Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  K.F. provides Květy with a story about a boy who encourages a young salesgirl to steal money from the store, and then leave for the West. He smothers her with a pillow before they manage to go abroad. The Security Service has no trouble finding the murderer in only a week. The city breathes a sigh of relief.

  The author takes the opportunity to write: “ ‘Keep quiet,’ the boy’s adoptive father often told him. And once added: ‘There are people who agree with everything in silence. And now, as an older friend, I’m advising you to do just that.’ ‘The flagpole is what matters,’ he went on. ‘After all, a flag of any color at all can fly from it.’ ”

  The secret of why he smiles without ever opening his mouth isn’t widely known in K.F.’s circle.

  And out of tact, nobody ever asks why he does it.

  Always chatty, he never mentions the fact that it was the Gestapo who knocked out all his teeth.

  Nor does he say that, from February 1942 until May 1945, he was a prisoner in the Nazis’ Straubing fortress.

  Or that he underwent ninety-four interrogations, forty-two of which were severe.

  Or that he was subjected to six weeks’ solitary confinement, in total silence. In winter, the temperature in the cell was only 2 degrees C [35° F].

  Or that, on another occasion, he was forced to go two weeks without food.

  Or that, when he was not being punished and was allowed to eat, the daily ration was three ounces of bread and nothing more.

  Or that he was part of the Nazi “extermination through labor” operation.

  Or that whenever there was an air raid, all the prisoners were deliberately herded to the top floor, where they were locked in a single cell in groups of at least thirty. That was when many of them succumbed to insanity.

  Or that whenever a prisoner died, the corpse was left among the living for a long time on purpose.

  Or that he returned to Prague with a leg injury and broken elbow joints.

  He never mentions any of this at all.

  This is strange, because old soldiers generally share their experiences. K.F. has a fine record—during the occupation, he belonged to an underground organization. At the Slavia Insurance Association in Prague, where he worked after dropping out of his legal studies, he distributed the biggest underground journal, V boj (meaning “Into Battle”). It wrote about national traitors and published patriotic poems.

  In just two months, the Gestapo arrested about a hundred distributors. He was tried in Berlin, and imprisoned in Straubing. The sentence: eight months incarceration for making preparations to betray the state.

  “Don’t mention it in public and don’t urge me to talk about it,” he asks a colleague at Květy. “I don’t want to make a heroic act out of it.”

  The colleague says: “Karel was no martyr.”

  Except that:

  “In 1942, when I was arrested by the Gestapo, in the course of excruciating interrogation, I betrayed all thirteen members of an organization to whom I had delivered the journal V boj. They were all imprisoned, and two of them were tortured.

  “Through my betrayal, I brought misfortune to fourteen families, because I also betrayed my first wife and her parents.

  “When I came back from Straubing to my former workplace, I wrote a letter begging for my crime to be forgiven.

  “I received a request from those mentioned above asking me to leave Prague if I didn’t want trouble. They did not wish to encounter me.

  “I decided to withdraw, and left for Liberec, where I was employed in a bank as a secretary. Then I started writing for Stráž severu.”

  He tells this story at one of his interrogations after the war.

  We don’t know if the Security Service used this information against him.

  Towards the end of the 1940s, even the most popular writers are no longer celebrities. Their pictures don’t appear in the press. If this confession is to be believed, enticed by Pokorný’s offer of the opportunity to live and publish in Prague, E.K. returns from Liberec and invents a new name for himself, so that the old one won’t be noticed and cause offence. And most probably, that protects him from being recognized.

  For “Operation Exclusion, Operation Substitution,” this is good timing.

  In 1961, when he returns to favor following his period of enforced labor, his novel The Flying Horse is published. It’s about the war in South Korea. An American officer travels there to see the results of the mass murder in which he took part. He goes to a village where women and children were killed because of him, and he is recognized. Suddenly, he develops a high fever. The locals tell him they have no wish to see him, but as he is sick, they won’t refuse him aid. They will leave food at his door, and then smash every dish he has touched.

  In his delirium, the officer reaches the conclusion that he should write a book in which there will only be one truth: if a man kills, he shouldn’t go on living. All he can do is exist, because he finds the thought that every dish he touches must be smashed unbearable.

  One would have to re-read the vast number of stories which Fabián wrote after the war to find out whether or not he burdens all his negative characters with his own sense of guilt.

  In both phases of his life, he has to write a capital letter K whenever he signs his name.

  According to a graphologist, the first man’s letter K is large, simple and sincere.

  The second man’s K is also large, but it is propped up.

  In various different versions, it has extra feet, flourishes and props. As if it were incapable of holding itself up unaided.

