Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (21 page)

They put the writer Lenka Reinerová in solitary confinement for fifteen months, not even letting her out into the prison yard; whenever she asks what she has been arrested for, she invariably hears: “You know better than anyone.” Finally, they release her without a trial, and drive her to a park on the edge of town. When she gets home, she discovers that her husband and daughter have been evicted, but nobody knows where they’ve gone, and somebody else is living in her apartment. She finds them living in a shack sixty miles from Prague. (Several years later, when she wants a certificate to prove that she was arrested, it will turn out that no case like hers ever existed. “Maybe you just imagined it all, comrade,” the Ministry of Internal Affairs will tell her.)

The Party takes vengeance on its own members.

The country is gripped by the trial of eleven senior officers, called the Slánský group, who are accused of forming a conspiracy. The wife of one of the defendants sends an open letter to the CPC, in which she asks the court to punish her husband just as he deserves. In a letter to a newspaper, the son of another defendant firmly demands the death sentence for his father. And one of the accused asks for the court to hang him as soon as possible, for “the only good deed I can still perform is to provide a warning for others.”

Only a short time ago, agent 62C/A saw K.F. like this: “He is honorable and patriotic. His weak side, however, is uncritical gratitude.”

K.F. suddenly stops being a journalist for
Květen
and is not entitled to write about the Five-Year Plan.

He is thrown out.

The CPC Central Committee’s Press Department realizes there’s something not quite right about him. He muddles up the terms
úderník
(“shock worker”),
předák
(“foreman”) and
stachanovec
(“Stakhanovite”), using these concepts as it suits him. He is slavishly loyal to an optimistic vision of the Plan. He miscalculates the percentages by which factories exceed the Plan. Sometimes he overstates them.

In his final report for
Květen
, he takes the liberty of writing: “Shunter Jaroslav Šmíd increased productivity by 33 percent. We could report figure after figure like this, except that figures are lifeless. The things that are alive are people and labor. Whatever we write today, especially figures, may be different tomorrow.”

Both he and the editor in chief (the man who was so thrilled by “The Five-Year Plan Versus the Centuries”) are both fired towards the end of 1949, and a series of unpleasant interrogations lies ahead of them.

What were they thinking?

Why are figures “lifeless”?

Why aren’t they “just as important as people and labor”?

On whose instruction could such a sentence have appeared?

Why exactly is this shunter’s productivity being disparaged?

Is the point of it to ridicule the worker Šmíd?

Or maybe to make fun of the entire working class?

Now it is K.F. who is to become a laborer. He will work at an automobile factory. Later, at a factory making decorative
products, he is promoted to manager of the textiles department. (“Nevertheless,” he will say years later, “I went on writing books with socialist content for my own pleasure.”)

He is arrested just as the Slánsky affair is erupting. In the spring of 1952, he is sentenced to six years for betrayal of the state, in other words for broadcasting the fact that he has been cooperating with the Security Service. He comes out after two years, because some sentences are revised after Stalin’s death. He becomes a worker again, and until the early 1960s, he casts metal at the Stalingrad II Foundry.

His talent refuses to leave him in peace.

He writes about a dozen popular novels, including
The Riddle of the Five Cottages
—about a group of boys who accidentally discover a nest of spies;
Canine Commando
—about a prisoner in a Nazi camp who looks after dogs that are trained to kill, and whose life is saved by his favorite dog when he escapes from the camp; and
The Flying Horse
—about the war in South Korea.

He comes back into favor and becomes a television screenwriter.

He still laughs without opening his mouth.

He still isn’t a member of the CPC.

Not in the least discouraged, for adults he writes fine things about the Security Service.

For children, he publishes fantasy stories in the weeklies.

He never says a bad word about anybody—that’s how he is remembered. He is nice to everyone. He has rosy cheeks, a red nose and ears that stick out. He takes his daughters to the bar. He knows how to find his place in society. “Compare her
with any cathedral you like, and a woman is always young,” he declares to the delighted company. As he is approaching seventy, his friends ask: “Karel, why don’t the characters in your books ever screw?” He replies: “I never get to do it, so I’m not going to let them either.”

