Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  Ludvík Švábenský, a jazz musician who was Helena’s boyfriend for seven years, recalls that whenever he went to a concert or a public reception with her, he felt awful. He didn’t know who he really was—boyfriend or bodyguard … In the eyes of all the Party types, he was a nobody; they looked straight through him like thin air. “They were desperate to shine in Helena’s presence, they besieged her almost to the point of indecency, and she would whisper: ‘Luděk, help!’ ”

  A later incident occurred in the bar at the Hotel Praha, by which time she was a married woman; everyone knew her husband, Helmut Sickel, and they knew she was very much in love with this German musician, in spite of which the Czechoslovak Communist Party secretary for culture lay across the grand piano, trying to embrace her, panting heavily. The comrade had one single ambition: to talk to Helena.

  And she was nothing but nice and kind.

  Everybody could see her smiling.

  Helena was always smiling.

  Marta’s father was a cardiologist who was the head of a hospital. She graduated from high school in Poděbrady, and dreamed of studying medicine or philosophy. The school gave her an order, telling her in writing that she had “a duty to become acquainted with the laboring professions.” The workplace would transfer her to higher education if she achieved a positive report. It was 1959, and Marta’s first job was at a glassworks. To begin with, she ran to the bar to fetch beer for the factory workers, then she picked out glasses and bottles that were below standard. For three years, she kept insisting that she wanted to go to college. “The manager told me that higher education was for the working class, but I wasn’t a member of that class,” she says, “so I escaped into singing.”

  She entered music contests and won them. She became a local star, and began singing in a café.

  While her father was the senior registrar, they lived at the hospital. When he reached the age of fifty, he went off with another woman. His former family was offered an apartment belonging to the widow of Lieutenant-Colonel Mašín; he had been shot by the Nazis, and his two sons had fled the country before Stalin’s death and joined the US army. The authorities had decided to punish his widow by evicting her from her apartment. Before a Party committee, Marta’s mother declared that she wasn’t going to move in when Mrs. Mašinová left. She found herself an empty apartment opposite the widow’s, on the same floor, and made friends with her.

  “Yes, Mom had a strong character,” admits Marta. “But it was just by chance that I was the one who sang the ‘Prayer.’ These days, whenever someone tells me I’m some sort of symbol, I run away. After all, any singer could have recorded the ‘Prayer.’ I’m not politically involved nowadays either. I’ve just been through a few things. I knew how to tell black from white, and I’ve always been guided by that.”

  According to Marta: “Jan wanted to leave. For America. Everything here disappointed him. ‘You’re good at singing jazz,’ he said. But I didn’t want to sing in an American bar—I believed I’d soon be back on the stage here, because in two years the Russkies would go home.

  “And I waited ten times longer than I thought I would.

  “I stayed here. Havel stayed, lots of people did.

  “I demanded a divorce.

  “The divorce dragged on for ages, I got the feeling I wasn’t meant to exist.

  “By then, I even felt scared waiting for the tram. I felt as if the driver was going to get out and say: ‘Miss Kubišová, you may not get on board. This tram is not for you!’

  “Once I was sitting alone at home, and I thought: ‘I’ll turn on the gas.’

  “ ‘After all, I can’t have a child.’

  “ ‘I can’t sing.’

  “ ‘I can’t even get divorced normally!’

  “ ‘I am a big mistake.’

  “And, at that point, a kind of strength kicked in. It came from the animals. I looked at my dogs. ‘My God,’ I thought. ‘What about them?’ And I came to my senses.

  “When Hrabal used to travel about Prague on the #17 tram, he drew strength from animals, too. I read that it was from swans. Because the seventeen goes along the Vltava.”

  She found a soothing job. She had a hot iron, a special knife, and a roll of PVC. She cut out a pattern and produced figurines. She assembled little bears out of plastic. There were left and right arms in separate heaps. The legs were all in one pile, because there was no difference between right and left. She had to press them firmly into the bears’ bodies, which made her fingers ache badly. “For six years, I either cut or pressed. And the doll-making cooperative that was willing to give me a job was called ‘Direction.’ ”

  She worked alone at home, glancing at a small television set. The work was not humiliating.

  Jan Procházka’s daughter Lenka spent twelve years cleaning a theater. She was forced to give up studying journalism in the radio department. The actors whom Lenka knew from her diction workshops would avoid her in embarrassment when they saw her there with her floor cloth and bucket. And Lenka says she’s grateful to them for that. But for Marta, sitting at the kitchen table, nobody had to change their route.

  During the normalization, Cardinal Miloslav Vlk spent eight years washing store windows.

  The philosopher Jiří Němec was a night watchman for five years.

  The writer Karel Pecka worked for six years in the city sewers.

  The critic Milan Jungmann spent ten years cleaning windows.

  Radio journalist Jiří Dienstbier was a stoker at a boiler house for three years.

  Journalist Karel Lánský laid tiles for twenty years.

  Historian Jaroslav Valenta, a member of the Academy of Sciences, became a proofreader at a printing house.

