Reluctant Witness

By Jaroslav Cervenka

Existence. It was a pretty exhilarating joy-ride, with a few sharp turns taken and in the second half, without a skid, downwind, on a sunny road. I find it fitting to end this writing (finally!) by an Eskimo chant, because after Israeli Jews, Eskimos of old times have been my most favorite people:


Glorious was life
Now I am filled with joy
For every time a dawn
Makes white the sky of night
For every time the sun goes up
Over the heavens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796062014

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Copyright © 2019 by Jaroslav Cervenka.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019915014

ISBN:       Hardcover       978-1-7960-6203-8

                 Softcover         978-1-7960-6202-1

                 eBook              978-1-7960-6201-4

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Rev. date: 11/15/2019

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Contents

FIRST HALF OF LIFE

THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

EPILOGUE TO AFRICAN LAMENT

On the wall of my parents’ bedroom there hung an eight-by-ten framed, unmated diploma. In full color, it pictured five baby angels, wings and all, holding in flight a wreath of flowers of unknown species. Under these flyers, in ornate script, it was writ: For the memory of this auspicious and happy day of March 15th, 1933, when our Jarousek opened his little eyes to illuminate the grey days of our life.

Well, Jarousek, Jarda, Jara, Jari, Jaroslav has remembered this ‘art’ hanging above his parents’ bed, often with a bitter grin, since he was not always ‘The Illuminator’, but at times he was a ‘The Generator’ of dark clouds. On following pages, I’ll recall events, stories, I’ll remember friends and foes, with the hope it might provide, occasionally, interesting information about the times – since in my view of literature the most important attribute of a writing is whether it is interesting, in ways to be comprehensible, and I’ll try to avoid the torrents of verbiage and gymnastic of metaphors fashionable in some writings, today.

The reader will learn that the ‘gray days’ of my parents’ lives were, sometimes, not of elephantine gray but rather like a black hole in Andromeda galaxy and that Jarousek failed, at times, to lighten the blackness. My parents lived a large part of their adult lives under the cruel Nazi occupation followed by unnatural ‘dictatorship of proletariat’, in bad times, all Orwellian stuff. But they survived with unbent character and with secret optimism which sufficed to nourish their hope, the optimism as necessary for life as is the intake of fluids.

I write about the past as the witness reluctant, because to expose readers to so many Is and mes, using the first person singular, is to try their patience; I apologize for that. But I promise, at least, not to be a ‘laudator temporis acti’, as Latins call the one who always extolls the good old days, and I’ll try to stick with truth, as I see it. To write in third person would feel nice – but it would be a cheat.

FIRST HALF OF LIFE

The historical architecture of Prague was mostly spared of major aerial bombardment and heavy shelling during wars and occupations, thus the ancient Karlova Street was crowded by admiring tourists. To escape the multilingual chatter, pushing by Chinese and Russians, screams of Italians and clans of drunk male Brits we took a right turn to Liliova Lane. While the tourists’ invasions bring good foreign currency, not bullets, the natives resent it, some nostalgic for communist times when nourishment and peace was assured, just like savages in Africa miss the colonial times without wars, when nourishment and peace was assured.

This street is not on the tourists’ list, yet, Jirka Nemecek said, pointing at the closed, boarded barber shop and he shook his head. It will soon be another destination. This was an old place, I used to come here for a haircut, it even smelled there a little moldy-historically. It will be replaced by another shop selling souvenirs and Bohemian glass with gold plated decorations, Arabs adore. It’s all about money, now.

I nodded in agreement, but had no comment on his observation, because its been about money’ since money was invented. The most famous journalist of her time, Italian Oriana Fallaci, once talked with playwriter Arthur Miller. She said she liked America – but it bothered her that everything there is about money. Miller just asked: …and in Italy? This little episode came to my mind while passing the boarded up historical barber shop. I also did not mention that, perhaps, when he, Jirka, finds a new barber, the cut will be done faster due to modern electrical barbering instruments and technique, it might be even cheaper. But as it used to be the old custom, the grooming will no longer be accompanied by extensive commentary on politics, soccer, and new dirty jokes, and he’ll be off that electric chair in ten minutes.

