A few hours after my experiment with Lucy's mysterious vitamin, I walked into Prague's Central Post Office and looked around furtively at the morose elderly sourpusses patiently waiting in long straggling lines. Eventually I figured out which line to join and after an hour or two managed to send off a very small package to a friend of mine in Kalifornia. The package contained one of Lucy's remarkable pills and a short note asking my friend Luke Leazy just exactly why these vitamins made me feel so good. And it wasn't just me, everyone else at the University of Truth and Justice felt good too: Lucy had been dispensing her vitamins like a little ministering angel to all and sundry, besides which they were also freely available at the reception desk and at the various bars and cafes in the building. Everyone at the university was on them, from the eminent Professor Masaryk down to the cleaning ladies, all the students and staff, everyone, with the exception of my formidable boss, crusty old Otto Hell. The environment at the university was scarily sunny, especially for a building crammed with Central European intellectuals. Not that I had anything against all this peace and love: it's just that I like to know what drugs I'm on and I figured Sleaze could find out.
I first met Luke when I was fifteen. I had just arrived at boarding school in New Hampshire, very tired from an all night flight from San Francisco and a long slow bus ride from Boston. It was a beautiful fall day, the kind of day you can only get in New England or on acid, the sky a heart-breaking ethereal deep blue and the air was so cool and clear that it made me dizzy. Little white wooden houses and stores lined the main street of the little town and I wondered where the school was. I dragged my heavy suitcases up a hill and beneath me I saw an expanse of old brick buildings with marble porticos and vivid swaths of emerald lawn. I had arrived. Young people in beautifully cut jackets and white dresses milled around everywhere. Someone directed me to my dormitory and I looked around the dark hallway, apprehensively awaiting my first real encounter with the sophisticates, the bored habitues of this swanky school. Suddenly, from around a corner, a compact boy of about my age with crisp curly brown hair appeared. My immediate impression was of neatness, of an impossible maturity, a watchful and intimidating self-control. The boy frowned slightly and then broke into a wide open smile that died as quickly as it had appeared. "You look lost." The boy's words were as crisply enunciated as his hair. "I'm Luke. I know who you are. Drummond, that's the house master, has been talking about you for days. He's a pompous asshole. My room is back here. I share with Jesus. Come and meet him. I'll make some tea. Do you smoke dope?"
And then a few minutes later, I was sitting on a Mexican rug in a big room hung with tapestries, two wooden desks under big bay windows, bunk beds in one corner and a big bookshelf stacked with books in the other corner, and weapons mounted on one wall, scimitars, numchuks, air pistols, sharpened stakes... The arsenal did not look like just decoration. The room gave me the same feeling as Luke's appearance: a watchful and meticulous neatness that had nothing to do with conformism. Luke's room-mate was a bulky South American with long shiny black hair and a pockmarked round face. He introduced himself in a mild slightly accented voice and with a kind smile. "Jesus Guevara. I am from Peru. We've heard all about you. Drummond has been boasting about the new Mongolian boy who will add to Bendover's diversity. Ah, tea. Thank you, Sleaze. Would you like to smoke some dope?" Jesus asked politely, bringing out a large hookah and a little plastic bag filled with grass. Luke pulled out two rolled up towels from a closet, with practiced movements dampened them under a tap, tossed one over to Jesus who caught it neatly, and then tucked the other towel tidily under the door, heightening my impression that I was in a fortress, a safe area in a war zone.
"I've never smoked any," I confessed. "But I'd like to. Thank you. I hadn't expected this kind of... welcome."
Jesus and Luke looked at each other and burst out laughing. There was a palpable closeness between them which I found appealing. "You'll go through the usual Bendover induction for the next two weeks," Luke said. Jesus carefully loaded the hookah with dope, set fire to it, inhaled deeply, held his breath for an eternity, held the damp towel to his mouth, and then exhaled silently. I watched the procedure admiringly. Jesus loaded the hookah again and handed it to me. "But this is our special induction. For people we think we might like."
