Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (30 page)

'When I first arrived at police headquarters, out near the airport,' he told me, 'I asked them why I had been arrested, and on what charges. The chief interrogator smiled at me - such an ironic smile! - and said,
That's not for us to tell you, but for you to tell us.'
He laughed, remembering it. Then, glancing sideways at me, he held up a hand. 'Please,' he said, laughing again, 'please don't mention Kafka.' The interrogations went on around the clock, three teams of questioners taking eight-hour shifts. Luckily, he said, he had been something of a mathematician at school, and was able to keep himself sane by working out equations in his head. What did they want from him, I asked, what did they expect him to confess to? 'That I was an enemy agent bent on undermining the regime. They were preparing me for a show trial, and in order for my court confession to sound to some degree authentic, I must produce the evidence against myself. You see?' There was a brief silence, and then he answered the question I dared not ask. 'Oh, of course,' he said, 'I did "confess". There was no other way out.'

The show trial took place a year and a half after his arrest. Everything was rehearsed. 'It was theatre,' he said, 'a kind of grotesque and meticulously prepared performance. I was presented with a text, on which were listed the court's questions, and my answers. If I did not keep to the text, strayed from it in any way, the trial would have been called off, and I would have been sent back to the secret police for the process to begin all over again.' His lawyer had given him a single piece of advice - do not use swear words before the bench - and then went into court and opened the case for the defence by saying that the 'supreme punishment', that is, the death sentence, was being demanded for his client, and that 'no doubt he deserves it.' However, since he was not a leader of the 'conspiracy' the court might find it in its heart to be lenient. Big-hearted as the judges were, they retired for the night to consider their verdict. 'The trial had lasted,' Goldstiicker said, 'from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. Then, from four until nine the following morning, I had to live with the distinct possibility of being sentenced to death and executed right away.' He smiled again. 'Doctor Johnson was right: the prospect of being hanged in the morning does concentrate the mind.'

He was spared the death penalty, and sentenced to life imprisonment instead. He was sent to the uranium mines, where he spent two and a half years digging radioactive material with his bare hands. 'I cannot understand,' he said, 'why I have not died of cancer long ago.' There were periods when he could move about only on all fours, even when work had ended for the day. In all this time, he was not aware that Stalin had died at the beginning of 1953. Khrushchev, prior to the momentous 20th Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow in 1955, at which he secretly denounced Stalin, had begun to release prisoners from the Gulag. The Czech authorities saw which way the Siberian wind was blowing, and started their own discreet programme of releases. By Christmas 1955, the same court which had almost sentenced him to be hanged changed their verdict, decided the charges against Goldstiicker had been illegal, and ordered that he should be set free immediately. 'The governor of the prison where I was held called me to his office,' Goldstiicker said. 'He was obviously embarrassed - I remember how he kept nervously moving documents about on his desk - and warned that it might be some time before I could be released. Of course, all my hopes collapsed at once, for this was just the kind of cruel trick they liked to play, these people: tell you that you would be set free, then delay your release for years.
Yes,
the governor went on,
it could take two or three hours before we can get you out of here.'
Goldstiicker was studying the watercolour landscape again. 'In that moment I realised,' he said, almost dreamily, 'that I was dealing with a man who was - how shall I say? - who was not human. If he thought that, after the years of interrogation and imprisonment that I had endured, I would consider three hours to be
some time,
then no, he was not a human being, as I understand being human.'

After his release he found a position in the philosophy faculty of the Charles University, later becoming Professor of German Literature there, and eventually was appointed Deputy Vice Chancellor. In May 1963 he organised the legendary Kafka Conference at Liblice Castle, which paved the way for Kafka's rehabilitation in Czechoslovakia. In the years that followed he busied himself with academic work, was a representative briefly on the National Assembly, and in January 1968 became President of the Czechoslovak Association of Writers and one of the promoters of the Prague Spring. That springtime proved a short season, as we know. 'The Russian invasion had just taken place, and my wife and I had fled to Vienna,' Goldstiicker said, 'when I received a telephone call from a journalist in England, telling me that the University of Sussex wished to offer me a teaching post. I accepted, of course. But do you know, I did not catch the journalist's name, and to this day I cannot say who my benefactor was.'

It is an indication of the strangeness of those times in Prague that Goldstiicker returned the following year, for a few days only, during which he was sworn in as a member of the Czech National Council. He wanted to remain in Prague, but the Husak government claimed to have uncovered a planned coup against it by dissidents, of whom Goldstiicker was one. He returned to Sussex, and in 1974, in his absence, his membership of the Czech Communist Party was revoked. He was happy in England, he said, or at least not unhappy. Eventually, in 1989, Czech history took another of its recurring twenty-year turns when Husak and his Calibans fell and Vaclav Havel came to power. At once Goldstiicker contacted the new Czech government to say that he wished to come back to Prague. The answer he received was equivocal: it might be some time before he could be allowed to return . . . He had, after all, he was reminded, been an active communist during the Novotny regime. It was not until his daughter in Prague became friendly with the daughter of the Havel government's Foreign Minister that he was at last given permission to return - 'to come,' he said, 'home.'

And what, I asked him, was his attitude to communism now? 'Oh, I am still a socialist,' he said, 'I never lost that faith. The people with the power were bad - more than bad - but the system was not.'

I kept in touch with Goldstiicker, and some years later I arranged, with the sponsorship of the Goethe Institute, for him to come to Dublin. He wrote to say that he looked forward to the visit, set for the following spring, but warned that I should realise that for a man of his age the Prague winter would be a 'hazardous undertaking'. As it happened, he did not make it through the autumn. On October 24th, 2000, the Goethe Institute telephoned me to relay the news that Professor Goldstiicker had died the previous day. It is not too much to say that, for me, an essential part of Europe, and of Prague in particular, died with him.

⁴⁹
seminafe is named after a sixteenth-century seminary founded exclusively for the education of postulants from the
region in the eastern part of the country, which had its own Slavic language, since lost. Now you know.

⁵⁰
The clock, completed in 1410 by
, was rebuilt in 1490 by a master clocksmith named
who did such a fine job that the town councillors, fearful that he would make a replica elsewhere, had the unfortunate craftsman blinded. The mechanism of the clock as it is today is the work of Jan Taborsky, who, from 1552, spent twenty years perfecting it. When the clock chimes the hour, the figure of Death pulls on a rope with his right hand, while lifting and inverting the hourglass he carries in his left. Two doors above the clock face then creak open and a number of figures including the twelve Apostles, led by St Peter, emerge and do their round. The doors close, a cock crows and the hour is chimed. The clock not only tells the time but also shows the position of the Sun and the Moon as they circle the Earth fixed at the centre of the world - Kepler must have snickered when he first passed under the tower. Beneath the clock is another, rather pretty dial, painted in 1846 by Josef Manes, showing the signs of the Zodiac and pictorial representations of the months of the year. The clock is a popular tourist attraction. That is an understatement.

⁵¹
in his play
R.U.R.
coined the word 'robot' from the Czech term
robota,
the labour owed by a vassal to his feudal overlord, and the Old Slavonic
rob,
meaning slave.

⁵²
Meisl was a great philanthropist, and built three synagogues one of which bears his name - public baths, a hospital, and the Jewish Town Hall, overlooking the Cemetery, which has a Hebrew clock the hands of which turn backwards, a detail not missed by ApoUinaire in his hallucinatory poem 'Zone'.

⁵³
Wearing his Professor of Useless Information hat, Ripellino informs us that '[I]n the Talmud a woman who has not yet conceived and a jug requiring polishing are termed
golem.''