From the telephone booth on the corner of our street, I called Olga and told her I was back in Prague.
“Klímka,” she said, “you can’t be serious! Have you gone insane?” She then added: “No, you’re still over there. For me, you left and remained there.”
*
I was waiting for the tram in front of the Mánes Gallery. Two boys and two girls were sitting on the sidewalk; all were wearing jeans and tennis shoes, and the boys were as hairy as forest people. One of them got up and walked over to me.
Him: My friend, what sort of problems are you having?
Me: The tram isn’t running.
Him: You don’t have any other problems?
Me: Not right now.
Him: Strange. You’re not suffering?
Me: No more than anyone else.
Him: In that case, I can’t help you. Keep waiting for the tram. It might never come.
From my diary, January 1970
*
I was received with astonishment at the writers’ meeting. To them, I seemed like an extraterrestrial standing right before their eyes. Then Jaroslav Seifert, who was chairing the meeting, welcomed me home. I think he was touched that at least one of his colleagues had decided to return from the free part of the world to our present misery. After the meeting, I went to see my former colleagues at the publishing house and learned that the entire print run of my last book of short stories had been confiscated and pulped. I asked if I could work for them as a freelance copyreader. They promised to look into it and during my next visit informed me that it was out of the question. Then I was asked, almost in a whisper, not to come back. The new director ordered everyone to tell me my visits were not welcome. Since I could no longer publish, the director would have to explain my visits not as work related but as social calls from someone who has shown himself to be an enemy of socialism. I soon learned that people who, in the eyes of the occupying power, committed an offense through their recent activities had no chance of securing any sort of professional work.
I overheard that acts of revenge were taking place in the Communist Party. Screening committees composed of the most obdurate and unrepentant opponents of the recent reforms were now deciding the fates of the other party members. These members were required to reject all attempts at reform and, most important, to express their support of the occupation, which now, in Communist newspeak, was referred to as brotherly assistance in the defense of socialism. Whoever did not agree with the occupation was either cast out of the party or crossed out. Being crossed out was somewhat better than being cast out. Everyone who was cast out was relieved of his job, and his entire family was subjected to persecution. The only encouraging thing was that even under these circumstances, there were plenty of those who refused to accept these degrading requirements. As one may assume, hundreds of thousands were cast and crossed out.
Our Writers’ Union was once again banned and, just as after the February coup, a new one was being organized. It did not matter if someone wrote a good book; what was important was the author’s stance toward Soviet occupation. Nevertheless, it took a while for what Communist newspeak referred to as normalization to solidify. Helena could still return to her job at the Sociological Institute (the fact that she’d never been a member of the party and therefore could be neither cast out nor expunged became, at least for a short time, an advantage). The institute, however, had not counted on her return and so did not even list her name as among the team. It took her in on a temporary basis.
To let us know it hadn’t forgotten about us, the Department of Passports and Visas summoned Helena and me to appear with our passports. A government official took the passports, looked them over to make sure they were ours, and kept them.
As my colleagues in Ann Arbor had warned, the gates of the camp called Czechoslovakia were closing behind us.
*
Pavel Kohout was trying to legally publish our writings abroad. He found a man in Switzerland willing to do everything he could to help banned Czech authors. Jürgen Braunschweiger worked in the Bucher publishing house and prepared contracts for seven of us: Jiří Gruša, Alexandr Kliment, Pavel Kohout, Eda Kriseová, Jiří Šotola, Ludvík Vaculík, and myself. The Dilia literary agency executed the contracts and acceded to the important point that Swiss law would govern any dispute.
Jürgen came to Prague (shortly thereafter he was not allowed to travel to the republic), signed the contracts, invited us to dinner, and asked us to provide him with more manuscripts soon. He promised to publish my collection of stories, My First Loves, immediately and even my plays; he also pointed out that plays and short stories did not sell well, and so I should write a novel.
Eric Spiess, of the German publishing house Bärenreiter, also came to Prague to represent Pavel Kohout and myself. Unlike Jürgen, who was bulky, cheerful, and bursting with optimism, Eric gave the impression of an ascetic. He was always broody and pensive — even skeptical. He said my plays were being staged quite successfully. Some had made it all the way to New Zealand in radio adaptations. As far as the stage productions were concerned, the one-act plays were usually performed on the smaller stages, but he was convinced that my royalties would allow me to support myself. Unless, of course, our government did not compel me to forbid the production of my plays abroad or even worse.
I asked if he’d heard that something was in the works.
No, but he added that he could imagine it happening. He was already over forty and remembered the history of his own country; anything could happen when the riffraff took power. Besides, he knew as well as I did what had happened to Boris Pasternak when his Doctor Zhivago was banned in Russia and he undertook to have it published in Italy. And Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel had been sentenced to prison for the same thing not so long ago.
I still retained some of that American optimism and energy. Certainly the money I had saved while in America contributed to this feeling; my material cares were, for the time being, taken care of. I recalled the parties in Ann Arbor, where everyone ate, drank, chatted, listened to the latest records of Iron Butterfly, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Cream, and maybe even smoked some pot. This gave me the idea that my friends and I could organize something similar perhaps once a month. And to give these gatherings greater meaning, someone could read a piece he’d just written.
My friends took to the idea. Although it was a small gathering of a few friends, it was a chance to bring our writing out into the open. We agreed not to mention our get-togethers to anyone and would invite only those we trusted. Our parties took place for over a year without drawing the attention of the omniscient State Security.
Once Ludvík Vaculík brought a little-known author from Ostrava, Ota Filip, who had recently been released from prison. He’d been arrested for writing and distributing some leaflets. Soon a television show was broadcast in which Filip discussed our meetings. (My friends had to tell me about it because I refused to own an apparatus that was at liberty to transmit only programs approved by the censors.) The newly hired television reporters were trying to demonstrate their industriousness by airing photographs of guests arriving at my home. The images supplemented the claim that representatives of the defeated right-wing and counterrevolutionary forces were continuing their activities.
The likelihood that from then on our meetings would be observed carefully and everyone who visited assiduously noted down was discouraging, to say the least. We decided discontinue our readings.