October 20th - Daňa Horáková read from her book About Pavel

In the summer of 1976, Pavel took me to Bratronice in Southern Bohemia, where he had filmed his movie Case for a Rookie Hangman. On the way, he told me about the unruly “daughter of the nation,” Zdenka Havlíčková (1848-1872), whose father, Karel Havlíček, the handsome not-quite priest, founder of Czech journalism and politician, died at the age of 35 – barely a year after his wife and, like her, of tuberculosis. Avid Czech patriots and “true Czech women” took the eight-year-old orphan under their protection and even announced a collection in the Národní listy newspaper, going so far as to have a lottery which was to secure Zdena her dowry. 

But – oh! – Zdena clearly didn’t care to conform to the image of a “daughter of the nation” worthy of their charity, let alone was she eager to become part of the martyr-cult surrounding her father’s death. The girl – aware of her exceptionalness – became wild. Once, during an excursion to the Prokop Valley, she didn’t place a wreath woven by Havlíček’s admirers on the head of the statue of St. Prokop but, rather, on the head of the devil in the form of a serpent at his feet. She avoided the domestic crafts taught at the girls’ academy but attended balls with unquenchable enthusiasm and flirted with whom she could, when she could. Perhaps it was all to get back at her father, who never concealed that “a boy would have been preferable.” 

Or perhaps she wished to “recompense” the idealized dissident who was her father for raising her like a little soldier: “At our house,” Havlíček once said to one of his colleagues, “Zdena only ever gets a beating when it’s necessary (but my rule is: rarely, never while angry, but always break the skin so she remembers it longer.)” Let us compare – just for fun! – with Havlíček’s no-doubt valuable epigram about pedagogy: “‘What you wouldn’t want done to yourself, don’t do to others,’ said the cantor, pulling a student by the hair.” 

Though she was the daughter of a passionate opponent of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, a man of whose standard of living in exile the pitiful Božena Němcová could have only dreamed (he had a maid and his food was brought in from restaurants), Zdena simply resisted becoming an instrument for the sovereignty of the Czech crown, resisted taking upon herself Havlíček’s political legacy. 

Here it is important to note that her legal guardian and the Prague ladies who helped him were very patient with the untamable Zdena. But perhaps only one of the “true patriotic women” actually understood Zdena’s longing for unconventional independence and equality with the “first sex”: our dear lady Božena Němcová who, thanks to her “romantic simultaneities” also, like Zdena, became the target of various slanders and rebukes, ones that today might be called “mobbing.” But barely did the “daughter of the nation” fall madly for an officer in the services of the Habsburg Monarchy and Viennese centrism that Božena’s sympathies waned.

This affair was generally seen as a betrayal of the nation. But Zdenka who, rumor had it, was pregnant, didn’t break up with her “wrongly-chosen foreigner” and was even seen with him on Na Příkopech street, one of  Prague´s principle promenades. Following this blunt provocation, the patriotic public rejected the, until now, revered orphan and subsequently “exiled” her to Poděbrady. 

“The poor girl withered, pale, gaunt,” and, abandoned by everyone, died – as one eye-witness attested – before the age of 24 of tuberculosis, like her parents. She didn’t even manage to marry some farm owner whom she, at the last minute, became “obediently and properly” engaged with, though she had her lover’s letters placed with her in her grave… Only Jan Neruda, in the obituary he wrote for her, admitted that he couldn’t shake the feeling “that we are somehow all responsible.” And, while her father’s funeral turned into a political rally and Božena Němcová is said to have placed a thorn wreath on Havlíček’s coffin, crowning him a martyr, Zdenka was accompanied on her last journey only by a handful of neighbors…  

Pavel finished his story and I asked how it’s possible that I had never heard of Zdenka before, despite having studied “women’s issues.” But a bigger question was: why was he telling me about her, now? What did the macho Pavel care about this proto-feminist, anyway? 

Well, what do you know? Of course, the point of interest was that officer who enchanted Zdenka similarly to how the dark forester enchanted Božena Němcová’s heroine, Viktorka. He supposedly wanted to leave the army in order to get married to Zdena. This officer was Josef Baron Battaglia de Sopramonte e Ponte alto (1846–1915), which is to say a member of military royalty, which since time immemorial had fought not only for honor and glory but, first and foremost, for a mercenary´s pay. And it was none other than this Josef who in anno domini 1864 bought the Bratronice manor, where we were headed. There, he had intended to ensure the continuation of his family line with the daughter of a nation oppressed by Habsburgs.

After Zdenka’s death, he married a woman of acceptable status, produced his longed-for descendant, and renovated the Gothic castle into a Renaissance chateau, modeled after Kratochvíle, a chateau owned by the Rosenberg family. It didn’t take long for his residence to become an expansive manor with deep woods, rustling pastures, sixteen ponds, a beer brewery, a park with a chapel of St. Joseph and a stork nest on the chimney which survived two wars and a communist regime. 

