My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  *

  Jürgen advised me somewhat emphatically to write novels rather than short stories. The reason, as far as I understood, was strictly profit related. Novels sold better and, if the author was lucky, might be made into movies. Antonioni had made the famous Blow-Up out of Julio Cortazár’s story, but this was anomalous.

  So I told him I would write a thousand-page novel. Of course, this statement was made in jest, but the truth was that I had long wondered if I had it in me to write a novel in which I described my fundamental experiences and expressed something of what I thought about the time I was living in.

  Of everything I’d experienced, it was the ruthless murders I had witnessed for over four decades of my life that had affected me the most.

  I still woke up in the middle of the night and vividly imagined the horror of the victims driven into the gas chambers or the anxiety of those sentenced to death during the absurd show trials.

  After the war, it was with a feeling of satisfaction that I read about the trials of the Nazis who were sentenced to death. When Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel after a long trial (it had been the only death sentence pronounced and carried out in that country), I accepted it as the appropriate punishment for a man who had been in charge of the internment and subsequent extermination of millions of people. But then I started to doubt the motivation for such punishment.

  The death penalty is an important subject for judicial institutions in every society. Several centuries earlier, the death sentence was one of the most frequent punishments carried out, even for negligible infractions or even deeds that had often not actually been committed. Confessions were exacted from the accused through torture. Those who arbitrated justice and the law often transformed a place of adjudication into a place where criminals in gowns sent innocent victims to hangmen. That’s how it was in the twentieth century, as well, where organized and legalized mass murder took place. How does even a slightly responsible judge reconcile himself to this in a country in which so many judicial murders have taken place and where the death penalty was used, or even required, for a number of offenses? I decided to make my somewhat autobiographical hero a judge.

  At this time, my life was becoming more and more monotonous. I had been kicked out of all organizations and deprived of the possibility of working anywhere I might be able to employ my knowledge and skills. Furthermore, all decent films had been removed from the cinemas, there was no modern drama in the theaters, and the radio, if it was not broadcasting classical music, was impossible to listen to. My disposition required movement. Writing remained the only space in which I could move about freely. And so I started to write; I worked from morning till evening on my novel about a judge named Kindl.

  A person can never be sure if what he has written is worth anything, but when constructing such a long piece of prose, he is even more unsure. I tried to banish my uncertainty with intensity. I kept writing even when I suspected that the following day, when I read over what I had committed to paper, I would almost certainly throw it out. Of course I consulted with my lawyer friends about many of the questions my hero grappled with, whether it was the law expert Pavel Rychetský; someone from his family, including his first wife; or Petr Pithart, who transferred his law erudition to the field of contemporary historical events.

  *

  I’m reading the criminal code from 1951, which Communist lawyers quickly cobbled together (based on the Soviet model). The legendary first chapter, according to which they executed dozens and dozens of innocent people, is chilling reading. Almost every paragraph, whether it deals with treason, sabotage, or espionage, allows for the death penalty, for instance, for putting the country at risk, and finally: “if there is any other especially aggravating circumstance.” How did the agents of State Security, and later the judges, construe these especially aggravating circumstances? Could it be, perhaps, class origin?

  Leaving the republic without permission (when permission was for most citizens unattainable) incurred a punishment of up to five years, if, of course, the fugitive did not have on his person a piece of paper that could be construed as treasonous or espionage material. In any case, even without this paper, contingent conviction was precluded. Anyone who “belittled the reputation of the president of the republic or his deputy” faced three years’ imprisonment. As we know from Švejk, the Austro-Hungarian law codes had already come up with this one.

  From my diary, April 1975

  *

  Of course there were days when I put off writing. One spring day, Vaculík talked me into going to visit some of his friends in Bratislava who shared our fate of being prohibited writers. The sense of solidarity would boost their spirits, claimed Ludvík. (There were only a few banned writers in Slovakia, certainly because the leader of the country was their countryman.) Ludvík had no idea that on the same day several Czech politicians, who had also been expelled, had set out to Bratislava to visit Alexander Dubček, a man who, although he had pusillanimously signed the Moscow Protocol, was still considered, even by the State Security, a symbol of the Prague Spring reform movement.

  It seemed that the government did not want me to succumb to indolence. The day after my return from Bratislava, our doorbell buzzed. When I opened the door, I saw an entire pack of fellows whose profession was obvious even before they presented their warrant to search the house.

  The piece of paper headed RESOLUTION explained the reasons for the search:

  Upon the resolution of investigators on 22 April 1975—document number 11/120-1975—according to article 160, paragraph 1 of the criminal code, the initiation of prosecution for the punishable offense of national subversion, which was to be committed in a manner specified below. After initiating prosecution, a suspicion arose that the apartment of the aforementioned individual contained written documents pertaining to the investigation of the punishable offense, which will be demonstrated.

  It is necessary to determine how this occurred.

