KAFKA WAS
BORN IN A building on the square of Prague's Old Town on July 3, I883.
He moved
several times, but never far from the city of his birth. His Hebrew
teacher
recalled him saying, "Here was my secondary school, over there in that
building facing us was the university, and a little further to the
left, my
office. My whole life-" and he drew a few small circles with his finger
"-is confined to this small circle."
The building
where Kafka was born was destroyed by a great fire in I889. When it was
rebuilt
in 1902, only a part of it was preserved. In 1995, a bust of Kafka was
set into
the building's outer wall. A portent of the Prague Spring, Kafka was
finally
recognized by the Czech communist authorities, hailed as a
"revolutionary
critic of capitalist alienation."
In a letter
to a friend, he wrote: "There is within everyone a devil which gnaws
the
nights to destruction, and that is neither good nor bad, rather, it is
life: if
you did not have it, you could not live. So what you curse in yourself
is your
life. This devil is the material (and a fundamentally wonderful one)
which you
have been given and which you must now make use of. . . . On the
Charles Bridge
in Prague, there is a relief under the statue of a saint, which tells
your story.
The saint is sloughing a field there and has harnessed a devil to the
plough.
Of course, the devil is still furious (hence the transitional stage; as
long as
the devil is not satisfied the victory is not complete), he bares his
teeth,
looks back at his master with a crooked, nasty expression and
convulsively
retracts his tail; nevertheless, he is submitted to the yoke. . . ."
Kafka ra
đời
tại một building ở quảng trường Cổ Thành Prague, ngày 3 Tháng Bẩy,
1883. Ông di
chuyển vài lần, nhưng không bao giờ ra khỏi thành phố. Ông thầy dạy
tiếng Hebrew
còn nhớ là vị học trò của mình có lần nói, “Đây là ngôi trường trung
học của tôi,
ở chỗ kia kìa, trong cái toà building đối diện chúng ta, là đại học, xa
tí nữa,
về phía trái, là văn phòng của tôi. Trọn đời tôi” – ông học trò khua
vòng vòng ngón tay – “thì đóng khung ở trong cái vòng tròn nho nhỏ này”.
Tòa nhà nơi
Kafka ra đời, bị một trận cháy lớn tiêu hủy vào năm 1889. Khi xây cất
lại vào năm
1902, chỉ 1 phần được giữ lại. Vào năm 1995, một bức tượng nửa người
của ông được
dựng lên trong toà nhà, tường phía ngoài. Một điềm triệu của Mùa Xuân
Prague, Kafka
sau cùng được nhà cầm quyền CS Czech công nhận, như là một “nhà phê
bình cách mạng
về sự tha hóa của chế độ tư bản”.
Trong 1 lá
thư cho bạn, Kafka viết, luần quần trong bất cứ 1 ai, là một con quỉ,
nó gậm đêm,
đến tang thương, đến hủy hoại, và điều này, đếch VC, và cũng đếch Ngụy,
hay đúng
hơn, đời Mít là như thế:
Nếu bạn đếch phải như thế, thì bạn đếch phải là Mít!
Bạn không thể sống,
đúng hơn.
Còn quỉ này
là… hàng – như trong cái ý, Nam Kít nhận họ, Bắc Kít nhận hàng – và bởi
thế,
hàng này mới thật là tuyệt vời, "ơi Thi ơi Thi ơi", một em Bắc Kít
chẳng đã từng
nghe, đến vãi lệ, 1 giọng Nam Kít, phát ra từ cặp loa Akai, tặng
phẩm-chiến lợi phẩm
của cuộc ăn cướp - Bạn ăn cướp và bây giờ bạn phải sử dụng nó, làm cho
nó trở
thành có ích… Trên cây cầu Charles Bridge ở Prague, có một cái bệ,
bên dưới 1 bức tượng thánh,
nó kể câu chuyện của bạn. Vị thánh trầm mình xuống một cánh bùn, kéo
theo với ông
một con quỉ. Lẽ dĩ nhiên, con quỉ đếch hài lòng, và tỏ ra hết sức giận
dữ
(và đây
là ý nghĩa của ẩn dụ, một khi mà con quỉ cuộc chiến Mít chưa hài lòng,
dù có dâng
hết biển đảo cho nó, thì chiến thắng đỉnh cao vưỡn chưa hoàn tất), nó
nhe răng, tính
ngoạm lại sư phụ của nó 1 phát!
