Shop Talk by Philip Roth Page A

bit since the seventies, his big facial features and mouthful of large carnivore teeth still make me sometimes think (particularly when he's having a good time) that I'm in the presence of a highly intellectually evolved Ringo Starr. Ivan had been at the center of the activities known now in Czechoslovakia as "the revolution," and yet he showed not the least sign of the exhaustion that even the young students reading English literature, whose Shakespeare class I sat in on at the university, told me had left them numb with fatigue and relieved to be back quietly studying even something as abstruse to them as the opening scenes of
Macbeth.
    I got a reminder of the stubborn force in Ivan's temperament during dinner at his house one evening as he advised a writer friend of his and mine how to go about getting back the tiny two-room apartment that had been confiscated by the authorities in the late seventies, when the friend had been hounded by the secret police into an impoverished exile. "Take your wife," Ivan told him, "take your four children, and go down to the office of Jaroslav Koran." Jaroslav Koran was the new mayor of Prague, formerly a translator of poetry from English; as the week passed and I either met or heard about Václav Havel's appointees, it began to seem

to me as though a primary qualification for joining the new administration was having translated into Czech the poems of John Berryman. Have there ever before been so many translators, novelists, and poets at the head of anything other than the PEN club?
    "In Koran's office," Ivan continued, "lie down on the floor, all of you, and refuse to move. Tell them, 'I'm a writer, they took my apartment, and I want it back.' Don't beg, don't complain, just lie there and refuse to move. You'll have an apartment in twenty-four hours." The writer without an apartment—a very spiritual and mild person who, since I'd seen him last selling cigarettes in Prague, had aged in all the ways that Ivan had not—responded only with a forlorn smile suggesting, gently, that Ivan was out of his mind. Ivan turned to me and said, matter-of-factly, "Some people don't have the stomach for this."
    Helena Klímová, Ivan's wife, is a psychotherapist who received her training in the underground university that the dissidents conducted in various living rooms during the Russian occupation. When I asked how her patients were responding to the revolution and the new society it had ushered in, she told me, in her precise, affable, serious way, "The psychotics are getting better and the neurotics are getting worse." "How do you explain that?" I asked. "With all this new freedom," she said, "the neurotics are terribly uncertain. What will happen now? Nobody knows. The old rigidity was detestable, even to them, of course, but also reassuring, dependable. There was a structure. You knew what to expect and what not to expect. You knew whom to trust and whom to hate. To the neurotics the change is very unsettling. They are suddenly in a world of choices." "And the psychotics? Is it really possible that they're getting

better?" "I think so, yes. The psychotics suck up the prevailing mood. Now it's exhilaration. Everybody is happy, so the psychotics are even happier. They are euphoric. It's all very strange. Everybody is suffering from adaptation shock."
    I asked Helena what she was herself having most difficulty adapting to. Without hesitation she answered that it was all the people who were nice to her who never had been before—not that long ago she and Ivan had been treated most warily by neighbors and associates looking to avoid trouble. Helena's expression of anger over the rapidity with which those once so meticulously cautious—or outright censorious—people were now amicable to the Klímas was a surprise to me, since during their hardest years she had always impressed me as a marvel of tolerance and equilibrium. The psychotics were getting better, the neurotics