“Don’t send my fee to my home address,” he asks at the editorial offices, “or Madame will see it.” (Everyone calls his wife Madame.) This way he loses out, because getting paid might have been the one occasion when she’d cuddle up to him.

His daughters think he’s longing for love.

A close friend thinks that he has never stopped being an only child, who wants to please everyone all the time, without ever losing either his mom’s or his dad’s affection.

His professional colleagues think he avoids altercations and arguments. They also notice that at official ceremonies he both does and doesn’t sing the “Internationale.” Everyone else sings out loud, but he just moves his lips.

As one of his colleagues says: “With Karel, it’s always the playback.”

But on one matter, he is principled.

He will not tolerate lies from his daughters.

For telling lies, he’s capable of slapping them across the face. “If you admit it,” he says, “I’ll let you off!”

Once she is an adult and has managed to get away, the daughter in Germany writes him a letter: “The problem we had in common, Dad, was that you demanded almost boundless obedience from me, but you never explained to me why exactly I had to be obedient.”

He succeeds in joining the Party in August 1968, twenty years after the first attempt. “It was the time when only decent people joined,” stresses the daughter from Prague.

The only decent moment in the history of the CPC had just gone by—the Prague Spring.

Despite being a sort of miracle, it kills Major Pokorný.

The former security agent has been at liberty for years. He can’t accept a state of affairs where open debate, allowing for a contrary opinion, is no longer treated as an affront against the state. He writes a farewell letter: “A communist from the Victorious February of 1948 cannot survive such a terrible defeat for the CPC. This defeat has deprived me of spiritual and physical equilibrium,” and places the noose around his neck.

The illusion that the communists themselves are capable of democratizing the regime only lasts for a few months—until the Soviet Army tanks and those of four of its allies roll in. While under the leadership of First Secretary Dubček, the Party continues to be morally opposed to its Soviet brothers. And a week after the invasion, K.F. declares in the newspaper
Svoboda
(meaning “Freedom,” and still free for the moment) that he is joining the CPC: “These days, it is a very simple matter, no great words are needed,” he starts his letter. “If only because yesterday,” he adds, “before my very eyes, our brothers killed a fourteen-year-old boy. And also because the situation is violent, and no one joining the CPC can expect any advantage. He’s more likely to get a bullet. I think it’s a form of betrayal to stand aside during the fighting. Karel Fabián, writer.”

The newspapers print other letters from people who, in
protest against the invasion, have also decided to support the Czechoslovak communists against the Soviet ones by joining the Party.

Except that some of them immediately resign from it.

The terror committed by the Security Service and the normalization as instituted by Husák deprive them of any illusions.

Once Czechoslovakia is back in the Stalin era, K.F., not in the least bit alienated, goes on writing fine phrases about the Security Service in the weekly
Květy
(“Flowers”).

As part of their ruthless destruction of the founders of Charter ’77, the authorities supply the editors of
Květy
with intimate photos of Ludvík Vaculík, one of the Charter leaders, for publication. Removed from a secret drawer in his desk by security agents, they show him naked, with his lover, in the outhouse at his allotment. His wife finds out about the pictures and the lover from the newspaper. “We wonder why the Western journalists lap up every word that falls from his lips,” says the editorial commentary.

K.F. provides
Květy
with a story about a boy who encourages a young salesgirl to steal money from the store, and then leave for the West. He smothers her with a pillow before they manage to go abroad. The Security Service has no trouble finding the murderer in only a week. The city breathes a sigh of relief.

The author takes the opportunity to write: “ ‘Keep quiet,’ the boy’s adoptive father often told him. And once added: ‘There
are people who agree with everything in silence. And now, as an older friend, I’m advising you to do just that.’ ‘The flagpole is what matters,’ he went on. ‘After all, a flag of any color at all can fly from it.’ ”

The secret of why he smiles without ever opening his mouth isn’t widely known in K.F.’s circle.