  The document bore the stamp of the general prosecutor. The method by which I was supposed to have committed the punishable offense of subverting the republic was not provided. This was not surprising. I was, however, somewhat surprised that these henchmen were accompanied by a “disinterested” witness (the criminal code required that an independent witness be present). He had the fine Jewish name of Kauder (obviously they had thought up this name especially for me, since that was the name of my ancestors), and for all his disinterestedness, his features looked more coplike than any of theirs. I was still drowsy from sleep and did not protest and allowed them to come in. Helena was more intransigent and yelled at them that no one was allowed to trample around in his shoes. Amazingly, the entire commando squad took off their shoes and thereby were immediately deprived of some of their superiority. This reminded me that the true horrors of the Stalinist years were over.

  This was the second house search I had experienced. I had simply gotten mixed up in the first one and was worried that the snoops would discover my notebook from my military preparation class. This time I was worried they would find and confiscate the novel I had begun.

  They discovered it, but fortunately I was writing in ink instead of typing it—typed documents attracted their attention more than handwritten ones. The chief of the trespassers wanted to know if the manuscript was mine, and when I said yes, he asked what I was writing about. Of course, I should have said it was none of his business, but I chose a more conciliatory answer and replied that I was writing something of my experiences from the war. This seemed to diminish his suspicions.

  Just as with the house search preceding my father’s arrest, I had the feeling that they had no idea what they were looking for. (It obviously had something to do with our visit to Bratislava; perhaps they assumed we had prepared some documents for Dubček, some sort of new “Two Thousand Words,” and they were trying to track down copies.)

  Vaculík once told me that after a house search, it was as if a dark force had swept through the apartm
ent, and he felt as though he should call a priest to have it consecrated. A house search, especially if a person knows he’s not hiding any weapons, drugs, or other sort of contraband (even though the greatest contraband in a totalitarian society is any kind of uncensored declaration, whether written, spoken, sung, or painted), arouses more disgust than fear—as if a revolting insect had been crawling all over everything, leaving behind a sticky phlegm or spiderwebs.

  Hour after hour they searched impotently through drawers, wardrobes, and especially my bookcase, which contained around five thousand volumes in Czech, Slovak, Polish, German, English, and Russian (they didn’t notice the volume of Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin). Most of it was fiction, but there were also essays as well as works of history and philosophy. What could they find that was subversive? It was beyond their powers to recognize it, and they would need dozens of boxes to confiscate all of it. They took a dislike to an English translation of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. I also had a copy of the novel in Russian, but they left that alone (obviously they didn’t know Cyrillic). They commandeered everything if they thought it was samizdat, or if the title looked suspicious, and piled it all on the daybed.

  They also noticed a framed original of one of Had’ák’s caricatures, which had been published in Literární listy. It was a replica of a Soviet poster of a Red Army soldier pointing at the viewer. Had’ák had replaced the Russian text, Have you signed up as a volunteer? with the inscription, Have you also signed the Two Thousand Words? The large and threatening You was spelled in both Cyrillic and Latin.

  Was I aware I could be tried for sedition?

  I objected that I could hang on my walls at home anything I wanted, couldn’t I? It was inciting neither my wife nor myself to sedition.

  The chief informed me that my penchant for such impertinent remarks would soon pass and tossed the picture onto the pile of confiscated artifacts.

  Whenever my wife or I went into another room, one of the rogues followed us, but the children could move about at will. Michal felt sorry for the caricature and, without any of the search team noticing, grabbed the picture and slid it under the daybed. Michal truly did evince extraordinary enterprise, for he himself was actually in possession of the greatest piece of “contraband.” He had been preparing copies of a large portrait of Dubček for his friends. He managed to place the pictures in a large envelope of photographic paper. When one of the snoops grabbed it, Michal stopped him and warned that the envelope contained still unused and sensitive material that would be destroyed if opened. Surprisingly, the fellow put the envelope back in its place. Michal also managed to disconnect the telephone, so we looked on with not a little schadenfreude when the boss of the search unit—most likely in the expectation of further instructions—vexedly attempted to compel the silenced instrument to function.

  Finally they went down to the basement, where the lowliest of them poked around with a shovel in the pile of coke to make sure it wasn’t concealing a printing press or a machine gun.

  When the head miscreant ended the search, he ordered a typewriter to be brought in, and one of his subordinates started typing up the individual items they were confiscating.

  The chief suddenly noticed that the picture was missing. He started yelling at me and demanding to know what I’d done with it. As he perfectly well knew, I pointed out, he hadn’t let me once out of his sight.

  He apparently considered berating children inappropriate and was too lazy to look through the entire apartment again for the picture.

  The list, which was also signed by the disinterested witness Kauder, contained fifty-six items. Among the documents that were supposed to prove subversion of the republic were manuscripts of the poetry collections of Karel Šiktanc and Oldřich Mikulášek, books by Pavel Kohout, the text of a fairy tale by Jan Trefulka, bound (but incomplete, owing to the events of 1968 and 1969) issues of Literární listy and Listy, as well as 28 sheets of typed letters from the writer Václav Havel addressed to Gen. Sec. Dr. Husák; three sheets of Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac then begat Jacob, Jacob begat Judah and his brothers . . .

  Of course there were 122 sheets of foreign correspondence in green folders that seemed to them auspiciously dubious and 1 letter of two pages, typewritten from 16 March in English, addressed Dear Isaac, in a plastic folder with the business card of Rabbi Isaac Newmann, Barnet Synagogue (to the disappointment of the investigators, who probably had it translated, the letter contained nothing except news of how the children were doing in school and what we’d been reading lately).

