Republic Of Whores Read online

  As Králová talked and talked, the tank commander watched Lizetka. Her skirt beneath the table was high enough for him to see under it. He also looked at the long legs and pitch-black eyes of Comrade Lexina, and the usual mixture of thoughts began tumbling around in his head, most of them ill-humoured and sullen. The world, it seemed to him, was no more than a few points of light drowned in a dark mush of displeasure.

  At last the fellow in the pale blue business suit looked at his watch, straightened up, and announced that he had to be going.

  “Jeepers!” said Comrade Lexina, checking her watch. “Five-thirty! Darling, would you put me down for two hours’ overtime?”

  “Now look, Lexina,” giggled Králová, “just get out of here. It was only an hour and a half, and that’s what I’m going to put down. You won’t catch me stealing from the state.”

  * * *

  Lexina and the fellow in the pale blue suit were barely out the door when the telephone rang for the first time since Danny had arrived. Králová picked up the receiver and said in a tired, official voice, “Králová, CECC.” Then her eyes opened wide. She winked at Ludmila, covered the mouthpiece with her hand, and whispered loudly, “Kustka!”

  She spoke in her official voice again: “Comrade Kovářová has just left.”

  A thin voice could be heard speaking on the other end, and then Králová said, “I don’t know where. She left by car with Comrade Dr. Hillman from screenwriting.” As she said this, she kept looking at Ludmila, her eyebrows dancing a strange routine, while Ludmila’s replied in kind. “Would you like to leave a message?” she asked sweetly, and when, instead of an answer, there was a sharp click in the receiver, she hung up and said, “I guess not,” and both women burst out laughing.

  “Lexina’s going to have to deal with that one,” said Králová.

  “I keep telling her he’s going to lay into her some day.”

  “It’s just what she needs, my dear. She’s almost as big a bitch as you are.” Králová took a sidelong look at the tank commander, then stood up, still giggling, and said, “Well, I’m on my way, young people.”

  The tank commander suddenly realized that the fellow in the pale blue suit was his cousin’s husband, whom he’d never met. He stood up quickly and said goodbye to the affable boss of his platonic mistress.

  As soon as she’d vanished through the door, Lizetka said with great feeling, “The cow! She’s a real swine, isn’t she? She’s all giggles and honey, but she stabs me in the back every chance she gets.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Why? How should I know? What kind of question is that, anyway? You talk like you’ve just come from the moon.”

  It was exactly how the tank commander felt. He said goodbye to Lizetka (she had to go somewhere to arrange something, but she declined to say what and where) and they agreed to meet again at ten-thirty in front of the Ministry of Culture. She was in a good mood and had invited him to something she called a “special screening for study purposes”.

  * * *

  The special screening for the minister, his girlfriends, and their lovers, and for a narrow circle of film experts and their mistresses, featured an American film called The Valley. The screening was held in a tiny rococo salon in the Wallenstein Palace which had been painstakingly restored in brilliant gold leaf and pink wallpaper. There were silver candelabras with flickering orange electric lights turned low, and as soon as Lizetka and the tank commander had taken their seats in the beige and pink armchairs, the lights were extinguished and the credits began to roll across the screen.

  The minister preferred musicals, since he liked young women, but sometimes, perhaps to whet his appetite, he declared a fast and showed westerns instead. Such was the case today. A lion filled the screen and, wreathed with the slogan ARS GRATIA ARTIS, roared out his ancient invitation to entertainment. The audience, however, had come to study.

  The movie was about a stagecoach travelling through Monument Valley, where it was attacked by a marauding band of Indians. It dealt with the relationships between the people on the stagecoach, and showed the Indians as creatures with a raw animal thirst for blood. Intellectually the film was extremely reactionary, but the direction was outstanding because it offered the specialists in the audience a whole range of wonderful formal ideas. The acting was pure naturalism.

  The film experts, who had come to the late-night screening directly from the première of a new Czech film called Heroes with Callused Hands, studied these elements intensely. In the dimness of the salon, they stared wide-eyed at the crude charm of the love scenes. A famous director, his brow furrowed in concentration, smacked his lips audibly at an original close-up shot looking straight down the barrel of a Colt six-shooter whose cylinder slowly revolved on the screen. Danny was the only one who simply let himself be carried away by the story. The hoofbeats of the horses thundered and the stagecoach lurched and rattled among the rocks, pursued by hordes of red men dressed in feathers and armed with bows. Despite a long-cultivated skepticism, Danny felt deeply anxious about the fate of the beautiful girl in the stagecoach, and Lizetka obviously felt the same, for when the redskins let loose their first salvo of arrows, she grasped his hand. This brought him back to reality. When the need is greatest, he thought bitterly, divine intervention is usually close at hand — in the movies, at least. Then a cluster of men in U.S. Cavalry hats popped up on the horizon. Danny squeezed Lizetka’s hand and she returned the squeeze. “After them!” yelled the minister joyfully, and the prize-winning director added, “Hip! Hip! Hip!” “After them!” roared several experts, and Lizetka jerked her hand out of Danny’s and added her voice to the swelling expressions of partisan support. Now the shots came rapidly: horses’ hoofs crashing like hammers on the stone-hard ground, pistols firing, terrified faces inside the stagecoach, and the painted faces of the Indian cut-throats were rapidly intercut with the determined Yankee faces of the cavalrymen. The salon thundered with applause and the stamping of feet. The specialists rose whooping to their feet, the women shrieked, the minister clenched his fists and emitted incomprehensible but energetic grunts. A sharp, piercing falsetto rose above the hellish pandemonium: “Hurraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

