The Cremator (Modern Czech Classics), page 18
A few days later, Mr. Kopfrkingl said to Zina, who was about to go to her piano lesson:
‘My lovely! A letter came for me. I’ve been appointed head of an enormous undertaking. I’m leaving the crematorium for a higher post. It concerns a Reich project which will prevent the exploitation of mankind once and for all, its suffering from hunger and poverty. It’ll rid people of all kinds of suffering, and perhaps even horses . . . Unfortunately, I can’t give you any details. It’s secret. Utter discretion is necessary. But what if I showed you the place where I’ve been working for the last twenty years before I leave the crematorium? What would you say to that? To see where your father began, worked, faithfully performed his duties, grew and matured? Tomorrow is Saturday, there’s no cremation in the afternoon, not until Monday . . . How about putting on that pretty black silk dress which I bought for you the other day, and going to have a look . . .? I’ll get,’ he said, ‘a camera somewhere . . .’
After Zina had left, the Tibetan envoy paid him a visit. He made tea with butter.
‘Rimpoche,’ the monk kneeled down before him on the carpet in the dining-room, ‘it’s time. The throne is waiting for you. Tibet, our blessed country, is waiting for her high priest. The people are waiting for their ruler. Here is the robe of the last Lama . . .’ The monk pointed with his hand into the empty space as if pointing to stars which were in the dining-room and were not visible. ‘Here’s the golden tegag and the dark red shamthav. The wall which obstructed your view has collapsed. The sky has opened, there are infinite stars above us . . .’ he pointed to the ceiling . . . ‘You’re going to save the world. Kyab su chiwo, kyabgön rimpoche.’ The monk touched the floor with his forehead. ‘You’re the Buddha!’
‘Get up, my son,’ Mr. Kopfrkingl motioned to the monk benignly, almost with tears in his eyes. Then he positioned himself behind the table, raised his hands as if to the sky, towards the ceiling . . . and said:
‘The sky has opened, there are infinite stars above us. Lags so. Just as I have read for years in the book by Madame David-Neel, in her book about Tibet, which Mr. Rudolf Kádner, the bookbinder, bound for me in beautiful yellow covers in Ovocný trh, in this city of Prague. May all beings be happy. In the name of the happiness which will come to mankind, no sacrifice is too great for me. Mr. Holý from Nekázanka Street also lost his wife. As did Mr. Strauss, from consumption of the throat, and his son from scarlet fever. But I have yet to do one more thing,’ he smiled towards his feet. ‘I still have to deliver one good soul. Tomorrow, on Saturday afternoon, I have to send one soul back whence it came, in time to save her from the suffering which awaits her in the future, happy world. She’s going to take her dark silk dress and lie down in it next to the greatest pianist there has ever been in Prague, Mrs. Hermína Sýkora. The celestial birds are going to sing the second movement from Chopin’s piano concerto to her, as laid down by her widower. Wait till tomorrow evening, my son.’
The monk gave a smile and at that moment it was as if the world misted over for Mr. Kopfrkingl. But it was a mist in his own soul. When he had collected himself a little, he heard beautiful music. It was the big aria from Donizetti’s “Lucia”, the piano concerto, the “Unfinished”, “Parsifal” and the “Eroica” . . . and then some lively music, clarinet, fiddles and the double-bass as well, and then some tambourines, kettle drums and prayer wheels. And he saw that three men in white were standing in the dining-room, near the cat and the door with the portrait of the Führer and Reich Chancellor; three angels, one of whom was called Piskoř. . . and then they lead him out of the fiat with heavenly kindness, down the stairs, while a terrified lady and her son stepped aside to let them pass . . . out of the apartment house. Out of the apartment house, with a car standing in front of it. A white car, the car for angels, adorned with a red cross and a German number plate. A faint autumn breeze stirred his hair as he bent his head to get in.
