My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  Real school started after the holidays. I passed a test to get into the high school in Vršovice. A few days after the beginning of the school year I celebrated my fourteenth birthday. For breakfast I got cocoa (my grandmother in Canada had sent it) and then gifts of a box of oil paints, a palette, and nonporous paper, so I could develop my fondness for painting. At the same time my father reminded me that the Germans had deprived me of five years of school. I should be two grades higher, so I’d better do everything I could to catch up, especially in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. I could paint only when I’d finished all my other obligations.

  It was difficult getting used to school. I bought notebooks and managed to borrow some textbooks from a couple of upperclassmen. Some of the books had been printed before the war, and when I paged through them I found entire paragraphs blacked out, which had obviously contained unpleasant facts or ideas during the period of the protectorate. There were, however, no other textbooks to be had.

  Our homeroom teacher liked to talk to us about life and the value and meaning of our future endeavors. The old man was supposed to instruct us in mathematics, but when he turned his attention to his subject he would start mumbling. We couldn’t understand him, so we stopped paying attention. Since we had no idea that mathematics was a precise logical structure in which every breach threatened the entire construction, we neglected mathematics and clamored all the more insistently for him to talk about politics. Certain students would prepare questions that were meant to provoke him: Why didn’t the Americans come to help during the Prague Uprising? What did he think about the nationalization of the film studios? What did he think about the National Front—wasn’t that actually an undemocratic organization? Why did we have the National Police Force instead of police? Perhaps it was due to the feeling of sudden liberation after years of occupation, when he had to watch every word; perhaps it was an attempt to elevate us above our coarse natures, which had been intensified by our wartime experiences of violence; perhaps it was a belief that speaking about essential life questions and providing some life lessons was more important than mathematical equations—our teacher always let himself be provoked into speaking about things that had nothing to do with mathematics.

  Fortunately, my father explained mathematics to me. And even though I excelled in it, I forgot everything later, whereas some of the teacher’s life lessons remain with me today. One of them concerned gambling. Whoever spends money on lotteries or gambling pays only the tax imposed by his own stupidity. Whoever has money to spare should be generous and help the poor, the sick, and those in need.

  *

  Sometime before Christmas we were paid a visit by Vlasta Kratochvílová. This woman, my father told me beforehand, was the bravest person he knew. She had risked her life many times over—to deliver mail to Terezín, to acquire needed medicines, and even to procure weapons.

  I was expecting a heroic-looking woman, but when she arrived I beheld a quite ordinary woman, dressed somewhat provincially and about as old as my mother. She had brought with her some cakes she had baked and a Marbulínek picture book for my brother. To my surprise, she and my father kissed at the door, and then we sat at the table drinking real coffee (sent by my aunt in Canada) and munched on the homemade cakes. Mrs. Kratochvílová reminisced about the various people she had met and sometimes asked what had happened to them, but she always received the same reply: They were no longer alive; they didn’t come back.

  Then she began to confide to Father her concern about what was happening. They were needlessly socializing everything, as if we hadn’t seen the chaos that ensued in Russia. She also didn’t understand why the Communists were behaving as if they alone had won the war. They were butting into everything and distributing false information about the resistance.

  I could see Father didn’t like such talk, and if not for Mrs. Kratochvílová’s past he probably would have begun shouting at her, but instead he tried to explain that communism represented the future of humanity. The war had proved this. It was, after all, the Red Army that finally defeated Germany and chased the Germans out of our country. Only the larger factories, banks, and mines were supposed to be nationalized, and that was proper and just. Why should people be left to the mercies of some coal barons and the like who cared only about increasing their own profits? For them, the worker was merely a means. We needed a society that would ensure that nobody suffered, that people were able to live their lives with dignity. “I know what unemployment is. I worked at the Kolbenka factory and knew a lot of the workers. Most of them were masters of their craft, but they were let go anyway. What happened to them then? They went begging? Vlastička,” he addressed her almost tenderly, “I do not hide the fact that I am a Communist, and I’m proud of it.”

  “But, Doctor,” she said in disbelief, “you can’t be serious. Do you think people are prospering under communism? I talked to their soldiers, and you wouldn’t believe the horrors they spoke of. They’ve got concentration camps there, for heaven’s sake. Nothing good will come from this quarter.”

  Her words astounded me. Was it possible that someone would dare speak like this about our liberating ally? Tension suddenly filled the air, and Father said in a raised voice, “Mrs. Kratochvílová, I would never have expected you to spread Goebbels’s propaganda.” Then he launched into a long lecture about English and French colonialists, who lived off the exploitation of millions of slaves in India, Africa, and China. There they didn’t need to build any camps because the people were so poor they were living in a concentration camp already. The imperialists were not above even extracting work from children, whose wages amounted to a handful of rice.

  Mrs. Kratochvílová said that it had never been like that in those countries, and even if what Father said were true, it did not excuse the atrocities taking place here or in Russia. After a moment she stood up. This time she didn’t kiss Father but merely shook his hand.

