Stanislav Komárek: The Opšlstis Foundation / Opšlstisova nadace - extract
Chapter One
In the March sun in the year of our Lord 1982 the chestnut trees were coming into bloom in the courtyard of the Traiskirchen camp. They were not there by chance. The chestnut tree, not of course the true chestnut tree, but the horse chestnut, Aesculus hyppocastanum, was a tree typical of old Imperial Austria, planted round all public buildings, in towns along boulevards as far as the might of the Austrian Empire extended. Even today they could act as a map showing the extent of the power of the imperial monarchy - chestnut trees have a long life, without the help of man they are slow to reproduce and after the fall of the double-headed eagle hardly anyone planted them - however in Lvov, Prague and Sarajevo to this day they are still indications of what is beginning to fade from popular memory. Why the old empire became so attached to these strange trees is difficult to say. It is of course true that in 1588 Busbeck, the Austrian ambassador to Istanbul, first sent them to western Europe, to Vienna to the botanists Clusius and Matthioli. Of course it is also true that at the same time he sent tulips, but they flourished better in Holland. God know why. And the buildings of the refugee camp were typical of former Austrian officialdom, with its combination of disciplined solidity and bureaucratic sergeant-major-like gloom, which is apparent in provincial, less impressive buildings, as is the case here. In fact, the whole area was a barracks, or rather a military academy of the old regime. The little town of Traiskirchen itself is a remote backwater in the steppes, which has of course now been ploughed up. It lies south-east of Vienna, boasts a church, a few shops and endless provincial boredom. The whole place is a good illustration of the oft-repeated contention that the north-east border of the Balkans runs along the ridge of the Vienna Woods and the countryside we are concerned with is, basically, apart from a few details, scarcely any different from the Wallachian lowlands. At times the number of refugees rose to tens of thousands, outnumbering the local population, who feared them, partly with some justification and partly because they were incapable of anything else, since they were as stupid as yokels usually are in wine-growing areas.
Viktor Kaplan sat behind bars in the isolation unit where new arrivals were kept until their applications for asylum were processed, so that they could not be coached by other more knowledgeable refugees about what to say so that their applications would be successful. He was a young man about twenty-four, dark-haired and a bit stocky. It was completely fortuitous that he shared a name with the famous inventor of the turbine. On the other hand it fitted in very well with his interests and chosen career and in fact with his destiny. He was a student of Turkish civilization, in the sense of the language, the life and the customs of the country. The word kaplan, as everyone knows, or more likely does not know, means tiger in Turkish. In certain circles this earned him, if not respect, at least amused interest.. To study this kind of thing in the Prague of the seventies was to do something bordering on desperation, rather like learning to swim on dry land. What really would have been of interest to him as a secret admirer of the reactionary Ottoman Empire, was to go to Turkey, where of course he could not go. The only country he had seen with his own eyes where Turkish was spoken was Soviet Azerbaijan. And learning from the only native speaker, Ahmed Pinardzi, who was incidentally a Kurd, an exiled left-wing poet and activist who spoke slipshod Turkish, was less than satisfactory and so anyone who did not take matters into his own hands did not get very far. The entire atmosphere at the academic universities at that time was stultifying and demoralizing, combining as it did half-hearted dissidence and the necessity of coming to terms with constant hypocrisy and sycophancy to the powers that be, and a feeling of being an isolated elite like academics in Russia. The only safe thing to do was simply to dream of abstract monstrosities and to study in detail similar foolish things such as ancient languages or the systems of obscure water worms, for there was plenty of time and it was of no value. Time seemed to stand still, while anniversaries and political feast days came round regularly, not unlike in ancient Egypt or in the Mayan towns of far-off Yucatan. From a certain standpoint it was time to get out, especially if one was young, relatively bright and relatively healthy. Also this was to keep within certain limits the melodrama of leaving the high-rise flat in Modrany, filled with stiflingly monotonous quarrels of the engine-driver father and the bureaucrat mother not counting the younger sister with rather uncertain personality characteristics. Like the vast majority of exiles he had left without saying a word to anyone - it was better to be safe in the face of universal surveillance, saying good-bye to one's family when making such radical decisions was also out of the question. Viktor's character was a peculiar mix of pure idealism and the desire of intellectual middle-class sons for something beautiful, interesting and fundamentally different for which it would be worth sacrificing normal worldly pleasures, perhaps even risking one's life, and of an extraordinary disregard for self and for others which is part and parcel of this kind of person, producing an