*
I was banned from the Writers’ Union. I didn’t have a job, so the only way I could spend my time was reading and writing. (However, they hadn’t forbidden me to play tennis, so about once a week I played with my brother — he had also come back from England — on one of the courts near the math and physics department where he, by contrast, was still allowed to teach.)
Until then I’d written mainly stage plays. Even though I’d never worked with any theater, I realized that writing without the possibility of seeing even at least one of my plays performed — that is, without being able to see how the actors played their roles or the audience’s response — wouldn’t be very satisfying. Furthermore, my publisher in Switzerland kept asking me to send him a novel.
I was forty years old and had written one novel, but it had been based on a screenplay that I’d reworked several times with a screenwriter. I didn’t have a good subject to write about — I didn’t want to return to the war, and I didn’t want to write about what I was currently going through because it was too depressing and ridiculous, and, as critics usually point out when they notice an author hasn’t dealt successfully with a contemporary subject, I lacked a certain distance from current events.
I wrote several short stories based on dreams. The longest story relied on a dream from about ten years earlier. I was trying to board a train which, to my horror, was transporting a group of lepers. Meanwhile the train had started moving, and in a panic I jumped from the steps and injured myself. When I asked around to learn the details of the strange train, no one knew what I was talking about — or, more precisely, no one wanted to know. The image of lepers being secretly transported struck me as an excellent metaphor for a world in which hundreds of thousands of the rejected disappear behind the wire fences of camps.
I reworked the story at least five times and so thoroughly that the shortest version was 10 pages and the longest 120.
*
I also started to write a love story: about an older, somewhat starchy and prudish scholar and a young actress studying puppetry.
I wasn’t seeing Olga anymore, but what we experienced together stayed with me.
The story consumed me. When I took my family on vacation to a village in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands (we couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel or even rent a cottage somewhere in the countryside), all four of us lived in a cubbyhole with small windows and only one chair. When the children went out to play, I pulled out my papers, pencil, and suitcase, which I used as a desk, and continued writing.
The heroine had many of Olga’s traits. I could almost hear her voice talking about the topics that obsessed her: Italy, the heat, the often bizarre stories she told about herself, her desire to have a villa somewhere in Italy, making love with passionate boys, living life to the full in the present moment. But I was afraid to make it too personal, so I invented most of the situations, characters, and dialogue. Besides, inventing is always more fun, and made-up conversations and events always sound more realistic than a transcription of what actually happened.
This novel, which I gave the somewhat mawkish title A Summer Affair, was the first of my novels translated into foreign languages and was even filmed in Sweden.
*
The fact that our plays were being performed, and our books, and sometimes articles, were being published abroad, irritated our government. When they learned that everything was executed according to valid contracts, which could not be abrogated without our consent, they decided they would deprive us of our royalties (torture or crude physical coercion was no longer used).
At this time, banks exchanged foreign currency (possession of foreign currency was a crime) at a ridiculously low rate. Therefore, anyone who received foreign currency at the bank could request payment in so-called Tuzex vouchers. They were used in special Tuzex stores where the price of goods was about a fifth of that in normal shops that used crowns. Because Tuzex stores frequently offered otherwise unavailable imported goods (such as foreign automobiles, liquor, cigarettes, cosmetics, and clothing), it was possible to sell the vouchers on the black market for their actual value, one Tuzex crown for five Czechoslovak. The official exchange rate was around seven crowns to the dollar; thus one dollar had the value of thirty-five normal crowns.
At the beginning of 1972, the Ministry of Finance banned the only bank authorized to exchange hard currency for Tuzex crowns for foreign editions of works of an antistate or antisocialist character and for works of authors whose distribution in the ČSSR is forbidden.
The bank received (probably from the Ministry of Culture) a list of writers who were not allowed to receive their royalties in Tuzex crowns. We received only one-fifth of the amount we actually earned. But even this measure was not sufficient. Besides normal taxes, a special contribution for the Literary Fund was taken from all royalties. This was 2 percent. For banned works, the contribution was increased to 40 percent. When their attorneys pointed out that this directive was illegal and could be deemed overt persecution, the “normalizers” thought up something else. A ministry (it’s not important which ministry because the secretariat of the Communist Party created similar stunts) issued an injunction according to which all payees (there were thousands of them because 2 percent was also taken off every newspaper or specialized article) had their contribution increased to 40 percent. At the same time, this special fee was reduced to 2 percent for everyone except those on the “blacklist.”
The result was the same but less assailable because leniency, or relief, could be granted, but it didn’t have to be. In total, we were deprived of 90 percent of our earnings. Instead of accepting this state of affairs, we asked our publishers and agencies to stop sending us royalties or, if they did send any, we refused to accept them and asked that they be returned to the sender.
From then on, our publishers and agencies would come to see us and present our money in person, and if the officials refused them a visa, they could always find messengers. Because the state needed hard currency so badly that it allowed it to be exchanged anonymously, we could then use our hard currency like any other citizen. In the end, these exemplary models of persecution had a single result: The government was deprived of any way of keeping track of our royalties.
*
A former colleague at Květy informed me that it was a guaranteed truth (like most guaranteed truths, it was false) that if we didn’t get a job, we would be accused of parasitism and would lose our claim to retirement pay. Most of my colleagues who had been forbidden to publish landed jobs elsewhere. Saša Kliment was a doorman at a hotel; the former editor in chief of Literární noviny, Milan Jungmann, was washing windows; one of my university professors was helping build the metro; some of my friends got work in water resources. This last job was considered the most advantageous for philosophers and historians. They were usually housed in a trailer somewhere in the middle of a field, and they had only one duty: Every three or four hours, both day and night, they were to measure the copiousness of the stream. They were supposed to alternate in three shifts, but usually only two of them worked, sometimes one. So the others were free to focus on projects for which they were more qualified.
My wife and I still had enough money for subsistence. If accused of parasitism, I could, in the worst case, go sweep the streets, but in the dark recesses of my mind I recalled something from a lecture on Russian literature about Russian populists of the 1870s going out among the people. I dimly recollected that Maxim Gorky — whom I considered a good writer after I’d read some of his short stories — had recommended this to young authors. If I had to go to work, I would get to know a new environment and perhaps happen upon a good subject.