Bliss wa s i t in Bohemia
Mi ch a l V i e w egh
BLISS WA S I T IN BOHEMIA Translated from the Czech by David short
ja n ta r p ubli shing 2015
First published in London, Great Britain in 2015 by Jantar Publishing Ltd www.jantarpublishing.com Czech edition first published in Prague in 1992 as Báječná léta pod psa Michal Viewegh Bliss was it in Bohemia All rights reserved Original text © Michal Viewegh Translation copyright © 2015 David Short Jacket & book design by Jack Coling The right of David Short to be identified as translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission. A cip catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. isbn 978-0-9933773-2-7 Printed and bound in the Czech Republic by EUROPR INT a.s. This translation was made possible by a grant from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
Contents
Foreword iii Translator’s note ix Bliss was it in Bohemia 1 Appendix 275
This novel – like most novels, when all’s said and done – is, typically, a patchwork of what is called the truth and what is described as a fiction. Whatever the ratio between these two components might be, it cannot be claimed with certainty – notwithstanding the assertions of numerous readers – that the novel’s characters are actually living persons and that the events narrated really did happen. Nor, of course, can it be claimed – as many authors would have us believe at this point – that “the persons and events portrayed in the story that follows are entirely fictitious”.
II. From Kvido’s diary 20 September 1968 We’re moving to some place called Sázava! Nobody can tell me in plain terms why. All they’ve said is that I missed the start of the school year and would be spending another year in pre-school in Sázava. Bad news all round. On top of that no one knows where Sázava is. We couldn’t find it on a map of Czechoslovakia. Father said he’ll get a bigger one tomorrow. He won’t stop singing Katyusha. Mother’s saying nothing. 21 September 1968 It’s not on the bigger one either. Father said he’d get hold of an even bigger one. Mother just laughed hysterically and suggested he borrow one from the army. If they still have any, she added. I asked 36
Father why I was expected to break at one go all the emotional ties I’ve formed to Prague. Because I didn’t want to wait till they sacked me, he said. He wanted to leave on his own terms. If I was really fond of Bruncvík, he’d arrange for me to go and see him at weekends. It felt as if he was having me on. 22 September 1968 My parents are going to be working at the Sázava glassworks, where they apparently make world-renowned laboratory and kitchen glassware. We’re to live in a large company house with a vast conservatory, and after work we’ll be able to go swimming in the river that flows right beneath our windows, Father said. We’re going to see it tomorrow. Mother looked sceptical and dismissed Father as a sentimental poet. She told me that what I’d seen wasn’t a film being made, but a common-or-garden military occupation. Grandma said it wasn’t an occupation, but a pogrom aimed at tourists. 23 September 1968 We made our first trip to Sázava today. The monastery was sort of okay, but when I saw the surroundings, it was obvious to me that the monks had left voluntarily. Father took me to have a look round the house. I liked the little bits of coloured glass stuck in the plasterwork. Mother had stayed in the car. I told her the house was called DRÁBOVKA. She said it was a pretty name. Then it started to rain. When I went into a shop to buy a lemonade, I was struck by the way they kept chocolates and soap and other stuff all next to each other on the shelves. Father explained that it was 37
a general store and this was a practical solution ahead of its time in many ways, though he did concede that the furniture polish was probably in the freezer cabinet in error. Then it had to start raining in earnest, so we ran to take refuge in the nearest restaurant. We were running for nearly half an hour. Mother screamed that a driver who’s scared of driving in the rain needs to see a psychiatrist. The restaurant was full of hikers. They had soup spoons stuck in their boot-tops, which I thought distinctly unhygienic. Mother and Father had an argument about whether the poster declaiming WE BUY RABBIT SKINS was Modernist or Functionalist. We polished off our hot-dogs and the rain stopped. I wanted to go, but Father insisted we wait until the road was dry. Mother ordered a rum. Then she joined the hikers in a sing-song, but burst into tears at the fourth number. I asked her what was wrong and she said she’d been overcome by the plaintive refrain SO KICK THE BLOODY BARREL AWAY. Back in Prague Father made us hang about in the park for an hour so you couldn’t tell Mother had been crying. Later, she told Grandpa that the Sázava valley is a balmy region full of odd, but amiable people, but that from here on she would be thinking of it as a Czech Siberia. 29 September 1968 We made the move this afternoon. Outside the windows of Drábovka there were crowds of strange people. Mother said the two removal men must be drunk seeing that they were taking her bed into the conservatory. Father said that her rudeness about the men completely missed the point, because the conservatory was indeed to be our temporary home. Mother ensconced herself in a 38