When I was medical student, my favorite barber was in Old Town. He was a master of crude, obscene language, many dirty jokes, and bizarre opinions on soccer which he pushed loudly. And he styled hair according to his ideas not the customers’. Asking him for more shortening on the sides he responded that he’s not going to do any ‘SS-Schnitt,’ the preferred hairdo of German SS troupes., and ordered me to shut up. You abstained from giving instructions. You pay too little, anyway, he said. His crude jokes and his manners of a prison guard made him so popular with medical students and teenagers that one had to stand in a queue to get the treatment. Old times.

This was what happens with memories, some emerge from the abyss of time without warning like a monster from black lagoon, and when strolling on the hundred years old lanes and streets of Prague, they come up more frequently. Jirka recalls more memories than me.

Jirka Nemecek is my old friend from medical school, mountain expeditions and skiing, amoral parties and army service. I had always admired him, mainly for his amazing skiing skills; he was a preeminent giant slalom and slalom racer, celebrted in the Academic Championships. He was, and still is very handsome with sharp features and a sporting posture, damned good looking is he. To someone it might sound primitive – but to see him to carve a turn with the composed grace, at a deadly speed, was a treat which might be compared favorably to a beautifully composed sentence, to an unforgettable stroke by a painter, to an elegant mathematical solution. The problem with such a comparison is that Jirka’s turns lack the permanence of an artist’s creation. It only remains encoded in the mind of the observer.

Always a straight talker, he remained a loyal and reliable friend - for over sixty years. During our walk, he wore a worn leather jacket, over a blue t-shirt, jeans and moccasins, the works. He looked right.

We laughed, put arms around our shoulders, just briefly, stumbled on the polished cobble stones like drunken toddlers, hollering in surprise when the memory of a special event emerged for the first time in those sixty years.

To quote W.B. Yeats: Think when man’s glory most begins and ends. And say my glory was I had such friends.

We found an Italian joint near the church where Jan Hus, The Reformer, preached his religiously-politically incorrect ideas. For which he was tied to a stake and incinerated, alive, the bright flames igniting the ‘Husites’ movement’. Today, preaching incorrectly against correctness, he would not be met with flames but only with boos and whistles by correct academic audience – some progress. We were sort of sliding in the direction of the Italian bar over 600-year-old cobblestones, which when drunk on absinth might appear the bold heads of buried pilgrims to the Hus’es Memorial. But metaphor aside: What actually lays underneath the cobblestones in Prague? Every dig to bury electrical cables or a water line turns out to be a dig archeological.

Do you remember how we missed the train to Riesengebirge Mountains (Krkonose)? Jirka asked. That night, lots of snow fell in Prague – we put on skis and skied down Vaclavske Square. People were freaking out applauding they have never seen skiing on Vaclavske, they thought they were seeing some kind of ghosts or Nordic trolls. Do you remember? We might have been the first people to schuss down and finish with a telemark turn on the square in the 2000-year history of Praga, Caput Regni. Ha!

But I did not remember. Jirka often started with asking if I remember and I often answered that I didn’t remember. It puzzled me and I could not explain, so I asked Vojta. Jan (Vojta) Volavka, our mutual friend for those sixty years. To put weight on his explanation it must be known that Vojta is a famous psychiatrist and neurobiologist (his book on aggression is the classic), Professor of psychiatry in New York University. Vojta explained to me, that I had traveled the globe few times around, lived in a few countries, met with thousand people from different cultures, etc. I had made million memories. Jirka was born and lived in one place, traveled for just a few vacations. Since the human brain has a finite capacity for memories, some must be eliminated to offer a place for the new ones. (Lately, it has been reported that implanting an array of electrodes to certain places on brain can stimulate memory).

While on the topic of the brain and its memory bank, the hippocampus, I hasten to add that the latest hypothesis states that the brain ‘itself’ decides which memories are less ‘important’ than others and eliminates those, like some kind of a dictator hiding in your scull. It’s fascinating to consider, that it is not me or you that consciously decides the value of certain memory but it is that strange, gelatinous bleb in the scull which decides. It decides not even asking man’s opinion. I’ll elaborate later.

So, the memory of skiing stunt on Vaclavske square was eliminated. I’d like to ask my hippocampus why.

Vojta was a generous fellow. One episode I will never forget: from relatives in England Vojta got Phillips shaving machine. WE admired this miraculous electronic device from the fabulous West. At that time, Jirka Nemecek’s father, a physician in Hradec Kralove, was imprisoned for some political ‘crime’. Vojta traveled to the prison in Hradec and gave this Phillips wonder to Dr. Nemecek Sr., the inmate.

