Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (24 page)

His mother notices that Zdeněk takes a backpack full of books.

So far, the head of the technical college has been very pleased with Zdeněk. In fact, he isn’t doing well at Czech and P.E., but he’s very good at physics and math. And he already knows all about computers. He was even going to offer him a paid job taking care of the Internet room, if not for that surprising incident with the police.

The police had discovered that Zdeněk Adamec was advising Internet users on how, for example, to make themselves a permanently charged payphone card.

There is also evidence indicating that Zdeněk Adamec lent access codes to his sites to alter-globalists. They used them to promote a method of interrupting the electricity supply. In
order, obviously, to break the monopoly of the all-powerful capitalist state.

After his first police interview, Zdeněk immediately removed the websites.

One day, Jaroslava Moserová sees Czechoslovakia’s most famous plastic surgeon, Professor František Burian, and cannot believe that he is smaller than she is. Standing on her right leg, she is only five foot six and a half inches tall, on her left five foot five and a half and on both five foot six.

“You’ve seen the smallest giant ever born,” one of the associate professors explains to her.

Professor Burian is small, but he has a great big idea: the Atlas of Plastic Surgery. He wants it to have 850 illustrations, and in addition the drawings are to show real patients, which has apparently never happened before in the field of illustrated reference books. The professor will not allow any anonymous faces to be included. He provides old photographs and descriptions of operations, and Jaroslava Moserová, junior surgeon and member of the artists’ union, spends four years illustrating the atlas.

The professor wears a hearing aid. Whenever he finds Jaroslava boring, he switches it off and starts to whistle. He is constantly dissatisfied. He makes her re-draw each illustration several times. After a while, before each meeting begins he asks her: “Are we going to have coffee first, or quarrel?”

She always prefers to quarrel first.

The housekeeper serves them the coffee. Professor Burian
lives with his daughter, his son-in-law and the home help. The housekeeper leaves when, for unknown reasons, the professor’s son-in-law is arrested. The professor probably understands her; even in a dentist’s waiting room, friends won’t sit next to the family of someone who’s been arrested. People are entitled to be afraid. Now the professor’s daughter brings in the coffee.

Professor Burian won’t live to see the atlas published; he’ll die only two days after writing the introduction.

There are computer printouts lying on Zdeněk Adamec’s desk. They are about Torch Number One.

Last year, Zdeněk started reading about an unusual student. He was known as Torch Number One. If, in August 1969, an exceptionally nasty era hadn’t begun, if the Soviets and four other armies hadn’t invaded the country, and if they hadn’t become more and more tyrannical, Torch Number One wouldn’t have had to resort to extreme measures.

Because, first of all, people gave in, and then they sold out. They were no longer allowed to say things that during the Spring were said freely. Torch Number One was a student in the philosophy faculty. He wanted to wake them up.

Zdeněk found the statement of a female student from Prague who later became a world-famous director, saying that the choice of those who were to be the top ten for self-immolation was made with great care. The point was for good students to set themselves on fire, young people who didn’t have psychiatric problems, neuroses or broken hearts, so it
wouldn’t be possible for the propaganda to disavow the motives for their act. The best of the best were chosen. And then they drew lots.

Zdeněk read the letter written by Torch Number One before his death: “If our demands—including the lifting of censorship—are not met in the next five days, that is, by January 21, 1969, and if the nation does not additionally support them through a general strike, the next torches will burn.”

Signed, “Torch Number One.”

Zdeněk takes these printouts with him.

At the burns unit, mirrors are not allowed in the patients’ rooms.

Not all the patients want their nearest and dearest to look at them. They would prefer to talk to them from behind screens.

Dr. Jaroslava Moserová collects material for her book
Skin Loss and Compensating for It
. She is interested in burned skin.

In places where skin has been charred, the patient’s own skin is grafted, for the time being. It is cut out, stretched to a scale of one to three, and applied. Where there is a lack of the patient’s own skin, for a couple of weeks skin from dead bodies is applied, like a natural dressing. But, in a few years’ time, before Jaroslava Moserová finishes her book, a method of supplementing losses using skin from piglets will be developed. Pig skin is the most similar to human skin, closer than that of chimpanzees.

