Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  We also asked the older citizens of Slatiňany, Helena’s home town, what they know about this affair. “It’s a great mystery,” say the locals. But not a word more. They don’t want to open old wounds, they love their Helena too much for that …

  There was no journalist’s name below the article.

  The issue of Blesk including “the truth about Helena” sold a record number of copies. Despite a court case that the interested party won against the newspaper, which had to pay her damages, the editors continue to regard Vondráčková as the people’s darling, meaning that Blesk is entitled to reveal her personal life.

  “In what way is that any different from the practices of the communist Security Service?” I ask.

  “In every way!” says one of the journalists. “First of all, by contrast with the Security Service we aim to meet public expectations. Secondly, our publication has nothing to do with communism, because we’re part of a Swiss capitalist concern.”

  LIFE IS LIKE A MAN

  She came into the recording suite in a sheepskin coat.

  It was November 14, 1989, quite a cold day. Communism would come to an end in a month’s time. The face that appeared from behind the glasses, warm scarf and fur collar was not a familiar one.

  She took off her coat and went into the studio. The sound director asked her to do a voice test.

  He went pale, glanced at the movie director, and said: “Fero, you must be crazy!”

  She began singing her warm-up exercises.

  Over the past twenty years, her voice had become husky, deeper, but it was still her. “And unfortunately, they recognized her by it,” says Fero Fenič. The assistant sound director grabbed his bag of sandwiches and the recording editor seized his briefcase. The cleaner grabbed her beret and said: “My child is sick!”

  “They ran like the plague,” the director recalls. “You have no idea what terrible terror they had in their eyes. Do you say ‘terrible terror’ in your language too? They fled the studio like rats,” he adds.

  The film Strange Beings is about the last night of communism. Fenič must have foreseen that night, because he started filming it in February 1989 but, as he says, out of fear no Czech actors were willing to play the leading roles, so the parts were played by Poles.

  She sang the song for the closing credits.

  Until 1970, Marta Kubišová is a pop star. She sings in a trio with Helena Vondráčková and Vaclav Neckář. After 1970, people cross the road at the sight of her.

  In the photos taken at the MIDEM music fair held in Cannes in 1969, she is still happy. Neckář is holding her and Vondráčková tight around the waist, and it’s clear that both girls are belting it out.

  In a photo taken twenty-one years later, she is frightened. She looks like an office worker (a postwoman? a store assistant?) whom someone has told to get up on stage. She is glancing fearfully into the camera and has too many gray hairs.

  But let’s go back to the photos from Cannes.

  A year, at most two years after Neckář held her and Helena round the waist, she should have appeared at a festival in Sopot, Poland. The three of them would have been a sensation, Sopot ’70 would have gone wild with joy. “Vondráčková, Kubišová, and Neckář—the famous Czech trio, the Golden Kids, who conquered the Paris Olympia!” the presenter Lucjan Kydryński would have announced. From that moment on, Marta would have been as famous in Poland as Helena ended up being.

  But that’s not what happened.

  On February 3, 1970, Neckář was summoned by the head of Pragokoncert, František Hrabal, who placed on the desk before him three pictures torn from a Danish magazine called Hot Kittens. “Take a good look at this, Mr. Neckář. One of these girls is Kubišová. You realize Pragokoncert can no longer work with an artist like that. If you want to go on tour, you and Vondráčková will be going alone.”

  “Forgive me, Mr. Hrabal. I have been working with Marta Kubišová for seven years, but I have never seen her in this sort of pose before. Perhaps if you were to call her husband …”

  “We know you people! We are perfectly aware how you artists behave … I’ll show you a porn movie that Kubišová made for a thousand West German marks in a villa in Prague! And then you’ll recognize her.”

  He didn’t show it to him.

  The Golden Kids ceased to exist. Rudé právo wrote that Marta Kubišová had posed for some pornographic photos and could no longer be a socialist artist.