“And his descendants live in the chateau to this day,” Pavel ended his story with a kind of mischievous contentment at a punchline well-told. 

“How come? Didn’t the communists take it?” I marveled. 

Pavel explained: Josef’s son, Quido, (1873-1962), made a name for himself as a good grounds keeper and successful carp farmer and his first-born daughter Blanka  (1911-2005) and only son Christian (1914-1991) excelled in cycling. So while the parents patrolled the manor on horseback, their children zipped across Europe on bicycles. In 1929, the siblings set out for their first race in Beroun. Christian, fifteen at the time, won silver while Blanka was “only” fourth but set out on her bike (under the unblinking attention of journalists) to Switzerland and biked down the Alpine slopes with bravado. Her father (who taught his daughter Latin without teaching it to his son!) didn’t try to stop her, but he didn’t give her money for the trip, either: she was to fight for what she needed on her own, just like all the other Battaglias. Christian’s first trip abroad to France ended in Marseille where he was hit by a car. He faced the possibility of getting his leg amputated but returned home with both his leg and his passion for bicycle riding intact. Ota Pavel dedicated his short story “Barons on Bikes” to the siblings. 

In 1939, Quido signed “A Proclamation of Bohemian and Moravian Nobility for the Preservation of Czech Statehood” (apparently, it wasn’t only Czech dissident intellectuals who were inclined to write “open letters”) which meant that, during the Protectorate, his property was put under German-ordered administration and the German warden forbade the Battaglias from using the front entrance. After 1948, the chateau, along with the surrounding properties, was nationalized and turned over to a collective of comrades from the cooperative farm. The communists finished the devastation of the manor which the Germans began. And the little barons who, until recently, had been playing barefooted with the other children in town, suddenly became contemptable freaks. 

Blanka got married to a Swiss master acrobat, who died of cancer before the age of forty, after which she returned to Bohemia, determined to take care of her paralyzed mother and demented father and brother, who used sports as a shield against everyone and everything: “I don’t get why they didn’t move us out. Was it providence that I was able to finish my duty here to my mother, father, and brother?”

So, they were allowed to stay at the chateau but only as renters to their former subjects and thus had to bear all sorts of bullying, and relinquish to the state government-assessed amounts of food which the estate produced. Christian, instead of dedicating his time to what his father taught him, namely managing the family estate, began building socialism as a manual laborer on construction sites and in the collective farm and, later, at the Strakonice firearms manufacturing company — but only until the “red aristocracy” accused his father of stealing 30 kilos of wheat. True, they didn’t find the bag of “spoils” at the chateau, but the 80-year-old baron was, never the less, sentenced to five months for not complying with the state-ordered levies. Christian went to prison in place of his sick father. After “serving time,” which is to say upon “having a criminal record,” he was, of course, no longer eligible to work in firearms manufacturing, and so he became a driver’s assistant at a construction company. Blanka who, like her mother, spoke six languages, was a gravedigger… We arrived at the chateau. 

It was hot and muggy and the air smelled like dust, sweat, and wheat and rye fields after harvest. No one in sight. Pavel banged at the chateau door in the middle of a portal with the coat of arms above it. Nothing. For a long time. I turned and went back to the car but Pavel, unexpectedly rough, like he always was when fighting his own nervousness, commanded: “Don’t go anywhere, she’s coming.” 

The tower rung noon. A second later, someone was unlocking the door. A brown-haired woman appeared, “old” for me at the time, tousled hair, in three-quarter pants and a bra, holding a bucket which reeked terribly and which she dropped the moment she saw who had been demanding entry: “Pavlíček, is that you? I can´t believe it. Pavlíček…” she cried and began hugging Pavel and pulling him inside, into the dark entry hallway with the barrel-vault ceiling... She asked why he came and if he would be filming something again. She either didn’t see me or didn’t take my presence as consequential. She ignored me with the brashness of a noble overlooking a subject, her thick arrogance so matter-of-fact that one couldn’t even get offended, on the contrary, one couldn’t help but feel a kind of a mixture of awe and gratitude for being able to breathe the same air. A cat walked through the hallway, grazed against her mistress’s leg, and sat down in front of Pavel, who ignored it. The cat stared at him, no, hypnotized him, and paid me even less attention than the lady of the house. 

Annoyed, I decided to take the initiative and offer this “lady” my hand to shake. I introduced myself: “Doctor Horáková.” This embarrasses me to this day, as I had already started leaving out the “doctor” part back then. 

