Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  “You’ve seen the smallest giant ever born,” one of the associate professors explains to her.

  Professor Burian is small, but he has a great big idea: the Atlas of Plastic Surgery. He wants it to have 850 illustrations, and in addition the drawings are to show real patients, which has apparently never happened before in the field of illustrated reference books. The professor will not allow any anonymous faces to be included. He provides old photographs and descriptions of operations, and Jaroslava Moserová, junior surgeon and member of the artists’ union, spends four years illustrating the atlas.

  The professor wears a hearing aid. Whenever he finds Jaroslava boring, he switches it off and starts to whistle. He is constantly dissatisfied. He makes her re-draw each illustration several times. After a while, before each meeting begins he asks her: “Are we going to have coffee first, or quarrel?”

  She always prefers to quarrel first.

  The housekeeper serves them the coffee. Professor Burian lives with his daughter, his son-in-law and the home help. The housekeeper leaves when, for unknown reasons, the professor’s son-in-law is arrested. The professor probably understands her; even in a dentist’s waiting room, friends won’t sit next to the family of someone who’s been arrested. People are entitled to be afraid. Now the professor’s daughter brings in the coffee.

  Professor Burian won’t live to see the atlas published; he’ll die only two days after writing the introduction.

  03

  There are computer printouts lying on Zdeněk Adamec’s desk. They are about Torch Number One.

  Last year, Zdeněk started reading about an unusual student. He was known as Torch Number One. If, in August 1969, an exceptionally nasty era hadn’t begun, if the Soviets and four other armies hadn’t invaded the country, and if they hadn’t become more and more tyrannical, Torch Number One wouldn’t have had to resort to extreme measures.

  Because, first of all, people gave in, and then they sold out. They were no longer allowed to say things that during the Spring were said freely. Torch Number One was a student in the philosophy faculty. He wanted to wake them up.

  Zdeněk found the statement of a female student from Prague who later became a world-famous director, saying that the choice of those who were to be the top ten for self-immolation was made with great care. The point was for good students to set themselves on fire, young people who didn’t have psychiatric problems, neuroses or broken hearts, so it wouldn’t be possible for the propaganda to disavow the motives for their act. The best of the best were chosen. And then they drew lots.

  Zdeněk read the letter written by Torch Number One before his death: “If our demands—including the lifting of censorship—are not met in the next five days, that is, by January 21, 1969, and if the nation does not additionally support them through a general strike, the next torches will burn.”

  Signed, “Torch Number One.”

  Zdeněk takes these printouts with him.

  65

  At the burns unit, mirrors are not allowed in the patients’ rooms.

  Not all the patients want their nearest and dearest to look at them. They would prefer to talk to them from behind screens.

  Dr. Jaroslava Moserová collects material for her book Skin Loss and Compensating for It. She is interested in burned skin.

  In places where skin has been charred, the patient’s own skin is grafted, for the time being. It is cut out, stretched to a scale of one to three, and applied. Where there is a lack of the patient’s own skin, for a couple of weeks skin from dead bodies is applied, like a natural dressing. But, in a few years’ time, before Jaroslava Moserová finishes her book, a method of supplementing losses using skin from piglets will be developed. Pig skin is the most similar to human skin, closer than that of chimpanzees.

  In the field of skin-loss compensation, Jaroslava Moserová collaborates with some Polish scientists, who award her a gold medal.

  She is also granted a scholarship to go to the University of Texas at Galveston.

  She notices that she suffers from a strange affliction: she has no memory of the patients whom she has helped. She only remembers the ones in whose cases she failed.

  Being ineffective is what she finds most horrifying about herself.

  03

  Mom asks if he took the sandwiches.

  Zdeněk knows that Torch Number One bought a white plastic bucket somewhere in downtown Prague, and then filled it up at a gas station. He’s not going to take a canister with him, because Mom will immediately ask what it’s for. He too will buy himself a container in Prague.

  He has already composed a letter, which begins with the words: “Dear Citizens of the World …” He posted it on a website called www.pochodnia2003.cz.*

  69

  A wave of burn victims injured during clashes with Soviet tanks has already passed through the unit.

  On January 16, Jaroslava Moserová is on call when they bring in a young man. She hears the paramedics saying that this is Torch Number One. His name is Jan Palach. He set himself on fire outside the museum on Wenceslas Square. Almost the entire surface of his body is charred, as are his airways.

  The orderlies, who always call young people by their first names, address him as “sir.”

  The nurses say he is Jan the Second, because he wanted to remind people of Jan Hus.

  Jan Palach’s death throes last for seventy-two hours.

  People bring hundreds of flowers to the hospital for him, and hundreds of letters arrive. The nurses read the letters to him. Jaroslava Moserová reads them too. And in his fever, he opens his eyes and asks in a hoarse, suffering voice: “It wasn’t in vain, was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” they reply.

  “That’s good,” says the patient.

  The secret police are standing outside the hospital.

