One day, a hundred thousand years ago, during the Ice Age or soon after, when the world began to melt from below, an iceberg must have carved out this valley, with its body dragging its tail behind it like an enormous scaly reptile. At least according to the long-winded account he heard yesterday from Big Joco as the two of them had been left to their own devices with machine guns aimed at the valley they were watching intently, charged with providing cover for their unit lying low in the woods behind them, and now, rushing hell for leather from the woods back to Big Joco after an endless night when they had not been relieved as planned, Melius concluded that very little had in fact changed, that they had entered another damned ice age and that even the sun, sinking its teeth into him like a cannibal, would also soon turn to ice.
This is the opening paragraph of the title story of the newly released collection of tales by the Jewish Slovak writer Leopold Lahola, available in English for the first time in Julia and Peter Sherwood’s translation. The brutal cold and the isolation of partisan fighters in the final winter of the Second World War cuts through to the bone in this tale of one man’s efforts to respect the dignity of a friend and fallen comrade. When Melius makes it back to the windthrow where he an Big Joco had been positioned, he finds his companion dead. To leave him there to suffer further indignities should the Germans pass by is unthinkable. But Big Joco is a monstrously huge man, now lying face down, stuck to the frozen ground. When Melius encounters a stray fellow partisan, a miserable character referred to simply as Walrus due to his distinctive moustache, he tries to enlist his support to move his friend. The reluctant recruit balks when he sees Joco’s massive form, and even when the two men combine forces their task seems impossible. So Melius conjures an ingenious, if gruesome plan to divide the load.
This desperate urgency to cling to some measure of humanity under inhumane conditions, with the inevitable conflicts that arise between individuals with different motivations—regardless of whether they are on opposing sides or not—is a key theme running through all of Lahola’s wartime stories. His ability to quickly set a scene, craft strong, often eccentric characters and his keen ear for dialogue give his fiction its unique cinematic intensity. It is not surprising that he was also an accomplished playwright and filmmaker. However, due to his own postwar malaise, he ended up spending much of his life in exile. In fact, the collection from which the stories in the present volume were drawn was not published until 1968, months after his early death just shy of his fiftieth birthday. However, the Soviet invasion that same year would lead to the erasure of his work from Slovakian literary history, not be rediscovered until twenty years later following the Velvet Revolution.
Born Arje Friedmann in northeast Slovakia in 1918, Lahola was conscripted into the Slovak Army in 1940. He deserted in 1942 to avoid deportation, but when he learned that his mother and younger brother had been interned in a labour camp, he willingly joined them. When they were to be taken away on a transport, he again offered to join them, however a friend working in the camp administration removed his name from the list. He then went on to join the armed resistance and engaged in front-line combat during the Slovak National Uprising. The final winter of the war he spent in the mountains fighting with the partisans. After the war he worked as a journalist and began writing for the theatre, adopting his more distinctive Slovak name, Lahola, inspired by a sign above a butcher’s shop. For a time he achieved considerable success in the postwar world, but he found it hard to shake the weight of the recent past. Following the Communist takeover in 1948, he emigrated, first to Israel and then to Germany, before finally returning to Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s in the light of growing liberalization.
Lahola drew on his own wartime experiences in his short fiction, not only the hardships and cruelty, but also the recognition that his enemies, the German Nazis and their collaborators, were human beings too. As he noted in his diary, “I participated in a war against people who were my spitting image.” It is this reality that complicates the emotional and ethical implications of many of the stories collected here. These are not heroic tales with clear black and white divisions between good and evil, shades of both exist on both sides as it turns out. The longest piece in the collection, “A Conversation with the Enemy,” is a prime example. It begins with a partisan, captured by the Germans, anticipating a harsh interrogation and summary execution. He finds, instead, bored officers who ask him nothing. He is then sent off and finds himself followed by an armed soldier who cordially introduces himself as Helmut Kampen. Fully expecting to be shot, the partisan is disarmed by the German’s desire to engage him in conversation, longing for a little friendly debate. As they make their way through the snowy woods, their banter continues—eagerly pursued by the soldier and suspiciously challenged by the partisan. It becomes, over time, an extended interaction between two men who, under other circumstances, might be friends. But ultimately, when the tables are abruptly turned, they each still have a role to play.
The nine stories gathered in this volume were composed primarily during the early years of Lahola’s exile, from the late forties through the mid-fifties, and are set amid rising facsism just before the war, through the years of concentration camps, direct conflict and on into the tragic aftermath. All feature third person narratives, save for one, aptly titled “In the First Person” set during the first summer after the war, in which the narrator, returning to his home community, collects the first person accounts of those who have survived as he seeks his own closure. Among writers chronicling this period, Lahola’s work stands apart, not simply because he can draw out the humanity in the enemy (not to mention the inhumanity on his own side) but because his narratives tend to adopt a dispassionate, distanced tone. This heightens the intensity of the moral choices he places before his characters, typically driving them to a point at which a decision must be made, and then leaving them there, in the terrible moment. The very clear theatrical quality of his stories, tinged as they are with a dark touch of the absurd, allows for an exploration of the realities of life during wartime intended to raise more questions than it answers. As such, The Last Thing is a long overdue opportunity for English language writers to come to appreciate the work of this remarkable Slovak writer.
The Last Thing by Leopold Lahola is translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood and published by Karolinum Press.
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