The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  Prague Castle sat on a hill overlooking the Vltava River. The buildings of the castle itself were broad rather than tall, painted in pale pinks and creams and beiges and opening onto spacious courtyards. Above all, though, that space was defined not by the bright neo-classicism of the New Royal Palace but by the dark neo-Gothic of St. Vitus Cathedral, with its stained-glass windows and towering spires. The castle complex formed its own charmed world, with twisting alleyways, one leading into the early Renaissance “Golden Lane” lined with houses painted sky blue, sun-baked yellow, and deep rose, miniature dwellings as if built for elves. It was an enchanted place. Yet outside the castle’s walls, on the streets, Czechoslovakia was not—or was not only—a fairy tale. Prague in the summer of 1993 was a city in which all the old rules were no longer binding. And no one yet knew what the new rules would be. The end of communism had brought robber-baron capitalism: “free market” taken literally as a free-for-all with no accountability and little restraint.

  I met a social psychologist named Martina in her thirties. She had spent time at American universities and spoke English well; now the fall of communism had opened to her the possibility of a transatlantic academic life. About her own society she was both proud and critical: for years the public had been pacified with relative stability and low prices; they had lived a lie, knowing all the while they were doing so. Martina taught me the communist-era saying “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” The transition to capitalism she described as a move from a zoo into a jungle: with the fall of the oppressive regime, crime had increased wildly. More and more women had gone into prostitution. Neo-fascist skinheads roamed the streets. Moreover, communist mafias were still powerful, and what the Czechs called “lustration” had thrown the country into a moral crisis.

  Lustration, a word with Latin origins, meant “purification.” It was both a political vetting and a purging from public life of former communist collaborators. This meant in particular collaborators with the secret police—a sizable portion of the population, as Czechoslovak citizens learned after the Velvet Revolution when a former dissident named Petr Cibulka took it upon himself to publish an initial list.

  Would you like to know—Martina asked—whether your neighbor, perhaps your friend or your lover, was a secret police informer?

  A FEW DAYS later I left for Bratislava, the capital of newly independent Slovakia. While, after 1989, Germany had come together, Czechoslovakia had come apart. By the time I had arrived in Prague that summer, Czechoslovakia no longer existed: as of 1 January 1993 the Czech Republic and Slovakia were two independent countries. This was the context in which I met Miloš, who a few years earlier had been studying physics at Bratislava’s Comenius University. Never a terribly diligent student, he did not become a physicist. Instead, in July 1992 he ran for parliament on the ticket of Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, a nationalist-populist party led by a demagogue named Vladimír Mečiar. Somewhat unexpectedly to himself, Miloš won. Just months later, in January 1993, came the “Velvet Divorce”: Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. There had been no referendum. Miloš explained to me that a referendum would have been impossible: a referendum among all Czechoslovak citizens would have been unfair because there were twice as many Czechs as Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, so the Slovaks could easily have been outvoted. And a referendum among only Slovaks would have been unfair because if the Slovaks had then voted to secede, under international law the Czech Republic would have inherited the rights of successorship to Czechoslovakia. There were many who doubted that either Czechs or Slovaks would have voted for a separation had they had the occasion to vote—which they did not. Instead Vladimír Mečiar and his Czech counterpart, Václav Klaus, took it upon themselves to negotiate the dismantling of Czechoslovakia. In the summer of 1993, newly independent Slovakia was voted into the Council of Europe, the Strasbourg-based organization working toward European integration and the promotion of democracy. Miloš, who had little political experience but was handsome and cheerful, became Slovakia’s representative to the Council of Europe. Now he was looking for an English tutor.

  In Strasbourg, at the Council of Europe, Miloš had to give speeches in English. It was a language he spoke a bit, more or less without grammar—a matter of little concern to him. He was charming and could always communicate. I tried to explain the verb tenses. He laughed—there were too many, he hardly had use for so many, he was sure they wouldn’t be necessary. I tried to help him edit the texts of his speeches, but he would always interrupt: we should go to a bar, get another drink. There was no need to be so serious.

