Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  Once they had grown tall enough for him to see them from his room, two boys from the block came up one night and chopped them to pieces.

  47

  The head teacher at the American school suggests that Jarka enter her drawings and sculptures for an art competition in North Carolina.

  In eight categories, Jarka wins seven first prizes and goes to Raleigh, the state capital, to collect seven Golden Keys. The eighth key is won by a black girl called Nora Williams. She is unsociable and hardly says a word. They are traveling home from Raleigh in the same direction. They board an empty bus, and Jarka wants her new friend to sit with her in the second row.

  “I’m not allowed,” says Nora. “Even if the bus is empty, we only have the right to sit in the back row. And only as many of us as can squeeze in at the back.”

  “Then I’m going to sit with you,” says Jarka, and Nora gradually becomes more talkative.

  During the journey, the whole bus turns to stare at the back. Finally, the situation is so tense that a passenger tells the driver to stop and sort it out.

  “Are you black?” he asks Jarka.

  Jarka thinks it’s funny. “Of course I’m not,” she replies.

  She doesn’t know she’s not supposed to say that. Anyone who regards themselves as black is black. It’s enough for them to have a single drop of black blood in their system. If she had said she was black, she would have been entitled to sit with Nora.

  Two men get up from their seats, their faces are turning red, and they start breathing heavily. “I’m not black,” says Jarka suddenly, “but I am from Czechoslovakia!”

  And that remark saves her from a lynching.

  03

  Zdeněk Adamec switches on his cell phone. He knows all about phones. If a friend has an old, broken cell phone, even if it’s in ten pieces, Zdeněk is the only person who can fix it for him. In a single afternoon, a cell phone can change people’s minds about Zdeněk entirely. Tomorrow, they’re all going to be reminded who Zdeněk really is anyway.

  48

  Out of the entire school, Jaroslava Moserová comes third in her final high-school exams. She should be on her way home to Czechoslovakia, but four months have gone by since February, when the communists took power there.

  She reads that Czechoslovakia has refused American aid, in other words the Marshall Plan, and that the Soviet Union is its only friend. Even the symbol of democracy, government minister Jan Masaryk, has bitterly said of himself that he has become a Soviet lackey.

  The head of the American school persuades Jarka that if she goes home, she will never leave the country again. He adds that as soon as she arrives in Prague, before being allowed to see her parents, she’s sure to be sent to a re-education camp, because she is the granddaughter of the director general of a major investment bank.

  At the camp, they will undoubtedly subject her to a change of consciousness.

  03

  Zdeněk’s mom is sure he got up early to be at school an hour before classes.

  49

  The Americans have extended the Czechoslovak students’ scholarships by a year, so Jaroslava Moserová is studying at the Art Students League. She earns a living at a lamp factory, where she paints roses in two colors onto the lamp stands.

  In the spring, she finishes her studies and wants to earn the money for a trip. She is given a three-month post at the home of a manufacturer of dried-fruit vending machines. She will take care of his children. At their home on Long Island, there are already three black servants, including a cook. But no black hand is allowed to touch the children’s beds, the children’s bathroom or the children’s clothes. “Of course, the children cannot enter the blacks’ kitchen!” the machine manufacturer’s wife explains to her. “You must make sure of that!”

  03

  At seven in the morning, they unlock the computer room at the industrial technical college in Humpolec, and every day before classes Zdeněk spends some time in there. He also spends time there after classes. Yesterday he was in a chat room until it was closed. He was chatting with Tomáš B., whose tag is Cooldarebák, meaning “Cool-rogue.”

  The topic was this: “I’m fat and I haven’t got a girlfriend.”

  (“So we were both fat guys,” Cooldarebák will later say, “but he was the only one who didn’t have a girlfriend.”)

  49

  Jaroslava Moserová doesn’t have complete faith in American civilization. In September, she wants to go home to her parents. She is nineteen now, and she decides that before being shut in a cage, she’ll take a trip around the world. She sails on cargo ships from San Francisco to India, and then to Europe. She plays cards with the sailors, fails to make any real friends, and brings home parasols made of fish membrane which she bought in the Philippines.

  On the train from Zurich to Prague, she is the only passenger. Nobody is going into Czechoslovakia, and nobody is coming out of it.

  She immediately wants to write to Nora Williams, but she realizes that in Czechoslovakia you don’t write letters abroad. That is, you can write them, because there’s freedom and the people’s democracy, but nobody wants to do that.

  Why not?

  Because you don’t know what sort of an answer you might get.

  Someone once wrote back from Canada: “You’ve never liked red, and now what?” and this harmed not just the woman who got the letter, but her entire family. A journalist from Prague wrote a letter to the Times about how much the price of cigars had risen, and how the stores named Lahůdky (“Delicatessen”) had been changed to Pramen (“Source”), and he was tried as a spy.

  No, she won’t be studying fine arts. Who knows whom they might order her to sculpt?

  “But I’m going to be a plastic surgeon, Daddy. I’ll make use of my talent, and surely they’re not going to tell me to remodel my patients’ faces to look like Marx and Engels?”

