Patsy Trap

Jan Vitek

Description

"I don't know..." whispered Ruzenka, leaving her doubt unvoiced. "What do you not know?" "If I can believe you or not." I understood that she had a problem with me. To convince her, I must crawl out of my shell, lay myself bare and surrender to her mercy. "Please listen to me, you need not say anything, just listen to me for a while," I began. "I am 33 years old, Christ's age. This is a turning point in the life of every man and all the more so of a dreamer such as I. Schopenhauer says that all dreamers should die at 33 because they have nothing good to expect any longer When a man reaches Christ's age, all things lie before him stripped and bare, without embellishment, warts and all. He thinks of all his failures, though he does not regret what he has done but rather that what he could have done and did notfrom lack of opportunity, feebleness of will to act or because of a missed chance or that he was too weak. And then he does not sleep at night and ruminates over what errors he has made, how many times he has slid down and rose again, and he tortures himself with hope that in the other remaining half of his life, he will live more fully, when there is no more time for trifles, games and pretense. I met you at the right time. My batteries were low, I vegetated from one day to another, I was burned out. But now everything is different. In your presence, I feel young and strong, I want to live, to fight and to love. The odometer shows zero again. Life begins with you, and you are my future."

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 29 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528965781
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Patsy Trap
Jan Vitek
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-03-29
The Patsy Trap About the Author Dedication Copyright Information Fast-Forward in Lieu of Prologue The Great Expectations That Failed How I Became a Giant Insect Friendship Is Partnership My Shining Tomorrow Moral Courage That’s How Life-Long Love Begins Say No First Encounters of a New Kind Manacled to a Treadmill The Showdown A Game of Double Bluff A Strange Riddle Game Changer In the Mixer Go to the Tenth Hole of Hell Political Dreamer Václav Prchlík
About the Author
At a time when it was almost unthinkable to do so, Jan Vitek, born in 1928, took a stand against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia; his courageous engagement would leave an indelible mark on the rest of his life. Expelled from Prague University for demonstrating against the 1948 communist takeover, Vitek was forced into hiding, adopting a new identity as a means of avoiding arrest. Under this new persona, he joined the army, where he would meet a powerful and significant ally, Lieutenant General Václav Prchlík, a man who would become his mentor and protector. Prchlík, a fellow dissident, enables Vitek to assume a career as a journalist.
He would later earn a position in the International Labour Organization in Geneva. After Soviet invasion of his home country, Czechoslovakia, he chooses exile in Switzerland. Besides being a prolific publicist, Vitek published half a dozen books and hundreds of short stories in Czech and one novel in English, A Pebble in the Torrent (2013).
Dedication
To my family
Copyright Information
Copyright © Jan Vitek (2019)
The right of Jan Vitek to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528929219 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528929226 (Kindle e-book)
ISBN 9781528965781 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
Fast-Forward in Lieu of Prologue
I did not expect, neither any inner guide warned me, that the first Monday in September would change the life of our family forever. When I drove to work, another sunny day dawned on the still sleepy town of Geneva. The sky was blue, the lake was dozing and its surface sparkled in the glow of early morning sun. The car park of the International Labour Organization was deserted. I put my mustang near the back entrance, closest to my office.
Until midmorning, it was just daily routine. When the telephone on my desk came to life, I lifted the receiver and said casually:
“Yes?”
“Hello…” the intimate voice in the receiver was faint, tentative.
“Růženka, my darling, are you calling from Prague?”
“From Olbramovice, we are staying with my parents… I am at the post office.”
“When did you arrive?”
“Yesterday evening.”
“I am so glad you called, I was worried… You sound strange. Are you all right?”
“Yes, but…”
“What but… is anything wrong?”
“I have no passport.”
“Jesus Christ! Did you lose it? Or was it stolen?”
“I had to give it to the two gentlemen who waited for me at the airport.”
“Why? Did you ask them why?”
“Yes…”
“What did they say?”
“That all our passports will have to be changed… and that we get new ones when you arrive. They wanted to know when you will come over. I said that you would come, but that you were still not sure when.”
The first shock and panic that got hold of me when she mentioned the two gentlemen and confiscated passport became stunning fear turning into silent terror. Hogwash that we need new passports, they want me back in Prague, and they must want me badly having resorted to hostage taking. Who are they, Czechs or Soviets? Have they stumbled on the rose pot? Most probably, but how? Did we, Gorges and I, blundered, or has there been a leak somewhere?
“How is little Jan and your parents?” I asked in a thin voice. “Are all they doing all right?”
