by Ivan Klíma
The selection of titles allowed for publication was meager. So I wrote about the stories of Karel Václav Rais, Mark Twain, and Maxim Gorky. Most of the books I was given to review were by officially approved Soviet authors. All of these authors wrote about the recently concluded war, a period that still fascinated me, and I was prepared to believe that the stories in these works would provide evidence of the new man, his bravery, and his Soviet patriotism. The texts had obviously been translated and brought out quickly. They were full of Russianisms and long-extinct participles. I certainly took in this cramped style, but at the same time there was the danger that it was affecting and perverting my own language.
I had no idea what was happening in the Soviet Union, the land that these authors so blatantly acclaimed and whose books I was recommending. But someone who has no idea should make an effort to acquire knowledge. If he does not succeed, he should at least keep quiet.
At the office of the Youth Club daily newspaper, for which I sometimes wrote reviews, I was offered the chance to attend a conference on Alois Jirásek’s novel Dog’s Heads. The conference was being held, appropriately enough, in Domažlice, where the novel takes place. Because the conference started in the morning, I was supposed to be there a day earlier, but I wasn’t to worry because the Youth Club would reimburse the cost of my lodging.
During a university lecture on Marxism, I was sitting (once again) next to Tatyana, and I told her that I would be gone for two days next week. I was going to a conference in Domažlice, and I wondered if she’d like to come with me.
She was surprised and nodded.
In case she hadn’t considered it, I pointed out that we would have to stay overnight.
Yes, that’s what she had assumed, since we would be there for two days.
The night before my first trip in the company of a girl, I slept poorly.
Did the fact that she had agreed to go with me mean that she had also agreed to spend the night with me in a single room or even amorously in a single bed? And what would I do if they didn’t put us in a single room? Knock on the door of her room and try to spend the night with her? Wouldn’t she see that as pure insolence? And what would I do if she let me in? I wasn’t sure that I was really in love with her. And if I wasn’t sure, then it wasn’t proper to act as if I wanted to spend my whole life with her.
The next morning I took my entire month’s pay from an envelope and in a state of extreme nervousness set off for the train station, where I arrived a half hour early. The train was just pulling in, and I managed to be the first one on and got two seats by a window in the last car. Then time dragged along unbearably as I waited for Tatyana. Three minutes before departure, I saw her running toward the train smiling, well rested, and toting a small overnight bag.
The train wheezed along in a cloud of its own smoke, and we sat across from each other with our knees touching. I realized we had two whole days ahead of us, which might decide our future. But it didn’t seem appropriate to talk about it. We chatted about other, more abstract topics. What was beauty? To what degree did it depend on the time period, on social conditions? Did art have a duty to educate?
When we finally disembarked at the Domažlice railway station, she asked me where we were going, where I had reserved a room.
I hadn’t reserved anything. It hadn’t even occurred to me. I reassured her, however, that the organizers of the conference had surely taken care of our accommodations.
She was doubtful, especially concerning her own accommodations.
In the end, we discovered that they hadn’t even taken care of mine. The hotel on the square was full. The receptionist explained to me that some sort of literary conference was supposed to be going on and advised me to inquire elsewhere. We wandered for at least two hours through town. On top of everything, it started to rain.
The idea of spending our first night together on a bench somewhere in the train station waiting room was certainly not encouraging. I realized with relief, however, that it would postpone the fateful moment of decision. Tatyana obviously did not share my feelings of relief. Her good mood had passed, and she remained stubbornly silent. As we blundered through the streets and alleys, soaked to the skin, a small sign attracted my attention: The building we had just passed housed the chapel of the Czech Brethren Church. The first-floor light was on, so I rang.
The pastor was young and looked the way people do when a complete stranger knocks at their door. I told him I was a member of the Vinohrady congregation and that I was very sorry to bother him, but my colleague and I (I wasn’t lying; she was after all my colleague) had arrived for a literary conference, and we couldn’t find lodging. He was our last hope.
