My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  I still hadn’t produced a book, but I had published around ten short stories, several of which had obviously been influenced by Hemingway.

  I offered the collection of stories to Mladá fronta, but I was informed that even if the editors accepted the book, it would not come out for at least two years. Shortly thereafter I received an unexpected letter from the people at the Literary Fund. They had learned that I was preparing a book of short stories. To allow me to complete it in peace, they were offering me a six-month stipend equal to what I had earned at Květy. This fund was to be used exclusively for the completion of the book, and they also pointed out that the stipend could not be extended. At the end of the letter, however, they betrayed their true intentions in a thoroughly unofficial manner: Please accept our offer as it is intended—as an attempt to assist you in your current situation.

  I didn’t think too much about this unexpectedly accommodating and generous organization. On the other hand, when I mentioned this marvelous offer at home, my twenty-year-old brother noted drily, “They’re trying to buy you off.”

  The book I almost had ready was of course too thin—I needed one more story. I decided to set off on an assignment in the hope that fate would offer a marvelous subject. Several ideas came to mind, but in the end, I set out for the Most region northwest of Prague. I descended the Victorious February mine shaft and paid a visit to a chemical factory that was awesome in its enormousness. I even had time to look at the house whose foundations I had helped lay seven years earlier. I also learned that as winter approached one finds only smoke, fog, dirt, waste dumps, and smoldering mine shafts. The air finally got to me; I came down with the flu, and when my temperature topped forty degrees Celsius, I called home not knowing what to do.

  Father had to go to work but he said that right away he would send Jenda, who would at least get some driving practice. He had just received his license. He would arrive in two hours and bring me some blankets that mother told me to wrap myself in. I waited. A fog fell so thick that the car trip might take double the time.

  After more than three hours, I was called to the telephone, and Father, in a somewhat agitated voice, informed me that my brother had had an accident. The car was ready for the scrap heap, but Jenda had by some miracle come through without a scratch.

  I arrived home on the bus wrapped in borrowed blankets.

  *

  I quickly recovered from the flu and set out on another reporting assignment. I went to the Plzeň region, where the University Art Ensemble, of which Helena was a member, was having an assembly at the Žinkovy Chateau. Here I met several of her friends, among them the excellent graphic artist Mirek Klomínek. We started talking, and when I told him about my plan for a reportage expedition, he asked if I needed someone to create a pictorial accompaniment to my writing.

  Right there on the spot we agreed to travel to eastern Slovakia, to the strip of land that lay between the borders of Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union (not long ago it had been Carpathian Ruthenia and inhabited by Ruthenians, but today it is called Ukraine and populated by Ukrainians). I offered to write several reports for Literární noviny about this most remote part of our republic. So far nobody had written about these parts of the republic, and no one knew much about them, so my offer was gratefully accepted.

  Mirek Klomínek was not only a talented artist and good singer but also an athlete with a sense of adventure. When we laid out all the maps of the area we could get our hands on, we saw that the railway line ended in Stakčin. From there we could identify only small, often unpaved roads. Some villages, according to the maps, were accessible only by field paths. It seemed highly improbable that buses ran in this area. Neither of us owned a motorcycle (not to mention a car), so we decided to use our default means of transportation—bicycles.

  At the beginning of the summer of 1958, Mirek and I loaded our backpacks and boarded a train that would spirit us to the final station before the border with the Soviet Union.

  Královský Chlmec was not a very interesting town. Low, squat buildings stretched far and wide. The people spoke mostly Hungarian, and the capital, from where we had come, was for them almost another country, which, owing to an accidental series of historical circumstances, now ruled over them. We didn’t linger here, and after a couple of hours set off northward on our bicycles. From the first day of our journey I remember only one adventure. On a vast plain we took refuge from the taxing heat in a wine cellar. About two hours later we went back and mounted our bikes, but after a few minutes, worn out by the heat and drunk on wine, we lay down on the scorching ground. I must have fallen asleep for a little while because I was suddenly awakened by a curious thundering and the feeling that the earth below me was shuddering. I looked around and saw a herd of cattle approaching in a cloud of fine dust. It was something out of an American western, and I realized at once we were in fact in a foreign country.

