by Marci Shore
IN THE SENIOR class there was a seventeen-year-old girl with long blond hair named Lenka who was serious about dancing, had a natural talent for languages, and wanted to study at Charles University in Prague. Her classmates whispered that she was “ambitious.” When Lenka returned from a bus trip to London she wrote in an essay:
When I visited England, the people I lived with asked me whether the people in our country had been hungry or had suffered during the communist period. They thought that there had been great changes in our lives after the revolution. But it isn’t true, at least in our family. In 1989 I was about twelve years-old and so I remember the communist era, the “tender revolution” and the events after it quite well. It is said now that the communist period was very cruel, that it was very difficult to live here, etc. I am not able to speak in general, but as for the people I knew very few of them suffered, we lived quite a normal life. Considering with our present life, it was nearly the same. There was no revolution in our town. Everything happened in Prague.
What Lenka wrote startled me. Everyone I’d met in Prague and in Bratislava had experienced communism’s fall as a great drama. Its aftermath, too, continually ushered in new dramas: lustration, by exposing the names of informers, had destroyed not only careers but also friendships, families, and marriages. Václav Havel’s general amnesty had emptied the prisons not only of political dissidents but also of ordinary criminals. The rise of nationalist politics had split Czechoslovakia in two.
Yet what was felt intensely in Prague was felt only mildly in Domažlice. Even the radical change of government was less radical in the provinces, where the lower and middle levels of bureaucracy remained embedded and where the teachers whose ideology the communist government had once deemed suitable for their profession continued to teach the same classes.
“I must say,” one of my students wrote, “that half of our neighbours were or are still communist. In offices and institutions are plenty of people, who were in StB (it’s same as KGB in Russia)…. And people are so, so impassive.”
“The system was destroyed,” another student wrote, “but people are still the same.”
“It was only a small revolution,” wrote another, “but it changed a lot of things.”
And it was true that even if people were still the same, this provincial town did experience other, different changes: above all the enormous inflation. The border to what had been West Germany was just a few miles from Domažlice, but until 1989 the border had been closed. Now everyone was free to go abroad, but soft currency and exchange rates made what was possible in theory very difficult in practice. Instead, it was the Germans who crossed the border to buy less expensive Czech products.
The students, like Lenka, understood this well—this was their lives—and while they spoke positively about the revolution they were not enamored of it. Before 1989, they had been too young to feel oppressed by censorship and too young to hate communism. Most real to them were the tangible changes in their own lives: Russian classes had ended and English and German classes had begun. There were new stores and new restaurants, new cafés and new bars. In the shops there were many things to buy but at high prices. The old buildings on the town square had been painted, and Domažlice looked much prettier now. Before the revolution, one girl wrote, “everything was darker.”
A seventeen-year-old boy wrote of the May Day parades and of how he and his classmates would walk through town wearing red scarves, sending greetings to the Soviet Union and shouting, “Long live the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia!”
“Today it’s amusing,” he wrote, “but in this time we were happy to have a day off from school.”
He lived not in Domažlice but in a nearby village, and he drew up a chart comparing his life before and after the revolution.
Before After
Town Staňkov (prefab house) Staňkov (prefab house)
Garden yes yes
Dog no yes
Money enough a little shortage
Equipment only essential things more comfortable
Freedom I can’t say no freedom, but it was very little almost completely
Goods prices suited to my needs why? because almost everything was supported by state for average wage too high
I was happy he had a dog now.
The students were conscious of the fact that something called “freedom” had been achieved, yet they were conscious, too, of the fact that the world was still not open to them.
“The life in Domažlice before the revolution was not very different as now,” one student wrote. “We were going to the school, after school we were sitting on a bench and talking about our friends and school. But something changed after the revolution—we are free.”
In some ways Domažlice was a place where the revolution had barely happened—but then again it had.
IN THE 1980s, when my Czech teacher Jarmila’s parents had denounced her to the secret police, she’d taken refuge with her grandmother, a widow who lived alone in the small town of Ústí nad Orlicí, two hours or so east of Prague. And when Jarmila had left for the United States, it was her grandmother to whom she entrusted her papers: Charter 77 and Civic Forum documents, memoranda from the Velvet Revolution. Before I’d left Vermont, Jarmila had given me a letter introducing me to her grandmother: “Receive her as you would me.”
In Prague I posted the letter. Jarmila’s grandmother, Paní Bendová, wrote to me at once: it had been already several weeks since she’d had news from her granddaughter, and she’d been terribly worried. She hoped I would visit her soon and wrote of the beautiful countryside, of the castles and monasteries around Ústí nad Orlicí. I could come anytime, as soon as I liked, she was always at home. She would wait for me at the train station, under the clock, holding a photograph of Jarmila in her U. S. Army uniform. Paní Bendová was afraid for her granddaughter, so far away in America; she wanted very much for her to come home.
“I love her,” Paní Bendová wrote of Jarmila, “she’s my sunshine.”