“He is an urchin, as you know… My mother and father give you their best regards. Maybe we made a mistake when I came here without you. What do we do now?”
I remained silent. The trap must have been carefully planned and it has a choice bait. Whoever set it up knows well that I will not live without Růženka and little Jan.
“What do we do now?” she asked in a voice that betrayed dread.
“I don’t know, my love. Please calm down, there is no reason to be afraid, not at all, trust me… all will be fine, just stay cool… And tell your parents to be…”
In a flash, I realized that it was the standard procedure in communist Czechoslovakia to record telephone calls abroad, and that I should throw the secret police a red herring.
“Tell your father to catch a carp for me and keep it fresh in the bath tub until I come over,” I said knowing that I was deceiving Růženka as well.
“When will you be here?” she wanted to know.
“Soon…”
“Tomorrow?”
“I have already an open air ticket.” I lied avoiding a clear answer. “Meanwhile, stay where you are, with your parents, don’t move anywhere else…”
“What do you mean?”
“Just stay home so that I can get in touch with you… I must think it through… Could you call me tomorrow at the same time?”
“Do you love me?”
“You know I adore you. Just put worries off your mind, darling, all will be OK, we shall be together again.”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“When will you come?”
“Soonest I can. I must leave you now. Hang up, dear. I love you.”
Petrified, I held the mute receiver in my clenched hand before putting it slowly back in the cradle. A sudden perception of danger and of helplessness knocked me over.
Now is the time when you will learn how courageous you are, I thought, for you have nothing left but courage.
The Great Expectations That Failed
Father arrested. Come immediately. When I received Mother’s telegram, I put textbooks and papers in my briefcase so that I could do some work in the train during the journey home.
The previous September, Father brought me to Prague in his Walter delivery truck to a sublet room that uncle Sklář had found for me in the apartment of a widow in a small house at Zlíchov on the outskirts of Prague. The widow was still on the right side of thirty, small, plump and enterprising. The very first night she slipped into my bed naked and took me with prowess and experience of a mature woman. Well, they say that in the dark every cat is black, and I humbly admit it is true. Next day in the morning, however, when the widow brought me breakfast and kissed me possessively, I got so scared that I packed up my two suitcases while she went shopping and fled like a thief. Desperate, I rented the first available shelter, a tiny narrow room in a boarding house on Husova Street in the popular borough of Žižkov. It was jerry-built during the Great Depression and had its marks all over it. No bathrooms, no showers or other luxuries, just monk cells, accessible directly from a courtyard gallery. I called the place our bedbug-house because these little blood-suckers crept out of their hiding every night and attacked my body. A neighbor told me that I should buy plenty of DDT powder. Soon, the room, the bed and I were smelling bad like a skunk, but I could finally wake up in the morning relatively unscathed. I had to wash in a basin. Luckily, there was a steam bath across the street that I visited every Thursday, avoiding Friday evenings and weekends when there were too many gays for my taste. Bedbug-house had two advantages, though. It was cheap and near to the Wilson railway station from which I would travel home every fortnight.
The train dropped me at a railway stop shortly before midnight. From there, I had to walk some two kilometers to Křemže, a township in southern Bohemia near Germany. I took a path over the meadows, a short-cut that I could find blindfolded since I walked there, and most often ran in early mornings and late afternoons for eight years during which I studied in a high school in the district town. The sky was clear, the stars bright and big as in the high mountains. I climbed over the yard gate that Mother had closed and secured by a bar. There was a light in the kitchen. I knocked gently on the window.
“You took a lot of time to come,” Mother said when she opened the door.
“I had to take a slow train from Prague, there is no fast train in the evening,” I explained. “Please, say what’s going on.”
“They came for him yesterday at five o’clock in the morning,” she told me breathlessly on our way to the kitchen, “they almost broke down the door and then searched the whole house. They confiscated all bills and business papers, all the money, our bank books and his beloved car, the Walter.”
I did not ask whom she referred to. ‘They’ were the new rulers of the country, the communists. Uncounted tens of thousands of them appeared among us, seemingly out of nowhere since the American army pulled out from the western part of the county in the autumn of 1945. The writing on the wall was clear. We were doomed to be Stalin’s spoil like we were sacrificed to Hitler in 1938. If during the war only few Czechs collaborated with German occupiers, now they joined the Communist Party in droves lured by its promise of shining tomorrows: work for all, factories to workers, land to its toilers, decent living wage, free education and health services, and old age pensions. Unsurprisingly, the Communist Party gained a comfortable majority in the parliament, its chairman, Klement Gottwald, became pri