Where Was the Angel Going?

Introduction-1

Introduction

Any Port in a Storm Jan Balabán and the Return to Eden by Charles S. Kraszewski

I once had a friend who was a chef. A real chef; someone who loved the art of eating, preparing food, and knew a lot about both. I remember telling him once, off-hand, about having eaten in a Hungarian restaurant somewhere off Bloor St. in Toronto. ‘What did you have?’ he asked. ‘Fish,’ I replied. ‘How was it?’ ‘Horrible.’ He laughed. ‘What did you expect from a landlocked country, hundreds of miles from the sea in every direction?’ I had nothing to reply to that. His logic was impeccable.

Now, in one of the poems that make up his autobiographical cycle Zvíře dětství [The Animal of Childhood], Rio Preisner, who was raised in an atheist household, compares himself to the other, Catholic children, as he gazes from afar at the affection they have for the kindly parish priest, their catechist. While they had something he was deprived of, some sort of hope, some love — which he saw, but could not understand — all he was left with was adventure stories of ‘happy shipwrecks.’ Unsatisfying, but somehow fitting for his situation: alone on a desert island.

Aquatic imagery abounds in Jan Balabán’s Kudy šel anděl [Where Was the Angel Going?] as well. In chapter 29, for example, sitting at the window with a coffee, Martin dreams of great expanses of water which ‘should’ be found just beyond the tracks:

There, at the railway line, the city ought to end. The brick hovels and the ramps, the approaches and the bridges and past all that there should be a pier, a strip of dirty harbour water and there, where the blinking red warning lights on the roofs of the prefab blocks emerge from the mist, there, the horizon, and on the horizon ships, and past the horizon, the measureless expanse of ocean.

The apartment in which Martin grew up is described in terms reminiscent of a sturdy little craft — something like the barque of Peter — breasting the turbulent seas of an inimical world:

The only light came through the peephole as if it were a window on another world, or the tiny porthole of a boat. Their boat, with which they navigate the adverse waters of that city. That’s where they live, where they have their books and their faith, which the people around them can’t understand. There, inside the boat, they sing their old songs, the echoes of which sometimes meet their neighbours’ ears there in their living rooms full of television (4).

His son always has to have little boats in bed with him ‘so he wouldn’t drown’ (34), and now that he is divorced, when he can only see his children on certain weekends, he dreams of gathering them together in the ‘temporary rented haven’ of his garret apartment ‘as if in a ship’s cabin’ (29). Even Monika, when reminiscing on her own childhood as the interracial daughter of a single mother, speaks of their home as having been ‘as cosy as a boat. A little boat’ (36).

Whence all this nautical imagery in the literature of a landlocked country like the Czech Republic, or Czecho-Slovakia, as it was back in those days, which is about as far away from a sea as one can get? Perhaps the answer is to be found in the myth of Noah’s ark — which is not so far away from our present reality as we may think. When the spell-checks of our ubiquitous electronic devices (that we take to bed with us?) underscore ‘Triune’ in red as if it were something misspelt, and offer ‘Goddess’ and ‘Gods’ as suggestions when we type in ‘God,’ it is not too far from here to a sense of being surrounded by a rising tide of incredulity and even the enmity of a society, once Christian, that now treats Christianity as a foreign body. A foreign body to be expelled, ignored, or wondered at, like some quaint curio. Fifty years ago, the young atheist (or agnostic; he seems more like someone who has never given a thought to God, rather than someone who rejects Him) who shows up at the chapel Martin is cleaning in chapter 39, oblivious to Christian realities, would be the odd man out. Today — in the UK and France, no less than the Czech Republic — he is the norm. Folk like Martin are the oddballs, the fossils, the trinkets to be picked up, examined, and set back down with a shrug.

Martin Vrána, the protagonist of these stories, is, like the author himself, an evangelical Christian.1 This puts him at a farther remove from the mainstream, as the member of a minority (Czech Protestants) within a minority (Czech Christians, most of whom are Catholic) in the overwhelmingly a-religious Czech Republic of today. Of course, Moravia, the eastern portion of the Republic, where most of the action takes place, has traditionally held a larger number of committed Christians than Bohemia, the western portion dominated by Prague. Martin, in short, is an outsider — something that becomes apparent from the very first chapter of the book, incongruously numbered ‘Chapter 19:’2

O, just don’t let me run across any neighbour. He’d never really quarrelled with them, but they still didn’t like him for some reason. He had striven to come to terms with this since childhood. The people I’ve actually done something to like me more. You come across a neighbour, your brother in humanity, in the gloomy light of the stairwell and he gives you a dirty look. Even if you’ve greeted him nicely, really meaning it.

His being cut off from the main currents of society is not merely a confessional matter — it is an ontological state. After Chapter 19, our first glimpse into the life of adult Martin (divorced, despairing, perhaps even despised) the narrative flow takes a hairpin turn to Chapter 1, in which we meet up with the adolescent Martin during his short-lived erotic idyll with his girlfriend, Eva.

