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(Translated by Jonathan Bolton)

Book the First: Chimpanzee

My Master’s Voice


I was born, gentlemen, if you really want to listen, I was born the night of December 31, 1899, and my father was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, my mother German (her fathers and later her brother owned a large estate in Lanškroun, in the foothills of the Orlické Mountains). I was born at home, which is how they did things in those days. My midwife was Magda, a Hungarian from Pressburg. City of birth: Brno. Place of birth: my bed, bedlam on the fourth floor of a large apartment building on Ferdinand-Strasse (later Masaryk Street, then Hermann-Göring-Strasse, and after that Masaryk Street again, and then Victory Avenue, and then Masaryk Street for a short time, and then Victory Avenue for a long time, and today Masaryk once again).
In case you didn’t know, my dears, every birth is a circus of emotions for all involved. The midwife held me and screamed something in Hungarian and Slovak. My mother kept trying to get a look at me and, even though they wanted to prevent her from doing so and pressed her back onto the bed with all their might, she lifted herself onto her elbows, pulled herself erect like a cobra, and rattled off something, first in Czech, then German. Dad knelt on the ground and, though lukewarm in his faith until now, prayed in Russian, and sentences of Czech, like little islands of vegetation uprooted by a flood, floated in that great Orthodox current bursting forth from him. And our American hosts stood around the bed; they just happened to be at hand, for they had sailed in from Niagara Falls and traveled here by railroad from the port of Hamburg. They had brought us bearskins and bison skins, and now they stood there like Three Kings from the New World, and they really were kings, three Indian chiefs (I’ll explain in a moment), rattling off something in Indian. And the raucous cheerfulness of a masked parade, running just then down Ferdinand-Strasse, collided with that mix of languages as well. In the middle of the Brno night, champagne bottles exploded, a band squawked, four thousand lights burned and flew about like the eyes of two thousand owls, and people dressed as animals growled, barked, whimpered, grunted, whinnied, brayed, bleated, baaed, crowed, and mooed. My life was beginning, and so was a new century.
But of course I don’t intend to leave out the most important thing. At the moment of my birth, despite all the noise, I clearly heard the voice of someone already waiting impatiently for me. I alone could hear that voice, my little doves, and it was like a taut fishing line dragging me stubbornly out of the uterus, the voice of my master, and just as soon as I had squeezed my way out, I answered him with a yearning cry. I knew about him in those very first moments, just as, somewhere far away, very far away (well, I shouldn’t exaggerate, it wasn’t all that far), he knew I’d been born.
Unlike me, he was already in his twelfth year on this earth, and he’d been following from afar the preparations for my conception. (He had crawled into my parents’ physical desires and kept egging them on, kibitzing: all right, you two, let’s go at it one more time! what are you waiting for? what the hell are you doing? don’t take it out of her now! you’ve got to leave it in there! you’re the son of an Orthodox priest and you don’t even know that it’s a sin to stop in the middle? that’s it, all the way, there you go! aaahh, that feels good, doesn’t it?) When conception finally occurred, he stretched out an invisible stethoscope mounted on a long rod, and he listened to see if he could hear me yet, and when I was finally born, he was overjoyed and grabbed a tailor’s dummy (he was the son of the court tailor) and wheeled around the workshop with it. At the same moment, his parents were attending a k. & k. ball at the Viennese court (in the Hofburg) to welcome the new century.
Up to then, gentlemen, everything went smoother than smooth. Our meeting, the meeting of immortal lovers of the coming century (a Petrarch and Laura of the atomic age, a Tristan and Isolde for the era of kitchen robots, sputniks, computers, and holocausts) was festively prepared. On one hand, our fearsome instinctual apparatus, capable of rhythmically shaking even a cosmic launching pad just before takeoff. On the other, love beyond the grave. We knew about each other from the start, and a powerful mutual attraction, comparable only to the mighty pull of the Gulf Stream, was supposed to arrange a timely meeting — an earthshaking event comparable only to the discovery of the structure of DNA.
But chance is an asshole, as you have already divined. Three days after my birth, twelve-year-old Ervin Mlock was returning from a visit to his uncle Moshe Bajles, returning to Leopoldstadt, and instead of walking all the way to the Reichsbrück like a good boy, he tried to take a shortcut across the frozen Danube, but because the evening was late, the Lord God high above, and the streetlights of Vienna still far off, he fell in the darkness into a hole cut in the ice by Viennese pike fisherman. The current swept him away and I heard him choking in the water, walled in under the ice, which his nails scratched at from below like the lid of a glass coffin. I heard that terrifying scratching, as if Edison’s phonograph were turning there inside my head, but I lay there helplessly, wrapped up in diapers and quilt and trussed up in swaddling clothes to boot, and after a while Ervin’s desperate scratching fell absolutely silent in my head, as when the sacristan puts out all the candles on the main altar, and it was dark and quiet, quiet and dark.
And so everything ended before it could get going. Our instinctual apparatus had suddenly missed its mark and from then on just raged as if insane; of love beyond the grave, nothing was left but the grave (in whose cold, wet depths the pike, like rabid dogs, brawled over Ervin’s silver buttons); and the century — which, as far as I was concerned, had now become nothing but one long funeral rite for Ervin — was just beginning.
But suddenly something strange happened.
And that, my loves, is what this story is about.


