My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  During the rise of Fascism and World War II, the intellectual had two choices, two sides between which to decide—the nation or betrayal, his own people or Fascism. The decision taken by Gide was tantamount to relegating himself to the trash heap. . . .

  Where are today’s descendants of Buddenbrooks, Forsyth, Thibault? Today they are no longer creating a “world in and of itself.” Today they stand as pawns in the game of the only predatory power: American imperialism. . . .American imperialism seeks to conquer the world. Their plans contain military, diplomatic, financial, cultural, and political elements. What will their cultural equivalent be? What elements of culture, and especially literature, correspond to their appetite for world domination?

  In his lectures he belittled Camus, Sartre, Wilde, and Steinbeck. The name of Sartre has become a symbol of decay and moral degeneration, a synonym for decadence, a prototype of the morass into which bourgeois pseudoculture has sunk. There were no limits to the abuse he heaped on the aforementioned books and the simplifying interpretations meant to prove the decadence of the greatest contemporary non-Communist authors. Sartre’s Troubled Sleep is poison, death, which agitates, which stretches out its claws for living people. . . . Yes, let us ask what sort of people does a literature of degeneracy envisage? Take for instance Steinbeck’s final series of California novels. What kind of human being is he reckoning upon when in Wayward Bus he introduces a repulsive series of human creatures. . . . Faulkner’s Light in August is organized training for murder, hatred, and a willingness to hire anyone for a criminal cause. . . . The unprincipled adventurer, sentenced in 1924 to three years of hard labor for a burglary in Cambodia, André Malraux, wants to be both a Goebbels and Rosenberg to today’s de Gaulle, his idol and leader. . . . The novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is the ideal work to further the foreign political goals of the United States. . . . Another mockery of the war in Spain was, according to our lecturer, Adventures of a Young Man by Dos Passos (whose works I admired); also, Eugene O’Neill revealed his degeneracy in his play The Iceman Cometh. Albert Camus was one of the apostles of decadence and morass; Simone de Beauvoir advocated the idea of cannibalism, as did Robert Merle. And literary critics and historians? The bourgeoisie sham-scholars, publicist nabobs, theorizing buzzards howl in unison like a pack of hyenas wrapped up in professorial garb.

  His way of thinking, and primarily speaking, appalled me, and even though I was still willing to consider the claim that art in non-Socialist countries was undergoing a decline, the abuses he showered on these authors was repulsive; I knew some of them, and what I had read seemed marvelous. From our assistant Parolek, who lectured on Russian literature, I learned how good literature comes into existence: The politics of the party is critical both for culture and for literature. They actively participate in resolving questions concerning the battle for peace and the construction of the material and technical basis of communism. The politics of the party emerges from the scientific analysis of the international situation as well. It directs* the development of Soviet society as well as Soviet culture on the basis of a scientific understanding of the sole proper direction. Writers should follow instructions that lead them in the proper direction. The author himself need not search. Other, more competent people searched for him. Soviet authors (and ours, as well) were supposed to write about four points:

  * Bold lettering indicates Klíma’s emphasis.

  1. Depict the epoch-making victory of the USSR and demonstrate its profound significance in all its aspects.

  2. Show the heroism of the Soviet people in their Socialist, constructive activity in factories and in the fields of their collective farms.

  3. Battle for peace against reactionaries abroad. Go on the offensive against bourgeois culture. Support the fight for peace by democratic forces abroad.

  4. Uncover palpable attributes of future Soviet communism directly in Soviet reality, primarily in the Soviet man.

  Fortunately there was at least one person among my colleagues who knew something about world literature. Josef Vohryzek, like me, should have died in a concentration camp, but his parents had managed to send him to Sweden at the last minute. There he survived the war living with some kind people. In a factory he learned to work with metal and after the war he returned to Czechoslovakia, where he searched in vain for his parents and relatives. He remained a blue-collar worker, but in the factory where he worked he was chosen for workers’ training. When he finished, he ended up in our department. He knew Scandinavian literature. He’d also read many translated works in Swedish, which had never been published in Czechoslovakia. After one of Comrade Bouček’s lectures, he heatedly announced that everything that fellow had claimed was nonsense. You can’t judge a literary work according to a political yardstick. The extensive list of condemnable authors, whom the assistant had tried to discredit, we should take rather as a recommendation. It was precisely their works that should be read because they belonged to the best of world literature.

  I managed to get hold of a translation of Camus’s The Stranger as well as Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Both novels mesmerized me.

  One day in a tram I ran into my former English teacher, Marek. He asked me what I was studying and how I was doing. When I mentioned the content of the lectures on foreign literature, he said it didn’t surprise him. Then he added, “You know, Klíma, whoever wants to break a free spirit always attacks education. That’s why the Germans closed the universities, and that’s why today they are reviling great souls and confusing concepts and values. The goal is to undermine education in its very foundation. He who truly wants to know must return ad fontem.** I don’t have to translate this for you. You did well in Latin.”