Pavel came to his senses: “This is baroness Battaglia...” The baroness quickly assessed me, did not shake my hand, and said: “Blanka is enough…. Pavel, will you stay the night?” But before Pavel could answer she added: “Nothing has changed, here. There’s still a draft everywhere, but the water is running again, but only in the kitchen and in the bathroom on the ground floor…” Pavel later explained to me that the water pipelines broke in the 1950s, which meant the baroness would have to fetch water in a bucket from the municipal well, like he used to do in Příbram. Blanka added that she can’t offer much for dinner, either, at which point I realized why Pavel insisted I prepare substantial “food supplies” for our trip, albeit generally hating the practice and preferring instead to “take his meals” at restaurants, even on the way to Havel’s Hrádeček, like he was used to doing from a young age. 

Blanka disappeared and Pavel looked around the hallway, proudly. A rusty metal wheelbarrow parked in the fireplace, above which hung a coat of arms depicting an armored knight, with a sword and a helmet adorned with a peacock feather, holding a bisected red and yellow shield. “Their ancestors hung swords, armor, and shields, here…” he said. Now, the place was adorned with dull scathes, a broken grave cross, the skeletons of rusty bicycles and other, unidentifiable, pieces of rusty metal. “They hung these up after the Krauts and the commies took everything they could. This isn’t about property, you understand – it’s about their relation to time. They know that in a few years, even this junk will count as antique. They preside over time, and that’s why everyone can kiss their ass!” And suddenly I, too, felt that Baron Christian Battaglia and Baroness Blanka Battaglia employed their unmistakable sense of eternity to elevate this junk-yard-worthy trash to a collection of artifacts bearing witness to an era. 

Blanka, still wearing only the bra, beckoned us to follow her into the garden where the gooseberries and currants were ripening and where she wished to rest for a while, because her lunch break ended at one at which point she would have to return to the graveyard, as there was a funeral the next day and she needed a new pickax but the higher ups… - there was a meaningful silence  - … but the soil is soft in the summer, she continued, so she could dig a new grave in three hours. “Those graves are my little gardens,” I heard her say. Ah, so that was why there weren’t any roses, peonies, lilies or any other flowers growing in the park, only cucumbers, potatoes, onions and carrots. 

How in the world does a person – a woman! a baroness!  - become a gravedigger? I didn’t have the courage to ask. “Pavlík, do you even know how I came to be a gravedigger?” asked Blanka, as if she had read my thoughts, and proceeded to explain that the father of one of her friends was a gravedigger, and that after his death her friend asked if she’d like to join her in taking over the profession…

Blanka lay down on her back in the shade of the chateau chapel and placed the reeking bucket, which was full of rotting meat and surrounded by a swarm of flies, above her head. Pavel settled down next to her and lit himself a cigarette. He handed it to Blanka, who took a drag and handed it back to him… and I suddenly felt like an intruder. Those two smokers had such an iron intimacy between them that I started to get jealous of this ridiculous “lady” and told myself that bucket and those flies are disgusting when really they were just – unusual. Different. Eccentric? Perhaps but – rather - bold… I began to discreetly nibble at the currants. Later – still blissful and seemingly hypnotized – Pavel told me that those flies that sit on baroness Blanka from time to time calm her down and help her calm her thoughts, focus only on the buzzing… their whispers to each other. 

When baroness B.B. left to work at the graveyard, Pavel took me (he knew the place so well!) to a large room on the second floor with a view of the park. It had stucco ceilings and a bed with a canopy, though the sheets seemed not to have been changed for centuries. In front of the chipped baroque table, there were two utterly ordinary chairs, similar to those gracing the waiting rooms of local committees and other state institutions. On the Biedermeier dresser stood a floral clay bowl for washing and a tin pitcher for water. No towel. The worn parquets were protected by an equally worn carpet. Curtains of an unidentifiable color swayed by the windows and, placed about, on the Art Nouveau flower stands and on the parapets, were small porcelain bowls with dried flies, bees, spiders, and other vermin. Nothing really “fit” here and yet it all belonged. And, unbelievably, within this morbid mix of styles everything matched. This was decadence in its most noble, most natural state. A reconciliation of styles across time, a weightless space in which one could rest. Peace as the vestibule of immortality. 

