My Crazy Century Page 9

  This trial was much discussed in our department. How was it possible that they could write about the accused as criminals deserving the death penalty when the verdict had not even yet been announced? Didn’t that reflect a tampering with the law? Wasn’t it bewildering that the same thing had happened before in the Soviet Union? Almost everyone there who had fought for the revolution and then led the country was in turn revealed to be a traitor. It seemed ridiculous that traitors, spies, and saboteurs were at the head of government. It was also odd that right after someone was arrested, he confessed. Even the war criminals at Nuremberg tried to defend themselves; they had denied their guilt or at least tried to minimize it.

  I was surprised by the strange phraseology of the accused. Would evil-intentioned enemies and spies use the term “camp of peace” for the Soviet Union and its allies and condemn American imperialism? Would they employ the language of speeches that had been only recently delivered? Even now that they were confessing, why didn’t they alter their choice of words? Was it possible they were speaking this way because they thought such an admission would be considered extenuating circumstances?

  No extenuating circumstances were conceded. All but three were hanged.

  At home Mother started to worry that they were going after Jews again. I waited for Father to object, to explain that communism was, after all, an international movement, and it condemned any kind of racism. But he remained silent.

  When Mother was asleep he called me into the kitchen, where he worked and slept. He seemed to be considering whether or not to tell me why he’d called me in there. Then he said, “They’re after me too.”

  I didn’t understand.

  He explained that several weeks earlier, four engineers under his supervision were arrested. They were constructing new high-tension motors for a Polish power station.

  I didn’t know what a high-tension motor was, but this clearly wasn’t the issue.

  Sixty motors had been ordered, continued Father, but no one at the factory had had any experience. It was a new factory where untrained women made so many mistakes in production that most of the machines barely functioned at all. He tried pointing this out, but no one would listen. Everyone was in a hurry to fulfill the quota. Now the bosses obviously wanted to hold them, the designers, responsible. “I wanted to tell you,” he said, coming to the most important point, “if something happens to me, it’s up to you to take care of Mother and Jenda. You’re an adult and know very well that Mother cannot work.”

  I protested, saying that nothing could possibly happen to him, since he hadn’t done anything wrong. Even if he’d miscalculated something, it wouldn’t be considered a crime.

  Father nodded and then simply smiled sadly.

  Essay: Revolution—Terror and Fear, p. 445

  6

  Attendance at specialized lectures was still voluntary. Participation in military preparation, however, was mandatory and strictly monitored; the only absences tolerated were those due to an illness officially confirmed by a doctor. The first military seminar dealt primarily with regulations and basic information about the composition and organization of the army. The smallest unit is the squad; three squads form a platoon; three platoons, and in some cases one motorized unit, make up a company. There were differences between infantry units and motorized or tank units. We were taught how ordinary soldiers were armed. Everything we were told was secret, and we were warned that any mention of this information outside class would bring us before a military court—because the enemy never slept. Even an apparently minor detail could be of crucial significance. An unbelievably half-witted lieutenant colonel explained that the moment we disclosed some seemingly unimportant detail, we became open to blackmail, and the enemy would demand more and more serious information (as if we had any). All the instructors were officers and emphasized vigilance and readiness to confront imperialist aggression, and a hatred of German revanchists and their American employers.

  Our notebooks for this class were likewise stamped SECRET, and at the end of class they were collected and locked up in a vault in the military department.

  I’m not sure how it happened, but once at the end of winter when I had just come back from class, I discovered that I’d forgotten to turn in my notebook and accidentally stuck it in my briefcase. Now this notebook, chock-full of strictly classified notes on military duties, the firing power of howitzers, and the effective range of antiquated antitank weapons, was at home, where I’d been instructed it had no business being. I was quite rattled and wondered whether I should run back to school and turn in the notebook. But they would probably start asking questions: Why had I taken it? What had I been doing with it all day? On the other hand, I could take it to the next class and turn it in as usual, and no one would be the wiser. So I shoved it in among my other notebooks in my dresser and paid it no further mind.

  The next morning the doorbell buzzed. When Father opened it, five men burst into the apartment. They reminded me of something that had happened a long time ago during the first day of the occupation, when gestapo agents burst into the apartment looking for my uncles. But the gestapo had merely walked through the apartment looking into various possible hiding places, and then they disappeared. These men pulled out some papers, shoved them at Father, and continued to conduct a thorough search of the apartment.

  While my panic-stricken mother tried to elicit from them what they were doing, what right they had to dig through our things, my brother was still sleeping, and Father mutely looked on. At that moment, I was thinking about my notebook. If they found it, I would never be able to convince anybody that I’d placed it in my briefcase by mistake and not with the subversive intention of photographing its contents and handing them over to an agent of the CIA.