  ** To the spring, the source.

  *

  I had been in the department barely two months when, after a lecture on the history of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, a girl whom I’d never noticed before approached me. She began by apologizing for taking up my time, but she knew that I’d been accepted to study literature even though I had a high school diploma (I had no idea how she had found this out). She had tried to enter the department, as well, but without success. They allowed her to study Czech only in connection with Russian.

  I didn’t know what to tell her. She kept walking with me as if expecting me to say something significant. We were no longer on the topic of changing majors. We talked about literature. She also liked Karel Čapek and Vladislav Vančura and had read a lot of poetry. She loved Pushkin and even recited something about Tatyana from Eugene Onegin. In class she was called Tatyana.

  She confided to me that she had composed a few poems. Then we discovered that neither of us smoked or went to pubs, and then she told me that she sometimes felt very lonely. She used to go out with Tomáš, but they didn’t understand each other and broke up. When you’re with someone you don’t understand, it’s worse than being alone. We walked all the way to Letenský Park, where dogs and children dashed about. In the distance we could hear the jackhammers of the construction workers who were building the largest monument in the country, in Europe, and perhaps in the world (I had no idea of Jesus in Rio de Janeiro)—to Stalin. The acacias were already in bloom as well as the early roses. The air was filled with sweet aromas, and I tried desperately not to sneeze.

  She said she loved flowers, roses most of all. A short distance from her house was a big park where she often studied.

  I asked her where she lived, and she said all the way out in Líbeň. I didn’t have to walk her the whole way home, but of course that was precisely what she was suggesting. But I was afraid my allergies would start up and I would begin sneezing, so I accompanied her only to the tram. The little marketplace near the tram stop sold flowers, and I bought her a delicate little pink rose which, in view of my financial situation, seemed to me a magnanimous gift.

  I could see gratitude in her eyes, which were similar in color to mine, and suddenly tears appeared. Her tram was approaching, and she quickly wiped away th
e tears and thanked me again for the rose. She wanted to talk with me again sometime.

  So we started seeing each other. I learned that she almost didn’t remember her father, who had died when she was three, but she could still recall how she would wait for him in the evenings when he came home from work. He would pick her up and throw her into the air and catch her. Tears started flowing down her cheeks again as she told me about it. She told me how she fell in love with Tomáš in high school, and everyone in the class knew they belonged together, but they were actually very different. She was fond of poetry, whereas he preferred sports and engines. He was marvelous at basketball because he was almost two meters tall, and she could never even get the ball into the basket. Besides, such an activity seemed pointless. Why would you like running around a gym or basketball court?

  Some days we just sat side by side in silence. At such moments she would peer, unblinking, into my eyes. She would stare at me so lovingly that it excited me more than words (we hadn’t even embraced yet, just held hands a couple of times). She wanted to know if I’d ever been in love, and she asked about my childhood. When I told her about Terezín, tears once again streamed down her cheeks even though I didn’t describe anything particularly brutal. The next day she told me she’d had a dream in which we were wandering down a long, dark tunnel with only a few intermittent flickering lanterns. We kept looking ahead waiting for light, but it never appeared. Then corpses were scattered over the tracks, and we had to step over them, but there wasn’t enough room, and they kept reaching out their chilly hands for us. It was terrifying.

  She struck me as delicate, gentle, and poignantly diffident.

  Of course, now we sat together in class. When it came time for exams, we studied together, usually in an empty lecture hall and sometimes outside in a park. Once we took a tram all the way to the edge of the city and lay in a meadow somewhere above Spořilov. We were studying for a while, and then she suddenly leaned over and began kissing me. She didn’t say so, but I’m sure she was thinking: since he’s never going to get around to it himself.

  Then came summer vacation. She left on a brigade to Ostrava, while I stayed in Prague. We promised we would think about each other every evening at nine o’clock, and she believed our thoughts would meet halfway. We would write as well.

  It was out of love for her that I started filling the gaps in my knowledge of poetry. I brought home from the library a bundle of poetry collections, as well as Vítěslav Nezval’s Manon Lescaut. The story of a great romantic love had me enthralled. I immediately identified with the couple from the narrative. Moreover, the rhythm of the verses penetrated into my mind, even my blood, like some rapidly proliferating microbe. For a while I lost my own voice. I wrote my sweetheart a romantic poem two pages long (I wrote it during class). A few of the verses still stick in my mind:

  To die, I want to die for your love,

  I long to go for a walk with you tomorrow

  how distant is black Ostrava,

  living without you is like an execution.

  My love, my love till death,

  now alone somewhere in the shadow of a smelter,

  in my soul I stare into your soft eyes,

  do something so my heart does not burst apart.

  I rambled on about our love, which I compared to a mountain we were climbing together. There above, my dear, stands a castle with 365 rooms,

  each created for a night and a day,

  may our love be glorified

  I was thrilled with my creation, and I was certain it would make an impression on my sweetheart as well. I waited impatiently for an answer.

  It didn’t come for a long time. Then I received an unusually cold and curt letter. She assured me that she wasn’t at all lonely. She was experiencing marvelous and utterly new human relationships and didn’t understand how, during this time of labor and constructive activity, I could scribble poetry about some sort of castles in the air so distant from real people and real life. She hadn’t even wanted to mention my poetry, but she thought it only proper to say what she was thinking and feeling. Finally, she had lost the desire to continue corresponding with me.

