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all day long. ”
    “ That would be the first week, ” Bolotka says. “ Then would begin the second week and the excitement of being Mr. Olga. ”
    “ That isn ’ t true, ” she says, “ I would leave him alone. ”
    “ Then would begin the vodka, ” Bolotka says. “ Then would begin the adventures. ”
    “ Not in America, ” weeps Olga.
    “ Oh, ” says Bolotka, “ you would not be homesick for Prague in New York City? ”
    “ No! ”
    “ Olga, in America you would shoot yourself. ”
    “ I will shoot myself here. ”
    “ With what? ” asks Bo l otka.
    “ A tank! Tonight! I will steal a Russian tank and I will shoot myself with it tonight! ”
    Bolotka occupies a dank room at the top of a bleak stairwell on a street of tenements near the outskirts of Prague. I visited him there earlier in the day. He reassures me, when he observes me looking sadly around, that I shouldn ’ t feel too bad about his standard of living—this was his hideaway from his wife long before his theater was disbanded and he was forbidden to produce his “ decadent ” revues. For a man of his predilections it really is the best place to live. “ It excites young girls, ” Bolotka informs me, “ 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 sloop-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, slitted green eyes whose manifesto is “ You will jam nothing bogus into this brain. ” He has a wife somewhere, even children; recently the wife ’ s arm was broken when she tried to prevent the police from entering their apartment to impound her absentee husband ’ s several thousand books.
    “ Why does she care so much about you? ”
    “ She doesn ’ t—she hates me. But she hates them more. Old married couples in Prague have something to hate now even more than each other. ”
    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 leading troublemakers were being given papers to leave. 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. 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?
    “ 1 have sixteen girt friends in Prague, ” he replies. “ How can I leave? ”
    I am handed his robe to keep myself warm while he undresses and gets into my suit. “ You look even more like a gorilla, ” I say, when he stands to model himself in my clothes.
    “ And even in my disgraceful dressing gown, ” he says, “ you look like a happy, healthy, carefree impostor. ”
    Bolotka ’ s story.
    “ I was nineteen years old, I was a student at the university. I wanted like my father to be a lawyer. But after one year I decide I must quit and enroll at the School of Fine Arts. Of course I have first to go for an interview. This is 1950. Probably I would have to go to fifty interviews, but I only got to number one. I went in and they took out my ‘ record. ’ It was a foot thick. I said to them, ‘ How can it be a foot thick, I haven ’ t lived yet. I have had no life—how can you have all this information? ’ But they don ’ t explain. I sit there and they look it over and they say I cannot quit. The workers ’ money is being spent on my education. The workers have invested a year in my future as a lawyer. The workers have not made this investment so I can change my mind and decide to become a fine artist. They tell me that I cannot matriculate at the School of Fine Arts, or anywhere ever again, and so I said okay and went home. I didn ’ t care that much. It wasn ’ t so bad. I didn ’ t have to become a lawyer, I had some