My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  Our journal was once again proscribed, this time irrevocably, and I was once again kicked out of the party. Inasmuch as during the time after my ID card had been returned, I hadn’t paid dues or gone to meetings, my expulsion was so incontestable that I wasn’t even informed about it, nor did anyone demand I submit my party card.

  *

  Two days after we left for the United States—the penultimate day of August 1969—our government, which by then had been completely altered, tightened the rules regarding exit permits. The borders securely—or, rather, dangerously—closed behind us.

  Once again we were greeted at the Detroit airport, this time by representatives of the department and Professor Matějka. During the drive to Ann Arbor, the professor explained how to proceed with the teaching of Czech and pointed out the building that housed our department. He also suggested I stop by and see the secretary, Mrs. Parrott, who would help me out and offer advice. Apparently she was the angel of the entire Slavic department.

  Then we stopped in front of a large apartment building on Geddes Avenue. They had assumed we would want something fairly inexpensive, and this apartment was only three hundred dollars a month (about four times as much as our apartment in Prague and roughly the same size), but we would also have to pay a three-hundred-dollar deposit, which would be returned to us when we moved out. The apartment had the advantage of being close to the department, and I could easily walk to work. So at first I could get along without a car but, as I would discover, I would need one as soon as possible.

  The apartment was on the second floor and had two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room with a kitchen corner, and a large bathroom containing two sinks. The bedroom windows looked out on the low walls of a cemetery across the street. I was surprised that instead of paths, there were little roads running between the individual graves. The living room looked out on an asphalt courtyard that primarily served as a parking lot. In the kitchen there was an electric stove and a large refrigerator. The cabinets were loaded with pots and pans.

  While my wife unpacked and the children explored the apartment, I set off for the department. Immediately I was struck and amazed by an enormous and familiar symbol of communism: a hammer and sickle. Someone had painted it on the carriageway of a bridge I had to cross on the way to school.

  I was greeted in the department by Mrs. Parrott, a young, slender, elegant, and helpful woman. She acquainted me with my teaching schedule and gave me a list of my students, some of whom had beautiful Czech names such as Janáček, Lišková, Jelínková (of course, without the diacritical marks). Then the secretary gave me lots of other good advice: which health insurance to choose, which schools would be best for our children, where the nearest grocery store and shopping center were. She also pointed out that the university operated a bus, which students and faculty could ride free, and that I would receive all necessary office supplies from her. Then she led me to my office, which, unlike all my previous workspaces, did not overlook a courtyard. It had a beautiful view of the tall tower, the dominating feature of the city. Then I noticed a bottle standing on my desk. The secretary informed me the dean had sent it as a welcoming gift. The bottle, which I immediately placed in a cabinet, contained an entire half gallon of sherry.

  *

  I had eight students. Some of them, despite their Czech names, knew not a word of Czech. Yet there was a student from a Czech community in Texas that had survived for over a hundred years. She’d brought with her an endearing archaic form of our native tongue.

  Even during my own student days, I hated it when a professor simply read to the class what he could have handed out at the beginning and allowed the students to read at their leisure. But was my English good enough to allow me to improvise? In the end, at least for the first few lectures, I compromised: Some passages I read, and in between I would digress into history or touch upon the present day.

  Certainly in part because their ancestors (if not they themselves) came from other countries and continents, Americans behave graciously and good-naturedly toward foreigners. From the very beginning, my colleagues invited Helena and me to parties and introduced us to another dozen or so colleagues and their wives, and they all told us to call them by their first names.

  The children started attending school. The mother of one of her classmates took Nanda under her wing and invited her over for help with English. Michal complained that he understood almost not a word, but unlike some students, he had no problems distinguishing individual letters.

  Those first few weeks must have been difficult for them. A veil of linguistic incomprehensibility concealed their world. My daughter enjoyed the fact that instead of sitting in the classroom all the time, they often went outside; and in the park there was something she’d never seen in Prague—rocking animals on springs. Once, when the radio was on, Nanda started yelling excitedly for us to come listen. To our amazement, a local Detroit station was broadcasting in Czech. Much to their disappointment, the children soon learned it was only once a week for thirty minutes. It was paid for by a local funeral home trying to secure all potential clients of Czech extraction.

  We saw funerals almost every day from our window. Grave diggers always arrived first, and if rain threatened or if there was too much sun, tarpaulins would go up around the grave site. Then the hearse would arrive along with other cars bearing the bereaved. The cars parked wherever they could near the grave site. If it was raining, the mourners wouldn’t even make use of the tarpaulins but stayed in the car. Then the priest would appear and speak to both the people and the automobiles.

  When there was no funeral, black squirrels dashed about the cemetery grounds, and students played soccer between the graves. I soon learned that in this country, it was not becoming to speak or even think about death, and it did not seem necessary to demonstrate any special respect toward the departed, since death, in fact, did not exist.