  Despite the Soviet occupation, the coffin is set out in the hall of Charles University’s Karolinum building, and there are candles in apartment windows. Crowds of people weep as they come to visit the deceased until midnight. All over the country, there are labor strikes, hunger strikes and rallies.

  The funeral is a demonstration, and the grave in Prague’s Olšany cemetery is a site of pilgrimage.

  A few years later, the authorities force Palach’s mother and brother to sign an exhumation agreement; then they remove the remains at night, cremate them, and give the urn to the family.

  They will keep it at home, because the cemetery in Palach’s native town of Všetaty refuses to accept it for a year.

  In 1990, President Václav Havel will ceremonially return the urn from Všetaty to Olšany.

  03

  Zdeněk has a choice: he can travel from Humpolec to Prague by bus or by train. If he went by rail, he would have to change trains and would only get there in the afternoon. In Kolín, he would have to board the express train “Jan Palach.” So he takes a direct bus, leaving at 6:30.

  The road to Prague is a freeway—fifty-six miles down a narrow pass running between trees and meadows. What could have stopped him on this road? The only things visible, apart from the dark brown woods, still without leaves, are gigantic billboards saying: “Now’s the time! Follow your heart. Get the benefit of a facelift.”

  “It’s the right time to make a good investment. The New Phone Book …”

  “Let me get my clothes off—0-800 …”

  Fifty minutes later, Zdeněk is in Prague.

  76

  After patients injured by the invasion, patients injured by the normalization start to appear—the first victims of the process of creating the new, obedient man. Mr. K., for example, one of 750,000 people who after 1970 are forced to change jobs. Mr. K., who went to university and speaks three languages, was employed in foreign trade. The Party decided that he would lay asphalt on the streets. One day, a tank valve couldn’t withstand the pressure and boiling tar came shooting out, straight at Mr. K.

  It melted his entire body apart from his face.

  People who
deal with monstrosities have to find ways to prevent themselves from going mad.

  For example, at first Jaroslava Moserová used to draw different versions of a little girl walking along with a sunflower held high.

  Now she is protected from madness by Dick Francis—the Queen Mother’s top jockey.

  He competed in the Grand National, riding the Queen Mother’s favorite, a horse called Devon Loch. The entire royal family was sure he would win. Suddenly, on the final straight the horse fell. Then it seemed to come to its senses, got up and ran on, but it could no longer win. Afterwards, it was examined—it wasn’t injured or sick. For years, people debated this astonishing incident, although the Queen Mother was typically stoical about it, commenting: “Oh, that’s racing!”

  And the demoted Dick Francis wrote a novel in which it featured.

  Then he started thinking up detective stories. Most of his novels are set at the horse races, and Jaroslava Moserová translates them all into Czech.

  By 2003, she had translated forty-four of his novels, and won a prize for the art of translation, while in the Czech Republic Dick Francis has outsold Agatha Christie herself.

  “What helps you to unwind?” ask the journalists. “Why do you translate these particular books? And why only this author?”

  “Because good always triumphs in them, and evil is punished. Apart from that, he’s reluctant to send anyone to jail,” replies Jaroslava Moserová.

  “If a bad guy does have to be punished, he’s more likely to fall off a cliff or get killed in a crash,” she adds.

  It’s the 1970s, and the word “jail” puts the Czechoslovak journalists on their guard; maybe they’d rather not see it in print, so they’d like her to give them a different reason.

  “Well, all right,” the translator does her best to satisfy them, “I also like the fact that in his books the only person who has to try and think up an alibi is the murderer.”

  03

  Mrs. Adamcová calls Zdeněk on his cell phone. She called earlier, but he didn’t pick up. “Where are you, son?” she asks.

  “Where do you think?” replies Zdeněk, and hangs up.

  77

  To Jaroslava Moserová, Václav Havel is the small boy in short pants, standing next to her and her sister Božena in a photograph. Their families were friends. The girls are about seven and nine years old, and Havel is three.

  Her stepson looks at the photo and asks: “What did you and your sister talk to Mr. Havel about, Mom?”

  “Nothing, Tomáš!” says his stepmother indignantly. “We took no notice of him at all. He was too young for us.”

  03

  Zdeněk Adamec has a full canister now.

  87

  Apparently, Jaroslava Moserová has treated a patient who suffered burns in a gas explosion, affecting not just the flesh under his thick shorts, but his hands too, because he had them in his pockets. He is a young violinist, and before the explosion he studied at the conservatory. A year after the skin graft he has started to practice again, but he can’t stand and hold the bow in his hand for long. After only ten minutes, he loses heart. As his doctor comes from a home where the children had to know the difference between Monet and Manet, and play the piano, she starts practicing with him, playing duets by Corelli.

  To catch up with the qualified violinist, the surgeon in her fifties signs up for piano lessons. When they practice together, the boy can keep going for a whole hour.

  They play like that for three years.

  Then they appear at the Congress of the European Society of Plastic Surgeons, where they perform Janáček.

  Now Jaroslava Moserová has an idea for a screenplay.