In mid-May of 1945 – after the war – through the window of a hospital train, in the railway station of a small German town, Mr. Kopfrkingl saw crowds of emaciated people returning home. It seemed to him that he recognized some familiar faces among them: the faces of a Mr. Strauss and a Mr. Rubinstein, and the old face of Dr. Bettelheim and a young man, possibly his Jan, and some woman too, who seemed familiar to him. He was smiling and he would have liked to wave at them, but his hand was in his pocket at that precise moment, and had just felt something in it. It was a piece of a string and a lump of sugar. And so he merely turned round in the compartment and said to the handless and legless:
‘Happy mankind. I’ve delivered it. There certainly won’t be any more persecution, injustice or suffering in the world. No more, for certain, not even for horses . . . Gentlemen, the new order is now beginning.’
Yellowish smoke was rising from the chimney of the Prague crematorium. At that very moment a morphine addict was being cremated.
AFTERWORD TO THE CREMATOR
BY LADISLAV FUKS
Fuks’s The Cremator, published in 1967, marks the high point of the 1960s literary re-evaluation of the Czechs’ Second World War experience. Following the Soviet-led military intervention of August 1968, this process would not be publicly resumed in Czechoslovakia until after the fall of Communism. Like other countries occupied by Hitler’s Germany, in the immediate aftermath of liberation in 1945, the narrative in the Czech press, literature and cinema had presented the Czechs as innocent victims of brutal Germans, while masking the extent of Czech accommodation with the occupier. The dominance of the Communist Party in post-war politics and culture ensured an exaggerated account of domestic working-class resistance, while attributing any collaboration to the middle-class. From the late 1950s, however, again as in other European countries, a new generation of writers, who had experienced the war as children or adolescents, returned to the subject, sceptical of the prevailing simple picture of the period. Famous examples available to English-speaking readers include Josef Škvorecký’s The Cowards and the somewhat older Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Observed Trains.
Fuks, who was born in 1923 and died in 1994, established himself in the 1960s as the leading Czech literary interpreter of the Occupation with four books, culminating in The Cremator. (The literal translation of the Czech title is ‘The incinerator of corpses’.) His first, Mr Theodor Mundstock, published in 1963 and also available in English translation, describes the preparations made by an elderly Prague Jew as he waits to be deported to Auschwitz. The next two – the short story cycle My black-haired brothers (1964) and Variations for a dark string (1965) – are both more obviously autobiographical, focusing on how an anxious adolescent with a feverish imagination apprehends of the Occupation and the fate of Jewish boys in his class.
At the time, the most celebrated Czech writer about the period was Arnošt Lustig, an Auschwitz survivor, whose fiction fits more squarely in the genre of ‘Holocaust literature’ in its focus on Jews and the camps, and its Existentialist-influenced search for glimpses of a positive, even heroic humanity amid the barbarity. Fuks, however, turns the focus on life in Prague, the centre of the Occupation. His narratives lack the implied strong, stable underlying interpretation of events and characters found in earlier treatments of the period. Instead, they examine the psychological impact of the Occupation on fragile, fearful minds that are uncertain how to make sense of or respond to what is happening. Fuks communicates this destabilized, chaotic experience of the world through disorientating narration, grotesque imagery, fluctuation between the real and imagined, and recurring motifs that suggest the possibility of an unreachable, hidden pattern or order beyond the absurdity. His portrayal makes the reader question the sanity of the character or the world in which they live. At the same time, however, these techniques, self-consciously exaggerated in The Cremator, show Fuks to be a playful writer, unflinchingly ready to expose the ‘human comedy’ behind the tragedy.