  03

  Zdeněk Adamec is getting dressed.

  His father makes gravestones, and in Humpolec, a town of eleven thousand in the central Czech Republic, he is known for it. His mom is on a state allowance and devotes herself to her son. Right up to the sixth grade in elementary school, she used to walk him to school and come to fetch him. The head teacher noted at the time that it was the only case he knew of where a mother carried a schoolbag for a healthy thirteen-year-old boy. He shared his observation at a meeting of the school board.

  “It looks to me as if the woman sticks to her son in an unhealthy way,” he said.

  51

  By now, even students are obliged to address their teachers as “comrade.”

  As clerks at a state bank, Jaroslava’s mom and uncle go to a community action event where everybody addresses each other as “comrade.”

  “And you know what, Jarka,” her mom says afterwards, “in front of those people my brother didn’t dare to ask, in the third person as usual: ‘Would my sister like something to eat?’ We stopped addressing each other normally! We started to feel embarrassed, so we spoke to each other impersonally, saying ‘one could have something to eat,’ or ‘one will have a bite to eat later.’ It’s not as if we called each other ‘comrade,’ but we did come to a sort of compromise. Does making this sort of small compromise gradually lead to making big ones?”

  03

  Apparently, one of the teachers had said (though not in Zdeněk’s presence) that his mother did things for him which every other boy does for himself.

  Because his surname is Adamec, the boys call Zdeněk “Ada.” “Ada!” they shouted recently. “We know your mom even spanks your monkey for you!”

  Zdeněk went blue and stopped breathing.

  51

  Jarka’s father, Jaroslav Moser, has four weaknesses: his wife, skiing, good cars and blondes. He is not in the Party. Nevertheless, as a lawyer and iron-working expert, he becomes a manager at a mining and steelworks syndicate in Ostrava. For unknown reasons, its Party-member boss commits suicide in his small garden, and Jaroslava’s father is arre
sted. He gets out after a year. With no charges brought against him, no trial and no day in court.

  Though haggard and deprived of a job, he is always happy about something. He says that in prison he sang arias from Wagner’s operas. (“And if I hadn’t ended up in there, it never would have occurred to me to sing.”) He finds a job as a clerk at an incineration plant. He is proud that Jarka is studying surgery, and her older sister gynecology.

  03

  Zdeněk prefers leaving the block in the morning to coming back in the afternoon. In the morning, no one is playing soccer in the yard yet, and there’s no fear of a ball accidentally flying towards him. Whenever he sees a ball coming his way, which he’s supposed to kick back, he feels himself go weak.

  (Later—once it’s all over—one of the internet chat-room users will recall that Zdeněk confided in him that he was afraid of the ball because he couldn’t kick it straight. “It’s awful when a ball comes flying at me.”)

  55

  Jarka Moserová is looking forward to receiving her diploma. She has no opportunity to read the thoughts of a writer from Poland on life under communism in a chapter entitled: “How do you go through university without losing faith in life?” (The Polish author’s answer is that it can’t be done.)

  In the fifth year of her studies at Charles University, Jaroslava Moserová finds out that she won’t get the title “doctor of medicine.” The college authorities inform her: “The Party and the government have decided that graduates of the medical faculties throughout the country won’t be called doctors of medicine, but ‘graduate physicians.’ ”

  A student delegation goes to see the president of the republic with a petition. They explain that patients will react badly to this, and it will reduce a doctor’s authority.

  The next day, all the students are summoned to the auditorium. The deputy minister of education and the head of the president’s office make speeches. The chairman of the student delegation reports that the comrade president listened to their petition and said: “In principle I agree with you, but …”

  At this, the head of the president’s office stands up and says that it isn’t true: The comrade president said, “In principle I do not agree with you, but …”

  At that, the chairman of the delegation glances at his fellow students, who handed in the petition with him, and says: “But I have witnesses!”

  A couple of weeks before their graduation ceremony, the chairman shows his fellow students from the medical faculty a summons from the Security Service. On the sheet of paper, there is a charge: “Falsely misrepresenting the words of the Head of State.”

  He goes to the interrogation and disappears.

  He is simply nowhere to be found, and nobody ever hears of him again.

  The entire fifth year class in Medicine sits and waits for the graduation ceremony in silence.

  Nobody is surprised by anything.

  “Why are we keeping quiet?” wonders Jarka.

  “Maybe because too many people keep disappearing,” says a friend.

  03

  If Zdeněk goes anywhere after classes, it’s with his mother, to polish the hood of the car.

  Of course, his parents know the boy should have somewhere to go. They persuaded him to join a fishing club. Fishing and beer are two hobbies for real men in the Vysočina region. Zdeněk did go to the club for two years, and his father even joined it too.

  And to improve things for Zdeněk, his father made an effort and became chairman of the club.

  60

  Now Jaroslava Moserová works in the burns unit at the Charles University hospital in Prague.

  Her life includes an increasing number of the sort of incidents where all you can say is: “Oh … my … God!”

