The Vow

Introduction-2

But more of that, later. To return to the characters in the novel, it is for this reason, among others, we hesitate to call Kamil Modráček, or anyone else in The Vow, a ‘hero.’ Jiří Kratochvil’s Vow is a multi-layered narrative of some thirty-one chapters. Although not every character in the work is afforded the chance to narrate a chapter, various parts of the story are told from different perspectives (although it very infrequently occurs that the same event is shown from different angles). A third-person, omniscient narrator leads us through a full third of these chapters; next comes Modráček himself, who presents nearly that many, for eight are given over to him to narrate. The private eye / SNB second lieutenant Dan Kočí’s voice dominates four, and then Modráček’s sister, and various other main characters (Fr Klenovský is an exception) are given one chapter each. However, there is no real difference between any of these voices. No one among them — not even, perhaps, the omniscient third-person narrator — is a moral paragon. The amount of space, so to speak, that Kratochvil allows his narrators is not intended to direct us to any conclusions about who is more worthy of our respect or our attention. To speak merely of the characters who figure in the main trunk of the book, the chapters dealing with the 1950s, the quantitative ranking has nothing to do with justice, but rather — the amount of naked power the given character wields over others.

power, and fate

The Vow displays the manner in which the fates of people are strongly influenced, if not determined, by forces beyond their control. Again, 1950s Czechoslovakia is a convenient background, against which matters of free will and compulsion can be shown in high relief. However, this is only a vehicle to confront us with our own situations. To what degree are we free in our decision making? What is it that compels us to this, rather than that, decision? Is it fear, or hope of gain, or a determination to do what we know is right, even if it hurts? In Kratochvil’s novel, it is fair to say that just about every one of the characters seems to be in control of his or her fate, only to have their control proved an illusion, sooner or later. We’ve already given the starkest example of this in that self-assured true believer Ivan Sluka, who is in control, not only of his own fate (he decides to take his turns at the twelve-hour night shifts at the station, which he has instituted, to be a good example to his men) but also of another man’s life (the presumed guilty Lieutenant Treblík), only to find that, after executing him — without anger or hatred, but ‘for the good of the working class’ — something changes deep inside him and he cannot function properly anymore. In the aftermath of a drastic, but well-considered action, he is by turns gripped by catatonia and vomiting; his mind itself is completely clouded over (he undertakes a midnight journey to a home he no longer lives in, to visit parents that no longer exist).

And everyone answers to someone; power devours us all. Given the historical setting of the novel, the height of Stalinism/Gottwaldism in 1950s Czechoslovakia, the ‘power’ that compels most of the characters is that of the State, in the person of its instruments Ivan Sluka and Lieutenant Láska. This introduces the theme of compulsion to collaborate (something which we, naively perhaps, feel sealed off safely from by those illusory temporal milestones of ours!). At the start of the novel, Modráček seems a stock character from anti-totalitarian narratives centring on the victims of Nazi or Communist exploitation. He is a victim, and the justification for his collaboration with SS Gruppenführer Wagenheim on the construction of his macabrely-shaped villa in Brno is an understandable one — if not to say ‘noble.’ He wishes to spare the life of his sister:

I was ready to declare myself Albert Speer if it would only buy me some more time to talk with him, to keep trying to fight for my sister’s life. So I risked it and just clenched my jaw and said, You’re looking to build something? I can build anything, from a doghouse to an opera to a hockey rink.

This same desire motivates his willingness to collaborate with the Communist security forces who have taken over from the Gestapo after the war:

As soon as I found myself outside it occurred to me that I should have stressed how I was simply bursting with desire to collaborate, sure, to the very separation of soul from body, anything to convince them that into the care of such a comrade they could safely entrust his little sister; that it was unnecessary for them to hold her any longer in some dark and cold cell.

And so, Kamil Modráček is a cringing doormat during the Nazi occupation of his city, and following its ‘liberation’ by the Soviets. As Ladislava Galusková puts it (though perhaps a bit harshly), he ‘navigates the régimes swimmingly without a single pang of conscience.’3 He will design a villa for a Gestapo officer in the early forties; less than ten years later he will participate in the metaphorical destruction of the family across the hall from him by agreeing to be a snitch for the StB. Is this enduring trait of his — grovelling sycophancy — a flaw in him, a weak human being, or the rational practicality of a man who has but one move out of checkmate? It is, presumably, easier to stick to one’s morals like a self-assured Antigone, usque ad sanguinem, when the only thing the martyr has to lose is his life. But when the gun, so to speak, is pointed at the head of someone we love? ‘Modráček fell victim to a hectic frenzy, such as he’d never before experienced all his life long. Even though he knew that he liked his sister very much, that he was really attached to her, he never imagined just how fatal a force in his life this sibling love was.’ Unlike Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell’s much darker 1984, who begins screaming ‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!’ when he is faced with torment, so as to spare himself, there is something (again, it is difficult to use the adjective ‘noble’ here), admirable in Modráček’s willingness to sell his soul to at least have the chance to save that of his sister. Considering the atmosphere of the entirety of the main, 1950s, portion of the novel, the second possibility mentioned above seems more suitable to Modráček’s situation. For Kratochvil shows us that oppression is a food chain; there is always someone above you, and someone in turn above him. Or, it is an ouroboros: no part of the serpent’s body is safe, when the head is swallowing its own tail. Rudolf Švarcšnupf, alias Lieutenant Láska, must watch his own step:

Švarcšnupf, Švarcšnupf, the chief was asking for you before he left.

