by Ivan Klíma
It occurred to me that even they, without realizing it, were one of these grand subjects—not for a novel, but for an absurd comedy.
Several days later I started writing a play I called The Castle.
The play was about a group of notable personages residing in a luxurious castle entirely cut off from all hardships and worries. They hold empty conversations about the people they serve and the work they do, although it is clear they do nothing at all. I wanted to write, not about a castle of writers, but instead about an elect class of almighty, yet otherwise feckless, notables, who rule in the name of the people. One of the heroes, Aleš, was a writer, another was a philosopher, a third a biologist, a fourth a commissioner in charge of demolishing the statue of Stalin; the fifth man’s occupation is unknown, but he’s apparently a worthy functionary.
I thought the beginning of the play quite imaginative. Behind the closed curtain the audience hears the horrifying scream of a man being put to death, and when the curtain opens, all the residents of the castle come onstage, and the dead man is lying on a table. It appears to be a murder, and at first each character provides his or her own alibi and at the same time calls into question the alibis of the others. At this moment an unknown young man enters the room and politely introduces himself.
Because I was afraid of being accused of stealing the name of Franz Kafka’s novel, or even of not knowing the novel, I gave the new arrival the name of Josef Kán and went on to note he was a land surveyor.
The castle inhabitants immediately unite against the newcomer, who has been sent, as he tells them, to continue his work in peace and quiet. Now everyone starts talking about the dead man as if he’d been their friend and had been felled by a heart attack.
The writer Aleš explains to him:
We welcome you among us. We are well aware that none of us is here of his own free will. This castle was once a stronghold of the most confirmed enemies and exploiters of the people. Today it has become the sole property of the people. It was their decision to send us here, a decision by the people, for the people, and it is our sacred duty to repay their faith in us a hundredfold. And you are certainly wondering how we will repay it. Josef, this place used to be a place of drunken brawls and unbridled debauchery, such as only the ruling class is capable of. We must convert it into a place of honor, a chapel of truth.
Of course the corpse must be removed, but because the castle is inhabited by respected personages, they induce a doctor they’ve summoned to certify that the cause of death was a heart attack. The doctor is only too glad to comply, but at the same time he tells them that conditions have changed somewhat, and a sort of commission will have to confirm the death certificate.
Never had writing pulled me into its story line so much as when I was working on this clearly metaphorical drama. I couldn’t tear myself away from it, and I carried the manuscript with me to the office, and there, in the middle of visits, meetings with authors, and telephone calls, I composed dialogues, which I believed mirrored the entire absurdity of the reality in which we were all living. The Castle gradually turned into the epitome of that absurdity—a metaphor for the ruling and untouchable party.
Conditions had indeed somewhat changed. To the surprise and displeasure of the inhabitants, a polite but uncompromising investigator appears as a bearer of justice. To the ongoing protests of the notables, he gradually discovers that a murder has in fact taken place at the castle. Furthermore, Josef Kán turns out to be an important witness, and it is confirmed that everyone was in the room when the victim shouted.
The investigator conducts a reenactment of the crime, which confirms that all of those present participated in the murder. The bearer of justice concludes:
My gracious lady and fellow citizens! I have come here among you because one of your colleagues has departed under somewhat unaccountable circumstances. Would you please all rise. Thank you. I would like to announce that all of the somewhat unaccountable circumstances have been carefully considered during the detailed conversations and are now explained. There is no doubt that grievous errors have occurred here. I hope that my findings will not be understood as an attempt to besmirch the essentially flawless reputation of the castle. Thank you. Respected friends, please accept my most sincere thanks for the willingness and love with which you have welcomed me to these famous and historical places and devoted to me so much of your precious time. I can assure you that no one will interrupt your important and beneficial work from now on.
The ending seemed to me entirely logical. The play must end the way it began: with another murder. Also, it was clear who the victim should be. The murderers, who were the unpunishable notables, could not let the one who testified against them live.
I wrote the play in less than three weeks. I thought I’d managed to express everything I believed to be important. At the same time I was certain that no theater would be allowed to stage it—the parallel between what my investigator said about the castle murder and what was said about the political murders by everyone on the party commission was too obvious. It had been determined that the crimes had been a regrettable breach of the law, but those who had participated in them either were still in power or had been demoted to less important positions. Certainly no one had been called to account. I was so convinced that my play had no chance of being performed that I didn’t even type up my manuscript; I just read it to a few friends. They also didn’t believe the play had a chance of being staged. The only thing that would happen was that I’d finally be kicked out of the party; nevertheless, they kept insisting that I offer it to the Vinohrady Theater.
I continued to think it would be a waste of time to type out the play (I typed with only two fingers and usually had to retype each page several times), so I dictated the text into a tape recorder and took the tape to the theater.
Much to my surprise, a few days later I was informed that the theater company liked the play. They found the topic very compelling and would try to produce it. Let others ban the play if it bothered them; that would be their business. They weren’t going to ban it themselves.