  The first time we were in the same class after vacation, she found a seat as far away from me as she could. She came over during the break to inform me that Tomáš too had been on the brigade, and she had realized she was still in love with him. I shouldn’t be angry. During the trip, she had grown up and come to understand that life is not just poetry but also labor and the happiness that comes from work fulfilled.

  *

  The accounting with members of the occupying offices, traitors, and collaborationists began immediately after the end of the war. Some of the trials were broadcast on the radio, and the larger ones were written about extensively. Most, however, were summarized in only a few lines that reported that a certain informer was sentenced to death, and the sentence was carried out immediately.

  At first I followed the trials with unhealthy interest, but as traitors continued to be uncovered and incriminated in almost exhausting succession, I had stopped paying attention.

  But suddenly an extensive and bewildering accusation appeared against a ring of conspirators whose members were leading Communist functionaries. At their head was the general secretary of the party, Rudolf Slánský. Almost all of the fourteen accused were Jews who were indicted of course not for their Jewish origins but for supporting and protecting the activities of Zionists, this reliable agency of American imperialism, for . . . allowing the capitalist elements of Jewish origin to rob the Czechoslovak state on a large scale. They were also in league with traitorous elements abroad, which were sheltering Trotskyites. The charges alleged they were attempting to bring back capitalism, committing sabotage, and working with imperialist and Titoist agents. They were also accused of attempting to assassinate President Gottwald. The prosecutor’s speech took up several pages of the newspaper Rudé právo, which demonstrated the tremendous significance we were supposed to attribute to the trial.

  Immediately after the accusation appeared in the paper, a weaver from Jaroměř shared her feelings with a reporter.

  As I read the accusation against Slánský’s band of traitors, I fully realized the danger threatening us, the working people. Slánský and his coconspirators were attempting to bring back the times of capitalism and do away with the democratic system of the people. Following the shameful example of their teacher Tito, they sought to bring back those times, which we working people, and especially the workers in the textile industry, remember very well.

  The same day the builders of the Slapská Dam had their say:

  We the workers constructing the Slapská Dam demand the severest punishment for the traitors. In reply to all our enemies, we pledge to work with even greater diligence to honorably fulfill our task before the birthday of J. V. Stalin.

  The court had not yet even pronounced judgment, but writers began to join in with their condemnation. One of their articles, “No, They Are Not People,” recalled court reporting before the war.

  During trials of the most serious and hardened scoundrels, I have never encountered such figures as I saw in the courtroom during the antistate conspiracy ring led by Rudolf Slánský. . . . I remember the faces of robbers, safecrackers, and murderers that I saw in the courtroom, and I must say . . . yes: these fourteen accused monsters are not people!

  A class-conscious poet who was present in the courtroom added his characterization of the accused: Here before us sits abomination embodied in living creatures who were at one time human beings.

  There was something hideous about this language, as if they were writing about a group of SS murderers from the gas chambers.

  The confessions of the accused and their witnesses filled a special edition of Rudé právo. Surprisingly, all of them repeated, with slight variation, the words of the prosecutor’s speech. One of them, André Simon, until recently a distinguished journalist, when asked how he judged his actions, replied in the
words of the prosecutor:

  I condemn myself as a criminal deserving the severest punishment. As a conspirator I am responsible for every deed and crime of each member of our conspiracy ring. I am of Jewish heritage. In which country does anti-Semitism grow freely? The United States and Great Britain. I was in contact with the intelligence services of these two countries. Which countries are reviving Nazism? The United States and Great Britain. I was in contact with the intelligence services of these two countries. In which country is there a law against racism and anti-Semitism? The Soviet Union. . . .

  I was a writer. It has been said that a writer is an engineer of human souls. What kind of engineer was I when I poisoned souls? Such an engineer of souls belongs on the gallows.

  In his concluding speech, the former secretary general of the Communist Party, designated as the leader of this antistate conspiratorial ring, stated:

  I know that the sentence suggested by the state prosecutor will be fair to the utmost in light of all of the terrible crimes I have committed. I bear the main and most burdensome guilt of all the accused because I stood at the head of this antistate conspiratorial and espionage ring. It was I who created this ring, led its activities, and provided the instructions for all of my accomplices, which were not only my instructions, but primarily those of the American imperialists I served. They were instructions of betrayal and conspiracy, sabotage, subversion, and espionage. . . . The enemy within the ramparts is the most dangerous enemy of all because he can open the gates. I was an enemy within the Communist Party, within the Czechoslovak state, within the entire camp of peace. The state prosecutor is correct when he says I disguised myself. I had to disguise myself to remain as an enemy within the ramparts. . . . I said I was against imperialist war, but I was preparing this war, I was carrying out sabotage, planting and protecting spies who would have formed a fifth column in case of war. . . . I committed the most perfidious crimes possible. I know that for me there are no extenuating circumstances, no excuses, no clemency. . . . I deserve no other end to my felonious life than the end suggested by the state prosecutor.