Vojta struggled much during the German occupation because he was a Jew and survived only by hiding. When the Russians invaded in 1968 this brilliant fellow joined us, 100 000 refugees, and emigrated to New York.

I was lucky to have another psychiatrist, friend. Milan Rektorik. As bizarre as it sounds, while an exuberant alcoholic, he headed The Institute for Prevention and Treatment of Alcoholics in Den Haag, Holland. Once he phoned me that … I don’t drink any more. Only rum. We had a marvelous time when I used to visit him in Holland, usually when returning from Africa, and when he visited us in Minnesota, because we could talk day and night until alcoholic beverages did not do us in.

I used to date the most beautiful girl in Prague, Jirina. Her portrait decorated the cover of magazines. But after half a year, our romance did not progress – so I left her. Milan married her within a few months. It was a famous match because Milan was the handsomest medical student of them all. Milan was a generous person, and lover of art, too. He gave me an African Ibibio mask which was previously owned by Andre Derain, the famed founder of fauvism. To repay, when he and Jirina’s visited us in Minnesota, I found a dead deer by the road and made venison on red wine. They praised the delicacy. later, I learned, that it was one of Milan’s favorite stories of to relate how they were fed road kill, by Jarda. He smoked himself to very sad death of lung cancer.

We talked with Jirka Nemecek for hours, over many grapas. He retold the story how he tried to emigrate to London with Jana, his wife, and two boys. How he got seriously sick there and could not do surgery, and could not take care of the family. He had to return to Prague, how he was persecuted, but not imprisoned. It all was very difficult, but after a while, Bolsheviks, malignos, allowed him some meager existence in medicine to feed his family of Jana and his boys. The toughness of downhill racer eventually prevailed.

They were closing the bar, waiter leaning the chairs back on the tables. The Russian waitress, with painted face of muzhik, suggesting we beat it.

Between first and second shot of grapa I got an idea, which made this excursion with Jirka important. I must put my adventures and misadventures on paper – I will write a memoir. If not for posterity then at least for me. It will be an adventure.

Christopher Hitchens, one of the great minds of our time was dying of terminal cancer of esophagus. He was never much inclined to the disposal of advice, or to tedious lecturing, but in the last of his days, he left an advice, after all, extoling the … stupendous importance of friendship and solidarity. He wrote that: "I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not, on any account, postpone the writing or visit. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated."

We decided to call on Petr (Petulka) Zvolsky and set a date to meet in Café Slavia, which Petulka liked, because sipping white Moravian one can look at Hradcany Castle through floor to ceiling windows, and at the right angle, on the wall, one could admire Oliva’s painting of ‘Absinth Drinker’, with green face of melancholy being observed by an apparition the translucent spirit of Artemisia absinthi, L. Petr Zvolsky, was the preeminent Professor of psychiatry in the country at that time, and an old pal. He would always arrive in conservative attire, an anachronous tie, talk silently with odd in gestures. He seemed from old times. While psychiatrists are known for oddities in behavior, carefully cultivated to serve their reputation of super-intellectuals, Petulka was a genuine natural. To be with him felt as being in the presence of a gentle man from a historical novel.

Jirka ended our discussion: All of you guys were gone. Emigrated to Germany, America, Switzerland, France, and yeah, to England, too. All my pals, all my old life. Good life remained only in memories. Do you understand?

Sure, I do, but for whatever it is worth, you should know that we, emigrants, when spread all over the world, found ourselves without old friends, too. Like you.

Well, Jirka said in suspiciously low voice, sometimes on Sundays, when the traffic is not bad I would get on my bike and ride to Hermanova street, Janovskeho, to Schnirchova, to Dejvicka … you know, all the places you guys used to live … I imagine things. Good things.

Back to Hitchens: There are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up.

To get to Narodni Boulevard we took a lane so narrow that only two lovers holding hands could pass through, then another wider lane where teenagers of the night and ladies of the night patrol– they did not greet us, they watched us closely with the keen eyes of ornithologists but then decided we did not look German enough. At Narodni, both of us would take the tram number 22, but each in opposite direction. Jirka’s tram to Karlak came first.

Well, waving is a must, with a smile and with the wrists and shoulders loose, as swimmers have.

