Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (12 page)

“I’ve been all over the city and there’s nowhere for me to bury my husband,” said the older woman.

They looked tired. Since morning, they had been to every cemetery in the city, and everywhere they had been told that no more deceased were being accepted.

The gravedigger gave them a suspicious glance. “How come you’ve been all over the city?”

They didn’t answer.

The dog began to growl, as if it could sense the tension.

“What exactly did he die of?” asked the gravedigger, surprised by their silence. (“We were as silent as children who’ve been up to no good,” one of the two younger women recalls today.)

The man who was with the women took a sheet of paper from his pocket. The gravedigger looked at it. He read the diagnosis, the patient’s age (forty-two), shifted his gaze to the printed letters of the surname, and then he knew. He sucked in air with a hiss. “I’m truly sorry,” he said, handing back the sheet of paper. “My cemetery is full to bursting …”

“O God, that’s the eighth cemetery now,” said one of the women.

He looked at her and said: “… but I do have one grave here. For myself.”

He picked up a flashlight and whistled for the dog. “Come on. I’ll show you what a lovely plot I’ve got. Under a tree. There are some very decent people buried around it. My name is Výborný [meaning ‘excellent’], so I couldn’t pick anything ugly for myself.”

The older woman cheered up distinctly, and tried to forestall his questions: “Of course I promise we won’t bury him in the daytime. And at night the funeral won’t bother anyone.”

They reached the site of Mr. Výbornýs grave.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” he asked proudly. “Not even your husband could have chosen a better plot for himself,” he said to the older woman. “Do you want it?”

“Very much,” she replied. “But what … what will you do then?”

“I’ll manage somehow. They always have to find a plot for the gravedigger. That’s the only good thing about this sad trade.”

“Writing isn’t a very cheerful trade either,” observed the man.

The diagnosis was bowel cancer. The deceased hadn’t suspected it. In fact, he had been convinced he didn’t have cancer at all.

All his life he had been particularly afraid of cancer, so when he had a gall bladder operation, he asked the doctors to examine his entire body to make sure there were no signs of it.

They did, and there weren’t any. He was in the best hospital
in the country, they couldn’t possibly have got it wrong, his family thinks. The illness came along a month later.

He’d gone about the house in an elated mood saying: “I don’t have cancer!”

Exactly eleven months before his death, on March 21, 1970, he was very happy. He had read in the newspaper that a program about him was being shown on television that evening. He called his friends and said: “There’s a show about me tonight.” The only thing he didn’t ask himself was: Who made the program and why didn’t he know about it before then? But he liked the idea that perhaps it was a surprise jubilee celebration of his creative work. After all, he was adored. In his country, they used the phrase “the people’s little darling.” And he knew he was one of the people’s little darlings.

The TV schedule gave only the program title:
Report from on the Seine: About Writer and Screenwriter Jan Procházka
.

They bought champagne and his wife made some fancy sandwiches. “The bottle’s on ice,” he joyfully told a friend over the phone. “It’s all very nice, and what’s more, just imagine, I haven’t got cancer,” he joked. He and his wife and three daughters settled down in front of the set. It was the so-called peak viewing time.

An hour later the program ended.

The champagne stood untouched in warm water.

No one had eaten a single sandwich, and next morning their daughter threw them in the trash can.

Jan Procházka sat dumbly in front of the television, staring
at the switched-off screen. Somebody had eavesdropped on his private conversations with a friend, recorded them, and broadcast them on TV.

Nobody said a word except the confused writer who kept repeating the same words: “That was my voice … it really was my voice, but … but I didn’t say that.”

The first call came through, and his wife picked it up. A man wanted to speak to Mr. Procházka urgently. “You despicable swine,” he began. “At last we know who you really are.”

“You’re a monstrous, shameless, two-faced bastard. One for show, the other at home,” the writer learned from the next call.

It must have been then—says his daughter Lenka—that his crushed spirit sent his body a signal, and the irreversible process began.

Her younger sister, Iva, thought it was the worst day of their lives, but she was wrong.

Next day, the radio began to broadcast the secretly taped private conversations of Jan Procházka, in seven episodes over fourteen days.

With one day’s delay, the country’s biggest newspaper published them in print.

He became the people’s little darling during the Spring.

It was a spring that had been prepared for the previous summer. In June 1967, the Writers Union had held a congress. The opening speech was made by the ruling Communist Party secretary for culture: “At a moment like this,” he said, “we should strengthen our alliance with the Soviet Union.”

He also expressed his expectations: “The Party expects you to formulate criteria for socialist literature.”

Despite the fact that Stalin was long since dead, the writers were yet again supposed to be making a public statement about the role of art—that it’s not about love, but about class struggle.

Nobody could have anticipated what happened next.

The first speaker was an author of novels and socialist-realist poetry, which he even went on writing after Stalin’s death, who had joined the Party when he was still in high school.

Suddenly, as if against his better judgment, he read out a quotation from a letter written by Voltaire to Hevelius: “I do not agree with what you are saying, but I shall defend to the death your right to be able to say it freely.” “That’s a wonderful remark,” said the Party writer to his colleagues, “it is the fundamental ethical principle of modern culture. Anyone who wishes to go back to the days before this principle is regressing to the Middle Ages.” (It was Milan Kundera.)

The audience—as witnesses recall—was dumbstruck, and the bald Party secretary who had demanded the alliance of literature with the USSR clenched his lips tight.

Photographs taken at the congress show more than forty writers sitting along tables in their shirtsleeves. They have taken off their jackets and are gesticulating.

