The Cowards is one of the first novels Josef Skvorecky wrote, between 1948 and 1949, though it was not published until 1958 when it appeared both in Czech and in an English translation by Jeanne Nemcova. The novel takes place over a week, between Friday the 4th of May 1945 and Friday the 11th in the (fictional) Czech town of Kostelec. The war is at a pivotal point as the Germans retreat and the Russians advance, and the town finds itself in the way of both. Meanwhile, competing forces in the town are readying themselves to step into the power vacuum: the middle-class establishment on the one hand, and communist partisans on the other. Despite the seriousness of the situation, however, the novel’s tone is largely comic.
The novel’s ‘hero’ (or perhaps anti-hero) is Danny, whose life is not entirely unlike that of Skvorecky himself. He, too, is middle-class, loves jazz (he plays the saxophone) and has spent the last two years as a forced labourer in a Messerschmitt factory. His main hope is that, after the war, his band will be able to play, though his dreams revolve around his unrequited love for Irena:
“I thought about Irena, or rather about myself, how much I loved her, and how wonderful it would be to be with her, and how it was really better to be with her this way than for real…”
When he thinks about dying a hero’s death he does so entirely for her benefit, and he has already written a letter to be delivered to her in such circumstances telling her “that I’d lived and died only for her.” In fact, it is Irena’s presence that encourages him to confront a (retreating) German officer, refusing to get out of his way, which leads to his arrest early in the novel. As events unfold, he thinks only about her watching, firstly when he is pushed over, and then when he is told to raise his hands:
“I know how to do that. How they did it in Chicago. I could see myself like in a gangster movie… Taking my time. And not too high…”
In this he confirms Irena’s view of him, that he doesn’t take anything seriously – as well as his sense of performance. When he finally gets hold of a gun, he first thought is to ask a local photographer to develop some photographs of him holding it – to show Irena, of course. In Danny, Skvorecky has created one of the great young men of literature – typical for his age, thinking mainly of music and girls, disillusioned with the previous generation, but in extraordinary circumstances. He does this in part through alternating sections of dialogue, sometimes involving a number of voices, with Danny’s internal monologue which (if we are to believe it) remains remarkably calm even when he is in danger – a calmness inspired more by youth than bravery.
Danny doesn’t stay in German hands for long and is soon part of a local militia designed to keep order by patrolling the town (the only incident they face is with partisans rather than Germans). They are not armed as the town authorities fear a communist takeover more than anything else. The boredom is made even less pleasant by heavy rain, as the choral dialogue tells us:
“They can stuff this whole business. I sure didn’t think it was going to be like this…
“All we’ll do is catch cold and then we won’t even be around for the liberation.”
Though the overall tone is light, and there are some genuinely comic moments (such as when the town’s population have to reconsider what flags to display as the various forces come and go), the novel does not shy away from the horror of the war. At one point Danny witnesses the doctor’s wife being shot by a fighter plane:
“A crimson puddle glistening on the sidewalk and the blood kept running out of her. I looked at her face and real tears came into my eyes.”
Danny helps lift her “scared to death her body wouldn’t be able to take it.” (His desire to help is frequently in evidence, such as when he finds billets for a group of British POWs). As tides of refugees pass through the town, Danny encounters a group of women who have escaped from a concentration camp:
“You couldn’t tell whether they were old or young. Hunger started from their eyes. They looked like ghosts.”
Typically, Danny leads them to where they can find something to eat. The war, however, is not entirely over and later, Danny finds himself briefly in the thick of the fighting as German SS soldiers (who have refused to surrender) approach the town, retreating from the Russians.
Unsurprisingly, Danny’s experiences lead him to consider life:
“I thought of all those deaths and wondered what life was about, what the point, and it seemed to me that it didn’t have any, unless maybe just thinking about girls and music, and I wondered if that was enough to live for, but nothing else came to mind…”
The reader senses that Skvorecky sympathises, and that the narrow focus of youth, which might be regarded as immaturity, is in fact a logical reaction to the ideologies which caused the war, and would imposed the peace.