My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  Right away the next day I wrote a somewhat moralistic article in which I claimed that the brigade workers here, who had been dispatched into unexpectedly arduous circumstances, felt like outcasts. They had no idea how to live or work in these new surroundings, so they drank or they tried to save themselves by running away. At the editorial office, they were appalled. I was told that if I was going to mention the negative aspects, I had to balance them out with something positive. Then they asked if I’d stopped by the district secretariat of the Union of Youth. I admitted that I hadn’t. After that they talked on the phone for a long time and then advised me to go to Dolní Krušec, where brigade workers were fulfilling the plan by 212 percent.

  Thus I received my first lesson concerning what you were allowed or, rather, what you were forbidden to write about if you wanted to get your reportage published.

  So what could I write about? Where was the border of what was allowed? Was it the duty of every journalist or writer to offer up only praise, only confirm the image of a society where, except for a few enemies and conspirators, everyone was enthusiastically building socialism?

  It occurred to me that instead of an article, I could write a short story about the brigade I saw in the Kašperské Mountains. I composed it in one rather protracted evening. I invented a teacher and had her tell the story of her experiences on the brigade. In a remote spot where the workers were toiling away, morale was gradually disintegrating. Then a young boy got blood poisoning and had to be taken immediately to the doctor in town. The telephones were not working, and the only means of transportation was a tractor that the brigade workers had received for their labor. Unfortunately, at this critical moment the driver was so drunk that he couldn’t get up from his chair in the pub. The teacher finally got behind the wheel of the tractor and drove the boy to the doctor. Everything ended happily and moreover brought the brigade workers around to see the error of their ways. Even though I had invented the entire story, including the happy ending, I thought I had actually said something about reality. In a paroxysm of pride, I took the story to Literární noviny, which I considered the most dignified literary platform.

  To my surprise, the editors asked to publish my story under the title “Far from the People.” Neither they nor I suspected that, despite the double happy ending, it could provoke the party overseers. But nonetheless I allowed myself to describe how the brigade workers were starting to get drunk and lose the sense of purpose of their activity.

  Perhaps you cannot imagine those long evenings in April and May. Not a soul outside, just rain and wind—and inside? Some go to the pub, others stay inside and remain silent. . . . I wanted to read, and then I was struck by the thought: Why should I read? Perhaps there are others who think everything here is pointless and without purpose—even work, because for us it has ceased to be something valuable. . . . None of us, after all, lives only to work off his hours in the field. . . . Everything is done for the people . . . and at the same time you see how people are going to seed before your very eyes. What are we doing here? If I had to live like this for a year or two, I would probably say: Why live at all?

  I was called to a meeting of the editorial board where the chair of the Writers’ Union himself, Jan Drda, would be speaking. The famous Jan Drda tried to analyze the subject of my prose. He said that I was obviously a talented and, in view of my youth, a promising author. He also praised my attempt to compose a story about the present day. But was reality actually so dreary? Can we really say that our young workers are losing their sense of the meaning of life, that the result of their collective effort is the question: Why live at all?

  *

  Father finally returned. This time there was no big family celebration. Aunt Hedvika stopped by with some real Russian pierogi filled with ground meat and cabbage.

  Father ate them with relish and recounted his experiences to us as if he had just returned from foreign parts. He had spent the last three months with some convicted monks, a scout leader, and real-live thugs. The monks were truly saintly people who hadn’t done anything wrong. Everyone in prison says he’s innocent, though; even the safecracker or the accountant who had embezzled nearly a hundred thousand crowns had said he was innocent. But those monks were guilty of nothing except having at one time entered a monastery and then refused to renounce their beliefs.

  Only now did we learn that they had held Father for nine months in solitary confinement and the whole time kept trying to convince him that if he wanted to get out of there he would have to confess to sabotage. They managed to turn everything he had accomplished into proof of his intention to undermine the building of socialism. They wanted to know why he wanted flee to England to escape Hitler and not go to the Soviet Union. According to them he had joined the Communist Party in order to undermine it sometime in the future. He had been severe on his subordinates because he wanted to discourage them and thereby ruin their work. He had given them such demanding tasks so they wouldn’t be able to fulfill them and thereby would disrupt the five-year plan. And he’d convinced his cronies (that’s how they referred to the other members of my father’s team) to help him create erroneous calculations so that his motors wouldn’t function properly. The other four saboteurs in his group had already confessed and were sorry that they’d allowed themselves to be led astray by him.

  When he insisted he’d never purposely calculated anything incorrectly, they had him taken away. Then for perhaps a week nothing would happen, but then they would come for him in the middle of the night and repeat the same thing until morning. And then the entire next day. They took turns assuring him that they would hold out, not him. And from the very beginning they had kept telling him that he was lucky—prisoners were no longer beaten.