  * * *

  * The debate about whether Jan Masaryk jumped from the window or was pushed out of it is now in its seventh decade. Viktor Fischl, a Czech writer who emigrated to Israel and was the former Israeli ambassador to Poland, was Masaryk’s secretary during the war. A few days before his death in May 2006, he gave an interview to the weekly Reflex in which he went back to this matter. He said that Jan Masaryk was a deeply religious man. “And so is it impossible for him to have jumped out of the window?” asked the journalist. “He can’t have done it,” said Fischl. “I was never in any doubt. But on the other hand, I saw how his Western friends were unable to understand him, they couldn’t see why he joined the communist government. I saw how he was unable to explain it to them, how he suffered as a result, and that torment took him nowhere. At the time I thought to myself, that man is so unhappy he could do anything. Afterwards, however, other things came to light. Dr. Karel Steinbach wrote that Masaryk kept sleeping pills on his bedside table, and Steinbach himself told him: ‘Honza, you can take one or two tablets. If you took a third, you certainly wouldn’t have time for a fourth.’ In 1990, I was a member of the Israeli delegation that made diplomatic contact with Czechoslovakia. Dienstbier was still the minister at the time. He invited us to dinner at the Černín Palace [seat of the Czechoslovak, and now the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs]. I was sitting next to him, when suddenly he asked if I would like to see Masaryk’s apartment. He took me upstairs. I knew that apartment, because I had often been to see Jan. He showed me the bathroom, too. Jan Masaryk was a big guy, he must have weighed over 220 pounds. It was physically impossible for him to get to the window from which he was supposed to have jumped. He would have had to climb up there on a ladder. I tried to imagine that giant climbing up to the window with difficulty, in order to jump out of it, while, beside the bed, he had sleeping pills which he only had to swallow for all his problems to cease to exist, and I said to myself: it’s out of the question.”

  † The sculptor was Otto Gutfreund.

  KAFKÁRNA

  It’s 1985.

  Joy Buchanan arrives in Prague, a student on a scholarship who wants to discover Kafka’s world. She is writing a paper on him. She can speak Czech, so she walks about the Old Town asking one single question: “Have you ever read Kafka?”

  People don’t answer. It is 1985, and right away they want to know if she has written permission.

&n
bsp; “For what?”

  “A document proving you have the right to ask that sort of question.”

  Miss Buchanan (as she will be called at Charles University) starts going round with a Czech female interpreter and a tape-recorder. This is supposed to increase her credibility. No one has read Kafka, but the passers-by often smile enigmatically and say: “Oh yes, kafkárna!” But the interpreter never translates that word.

  Finally, the student asks her: “What does kafkárna mean?”

  “Oh, it’s nonsense,” says the interpreter and stops talking. But Joy Buchanan refuses to leave it at that. “Well, that word simply shouldn’t be used, or rather it can’t be used,” explains the interpreter at last.

  “You have words that can’t be used?”

  “No, we don’t have any forbidden words, of course not. It’s just that that word doesn’t appear anywhere.”

  “But people keep saying it!”

  “Yet if you were to look for it in writing, you wouldn’t find it. And in our country anything that isn’t written doesn’t really exist. And I’ll tell you frankly, that suits everyone fine.”

  A café is a place where coffee is made, thinks the American, a vodárna in Czech is a place where water—voda—is purified, and an octárna is where vinegar—ocet—is made. So there must be a place where something is done with Kafka.

  Joy Buchanan starts asking on her own initiative. Her advisor at the university says the word kafkárna describes something everyone knows about, but which they also know nothing can be done about. And there’s no reason to be surprised. Instead, one should just accept it.

  “But accept what?”

  “It’s something subconscious in people’s minds. If you’re going to live here for a while, you’re sure to get your head round it and suddenly you’ll say: ‘Aha, kafkárna!’ ”

  The people on the Old Town Square give various answers. “It’s a joke, and if you didn’t take it as a joke you really wouldn’t understand it.” Or: “It’s something very silly, but that has to be.” “You must be confusing it with švejkárna, but that’s bad too, because there’s no such word. But there is švejkovina, which means behaving like Švejk. But that’s completely different from kafkárna.”

  She notices that people in Czechoslovakia often compare something specific with something that they say doesn’t exist at all, or that they don’t know anything about it.

  An office worker gives her an example: “Imagine you’re a man, you go into a store and ask if they’ve got any fleecy socks. The sales assistant replies: ‘Ladies’, yes—but we haven’t got any for children.’ That logic makes no sense, Miss, but it works.”

  “Where’s the logic in that?”

  “Because it assumes he knows, or ought to know, that men’s socks haven’t been on sale for the past six months, so there probably aren’t any. So what socks can he be asking about? Obviously just ladies’ or children’s.”

  The student has over a hundred answers, but no proper definition.

  The Charles University employees who come into contact with her are cagey. When, at a reception given in her honor, more and more people find out who she wants to write about, they all drop her like a hot potato.

  However, the wives of her academic colleagues are braver than their husbands. The wife of the head of the institute for Czech literature admits to Buchanan that her husband is thinking of reading a little of that Kafka, but for the time being he can’t. He started, but he can’t get to the end. “Just imagine, he tried reading about the man who turned into an insect. But that’s so unnatural, so dreadful. It’s more like something from your American literature—you’ve got science fiction over there, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “But in the Czech literary tradition, that sort of aberration is not at all usual.”