But the authorities did not ban it. The premier took place on October 25, 1964. I do not suffer from stage fright, and even at the premier I felt only curiosity or perhaps anticipation concerning the audience’s reception and appreciation of my representation of arbitrary power and its homicidal dignitaries. At the time, viewers were already used to the language of allegory, metaphors, and hidden allusions. They understood everything and interrupted the play many times with applause.
Our joy, however, was premature. That very week the municipal council of the Communist Party complained that the theater had performed a play antagonistic to socialism. Because the play had already been approved, it was not prohibited immediately, but any sort of advertising was forbidden (the council did not understand that such a prohibition was the best kind of advertisement, and the play was always sold out). Then they decreed that the play could be performed only once a month, and after a few months it was to be removed from the repertory.
Nevertheless, the attempts to escape the mendacious ideology multiplied, as new theater and radio plays appeared by Václav Havel, Milan Uhde, and Josef Topol, along with the films of the young directors Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman, Jan Němec, and Antonín Máša. We began to fall prey to the illusion that despite the conditions in which we were forced to live, it was possible to achieve at least a certain measure of freedom.
*
The reception of The Castle and the effortlessness with which I wrote it impelled me to write another play.
Again I tried to think up an effective metaphor that would help me speak about our current problems. I imagined a detective story that included several murders. But this time my effortlessness abandoned me. I wrote sixty pages in nine months and completely altered the play at least as many times, even the title. Finally I settled on The Master.
The play was set, like all good detective stories, in a secluded mountain vil
la. Unexpectedly and for no apparent reason, a master coffin maker arrives—although no one has died—claiming he’s been summoned there by telephone.
A corpse is soon discovered. An old man, the owner of the villa, has just died in his room. Furthermore, his dumbfounded relatives learn that he was apparently poisoned. The plot gradually unfolds. Of the four remaining residents, one of them is clearly the murderer. The coffin maker, who envisages a fanciful desert representing a blissful place everyone desires to reach, participates in the investigation. He interrogates, advises, accuses, and consoles. Then another murder takes place. Except for one woman, all the inhabitants of the villa die one by one at the murderer’s hands. Finally the surviving member of the family accuses the coffin maker. She wants to shoot him, but in the end cannot take the murderer’s life.
The play ends with the monologue of the murderer, the coffin maker. First he addresses the woman who uncovered him but could not kill him:
Sometimes when I’m treated with such appalling words of incomprehension, accused of such deeds, I become afraid: What if they do not understand my words and are seized with horror? Have I chosen the wrong time to come? . . . But yet I can see it! Transparent and aflutter! The sand, the dusky boulders rising to the heavens. I can discern the bells of the caravans, the distant roar of tigers, the bleat of antelope. And a sandy bed within a shallow depression waits to receive me. . . . And the stars are already descending until my heart breaks. The desert! My hope. So many times it has been promised—it must exist.
I was convinced that I had found a forceful image for an insane vision that tries to pass off a desert and death as the only salvation. In my opinion, this was where we had all been led, in the name of a redemptive vision and as the only hope for mankind, by those who had defiled themselves with murder. This time no theater would dare produce this image of our present day. It was performed in the United States, but it was printed in Czechoslovakia. In print, there was no danger that people would applaud the concluding speech of the diabolical master.
*
Our daughter was already two years old when we finally got a co-op apartment and somehow succeeded in exchanging it for a flat in a villa on a street named Nad lesem (Above the Forest). The forest actually began just fifty meters from the building’s entrance. My dreams of the forest—from the time I was forced to live in barracks confined within the walls of a fortress—had become a reality. Suddenly instead of clamoring automobiles, we were awakened by the chirping of birds in the garden or a woodpecker that had taken a liking to our lightning rod and immediately upon the break of day started in on it with powerful blows of his beak.
We redesigned our second-floor apartment in the house, which had been built at the end of the 1920s. We turned the kitchen into a dining room and moved the kitchen into a little room originally intended for a maid. We also altered the heating system. I finally had my own study. Because it was impossible to get a proper desk, I bought a brand-new—and, most important, large—tabletop and placed it on a small cabinet on one side, which I’d used to store my shoes, and two pickax shafts on the other. It was far from a stylish desk such as you find in the well-kept studies of famous authors, but I could write well enough on it.
Helena and I liked arranging and fixing up the apartment, but at the same time we both had a lot of work, perhaps too much, and there wasn’t time for anything but the most important things.
I think Helena perceived the lack of time we could spend with our loved ones as inflicting more damage than I did. She started writing a series of articles concerning the harm we were doing our children in their upbringing; we were forcing upon them, especially in the cities, an unhealthy way of life. It was bad for children to spend time in different nurseries, preschools, or day-care centers where they were deprived of freedom of movement. She rejected the image that emancipating women from their children was supposed to lead to their greater overall freedom and equality with men. She believed that the contemporary concept of the care of children hinders the free development of the nascent individuals; it deprives them of movement, does not lead to creativity, and, at most, compels children to memorize often useless or dubious knowledge. Thus what we are raising is the relatively educated and cultivated—artistically disciplined and seemly—average. . . . Our children are not doing badly. They have it a little good and a little bad. When they grow up they will be a little kind. To us too.
