Free The Prague Orgy by Philip Roth

woman. To be fucked is the only freedom left in this country. To fuck and to be fucked is all we have left that they cannot stop, but you do not have to fuck me, if I am such an unattractive woman compared to the American girls. He can even print the stories in his own name, your friend Sisovsky. The hell with it. The hell with everything. In spite of the charm with which he seduced you, with which he seduces everybody, he can be quite vicious—do you know. ’ There is great brutality in your Sisovsky. Did he tell you about all his doubts—his tragic doubts? What shit! Before Zdenek left Prague, we measured personal vanity here in millisisovskys. Zdenek will survive in America. He is human in the worst sense of the word. Zdenek will flourish, ihanks to his dead father. So will she. And in return, I want nothing. Only that when he asks you how much did you have to give her, how much money and how many fucks, you will do me one favor: tell him you had to give me nothing. Tell her.
    At the hotel, two plainclothes policemen come to the room and confiscate the candy box full of Yiddish manuscript within fifteen minutes of my return. They are accompanied by the hotel clerk who ’ d earlier in the day handed me Hrobek ’ s note. “ They wish to examine your belongings, sir, ” he tells me— ” they say some body has mislaid something which you may have picked up by mistake. ” “ My belongings are none of their business. ” “ I ’ m afraid you are wrong. That is precisely their business. ” As the police begin their search I ask him, “ And you, what ’ s your business? ” “ I merely work at the reception desk. It is not only the intellectual who may be sent down to the mines if he does not cooperate with the present regime, the hotel clerk can be demoted as well. As one of our famous dissidents has said, a man who speaks only the truth, ‘ There is always a lower rung under the feet of every citizen on the ladder of the state. ’” I demand to be allowed to telephone the American Embassy, and not so as to arrange a wedding. I am told instead to pack my bags. I will be driven to the airport and put on the next plane out of Prague. I am no longer welcome as a visitor in Czecho slovakia. “ I want to speak to the American ambassador. They cannot confiscate my belongings. There are no grounds on which to expel me from this country. ” “ Sir, though it may appear to you that ardent supporters of this regime are few and far between, there are also those, like these two gentlemen, who have no trouble believing that what they do is right, correct, and nec essary. Brutally necessary. I am afraid that any further delay is going to cause them to be less lenient than you would like. ” “ What the box contains is simply manuscript—stories written by somebody who ’ s been dead now thirty years, fiction about a world that no longer even exists, It is no possible threat to anyone. ” “ I am grateful, sir, in times like these, still to be able to support my family. There is nothing a clerk in a Prague hotel can do for any writer, living or dead. ” When I demand for the third time to speak to the Embassy, I am told that if I do not immediately pack my bags and prepare to leave, I will be arrested and taken to jail. “ How do I know, ” I ask, “ that they won ’ t take me to jail anyway? ” “ I suppose, ” the clerk replies, “ that you will have to trust them. ”
    Either Olga had a change of heart and called the cops, or else they called on her. Klenek ’ s is bugged, everyone says so. I just cannot believe that she and the hotel clerk work for the same boss, but maybe that ’ s because I am a shallow, sentimental, American idiot Jew.
    At the desk the police wait while I charge my bills to the Diners Club and then I am accompanied by them to a black limousine. One policeman sits up front with the driver and the candy box, and the other in the back with me and a bulky, bespectacled, elderly man who