  In the days when Czech art books had only black-and-white reproductions of van Gogh paintings, the Security Service was very good at faking Danish porn magazines, producing photographs in the very same colors, on exactly the same sort of paper, but with Marta’s face.

  Only a year earlier, the reviewers in Paris had written: “Marta, Helena, and Vašek are socialism with a human face.” Josephine Baker was among those who praised them. But unfortunately, since then the twenty-eight-year-old Marta had infuriated the regime.

  • • •

  When the Soviet tanks entered the streets of Prague, Kubišová had just been asked to record the final song for a television serial, Songs for Rudolph III. The program told the story of a kingdom where the king’s death is followed by chaos, but then along comes a knight who drives out the traitors and marries the princess. In Marta Kubišová’s low voice, the princess sings:

  May peace be with this land,

  May spite, envy, jealousy, strife, and terror

  be at an end, let them now be at an end.

  The program went out twice. The song, to words by Petro Rada, became an anthem. The radio, which was still controlled by the Prague Spring team, broadcast it as “A Prayer for Marta.” People started singing it on the streets, among the Soviet tanks.

  “To this day,” says the writer Lenka Procházková, “some people weep when they hear the ‘Prayer.’ Just as I do.”

  The new head of Czech radio, appointed in the wake of the invasion, ruled that they should only broadcast one work by Kubišová daily. They had to weaken her position in the forthcoming popular vote for the Golden Nightingale award.

  She had won it in 1968. The Golden Nightingale was the top prize a singer could win from the public. In the male category, it was always won by the tenor Karol Gott.

  The votes were counted, and despite the efforts to damage her, Marta Kubišová still won the female vocalist category.

  At that point, Edvard Švach, head of the censor’s department and formerly a Stalinist prosecutor, paid a visit to the competition office and told them how the public vote should work. They should combine the male and female categories, and then Gott would gain the advantage over the female singers too. If, even in this case, Kubišová came too high, they would have to destroy the postcards with the votes for her and double the votes for a singer called Eva Pilarová.

  The categories were combined and the votes doubled. Gott came first, and Marta was in seventh place.

  The Nightingales had always been awarded at a special ceremony, with the top ten winners appearing on television.

  The censor gave the following instructions: Kubišová will be awarded her prize at the office, and only the top six performers will take part in the concert.

  Copies of Hot Kittens were sent to the concert offices, newspapers, radio and television. Neckář describes how they were also sent out to selected individuals—those who were suspected of being enemies of socialism. When the head of a provincial cultural center received an envelope with no sender’s name and a picture of the naked Kubišová inside, he immediately felt as if someone were watching him, that they knew something about him, and they were warning him: if you’re a naughty boy, we can do something equally horrible to you.

  She disappeared.

  For twenty years, the radio and television stations didn’t broadcast a single song performed by her. She tried to find a job of any kind, but the Security Service made sure she couldn’t get one.

  She and her husband went to live in a village, in a house lef
t to him by his family. The village was called Slapy.

  The word Slapy was not allowed to appear in the media.

  Journalist Jiří Černý did an interview for Melodie magazine with the jazz vocalist Eva Olmerová, who mentioned that she had recently been to stay with friends in Slapy. The editor in chief of Melodie personally changed the phrase “in Slapy” to “not far from Štěchovice.” “For God’s sake,” he said, “let’s be careful that no one figures it out. Štěchovice is the next little place, and it’ll let us sleep in peace.”

  Marta went to Prague for court hearings—she had sued the head of Pragokoncert for defamation. The court admitted that it was in fact uncertain whether the woman in the pictures was Kubišová. “Perhaps the plaintiff would like to be photographed in identical poses? For comparison and an expert opinion.” Her husband reckoned that they were just waiting for pictures like that to have real proof that yes, she did take part in a porno session. She refused. The court ruled that an apology should be made, the head expressed his regret, and the case was closed. Kubišová and her husband realized they had no money left. “A few weeks went by and there was nothing to eat,” says Marta.