And so I encountered the counter-culture on the very first day I arrived at Bendover, a small clique of iconoclasts who had no intention of joining the mainstream of the smart rich kids from good families who lived on 5th Avenue and Nob Hill and played on the lacrosse team and did their homework and only got drunk covertly on weekends and on other nights sat drinking chocolate frappes together talking about which Ivy League university to apply to and whether there was more steady money in investment banking or in medicine; but the rebels felt a stronger pull in their blood, an urge to test the limits, to break the rules, and they did break the rules, often stupidly, like Tim who once got caught spending the night in his girlfriend's room when he was already on probation, or through some demonic urge to self-destruction like Johnny, my best friend and the most naturally talented writer I have ever known, who got thrown out of school for coming out of the dormitory during a surprise fire alarm in the middle of the night with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other and coolly asking an infuriated Drummond if he had been born a hypocrite or if it was an acquired skill, why there was whisky on his breath and a pipe in his hand if alcohol and tobacco were all that bad, or through simple fatigue, like Steele, who just got worn out from the rigors of adolescent infatuation and long nights talking and writing his masterpiece, an epic poem in rhyming Greek hexameters on the sad fate that awaited Drummond's stupid black labrador bitch if it barked just once more outside Steele's basement window at seven in the morning, and a brain that worked too fast for his bewildered teachers who eventually told his diplomat father that Steele belonged either in an institution for emotionally troubled teenagers or in a military academy and that his education and everyone else's was suffering while he remained at Bendover; but other rebels were either less stupid or less clever or maybe just more careful and so Jesus, Luke, and I all managed to evade Drummond's stern scrutiny and we all graduated cum laude from Bendover and went to good colleges after years of deliberately and repeatedly breaking every single rule and never drinking chocolate frappes.
Luke's family was from old New England Puritan stock. I stayed with them one Christmas vacation and I came to understand that there was really no contradiction at all between Luke's self-control and his disregard for established rules: as a good Puritan should, Luke did what he considered rational and good for his soul. After Bendover he went to Yale and studied chemistry, then moved to the West Coast and did a Ph.D. in psycho-pharmacology at Berkeley, and then became a drug dealer. I was in contact with him only intermittently during the years since the only times I saw him were during my brief visits to Kalifornia, but I remained impressed by his essential neatness. There were no fuzzy edges in Luke's world, no hazy mists left behind by the many powerful chemicals with which he experimented, no intellectual shadows marred the precise crispness of his thought. People did silly things because their bodies and brains were warped by the ingestion of the wrong substances produced and regulated for maximum profit and social control by large companies and government agencies run by men who were themselves warped by preservatives, sedatives, laxatives, stimulants, anti-depressants, analgesics, and other dangerous chemicals, Luke thought, and in his own reserved and unemotional fashion, sitting in his clean underground laboratory, calmly fitting together molecules which would forever alter the brains of those who took his sleek designer drugs, Luke was trying to change the world for the better.
Like Xox?
After mailing Lucy's vitamin to Sleaze I wandered aimlessly around Wenceslas Square, elbow to elbow with tourists from every European country, so easily mocked because they behaved so true to type, Bavarians whose ruddy flesh, fed on pork swilled down with beer, nearly burst through ruddy sausage skins; throngs of teenage Spanish chiquitas whose harsh sibilant speech matched their thick tanned hides; tall Scandinavian couples loping along, hand in hand, bovine blue eyes glazed in trusting confusion even after their pockets had been deftly picked for the third or fourth time by one of the swarthy street Arabs in patched leather jackets, loitering in packs at the entrances to the dark passages that led off the square, calling each other dirty names to fill the time until the next unguarded wallet came along just asking to be lifted; a mousy English couple of indeterminate age shuffling along stiffly, the husband looking around vaguely, wiping his spectacles on the lapel of his blue and white zipped windbreaker which matched so well with his brown synthetic trousers and his wife's flowery dress, poor dear, so staid, so dowdy next to the chic black suit of the well-preserved Parisian lady stepping along with her rather younger but equally well-groomed companion showering icicles of disdain with every glance of his frosty grey eyes; and then, of course, there were the Amerikans, hordes of them on their annual pilgrimage to see Europe, now bigger, better, since the Wall came down and the word went around the grapevine of the travel agencies and the tour buses moved freely east on the Autobahn, and the families came to swarm, noisily gawking at the statue of King Wenceslas proudly astride his horse, some dim comprehension of history distending their mouths into a gasp of happy surprise that the money they had saved up for this trip had not been spent in vain even if these Czechoslovaks did speak a weird language and were clearly all alcoholics who drank beer at breakfast instead of orange juice or milk, and where was the nearest McDonalds anyway?, questions provoking a superior smirk on the tanned face of the nearest backpacker doing Europe on two dollars a day, an initiate in the arcana of wilful penury, secretly hoping that the two chicks near him would look up from their Tough Guide and just ask him where to go and what to see and maybe the cute blonde would dump her fat freckled friend with the plain earnest face and big round glasses and go hiking in Romania with him instead... I stopped seeing individual faces and could see only types and I knew it was time for me to go to a cafe and hide.
