At supper, we made the acquaintance of the other participants in this Christian Christmas; everyone did indeed appear younger than we did.
Each evening, both the genuine and the spurious students were invited to the home of a different family. One evening, a minister of the congregation invited my wife and me to his home. We were treated to an enormous beefsteak, wine, and a cake. Afterward, when we were munching the Christmas cookies, it was time for conversation. Although we had already become accustomed to avoiding anything serious or controversial, we searched in vain for a topic of discussion. Our hosts were not interested in art, politics, or Europe. They knew nothing of such a small country as Czechoslovakia; the tragedy that had occurred would not be of interest to them. For a while we chatted about the flight of Apollo 11, the weather, potential day trips from Midland. Then — I don’t know what got into me — I started talking about marriage as an institution undergoing a crisis and that sometimes dissolving the marriage was more ethical than maintaining a strictly formal relationship in which two people persevere without love. Fortunately, my wife kicked me under the table, and only then did I register the horror, consternation, offense, and absolute disapprobation on the faces of our hosts.
After four days in Midland, I could no longer stand it. We decided to take a trip to the nearest national park, Big Bend (only a couple of hundred miles away), and spend the night there. The next morning we set off on an exquisite and all but empty freeway through scenery that is so typical for a significant part of the United States — a landscape dominated by semideserts and very little vegetation. Every now and then we caught a glimpse in the distance of a herd of grazing horses or cows, but only rarely did we come across a farmhouse.
In the park, we climbed along several hills covered with some sort of unfamiliar vegetation. For the first time in our lives, we saw cactus growing somewhere other than in a flowerpot and made it to a magnificent canyon formed from the erosion of the Rio Grande River. At our own risk, we boarded a ferryboat that transported us and a few other passengers illegally to Mexico so we could brag that we had stepped onto Mexican soil.
We also joined an excursion to some caves, which, although in German transcription, were called Karlovy Vary, or Carlsbad. Max Frisch, even though he doesn’t call them by name, describes them beautifully in his novel I’m Not Stiller.
After less than a week, we embarked on our return trip and finally made Michal’s wish to see real American Indians come true. We arrived just as the celebration was beginning. We fell in with a group of tourists who’d come for the same reason: to experience something of the life of the original inhabitants of the continent.
The Indians — a number of them were only a little older than Michal — stood in a group. Some were partially naked, some were covered in buffalo skins that were old and had seen better days, just like their headdresses. Then drums and tambourines started up, and the dance began. Despite the cold weather, I noticed there was no smoke rising from most of the old-fashioned dwellings, and I realized that most of the dancers no longer lived here. They came as a folklore group to sell something of their former glory and make use of their decaying animal skins, which they had inherited. It was more sad than anything else, like a memorial celebration of a lost culture and its rituals.
The next day we covered almost a thousand kilometers (Timoteus and I took turns driving). Outside Chicago, we were hit by a blizzard, and we could see only a few meters ahead of us. I happened to be driving just then, and I knew we should pull over, but I stubbornly wanted to get as far as we could, all the way to Ann Arbor, if possible. The highway was becoming more and more snowbound, and at one point, as I was passing an enormous truck, I was blinded by snow kicked up by its wheels. Fearing I would steer the car under the truck, I veered too much in the opposite direction, and we drove into a snowdrift in a ditch.
The driver of the truck stopped and jumped out. I got out as well.
An icy wind lashed my eyes and face. The driver looked over our snowbound automobile and said he wouldn’t be able to help, but he offered to drive one of us to the nearest gas station or repair shop.
Timoteus got in with him, and I returned to our car, completely frozen after those few minutes outside. Fortunately, I’d left the engine running, and the heater was on. I can’t imagine what would have happened to us had the engine died. Timoteus’s wife — usually quiet and nearly silent — now burst into a paroxysm of hysteria and started screaming that she shouldn’t have gone anywhere; she shouldn’t have come to America, let alone on this trip. We were going to die here with the children, and no one would come to our rescue.
On one account she was mistaken. As for the other, over the course of the next fifteen minutes, several cars halted to see if anyone was hurt or if we needed assistance. One driver even went to the edge of the freeway, in this dreadful storm, took a rope from his trunk, and, though I told him a friend had already gone for help, tried to pull us out. To no avail, of course.
While the children were enjoying our shipwreck and Timoteus’s wife was sobbing, I kept revving the engine to keep it going. After about half an hour, a tow truck arrived with Timoteus in the passenger’s seat, and a minute later, we were back on the road unscathed. We saw that we’d gotten stuck about a hundred meters from a small motel where we could spend the night.
The next day around noon, we safely stepped out of the car in front of our transient home overlooking the cemetery.
I realized that during our entire two-week trip, including a several-hour illegal stay in Mexico, we hadn’t had to show anyone our identity cards.
*
The sense of freedom in this country was strong. I could say anything I wanted in public or in my lectures; I could go wherever I wanted, and if I was just a little frugal, I could acquire anything I wanted. At the same time, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that the whole thing was inappropriate. I was enjoying freedom and prosperity I didn’t deserve, whereas I was needed at home, where one had to somehow fight for everything.
I started subscribing to a newspaper with the paradoxical name Lidová demokracie (People’s Democracy). The department also received the Communist Party paper, Rudé právo. This was not encouraging reading. It appeared that everything was returning to the way it had been before the Prague Spring, and because it is impossible to go back in history, I assumed that everything would naturally be much worse than when I’d left a few months ago.
I also saw that the Chamber Theater, which had staged my Jury, had removed the play from its repertory even though, I knew, the performances had been sold out.
In my correspondence with friends and family, I was trying to find out something more, but their answers were either evasive or ambiguous because they knew they had to be careful.
After the trip to Texas, I found a letter from our embassy informing me that as a result of new decrees concerning the residence of Czechoslovak citizens in capitalist countries, our exit permit would be revoked on December 31, and we would have to depart the United States as quickly as possible and return to Czechoslovakia. I immediately wrote back asking for an extension because I was teaching at the university until the end of the spring semester.
I also called my parents (they had stayed in Switzerland only a few months; my mother refused to live abroad). First, I mentioned our trip to Texas and then I started to complain about the authorities who were apparently forbidding me to conclude my teaching duties.