Free The Prague Orgy by Philip Roth Page B

point of view. You write, if you even can here, into the teeth of this.
    “ Well, ” I say, “ it ’ s kind of you personally to see me out, Mr. Minister. This is the road to the airport? Frankly I don ’ t recognize it. ”
    “ You should have taken the time to come to see me when you first arrived. It would have been worth your while. I would have made you realize what the common life is in Czechoslovakia. You would understand that the ordinary Czech citizen does not think like the sort of people you have chosen to meet. He does not behave like them and he does not admire them. The ordinary Czech is repelled by such people. Who are they? Sexual perverts. Alienated neurotics. Bitter egomaniacs. They seem to you courageous? You find it thrilling, the price they pay for their great art? Weil, the ordinary hardworking Czech who wants a better life for himself and his family is not so thrilled- He considers them malcontents and parasites and outcasts. At least their blessed Kafka knew he was a freak, recognized that he was a misfit who could never enter into a healthy, ordinary existence alongside his countrymen. But these people? Incorrigible deviants who propose to make their moral outlook the norm. The worst is that left to themselves, left to run free to do as they wish, these people would destroy this country. I don ’ t even speak of their moral degeneracy. With this they only make themselves and their families miserable, and destroy the lives of their children. I am thinking of their political stupidity. Do you know what Brezhnev told Dubcek when he flew our great reform leader to the Soviet Union back in ‘ 68? Brezhnev sent several hundred thousand troops to Prague to get Mr. Dubcek to come to his senses about his great program of reforms. But to be on the safe side with this genius, he had him taken one evening from his office and flown to the Soviet Union for a little talk. ”
    To the Soviet Union. Suppose they put me aboard Aeroflot, suppose that ’ s the next plane out of Prague. Suppose they keep me here. As Nathan Zuckerman awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a sweeper of floors in a railway cafi. There are petitions for him to sign, or not to sign; there are questions for him to answer, or not to answer; there are enemies to despise, there are friends to con-sole, mail doesn ’ t reach him, a phone they withhold, there are informers, breakdowns, betrayals, threats, there is for him even a strange brand of freedom — invalidated by the authorities, a superfluous person with ho res ponsibilities and nothing to do, he has the kind of good times you have in Dante ’ s Inferno; and finally, to really break him on the rack of farce, there is Novak squatting over the face of culture: when he awakens in the morning, realizes where he is and remembers what he ’ s turned into, he begins to curse and doesn ’ t stop cursing.
    I speak up. “ 1 am an American citizen. Mr. Minister. I want to know what ’ s going on here. Why these policemen? I have committed no crime. ”
    ‘“ You have committed several crimes, each punishable by sentences of up to twenty years in jail. ”
    “ 1 demand to be taken to the American Embassy. ”
    “ Let me tell you what Brezhnev told Mr. Dub èe k that Mr. Bolotka neglected to say while elucidating on the size of his sexual organ. One. he would deport our Czech intelligentsia en masse to Siberia; two, he would turn Czechoslovakia into a Soviet republic: three, he would make Russian the language in the schools. In twenty years nobody would even remember that such a country as Czechoslovakia had ever existed. This is not the United States of America where every freakish thought is a fit subject for writing, where there is no such thing as propriety. decorum, or shame, nor a decent respect for the morality of the ordinary, hardworking citizen. This is a small country of fifteen million, dependent as it has always been upon the