Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  (It was Pavel Kohout. He must have had himself in mind too. He had written his final poem praising the regime after Stalin’s death: “He is not dead! He is just asleep / He will be here forever, within you and within me.”)

  Europe couldn’t believe its eyes and ears: here was a communist party that had managed to regain the support of a significant part of society without applying force.

  Six months after the writers’ congress, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, who was also the state president, was removed from his post. He was Antonín Novotný—a gloomy, solemn man. It was his conviction that anything that did not fall within the Soviet model was not socialism. In January 1968, he was replaced within the Party by Alexander Dubček, who allowed the public to speak freely and to photograph each other in nothing but their bathing suits at the pool.

  People stopped being afraid of each other, and society was full of admiration for itself.

  A sort of miracle had occurred.

  The newspapers and television lost their colorlessness. The tedium vanished from the theater and cinema. Banned books were published. Censorship was lifted.

  In a cartoon in the previously regime-run newspaper Rudé právo, one guy says to another at a café table: “There’s nothing to talk about. It’s all in the papers.”

  In another cartoon, a young couple are standing under a tree. The man is carving a large heart into the bark, with the name “DUBČEK” inside it.

  People even painted slogans on the walls in Poland, such as: “All Poland is waiting for its Dubček.”

  HURRAY!

  Thirty-nine-year-old Procházka wrote newspaper columns and had daily meetings with young people. In those days, some of them were even held in the city parks.

  “Not everyone can be a philosopher, but in his own interest each person should devote half an hour a week to thinking,” he advised in his book Politics for Everyone. It was an instant bestseller. He received up to fifty letters a day, because he knew how to explain various problems.

  “Is it at all possible to be happy these days?” he was asked. Or: “Why are the reviewers comparing the Czech movie The Hop Pickers to West Side Story, when the ordinary citizen still can’t see this American movie, although it came out six years ago? Can you confirm that our comrades from the Central Committee watch American movies in secret?”

  “They accuse us of attacking socialism,” he told the young people. “But those charges are brought by the very men and women who have made socialism into a dreary prison for the intellect.” (“He was like the first Christians,” adds his daughter. “He believed that socialism is the best system. My son is convinced that the ideas his grandfather promoted in those days could still be a success. But I always say they’d have to be implemented by angels.”)

  In March 1968, at a meeting held at the Slavonic House in Prague, he uttered a famous remark about censorship: “Man did not spend ages learning to talk only to end up with no right to speak.”

  “Hurray!” the crowd of students cried in answer.

  “Some historians believe to this day that the main aim of the Soviet invasion was to destroy freedom of speech in our country,” wrote Dubček in 1990.

  “We’re not afraid of scary monsters anymore,” declared Procházka. “A return to democracy does not have to mean a return to capitalism.”

  And also: “Let’s not teach cows to fly; if we’re going to try at all, let’s teach the horses. They’re more than twice as intelligent.”

  HANDS

  Let’s go back to the evening of March 21, 1970.

  First, the TV viewers saw an Air France plane landing at an airport.

  Then, a terminal building marked PARIS.

  “Paris is a beautiful city, full of cultural monuments. But not all of us go there to admire them,” said a straight-talking female voice.

  After the terminal, they saw the interior of a car, and a pair of hands. White shirt cuffs protruded from the sleeves of a coat. The hands were driving a Mercedes. The right one occasionally held a cigarette, tapping the ash into an ashtray on the dashboard.

  The only performers in the movie Report from on the Seine were these two hands.

  Off went the car. A road was visible through the front windshield. According to the woman’s voice, it was meant to be the highway from the airport into Paris, but it looked like the highway from Prague to Karlovy Vary in western Bohemia.

  The invisible owner of the hands was talking to another—also invisible—person.

  It is certain that one of the voices in the car belonged to the writer Jan Procházka. This is what he said: “On Saturday I had a meeting with some people from the government. They’re cretins. And Dubček isn’t any smarter either.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the other voice.

  “The man has good intentions, but he has obvious limitations … He’s not the sort of person who could possibly manage to do anything except keep adapting to the situation.”

  “Yes, but …” added the voice.

  “In which case he should wave goodbye to the top job in the Party. Because it’s idiotic.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They’ve got to find the key to it all! Ways to deal with all those stupid cleaners or lunch ladies who appear up there with the help of those equally stupid Party secretaries.”

  “Yes, too true,” confirmed the voice.

  THE VOICE

  The “uh-huh” and other affirmations came from a well-known professor of literature whom the writer had met two years earlier. They had talked for four hours as they drank a bottle of vodka. The recording came from this particular conversation.

  They had never been to Paris together. They had never been on a car journey together. The Mercedes didn’t belong to either the professor or the writer. Procházka didn’t have a car or a driver’s license. Even though the noise of an engine had been added over their voices, an echo could be heard, which doesn’t happen when you’re in a car. It’s easy to tell they were talking somewhere else, in a place with tiling on the walls, for example.

  And, in actual fact, the source of the echo was the professor’s tiled kitchen.

