Alfred Menazbach, Subletter

Alfred Menazbach was a somewhat complicated person. That is to say, he was not complicated in the manner of a unique, problematic phenomenon, because in 1939 there were a great many Menazbachs in Prague, but rather he set great store by appearing to be complicated.

The son of a prematurely retired middle school teacher, he graduated from high school with achievements modest in a way that put attending college out of the question. But since his father played cards every day with an officer in a big insurance company, the question of young Alfred’s cultivation resolved itself in this way: he became a trainee in the Prague branch of a foreign insurance company. But as he found little to savor in this work, he turned to good account the one thing that he really knew, stenography, and answered a classified ad in which The Prague Herald sought a permanent stenographer for the editorial office. And this was the field which young Menazbach would have tossed about in for life, had the Allies not made their blunder at Versailles after the First World War, and thereby subsequently created a new Tamerlane, who brought the republic of the Czechs and the Slovaks under the hooves of his horde on March 15th, 1939. With time Alfred rose from being one of the stenographers typing the chief editor’s letters to becoming part of the actual editorial staff. Even if during his employment at the Herald he never wrote even one article, other than  an occasional short report on a movie or a convention, he was nevertheless an editor. He gathered up the telephone and radio dispatches, and soon evolved into an artist in this sphere, who could simultaneously handle several telephones, read and translate the headlines coming in from the English press, and eat his second or third breakfast. This astonishing ability secured him his place, which otherwise was not always secure even for much older colleagues. He settled in very quickly and soon recognized that all kinds of work other than journalism were out of the question. To sit in the center of sensations, without the responsibility of producing his own thoughts, a secure career that allowed him to dress fashionably and randomly sample all the review copies of contemporary literary works—that was just what he had been looking for.

Alfred was anything but handsome—his somewhat too small head sat on a much too lanky...