He nodded that he understood. We were welcome. They had a room for guests, and of course we could spend the night. I gazed proudly at my bewildered companion. I hoped she appreciated my ability to find a solution to a difficult situation.
The pastor let us in and asked about my congregation. He’d gone to college with our pastor but hadn’t seen him for a long time. Then his wife entered and offered us bread, butter, and tea.
She also told us that the room was ready for the young lady and asked if I would mind sleeping on the sofa in the office. The church rectory was not going to be an appropriate sanctuary for an amorous rendezvous. So I wished my sweetheart a good night without even kissing her and went off to a room full of religious tracts. Above my head was a portrait of Jan Amos Komenský, and on the opposite wall a reproduction of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance.
On a chair beside the sofa lay a Bible.
In the end, the conference was boring, and I noticed with a feeling of desperation the disapproval of the one person who mattered to me.
On the trip back in the train I nearly tied myself into knots trying to be amusing or at least create interesting conversation. My beloved Tatyana smiled at me now and then—with sadness, sorrow, and perhaps even understanding.
I realized that Tomáš would have reserved a room and certainly would not have dragged her to a rectory where even a good night kiss was improper.
Essay: Abused Youth, p. 452
7
A letter arrived from the legal advisory office in Uherské Hradiště. A certain Attorney S. informed us that he had been assigned the case of the engineer V. Klíma, which would be taken up on June 24. He had good news: Paragraph 135 (endangerment of the economic plan), according to which the accused was to be mandated, allowed for a punishment of only three months to three years. But he thought that in view of the current situation the maximum penalty would not be applied. Furthermore, the case would probably not be made public. The reading of the verdict, however, would be public and visitors would be allowed.
Mother burst out crying because she still believed that Father, who could not have done anything wrong, would one day be deemed innocent and released, whereas now he would be placed before the court like a common criminal.
My brother was intrigued by the word “situation.” The verdict couldn’t depend on some sort of situation, could it?
There were only three days until the hearing. Mother asked us if she should go to the court and immediately added that the trip there along with the trial would probably kill her. My brother offered to go, but Mother objected that he had to go to school, and if he did in fact attend the trial, he would most likely say something inappropriate because when he was angry he couldn’t control himself. It would be best if I went because I was levelheaded and didn’t start jabbering the first thing that came into my mind. So I left for Uherské Hradiště, a place where I’d never been and where I knew no one.
Father’s attorney was so unprepossessing that nothing about him stuck in my memory except his small, gold-rimmed glasses. But these belonged merely to his external appearance, just like his gray jacket. He suggested we go to a café, where he said he had a table. He then offered me a cigarette (which I refused), addressed me as “my dear boy,” and informed me that the prosecution, as he’d learned from the document
s, was apparently trying to prove that my father had committed sabotage. As I was surely aware, certain changes of a general nature had occurred, and now, although he didn’t want to promise anything, it looked as if he might be able to ask for an acquittal. He assured me he would do everything in his power, even though as I was certainly aware . . .
I said I had no idea what he was talking about.
These days, he explained, a lawyer could do less than— He looked around to see if anyone was sitting at the neighboring tables and said in almost a whisper, “A lawyer can accomplish less than a cleaning lady from the district committee.”
When I entered the dreary courtroom, where the only décor was the state symbol and a picture of President Zápotocký, I felt a weight descend upon me.
The court entered, then five uniformed hulks brought in Father and four other accused. Father seemed the smallest. He was extremely pale but not unrecognizably emaciated the way he was when we first saw him after being liberated from the concentration camps.
He saw me sitting there, forced a weak smile, and acknowledged me with just a nod because he was handcuffed.
I was so flustered when I saw Father sitting on the bench of the accused that I nearly couldn’t follow the prosecutor’s speech. He spoke without any zeal, as if he were trying to put the court to sleep as quickly as possible. Then we were ordered from the room.
The next day toward evening I was let into the courtroom to hear the verdict.
