The children started attending school. The mother of one of her classmates took Nanda under her wing and invited her over for help with English. Michal complained that he understood almost not a word, but unlike some students, he had no problems distinguishing individual letters.
Those first few weeks must have been difficult for them. A veil of linguistic incomprehensibility concealed their world. My daughter enjoyed the fact that instead of sitting in the classroom all the time, they often went outside; and in the park there was something she’d never seen in Prague — rocking animals on springs. Once, when the radio was on, Nanda started yelling excitedly for us to come listen. To our amazement, a local Detroit station was broadcasting in Czech. Much to their disappointment, the children soon learned it was only once a week for thirty minutes. It was paid for by a local funeral home trying to secure all potential clients of Czech extraction.
We saw funerals almost every day from our window. Grave diggers always arrived first, and if rain threatened or if there was too much sun, tarpaulins would go up around the grave site. Then the hearse would arrive along with other cars bearing the bereaved. The cars parked wherever they could near the grave site. If it was raining, the mourners wouldn’t even make use of the tarpaulins but stayed in the car. Then the priest would appear and speak to both the people and the automobiles.
When there was no funeral, black squirrels dashed about the cemetery grounds, and students played soccer between the graves. I soon learned that in this country, it was not becoming to speak or even think about death, and it did not seem necessary to demonstrate any special respect toward the departed, since death, in fact, did not exist.
We soon discovered that it was difficult to cope without an automobile. Ann Arbor is a medium-sized university town with about a hundred thousand inhabitants, but because America has much more open space than Europe, the city is spread out. So I started looking for a used car in the classifieds. I was intrigued by an ad by a certain Mr. Zizala, who I correctly assumed was formerly Mr. Žížala. He lived at the other end of the city, and one of my students gladly drove me to see him. Mr. Zizala was a mechanic by trade, and this aroused in me the hope that the Chevrolet Impala he was offering — the color of a light coffee — would be in decent shape. This man, whom I met only once in my life and for less than thirty minutes, remains fixed in my mind. He had emigrated less than two years earlier but already owned a small house and workshop (certainly mortgaged). It was his unbelievable mixture of English and Czech that stood out. He assured me his car was super-duper and that since I was from Prague, he would give me a special férst reyt prais. He sold me a brand-new automobile for seven hundred dollars and wished me fayn draivovat.
The car altered our way of life entirely. Until then, we had walked to the local grocery store, made our purchases, and then, to the astonishment of everyone looking on, pushed the clattering shopping cart home past university buildings and the cemetery on Geddes Avenue while motorized argosies roared past us. Now, for the first time, we drove to the shopping center outside town.
As slightly awestruck visitors from a country that was in the midst of constructing the most advanced system of society where every person would soon be able to take according to his needs, we entered an immense (and ridiculous) empire of overabundance. To the sound of elevator music, we walked among piles of blouses, skirts, dresses, scarves, coats, and underwear; among millions of shoes, boots, perfumes, powders, forest scents, and eliminators of all unpleasant smells. We could touch anything we wanted and try on anything that could be tried on, and, according to hypotheses of scientifically based marketing studies, we were supposed to fall into that state of ecstasy so often described as a loss of all judgment within these cathedrals of capitalism.
*
At first money was tight. Fortunately, I started receiving invitations to lecture at various universities, including Indiana University in Bloomington, a university in Kansas City, and Columbia University in New York.
I prepared a fairly political talk in which I tried as best I could to summarize the central ideals of the Prague Spring and describe the way the official policies of the Communist Party differed from the demands of its citizens, who longed for a renewal of democracy, free elections, and an independent judiciary. At the time, interest in occupied Czechoslovakia, and primarily the Prague Spring, was enormous.
The young generation had succumbed to left-wing ideals: The most radical wore T-shirts sporting pictures of Che Guevara, Castro, or Chairman Mao; they read Daniel Cohn-Bendit or Sartre. Among their idols were Noam Chomsky and Rudi Dutschke. Now these idols were joined by, at least for the more moderate, Alexander Dubček and his “Socialism with a Human Face.” (Of course, almost everyone at the university, especially the students, was against the war in Vietnam.)
Then an unsigned (and sensibly so) document containing ten points arrived for me from Czechoslovakia. The preamble read:
Many capable, enthusiastic, and duly elected people have been compelled to leave their jobs or their appointments. . Societal organizations are being undermined by violent intervention; the public has been excluded from participation in national politics; questions of deep consequence are being decided by groups of individuals instead of democratic organs of the country. Not a single Czech agency has arisen from the will of the people. . On top of everything else, censorship is making it impossible to discuss these issues publicly, which is quite convenient for people of limited thinking and a dictatorial disposition, for old opportunists and new careerists, because they can claim what they want, falsify facts, slander individuals, and organize campaigns in newspapers that are responsible to no one. At the same time, they tell the people straight to their faces that now the truth can finally be told!
The authors and signatories of the ten points demanded the departure of Soviet troops, whose presence they considered the cause of unrest in society. They protested against the purges, against the dissolution of most voluntary civic organizations, and against the renewal of strict censorship. The important point was number five, which began with this proclamation:
We do not recognize the role of the Communist Party as an organization of power and its primacy over government organs that should be answerable to the people. Placing party membership above citizenship is repugnant.
The ninth point called for civil disobedience.
When censorship silences critics, when crude intervention into government organs is supposed to frighten people, when dishonorable journalists with miserable standards are obviously preparing the atmosphere for worse things to come, we announce plainly and clearly that the right to disagree with the emperor and his rule is an ancient and natural right of man. Even the enlightened monarchies were able to make use of it as a constructive force. Therefore, we ask how this question will be resolved here. And we reserve the right to disagree, which we will express by resisting, through lawful means, everything that goes against our reason and against our conviction as citizens attempting to achieve a socialism that is both democratic and humane. . We express our solidarity with people who are persecuted for their political views.
The sender of the document, whose handwriting I recognized in several of the passages as that of my friend Ludvík Vaculík, added a postscript noting that some of the signatories had already been arrested.