  Slowly but surely we made our way across this exotic plain with the Laborec River flowing above our heads, or so it seemed, restrained by several-meter-tall embankments. Then we boarded a motor coach along with our bicycles and made it all the way to Snina.

  The most pitiful and backward region in the whole republic was ruled from Snina. The people here spoke a local dialect resembling a combination of Slovak and Russian. The first few days we more or less guessed at the meaning of what we heard. We visited local functionaries (who mostly spoke Slovak) and received many recommendations about people to meet.

  The maps had not lied—the asphalt roads soon came to an end, and all that remained were narrow and worn stony paths. Every few kilometers we had to patch up a punctured wheel.

  Then we set off for Uličská doliny. I had expected a romantic trip, I had expected poverty. But in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined all the things we stumbled upon here. In this still untouched countryside we chanced upon tiny cottages with minuscule windows, walls of unfired bricks, often just trampled dirt instead of a floor, and animals sometimes living together with people—though there were rarely any animals except chickens. Once we came upon a small wooden chapel on a hilltop, something out of a fairy tale. Inside were cheap icons, but when the worshippers (primarily women) gathered, we heard Eastern hymns so marvelous, so untamed and wild, that they knocked us off our feet. The women wore plain black dresses and skirts. And everywhere we came across the crippled and mentally ill. The former were victims of the war that had passed through here with all its cruelty fourteen years earlier. The latter were victims of moonshine.

  Most of the villages had no shops, or if there were shops, there was nothing to buy. The people lived on what they grew, and every now and then would purchase salt, sugar, yeast (as much as was needed to distill moonshine), and denatured alcohol (which could also be imbibed). Because there were no taverns along the way, we ate out of tin cans and slept wherever we could thanks to the hospitality of the villagers, usually somewhere in the kitchen—one on a bench, the other on the floor.

  The nearest doctor was in Snina. Sometimes a medic who had learned to treat battle wounds during the war could be found in a village—this skill came in handy because unexploded mines and other munitions lay scattered in the woods. Midwives, herbalists, and exorcists made up for the lack of doctors.

  Soon I saw how advantageous it was for my work that I had taken along an artist instead of a photographer. The ability to quickly draw a house, a cow, or a figure of the owner aroused admiration and wonder and was an excellent conversation starter. I listened to and recorded a great number of stories, legends, and superstitions; I heard epic, often tragic tales from the war.

  I also discovered something else one found only in such backward regions: how an old and venerable culture—habits and a way of life, costumes, songs, and rituals—quickly crumbles and disappears. A new culture of pop music, kitsch, transistor radios, nylon, and ready-made clothing was making its way into these regions. It was brought primarily by young men who had gone off for their two years of mili
tary training somewhere in the western part of the republic (it was a rule of the military authorities to place the recruits as far away from their homes as possible) and also by those who had left the village for work, and when they returned, they saw everything as unacceptably backward and unsophisticated. The new era, of course, penetrated these parts wearing comradely vestments. One goal was to establish agricultural cooperatives. I heard stories of agitators placing upon the table their strongest argument—a pistol—when trying to convince farmers to join.

  *

  Helena and I got married, and at twenty-seven I finally left home. (My father thought it was high time, my brother rejoiced because now he could have his own room, and Mother was worried I’d miss living there.)

  Although I truly loved Helena, I was not in a very celebratory mood. I was worried about how I would hold up in my role as husband, how I would fulfill this new obligation that I considered inviolable.

  On our honeymoon, we took a small plane to Poprad in the High Tatra Mountains, but on the way back (and for a long time Helena did not forgive me for this) I sent Helena home by train, while I took off in the opposite direction for Trebišov, where Mirek and my bicycle were waiting for me. Literární noviny was planning to publish our reportage from eastern Slovakia in installments, and I wanted to undertake another trip to the Uličská valley.

  Along with a life companion, I had acquired some new relatives. My in-laws were very quiet and kind people. They welcomed me as their own and generously allowed us the use of one of three rooms in their large apartment. (At the time, apartments were impossible to come by.)