“The defendant Klíma,” announced the judge, who didn’t bother with Father’s academic title, “in his capacity as the director of the national enterprise MEZ Development, which he held from August 1, 1947, to June 30, 1951, did not see to proper labor organization. Furthermore,” he continued, “he did not devote the proper care to the training of personnel, tolerated criticism of his work with difficulty, and systematically did not cooperate with the manufacturing plant even though he knew the machines he had designed could be built only by personnel who were both professionally and politically adept.”
At the same time, the judge allowed that the machines Father had designed were so demanding that the personnel at the manufacturing plant could not even assemble such complicated apparatus.
The court also established that the accused attempted to refute most of the accusations by claiming he had tried to point out and warn against these shortcomings during the manufacturing process.
“The national economy, however, has suffered considerable damage, the extent of which it is impossible to determine without a thorough investigation,” he continued in the voice of a weary shopkeeper who toward evening was already suspecting that no one would buy his limp produce. “Nevertheless, the court believes it cannot conclude that the accused is guilty of sabotage, for he attempted to rectify the situation.”
Father and the other accused engineers were sentenced to thirty months in prison; father was also fined two thousand crowns.
Immediately after the trial, the agitated attorney ran up to me and led me aside where no one could hear us and said the court was supposed to sentence them only to the time they had served during the investigation, and because all of the accused had been given a year’s pardon owing to the recent amnesty, they could go home immediately, but the blockhead of a judge did not take into consideration that Father had been arrested three months later than the others, so he’d actually given him three extra months.
I confessed that I had no idea what Father had been found guilty of, since he clearly had not done anything unlawful.
“But my dear boy,” said the attorney, amazed, “it’s a matter of how things are interpreted, not how they are in reality. That would smack of bourgeois rule, wouldn’t it? Just a year ago, your father would have received at least twenty years for the same thing. And a year before that . . . It’s best not to think about it.”
*
When I next brought one of my reviews to the editorial office of Mladá fronta, I was asked if I’d like to take a trip to one of the border regions and write a news story about it. At that time, the Union of Youth had announced a big campaign of long-term agricultural brigades to the border regions, which had still not managed to recover from the mass deportation of their German inhabitants.
I said I’d be glad to try.
They also wanted to know if I had a special relationship with any particular part of the border regions, and, fearing they might change their mind, I said I liked Šumava.
Šumava appealed to them as well. A certain group of brigade workers in the Kašperské Mountains were promising to harvest the hay on fifty acres of mountain fields even though they had only two scythes. This time I had no one to invite to accompany me, so the next day I got on my bicycle and took off in the direction of Plžeň. Along with my ordinary things, I took with me a folding map from 1935, which displayed features that were missing from contemporary maps for reasons of secrecy. It also listed the population from 1930. I read that in the district of Sušice, where the Kašperské Mountains were located, there had been twenty thousand Germans. Now they were undoubtedly no more.
After nine hours, I rode into town, where it looked as if the war had ended only a few weeks ago. I climbed off my bicycle, went into a restaurant, and sank down on the nearest chair. At a long table sat two scruffy, ragged, and obviously somewhat drunken men who looked at me with apparent suspicion or perhaps even malice. In the tavern, which reeked of cheap cigarette smoke, beer, goulash, and mildew, sat several other half-drunken, scruffy fellows wearing overalls. In the corner of the room sat a group of young people bawling out a drunken song, or at least trying to.
After a while a similarly drunk waiter shambled over and wordlessly placed before me a half liter of beer. Sometime later he appeared with a bowl of soup, and I asked where I could register for a room.
He was surprised it had occurred to me I could get a room here; maybe in Sušice at Fialka, he suggested. It was a big hotel. I said I couldn’t make it to Sušice; there had to be someplace in town I could spend the night.
Maybe at the farmhouse where they took all the military bunks. There would certainly be a free spot there since half the brigade workers had already run off. He pointed at the group of young drunks sitting in the corner, and I realized that these were the brigade workers I’d pedaled nine hours to see.