  After she left, Father paced about the room repeating almost brokenheartedly: “She used to be such a courageous woman, and now look what’s become of her: a reactionary!”

  *

  At this time, entire gigantic tracts of land in the border regions were suddenly depopulated. I’d heard that interim governors had taken over some of the factories and enterprises, and entire divisions of the Revolutionary Guard carrying rifles and machine guns had set out for the border. In exasperation, Father said that instead of bringing life, these people had taken away everything that wasn’t nailed down. They weren’t called the Ransacking Guard for nothing. Of course, he quickly added that it wasn’t only the guards who showed up there but also those without land so they could finally acquire some property.

  None of the new arrivals, however, could replace the millions who had been forced to leave. Crops, usually poor ones, stood abandoned in the fields with no one to harvest them. Soon an old military word found a new meaning: brigade.

  Although I was born in the city and had never lived in the countryside, thanks to the brigades I enjoyed a significant amount of farmwork: I thinned out beets; harvested potatoes, cabbage, and onions; tied sheaves of wheat; worked with the threshing machine; labored on hay mounds; picked hops; and loaded trucks with hay. (They didn’t know about my hay fever and once sent me up to the hayloft. After a couple of seconds I was gasping for air—much longer, and I would have died.)

  We did all of this work at the expense of our studies, but I thought harvesting, or rather saving crops from ruin, was much more important than agonizing over consecutio temporum in Latin sentences. The others did not share my opinion. I also welcomed every opportunity to escape the city and go somewhere near the forest.

  Once our entire class arrived in a border village to help with the harvest. The trucks were arriving at the thresher, loaded with sheaves of grain. Our homeroom teacher selected four of us to pass the sheaves to a man who would toss them into the thresher. The man was a re-emigrant, a muscular farmer whose features were hidden behind a wet sponge h
e had attached to his face; clouds of dust poured from the thresher.

  At first we took turns, but after about an hour I was the only one left with the man. I would hand him sheaves as fast as I could, but the dust bothered me so much that I started to suffocate. I was ashamed to quit, however, and leave him by himself.

  My classmates considered me either a blockhead or a strikebreaker. But I was usually able to reestablish my reputation in the evening, when I would compose love letters for their absent loves, even verses.

  On one brigade when we were pulling onions, I composed “Onion Blues” for our improvised jazz orchestra:

  Evening falls

  My hands they reek of onion.

  Unspeakably tormented,

  I go on day after day,

  Till I myself become an onion.

  Before I give up my soul on these broad fields,

  I want to sing my onion blues

  Into your ear, my love.

  My sad, my final

  My onion blues.

  *

  At the end of spring 1946, I came down with measles. Because of my age, it laid me out. For several days, my fever was so high I was delirious. When the illness finally passed, the doctor gave me a thorough examination and saw from the electrocardiogram that I’d had, or still had, myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle. The doctor prescribed six weeks of complete rest: lying, lying, and more lying. At most I could get up to eat at the table.

  My prostration was oppressive primarily because it plunged me into solitude. I had lost all my friends during the war and so far hadn’t been able to make any new ones. It was as if I was afraid that every new attachment would end in tragedy.

  I read a lot. This was actually the first time in my life that I had both the time and the opportunity. No books were to be had in Terezín. We didn’t have a lot of books at home. Those that my parents had accumulated before the war were lost during the occupation. But at an old bookbinder’s shop a few buildings down from ours, Mother purchased a buckram-bound copy of War and Peace. Finally I had something to read, something that promised to absorb me for several weeks. I read avidly, drawn into the flow of events. The translation was somewhat archaic, full of participles. But I soon stopped noticing the style. It belonged to a far-off time, full of noblemen—the somewhat awkward Pierre Bezukhov, the Rostov family, and Prince Andrei. Then there was the great conqueror Napoleon, who slogged through broad Rus, where he succumbed to defeat just like his miserable successor.

  From this epic novel I came away with the conviction that greatness that cannot be measured in terms of good and evil is worthless. It’s possible to be happy in life, but whether anyone manages to or not depends primarily on his ability to detach himself from his own suffering and from his concern for things and property, because all happiness comes not from insufficiency but rather from superfluity.

  During my illness I also listened to the radio a lot. Two big trials had just concluded: one in Nuremburg and the other in Czechoslovakia, which dealt with the government during the protectorate. Sometimes the second one was broadcast live. I followed it fascinated. Shortly before the beginning of the new school year, my desk mate Jirka came by to visit and promised he’d save my place next to him. Everyone in the class, he said, was looking forward to my return. I knew he was exaggerating. Then he presented me with a gift, which I opened right there in front of him. It was a wartime paperback edition of Plato’s “Phelibus.” My classmate’s visit unexpectedly brought me back to life. I started looking forward to new encounters and thinking less about my dead friends.

  That very evening I read Plato’s dialogue about the truly happy life. Being used to fiction, I devoured the strange and abstruse morsels of Socrates’s arguments. To this very day, I remember that there are clean pleasures and unclean ones, higher and lower, and that the intellect is much more beneficial than pleasure for human life and happiness.