"Hey! How are ya? Good to see ya!" An Amerikan with long blond hair and a vaguely familiar face greeted me heartily. I recognized his type but I couldn't quite place this specific specimen. But then he announced that `Manny' should be here soon, and I remembered: I had met him soon after my arrival in Prague, sitting with the radical philosopher Immanuel, talking about environmental catastrophe and the end of the world. He was Bob, a liberal, and he ran an English language newspaper catering to Prague's Amerikan expatriates. There were no other chairs free so I reluctantly sat down with Bob and his companion. "Lemme introduce my friend, Benny."
"My real name is Benito," an impossibly handsome young man said, smiling, exposing two rows of perfect white teeth. Very tall, broad-shouldered, tanned, thick long eyelashes obscuring liquid olive eyes, Benito was the epitome of a male beauty I had previously seen only in the airbrushed pages of men's magazines. "People used to call me Benny at Santa Cruz but now I'm getting in touch with my roots. I am Benito! And I am a wop!" he declared with a pleasant loud laugh. I liked him immediately.
Oddly enough, so did Immanuel, despite his professed aversion to surfers. He showed up a few minutes later holding hands with a pretty woman with short silky black hair that nicely set off the high color of her cheeks. As I soon discovered, Divka was always running from one appointment to another. While Man and Bob and Benito bonded with loud mutual insults, Divka and I indulged in the luxuries of polite conversation and hot chocolate laden with lots of whipped cream.
"You're Czech? But your accent sounds Arabic…"
"Well, Arabic was the last language I was working with. I am a linguist by training," Divka explained shyly. "Academic work doesn't pay so well here, so I also teach Czech to foreigners. I'm trying to teach him," she pointed accusingly at Immanuel, "but it is not easy. He just wants to hold hands all the time."
I grinned, recalling Immanuel's declaration that the only justifiable ethical response to apocalypse was to hold the other's hand. "He's a philosopher," I said soothingly. "He's just putting his theories into practice. Why were you working with Arabic?"
"Well, an old friend asked me to help him a little in this difficult period..." Divka squinted vaguely at her cup, took a dainty sip, and made a face. I silently agreed: besides leaving a gritty bitter residue on the tongue, the chocolate content was abysmally low. Life in Prague had its drawbacks, especially in the finer details of creature comfort.
"What kind of help?"
"Well, I have to travel all the time."
"Why do you have to travel all the time?" I felt like I was pulling teeth.
"I wish I had never agreed," Divka said mysteriously. "But Wenceslas was so insistent and then, you know, it was just after the revolution and I felt that I should do something to help. So now I have to go somewhere with him almost every week. I don't know why he likes travelling so much. Maybe it's just because he has so many friends everywhere from his dissident days and he likes to see them again. But I have to go along with him and translate and most of the meetings are so boring! I will have to stop. But then he would get upset and I don't want to hurt his feelings. He cries so easily. Oh, I don't know." She shook her head. I stared at her.
"Divka, are you telling me that you are the President's interpreter?"
"Well, he's known me since I was a little girl and he has to have someone with him whom he trusts," she said defensively.
"Don't you like travelling?"
"That's the thing. I really like to meet people from different places. It's so interesting. And I must admit that I have met a lot of interesting people because of Wenceslas. The amusing ones are those he knew before he became President. The heads of state and the other official people are so boring. Also I really hate all the protocol. Red carpets and limousines and luxury suites in hotels and security guards and you can't go for a walk and you can't just have a coffee somewhere nice and quiet. I think Wenceslas misses his privacy also. He likes to talk about how much privacy he had when the Communists put him in jail. Sometimes he says that he wishes he could put himself in a nice cell in solitary confinement. Just now and again, so he could relax a bit."
"All those servants. It must be very difficult."
