Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  The movie remained in detention for twenty years.

  An “ear”—the personification of an invisible being. A complement to Kafka’s ideas. Everyone knows it’s listening all the time, but they can’t talk about it, not even in a whisper; only Anna, through stupidity and to spite her husband, lets herself go round the house shouting: “An ear … A goddamn ear!” In Procházka’s novella, the “ear” is a sacred kind of symbol. “It becomes a sort of god, whose name no one dares to utter,” said one of the reviews.

  Procházka never suspected that he himself was being bugged and recorded in the first days of the Prague Spring, after Dubček came to power. He thought they had only started to do it after the Soviet invasion.

  Meanwhile, Dubček himself had been presented with a technological novelty: the prototype of the first Czechoslovak color TV, to try out at home. When he realized there was a bugging device in the TV set, he stopped using it, took it down to the cellar, and deliberately didn’t tell anyone about it. Two weeks later, the man who had given him the TV set questioned him in person: “So tell me, aren’t you watching color TV anymore, comrade?”

  LOVE

  In 1968, Procházka’s daughter Lenka was seventeen. She has been in love many times since then. In January 2001, when further Security Service documents were declassified, she found out that three of her boyfriends had been recruited by the secret police, and had made regular reports on their relationship.

  “Do you feel hatred towards them?”

  “I was shocked, I’ll admit. But I’m not going to let some new piece of information ruin my memories of a relationship. Because what is the truth? The truth is what we experienced, not what someone’s going to tell us about it years later.

  “I feel sorry for those guys. They were a part of my life. If I’d blocked off my emotions, if I hadn’t smiled at one of them in the metro, if they hadn’t come into my life, they wouldn’t have had any problems, and the Security Service would never have offered them the temptation that they did.

  “Yes, they weren’t brave. But they had other virtues.

  “You can’t measure everyone by your own yardstick.

  “For the people I have loved I have a different yardstick.”

  THE BLONDE

  When the children were little, she went off to the swimming pool. There, she met a nice girl. With fair hair, always smiling. They became friends. For several years, the blonde girl took care of her children, did the cooking, and stayed the night. “All my life, I was sure it was I who had picked her out of the crowd, I who had approached her, I who had offered her a cup of coffee,” she says. “And now from the files I’ve learned that she was a secret police operative placed at the pool. She made copies of all the letters she found in my apartment.”

  A CLOSE FRIEND

  Everyone who remembers this episode instructs me: “But don’t forget to write that when Procházka was dying Kachyňa played the dirtiest trick on him—before his death, he gave an interview saying that he regretted everything they had filmed together.”

  Karel Kachyňa was a close friend of Procházka. At his interrogation, the security officers demanded that he distance himself from the movies they had made together. Especially The Ear. That was the condition imposed on him by the state. He must disown Procházka, and then he would be able to go on working.

  The interview in question appeared in the cinema journal Záběr (meaning “The Take”), and on the same day Rudé právo reprinted extracts from it along with a commentary. However, it was two months after Jan’s death, a fact nobody remembers, but then who’d want to go through the papers from thirty years ago?

  Not once does Procházka’s name appear in either article. Kachyňa talks about his new movie. As for settling scores, all he says is: “Nobody is infallible. Least of all me, since I work on emotional topics.”

  The journalist presses him: “But perhaps you could say a bit more about that?”

  Kachyňa: “It would be easy here, on paper, to disown everything that belongs to yesterday, while ardently signing one’s name to everything that belongs to today.”

  And that’s just about all he says. One more sentence about socialism and a promise to make a movie about Lenin in the future.

  “Karel Kachyňa’s words are to be warmly welcomed, as they imply that he is now on the right path towards self-awareness,” wrote the Rudé právo commentator.

  From then on, Kachyňa made movies for children, and never produced anything about Lenin.

  THE MORGUE

  Nowadays, Karel Kachyňa lives* near Prague Castle, in a pleasant house with a small garden. He is seventy-six. As I am on my way to see him one sunny February morning, I think about fate. In a period of about fifteen years, four of his screenwriters and script originators died. First Procházka, then two years later the writer Ota Pavel—a sports journalist who saw the Devil, ended up in the hospital as a result, and started to write as part of his therapy. Kachyňa adapted his memoir The Death of the Beautiful Deer for the screen. Then two more of them died.

  “My house is a former morgue converted into an apartment,” a small, skinny, wrinkled man tells me on the threshold. “But there aren’t any ghosts, because if there were, the dogs would refuse to live here,” he reassures me.

  We bring up the interview.

  “I had to give it, or for twenty years I wouldn’t have been able to make any movies, and I’m a born filmmaker,” he explains. “So the journalist and I spent a month working on that little bit of text. You see this sentence about socialism, right here?”

  “Yes.”

  “To avoid saying that I was going to support socialism, the editor and I thought up the following phrase: ‘I am convinced that most artists who live in this country want to serve the idea of socialism; each of them wants to be a faithful mirror of modern times and a sensitive detector of the future.’

