He holds out a pair of cute blue scissors with rounded ends—the sort young schoolkids use. It can’t have been easy for him to get his hands on such an exceptional item in the Lager. And he leaves immediately to avoid hearing her thanks.
Dita decides to take advantage of the scissors to cut some stray threads off the old Czech book. She’d rather stay and do any task in Block 31. She knows that Mrs. Turnovská and a few acquaintances from Terezín are keeping her mother company, and she doesn’t feel like seeing anyone. She stows all the books in the hidey-hole except for the dilapidated novel, and then retrieves a little velvet bag tied with string in which she keeps her librarian’s small first-aid kit. The bag used to hold a whole potato, the prize in a heavily contested crossword puzzle competition. Dita occasionally lifts the bag to her nose and inhales the marvelous smell of that potato.
She goes over to the corner where the hidey-hole is and painstakingly applies herself to her task. First, she cuts off all the dangling threads with her scissors. Then, as if she were suturing an open wound, she uses a rudimentary needle and thread to resew some pages that are on the verge of coming loose. The result isn’t beautiful, but the pages are now firmly held together. She also applies strips of tape to the torn pages, and the book stops looking like something that’s going to fall apart imminently.
She wants to escape from the loathsome reality of the camp that has killed her father. A book is like a trapdoor that leads to a secret attic: You can open it and go inside. And your world is different.
She hesitates briefly, wondering whether she should or shouldn’t read this book with its missing pages, which according to Hirsch, is unsuitable for young ladies and bears the title The Adventures of the Good Soldier ?vejk. But her hesitation lasts less time than her midday bowl of soup. After all, who says she wants to be a young lady? And anyway, she’d rather be a research scientist investigating microbes or an airline pilot than a prissy young thing who wears frilly dresses and white ribbed stockings.
Jaroslav Ha?ek, the author of the book, sets the action in Prague during the Great War and describes the protagonist as a chubby chatterbox who, having already escaped once from joining the army—“exempted because of stupidity”—is drafted again. He arrives at the recruitment office in a wheelchair, supposedly suffering from arthritis in the knees. He’s a rogue who’s keen to eat all the food and drink all the liquor he can lay his hands on, and work as little as possible. His name is ?vejk, and he earns a living by catching stray dogs and selling them as if they were purebreds. He speaks very politely to everyone, and his gestures and friendly gaze are always kindly. Whenever he’s asked for something, he usually has some anecdote or story to illustrate the matter, although frequently it has no bearing on the case and no one has asked to hear it. And everyone is puzzled by the fact that whenever somebody attacks him or yells at him or insults him, he doesn’t answer back, but agrees with them. In this way, he convinces them he’s a complete idiot and they let him be.
“You’re a complete nitwit!”
“Yes, sir, what you’re saying is absolutely true,” ?vejk replies in his meekest tone.
Dita misses Dr. Manson, whom she had accompanied in her reading through the mining towns of the Welsh mountains, and even Hans Castorp, calmly stretched out on his chaise longue facing the Alps. This book insists on tying her to Bohemia and to war. Her eyes skim over the pages, and she can’t quite understand what this Czech author wants to say to her. A furious officer reprimands the soldier-protagonist, a poor potbellied, shabbily dressed soul who’s a bit of a fool. She doesn’t like it; the situation is almost decadent. She likes books that enlarge life, not the ones that belittle it.
But there’s something familiar about this character. And in any case, the world out there is much worse, so she’d rather stay curled up on her stool, concentrating on her reading and hoping the teachers sitting around talking don’t pay too much attention to her.
A bit further along in the book, she comes across ?vejk dressed awkwardly in his uniform as a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, despite the fact that the Czechs, at least those of the working classes, were not at all pleased to be under the command of the snooty Germans in the First World War.
And how right they were, thinks Dita to herself.
He’s the adjutant to Lieutenant Luká?, who yells at him, calls him an animal, and gives him a whack on the back of his head whenever ?vejk drives him mad. Because there’s no question that ?vejk has a talent for complicating everything, for misplacing documents entrusted to him, for executing the exact opposite of every order, and for making the officer look ridiculous, even though he always appears to do everything good-naturedly and with the best of intentions, but with minimal brainpower. At this stage in the book, Dita still can’t work out if ?vejk is acting the fool or actually is a complete idiot.
She’s having a hard time understanding what the author is trying to say. The outrageous soldier answers his superior’s questions and orders in such a painstaking and detailed manner that his lengthy replies go on forever. They branch out into digressions and little stories about relatives and neighbors whom the soldier, absolutely seriously, introduces into his response in the most absurd way.
I met a certain Paroubek who had a bar in Libeň. On one occasion, a telegraph operator got drunk on gin and, instead of taking the messages of condolence to the relatives of a poor man who had died, he took them the price list of the alcohol being sold at the bar. It caused a huge scandal. And especially because up until then no one had read the price list, and it turned out that good old Paroubek was charging a few cents extra for each drink; although he did later explain that the extra money was for charitable works.…
The stories he uses to illustrate his explanations become so long and so surrealistic that the lieutenant ends up yelling at him to disappear: “Get out of my sight, you blockhead!”
And Dita is surprised to find that she’s laughing at the thought of the lieutenant’s expression. She immediately scolds herself. How can such a stupid character make her laugh? She even briefly questions whether it’s legitimate to laugh after everything that’s happened, and with everything that’s still going on.
How can you laugh while people you love are dying?
And her thoughts turn momentarily to Hirsch, and that permanent, enigmatic smile of his. And suddenly, she understands: Hirsch’s smile is his victory. His smile tells whoever is standing in front of him that he’s no match for Hirsch. In a place like Auschwitz, where everything is designed to make you cry, a smile is an act of defiance.