Her articles aroused extraordinary interest among readers and were subsequently published in book form.
I was still perceived as a novice at the editorial offices, and I never got close to any of the older editors. My closest friends remained Ludvík Vaculík and Saša Kliment, who had both joined the editorial board. They were a little older, but because I had helped them publish their first books, they considered me more experienced or at least more worldly-wise in the area of literature, a place in which neither of them felt very comfortable. Our family became such good friends with Ludvík’s that we sometimes went on trips together. After I bought a car with the proceeds from my book advance, we took off on our first journey together, eight of us crammed into the little Renault. To demonstrate what a wonderful, although in truth quite inexperienced, driver I was, I almost collided with an oncoming car as I was overtaking another.
In Prague, Ludvík, Saša, and I mostly talked about politics (in this land of socialism, everything became a political topic) and speculated about what we could and should discuss or, as Ludvík would say, have our word about the situation. In our opinion it was not very satisfactory.
No one who had preserved even a little sense of reality could accept without shame the fact that we were living under a regime based on injustice and violence.
Saša and I, along with a historian who contributed to Literární noviny, were once invited to a radio talk show to discuss life values. The discussion was too abstract and wasn’t very successful, but Saša pronounced one brief sentence that made the discussion worthwhile and that the censor surprisingly allowed: “I admit that every day I wake up with a feeling of shame.”
Essay: Weary Dictators and Rebels, p. 496
13
Sometime in the middle of the 1960s, a dark BMW stopped in front of the house we had recently moved to. A short, burly young man stepped out and a moment later was buzzing at our door. He informed me, in good Czech, that his name was Ehrenfried Pospisil and he’d just come from Hannover—he was translating my Castle. He was quite talkative, and I soon learned he’d been transferred from the Sudetenland, entirely unjustly, since his native language was Czech. He was not sorry, however; what would have become of him had he stayed in Most or Chomutov? Could I imagine the horror? Not only were houses and churches disintegrating, but pubs as well, whereas in Hannover he was the owner of a prospering fur dealership. Of course, he mostly concerned himself with art. Each morning he stopped by his workshop for a couple of minutes, assigned tasks, and worked up a design, and then he could devote himself to his creative profession, which right now happened to be my Castle. Afterward his wife would look over the text to make sure it read well. She was an actress, and I wouldn’t have to worry in the least. He even suggested his translation would be better than the original and gave a loud cackle to inform me that although he was genuinely of this opinion, I wasn’t to take it altogether seriously.
I had no experience with translations, but the vocation of a furrier did not strike me as the best preparation for a translator. I did admit, however, that Mark Twain had been a riverboat pilot, Jack London had been a gold prospector, and Edison hadn’t even had any schooling. Perhaps the Hannover furrier would turn out to be an ingenious translator.
Then another German paid me a visit, this one thin and possessing the face of a brooding philosopher, Mr. Eric Spiess. He directed the theater division of a large music-publishing house, Bärenreiter, and informed me his firm was representing my play in Germany, just as it was representing Pavel Kohout’s plays. He told me that the premiere of The Castle
would take place in January in the famous Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. He assumed I’d heard of his stage director, Karl Heinz Stroux. I pretended I had.
Mr. Spiess praised my play, and I put his praise down to politeness. Nevertheless, neither the play nor the translation could be completely bad if it had pleased the famed stage director.
The German theater had decided to adopt the Czech production. Soon thereafter I received an official invitation and started to believe that my play would actually be performed on a stage somewhere in Germany.
Except for sojourns in countries proclaiming themselves Socialist, I had never in my thirty-three years been abroad. Now, at the insistence of my wife, I bought new shoes and a white shirt, packed my best suit, said goodbye to my family, and on a moderately cold January day boarded a train for Frankfurt.
The moment the train arrived at the sleek train station in Schirnding, I thought I had suddenly entered another world. There were no border guards with dogs or battered houses, just a vendor scampering along the platform offering beer and Coca-Cola.
I continued on to Düsseldorf, where I was welcomed by my translator and Mr. Spiess, who then drove me to my hotel, which to me seemed ridiculously opulent. I was in Germany. Instead of a gas chamber, I was led into a room with leather armchairs, a minibar, and a television set. Six towels were hung in the bathroom, and on a little table stood a vase with a large bouquet of flowers; next to the vase, a bottle of Riesling. A newspaper lay on the bed with an article highlighted in red about a young Czech writer who was attending the premiere of his play, The Castle, and so on.
The next day I walked around the city a little, looking into bookshop windows. I was amazed by the number of periodicals sold at the news kiosk. For a while I watched a young artist drawing on the sidewalk a picture of a woman and a guitar. On the same sidewalk he’d written, in beautiful calligraphic script and in different languages: Studentschüler auf Studienreise durch Europa, Student of art on a study trip through Europe, Beaux Arts. He had a small box inscribed with Danke, Thanks, Gracias, Merci.