by Ivan Klíma
*
Soon thereafter, I took another trip into the freer world, to a country that seemed to me the embodiment of democracy.
It was impossible to go abroad to the West without an exit visa and an allowance of a limited amount of hard currency (which was in short supply for most writers).
Sometimes editors at Lidové noviny received both. My stay in Germany, connected with the premiere of The Castle, was paid for by the Düsseldorf theater, so I could manage without the hard currency. My trip with my wife to Israel was upon the invitation of our hosts and also free of charge for our offices. Now our editorial offices were offering me an allowance of hard currency to go on some sort of study trip. Because I’d already been to Germany and because the only foreign language I could make myself understood in was English, I decided to go to Britain. I also had a personal reason for this trip. In England, if he was still alive, lived Isaac Deutscher, the man whose book on Stalin’s struggle with Trotsky revealed to me more about the foundation of the Stalinist regime than any other book.
My well-traveled colleagues offered me many pieces of advice for the trip. I received the address of a particularly inexpensive Paris hotel bearing the exalted name Bonaparte as well as the addresses of some Czechs in Birmingham in case I happened to wander into that city. My wife had a friend named Janet in London, and when she’d written to her, Janet offered to let me stay at her house. She would ensure I saw the most important things in England.
In Prague I purchased, besides maps and guidebooks, all the train tickets I would need to Paris, London, and Birmingham, and from there—most likely because I’d seen it on the map rather than from any personal reason—to Inverness, which was the northernmost station I could get to. I’d always wanted to see Scotland—it was supposed to be exceedingly beautiful and romantic, and ancient monsters dwelled in the deep lakes. Besides that, I loved Scottish folk songs.
The Hôtel Bonaparte was indeed inexpensive, and the cheapest room, which I requested, was a small black hole with a window opening onto a murky airshaft. The air in my hole had probably traveled here all the way from the Sahara. I bought an unbelievably cheap bottle of wine at a little shop next to the hotel (even so, it was an additional expense; I’d brought bread and a can of liver pâté from home), and when I’d washed down my food with a liter of wine I even managed to fall asleep.
In the morning, aware that I wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone, I set off to the Louvre with my map. I didn’t have money for a bus or taxi, so for three days I covered on foot dozens of kilometers on the boulevards and in museums and galleries. And because I had no sense of proportion and didn’t realize that it was better to examine five pictures thoroughly than several hundred on the run, only a confused welter of experiences remain in my mind about the trip.
On the morning of the fourth day I headed for the train station, where I was astounded and overwhelmed by the number of platforms. Although I found the information counter, I couldn’t find anyone who understood English or German, so I ran back down to the hall in a panic, thinking I’d never make it out of Paris. I went from platform to platform looking for the train to Calais.
A few minutes before departure I found it, much relieved. I took a seat in a compartment occupied by several Englishmen.
Soon after the train departed, a pair of uniformed men entered the compartment, said something in French, and all the Englishmen presented their passports. I assumed this was the border control (the train wasn’t stopping until Calais), and so I handed my passport to one of the uniformed men. Whereas the Englishmen got back their passports with a simple “Merci,” I was treated to a flurry of explanations or more likely questions. I had no idea what they were saying, and they didn’t understand me either. For a while we exchanged inquiries. The Englishmen were listening and certainly would have tried to help had their linguistic knowledge been any better than mine. The uniformed men then left with my passport, and after about an hour I started to fear I’d never see them or my passport again and I’d remain forever in this country where I understood not a word. My fellow passengers nodded their heads in apparent sympathy with my misgivings. They agreed that the behavior of the border guards was indeed odd.
When we arrived in Calais, the uniformed men reappeared, returned my passport, and treated me to another long explanation. I didn’t know if everything was all right or if I was being expelled from France or wasn’t allowed to leave. The most likely explanation was that they had seen in me a citizen coming from a country of the Soviet Bloc; I had squirmed out of a dark hole encircled with barbed wire, a place from which nothing good could come. I was in all respects suspicious, and they had to check to see how much damage I could cause.
With that unpleasant experience behind me, I soon learned that the English Channel was rougher than the Mediterranean Sea; nevertheless, the trip went smoothly, and I peered at the approaching land. When we’d almost made port, there was an announcement, this time in English, but in sailor talk and, moreover, from a raspy loudspeaker. Once again I understood nothing.
The others got up and started disembarking, so I joined them.
The sailors ordered us into a single group and then ringed a long rope around us.
No one else seemed upset or frightened, just me, who had come from a country in which you could never be certain what awaited you. Also in mind were my experiences from the concentration camp. I was afraid and it occurred to me that all it would take was a light machine gun, or perhaps just a rifle, and none of us could hope to escape.
Even though it was merely an idea, a paranoid fantasy, however excusable in view of my own experiences, the feeling of standing in a group hemmed in by a rope stayed with me, and I never forgot it.
Everything proceeded, though, without the expected terror. At the London station, the pleasant and energetic Janet was waiting for me. She had prepared a bed in her study and an almost hour-by-hour schedule for my time in London. When I mentioned Isaac Deutscher, she said she knew the name and as far as she was aware he was still alive. She would try to set up a meeting for me.
