My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  I overheard that acts of revenge were taking place in the Communist Party. Screening committees composed of the most obdurate and unrepentant opponents of the recent reforms were now deciding the fates of the other party members. These members were required to reject all attempts at reform and, most important, to express their support of the occupation, which now, in Communist newspeak, was referred to as brotherly assistance in the defense of socialism. Whoever did not agree with the occupation was either cast out of the party or crossed out. Being crossed out was somewhat better than being cast out. Everyone who was cast out was relieved of his job, and his entire family was subjected to persecution. The only encouraging thing was that even under these circumstances, there were plenty of those who refused to accept these degrading requirements. As one may assume, hundreds of thousands were cast and crossed out.

  Our Writers’ Union was once again banned and, just as after the February coup, a new one was being organized. It did not matter if someone wrote a good book; what was important was the author’s stance toward Soviet occupation. Nevertheless, it took a while for what Communist newspeak referred to as normalization to solidify. Helena could still return to her job at the Sociological Institute (the fact that she’d never been a member of the party and therefore could be neither cast out nor expunged became, at least for a short time, an advantage). The institute, however, had not counted on her return and so did not even list her name as among the team. It took her in on a temporary basis.

  To let us know it hadn’t forgotten about us, the Department of Passports and Visas summoned Helena and me to appear with our passports. A government official took the passports, looked them over to make sure they were ours, and kept them.

  As my colleagues in Ann Arbor had warned, the gates of the camp called Czechoslovakia were closing behind us.

  *

  Pavel Kohout was trying to legally publish our writings abroad. He found a man in Switzerland willing to do everything he could to help banned Czech authors. Jürgen Braunschweiger worked in the Bucher publishing house and prepared contracts for seven of us: Jiří Gruša, Alexandr Kliment, Pavel Kohout, Eda Kriseová, Jiří Šotola, Ludvík Vaculík, and myself. The Dilia literary agency executed the contracts and acceded to the important point that Swiss law would govern any dispute.

  Jürgen came to Prague (shortly thereafter he was not allowed to travel to the republic), signed the contracts, invited us to dinner, and asked us to provide him with more manuscripts soon. He promised to publish my collection of stories, My First Loves, immediately and even my plays; he also pointed out that plays and short stories did not sell well, and so I should write a novel.

  Eric Spiess, of the German publishing house Bärenreiter, also came to Prague to represent Pavel Kohout and myself. Unlike Jürgen, who was bulky, cheerful, and bursting with optimism, Eric gave the impression of an ascetic. He was always broody and pensive—even skeptical. He said my plays were being staged quite successfully. Some had made it all the way to New Zealand in radio adaptations. As far as the stage productions were concerned, the one-act plays were usually performed on the smaller stages, but he was convinced that my royalties would allow me to support myself. Unless, of course, our government did not compel me to forbid the production of my plays abroad or even worse.

  I asked if he’d heard that something was in the works.

  No, but he added that he could imagine it happening. He was already over forty and remembered the history of his own country; anything could happen when the riffraff took power. Besides, he knew as well as I did what had happened to Boris Pasternak when his Doctor Zhivago was banned in Russia and he undertook to have it published in Italy. And Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel had been sentenced to prison for the same thing not so long ago.

  I still retained some of that American optimism and energy. Certainly the money I had saved while in America contributed to this feeling; my material cares were, for the time being, taken care of. I recalled the parties in Ann Arbor, where everyone ate, drank, chatted, listened to the latest records of Iron Butterfly, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Cream, and maybe even smoked some pot. This gave me the idea that my friends and I could organize something similar perhaps once a month. And to give these gatherings greater meaning, someone could read a piece he’d just written.

  My friends took to the idea. Although it was a small gathering of a few friends, it was a chance to bring our writing out into the open. We agreed not to mention our get-togethers to anyone and would invite only those we trusted. Our parties took place for over a year without drawing the attention of the omniscient State Security.

  Once Ludvík Vaculík brought a little-known author from Ostrava, Ota Filip, who had recently been released from prison. He’d been arrested for writing and distributing some leaflets. Soon a television show was broadcast in which Filip discussed our meetings. (My friends had to tell me about it because I refused to own an apparatus that was at liberty to transmit only programs approved by the censors.) The newly hired television reporters were trying to demonstrate their industriousness by airing photographs of guests arriving at my home. The images supplemented the claim that representatives of the defeated right-wing and counterrevolutionary forces were continuing their activities.

  The likelihood that from then on our meetings would be observed carefully and everyone who visited assiduously noted down was discouraging, to say the least. We decided discontinue our readings.

  *

  I was banned from the Writers’ Union. I didn’t have a job, so the only way I could spend my time was reading and writing. (However, they hadn’t forbidden me to play tennis, so about once a week I played with my brother—he had also come back from England—on one of the courts near the math and physics department where he, by contrast, was still allowed to teach.)