intricate mixture of an inferiority complex, impartiality and good nature in varying degrees, depending on the situation. Because of his reclusive nature, absence from his closest family and his native land did not trouble him too much. His German was far from fluent and he lacked practice but it was sufficient for making himself understood in ordinary situations. Within the camp, in the Babel of languages, the lingua franca was of course Polish, because by far the largest number of inmates were Poles. But ths was not to become obvious till later. Meanwhile he sat in so-called "quarantine", watching his potential fellow asylum seekers as if he were in a menagerie. He looked as if he did not belong among his compatriots, an assorted group of speculators in foreign currency, waiters and other petty entrepreneurs, and partly from an excess of caution and partly from intellectual superiority, his conversation with them was at best half-hearted. Two of these young men lay on their backs on their bunks dreaming of the United States. They could already see the fancy houses on the beaches of California, the cars of famous makes, the swimming-pools in the gardens and hundreds of girls of all races converging on them. Then they would become engrossed in textbooks of English. After they had studied for a while you would hear, "Man, this is amazing. Here's a word not in the dictionary, a little word 'the'!" All beginnings are hard. Right next to them, the son of a well-off businessman from Kabul, who had, amongst other things, a fair knowledge of English, was explaining translations of various suggestive phrases in Pustu to a little Polish family. Out of boredom a Polish girl with voluptious breasts was kissing a policeman from Bratislava - goodness knows what machinations had driven him to the chilly steppes of exile. On the whole it was mostly young men in the huge room where there were about sixty beds, and the camp generally mostly gave the impression of a barracks from which the officers had fled. This is all part of the phenomenon that throughout the animal kingdom young males seem to be more mobile and more inquisitive than young females who do not stray far from the maternal nest. Older males also tend to keep to their own territories no matter how poor. It is the same with people as with voles. It is well known that young journeymen spent years travelling the countryside gaining experience of their trade, while young girls sat at home, or at least this was what was expected of them. If they ran off with the owner of a travelling theatre it was advisable not to return, even though they may in the meantime have learned the way of the world. So it is not to be wondered at that the ratio of sexes among the emigrants was roughly ten to one. Most of the women and girls escaped with their husbands or partners, some of them even "psyching up" a new lover to emigrate and then, after the worst troubles, experienced together, were over, they would dump the stupid fellow. However this was not a typical strategy, and because only properly married couples could live together in the camp, a considerable part of the work of the padre and the mayor consisted in performing marriage ceremonies for foreigners. Another not inconsiderable part of the padre's work was arranging funerals - now for a Pole killed during a game of cards, now for a Rumanian shut up in an iron box by an Albanian gang and thrown out of a fifth floor window, and so on. Those with no religious beliefs were buried without ceremony. At first to pass the time while he was waiting Kaplan engaged in conversation with a small-time Rumanian crook, a small figure covered in tattoos even behind his ears. As enteretainment it was exceedingly boring. On the one hand his Rumanian, gained on his trips to the Balkans, was very limited and on the other hand the criminal kept asking the same question - and that was about the precise time. "Ce ora?" he would ask ever more frequently. Evidently time was marching on. Finally, two policemen came in carrying handcuffs which they clapped on the offender and led him away. There was nothing for it but to look around for another source of conversation. He found it in a Peruvian, an Indian half-caste, sitting not far away. Unlike the outlaw from the Balkans this was a student, an educated man, who had attended some university in Lima. Perhaps he was a Guzman graduate but it did not occur to Kaplan to ask. The Indian, whose name was Pedro Lopez, had ended up in Austria by way of the United States. He could speak English and even a bit of German and their conversation was beginning to develop promisingly. Viktor gave a graphic description of the depravity and brutality of Husak's Czechoslovakia to which his fellow asylum seeker listened with lively attention. "Did they torture you?" he asked finally. On receiving a negative answer he said, "Oh, at least they killed someone in your family?" When the answer to this was also no, he resorted to the last possibility. "You were starving then, weren't you?" Uncomprehending, the Peruvian shook his head - then what was the problem? Intercontinental misunderstanding spread and began to hover in the air already thick with mistrust. Again that finished any small talk. But of course, the time was now approaching for a much more serious and fateful conversation, almost like in the style of Everyman who is addressed by the Grim Reaper. "Kaplan Fictor!" was bawled from the door and a few minutes later the subject of the interrogation was sitting in the office reserved for