*
Bắc Đảo
dùng
từ như thể ông ta vật lộn đời mình với chúng [Ông] kiếm ra đường, để
nói với tất
cả chúng ta.
NYRB
Thiên tài Bắc
Đảo và cơn hăm dọa của ông ta, là ở trong cái sự liền lạc, không mối
nối, không
sứt mẻ, nhưng thật là hài hòa, khi thực hiện cuộc hôn nhân giữa ẩn dụ
và chính
trị: ông là 1 chiến sĩ, 1 tên du kích, đúng hơn, trong 1 cuộc chiến đấu
ở mức
ngôn ngữ.
Chicago
Tribune
Kafka’s
Prague
Bei Dao
I
MICHAEL TOLD
ME ON THE PHONE, "Don't worry, somebody will be there to pick you up.
He's
really tall, like a basketball player. . . ." Sure enough, as soon as I
came out of customs I saw him holding a sign up in the air, his head
bobbing
above the crowd. He was very tall and skinny; his smiling face looked
tired,
but warm. His name was Stanislav, a musician who was also the chauffer
for the
Prague Writers' Festival. His English was not very good and he asked me
if I
spoke German. I said I didn't. He said that he was going to Germany at
the end
of the month to perform. I asked what instrument he played. He said
something
in German, and pantomimed with his hands. Piano? No. Pipe organ? He
nodded
emphatically. I asked him where he usually performed. He said usually
for sick
people. In a hospital? No. In a convalescent home? He nodded his head
emphatically again. As long as it isn't a funeral home, I thought to
myself. I
abandoned my curiosity about two of the greatest details of his life,
and
looked out the window at the scenery.
I was in Berlin in the summer of 1989.
Michael and his wife set out from Oslo, picked me up, and we drove
through East
Germany into Czechoslovakia. After crossing the border, we had lunch at
the
first city we entered. The waitress couldn't speak English, so with
gestures
and a few words of Russian, we ordered colas and Hungarian beef soup.
We were
happy when the bill came as the meal was virtually free. This was the
first
time I experienced the Western tourist's sense of superiority.
When we crossed the bridge
across the Vltava River and
entered downtown Prague, it was already dark. We parked the car on a
bustling
street and Michael gave me the telephone number of a sinologist named
Olga.
When I called, Olga's husband said that she was vacationing with their
children
in the country, but he welcomed us to stay at their house anyway. He
was an
architect and knew Prague like the back of his hand. We went out that
night to
have some drinks and wander around. He took us to Kafka's home beside
the
square of the Old Town, and pointed out that beneath our feet flowed a
huge
vein of ore. Prague's beauty is unique, especially at night. The
ancient
streetlamps lead wanderers into darkness until all sense of direction
is lost.
Under the light of the lamps, shadows turn and echoes rise and fall. I
suddenly
realized that Kafka's fiction is like this reality, a reality that can
be touched.
It was the eve of the
Velvet Revolution. I was introduced to
Martin, who was Olga's colleague at the university and an editor of the
underground literary journal, Kritická
Príloha (Revolver Revue). At the time, he was busy secretly
circulating a
petition in support of the nephew of the former king, restoring the
monarchy.
He wanted us to sign it, but I'm not a fan of monarchies, so I refused.
Four years later, the Revolver
Revue invited the European editor of Today and Professor Leo Ou-fan
Lee
from Harvard to hold a symposium in Prague. After eight or nine years,
one of
these underground publications enjoyed a well-earned reputation, while
the
other was totally discredited. On the eve of our departure, our hosts
organized
a poetry reading for us in a medieval cellar. Afterward, an angel
appeared.
