Prague, May 26th, 1984

My dear girls,

A little while ago I spoke to you over the phone and now again I have nothing else to do but write you a letter. I must tell you, I’m so terribly exhausted and I don’t want to make jewellery for fashion shows, nor do I want to write scripts under the table for all those bastards from television who pretend they want to help me but in fact want to use me. They want me to be good and accept any sum and are only offering me shitty topics. All that is frightful, and also the operation on my feet – you know I’ve never cried on anybody’s shoulder to complain about the pain, only my beloved cats laid next to me and screamed in their mute voice, buck up! or we won’t get ourselves together either – and so on – I am sure you understand what it is to have animals. And you certainly understand how, for example, I was writing my black stories full of fun that was more black than anything else – but even that is suddenly difficult for me, to endure my own personality, to understand it, and again I will add ETC.

For God’s sake, why do they treat us like that? All artists born anywhere in this world and not exceptionally, under a lucky star, are always treated in such a mean and disgusting manner! As if they were IMBECILES.

When a friend from Sweden told me that over there they write about me with respect and understanding which I’d long since weaned myself off, I sort of collapsed on the floor, my girls. Like a sack of grain. I have in me such a potential for films, so many themes, so much strength, so much joy and laughter and such pleasure knowing that what I write and what I do is the right MESSAGE to this fucking world, in which the wheat of idiots prospers, that it has made me feel hurt and pretty bad today. As you know, self-pity isn’t worth shit, as Květa says, but what can you do when it seizes you? And that friend from Sweden told me: For God’s sake, what are you still doing HERE – that is, in the country where I was born – and what are you going to do here? And he continued with all the job offers I had abroad and as he went on in this reproachful tone, I was looking at my desk, at the peeling varnish, my scratch paper and my two sleeping cats, brothers Crayon and Bajaja, and at Aranka (who tried to climb into my lap just now when I started writing this letter to you, gazing at me with those yearning eyes of Petinka, who is buried in your garden) and I realized how much I love that terrace of mine with all those plants. How much I love that desk and the green lamp and the budgie Růženka Nováková who is just now reciting her evening prayers in her cage, jabbering so quietly and so intimately, you know. And also how much I like the view of the dirty roofs opposite and the sun setting behind the prefab blocks and since I must share this with someone, I’m writing to you.

There are clever people who live in Prague’s Lesser Town surrounded all the time by the same eternal culture. While I’ve gotten to know various people here in the local pubs. For example, the other day I met the Fatty Josef. He’s a rowdy and a ruffian, all the time on the inside. He put his arm round my shoulders and said in tone of a Chanel costume designer: How are you, Madam Ester? And I replied, okay and said: Josef, dear boy, how are you not behind bars again? And he, with his cunning expression of an orphan from orphanage – which he is particularly good at, says: Well, the cops came to my place and said: Joey, you’re such a good, kind, and educated guy that we can’t lock you up. And with sincere laughter, he shook my whole body, that is, he gently tapped my shoulder, and went on. I turned to see him, he turned as well and in his face there was this resignation. Looking at these people I always realize that I remember that it could be me, that they are in fact close to me, even though they’re not.

I know it’s nothing important, just – this desk with the peeling varnish and this neighborhood and this dirty street and, my girls, in it there’s a piece of my heart, a piece of my personality, my knowledge, my training, my destiny or how do you call it. What do I know?

For where would I go? This is the very sea-mark of my utmost sail,1/ as Othello says in Saudek’s translation when he should be fleeing really fast, since he’s killed Desdemona. By mistake. That must have been a mess! Poor guy.

So you don’t know why I’m so sentimental when I am AT HOME? You know, the two of you know how much I longed to make film, the biggest love of my life, but they cut me off and since then I’ve just gone on existing. I don’t say it’s been in vain, nothing is in vain, but once it gets you, you’re screwed. And I do know how to defend myself, I’m full of energy and will, but then suddenly I fall apart like an empty sack.

I had to stop for a while, Ivan Vyskočil called me and I said I was just writing a letter to you. He sends love from all the hearts he has, he loves you and admires you so much!!! My dear dear girls! We talked a little and I told him, just by the way, how sentimental and stupid I was today and Ivan comforted me: Esti, get used to it.

Beautiful, isn’t it. What a cynic he is! The author of authors and his work is pure poetry. Yes, such a chap understands a lot of things, especially if the other day he was choking a boss of his with his own hands, right at his neck. Otherwise choking makes no sense, remember that, maids. It was a real embarrassment but it sort of belongs to Ivan – something like a bow tie under the chin. Ivan sometimes calls me at night and says in a light voice: Esti, today I tried to choke an idiot again. Which tells you that Divin’ Ivan, as I call him, really deserves his PhD in psychology which earned him a job of working with juvenile offenders among whom he in a way also belongs. For who else but Fatty Josef and Ivan is able to respond to evil deeds with evil deeds, no?