"Oh, but that's not the worst of it. The poor man likes drinking and gambling and smoking smelly cigars and getting into fights in bars and chasing girls and raising hell, and now he can't do any of these things. His guards won't let him go outside the castle with his friends. And most of the rooms in the castle are so gloomy, you know, big formal rooms with moulded ceilings and uncomfortable furniture. So Wenceslas and a few of his old dissident friends who became ministers sit together all cramped up in a little unused lavatory they discovered in the attic. His friends insist that Wenceslas has to sit on the toilet seat because he is, after all, the president. And they sit there all night long drinking plum brandy and talking sadly about how relaxed life was back in the good old days when they were dissidents and they could at least go to pubs. And then he has to give all these speeches to the nation and pretend to be so responsible and moral when actually he's got this terrible hangover and a splitting headache. That's why he looks so worn out on television these days. Don't tell anyone," Divka said anxiously.
"Whom would I tell?" I shrugged. "You're almost the only Czech I've spoken to since I came to Prague."
"What are you doing here?"
"I work at the University of Truth and Justice."
"Is that Xox's university? I just got a letter a few days ago from Professor Masaryk asking me to come to a meeting there tomorrow. Something about starting a Department of Culture. Is that right?"
"Yes. But how did you get involved with the university?"
"It's Blodgett Scrotum's fault," Divka said crossly. "I don't like that man. He told me that a woman's place is in the kitchen and not in the library and that I should have had at least three babies by now. I wanted to arm wrestle him but Wenceslas told me that I had to be polite because Scrotum is so influential in British politics. Anyway, I think Scrotum must have told someone at this University of Truth and Justice about me, maybe this thin man with the glasses and the shaky hands who looks like a vulture..."
"Terence Killjoy-Yuck," I confirmed.
"Yes, well, so now I'm supposed to be on some of your overseeing committees. Did Immanuel tell you that he got a job at your university? Jiri Novak told him to come to this meeting."
"Do you know Professor Novak?"
Divka grinned ruefully. "I was married to him for two years."
"Oh, I'm sorry..."
"No, I'm sorry," she said. "Jiri is a nice man and he is very smart but he has the emotions of a three month old baby. He sees a breast and he grabs for it. Any breast. That reminds me. I must go to a meeting on breast cancer. Wenceslas is making a speech. I have to tell him not to smoke cigars at the meeting" She drank the rest of her hot chocolate and stood up. I watched her sweep away with long strides, clearly in a hurry to get to her next appointment. I liked her hair and I was glad to have finally met some local person after spending almost a month in Prague. The University of Truth and Justice seemed an impenetrable bubble in which I was trapped: a luxurious bubble filled with interesting people but disconnected from the outside world. I sometimes felt like a guinea pig in a mad scientist's laboratory, and I had to wonder afresh about Xox's motivations in setting up the university. Fear billionaires bringing gifts...
I first met Luke when I was fifteen. I had just arrived at boarding school in New Hampshire, very tired from an all night flight from San Francisco and a long slow bus ride from Boston. It was a beautiful fall day, the kind of day you can only get in New England or on acid, the sky a heart-breaking ethereal deep blue and the air was so cool and clear that it made me dizzy. Little white wooden houses and stores lined the main street of the little town and I wondered where the school was. I dragged my heavy suitcases up a hill and beneath me I saw an expanse of old brick buildings with marble porticos and vivid swaths of emerald lawn. I had arrived. Young people in beautifully cut jackets and white dresses milled around everywhere. Someone directed me to my dormitory and I looked around the dark hallway, apprehensively awaiting my first real encounter with the sophisticates, the bored habitues of this swanky school. Suddenly, from around a corner, a compact boy of about my age with crisp curly brown hair appeared. My immediate impression was of neatness, of an impossible maturity, a watchful and intimidating self-control. The boy frowned slightly and then broke into a wide open smile that died as quickly as it had appeared. "You look lost." The boy's words were as crisply enunciated as his hair. "I'm Luke. I know who you are. Drummond, that's the house master, has been talking about you for days. He's a pompous asshole. My room is back here. I share with Jesus. Come and meet him. I'll make some tea. Do you smoke dope?"