what was usually termed an "asylum interview". Opposite sat a fierce-looking little man, covered in warts, angrily pecking at a typewriter. It should be mentioned that the story takes place at a time when there were almost no computers in government offices and the first simple table versions, more a means of keeping things in order than anything else, (incidentally in French a computer is called an ordinateur), were the privilege of banks and big firms - the civil service was as yet the domaine of card-index files, folders and wax seals. Now it was tie time for thrust and parry. It was like a game in which the quarry neither knew the number of pieces on the board nor the rules of the game. The whole thing was more or less a perfect example of Darwinian selection by agility of mind, sang-froid and the ability to guess what the opposition wanted. Slepitzka, that was the name of the official, spoke in some kind of broken Moravian dialect and began thumping his fist on the table. This was partly a deliberate strategy to discourage emigrants from trying to settle in Austria, which was small and overcrowded anyway, and partly from intellectual staleness through years of associating with all kinds of refugees. Caricatures of officials in Imperial Austria as depicted by Hasek in his Svejk seemed suddenly to be realistic in a manner worthy of Turgenev or Zola. Another snag was that according to the Geneva convention on refugees, asylum should be given to anyone persecuted for his politics, religion or race, or anyone who had reason to fear such persecution. In view of the fact that the burden of proof lay with the asylum seeker, it was all rather tricky and if the asylum seeker had no freshly bleeding wounds or visible scars (Viktor was involuntarily reminded of the Peruvian - surely he had some, the rat), basically it depended absolutely on the goodwill of the person taking the statement or on the interpretative skill of the lawyer making the final decision. Ideally it would be best to have a legally attested translation of a certificate from the local secret police stating that Mr XY had been constantly persecuted for two years by one of their number, during which time he had been interrogated three times and beaten up once - signed, warrant officer Vonasek. Considering how officials the world over stick together it would be hard to find a surer method - one official is more inclined to believe another just as one Chinese another Chinese. The sole fact of being out of sympathy with the regime is not enough. It crossed our hero's mind to declare himself a Muslim, an adherent of a faith not recognized in his country of origin and by so doing have good reason for his fears. Islam was certainly of interest to him because of the nature of his field of study and he knew quite a lot about it but he was definitely not a practising Muslim. The humiliating possibility of a government doctor searching in vain, on his body below the belt, for signs of Islam did not fill him with enthusiasm. However, he rejected this foolish notion after mature consideration lasting a second or two. The police lawyer who would process the whole application was sure to be a good Austrian of the old school, who would bear in mind the relatively recent past, the union of church and state, and observe all the prescribed religious festivals as they occurred, and so would certainly not increase the ranks of his fellow citizens by one renegade Muslim who had rebelled against one regime and would undoubtedly rebel against another. There was nothing for it but to stake everything on a single card - the little man seemed to be in sympathy with that part of the heritage of Imperial Austria that venerated titles and rank, whether noble, official or academic. Kaplan mustered up all his courage and with calculated fury roared as best he could in German, "Don't shout at me, I am a doctor!" This was not strictly true - his PhD thesis had not yet been recognised in Austria and he could happily have papered his room with its pages. The reaction was immediate and shocking. "Oh, I'm sorry, doctor, I had no idea, among all this scum here, I'm at your service!" From then on his statement was taken down almost without a hitch although it was done in German and not in Czech dialect. When he was singing it, he felt as if he were dreaming. In fact he had hardly understood the official because bureaucratic German is something like Orwellian newspeak and is so different from colloquial or standard German that a layman without a lawyer cannot make head or tail of it. He had the feeling that the worst was behind him. He had no idea that the whole proceedings usually drag on for an average of eight months, if something unexpected does not stand in the way. Franz Kafka was no morbid visionary or religious symbolist. He was the perfect model of an experienced civil servant and was to bureaucracy what the lyric poet Vitezslav Halek was to the Czech countryside. Our trials drag on throughout our lives and by constantly pandering to them, taking good care of them and keeping them under control, we manage to prevent them from promptly choking the life out of us. Anyway life is a risky, unhealthy business, in essence it is a sexually transmitted disease ending in death. On the threshold of exile, which of course is almsot like being born again. Emigration is halfway to being a kind of rebirth or rather it is a bit like beginning to breathe again after suffocating under water, but of course it did not seem like that to anyone on the threshold of exile.
