The Vow

Introduction In the Name of Kamil Modráček? Jiří Kratochvil’s Imperfect God Tadeusz Kantor once said that one doesn’t enter the theatre with impunity. Ezra Pound said that a book should be like a ball of light in one’s hand. Both these great writers, whose lives were impacted by the horrible events of the mid-twentieth century, a portion of which make up the background to Jiří Kratochvil’s novel The Vow [Slib], imply that those who engage with dramatic or literary art ought to expect to be challenged by the artworks. Texts are not made to entertain, or, at least, not merely to entertain. They are to pose questions to us — sometimes uncomfortable ones. The Vow is just such a challenging work. As such, the questions it asks are many; perhaps as many as there are readers. As a translator, I have been engaged with this book for several years. But it was only very recently, once the translation was completed, that it finally became clear to me what question it was confronting me with. Just in time, as I was about to begin work on this introduction. It came to me at Mass. It was a Sunday morning, at a small parish not my own, in upstate New York, near a lake. Before I go any further, I ought to confess that whereas I love the Mass, I loathe sermons. They’re usually overlong, ingratiating, and full of platitudes, repetitive, poorly constructed, and not at all inspiring. Just like introductions, the cynical reader might smirk. Perhaps.1 At any rate, for me, sermons are a waste of time. I’d like to say that this is because I’m a Catholic, not a Protestant, and ‘we Catholics’ or ‘Catholics of my generation’ don’t go to Mass for sermonising, we go for another reason entirely — to be present at the Holy Eucharist, in which God Himself is not symbolically, but actually, present. But while there’s something in that, the real reason is — probably (I’d like to say that this is an occupational hazard, but that would just be another excuse) — the real reason is probably that I’m just a prig, a snob. Anyway, I almost missed the question entirely because, with what I’ve just admitted, it won’t be a surprise to You, Reader, that I don’t pay much attention to what the priest is saying during his sermon. Sometimes, I’m even lucky enough to drowse (and luckier still if my wife doesn’t notice me drowsing and elbow me awake). But on this particular Sunday, maybe it was because the weather was nice, or the setting was beautiful, or the trip was enjoyable — I was more conscious than usual during that part of the liturgy. The Gospel was taken from Mark (10:46–52) and dealt with Timaeus, the blind man, who called to Christ while the Lord ‘was leaving Jericho:’ ‘Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.’ To His question ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ the blind man replied ‘Master, I want to see.’ The sermon that ensued was just as dull, boring, predictable and pedestrian as all the rest I’ve ever suffered through. Predictably, the priest tossed some bland rhetorical questions out at the congregation, such as ‘What is it that blinds us? What is it that stops us from seeing Christ in our neighbour?’ after which he spooled off onto a digression, the dimensions of which would have sufficed for a sermon of its own, with questions like ‘What takes the place of God in our lives?’ At (long) last, he brought that digression to an end with some groaner of the sort ‘I’ve never seen a Brinks truck follow a hearse to the graveside.’ As I looked about the church that day, it occurred to me: There’s not a single person here who isn’t thinking right now: ‘I’m not blind; no, not me. I see Jesus in everybody. My stomach’s not my God; nothing takes the place of God in my life; I’m not one of those materialistic fools to whom passing things like belongings or money mean anything…’ And what a wonderful world it would be, if all that were actually true. So, this is when the question that Kratochvil’s novel is posing to me, particularly, hit me. Permit me to hold you in suspense about that for a moment, but I will tell you that I was helped on to the answer, almost immediately, by recollections of two quite different writers: St James and Tadeusz Różewicz. But, with your indulgence: of that, a little later. we’re only human. unfortunately Kratochvil subtitles his novel ‘A Requiem for the Fifties.’ This has the ring of finality to it; something akin to what John Lennon said in one of his last interviews: ‘Wasn’t the seventies a drag, you know? Well, here we are, let’s make the eighties great because it’s up to us to make what we can of it.’2 There are a lot of such milestones we impose upon history, as if to say: well, now that’s over, and we don’t have to worry about it any more. But although Khrushchev may have denounced Stalin in February 1956, that no more put an end to totalitarianism and government oppression (of all stripes) than George Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished!’ speech in May 2003 put an end to the troubles besetting the world since 9/11. There are no full-stops or ‘thick lines’ — to use another frequently invoked metaphor — in history, because people do not change. The same human material that gave rise to the problems besetting the characters in Kratochvil’s novel in the 1950s is walking around today, in the clothes that you and I wear, and it’s only a matter of time until it gets this poor suffering planet into more serious trouble. Woes such as Kratochvil describes don’t come about because of something in the air or the water in a given decade, a given place on the map, they come about because of something in you and me and all of our kind, whether we consider them our brothers and sisters or not, whether we’re able to see Christ in them or not. My tradition, after Augustine, understands it as the ‘spiritual syphilis’ that still inclines us to evil, a residue of Original Sin. Depending on what your tradition may be, you may just want to say ‘Man’s a bastard.’ Yep. No argument here — brother. The grime that infects our world doesn’t carry an expiration date. It’ll be around as long as we are. Kratochvil himself toys with the idea of original sin when he brings in Nabokov’s short story, the Czech translation of which sparks Kamil Modráček’s imagination on how to even the score with the State Security Services (StB) following the death of his sister. In the Russian tale, a family captures a KGB officer, imprisons him in their bathroom after pronouncing a life sentence upon him. And then: The family […] arrive at the determination that, when he attains an age older than that of his gaolers at present, they will pass him on to their children’s care, and then, perhaps, on and on, to the children of their children — passing him on like an inheritance from generation to generation. What is this inheritance, but a binding of all future generations to slavery, to an inherited guilt? To say nothing of the fact that, in this fictional world of Nabokov’s, the present family and their descendants are condemned to life imprisonment as well. Obviously, someone has to remain stuck in that apartment as warder and turnkey, as long as the ‘guilty party’ is imprisoned in the bathroom. It is hard for us to imagine the manner in which our debased human nature holds us in thrall; it is hard to get our minds around the great freedom that our first parents enjoyed before the Fall, which St Augustine sums up in the laconic truth: possunt non peccare — ‘They didn’t have to sin.’ But once they made that decision to sin, the toothpaste, to continue with Nabokov’s bathroom metaphor, couldn’t be squeezed back into the tube, and here we are. Thanks a lot, Adam. Way to go, Eve. From Adam and Eve stretches a direct line through Cain to Kamil Modráček to… At one point in The Vow, Kamil Modráček, the main character (not to say ‘hero’) of the novel, references Dante’s Divine Comedy, ironically casting himself in the role of Virgil, Dante’s guide. The difference is — as he himself notes with a wink — Virgil’s not carrying a hammer to rap someone on the noggin with. ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ indeed. Also unlike the magnum opus of the great Florentine, this ‘Virgil’ will not lead us out of Hell and into the blessed region of Purgatory. He might also have quoted Marlowe’s Mephistophiles in reference to The Vow, at that point where the devil appears to Faustus who, when (O, blessed naiveté!) he professes his belief in progress and doubt in the existence of Hell, responds, ‘Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it!’ Given our tendency to evil, however you wish to explain it, which is as inseparable from us as our very flesh and bones, it is in this sense that Sartre’s quip of hell being ‘other people’ is almost correct. Almost, because — again, in this sense — we just need to strike that word ‘other.’ For proof, I will just point to one more sermon, before I’m done: that which Fr Klenovský delivers in his underground church on the text ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ In the end, someone in his congregation (maybe even more than just one of their number), goes ahead and does just that. In what way is the murder committed in Modráček’s underground ‘cathedral of silence’ — a killing that some try to justify using Caiaphas’ bloody reasoning (it is better ‘that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not’) — any different from the extra-judicial execution of a supposed enemy of the state in the nearby cellars of the Security Services’ building? The answer is: there is no difference at all. In his book, Kratochvil helps no one to any ‘high ground’; some people may be more victimised here than others, but… everyone is a perpetrator. It would be nice to say that Kratochvil so constructs his novel as to set his characters in extreme situations, where they are forced to make a choice, or make choices, which they later learn from. This is hinted at once, when Ivan Sluka executes Lieutenant Treblík in the cellars of the StB station on Běhounská: Once again the basement came to your mind, along with the burning match falling along Treblík’s trouser leg, and what was slipping out of it. And how your d**k swelled and stiffened right at the moment when you readied yourself to pull the trigger — just as if it, too, wanted to shoot its load into Treblík, and how then you struck your last match so that you could see where you were shooting, and how you then pulled the trigger four times, and how between the first and second shot you heard Treblík cry out softly Mama, mama! before he crumpled along your legs, rustling to the ground, and how you pulled your left shoe out from under his body with a quick jerk. And how immediately, horridly sick to your stomach you became, hurling the contents of your stomach into the darkness, probably onto Treblík lying there at your feet. My God, you whispered through your sour and sticky lips, I’ve just killed a man. But then you got a grip on yourself, left the scene of your deed, and emerged from the cellar over those endless steps. But Kratochvil is too good a writer to write so predictable a story. As we shall see, there are various narrators in the complex novel The Vow, and here it is significant that Sluka’s thoughts are not being reported in the usual third-person omniscient voice; rather, we have here a sort of legal protocol. The paragraph above sounds like a prosecutor’s summation, rehearsing the facts to the guilty party. But — no verdict is pronounced, no jury votes, and after this undeniably dramatic moment, Sluka will disappear from our purview. Of great importance here is how even Sluka’s conscience seems to abandon its role as Fury; or, more precisely, is overcome, shrugged off the perpetrator’s shoulder, as soon as he ‘gets a grip on himself and leaves the scene of his deed.’ For — and this is the great strength of Kratochvil’s writing — it is not the fictional characters who are being challenged; we are not being invited to sit on the jury here. No, it is us who will be in the dock.