Martin introduced us: "This is the editor-in-chief of the Revolver
Revue." She gracefully sat
down at our table, causing a disturbance in the Chinese literary world.
Leo
Ou-fan Lee, his forehead shining, lavished high praise on Czech
dramatists;
Zhang Ji, clutching a cigarette, violently attacked the incursions of
American
cultural hegemony; and I am certain that whatever I said was utterly
incoherent.
The third time I visited
Prague was in the spring of 1995. I
was living in Paris at the time, and in response to Michael's
insistence, I
took part in the Prague Writers' Festival at my own expense. Michael is
from
New York, but he moved to London in search of his spiritual home, got
married,
had children, and was trapped there for more than twenty years. There
was no
room for him in the conservative world of English poetry. He was like a
Kafka
in London. In I99I, he organized the first Prague Writers' Festival. At
the
time, Michael was the lackey of an English company that hosted the
annual
Prague International Book Fair, with the Writers' Festival incidentally
tacked
on to it. It seemed just about everyone was Michael's boss, arrogantly
ordering
him around, making him spin like a top.
Michael always took me to
discos to show me Prague's younger
generation, hoping we would also breathe in some of that same youthful
spirit.
But the music rattled my insides so much that I had trouble holding my
drink.
Michael was going through a divorce and suffering at the hands of the
English
merchants. Under the flashing lights, his face was mournful. I called
him
"my successful friend," which succeeded in cheering him up a little.
In a thick English accent, he laughed, "Me, mother-fucking successful?
Successful my arse!"
2
KAFKA WAS
BORN IN A building on the square of Prague's Old Town on July 3, I883.
He moved
several times, but never far from the city of his birth. His Hebrew
teacher
recalled him saying, "Here was my secondary school, over there in that
building facing us was the university, and a little further to the
left, my
office. My whole life-" and he drew a few small circles with his finger
"-is confined to this small circle."
The building where Kafka
was born was destroyed by a great
fire in I889. When it was rebuilt in 1902, only a part of it was
preserved. In
1995, a bust of Kafka was set into the building's outer wall. A portent
of the
Prague Spring, Kafka was finally recognized by the Czech communist
authorities,
hailed as a "revolutionary critic of capitalist alienation."
During the first year of
Kafka's life, his father, Hermann
Kafka, opened a small general store on the north side of the old town
square,
first dealing in retail and later in wholesale. Kafka wrote in an un
mailed
letter to his father, "But since you gradually began to terrify me on
all
sides, and the shop and you became inseparable for me, the shop was no
longer a
pleasant place for me to be. Things which had at first been a matter of
course
for me began to torment and shame me, especially your treatment of the
staff .
. . You I heard and saw screaming, cursing and raging in the shop, in a
manner
that, in my opinion at the time, had no equal anywhere in the world."
In another letter to his
father, he wrote, "You could,
for instance, rail at the Czechs, then at the Germans, then at the
Jews, and
not only selectively but in every respect, and finally no one was left
but you.
For me, you took on that enigmatic something that all tyrants have
whose law is
founded in their person, not their reasoning."
Between 1889 and 1893,
when the family moved to a building
called "At the Minute," Kafka's three sisters were born. These
sisters eventually perished in Nazi concentration camps. Kafka went to
a German
elementary school. Many years later, in a letter to a friend, he
described the
following incident from his childhood: "Once, as a small boy, I
received a
sixpence and wanted very much to give it to an old beggar woman who was
sitting
between Old Town Square and Small Square. Now, this seemed to me an
outrageous
sum, a sum which most likely had never been given a beggar before, and
I felt
embarrassed in front of the woman to be doing something so outrageous,
so I
changed the sixpence and gave the woman a penny, walked around the
entire
complex of the Town Hall and the arcade along the Small Square,
reappeared from
the left as a completely new do-gooder, gave the woman another penny,
started
again to walk and happily did this ten times (or perhaps a little less,
for I
believe the woman later lost patience and left). In any case, in the
end I was
so exhausted, morally too, that I went home right away and cried until
my
mother replaced the sixpence."