––- . -––

People claim to have memories all the way to earliest childhood. Some even say they remember their existence in the womb. But these are mostly those who believe in miracles, god, and other childish follies, the sort of folks who venerate supernatural. (And who have no notion about space-time and its connection to gravitational field, never traveled into the field of quantum gravity… etc.) My earliest memory, dates to my sixth birthdate, March 15, 1939, and it is not as happy as birthdate memory should be. That day my father and uncles congregated around the table in my grandfather’s house in Podbaba, like the cell of a secret society in tense times. It must be understood, that my grandpa was a man of substance, the mayor of Podbaba, but he was not mayor at home. It was Grandmother Josefa who ruled, like alpha female hominid. She ran the household and decided important things. I did not love her much since she was strict, never smiled and was devoid of expression of emotions, ‘empathy deficit’, one might say.

That evening everybody was smoking, sipping 60% home distilled Slivovice and arguing about politics. Dangerous events were happening in Europe. The Czechoslovak army was put on alert. Through the cloud of smoke and weapors of the moonshine, grandma appeared; she brought little Czech cakes- kolace, and coffee, when, at the same time uncle Tonda arrived. He was greeted by everybody, but he gestured that he has something urgent to say.

Germans just invaded Czechoslovakia. In full force. His face was blank, he looked different than as I knew him. Suppressed emotions can change a face. They are now on the way to Prague. Not one of men around the table said a word. Grandmother stood up, I remember she looked like a very large monument. The silence was long.

There will be a war, Grandmother uttered and started to cry. Nobody has ever seen Grandma cry. That’s how rare it was. I did not know what a war was, my brain was about three quarters of the final size then, but the memory about Grandmother’s tears remained imbedded, safely encapsulated in my small hippocampus for another eight decades. At that moment I loved Grandma with the descending tears.

–- . -–

My family, my first-degree relatives were the people most important to me. They were, in a way, me. My mother Marta was beautiful ‘like a picture,’ people used to say. I liked to look at photographs of her when she was young because she looked happy. She had a little gypsy visage when she was little, strangely. Her nature could be described in a few words, as the epitome of kindness and good humor, with a smile which could brighten the last day of a prisoner on death row in Pankrac. Everybody liked her, I couldn’t have imagined otherwise. To sit down with my mom, having white coffee and her sweet creations meant to lose all worries and troubles of life. she was a very good cook. She might not cook with truffles, and did not understand molecular cooking with liquid nitrogen or Millard reaction, but she would make good, digestible Sunday lunch out of nothing, because during the war, and then under communist rule, there was sometimes nothing edible to buy, except potatoes. And, of course, she loved us kids and the feelings were mutual, it was normal, no exceptional psychology involved.

I had two sisters, dizygotic, fraternal twins Marta and Jitka, four years younger than me. While they were expelled from the same womb at the same time and while they developed from the two identically looking little eggs, they grew into two individuals who could not have more different personalities, character, and resulting behaviors. Marta was an 800 meters competitive runner, and a volleyball player, with many, many friends for life. She was a teacher, and the director of preschool institute. Marta was- is mild, reflective, very social and very reliable, somebody with whom I feel comfortable in a way one would feel huddling under the warm, down filled comforter. She is now 81 years and I do not see any changes in her personality, which so often accompany aging. Visiting her, and her husband and best friend Bohous has been always the highlights of my yearly visits to Czech Republic. We go to their Summer village home in Babice, where Marta overfeeds me old-fashioned delicacies from my youth, I bike in the forest, collect mushrooms, have no smart phone or dumb phone, or internet, I read and sleep in the attic where hay used to be stored and still could be smelled like nothing in the world of precious perfumes. I wallow there in a fine zone of peace, and in the fog of solitude.

Jitka, the other twin, who died of metastatic cancer of uterus, was ambitious, rowdy, very social, but she liked to oppose the political views which characterized our family. We liked each other, but love was it not, mostly because of the contrary views on things. She rose to the Director of Documentary Films in state TV, despite never joining the communist party. However, she married one of the most powerful communist politicians in the country, Josef Kempny, member of the Central Committee of the Party, head of Ceska Rada (senate?), etc. Pepa, as we called him behind his back, was of course dismissed after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, and became persona non-grata, disgraced and degraded from his position of unlimited power to the status of aging pensioner. Without a bit of schadenfreude, I remember meeting him on the street in Prague-Bubenec. He was dragged by their cocker spaniel, limping slightly. The ‘King of the Hill’ would raise his eyes, time to time, looking at passersby, maybe in expectation, but nobody acknowledged him. He died of heart attack on the street in 1996. Jitka took good care of the communist to the end.