Blanka returned after four and came to fetch Pavel in our room – wearing tennis shoes and freshly-applied mascara, she was suddenly insurmountably beautiful, like the Italian noble women in the paintings of Renaissance masters… except for her hands, those couldn’t be scrubbed clean, anymore, after decades of gloveless contact with shovels and axes, brushwood and dirt. So, I grabbed a cheese sandwich from our provisions, sat down under the canopy of the bed, and began reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, the pocket-edition I always carry with me just in case (which is to say as a shield against boredom.) I thought of Zdenka, the willful exile, and wondered if “our beautiful lady” Božena Němcová felt empathy towards her, or even solidarity. Hardly. Protesting against the patriarchal establishment was one thing, but an affair with an oppressor of national independence was another. Not to mention the fact that Zdenka was clearly only being girlishly cheeky whereas Božena fought for her right to love… 

Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by the absurd desire to bite into one of those dry flies but stopped myself with the, even more absurd, suspicion that that would mean depriving the castle lordship of their dinner. And I can’t remember if we had brought with us a bottle of wine, box of chocolates, a book – I think not. Pavel regarded bringing “a little something” as a gift to be awkwardly conventional, and the Barons of Bratronice didn’t expect anything from him, just as they didn’t expect anything from fate or life. 

I started to understand why Pavel shot A Case for a Rookie Hangman, here, in the spring of 1969. He must have been fascinated and seduced by this dazed world where everything that represents real life seems unnecessary, a mere representation of the existential emptiness beyond a facade. Everything was possible, here, because it wasn’t about what is or isn’t real, but about the feeling, the mood, the atmosphere – that state which can’t be understood from outside, the averted side of life, which he tried to capture both in his movies and in his diary. 

All those winged little corpses in the Meissen bowls, that hopeless run-down look, that matter-of-fact detachment of the Battaglia barons, all this embodied the “derangement” of a person refusing to abandon a dream, refusing to integrate, exist in community with others, live responsibly. In this chateau, Pavel had before his eyes, even at the tip of his fingers, his “key to determining reality,” that youthful tristesse he never shook, and which he later alleviated with biting humor or masked with aggressive skepticism. Here, all you had to do was sit down and be still – and the rifts of time would open, leading to outer-time. Here, one could merely wait for dramatic conflicts to spontaneously shrink into harmless trifles.

Sure, Blanka’s and Christian’s all-encompassing “blasé-ness” was tiring, but bearable. After all, these two Spartan-raised descendants of aristocratic mercenaries have spent decades – never growing bitter! – facing adversity and enemies with such toughness that it seemed they were the “citizens” of a place unnamable, a place much greater than this or that régime and the graves it left behind – an attitude which, for those on the outside, must have seemed like resignation. 

But, to me, the Battaglias seemed more like the distant relatives of the mythical Sisyphus who, upon reaching the summit with his rock – just like the two of them – watches it roll down. And so they descend, tired, but as they do so they, albeit almost imperceptibly, smile and perhaps even look down upon the gods who sentenced them to eternal toil. 

After all, these barons were not afraid of finality or poverty but, on the contrary, stepped up proudly to their daily lot. They regretted nothing and didn’t complain for anything, nothing surprised or startled those two – like Pavel’s Jan Herold in his film Joseph Kilian, like Gulliver in his Case for a Rookie Hangman … - because their ancestors have experienced “it” all, in this or that guise. 

I think that both Blanka and Christian knew that – en fin de compte – they could not escape their “blue blood” and so they lived here, “in the spirit of” their ancestors, who lay buried in a family tomb at the edge of the forest bordering the chateau park... And they remained themselves, absolutely authentic, just like Pavel’s Gulliver who fell through into the attic of a “trap house” with uneven wood carpets, through whose cracks he glimpsed his dead (light, amazing!) lover and his current (dark, complicated!) one, along with his ancestors among whom she belonged and would belong forever… It was because of this scene that I fell in love with Juráček. (If the Battaglia siblings saw the Rookie Hangman, I’m not sure as I forgot to ask.) 

Pavel didn’t wish his films or the things he wrote in his diary to be statements, that is, explanations or arguments which could persuade. He didn’t wish to promote any thought, defend any opinion, critique the régime through metaphors, bear witness to his generation – no, he merely wished to conjure that captivating atmosphere in which one turns off the mind, allows thoughts to swarm and flit about like flies, and thus descends into the state of a detached observer, unswayed by titles, terms, or budgets, party secretaries or editors, a state outside of rules, responsibilities, bonds, and ties, a state in which it makes no sense – and perhaps it’s even impossible? – to distinguish a lie from the truth and evil from good and in which Pavel himself could – as he wrote – “live in harmony with his dreams and his imagination,” undisturbed. 

But the main thing is: Here, in this worn, broken-down chateau, Pavel didn’t feel like an “outcast” although he always remained one. Nothing was required, here, although what was “allowed” was only that which one was inadvertently tied to do through lineage, heritage, and tradition. There was nothing to explain or ask, here. No theses, no answers. Only something primordial, unconditional, self-evident like the blooms on a forest meadow or a forgotten pond, overgrown with moss. That was the decadence Pavel was drawn to. An attitude paid for with expropriation, sealed with excommunication, legitimized with a coat of arms. Dignified poverty. That was the upper hand before which he bowed.