In Domažlice I wrote to Jarmila, who answered quickly: she was very glad to know that I would visit Ústí nad Orlicí. “You’ll have the chance to see places where I grew up, and moreover you’ll be able to rest for a while from all problems and cares. You’ll soon see that the Czech Republic is unlike America in many ways, that people live inside the attitudes of the last century, and that ‘perhaps tomorrow’ or ‘it is not possible’ is completely possible and normal.”
By now Jarmila had been in the hospital for eleven weeks. The doctors had diagnosed her with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. They knew what was wrong but not how to help her.
“But don’t tell my grandmother this,” she wrote, “she would worry unnecessarily. Insofar as I’m to end up on the streets in New York or somewhere else, I’ll return to Prague.”
She hoped very much it would not come to that.
Days later I walked into my classroom to find a middle-aged man waiting for me. He was excited, or rather agitated, talking very quickly and in a colloquial language I couldn’t make out at all. After some time I understood that he wanted me to come with him to his village, that he and his wife wanted to talk to me. Some minutes passed before I realized, suddenly, who he was: this man was Jarmila’s father.
Some days later he returned. This time I got into the run-down car, and we set off for his village some ten or fifteen miles away. He was calmer now, and I understood more of what he said. When we arrived he took me first to a crumbling wooden building, a single room with a cross, a small altar, some flowers. It was their village church, and he wanted me to know that he and his wife did their best to look after it, to water the flowers. At their home, Jarmila’s mother was waiting for me. She was nervous, excited. It had been four years since they’d last seen their daughter—the daughter they had once betrayed, who had now gone off to a faraway world.
It was midafternoon. Jarmila’s mother poured Becherovka, a vaguely sweet Czech liquor that tasted of cinna
mon but was deceptively strong, and we sat down in the kitchen, around a wooden table. She disappeared for a moment and then returned with a box of papers: Jarmila’s childhood report cards. She had always had the highest grades in Russian. In the sixth grade she’d thrown chalk and an eraser at a picture of Czechoslovakia’s communist leader, Gustav Husák. She’d also drawn three hairs on a picture of Lenin. Her parents had saved, too, press clippings from November 1989, the days of Civic Forum, when their daughter became a heroine of the revolution. And press clippings from a later time, when their daughter was already living across the ocean: Jarmila in her U.S. Army uniform, a Radio Free Europe journalist writing that Jarmila always appeared in every place where something was happening. She was fearless. When in November 1989 demonstrators were met with police violence, Jarmila—one article said—bore her injuries like a man. People called her “that pretty boy.”
Jarmila’s parents wanted me to know how proud they were of their daughter. And they wanted me to know how much they hated the communists, how much they had always hated the communists. When they had denounced their daughter to the secret police, it was only that they had two other children, that they were afraid. I understood what they meant: Jarmila’s activities had put the entire family in danger.
They had a good Czech dictionary—an old two-volume dictionary of phraseology and idioms. They wanted me to have it. They wanted to do something for me—to help me, to feed me, to buy me things with money they surely did not have. I understood that their desperate generosity was a plea for forgiveness. But it was not for me to forgive them.
Some time afterward a letter arrived from Paní Bendová. She was happy I had met her son and daughter-in-law. “They’re good people,” she wrote.
IN DOMAŽLICE I took long walks and read Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov absorbed me: Alyosha, who guessed that the Grand Inquisitor’s secret was that he did not believe in God; Ivan, who insisted that if God was dead, then everything was permitted; Dmitri, who stared at Katya “with a terrifying hatred, with the kind of hatred that is only a hair’s breadth from the maddest, most desperate love.”
One night I walked to the town square and into a small café. It was empty but for one table of some half dozen young, attractive people—women in tight jeans and low-cut blouses and creamy makeup, their nails brightly colored, their hair dyed the same brilliant auburn, their boyfriends’ arms hanging possessively around their shoulders. One of the men with tousled dirty blond hair called out, gesturing for me to join them. He introduced himself: his name was Libor.
Now some evenings I would go to the newly opened Italian-style café where Libor and his friends spent most of their time. One of them, Markéta, served as both bartender and waitress. She wore thick mascara and bright lipstick, tight black dresses cut low enough to hint at lacy lingerie. On the nights when she was not working she would come to the café as a customer, in jeans with a leotard top. Her girlfriends, the women I had met with Libor, would come to show her their new purchases, laying shopping bags on the bar counter and pulling out black stockings, auburn hair dye, violet nail polish, a red scarf. Markéta’s boyfriend, adoring, would come, too. I admired Markéta: the way she enjoyed inhabiting her body, pouring drinks, being beautiful. And I was jealous of her—of her presentism and contentment.
Libor lived with his parents, not in Domažlice, but in a village a few miles away. As an adolescent, he had been sent to a vocational school and trained to work with machinery. He was eighteen when the revolution came and freed him from an officially assigned job. Instead he parlayed his charm into a relatively well-paying position at the local insurance company. Before the revolution he’d been unconcerned with politics: there was first love, there was soccer and ice hockey. Now, after the revolution, he was only slightly less unconcerned with politics. The time after work he spent at bars and cafés, he drank beer and chain-smoked, he played cards and read soft-porn magazines. He was very proud of his job at the insurance agency. It was a good job—he had his own business card—and money had become very important in these past few years. It had changed people. Once no one had had very much, but everyone had had some. Now some people had a lot, and some people had almost nothing. His parents struggled with this, but for Libor it was not a problem at all. On the contrary, he preferred it this way.
