My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  He glanced around the room in which he knew only the two rogues who had started fighting before the new school year had begun.

  He pointed at me. “Klíma, I daresay that not only are you capable of committing frightful offenses against school rules, but you’re also able to cope with difficult situations. I see you as the most appropriate adept for this praiseworthy activity. I hereby appoint you collections officer of the entire school. You have a sense for the passive voice, I assume, so pay attention: From this moment you are put in charge.” He grinned and added serenely, “I believe that in this function you will perform much better than in a fight.”

  *

  I soon joined the Czechoslovak Union of Youth. Several students from our class did too. We were accepted at a meeting that took place in the art room. A smiling twelfth-grade girl in a white blouse with a badge of the union was acting as chair. She introduced herself as Milena. She welcomed us briefly and noted how wonderful it was that the organization was growing. Then she invited us on a cleanup brigade in the school neighborhood.

  When the meeting was over, she approached me and said she’d spoken to the principal about me. She thought I should be the chair in our class.

  Until then I’d been the chair of our church choir youth group. It seemed to me that these two functions didn’t quite jibe. I asked her what she thought.

  “It would be fine.” She beamed. She went on to say that it wouldn’t really be any work at all. I’d just call a meeting every now and then and if necessary get people to go on brigade work. She would always tell me about an event well ahead of time.

  I liked her smile. If I’d been a little bolder, I would have perhaps invited her for a walk in the park, but I merely said I would think it over.

  I had my hands full, as I had started publishing the school magazine with the consent of the principal. I cannot recall a single contribution, but I do remember that we had to return all the used duplicating paper to the office. I didn’t suspect that having access to copy paper and a mimeograph was a great advantage in a land where not a single line could appear without being approved by the appropriate comrades.

  The weekly newsreels showed clips demonstrating the constructive enthusiasm of the workers. Weavers were using an ever greater number of looms; miners were accepting obligations to extract more and more coal; smelters poured out white-hot gleaming steel by the ton. Also, with the help of youth brigades, new smelting houses and dams were being constructed along the Vltava River. At numerous and apparently unrelated meetings, participants would applaud enthusiastically and proclaim glory to the Communist party along with Comrades Stalin, Gottwald, Slánský, or Zápotocký. The comrades would smile amiably and sometimes during a demonstration bow down to accept a bouquet proffered by a young girl, whereupon the crowd would applaud all the more ecstatically. The newsreels also showed black marketeers covering up hundreds of bolts of cloth, pairs of shoes, or sacks of flour whereby they sought to destroy our market. It was only because of these vampires, we were told, that our goods were rationed.

  The hours devoted to Latin in school were cut in half, and our new Latin teacher was an amicable woman who understood that Latin belonged to an entirely different era.

  In civics class, instead of Plato’s Laws or even our own, we studied the Communist Manifesto. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. . . . The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” The gray-haired teacher, whom we had nicknamed the Snake Charmer, always lectured as if in melancholic contemplation, which contributed to the dullness of her lecture, as if she were saying, “I’m sorry to bother you with all this.” “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

  *

  They locked up our landlord, Mother told Father when he came home one Sunday. He was apparently in some sort of work camp; at least that’s what his wife had said.

  “He was a bougie,” explained Father.

  “I didn’t know there were any camps in Czechoslovakia,” my brother joined in.

  “Obviously only for people like him.” Father brushed him off. “It won’t hurt him to do a little real work.”

  “She started crying when she told me,” continued Mother. “She asked me if I knew what she should do. They hauled him away and didn’t even say where they were taking him.”

  “Why wouldn’t they have told her? Why do you insist on believing everything those people tell you?” Father pronounced the words “those people” with a grimace and went over to his desk, which was always heaped with stacks of papers covered with numbers and indecipherable sentences. He made it apparent that Mother’s news didn’t interest him. Nothing had happened that should have upset her. After all, bougies were used to living off the work of others. It was only fair that now they’d be forced to work.

  Of course our landlord was an ordinary building contractor, and I saw him almost every day as he left for work.

  Every day during first period at school we announced who was absent. Usually somebody was sick and could be gone for several weeks. All the teachers would conscientiously write down the absences, and at the end of the year they would be added up and listed on your report card. Two of my classmates were absent for several days. One of them, Polívka, was the administrator of something like parliamentary elections in our class. We dutifully announced that they were absent, but one day our homeroom teacher informed us that we no longer had to report their absence because they would certainly not be coming back this year. We stared at him in surprise, but he remained silent. Instead, he went to the board and wrote: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer” (Sir William Gladstone). “Write this down if you’re interested: ‘good, better, best.’ Which comparative is this?”

  As we stared at him in dumb silence, he explained, “As the brightest would understand, if they were not absent right now: the irregular!”

