My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  The kind-looking custodian welcomed me to Dobříš and showed me the way to my room. She gave me the key and informed me that quiet hours were after 10 p.m.

  The castle, which the state had appropriated (as the Nazis had before them) from the Colloredo-Mansfeld dynasty and magnanimously donated to writers, was under the administration of the Literary Fund. Thanks to the continuous income it received (a 2 percent royalty for every book or article published), not only could the castle be maintained in decent condition but some modifications could be undertaken as well. One of them was the transformation of the rooms in the front wing into studies.

  The tiny rooms were indeed sparsely furnished: desk, chair, armchair, wardrobe, and bed. My windows looked out on a road that wound sharply uphill from the front of the castle and upon which heavy trucks climbed with clamorous effort.

  I quickly unpacked my things, pulled out a sheet of paper, and started writing with the utmost resolve. The cars outside started distracting me, so I closed the windows, but I still couldn’t concentrate. I forced myself to read several previous pages of my manuscript to immerse myself in the environment of my hero, but my new alien surroundings would not permit it.

  I went downstairs to the porter’s lodge and asked the way to the garden.

  All I had to do was cross the courtyard and open the glass doors, and I’d find myself in the park.

  The doors were already wide open. A French park spread out before me with carefully tended flowerbeds and yellowish gravel paths, terraces, statues, and a fountain from which stone horses were drinking. It was a scene straight out of a movie, something almost unreal during these Socialist times. Several women were sitting on benches taking the sun. I walked for about an hour around the park, collected a few mushrooms, and tried in vain to concentrate on my story. I climbed the steep forested hillside and set off along a narrow path back to the castle. At one point the trees parted, and I caught sight of the magnificent structure of the castle from a different point of view: the red baroque walls appeared like blazing flames among the green vegetation, and I saw several figures crawling slowly along the yellow park paths like large multicolored beetles. I sat down on a boulder and felt as if I were in the middle of a dream. Soon I would awaken and find myself in a barracks, flea-bitten and hungry, fearing what the day would bring.

  I walked at a leisurely pace back to the castle, overcame my feeling of not belonging, and entered the dining room. It was still half empty. I knew several of the authors who dined here from the publishing house, but I didn’t dare sit down with them. I found the most remote empty table and ordered dinner.

  Along the sidewall near the entrance you could not miss a long table at which our most famous authors were sitting. I recognized Jan Drda, then Milan Jariš, on whose concentration camp stories my wife was writing her dissertation. A little later Jan Otčenášek, the author of the prize-winning Citizen Brych, appeared, and then Josef Kainar with his pretty wife. When I was leaving I had to walk past their table, and Jan Drda asked me not to rush off but to have a seat. His wife, Alice, told him I played Mariáš and they needed a fourth.

  *

  I was getting ready to write my first novel, and I thought I would try to articulate all my opinions on the meaning of life, love, the war, and justice. I was afraid I was not well enough acquainted with life in the provinces where the action of my novel took place, but as I continued writing it came to seem less important. A novel is, after all, an invention associated primarily with an author’s thoughts, with his imagination and his ability to create a world of his own, which can, but does not have to, precisely resemble the real world. I was enchanted by the opportunity to fabricate. I made more than two dozen characters come to life.

  A person feels nowhere more free, and at the same time more responsible, than in a world of his own creation. Suddenly I stopped paying attention to what they’d tried to pound into our heads at school, and dismissed the idea that the hero had to be a typical representative of his environment. Even if he was entirely atypical, he could live if I managed to breathe life into him.

  Immeasurable poverty and the constant threat of flooding afflicted the countryside. The period of my novel was wartime. It had deprived some of their lives and others of their property. Others were weighed down with guilt or, on the contrary, well-deserved admiration. Then began a period that promised a happy and unfettered life but that actually brought further suffering—all this offered a multitude of extreme and sweeping plots and entanglements. I was learning that people’s fortunes, if described in the key moments of their lives, say more about life, about its values, erroneous faiths, and illusions, than lengthy meditations. I had my engineer join the Communist Party. I chose such a hero not because I had to, but because by depicting his fortunes I could place the repeatedly proclaimed ideals against a reality that was so different.

  I spent ten entire days cut off from people and wrote about eighty pages. I concluded with a lament:

  It is probably easier to kill everyone, enclose the country with barbed wire; anything is easier than giving people freedom. . . . We could imagine it all too easily, we discovered the ideal and believed we had found the path to human happiness. But how many times have humans discovered what they believed to be the ideal? And how many times have they managed to make it a reality?

  Because the most significant parts of my novel took place in the ’50s, I gave it the somewhat symbolic title Hour of Silence.

  *

  The post-February government mercilessly forbade authors to publish if they did not support the regime. The Czechoslovak government tried to follow the Soviet model and replaced their work with the production of new working-class authors. Nothing of interest, however, came from it. Thus those in charge of culture (as well as everything else) decided to give new and young writers a chance. Several literary newcomers and their works joined the ranks of official authors, but most of them were against the dogmatism that raged about Socialist themes. Suddenly manuscripts began to appear with nonpolitical prose or even prose that was critical of society. Surprisingly, the overseeing offices allowed their publication (even though Josef Škvorecký’s novel The Cowards provoked furious criticism among the “old and loyal” comrades).

