The Journey. Sergio Pitol
as the fortune-teller in Un ballo in maschera. We applauded her to death. Much more than the soprano who sang Amelia, who incidentally was also perfect;” or “I just arrived from the airport. I went to welcome Carmen, who told me that it seemed small relative to this ancient city’s importance.” A restaurant, a theater, the airport. Nothing, in retrospect: twaddle. In contrast, in the same diaries I go on and on about a) the noxious atmosphere I breathed in the foreign ministry; b) the frequent visitors I received from Mexico, Spain, Poland, and elsewhere; what my friends say, what they do, the topics we discuss; c) my physical ailments, medications, doctors, clinics, periods of convalescence in magnificent spas; d) my readings, to which, perhaps, the majority of the space is devoted. During those years, I returned fully to Slavic and Germanic literature, consistent with the history and creation of Czechoslovakia. I reviewed with almost maniacal voraciousness the authors I had admired since adolescence, and those years in Prague strengthened in a strange, elusive but persistent way, my knowledge of the Czechs. I read all of Ripellino—his books on Russian literature, the Czech anthology, his essays could all be included in the title of one of his extraordinary books: Saggi in forma di ballate [Essays in the Form of Ballads]; the Russian formalists, starting with Shklovsky, whose Theory of Prose I studied assiduously; Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, which played an extensive role in the novels I wrote in Prague; and massive amounts of Chekhov and Gogol, whom I read and reread at every hour and in every place. During those six years, I also did an extensive review from the Middle Ages to the present of the literature of the German language, the most historically influential in the lands of Bohemia and Moravia, especially its Austrian variant. I found myself closer to Kafka than in any previous reading. As I frequented his daily haunts, I felt closer to his visions. In my youth, my enthusiasm for Kafka transformed, as happened to my entire generation, into a true passion, with all the exclusivity, visceralness, and intransigence that implies; it was equivalent to the first moment in which one feels overpowered by a spirit that he recognizes as undoubtedly superior, the only one capable of explaining in depth a time that will never disappoint us. In Prague, his role grew immensely. It was not merely a matter of providing the scope of an era, but of knowing the whole universe, its rules, its secrets, its ways, its purpose. The signs for knowing the answer are hidden in his writing; they must be sought in earnest. I set my sights on two other fascinating figures: Thomas Bernhard and Ingeborg Bachmann, both Austrians.
The hatred of the Russians was intense, monolithic, visceral; and no fissure, not even the slightest nuance, was allowed. It extended, albeit with less intensity, to the other socialist countries for having collaborated in the military occupation that cut short the experiment known as “socialism with a human face” in Prague in 1968. When I arrived to assume my post at the embassy, fifteen years had passed since this despicable event, but the memory of the tanks in the streets, the days of humiliation and powerlessness, the absurd argument that the Czechs and Slovaks had requested assistance to put an end to the enemies of socialism redoubled the population’s anger rather than assuage it. In the city center, there were two spacious Soviet bookstores always teeming with people. But no Czech or Slovak would set foot in them. The feverish horde that crowded inside to reach the shelves before others emptied them with exorbitant purchases consisted of Russian tourists or travelers from the other Soviet republics, who as soon as they arrived in the city, rushed to bookstores to acquire art books and literary editions that in their country sold out immediately, due to reduced printings of works that differed from the official canon, or those that touched on “dangerous” topics, which in Moscow could only be purchased with hard currency from the West, which when purchased in Prague with Czech korunas were a steal. Appearing in these collections were Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksey Remizov, Andrei Platonov, Isaak Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Ivan Bunin, Boris Pilnyak, Andrei Bely, and other writers persecuted by Stalinism—enemies of the people, cosmopolitans who had turned their back on the nation, the recalcitrant bourgeois, those who were executed, those who spent long years in the Gulag; others, who were treated better, who lost the right to publish their work during long periods of their life, those who began to reemerge after the death of Stalin, were vindicated and over time became the greatest artists of their century, literary classics, and notable examples of human dignity. Russians came to Prague in the morning and returned to Moscow at night, just to purchase dozens of books they would then sell in Moscow or Leningrad at prices so exorbitant that they could make a profit even after traveling by plane. Near my embassy offices there was an exclusively Soviet press office, which no one ever entered. From time to time I would pause in front of its windows and not once saw anyone buy a newspaper or magazine. On television, one could easily watch a Soviet channel with less banal programs than the national ones, and I would even venture to say less ideologically rigid. As always happens, of course, to win the trust of superiors, these programs had to brim with ideological zeal, be more Catholic than the Pope. Once a week, on Saturdays, I occasionally watched masterfully directed and acted plays on this channel, to which I had grown accustomed from when I lived in Moscow. But if I mentioned it in the presence of my Czech friends, they grew silent, pretending not to have heard my comments, as if they suddenly suspected a trap.
The absence of written references to my day-to-day contact with Prague discouraged me. On the other hand, in one of my notebooks, I found an envelope with notes on a short trip I had made to the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev experiment. As I read these notes, I recalled moments of irritation and moments of pure emotion, constantly interspersed with each other, during the two weeks I spent in the bosom of that empire that had taken centuries to forge and whose impending collapse neither I nor anyone else could foresee. I got the idea to rework those notes, to set aside the texts from my diaries and to mention briefly, by way of background, some situations about my experience in the period in which I worked as a cultural advisor in Moscow.
Upon arriving in Prague, I looked for a Russian teacher, and a Czech woman came highly recommended; I read literary texts, practiced conversation with her in the language, and we did translation exercises. She was retired, which allowed her a freedom of movement that many others lacked. No one could expel her from anywhere for approaching a diplomat, nor could they remove her pension. Like all Czechs, she felt the wound of history in her marrow; she no longer believed in the possibility of a revival of socialism. When news began to circulate that a relatively young Communist leader in Moscow was trying to ease international tensions and introduce in his own country liberal reforms, among others an easing of literary and film censorship, she laughed sarcastically. She had heard it so many times, and everything always stayed the same if not worse, “Surely this is a ploy,” she said, “to fool Americans and to try to take advantage of them.” Some time passed, almost two years, I think, and one day she came to our lesson rather upset with a copy of Ogoniok, a Moscow magazine detested by all of my acquaintances in Moscow. “A friend of mine, who is also a teacher,” she said, “brought me this magazine; I’ve read it from cover to cover, and I’ve barely been able to sleep since. I still can’t believe it, but the fact is that something serious is happening on the other side of our border. Revolution! Not even in ’68 did they write things like that here.” We began to work that day on a very well written article about Meyerhold’s final days of freedom and the monstrous persecution to which he was subjected at the end. The help of Eisenstein, one of his best friends, to save his archive and a few documents, if the worst were to happen. The article ended with the chronicle of his arrest as well as different versions of his death and the prison camp to which he had been sent.
By this time, I was not only watching the Soviet channel on Saturdays for the theater programs; I was also following the daily newscast. And every week I would stop by the Russian newspaper store, which was no longer the desolate space it once was, to pick up a copy of Ogoniok, which I paid for in advance because it usually sold out within a few hours of arriving. Ogoniok! It seemed inconceivable that Ogoniok had been rehabilitated, had become decent! For many years it was a weekly. During the Khrushchev period, it became a publication of monstrous intolerance, of a repressive police mentality. It was headed at the time by Vsevolod Kochetov, one of the organic writers of Stalinism, a mediocre novelist, primitive to the point of exaggeration. After that leech, even more powerful reactionary forces followed, linked to the repressive apparatus. Kochetov ferociously insulted the intellectuals of the Thaw, the old ones because they dared to say what they had kept silent for so many years, the young ones because they expressed