The Vow

Introduction-4

Kamil Modráček is a loner. He is estranged from his wife, he has no friends to speak of, his sister (in whom he has perhaps an unhealthy interest) is taken away from him by Láska, and that one constant relationship of his life, which he shares with his ‘invisible wife,’ can hardly be called a human relationship of love. And so his creation of the underground city can be understood as a desperate attempt to collect a group of people who will love him, for they must. He is not just Noah with his ark, he is a morally ambiguous ‘god’ trying to create an Eden where there will be no fall, where he might walk in the garden in friendship with his creatures. Of course, this is naive, to say the least. For he is not God, to Whom man owes obedience and love and gratitude for His having brought him to life; no, Modráček is more or less a puny, negative image of God — he created no one’s life, he ended the lives of twenty-one persons, as far as any of them could tell, by stealing them from the lives they led aboveground, with people whom they loved, to lock them up in a mediaeval vault deep underground. Where God intends freedom, Modráček imprisons, enslaves (they were, after all, forced to help him in the construction of his subterranean opus). So his dream for a little paradise may not be crazy as much as childish, or crazy in an innocent way: the very wrongest realisation of childhood longings for a peaceful world of friendship and harmony. That it had no chance of being realised is something that he himself perhaps sensed. As he is about to leave them for good, their ordeal nearly over, he wishes to bid them farewell:

Turning around, standing face to face with the half-circle that the people now formed, he assayed a friendly smile. But that smile didn’t quite work. He had sensed that this farewell of his with them wouldn’t be worth much, but he had no idea that it would actually be impossible. Right now, he wanted to say something, but his tongue cleft to the roof of his mouth and — why not admit it? — his chin nearly trembled. But on their faces, there was no movement whatsoever.

Well, maybe he is a little crazy. After all, he was stunned at the manner in which ‘somehow none of [them] were taken with the thought,’ when, in apricot season, he offered to cart down bushels of the fruit so that twenty-one adults might ‘make preserves until [they] keeled over!’ Váša the lifeguard from the Zábrdovice baths puts his finger right on it when he snaps, ‘What, when you were a little boy, did you experience a big apricot boil at your grandmama’s and now you want to spread the joy among us?’ Certainly, one definition of insanity is to be so overcome with your own idée fixe that you are literally unable to understand the effect that your actions have on another person; how any ‘reasonable’ person might be unable to comprehend the logic of your progress, or how, really, you have your victim’s best interests in mind. It is for this reason that, as innocent as the apricot boil idea seems to be, we cannot have sympathy for Modráček. A good portion of his insanity certainly is his lack of empathy for others. Consider, for example, what he says about his appropriation of and use of the gold and jewels left behind in the cavern by its previous inhabitants, whether Germans or Jews, or Germans secreting the wealth robbed from the Jews of Brno during the long night of the h*******t. Modráček has a tinge of conscience at so liquidating the wealth of others for his own benefit, but he rationalises his behaviour immediately:

For that reason I can perhaps consider my discovery an inheritance from those who had to abandon everything when they tried to find some path, some way, to remain at least a little alive. And after all, I hadn’t broken into this mediaeval vault, this their underground place of refuge, by force, like some burglar. No, I’d pierced into it by pure accident, during that wild frenzy of mine, which perhaps they themselves would be able to understand, just like all outcasts and outlaws who fight back against institutionalised hatred in explosions of helpless rage.

Yet, in reference to his own ‘tenants,’ he doesn’t understand that for them he is a hated institution, which projects, if not an institutionalised hatred, at least an institutionalised unconcern with their wills and rights. Modráček’s lack of empathy is actually infuriating. During the apricot-boil episode, he says to his prisoners with a smile: ‘All you need do is ask […] just tell me what you need and I’ll bring it all down here for you, I’d be delighted to.’ What they need? They need their freedom. But that can’t be ‘brought down here,’ and so it’s out of the question.

Modráček’s obtuseness is, or has become, a pronounced trait of his character. He — like we all — has a healthy terror of prisons, something that is made clear when he describes his attempts at tracking down his sister after her arrest by the StB. Stonewalled by everyone he queries as to her whereabouts:

Modráček wanted to try his luck in the prisons of Brno, as well. But the mere sight of those huge, gloomy edifices filled him with terror. He’d never before considered how deeply prison architecture might depress a person: the whole intention of which was not to include in its design anything slightly uplifting or aesthetic, but to create a dead monolith of spiritual emptiness!