  “I didn’t say ‘I am in favor of socialism,’ I just said that others ‘are in favor.’ Now you can see that what people think is true nowadays is stronger than what really happened. The commentary in Rudé právo made an impression on people, and now they’ve got it all mixed up together, my carefully considered words and the communist propaganda,” says the director, staring into space.

  I think I can sense the right moment. “Let’s talk about Procházka,” I suggest.

  “I can’t,” he replies. “As soon as I talk about him, I sink into a dreadful depression. So I try to say as little as possible about him.”

  Our conversation can go no further.

  As a way of making up for the awkward silence, the old man suddenly fetches the screenplay of The Ear out of a drawer.

  He asks if I’d like to hold it. He says it’s the original director’s copy with hand-written corrections. I pick up a fat typescript on blue paper.

  FEVER

  This is the land of Kafka. “In a political trial the fact of the defendant’s birth is already a crime in itself.”

  This is the only complaint against fate that Professor Černý wrote in his 1,600-page diary. By contrast with Procházka, he was steady as a rock, according to his friends.

  Whereas the writer had been lying in the hospital for the past ten months. His trial was under preparation, and the secret police were taking an interest in his illness.

  (“4.02.1971, the PUS had a fever of 39° C [102° F].”)

  When a friend came to visit him, Mrs. Procházková asked the visitor not to show any signs of shock. “Jan looks terrible,” she said. “We’re expecting the end any day now.”

  “And one more thing,” she added. “He doesn’t know he’s got cancer.”

  “You have to know how to fight a fever,” he began as soon as he saw his friend in the doorway. He talked for half an hour without stopping. “By now I can tell when it’s coming over me. If I were to give in and fall asleep after dinner, I’d wake up in an hour or so with a raging fever. It’s as if it’s just waiting for me to lie down and wilt. But I won’t! I walk ab
out, stand up, sit down, go to the bathroom, look out of the window, wait for the right time when I have to take one drug or another, then the doctor comes, then my wife, she cooks for me and brings in the food afterwards, so I have to eat it, because I’ve no business losing strength over things that are bound to happen. And so evening comes. And the temperature I get at night is no longer quite so high. Then I sleep two hours, I get up, walk about, stand still, sit, take a look out of the window, over and over, and fall asleep at dawn. Then the day comes and the whole thing repeats itself. I’ve got to be on the offensive all the time and never give in!”

  The offensive lasted thirteen days longer.

  The doctors decided on another bowel operation.

  During the operation, the power station cut off the electricity for forty-five minutes. So they operated on him with the help of flashlights and candles.

  THE LAMB

  In 2000, Lenka Procházková’s popular novel about the life of Jesus was published, The Lamb. As in the Apocrypha, the author had to create scenes to fill in the gaps in the basic story offered by the Gospels, and she had to invent the dialogues. It was a while before she realized where she had gotten the words Mary addresses to Jesus when He is brought down from the cross.

  They were the words her mother used to say goodbye to her father on his hospital bed.

  “All the bad things have already happened. I know how much they have wronged you. But you are no longer in pain. Only I am in pain.”

  A PARTLY OPEN DOOR

  The head of Czechoslovak cinematography publicly criticized himself on television for having been too close to Jan Procházka.

  He burst into tears in front of the cameras and said the writer had disappointed him.

  Then he came to see Iva, Lenka and Mahulena and said: “They interrogated me at the police station and I heard him. I heard your Jan from behind a partly open door! But I knew he was dying in the hospital. And at that point I thought: ‘Oh my God, they even interrogate dying people.’ And I was terrified about what would happen to me.

  “It never even crossed my mind that they were playing me a taped voice from the other room.”

  LIFE, CONTINUED

  Pavel Kohout, who three days earlier had pointed out to Mr. Výborný the similarity between the work of a writer and a gravedigger, made a speech over the coffin.

  Nowadays, he says that funeral was the symbolic end of the Prague Spring and the beginning of winter. Most of Procházka’s former friends didn’t come. By the same token, the Czech cultural elite were divided into the vast majority, who surrendered, and a microscopic minority, who seven years later became the group of “pretenders and castaways from Charter 77,” as the press called them.

  Kohout also says that many artists felt relieved as, day by day, they gradually found out about the Procházka affair. Thanks to those lousy programs, they were able to say: “We’re not going to associate with people like him anymore.” And the story confirmed their belief that one should comply with the regime after all—that made life easier.

  Kohout later emigrated to Austria, where he wrote a novel about a girl who hadn’t gotten into theater school, so she began training to be an executioner. At the school for executioners, she realized that just about anyone can hang a person, but the art is to hang them in such a way as to contain in this act the entire history of human civilization, right up to the technological revolution.

  When, in the fall of 1979, he tried to go back to Prague, he was forced out of his car on the Czechoslovak border and deported to Austria. Straight after that, the authorities stripped him of his Czechoslovak citizenship.