  Until then I’d written mainly stage plays. Even though I’d never worked with any theater, I realized that writing without the possibility of seeing even at least one of my plays performed—that is, without being able to see how the actors played their roles or the audience’s response—wouldn’t be very satisfying. Furthermore, my publisher in Switzerland kept asking me to send him a novel.

  I was forty years old and had written one novel, but it had been based on a screenplay that I’d reworked several times with a screenwriter. I didn’t have a good subject to write about—I didn’t want to return to the war, and I didn’t want to write about what I was currently going through because it was too depressing and ridiculous, and, as critics usually point out when they notice an author hasn’t dealt successfully with a contemporary subject, I lacked a certain distance from current events.

  I wrote several short stories based on dreams. The longest story relied on a dream from about ten years earlier. I was trying to board a train which, to my horror, was transporting a group of lepers. Meanwhile the train had started moving, and in a panic I jumped from the steps and injured myself. When I asked around to learn the details of the strange train, no one knew what I was talking about—or, more precisely, no one wanted to know. The image of lepers being secretly transported struck me as an excellent metaphor for a world in which hundreds of thousands of the rejected disappear behind the wire fences of camps.

  I reworked the story at least five times and so thoroughly that the shortest version was 10 pages and the longest 120.

  *

  I also started to write a love story: about an older, somewhat starchy and prudish scholar and a young actress studying puppetry.

  I wasn’t seeing Olga anymore, but what we experienced together stayed with me.

  The story consumed me. When I took my family on vacation to a village in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands (we couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel or even rent a cottage somewhere in the countryside), all four of us lived in a cubbyhole with small windows and only one chair. When the children went out to play, I pulled out my papers, pencil, and suitcase, which I used as a desk, and continued writing.

  The heroine had ma
ny of Olga’s traits. I could almost hear her voice talking about the topics that obsessed her: Italy, the heat, the often bizarre stories she told about herself, her desire to have a villa somewhere in Italy, making love with passionate boys, living life to the full in the present moment. But I was afraid to make it too personal, so I invented most of the situations, characters, and dialogue. Besides, inventing is always more fun, and made-up conversations and events always sound more realistic than a transcription of what actually happened.

  This novel, which I gave the somewhat mawkish title A Summer Affair, was the first of my novels translated into foreign languages and was even filmed in Sweden.

  *

  The fact that our plays were being performed, and our books, and sometimes articles, were being published abroad, irritated our government. When they learned that everything was executed according to valid contracts, which could not be abrogated without our consent, they decided they would deprive us of our royalties (torture or crude physical coercion was no longer used).

  At this time, banks exchanged foreign currency (possession of foreign currency was a crime) at a ridiculously low rate. Therefore, anyone who received foreign currency at the bank could request payment in so-called Tuzex vouchers. They were used in special Tuzex stores where the price of goods was about a fifth of that in normal shops that used crowns. Because Tuzex stores frequently offered otherwise unavailable imported goods (such as foreign automobiles, liquor, cigarettes, cosmetics, and clothing), it was possible to sell the vouchers on the black market for their actual value, one Tuzex crown for five Czechoslovak. The official exchange rate was around seven crowns to the dollar; thus one dollar had the value of thirty-five normal crowns.

  At the beginning of 1972, the Ministry of Finance banned the only bank authorized to exchange hard currency for Tuzex crowns for foreign editions of works of an antistate or antisocialist character and for works of authors whose distribution in the ČSSR is forbidden.

  The bank received (probably from the Ministry of Culture) a list of writers who were not allowed to receive their royalties in Tuzex crowns. We received only one-fifth of the amount we actually earned. But even this measure was not sufficient. Besides normal taxes, a special contribution for the Literary Fund was taken from all royalties. This was 2 percent. For banned works, the contribution was increased to 40 percent. When their attorneys pointed out that this directive was illegal and could be deemed overt persecution, the “normalizers” thought up something else. A ministry (it’s not important which ministry because the secretariat of the Communist Party created similar stunts) issued an injunction according to which all payees (there were thousands of them because 2 percent was also taken off every newspaper or specialized article) had their contribution increased to 40 percent. At the same time, this special fee was reduced to 2 percent for everyone except those on the “blacklist.”

  The result was the same but less assailable because leniency, or relief, could be granted, but it didn’t have to be. In total, we were deprived of 90 percent of our earnings. Instead of accepting this state of affairs, we asked our publishers and agencies to stop sending us royalties or, if they did send any, we refused to accept them and asked that they be returned to the sender.

  From then on, our publishers and agencies would come to see us and present our money in person, and if the officials refused them a visa, they could always find messengers. Because the state needed hard currency so badly that it allowed it to be exchanged anonymously, we could then use our hard currency like any other citizen. In the end, these exemplary models of persecution had a single result: The government was deprived of any way of keeping track of our royalties.