  In school I quickly caught up with the little material I’d missed; I had the advantage that Father, during his brief visits to Prague, was able to explain the parts of mathematics that the teacher couldn’t, and Mother patiently helped me translate elemental Latin texts: Qui dedit beneficium, taceat, narret, qui accepit. Accipere quam facere praestat irjuriam.

  My mother was a frail, silently suffering romantic and at the same time an ascetic. I never once saw her drink even a glass of beer. She never smoked, and you could not express in her presence a single word that was even a little vulgar. When she spoke about her childhood and youth, it was always memories of various miseries and injustices: hunger during the First World War, when she would stand in line for bread in the early morning darkness. The bread never arrived or only a couple of loaves were available, and she wouldn’t get one. At barely eleven years of age, she was sent by a charity organization, the Czech Heart, to some rich farmer who considered her a useless little girl, a good-for-nothing, because she couldn’t lift a full bucket of water.

  She was well-read and loved Russian and French literature: Anna Karenina and Romain Rolland’s The Soul Enchanted and Jean-Christophe. The first books that came into my possession I received from her: Anatole France and Stendhal. I was later guided by her taste and purchased short stories by Turgenev and Gogol.

  In Terezín I once managed to filch from the storeroom a suitcase that had been left by a dead inmate, and I found some French novel, or maybe it was a book of poetry. I don’t remember the title or the author, but it was one of the few things Mother brought home with her to Prague.

  The main thing she brought back from Terezín was fear. Even after the war had ended and no one was after us, she never ceased to be afraid. She didn’t want us to attend large gatherings of people and asked us not to speak about our time in the concentration camp, especially that we had been imprisoned on the basis of race. The word “Jew” never crossed her lips.

  My mother created in me the image that women were frail and vulnerable. They were sufferers who needed protection. They were a combination of beauty and inaccessible corporeality, which they would prefer to be rid of.

  *

  Scarcely had I returned to school after my illness when I fell in love with one of my classmates. I could admire the object of my affection only from afar. To me she seemed beautiful, smart, and virtuous, and she was afflicted with a debilitated hip joint. I didn’t dare reveal even a little of my feelings to her. I could only dream and, at least for myself, put my feelings into words. So I started writing my first novel.

  It was a love story beyond compare—at first unhappy but later blessed with a happy ending—between a girl crippled in an auto accident and a poor medical student. I managed to cobble together the beginning and outline the initial complications caused by the uncomprehending parents and treacherous and scheming friends, along with the oppressive social situation of both protagonists. Then, as I couldn’t wait for the denouement, I wrote the ending in advance. I used up several school notebooks, and in the story I made it all the way to kisses and embraces. In reality I didn’t even come close to touching the object of my adoration.

  Certainly, even something like this can be an impetus for a writer: timidity in love, the need to replace reality with fantasy and to project this fantasy into reality by endowing it with form. Literature, or any kind of art, can emerge from the life experience of the writer or from his fantasy, which elevates to reality.

  I still remember the excitement I felt when on the first blank page in the black, narrow-lined notebook I signed my name and beneath that the title, Great Hearts. Beneath the title I wrote A Novel, which corresponded to my resolve to cover every single white page. The emptiness of the paper was thereby annulled. Then when I read over the sentences I had just composed, I trembled with joy when I saw that they formed a whole, a story that unfolded just like those in printed books. I couldn’t believe I was capable of something like this.

  Every boy experiences something similar the first time he succeeds in constructing a kite from sticks, paper
, and string, which then literally soars into the air.

  Imparting form to something formless provides a certain satisfaction. You are intoxicated with the work, even if the form is imperfect or derivative, as long as, of course, what you have just created is recognizable.

  Art obviously does not begin when you succeed in generating form out of formlessness; it begins when you are able to judge the caliber of your creation and not fall into raptures over the sole fact that you have created one of countless paper kites. At the time, however, I had no clue, and never again did I feel anything like the excitement I had when I filled the notebook with my artless and untutored sentences. The enthusiasm over the creation does not correspond directly to the quality of the thing created. Just the opposite: The creator never rids himself of doubts as to whether his construction will hold up even during his lifetime. The writer of mass-produced, popular works, on the other hand, is a stranger to these doubts and is convinced of the quality of his creation.

  When I solemnly penned the words “The End,” I was ecstatic. I wasn’t even bothered by the fact that I’d left out the whole middle of the story.

  Later, when I was moving out of the house, I placed all my manuscripts in a cardboard box that I stored in a closet next to the gas meter. As soon as I had my own apartment, I planned to return and retrieve it. After many years (I’d had my own family and apartment for a while), Mother asked me to finally come and fetch the box. I opened the closet and took out the box filled with faded manuscripts. They reeked of coal gas. I opened one of the notebooks at random and then one of the folders containing my unfinished epic. The quality of what I read was appalling.