  I had only one publishing idea. Until now, perhaps for financial reasons, prose works were not published in book form unless they were at least four signatures long. Years might pass before a short story collection reached the required length. Waiting, however, was dangerous. What could come out this year might be banned the next. I suggested a new series of smaller dimensions, so that a book of perhaps only three stories or a shorter novella could be published. Most of the editors, finally even Pilař, liked my idea. We decided to call the series the Little Library of the World Around Us and soon succeeded in publishing several texts that became harbingers, or even the basis, of the new wave of Czech prose. (Three Kundera short stories under the title Laughable Loves; Bohumil Hrabal’s ingenious single-sentence-long Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age; one of Škvorecký’s best prose pieces, Emöke; and some wonderful pieces by Alexander Kliment, Milan Uhde, and Jan Trefulka.)

  At the time, the beginning of the 1960s, when party control was still in place, we were already receiving information about artistic developments beyond our borders. In literature, it was the wonderful review Světová literatura that saw to this. It published the first translations of the French nouveau roman and the works of the foremost authors from around the world. We could read the first examples of magic realism and acquaint ourselves with theater of the absurd.

  Experimental texts began to appear, at least in manuscript form, along with their passionate advocates as well as their detractors.

  While working at the publishing house, I got to know most of the prose authors from several generations and their opinions about art, which then, unlike those in very recent times, differed sharply. I felt no need to profess allegiance to a certain group or literary trend. If anything brought me t
ogether with some friends, it was our opinions on politics rather than any literary credos or formal approaches.

  If someone is genuinely endeavoring to create something, he determines what he wants to say and seeks out his own rules, his own arrangement. If he is unable to do this, nothing will come of it. A writer has at his disposal the words of his language, his own experience, and his fantasy. He must possess the ability to perceive the delicate fabric of the work he is trying to usher into existence. External injunctions are worth nothing or are even harmful. It is true that almost every artist who lays hold of a trendy formula and manages to exploit it can not only create an artifact but also achieve recognition or even fame. Fashionable formulas offer success to average and uncreative individuals and even swindlers. According to the example of great artists or the latest exclamations of theoreticians, they line up letters or cobble together a story; pile up tin cans, tiles, or stones; or douse a canvas with paint. Why not? In all branches of human activity, the average has always prevailed over genuine creativity or even genius, and there has never been a dearth of proficient frauds.

  *

  It was at this time that I was summoned to the secretariat of the Writers’ Union and asked if I’d like to go to Poland. According to a mutual exchange agreement between our union and theirs, one of our authors was supposed to go to Poland, for three entire months if possible. My hosts would pay all my expenses, and I’d receive a daily food allowance as well. My task was to write several reports from my trip—something I knew how to do.

  I objected that I didn’t know Polish.

  The secretariat staff told me I could go in three months’ time, and in three months one could learn even Turkish.

  This I doubted. But one thing I did not doubt was that they had looked for someone interested in going to Poland but hadn’t found anyone. Had it been a trip to France or Italy . . .

  I couldn’t just get up and leave work for three months.

  But they’d already asked at the publisher’s office and obtained approval.

  I said I’d have to consult with my family. But just in case (not to waste any time), I immediately purchased a Polish textbook.

  I knew little about Polish history and even less about Polish culture. I’d read something by Henryk Sienkiewicz, but his works didn’t make any special impression. Adam Mickiewicz’s novels Pan Tadeusz and Forefathers’ Eve didn’t speak to me. Of contemporary Polish literature I loved two of my peers, Sławomir Mrożek and Jakob Hlasek. I liked Mrożek’s wittiness and biting satire and Hlasek’s stories for their special rawness or even crudeness. I’d read something by Bruno Schulz—another interesting author who, like Kafka, had been concealed from us in school, someone with whom I had in common my spinning of dreamlike worlds. I liked Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski and admired some wonderful Polish films: for example, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Night Train and Mother Joan of the Angels and Andrzej Wajda’s Sewer and Innocent Sorcerers.

  I knew a little more about Polish politics. I’d followed the developments of the bloody Poznań protests with the naive hope that the new chair of the party, Władysław Gomułka (his comrades had nearly sent him to the gallows a few years earlier), would be able to combine socialism with freedom. Shortly after he was elected, he announced that the current system oppressed and wronged the character and the conscience of the people. In this system, human honor has been spat upon. . . . whereas now the silent, enslaved minds were beginning to wake from the stupor caused by the poison smoke of lies, falsehoods, and sanctimoniousness. We have finished with this system or we are finishing with it once and for all. Such a public condemnation of our regime was unthinkable.

  But the most important thing for me was that at the moment I did not have a topic to write about. Perhaps I would stumble across it on the journey.

  I decided to accept the invitation. I convinced my friend Mirek Klomínek to go with me to draw some accompanying pictures, and I would try to get him the same invitation I had.

  In the end he didn’t get it, but the Polish Writers’ Union was willing to pay a month’s accommodation for the two of us. Fortunately, my food allowance was sufficient for both of us to travel by train or bus and dine in cheap canteens.

