My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  Before our guests arrived, two black Tatra 603s parked around the corner of our street. I went over to one of the cars and asked the driver if he was looking for anyone.

  He told me not to worry about it and rolled up the window. His physiognomy told me more about him than if he’d presented his service card.

  That evening, we spoke uninhibitedly with our celebrated colleague about what had befallen Czech culture as well as all of the intelligentsia.

  We were probably being monitored, but it was all the same to us.

  I think Miller was trying to encourage us when he shared his experiences with McCarthyism; U.S. publishers had refused to publish his book, and films based on his screenplays had to be shot in Europe. But after a few years, all the nonsense about un-American activities had come to naught. Then he told us a story from the time he was chair of the PEN Club. He had been invited by a Soviet-American commission to speak on the significance of freedom for scientific research. In his speech, he criticized the lack of freedom of expression in the Soviet Union and the fact that several outstanding Soviet researchers were not allowed to publish. At this, a Soviet professor, a world-famous specialist in cancer treatment, spoke up. He was offended by Miller’s assertions and denied them outright. There was nothing like that going on in the Soviet Union. In fact, unlike those in America, Soviet scholars enjoyed unprecedented support and absolute freedom in their work.

  The following day, a secretary handed Miller an envelope with a gift from the aforementioned Soviet professor. He couldn’t believe the professor had sent him a present after their argument. In the envelope, he found a portrait of Pasternak with two words below it written in pen: Spasibo vam (Thank you) along with the professor’s signature.

  *

  A few months later, William Styron and his wife visited Prague. Unlike Miller, he was more or less our own age and yet he was one of the most famous American writers. I invited him over along with a few of my friends.

  Like most American intellectuals—I’d noticed this from my time in the States—he had a lot of reservations about life in America. Society there would perish of overabundance. Americans, he claimed, will drown in material goods; they will go deaf from the constant roar of commercials and inane television shows. They were losing their taste, their feeling for reality. Deaf citizens lose their discernment; objects become goals in themselves, often the only goals in life. No matter what we might think about Marxism, Marx was right about one thing: Capitalism transforms material goods into a fetish. He thought that we Czechs, along with the entire Eastern Bloc, were different, he explained to our astonishment. For us, money was not the only goal; people were looking for meaning in their lives other than the accumulation of goods. He’d come to this realization from his stay in Russia. The only problem was something that was taken for granted in the United States: the opportunity of free expression.

  It was bizarre that a writer, who everyone assumed possessed a heightened sense of perception, could be deceived by Communist propaganda and believe that platitudes concerning the construction of a Communist society could, after all the horrible experiences, offer some kind of higher meaning.

  A few days before Styron’s arrival, the trial of a twenty-two-year-old woman named Olga Hepnarová was taking place. She had intentionally driven a truck into a group of people waiting at a tram stop. She had killed eight people and seriously injured twelve. Hepnarová became the largest mass murderer in Czech history. She justified her act by saying she wanted to take revenge on the people who had hurt and wronged her. She was sentenced to death, and because she saw in her sentence only a confirmation of her opinion of human society, did not seek an appeal.

  To my surprise, Styron knew about Olga Hepnarová’s trial and brought it up himself. He claimed that the experience of the last war had demonstrated that it was necessary to ensure no one had the right to take another’s life, even a murderer’s. When he saw that some of us were surprised, he added that the woman had clearly deprived several innocent people of their lives, but this did not give us the right to take hers. She was obviously insane and required treatment. She should have been treated before she committed what she did, but even now she deserved medical care and not the gallows. (Indeed, as I later learned, she had tried to commit suicide at thirteen and had spent a long period of time in an asylum. Years later, Bohumil Hrabal said that he had spoken with her executioner. The woman was terribly afraid of her own death and had to be dragged to the scaffold. Apparently, until that moment, she had lived in some sort of dark pall of injury and injustice that detached her from reality.) Someone then objected that murderers were also sentenced to death in the United States. Yes, Styron admitted, but he was decidedly against it. He was horrified that some states were even trying to reinstate the death penalty. Europe should serve as an example; practically every country—he certainly meant the countries to the west of our borders—had abolished the death penalty.

  This conversation later influenced me when I had the protagonist of my novel Judge on Trial contemplate the death penalty.

  *

  Philip Roth, the third American prose writer who visited us several times during the first few years after occupation, seemed to me unlike other Americans in one noticeable way: He was not fond of polite, social conversation; he wanted to discuss only what interested him. Primarily this was Jewish identity and the calamity that had befallen the Jews during the last war. It seemed that Roth had brought his interest in Franz Kafka to Prague. He lectured on him back in the States and had written a fairly long and entirely unrealistic story—in it, Franz immigrated to the United States. He had succumbed to Kafka’s style and dreamlike vision of the world (fortunately only once) in his novella The Breast, in which the protagonist turns not into a bug, but into a breast.

  Because Pavel Kohout and I were just then preparing a dramatic version of Kafka’s Amerika, we spoke quite a bit about it. Roth thought it weaker than his other works. He considered it a story about a still immature young man who, in all innocence, comes into direct conflict with a ruthless world. Kafka’s power, however, was in creating an ambiguous hero: simultaneously innocent and guilty. Josef K. also was not aware of his guilt, but he had committed an offense and was condemned.