  Danny got to his feet, kissed Lizetka’s indifferent hand, and walked out of the projection room. He had to catch the night train that would get him back before reveille the next morning. He was already facing one disaster — the one in the guardhouse — and he didn’t want to add to that another breach of the orders set for the army by the people who were the source of all power, and the only ones who enjoyed all the rights and privileges of the state.

  5

  THE AUTUMN INSPECTION OF POLITICAL AND COMBAT READINESS

  As it turned out, the tank commander was rescued from the consequences of his dereliction of duty by a stupid idea advanced by the army’s general staff. Orders had come down from headquarters that the officers in charge of monitoring the annual autumn inspection of political and combat readiness in the Eighth Tank Division would be arriving two weeks ahead of schedule. This change threatened to disrupt the quiet process of manufacturing illusions about the real state of readiness in the division — something that in army slang was referred to as movie-making. The Pygmy Devil was so upset at the news that he completely forgot about the nighttime escapades in the guardhouse.

  At a special course for officers, the division CO, General Helebrant, was just taking up the matter of patriotism and treason raised in the past year by the case of Slánský and his ten henchmen. He enjoyed mulling over the question out loud. Those eleven gallows had lent the problem a boldness and clarity dear to the hearts of military pedagogues, and besides, just the day before, a young lady the general had been trying to win over for at least a year had finally agreed to marry him. She came from a good Communist family with connections in the Ministry of Defence. The general’s voice was full of warmth and enthusiasm.

  “One’s mind — not to mention one’s political consc
ience, comrades — boggles. Slánský was paid” — and he paused — “at least thirty thousand a month, and yet he betrayed his country. I — and you too, comrades — none of us makes half that, yet we will never — what?”

  “Betray our country,” said the eager-to-please Lieutenant Hezký, with feeling. At that instant the general’s adjutant burst into the room. The dispatch from the general staff office had come while he was negotiating with the commander of the local detachment of the political detainees unit for the free transfer of some lumber from the site of the future football stadium to the site of his future weekend cottage. The general scanned the dispatch quickly, blanched, and, with the courage worthy of a tank commander, went to the telephone and postponed the wedding that had been arranged only the day before. Then he rushed to the division’s political department.

  There Major Sádlo was slowly turning the handle of the duplicating machine, reproducing a top secret and rather unreadable (and unread) document called “Instructions of the Divisional Political Department for the Political Backing of the Preparations of the Autumn Inspection of Political and Combat Readiness”. Captain Vavruška was putting together the monthly summary of the mass cultural activities of the Eighth Tank Division, based on reports passed to him by the leaders of the individual regiments, who in turn had assembled their reports from material passed to them by the leaders of the individual battalions, which were compiled from memoranda written by the political officers of the individual squadrons, who had conscientiously fabricated these reports in conformity with the program of mass cultural activity invented a month before by Major Sádlo and Captain Vavruška and sent to all units in the division.

  The general entered the room, sat down heavily on his chair, and informed the officers of the impending visitation, which had rendered instantly obsolete the beautifully thought out system now being duplicated. Stencils were torn out of the machine and replaced with new ones, the duplicator began cranking with unaccustomed speed, and the new orders, reformulated as a series of thinly veiled threats, were soon on their way to all units, where they in turn provoked typewriters into a flurry of unaccustomed efficiency.

  * * *

  The orders hit Captain Matka of the Seventh Tank Battalion like a bolt of lightning. He had just been watching with great pleasure as Sergeant Filip clandestinely assembled a sophisticated radio receiver for him out of spare parts, while hiding behind the grille of the secret document depository, and the bad news ruined his satisfaction at seeing a job well done. Feeling sorry for himself, he gave his duty officers a brusque order to round up his staff, regardless of where they were, and assemble them in five minutes. When they arrived, he gave them all a thorough tongue-lashing rich in military imagery, like “I’ll make your tonsils sit up and beg for supper!” and “I’ll make your hams cry out for mercy!”, and then marched off to the meeting at divisional headquarters, feeling that his forceful performance had helped lay the proper groundwork for the upcoming inspection and perhaps even guaranteed that the men would do well.