What did you tell him?

That the devil only knows where you’ve been running about.

But you knew I had an interrogation! And the interrogated party was a stubborn cuss — and this drew the investigation out enormously!

Enormously! Chovanec laughed. Where’d you get that one from, enormously! That’s a beaut, that is! Just be careful — that’s not an imperialistic term, is it?

As we said above, no one is exempt from blame. Even as positive a character as Dan Kočí, as far as anyone may be said to have ‘positive’ characteristics in a novel so pessimistic about mankind as The Vow, exploits whomever is in his power:

Just the same was he cheered by the realisation that, at last, he would be using his Leica again, and without having to respect the persons of his subjects overmuch. On the contrary — he was again being empowered to shamelessly strip them to their underclothes in an attempt to eternise them in flagranti, after which, in his darkroom, he would see what intimate details would emerge from the developing pans, captured by his camera… and perhaps he would play with those intimate details under the enlarger… (The private eye had his own private collection of intimate details, worked up by the enlarger. Should anyone take those large format obscenities in hand, they’d never guess that he was glomming at a stable of prominent, highly placed promiscuous mares.)

What is Dan Kočí’s private collection of smut if not his own way of using people, no less repulsive for its ‘virtual’ nature (the camera ‘capturing’ his victims at their most vulnerable moments) as Modráček’s underground ‘city’? In another place, we read of him, setting off on a case: ‘Ants began to crawl all over his back — something he only felt these days right before bedding a heretofore inaccessible partner, whom he’d had to chase after for a long time.’ So, no matter what Dan suggests about his ‘professional ethics,’ the connection he makes between the stimulation provided by his investigation and s****l arousal suggests that he is little more than the classical idea of a pornographer, or addict to pornography, who sees not the whole person in his photos, but only body parts. What is more, Dan’s self-description is just as predatory as any Kamil Modráček prowling the streets of Brno with a rag and bottle of chloroform in his breast-pocket; he too is a ‘hunter.’

whose fault? / whose but his alone?

ingrate. mate in two

If this is the case — dog eat dog eat dog — perhaps everyone is inculpable? Perhaps the world is nothing but an inimical corrosive soup, in which we thrash about, without any hope of reaching shore? Does Modráček speak for us, when, at a particularly nerve-wracking crossroads, he exclaims: ‘What was I thinking, after all? That I’d be able to cheat fate?!’

At times, the world presented by Jiří Kratochvil in The Vow seems a trap. The story of Konečný the builder, who controls Modráček for an entire week, and from afar, like some tantalising god, might be offered in evidence of this fact. His mind is that of a chess-master, always at least one step ahead of his opponent:

Konečný led me over to one of the empty tables. He set up Nabokov’s mate-in-two, and after a short pause, which he evidently relished, he stretched out his hand, set it on the white bishop, and moved it to C2. Careful! I wanted to call out, but the builder, who even heard my unexpressed cry of alarm, immediately showed me how marvellous a move it was, and what resulted from it. […] See? smiled Konečný the builder, and then, with a tiny flick of his finger, he executed the king as if beneath a tiny guillotine. Then he said that he was very sorry, but that the painting would not be changing hands.

I understood then that he had known all along that I hadn’t the slimmest chance of lighting upon that solution, and that he wasn’t taking the slightest risk of losing his Le Corbusier.

Then, in the game of his life, as he attempts to cross the ‘green border’ into the free West, lugging his valuable painting with him, he is ‘checkmated’ at the border, and falls under a hail of bullets just as surely as he flicked over the king with his finger.

The story of the builder and the ‘Russian Roulette’ game with the Le Corbusier is one of the many digressions to be found in this stromata of a novel. At first, it seems to be merely a fleshing-out of Modráček’s character, the introduction of something into his life that would provide it with a ballast of human interest (he loves something other than his sister), something that could give his cringing life a direction, as he puts it: ‘I don’t just admire Le Corbusier, immensely; for me, he’s something of a saint. And with him in my atelier, I’d be ashamed to commit those indecencies of mine before his eyes, that mass production of architectural dwarves. For such magical values a person is willing to pay any price.’ But when we come to the end of the story, and see how it ends, finally and dramatically, for Konečný, the game of chess expands into a metaphor of life, free will, inescapable destiny. The world, it seems, is a prison — Alžběta Hajná, one of Modráček’s ‘tenants’ describes the ‘subterranean horizontal city’ in which she is imprisoned as a ‘delightful Alcatraz.’ Perhaps the story of builder Konečný (whose last name suggests ‘finality’ in Czech, and as koniecność in the kindred language of Polish, ’necessity’) is meant to teach us that, even if you scale down the drainpipe and make it down to the shore of the bay, the currents are too strong, you’ll never make it to freedom?