The Miracle Game
By Josef Skvorecky
Translated by Paul Wilson
Knopf, 436 pages, $22.95
In Josef Skvorecky`s earlier novels about him, ”The Cowards” and ”The Engineer of Human Souls,” Danny Smiricky has been part Tom Sawyer, part Tom Jones-a young man who dealt with the nastiness of the real world by concentrating upon a few basic verities, such as playing jazz or chasing women. These simple drives, far from being callow, help cut through the insane politics that have raged over Danny`s unhappy homeland, Czechoslovakia.
Danny survives the Nazis and then the Russians mostly because he always is interested in some girl who generally is not interested in him or, if she is, happens to have a big and jealous boyfriend. This tight focus of interest, as well as his acute, skeptical intelligence, always serve Danny as a beacon through the rhetorical fogs that blind his elders and contemporaries. The net effect is to make the Danny Smiricky books wonderfully funny and cheerfully encouraging, because Danny is always discovering that, horrible as things may be, life will still come right in the end.
A year ago, with the miracle of Czechoslovakia`s ”Velvet Revolution,”
Danny`s optimism seemed prophetic. However, as the reality of freedom, and the staggering burden of responsibility it brings, have become clearer in Eastern Europe, Danny`s nonchalance has begun to resemble that of another Czech hero, writer Jaroslav Hasek`s the good soldier Schveik. A man who agrees to everything and does nothing, Schveik is free only because he displays a stupidity that borders on the subhuman. And the Czechs, a cautious nation of survivors who can`t decide whether they are canny or servile, are
understandably uneasy about any resemblance they might bear to Schveik.
Thus the appearance of ”The Miracle Game” is nicely timed, not only to dispel these doubts about Danny but also to pose deep and disturbing questions about an Eastern Europe that is facing independence in a sour and nervous mood.
Danny`s problem in ”The Miracle Game” is the reverse of his usual one. Appointed to his first job, he finds himself the only male teacher in a school full of bored and randy country girls. Far from having to chase them, he now is pursued. But what should be heaven has turned into hell, because Danny is suffering from gonorrhea. And this reversal reverbrates through the book.
In the earlier novels, Danny had the consolation of being able to blame outside circumstances for his failure with girls and, by extension, for his inability to live any other part of his life as he would wish. But here he has to face the bitter truth that what keeps him back from happiness lies within himself. And the era in which Skvorecky has chosen to set the novel`s action forces a similar awareness upon its audience.
”The Cowards” and ”The Engineer of Human Souls” were set in periods when either the Nazis or the Russians were imposing their will on
Czechoslvakia by sheer strength. But ”The Miracle Game” focuses on the days of Czech Stalinism, 1948 to 1954, and on 1968, the summer of the Russian invasion-and for what happened in those periods the Czechs must bear some responsibility, in part because they did not fight and in part because they did.
In this novel Skvorecky weighs and reweighs the question that our cursed century seems to force upon us: how can a person balance the natural desire to live and prosper against the constant need to define and defend a moral territory? And the ”miracle” of the title touches upon this issue.
Danny has chanced to witness an apparent miracle, a statue of St. Joseph that seems to move by itself. But because this is the Stalinist Czechoslovakia of 1948, an ideological struggle arises that eventually claims two lives.
The secret police insist upon mechanical explanations for the event, even though their wires and magnets seem to have been placed on the wrong statue. The believers persist in declaring the moving statue a miracle, despite the devices of the secret police and even a priest`s confession.
Though he has no wish to do so, Danny ends up spending two decades trying to unravel the mystery. Those who become martyrs to their beliefs always harbor some deceit, Danny finds, just as he himself lies to the naked nymph who keeps thrusting herself upon him, telling her that he must refuse her advances because he is a devout Catholic. Conversely, Danny finds redeeming virtues in those whom the world would say have struck bargains with evil.
For example, a Stalinist schoolmistress forces a girl to renounce her own father, just arrested as a kulak, but only because there is no other way for the girl to complete her education. When the Prague Spring of 1968 arrives, the unhappy schoolmistress is driven to hang herself, although neither the father nor the daughter bears the woman any grudge. The girl, in fact, writes a letter to a newspaper in the schoolmistress` defense, only to be told by the editor that the letter is unpublishable because it violates the temporarily reformist Party line.
It would be wrong to call the hero of this novel an older Danny, for the Czech original of ”The Miracle Game” was written in 1972, five years before the much more ebullient ”Engineer of Human Souls.” But circumstances have conspired to make the Danny of ”Miracle” seem wiser.
The events of the year past and, even more, the daunting tasks of the future, have revealed that freedom is not something naked and lush, simply to be grabbed at. No sooner have the Czechoslovakians rid themselves of the Russians than they have had to face their own devils within-intense ethnic rivalry, economic disintegration and a people long accustomed to the consolations of captivity.
”The Miracle Game” is a very skeptical book, but that, paradoxically, is what makes it Skvorecky`s most optimistic novel. Danny grows disillusioned with the motivations of everyone whom the rigged or real miracle touches. Everyone, he finds, is playing a game of some sort, trying to impose his system of beliefs on others. But because the statue has moved, or because people believe it has moved, they are slowly brought to act. There are no explanations, yet there are results.
When he wrote ”The Miracle Game,” Skvorecky could not have dreamed that there would be a time when his country, and Danny`s, would again be master of its own fate. And the reasons that has come to pass are as convoluted and obscure as the reasons the statue in the novel moved-and as unlikely as the fact that it moved at all. But the marvel of that final fact is what the novel celebrates. Move the statue did. And game or not, miracles do happen.
”The Miracle Game,” written in 1972, is the third Josef Skvorecky novel in which his hero is jazz-loving, girl-chasing Danny Smiricky.