I spent a week in London visiting various galleries and the British Museum. Janet took me to some sort of court hearing so I could see the judges wearing their wigs, to Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard, to the City of London to see the capitalists in their top hats, and to Soho so I could have a good time where Londoners had a good time. She also bought me a ticket to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, where at one time my Castle was supposed to have been performed. Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing was on the program and I was amazed that people wore sweaters in this sanctuary of the greatest dramatist who had ever lived. They tossed their coats over the backs of their chairs and even smoked as if they were in a beer joint.
At first London enchanted me. I fell in love with the double-decker buses and spent hours on a corner in Hyde Park listening to the fiery and rebellious orators. An institution not restricted by anything or anyone seemed to me the embodiment of freedom. Only later did I realize that in a free country there was no need of such rostrums, and therefore they were used mostly by crazy people, freakish messiahs, experts who knew the only correct path, or diseased gasbags.
From London I traveled to Inverness, where I chanced upon a bagpipe festival. To my surprise, besides the beauty of the wild countryside, only one, somewhat mystical moment has stayed with me. I was climbing a hill toward a little village beyond Inverness, and all at once from the window of a cottage I heard a female voice singing a beautiful Scottish ballad. The singer was nowhere to be seen, and it was entirely possible that the voice was issuing from a radio or a record player. But I stood there in stupefaction, leaning against a wall, listening and gazing out into the horizon and the mountains bordering it. Suddenly a white house emerged for a moment on the ridge of the mountain as if from a mist. The house seemed to light up and then vanish. It seemed to me miraculous.
When I returned to London, Janet proudly announced that sh
e’d discovered the address of Isaac Deutscher and had set up a meeting with me for the next day at four in the afternoon.
The following day I bought an egregiously expensive (at least for me) bouquet of flowers and set off to see Mr. Deutscher. He was a small, bald sixty-year-old man with lively eyes and sporting a beard like his beloved Lev Davidovich Trotsky. He studied me carefully at the door, most likely making sure I didn’t have an ax or ice pick hidden somewhere under my coat, and then led me to his study. I remember this study very well. It was an enormous room, tall, with thousands of books lining the walls.
Much to my relief, Mr. Deutscher spoke Polish (my Polish was still better than my English), and I could easily convey to him the enormous influence his book had had on me. I told him that our country was still being governed by an only somewhat less tyrannical Soviet regime and tried to explain how horrible it was for me when I realized that I had barely survived one bloody dictatorship only to begin serving another. Just like Literární noviny, where I worked, I was trying with my limited possibilities to do everything I could to push for a renewal of democracy in Czechoslovakia. Because as soon as democracy is suppressed, I opined, tyranny takes its place.
I think he listened to me with solicitude. He said he’d been following developments primarily in Poland, but also in the other countries of the Soviet Bloc. He knew of our newspaper; reading in Czech didn’t cause him any great problems. He said he understood our disenchantment with the postrevolutionary developments in our countries, but he believed that the Stalinist bureaucratic deformation of socialism could not survive for long. What must survive, however, what we must guard and try to preserve, is the idea of socialism and its undeniable advantages over capitalism. Stalin was a tyrant, but we cannot compare him to Hitler. Hitler represented a blind alley of history. Stalin was a criminal who had veered from the path, but the path still represented hope for humanity. My radicalism, he warned me, could lead to an entirely different place from where I want to go. Surely I wouldn’t want to have a hand in the workers’ becoming once again an object of exploitation. It was necessary to genuinely return the government to the hands of the people, and bourgeois government the Czechs and Slovaks had experienced before the war would never do that. Our slogan should be: Never return to the old democracies but do return to the regenerated Soviets of the people’s representatives.
He was recommending this to me, someone who had come from a country where we had to argue with the censor over every semi-intelligent article, while he was living in a country where he himself enjoyed all the freedoms offered by a system he referred to as a bourgeois democracy.
*
Even though our newspaper was acting rebelliously, we could in no way extricate ourselves from the Soviet system. It had its maximum allotment of paper; it was distributed by the Postal News Service—the only organization set up for this. Because Literární noviny was a legal periodical, the editor in chief received daily news reports from the Czech News Agency, even reports to which only a privileged minority of party members and journalists had access. These reports, copied on red paper, usually contained editorials from the otherwise consistently blocked Radio Free Europe or translations of articles, published in the main West European or American newspapers and magazines, which concerned the countries of the Soviet Bloc. Even some foreign journals were mailed directly to the editorial offices (they were naturally not available for purchase anywhere). We were allowed access to this material to better polemicize with “enemy propaganda.” We decided against polemicizing, but for us all of this “red news” was an important source of information and knowledge.
But our most vital source of information was of course the reality we were living in. Literární noviny began publishing more reportage treating contemporary everyday difficulties. Personally, I rarely contributed to the paper, but because I was in charge of the opinion pages, I sought out the most qualified specialists.
