Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  At the end of his request to join the Party, E.K. adds that he is not from a bourgeois family, his father was a servant, and then a clerk, and his grandfather was a tailor.

  Except that just after his burst of passion for communism, E.K. flees the socialist country.

  The communists aren’t hiding the fact that they will crack down on whomever necessary. The Security Service immediately puts the ministers who have resigned under surveillance. The former Minister of Justice (a democrat called Prokop Drtina) tries to kill himself. The Minister of Foreign Affairs (Jan Masaryk, son of the former president) is found on the flagstones under his window with a broken skull. Some people think he jumped because he disagreed with the new system. Others believe it was the new system that had him thrown out of that third-floor window.*

  Nobody can leave the country anymore.

  When a certain comedian performs for the soldiers guarding the border, he and his family manage to escape to West Germany during the interval. At that particular moment there’s nobody on guard, because they’re all waiting for the second half of the show to begin. The leader of the national socialist youth movement escapes by sliding between the ceiling and roof of the restaurant car of a train going from Prague to Paris. The leader of the social democrats and his wife put on skiing outfits and get across to Austria by pretending to be skiers. The former ambassador to Bulgaria escapes by hiding in a large chest for books, which the Mexican ambassador claims as his personal luggage.

  E.K. has still had no reply from the CPC. Someone at the bank tells him he might be arrested for the letter to Veverka, because it was critical of the Czechoslovak people. So, at all the kiosks in Liberec and Prague, he starts to buy up the ignition stones that are in cigarette lighters. He knows they can be used as a currency in Germany. He hides the stones with a friend who is a customs officer, whom he urges to flee the country as well. E.K. confides in him that if he doesn’t escape, he’ll commit suicide. He weeps.

  They escape on the day E.K. comes home from the bank and sees a militia car outside his house.

  In Berlin, he tells his interrogators that his country is in the grip of the red terror, and that no honest person can possibly live in that communist hell.

  Except that two months later he goes back.

  In the press, he publishes a cautionary novel in installments. He signs it with the pseudonym František Navrátil, which in Czech means “he came back.”

  The story can be summarized as follows. One night, Navrátil and a friend swim across the Nysa River near Hrádek, on the German border, aiming to get away to London. They wade through swamps and spend hours lying in a field. Navrátil falls ill with a temperature of 39 degrees C [102°F], but nobody will give him a sip of water until he shows his documents. “Maybe because I have nothing to pay with. People in the West have to be bought.”

  For those who read it, it should immediately be clear why Navrátil came back. There is no refugee camp in Germany which our heroes have not visited. Nowhere do they find help or a crust of bread. “We only help people who are useful to us,” they hear. “When you talk to them about ideals,” he confides in his readers, “they start to smile pitifully. They have no ideals—instead of using their brains to think, they use the contents of their pockets.”

  Fainting with hunger, they reach Hamburg on foot. In the suburbs, they look into a window and see a married couple quarrelling. “How can they be quarrelling when they have their own table, their own floor, their own ceiling, and their own language? What fools people are.”

  The authorities are so pleased by this account, which appears in the weekly Květen, that Navrátil also broadcasts it as radio talks. Then he describes his escape in a novel entitled The Runaway, which is publicized by the authorities.

  “I think he had to write it,” says his daughter nowadays. “He came back to us, because Mom couldn’t manage, but he was extremely scared of being punished. That book was his way of buying himself out of the ordeal that might have befallen him.”

  Except that the regime announces an amnesty for runaways, who are no longer under any threat (something his daughter can’t have known about, as she was a little girl at the time). E.K. takes advantage of this.

  Even children run away from Czechoslovakia. For example, in the month after the Victorious February, the secret police in Budějovice alone catch eight boys on the border. The European press publicizes these escapes, and the authorities have to make a grand gesture. Thus, E.K.’s future ordeal is cancelled.

  Except that, despite the amnesty, E.K. wants to show extra gratitude for being treated so leniently. He offers to cooperate with the Security Service.

  But before this happens, he tells a friend about his escape, and the friend informs the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which summons the writer to meet with Major Bedřich Pokorný in Prague. The Voice of America describes the Major as “the republic’s red executioner,” and the executioner himself describes his own investigative methods as “pins and screwdrivers.” The Major is acquainted with the great lyric poet Halas and is capable of lecturing on French painting and its influence on Czech art.

  Pokorný calls ten journalists in to the Ministry, who are to listen to E.K. They are impressed by his story.

  “At that point I realized my political mistake,” as K.F. will later confess. “Solely because the people’s organs and Major Pokorný treated me very decently after my return.”

  It is Pokorný, deputy head of the Department for Special Operations, who suggests that he write (as Navrátil) about his escape and his return.

  He also suggests that he write a separate book about him, the Security Service major, and the screenplay for a movie. The Major already has a title for it: I Came to Shoot.

  E.K. sees him as his protector. “In the evenings,” he will later say, “he often sent a car for me, and we would discuss Marxism, a topic in which the Major was an excellent teacher for me.”

  (Not long after this, the Security Service will arrest its own major. For using Gestapo methods during interrogations and for tolerating former Gestapo collaborators among the secret police officers. The penalty: sixteen years in jail.)