  The wife of another employee, the archivist at the institute, wants to set up the American student with her son, who hasn’t a clue about Kafka. The mother decides to read The Trial and summarize it for him, so he can impress his future fiancée with it. She soon gives in to despair. She keeps going back to the beginning of the book, because she thinks she’s missed the bit saying what Josef K. has been accused of. Then she thinks she’ll find out at the end, but still there’s nothing. Then she’s convinced the writer must have coded the explanation into the subtext, but she still can’t find it.

  All this makes her erupt: “Son, it’s a total fraud! There are no clues! This book is supposed to be a horror story, but after this many pages anyone reading a horror story should know what they’re supposed to be scared of!”

  Two months later, two plainclothes police officers turn up at the student’s room. The Security Service wants to know if the passers-by who replied to her survey hadn’t by any chance been deprived of their own will. And whether they had answered her questions in that state.

  One of the professors advises the American that it would be better not to use the name Kafka in her paper on Kafka. He tries to convince her that in Czechoslovakia people are extremely good at skirting boggy ground. “People have been talking about the first Czechoslovak republic for years and years, and sometimes they say the president of the time did this or that. Everyone knows who they’re talking about, but no one ever says the name Masaryk, not for love or money. And that’s perfectly all right.” So she’d better say “the writer.”

  It’s 1992.

  The story of Joy Buchanan wasn’t written by me, but was made up by an associate professor of American literature at Charles University, Radoslav Nenadál. The son of an army officer, born in 1929, nowadays he is one of the leading translators from English. He wrote his novel In the Footsteps of K. in 1987, during the socialist era, and submitted it to a publisher. By some miracle, the employees at his institute knew what was in it before it was published. None of them spoke to him for over six months.

  These experts on literature were all deeply offended by its content. They realized that the story was made up, and yet, as one of them commented, it was a truthful fabrication.

  The publisher didn’t dare publish it. It only came out in 1992, once socialism had collapsed, and the author had already retired. It was published by the Franz Kafka Publishing House, but they were unable to sell it. “Maybe people weren’t ready for this sort of mockery?” the author wonders. So there are piles of his novel lying in the bargain bookstores. These days, the price per copy is the same as for a tram ticket.

  “If you’d like to translate it into Polish,” he says, “or at least summarize it in one of your journals, maybe it would leave more of a mark.”

  “By all means.”

  THE MOVIE HAS TO BE MADE

  47

  The SS Marine Tiger is sailing from Southampton to New York. Jarka (short for Jaroslava) Moserová from Prague is sitting beside Šárka Šrámková from Prachatice in a thirty-person cabin. She is describing how astonishing she finds her own family.

  Jarka’s grandmother addresses both her granddaughters in the informal second person, as “you,” but addresses her own son and daughter in the third person, a form which is becoming old-fashioned. Jarka’s grandfather calls his children “you,” but his son calls him “sir.” The son addresses his own sister in the third person, but talks to his mother informally as “you.” “Would my daughter come here …” “Has my son served himself some cake yet?” says Jarka, imitating her grandmother. “And no one knows where all this confusion comes from,” she tells Šárka.

  03

  Zdeněk Adamec wakes up early and sees that there aren’t any cheese sandwiches on his table yet. But Mom has already put out clean shorts for him (she ironed them last night), socks (ironed), and a thermos full of tea (sweetened). She has just run out to the store.

  47

  “And now I’ll show you our pictures,” says Jarka Moserová, fetching out the family photographs from her case to show Šárka.

  In every single one, there is a middle-aged woman trying to escape. She is either t
urning her head away, or trying to shield it with a hand, or moving her entire buxom body out of the picture.

  “That’s Hilde, my favorite maid,” says Jarka. “Whenever someone filmed her or took her picture, she ran off. We’ve got lots of movies with Hilde running away. She doesn’t work for us anymore, because my sister and I grew up, and besides, she was a Sudeten German.”

  03

  Zdeněk Adamec has P.E. today. Awkward.

  Overweight. Sniggers. Sneering.

  47

  They sail into New York. Before the war, the Moser family subscribed to National Geographic, and Jarka sees that the American grass is exactly the same as in the pictures. So it wasn’t lies—the grass really is darker than in Prague, it really does verge on blue.

  From New York, they immediately take the train to Swannanoa in North Carolina. They are scholarship students sponsored by the American Field Service. The organization invites young people from countries which are under fascist occupation to visit schools. It is 1947, and the organization wants young Americans to hear from their contemporaries what it is like to live under threat.

  The two girls enter the dining hall at the art school in gray woolen suits. The American girls are wearing long, loose shirts and denim dungarees. Jarka has never seen denim jeans before, or forks held unashamedly in the right hand.

  03

  The Adamec family’s apartment is on the ground floor of a shabby block built in the 1970s. Last year, in June, Zdeněk planted five sunflowers under the window.