Hello all and welcome back. This is not a political essay - it’s a literary read. Hope you like it. Please comment - your comments are very valuable
THE UPSTAIRS NEIGHBOR
A few times each week, a black Tatra 603 limousine would pull up in front of our building. The chauffeur, who looked like Mr. Smith from “The Matrix”, only with a Communist Party pin in his lapel, would step out and open the door for Mr. Novak, a tall, gaunt man of about forty who lived on the fifth floor of our building. Anyone stepping out of a chauffeur-driven Tatra 603 was to be regarded with suspicion and fear. The black Tatra was the official vehicle of the “big game”, the top honchos, the faithful minions.
We saw see Mr. Novak daily, a quick encounter in the mailroom or on the stairs. He greeted people without a smile, using the standard Party salutation “Respect labor”, never a simple “Good morning”. Our building dated back to the 1930’s. It had one tiny elevator, only large enough for two adults. You did not want an elevator ride with Mr. Novak, a secretive and sinister man. There were whispers in the building saying that he worked for the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for the feared secret police. Interior was the most reviled and hated of all the government bureaucracies.
In the early 60’s I was being taken care of by my nanny, Maria, whom we all called “Auntie”. Maria spent the whole day with me. She arrived as my parents were leaving for work; she cooked lunch, cleaned the apartment, did laundry and prepared snacks for me. During summer and winter vacations, she took me with her to visit relatives who lived in a small town in Southern Bohemia, only a couple of miles from the Austrian border.
Our summer trips were especially exciting: they involved a long train ride with two changes: half way through the trip we were demoted from a fast inter-city train to slow and smelly two-car affairs. The town stood at the edge of a thick coniferous forest; mysteriously dark, fragrant with pine sap, decaying wood and a million mushrooms. A couple of hundred yards into the woods there were signs “Do not approach – border region – entry strictly forbidden”. Czech border guards were famously trigger-happy and all of us kids were warned every morning before heading out to play in that magnificent forest. “Don’t go anywhere near the border sign. If you see it, turn right around and run!” The magic of those woods never leaves you once you’ve breathed it. It’s as if the essence of the white clouds and the nearby headwaters of the Moldau river, and those mushrooms and the sweet earth had seeped into the ancient spruces and firs. And the trees breathed that essence back at you and filled your lungs and your head, leaving an intangible part of the forest inside you forever.
The ominous signs and the watchtowers with their young and vigilant guards eventually came down. Old timers may still carry a memory of those bad times, but for anyone younger than forty, there exists no memory at all. Where there once were warning signs, a mined no-man’s land and snipers high on watchtowers, there is now a leafy path for cyclists. Austrian day trippers cross over for cheap beer and Czech citizens wolf down Wienerschnitzels in the villages of north east Austria.
Mr. Novak, the fifth-floor spook ferried home by a black Tatra 603, had a son called Nikolaj, Nikki for short. He and I played together often, though our parents barely acknowledged each other downstairs in the mail room, mumbling the routine “Good morning, Mr. Novak” and “Respect labor, Comrade”. In the winter, I would run up to the fifth floor and bring Nikki down to play in our apartment. Nikki’s mother was a homemaker (“woman-in-household” was the official Communist ID card designation) She opened the door when I knocked but she never invited me in. I never saw more than their mudroom, always overheated and smelling of mothballs.
“Nikolaj, your friend is here. You boys can run down and play at his place. Don’t forget to take your slippers”.
No Czech household would ever be soiled by outdoor shoes. Slippers were provided at the door for guests thoughtless enough not to bring their own.
As soon as Nikki’s mother shut the door behind us, we hopped up to slide down the stairway banister – an indoor pastime well known to every child who ever lived in older Prague buildings. Once in my apartment, we would play with my electric train and Auntie would make us open-faced sandwiches. Once another neighbor’s kid, a little girl called Jelena, joined us. She and I were eager to play doctor but Nikki was a little snitch – an apple to his daddy’s tree – and he ran to tell Auntie we were playing a naughty game. Auntie stormed in and gave Jelena such a tongue lashing, the poor girl bolted out the door crying and never visited again. A pity: I sensed even then that playing doctor would have been more fun than electric trains. Nikki was never my best friend but we got along well enough and when you’re a kid on a large block in a big city, you play with whoever is available.
On warm spring days we played at the nearby playground. We’d kick a ball with other neighborhood kids and chase each other and hoot and holler, the way boys do. When Auntie nodded off on her bench we’d get into more wicked mischief, like “borrowing” a parked bicycle or lighting up reed “cigarettes”
It was on one such bright, sunny day in the early 60’s that I almost caused an earthshaking scandal. Nikki and I headed out to the playground. Auntie got busy knitting on a bench, while we kicked a ball around, casting glances at the bench to see if our minder was nodding off. She kept on knitting and we got bored. Heavens know what I was thinking but I picked up a stick and drew a large clumsy swastika in the sand. I peered at it for a few seconds, then shuffled my foot to erase it. No new kids showed up, so Auntie took us home, gave us tea and cookies and dispatched Nikki back upstairs to the Novaks’ dark and fusty apartment.
A word about the swastika symbol. In our world back then, the war was still fresh and raw in everyone’s memory. Many buildings bore plaques marking spots where young men fell during the Prague uprising: while the war had effectively ended in the rest of the country, many Prague buildings were still infested with Gestapo and SS officers that had to be rooted out. We school kids were constantly told tales of combat and suffering. Then there was the official deification of the Soviet Union (“The Soviet Union Our Shining Example Forever”) and its heroic Red Army. Our family friends – Jewish intellectuals, like my parents – were all Holocaust survivors, who carried lifelong psychological injuries from the war and often spoke of their wartime experiences. My own parents’ psyche – and consequently my own - was heavily marked by the war. My father’s vast library contained many books in which I would have seen the swastika, the symbol of German inhumanity. To a boy it was a fascinating symbol of evil. Simply put, the war was on all our minds, lurking just beneath the surface.
