When we arrived in Calais, the uniformed men reappeared, returned my passport, and treated me to another long explanation. I didn’t know if everything was all right or if I was being expelled from France or wasn’t allowed to leave. The most likely explanation was that they had seen in me a citizen coming from a country of the Soviet Bloc; I had squirmed out of a dark hole encircled with barbed wire, a place from which nothing good could come. I was in all respects suspicious, and they had to check to see how much damage I could cause.
With that unpleasant experience behind me, I soon learned that the English Channel was rougher than the Mediterranean Sea; nevertheless, the trip went smoothly, and I peered at the approaching land. When we’d almost made port, there was an announcement, this time in English, but in sailor talk and, moreover, from a raspy loudspeaker. Once again I understood nothing.
The others got up and started disembarking, so I joined them.
The sailors ordered us into a single group and then ringed a long rope around us.
No one else seemed upset or frightened, just me, who had come from a country in which you could never be certain what awaited you. Also in mind were my experiences from the concentration camp. I was afraid and it occurred to me that all it would take was a light machine gun, or perhaps just a rifle, and none of us could hope to escape.
Even though it was merely an idea, a paranoid fantasy, however excusable in view of my own experiences, the feeling of standing in a group hemmed in by a rope stayed with me, and I never forgot it.
Everything proceeded, though, without the expected terror. At the London station, the pleasant and energetic Janet was waiting for me. She had prepared a bed in her study and an almost hour-by-hour schedule for my time in London. When I mentioned Isaac Deutscher, she said she knew the name and as far as she was aware he was still alive. She would try to set up a meeting for me.
I spent a week in London visiting various galleries and the British Museum. Janet took me to some sort of court hearing so I could see the judges wearing their wigs, to Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard, to the City of London to see the capitalists in their top hats, and to Soho so I could have a good time where Londoners had a good time. She also bought me a ticket to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, where at one time my Castle was supposed to have been performed. Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing was on the program and I was amazed that people wore sweaters in this sanctuary of the greatest dramatist who had ever lived. They tossed their coats over the backs of their chairs and even smoked as if they were in a beer joint.
At first London enchanted me. I fell in love with the double-decker buses and spent hours on a corner in Hyde Park listening to the fiery and rebellious orators. An institution not restricted by anything or anyone seemed to me the embodiment of freedom. Only later did I realize that in a free country there was no need of such rostrums, and therefore they were used mostly by crazy people, freakish messiahs, experts who knew the only correct path, or diseased gasbags.
From London I traveled to Inverness, where I chanced upon a bagpipe festival. To my surprise, besides the beauty of the wild countryside, only one, somewhat mystical moment has stayed with me. I was climbing a hill toward a little village beyond Inverness, and all at once from the window of a cottage I heard a female voice singing a beautiful Scottish ballad. The singer was nowhere to be seen, and it was entirely possible that the voice was issuing from a radio or a record player. But I stood there in stupefaction, leaning against a wall, listening and gazing out into the horizon and the mountains bordering it. Suddenly a white house emerged for a moment on the ridge of the mountain as if from a mist. The house seemed to light up and then vanish. It seemed to me miraculous.
When I returned to London, Janet proudly announced that she’d discovered the address of Isaac Deutscher and had set up a meeting with me for the next day at four in the afternoon.
The following day I bought an egregiously expensive (at least for me) bouquet of flowers and set off to see Mr. Deutscher. He was a small, bald sixty-year-old man with lively eyes and sporting a beard like his beloved Lev Davidovich Trotsky. He studied me carefully at the door, most likely making sure I didn’t have an ax or ice pick hidden somewhere under my coat, and then led me to his study. I remember this study very well. It was an enormous room, tall, with thousands of books lining the walls.
Much to my relief, Mr. Deutscher spoke Polish (my Polish was still better than my English), and I could easily convey to him the enormous influence his book had had on me. I told him that our country was still being governed by an only somewhat less tyrannical Soviet regime and tried to explain how horrible it was for me when I realized that I had barely survived one bloody dictatorship only to begin serving another. Just like Literární noviny, where I worked, I was trying with my limited possibilities to do everything I could to push for a renewal of democracy in Czechoslovakia. Because as soon as democracy is suppressed, I opined, tyranny takes its place.
I think he listened to me with solicitude. He said he’d been following developments primarily in Poland, but also in the other countries of the Soviet Bloc. He knew of our newspaper; reading in Czech didn’t cause him any great problems. He said he understood our disenchantment with the postrevolutionary developments in our countries, but he believed that the Stalinist bureaucratic deformation of socialism could not survive for long. What must survive, however, what we must guard and try to preserve, is the idea of socialism and its undeniable advantages over capitalism. Stalin was a tyrant, but we cannot compare him to Hitler. Hitler represented a blind alley of history. Stalin was a criminal who had veered from the path, but the path still represented hope for humanity. My radicalism, he warned me, could lead to an entirely different place from where I want to go. Surely I wouldn’t want to have a hand in the workers’ becoming once again an object of exploitation. It was necessary to genuinely return the government to the hands of the people, and bourgeois government the Czechs and Slovaks had experienced before the war would never do that. Our slogan should be: Never return to the old democracies but do return to the regenerated Soviets of the people’s representatives.
He was recommending this to me, someone who had come from a country where we had to argue with the censor over every semi-intelligent article, while he was living in a country where he himself enjoyed all the freedoms offered by a system he referred to as a bourgeois democracy.
*
Even though our newspaper was acting rebelliously, we could in no way extricate ourselves from the Soviet system. It had its maximum allotment of paper; it was distributed by the Postal News Service — the only organization set up for this. Because Literární noviny was a legal periodical, the editor in chief received daily news reports from the Czech News Agency, even reports to which only a privileged minority of party members and journalists had access. These reports, copied on red paper, usually contained editorials from the otherwise consistently blocked Radio Free Europe or translations of articles, published in the main West European or American newspapers and magazines, which concerned the countries of the Soviet Bloc. Even some foreign journals were mailed directly to the editorial offices (they were naturally not available for purchase anywhere). We were allowed access to this material to better polemicize with “enemy propaganda.” We decided against polemicizing, but for us all of this “red news” was an important source of information and knowledge.