And then a few minutes later, I was sitting on a Mexican rug in a big room hung with tapestries, two wooden desks under big bay windows, bunk beds in one corner and a big bookshelf stacked with books in the other corner, and weapons mounted on one wall, scimitars, numchuks, air pistols, sharpened stakes... The arsenal did not look like just decoration. The room gave me the same feeling as Luke's appearance: a watchful and meticulous neatness that had nothing to do with conformism. Luke's room-mate was a bulky South American with long shiny black hair and a pockmarked round face. He introduced himself in a mild slightly accented voice and with a kind smile. "Jesus Guevara. I am from Peru. We've heard all about you. Drummond has been boasting about the new Mongolian boy who will add to Bendover's diversity. Ah, tea. Thank you, Sleaze. Would you like to smoke some dope?" Jesus asked politely, bringing out a large hookah and a little plastic bag filled with grass. Luke pulled out two rolled up towels from a closet, with practiced movements dampened them under a tap, tossed one over to Jesus who caught it neatly, and then tucked the other towel tidily under the door, heightening my impression that I was in a fortress, a safe area in a war zone.
"I've never smoked any," I confessed. "But I'd like to. Thank you. I hadn't expected this kind of... welcome."
Jesus and Luke looked at each other and burst out laughing. There was a palpable closeness between them which I found appealing. "You'll go through the usual Bendover induction for the next two weeks," Luke said. Jesus carefully loaded the hookah with dope, set fire to it, inhaled deeply, held his breath for an eternity, held the damp towel to his mouth, and then exhaled silently. I watched the procedure admiringly. Jesus loaded the hookah again and handed it to me. "But this is our special induction. For people we think we might like."
And so I encountered the counter-culture on the very first day I arrived at Bendover, a small clique of iconoclasts who had no intention of joining the mainstream of the smart rich kids from good families who lived on 5th Avenue and Nob Hill and played on the lacrosse team and did their homework and only got drunk covertly on weekends and on other nights sat drinking chocolate frappes together talking about which Ivy League university to apply to and whether there was more steady money in investment banking or in medicine; but the rebels felt a stronger pull in their blood, an urge to test the limits, to break the rules, and they did break the rules, often stupidly, like Tim who once got caught spending the night in his girlfriend's room when he was already on probation, or through some demonic urge to self-destruction like Johnny, my best friend and the most naturally talented writer I have ever known, who got thrown out of school for coming out of the dormitory during a surprise fire alarm in the middle of the night with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other and coolly asking an infuriated Drummond if he had been born a hypocrite or if it was an acquired skill, why there was whisky on his breath and a pipe in his hand if alcohol and tobacco were all that bad, or through simple fatigue, like Steele, who just got worn out from the rigors of adolescent infatuation and long nights talking and writing his masterpiece, an epic poem in rhyming Greek hexameters on the sad fate that awaited Drummond's stupid black labrador bitch if it barked just once more outside Steele's basement window at seven in the morning, and a brain that worked too fast for his bewildered teachers who eventually told his diplomat father that Steele belonged either in an institution for emotionally troubled teenagers or in a military academy and that his education and everyone else's was suffering while he remained at Bendover; but other rebels were either less stupid or less clever or maybe just more careful and so Jesus, Luke, and I all managed to evade Drummond's stern scrutiny and we all graduated cum laude from Bendover and went to good colleges after years of deliberately and repeatedly breaking every single rule and never drinking chocolate frappes.
Luke's family was from old New England Puritan stock. I stayed with them one Christmas vacation and I came to understand that there was really no contradiction at all between Luke's self-control and his disregard for established rules: as a good Puritan should, Luke did what he considered rational and good for his soul. After Bendover he went to Yale and studied chemistry, then moved to the West Coast and did a Ph.D. in psycho-pharmacology at Berkeley, and then became a drug dealer. I was in contact with him only intermittently during the years since the only times I saw him were during my brief visits to Kalifornia, but I remained impressed by his essential neatness. There were no fuzzy edges in Luke's world, no hazy mists left behind by the many powerful chemicals with which he experimented, no intellectual shadows marred the precise crispness of his thought. People did silly things because their bodies and brains were warped by the ingestion of the wrong substances produced and regulated for maximum profit and social control by large companies and government agencies run by men who were themselves warped by preservatives, sedatives, laxatives, stimulants, anti-depressants, analgesics, and other dangerous chemicals, Luke thought, and in his own reserved and unemotional fashion, sitting in his clean underground laboratory, calmly fitting together molecules which would forever alter the brains of those who took his sleek designer drugs, Luke was trying to change the world for the better.
Like Xox?