She should be remembered by her three good deeds, that I know about: through the power of Pepa Kempny, she saved careers of three of my friends, who were going to be finished by Bolsheviks. (Petr Kadlecik, Kaja Fahoun and Petr Sis) I’ll come to that, later.

I always admired my father Jaroslav. He was born in 1908 in Podbaba which is now part of Prague 6 (It was, at times, part of Prague XIX, including Lysolaje, Sarka, Bubenec and Dejvice.) It once was to be a small ‘village’ on Vltava river. Father, in his mind, never left Podbaba and in later years he managed to return. He bought to buy a house there, with a garden of 14 terraces, where he built a barbeque to hold parties and dug out a swimming pool, where deer used to come to drink at evening. He possessed many good qualities, of which the talent for organization was, perhaps, most notable. He founded orchestra Tamburasi - Jaro, was an active member of a Ski Club, and the Hunters Club of Smichov, he founded Developers and Builders Coop Klid, an Economic Society in Bubenec and became president of a bank in Dejvice. All, before he was 40 years old. And he had true friends. I remember how proud of him I was, as a kid, when we used to go to visit my grandfather in Podbaba and on the walk from the bus station almost everybody whom we met greeted my dad like you would greet a pal, exchanging few sentence, raising hand in air salute, smiling.

Father had an interest in the history of the village which had been a seat of many Cervenkas, who were fishermen, fruit growers, and vineyard owners. (Now only one Cervenka remains there, Vaclav, my cousin, son of Antonin, grandson of Vaclav, expert on butterflies and author of 3 scientific books on caterpillars, published by Academy of Sciences, and inexpert breeder of farm animals, and with great knowledge of succulent plants, I admire him.)

After years of searching the Archives of the City of Prague, the Land Registers and church records in Sarka, Bubenec and Bohnice, Dad was able to assemble, in 1950, a vast chronology of our family. This volume contains the pedigrees, family trees of 16 generations, starting with Vit Cervenka, born in 1480, approximately. His A Short History of Podbaba and Life of Cervenkas are informative excursions into history, as are the elaborate and detailed volumes Vineyards of Podbaba, and Ruins of Baba. His collection of stories from the old times From Podbaba Pub, is written in the language used century ago, it is a fine and interesting writing.

His life also could be characterized as a sequence of persecutions, first by Nazis, then by Communists, because of his upright and uncompromising character. He ended as a lowly clerk in some industrial storage. He avoiding being sent to the mines because his friend, a physician, falsely testified that Jaroslav suffers of congenital heart defect (open ductus Botali).

One sunny Summer afternoon, at the age of 76, Jaroslav sat down with his daughter Jitka having coffee and the cake dad baked himself. They planned a birthday party. The celebration would take place by the swimming pool dad built, there would be enough sweets and open face sandwiches, definitely there will be a barbeque. But there was one problem to be solved – should they buy more red wine, rouci – as Dad called it in old-fashioned Czech, or more white - prine.

Suddenly, without a warning, Dad fell off the chair, unconscious. His brain aneurism burst open. Shortly after he stopped breathing. He did not die a lingering and conscious death, so I think it must have been some very kind gods who gave him this present as a reward for surviving the life of the suffering forced on him, and for his never broken, admirable spirits. He departed to Eternal Hounds with one thought: red or more white wine for the party? I might repeat this paragraph later when discussing our relationship because I find it remarkable.

–-- . -–-

The Second World War started as predicted by Grandmother and our land became occupied by Germans for five years. I grew up to Middle School. For adults, it was time of oppression and bestiality not known before. But where are my memories from those five years of war? As I mentioned above, some people claim to remember events in childhood in a great detail, but I barely recall anything of the years of Elementary School. It might be hypothesized that I took into my bloodstream some of the poisoned air of those Protektorat Bohmen und Mahren years (that is how occupied Czechoslovakia was called) but, somehow, me Jarda, the little rowdy boy, remained a mere observer, as if watching a movie about events which he could not comprehend– therefore forgettable. I could have seen German soldiers marching through our street like clones of evil phantoms, with ugly weapons, stony faces of enemies, passersby stealthily spitting on the ground in disgust, my parents talking silently so I did not hear, our radio with a compulsory paper tag announcing a punishment by death if listening to foreign broadcasts like BBC, Free Europe, my mother crying without a reason which I could have understood. When visitors came, I had to leave the living room, and while secretly listening behind the