In another letter to the
same friend, Kafka relates the details
of how he walked to school every morning: "Our cook, a small, dry,
skinny,
sharp-nosed, hollow-cheeked, yellowish yet firm, energetic, and
superior woman,
led me to school each morning .... Upon leaving the house the cook
would say
that she was going to tell the teacher how bad I'd been at home. . . .
School
itself was already a horror, and now the cook wanted to make it even
more
difficult for me. I would begin to plead, she would shake her head; the
more I
pleaded, the more I felt what I was pleading for to be of value, the
greater
the danger; I would stand still and beg for forgiveness, she dragged me
along;
I would threaten her with retaliation through my parents, she laughed,
here she
was almighty; I held on to the doorframes of the shops, on to the
corner-
stones, I didn't want to go on until she had forgiven me, I tore her
back by
her skirt (she didn't have it easy either), but she dragged me further,
assuring me that even this she was going to report to the teacher; it
would get
late, the clock of the Church of St. James struck 8:00, you could hear
the
school bells, other children began to run, I was always most afraid of
being
late, by now we would have to run as well and always the thought,
'She's going
to tell, she's not going to tell'; as it happened, she did not tell,
ever, but
she always had the opportunity, and a seemingly increasing one
(yesterday I did
not tell, but today I will for sure), and from that she never desisted.
And
sometimes-think of it, Milena-she would stamp her feet in anger at me
in the
lane and a coal merchant was sometimes around and would watch us.
Milena, what
foolishness, and how I belong to you with all the cooks and threats and
all
that enormous amount of dust that thirty-eight years has whirled up and
which
has settled in my lungs."
3
THE GUEST
HOUSE OF A certain ministry is near the Old Town Square, and when I
came to
Prague in 1995, this was where I stayed. The rooms were tolerably
clean, the
furniture old and solid, and the longest long-distance call you could
make was
to the desk downstairs; it recalled the socialist years before the
Velvet
Revolution. The old doorkeeper was clearly a relic of that era,
sleepy-eyed and
wearing the smiling face of a transitional period.
I hurriedly washed up and
went downstairs to the lobby where
Stanislav was waiting for me. Once again, we had a difficult time
making
ourselves understood. He gestured, where do you want to go, and I
nodded and
said, yes, yes. While walking through the Old Town Square, he stopped
and, with
his face full of awe, whispered, "There is Josef Skvorecky." All I
knew about him was that he was a Czech novelist who lived in Canada and
with
whom I was supposed to read on Thursday evening. I was led to City Hall
and I
showed my invitation. When I went inside, I was stunned to see everyone
else
dressed in formal attire-the men in suits and leather shoes, the women
all
made-up and in long dresses. I was the only unkempt and ragged one
there in my
leather jacket, blue jeans, and tennis shoes, with a big book bag still
slung
over my shoulder. I looked like a refugee. But there was no place to
run, no
place to hide, nothing but to brace myself and head up to the third
floor
auditorium. City Hall is one of the historic sights of Prague, dating
back to
the thirteenth century. How many changes of rule has it witnessed over
the past
seven hundred years? How many lives and deaths?
His honor the mayor spoke
first in fluent English. He kidded
Michael about his short stature. Michael joked back, throwing in a
reference to
his recent collection of poems, Disappearance.
Disappearance. What a good topic in this age of exhibition where not
many
people understand all its implications. At Michael's side was his
girlfriend,
Vlasta, the vice-chair of the Writers' Festival, a warm and outgoing
woman in
her forties. Michael mentioned the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert. The
evening's
reading was in his memory. Michael raised his face and closed his eyes
as he
spoke, as though nostalgic for lost poems and the dead.