After mailing Lucy's vitamin to Sleaze I wandered aimlessly around Wenceslas Square, elbow to elbow with tourists from every European country, so easily mocked because they behaved so true to type, Bavarians whose ruddy flesh, fed on pork swilled down with beer, nearly burst through ruddy sausage skins; throngs of teenage Spanish chiquitas whose harsh sibilant speech matched their thick tanned hides; tall Scandinavian couples loping along, hand in hand, bovine blue eyes glazed in trusting confusion even after their pockets had been deftly picked for the third or fourth time by one of the swarthy street Arabs in patched leather jackets, loitering in packs at the entrances to the dark passages that led off the square, calling each other dirty names to fill the time until the next unguarded wallet came along just asking to be lifted; a mousy English couple of indeterminate age shuffling along stiffly, the husband looking around vaguely, wiping his spectacles on the lapel of his blue and white zipped windbreaker which matched so well with his brown synthetic trousers and his wife's flowery dress, poor dear, so staid, so dowdy next to the chic black suit of the well-preserved Parisian lady stepping along with her rather younger but equally well-groomed companion showering icicles of disdain with every glance of his frosty grey eyes; and then, of course, there were the Amerikans, hordes of them on their annual pilgrimage to see Europe, now bigger, better, since the Wall came down and the word went around the grapevine of the travel agencies and the tour buses moved freely east on the Autobahn, and the families came to swarm, noisily gawking at the statue of King Wenceslas proudly astride his horse, some dim comprehension of history distending their mouths into a gasp of happy surprise that the money they had saved up for this trip had not been spent in vain even if these Czechoslovaks did speak a weird language and were clearly all alcoholics who drank beer at breakfast instead of orange juice or milk, and where was the nearest McDonalds anyway?, questions provoking a superior smirk on the tanned face of the nearest backpacker doing Europe on two dollars a day, an initiate in the arcana of wilful penury, secretly hoping that the two chicks near him would look up from their Tough Guide and just ask him where to go and what to see and maybe the cute blonde would dump her fat freckled friend with the plain earnest face and big round glasses and go hiking in Romania with him instead... I stopped seeing individual faces and could see only types and I knew it was time for me to go to a cafe and hide.
"Hey! How are ya? Good to see ya!" An Amerikan with long blond hair and a vaguely familiar face greeted me heartily. I recognized his type but I couldn't quite place this specific specimen. But then he announced that `Manny' should be here soon, and I remembered: I had met him soon after my arrival in Prague, sitting with the radical philosopher Immanuel, talking about environmental catastrophe and the end of the world. He was Bob, a liberal, and he ran an English language newspaper catering to Prague's Amerikan expatriates. There were no other chairs free so I reluctantly sat down with Bob and his companion. "Lemme introduce my friend, Benny."
"My real name is Benito," an impossibly handsome young man said, smiling, exposing two rows of perfect white teeth. Very tall, broad-shouldered, tanned, thick long eyelashes obscuring liquid olive eyes, Benito was the epitome of a male beauty I had previously seen only in the airbrushed pages of men's magazines. "People used to call me Benny at Santa Cruz but now I'm getting in touch with my roots. I am Benito! And I am a wop!" he declared with a pleasant loud laugh. I liked him immediately.
Oddly enough, so did Immanuel, despite his professed aversion to surfers. He showed up a few minutes later holding hands with a pretty woman with short silky black hair that nicely set off the high color of her cheeks. As I soon discovered, Divka was always running from one appointment to another. While Man and Bob and Benito bonded with loud mutual insults, Divka and I indulged in the luxuries of polite conversation and hot chocolate laden with lots of whipped cream.
"You're Czech? But your accent sounds Arabic…"
"Well, Arabic was the last language I was working with. I am a linguist by training," Divka explained shyly. "Academic work doesn't pay so well here, so I also teach Czech to foreigners. I'm trying to teach him," she pointed accusingly at Immanuel, "but it is not easy. He just wants to hold hands all the time."
I grinned, recalling Immanuel's declaration that the only justifiable ethical response to apocalypse was to hold the other's hand. "He's a philosopher," I said soothingly. "He's just putting his theories into practice. Why were you working with Arabic?"
"Well, an old friend asked me to help him a little in this difficult period..." Divka squinted vaguely at her cup, took a dainty sip, and made a face. I silently agreed: besides leaving a gritty bitter residue on the tongue, the chocolate content was abysmally low. Life in Prague had its drawbacks, especially in the finer details of creature comfort.