  In the beginning, when he wasn’t being interrogated, he kept trying to come up with a way to convince the inquisitors of his innocence. Finally he understood that they weren’t interested in the truth. Their job was to get a confession out of him, and they had plenty of time. He also started to understand that the same thing was taking place in all cases like this. They forced people to admit to crimes they hadn’t committed. It didn’t make sense to befoul his mind and waste time trying in vain to convince them. He couldn’t write because they wouldn’t give him pencil or paper. Fortunately he’d always had an excellent memory, so he started recalculating his design, trying to figure out if there had been any errors. It was taxing, but it also relaxed his mind, and he was proud he could manage even complicated calculations without a slide rule.

  Finally he gave up and signed mountains of reports. Then for several weeks they prepared material for the prosecution. He’d already come to terms with the fact that he wouldn’t get out of there for more than ten years. But they took him to the prosecutor, who surprisingly addressed him not as the “accused” but rather as “Mr. Klíma” and advised him to forget about everything he’d confessed to and/or signed. Originally it had been decided that he would get twenty years for sabotage, but now there was no need. Yes, he’d used the word “need.”

  “Now I was supposed to confess that I’d devoted too little time to the training of young people; I’d neglected the rules of job management and thereby disrupted the fulfillment of the five-year plan. Then I could go home. I didn’t understand what was happening,” explained Father.

  Yes, you were actually lucky, agreed Aunt Hedvika, and she explained that when the Leader had died, everything started to change. New instructions had arrived from Moscow, and prosecuting attorneys were ordered to make sure that they didn’t break any laws, that they didn’t force confessions and convict the innocent.

  The ordinary criminals he had been placed with, continued Father, taught him never to admit anything. Not even what you’d actually committed. Keep this in mind, he said, turning to us; you never know what you might run into.

  Essay: The Necessity of Faith, p. 458

  8

  On one of my journalist excursions, this time to eastern Bohemia, I arrived
at a village where placards announced that actors from the Východočeské Theater would be performing that day. The performance took place on a small stage in the local pub. I bought a ticket and took a seat in the overcrowded room.

  In this pretelevision era, the audience was quite grateful and applauded after each scene whether it was a song or speech. But sometimes I didn’t really understand what was going on. The audience members would become extremely boisterous and burst out laughing. They would interrupt the actors with applause or shout out something that was apparently supposed to add to the dialogue of the theater troupe.

  When it was over I went backstage, introduced myself to the actors as a correspondent from Mladá fronta, and said I would love to write about their performance.

  They weren’t much older than myself, and like most actors they wanted as much attention as they could get even after they had stepped down from the stage. It was with great pleasure that they described how they traveled during their free time around the provinces and sang folk songs along with the new revolutionary ones, recited classics, and added some progressive poets who composed verses about contemporary times. The greatest success was reserved for those sketches taken directly from daily life. They explained that a few days before they were supposed to perform, they would send their writer into the town to listen as the locals described the difficulties they were having, and whether something special or unusual had happened. Then he would put together a brief sketch in which the people would recognize themselves or their neighbors. Thereby the theater was returning to its ancient roots when people sat around the fire and talked or sang about their immediate concerns.

  I was captivated by the image of an author seeking out stories among the lives of villagers and then concocting miniature dramas from them. I knew I could do it too, but I lacked actors along with everything else necessary for such an undertaking.

  When I returned to Prague, however, ideas began flitting through my mind. We had foreign students in our department studying the basics of the Czech language, and I thought viewers would find them fascinating during this time when the entire country was locked behind impermeable borders. A few days later I learned that a Chinese woman, whose name in translation meant Doe Grazing in a Spring Meadow, had decided to study opera in Prague. An Italian by the name of Fabri played the accordion and knew loads of folk and revolutionary songs, and an officer in the Korean People’s Army, Nam Ki Duk, was willing to talk in tolerable Czech about the horrors of the recent war. A pair of young Czech teaching assistants knew some satirical sketches they had already performed. Further inquiry led me to a group of girls who had formed a Moravian folk song trio, and one of my classmates, who had already published a collection of poems, was willing to go with me around the villages and compose satirical verses for other sketches. These would then be set to music and sung. There were plenty of students in the department who could recite poetry or read a text. I was convinced that the idea of forming a traveling troupe with such an appealing repertoire seemed realistic. Now all I needed was an audience.

  Feigning apology, a secretary at the dean’s office informed me there were no funds available for our enterprise, and she advised me to go to the Ministry of Culture.

  I had to consult the telephone directory to locate the ministry and had no idea whom to see there.

  An older female comrade in charge of folk art led me to an office that contained a cheap desk, a baroque bureau, and several marvelous Chinese vases, all apparently from the erstwhile palace the ministry had taken over. The comrade took a seat behind her desk, lit a cigarette, and gazed at me silently for a moment. Then she tapped her cigarette ash into a Chinese vase and bade me speak.