  We soon discovered that it was difficult to cope without an automobile. Ann Arbor is a medium-sized university town with about a hundred thousand inhabitants, but because America has much more open space than Europe, the city is spread out. So I started looking for a used car in the classifieds. I was intrigued by an ad by a certain Mr. Zizala, who I correctly assumed was formerly Mr. Žížala. He lived at the other end of the city, and one of my students gladly drove me to see him. Mr. Zizala was a mechanic by trade, and this aroused in me the hope that the Chevrolet Impala he was offering—the color of a light coffee—would be in decent shape. This man, whom I met only once in my life and for less than thirty minutes, remains fixed in my mind. He had emigrated less than two years earlier but already owned a small house and workshop (certainly mortgaged). It was his unbelievable mixture of English and Czech that stood out. He assured me his car was super-duper and that since I was from Prague, he would give me a special férst reyt prais. He sold me a brand-new automobile for seven hundred dollars and wished me fayn draivovat.

  The car altered our way of life entirely. Until then, we had walked to the local grocery store, made our purchases, and then, to the astonishment of everyone looking on, pushed the clattering shopping cart home past university buildings and the cemetery on Geddes Avenue while motorized argosies roared past us. Now, for the first time, we drove to the shopping center outside town.

  As slightly awestruck visitors from a country that was in the midst of constructing the most advanced system of society where every person would soon be able to take according to his needs, we entered an immense (and ridiculous) empire of overabundance. To the sound of elevator music, we walked among piles of blouses, skirts, dresses, scarves, coats, and underwear; among millions of shoes, boots, perfumes, powders, forest scents, and eliminators of all unpleasant smells. We could touch anything we wanted and try on anything that could be tried on, and, according to hypotheses of scientifically based marketing studies, we were supposed to fall into that state of ecstasy so often described as a loss of all judgment within these cathedrals of capitalism.

/>   *

  At first money was tight. Fortunately, I started receiving invitations to lecture at various universities, including Indiana University in Bloomington, a university in Kansas City, and Columbia University in New York.

  I prepared a fairly political talk in which I tried as best I could to summarize the central ideals of the Prague Spring and describe the way the official policies of the Communist Party differed from the demands of its citizens, who longed for a renewal of democracy, free elections, and an independent judiciary. At the time, interest in occupied Czechoslovakia, and primarily the Prague Spring, was enormous.

  The young generation had succumbed to left-wing ideals: The most radical wore T-shirts sporting pictures of Che Guevara, Castro, or Chairman Mao; they read Daniel Cohn-Bendit or Sartre. Among their idols were Noam Chomsky and Rudi Dutschke. Now these idols were joined by, at least for the more moderate, Alexander Dubček and his “Socialism with a Human Face.” (Of course, almost everyone at the university, especially the students, was against the war in Vietnam.)

  Then an unsigned (and sensibly so) document containing ten points arrived for me from Czechoslovakia. The preamble read:

  Many capable, enthusiastic, and duly elected people have been compelled to leave their jobs or their appointments. . . . Societal organizations are being undermined by violent intervention; the public has been excluded from participation in national politics; questions of deep consequence are being decided by groups of individuals instead of democratic organs of the country. Not a single Czech agency has arisen from the will of the people. . . . On top of everything else, censorship is making it impossible to discuss these issues publicly, which is quite convenient for people of limited thinking and a dictatorial disposition, for old opportunists and new careerists, because they can claim what they want, falsify facts, slander individuals, and organize campaigns in newspapers that are responsible to no one. At the same time, they tell the people straight to their faces that now the truth can finally be told!

  The authors and signatories of the ten points demanded the departure of Soviet troops, whose presence they considered the cause of unrest in society. They protested against the purges, against the dissolution of most voluntary civic organizations, and against the renewal of strict censorship. The important point was number five, which began with this proclamation:

  We do not recognize the role of the Communist Party as an organization of power and its primacy over government organs that should be answerable to the people. Placing party membership above citizenship is repugnant.

  The ninth point called for civil disobedience.

  When censorship silences critics, when crude intervention into government organs is supposed to frighten people, when dishonorable journalists with miserable standards are obviously preparing the atmosphere for worse things to come, we announce plainly and clearly that the right to disagree with the emperor and his rule is an ancient and natural right of man. Even the enlightened monarchies were able to make use of it as a constructive force. Therefore, we ask how this question will be resolved here. And we reserve the right to disagree, which we will express by resisting, through lawful means, everything that goes against our reason and against our conviction as citizens attempting to achieve a socialism that is both democratic and humane. . . . We express our solidarity with people who are persecuted for their political views.

  The sender of the document, whose handwriting I recognized in several of the passages as that of my friend Ludvík Vaculík, added a postscript noting that some of the signatories had already been arrested.

  *

  To make up for the little time I had been devoting to the children, I decided we should take a trip to Lake Erie, the closest of the Great Lakes. We parked in a spot that seemed suitably close to the water and, without suspecting anything ill, set off on a path that seemed to lead to the shore. We did not notice the sign informing us this was private property.