  A mother has unintentionally injured her daughter’s cheek. The story begins when the girl is already grown up; she has a scar on her beautiful face, a good job and lots of friends. Everything is fine, except for the mother’s sense of guilt. She plagues her daughter by being morbidly overprotective. Guilt is her life.

  The screenplay idea appeals to Evald Schorm, an icon of the Czechoslovak New Wave in cinema who has been silent for almost twenty years, roughly since the death of Palach. He wants to direct it, but he has no desire to write the script. He says she should write it. When Jaroslava tries to make excuses, Schorm explains how to write it: everything that’s heard, such as a car hooting, goes on the left-hand side of the script, and everything that’s seen, such as a curtain moving, goes on the right.

  The role of the mother will be played by a friend of Jaroslava’s. She is the ex-wife of the nice orphan boy who used to visit the Mosers after the war. He had nobody, and he wanted someone to spread butter on his bread, and even to shout at him now and then, which is understandable—what he needed was a substitute family. The actress friend is called Jana Brejchová, and the name of her former husband with the bread and butter is Miloš Forman.

  The movie is going to happen, but it can’t have the title the screenwriter wants. She’d like it to be called White Lie.

  The word “lie,” like the word “truth,” is banned in art, and during the normalization neither of them can be used. Another iconic director of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Věra Chytilová, has been unable to use the words “I think” in a movie. “I think that …” the actor said quite slowly, but the pre-screening inspection committee ruled that he shouldn’t think so meaningfully, because that could be interpreted in various ways. And at another point, when a man locked himself in the bathroom and shouted, “I’m trapped,” Věra Chytilová had to cut the entire scene out of the movie.

  So Evald Schorm’s latest picture is called Nothing Really Happened.

  03

  Zdeněk Adamec goes up the wide museum steps.

  It’s eight in the morning and it’s cold, at the beginning of March.

  89

  Seriously ill, Evald Schorm dies a month before the premiere of the movie.

  Coincidentally, it is scheduled for January 19, at the movie theater in the Lucerna Palace on Wenceslas Square.

  But that day, no trams or subway trains are running there. It was on January 19 twenty years ago that Jan Palach died, and in the square several thousand demonstrators have just been surrounded by militiamen.

  There is no audience at all for the premiere of Nothing Really Happened.

  In May, Gazeta Wyborcza comes out for the first time in Poland—the country’s first independent newspaper—but in Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel is still in jail. But by November, when the Civic Forum is formed, he is at the head of it. Actors, philosophers, journalists and doctors join … She joins too. “But I have lots of fears—after all, I’m not a politician,” she says.

  “Thank God, Mrs. Moserová, none of us are politicians,” her colleagues reassure her.

  03

  Just like Torch Number One, Zdeněk Adamec soaks himself, from the head down.

  He jumps onto the stone balustrade and fires up a cigarette lighter.

  He leaps.

  Contact with the air in motion causes the fire to engulf his entire body evenly.

  01

  Seventy-one-year-old Jaroslava Moserová writes her memoirs, Stories: People You Never Forget. She sets up www.moserova.cz, as she needs to account for the past twelve years.

  She has been vice president of the Civic Forum, Czechoslovakia’s and then the Czech Republic’s ambassador to Australia and New Zealand, and vice president of the Senate of the Czech Republic.

  She has also been president of the General Conference of UNESCO, which supports education. Jaroslava Moserová believes there are simple ways to help even the poorest parts of the world. If there aren’t enough resources for education, the first thing you need to do is set up a radio station. The radio will be an attraction, and at the same time it can teach people about hygiene and birth control.

  Now Moserová is a senator for the ODA, or Civic Democratic Alliance, representing the Pardubice constituency. The ODA competes with Václav Klaus’s Civic Democratic Party.

  Her part
y doesn’t have huge support. So what if they wanted to reduce annual tax returns to a single sheet of A4? (People liked that.) So what if they wanted to register same-sex partnerships? (Not everybody liked that.) When at the same time they wanted complete exemption from paying rent. (Hardly anybody liked that!)

  Jaroslava Moserová only won because people in Pardubice reckoned she was a decent woman.

  03

  Zdeněk Adamec falls four yards away from the spot where Palach set himself on fire.

  His lips are burned, but he is still trying to say something.

  Later it will be reported that, like Torch Number Two—Jan Zajíc—Zdeněk Adamec drank corrosive acid to stop himself from screaming.

  02

  Now and then, Jaroslava Moserová comes up against a certain issue.

  It concerns the fact that in 1977 she did not sign a document which was very important for any decent person to sign. Especially as the campaign and the document were initiated by the boy in the photograph, the one in short pants, who thirty-six years earlier had been too young for a serious conversation with the Moserová sisters.

  Why didn’t she sign Charter ’77?

  Jaroslava Moserová could give an answer in the style of Bohumil Hrabal: “I have so much trouble dealing with myself, and so much trouble with my own friends and relatives that I haven’t enough time to follow changing political events in any way. I don’t even know what the people who want those changes are talking about, because the only thing I would want to change is myself.”