I enjoyed strolling the
streets of Prague. Going back and
forth between the reception center and the theater, I had to pass
through the
Old Town Square. It was the night before Easter and tourists surrounded
the
open-air stages; vendors were selling colored eggs, traditional wooden
toys,
and crystal at their stalls. I went into a clothing store and
transformed
myself into a real pillar of society for the nightly receptions at the
various
embassies so that I would not become a public disgrace again. Compared
to five
years earlier, Prague had changed quite a bit. It was becoming more
commercialized,
and there were advertisements everywhere for the name brand products of
multinational corporations. One could also see that the Czech people
maintained
a certain self-confidence that kept them from being totally consumed by
the
battering waves of commercialism, The streets were full of dazzling
Czech
girls. They have an unworldly beauty that you don't usually see in the
U.S. or
Western Europe, a kind of earthy beauty often extinguished by
modernization.
It surprised me to find so
many young Americans living in
Prague, enough for them to have their own newspaper. Michael explained,
"The cost of living is so low here they can escape the pressures of
American life. And Prague is like Paris in the '30s, so some come here
for
artistic inspiration." Shaking his head, he added, "But why haven't I
seen anyone get anywhere with it?"
Michael took me to see his
new house. As we left the tourist
district, there were fewer people on the streets. Michael was carrying
a pile
of books in his arms and, as if in a dream, said as he walked, "Look,
the
only one in this world who loves me is Vlasta... I've found no one else
in
Prague who I can get into a deep conversation with. Everything is
superficial,
shiny, feigned happiness .... Most Czech writers are nationalists and
they
don't like it that a foreigner is running the Writers' Festival. No
matter
where I go, I am a foreigner. And the English are worse, snobbish
conservatives
convinced of their own correctness. New York used to be my home, but my
home
doesn't exist any more. . . ."
Every morning there was a
press conference for the Writers'
Festival at the Globe Bookstore. Most of the books sold there were in
English,
and there was a coffee shop inside. Several computers lined the wall,
available
for customers to check their e-mail. There were no chairs, so customers
had to
perch like birds, unable to settle in and refuse to leave. I headed
over to a
computer thinking I might catch up a little on this new age, but I
didn't know
how to use it. I asked the young fellow sitting next to me and he
deftly used
the cursor to lead me into the labyrinth. But as soon as he left me
alone, the
screen froze and I instantly broke into a cold sweat.
A man draped in cameras
greeted me. He introduced himself as
Rossano, the designated photographer for the Writers' Festival. His
head was
covered with ruffled hair, and his eyes were as shiny as his camera
lenses. I
followed him into the street. Rossano had a unique way of taking
pictures,
either making me stand on a stone block in front of a church like a
martyr, or
enclosing me in a telephone kiosk like a prisoner. He came from
Florence, and
was a typical Italian-warm and hearty. "Why do you live in Prague?" I
asked him. "Simple. 1 married a girl from Prague and we just had a
child," he sighed.
The press conference was
about to end. The coffee shop was
filled with people. Susan Sontag sat at the rostrum, handling the
various
maneuvers of the reporters' questions that ranged from the war in
Kosovo to
globalization. She had just gotten off the airplane, but there seemed
to be no
sign of fatigue at all, her words were sharp-edged, and she had the
courage of
her convictions. I waited until Michael announced that the press
conference was
over and walked over to greet Susan. She brushed away a lock of white
hair that
had slipped down onto her forehead. We agreed to meet for dinner to
talk-no
reporters, no interviews, no cameras.
4
Prague isn't willing to
leave nor
will it let us leave. This girl has claws and people must line up or we
will
have to light a fire at Vysehrad and the Old Town Square before we can
possibly
depart.
-Excerpt
from a letter from Kafka to Oskar Pollak
CHARLES
UNIVERSITY WAS ESTABLISHED in 1348-the oldest university in Central
Europe. In
1882 it was divided into a German university and a Czech university.
Kafka
enrolled in the German university in 1901, his academic performance
mediocre.
For him, studying law was simply a matter of expedience since Jews
could only
pursue professional degrees such as medicine and law.