  Before the departure I devoted my spare time to learning Polish. I took a subscription to the Polish newspaper Politika, which published socioscientific essays that would never be allowed in Czechoslovakia, and from the Polish Cultural Center I acquired some original stories by Sławomir Mrożek. I discovered that Polish was not that difficult for someone who knew Czech, Slovak, and Russian; had heard a bit of Bulgarian; and had moreover studied Old Church Slavonic. Also, Polish seemed, at least at first glance, to resemble old Czech most of all. When we finally departed, I was certain I would be able to manage any necessary conversation.

  Klomínek and I traveled across Poland, from the south to the north and back again. We stayed in Warsaw, Rzeszów, Gdańsk, Gdynia, and even Łódź.

  I soon learned that Poland was afflicted with an even worse scarcity of goods than we were, but at the same time there was a small but enterprising private trade that offered a selection of materials that were in short supply, especially fashionable (and almost certainly smuggled) goods. This was already a sign of a more unfettered society. More important, however, at least to me, was the greater freedom of the press and the availability of foreign books. I spent a half day in the frightful Palace of Culture, where foreign books were stored in the basement. There were hundreds of books in German, English, and of course Russian and sociological and political studies that were patently non-Marxist, which was the main thing. Such bookstores did not exist in Czechoslovakia. I knew that here I would spend all my remaining money. The only thing I hesitated over was what language to buy them in. Finally I chose, probably sensibly, English.

  Klomínek and I returned to Prague, where I stayed for a brief visit, but then I went back to Poland—this time alone. I had decided to visit Auschwitz, but I did not dare write about this place where so many of my loved ones and millions of others I hadn’t known had been murdered.

  In this desolate wasteland teeming with the remnants of its previous horrors, I was oppressed by an awareness of something I had already begun to forget: Everything I had heard and read had actually occurred. I saw the gas chambers and thought again of the thousands of people who had been brought here to be slaughtered.

  In Kraków, I wrote a long letter to Helena, not about what I’d seen but to tell her I loved her. I also bought a bundle of postcards with all kinds of animals on them: a hippopotamus, a lion, a parrot, a crocodile, even a cuckoo clock. Every evening I wrote a short fairy tale on one of the postcards and sent it to Michal. It was probably the first correspondence he ever received in his life.

  I attended the theater as well. I remember a play by Tadeusz Różewicz called Our Small Stabilization. It came highly recommended, but I was disappointed because it so blatantly hovered between Ionesco and Beckett.

  I visited a few painters, theater people, and writers of my generation. All of them lived in small apartments suffused with tobacco smoke (destroyed by the war, Poland had an even worse housing situation than we did).

  We held opinions that were similar on politics, less so on literature. Compared with them, I was a conservative. I believed that literature had a mission and thus a responsibility. I also didn’t feel the need to get drunk and disdain the world and human narrow-mindedness. It seemed to me that here—certainly owing in part to the greater political freedom—artists were reveling in fashionable trends that their colleagues professed in countries wearied by freedom.

  I managed to cajole a short interview out of Mrożek in Warsaw; I didn’t get to meet Hlasek, who had fled to Israel, where he continued to drink himself to death.

  I don’t like it when people make generalizations about nations or ethnicities, claiming that Germans are disciplined, Czechs have a sense of humor, the English are tight-laced, the Russians are drunkards, Jews are busines
smen, and Gypsies are thieves. I did not attempt any such generalizations about the Poles even though I noticed that most of them went to church, and I ran into monks and nuns everywhere I went. The Poles also like to talk about their glorious past. Their heroism of both recent and ancient times is shrouded in an almost mystical reverence, as if they are trying to convince themselves that being a Pole is a calling. And it was precisely these topics that were argued about passionately in the newspapers and in private. In a slender booklet I wrote about my trip, in which I combined reportage, conversations, feuilletons, and essays, I quoted an advertising billboard that somewhat suggested this:

  THE SCRIPTURES EXIST IN 830 LANGUAGES

  AND DIALECTS OF THE WORLD.

  THIS INSTITUTION WAS FOUNDED IN 1840.

  IN POLAND IT HAS EXISTED SINCE 1816.

  *

  Helena noticed me trying to decipher the book about socialism and democracy with the help of an English dictionary and said this simply would not do. A few days later a little man appeared at our door and introduced himself as Vlček, previously Wolf. He told me that upon the wish of my dear wife he would perfect my knowledge of English. From then on he came twice a week and induced me to speak the language of Shakespeare and Dickens. He had an odd teaching method. The only available books in English at the time were published in the Soviet Union. Besides the history of the Communist Party, the works of Karl Marx, and the life of Lenin translated from Russian, it was possible to find brief retellings of classic novels such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. These books were used for the study of English in Soviet schools. For the youngest students they published fairy tales. I had to buy every volume available, and during each lesson I would retell one of the stories. Mr. Wolf listened in silence (and probably in pain) and then pointed out my grossest grammatical errors by saying that English really had no obligatory grammar. He explained something about a strict sequence of tenses and forbade me to use the conjunction “if” in the future tense.