  Roth surprised me by asking if I thought Kafka had been impotent.

  I had gathered from his correspondence with Milena that he hadn’t been impotent at all but was simply so fastidious that whenever he was supposed to meet with a woman he was in love with (or tried to convince himself he was in love with), he perceived it as interfering in his daily routine. In order to somehow renew the order of this routine, he would try to think through what he would do and say, how everything would go. He was so disturbed by the planned meeting that he wouldn’t sleep for several nights before. In the climactic scene of The Castle, a tall castle official named Bürgel somewhat absurdly receives the land surveyor in his bed and says all he has to do is express his wish, and it will be fulfilled. But K. is so tired that, at that very moment, he falls asleep. In my opinion, this scene was precisely an image of such a breakdown, which could influence all subsequent encounters.

  When we had concluded this somewhat eccentric investigation of the love life of a writer who had been dead for half a century, I realized how unusual this conversation was for me: Our lives in an occupied country, the problems we thought and talked about, were entirely different from those that occupied my colleagues in the freer part of the world.

  Of course, Roth was among those who tried to understand our situation. Given his interest in the fate of Jews, of course, he could not ignore one of the most fundamental Jewish experiences: persecution. However much he had managed to evade it in a free country, he harbored a feeling of solidarity with those being persecuted in a country that had been deprived of its freedom. I don’t think any other author has written with such understanding and earnestness about the oppressive fate of Czech writers and Czech culture. He too, however, was denied further entry visa
s to Czechoslovakia.

  *

  We started to realize that, in addition to foreign readers, Czechs should know what we were writing about.

  Of course no journal here would publish even a single love poem by any of us without the permission of the party overseers. All modern means of textual reproduction were strictly controlled, and using them surreptitiously was considered an actionable offense.

  We met with some lawyer friends who told us that an author could not be punished for a copy made on an ordinary typewriter.

  We agreed to have new works typed up, in several copies. We would sign the copies to emphasize that these were our own private manuscripts. Then we would get them to readers one way or another.

  But even this primitive method of distributing our works required someone to organize it. The laboriousness of the task was difficult to imagine; it was essentially doing the labor of several publishers. Ludvík Vaculík volunteered. He would take the manuscripts to his girlfriend, Zdena, who would be able, just barely, to make eight copies on her typewriter. For this, however, she worked ten hours a day.

  Michal observed our somewhat childish activity. He was a technically adept and enterprising young man. Sometimes at a bazaar, he would find a broken tape recorder, buy it, and fiddle around with it until he got it running. Then he would sell it at a profit. Once he noticed a used but perfectly functioning and cheap electric typewriter. He convinced us that we’d be able to make up to fourteen copies on it. Bearing in mind that it was more than five hundred years after the goldsmith and printer Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention, this was not a breathtaking number. Nevertheless, we bought the typewriter and then searched around stationery stores for bundles of paper that was lightweight but of good quality. What we found was surprisingly inexpensive and well suited for duplication.

  The first volumes of our manuscript series were quite appealing, and the best publishers in any free society would have expressed interest in them. Vaculík inaugurated the series with his novella, The Guinea Pigs, which had already come out in German translation. (Tomáš Řezáč, one of the most agile agents of State Security, had managed to penetrate Bucher’s publishing house in Switzerland and blatantly lied in one of his articles when he said that not a single copy had been published abroad.)

  Among the first volumes of our typewritten series were verses by Jaroslav Seifert, Karel Šiktanc, and Jiří Gruša; Havel’s original version of The Beggar’s Opera; and novels by Pavel Kohout.

  Ludvík started making the rounds of his friends, colleagues, and acquaintances (because of his long journalism career as well as his Wallachian gregariousness, he had a lot of them) and provided them with freshly copied works. At first, they looked more like official files clamped in three-ring binders. To make them more resemble books, Zdena cut the pieces of paper in half. When the book had been typed, Ludvík would take it to Tomos, the only legitimate bookbinding firm, and the books received a binding. We decided to place a warning on the title page: Further Copying of the Manuscript Expressly Forbidden. Thereby it was made clear to the authorities that the author’s intention was not to distribute the manuscript. Furthermore, the first letters of this phrase in Czech, which even the least astute State Security investigators could understand, spelled the word “Resistance.”

  Vaculík sold the copies for the price of the paper and wages for the copier, who received five crowns per page. The authors received not a crown. Not only would this have increased the sale price, but it would have also exposed the author to accusations of publicizing his work illegally. For New Year’s Eve, Vaculík sent around a hand-painted postcard on which he’d sketched the initial works of the series. The names of the authors were listed on the spines of the books, and the entire bundle was enclosed in a large padlock. From this time on we called our series, which endured until the end of communism, Padlock.