In the March sun in the year of our Lord 1982 the chestnut trees were coming into bloom in the courtyard of the Traiskirchen camp. They were not there by chance. The chestnut tree, not of course the true chestnut tree, but the horse chestnut, Aesculus hyppocastanum, was a tree typical of old Imperial Austria, planted round all public buildings, in towns along boulevards as far as the might of the Austrian Empire extended. Even today they could act as a map showing the extent of the power of the imperial monarchy - chestnut trees have a long life, without the help of man they are slow to reproduce and after the fall of the double-headed eagle hardly anyone planted them - however in Lvov, Prague and Sarajevo to this day they are still indications of what is beginning to fade from popular memory. Why the old empire became so attached to these strange trees is difficult to say. It is of course true that in 1588 Busbeck, the Austrian ambassador to Istanbul, first sent them to western Europe, to Vienna to the botanists Clusius and Matthioli. Of course it is also true that at the same time he sent tulips, but they flourished better in Holland. God know why. And the buildings of the refugee camp were typical of former Austrian officialdom, with its combination of disciplined solidity and bureaucratic sergeant-major-like gloom, which is apparent in provincial, less impressive buildings, as is the case here. In fact, the whole area was a barracks, or rather a military academy of the old regime. The little town of Traiskirchen itself is a remote backwater in the steppes, which has of course now been ploughed up. It lies south-east of Vienna, boasts a church, a few shops and endless provincial boredom. The whole place is a good illustration of the oft-repeated contention that the north-east border of the Balkans runs along the ridge of the Vienna Woods and the countryside we are concerned with is, basically, apart from a few details, scarcely any different from the Wallachian lowlands. At times the number of refugees rose to tens of thousands, outnumbering the local population, who feared them, partly with some justification and partly because they were incapable of anything else, since they were as stupid as yokels usually are in wine-growing areas.
Viktor Kaplan sat behind bars in the isolation unit where new arrivals were kept until their applications for asylum were processed, so that they could not be coached by other more knowledgeable refugees about what to say so that their applications would be successful. He was a young man about twenty-four, dark-haired and a bit stocky. It was completely fortuitous that he shared a name with the famous inventor of the turbine. On the other hand it fitted in very well with his interests and chosen career and in fact with his destiny. He was a student of Turkish civilization, in the sense of the language, the life and the customs of the country. The word kaplan, as everyone knows, or more likely does not know, means tiger in Turkish. In certain circles this earned him, if not respect, at least amused interest.. To study this kind of thing in the Prague of the seventies was to do something bordering on desperation, rather like learning to swim on dry land. What really would have been of interest to him as a secret admirer of the reactionary Ottoman Empire, was to go to Turkey, where of course he could not go. The only country he had seen with his own eyes where Turkish was spoken was Soviet Azerbaijan. And learning from the only native speaker, Ahmed Pinardzi, who was incidentally a Kurd, an exiled left-wing poet and activist who spoke slipshod Turkish, was less than satisfactory and so anyone who did not take matters into his own hands did not get very far. The entire atmosphere at the academic universities at that time was stultifying and demoralizing, combining as it did half-hearted dissidence and the necessity of coming to terms with constant hypocrisy and sycophancy to the powers that be, and a feeling of being an isolated elite like academics in Russia. The only safe thing to do was simply to dream of abstract monstrosities and to study in detail similar foolish things such as ancient languages or the systems of obscure water worms, for there was plenty of time and it was of no value. Time seemed to stand still, while anniversaries and political feast days came round regularly, not unlike in ancient Egypt or in the Mayan towns of far-off Yucatan. From a certain standpoint it was time to get out, especially if one was young, relatively bright and relatively healthy. Also this was to keep within certain limits the melodrama of leaving the high-rise flat in Modrany, filled with stiflingly monotonous quarrels of the engine-driver father and the bureaucrat mother not counting the younger sister with rather uncertain personality characteristics. Like the vast majority of exiles he had left without saying a word to anyone - it was better to be safe in the face of universal surveillance, saying good-bye to one's family when making such radical decisions was also out of the question. Viktor's character was a peculiar mix of pure idealism and the desire of intellectual middle-class sons for something beautiful, interesting and fundamentally different for which it would be worth sacrificing normal worldly pleasures, perhaps even risking one's life, and of an extraordinary disregard for self and for others which is part and parcel of this kind of person, producing an intricate mixture of an inferiority complex, impartiality