For a moment I succumbed to misplaced hopes. At once I was ashamed that I had hesitated for almost a month before coming back, while my friends had been resisting the occupiers as much as they could.
*
A few days after our return, after the children had gone to bed, Helena said she had something to tell me. It had been such a difficult time, I was so far away, and when she called me it seemed I was even farther away. She needed someone to come to her aid, someone to lean on, someone to draw comfort and strength from. And Jirka, the student we took to Brno, had tried to help her as much as he could. Now that we were back together, she didn’t know what to do — at least she was telling me about it. One has to live in truth no matter how painful it might be.
I too confessed with whom I’d been in London.
We offered each other no reproaches. We both started to perceive that a time was drawing near when the only certainty (if there was such a thing in life) would be our loved ones. We put aside our infidelities, at least from our conversations. Despite all the dejection we were experiencing, we were both glad to be home.
Life, which I had been watching from afar, quickly pulled us back into its quotidian embrace.
The Writers’ Union had decided to reestablish the weekly under the new name Listy. I returned to my office and for the first issue wrote a prefatory column, which I named after Viktor Dyk’s famous poem, “If You Leave Me.”
I wrote about my feelings over the course of those emotion-filled postoccupation days while I was abroad. I wrote about what the word “homeland” meant to me.
To hear! Unable to give ear to my native language, to words that opened the world from the depths of the first darkness?
. . Of course you can speak any language, you can order dinner and debate politics or the overcrowding of cities in English or Spanish, but can you express your love, can you do this in a language that is not your own?
And I said to myself: My lover, my little duckling, my little doe, my little fawn, my sweetheart, snowdrop of spring daybreak, little skirt full of tenderness, princess of my wakefulness, my petite starry-eyed dove, my graceful goddess, my love, is it possible you are no longer mine? Is it possible that I will abandon you, that I will renounce you, the only one who can thrill me with tenderness?. . Then I realized: What a terrible world it is in which you can choose between a homeland that promises suffering and the suffering that afflicts those who choose to renounce their homeland. And I said to myself: The only human prerogative is the right to choose, even if it is between two sorrows. I do not know which is greater, but I know that in the first case I will not remain alone, I will remain in it and with you, my friends.
The column was overwrought, even sentimental, but it was understandable given a time of such intensified feelings. Perhaps this was the reason that, of all my articles, this one had the greatest response among readers. I received letters from people telling me that they had clipped out the column and sent it to loved ones abroad who were hesitating to return. Perhaps I convinced a few to come back. Later I felt this as a commitment, a choice I had to validate through my own behavior.
Many of my friends, however, opted for emigration. Six from our offices left immediately after the occupation. Igor Hájek, with whom I had listened to Prague radio in London, remained in Britain as well.
Although most of the politicians who had garnered popularity and trust retained their positions and enjoyed the support of the citizens, I noticed the atmosphere in the country changing day by day, and I had no illusions that anything would halt this progression. An army of a hundred thousand soldiers from a totalitarian power did not invade our country in order to help build a democratic regime. We also had no doubts that those who had until recently held power and then lost it in the spring must come back to life after the occupation; it was only a question of how soon.
My friends and I discussed what could still be preserved. On the last day of October we met at the Writers’ Club, and beneath the banner “Prague Writers,” we adopted a resolution. We announced support of the politics of the Prague Spring, which had chosen a trajectory on the basis of socialism and protested the fact that this period was beginning to be referred to as the advent of counterrevolution. The resolution warned against a politics of compromise: The real tragedy of Czechoslovakia would come to pass if compromises overwhelmed the genuine import of our battle and only the name of the democratic process remained. The text pointed out that censorship was already being reinstated; people who had earned the trust of the citizens were leaving government and were being replaced by those who have squandered their moral credit. The prepared economic reforms were not being instituted. It is unacceptable to reconcile oneself with the idea that the presence of foreign troops on our territory has been legalized with no time limitation.
The resolution ended with an impassioned appeal to Jan Hus. We recall that if anyone, after many years, had preserved the character and resolve of the Czech nation and saved it from ruin, it was the man who said: I do not recant.
We printed the text in the first issue of Listy; in the same issue was a less eloquent but bitingly ironic poem by Václav Haveclass="underline"
WE DO NOT DECLARE!
WE DEMAND!
WE STAND!
WE WILL NOT RELENT!
WE CHALLENGE!
WE PROMISE!
WE DO NOT BETRAY!
WE REFUSE!
WE WILL NOT PERMIT!
WE DENY!
WE CONDEMN!
WE WILL ENDURE!
WE WILL NOT DISAPPOINT!
WE WILL NOT RELENT!
WE WILL NOT ACCEPT!
Hm. .
*
At the beginning of November 1968, I received a registered letter from the Mendelssohn Theatre in Ann Arbor. The director would be staging my play The Castle on December 3 and would be very pleased if I could take part in the premiere; my travel and accommodations, of course, would be reimbursed.
The prospect of spending several days in America and escaping the depressing environment of an occupied country thrilled me. Surprisingly, it was easier to get an exit permit from the Czech offices at that time than to obtain an American visa. The Americans, more or less since the period of McCarthyism, were displaying (and justifiably so) a significant amount of distrust toward anyone who had been in the Communist Party. Nevertheless, I managed to secure a visa without great difficulty. The relevant offices apparently did not suspect me of working as an agent of the Czech Secret Service.
On the last day of November, I boarded a plane with a feeling of wonder at what fate had prepared for me and set out on my overseas journey.
At the New York City airport, my translator, Mrs. Ruthka, a kindly and demure woman, was waiting for me. She drove me to her large home in Roslyn Heights, where she and her family lived: her diminutive husband, a somewhat eccentric son — a mathematical genius — a quiet daughter, and a lazy, shaggy mongrel with the philosophical name Plato.