  “Why exactly are we showing this?” asked the voice-over. “To give you the chance to form your own opinion about the democratic spirit in which those whom you were so eager to believe talk to each other.”

  When some “pissed-off miners from Ostrava” called his house, Procházka spent a long time explaining to them that those were his words, but not his opinions. (We know this because there are instructions in the Security Service archives, declassified in March 2001, setting out who was to call Procházka and what they were to say. We know how these tasks went.)

  His wife unplugged the phone.

  “How pale you are,” she said to the Person Under Surveillance. The PUS made no reply.

  THE HOOK

  They couldn’t sleep.

  Suddenly, at four in the morning, they heard the crash of breaking glass.

  They ran into the sitting room.

  A large mirror had fallen from the wall and shattered against the floor.

  Only the hook was still there, high up on the wall.

  The writer stared at the hook, then at his wife, and asked what it could mean. She didn’t reply.

  Their daughter Lenka says the mirror couldn’t withstand the tension in the apartment, where six people were lying awake, suffering.

  THE BALCONY

  For a long time, he refused to believe a recording could be manipulated to quite that extent. “He was a screenwriter, his movies had won prizes. I realize he didn’t edit them, but he must have known what could be done with a tape,” I wonder out loud.

  “No, he couldn’t have understood that. He really was just a naive boy from the countryside,” says his wife, Mahulena.

  He stopped leaving the house.

  The nation believed the television.

  Kundera wrote that plenty of people who bitch about their own friends at the first opportu
nity were more shocked by their beloved Procházka than by the methods of the secret police.

  For two weeks, he paced up and down the balcony.

  If he did any whispering to himself out there, he could be heard—unbeknown to him—by nine microphones.

  Fourteen days after the program was broadcast, he fell ill with a temperature of 42 degrees C [107° F].

  He sat and wrote. He typed out hundreds of letters of explanation. To the editors of newspapers, to the radio and television stations. None of them was ever published. So he sent explanations to his barber and to the manager of his favorite Chinese restaurant.

  At college, nobody would speak to Lenka—she was the daughter of the man who had betrayed the Spring. So she brought in twenty copies of her father’s letter, and tried to get her fellow students to read his explanations. Her younger sister Iva took copies to high school too.

  But their classmates said: “Don’t give us that letter.”

  “Don’t destroy people.”

  “Why would you even touch those pieces of paper?”

  NAIVETY

  TV director and documentary filmmaker Jordi Niubó listened carefully to the soundtrack of Report from on the Seine through headphones (the audibility is much better than without), and today, thirty years on, he is convinced Procházka’s words haven’t been transposed. “He really did say Dubček was naive, etcetera. But he was, wasn’t he? Today anyone will agree that he was. But at the time it sounded like real sacrilege in Czechoslovakia.”

  Years later, Dubček himself frankly admitted to having been misled by his own imagination: “The problem for me was that I didn’t have a crystal ball to help me see the invasion coming.”

  At 11 p.m. on August 20, 1968, the Russians attacked Prague from the air. The airplanes dropped tanks and guns at Prague airport. At dawn, before the Soviets seized Dubček and five other people in charge of the country, seven Soviet paratroopers entered his office. “Immediately,” he recalls, “they took up position by the windows and internal doors. It looked like an armed robbery. I automatically reached for the phone, but one of the soldiers pointed his machine gun at me, grabbed the phone, and ripped the cable from the wall.”

  They sat Dubček and the others at a large table. Next to him sat his friend, the chairman of parliament Josef Smrkovský (the man whose urn would be discovered on the express train to Vienna five years later). “Indeed,” writes Dubček, “we were pretty well protected as we sat around the table—each of us had a machine-gun barrel aimed at the back of his head.” As they were leaving, he noticed a man called Soják, the head of his chancellery. “I whispered to him to keep an eye on my briefcase, in which there were some official documents: I didn’t want them to fall into the hands of the Russians. At that point I didn’t know Soják was one of the Soviet lackeys.”

  Abducted and imprisoned by the Russians (“At the Kremlin I was not allowed to wash off the dust and dirt of the last three days”), he knew his country had been invaded by a gigantic military machine, and that there was no force on earth capable of driving it out. Nevertheless, as he recalls, it was only when he was sitting in front of Brezhnev, with no doubt left in his mind that he had to sign the—forcibly imposed—act of capitulation, that he realized the most important thing: “that in this madhouse nothing made sense—none of the ideals to which I was attached, and which I had thought both sides shared.”

  Wasn’t he naive?

  Right up to that moment, he had believed those people had ideals!

  PACKAGES

  By the time the Procházka family were sitting in front of the TV set looking forward to the special program, Alexander Dubček was no longer First Secretary of the Communist Party, but ambassador to Turkey. (Three months later, he was an employee of the State Forestry Service in Slovakia.) The First Secretary was now Gustav Husák.