  Her husband, movie director Jan Němec, made inquiries about work in Slapy. They had a job for him as a tractor driver. For her, there would be a job at a food processing plant, chopping up chickens.

  As we know, the country didn’t immediately change into a Soviet ghetto after the invasion.

  Humiliated by the Russians, the party chief Dubček left his post in spring 1969, and until Gustav Husák replaced him, until his government, imposed by Moscow, had mercilessly suppressed everything it hadn’t thought up itself, there was a transitional stage. For a year and a bit, a lot of things were still possible.

  After the invasion, Marta still won the Golden Nightingale for 1968. She recorded “Taiga Blues ’69” for the radio—a haunting song about the “tender taiga” in honor of eight Moscow University employees who on August 25, 1968 held a protest in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Six of them were sent to labor camps for four years and two were shut up in a psychiatric hospital.

  Six months after the invasion by fraternal troops, she put out a solo record. Two months later, the Golden Kids had a premiere at Prague’s Rokoko Theater. A year after the invasion, Marta also performed at a song festival in Yugoslavia.

  When, towards the end of 1969, the “normalization” began, the émigré poet and singer Karel Kryl described it like this: “Comrades Husák and Bilak have passed a death sentence on Czech culture and made a goulash out of it.” The occupying force was no longer needed. “And the Gustapo has smashed us in the face,” said Kryl. “Gustapo” was a famous pun he’d made up in honor of Gustav Husák.

  The name of a theater in Brno was even changed because of him. Husák means goose, so instead of Husa na provázku (“Goose on a string”) it became Divadlo na provázku (“Theater on a string”).

  Marta began to receive anonymous letters: “Miss Kubišová, the songs you sing are shit that demoralizes people.”

  She used to sing Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin songs with Czech lyrics.

  “The Western leisure industry is influencing revisionist attitudes in Czechoslovakia. An opponent can systematically gradate his ideological sabotage with the help of pop songs. Aided by Western chart toppers, he can cause apolitical attitudes to further demoralize youth, and by the same token create a rabble that would then conduct campaigns against the socialist authorities”—went the analysis of Marta Kubišová’s role in Czech society, as published by the East German newspaper, Neues Deutschland.

  People usually look towards the future to escape from their troubles. They imagine a line across the path of time, beyond which their present worries will cease to exist. Dr. Tomáš’s wife Teresa, the heroine of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, couldn’t see any such line ahead of her. The only consolation she had was in looking back.

  “I had a bad time,” remembers Marta. “Because there was nothing to console me, neither in the future nor the past.”

  Absolutely nothing.

  She became pregnant, but got too upset in court and miscarried in the eighth month; the doctors saved her from a state of clinical death. “Your child was killed by stress,” they said when she opened her eyes.

  “ ‘What child? What stress?’ I thought. I could only think of one thing: there was some Coca-Cola on the windowsill and I wanted to drink it. Something had wiped my mind clean. Later on, whenever I had to talk about the past, I found a way to avoid it because I couldn’t remember anything and whatever I said sounded unreliable. The trauma gradually passed, but even now I have to say everything twice or I don’t remember it. Apart from song lyrics.”

  She used to go back to Prague and walk about the city aimlessly. “When you’re walking fast, your thoughts aren’t as intrusive,” she explains. At the same time, the writer Bohumil Hrabal was travelling up and down Prague in the #17 tram. He’d been interrogated at the Department of Security, and didn’t want to be at home, where they might be able to find him again. In the tram, he used to consider ways of departing this world.

  Marta roamed Prague with the presentiment: “Something’s going to fall on me, a balcony, a cornice, or a flowerpot. A while back, a woman was killed by a falling cornice.”

  “ ‘There are lots of old houses in Prague,’ I would tell myself. ‘The occasional balcony is bound to fall.’ But luck passed me by in every way.”*

  • • •

  Meanwhile, luck didn’t pass Helena by.

  She performed at festivals in Split, Bratislava, Istanbul, Knokke and Bucharest. Her crowning achievement was the Grand Prix Sopot ’77 for “Malovaný džbánku” (“The Painted Jug”). The song was composed by Jindřich Brabec, who wrote “A Prayer for Marta.”