At the very end, on the third day, the son of a peasant from Moravia took the floor; a farmer by education, he was an eminent screenwriter and member of the ideological board of the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s Central Committee, and his name was Jan Procházka. He had such faith in communism that, shocked by his views, his parents hadn’t
attended his own wedding. He had written a lot, but the critics had judged his first screenplays to be lackluster. For eight years, he had been a full-time screenwriter at the Barrandov Film Studios. There he underwent a creative metamorphosis. He discovered that not every screenplay has to be educational, and that what kills creativity is sticking to a formula. For a decade, only one of his movies had been produced each year, occasionally two. They were usually directed by Karel Kachyňa, one of the founders of the new wave in Czechoslovak cinema, who was Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s tutor at the Prague film school. “At the very same moment,” said Procházka, “the writer is happy with those who are happy, and desperate with those who are desperate.”

A murmur ran through the room.

No other member of the Central Committee was as brilliant, not even those who were involved in literature.

“We are brothers to all those who love, because our main weapon is the heart,” he added.

According to historians, the Party secretary left the congress hissing: “You’re going to muck it all up …” However, those present in the auditorium claim that the secretary had said something similar, but put in a different way:

“You’re going to fuck it all up,” he said.

That was how the ferment began, which culminated in the aforementioned Spring. The congress of writers and poets came out in opposition to the Party. The system’s own grave-diggers had evolved from within.

“In the Czechoslovak Communist Party, there was a large number of decent people who were horrified by what they had set their hands to”—thirty years later, so said the man who explained to Mr. Výborný at the cemetery that writing is just as sad as burying the dead.

(It was Pavel Kohout. He must have had himself in mind too. He had written his final poem praising the regime after Stalin’s death: “He is not dead! He is just asleep / He will be here forever, within you and within me.”)

Europe couldn’t believe its eyes and ears: here was a communist party that had managed to regain the support of a significant part of society without applying force.

Six months after the writers’ congress, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, who was also the state president, was removed from his post. He was Antonín Novotný—a gloomy, solemn man. It was his conviction that anything that did not fall within the Soviet model was not socialism. In January 1968, he was replaced within the Party by Alexander Dubček, who allowed the public to speak freely and to photograph each other in nothing but their bathing suits at the pool.

People stopped being afraid of each other, and society was full of admiration for itself.

A sort of miracle had occurred.

The newspapers and television lost their colorlessness. The tedium vanished from the theater and cinema. Banned books were published. Censorship was lifted.

In a cartoon in the previously regime-run newspaper
Rudé právo
, one guy says to another at a café table: “There’s nothing to talk about. It’s all in the papers.”

In another cartoon, a young couple are standing under a
tree. The man is carving a large heart into the bark, with the name “DUBČEK” inside it.

People even painted slogans on the walls in Poland, such as: “All Poland is waiting for its Dubček.”

Thirty-nine-year-old Procházka wrote newspaper columns and had daily meetings with young people. In those days, some of them were even held in the city parks.

“Not everyone can be a philosopher, but in his own interest each person should devote half an hour a week to thinking,” he advised in his book
Politics for Everyone
. It was an instant bestseller. He received up to fifty letters a day, because he knew how to explain various problems.

“Is it at all possible to be happy these days?” he was asked. Or: “Why are the reviewers comparing the Czech movie
The Hop Pickers
to
West Side Story
, when the ordinary citizen still can’t see this American movie, although it came out six years ago? Can you confirm that our comrades from the Central Committee watch American movies in secret?”

“They accuse us of attacking socialism,” he told the young people. “But those charges are brought by the very men and women who have made socialism into a dreary prison for the intellect.” (“He was like the first Christians,” adds his daughter. “He believed that socialism is the best system. My son is convinced that the ideas his grandfather promoted in those days could still be a success. But I always say they’d have to be implemented by angels.”)

In March 1968, at a meeting held at the Slavonic House in
Prague, he uttered a famous remark about censorship: “Man did not spend ages learning to talk only to end up with no right to speak.”

“Hurray!” the crowd of students cried in answer.

“Some historians believe to this day that the main aim of the Soviet invasion was to destroy freedom of speech in our country,” wrote Dubček in 1990.

“We’re not afraid of scary monsters anymore,” declared Procházka. “A return to democracy does not have to mean a return to capitalism.”

And also: “Let’s not teach cows to fly; if we’re going to try at all, let’s teach the horses. They’re more than twice as intelligent.”

Let’s go back to the evening of March 21, 1970.

First, the TV viewers saw an Air France plane landing at an airport.

Then, a terminal building marked
PARIS
.

“Paris is a beautiful city, full of cultural monuments. But not all of us go there to admire them,” said a straight-talking female voice.

After the terminal, they saw the interior of a car, and a pair of hands. White shirt cuffs protruded from the sleeves of a coat. The hands were driving a Mercedes. The right one occasionally held a cigarette, tapping the ash into an ashtray on the dashboard.

The only performers in the movie
Report from on the Seine
were these two hands.

Off went the car. A road was visible through the front windshield. According to the woman’s voice, it was meant to be the highway from the airport into Paris, but it looked like the highway from Prague to Karlovy Vary in western Bohemia.

The invisible owner of the hands was talking to another—also invisible—person.

It is certain that one of the voices in the car belonged to the writer Jan Procházka. This is what he said: “On Saturday I had a meeting with some people from the government. They’re cretins. And Dubček isn’t any smarter either.”

“Uh-huh,” said the other voice.

“The man has good intentions, but he has obvious limitations … He’s not the sort of person who could possibly manage to do anything except keep adapting to the situation.”

“Yes, but …” added the voice.

“In which case he should wave goodbye to the top job in the Party. Because it’s idiotic.”

“Uh-huh.”

“They’ve got to find the key to it all! Ways to deal with all those stupid cleaners or lunch ladies who appear up there with the help of those equally stupid Party secretaries.”

“Yes, too true,” confirmed the voice.