In a letter to a friend,
he described his first sexual
experience: "We were living in Zeltnergasse at that time. Opposite was
a
clothes shop, a shop girl was always standing in the doorway, I was
little over
the age of twenty, ceaselessly pacing back and forth in my room,
preoccupied
with the nerve-racking rote-learning of what I considered to be
senseless
things for the first state exam. It was summer, very hot at this time I
guess,
it was absolutely unbearable, at the window I remained, the disgusting
Roman
Law History between my teeth, always standing. Finally, we communicated
through
signs. I was to fetch her at eight o'clock in the evening, but when I
went
down, another was already there, well, that did not change a lot, I was
afraid
of the entire world, and also of this man; had he not been there, I
would still
have been afraid of him. But though the girl slipped her arm through
his, she
gave me a sign that I should follow them. Thus we came to
Schutzeninsel, drank
beer there, I at the neighboring table, then we slowly walked, with me
behind,
to the girl's flat, somewhere around the Fleischmarkt. There the man
took his
leave, the girl disappeared into the house, I waited for a bit until
she came
out again, and then we went to a hotel on the Kleinseite. All that was
charming, exciting, and disgusting, even before the hotel, and in the
hotel it
was no different.
And when, towards morning,
it was still hot and beautiful, we
went back home over the Charles Bridge, I was, of course, happy, but
this
happiness meant only that my eternally moaning body had finally found
relief,
but most of all, this happiness consisted of the fact that the whole
thing had
not been even more disgusting, even dirtier."
In the winter of I904, the
twenty-one-year-old Kafka began to
write the first draft of Description of a
Struggle. In a letter to a friend
from that time, he wrote, "A book must be the ax for the frozen sea
within
us. I believe that." In this book, I -the narrator- describes his night
ramblings with a classmate through a cold and bleak Prague. But his
other books
are not like this one, where Prague plays such a central role. The
famous
landmarks Kafka touches on in the course of these midnight rambles are
still
there with the exception of a few that were destroyed in the Second
World War.
The Charles Bridge is the oldest and most famous bridge in Prague,
crossing the
Vltava River, linking the Old Town with the opposite bank. This
bridge's
predecessor was destroyed by floodwaters and ice floes. In 1357,
Charles IV instructed
his architects to build the Charles Bridge. Except for two arches
damaged in a
flood in 1890, it has miraculously survived wars and disasters down to
the
present day.
In the diary entry for
June 19, 1919, Kafka wrote, "With
Ottla. She is fetched by her English teacher. Over the quay, stone
bridge,
small piece of Mala Strana, new bridge, home. Exciting statues of
saints on
Charles Bridge. The odd evening light of summertime when the bridge is
deserted
at night."
In a letter to a friend,
he wrote: "There is within
everyone a devil which gnaws the nights to destruction, and that is
neither
good nor bad, rather, it is life: if you did not have it, you could not
live.
So what you curse in yourself is your life. This devil is the material
(and a
fundamentally wonderful one) which you have been given and which you
must now
make use of. . . . On the Charles Bridge in Prague, there is a relief
under the
statue of a saint, which tells your story. The saint is sloughing a
field there
and has harnessed a devil to the plough. Of course, the devil is still
furious
(hence the transitional stage; as long as the devil is not satisfied
the
victory is not complete), he bares his teeth, looks back at his master
with a
crooked, nasty expression and convulsively retracts his tail;
nevertheless, he
is submitted to the yoke. . . ."
5
I WAS
STANDING IN FRONT of the French windows of the Mlynec restaurant,
gazing out at
the glowing Charles Bridge. The coffee shop was too extravagant, too
nouveau
riche. I was reading an English edition of Franz Kafka and Prague by
Harald
Salfellner. The back cover of the book cites the words of Kafka's
friend
Johannes Urzidil: "Kafka was Prague, and Prague was Kafka. It was never
so
wholly and typically Prague, and would never again be as it was in
Kafka's
lifetime. And we, his friends, 'the happy few,' ... we knew that this
Prague is
contained in the smallest quanta everywhere in his works."
