The Fate and Demise of Czechoslovakia Was Made in the Beds of the Mucha VIP Cathouse

 

A man I used to know,

I thought I knew,

put his lifetime work

into one thick compendium,

 

while making sure

that as little as can be

there was included

 

from what he wrote

on literature before 1989.

But the penultimate piece

that crowns his book

 

is a massive paean, a tribute,

to the gallery of girls and women

who were pimped by George Mucha,

the son of the famous painter,

 

to the VIPs and agents of the East and West,

and the select, leading dissidents,

including Vaclav Havel, a future President,

 

and to many from Who’s Who

from the communist cultural establishment,

and all these orgies (under the eye

of the StB, the KGB, MI 6, and the CIA)

 

were taking place over decades

in a small palace, leased by the Church

to the communist government,

 

right behind a Baroque building

of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

and across from the Castle of Prague,

the country’s presidential seat.

 

He called these “Mucha girls”

“female teenage beasts” … who,

he “assumed, must have

closely felt the purity [sic]

 

in the gaze of their shy [sic]

[patrons and] stalking hunters,

their burgeoning and timid [sic] lust,

all the respect, all the passion,

 

that these artists had to suppress…”

This VIP, state-run détente bagnio,

he avows, was “in Prague the last

truly authentic salon”

 

in which the girls, “the butterflies

were caught and pinned

in an eerie loop of time,

as if fossilized in drops of amber.”

 

At times even British diplomats

shared there their wives

for the Crown

and the Hammers of the Reds.

 

There aging Saturns fed

and feasted like “Oriental sultans”

on “the youth of the [local] femmes

 

and their biology rising and the need

and hope for freedom

already there and right then,

 

and so piercing the crust

of their [communist] oppression,

becoming a protest song

in the name of life

 

as it truly is …

a cry of the senses

enslaved all the same;

 

otherwise their young lives,

their future, would have been

completely wasted

 

in the years of that aged

and sterile socialist gerontocracy.”

But there “just within the reach

of the exposed arms of those queens of nights

 

were great fates”—and this was “the peak,

the best, the utmost, which their otherwise

drab and humdrum, ordinary lives

could ever attain or ever hope for,

 

even so most likely still condemned

to be dragged unjustly and mercilessly

back to their normal, worthless selves.”