Family History

I spent much of my childhood in Lanškroun, where my uncle Helmut Sammler owned a large estate with extensive forests and cultivated fields, through which you could walk and keep walking and keep walking for two or three hours, getting lost and never reaching the end.
My mother’s parents (Walter and Alma Sammler) left their large family holdings to their eldest son, uncle Helmut, who then paid out carefully calculated shares to his three siblings (my mother among them), giving them each an equal percentage of the family property. That was a common practice in those days: holdings could not be torn apart, the eldest son took over the estate, and my mother put her cash share in the bank. And in addition, Uncle Helmut sent us a big basket of food from Lanškroun every month — until 1945, when he lost the estate, the fields, and the forests — so that until the age of forty-five I never knew poverty, never knew hunger.
From my father’s relatives, on the other hand, nothing was in store for us, in fact less than nothing: nichtozhestvo i nishchenskaya nishcheta, esli ponimaetebessmertniky, or Skoptsy, but it didn’t, because instead, lo and behold, he embarked on his own journey: suddenly he packed up his priestly things, took off across Ukraine and Galicia, and continued south in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy all the way to Trieste, and from there to Italy. He took off with his trailer, on which was painted a gigantic Christ-Pantokrator, Vsederzhitel, Lord of the Universe, with strict, piercing eyes from which there was no place to take cover, his right hand rendering a blessing, his left shaking an open codex, and inside the trailer, behind Christ’s back, screamed Grandpa’s hungry children. And so Grandpa became a priest-gypsy, he took off after a vision of an Orthodox America, and scattered his children on his trip across Europe (he dropped off my father between Prosiměřice and Oleksovice), and in Italy he boarded a ship along with his trailer and sailed to the longed-for New World. Lightning streaks painted the legs of night mares and tarot-card symbols across the sky, and the rearing Goat of Mendes, the Ancichrist, above the waters, as well as the Heavenly Ladder, whence monks fell into the maw of the sea dragon Bythios Drakón. Water demons and sea monsters emerged from the ocean, ready to swallow on someone’s orders the little Italian boat and Grandpa’s trailer, but the order was always revoked in time, so my grandfather sailed to America, whose original inhabitants he hastened to address in Church Slavonic, and he really did become the first Orthodox bishop of all North American and Canadian Indians, from Alaska to the Mexican border. On his initiative a delegation of Indians came to Petrograd in 1897 (they came on sleds and wandered in on snow-shoes across the frozen Gulf of Finland) to pay their respects to the Orthodox czar, and they brought him not only the obligatory bearskins and bison skins but also an offer to become the great chief of all the remaining orphaned Indian tribes, especially the Dakotas, Delawares, Shoshones, Apaches, Iroquois, Omahas, Navajos, Shawnees, and Ojibwas, not to mention the Cherokees, but the czar-batyushka scorned this magnificent offer, sitting with his Romanov behind stuck to his mound in the Tsarskoe selo, and thus did he call down upon himself all the disasters that would come looking for him during the next twenty years. Including the government of Antichrists, one of whom, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, had the cynical, blasphemous gall to take over our family name, Trotsky, and begin to use it as his revolutionary title.
But there was nothing at all priestly about my father, unless I count his adoration of technology. He was an impassioned Edisonian and all his life needed to be near things that sparked, droned, and smoked. He began as a locksmith — his signboard showed a barebacked key, on which a rider sat as if it were a wild mustang — but he quickly mounted another fiery steed, earning his spurs on Emperor Ferdinand’s Northern Railway, where he traveled many years with the famous locomotive Comet II. (Yes, gentlemen, in those days they still christened and named locomotives!) He met my mother, however, on the Prague-Olomouc line, when she was going to Brno with her brother Jacob, who at the time was already a Capuchin monk in a mountain monastery in the Alps, not far from Salzburg (he transferred his entire compensation for the Lanškroun property, and this will interest you, to the Capuchin order, and so the basket of victuals wandered its way each month from Lanškroun to the mountain monastery, and Uncle Jacob never got any of it, not even one little fried quail).
But before my father met my mother, my mother and Uncle Jacob met with an anarchist known under the alias of Radek-Paperboy. He was handing out the eighth issue of the anarchist Workers’ Foundation in the train, but scarce had he seen my uncle the Capuchin when a flame burned up in his eyes: most likely he had remembered the fourth of Prince Kropotkin’s Ten Commandments for Anarchists (Thou shalt smack all manner of cleric on the jaw!), and he put down his stack of newspapers and jumped on my uncle, intending to pull his hood down over his eyes and humiliate him in other premeditated ways. But he had picked the wrong person to pick on. A conductor who was present ran to my father and reported that Radek-Paperboy was in the third compartment of the second car, barbarously humiliating a monk, with no regard for the ladies present. And my father did what was completely normal in such cases. He stopped the locomotive (that is, he took the few basic steps necessary to stop it, although in those days the braking distance of a locomotive was as long as the tail of a comet, so the stoker took over for the rest of the time) and, arming himself with an iron bar, went to the third compartment of the second car. But as soon as Radek-Paperboy saw him, he let go of the monk, threw his stack of newspapers out of the train, jumped adroitly after them, and, watched by passengers leaning out their windows, rolled up the railway embankment as if powered by some Anarcho-syndicalist force. Dad said a few apologetic words to Uncle Jacob (after all, he felt responsible for keeping order in the whole train), smiled gallantly at Mom, and didn’t neglect to exchange a few words with her. Only then did he return to the locomotive and nod to the stoker, and the great, heavy machine with its funnel chimney and long string of cars slowly started up again.
Nothing else important happened that day. And what happened in subsequent weeks on the Prague-Olomouc line, leading eventually to my birth, is already as clear as day, so I can leave it out.


