The Jail/Chapter XXIV
XXIV.
I was again in the Street of the Tigers. When they took me there, I went with a certain amount of alarm. For a few days previously I had received a visitor who had caused me considerable agitation. It was the wife of a friend of mine, a journalist who was then in the army. After many entreaties, Frank had granted her the usual ten minutes; they led me in, and when she caught sight of me, she burst into tears and could not utter a single word—she did nothing but cry. In number 60 there was no mirror, but I felt my ailing appearance and the decrease in all my bodily strength. In front of Frank, however, I had not shown any signs of this, and all my visitors hitherto, as if guessing my wishes, had not alluded to my health either by remark or question,—until this lady had revealed her tears at my wretched condition in front of the German. With his cold eyes he looked at her and at me; this glance scalded my soul, I felt shame for her unaffected tears, and I would have given a year of my life to have prevented them. My body was weak and ailing, but my spirit was so strong, that I knew, even if they had led me to the gallows, I should have gone with upraised head and should have whistled a defiant song; and lo and behold, now a visitor came, of Czech race, and was weeping in front of this German. Hitherto I had not heard a human word from him; he had always been stiff and cold as the letter of the law; in the correspondence which were sent me he expunged all the names, greetings from acquaintances, news of weddings and deaths, and if during our conversations he diverged by a question or a remark from the official path, I had the feeling that he was laying a trap for me, that he was seeking something which I was hiding from him, and wanted to be assured that it was something which in reality it was not. For me he was an immediate representative of the system current in the years 1915 and 1916, which recognised no accused, but only culprits, for which one's nationality was enough to rouse suspicion, and three words written or uttered sufficed to draw up a charge of a serious crime. And it was in front of this automaton of the law that my visitor was weeping. I made some joke or other, asked after her husband and children, spoke about the weather, but I could not stop her crying, and so after a few minutes I announced that I was going home.
And that was why I arrived this day with alarm; my health was getting worse from day to day. Kranz, the burglar of goldsmith's shops, the good Kranz, brought me lemons, rum, flasks of cognac daily, and Papa Declich, my only doctor, prepared remedies and medicines for me from them. Mr. Fels remarked that he was concerned on my account by the cold here. Sergeant Kretzer wanted to report on his own account that I was sick, and Warder Sponner advised me to wrap myself up in the blankets and to lie down all day, this being, he said, the best remedy against fever.
In a word, I shrank from showing myself to any new visitor.
This day, however, it was not a visitor. A cross-examination. A cross-examination into the merits of my case, which Frank had promised me on the day of my arrest. That is, seven weeks previously.
Frank, clean-shaven, took my file out of a table-drawer,—this precious file of mine had become quite fat. He handed me my book "Drops", and asked me whether I knew that the "Temps" and the "Times" had published articles on my imprisonment.
How could I know it,—I was hermetically closed up.
He smiled, strips of gold flashed in his teeth, but he did not begin. He was clearly waiting for somebody.
This somebody now entered. A cadet sergeant-major, the interpreter.
He gave me his hand, which surprised me somewhat—Frank had never done so.
We began. I translated the first poem. Frank held a German translation in his hand, nodded, and where my translation deviated from his translation, the interpreter gave his decision. The translation deviated often, in places Frank had the precise opposite of what I had written in my verses.
This was my first crime—a poem "In memory of November 5th, 1905." When I had completed the translation. I explained how the poem had arisen. At the time when negotiations were proceeding to codify the universal suffrage law, there had been big workmen's demonstrations in Vienna and Prague. Thousands and thousands of people had marched through the streets, nowhere had there been any disturbances, the police were superfluous, the proletariat had displayed their disciplined strength and with it the justice of their demand. They had not threatened, they had kept silent, but it was a silence which was eloquent. And the deductions I had drawn from this as regards the success of my nation's desires, I had expressed in that poem.
A few more questions, then the report. Frank paraphrased my remarks and deductions very nicely; if I wanted to supplement anything, he paraphrased everything readily in accordance with my wishes.
Can there really be a human being inside this letter of the law? I thought to myself in astonishment.
We proceeded to the second crime, the poem "Hospital Humanitarianism". Again the translation first, then the commentary. As the somewhat trivial treatment of the verses attests, it is the monologue of a poor wretch who has just been discharged from a hospital, I heard the contents in a tram, where that man was formulating his view of the world. As long as you are well, nobody troubles about you, whether you are starving, freezing—it's all the same. They want taxes from you, they take you into the army, give this and they care nothing else about you. But if you fall ill, what a fuss! You have a bed, attendance, plenty of food, suddenly you are somebody whom everybody looks after as if it mattered how you die.