The Prague Writers'
Festival went smoothly. Writers ascended
to and descended from the podium one after another, the applause from
the
audience rose and fell, the theater filled and emptied. If Kafka had
been
alive, he would certainly have found the Writers' Festival absurd, and
perhaps
he would have written a story about it. Today's entire activity is
called
"Prague" and all the writers are Czech-except for me. In the evening,
Josef Skvorecky and I will share the stage for a reading. How did I get
placed
in the ranks of the Czech writers? It was Michael's idea. He said he
had
originally planned to have me read with Vaclav Havel, and to do this he
went
right over to the presidential residence; but Havel's advisor sent him
away
with the excuse that he did not understand English. The fortress
refused
invitations from another world.
In the afternoon, I was
interviewed on the national
television station. The host of the program told me that in 1968, after
Soviet
troops had occupied Prague, this studio number nine, due to its
isolated
location, still kept up the cry of resistance. It took the Russians two
days to
find it.
There was not an empty
seat in the house that evening. The
audience had come to see Skvorecky, who enjoyed even more fame in the
Czech
Republic than Milan Kundera. In 1968, not long after the Soviet
invasion,
Skvorecky fled to Toronto, began teaching at a university there, and
assisted
his wife in setting up the 68 Publishers, which specialized in banned
books by
Czech authors. A Czech scholar told me that after Skvorecky fled he
still made
a great contribution to the Czech cause, but Kundera has always
disdained his
homeland and identified himself as French.
Skvorecky had caught a bad
cold and was sitting at the rear
podium drinking brandy. He had gotten old, he said to me, and wasn't
fit for
traveling long distances. Then he went to the podium, still drinking
brandy,
and read his story "Bass Saxophone," first in his native language,
then in English. Applause thundered, someone shouted something in a
loud voice,
and the Czech people saluted their hero. It was my turn to read for the
second
half, but first Michael gave a brief introduction. He closed his eyes
as though
thinking about the past.
My "date" the previous
evening with Susan Sontag
had been bruited around, causing quite a stir. Susan was too famous,
cold as an
icebox, and had an aura of mystery. Rossano asked me to try to work out
a photo
op for him; the undersecretary at the Swedish consulate asked me to
pass his
business card to her, to give her his highest regards, and to tell her
that he
had adored her for many years. Entrusted with these important missions,
I
waited at the hotel where she was staying.
At 9:40, Susan finally
returned from her television
interview. "Oh, all the stupid questions, it was torture. Let's go, I'm
starving."
We took a taxi to a
Chinese restaurant. I noticed that the
driver hadn't turned on the meter and was circling the city on his way
to the
restaurant. When we got to our destination, he asked for a fare more
than three
times higher than it should have been. I signaled to Susan to get out
of the
car first, stuffing half the fare that he was asking for into his
hands. He
began cursing me in Czech, but fortunately I didn't understand him.
At the dinner table, I
passed on the Italian's request and
the Swede's admiration. Susan took the business card and sighed.
"Whenever
I accept an invitation, I always forget about the media and their
endless
questions."
When I brought up Havel,
Susan said that many Czechs
criticized him but she always spoke up for him. When she last visited
Prague,
Havel had invited her to a tête-à-tête dinner in a restaurant, but his
bodyguards were seated nearby. She had wanted to ask him his real
feelings
about a number of things. "You know, under those circumstances, I
couldn't
bring myself to ask them."
I replied, "What I don't
understand is, as a writer, how
can he tolerate that kind of life? It isn't much better than being in
jail. For
example, he can't just walk down the street anymore, or talk with
ordinary people."
At midnight, we took a
walk down the street, neon signs
representing the Western world flirted with the Prague night. Susan
suddenly
said, "That's right, nobody wants to bring back the old system, but
could
it be that this emptiness is what they want?" I suggested that we have
another drink. We turned into a bar, ordered two beers, and talked some
more. I spoke about my daughter,
American schools, and the problems of today's youth; Susan spoke about
her son
who was studying history-he was her best friend in the world. Walking
Susan
back to her hotel, the streetlamps of Prague made us lose our way.
Bei Dao, in Midnight's
Gate. Essays. A New Direction
Book, 2005