On the Aegean

My first memory is of when I was three. And it’s an undersea memory.
As I’ve already mentioned, my dears, we were taken care of financially thanks to my mother’s parents, the Sammlers of Lanškroun. And it might even have been possible to live out our lives quite comfortably on our share of the Sammlers’ property, a share deposited in a dependable banking house, do you hear? without lifting our little fingers. Especially when we take into account the food baskets from Lanškroun. But that also means it was absolutely unnecessary for Dad to work as an engineer, to perform this difficult and uncompromising service, this slavish drudgery that was subject to the strictest discipline and demanded, as Dad used to say, the abilities of an ox, an eagle, and a tapeworm combined. An ox for the Herculean strength it was necessary to display on the tracks — why, all those slide valves, clutches and couplings, hand and air brakes kept him busy, and occasionally something stopped working and it was necessary to use substitute mechanisms, if you understand me, darlings, and what about those boulders that used to lie on the tracks, thrown there by the fanatic enemies of technological progress — Dad had to reach for an enormous crowbar, which he wielded like a conductor’s baton, and occasionally it was necessary to upright an overturned locomotive back on its wheels. Nor could he get by without the abilities of an eagle — seeing the whole track as if from an enormous height and yet in all its detail, especially where it twisted sharply behind a rock overhang. And I haven’t yet spoken of the abilities of a tapeworm, when it was necessary to slip into the locomotive’s maw and scrape through its metal intestines after a clattering internal malfunction.
What I want to say, friends, is that Dad could have easily indulged himself in some quite comfortable employment — sitting behind a desk in a large Austrian k. and k. office, for example, cleaning doorknobs, spitting into state spittoons, and walking home with a mere clerk’s salary. But not only would it have bored him to death, as I surely need not explain, but he also would have considered it immoral. Yes, you heard me correctly, immoral. For he was convinced that the Sammlers’ property was not here only so he could slouch through life; it was oriented completely on the future, as the Egyptian sphinx faces the rising sun. And it was also supposed to help out in case something bad occurred. And, of course, it was also meant as my dowry.
But I remained single and, the whole century, didn’t think once about getting married. Actually, I thought about it, I don’t want to lie to you, but always with my dead Ervin Mlock. But, if you’re asking about occasional lovers, there were countless occasions. I could have built an army from them, even though it would certainly have been a strange army, whose general would be a real live general (he won his stripes and medals in the Czechoslovak Legions during World War I) and whose last soldier could have been the cripple Toníček, who was a cripple, not because he was missing something, but because something extra had grown on him: he limped through the world on three legs that got in each other’s way, tripped on each other; but when Toníček stood somewhere without moving, well — no one else in the world could stand like him. But you’ll learn hardly anything about this army of occasional lovers. I’ll only mention one from time to time, for his good nature or some other eccentric characteristic. For I’m ashamed of my fearsome instinctual apparatus, which, without Ervin, completely missed its mark and discharged itself furiously, in vain, on occasional lovers (it would meet Ervin briefly from time to time, but in the most unusual circumstances — don’t worry, you wont miss out on anything, that’s what the following story is about).
And because I never got married, the Sammlers’ property never became my dowry, waiting out World Wars I and II in peace, but in the end, in 1945, something bad occurred, something fateful, which the property, it seems, had been waiting for motionlessly for half a century, so as to vaporize itself completely in the space of several days. For in July 1945 my parents were included in the “wild expulsion” of Germans, which was of course an awful mistake, because they were not Nazis, and Dad was actually a Russian. And when the time comes, I’ll describe how I did everything in my power, and in the power of the Sammlers’ property, to fix that mistake, and how things turned out in the end. But that’s still far off, let’s not think of it now — now I’m three years old, and Dad has decided to reach for that pile of Sammler gold pieces, for the first and last time.