  Výborný the gravedigger died ten years after Procházka. He didn’t end up in an equally beautiful spot. He was buried on the sidelines, closer to the cemetery wall. He was put in a communal grave, where he lies along with strangers.

  Lenka was expelled from college, and for twelve years she worked as a cleaner.

  Iva, who graduated from high school, was denied the right to go to college. She was given a job at the airport, packing dinners for passengers into plastic compartments on trays.

  All their father’s books were withdrawn from circulation. Kohout wrote that Procházka, like many others, was “silenced to death.”

  PEACE

  Ninety days after the funeral, in May 1971, the Czechoslovak Communist Party Congress was held, which opened with the words: “We have conquered chaos.”

  It was the president of the republic who was speaking. “For the past two years,” he said, “the Central Committee under the leadership of comrade Husák has accomplished a task worthy of respect.”

  In the name of the artists, actress Jiřina Švorcová, who played the store assistant in the TV series A Woman Behind the Counter, sighed with relief at the lectern: “At last!”

  “In 1968,” she continued, “the enemies of socialism unleashed the problem of so-called ‘absolute freedom of artistic creativity.’ Backed by the applause of the West, eventually they began to inspire in people a lack of faith in socialism as the basic principle of life.”

  A SLIP OF PAPER

  As I hold the fat script of The Ear in front of me, director Karel Kachyňa is encouraging me to leaf through it, when a slip of paper falls from inside.

  “Oh, that’s Procházka’s writing. Take a look, I think he wrote something about The Ear there,” he says.

  Yes, he did.

  “This story is made up. The things that really happened were far more terrible.”

  * * *

  * Karel Kachyňa died on March 12, 2004, two years after this essay was originally published in Poland. Besides The Ear, Kachyňa and Procházka’s most important co-production is Coach to Vienna (1966), one of the most controversial movies of that era. The heroine is a desperate village woman whose husband has been hanged by the Germans. On the final day of the war, a young Nazi soldier forces her to transport him and his wounded comrade by horse and cart across the border illegally. The woman takes a sickle with her, in order to kill them both at the first opportunity. However, first a mutual liking arises between the young German and the woman, and then desire. At this point, they are attacked by Czech partisans. The movie was criticized as anti-Czech. Procházka and Kachyňa explained that it was “simply a movie against killing.”

  THE PUBLIC CONCERN

  In 2000, reporters for Blesk (“Flash”), the post-communist Czech Republic’s top-selling newspaper, wrote about singer Helena Vondráčková’s jaw, pointing out which of her teeth were false.

  In 2003, they gave the number of the courtroom where she was granted her divorce.

  In 2004, they photographed and described every item of trash in her trash can.

  In 2005, they published a list of plastic surgery procedures which she should—in their view—immediately undergo.

  Among all these items, they also reported:

  THE TRUTH ABOUT MY CHILD

  VONDRÁČKOVÁ—AT LAST WE TELL ALL!

  From our reporter, Prague—Deep inside, Helena Vondráčková (56) has suppressed a terrible secret for years on end. Finally it has come to light. If not for the bungled termination which her one-time German lover forced her to undergo, Helena would now have an adult son or daughter! Even though decades have gone by, time has never healed the wound. It still hurts to this day! Every time she sees a baby in a pram she starts to choke up.

  When this dreadful thing happened, Helena’s world crumbled. The lyricist Zdeněk Borovec wrote a song for her, “Two Little Wings Are Gone” [the Czech version of the American hit “Killing Me Softly”].

  Search in every corner of the house

  You won’t find anything but shadows

  Two little wings are gone now

  They were almost here

  Where have they flown to, where are they now

  The nest is empty

  The heart is silent

  … Yes, this song is about her! It’s a poem about a tragedy …

  For years we’ve bee
n hearing rumors about Helena—that she was never interested in having children, that instead of being a mother she preferred to have a career and to earn millions as a singer, and that she didn’t want pregnancy to ruin her perfect figure. But all that was just hot air! She alone knew the truth. And for all these years she has kept her silence …

  Something terrible happened!

  At the time, she was on tour in America, where she had gone to sing for her compatriots. One day she felt unwell and the doctor declared: “Miss Vondráčková, you’re going to be a mother!” She beamed all over. At last! She rushed to the phone to give the news to her lover, Helmut Sickel, who later became her first husband. But there was a cold shower in store for her. “A child? Now? You’ve gone crazy!” he sharply reined her in. “Helena, be sensible! I live in Germany, you live in Prague, there’d be problems. The child will have to be aborted!” She couldn’t listen to any more. With tears in her eyes she hung up. Her heart was filled with despair, regret, and confusion. Helmut was the only man she loved that much! More than herself, more than her dreams. And so she did as he said.

  And the doctor wrote a short

  Official note

  The first mention of someone

  The final mention

  You’re no longer a mother, girl

  The bird no longer sings

  “To avoid exposing herself to accusations and condemnation she didn’t go to a hospital. Unfortunately, she fell into the wrong hands, and then there was no question of ever becoming pregnant again,” claims one of Helena’s closest friends …