  My mother-in-law had likewise been in Terezín during the war, but only for three months—her husband had not yielded to the pressure of the Nazi authorities to divorce his Jewish wife. Something unimaginable had happened there, something that had nearly cost her her life but had saved the life of her sister.

  During the final days of the war, as well as maintaining the existence of the Terezín ghetto, the Nazis started bringing in prisoners from other camps, which they had to hastily clean out before the approaching allied armies arrived. I remember the new prisoners well: men and women wearing light blue striped prison uniforms who had been in the worst camps. They had been forced to travel a great distance by foot or by train crammed into boxcars, where they were locked up without food or water. Then they were unloaded, dead or dying, and left to sit for hours on the grass near the rail tracks.

  My mother-in-law knew that her sister had been imprisoned in Auschwitz, and even though it would be almost impossible to find her, she set off looking. (We had also tried looking for Father at the time.) A miracle occurred—she found her sister: emaciated, at death’s door, half unconscious, and burning up with spotted fever. She loaded her on her back and brought her to the overcrowded camp hospital, where she visited her until she herself became infected. It was already the end of the war, and doctors were coming from Prague to help save the sick. After many months, both sisters recovered.

  I met Aunt Andulka thirteen years after these events. She was an exceptionally elegant and cultured lady who had mastered several languages. From our very first meeting, she came to hold for me a special significance. She mentioned a book by Isaac Deutscher that might interest me, concerning the battles between Stalin and Trotsky, that is, the brutal and bloody way Stalin achieved power.

  Of course the book was in English, and at the time my knowledge of that language was hardly good enough for the most primitive conversation. My new aunt offered to translate for me, and so I would visit her small flat in Pankrác carrying a thick notebook in which I would copy all the important passages. This is how I first became acquainted in detail with Stalin’s diabolical dictatorship. For the first time I read about the monstrous show trials, Stalin’s betrayal of his former friends, his collusion with his recent enemies to achieve absolute power.

  This bloody tale liberated me from my illusions concerning what had actually happened in the “first Socialist country” and helped me to see what I had been afraid to admit until then. I finally realized that in a society in which all means of expressing disagreement are suppressed and every word of doubt is considered grounds for prosecution and subsequent execution, only the despotism of the leader comes to power.

  *

  At the beginning of the new year, my father showed me, as if embarrassed, a piece of paper with the heading:

  Communist Party of Czechoslovakia

  Central Committee

  Notice to appear on Wednesday, January 14, 1959, at 8:30 a.m. at the Committee of Party Control of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Prague, Příkopy #35 to Comrade Hasík, who will inform you of the decision by the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia regarding your membership in the party.

  Because the date had already passed, I asked my father how it had turned out.

  He told me to turn over the paper.

  On the other side of the austere invitation—or, rather order—Father had written in his large and clear handwriting:

  I was informed that upon my return from prison, I had participated in few political rallies, and therefore the Secretariat forbade the renewal of my membership. I responded by pointing out that I had dedicated myself assiduously to my scientific work, which was certainly more important for society than any May Day agitprop activities.

  At first I wanted to say that everything had actually turned out fine, but then I gathered that he saw this rejection as a continuation of the injustice that was being perpetrated upon him. So I merely said, “They certainly gave you an idiotic excuse.”

  Essay: On Propaganda, p. 481

  11

  After the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, the leadership of the party, of which I was still a member, decided once again to silence even minor hints of criticism and issued an order to “change” the editorship of the Československý spisovatel publishing house. The purge, which fortunately this time was not a bloody one, replaced the more enlightened editorial party members with less enlightened and more obedient ones. I was still far removed from the activity of writers or even party circles and thus heard almost nothing about the changes.

  However, the new editor in chief, Jan Pilař, knew about me from Literární noviny, which he had directed up until then. He had treated me kindly and even managed to secure me a special fee for my eastern Slovak reportage. Now he called me into his office and told me the publishing house had great plans. He wanted to initiate a series devoted exclusively to prose and reportage dealing with contemporary matters and call it Life Around Us. He was intent on including my little book about eastern Slovakia and asked if I’d like to be in charge of the series.

  Working as an editor for a publishing house was not a job that enticed me. It struck me as less challenging than writing reportage, but I had no other offers. I could imagine what was written in my cadre file after I’d been fired from Květy, and I couldn’t really expect another magazine or newspaper to take me on. So I accepted the offer.

