by Marci Shore
For the veterans of dark prison cells, the political engagement that followed November 1989 was a loss of virginity—and of virtue. The words I heard most often from them were existential and truth—both ill suited for politics. For the dissidents had found themselves in a philosophical trap: they had defined politics in opposition to truth. And then came the revolution. Perhaps they had made the revolution and perhaps they had not, but this no longer mattered. Milan Otahal told me that in 1989 Havel had insisted that his sphere of interest was the human being and that he did not want to become a politician. But he did—even as he gave speeches about authenticity and Being and the irreducibility of subjective human experience.
As I left the apartment with the angelic dachshunds, Jan Urban gave me a copy of an essay he had recently published. “The Powerlessness of the Powerful” was dated November 1992. The essay was a collective self-criticism, his friend Václav Havel was now the antihero.
The moment when the dissidents stepped out from their unreal world and through the few miraculous weeks of the Velvet Revolution entered the real world of the normality of political and public life, they were lost. Their old instincts did not work. Nearly all resistance movements in history ended this way. Their legitimacy is given by the existence of an enemy and is lost with his defeat. The dissidents in Czechoslovakia did not know a non-society they lived with. All they knew was their enemy and he—spiteful bastard—all of the sudden ran away.… The Old Velvet was a mess. We won it too fast and immediately forgot to think further.
SLOWLY, DURING THAT summer of 1993, I began to understand there was something more, still another layer of moral ambiguity: the neat opposition between the dissidents and the communists was in some way deceptive. For dissidence itself had often been born of communism. Many dissidents were former believers who once upon a time had been Marxist revisionists, supporters of Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring. They had believed that they could publicly acknowledge the evils of Stalinism and then make a fresh start; they had believed that Marxism could be democratized while still remaining Marxism. Even while, in the 1970s and 1980s, they were sent to communist prisons, some of these dissidents, the older ones above all, continued to hope for a “socialism with a human face.”
Jan Urban’s father had spent six years in the anti-Nazi resistance before he became a communist apparatchik. He was a believer. As a child, his son, too, had loved communist ideology.
“It was beautiful, we believed in it,” Jan Urban told me. He still remembered with nostalgia the May Day parade of 1968, when no one organized anything but everyone flooded the streets. Then came the Soviet invasion; Jan Urban’s father was in Finland as the Czechoslovak ambassador. A communist who supported Dubček’s reforms, Urban’s father was among the first diplomats whom Moscow demanded be recalled. In the years to come, the secret police began to detain him and tried to extract information about his son’s oppositional activities. After a third brutal interrogation, Jan Urban’s father died of a heart attack.
Among the dissidents, Jan Urban belonged to the younger generation. Many of his fellow signatories, older than he, had once been communists themselves, hoping for a gentler, more humane socialism. Josef Hiršal was the first one to tell me that many of the signatories were former Communist Party members. When the secret police had come for Hiršal, they had declared him to be in the ranks of the enemies of socialism.
“No,” Josef Hiršal had answered them, “you put me in these ranks.”
In the 1960s, the young philosopher Miroslav Kusý was writing as a critical Marxist. He was a Dubček communist: he believed both in communism and in reform, in the potential of a nondogmatic Marxism. Then came “normalization,” and the professor of Marxist philosophy was expelled from the university. Living “as if” was a kind of game the people and the Communist Party played with each other, and Kusý did not want to take part in this game of pretend. He became first a librarian. After he signed Charter 77, he lost his job as a librarian and became a manual laborer. Time and time again he found himself arrested, interrogated, imprisoned. He had the chance to escape: the secret police told him that if he was not content in Czechoslovakia, he could go abroad. He told them that he would be content when they went abroad.
After the revisionist Marxists who made the Prague Spring were expelled, the Communist Party became a party of those who were left, those who cared little for the human face of socialism. This kind of socialism, Miroslav Kusý understood, could not be repaired. When I met him in Bratislava, we met at the university; the Velvet Revolution had restored him to his professorship. He was disappointed that in 1989 it had been too late for socialism with a human face.
“Hair Is Like Garbage”
That fall of 1993 I became immersed in the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, in his idea that the struggle of man against power was the struggle of memory against forgetting, and in his division of people into those for whom life was light and those for whom life was heavy. Through his books I came closer to the Stalinist years. Ludvík, the protagonist of Milan Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, was a university student and committed Communist Party member. One day, resentful of the fact that a young woman had left him to go off to a Communist Party training camp, he sent her a sarcastic postcard: “Optimism is the opium of the masses! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!”
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin had won the power struggle with Trotsky. Eventually Trotsky was forced into exile. Yet even very far from Moscow, he remained a threat to Stalin—until, in August 1940, one of Stalin’s henchmen found Trotsky in Mexico and murdered him with an ice pick. For the remainder of Stalin’s rule, Trotsky’s name remained anathema.