  *

  A former colleague at Květy informed me that it was a guaranteed truth (like most guaranteed truths, it was false) that if we didn’t get a job, we would be accused of parasitism and would lose our claim to retirement pay. Most of my colleagues who had been forbidden to publish landed jobs elsewhere. Saša Kliment was a doorman at a hotel; the former editor in chief of Literární noviny, Milan Jungmann, was washing windows; one of my university professors was helping build the metro; some of my friends got work in water resources. This last job was considered the most advantageous for philosophers and historians. They were usually housed in a trailer somewhere in the middle of a field, and they had only one duty: Every three or four hours, both day and night, they were to measure the copiousness of the stream. They were supposed to alternate in three shifts, but usually only two of them worked, sometimes one. So the others were free to focus on projects for which they were more qualified.

  My wife and I still had enough money for subsistence. If accused of parasitism, I could, in the worst case, go sweep the streets, but in the dark recesses of my mind I recalled something from a lecture on Russian literature about Russian populists of the 1870s going out among the people. I dimly recollected that Maxim Gorky—whom I considered a good writer after I’d read some of his short stories—had recommended this to young authors. If I had to go to work, I would get to know a new environment and perhaps happen upon a good subject.

  Just then Helena and I were invited to the home of our foremost pediatrician, Dr. Josef Švejcar. During the visit, I mentioned that I would have to find some sort of employment to avoid any trouble with the authorities, but I wanted a job that required absolutely no qualifications. Could he find something for me in the hospital?

  The professor was naturally surprised, and when I explained that I wouldn’t be accepted anyplace else, he told me there were jobs at the hospital for orderlies, cleaners, maybe some work in the kitchen, but those positions were so badly paid that no one stayed for long. If I really wanted something like that, he would let me know when there was an opening.

  The next day someone called to inform me that an orderly position was available.

  *

  At the personnel department, I had to fill out all sorts of questionnaires. As my last job and place of employment, I wrote: professor in the Slavic department of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and gleefully imagined them writing to the university for my cadre file.

  The personnel woman saw that I was asking for only part-time work and sent me for a medical examination.

  The following Tuesday I reported to the nurse on duty. She’d apparently been given preliminary information and didn’t ask me anything, just told me my responsibilities. There were not many. In the morning I was to take the trash out to the furnace and burn everything, deliver containers of blood and urine samples to the laboratory, pick up the daily allotment of medicine from the pharmacy; in case of an emergency, I was to hurry immediately to the laboratory or the pharmacy. According to what was needed, I was to ferry patients in their wheelchairs to other exams or transfer them to another ward. Of course, I was to be available during the entire time of my shift.

  I could have a twelve-hour shift, which, at part time, would be two days a week. Then the nurse showed me the orderlies’ room where I could stay if I didn’t have any work, even though, she was required to inform me, it was disallowed during work hours.

  Thus I once again fell into the labor force, which is what such activity is called in a Socialist country. Each workday, as I soon learned, was divided into two parts of equal length. During the first, work took place; during the second, everyone pretended that work took place. Everyone simply killed time.

  Socialist health care was free, and looked like it. In the morning, shortly before six o’clock, the merry-go-round of duties began for the nurses and orderlies. The ill were mercilessly awakened to have their temperature taken and their beds made up. Then the cleaning women burst in, and the nurses distributed medication and took blood and urine samples. Then came the doctors’ visits. In the meantime, I would take the trash out to the incinerator. Besides ordinary refuse, the trash contained, as is usual for a hospital, medicine packaging and lots of bloody bandages, broken casts, and, every now and then, a finger or an amputated leg, but I never had
to remove any human limbs. I also often helped change the elderly who couldn’t control their bowels. Then I completed the rest of my duties and around ten o’clock went back to the orderlies’ room, pulled out a book, and devoted myself to reading. In the afternoon, there was practically nothing in the ward that required my attention. In a short time I read three volumes of Chekhov’s short stories (well suited for this place), a pocket edition of Kafka’s Amerika, Kierkegaard in the same format, and the memoirs of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, in an English translation.

  After their rounds, the nurses also gathered in a room that served as the medicine disposal site and as a room for the deceased. The nurses smoked, drank coffee, and chatted. If I ever joined them, they would ask me why I was there. If a patient kept buzzing, trying to get their attention, they would usually wait for him to stop; if he didn’t, one of them would go see what was the matter and then come back to continue their amusements. The pay corresponded to our essentially part-time work. Even had I been working full time, I’d never be able to support my family, let alone drive to work, which I did once when it was pouring rain and another time when I’d overslept.

  A hospital is, of course, a place where people die. If a patient died during my shift, one of my duties was to transport the body to the morgue after an hour had passed (all the patients who died had to remain in the ward for at least an hour, probably in case they woke up—something that never happened during the three months I was there). If he died during the afternoon or night shift, an orderly specially entrusted with carting away the dead from the various hospital wards would come for him. If someone died toward the end of a shift, the nurses would hold on to the body for a bit and save “their” orderly from the unpleasant journey to that gloomy place containing refrigerators filled with the deceased. During my three months as an orderly, I had to go to the morgue only once.