"What kind of help?"
"Well, I have to travel all the time."
"Why do you have to travel all the time?" I felt like I was pulling teeth.
"I wish I had never agreed," Divka said mysteriously. "But Wenceslas was so insistent and then, you know, it was just after the revolution and I felt that I should do something to help. So now I have to go somewhere with him almost every week. I don't know why he likes travelling so much. Maybe it's just because he has so many friends everywhere from his dissident days and he likes to see them again. But I have to go along with him and translate and most of the meetings are so boring! I will have to stop. But then he would get upset and I don't want to hurt his feelings. He cries so easily. Oh, I don't know." She shook her head. I stared at her.
"Divka, are you telling me that you are the President's interpreter?"
"Well, he's known me since I was a little girl and he has to have someone with him whom he trusts," she said defensively.
"Don't you like travelling?"
"That's the thing. I really like to meet people from different places. It's so interesting. And I must admit that I have met a lot of interesting people because of Wenceslas. The amusing ones are those he knew before he became President. The heads of state and the other official people are so boring. Also I really hate all the protocol. Red carpets and limousines and luxury suites in hotels and security guards and you can't go for a walk and you can't just have a coffee somewhere nice and quiet. I think Wenceslas misses his privacy also. He likes to talk about how much privacy he had when the Communists put him in jail. Sometimes he says that he wishes he could put himself in a nice cell in solitary confinement. Just now and again, so he could relax a bit."
"All those servants. It must be very difficult."
"Oh, but that's not the worst of it. The poor man likes drinking and gambling and smoking smelly cigars and getting into fights in bars and chasing girls and raising hell, and now he can't do any of these things. His guards won't let him go outside the castle with his friends. And most of the rooms in the castle are so gloomy, you know, big formal rooms with moulded ceilings and uncomfortable furniture. So Wenceslas and a few of his old dissident friends who became ministers sit together all cramped up in a little unused lavatory they discovered in the attic. His friends insist that Wenceslas has to sit on the toilet seat because he is, after all, the president. And they sit there all night long drinking plum brandy and talking sadly about how relaxed life was back in the good old days when they were dissidents and they could at least go to pubs. And then he has to give all these speeches to the nation and pretend to be so responsible and moral when actually he's got this terrible hangover and a splitting headache. That's why he looks so worn out on television these days. Don't tell anyone," Divka said anxiously.
"Whom would I tell?" I shrugged. "You're almost the only Czech I've spoken to since I came to Prague."
"What are you doing here?"
"I work at the University of Truth and Justice."
"Is that Xox's university? I just got a letter a few days ago from Professor Masaryk asking me to come to a meeting there tomorrow. Something about starting a Department of Culture. Is that right?"
"Yes. But how did you get involved with the university?"
"It's Blodgett Scrotum's fault," Divka said crossly. "I don't like that man. He told me that a woman's place is in the kitchen and not in the library and that I should have had at least three babies by now. I wanted to arm wrestle him but Wenceslas told me that I had to be polite because Scrotum is so influential in British politics. Anyway, I think Scrotum must have told someone at this University of Truth and Justice about me, maybe this thin man with the glasses and the shaky hands who looks like a vulture..."
"Terence Killjoy-Yuck," I confirmed.
"Yes, well, so now I'm supposed to be on some of your overseeing committees. Did Immanuel tell you that he got a job at your university? Jiri Novak told him to come to this meeting."
"Do you know Professor Novak?"
Divka grinned ruefully. "I was married to him for two years."
"Oh, I'm sorry..."
"No, I'm sorry," she said. "Jiri is a nice man and he is very smart but he has the emotions of a three month old baby. He sees a breast and he grabs for it. Any breast. That reminds me. I must go to a meeting on breast cancer. Wenceslas is making a speech. I have to tell him not to smoke cigars at the meeting" She drank the rest of her hot chocolate and stood up. I watched her sweep away with long strides, clearly in a hurry to get to her next appointment. I liked her hair and I was glad to have finally met some local person after spending almost a month in Prague. The University of Truth and Justice seemed an impenetrable bubble in which I was trapped: a luxurious bubble filled with interesting people but disconnected from the outside world. I sometimes felt like a guinea pig in a mad scientist's laboratory, and I had to wonder afresh about Xox's motivations in setting up the university. Fear billionaires bringing gifts...
No comments:
Post a Comment