  Mr. J. was a typographer, but he committed a mortal sin: he had his own printing press. In this situation, the Party decided that he would become an electrician.

  They took away his printing works and told him to get used to his new profession. A month later, he was electrocuted so badly that he lost his brow, nose and cheekbones, and his eyeballs melted.

  “Just imagine,” Jaroslava tells her sister, “the current damaged his brain but in a merciful way.”

  “What do you mean, in a merciful way?” wonders her sister.

  “Just slightly,” explains Jarka, “so for a long time he remained in a state of—how can I put it?—misplaced optimism. He told me he’d go back to printing, so I started encouraging him to learn Braille. But he wouldn’t hear of it! He said that these days, when man is getting ready to fly to the moon, doctors will soon know how to transplant eyes. And not only did the man saying this have no eyes, Boženka, he had no face either!

  “Our professor made him an artificial face, modeled a nose, and was getting ready to give him eye sockets. So that glass eyes could be put in them. Then, if Mr. J. put on a pair of spectacles, nobody would realize …

  “And before doing the eye sockets, we let him go home. Because it was the summer vacation, and his daughter said he’d be able to rest in a fragrant garden. Just imagine, despite being completely blind, Mr. J. installed all the electricity in the house his daughter had just built! And to finish it off he put a TV aerial on the roof himself.”

  “That’s wonderful!” says her delighted sister, who has no gynecological stories as spectacular as that one.

  “But once the house was finished and the vacation ended, when the grandchildren had gone back to school and the daughter to work, Mr. J. was left on his own. And you know what? They came home one afternoon, and found him in the yard, dead. He hanged himself.”

  03

  Zdeněk Adamec can’t live without the Internet.

  Yesterday, for instance, he looked at some websites about the mindless pollution of the global environment. He left a comment: “Mankind horrifies me.”

  He left traces on websites where there is proof that democracy is ineffective. (“Because it just means being ruled by civil servants and money,” he added.)

  He left traces on sites for supporters of the view that television is a tool of the devil.

  He left them on sites for people who object to Tom and Jerry cartoons. (“These apparently innocent cartoons contain more violence than any others.”)

  On sites which predict a major energy crisis, to be followed by the outbreak of several wars over the remaining crude oil. (“That was the only reason for the attack on Iraq.”)

  On some chat sites and in some addresses, Zdeněk hides behind the name “Satanic.” (Afterwards, some people will claim that Adamec was also “Satanic666,” whose comments were more aggressive.)

  He agonizes over the imperfection of human nature. “What do we need the law for?” he asks. “Isn’t each person capable of understanding what’s allowed and what isn’t? Evidently, we’re not a mature civilization yet, and we have some learning to do.”

  60

  For once in their lives, Jaroslava’s parents are going abroad. At the invitation of their former maid, Hilde. She and her gynecologist husband live in West Germany. They greet each other. She with a sense of shame for the war, and they for the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans.

  “It’s like a scene from a movie, Boženka,” Jaroslava tells her sister, “two impoverished old people going to see their maid, who receives them in a beautiful apartment. And all three are in tears.”

  Her sister shows her some photographs of her friends. In a group picture, Jaroslava sees a man and a boy, neither of whom she has ever met.

  Her sister explains that the man is a lawyer called Milan David, and the boy is his son Tomáš. The man is divorced, and has custody of the twelve-year-old boy.

  “I like that,” she says, “a man with a ready-made child.”

  They go skiing with the people from the photo. Jaroslava takes cans of soup from Milan and sets them next to her own can on the electric cooker. After a week, they feel as if they belong to each other, and two years later they get married.

  Milan and Tomáš l
ive in a single room with Milan’s father, also known as Grandpa Josef. The proposal goes like this: “Grandpa and Tomáš would love you to come and live in our room with us,” says Milan.

  Before the communists came to power, Grandpa—in other words, Milan’s father—was the chairman of parliament. The day after the putsch he withdrew from politics, and for the past twelve years he has been solving crosswords. Now the chairman of parliament will sleep behind a curtain stretched on a string between the closet and the wall.

  03

  His mother notices that Zdeněk takes a backpack full of books.

  So far, the head of the technical college has been very pleased with Zdeněk. In fact, he isn’t doing well at Czech and P.E., but he’s very good at physics and math. And he already knows all about computers. He was even going to offer him a paid job taking care of the Internet room, if not for that surprising incident with the police.

  The police had discovered that Zdeněk Adamec was advising Internet users on how, for example, to make themselves a permanently charged payphone card.

  There is also evidence indicating that Zdeněk Adamec lent access codes to his sites to alter-globalists. They used them to promote a method of interrupting the electricity supply. In order, obviously, to break the monopoly of the all-powerful capitalist state.

  After his first police interview, Zdeněk immediately removed the websites.

  63

  One day, Jaroslava Moserová sees Czechoslovakia’s most famous plastic surgeon, Professor František Burian, and cannot believe that he is smaller than she is. Standing on her right leg, she is only five foot six and a half inches tall, on her left five foot five and a half and on both five foot six.