  Occupied with my own paltry problem, I barely noticed the growing pile of documents with Father’s calculations, and specialized books in German, English, French, Russian, and Hungarian. These strange investigators could not make sense of any of it (they knew no foreign languages and had no idea what the documents and books dealt with). Therefore, they found them suspicious. To the pile of books and calculations they added a camera, a projector, and binoculars. We didn’t own anything else of value.

  Then one of them walked over to my dresser, opened a drawer, and took out a notebook, which had notes in Russian. This fellow, who belonged to the ancient past as well as the present, asked: Is this yours?

  I nodded

  Are you a student?

  I said I studied Czech.

  He took another notebook, opened it, and gave it a good shake. A piece of blotting paper fell to the floor. He let it lie there for a moment but then it occurred to him that it might contain a message. He picked it up and held it against the light.

  I didn’t remember how far down the SECRET notebook was, just as he didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking for in my dresser. I said, “That one’s for Russian literature.”

  He put the notebook back and closed the drawer. I knew I was saved.

  Father, however, was not. They led him away without even letting him say goodbye.

  It looked as if a tornado had ripped through our apartment. Books, piles of paper, everything lay all over the chairs, floor, and dining room table. Some things they’d taken away, and the rest they’d just left lying wherever they’d thrown it.

  *

  Funeral music was playing on the radio at the time when Socialist songs should have been broadcast. Then a voice, tremulous with emotion or pain, announced: The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the USSR Council of Ministers, and the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet announce with profound sorrow . . .

  Yesterday we’d already heard the doctor’s report about J. V. Stalin’s serious illness, so I didn’t have to wait for the end of the announcement. It was clear: Stalin was dead.

  The next day, the newspapers’ front pages were bordered in black and bore a youthful picture of the recently deceased. Th
e state newspaper Rudé právo, on the very day of his death (I remember thinking it strange the paper did it so quickly), printed a text, which I cut out because of its remarkable combination of folk song and political phrasing (at the time I didn’t fully understand the duplicity of the content):

  When our workers were given to understand this woeful news, they were stricken with boundless grief and wept bitter tears. They wept for the most painful loss that could afflict the Soviet land, the international working class, the working people of all countries, and the entirety of progressive and peace-loving humanity. Farther on it continued in a decidedly nonlyric tone: In vain did the imperialist hyenas base their hopes upon the death of the great Stalin. His work is unchallengeable and incontrovertible.

  A period of national mourning was proclaimed; flags were lowered to half-mast or exchanged for black funeral banners.

  My former love, Tatyana, who had taken a dislike to me, came to see me one day and asked if I had a moment.

  We sat on a bench on the top floor of the building where students were waiting to take an exam in the dead languages of the Near East, and, as was her habit, she peered unblinkingly into my eyes. She said she knew how horribly she’d offended me and could imagine how alone I must feel after such a calamity.

  I wasn’t sure what calamity she was talking about. At first I thought she’d found out that my father had been arrested, but then she explained: How horrible it is that even the greatest of people must die. She said she also felt alone, completely alone. She placed her head on my shoulder and started crying.

  In Literární noviny respected poets were expressing their grief. Milan Jariš lamented:

  Each felt the cold in his heart

  and the responsibility—we must continue apart

  No, there is no one I loved more

  than my father who is no more.

  Stalin—The strength of the Soviet Union

  Stalin—The author of future instruction

  Stalin—The life of every future human

  Stalin—The one that will destroy destruction.

  The weekly newsreel showed the crowds at the funeral. You could hear the oaths of loyalty to his eternal memory, and black crepe seemed to blanket the entire world, which was apparently drowning in tears.

  Tatyana confided to me that she’d made a tragic mistake with Tomáš. She had succumbed to the atmosphere there on the Ostrava Brigade. Life, however, is built not from bricks and mortar but from feelings and understanding. And now during these difficult and dismal days, she had realized it.

  On the bench, looking out over the embankment and castle arrayed in black, we embraced each other and kissed.

  On top of all this, President Gottwald died a few days later.

  Once again crowds swarmed the funeral; oaths of loyalty were sworn to the sacred memory of the first workers’ president; there were more black banners and tears. Cinemas and theaters were closed, and the only thing on the radio was funeral music.

  We had no news of Father—where he was, what had happened to him, why they had taken him away. We didn’t even know what we were going to live on.

  Aunt Hedvika, who always talked about the great Stalin with such enthusiasm, stopped by. She said Father had certainly done nothing wrong, and she offered to contribute at least a little money until he returned. Then my aunt, the one who had lived so many years in the Soviet Union and revered Stalin as a giant among men, said something that astounded me. Vilík is lucky the Leader has died. Maybe everything will change now, and these disgraceful trials will cease.

