I began to despise myself. Where was my character? What had become of me? One day, I said to Jaromir, ‘From now on I’m taking no more morphine. Don’t give me any more. You must help me break the habit.’
“Neither he nor I had any suspicion of what happens when an addict is suddenly deprived of his drug. It wasn’t just the horrible waves of pain. No, everything went wrong with my mind as well as my body. I’d lie writhing in my bed, and every night until late a Gypsy band would be playing in the bar downstairs. I thought I’d go mad. Those fiendish tunes made it a thousand times worse. One night I woke up in a daze. I looked for Jaromir. He wasn’t there, but beside the lamp on the bedside table I saw a revolver. So that’s what it had come to. Jaromir couldn’t take any more, he couldn’t stand me anymore, he was giving me a hint…, I lay there sobbing, and the Gypsy fiddles sobbed down below….” Milena was silent for a while. Then a little more calmly, she said, “It’s come to me lately that the revolver may have been a hallucination, maybe it wasn’t there at all. But one way or the other, that was the end of my love for Jaromir.”
* Milena Jesenská, “People in Movement.”