Rock 'n' Roll (6 page)

MAX
Nine hundred.

JAN
Ah—the score. Also half my fellow journalists. Self-censorship about the Russian occupation didn't save us. Loyalty meant kissing their Soviet arses. I would have tried to emigrate but …

Jan removes a record album from the bag
—The Madcap Laughs
by Syd Barrett.

JAN
(
cont.
) Huh …

MAX
What?

JAN
(
misunderstanding
) She wrote on the sleeve. ‘Now do you believe me?'

MAX
But what?

JAN
(
absent, asking permission
) Is it okay?

Max is seething. Jan doesn't notice. He moves to put the record on.

MAX
You would have emigrated but what?

JAN
Yes … I was offered a job in Frankfurt… but I don't know … German rock bands …

SYD BARRETT
(
sings, on record
) ‘Lean out of your window,
Golden Hair,
I heard you singing
In the midnight air.' (
continues
)

MAX
(
erupts
) I never heard anything so pathetic. Do everybody a favour, go and live in the West, it's where you belong. You bedwetter! If it wasn't for eleven million Soviet military dead, your little country'd be a German province now—and you wouldn't be bellyaching about your socialist right to piss everywhere except in the toilet, you'd be smoke up the chimney.

Jan is shocked. He stops the record. Max refills his glass and drinks. He steadies himself.

MAX
(
cont.
) I'm exactly as old as the October Revolution. I grew up with the fight against Fascism. In the slums, in Spain, the Arctic convoys … And today on a urinal wall I saw where someone had scrawled a hammer and sickle and a swastika joined by an equals sign. If I'd caught who did that, I'd probably have killed him. (
He drinks.
) And Esme thinks a Fascist is a mounted policeman at a demo in Grosvenor Square.

JAN
So.

MAX
(
turns to him
) There's something which keeps happening to me. More and more now that I'm getting to be half-famous for not leaving the Communist Party. I meet somebody, it could be a visiting professor, or someone fixing my car, anyone … and what they all want to know, though they don't know how to ask, because they don't want to be rude, is—how come, when it's obvious even to them,
how come I don't get it?
And it's the same here. I meet some apparatchik working the system, and he's fascinated by me. He's never met a Communist before. I'm like the last white rhino.
Why don't I get it?

JAN
So why don't you?

MAX
Don't push it. A workers' state fits the case. What else but
work
lifts us out of the slime? Work does all the work. What the hell else?

JAN
How about… ballet?

Max grins amiably, he's calm now.

MAX
‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs'. What could be more simple, more rational, more beautiful? It was the right idea in the wrong conditions for fifty years and counting. A blip. Christ, we waited long enough for someone to have it.

JAN
A blip. Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler. Perhaps we aren't good enough for this beautiful idea. This is the best we can do with it. Marx knew we couldn't be trusted. First the dictatorship, till we learned to be good, then the utopia where a man can be a baker in the morning, a lawmaker in the afternoon and a poet in the evening. But we never learned to be good, so look at us. A one-legged
man showed up at my school once. He waited outside the classroom. It turned out the man with one leg had come to say goodbye to our teacher. Afterwards, the teacher explained to us his friend lost his leg in the war, so as a special favour he'd been given permission to go and live near his sister somewhere in north Bohemia. ‘You see,' our teacher said, ‘how Communism looks after its war heroes.' So I put my hand up. God, I must have been stupid. I really thought it would be interesting for them, so I said in England anyone could live anywhere they liked, even if they had two legs. My mother was questioned and she lost her job at the shoe factory, but the point is the other kids in the class. They thought I was telling travellers' tales. They couldn't grasp the idea of a country where someone, anyone, could decide to move to another town and just go there. Suppose everybody wanted to live in Bohemia when their job is in Moravia! How would such a society
work?

MAX
And you didn't explain?

JAN
Explain what?

MAX
How it works. How everyone's free to have lunch at the Ritz and it's absolutely legal to be unemployed.

JAN
Your problems are yours, you fix them, okay? I love England. I would like to live forever in my last English schoolboy summer. It was exceptional, you know? 1947, endless summer days, I collected birds' eggs, and the evenings so long you couldn't sleep for the light, listening to the farmer's boy calling the cattle home. And the winter was amazing that year. A Christmas card winter. My mother knew all the songs. She baked
svestkove buchty
for my friends, and sang ‘We'll Meet Again' in a terrible accent over the washtub. I was happy.

MAX
Jesus Christ.

JAN
If I was English I wouldn't care if Communism in Czechoslovakia reformed itself into a pile of pig shit. To be English would be my luck. I would be moderately enthusiastic and moderately philistine, and a good sport. I would be kind to foreigners in a moderately superior way, and also to animals except for the ones I kill, and I would live a decent life, like most English people. How many voted for the party, Max?

MAX
About two-tenths of one per cent. It's called the parliamentary route to government.