  *

  At the beginning of the spring of 1974, Bohumil Hrabal—whom I considered the most remarkable Czech prose writer—was going to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. If the conditions in our country had been only a little more seemly, his birthday would unquestionably have been an occasion for newspaper articles and radio and television discussions, and thousands of his admirers and even government functionaries would have sent him their congratulations. If he’d belonged to the small group of collaborationist authors, he would probably have received the title of national artist. But he was classified among the prohibited writers and essentially did not exist for the current government and all publishing houses.

  I was not among the circle of Hrabal’s close friends who regularly met at the Golden Tiger pub. But I knew Hrabal from our brief encounters when we were still members of the Writers’ Union. It struck me that we should render our colleague an appropriate honor, and my friends agreed. So we wrote up a sort of bull in archaic-sounding language in which Bohumil Hrabal was named Prince of Czech Letters with the right to wear a diamond crown. Saša Kliment secured a Latin translation of the text. We got an artist (I don’t remember who it was, but a little later Nanda created a similar document) to embellish the bull. We convinced the orientalist Oldřich Král, one of Hrabal’s friends, to sign the bull. (His first name had naturally preordained him for the task.) We didn’t have a diamond crown, but I pulled together a collection of contributions from other writers, and Ludvík arranged for it all to be recopied and superbly bound.

  Hrabal was waiting for us in the street in front of his building. He greeted us somewhat awkwardly and suggested we not go inside because the whole building was bugged.

  We explained that we needed to go upstairs because he was going to be presented with a document requiring a seal that had to be made of wax. We couldn’t do it on the street and, besides, the street was not sufficiently solemn. Hrabal acquiesced and led us up to his apartment.

  There we presented him with the collection of articles along with the bull.

  The Prince of Czech Letters was indeed moved. Several times he repeated, “This is wonderful, fellows, you didn’t have to do this.”

  Then he opened the collection, which was titled: What I Would Write If I Had Somewhere to Publish It, So I’ll Write to You, Mr. Hrabal.

  Then the prince signed copies for all of us who brought one: B. Hrabal received the original of this text on 28 March 1974.

  Then we took a seat at a round table and affixed the seal. It was indeed a solemn occasion. I held the burning candle while Saša heated the sealing wax and dripped it on the bull. Then Saša pressed an old Swedish coin into it. Hrabal brought out a bottle of Egyptian cognac, poured us all a glass, and then began telling us about his childhood, about his mother and how he was conceived out of wedlock. When she revealed her condition at home, her father was going to shoot her, but his wife took the gun away from him and said, “Knock it off and come eat!” He told it so convincingly, it was as if he’d seen it with his own eyes.

  *

  Sometime later that spring, I received a message from Jürgen that the Munich publisher Blanvalet, which published children’s literature, was interested in a collection of fairy tales by prohibited Czech authors, but it needed the manuscripts by the summer. I asked Jürgen to thank Blanvalet for us and said I’d try to get the fairy tales as soon as I could.

  There were still more than a hundred banned authors, but I wanted the connecting link between the writers of this collection to be not their illicitness but rather the quality of their work. In addition, I soon discovered that many authors were afraid to publish abroad and didn’t want to end up in prison as enemies of the Socialist system. Many still (naively) believed that if they behaved inconspicuously, the rulers would show mercy and eventually allow them to publish again.

  I received contributions from the excellent modern storytellers Jan Vladislav and Jan Werich as well as from the poet Jan Skácel. I succeeded in convincing Václav Havel to write something for the collection, and that is how Pižďuchové came into existence, the only one of his texts intended
(at least to a certain degree) for children. In the fairly short time of five months, I managed to collect stories from thirteen authors.

  I had all the manuscripts copied and assembled, placed them in an envelope, and, with a delay I thought excusable, sent them to Munich by certified mail. I knew mail going abroad was monitored, but I told myself they wouldn’t find anything objectionable in a collection of fairy tales; maybe they’d find fault with a couple of my sentences from the introduction, but they wouldn’t confiscate the entire package just for that.

  Apparently they did, because after about three weeks I received a polite but slightly admonitory letter from the publishing house asking when I was sending the fairy tales. The publisher had to have them translated, and that would take time.

  I replied that the package containing the texts had apparently gone astray, and so I put one of the copies into another envelope and sent it off. Then I went to the post office to reclaim my previous package.

  After about another month, an editor I didn’t know called me and could not understand why she hadn’t received the manuscripts I had sent twice. Just in case, she repeated to me the address of the publishing house. The only problem was that it was located in Munich.

  I didn’t know what to do. As far as I was aware, none of Jürgen’s messengers were planning a trip to Prague in the near future, and sending the package a third time by the Czech post seemed futile.

  Fortunately, I ran into Jan Vladislav, one of the authors. When I told him about my difficulties with the manuscripts, he said it had been very naive of me to send the texts by mail. I was to get them to him as soon as possible, and he would see to their delivery. He had friends in the French embassy.

  I brought him the manuscript the next day, and a few days later the fairy tales arrived at the Munich publishers.

  I finally received an explanation from our post office. The second package had departed Czechoslovakia in good order, but it had apparently gotten lost in the Federal Republic of Germany. I therefore ought to turn to the German postal service. Regards. Signature illegible.