Escaping from their prefab estates, they enjoy an innocent frolic on the grounds of an abandoned colliery. Their existence there is typically adolescent — oscillating between the adulthood of heavy petting and the childlike innocence of play:

One simply lost oneself in that fantastic land, which they regarded as their own. The sunlight flashed and flickered on the aspen leaves, the bindweed curled toward the tree branches and they two curled toward each other as well, just a little frightened. They would kiss and embrace on an iron catwalk stretched between two pipes over a black stream. They would smudge up Eva’s blouse, pressing against one another, until they couldn’t tell where those snapping sounds were coming from — whether from the pipes below them, or the pipes within their bodies. And then again, a few steps apart from one another, to leap from the concrete pylon — she into his arms, there in the wood that figured on no maps, but all the same was full of birdsong and breathed its cool exhalations; where the ground was covered with nettles and burdock and birches stood naked, like skin suddenly revealed from beneath clothes. There was no end to it. Martin, knackered with standing, couldn’t stop; Eva, tousled and manhandled by Martin, would fall on him, again and again. From the elderberry above them protruded an old winch, on the rusty drum of which there remained a few twists of wire rope, its end slithering on the grass like a snake.

It is an Edenic scene — underscored (not overbearingly) by Eva’s name — but that cable, ‘slithering on the grass like a snake,’ seems a foretelling of doom. And indeed, before too long, the couple are to be expelled from Eden — through the agency of ‘Eve’ no less — who blindsides Martin by suddenly breaking up with him.

Is Martin’s tale, like that of Adam himself, the story of us all? It’s hard to be certain. Yet Balabán hints at just so much in Chapter 33. There, the two former young lovers find themselves, by coincidence, together in London. When Eva rings up Martin, he sets a rendezvous for Lambeth station, something that makes little sense — is it the proximity of the old Battersea power station, familiar to them from the album cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals? — until he explains to her:

‘You know, there exists this unprovable and yet irrefutable legend, that somewhere in the garden of one of these old houses the Lake poet Wordsworth surprised William Blake and his wife, seated on a garden bench beneath the woodbine, as naked as Adam and Eve. The Lake poet supposedly turned aside his chaste eyes, but then he kept flapping his gums about it so, that it entered into every literary history.’

So, we might say, just as the Blakes’ Edenic idyll was sullied and ruined by Wordsworth, so were Martin and Eva expelled from their Eden by the world. You can’t escape the surrounding world; it penetrates every little Eden and ruins it. Those little boats of ours, bravely breasting the billows of an inimical world, are listing, punctured and cracked, the waters of the world constantly seeping into our dangerously heavy ballast.

Where Was the Angel Going? is a book about displacement — no Archimedian pun intended. While the main character, Martin, is the eternal outsider, much the same can be said for any of the main characters. Monika, his lover, is a Czech girl with slanted eyes — the fruit of her mother’s dalliance with an Oriental colleague while away on a stipend in America. She, as her half-sister puts it, is ‘responsible’ for the breakup of a family, although she’s paid a high price for it — being ‘hidden’ as much as possible from the outside world by her otherwise loving mother, and constantly having to bear the questioning eyes of those who look upon her as something ‘other.’ Even Martin cannot withhold his curiosity, a cruel trait in his character that, oddly enough, humanises him for the reader. He is sinner as well as sinned against; whoever the titular ‘angel’ may be, it is certainly not Martin Vrána.

Martin’s eldest brother, Petr Jr, searches for what he lacks in West Germany. Perhaps he alone of all the searchers finds some semblance of his particular lost Eden. Tomáš, the middle brother, a photographer, must live in Prague, and even though his mother can’t understand why this must be so, she herself idealises her life in the countryside, that period from before she got married and moved to industrialised Ostrava.

As the story plays out in the milieu of a family of committed Evangelicals, it might be that we are dealing with an allegory of the homo peregrinus, underscored by St Augustine in his famous dictum ‘our heart is restless, until it rests in Thee.’ But it must be remembered that the majority of Martin’s story, at least those parts of it narrated as recollection, is set in the frustrating years of Communist Czechoslovakia, where Gustav Husák ‘gazed at us’ from his official portraits with those censorious eyes of his and that somewhat sadistically pursed lip, like a broad pretending to be a guy. He too was a great mystic, of a sort, who knew that his material face, that trembling map of aged liver spots, didn’t really exist — that only those silver icons of it glowing everywhere did — those dusty holy pictures of him hung in each and every classroom and office (20).

And so, it is a generational sense of displacement, not merely a confessional one. All of Martin’s chums shared it, fantasising in a cheap sci-fi way of a lost world where they ‘really’ belong, and from which they have been transported to this ‘prison planet’ for some crime they can’t remember having committed:

We drank ourselves stupid in taverns in Prague, Olomouc and Ostrava; we blushed in shame in our schools on account of all that Marxist idiocy, we goofed off at night, and, half-joking, half-serious, we told one another stories of how somewhere in the cosmos there were happier places — maybe on Jupiter or in the Pleiades — and that people are transported to the planet Earth for punishment. Part of the punishment is their ignorance of the fact. We’d forgotten that we’d forgotten. We’re all in a penal colony, though we don’t know it. We’d say that somewhere our letters must be hidden, in among the pages of old books, under the tiles in church, in boxes in the pillars of old bridges. Somewhere, the message I wrote to myself before they wiped my memory clean is hidden. Before they brainwashed me. There is my real name; there I could find out what it was I did, and what I’m being punished for. How I got here, and how I might get out (28).