  The professor responsible for the “uh-huhs” and other affirmative noises in Report from on the Seine was historian of literature Václav Černý. He was twenty-six years old when, in 1931, he became an associate professor at the University of Geneva. He discovered some unknown plays by Pedro Calderón, and was quickly acclaimed as one of the most outstanding representatives of Czech culture in the twentieth century. An inveterate opponent of communism, he was the target of propaganda campaigns from the Stalinist era until his death in 1987. If he took an interest in the Middle Ages, he was attacked for being partial to an age of ignorance; if he turned to the Baroque, he was accused of doing it out of admiration for the Jesuits; and if he wrote about Romanticism, he was charged with being an individualist, which disqualifies a citizen from being a true socialist. Whereas he was only interested in Iberian studies out of reverence for General Franco. After the Prague Spring, he was forced to retire, and his work was only issued by émigré publishers.

  The makers of the provocative television show had deliberately not revealed too many of his words. His other recorded remarks were needed for a series of radio programs, entitled On Professor Černý and Others. The others, bugged at Černý’s house, were Procházka, Havel and Kohout.

  “The wheels have begun to turn,” ran the title of the first program.

  They described how the tapes of the conversations had reached the media: “History has many remarkable stories about how things that should have been kept hidden forever suddenly came to light.”

  And they went on: “In this instance, some packages just as suddenly appeared on the desks of the managers of the mass media. The sender was anonymous, but the postmark implied that they came from the city on the Seine. However, despite that country’s reputation, the packages didn’t contain bottles of cognac, but tape recordings. On them, we heard some voices familiar to us from the Prague Spring.”

  On the tapes, Václav Havel talked about the possibility of creating a social democracy similar to the Swedish model. He said he could see Professor Černý taking part in it.

  The professor told Procházka one-to-one that he wasn’t backing out, “but first Dubček has to win. For himself, not for me. For himself! Once he wins, I’ll show my face. If necessary, I’ll even come out against Dubček.”

  “A shiver goes down the spine,” wrote a commentator, “when we hear how cynically they traded the fate of the country and its people, with no embarrassment or shame.” And he concluded: “We realize that the bourgeois media are bound to create complex rhetorical constructs around our series—we’re already familiar with that sort of hysterical outcry. But the tapes could not remain hidden. Once upon a time, these voices spoke words that were like honey for the people’s hearts. But in private they didn’t conceal their hatred for our world.”

  As for the bourgeois media, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung, for example, Prague was already experiencing George Orwell’s 1984 in 1970.

  OLD PEOPLE’S HOME

  Not long ago, Jordi Niubó endeavored to find out where the people who signed their names to those productions are today. The documentation for Report from on the Seine has disappeared, and there’s nothing left in the television file but the wire binding.

  The people listed in the program’s closing titles are either not alive anymore, or nobody knows anything about them. The man who was head of Prague television in 1970 stopped working there in the mid-1980s, and it is impossible to establish where he lives now. According to the newspaper Rudé právo, they obtained the recording from radio broadcasts made by someone called Karel Janík. It praised the editor for doing a good job. No such person ever existed. Karel Janík is the secret police.

  The man who was Minister for Internal Affairs in those days is still alive. Niubó saw his hunched back in an old people’s home. “He might mistake you for his mother,” the nurse warned him.

  THE EAR

  It is the late 1950s.

  Ludvik, secretary to a certain government minister, and his wife Anna are on their way home from a party. At their front gate, it turns out they’ve lost their keys, so they break into their own home.

  Th
e keys are there, stuck in the lock, but on the inside. But they had locked the door behind them—Ludvik had had the keys in his pocket.

  Somebody has switched off the electricity. Anna is drunk, and criticizes her husband for not even knowing how to mend a fuse; they start bickering about stupid things, they tussle, and suddenly a fork falls to the kitchen floor. It has fallen between two cabinets. Anna insists on getting it out of there. In the narrow gap between the cabinets, she finds an “ear.”

  Ludvik panics, and starts burning all his compromising documents. He throws them into the toilet bowl and tries to flush them away. The bathroom is filled with acrid smoke, but they’re afraid to open a window. They’ve noticed that there are two men sitting in a car, watching their property.

  They find another “ear” in the bathroom under the dirty laundry.

  The next one is close to the ceiling, on the sill of the little bathroom window.

  (After the Soviet invasion, Procházka wrote a short story about an “ear.” It was soon filmed by a friend of his as The Ear.

  (An “ear” is a tiny chip with an antenna the length of an eyelash. A transmitter.)

  Ludvik realizes that his minister, who lives across the street, has been interned in his own home. What’s the meaning of the lack of electricity in Ludvik’s villa and the three bugging devices they’ve found? They’re sure to be coming for him as well. Anna sorts out some shirts for her husband, and gets him ready for arrest.

  Once our hero has revealed his fear, cowardice and lack of character to the audience, the next morning he is not arrested, but appointed minister.

  TABOO

  The Ear immediately became legendary and was marked down for deletion. There was only one copy of the movie, which was known as “detained production No. 1.” It was described as one of the best movies in the history of Czech cinema, and definitely the best ever made by director Karel Kachyňa.