Frank again collected my observations for the report and concluded: "The poem is not an accusation against the State, but against human society," and with his cold eyes he looked inquiringly to see whether I agreed.
Perhaps after all I had been unjust to him; perhaps he is only—
Third crime: To Dr. Frant. Mesany:
Were I king, I would reward you
With a wealth of honour's garlands;
With Mauritius, Theobaldus,
Then a missive in my writing
Would append a barony
To your name—
I translated,—this time there was not a single divergency in Frank's translation. But the commentary and the reason why I wrote the poem were entirely new to him. In February 1913 Dr. Mesany had operated on me, and with unexampled care and devotion had nursed me back to complete health by the end of April. When my interrupted literary activity was renewed, it could begin in no other way than by this expression of thanks to the man who had saved my life. His position in society was at that time extremely unpleasant. He and the woman he loved were living together without the sanction of the Church, and respectable persons of both sexes were highly indignant thereat; the Post Office made a point of returning letters adressed to his wife, if they bore his surname; in fact, public opinion in a provicial town had found its victim, which it condemned severely and mercilessly, as only such a tribunal can do. My friend suffered immoderately in consequence, and I knew all about it. And here was an opportunity to tell him how time-serving was the judgment of such moralists; if I had been king, and had given him baronies and orders, they would have bowed and scraped before him, he would have been an ornament to society, a celebrity, a man "of high renown", "one of our own" etc.
"But don't these lines ridicule the orders a little?" asked Frank.
"I would ridicule only my own orders, but otherwise there is no ridicule in them. The proof is that in the first draft of this poem which was printed in the "Beseda Času", the third line ran:
Golden fleece and Leopold—
But when I arranged the poem for the book, I changed this verse to its present form, precisely in order to avoid even the shadow of such a suspicion, although even in its first form it contains no ridicule, and I had no intention of investing this poem with it".
By chance the cadet-interpreter knew Pardubice, and corroborated the accuracy of my statements.
And Frank again dictated,—a man, truly a man. But it occurred to me that we should wait till the end. That this was the only thing they had against me, that they had imprisoned and detained me only for this,—it was impossible. But I would see what was coming.
Fourth crime: "Twenty Years Later". Verses dedicated to the memory of the Omladina.
I translated them. Frank corrected his translation which had been prepared by God knows whom, and then we discussed what the Omladina really was. Frank thought that it consisted of young men who smeared over the eagles on pillar-boxes; my view was the young literary and political generation which had promised much, had fulfilled something, had failed in other things, but which had not yet spoken its last word. Frank mentioned the names of Mrva, Dragoun, I those of Dr. Rašín, the Hajns, F. V. Krejčí, Dr. Preiss, Soukup, Groš. Frank supposed it was a secret society which had been formed in the year 1893; I, that it was a mighty wave which in that year had surged upon us Czechs,—in a word, each of us told what he knew.
And Frank paraphrased for the report what I had known and told.
We were ready. Frank read the report to me.
"Correct?" he asked, when he had finished.
"Yes. But tell me, did you find nothing else in my literary activity for which you could have imprisoned and tried me? l have written heaps of other things which might be more important to you and more serious to me—"
He looked at me with his cold eyes, and showed the golden strips in his teeth as he smiled quietly: "No, this is the only thing which has come to our knowledge".
I signed the report.
Frank handed me over to the defence-corps men, and the defence-corps men took me home. The streets, their bustle, the houses, the flowers in the windows, the shop-fronts, the placards, the golden radiance of the sun in the air,—all these things were already quite strange to me, quite strange.
In number 60 our "Galicians" were standing in the middle of the room, and Mr. Wilder was describing to them the courses of some banquet or other; Papa Declich was sitting on my bed (this was how he kept guard over it whenever I went away, so that nobody else should lie down there), and for motives of economy was carefully splitting matches in half; Papa Declich never smoked a cigar as a cigar, but hacked it into small pieces, and then smoked it in the form of cigarettes,—a modest and frugal man, as far as his own wants were concerned, but open-handed and liberal towards us, his friends. He greeted me, as he shook my hand, with a silent smile.
"A cross-examination, Papa Declich, that's all. And now there will be a very long silence, a lifelong annuity, as in your case".
My strength was exhausted, I sank down on the bed.