The Cremator differs from both Fuks’s earlier work and previous writing about the Occupation by focusing on a character who collaborates. In keeping with prevailing ideological expectations, Kopfrkingl is petty bourgeois. The perception of working-class Czechs as innocent victims is intensified by the use for crematorium employees of common surnames denoting small, relatively harmless animals that often feature in fables: Beran (Lamb), Liška (Fox), Vrána (Crow), Zajíc (Hare). In accordance with the post-war demonization of Bohemian Germans, over two million of whom were expelled from Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1947, Willi Reinke is a one-dimensional Devil figure, by turns threatening and tempting Kopfrkingl. Previously, however, collaborators in Czech fiction had been shadowy, minor characters. Fuks, by contrast, places his collaborator at the centre of the novel and asks the reader to accompany him closely on his transition from eccentric but well-intentioned family man to murderer of his wife and son. Perhaps most radically, it is not clear at the end of the novel whether Kopfrkingl will face justice for his actions, or whether – as, in fact, sometimes happened with Nazi collaborators – he will find his way to serving the coming Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia.
Fuks thus, almost uniquely among Czech writers, manages to draw Kopfrkingl’s story out of the Occupation and into a more universal context. Czech readers in 1967 could hardly fail to recognize Kopfrkingl’s situation as an allegory for their own under Communist dictatorship, even though any identification of communism with Fascism was taboo. As a writer, but also as a devout Roman Catholic and homosexual in times deeply hostile to both, Fuks well understood the internal conflict between resistance and conformity, expression and repression, and indeed in the 1970s he was himself criticized for collaborating with the Moscow-ordained Party leadership by continuing to publish when many others could not or chose not to. Fuks’s novels repeatedly explore the nature of strength and weakness; in The Cremator, Willi tells Kopfrkingl: ‘There is often greater evil in weakness than in strength’, yet Fuks frequently portrays the resilience of the apparently weak. He often sets physically strong, daunting, strident, coldly logical masculinity, embodied in The Cremator by Willi, but in other novels by distant, austere fathers, against physically weak, introverted boys or child-like men and women, who resist at least for a time by retreating from an unloving society into elaborate inner worlds.
Kopfrkingl constitutes a negative version of this type. At the beginning of the novel, Kopfrkingl is a peculiar but far from bad man, who wants the best for his family and is deeply troubled by the violence and cruelty of the world, which he seeks to make more benign by renaming things. His Jewish doctor, Bettelheim, a counterweight to Willi, suggests that he needs to accept pain and suffering as inevitable and essential to mortal existence, but Kopfrkingl’s love for his family and his yearning for a better world – embodied by the perfection of the crematorium timetable – prove his key weaknesses. Indeed, his decision to collaborate seems motivated more by these than by a desire to ensure his own survival or well-being under the Occupation, though he prospers as a result. The killings may be understood either as a prescient attempt to save his wife and son from the suffering they will undergo once their Jewish blood is discovered, or the liberation of their souls from imprisonment in what Willi tells him is a decaying Jewish body. Fuks’s perception that the pursuit of perfection only leads to greater misery and brutality, also found in Hrabal’s major works from the 1970s, is a lesson learned from personal experience of two forms of totalitarian ideology, but was and remains unfashionable in a twentieth- and twenty-first developed world predicated on modernization and progress.
The Cremator was met with widespread critical debate and acclaim on publication, and has become a classic of twentieth-century Czech literature. It quickly attracted the attention of the Slovak Jewish film-maker, Juraj Herz, a concentration camp survivor, who claims to have been disappointed with the novel after the promise of its title. Fuks wrote the screenplay, but the film lacks the ambiguity of the novel, and the blackly comic tone of the novel are subordinated to elements of psychological thriller and horror. Evil is nascent in Kopfrkingl from the opening scenes; he attracts no empathy, and is not so much changed as inspired by his encounters with Willi. One might attribute the changes to Herz’s own experiences, or the changed context; while the novel was written at a time of increasing liberalization, the film was shot before and after the Soviet-led military intervention, which signalled the defeat of reform-Communism. Indeed, Herz was apparently prevented from using shots of the Soviet army in 1968 to represent the liberation in 1945. The film was withdrawn from cinemas soon after its release in March 1969, but is now widely considered one of Czechoslovak cinema’s finest. With this re-publication, English-speaking audiences familiar with the film will once again be able to compare it to the original novel.
