My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  *

  Immediately after our Šumava expedition, I left on a construction brigade to Most with my classmates. We took a bus, and there was no celebratory welcoming to greet us. The period of great construction brigades enthusiastically celebrated by newspapers and weekly newsreels was over. They also didn’t charge us with building anything so magnificent and important as smelting plants or railway tracks in mountain terrain. Our task was to lay the foundations for a housing development.

  The leaders of the brigade took us straight from the bus to a wooden barracks that reminded me of Terezín.

  They gathered us together in the dining room, and to my surprise I was named the leader of an eight-member group that would work on block fifty-something. I didn’t understand why I’d been chosen; I’d never worked on any construction project before and had no idea what was expected of me. None of the members of my group, however (most of them were in the same class as I was), protested my appointment. They all correctly assumed that when their work ended and they were free, the group leader would then have to review the completed assignments, fulfill various orders, consult with the foreman, and attend to other superfluous activities.

  We were informed that work started at six in the morning, and fifteen minutes before that a truck would arrive to take us to the site. They also advised us to wear boots or at least galoshes. Because lunch would be served only after the shift had ended, we were to bring a snack. The foremen would explain the rest. The others were free to leave, but as the group leader, along with the others afflicted with this task, I had to wait and listen to a homily on workplace safety. The spokesman explained the Decalogue of Greatest Dangers, most of which I forgot immediately, but I do remember that suffocating in a crush of clay, loam, and rock was a horrible way to die. Anyone who stuck his head into the mixer risked losing it, and riding on the Japanese could have similarly tragic consequences not covered by insurance. (I had no idea what or who this Japanese was.)

  In the morning I looked out the window at the yellowish dawn; the air reeked of sulfur and God only knew what other chemicals. There was a line to the toilet in the hallway, and the bathroom was crammed as well, but I was used to all this from Terezín.

  As soon as the truck had dropped us off on a plain suffused with stinking haze, we set off uphill to the work site. The individual blocks were marked with numbers. In some places we saw construction ditches, and in others the ground was as yet untouched. Every now and then we’d pass grubby caravans and wooden shanties that stored work tools and bags of cement. When we finally found the block assigned to us, we saw that although the ditches had indeed been prepared for laying cement, they were flooded with water. Now I understood why we’d been told to wear rubber boots. When my coworkers looked over the terrain, they asked me, as the group leader, to protest immediately, for this was obviously the worst block of all. But our foreman had already arrived, a gaunt middle-aged beanpole of a man with a face Jack London would have described as weather-beaten and features usually referred to as craggy. He welcomed us with overt animosity and ordered us to get a pump from the storeroom and pointed to one of the wooden shanties. So instead of lodging a protest, I set off with two of my coworkers. Of course it was a manual pump and, as we soon ascertained, partially broken. No matter how hard we tried, it would spit out only a tiny stream of water. The entire time we spent in this inhospitable place, we referred to the area around the excavation pits as the shore.

  The foreman skeptically observed our vain efforts as if asking himself what could be expected from a group of inexperienced students.

  When he learned I was the group leader, he read to me the list of equipment issued to us from the storeroom; took me around the excavation pits, which were only slowly emptying of water; and showed me the staked-off area we were supposed to dig. He even specified the depth we were to reach, which I was to strictly monitor because he would check it himself. Then he addressed us all and pointed out that we had to work hard, damn it, otherwise we wouldn’t earn enough for the mountain air we were breathing. He addressed us as little idiots and used this epithet every time even though he should have called us comrades.

  The next day we were issued a mixer and a vehicle covered with encrusted cement. This was the Japanese that we’d been warned not to ride on. The warning was superfluous because no one would have voluntarily climbed onto it. We also received instructions on the ratio of water, cement, and sand, and the foreman reminded me that I was responsible for everything. If the foundation was not solid, he threatened, the house built atop it would collapse, and its inhabitants, including women and children, could die in the wreckage.

  We took turns at the mixer, dragging half-ton bags of cement and pouring their contents into its maw, while the dust lodged itself in our lungs.

  At first we tried to convince ourselves this was only temporary, and despite the toil and heat we carried on quite learned conversations. We finally realized, however, that such colloquy was inappropriate given our surroundings, and we began to argue about things like why there was water still flowing into our excavation pit, what grade of soil we were digging, or whose turn it was at the mixer tomorrow. The mixer sometimes stopped working, and none of us knew how to get it going again, so we were losing both time and money, and it was up to me to locate the repairmen. If they did not happen to be in one of the neighboring blocks, they were sitting in the tavern, drinking beer and sometimes playing cards.

  The foreman gradually started to see that we were working more and better than he’d expected. But the norms had not been set for college students and probably not even for experienced construction workers. Instead, they were established so that no one could earn more than was necessary for daily subsistence. The employees made up for this by either purloining building material or sneaking off during work hours to make money on the side. We, on the other hand, as the foreman told me, wouldn’t make a thing at this rate. We’d had the misfortune of being assigned to this block.

