The Vow

Introduction-3

Cages and imprisonment are a constant Leitmotiv in Kratochvil’s Vow. The bear-cage, with which Modráček (unintentionally) initiates the construction of his ‘delightful Alcatraz’ is introduced right after the circus investigation with ‘electric Belinda,’ whom Dan Kočí tracks down on an adulterous bed in the middle of the big top, with a fierce tiger circling about to ward off intruders. And here we have another marvellous, and marvellously subtle, metaphor. This is as much enjoyment and freedom as we can hope for: lovemaking in a tightly constrained space, s*x in a tiger’s cage. We will perhaps call this metaphor to mind in the later parts of the novel, when Luděk explains to his lover Petra: ‘at the time, for our folk s*x was the only available route to freedom that the puritanical comrades (and their street gangs) weren’t able to control.’ Alas, as enjoyable a freedom as it may be, it was also an illusory one; s*x leads to children; the hooking up of Mrs Modráčková and Láska, both imprisoned in her husband’s ‘underground Utopia,’ leads to the birth of little Eduard Láska. And while, in his benign insanity, Modráčk announces to his prisoners, as Hajná puts it, that ‘we should take the birth of our first child as a joyful sign that we have accepted our new tasks as passengers on Noah’s Ark’ — as a kind of underground Virginia Dare — it is Fr Klenovský, the only character in the novel who represents a world-view that rejects predetermination, who protests:

even though you provide for us in this reality here, the fact remains that we are in a prison, which is, let us assume, merely one pocket in the straitjacket of that much greater prison, into which the entire Czech nation has been thrust, but we needn’t understand a prison within a prison as some sort of enclave of freedom, […and] even if, like it or not, we were to accept the fact that we ourselves are to spend a certain amount of time here, that doesn’t mean that you have the right to imprison children as well, you cannot justify such an act in any way.

These words should be understood in a broader manner than just as the particular situation intimates. The idea of a good, loving God, who loves man so much as even to refuse to impede his freely-willed choices, even when they are harmful (and thus we begin this segment with a citation from Milton’s Paradise Lost III: 96-97) is incompatible with the idea of any sort of acquiescence to the evil determinism that would condone the propagation of children into a prison — this particular one, governed by Modráček, or the wider one, governed (seemingly) by Calvinist-Hegelian-Marxist historical necessity.

The voice of Fr Klenovský, especially here, is one of the most important, if not the most important, in The Vow. This despite the fact that all evidence seems to point to the contrary; we constantly find ourselves in the environment of power and imprisonment. The novel moves from ‘legal’ constraint (Modráček at the beck and call of Láska) through his sister’s imprisonment, to Kočí’s circus investigation and cages both literal and figurative (the bear and tiger cages, Kočí’s Leica), to the purchase of the bear cage, the virtual imprisonment of Láska, and then Modráček’s collection of people in his underground city beginning with Láska himself. Finally, we have (as Fr Klenovský points out) the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR) as an inescapable prison (since both Konečný’s and Modráček’s escapes are foiled)… It would be reasonable to assume that the universe is being described here as God’s toy box, and human history the story of the compulsion He exerts on us, no less irresistible as the will of the chess-master who takes a pawn in hand.

Even ignorance is its own form of prison. Consider the story Anička Fraccaroli, Láska’s daughter, relates to Petr Luňák during their interview:

Supposedly, Dad reported that the entire case against the architect’s sister had been fabricated, and he kept on insisting that this was murder, categorically demanding an investigation. He was taken off the case, and a few days later he vanished completely. So, it’s all quite clear, isn’t it? A word to the wise suffices.

She has no idea that it wasn’t the StB who did her Dad in, but the architect. There is no one to explain the truth to her now, and so she — this is important — is constructing an image of the world that has very little to do with the actual truth, no matter how convincing it seems. Remember Fr Klenovský’s objection! In a very similar way, Modráček himself is incarcerated in the prison of ignorance:

I went down into the cellar every morning and evening, in order to satisfy the ever more ravenous Lieutenant Láska. It seemed as if he had decided to compensate for what had befallen him by a fantastic gluttony. And to punish me for having imprisoned him by devouring all of my grain and meat stores. I still couldn’t quite figure out whether or not something had happened to his brain, or whether it was all a trick with which he was assailing my compassion and polite upbringing. Some days he said nothing at all, while on others he babbled on endearingly before falling into some quite incomprehensible tongue.

In exactly the same way — if what Fraccaroli tells us is true — Modráček serves out his own life sentence of ignorance, never coming to know the truth of his sister’s death, which he might have learned that very moment that Láska, by chance, rushed into the foyer of his building to escape the pounding rain. Modráček never gave him the chance, thwacking him on his noggin with the hammer, twice, having prejudged a case without being in possession of all of the evidence.