  For the public statement he made opposing the Soviet occupation, legendary Olympic athlete Emil Zátopek, the track and field star of the late 1940s and early 1950s, was forced to work in a uranium mine.

  Journalist Eda Kriseová found herself on a list of authors who couldn’t publish, but thanks to friends in high places she became a librarian. She worked alone, so that nobody would be obliged to talk to her. So, in the afternoons, she used to go and talk to the patients at a mental hospital. “There were two nurses caring for seventy patients and they couldn’t cope. Nobody ever talked to those people, so I thought: ‘They’re more desperate than I am, I’ll help them.’ But it was they who helped me. They opened up the world of storytelling for me. Thanks to those patients, I went on to write two collections of novellas. I realized that, in Czechoslovakia, a hospital for the mentally ill was the only normal place, because there everyone could say what they really thought with impunity.”

  Just like Eda, Marta has no regrets.

  What about regret for all the opportunities that will never come again?

  What she was forced to do was no loss. “A person grows wiser,” says Marta. “Not because he’s washing windows, but because he’s living a life he would never have touched if he were only an artist.”

  “I’ve got a child,” she adds, “and if I had stuck with singing, I probably never would have had her.”

  She got married again. To another director, also called Jan. She looked after herself properly. She was careful to avoid stress. She gave birth to a daughter, Katarína. Her husband was happy, and started calling the baby girl Kačenka. “It was Easter Saturday, and our daughter was eighteen months old,” says Marta, “when my husband called home to say he wouldn’t be back for the night. ‘Kačenka has a new little sister,’ he said. And so for the past twenty-two years I’ve been happily divorced.”

  Maybe Marta is right. Maybe any other female singer of the time might have sung the “Prayer.”

  However, ten years after the “Prayer,” she and the singer Jaroslav Hutka were the only ones who weren’t afraid to write a letter to Johnny Cash.

  He was due to appear at the Lucerna on the day when the trial of Ivan Jirous was taking place. Known as Magor (meaning “Loony”), the wrongfully arrested Jirous was the inspi
ration behind the band Plastic People of the Universe. This was the most oppressed, the most outrageous, the most legendary and the most indomitable rock group in the history of Central Europe. What Kubišová and Hutka wanted was for Cash to tell the West about it.

  • • •

  She was also the only one of the popular stars to sign Charter ’77.

  The Charter was born on the initiative of Václav Havel, following the trial of the Plastic People musicians.

  Legend had it that they performed sexual acts on stage. In fact, they played psychedelic rock. At one of their concerts, they hung up dozens of smoked herrings on strings, dripping oil onto the audience.

  In the neo-Stalinist era, lyrics such as: “Sunday morning, what a gas, I really had to scratch my ass” took on special significance.

  Nobody had ever treated the audience the way they did.

  The hit of the independent music scene was the one-verse “Zácpa” (“Constipation”).

  The band was formed in Prague in October 1968, two months after the invasion. “Nobody’s ever got anywhere …” they sang, and with every performance they infuriated the authorities more and more. They were accused of a lack of respect for the working people, and a series of repressive measures were taken against them.

  Special units were even sent to destroy the buildings where they had performed. In Rudolfov near České Budějovice, where they gave a concert in 1974, a motorized militia unit herded a hundred spectators ahead of it like cattle, as the militiamen drove vehicles straight at them. The band and their fans were constantly being charged with hooliganism. A lawyer explained to them that, according to law, hooliganism could only happen in a public place, so, in the 1970s, fans of the Plastics (as they are generally known) began buying up private houses. These were old, ruined country cottages and barns where they could perform. They recorded their best-known album in the barn at Václav Havel’s place in the country.

  A house not far from Česká Lípa was burned down by the Security Service three weeks after the Plastics had performed there. For two years, the authorities did their best to take official possession of a house in Rychnov, which apart from being a site for concerts, was where the Princ family lived. As soon as they had succeeded, a special unit immediately invaded the farm. “We were still carrying out our belongings,” said Mrs. Princová, “and they were drilling holes in the walls for explosive charges. We hadn’t even had time to get around the corner before the house was blown sky-high.”

  However, in their attitude towards the regime, the Plastics instantly became the antithesis of Švejk.

  In the underground press, Magor announced that those who produced the official culture were criminals: “To play Bach for tourists from West Germany and not protest against the fact that the Plastics are not allowed to play ‘Constipation’ is a crime. To stage Shakespeare when there is no right to stage Havel is a crime.”

  They were tried as parasites.

  They defended their right to sing whatever they pleased.

  The prosecutor recommended not cutting their hair or letting them shave, and then showing them on television in this unkempt state—as public enemies. On the second day of the trial, Václav Havel left the courtroom feeling upset, and unable to think about anything else. In Malá Strana, he ran into a well-known Czech director, who asked where he was coming from. “From the trial of the underground,” he replied. The director asked if it involved drugs. Havel did his best to explain the essence of the case to him. The director nodded, and said: “So what else is new?” “Perhaps I’m being unfair to him,” wrote Havel years later, as president, “but at the time I was violently overcome by the feeling that people like that belong to a world I wanted nothing more to do with.”