Milan Kundera’s protagonist Ludvík understood this. The postcard was a joke, but Ludvík was living in times without a sense of humor. He was expelled from both the Communist Party and the university and was sent to work in the mines. Everything else that happened in his life turned on that postcard, and in his mind he revisited obsessively the moment of his expulsion, when everyone in the room—some hundred people, including his professors and his closest friends—raised their hands to cast him out. Decades passed, but Ludvík never overcame that moment of alienation:
Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that hall, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test: every one of them has raised his hand in the same way my former friends and colleagues (willingly or not, out of conviction or fear) raised theirs. You must admit: it’s hard to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it’s hard to become intimate with them, it’s hard to love them.
THAT SPRING OF 1994 I invited to Stanford, where I was then a senior, a Slovak couple, Martin Bútora and Zora Bútorová, sociologists who had been dissidents. After the Velvet Revolution, Martin had become human rights adviser to Václav Havel. This was while Czechoslovakia was still a single country, before my parliamentarian friend Miloš’s boss, Vladimír Mečiar, had engineered the “Velvet Divorce.” At the San Francisco International Airport, Martin and Zora arrived with their eleven-year-old son, Ivan, who was charming and precocious. As we drove down the highway toward Stanford, they asked me about San Francisco. They wanted to know: where was City Lights Bookstore? Little seemed as peculiarly American as the Beat poets. What was it about Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti that spoke to East Europeans? Yet something did. Miloš had a copy of Howl in his Bratislava apartment. Martin and Zora had read Jack Kerouac; they knew the story of City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, which Lawrence Ferlinghetti had founded in the 1950s.
Martin and Zora gave me a present: the English translation of their friend Martin Šimečka’s novel The Year of the Frog. It was moving and sweet. Milan Šimečka, the author’s father, had been imprisoned in the 1980s; when Havel became president, Milan Šimečka became his advi
ser on Czech-Slovak relations. Milan Šimečka, though, survived communism by less than a year: he died in September 1990, when he was but sixty. In The Year of the Frog, his son, Martin—who would have then been a university student had he not been the son of a dissident—wrote of his father’s imprisonment. The arrest had come shortly after the birth of the Polish free trade union Solidarity, when the young Martin Šimečka was visiting Warsaw.
It all began approximately a year ago, if one can talk about the beginning, when they arrested my father. I happened to be in Warsaw then.… We had heard that there was freedom in Poland, and we wanted to see it.… When I returned home, instead of my father I found a male kitten with a pink nose and a silly face.
Martin Šimečka wrote of his mother’s grief and of the kitten she clung to in her husband’s absence. He wrote of how he learned to be a pipe fitter but quickly forgot plumbing, and of how he found work as a hospital orderly and watched his patients die. He also wrote about his love for long-distance running, and for his girlfriend, who did not mind when her coffee got cold because she liked it that way.
During their visit Zora and Martin Bútora gave a talk at the Slavic studies house. They were wonderful speakers: smart and serious, warm and sincere. They were not at all like my friend Miloš: life—the past as well as the present—was heavy for them. They were engaged in a political world that they always understood in moral categories. It mattered to them very much that certain things be understood: that there had been fascism in Slovakia during the war, fascism and collaboration with the Nazis. That the Slovaks had participated in the Holocaust, that they had sent Slovakia’s Jews to their deaths. And Martin and Zora feared very much that under Vladimír Mečiar, Slovakia would see fascism again.
Only now, belatedly, did I begin to understand that there were ethical implications to my friendship with Miloš. Martin and Zora’s agonized grappling with Slovakia’s uncertain transition to democracy contrasted so sharply with Miloš’s good-humored pragmatism and lighthearted opportunism, with his laughter and good spirits. Miloš and I remained in touch: every so often he would call me from parliament, usually in the middle of the night or very early in the morning, California time. Once he called to tell me that in a day or two there would be a vote of no confidence and Vladimír Mečiar’s government would fall. And so it happened. I read the story in the New York Times a few days later. Vladimír Mečiar, however, always came back. Once Miloš called very early in the morning, when I was still asleep, and began to ask me about President Clinton and education.
“This is a large topic,” I told him. “Can you be more specific?”
“You know, the government—they give money to students,” he said.
“University students?”
“Yes, yes, university students.”
“Well, in 1992 there was a Higher Education Act.”
“Good, good, Higher Education Act!” He was very pleased to hear of it.
“Miloš,” I said, “why don’t you tell me what you want this for, and I will try to help you.”
“You know, the Slovak elections are coming in September, and I think it would be a good idea to say that the Slovak government will give money to Slovak students.”
“What a nice thought. How can I help you?”
“I have an idea. Why don’t you send me a copy of Clinton’s law—and I will translate it into Slovak.”
I thought then: I could be in the Slovak government too. But I liked Miloš very much, I promised I would try to find a copy of Clinton’s law. A few days later I was having dinner with a friend. When I told him about my conversation with Miloš, he logged in to a government documents database and reappeared shortly thereafter with a copy of the 1992 Higher Education Act. I folded it into an envelope and sent it to Miloš.