How strongly these words strike us when we recall that, whatever he choose to call his ‘subterranean horizontal city,’ it’s still a prison, and the people who populate it didn’t volunteer for residence there — he literally plucked them from the street and incarcerated them within it. His childish regard for his ‘tenants’ or ‘lodgers’ as he calls them can be disarming — as Alžběta Hajná reports: ‘Mr Architect indulged us with a little grass down here and some shrubs, even tulip beds, just about everything that can bear this hothouse regimen of ours without sky and much space,’ but the fact remains: no matter how pleasant you make it, a prison is still a prison. And, as Hajná — happy enough to be incarcerated alongside Dan Kočí (again: s*x in a cage) — develops her thought: ‘but beneath this low cavern vault some days I feel that I’d be happy to trade Dan Kočí for a walk lined with chestnut trees or a gigantic kingly walnut or an even grander holm-oak of the sort I used to go visit in Lužánky.’

Another characteristic of insanity, I reckon, is the inability to understand, or accept, the fact of one’s guilt, the inability to accept responsibility for one’s actions, the blame for which one is quite happy to lay at someone else’s feet. In the case of mad Kamil Modráček, he uses the same tropes of predestination which we’ve already debunked to exculpate himself from responsibility for something he knows, deep down, is wrong, convinced that he is under the influence of some will other than his own. He describes his extraction of his father’s manuscript thus:

One evening upon returning home I pulled out a large packet of my father’s unpublished writings from behind some books on the bookshelves. To the very last moment, I had no idea why I was doing what I was doing; what was inducing me to ferret through those old papers at that very moment.

We will pass over the fact that nothing in the scene prepares us for a suggestion of supernatural agency here; this is not Dante’s son having a prophetic dream about the location of the missing ‘heavenly’ cantos of the Paradiso. But Modráček is convinced that he is somehow being ‘led’ to the actions he undertakes. To give just two more examples, from among many, when he discovers the forgotten poster of the SNB operative, the destruction of which will reveal to him the fateful undergrounds of Brno, he says: ‘Nearby, a pickaxe was lying on top of a large box, just as if someone had placed it there for me,’ and later, after the discovery had been made: ‘I knew that that mediaeval vault had revealed itself to me at precisely the right moment; that someone had carefully prepared it for me, just as I had been led to those bookshelves and induced to rummage through the writings my father had left behind.’

No. All of this is nothing but an attempt at rationalising actions which, deep within him, he knows to be wrong. If one is merely the instrument of a higher power (passing over, for the sake of argument, the rightfully discredited Nuremberg Defence), who is to blame for the evil one commits? There may be some tenuous, and perhaps none too convincing, yet all the same comprehensible reasons for his decision to pronounce a sentence upon the head of the person he blames for the death of his sister, but is there any excuse for the composition of his human menagerie? As explained, from a distance, by Luděk, the contemporary student of Russian philology whose interest in Modráček’s history seems something of an obsession itself:

In the end, Modráček understood it all as a vocation, a mission. On the one hand, he kept the promise he had made to his dead sister, his vow to snatch her murderer and punish him with a sentence of life imprisonment, while on the other, by a chance set of circumstances, and random motivations, he broadened that mission of his by degrees: to preserve some sort of pattern of humanity from that which threatened them up above.

This is a megalomania bordering on a god-complex, which (as my entry for the understatement of the year award), I will state is a rather problematical attitude. If we are looking for proof of anyone’s insanity, this sort of thing is fairly convincing.

But if Modráček is a ‘god,’ is he a just god? The very fact of his imprisoning people who have done him no harm is evidence enough of his injustice. Even stronger evidence against him is presented by his initial motivation to impose his (punitive) will on another human being. At first glance, the motivation to take vengeance upon a criminal who is otherwise untouchable seems rational. It is, after all, the common theme of the great majority of black-and-white-hatted Hollywood vengeance trash. It is so understandable as to be almost syllogistic: a) Lieutenant Láska’s role in my sister’s death deserves to be punished. b) The apparatus of ‘justice’ in this country protects criminals such as Lieutenant Láska, so he will not be punished by the proper authorities. c) Therefore, I shall punish Lieutenant Láska myself. Or, as Modráček puts it: ‘Láska must meet with a just punishment, such as refers to a higher justice, far removed from that of the inhuman Communist regime.’ The problem with this is not only that Modráček is neither God nor cognisant of God’s will in this matter, but that vengeance is not justice. Furthermore, there is the matter — not unconnected with the fact of Kamil Modráček’s being far from omniscient — of Lieutenant Láska’s humanity:

Where’s Anička?

Playing outside in the courtyard, Marta answered. That’s not an answer to make Láska very happy. The courtyard in question was full of garbage cans and rotting mattresses, rusted and hole-riddled metal pots. Rats ran about there, and at nighttime drunks would piss down into it from the gallery running outside their doors. Láska fears for his daughter with a tormenting fear. Sometimes, during an interrogation, he’d grow suddenly still. His gaze would drift until his eyes came to rest somewhere, up on the ceiling, let’s say… Once it even so happened that Láska’s victim had to clear his throat once, twice, to jog the Lieutenant back into the present moment, so as to get on with the interrogation.