  * * *

  In the meantime, Captain Matka’s chief of staff, First Lieutenant Pinkas, had assembled the commanders of the four squadrons and their political officers. In a brief and somewhat listless fashion, he informed them of the tasks that lay ahead (as usual these were beyond their capacities) and then dismissed them without offering a glimmer of hope. Next, his face more a mask than ever, he went to the depository for top-secret documents, threw out Sergeant Filip and his unfinished super-radio, and began drawing up an elementary set of orders. This was really Captain Matka’s job, but — as usual — Captain Matka was incapable of doing it, and so, using his power to delegate work, he had ordered Pinkas to do it. Lieutenant Pinkas also had the power to delegate, but none of his subordinates, with the exception of some of the enlisted non-coms, was capable of carrying out such an order either. So the first lieutenant, trapped in one of life’s conundrums, locked himself in the depository and didn’t emerge for two weeks. He even slept there, and sometimes, before dozing off for two or three hours among the secret documents, he thought about his wife, Janinka. Pinkas was an old front-line soldier, and his logical brain told him it was improbable that Janinka, surrounded by so many young men, had remained faithful to him. The thought would inspire momentary fits of jealousy, but in the end he would be too tired, and too wedded to his duty (his military duty, that is), to do anything about it. He would sink back into his uneasy sleep, all thoughts of her round breasts and her delightful mound adorned with those delicious little curls forced out of his mind by the unresolved problem of how to execute a flanking manoeuvre with the indirect support of the artillery. And then, as trapped as his wife (though differently) in the Kobylec army base, he would rise from his improvised field cot, make himself a cup of black coffee, and sit down again to his maps.

  And towards morning, Danny would slink along the alley of chestnut trees, the raindrops rustling the russet leaves, and sneak past the discreet sentry to catch an hour of sleep before reveille.

  * * *

  The eager-to-please Lieutenant Hezký, CO of the First Tank Squadron, trotted briskly into his office and enthusiastically tried to stir up some activity. The third-year men were prudently absent, and when he tried to find enough men to tidy up, he could only find a few first-year recruits. Then he came across Tank Commander Smiřický in the cultural centre, in the middle of writing something which he slid under a fresh copy of the army daily, Defence of the People, when the lieutenant walked in. Normally Hezký would have asked the tank commander what he was hiding, but today he was preoccupied with grander designs, and merely gave an order. Within fifteen minutes, Danny was leading a ragtag formation of greenhorns across the base and up the hill towards the long shacks that stood near the woods and served as classrooms for the Seventh Tank Battalion. “In view of the upcoming inspection of combat readiness,” ran the order, they were “to remove from the desks and latrines all politically inappropriate graffiti.”

  The camp was humming with unusual activity. Several indignant platoons (all passes had been cancelled because of the tests) were crowding the asphalt roads, sweeping them with brooms which they got (or stole) where they could. Columns of smoke curled into the sky from bonfires as they burned the dry chestnut leaves swept from the roadways or plucked from the unruly trees to which they still clung. Soldiers with artistic talent were assigned to rake the little plots of grass by the entrance to the barracks, and to use sand, smooth stones, coloured glass, and artless wooden models of the T-34 tank to construct displays that looked like ancient grave mounds, decorated with reddish stars made of crushed brick, mosaic portraits of Generalissimo Stalin and General Čepička, and strident slogans like EVERY TANKIST AN EXEMPLARY SOLDIER. A chorus of hoarse singers could be heard from one of the cultural centres, trying to master the rigours of two-part harmony in a thrilling song called “Forward with Čepička”. The wind wafted away the hoarse cantata, and groups of men in dirty coveralls slouched along beneath the columns of smoke to the hangars of the 117th Tank Brigade, where the doors were rattling open and the motors thundering into life. The armoured division was awakening from a year-long slumber and, prodded by the officers, was trying to achieve in practice what the officers had achieved in their reports.

  When Danny’s demolition squad turned past the barracks of the Second Battalion, they heard someone calling out to them. The voice seemed to come from the sky. They looked up and there, fifteen metres above the ground, they could see the figure of Corporal Müller leaning over the edge of the roof. When Danny yelled up to ask what he was doing, the corporal’s voice, made fainter by the distance but clear enough all the same, came back: “We’re washing the birdshit off the roof.”

  Perhaps the officer who had given that order was trying to cover himself in case God showed up in person to carry out the inspection.

  * * *

  Tank Commander Smiřický led his squad up to the battalion classrooms, which stood beneath a sandy slope
with pine boughs swaying overhead. The door was locked, but after all four of them pounded and kicked at it so long that an inexperienced person would have given up, the sleepy face of Private Semerák appeared in the window. Semerák had a weak heart and had been declared superintendent of the classrooms. He lived up here like a hermit and was therefore practically exempt from standing orders.

  Semerák’s workplace had a soporific effect on people. As soon as the squad stepped inside the door, they immediately lay down; by the time Danny had managed to prepare a tin of green paint for the desks and a bucket of tar for the latrines, they were all sound asleep. It took a good deal of shouting and shaking to wake them up.

  “Now, boys,” he said, “we’re to look for dirty graffiti and anti-state slogans. Report them to me and we’ll paint them over, and then we’ll take a break.”

  Since this was more attractive than a lot of jobs, the team abstained from the usual complaints and spread out through the classrooms. Soon there were requests for the tank commander to come and carry out inspections. He did so with relish.