A LETTER ARRIVED from Miloš in Slovakia, who had lost his seat in parliament in the September 1994 elections. His tone was neither defensive nor sad: now he had more time for himself—and for his family.
“I think,” he wrote in Slovak-inflected Czech, “that your Czech is similar to my daughter’s Slovak, and that you two would understand each other. (That was a joke.) And now seriously. If you’re feeling lonely, come to our place at least for a weekend.… You’re warmly invited and my woman (wife), Maria, is now learning English (she’s terribly ashamed), I’m not supposed to tell you.”
In early October I decided to go to Slovakia to visit them. Miloš, together with Maria and little Maria, was now living in a small town called Topol’čany, two hours from Bratislava. Now again we drank red wine mixed with Coca-Cola and drove through the countryside to visit a castle. At the bookstore in Topol’čany Miloš picked out a dozen books and asked the bookseller to wrap them: they were a present for me. The books—some in Czech, some in Slovak—were mostly works of samizdat literature, originally printed in underground editions on thin paper and in small type. For years they’d been banned, now they were on display—in fact on sale at a large discount: no longer was there much interest in dissident literature. Communism was over.
The trip from Domažlice to Topol’čany was long, and on the way I had stopped in Prague, where Amanda met me at the train station. By now she had been in Prague for nearly three months. She was trying very hard to orient herself in this new life, to find a place for herself in this foreign city—while Oskar was trying to find a place for himself among the friends of his youth. Two disconnected projects. We wandered the city, stopping in pubs and cafés, drinking red wine and smoking cigarettes. I only pretended to smoke. I didn’t inhale, I only liked to tap the ashes into the ashtray.
Later, after I returned to Domažlice, Vlasta wrote to me: there would be no Halloween party at Amanda and Oskar’s apartment after all, as it seemed that for Amanda and Oskar life in Prague “was not party-like … for various reasons.”
IN HER LETTER Vlasta added, “I hope you are already feeling better, coping with Domažlice somehow, not letting the small world overwhelm you.”
Had my Czech been better, I could have learned much from my Ukrainian friend Galina’s daughter Mara about this small world, about the students, the school, the teachers, the town. I was preoccupied with the language’s grammatical intricacy, but I was slow to absorb the social codes that were so much more important. My colleagues, like the other adults in the town, kept their distance. It was the students who accepted me the most, especially the younger ones.
At the school classes were often interrupted by construction work, for the headmaster had a rather grandiose expansion plan: he wanted to enlarge the cafeteria, open it at lunchtime to local businessmen, and in this way make a profit for the school. Because the construction workers worked only during the day, and only on weekdays, the drilling and hammering often made it difficult to hear anything else. Several classrooms could not be used at all, so the headmaster had arranged for one class of fourteen-year-olds to be transferred to a decrepit building on the other side of the town, a fifteen-minute walk from the school.
Winter arrived in Bohemia early that year. One day in November I walked through the snow to reach the fourteen-year-olds’ temporary classroom. When I came into the building something felt different. Inside the students were wearing their coats and scarves: the stove had broken and there was no heat. It was already the middle of the day, and the students were frozen. After a moment I asked them all to stand: we would do something that involved movement, they would warm up.
They all stood. And that
was when I noticed they were wearing no shoes. By then I knew it was Czech custom to remove one’s shoes indoors—at home or when visiting someone else’s home. Stranger, though, was the shoe-changing rule at school: inside both school buildings, students—although not teachers—were required to remove their shoes and change into something resembling slippers. This remained true despite the construction that left sand and dust around the school, and this remained true in that small, dirty building on the other side of town where the stove had broken. Their shoes—much warmer winter boots—were piled outside the classroom door, and I told the students to put them back on.
No one moved. Then a girl in the front row, Tereza, asked if they could really put their shoes back on. Tereza was unlike the other students: her parents were from Prague, and even though she and her brother had been born and had lived all their lives in Domažlice, she was still in some way an outsider. She had been formed by Prague, where both of her grandmothers lived and where she visited often. She was a pacifist with the long, straight hair of a hippie. She dressed like a flower child, refused to eat meat, and loved the Beatles. Tereza’s father was a lawyer who’d read samizdat; Tereza’s mother as a child had lived for a year in India and spoke English. They were an intelligentsia family, exiled to the provinces by the capital’s housing shortage.
A girl sitting beside Tereza added that in the morning, when they’d learned the heat was broken, their math teacher had warned them that she would report anyone wearing shoes to the feared headmaster. I hardly understood what to make of this. I only said it was cold, and they should put on their shoes. I promised to take full responsibility: no one would be reported to the headmaster. Still they hesitated, unsure, I saw, of whether to trust me—then Tereza got up, and the others followed.