  Several days later, one of our classmates who lived on the same street as Polívka shared the news that both our classmates had been locked up and accused of some horrible antistate crimes.

  I would have liked to hear more, but it seemed everyone was afraid to talk about it.

  Not long after, our drawing teacher also disappeared. He was of Serbian heritage and had abstained from voting upon a resolution condemning Josip Broz (Tito), who had been until recently the magnificent son of the working people of Yugoslavia (now a traitorous agent of imperialism and a rabid dog). Our teacher had obviously been one of Tito’s many spies. At least that was how our classmate, who, unlike myself, was actually a member of the Communist Party, had explained it.

  Our teachers never mentioned their colleagues, just as they never gave us their opinion about what was going on.

  *

  Graduation was approaching. It was a different kind of graduation from the one our parents had told us about. The teachers were no longer our fearsome overlords but comrades on our shared path to socialism. We wore Union of Youth shirts (everyone was now a member); some of the teachers had stopped wearing ties, while others dressed as inconspicuously as possible; and everyone pretended to be a mere worker in the field of education.

  Now education was viewed as a reevaluation of what had previously been presented as the truth. This concerned primarily history. The Americans and English were no longer allies. Masaryk and Beneš were no longer our beloved President Liberators or Socialist Constructors —they were now representatives of the bourgeoisie. History had become the story of class struggles.

  The revolutionary spirit had affected even the evaluation of literature. Great poets were now shriveled-up apples or they completely disappeared. Above all of them loomed the marvelous standard-bearer, the author of Red Songs, Stanislav Kostka Neumann, along with Jiří Wolker.

  Betwe
en the final written and oral exams, our history teacher called me into the staff room and informed me that the party caucus of the school had decided to offer me membership in the Communist Party. We all believe, she said with amicable sternness, that the party will assist you in your aspirations to achieve greater consciousness, and your work will be an asset to the party.

  I said thank you.

  At home I conscientiously filled out the application. My class origin was not exactly the best. I knew of not a single worker among my ancestors, but on the other hand two of my uncles had been executed and were prewar Communist functionaries and national heroes.

  A few days after graduation, I was invited to a meeting of the party caucus, whose members, much to my surprise, were mostly teachers.

  I sat through a boring lecture and a similarly unenjoyable discussion of it, but finally my turn came. The history teacher, who was apparently chairperson of the local organization, announced that the district council had approved my membership application. “So, Comrade, we welcome you among our ranks. Never forget that being a member of the party is an obligation for the rest of your life. You must always act faithfully, honorably, and unselfishly to defend the interests of the party, which stands at the head of our entire society on its path to socialism.” She failed to add, “So help you God.”

  I received a party ID card and mumbled something; I don’t remember a word of it. Most likely I promised not to disappoint them.

  At home, I was surprised that my party card was not met with approval. Father merely said, “It was your decision!” Mother looked doubtful. “Couldn’t you have waited just a little while?”

  And thirteen-year-old Jan said that people like me in his class were called freshly hatched reds.

  “They’re in your school already too?” cried Mother in astonishment.

  No, my brother explained, but all around us.

  Essay: The Party, p. 438

  5

  I was nearly twenty years old when I graduated from high school. Despite the number of unlucky circumstances, I had acquired some knowledge of chemistry, physics, and geography along with ancient and medieval history and Czech literature. I excelled in mathematics and was able to translate some less complicated Latin texts. I also read Lev Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata” in the original Russian. Thanks to my aunt Eliška, who owned the collected works of Karel Čapek, I devoured almost all of his works. I knew a little German and even less English, even though our English teacher was a notable translator of Thackeray and studied at Oxford. I had read (not studied) several works by Plato and Aristotle. I had also read some of the books of the Bible, mostly Ecclesiastes, several times.

  I still hadn’t kissed a girl; I’d never been interrogated; I wasn’t interested in the fates of those who had been unexpectedly arrested and condemned; and it didn’t even occur to me to compare the activity of the current government to that of the Nazis. It was as if the walls of the fortress where I had been forced to spend part of my childhood had hindered me from seeing the world in its true colors.

  Despite the prevailing conditions, most of my classmates were accepted into the university. What was I supposed to study when I figured out that the only work I might be any good at was some sort of writing?

  How did a writer actually make a living? And who could tell me if anybody would be interested in my writing? The most appropriate thing seemed to be to become a journalist. Karel Čapek had been one, after all, and his was the only work I knew fairly extensively. At the same time, however, I wasn’t aware that journalism had changed since Čapek’s time. It had become one of the least free occupations and was in such ethical decline that any decent person would have avoided it.