  *

  Mother had become desperate. She kept looking out the window as if thinking she would catch sight of Father, who couldn’t be kept in prison, since he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Because she was the sister of national heroes after whom a Prague square had been named, she steeled her resolution and wrote a letter to the new president of the republic. She said she’d known Father from their early student days and was quite certain he’d never done a single dishonest thing in his life. She knew that work meant everything to him, and every day he worked well into the night. She also knew that when he was working in Brno, he was attacked, and only because he’d urged people to do honest work. Such aspersions, however, have no place in our republic.

  She racked her brain over every word, even over the closing. She knew she should end with the comradely Honor to Work, but that greeting never passed her lips, so she wrote just With Deep Regards.

  Mother never received an answer to her letter, but about five weeks later we found a letter from Father in the mailbox with the stamp Uherské Hradiště. Father wrote that he was thinking about all of us and we shouldn’t worry about him. He was lacking for nothing and hoped we too were healthy and were somehow getting by.

  The letter was written on gray paper, which immediately brought to mind the notes we were allowed to write from Terezín now and then.

  Paradoxically, it was during this time that my probationary period expired, and I was to be either accepted or rejected as a member of the Communist Party.

  At the meeting, my admission to the party was the last item on the agenda. In the lecture hall, shrouded in tobacco smoke, the chairman acquainted the party members present with my case. I was an excellent student. For reasons of health, I hadn’t gone on the summer work brigade. I had a good relationship to the collective. As far as my class origin was concerned, I had a white-collar background, but my uncles were national heroes and loyal members of the party who had fallen in battle against the Nazis. Now, of course, my father had been arrested, apparently for political reasons, so it would be necessary to consider carefully my possible membership.

  I was given the floor in order to discuss my father’s situation.

  I said my father was the victim of some sort of mistake or a false accusation. He would definitely be proved innocent.

  A comrade addressed me from the floor and asked about my relationship to socialism.

  I replied that I believed in its future.

  The comrade was not satisfied with my answer. My father had obviously not believed in socialism and hated it. Was I prepared to disown him if it turned out he had committed a crime against the state? I was not prepared for anything like this. It was unthinkable that my father would get mixed up in any criminal conspiracy, and I answered heatedly that my father would never perpetrate anything like that.

  The comrade from the floor held his ground and demanded a straightforward and unambiguous answer: yes or no. To my great surprise, the chair intervened. He said I had indeed provided an answer, and there was no need to anticipate the judgment of the court. Since no one had any further questions, they took a vote on whether or not to admit me. I was certain there was no way I would be accepted, and it was with amazement that I observed my classmates, the young assistants from various departments, staff members of the dean’s office, even the cleaning women raising their hands.

  So I was accepted, and the chair invited me up to the table and congratulated me. My mood, however, was not at all celebratory. Instead I was oppressed by anxiety. It was as if I had been accepted into some kind of merciless holy order that could demand of you anything, even the renunciation of your own father.

  *

  Father hoped that we would somehow manage to scrape out our livelihood without him, which of course meant that I was supposed to manage it somehow. We had no savings (even if we had any, they would have been worthless after the currency reform at the beginning of the summer). Mother continued to believe the diagnosis according to which she wasn’t even supposed to be alive. Just as the mistaken doctor had advised, she tried to avoid any effort. She suggested that she could at least do some knitting at home, but there was no yarn to be had. She could also translate from French, but no one showed any interest.

  On the bulletin board at the department I noticed an opening for a student assistant. Obviously no one had thought it worthwhile to apply. They paid only two hundred crowns a mo
nth for attending to library loans and cataloging book acquisitions.

  I got the position and was at least able to pay for lunchtime meal tickets at the cafeteria, and for supper I always waited until the last minute before the kitchen closed, since the kindhearted cooks would give away part of the leftovers. So almost every evening I would bring home at least ten slices of lightly salted bread and a usually large military mess tin full of dumplings and some kind of sauce or at least thick soup from the very bottom of the pot.

  My brother, who with surprising obstinacy had wiped from his memory everything related to our stay in Terezín, sometimes complained that the food from the mess tin reminded him of something unpleasant. Mother usually just nibbled on a piece of bread and said she had eaten some potatoes earlier. I had no idea what Father was eating. In my foolishness, I told myself that today’s prisons could in no way resemble wartime concentration camps.

  But we couldn’t live like that for long. I knew I would either have to give up my studies or find some other, more lucrative source of income. But what did I know how to do? I had excelled in mathematics in high school, but I was already starting to forget it; and German, which I had picked up during the war, was also fading from my mind. I could paint a little, but I’d abandoned this hobby as well. All that was left was my writing.

  Without a letter of recommendation, I set out after the holidays on a pilgrimage to the ever smaller number of newspapers and magazines and asked if they wanted me to do any reviewing. To my surprise, they offered me several books as a test. (Only later did I learn that lying around editorial offices are a great number of books, which almost every reviewer with any sense avoids.)