And out of tact, nobody ever asks why he does it.

Always chatty, he never mentions the fact that it was the Gestapo who knocked out all his teeth.

Nor does he say that, from February 1942 until May 1945, he was a prisoner in the Nazis’ Straubing fortress.

Or that he underwent ninety-four interrogations, forty-two of which were severe.

Or that he was subjected to six weeks’ solitary confinement, in total silence. In winter, the temperature in the cell was only 2 degrees C [35° F].

Or that, on another occasion, he was forced to go two weeks without food.

Or that, when he was not being punished and was allowed to eat, the daily ration was three ounces of bread and nothing more.

Or that he was part of the Nazi “extermination through labor” operation.

Or that whenever there was an air raid, all the prisoners were deliberately herded to the top floor, where they were locked in a single cell in groups of at least thirty. That was when many of them succumbed to insanity.

Or that whenever a prisoner died, the corpse was left among the living for a long time on purpose.

Or that he returned to Prague with a leg injury and broken elbow joints.

He never mentions any of this at all.

This is strange, because old soldiers generally share their experiences. K.F. has a fine record—during the occupation, he belonged to an underground organization. At the Slavia Insurance Association in Prague, where he worked after dropping out of his legal studies, he distributed the biggest underground journal,
V boj
(meaning “Into Battle”). It wrote about national traitors and published patriotic poems.

In just two months, the Gestapo arrested about a hundred distributors. He was tried in Berlin, and imprisoned in Straubing. The sentence: eight months incarceration for making preparations to betray the state.

“Don’t mention it in public and don’t urge me to talk about it,” he asks a colleague at
Květy
. “I don’t want to make a heroic act out of it.”

The colleague says: “Karel was no martyr.”

Except that:

“In 1942, when I was arrested by the Gestapo, in the course of excruciating interrogation, I betrayed all thirteen members of an organization to whom I had delivered the journal
V boj
. They were all imprisoned, and two of them were tortured.

“Through my betrayal, I brought misfortune to fourteen families, because I also betrayed my first wife and her parents.

“When I came back from Straubing to my former workplace, I wrote a letter begging for my crime to be forgiven.

“I received a request from those mentioned above asking
me to leave Prague if I didn’t want trouble. They did not wish to encounter me.

“I decided to withdraw, and left for Liberec, where I was employed in a bank as a secretary. Then I started writing for
Stráž severu
.”

He tells this story at one of his interrogations after the war.

We don’t know if the Security Service used this information against him.

Towards the end of the 1940s, even the most popular writers are no longer celebrities. Their pictures don’t appear in the press. If this confession is to be believed, enticed by Pokorný’s offer of the opportunity to live and publish in Prague, E.K. returns from Liberec and invents a new name for himself, so that the old one won’t be noticed and cause offence. And most probably, that protects him from being recognized.

For “Operation Exclusion, Operation Substitution,” this is good timing.

In 1961, when he returns to favor following his period of enforced labor, his novel
The Flying Horse
is published. It’s about the war in South Korea. An American officer travels there to see the results of the mass murder in which he took part. He goes to a village where women and children were killed because of him, and he is recognized. Suddenly, he develops a high fever. The locals tell him they have no wish to see him, but as he is sick, they won’t refuse him aid. They will leave food at his door, and then smash every dish he has touched.

In his delirium, the officer reaches the conclusion that he should write a book in which there will only be one truth: if
a man kills, he shouldn’t go on living. All he can do is exist, because he finds the thought that every dish he touches must be smashed unbearable.

One would have to re-read the vast number of stories which Fabián wrote after the war to find out whether or not he burdens all his negative characters with his own sense of guilt.

In both phases of his life, he has to write a capital letter K whenever he signs his name.