IN JUNE 1994 after graduation I flew from San Francisco to Burlington; I had signed up for an intensive Czech course at a small military college in rural Vermont. When I arrived at the airport one of the two instructors was waiting for me. Only because we had spoken on the phone did I know she was a woman, for Jarmila looked like a man. She was wearing khaki shorts and a man’s tank top. She was very fit and entirely bald: her head was shaven.
Vermont was beautiful, and peaceful, the campus was small and green. We had class all morning and most of the afternoon, and in the evenings we went swimming in a nearby lake.
Jarmila was an excellent swimmer. In the weeks that followed I learned more about her: In the 1980s, growing up in a small village, she’d become involved in the underground church, in Catholic samizdat. While still a teenager she became the youngest person to sign Charter 77. Her parents were afraid, for themselves and for their other children. They tried unsuccessfully to dissuade her. Eventually they denounced her to the secret police, and so began a long series of arrests, detentions, interrogations, beatings. It seemed Jarmila held up well; she was obstinate and undeterred. Then came November 1989, when she joined Václav Havel and other Charter signatories in the Magic Lantern Theater and became one of the heroes of the revolution: a girl who looked like a boy. She met Shirley Temple Black, George Bush’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia, and other American diplomats. After the communist regime fell in Czechoslovakia, Radio Free Europe sent her to the Balkans to report on the revolutions in Bulgaria and Romania. She was in Bucharest that December, when the cheers at the rally Nicolae Ceauşescu had organized in support of himself suddenly became boos and cackles, the opening act to the main drama: Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu’s execution on Christmas Day.
When Jarmila returned to Prague she studied theology at Charles University, taking classes in Latin and Hebrew. She did not, though, complete her degree. Instead she came to America—or rather was brought there, by a man named John Hasek—to join the U.S. Army. She attended a military academy in New Mexico, then transferred to the small military college in Vermont. She spoke about John Hasek often, although she did not explain what his role in the military was or how they had met or what their relationship had been. I understood it was a sensitive topic, for she was mourning his death: the previous year he’d been badly injured in Bosnia; he died a few months later in a Prague hospital.
I supposed Jarmila must have learned English well, insofar as she was serving in the American military, but with me and the other students she spoke only Czech. She enjoyed teaching; I sensed she enjoyed her time with us, her students who were more or less her own age. She would ask us to make up comic strips in Czech, with caricatured drawings and dialogue. She was full of warmth and goodwill. Yet I was disconcerted by her appearance—or rather by the indeterminacy of her gender, an indeterminacy that prevailed even over a Slavic grammar that allowed for very little gender ambiguity: in Czech men and women use different forms of adjectives and past-tense verbs.
Jarmila had her own mantra. “Marci,” she would say, “you don’t need hair. Hair is like garbage.”
Then one day she was gone. From Marcela, our other Czech teacher, we learned that Jarmila was in the hospital. Marcela was at once an energetic and almost ethereal presence, entirely different from Jarmila. She was older, perhaps in her fifties, and beautiful; she wore her hair long, in soft blond waves. She had defected from communist Czechoslovakia long ago, coming to the States to marry an American filmmaker. In December 1989 she’d rushed to Prague to be part of the crowd on Wenceslas Square, the crowd she described as moving like an ocean, in currents and undertows. By the time I met Marcela she had a long career as a professor of engineering behind her. It had been only several years earlier that she’d decided on a radical change: she would leave engineering and become a Slavicist. She returned to the university and studied Russian and Czech literature. Languages came easily to her; she was warm and gentle and seemingly indefatigable. Something about her was otherworldly.
Between Jarmila and Marcela there was a subtle tension, though it was never articulated. It was Marcela, though, who drove us to the hospital to visit Jarmila. Only when we arrived did I realize she was in
a psychiatric ward. She still seemed very much herself; she was happy to see us. Her head was no longer quite so clean shaven, and she asked whether, when I next visited, I would bring her a razor. No one in the psychiatric ward wanted to give her one.
“Everything I Know about People I Learned in the Camps”
It was late summer in Prague, busy and bright. The city’s usual residents had long before left for their cottages in the countryside; by 1994, the Czech capital was transformed during the summer months into an English-speaking city, full of tourists. Prague’s fairy-tale glamour, though, was all in its old center. A few miles away, in the unglamorous proletarian district of Žižkov, the wildly successful financial speculator George Soros had conjured into existence an English-language university that drew students from all corners of Europe. It was a university designed to create a new East European intelligentsia cosmopolitan in form, democratic in content—benevolent social engineering by means of philanthropy. There former dissidents came to teach those who were too young to have faced difficult choices. Among those who lectured at the new Central European University was the Slovak writer Martin Šimečka. He seemed less vulnerable than the narrator of The Year of the Frog; still, like his autobiographical protagonist, he was reflective—and saddened by the breakup of Czechoslovakia. He spoke about the crisis of intellectuals in the post–Velvet Revolution years. To be in prison, he explained, was its own kind of privileged position: it meant that you had been recognized as a threat to the powers that be. Now writers had lost that privileged position. They were searching for a new place in this new world.