There were ten of them, six boys and four girls. None of them was wearing the blue Union of Youth shirt. The girls seemed drunker than the boys. A quite pretty brunette was wearing a khaki military shirt almost completely unbuttoned with nothing covering her breasts. She was sitting on the lap of a boy dressed like a cowboy and giggling. When I walked over to the table, the boy pushed her off, lifted his cowboy hat, and waved to me. He was obviously the leader.
I asked him for a place to spend the night but I did not betray my journalistic profession. I said I was a student on vacation; this cheered up the brigade workers, and they wanted to know if I perhaps intended to leave the country. I denied any such intention, and this cracked them up again. They assured me I had nothing to be afraid of. Some of them had come to Šumava for precisely that reason, but then they discovered they couldn’t leave through here because those green swine would start shooting right away. It’s better to go through Berlin.
I tried to ask them what it was like living here. My inquiry struck them as amusing. Couldn’t I see? There was nothing to do except get drunk. Sometimes there was some shooting going on. And the pigs squeal a lot because there’s nothing to feed them.
Then they ceased paying attention to me, and I didn’t dare disturb them.
The waiter chased us out sometime after midnight, and I skulked behind the singing brigade workers to the farm. In a large barn by the light of an oil lamp, I counted twelve military bunks with bare straw mattresses—two were empty. One of the girls reeled over to me carrying three blankets and suggested I put one under my head. There was a pump in the yard if I wanted to wash up.
When I awoke in the morning, the bedroom wa
s already half empty. Two brigade workers were getting ready to go to the dentist in Sušice, and if I wanted a ride, the bus was leaving in a moment. The girl who had been sitting on the lap of the comrade wearing the cowboy hat was still asleep, with her head wrapped in a wet towel. Another was just walking into the room with a bucketful of water and a rag tied around a broom.
I said I would like to pay for my bed.
Payment was not necessary; the beds were free. She laid aside her broom and complained for a bit. If they didn’t get a little milk from the cows and hadn’t found some year-old potatoes in the basement, they would have died like the pigs here who are dying of hunger. Then she led me to the sty to see several gaunt and squealing swine. Behind them stood two filthy goats.
I went back to the pub for breakfast. The now sober waiter asked me how I’d slept. He then wanted to know which one I’d chosen. They’re all sluts, he explained. Why did I think they had come here? They wanted to get rid of them at the factories, so they booted them to this place. Here they had plenty of customers, and he pointed to the tavern where several border guards were standing.
Afterward, I climbed a steep hill above the town. I saw several cows being watched by a boy around my age. He was sitting, leaning against a tree and smoking a small pipe. I recognized him as one of my bedfellows.
He was surprised I was still around. Did I perhaps relish the beauty of the wilderness? It was the asshole of the world is how he explained his relationship to the local splendor. I tend cattle, he added as if in apology. They couldn’t find anything else for him to do.
He took from his wrist a copper bracelet embossed with grape clusters and rose blossoms and handed it to me to show what he used to do. He added that they’d sent him here as punishment for attending Mass on Sundays.
Here Mass is celebrated only once a month, but on the other hand you’re closer to God. Or at least the sky.
I went back to the farm. Only the brunette with the wet towel on her head was there. She gave a sigh of apology, since she obviously looked so awful. She knew she shouldn’t drink that much, but just let him try to tell her what to do. She opened one of the wardrobes and pulled out a bottle of rum and two mustard glasses. I said I didn’t drink, and she poured one for herself. “I can’t work anyway.” She pulled up her military shirt, which was buttoned this time, and I saw on her belly a bloody, inflamed gash. She explained that they’d been fighting a bit. She’d probably gotten this from a pitchfork. She didn’t remember much of what had happened. I asked if she’d seen a doctor. She waved her hand. She wouldn’t get any sick leave, so what was the point? Again she offered me a glass of rum, and when I refused, she drank it. Then she stretched out on the bed, stared at the ceiling covered with cobwebs and damp plaster, and after a moment said, “I’ll kill myself someday anyway. But before that I’m going to break somebody’s jaw. I can’t stand guys. Especially those clever swine who sent us to this shit hole.”