In the field of skin-loss compensation, Jaroslava Moserová
collaborates with some Polish scientists, who award her a gold medal.

She is also granted a scholarship to go to the University of Texas at Galveston.

She notices that she suffers from a strange affliction: she has no memory of the patients whom she has helped. She only remembers the ones in whose cases she failed.

Being ineffective is what she finds most horrifying about herself.

Mom asks if he took the sandwiches.

Zdeněk knows that Torch Number One bought a white plastic bucket somewhere in downtown Prague, and then filled it up at a gas station. He’s not going to take a canister with him, because Mom will immediately ask what it’s for. He too will buy himself a container in Prague.

He has already composed a letter, which begins with the words: “Dear Citizens of the World …” He posted it on a website called www.pochodnia2003.cz.
^*

A wave of burn victims injured during clashes with Soviet tanks has already passed through the unit.

On January 16, Jaroslava Moserová is on call when they
bring in a young man. She hears the paramedics saying that this is Torch Number One. His name is Jan Palach. He set himself on fire outside the museum on Wenceslas Square. Almost the entire surface of his body is charred, as are his airways.

The orderlies, who always call young people by their first names, address him as “sir.”

The nurses say he is Jan the Second, because he wanted to remind people of Jan Hus.

Jan Palach’s death throes last for seventy-two hours.

People bring hundreds of flowers to the hospital for him, and hundreds of letters arrive. The nurses read the letters to him. Jaroslava Moserová reads them too. And in his fever, he opens his eyes and asks in a hoarse, suffering voice: “It wasn’t in vain, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t,” they reply.

“That’s good,” says the patient.

The secret police are standing outside the hospital.

Despite the Soviet occupation, the coffin is set out in the hall of Charles University’s Karolinum building, and there are candles in apartment windows. Crowds of people weep as they come to visit the deceased until midnight. All over the country, there are labor strikes, hunger strikes and rallies.

The funeral is a demonstration, and the grave in Prague’s Olšany cemetery is a site of pilgrimage.

A few years later, the authorities force Palach’s mother and brother to sign an exhumation agreement; then they remove the remains at night, cremate them, and give the urn to the family.

They will keep it at home, because the cemetery in Palach’s native town of Všetaty refuses to accept it for a year.

In 1990, President Václav Havel will ceremonially return the urn from Všetaty to Olšany.

Zdeněk has a choice: he can travel from Humpolec to Prague by bus or by train. If he went by rail, he would have to change trains and would only get there in the afternoon. In Kolín, he would have to board the express train “Jan Palach.” So he takes a direct bus, leaving at 6:30.

The road to Prague is a freeway—fifty-six miles down a narrow pass running between trees and meadows. What could have stopped him on this road? The only things visible, apart from the dark brown woods, still without leaves, are gigantic billboards saying: “Now’s the time! Follow your heart. Get the benefit of a facelift.”

“It’s the right time to make a good investment. The New Phone Book …”

“Let me get my clothes off—0-800 …”

Fifty minutes later, Zdeněk is in Prague.

After patients injured by the invasion, patients injured by the normalization start to appear—the first victims of the process of creating the new, obedient man. Mr. K., for example, one of 750,000 people who after 1970 are forced to change jobs.
Mr. K., who went to university and speaks three languages, was employed in foreign trade. The Party decided that he would lay asphalt on the streets. One day, a tank valve couldn’t withstand the pressure and boiling tar came shooting out, straight at Mr. K.

It melted his entire body apart from his face.

People who deal with monstrosities have to find ways to prevent themselves from going mad.

For example, at first Jaroslava Moserová used to draw different versions of a little girl walking along with a sunflower held high.

Now she is protected from madness by Dick Francis—the Queen Mother’s top jockey.