  In the meantime, Pokorný allows E.K. and his family to move to Prague and gets him a job at Květen. That is where E.K.—now as K.F.—writes about the Five-Year Plan.

  At this point, despite already having committed to writing the book about Pokorný, he spontaneously suggests that he can also recruit informers working for several other journals.

  Except that he immediately tells everybody in his circle that he is an agent and is trying to form a network.

  (When he is later arrested for this—betrayal of a state secret—he will insist on a single explanation: “I said it because I wanted to feel that I was a better person than those to whom I was saying it.”)

  Except that there is one thing he never talks about at all: a month after returning from Germany, he informs on a woman, whose life he destroys in the process.

  She is Žofia V., a rich widow, owner of a tenement house on the Vltava River next to the National Theater, where she used to receive senior SS officers. As there are rumors going around about K.F., implying that he is a Western agent, the woman seeks him out and asks him to help her escape. She would like to get as far away from Czechoslovakia as possible in a month’s time. She thinks that she’ll be smarter than Ida L.—recently featured in the press—who was arrested with well over six pounds of twenty-dollar gold coins glued to her chest with sticking plasters.

  K.F. promises to help her, and goes to reveal all to the Major.

  Pokorný virtually jumps for joy at the fact that his good deed towards K.F. has paid off; this is a big case that will earn him praise, and next morning they’ll be locking up Žofia V.

  Except that in the evening K.F. goes to warn her.

  They meet in a café. “I had pangs of conscience,” he will later admit, “and I advised her to get away immediately, not in a month’s time. She said she hadn�
�t amassed enough jewelry yet, and left. As if she hadn’t absorbed the fact that next day they were going to imprison her.”

  She is arrested at dawn. A week later in jail, she swallows poison and dies.

  Eduard Kirchberger was born in Prague in 1912.

  At the same time and in the same place, the world’s first Cubist sculpture of a human head was created.†

  These two facts have no connection.

  Nonetheless, E.K./K.F. is a Cubist personality. If, in a Cubist picture, the planes are fragmented by countless sharp edges, then, in his life, the successive “except thats” are the sharp edges.

  Everything that for the moment seems certain instantly changes direction. His personality—like an object or a figure in Cubism—is in a state of repeated fragmentation.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have been, if not for fear.

  PART 3: PLAYBACK

  Fear is highly relevant.

  Early in 1951, some Prague intellectuals, who are enemies of the system and have been removed from their professions as a punishment, are building a railroad bridge across the Vltava, which to this day is known as the Bridge of the Intelligentsia.

  The CPC now starts to lock up Party comrades, even before they have committed any misdemeanors. Major Pokorný says that it’s not only dead traitors who are suspicious. “If someone is alive, he’s always a suspect, because foreign agents can contact him,” he explains to his subordinates.

  They put the writer Lenka Reinerová in solitary confinement for fifteen months, not even letting her out into the prison yard; whenever she asks what she has been arrested for, she invariably hears: “You know better than anyone.” Finally, they release her without a trial, and drive her to a park on the edge of town. When she gets home, she discovers that her husband and daughter have been evicted, but nobody knows where they’ve gone, and somebody else is living in her apartment. She finds them living in a shack sixty miles from Prague. (Several years later, when she wants a certificate to prove that she was arrested, it will turn out that no case like hers ever existed. “Maybe you just imagined it all, comrade,” the Ministry of Internal Affairs will tell her.)

  The Party takes vengeance on its own members.

  The country is gripped by the trial of eleven senior officers, called the Slánský group, who are accused of forming a conspiracy. The wife of one of the defendants sends an open letter to the CPC, in which she asks the court to punish her husband just as he deserves. In a letter to a newspaper, the son of another defendant firmly demands the death sentence for his father. And one of the accused asks for the court to hang him as soon as possible, for “the only good deed I can still perform is to provide a warning for others.”

  Only a short time ago, agent 62C/A saw K.F. like this: “He is honorable and patriotic. His weak side, however, is uncritical gratitude.”

  K.F. suddenly stops being a journalist for Květen and is not entitled to write about the Five-Year Plan.

  He is thrown out.

  The CPC Central Committee’s Press Department realizes there’s something not quite right about him. He muddles up the terms úderník (“shock worker”), předák (“foreman”) and stachanovec (“Stakhanovite”), using these concepts as it suits him. He is slavishly loyal to an optimistic vision of the Plan. He miscalculates the percentages by which factories exceed the Plan. Sometimes he overstates them.

  In his final report for Květen, he takes the liberty of writing: “Shunter Jaroslav Šmíd increased productivity by 33 percent. We could report figure after figure like this, except that figures are lifeless. The things that are alive are people and labor. Whatever we write today, especially figures, may be different tomorrow.”

  Both he and the editor in chief (the man who was so thrilled by “The Five-Year Plan Versus the Centuries”) are both fired towards the end of 1949, and a series of unpleasant interrogations lies ahead of them.

  What were they thinking?

  Why are figures “lifeless”?

  Why aren’t they “just as important as people and labor”?