  And there was more misfortune yet to come. During our third week, it rained continuously, and when we finally made it to the work site—it was a Saturday, and the shift ended at noon—we saw that part of our freshly dug pit had collapsed along one side and filled our hole with a considerable amount of new earth. Water spurted from the side, which was probably the source that filled our pit every night.

  The foreman arrived, surveyed the destruction, and, as if we were the builders instead of him, concluded that we should have timbered the pit. So we’d have to dig out the earth once again, and of course no one would pay us for this extra work. Then he added that now it would be best to embed the whole thing in concrete, otherwise we’d have a lake on Monday, but we probably would anyway because we wouldn’t be able to get it cemented by lunchtime. He sent me for the pump and said he was leaving to go see his family. Then he took off just like the others who weren’t here working like idiots.

  When we came back on Monday morning, the trenches were dry. The foreman stood over them almost in surprise and asked how we’d managed to do it. Then he invited me into his trailer, took a seat behind his unbelievably dingy desk, and asked me if I’d calculated how much we had earned for the previous week.

  We’d always made very little, but this week as a result of the repeated breakdown of the mixer, the flooded excavation pits, two days of no work because of rain, and finally the collapsed wall that we had to dig out again, we didn’t even make a hundred crowns apiece.

  Then he asked how many times we’d had to use the pump. I said every day we were working last week. He pulled out a worksheet and wrote: manual transfer of pump, sixteen hours. Then he added carpentry work and manual transfer of wood, eight cubic meters.

  I objected that we had timbered only on Saturday, and then only a few boards.

  “Don’t bother me when I’m working, you little idiot!” he replied.

  He thought up several more operations I’d had no idea existed and calculated each of our wages to be three hundr
ed crowns and some change.

  At a loss, I started to thank him. “Don’t thank me,” he admonished me, and he added that he wasn’t paying me out of his own pocket. They were swindling us as much as they were him.

  This had been my first encounter with those we had been taught were the working, and thus ruling, class—if I don’t take into account those who two years earlier had searched our house.

  *

  It wasn’t easy to select a topic for my seminar paper, let alone a senior thesis in the field I was studying. I could choose either some sort of historicizing topic of Czech literature: Czech national revival authors (most of them were revivalists rather than writers) or the rural realists, or perhaps I could heap praise upon one of the few prewar leftist authors or one of the many contemporary authors.

  At this time appeared a slim pamphlet by a Soviet Slavist named Nikolsky praising the antifascist work of Karel Čapek, an author who until then had been blacklisted because he had been among the major personalities of the democratic republic. A friend of President Masaryk, Čapek had written an angry essay called “Why I Am Not a Communist” (one of my classmates had lent me a nearly illegible typewritten copy), and had attacked the Communist movement, especially in its early stages.

  The fact that Čapek was published and praised in the Soviet Union somewhat befuddled those who were determining what was admissible in literature and what was harmful. Finally, his book The War with the Newts was allowed to be published with only minor censorship, and I decided to write my seminar paper on it. Čapek’s political utopia entranced me so much that I decided to study his work further, and I began regularly visiting the university library reading room. Surprisingly, during a time when all “ideologically harmful works” in the area of politics, history, economics, philosophy, and social science, that is, all non-Marxist works, had disappeared from the libraries and bookstores (it was as if authors such as Camus, Hemingway, Sartre, Faulkner, and Kafka had never existed), in the reading room I could request any journal from the polemical anticommunist Nebojsa to anti-Semitic and Fascist tabloids such as Arijský boj or Vlajka.

  I spent hours and hours poring over volumes of prewar Lidové noviny, Přítomnost, and dozens of other journals to which Karel Čapek had contributed.

  Eventually I was given permission to write my thesis on Čapek, which was supposed to address the antifascist elements in his work. But the works that were imprecisely designated antifascist, as far as I understood them, simply consummated Čapek’s lifelong efforts to warn against any form of totalitarianism, whether it was a technological civilization or the Nazi regime. In the end, my thesis treated Čapek’s entire oeuvre.

  *

  The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party took place at the end of February 1956. The press wrote about the congress in the usual spirit. The Communist Party members proudly reviewed the successes achieved as they were rebuilding their war-ravaged land and offered dizzying glimpses into the future. The people were following closely behind the country and a Leninist government of the party and the country. But there was nevertheless something astounding: a criticism of Stalin’s economic mistakes! The Soviet Communists also admitted that capitalism might temporarily achieve better economic results than Socialist economics. The congress concluded with elections in which the recommended candidates were unanimously approved.