  Helena insisted on verifying once again that everything was written down, which, after a moment of hesitation, the chief allowed, but he required Helena to sign that she herself had requested the verification and that everything was in order.

  Then the members of the search team donned their shoes and as they were carrying the confiscated items to the car called out threateningly, See you later.

  *

  Although the search team had departed and there was nothing among the things they had confiscated that was illegal even according to our oppressive laws, in the evening when we went to bed, the arrogant faces of the police kept flitting before my eyes. What was their intrusion supposed to mean or prefigure? Were they trying to frighten me? Or had they finally found something for which I could be punished? The next day I was laid out once again with the spasms that had afflicted me before my recent gallbladder operation.

  So I went, as I usually did when an attack of colic set in, to see Dr. Šetka at the hospital on Charles Square. He prescribed a strict diet.

  Because the experience of the house search was still fresh in my mind, I complained about it to him. I added that they could lock me up; this was just a prelude.

  Besides being an excellent specialist, the doctor was sympathetic to my plight. He said the colic attack was obviously due to nerves and offered me asylum in the hospital for a few days. If I were in the hospital, he assumed, they wouldn’t come to arrest me. And then . . . then we would see.

  And so I became a patient. The doctor prescribed a gallbladder diet and said he would conduct a couple of unpleasant examinations of my pancreas and stomach.

  Over the next few days, my memory of the shadowy figures faded, my pains went away, and I felt absolutely fine. My asylum, however, continued. The doctor was perfectly willing not to rush the examinations.

  The facilities of the general hospital were in a worse state of neglect than those of the hospital in Krč, where I’d been employed as an orderly. The building was from the eighteenth century, and it was swarming with beetles and cockroaches that crawled over the floors and walls and especially in the drawers of the night tables where patients stored their food. The rooms had high ceilings and were so spacious that plenty of beds were squeezed into them—a patient would never be wanting for company.

  To my left lay a well-built old man who said he had been member of a Czech unit of the Red Army. I didn’t know what was wrong with him; he probably was just old and doddery and had no one to care for him. The doctor prescribed him no medication or examinations, just a healthful diet. The Czech Red Army soldier told me about the battles—or, rather, skirmishes—he had participated in; he recalled hearing Trotsky speak (and all sorts of situations where Czechs were present). The president had even awarded him a medal for his services. It was in the drawer of his bedside table if I wanted to have a look.

  When I opened the drawer, it was not the pointless piece of beribboned metal that intrigued me but the mass of hard-boiled eggs the drawer contained. The hands of this warrior, who had been present during Lenin’s reign of terror and had been weakened by age and life, shook so badly that he was unable to peel the egg he received each day for breakfast. Apparently, he’d once asked a nurse to peel an egg for him, and she retorted that if she had to peel everyone’s eggs or butter everyone’s bread, she’d never be done with her work by evening. From that time on, I peeled his eggs and buttered his bread for him.

  I spent
three weeks in the hospital. The kind doctor informed me that all the tests had come back negative. My colic was definitely due to nerves—not surprisingly given my recent stressful conditions. Nevertheless, he suggested I eliminate fatty and fried foods from my diet and then added almost in a whisper that none of “them” had been asking about me, so they would probably leave me be. If there was any immediate danger, however, I should not hesitate to come back. More tests could always be arranged. He looked again into my file and noted, “You also suffer from hay fever? Maybe you could apply for partial disability. That’s always a good thing,” he added. “They seem to behave more decently toward the infirm.”

  I thought it improbable I could be considered an invalid, but if I did become one, my employment worries would be assuaged. I would have a legal income and could not be accused of parasitism. I started to hunt down doctors’ confirmations attesting to my condition. The allergists were very charitable and slightly exaggerated my difficulties when they wrote that during the hay fever season—which in my case lasted from March to September—I was unable to work for longer than four hours a day.

  Because I’d been in a concentration camp during the war, I came under a special doctors’ commission, which had apparently been given orders to be kind to survivors.

  I concluded that the searchers had only wanted to frighten me or perhaps they’d learned that I really had nothing to do with the people who went to visit Dubček.

  I now spent most of the time working on my novel.

  *

  At the beginning of January 1975, a repulsive and intellectually sterile literary tabloid, which in the spirit of the Communist newspeak called itself Tvorba, printed a conversation with the Prince of Czech Letters. To the horror of his readers, he expressed support for Communist policies. Hrabal announced:

  I do not want anyone to brandish my name about who does not wish our country or our people well, people I live among and am fond of. . . . I am not a political person; it takes me a while to become acquainted with everything, but there is one thing I have come to understand well: the XIV Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was a challenge and a summons to all writers of this land to enrich the lives of our people. . . . As for me, I do not wish to stand aside but rather to contribute to creating, in my own way, relationships among people the way they should be among Socialist people. I think that it is important to today’s Writers’ Union that all honorable Czech writers understand that the most important thing is what our readers say about our work and not what some foreign broadcast reports.