  On whose instruction could such a sentence have appeared?

  Why exactly is this shunter’s productivity being disparaged?

  Is the point of it to ridicule the worker Šmíd?

  Or maybe to make fun of the entire working class?

  Now it is K.F. who is to become a laborer. He will work at an automobile factory. Later, at a factory making decorative products, he is promoted to manager of the textiles department. (“Nevertheless,” he will say years later, “I went on writing books with socialist content for my own pleasure.”)

  He is arrested just as the Slánsky affair is erupting. In the spring of 1952, he is sentenced to six years for betrayal of the state, in other words for broadcasting the fact that he has been cooperating with the Security Service. He comes out after two years, because some sentences are revised after Stalin’s death. He becomes a worker again, and until the early 1960s, he casts metal at the Stalingrad II Foundry.

  His talent refuses to leave him in peace.

  He writes about a dozen popular novels, including The Riddle of the Five Cottages—about a group of boys who accidentally discover a nest of spies; Canine Commando—about a prisoner in a Nazi camp who looks after dogs that are trained to kill, and whose life is saved by his favorite dog when he escapes from the camp; and The Flying Horse—about the war in South Korea.

  He comes back into favor and becomes a television screenwriter.

  He still laughs without opening his mouth.

  He still isn’t a member of the CPC.

  Not in the least discouraged, for adults he writes fine things about the Security Service.

  For children, he publishes fantasy stories in the weeklies.

  He never says a bad word about anybody—that’s how he is remembered. He is nice to everyone. He has rosy cheeks, a red nose and ears that stick out. He takes his daughters to the bar. He knows how to find his place in society. “Compare her with any cathedral you like, and a woman is always young,” he declares to the delighted company. As he is approaching seventy, his friends ask: “Karel, why don’t the characters in your books ever screw?” He replies: “I never get to do it, so I’m not going to let them either.”

  “Don’t send my fee to my home address,” he asks at the editorial offices, “or Madame will see it.” (Everyone calls his wife Madame.) This way he loses out, because getting paid might have been the one occasion when she’d cuddle up to him.

  His daughters think he’s longing for love.

  A close friend thinks that he has never stopped being an only child, who wants to please everyone all the time, without ever losing either his mom’s or his dad’s affection.

  His professional colleagues think he avoids altercations and arguments. They also notice that at official ceremonies he both does and doesn’t sing the “Internationale.” Everyone else sings out loud, but he just moves his lips.

  As one of his colleagues says: “With Karel, it’s always the playback.”

  But on one matter, he is principled.

  He will not tolerate lies from his daughters.

  For telling lies, he’s capable of slapping them across the face. “If you admit it,” he says, “I’ll let you off!”

  Once she is an adult and has managed to get away, the daughter in Germany writes him a letter: “The problem we had in common, Dad, was that you demanded almost boundless obedience from me, but you never explained to me why exactly I had to be obedient.”

  He succeeds in joining the Party in August 1968, twenty years after the first attempt. “It was the time when only decent people joined,” stresses the daughter from Prague.

  The only decent moment in the history of the CPC had just gone by—the Prague Spring.

  Despite being a sort of miracle, it kills Major Pokorný.

  The former security agent has been at liberty for years. He can’t accept a state of affairs where open debate, allowing for a contrary opinion, is no longer treated a
s an affront against the state. He writes a farewell letter: “A communist from the Victorious February of 1948 cannot survive such a terrible defeat for the CPC. This defeat has deprived me of spiritual and physical equilibrium,” and places the noose around his neck.

  The illusion that the communists themselves are capable of democratizing the regime only lasts for a few months—until the Soviet Army tanks and those of four of its allies roll in. While under the leadership of First Secretary Dubček, the Party continues to be morally opposed to its Soviet brothers. And a week after the invasion, K.F. declares in the newspaper Svoboda (meaning “Freedom,” and still free for the moment) that he is joining the CPC: “These days, it is a very simple matter, no great words are needed,” he starts his letter. “If only because yesterday,” he adds, “before my very eyes, our brothers killed a fourteen-year-old boy. And also because the situation is violent, and no one joining the CPC can expect any advantage. He’s more likely to get a bullet. I think it’s a form of betrayal to stand aside during the fighting. Karel Fabián, writer.”

  The newspapers print other letters from people who, in protest against the invasion, have also decided to support the Czechoslovak communists against the Soviet ones by joining the Party.

  Except that some of them immediately resign from it.

  The terror committed by the Security Service and the normalization as instituted by Husák deprive them of any illusions.

  Once Czechoslovakia is back in the Stalin era, K.F., not in the least bit alienated, goes on writing fine phrases about the Security Service in the weekly Květy (“Flowers”).

  As part of their ruthless destruction of the founders of Charter ’77, the authorities supply the editors of Květy with intimate photos of Ludvík Vaculík, one of the Charter leaders, for publication. Removed from a secret drawer in his desk by security agents, they show him naked, with his lover, in the outhouse at his allotment. His wife finds out about the pictures and the lover from the newspaper. “We wonder why the Western journalists lap up every word that falls from his lips,” says the editorial commentary.