But he won’t reach down deep, don’t worry, he won’t stick his arms in up to the elbows; he’ll only scratch around on the surface. For we traveled to Trieste on the Austrian railroad (along the famous Südbahn, the Southern State Rail from Vienna to Trieste), which was free for us, the families of an engineer. And after we crossed the Empire’s boundaries, we headed for the Aegean Sea and the Greek island of Crete.
Why Crete? Dad had decided that he would teach me, at the age of three, to swim in the sea. And he considered the Aegean a decent substitute for the Black, where, at the same age, he had learned. Not to mention the fact that both seas are connected through the Bosporus and the Dardenelles (just look it up in the atlas, my little beetles).
Once Dad told me that, when he was three, his father took him to Sevastopol and woke him up early the next day, while it was still pitch dark, and led him somewhere beyond the city and then to the shore of the Black Sea. My three-year-old Dad pattered along next to his enormous father, and when a red blotch began to burn far away in the ocean, they reached a white beach and Dad’s father took off his priestly garb, piece by piece, soutane, purple stole, priestly cap, and then took young Dad by the hand and went with him closer and closer to the great sea tongue licking the white sand.
We must have taken an Italian boat, and then maybe even a Greek one, from Trieste. We traveled a long time, but I don’t remember any of the trip; my memory begins to glow below the ocean surface, in a gulf by Crete, and lights up to meet the eye of a large saltwater fish, looking at me all agog, amazed, and surprised, as I drop past it like a drugged-up sea horse into the depths, while Dad holds a rope tied to my leg and looks after me, kneeling down to the ocean surface and shading his eyes from the Aegean sun with his palm. He taught me, at one blow, both to swim and to dive, and so, tied by the leg, I descended to the bottom and fit in there like a sea urchin, like a starfish in a colored carpet, where spreading castles grew with druse towers and battlements, and I walked through this world, both dusky and strangely illuminated, for an unbelievably long time, and in my memory it now seems I walked for whole months, Dad let out the rope and I cut through the undersea primeval forest and sent up bubbles, like the patented lemonade made in Třebič. If you have the good luck to see the enormous conch of the underseas open up before you at the age of three, enclosing the whole universe with all its galaxies and divinities, smelling sharply of fish, if you have such good luck, then it will remain with you to the end of your life. Wherever you go, it will escort you hand in hand, because the Aegean Sea is an endless, inextinguishable, moveable feast.
But just a moment, just a moment, I’m not done yet. In fact, the only thing I really remember is the awed, amazed, surprised fish’s eye I met on my way into the depths. The other memories are merely reflected in that eye as in a stereoscope. Memories of the gulf, the shore, and all of Crete, as well as the Cretan mountains, composed of the Dikté, Idé, Kedros, and White ranges (mountains I could never have seen, because we did not fly over Crete in airplane, balloon, or even dirigible; we sailed there, and not even on a ship, please note, as I would certainly have wished to persuade you, but in the shell of a mythological bird whom the Greeks had shot down and whose nest they had cleaned out before any further monsters, with bodies of birds and heads of foxes, could hatch) — and memories of the entire island surface, overgrown on one side by olive trees and ilex bushes, by plane trees on the other, concealing high up in the Idé Mountains a strict, secret monastery with all the accoutrements: convent, monks’ cells and dormitory, cloister, courtyard, refectory, monastery library, and a gigantic nave, navigating its way majestically through the rocky massifs. (And only now does it occur to me, my little doves, get ready for this, only now does it occur to me that, when we were already in those parts, when we had disappeared into those parts, Dad might have set out for the sacred mountain of Athos, which his father may have used to visit, too, before setting sail as a missionary to the Indians.)
At a distance of many years, I managed to find the Mediterranean deep-sea fish I had looked in the eye as a three-year-old, in an English encyclopedia of natural history. It is called the Regalecus banksii, and it’s about three meters long, conspicuously striped and flattened, like an undulating scarf; a crest of very long rays sticks up from its head, and just below that is its eye, awed, agog, amazed.