  We were always close to a bar, even though Bratislava felt small and provincial. Slovakia’s capital city had none of Prague’s glamour, yet it had its own appeal. A round fountain in the main square was surrounded by mannerist and art nouveau buildings painted in spring colors. Along the winding cobblestone streets of the old town were dozens of sidewalk cafés and wine cellars.

  At thirty, Miloš was energetic and flirtatious. Happy-go-lucky. He had a baby and a young wife, both named Maria. Miloš and the grown-up Maria had met at the physics faculty, where she had been the better student.

  “My woman,” he would always say when speaking of her.

  “My wife,” I would correct him.

  He never remembered.

  I tried to explain: “Wife indicates a relationship: my brother, my father, my daughter, my wife. Woman is a generic noun. And when you add the possessive to a generic noun, it sounds as if you’re claiming ownership.”

  He contemplated that for a moment.

  “Like property?” he asked.

  “Yes, exactly, like property,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, exactly—like property!”

  Miloš and the two Marias and I traveled together through Slovakia to the spa town of Dudince. People came “for the water,” Miloš told me, although I didn’t see any water and we were far from the sea, among white hotels surrounded by green farmland. We went swimming in the hotel pool and rode in a horse-drawn carriage through the countryside. We took walks and drank red wine mixed with Coca-Cola, and Miloš talked to me about the revolution.

  A few years earlier, while a student, Miloš had organized a film club at the university. American films were generally banned, as were films from the Czech New Wave of the 1960s. But Miloš was amiable and gregarious; he befriended the head of the film archive and in this way managed to show some censored films like the adaptations of Milan Kundera’s The Joke and James Simon Kunen’s The Strawberry Statement, a chronicle of the 1968 student protests at Columbia University. Miloš was also a competitive distance runner who had represented Czechoslovakia in cross-country races abroad. He had seen the West, and he planned to emigrate.

  Then one day—it was 18 November 1989—Czech friends from Prague unexpectedly came to visit. The Communist Party still controlled the newspapers, the radio, and the television, so Miloš’s friends had come in person to deliver the news: there were demonstrations in the capital. Now computer-savvy students at the technical faculty bypassed censorship by communicating with Prague via computer modem. Soon Miloš found himself, as if inadvertently, in the middle of the revolution. In Bratislava he organized student meetings; he was among those who presented a proposal to parliament demanding that the Communist Party relinquish its leading role in the state. The parliament conceded. Miloš found this quite funny: he and his friends had hardly expected this. It had been unthinkable just a day or two before.

  Many days during that summer of 1993 I spent with Miloš at the Slovak parliament, where sessions began early. All were working faster than they otherwise might have: Slovakia was a brand-new state, and the parliament needed to enact a basic set of laws—before the country realized these basic laws were missing. So legislation was being passed quickly. Between votes the parliamentarians would gather for beer at a small café on the ground floor. Drinking began at breakfast time.

  One day in July, in the corridor outside the chamber where the sess
ions took place, Miloš introduced me to Jan Čarnogurský chairman of the Christian Democratic Movement and a leader of the anti-Mečiar opposition. Just after the Velvet Revolution Čarnogurský had founded the Christian Democratic Movement, a party with close ties to the Slovak Catholic Church. The party opposed abortion and pornography, supported private education, and called for the restitution of Church property nationalized by the communists. It supported, too, a free market economy and Slovakia’s integration into the European Union. Mečiar’s nationalism, the Christian Democrats believed, was a threat to democracy. Yet despite their politically antagonistic positions, toward Jan Čarnogurský, as toward everyone else, Miloš seemed to have only authentically friendly feelings. For his part, Jan Čarnogurský was very gracious. He told me about himself: he’d grown up after the Second World War in a Slovak Catholic family. He’d grown up under communism, a militantly atheistic ideology; from the point of view of the communist regime, religious observance was subversive. When one year the communist police discovered a prayer retreat in a Slovak mountain cottage, they imprisoned both the organizer and the priest. By this time Jan Čarnogurský had become a lawyer, and he defended them. He served, too, as a defense attorney for other dissidents: signatories of the human rights petition Charter 77; readers, writers, and distributors of samizdat literature.

