We sent our proclamation to the Czechoslovak Press Agency, but just in case, we also immediately telephoned Radio Free Europe.
Two days later, I was invited to the New Stage of the National Theater. As in all other theaters, the actors here were on strike and, instead of continuing with their planned performances, they were calling various personalities onto the stage, usually those who hadn’t been permitted to appear before any kind of audience for twenty years. Essentially, we all talked about the same thing: free elections, basic human rights, how freedom of speech and association had to be guaranteed, and that the constitutional article guaranteeing the leading role of the Communist Party had to be abolished.
I don’t remember what I said. I do remember the feeling when, after almost two decades, I stepped onto a stage and the people in the hall began applauding even before I said anything. Somewhere in my subconscious was huddling the idea that at any minute, one of those gentlemen would appear whom I knew all too well and who for years had been on the lookout for anyone who, in their opinion, threatened the safety of the country, socialism, peace, and, thereby, all of humanity. Where were they? Where had they disappeared?
While I was thinking that the moment had arrived, the moment we had imagined over these years, the moment of change, I was overcome with an excitement similar to what I had felt when I stood by the collapsed fence at Terezín and waved at the passing soldiers who I knew were bringing with them the end of the war.
There are few experiences as strong as that of freedom, especially when it seemed for decades so unattainable. The most uplifting thing at this moment was the feeling that people in the audience were experiencing the same thing I was. Never had I longed to merge with the masses. In fact, such feelings frightened me. But once or twice in one’s lifetime, for a few climactic moments of shared history, one can allow oneself precisely this exalting feeling.
*
During those days, writers who had been assiduously writing and publishing started calling me (apparently they had heard I was the head of the Czech PEN Club, which, unlike the current collaborationist Writers’ Union, seemed to be the primary writers’ organization for the near future). Only a week earlier, it was as if they hadn’t known who I was, but now they were all but declaring their love and admiration for everything I’d ever written and done. Then they usually alluded to the fact that, although they had been publishing all along, they had actually been sacrificing themselves. They had longed to say something of import to their readers, but with censorship — certainly I could recall my own experiences — life was almost unbearably difficult. Then they tried inconspicuously to turn the conversation to the future: Would only certain people be allowed to publish, and others be banned? Would the roles now be reversed? Could they join the PEN Club?
These were difficult conversations, and I tried to cut them as short as possible. Freedom of the word and expression, I tried to assure these writers, was taken for granted. There was no force that could limit someone’s freedoms. The telephone (at least at that time) did not permit one to see the face of one’s interlocutor, but I imagined I could see the uncertainty in their faces: How could it possibly happen that suddenly everyone was permitted? This was against all their experiences, even common sense. Fortunately, I was difficult to reach at home.
Someone from among the group of students striking in the School of Humanities of Charles University invited me to a discussion and introduced me as a banned writer. I was asked to say something about how I had supported myself and how we smuggled our manuscripts abroad.
Finally, the students asked me to accompany them to northern Bohemia to meet with the workers. We agreed to go first thing the next day.
From the School of Humanities, it was only a brief walk to the School of Performing Arts, so I went to see Nanda. I bought her some food, since I’d heard from her husband that she hadn’t been home for several days. It turned out to be unnecessary because, in their sudden revolutionary fervor, people had been bringing the students more food than they could consume.
I went straight to the classroom where students were cranking out slogans, proclamations, and posters as if on an assembly line. Nanda was excited, and when I asked her if she wanted to go home for at least one night, she said she wasn’t about to lounge about when something so marvelous was going on.
I read the slogans on the posters and signs: CZECHS, COME WITH US! STUDENTS OF ALL DEPARTMENTS, UNITE! DOWN WITH THE CPČ! END THE RULE OF ONE PARTY! THIS COUNTRY IS OURS!
Scarcely had I arrived home when I received a call from the Central Students’ Strike Committee, which had convened at the School of Performing Arts. They wanted my advice concerning an important matter. Could I come back? I had no idea what it could be, but they were wisely avoiding any sort of telephone conversation. I said I could be there in thirty minutes.
On this visit — unlike my visit an hour earlier to the same building — I was met by a guard who checked my ID. Then I was led across a courtyard and up and down stairs, and at another entrance I was transferred to another guard. It was all impressively conspiratorial. Finally, I was let into a room where a committee was in session; at its head was my nephew Martin. He welcomed me and said they needed to establish that the prime minister of the government, Alexander Adamec, was a member of the presidium of the Communist Party. I said yes. I waited for another question, but none was forthcoming.
On my way home again, I kept running into people coming from a protest demonstration. They were carrying bundles of banners as well as signs, many of which I had seen shortly before spread out on the floor and tables in Nanda’s classroom.
I noticed that people were stopping or at least greeting one another. In the tram, I asked an older woman holding a small flag how it had been.
She said that Dubček and Havel had spoken and, had Masaryk been alive, he would have definitely been on the balcony as well.
This striking image stuck in my mind.
Of course, it was a time of striking images and unexpected changes (and metamorphoses), and, just as in a real drama, the tension and uncertainty were increasing.
The improvisation on the part of the victors, who were unprepared for victory, and the helplessness of the defeated, who could not imagine that over the course of a few days the structure that had been prophesied to endure for eternity would collapse, stood behind this remarkable, bloodless transformation.
The unexpected development of events also led to a strange compromise, which resulted in the Communist parliament unanimously electing Václav Havel president of the republic, and Havel appointing the Communist Marián Čalfa prime minister. As the brewmaster in Havel’s play Audience says, “Them’s the paradoxes of life, right?”
The most important thing, however, was that the heavens of freedom, imperceptible only a short time ago, had finally opened before us.
EPILOGUE
Most of my life up to now, I have lived without freedom. This lack of freedom assumed different forms and different intensities. Sometimes it was a matter of one’s very existence, other times prison, and other times only the loss of a job and constant police persecution. To my discredit, for several years I had been a member of the party, the party that had this lack of freedom on its conscience, the party that had enthroned terror and was responsible for one of the most loathsome periods of our history. When I understood this (fortunately, fairly early), I did everything in my power to reestablish this freedom.
I gradually came to realize that there were two kinds of freedom, internal and external. One can behave unfreely even in free circumstances, and one can behave freely (with all the risks it entails) in unfree circumstances. I believe that for almost my entire adult life I tried to behave like a free person; I wrote about the world not the way I was ordered to but the way I perceived and experienced it.