Auntie wrapped up her kitchen chorses and was getting ready to go home as soon as my mother got back from work.
Nothing of note had happened that day, so she didn’t have a lengthy situation report to relay to mother, the way she would if I’d broken a window, gotten into a fight or used naughty words Auntie disapproved of.
An hour later, vegetable soup and goulash that mother had whipped up like a sorcerer were neatly arranged on a fresh white tablecloth. Father stubbed out his Lípa cigarette and we were about to sit down for dinner. And then someone knocked on the door. Three loud, determined raps.
Nowhere is Dorothy Parker’s famous quip “What fresh hell is this” more apt than upon hearing a knock on your door after sunset in a darkly Stalinist country. Father stood up, walked to the door, slowly opened it. There stood the secretive, dangerous Mr. Novak who never said a word to us, much less come down for an unexpected visit.
“Come on in, we were about to have supper”
“I won’t stay long, Comrade, but I have come to discuss an urgent matter”.
He remained standing. He wore a brown blazer with the requisite Party pin in his left lapel.
“How can I help?” said my father. His voice was firm but he must have felt a cold grip of terror inside. This was not good.
“I do hope you CAN help, Comrade. This is serious business.”
Father lit a fresh Lípa.
“Here’s the thing,” Mr. Novak began. “If your son is to associate with my son at all, he must not expose him to a sick, twisted ideology! That I will not abide!”
Father’s face was pale and he took quick short drags on his cigarette. This really was serious business: to hear the words “twisted ideology” out of the mouth of this surly, devout apparatchik.
“Perhaps you can tell me what’s on your mind, exactly.”
“I was about to. While your son and Nikolaj were playing this afternoon, I am informed that your son drew a disgusting thing in the sand. I cannot imagine where he learned it or why he would draw the symbol of our fascist German occupiers. Yes! Your son drew a swastika in the sand, comrade! A SWASTIKA IN THE SAND. The boy is obviously picking up this perversion, this deviance, this...HERESY somewhere and we need to put a stop to it immediately!”
The man’s face was purple, his eyes squinted in my father’s direction.
In an unexpected, calming gesture, father put his arm around Mr. Novak’s shoulders and led him to the table.
“Edith, roll up your sleeve”
My mother rolled up her sleeve to reveal a pale tattoo: the number *1970* .
“I assume you know what this is, comrade.” My father never used that word. It sounded contemptuous. “My wife spent three years in the Nazi hell of Auschwitz. I spent the war hiding in the forest and fighting the retreating German occupiers, side by side with Red Army units. I joined the Party when I moved to Prague. You can rest assured there is no other family on this block, on this street, in this whole district, that suffered more than we did under that disgusting symbol. You can take it to the bank, MISTER Novak: wherever my son had seen it – most likely in one of my books, reading about the horrors of Nazism – he did not draw a swastika because he is being raised in a Nazi loving household, or being fed enemy propaganda. So while I’m glad you came down to tell me about it, I resent any attempt at smearing my family with this kind of repulsive nonsense. I’m sure you understand.”
There was silence. Father stubbed out his cigarette and turned to Mr. Novak with a familial smile:
“Now, how about a shot of Slivowitz plum brandy? I just had some sent to me from my brother in Slovakia. Exquisite stuff. Strong enough to put hair on your chest”
Mr. Novak stood in the kitchen, speechless. Father poured two shots. Mr. Novak knocked one back and snorted through pursed lips.
“Great stuff indeed! Excellent. Comrade, I would like to apologize. I had no idea we had such an exemplary anti-fascist family in the building. Rest assured, the matter is dead and buried. Nikolaj had mentioned the incident to my wife and she urged me to...well, you know how wives can get, no offense. And no hard feelings, I hope. Now, please go back to your meal…it smells divine, if I may use such an outmoded expression”, he laughed awkwardly, “I’ll get out of your hair. And if you ever need anything, anything at all, you know where to find me dear Comrade.”
They shook hands. Our fifth floor cloak-and-dagger man trotted out. Father was about to light another cigarette, then looked at the set table.
“Let’s eat before it gets cold! Who can eat cold vegetable soup!”
It took chutzpah to speak to a highly-positioned Party minion the way father did but it was characteristic of him.
“Don’t forget that offense is the best defense”, he would say when I complained about being bullied. “Don’t wait for the blow. You hit first!”
From that day on, while Mr.Novak still said “Respect labor” as per Party guidelines, he would stop for a moment or two to exchange pleasantries. It didn’t matter. How could we forget this was a man chauffeured home in a black Tatra 603 limousine, employed by the most fearsome ministry, with the power to destroy a life on a whim.
A few years later, we noticed Mr. Novak’s posture began changing and his confident stride turned into a hesitant shuffle. The scuttlebutt had it that he had contracted multiple sclerosis. Two years after the swastika incident, Auntie quit her job and retired to the country to live with her family on the edge of fragrant pine forests, at the mouth of the river Moldau, where I had picked mushrooms with her and ran with local boys, careful not to stray into dangerous no-man’s-land. A year after Auntie left our household, my parents finally found a nice two-bedroom apartment: they’d been on a waiting list for years. We moved out of our old, gloomy building with its tiny elevator and banisters buffed clean by the behinds of rowdy boys. I never saw Mr. Novak or Nikki again.