As long as you keep climbing, there will be steps, they will grow under your climbing feet.
—KAFKA, DER FÜRSPRECHER (THE ADVOCATE)
A few days after Milena was expelled from the party, a young comrade by the name of Kurt Beer, who though still a party member was plagued by doubts, came to see her. She made it clear that she still stood for something that might be called communism but had nothing in common with what went by that name in the Soviet Union and in the party. “The Communists have ruined everything,” she concluded. “Now we shall have to start all over again.”
Though much older than Beer, Milena won his confidence by speaking to him without a trace of condescension, treating him as an equal, and listening to everything he had to say. From then on he became a regular visitor. Once she and her friends were discussing criteria of masculine beauty. Someone asked her if she knew any handsome men. “Zavis Kalandra is handsome,” she said, “especially his eyes, but what would his eyes be without all the wrinkles around them? Every little line in his face is alive. That’s what makes it beautiful.”
Once in the course of a violent political argument, Milena flared up and said something deeply insulting to young Beer. His response was to walk out. He felt sure that this was the end of his friendship with Milena. That same evening she came to see him and apologized. No, “apologize” is not the right word. She had the gift of behaving in such a way that any harm she had done was not forgiven, but completely forgotten. It was not possible to “forgive” Milena. “You have a peculiarity,” Kafka once wrote her, “I think it lies deep in your nature, and others are to blame if it is not always effective … this peculiarity is that you cannot make anyone suffer.”*
In 1937 Ferdinand Peroutka, editor in chief of the liberal-democratic Pntomnost (The Present) and an outstanding journalist and man of letters, asked Milena to contribute to his journal. Both financially and in other respects, this was her salvation. Pntomnost was a political, literary, and scientific monthly, comparable in a way to the American Nation. Peroutka had known Milena for many years and thought highly of her writing ability. He thought her articles would give his rather solemn publication the light touch it needed.
Milena slowly got the feel of her new job. Her first contributions still showed traces of her Vienna fashion correspondence. Indeed, she took the opportunity to pay a belated homage to the city of Vienna, where she had spent so many difficult but also happy years. As long as she was writing for Tribuna or the NárodníListy, it would not have been possible for her to say anything pleasant about the former capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the liberal Pntomnost there was no objection.
Her first articles for Pntomnost were for the most part sociological studies full of compassion and humor, based on her thorough knowledge of Prague society. Every one of these is drawn from life. Once, while strolling through the streets, she caught sight of a sign: FRANTISEK LILIOM, GROCERIES. Memories of Molnar’s play Liliom, of Vienna, the Prater, and the days of her youth poured in on her. She went to the nearest cafe and wrote a sort of farewell to Vienna.
“If you have never been in Vienna when the chestnut trees are in bloom and the whole city is fragrant with lilac, when in the Prater one swingboat booth opens after another; if you have never seen the greenish-gray light that the electric lamps throw on the leaves of the chestnut trees in the evening; if you have never seen the giant aspens on the banks of the Danube, never seen the vast violet-studded meadows with their ash trees and silver poplars that surround the Prater for miles around and on spring nights throw a chaste mantle over loving couples; if you have never strolled through the streets of the Prater of an evening, when gold and silver tinsel hops and sways on the fair booths and swingboats; if you have never heard ten different waltzes resounding at once from ten different barrel organs, and all that under a sky whose stars pale in the presence of so much glitter—well, in that case, you can’t know who Liliom is, even if you’ve read Molnar.
“Liliom is the swingboat man. There’s something utterly unreal about the amusement park at night. Like a stage. And next to every swingboat there’s a man, a magnificent specimen from the Vienna slums, he’s wearing a striped jersey and his cap is pushed over the back of his head. Paris has its apaches, though I don’t know if they’re authentic. The Vienna swingboat man is authentic all right. With a magnificent thrust of his powerful arms he pushes the boat into the sky. In it sit pale city girls, holding each other tight, the kind who only go out with their girlfriends on Sunday…. They look with wonder and adoration at the man who is flinging them into the sky with such magnificent vigor; but then they begin to be scared, they screech, their skirts balloon, and their carefully curled hair escapes from under their hats…. But what does it matter! They are borne high on a wave of unforeseen happiness, which the poor things have paid for with their hard-earned pennies. And the hero, in whose hands the coins disappear, who calls them ‘Miss,’ and says’If you please’. The man with the glorious muscles, with the cigarette behind his ear, with the dirty hands, the flattened nose, and the crude, impudent sex appeal, the man who knows his way around and has no scruples about breaking the hearts of little housemaids and working girls—that man is Liliom.”*
Here the reminiscences of Vienna end, because her article isn’t really about the Viennese Liliom but about FrantiSek Liliom, the good Czech grocer. From that point on the article ceases to be lyrical. The Czech Liliom is a very different sort of man from his Viennese namesake. With deep sympathy and a surprising knowledge of the food industry, Milena goes on to describe the difficult and eminently useful existence of a small grocer in a big city.
In 1937 Milena asked Willi Schlamm, the editor of the Vienna Weltbuh?ie, who had moved to Prague, to contribute to Pfitom-nost. He wrote his articles in German and she translated them into Czech. Not only this collaboration, but also the many tastes they shared—for music, literature, and laughter—soon led to a close friendship. Willi Schlamm was enormously impressed by Milena’s capacity for work. She could squeeze sixty hours into a single day; she wrote, translated, did things for numerous people, kept house, and cooked for anyone who happened to be in the apartment. She never kept an appointment with Schlamm without bringing him some little present. She always had time. Busy as she was, she could sit calmly with Schlamm at the Cafe Bellevue near the Charles Bridge, where Schlamm did his writing, or she would arrange to have dinner with him in some little restaurant. She would always be in a mood for talking and laughing.
By 1937 she had thrown off all trace of her Communist past and freed herself from every sort of wishful thinking. She had the courage to denounce all threats to freedom, whether from the left or the right, whether from the Soviet or the National Socialist dictatorship. This even-handed attitude brought her into conflict with many antifascist intellectuals, who were closing their eyes to the reality of the Soviet Union. Milena had a gift for political prognosis. At the very start of the Second World War she said to friends, “If the Red Army were to liberate us, I’d have to commit suicide.”