He competed in the Grand National, riding the Queen Mother’s favorite, a horse called Devon Loch. The entire royal family was sure he would win. Suddenly, on the final straight the horse fell. Then it seemed to come to its senses, got up and ran on, but it could no longer win. Afterwards, it was examined—it wasn’t injured or sick. For years, people debated this astonishing incident, although the Queen Mother was typically stoical about it, commenting: “Oh, that’s racing!”

And the demoted Dick Francis wrote a novel in which it featured.

Then he started thinking up detective stories. Most of his novels are set at the horse races, and Jaroslava Moserová translates them all into Czech.

By 2003, she had translated forty-four of his novels, and won a prize for the art of translation, while in the Czech Republic Dick Francis has outsold Agatha Christie herself.

“What helps you to unwind?” ask the journalists. “Why
do you translate these particular books? And why only this author?”

“Because good always triumphs in them, and evil is punished. Apart from that, he’s reluctant to send anyone to jail,” replies Jaroslava Moserová.

“If a bad guy does have to be punished, he’s more likely to fall off a cliff or get killed in a crash,” she adds.

It’s the 1970s, and the word “jail” puts the Czechoslovak journalists on their guard; maybe they’d rather not see it in print, so they’d like her to give them a different reason.

“Well, all right,” the translator does her best to satisfy them, “I also like the fact that in his books the only person who has to try and think up an alibi is the murderer.”

Mrs. Adamcová calls Zdeněk on his cell phone. She called earlier, but he didn’t pick up. “Where are you, son?” she asks.

“Where do you think?” replies Zdeněk, and hangs up.

To Jaroslava Moserová, Václav Havel is the small boy in short pants, standing next to her and her sister Božena in a photograph. Their families were friends. The girls are about seven and nine years old, and Havel is three.

Her stepson looks at the photo and asks: “What did you and your sister talk to Mr. Havel about, Mom?”

“Nothing, Tomáš!” says his stepmother indignantly. “We took no notice of him at all. He was too young for us.”

Zdeněk Adamec has a full canister now.

Apparently, Jaroslava Moserová has treated a patient who suffered burns in a gas explosion, affecting not just the flesh under his thick shorts, but his hands too, because he had them in his pockets. He is a young violinist, and before the explosion he studied at the conservatory. A year after the skin graft he has started to practice again, but he can’t stand and hold the bow in his hand for long. After only ten minutes, he loses heart. As his doctor comes from a home where the children had to know the difference between Monet and Manet, and play the piano, she starts practicing with him, playing duets by Corelli.

To catch up with the qualified violinist, the surgeon in her fifties signs up for piano lessons. When they practice together, the boy can keep going for a whole hour.

They play like that for three years.

Then they appear at the Congress of the European Society of Plastic Surgeons, where they perform Janáček.

Now Jaroslava Moserová has an idea for a screenplay.

A mother has unintentionally injured her daughter’s cheek. The story begins when the girl is already grown up; she has a scar on her beautiful face, a good job and lots of friends. Everything is fine, except for the mother’s sense of guilt. She plagues her daughter by being morbidly overprotective. Guilt is her life.

The screenplay idea appeals to Evald Schorm, an icon of the Czechoslovak New Wave in cinema who has been silent for almost twenty years, roughly since the death of Palach. He wants to direct it, but he has no desire to write the script. He says she should write it. When Jaroslava tries to make excuses, Schorm explains how to write it: everything that’s heard, such as a car hooting, goes on the left-hand side of the script, and everything that’s seen, such as a curtain moving, goes on the right.

The role of the mother will be played by a friend of Jaroslava’s. She is the ex-wife of the nice orphan boy who used to visit the Mosers after the war. He had nobody, and he wanted someone to spread butter on his bread, and even to shout at him now and then, which is understandable—what he needed was a substitute family. The actress friend is called Jana Brejchová, and the name of her former husband with the bread and butter is Miloš Forman.

The movie is going to happen, but it can’t have the title the screenwriter wants. She’d like it to be called
White Lie
.