  On November 3, 1994, the historian Timothy Garton Ash was sitting in the concert hall at the Lucerna Palace in Prague. He later wrote:

  Tonight’s guest stars are the Golden Kids, a Sixties pop group who haven’t performed together for nearly twenty-five years … When [they] sing “Suzanne” there’s just total silence … Tense and heavy with regret … There’s another story being played out on stage this evening: the story of Marta and Helena … In the middle of the “Velvet Revolution,” Marta Kubišová … made her first comeback—a moment I will never forget, at once rapturous and terribly sad. Barely able to sing, due to the engulfing emotion, she whispered into the microphone, Časy se mění. “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”

  He continues:

  Helena Vondráčková took a quite different path after 1969. She continued performing and was seen often on state television. She collaborated. Now their paths have met again. Will virtue have its reward? Or does none of that matter anymore?

  Helena—tall, blonde, and still very much in practice—seems to dominate at first. She’s younger, more professional, and the audience knows her from television. Perhaps they even feel a little easier with her, for most of them collaborated, too, or at least made little compromises to keep their jobs. Marta—older, shorter, black-haired—is a shade slower, and you feel the nervousness in her voice … People bring bouquets of flowers up on stage … and the flower count is going Marta’s way … a comfortable-looking man in jeans shambles up and says he’d like to thank all the performers …“but above all, Ms. Kubišová.” And we all applaud loud and long, and we know what he’s thanking her for, and it’s not her singing this evening—it’s for twenty years of silence.

  For Helena, 1994 was a wonderful year. Wonderful, because after all that time she appeared with Marta again. And wonderful too, because she began recording on her own again.

  When decommunization began in the Czech Republic, Helena faced a desert. “New, younger people joined the recording labels and radio stations, and they told me: ‘Miss Vondráčková, you must bring along a demo tape. We’ll listen to your singing, and then perhaps we’ll make you an offer.’ Out of self-respect
I couldn’t do that,” she says, and falls silent.

  For four years, she didn’t release a new record.

  After a pause, she says: “Did they write about the Polish folk singer Maryla Rodowicz in Poland too, saying she collaborated with the regime?”

  She suddenly asks: “What are you most afraid of?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Illness, perhaps.”

  “Because what drives me nuts lately is people who are prepared to do anything for money. I find them really frightening.”

  For years, Helena’s name was linked with that of the communist prime minister Lubomír Štrougal. According to rumor, they had a lengthy affair.

  Another rumor said that Štrougal had bought her a sheepskin coat, and that when his wife found out about it, she had knocked out all of Helena’s teeth with a champagne bottle. From then on, apparently, she had teeth made of expensive porcelain, paid for—naturally—by Štrougal.

  After 1989, she received the first of many anonymous letters addressed to “Štrougalka [‘Štrougal’s woman’]…”

  “I get lots of anonymous letters that dub me Štrougalka, Štrougalova milenka [‘Štrougal’s darling’] or stará Štrougalová [‘old Mrs. Štrougal’],” wrote Helena in her last book.

  “Štrougalka, now it’s your turn!” one of them said.

  “Were you his milenka?” I ask.

  “I’ve never even met the man. I only ever saw him on the TV news. I spent ages wondering where that rumor could have come from, and suddenly I got a letter that shed some light on it. It was from a married couple living in a small place called Příbram, who happened to like me, and were upset whenever someone spoke badly of me. They suggested that I take a close look at Štrougal’s daughter, Eva Janoušková. She looked very much like me: she was tall, with a similar way of dressing, she had an identical hairstyle, and even drove exactly the same car in the same color. A green Fiat sports car. She was extremely close to her father, often went to receptions with him, and they used to say goodbye by kissing each other on the cheek in public. Years later I met her, and she greeted me with the words: ‘Hello, my alter ego.’ That explains the whole mystery.”