You see, I’m chatting with you on a sheet of paper and I immediately feel better. It’s the will of THE PEOPLE, says the PARTY.2/ And the Party is always right. Are we the PEOPLE? Probably not, I think we’re the lower sort. You should paint in a different way. You should consider your activities. Me too. That’s true. And that honor gets pushed aside.

Several young people started visiting me lately, maybe they want to be misled or something like that. They probably are not the PEOPLE either. They take me as a support, they want to spill their guts, but I find it terribly exhausting. I must pretend that I’m all right, I just cannot complain to anyone. And they, poor kids, think I’m strong as God. But I’m not. First, I don’t have that long white beard, and second, HE doesn’t have my bust.

I have never understood why the notion of God is linked with a bearded old fogey. I understand that, in cavemen times, the bearded old fogey represented the clan leader and that scores of such individuals now sit in the UN and elsewhere thinking rather about tennis or their private sexual life – depending on their age – and the wars and occupations merrily go on because they really do NOTHING, but just REPRESENT the POSTS that take most of the credit for good winning over evil. And that God is also REPRESENTED by the sometimes stern and completely unjust old fogey. From here stem the buck-passing pieces of wisdom such as Whomever God loves, he visits him with the cross. I perceive this as hideously masochistic. And also it’s so confused as the bearded old fogey comes from the Old Testament, that he’s a kike and “Jews out!”, as golden Czech hands wrote in the Jewish cemetery near Klatovy, hands that on Sunday were devoutly clasped together in pious prayers chanted in the local church. And they say this God is the father of Jesus Christ and it caused such a mess that it’s lasted for so many centuries and turned thousands of people into corpses who didn’t have to die prematurely, who could have died at a more suitable time, like for example at our age. We’ll be dying almost smiling, for after all, what’s so good about here? And mainly HERE.

Girls, I feel better and better. I don’t do backwards somersaults anymore – not a bad gymnastic phrase, don’t you think? God knows what I really meant, probably it’s a printing error – so I don’t do somersaults out of self-pity that my brilliance has not been recognized, but I quietly chuckle and rub my hands together in my mind. And in my mind I scratch behind my ears rejoicing at my cunningness so much that I started writing this letter to you and I’m happy it’s paid off. And they say don’t use cunning, it’s stupid not to be shrewd! You see, and right away I feel merry and optimistic, and all that must be planned long ahead, as hilarity and optimism are not enough for merely one five-year plan, they are for life, unless of course one dies at the end of the fifth year. Though from the subjective point of view it might not be that bad, if I wanted to be morbid. At five one does not yet cling so much to life. It’s interesting how it’s old people who cling to life the most. The old Romans were right to say that those beloved by the gods die young. In a way it’s an acceptable solution, you don’t suffer from gout, don’t have backaches, you can still hear, and then suddenly bang and you’re gone. Except I have a suspicion – that’s my nasty nature, I’m always suspicious, which is bad for my life as well as for my skin, no wonder the Party doesn’t want me – in fact I suspect it could be similar to those visitations with the cross. After all in Rome they had all these military campaigns and in war-making people die lickety-split, every macho man knows this and proudly rushes to join them so that they’re not seen as chicken, their mothers can weep for them and sometimes even collect their medals. Some women are silly. But the Roman gods, not that I want to praise them too much, were really fine, they had lovely bodies and were handsome and the women had bottoms like they came from Renoir pictures, clearly Italian. They weren’t skinny bitches like e.g. we are nowadays, like the fashion is today. Twiggy, they say. In a few hundred years the guys will have to embrace new Venus figurines and push their breasts against their eyes not to see the skinny ugliness of the past that makes them sick and, yes, perhaps even impotent.

I have met some Vietnamese. I felt sorry for one boy attacked by drunk Czechs. The same as the stag with large antlers from the book of Jirasek’s Old Czech Legends who snarled at a duke, I too snarled at them as they called him names like “yellow trap”, a la “Jews out!” in the past – and then they left him alone. Nearby there must have been several guardian angels who were hanging around the people in danger, which is what they have been instructed to do, and quickly rushed to me to help. The Czechs were really plastered and I’m surprised they did not slap my cheeky mouth. The poor Vietnamese guy wanted to buy me a bottle of beer. Oh dear.

So now I have befriended a few of their people, one of them is called Thong, he’s from Saigon, speaks pretty good Czech and he’s really clever. His parents studied meteorology at Sorbonne. But more about him when we meet.

Well, my dear girls, good night and all the best, and we have to organize something, although I still don’t know what exactly, but we must do something. So that we can like our surroundings. Which I doubt. But never mind.

And do love me, for I really deserve it.

Ester

1/ The Czech passage quoted is Zde je přenejzazší bóje mé plavby.2/ That is, the ruling Communist Party.