Despite its critical reputation, The Cremator remains an emotionally difficult text not only for Czech readers. This translation was originally published by Marion Boyars in 1984, at a time of unparalleled popularity for Czech writing by contemporaries of Fuks like Škvorecký, Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma and Milan Kundera, but did not make the same impact. Both at home and abroad, The Cremator – similarly but more sharply than Hrabal’s I Served the King of England – challenges the conventional idea of the Czechs not only as victims, but also as plucky survivors and resisters, which underpinned international imaginings of them especially after 1968. The novel will extend readers’ understanding of both the historical context and – as an example of writing not from the liberal centre-left, which draws instead on ‘techniques of strangeness’ reminiscent of Czech Baroque and Decadent aesthetics – the breadth and depth of Czech literature. Above all, however, Fuks’s unique artistic vision deserves at last to take its place in world literature about both the Second World War and the fate of the individual human being amid the oppressive ideologies of the twentieth century and beyond.
Rajendra A. Chitnis
University of Bristol
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ladislav Fuks employs metaphors, symbolic characters and motifs. I have tried to preserve as much of the original tone, style and language as possible except in the case of Czech surnames which I have left unchanged.
The names of the employees of the crematorium and some of the dead are names of animals and composers, or names with musical meaning. They are listed with the English translation as follows:
Beran Ram
Daněk Fallow deer
Fenek Desert fox
Liška Fox
Pelikán Pelican
Piskoř Weather loach
Sýkora Great tit
Srnec Roebuck
Strunný Stringed
Veverka Squirrel
Vlk Wolf
Vrána Crow
Zajíc Hare
There are a few sentences in German in the original which I have also left unchanged in the translation.
I would like to thank my friends, Sue Gilbert and Lionel Munby, for reading the English text and for their helpful comments on the translation. My thanks also go to Richard Hockaday for his support.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Eva Kandler is an IT consultant. She was born in Nottingham, educated in Prague and is a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge. She has translated prose and poetry and scientific papers from Czech and German.
Central European modern history is notable for many political and cultural discontinuities and often violent changes as well as many attempts to preserve and (re)invent traditional cultural identities. This series cultivates contemporary translations of influential literary works into English (and other languages) which have not been available to global readership due to censorship, the effects of Cold War or repetitive political disruptions in Czech publishing and its international ties.
Readers in English both in today’s cosmopolitan Prague or anywhere in the physical and electronic world can thus become acquainted with works which capture the Central European historical experience and which express and also have helped to form Czech and Central European nature, humour and imagination.
Believing that any literary canon can be defined only in dialogue with other cultures, the series will bring proven classics used in Western university courses as well as (re)discoveries aiming to provide new perspectives in intermedial areal studies of literature, history and culture.
All titles are accompanied by an afterword, the translations are reviewed and circulated in the scholarly community before publication which has been reflected by nominations for several literary awards.
Modern Czech Classics series edited by Martin Janeček and Karolinum Press
Published titles
Zdeněk Jirotka: Saturnin (2003, 2005, 2009, 2013; pb 2016)
Vladislav Vančura: Summer of Caprice (2006; pb 2016)
Karel Poláček: We Were a Handful (2007; pb 2016)
Bohumil Hrabal: Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp (2008)
Karel Michal: Everyday Spooks (2008)
Eduard Bass: The Chattertooth Eleven (2009)
Jaroslav Hašek: Behind the Lines. Bugulma and Other Stories (2012; pb 2016)
Bohumil Hrabal: Rambling On (2014; pb 2016)
Ladislav Fuks: Of Mice and Mooshaber (2014)
Josef Jedlička: Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life (2016)
Jaroslav Durych: God’s Rainbow (2016)
Ladislav Fuks: The Cremator (2016)
In Translation
Bohuslav Reynek: The Well at Morning
Ludvík Vaculík: Czech Dreambook
Jan Čep: Short Stories
Viktor Dyk: The Pied Piper
Ladislav Fuks, The Cremator (Modern Czech Classics)