  The offices of Československý spisovatel were located in the very center of Prague in a marvelous art nouveau building. It was listed as a national monument, and this designation certainly helped preserve its splendid façade. Inside, however, it had been disfigured by partitions and fittings. I was placed in a tiny, dimly lit room that served as a passageway with a window looking out onto a gallery. The proofreaders in the staff room behind me had it better than I did simply because no one could walk through their room.

  The editorial staff was divided into several sections. One was in charge of poetry, another of specialized literature. I came under prose. I was certainly not a good editor for I did not enjoy advising authors how to write. (The author should surely know this himself; otherwise what kind of author was he?) But dispensing this sort of advice was one of an editor’s primary duties. He was responsible for the quality and the content of the book, perhaps even more than the
author himself. I was somewhat better as a copyreader. Sometimes I could recognize talent, even if it was buried beneath a mass of raw text. Soon the Secretariat started overwhelming me with manuscripts from unknown hacks. All this reading seemed like a waste of time, but later I came to see that it was not without its advantages. For the rest of my life I harbored within me a revulsion for all clichés and hackneyed phrases that bad authors and sometimes even otherwise good journalists employ.

  Every now and then a truly excellent text would materialize. Once I was presented with a slender partial manuscript by someone named Alexandr Klimentiev. This story, entirely devoid of Socialist rhetoric, was titled Marie and dealt with a deceived and despairing wife. It was written with unusual feeling for both language and narrative. I found the manuscript so engaging that even before anyone else had read it, I took off to see the author to tell him how much I admired his story. Upon the recommendation of the publishing house, Klimentiev (who was only two years older than I was) received a stipend from the Literary Fund in order to complete the novel. He published it under his Bohemized name, Alexandr Kliment, and Marie became one of the most successful prose pieces of the period. I also managed to track down Ludvík Vaculík, the author of a pedagogical diary I had read several years earlier. He too received a stipend, and from his slender bundle of notes emerged the extensive novel A Busy House, one of the works inaugurating the new wave in Czech prose.

  Another book of the new wave, Ladislav Fuks’s world-famous Mr. Theodore Mundstock, had a rather bizarre genesis, however.

  Several copyreaders had to read each book, and disagreements often arose concerning their quality. In this case, everyone agreed it was an extraordinary manuscript, perhaps a bit morbid, but the war, still in recent memory, was a morbid subject. As one of the copyreaders, I recommended the book for publication and gave it no more thought. About a year later, one of my colleagues came to see me. She’d brought with her Fuks’s manuscript, which looked as if it had swelled to almost twice its original size. She told me she’d received the book to edit, but the author was driving her crazy. Any suggestion Fuks was given, he immediately complied with, and with such verve that the story was gradually losing all sense. I’d been the first to recommend the book, so perhaps I could speak with the author and advise him what to do with the manuscript. I thumbed through the pages and saw that the story did indeed fall apart. Some passages were digressive and meandering. I called the author and asked if he could find a moment to stop by the publisher’s office. He turned up and, even before I could open my mouth, started overwhelming me with thanks and assured me how much he respected me. He had read both my books and hoped I would forgive his presumptuousness in telling me they were simply brilliant. He then made an enthusiastic gesture, and I was afraid he was going to embrace and start kissing me. I thanked him for his praise and asked if he still had the original version of his novel. He said he did but was now ashamed of it. I asked if he could lend it to me. When I reread the text, it seemed so good that nothing had to be changed. I invited the author in again and told him that the original text was excellent. As a sort of apology for all the fiddle-faddle he’d gone through, I added that, of course, there were a few minor things that could be expressed better; for example the figurative phrase “rose-colored dreams” seemed to me a little clichéd. It would be enough to cross out “rose-colored” and replace it perhaps with something like “nice” or “comforting.” Or, on the other hand, he could illuminate or expand upon “rose-colored.” Enthusiastic assent gleamed in the author’s eyes, and I hastily told him not to revise a thing, for goodness’ sake, just to read the text through one more time, and then we’d send it straight to the printer.