  In August 1989 Jan Čarnogurský, like so many of those he had defended, went to prison. That November the Velvet Revolution freed him; on 10 December he was nominated first deputy prime minister and sworn in as a member of the Czechoslovak federal government, which then still existed. He was placed in charge of the secret police—who just weeks before had been his interrogators.

  About his years as a dissident, Jan Čarnogurský was reflective: there had been some successes. In the 1980s international phone lines were installed in public phone booths. Dissidents would telephone friends in the West, who would pass the information on to Voice of America or Radio Free Europe—radio stations that would then broadcast the news back into Czechoslovakia. A circuitous route, yet an effective one. There had been many failures as well—yet even the failures had often been moral victories. As a defense lawyer in a communist state, he had not managed to free his clients from prison; there had been no chance of that. Yet those he had defended had understood this: by making the choices they had, they had knowingly risked imprisonment. It was worth it to them to know that they were doing the right thing.

  For Jan Čarnogurský Christianity and democracy were naturally of a whole, and Christian democracy was a path to Western-style liberalism. He said nothing—and I did not ask him—about the very different Christian politics practiced in Slovakia once upon a time, decades earlier. It had happened after September 1938, after British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had “appeased” Adolf Hitler at the Munich conference, and Nazi Germany had annexed a western region of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. Six months later, in March 1939, Nazi Germany invaded what remained of Czechoslovakia. The Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia became a Third Reich protectorate. Slovakia became a Catholic fascist state—nominally independent, albeit under Nazi tutelage.

  In 1987, Jan Čarnogurský had been among a handful of Slovak intellectuals who signed an open letter of collective remorse for Nazi-allied Slovakia’s deportation of its Jews, first to Slovakia’s own labor and concentration camps, and later to Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Majdanek. I didn’t ask Jan Čarnogurský about this singular precedent of Slovak independence, but later, sitting on the grass by the Danube River, I did ask Miloš. When I mentioned fascism, Miloš laughed.

  Yet he was emphatic: “We made boots, the Germans bought boots. This was not collaboration. This was work.”

  Slovak independence was important to him, and the wartime years had been years of independence.

  On the bookshelf in Miloš’s apartment one day I noticed a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, whose opening stanza had been so deeply ingrained in the American counterculture:

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

  dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

  angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

  who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

  Miloš had read the Beat poets; he’d watched The Strawberry Statement. A strange mixture of influences: Vladimír Mečiar and Allen Ginsberg, Slovak nationalism and psychedelic poetry. Miloš had campaigned with Mečiar in the countryside; he admired the way that Mečiar, unlike the intellectuals in Bratislava, knew how to talk to ordinary people, to people like Miloš’s grandfather, who had been born in a house in a small village and who died an old man in that same house, never having spent a single night anywhere else. Miloš was not a fan of Václav Havel. He was not part of the romance of the dissidents, of the fairy tale of the persecuted playwright who went to live happily ever after in the castle. He laughed about Vladimír Mečiar—“My boss, he knows how to make propaganda!”—but Miloš had chosen precisely him: someone who was in some way heir to Slovakia’s dark legacy of a clerico-fascist nationalism, someone whose language, unlike Havel’s, contained no softness.

  LIKE PRAGUE AND so many European cities that came into existence in premodern times, Bratislava was built on a river. The Danube joined Bratislava, Vienna, Budapest, and Belgrade, and strong rowers could row their small boats between Bratislava and Vienna in a day. Only some fifty miles lay between the two capitals; there was no natural border, yet the two cities had long been separated by the Iron Curtain, and even four years later the distinction between the East and the West was a palpable one.

