Conditions had indeed somewhat changed. To the surprise and displeasure of the inhabitants, a polite but uncompromising investigator appears as a bearer of justice. To the ongoing protests of the notables, he gradually discovers that a murder has in fact taken place at the castle. Furthermore, Josef Kán turns out to be an important witness, and it is confirmed that everyone was in the room when the victim shouted.
The investigator conducts a reenactment of the crime, which confirms that all of those present participated in the murder. The bearer of justice concludes:
My gracious lady and fellow citizens! I have come here among you because one of your colleagues has departed under somewhat unaccountable circumstances. Would you please all rise. Thank you. I would like to announce that all of the somewhat unaccountable circumstances have been carefully considered during the detailed conversations and are now explained. There is no doubt that grievous errors have occurred here. I hope that my findings will not be understood as an attempt to besmirch the essentially flawless reputation of the castle. Thank you. Respected friends, please accept my most sincere thanks for the willingness and love with which you have welcomed me to these famous and historical places and devoted to me so much of your precious time. I can assure you that no one will interrupt your important and beneficial work from now on.
The ending seemed to me entirely logical. The play must end the way it began: with another murder. Also, it was clear who the victim should be. The murderers, who were the unpunishable notables, could not let the one who testified against them live.
I wrote the play in less than three weeks. I thought I’d managed to express everything I believed to be important. At the same time I was certain that no theater would be allowed to stage it — the parallel between what my investigator said about the castle murder and what was said about the political murders by everyone on the party commission was too obvious. It had been determined that the crimes had been a regrettable breach of the law, but those who had participated in them either were still in power or had been demoted to less important positions. Certainly no one had been called to account. I was so convinced that my play had no chance of being performed that I didn’t even type up my manuscript; I just read it to a few friends. They also didn’t believe the play had a chance of being staged. The only thing that would happen was that I’d finally be kicked out of the party; nevertheless, they kept insisting that I offer it to the Vinohrady Theater.
I continued to think it would be a waste of time to type out the play (I typed with only two fingers and usually had to retype each page several times), so I dictated the text into a tape recorder and took the tape to the theater.
Much to my surprise, a few days later I was informed that the theater company liked the play. They found the topic very compelling and would try to produce it. Let others ban the play if it bothered them; that would be their business. They weren’t going to ban it themselves.
But the authorities did not ban it. The premier took place on October 25, 1964. I do not suffer from stage fright, and even at the premier I felt only curiosity or perhaps anticipation concerning the audience’s reception and appreciation of my representation of arbitrary power and its homicidal dignitaries. At the time, viewers were already used to the language of allegory, metaphors, and hidden allusions. They understood everything and interrupted the play many times with applause.
Our joy, however, was premature. That very week the municipal council of the Communist Party complained that the theater had performed a play antagonistic to socialism. Because the play had already been approved, it was not prohibited immediately, but any sort of advertising was forbidden (the council did not understand that such a prohibition was the best kind of advertisement, and the play was always sold out). Then they decreed that the play could be performed only once a month, and after a few months it was to be removed from the repertory.
Nevertheless, the attempts to escape the mendacious ideology multiplied, as new theater and radio plays appeared by Václav Havel, Milan Uhde, and Josef Topol, along with the films of the young directors Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman, Jan Němec, and Antonín Máša. We began to fall prey to the illusion that despite the conditions in which we were forced to live, it was possible to achieve at least a certain measure of freedom.
*
The reception of The Castle and the effortlessness with which I wrote it impelled me to write another play.
Again I tried to think up an effective metaphor that would help me speak about our current problems. I imagined a detective story that included several murders. But this time my effortlessness abandoned me. I wrote sixty pages in nine months and completely altered the play at least as many times, even the title. Finally I settled on The Master.
The play was set, like all good detective stories, in a secluded mountain villa. Unexpectedly and for no apparent reason, a master coffin maker arrives — although no one has died — claiming he’s been summoned there by telephone.
A corpse is soon discovered. An old man, the owner of the villa, has just died in his room. Furthermore, his dumbfounded relatives learn that he was apparently poisoned. The plot gradually unfolds. Of the four remaining residents, one of them is clearly the murderer. The coffin maker, who envisages a fanciful desert representing a blissful place everyone desires to reach, participates in the investigation. He interrogates, advises, accuses, and consoles. Then another murder takes place. Except for one woman, all the inhabitants of the villa die one by one at the murderer’s hands. Finally the surviving member of the family accuses the coffin maker. She wants to shoot him, but in the end cannot take the murderer’s life.
The play ends with the monologue of the murderer, the coffin maker. First he addresses the woman who uncovered him but could not kill him:
Sometimes when I’m treated with such appalling words of incomprehension, accused of such deeds, I become afraid: What if they do not understand my words and are seized with horror? Have I chosen the wrong time to come?. . But yet I can see it! Transparent and aflutter! The sand, the dusky boulders rising to the heavens. I can discern the bells of the caravans, the distant roar of tigers, the bleat of antelope. And a sandy bed within a shallow depression waits to receive me. . And the stars are already descending until my heart breaks. The desert! My hope. So many times it has been promised — it must exist.
I was convinced that I had found a forceful image for an insane vision that tries to pass off a desert and death as the only salvation. In my opinion, this was where we had all been led, in the name of a redemptive vision and as the only hope for mankind, by those who had defiled themselves with murder. This time no theater would dare produce this image of our present day. It was performed in the United States, but it was printed in Czechoslovakia. In print, there was no danger that people would applaud the concluding speech of the diabolical master.
*
Our daughter was already two years old when we finally got a co-op apartment and somehow succeeded in exchanging it for a flat in a villa on a street named Nad lesem (Above the Forest). The forest actually began just fifty meters from the building’s entrance. My dreams of the forest — from the time I was forced to live in barracks confined within the walls of a fortress — had become a reality. Suddenly instead of clamoring automobiles, we were awakened by the chirping of birds in the garden or a woodpecker that had taken a liking to our lightning rod and immediately upon the break of day started in on it with powerful blows of his beak.