  A short time after, late in the evening Father called us together to the radio, which he’d acquired when he was released from prison. It was usually tuned to the news from Vienna rather than Prague. Although I was slowly forgetting my German, and although the radio was sometimes mostly static, I understood that at some sort of secret and closed meeting of the Central Committee in Moscow, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, had delivered a heretical speech in which he spoke of his predecessor as a criminal who had on his conscience the illegal persecution of innocent people, the torture of prisoners. According to Khrushchev, this all led to mass murder based on lists drawn up by Stalin himself or at least approved by him. Stalin had also apparently underestimated the danger of a German attack, and owing to his military ignorance he was responsible for a nearly hopeless situation on the fronts during the first months of the war. It wasn’t the content of the speech alone that struck me as unbelievable; it was that something like this could be said at the Congress of Soviet Communists, moreover by its highest member.

  Shortly thereafter, Aunt Hedvika, who had spent so many years in the Soviet Union and was well-informed, came to visit. She seemed extremely agitated. Not only was everything we heard true, she assured us, but this was only a small part of it. And she, who had never said a single bad or even critical word about her time in Russia, began to talk. When she was working in Czech broadcasting at the Moscow radio station, people she was working with would be there one day and then gone the next, and no one dared ask where they were or what had happened to them. No one even dared pronounce their names. And if one of the disappeared had happened to write a book or an article, not a word of it could be cited, and the book was immediately removed from the library and destroyed. Merely cracking a stupid joke or just laughing at it was enough for the security forces to come for the unfortunate person. Sometimes the police would come that very night and sentence him to ten years in a camp in Siberia. Or he would disappear completely, and at most his family would receive a package containing his clothing.

  I asked why she’d never told us about this, why she hadn’t warned us after she’d lived through it.

  She explained that she couldn’t precisely because she had lived through it. No one was watched more than those who had lived in the Soviet Union and could testify to these horrors. No one would have believed her anyway

  A few weeks later at a party meeting of the department, excerpts of Khrushchev’s heretical speech were read.

  I was surprised that a lot of people had not heard about the speech, or, if they had, thought the whole thing was an invention of the enemy. Now they were stunned. Some of the women started sobbing, and I remember hearing the hysterical cry: “You deceived us.”

  *

  It appeared that things were actually starting to change. At meetings and previously boring seminars on Marxism-Leninism, people started speaking more freely. If innocent people had been condemned in the Soviet Union, what had happened here? Wasn’t it necessary to reconsider all the political trials? Shouldn’t the Communist Party, which had apparently deceived its members, step down?

  At a party meeting we resolved that an extraordinary congress would convene to undertake rectifications.

  Like so many other people, I still believed in the possibility of rectification, or, deceived by the sudden feeling of freedom, I unreasonably and senselessly placed my hopes in it.

  It was in this atmosphere of intoxication that we began to prepare for the student Majáles—the traditional May celebration (whose origin is centuries older than the garish May Day festivities). We constructed masks and trudged singing from our department along the bridge in the direction of the exhibition ground where we planned to choose the king of Majáles. I don’t remember who came up with the idea that I don a crumpled broad-brimmed hat and tattered coat to represent an unfortunate and persecuted kulak. Along with the others I sang “Gaudeamus Igitur” and was proud to be a student of one of the world’s oldest universities and that I was helping to renew the venerable tradition of so-called academic freedom.

  When I got back to the department, two men stopped me at the entrance, showed me some sort of document, and demanded my identity card. They led me behind the porter’s lodge into the Youth Union committee room and began their interrogation.

  Where was I coming from?

  A procession.

  What did I mean by procession?

  At that moment I recalled Father’s recent advice not to say anything about what you were doing. Even if you were doing nothing at all.

  It was a procession of students.

  Who had organized it?

&n
bsp; I answered that I didn’t know, but they could certainly find out. (Everything was always organized by either the party or a Youth Union committee.)

  They yelled at me not to tell them what to do. They wanted me to tell them who had invited me to the procession.

  I really didn’t remember.

  What had I been disguised as?

  I hadn’t been disguised. I’d never possessed a disguise in my whole life.

  One of the men started shouting at me not to start pontificating. Who was I pretending to be?

  A man in a hat.

  They started to shriek that if I was trying to make fools of them, this would all end unpleasantly.

  I probably wanted to look like a farmer, I explained.

  Why? Did I have a farmer’s background?

  I said nothing.

  Why had I shouted antistate slogans?

  I said that I didn’t shout anything because I don’t shout slogans on principle.

  Then who was shouting antistate slogans if not you?

  I said I hadn’t heard anyone shouting any slogans.

  Two more detained students were brought in, two of my classmates dressed in Moravian folk costumes.

  My two men were obviously in a hurry to move on. The one who had been asking the questions now emphatically warned me not to think that the time had come for any sort of counterrevolutionary activity. The working class had made it possible for us to study so that we might become useful members of a Socialist society, not so that we could walk around the streets shouting antistate slogans.