wicker armchair on the path outside the house and stared at the rippling river for the best part of an hour. Then she took me by the hand and informed Father that we were leaving for Prague. Father said that he’d always wanted to marry a girl who’d see him through thick and thin, but what he’d actually got – as he could now see – was a Proud Princess. What did she suppose their friend Zvára was to do, given that he and his fiancée had been living illegally inside an electricity substation for more than two weeks? As dusk descended, Mother told me that living with Father was getting more and more like that game, Canada by Night. 30 September 1968 The conservatory is glazed on three sides. Last night Mother was too embarrassed to change into her pyjamas. She claimed that hundreds of pairs of eyes were watching her through the glass. I felt a bit sorry for her. I crept under the duvet to join her and snuggled up against her coat. Father was reading various books about glass. 1 October 1968 October’s here. I asked Father what he would do when the icy North Wind blew three or four tongues of snow in on us – he said he’d hoover them up. Sometimes I wonder if he’s at all up to supporting Mother and me. Either he’s reading about glass, or he’s whittling fancy walking sticks. An ordinary whistle, of the kind I’ve politely asked him for several times, is obviously beyond his capabilities. The day after tomorrow they’re going to work for the first time, and me to school. Metaphor is the key to reality. I read a book about the writer’s craft and help Mother. When she wants 39
to get changed, I build her a bunker of mattresses. 2 October 1968 Today Father and I went down to the river. He said he needed some sticks to whittle. I asked what had got into him with all this whittling stuff: he said that as a working material it’s got brilliant mental-hygiene properties, something that’s hard to appreciate fully in an Eastern bloc country. In the evening he finally made me a whistle. At long last. 3 October 1968 Apart from Miss Havel and the quark with raspberries, my nursery school reflects the abysmal state of pre-school education in this country, and I told them as much. Miss Konečná, who came in from the baby class to see me, said that I would be an asset to the school. I sit with Jarka Macek. She’s quite a nice girl, if provincial, and full of naïve prejudices against metaphorical expressions concerning obesity. Mother brought home four bagsful of papers from work. I played ‘Love’s Dream’ on my whistle to welcome her, but she just leapt at me and tossed the whistle out of the window. I shouted that I’d jump out after it, but she voiced some doubt that, given my bulk, I could even haul myself onto a chair and thence onto the window ledge. The alienation between Mother and me is growing like a panthercap toadstool after a cloudburst. I’m giving up all sweet things from tomorrow. 4 October 1968 Last night there was a storm. I crept into bed with Mother, but 40
Father wedged himself between us. We watched the sky flashing blue and white. Father said that it was a better show than any feature film at the Alfa cinema. The rain pounded at the roof like a gang of savage roofers. Father kept stroking Mother, which I found distinctly tactless vis-à-vis myself. 5 October 1968 At school today I went without dessert and let Jarka Macek have it. (Yesterday it was an orange.) During our afternoon nap she returned the favour by showing me her privates. 6 October 1968 Jarka wanted to see my privates! I told her she could have my dessert tomorrow. Mother is getting more and more uptight. In the evening, Father suggested they go out somewhere, but fifteen minutes later they were back, having tumbled in the dark into the sewage outlet next to the hostel for Polish workers. They stank like polecats long estranged from soap and water. And I told them as much. 14 November 1968 I’m writing with a lot of noise in the background today, my parents having brought Mr Zvára and his fiancée home. Round my bed they erected a metre-high wall of boxes that still haven’t been unpacked since our move and tried to make out that I now had a room of my own. Then they sang some Soviet war songs and drank vodka from some insulators that Mr Zvára had stolen from their sub-station. 41
15 November 1968 Today I asked Miss Hájek if, as an exception, I could take my afternoon nap in the morning. She said I could, but wanted to know why, so I gave her a brief account of how late into the night I’d been kept awake by a medley of mournful and vigorous Soviet ‘songs’. She appeared to be fairly sympathetic, but I don’t think she really believed me until I showed her my vest, which Father had used, in the dark, to wipe up some alcohol that they’d spilled. She let me sleep on the settee in the head teacher’s office! So I had a lovely kip while my country cousins had to play all those infantile games! 16 November 1968 Father and Mother aren’t speaking to me. I have to go to bed at seven on the dot like some bleary-eyed chicken. At the stroke of seven both my parents start whispering provocatively. Mother might as well not have bothered, because from her life on stage she was used to whispering very loud. And I told her as much. 17 November 1968 18 November 1968 I spent the entire weekend behind my boxes. Nobody’s talking to me still, nor I to them. I’m reading Montaigne’s Essais. A lot of the time I find myself agreeing with him 100%. But when I read that “he who would teach people to die would also be teaching them to live” I was beset by a sense that he was quite off his rocker. 19 November 1968 Father and Mother are speaking to me again. Mother only a bit, 42