  Suddenly, a man appeared out of nowhere pointing a rifle at as and shouting something I took to be: Not one more step or I shoot! As in a scene from a fatuous gangster film, we were told to raise our hands. In vain, I tried to explain to the apparent owner that I was not a criminal but merely a foreigner teaching at the university who wanted to show his children the lake. We made an about-face, were allowed to put our hands down, and, under the constant watch of the man with the rifle, we marched back to our car. Thus we became vividly acquainted with one of the pillars of American civil liberties: the inviolability of private property.

  At the beginning of winter, an unfamiliar man called and informed me in Czech that he was a professor at a Catholic college in Saint Louis. He taught drama and invited me to the premiere of my play The Master, which he had been putting together.

  Since childhood, I’d loved Mark Twain and, because of him, the Mississippi, the queen of rivers. Saint Louis lay on the bank of this river.

  I succeeded in getting away for three days. I traveled to Hannibal, where I visited the house in which the famous boat pilot had spent his childhood and where, for myself and millions of other readers, lived Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

  I awaited the premiere of The Master with trepidation. It was supposed to be performed on a small stage belonging to the college. The director was a Czech postwar émigré who confided to me that at home he had been sentenced to death in absentia. The previous spring he was informed that he could be rehabilitated, but the Soviets had invaded before he’d had a chance to reply. I was surprised by how ardently he followed the events back home; he even allowed himself an idiosyncrasy: His wristwatch was set to Prague time, which differed from the Mississippi basin by seven hours. The director enthusiastically talked to me about my plays. He liked The Master because of the image of a fanatical faith in the redemptive role of desolation. Then, with some embarrassment, he admitted that he’d run into a little problem while putting together the play. The college was exclusively women, and there were two female roles in my play and three roles for men. It was this play, however, that he wanted to stage, so he took the liberty of turning one of the male roles into a female one.

  He glanced at me and added that he understood my misgivings, but I would see that it worked quite well. To my relief, he revealed to me that he himself would be playing the role of the grave digger, and the woman who would be playing the old male professor was an old professor herself. She was extremely talented, and he was convinced I would be hearing of her in the future.

  Armed with this information, I took a seat in the front row of the theater.

  To my astonishment—perhaps this was due to my reduced sensitivity to the English language or my expectations of the worst—it really did work quite well.

  I consoled myself by imagining that instead of the Three Sisters, I would one day see the Three Brothers (in a men’s university production), and the uninitiated spectators would be none the wiser.

  *

  Christmas was fast approaching. A compatriot of mine named Timoteus Pokora was on a study trip through the department of Asian languages and literatures. We’d met here in Michigan and knew each other more by sight. He had come here with his wife and son, and his stipend was barely sufficient. He stopped by my office one day with the departmental newsletter, in which he’d circled a small announcement. The members of some sort of Reform church in Midland, Texas, were inviting foreign students to spend the week of Christmas with them free of charge. The application deadline was today. I agreed that it was a generous offer, but Texas was a bit out of the way and, besides, I wasn’t a student. I refrained from mentioning to Mr. Pokora that his half-bald head and elderly appearance did not strike me as exactly boyish.

  He objected that they wouldn’t check up on us and, besides, he still considered himself a student, and this invitation was interesting if only because it was Texas. When else would we be able go there?

  It slowly dawned on me that he’d be glad to accept the invitation but didn’t have enough money for the trip. It wou
ld be cheaper if we went in my car; of course, he said he would contribute money for gasoline. Gas was so cheap, though, that I didn’t need any contribution. It just seemed embarrassing to try to pass myself off as a student.

  Mr. Pokora maintained that we were all essentially students until the day we died, and most of the students here had more money than the two of us put together. Could either of us afford a weeklong vacation in Texas? Did I realize what an opportunity this would be for our children?

  I said that, in my case, an entire week was out of the question; I’d feel like a fraud.

  With this decision, my compatriot left to telephone Midland and in less than an hour delightedly informed me that we were expected—and, of course, we could extend or shorten our stay as we wished. He was of the opinion that my worries were exaggerated. Timoteus learned that Midland was the business center of Texas petroleum production and one of the richest cities in the United States. The Midland church would assuredly not be impoverished.

  So a few days later, the seven of us crammed into the Impala and embarked on a trip to Texas.

  When you drive through this vast country from north to south, you realize that in addition to the America of extravagant residences, mansions, skyscrapers, slums, farmhouses, and wooden colonial structures, there is another America—an America of freeways, a landscape of gas stations, billboards, and neon, enormous signs providing directions and distances in hundreds of miles, signs with highway and freeway numbers. There are speed-limit signs, signs with telephone numbers in case of emergency, repair shops, fast-food restaurants, rest stops for truck drivers, an America of motels and hotels, where you can spend the night without anyone demanding to see your identity card, just the license plate number of your car, and that’s in case it gets stolen. When I was reading Nabokov’s Lolita, I had the feeling that the author was much more fascinated by this bizarre and colorful world of freeway anonymity—in which you can conceal infidelity and much worse atrocities—than he was by the love affair between a grown man and his underage stepdaughter.