The editorial office kept growing, doubtless owing to the Socialist economy and the increasing interest in Literární noviny, which was reaching a circulation of about a hundred thousand.
A large group of contributors gradually became concentrated around the newspaper. Among them were philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and young lawyers. Because we were a newspaper of writers, we had to attend to the level of language, which often demanded significant editing, and several, later important, authors of academic articles and books recalled how Literární noviny had taught them to write more “humanly.” We also had to publish prose, poetry, and articles that were not so much to our taste, but we couldn’t refuse them either because they were written by members of the Writers’ Union, that is, our publishers, or because otherwise we would be accused of censoring opinions we didn’t agree with.
Writing or procuring a good article, however, was only the first step in the editorial process. The second was securing permission for its publication. The more compelling the topic, the more original and nonconformist its conclusions, the less likely it was that the supervisors would approve it.
We became accustomed to preparing several such articles for a single issue; thus it was more likely that one would get through. We also agreed with the authors ahead of time which sentences or paragraphs were possible to delete so that we could make a deal with the censor. Because the censor wanted to see only the printed page, whoever was working in the typesetting room would run with the page to the editors’ driver, Mr. Houdek, who was always parked as close as possible to the printers. Then we waited to see if the page would be approved. One of my diary entries (from May 1967) describes it best:
In the afternoon it was my turn in the typesetting room. When I’m on duty here (at least so it seems to me) the censor raises more hell than usual. They stopped a gloss of academic titles (why this, for God’s sake?). The lead article about the coldheartedness of people and dehumanizing bureaucratic relations. Excellent reportage about the housing situation—no generalizations, just facts and figures, unless insisting that people are entitled to a place to live is a dangerous generalization. Then they removed a report on prostitution. Also excellently written. The typesetter said: as if we had prostitution. And laughed. He said he had to read it—he liked reading things that wouldn’t make it past the censor because they were actually about something.
Production dragged on and on. The issue is going to be so dreadful I could scream. Mrs. H. complains she’ll be here until at least eight, another fourteen-hour day. She’s had enough. The proofreader is moaning because he has the flu. He wanted to stay home, but the doctor refused to allow it. If only it wasn’t taking so long; he’s getting feverish. The typesetter had to finish up because his train leaves at six. The new typesetter is more patient—don’t worry, we’ll make it, he assures me.
We drove to the inspector just before eight. As on every Thursday he curses the day he became a driver. He was supposed to have stayed at Walter, where he’d been a clerk until 1945. Usually he doesn’t curse the institution of censorship, he only curses himself for allowing himself to be dragged into a job that makes his life so difficult. He stopped in front of the dreary building and took off about fifteen minutes later with another man, who had shaken his hand cordially. “Who was that?” I ask later. He said it was our censor. “Why do you greet him so warmly?”
“Please,” he says, “if I wasn’t friends with the censor, we’d never be able to publish.”
So that’s why we’re still being published.
Usually their objections were not expressed directly. Instead they would say things like society was not yet ripe for such opinions expressed in a certain article or that the article might be true, but it wasn’t the whole truth, and because it wasn’t the whole truth (since the concept of whole truth is ridiculous), they had confiscated the article. At other times they would say the party was currently giving priority to other issues.
Arguments with press control became more frequent as well as more serious. Everything came t
o a head at the beginning of July 1967 and the Six-Day War. The official Czech reaction to the war, like the Soviet reaction, was severe and one-sided. The Czechs and Soviets broke off all diplomatic ties with Israel as the aggressor and launched a hateful press campaign. The unconditional bias of the official propaganda, which did not take into consideration the fact that the Arab states had been preparing for a war in which the Israeli state was to be “wiped off the map,” led us to organize a discussion of several writers. We all tried to speak as dispassionately as possible about the causes of the war and about Israeli politics in general, that is, at variance with government policy, both ours and that of the Soviet Union. The transcript of the meeting, which we wanted to publish, was confiscated, and the news office warned that it was beyond what could be tolerated.
This happened right before the Fourth Congress of the Union of Writers.
*
The congresses of all organizations were supposed to be a display of loyalty to the Communist Party. The ideological department, which was intended to oversee the Writers’ Union, was aware that writers had been lately behaving ever more recalcitrantly (irresponsibly, in their conception) and therefore insisted on postponing the congress in order to buy time and try to figure out who might disrupt this manifestation of loyalty. With the help of state security forces, they designated two groups of writers as the most dangerous: the first were nonparty writers who had contributed to the recently banned Tvář, including Václav Havel, Antonín Brousek, Věra Linhartová, and Jiří Gruša. The other group were writers of Literární noviny, primarily Milan Jungmann, A. J. Liehm, Ludvík Vaculík, and myself. A proclamation, delivered to parliament by Deputy Jaroslav Pružinec several weeks before the congress attests to the concept of art that prevailed among party officials. The target of their attack was the movies of young filmmakers, primarily the wonderful Daisies by Věra Chytilová along with other remarkable films by Jan Němec, Antonín Máša, and Juraj Herz. The proclamation applied, however, to art in general.