because with all that stage whispering she’s given herself laryngitis. When I asked her why she whispered so loud, putting such a strain on her vocal chords, she explained that this was how she – like any other actor worth his salt – showed her solidarity with the students up there in the gods. Father claimed to have used my vest by mistake – half-blinded because Mother had scorched his cornea with her cigarette. I said I would explain things properly to Miss Hájek tomorrow. “You’ll do no such thing!” Mother wheezed. Her eyes were so bulging that it crossed my mind that we could soon be hauling her off to the Bohnice asylum. 20 November 1968 I’ve managed to get Father two big chunks of ebony that someone had tossed, unforgivably, onto the rubbish dump at the foot of White Rock. When I got home with it, neither of them was back from work yet. They’re getting in later and later. I’ve told them they shouldn’t have taken jobs that they’re clearly not up to. Everybody else comes home at two-thirty. 21 November 1968 Father maintains that it isn’t ebony, but charred bakelite, but that he was grateful anyway. He was a bit standoffish, but Mother praised me and said that I was possessed of a bitty intelligence. Otherwise all they talk about is their work, though as little as two months ago they knew sod-all about laboratory glassware. And I told them as much.
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22 November 1968 The school is awash with problems: this morning was sunny, so they herded us out into the garden like a bunch of calves. Miss Konečná forced me to go and play inside one of those ghastly tin play-houses. I asked her what she thought I was supposed to play there. She said I could play at receiving visitors. I told her that the absurd ritual that receiving visitors is in this country was a chapter to itself – the more so in that so-called play-house, which was more like a cramped train compartment or a burnt-out dummy on a tank firing range, and that I’d much rather – provided that was all right by her – go and finish reading my Heinrich Böll on a nearby bench. She said certainly not, because we didn’t have any Böll, just games involving communication. So I asked her if she really wanted to develop my character – as per her job description – or to suppress it. She said that the only thing she wanted at that moment was to survive in peace until her retirement. She looked about to burst into tears, so I obediently went to do some communicating with Jarka Macek, just to make her happy. We did it in the red play-house. It was quite interesting to see Jarka’s privates under different light conditions! 23 November 1968 We had Miss Hájek today and all was pleasantly peaceful. In the morning, while playing skittles, I knocked the picture of President Svoboda off the wall, the glass broke and cut the President’s upper lip, which made him look a bit like an ageing hare. Jarka Macek found it funny. Miss Hájek asked if I intended to partner Jarka at the Christmas dance. I said I probably would, though in truth 44
I wouldn’t want to commit myself prematurely to one particular provincial girl. When I got home, I started shivering dreadfully with the cold. I opened a window and scattered a few handfuls of wet leaves from the garden over my bed and the other furniture to get Father finally to realise that outdoors autumn was coming to an end. When he saw it in the evening, he went for me with the strip of wood that he’d got ready prior to creating a plant stand, but instead of me he clouted Mother. After they’d both calmed down, they sat down with their backs to the electric fire and started interrogating me about that picture. Father didn’t believe that I hadn’t done it deliberately: a picture can get knocked down during football or basketball, but not during a game of skittles. “At skittles only an idiot could knock a picture down!” he yelled. Mother urged me not to get cross with Father, because he’d had his party-political appraisal earlier in the day. 25 November 1968 Yesterday was Saturday. We were supposed to go to Český Šternberk, but instead Father spent an hour threatening me: he’d got two witnesses who would confirm that, having hit the picture, I’d shouted: “Bull’s eye!” I confessed that that was indeed so, but it had only been so as to distract the other children from how useless I was at skittles. Father sighed and went off to the cellar to finish making the plant stand. Mother confided that Father needed a psychiatrist and that we’d be going to Šternberk after lunch. However, before lunch, Father ran a semi-circular chisel into his femur, so we ended up going to A&E at Uhlířské Janovice. We were taken there by Mr Zvára because Father refused to drive in his condition. For 45
the entire time, Father kept laughing this weird laugh and going on about some chap called Šperk from the works committee. I was cold and missing Prague. I’m going to write to Grandpa.
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