and good nature in varying degrees, depending on the situation. Because of his reclusive nature, absence from his closest family and his native land did not trouble him too much. His German was far from fluent and he lacked practice but it was sufficient for making himself understood in ordinary situations. Within the camp, in the Babel of languages, the lingua franca was of course Polish, because by far the largest number of inmates were Poles. But ths was not to become obvious till later. Meanwhile he sat in so-called "quarantine", watching his potential fellow asylum seekers as if he were in a menagerie. He looked as if he did not belong among his compatriots, an assorted group of speculators in foreign currency, waiters and other petty entrepreneurs, and partly from an excess of caution and partly from intellectual superiority, his conversation with them was at best half-hearted. Two of these young men lay on their backs on their bunks dreaming of the United States. They could already see the fancy houses on the beaches of California, the cars of famous makes, the swimming-pools in the gardens and hundreds of girls of all races converging on them. Then they would become engrossed in textbooks of English. After they had studied for a while you would hear, "Man, this is amazing. Here's a word not in the dictionary, a little word 'the'!" All beginnings are hard. Right next to them, the son of a well-off businessman from Kabul, who had, amongst other things, a fair knowledge of English, was explaining translations of various suggestive phrases in Pustu to a little Polish family. Out of boredom a Polish girl with voluptious breasts was kissing a policeman from Bratislava - goodness knows what machinations had driven him to the chilly steppes of exile. On the whole it was mostly young men in the huge room where there were about sixty beds, and the camp generally mostly gave the impression of a barracks from which the officers had fled. This is all part of the phenomenon that throughout the animal kingdom young males seem to be more mobile and more inquisitive than young females who do not stray far from the maternal nest. Older males also tend to keep to their own territories no matter how poor. It is the same with people as with voles. It is well known that young journeymen spent years travelling the countryside gaining experience of their trade, while young girls sat at home, or at least this was what was expected of them. If they ran off with the owner of a travelling theatre it was advisable not to return, even though they may in the meantime have learned the way of the world. So it is not to be wondered at that the ratio of sexes among the emigrants was roughly ten to one. Most of the women and girls escaped with their husbands or partners, some of them even "psyching up" a new lover to emigrate and then, after the worst troubles, experienced together, were over, they would dump the stupid fellow. However this was not a typical strategy, and because only properly married couples could live together in the camp, a considerable part of the work of the padre and the mayor consisted in performing marriage ceremonies for foreigners. Another not inconsiderable part of the padre's work was arranging funerals - now for a Pole killed during a game of cards, now for a Rumanian shut up in an iron box by an Albanian gang and thrown out of a fifth floor window, and so on. Those with no religious beliefs were buried without ceremony. At first to pass the time while he was waiting Kaplan engaged in conversation with a small-time Rumanian crook, a small figure covered in tattoos even behind his ears. As enteretainment it was exceedingly boring. On the one hand his Rumanian, gained on his trips to the Balkans, was very limited and on the other hand the criminal kept asking the same question - and that was about the precise time. "Ce ora?" he would ask ever more frequently. Evidently time was marching on. Finally, two policemen came in carrying handcuffs which they clapped on the offender and led him away. There was nothing for it but to look around for another source of conversation. He found it in a Peruvian, an Indian half-caste, sitting not far away. Unlike the outlaw from the Balkans this was a student, an educated man, who had attended some university in Lima. Perhaps he was a Guzman graduate but it did not occur to Kaplan to ask. The Indian, whose name was Pedro Lopez, had ended up in Austria by way of the United States. He could speak English and even a bit of German and their conversation was beginning to develop promisingly. Viktor gave a graphic description of the depravity and brutality of Husak's Czechoslovakia to which his fellow asylum seeker listened with lively attention. "Did they torture you?" he asked finally. On receiving a negative answer he said, "Oh, at least they killed someone in your family?" When the answer to this was also no, he resorted to the last possibility. "You were starving then, weren't you?" Uncomprehending, the Peruvian shook his head - then what was the problem? Intercontinental misunderstanding spread and began to hover in the air already thick with mistrust. Again that finished any small talk. But of course, the time was now approaching for a much more serious and fateful conversation, almost like in the style of Everyman who is addressed by the Grim Reaper. "Kaplan Fictor!" was bawled from the door and a few minutes later the subject of the interrogation was sitting in the office reserved for what was usually termed an "asylum interview". Opposite sat a fierce-looking little man, covered in warts, angrily pecking at a typewriter. It should be mentioned that the story takes place at a time when there were almost no computers in government offices and the first simple table versions, more a means of keeping things in order than anything else, (incidentally in French a computer is called an ordinateur), were the privilege of banks and big firms - the civil service was as yet the domaine of card-index files, folders and wax seals. Now it was tie time for thrust and parry. It was like a game in which the quarry neither knew the number of pieces on the board nor the rules of the game. The whole thing was more or less a perfect example of Darwinian selection by agility of mind, sang-froid and the ability to guess what the opposition wanted. Slepitzka, that was the name of the official, spoke in some kind of broken Moravian dialect and began thumping his fist on the table. This was partly a deliberate strategy to discourage emigrants from trying to settle in Austria, which was small and overcrowded anyway, and partly from intellectual staleness through years of associating with all kinds of refugees. Caricatures of officials in Imperial Austria as depicted by Hasek in his Svejk seemed suddenly to be realistic in a manner worthy of Turgenev or Zola. Another snag was that according to the Geneva convention on refugees, asylum should be given to anyone persecuted for his politics, religion or race, or anyone who had reason to fear such persecution. In view of the fact that the burden of proof lay with the asylum seeker, it was all rather tricky and if the asylum seeker had no freshly bleeding wounds or visible scars (Viktor was involuntarily reminded of the Peruvian - surely he had some, the rat), basically it depended absolutely on the goodwill of the person taking the statement or on the interpretative skill of the lawyer making the final decision. Ideally it would be best to have a legally attested translation of a certificate from the local secret police stating that Mr XY had been constantly persecuted for two years by one of their number, during which time he had been interrogated three times and beaten up once - signed, warrant officer Vonasek. Considering how officials the world over stick together it would be hard to find a surer method - one official is more inclined to believe another just as one Chinese another Chinese. The sole fact of being out of sympathy with the regime is not enough. It crossed our hero's mind to declare himself a Muslim, an adherent of a faith not recognized in his country of origin and by so doing have good reason for his fears. Islam was certainly of interest to him because of the nature of his field of study and he knew quite a lot about it but he was definitely not a practising Muslim. The humiliating possibility of a government doctor searching in vain, on his body below the belt, for signs of Islam did not fill him with enthusiasm. However, he rejected this foolish notion after mature consideration lasting a second or two. The police lawyer who would process the whole application was sure to be a good Austrian of the old school, who would bear in mind the relatively recent past, the union of church and state, and observe all the prescribed religious festivals as they occurred, and so would certainly not increase the ranks of his fellow citizens by one renegade Muslim who had rebelled against one regime and would undoubtedly rebel against another. There was nothing for it but to stake everything on a single card - the little man seemed to be in sympathy with that part of the heritage of Imperial Austria that venerated titles and rank, whether noble, official or academic. Kaplan mustered up all his courage and with calculated fury roared as best he could in German, "Don't shout at me, I am a doctor!" This was not strictly true - his PhD thesis had not yet been recognised in Austria and he could happily have papered his room with its pages. The reaction was immediate and shocking. "Oh, I'm sorry, doctor, I had no idea, among all this scum here, I'm at your service!" From then on his statement was taken down almost without a hitch although it was done in German and not in Czech dialect. When he was singing it, he felt as if he were dreaming. In fact he had hardly understood the official because bureaucratic German is something like Orwellian newspeak and is so different from colloquial or standard German that a layman without a lawyer cannot make head or tail of it. He had the feeling that the worst was behind him. He had no idea that the whole proceedings usually drag on for an average of eight months, if something unexpected does not stand in the way. Franz Kafka was no morbid visionary or religious symbolist. He was the perfect model of an experienced civil servant and was to bureaucracy what the lyric poet Vitezslav Halek was to the Czech countryside. Our trials drag on throughout our lives and by constantly pandering to them, taking good care of them and keeping them under control, we manage to prevent them from promptly choking the life out of us. Anyway life is a risky, unhealthy business, in essence it is a sexually transmitted disease ending in death. On the threshold of exile, which of course is almsot like being born again. Emigration is halfway to being a kind of rebirth or rather it is a bit like beginning to breathe again after suffocating under water, but of course it did not seem like that to anyone on the threshold of exile.