Philip Roth
THE PHENOMENON OF ALIENATION
IS
NOT APPROVED OF FROM ABOVE
Bolotka occupies a dank room at the top of a bleak stair–
well on a street of tenements near the outskirts of Prague. He re–
assures me, when he observes me looking sadly around, that I
shouldn't feel too bad about his standard of living-this was his hide–
away from his wife long before his theater was disbanded and he was
forbidden to produce his "decadent" revues. "It excites young girls to
be fucked in squalor." He is intrigued by my herringbone tweed suit
and asks to try it on to see how it feels to be a rich American writer.
He is a stoop-shouldered man, large and shambling, with a wide
Mongol face, badly pitted skin, and razor blade eyes, eyes like rifts
in the bone of his skull, gray slitted eyes whose manifesto is, "You
will jam nothing bogus into this brain." He has a wife somewhere
still, even children; only recently her arm was broken when she tried
to prevent the police from entering their apartment to impound her
absentee husband's library of several thousand books.
"Why does she care so much about you?"
"She doesn't- she hates me. But she hates them more. All the
old married couples in Prague have something to hate now even
more than each other."
Just a month earlier the police came to the door of Bolotka's
hole at the top of the stairwell to inform him that the country's lead–
ing trouble-makers were being given papers to leave. His was the
name at the head of the list. They would allow him forty-eight hours
to get out.
"I said to them, 'Why don't
you
leave? That would amount to
the same thing, you know. I give
you
forty-eight hours."'
But would he not be better off in Paris, or across the border in
Vienna, where he has a reputation as a theatrical innovator and
could resume his career?
"I have sixteen girlfriends in Prague," he replies. "How can I
leave?"
I am handed his robe to keep myself warm while he undresses
Editor's Note: This is excerpted from a work in progress.