  She listened to my story and had only one question: Had we prepared something from Soviet literature?

  We were just working on that part, I managed to reply. But our singing trio had two Russian folk songs: “Volga, Volga” and “Stenka Razin.”

  The comrade gazed at me again for a moment, tossed her butt into the Chinese vase, and said that our project sounded interesting, but she had her doubts about the original sketches. She’d never heard of anything like it before, but we could at least venture an attempt. She leafed through her bulky diary and suggested she come next Wednesday at two o’clock to see our program. Unfortunately, she couldn’t come sooner.

  Her willingness to see our program in a week took me by surprise, but it was only Thursday, so we had six days. I said I’d be waiting for her at the porter’s lodge.

  The following Tuesday evening I was certain that all was lost. Both of our teaching assistants who had prepared a satire had left to attend a seminar; the soprano of the women’s trio was down with a fever; the emcee who could recite verses of contemporary poets had a seminar he couldn’t get out of; and our Italian accordion player had a funeral in Italy. The satirical sketches that were supposed to address local problems couldn’t be written, and even if they could, we had nobody to perform them.

  My comrade from the ministry arrived a half hour late looking contrite. She was accompanied by a colleague who looked rather skeptical.

  I led both women to one of the lecture rooms on the third floor and acquainted them with the bad luck that had befallen us.

  An unenthusiastic group composed of the remaining members of our nonexistent troupe was waiting for us in a spacious lecture hall with a view of Prague Castle. To my horror I noticed that the highlight of the show, my Doe Grazing in a Spring Meadow, was missing.

  Both comrades seated themselves in the second row and fired up their cigarettes as a sign they were ready. I asked for a brief moment of their patience.

  The comrade I was acquainted with fixed her eyes for a moment on Prague Castle and recalled how she had been sitting in this room in 1939. It was the last lecture on art history she had attended. Then the Germans closed the university. Suddenly the doors opened, and Doe entered dressed in a marvelous silk robe. I noticed that both comrades were staring at her delightedly.

  I stood in for the emcee and announced that the opening number —an Italian revolutionary song, “Bandiera Rossa”—would not be performed because Fabri’s father had unfortunately died. Also, the next satirical piece, which was supposed to take us directly to the floor of the UN, would not be performed because both of its protagonists had left for a conference in Ostrava. Then I invited the women’s trio to perform folk songs from the Chodsko region, and when my two classmates took the stage I glanced apologetically at my comrades from the ministry to remind them that the third singer lay in a fever somewhere in the dormitory.

  The satirical number, which was supposed to come next, hadn’t yet been composed, but it would definitely not be absent during the actual performance.

  The skeptical-looking comrade wondered why we hadn’t written a sketch about the life of our department. Certainly there were plenty of themes we could use.

  But Doe Grazing in a Spring Meadow had already mounted the stage. She sang a Chinese song and then an aria from Dvořák’s Rusalka, “Song to the Moon,” in her soft and supple Czech. Her singing was so spectacular that both comrades burst into applause.

  Our program comprising only a handful of routines and a good number of apologies was already stumbling its way to the conclusion. The Korean officer Nam recounted how wonderful life was during peacetime and then came the horrible attack on his beautiful country by imperialist troops. Only one passage, which I heard many times, sticks in my mind: “After one battle I was walking through a village and came upon a corpse. It was a woman who had been carrying a baby who couldn’t yet speak. He just cried and cried, and I took him to another village and gave him to a good woman, who fed him.”

  When it was over, the comrades stood up and said they would still have to review and discuss everything. I was to call the following week to learn their decision. The other performers and I remained in the lecture hall and agreed that what we had just performed, perhaps with the exception of our Chinese singer, couldn’t hope
for success even in an elementary school.

  A week later I arrived the Ministry of Culture with a feeling of futility.

  To my amazement, the board of the humanities department found our project interesting and was prepared to provide us with a bus and chauffeur. On top of that, we would be allocated money for meals. To the question of where we were planning to go first, I answered, still in a state of shock, to Šumava, as if I’d already made arrangements with all the local amateur theaters.

  They asked if we had arranged accommodations yet, and when they heard we hadn’t, offered us free housing at Castle Velhartice.

  Only years later, when I started to see the connections, did I manage to explain to myself the unbelievable motivation and assistance we received. The same ministry employees (or their party superiors) had several years earlier silenced (often by imprisonment) hundreds of artists, but they did not trust even those whom they had “screened.” Everyone still remembered democracy and its freedoms all too well, and could feign accommodation to the new regime. We of the young generation didn’t remember anything, or remembered so little that we could still find credible the ideological fabrications about the past, present, and future. For them we were the ones, the appropriate generation, that would, according to the prediction of the ingenious Lenin, complete the building of communism. It was, therefore, politically correct to support us.