Death of Camus by Catelli Giovanni; Auster Paul; Tanzi Andrew

Author:Catelli, Giovanni; Auster, Paul; Tanzi, Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: C. Hurst and Company (Publishers) Limited
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

A CONVERSATION AT CAFÉ SLAVIA

It was late morning and Café Slavia was almost empty. The odd tourist gazed at the selection of chocolates and pastries, breathing in the warm aroma in the hope of finding traces of a long-gone past. I gazed at the trams rolling by at the crossing—that hypnotic, eternal gliding of theirs beyond generations and men, promising endless movement along the river, the city, the outlying neighbourhoods, the future.

My contact appeared out of the blue as I was caught up in my own thoughts. He sat in front of me without a word, with the dogged silence of a man who doesn’t need to ask anything.

He smiled and then whispered, “Here I am.”

We’d never met and yet I could tell from his body language that he knew me and had full command over what concerned me. He asked me mockingly if I’d found anything I liked the day before at an antikvariát in Vinohrady.

I answered that the package I’d walked out with showed I had.

After a short silence he decided it was time to talk about the issues I’d laid out on the table—that restless, dogged past lying under the sediment of time and yet pulsing away, demanding its own light were it even in the vain present of the living.

The summer of 1980 was stifling—the heat and an air of perpetual imprisonment following Charter 77, the turns of a screw, the increasingly obsessive monitoring of everything that might be a hotbed of opposition or rebellion. With dogged resignation, Zábrana always went to his favourite cafés. He’d often spend time at the Malešice pub just outside his house, then he’d move to the town centre; he patronised Waldek in Václavské Náměstí as well as another café in Náměstí Míru; he’d even come here to the Slavia to play chess with some other patron.

Who knows—maybe he met his source here. But Václavské Náměstí is more likely. They’d meet up every now and then when the other guy came back from Moscow, took a break from his studies or repaid a favour to those who gave him so much freedom.

Zábrana’s work as a translator had earned him several contacts with American scholars; in fact, we long doubted the exact identity of his sources and the actual nature of the information he received. It was always stuff having to do with literature and maybe a smattering of politics with no objective proof, but it was our job to look into every single thing.

We’re pretty sure the talk took place towards the end of summer. His informer was about to come out with an important book for his own career. Maybe he was overexcited; maybe he thought the limitations of common citizens didn’t apply to him and that the confidential information he owned could be passed on safely. Whatever the case, he told Zábrana about that operation, going into every detail and not bending the truth in the slightest, even though twenty years had passed. In fact, it was all so accurate that Zábrana asked him where that information came from.

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