  Prague lay 150 miles west of Vienna, but like Bratislava it was not the West. The trip between Bratislava and Prague lasted about six hours, and I began to make it often. It was a slow train ride across a new international border, and few were used to the border crossing. The currency had been divided with stickers: old Czechoslovak crowns with Czech stickers were now Czech currency; old Czechoslovak crowns with Slovak stickers were now Slovak currency. Exchanging currency meant paying a commission, so often travelers—Czechs and Slovaks, former Czechoslovak citizens—would gently pull the stickers off and paste on the others.

  The economic transition—exploitative privatization, banking corruption, pyramid schemes—was not a romantic story. I wanted to learn about the novelists and the philosophers. I was interested in peace studies and human rights, and in particular in Charter 77—whose origins suggested that Václav Havel’s essays were not so unsuited for the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert.

  As in Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury, in Prague and Bratislava, too, there had been a counterculture: “angelheaded hipsters … contemplating jazz,” poets and painters, saxophone players and psychedelic guitarists who played loud music, drank beer, and smoked marijuana, who believed in free love. In the 1970s, they would gather in the countryside for rock concerts held in barns. At that time in Czechoslovakia a band called the Plastic People of the Universe co-opted a young Canadian English teacher named Paul Wilson as its lead singer. It was a rebellious band, arrogant young men with long hair and a taste for saying “Fuck you” to those in power. They addressed a song to a communist apparatchik: “What do you resemble in your greatness? / Are you the Truth? / Are you God? / What do you resemble in your greatness? / A piece of shit …”

  Paul Wilson and the other Plastic People were not great musicians. They had, though, a band manager who was a great personality. Ivan Jirous possessed the peculiar ability to persuade people to do things. In 1976, he met the playwright Václav Havel at an apartment in Prague. Havel, who was on his way to a party, never made it there: instead he spent the night at a pub, mesmerized by the long-haired Ivan Jirous and the rock music coming from his squeaking cassette player. The sound quality wa
s poor, the musicians of mediocre talent. That mattered little: to Havel, here was authenticity, existential truth. For Havel that night with Ivan Jirous and his old cassette player was an epiphany.

  “Suddenly I realized,” Václav Havel later wrote, “that, regardless of how many vulgar words these people used or how long their hair was, truth was on their side.”

  Václav Havel’s alliance with Ivan Jirous was a fateful one: nothing would be the same again. Serendipitously, the encounter had happened just in time: soon afterward the police came and arrested Ivan Jirous and his band. Paul Wilson was deported to Canada. The prosecutor instructed prison officials not to cut the hair or shave the beards of the accused: the regime wanted the musicians to appear on television as long-haired hooligans.

  Now it was through Václav Havel that the older, “respectable” dissident intellectuals came to offer their support to the young rock musicians who called themselves the Plastic People. On 28 August 1976 the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an open letter on behalf of a handful of irreverent long-haired youth, signed by Czechoslovakia’s intellectual elite, among them Václav Havel, Pavel Kohout, Karel Kosík, Jan Patočka, and Jaroslav Seifert. The signatories included playwrights and novelists, a future Nobel Prize winner, the greatest philosophers. The marriage was, from the outset, a seeming mésalliance, between the protégés of the philosopher Edmund Husserl and those of the guitarist Lou Reed.

  Havel could not save his new friends. Ivan Jirous and three other band members were convicted; Jirous received the longest prison sentence. Yet something had happened, a certain magic conjured up by this unlikely alliance. It was 1976, the year when in communist Poland Adam Michnik and other intellectuals formed the Workers’ Defense Committee. It was the year after the Helsinki Accords, when communist bloc leaders had traded their signatures to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for Western acceptance of the inviolability of borders. The communist governments had never intended to honor that agreement. Nonetheless, the text was there. Now, perhaps unexpectedly, this détente-inspired document provided a new language, one that could possibly fill the void left after Marxism’s death.