  I learned that journalism was taught at the University of Political and Economic Sciences. I knew nothing about this school, so I went to the dean’s office to get some information. I was told I could apply in theory, but the school was unique in that it trained primarily political officers and therefore accepted only graduates of workers’ training schools, not high school graduates. He didn’t tell me—perhaps he himself wasn’t aware—that journalism was no longer going to be taught. I applied even though I definitely did not want to become a political officer.

  In the cadre questionnaire, I mentioned my two uncles who had been executed; it was definitely owing to them that I was accepted.

  The very first day we were divided into groups. We were to help each other in our studies, culturally nourish one another, go on brigade work, and learn about the new relationships among comrades in general. My classmates were indeed originally blue-collar workers or Youth Union members or party functionaries. Most of them had attended a one-year—in some cases, a several-month—course that was supposed to replace four years of high school study. But even the school administration was aware that such hastily acquired knowledge was insufficient. And so half of the lectures covered high school material. Since time immemorial, the life of a student has always been arduous, but it offered many joys.

  When I entered the university, student life was not inordinately merry. Any unauthorized gathering, unorganized debate, unregistered and uncensored written expression was considered antisocial or even antistate.

  By some miracle, a small private shop selling stationery and books had survived on Albertov Street, where our lectures took place. Once I went in, and there was not a single customer to be seen, so I started talking with the owner about books. I complained that there were so many authors I’d heard or read about, but it seemed they had ceased to exist. You couldn’t find their books anywhere.

  He asked whom I had in mind, and I recalled Čapek and Dos Passos, whose 42nd Parallel sounded like an ingeniously conceived novel.

  The bookseller agreed and went on to explain the present state of book publishing. All private publishing houses had disappeared, and only a few were permitted to operate. These had to belong to certain organizations and they were told what they could publish and primarily —here he grimaced—what they could not publish. Then he asked what I was studying. Journalism, I told him, even though I had no desire to be a journalist. I wanted to write books. But at the same time I wasn’t studying journalism, because the subject had been abolished.

  “So, you’re a budding writer.” Most likely he’d intended it ironically, but then he said, “Wait here a moment.” He disappeared into the back of his shop and brought out two leather-bound books. “These are two of the greatest American authors, but you won’t find their books anywhere.” They were Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle and Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.

  To my shame I had not heard of either author.

  *

  My mother noticed an article in the journal Tvorba mentioning the field of literary studies, which had just opened at Charles University’s School of Humanities.

  I went to the dean’s office to inquire about the requirements for acceptance. Once again I learned that literary studies (considered an ideological field) did not accept high school graduates. He added, however, that I could of course submit an application.

  So I did. I explained in the application that I wanted to change universities because the department of my studies had been abolished.

  During this short period of my life, everything was panning out. It was certainly due to my membership in the party. I was accepted and could leave the school that was so senseless that it was closed two years later.

  I knew that Charles University was an old and venerable institution. Three years earlier it had celebrated six hundred years since its founding. But I was unaware that the faculty had been purged that very year, and all of its traditions as a free university had been debased. The new students no longer had a chance to take part in those traditions, and the professors who were now here (most had entered the Communist Party) didn’t even mention them. (Many of the professors had probably participated in the purge.) I had only a smattering of education and was blind. I paid no attention to the purges that had occurred not only
at this university but at the others as well, along with all the newspapers, journals, and radio stations. I didn’t even notice the news about sentenced, banned, or imprisoned writers. I didn’t follow the discussions concerning socialist realism, the new type of hero, or ideology in literature.

  Of course I understood well enough that subjects such as the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Introduction to Marxist Philology, or A Marxist View of Literature certainly could not until recently have been compulsory.

  *

  The university (like every school) thrusts a lot of knowledge upon the student, most of which he will never need and will sooner or later forget. The university should teach students a systematic and responsible approach to research. It should teach them how to seek out sources and work with facts. And the most important thing it can offer is contact with figures who can serve as mentors—an example for both the student’s work and his civic conduct.

  Besides a lot of useless knowledge, my university provided above all knowledge that I had to reject later on in my life because it was fundamentally untrue.

  While most of the linguistic subjects were taught by professors and genuine philologists, most of the literature lectures and seminars were led by young assistants who had written nothing more than perhaps a brochure or newspaper article. All that was left of modern Czech literature for our lecturer was the realistic social branch and of course Communist authors. Interpretations concentrated on the content and their political assessments. Nobody really attempted literary analysis, and as a result second- and third-rate authors became prominent, whereas many of those whose works were superior were not even mentioned—they were considered Catholics, ruralists, legionnaires, decadents, or formalists.

  In the class that treated progressive traditions in world literature, which was the only class on world literature, a young party journalist read to us the text of his own pamphlet, Troubadours of Hatred. It was the only lecture concerning contemporary literature that had come into being to the west of our borders.