JAN
You got the strange gods vote: Marxism, Fascism, anarchism kept on the side of the plate like a little bit of salt to bring out the flavour of English moderation. A thousand years of knowing who you are gives a people confidence in its judgement. Words mean what they have always meant. With us, words change meaning to make the theory fit the practice. We eat salt. Come on in, Max! Give me your place! Because I dream of having what you invented—trial by jury, independent judges—you can call the government fools and criminals but the law is for free speech, the same for the highest and the lowest, the law makes freedom normal, the denial of freedom must prove its case, and if the government doesn't like it, tough shit, they can't touch you, the law is constant—and yet, what you have set your heart on, Max, the only thing that will make you happy, is that the workers own the means of production. I would give it to you gladly if I could keep the rest.

Max turns ugly.

MAX
What do you want it for?

JAN
To live free.

MAX
The little diddums!—still sucking on philosophy's tit! For you, freedom means, ‘Leave me alone.' For the masses it means, ‘Give me a break.'

He puts on his coat etc.

MAX
(
cont.
) Social relations are economic, as I thought we'd agreed at Cambridge. You, me and Marx …

JAN
So. Some sunny day.

MAX
So, at Cambridge, why were you pretending to be what you were not?

Max leaves.

After a moment, Jan restarts the record on the turntable.

SYD BARRETT
(
sings, on record
)‘Lean out of your window,
Golden Hair,
I heard you singing
In the midnight air …'

The sound fades out. Jan continues to listen.

Exterior—continuous.

MILAN
on a street bench—who may have been visible waiting and watching throughout the scene—stands up to meet Max approaching.

MILAN
Max …
Ahoj. (reproachfully
) I left you a message at the hotel.

MAX
Milan … that thing in Cambridge in '68 … it was a one-off, a titbit, an accident. A goodwill gesture. There's no more where that came from. I'm not worth cultivating.

MILAN
(
cheerfully
) You're too modest. How is your old pupil?

Milan takes out a small tin of lozenges and puts one delicately into his mouth. Max declines a lozenge.

MAX
Jan? He learned nothing.

Max and Milan leave.

Jan is still listening to the record.

SYD BARRETT
(
sings, on record
)
‘… singing and singing a merry air,
Lean out of your window,
Golden Hair …'

Blackout—‘Astronomy Domine' by Pink Floyd picking up thirty seconds in.

Smash cut to morning and silence. Summer 1972. Jan is looking at a sheet of paper. The lavatory flushes, heard through its open door.

JAN
(
raising his voice
) I'm supposed to sign this?

A young woman enters in her slip:
MAGDA.

MAGDA
Aren't you going to work?

JAN
Magda, when did Ferdinand leave this?

MAGDA
He was at Klamovka. We waited for you.

She smells him carefully like a dog, half-serious.

MAGDA
(
cont.
) Where were you, then?

JAN
At the police station. As a witness. Jirous got shoved around by a drunk outside the party, and two cops sprayed his eyes and arrested him. They let him go this morning.

MAGDA
That's good, now they've got your name down as a witness for a dissident.

JAN
He's not a dissident, he's a hooligan. The band was great, anyway … a lot of new material.

MAGDA
You should get a tambourine and go full-time like Linda with Paul.

JAN
I can't afford to turn amateur. Haven't you got lectures?

Jan looks at the piece of paper again.

MAGDA
I can't face it this morning. It's you who's late, Jan.

JAN
They changed my shift. Did Ferdinand ask you to sign his petition?

MAGDA
Of course not. Some of us have careers to study for.

She goes out to continue dressing.

JAN
(
laughs at the paper
) It's so polite. It doesn't protest against the sentences, it's just please dear kind Dr Husák, please be generous and include these three intellectuals in the amnesty next Christmas out of the goodness of your heart so they can go back to their families …

Magda comes back in a skirt, doing up her blouse.

MAGDA
So will you sign it?

JAN
No, I won't sign it. First because it won't help Hubl and the others, but mainly because helping them is not its real purpose. Its real purpose is to let Ferdinand and his friends feel they're not absolutely pointless. It's just moral exhibitionism.

MAGDA
What's moral exhibitionism?

JAN
All they're doing is exploiting the prisoners' misfortune to draw attention to themselves. If they're so concerned for the families they should go and do something useful for the
families, instead of—for all they know—making things worse for the prisoners.

MAGDA
Well, you'll be able to tell him that.

She looks for and finds her shoes.

JAN
Hey, Magda, who's been at my records?

MAGDA
Ferda borrowed one.

JAN
When?

MAGDA
Maybe two. I think one with the cows.

JAN
Atom Heart Mother!

MAGDA
He wanted to make tapes.

JAN
(
looking for a record
) He's taken
Madcap Laughs.

MAGDA
What?

JAN
My Syd Barrett!

MAGDA
He said he'd bring them back before you even noticed.

JAN
When the hell would that be?!

There's a scratching at the door. Jan jumps up and opens the door—to Ferdinand, who has the missing records in a bag.

JAN
(
cont.
) There's a bell, you bastard.