  However, he was later to say: “There were various circles where people immediately understood that the threat to the Plastics’ liberty meant that everybody’s liberty was under threat.”

  The audience of bold intellectuals who started attending the Plastics’ trials heralded Charter ’77. Rejected by the system, deprived of the opportunity for intellectual development, or even access to libraries, the intellectuals created an opposition. First, in December 1976 and January 1977, the Charter was signed by 242 people, and eventually, over the next few years, by almost 2,000.

  The Charter was a manifesto. It came to the defense of people whom the communists had deprived of their jobs, forcing them to work in professions that were humiliating for them.

  It was proof of the power of the powerless.

  The people who wrote the text called things by their proper names. “The victims of apartheid” was their term for the thousands of people who were refused jobs in their own professions. “Hundreds of thousands of citizens are denied freedom from fear, because they are forced to live with the constant threat that, if they express their own views, they will lose their job opportunities.”

  For all those years, every few days they sent letters, protests and petitions to the authorities within the country and abroad. In 1978, they formed the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted.

  The first spokespeople for Charter ’77, who represented it to the outside world and guaranteed the truthfulness of the words published as the Charter’s texts, were the philosopher Jan Patočka, Václav Havel and Professor Jiří Hájek, Minister of Foreign Affairs during the Prague Spring.

  Marta, too, was a spokesperson for Charter ’77, and Havel became Kačenka’s godfather.

  She knew her child was what mattered most. She had to guarantee her daughter a normal life. At the beginning of the 1980s, she returned to Prague from the countryside. “Quite without expecting to, I found a good job,” she says. She worked as a report writer at the Prague Urban Development Department. For ten years. Her mother sold a few family heirlooms and her brother sent sums of money from Canada, where he had moved in 1968.

  There were usually two cars parked outside the house with people sitting in them. It was easy to tell where the best known opposition activists lived, because each of their homes was watched by two cars. In Prague, there was a story about a Professor Hájek, who used to go running in the park each morning among the trees, where no car could make its way. Until the Security Service banned the professor from taking physical exercise in the open air.

  She always took a toothbrush and toothpaste with her when she went out, in case she had to spend the night at the police station. “They often detained me at around two in the afternoon. Because at three, Kačenka came out of classes and they closed the school. ‘Oh! your daughter is just finishing her lessons,’ the smug Security Service agent would say. Sometimes they deliberately kept me there until six, and the poor teacher would spend three hours walking around the school with my child.”

  Marta’s eyes are shining.

  “Jesus!” she says. “I was always the last mother there. I was half crazy by then. Whenever I couldn’t bear it, I’d say to Havel: ‘You tell them! Tell them I haven’t signed any petitions for ages. And that I want to be left in peace.’ ”

  She drags on her eighteenth cigarette of the day.

  “Do you know my song ‘Life Is Like a Man’?”

  For thirty years, Vondráčková and Neckář have been dogged by the accusation that they kept performing while their friend was “an artist in liquidation.”

  According to Helena: “People were outraged that we were working. It takes a bit of imagination: I was eighteen years old, Vašek was twenty-three, and Marta was twenty-seven with a husband. At the age of eighteen, I couldn’t just sit down on the sidewalk and beg. I was so set on being a singer!”

  According to Václav: “They say Helena and I did nothing for her cause. It’s not true. We went to all the official places we could. We even got into President Svoboda’s chancellery. His daughter worked there (she was married to the Minister of Culture), and she said that nothing could be done because the cards had been dealt and that was that.”

  Helena, again: “Should we, throughout th
e communist era and beyond, have pulled out that sheet of paper and shown it to the audience before every single one of our performances, saying: ‘Here is our right to live our lives!’?”

  “A sheet of paper?”

  “A letter,” says Neckář. “Marta wrote us a letter. She was trying to make our lives easier. In black and white.”

  My Dear Kids, Helenka and Vašek!

  Forgive me for writing things that I’d rather be saying to you, but it’s better this way, because one day someone might accuse you of not having stood by me. You have behaved fantastically towards me—few people would have shown that side of themselves. Go perform on your own without me. I’m going to be appearing in court, giving explanations, and it’ll be impossible for me to perform as if nothing had happened. If you can still work, go ahead and work. Dear Kids, perhaps one day we’ll be able to do it all again, but for now we must put off the dream of the ‘Invincible Three’ for later.

  Yours, Marta.

  Prague, March 25, 1970.

  • • •

  To weaken the force of Charter ’77, the authorities organized a counter-campaign, known thereafter as the Anti-charter. This document condemned the dissidents, and was designed to scare ordinary people away from wanting any sort of contact with “the enemies of socialism.”

  Intellectuals, performers and writers from all over the country were summoned to the National Theater in Prague. Each day for a week, Rudé právo announced the names of hundreds of people who had signed the declaration of loyalty. Male and female singers were called to the Music Theater on the Friday, so that everybody could read about them on Saturday, February 5, 1977, in the edition with the biggest circulation. The name of a leading translator or architect didn’t have the same force as the name of a popular singer.