Fates

Arnošt Lustig (1926-2011) talks about his life

Dancer with a destiny

My favorite old man liked to dance. After the Second World War, mainly American swing and Czech polkas, after the Soviet occupation, Argentine tangoes and Posázaví ploužáky. He lasted the longest on the dance floor - the end was usually determined by the dawn. After our emigration to the USA, in 1970, as a member of the International Writers Program in Iowa, I dominated the dance parties in the house the university provided for us - as a DJ I operated the second most important machine in the family - the gramophone - only the Hermes Baby case typewriter was more important. (Arnošt's mother Terezie and sister Hana, my father's "twin brother" Ota Pavel and my friends from high school sent us the records. ) Later, already in the "post-amet" Karlovy Vary, as vice-president of the film festival jury, my father danced with Julia Ormond, two generations younger than him, at the Grandhotel Pupp and the festival director Jiří Bartoska wondered where "the juice" was coming from (he was only 69! ).

I noticed that my father was the dominant partner of beautiful women at dances, including my mother Vera. The ones he led in dance duels to a charming demise seemed happy. The only partner he couldn't lead to his liking was named DESTINY, but maybe she was also satisfied in dancing with my dad. In her unrelenting embrace, they went through a series of endurance "sessions", most often without preparation. At first he managed to keep up with her in steps and flexibility (in Terezín he was nicknamed "the snake man" because he squeezed through the bars into the German potato warehouses). But in the end, Mrs. Doom got my favorite old man, as she gets them all. But no one had ever seen his worn soles, cracked blisters or heard his shortening breath. My favourite old man's motto all his life was "we will fight - we will not cry!" (So he wrote in the margin of a fictitious letter to his gassed father Emil "Dad!" in the Young Front in 1947. )

My father liked to tell me about his pas-de-deux with Lady Fate - and he liked to tell me even more than he liked to dance or eat (that too with gusto). Not only did I love hearing the stories, I shuddered and admired him. He had stamina. You can see that from the enclosed CD. Pepi Lustig, USA, 2016

To this day, I don't know if I came out of his story. From his ideas of what I would be like if I had been born then and there and lived there, with him and them. Everyone I could have known and should have known.

The devil looked into his eyes as if perhaps his life belonged to him. Fate was toying with him. Perhaps to kill his playfulness, and with it his irrepressibility, which flowed through him into the unknown. And yet his luck held. He often dropped his piece of bread on the water, and there often came a time when he returned to it. Like light, dark, light, dark. ("What comes and goes into darkness again?") Like his Tanga, the girl from Hamburg, he had a prophetic sadness in his gaze. And with Tanga, Sonia Gross, a beauty queen from the Odeon Circus in Hamburg, for whom he was not just a brother, were looking "at the trees, like leaves falling." They have "accepted that no one has anything forever. What bloomed in spring and ripened in summer, began to bloom and die in the autumn, and it perished even earlier, before winter came... When the star was falling," they smiled, "as if they were relieved." They didn't know "perhaps before, that nothing - literally nothing - is immortal?" Arnošt Lustig, Prague, 1992 Eva Lustig, Vienna,