A similar case is that presented by Dr Pešek. This is all the more eloquent as possible evidence of predetermination than the foregoing. For Pešek is not going to be metaphorically imprisoned by ignorance, he is going to become Modráček’s second victim, imprisoned in the underground after stumbling by chance upon the architect at work constructing his prison in the mediaeval vault. In what is perhaps the one passage of dry Czech humour in a basically sombre book, Pešek’s imprisonment at Modráček’s hands is directly caused by the actions he takes to avoid being imprisoned by the authorities!

And so, still barefoot, I’m walking around the flat, near the glass-paned bookshelves when my good guardian angel turns my head in that direction and — what do I see but — horror of horrors! Masaryk’s World Revolution, the Black Band of that émigré Hostovský, Beneš’s Memoirs and all the books from the Anglo-American Bookstore. What, as if I didn’t know how Venhoda flits his eyes about? I don’t know that just one book of that sort could turn my life upside-down, and after Venhoda’s visit, the next guests to show up at my door might be some SNB goons, just as it happened at the Kratochvils? No, I definitely can’t play around with that. And so I immediately set my hand to the task.

Had he not overreacted to the impending visit of a Communist official who was to drop into his flat the next day, he would have never pulled those books off his shelf, never gone down into the building’s basement at midnight. ‘I had no wish to be part of the idiotic vacuum,’ states Dan Kočí when he comes upon his friend Radek staring blankly into the distance. And yet that’s exactly how he’ll end up too, swallowed by the vacuum along with Pešek who preceded him there, when he goes off cockily, without backup, after Lieutenant Láska.

The fact that it is Fr Klenovský who is proven right in the end, and not the determinists (of Calvinist or Marxist stripe) is borne out by the manner in which time is dealt with in The Vow. For although primarily set in the 1950s, a significant portion of the novel takes place in the 2000s, when we are with Luděk and Petra, who discuss the deeds of Modráček and other amateur turnkeys from the distance of our own day and age, and — this is most important — at least a full two decades after the Velvet Revolution saw the prison walls around Brno and the entire ČSSR come tumbling down. So again, Fr Klenovský’s urging of his fellow prisoners to be patient, for ‘in two or three days they’d be free anyway,’ has an eloquence that exceeds the particular situation in which the words are uttered. In the large sense, they are eloquent of a faith and hope that were proven true in the end: not only was Modráček’s prison door to be opened, but the ‘Communist Utopia’ up above was fated to disappear. And, in a still larger sense, the manner in which time is handled in The Vow, which brings in the free Czech Republic of the twenty-first century as the Communist prison that was Czechoslovakia in the fifties, testifies to change, to progress. Determinism is a prison, because it excludes change, it is a continuum. No child should ever be born into that, and, as history and Fr Klenovský prove, no child is.

Another proof against determinism is provided by Modráček himself. Although (as we will see) he feels himself to be ‘moved’ to his mission by a power outside of himself, the truth is that he takes all of these aberrant decisions himself. And why? He feels trapped, and he wishes to take control, to act out in some way against the horrid chains that seem to bind him.

Consider, for example, the aftermath of his sister’s death, once the initial numbness has passed, and he begins to busy himself with the disposal of her body. Although ‘neither he nor his sister were believers’ in the Christian God, Modráček arranges a ‘funeral Mass and Catholic burial ceremony’ for her, because — he ‘felt that he had to do something.’ It is this feeling of being obliged to ‘do something,’ perhaps anything, that is at the root of Modráček’s insanity, and is to be blamed for the harm he inflicts on other people. For it is not ‘something’ that we need to do, in order to ‘somehow transcend everything that had happened’ — which in this case and all others is selfish self-therapy, something that we need — but the right thing that must be done, to help others. The former attitude is inward thrusting, the latter, outward. And, as another positive character in the book, the physician Dr Štefl well knows — first, and above all, do no harm. When we don’t know what is the right thing to do, when others come into the equation, it might just be better to do nothing at all, even if that means that we must live with our own helplessness. It is better not to help ourselves, than to harm others.

Here, perhaps, it might be fitting to introduce one of those writers who helped me to an understanding of the question posed by Kratochvil’s The Vow just the other day at Mass (as I continue in this question to put the cart before the horse). In his long poem Recycling, Tadeusz Różewicz poses the rhetorical question:

Skąd się bierze zło?

jak to skąd

z człowieka

zawsze z człowieka

i tylko z człowieka4

[Where does evil come from? / what do you mean where // from man / always from man / and only from man]

And Różewicz, whose entire postwar poetic career can be read as a long polemic with God concerning justice, agrees at least so far with traditional Christianity. It’s as simple as that.

kamil modráček, the puny god

Of course, if Modráček were wise, or sane, enough to realise this, we would have no novel. And so, now let us turn to this most important figure of all, in more depth. For, above, all, it is Modráček who is at the centre of The Vow. It is the vow he made to his sister — however meritorious or lacking in merit that vow may be, however reasonable or insane — that is the motor to the entire story, and it is he who deserves most of our attention in a discussion of a novel so deep — no pun intended — that a discussion of all of its characters and motifs would require a book of its own.