There were still more than a hundred banned authors, but I wanted the connecting link between the writers of this collection to be not their illicitness but rather the quality of their work. In addition, I soon discovered that many authors were afraid to publish abroad and didn’t want to end up in prison as enemies of the Socialist system. Many still (naively) believed that if they behaved inconspicuously, the rulers would show mercy and eventually allow them to publish again.
I received contributions from the excellent modern storytellers Jan Vladislav and Jan Werich as well as from the poet Jan Skácel. I succeeded in convincing Václav Havel to write something for the collection, and that is how Pižďuchové came into existence, the only one of his texts intended (at least to a certain degree) for children. In the fairly short time of five months, I managed to collect stories from thirteen authors.
I had all the manuscripts copied and assembled, placed them in an envelope, and, with a delay I thought excusable, sent them to Munich by certified mail. I knew mail going abroad was monitored, but I told myself they wouldn’t find anything objectionable in a collection of fairy tales; maybe they’d find fault with a couple of my sentences from the introduction, but they wouldn’t confiscate the entire package just for that.
Apparently they did, because after about three weeks I received a polite but slightly admonitory letter from the publishing house asking when I was sending the fairy tales. The publisher had to have them translated, and that would take time.
I replied that the package containing the texts had apparently gone astray, and so I put one of the copies into another envelope and sent it off. Then I went to the post office to reclaim my previous package.
After about another month, an editor I didn’t know called me and could not understand why she hadn’t received the manuscripts I had sent twice. Just in case, she repeated to me the address of the publishing house. The only problem was that it was located in Munich.
I didn’t know what to do. As far as I was aware, none of Jürgen’s messengers were planning a trip to Prague in the near future, and sending the package a third time by the Czech post seemed futile.
Fortunately, I ran into Jan Vladislav, one of the authors. When I told him about my difficulties with the manuscripts, he said it had been very naive of me to send the texts by mail. I was to get them to him as soon as possible, and he would see to their delivery. He had friends in the French embassy.
I brought him the manuscript the next day, and a few days later the fairy tales arrived at the Munich publishers.
I finally received an explanation from our post office. The second package had departed Czechoslovakia in good order, but it had apparently gotten lost in the Federal Republic of Germany. I therefore ought to turn to the German postal service. Regards. Signature illegible.
*
Jürgen advised me somewhat emphatically to write novels rather than short stories. The reason, as far as I understood, was strictly profit related. Novels sold better and, if the author was lucky, might be made into movies. Antonioni had made the famous Blow-Up out of Julio Cortazár’s story, but this was anomalous.
So I told him I would write a thousand-page novel. Of course, this statement was made in jest, but the truth was that I had long wondered if I had it in me to write a novel in which I described my fundamental experiences and expressed something of what I thought about the time I was living in.
Of everything I’d experienced, it was the ruthless murders I had witnessed for over four decades of my life that had affected me the most.
I still woke up in the middle of the night and vividly imagined the horror of the victims driven into the gas chambers or the anxiety of those sentenced to death during the absurd show trials.
After the war, it was with a feeling of satisfaction that I read about the trials of the Nazis who were sentenced to death. When Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel after a long trial (it had been the only death sentence pronounced and carried out in that country), I accepted it as the appropriate punishment for a man who had been in charge of the internment and subsequent extermination of millions of people. But then I started to doubt the motivation for such punishment.
The death penalty is an important subject for judicial institutions in every society. Several centuries earlier, the death sentence was one of the most frequent punishments carried out, even for negligible infractions or even deeds that had often not actually been committed. Confessions were exacted from the accused through torture. Those who arbitrated justice and the law often transformed a place of adjudication into a place where criminals in gowns sent innocent victims to hangmen. That’s how it was in the twentieth century, as well, where organized and legalized mass murder took place. How does even a slightly responsible judge reconcile himself to this in a country in which so many judicial murders have taken place and where the death penalty was used, or even required, for a number of offenses? I decided to make my somewhat autobiographical hero a judge.
At this time, my life was becoming more and more monotonous. I had been kicked out of all organizations and deprived of the possibility of working anywhere I might be able to employ my knowledge and skills. Furthermore, all decent films had been removed from the cinemas, there was no modern drama in the theaters, and the radio, if it was not broadcasting classical music, was impossible to listen to. My disposition required movement. Writing remained the only space in which I could move about freely. And so I started to write; I worked from morning till evening on my novel about a judge named Kindl.
A person can never be sure if what he has written is worth anything, but when constructing such a long piece of prose, he is even more unsure. I tried to banish my uncertainty with intensity. I kept writing even when I suspected that the following day, when I read over what I had committed to paper, I would almost certainly throw it out. Of course I consulted with my lawyer friends about many of the questions my hero grappled with, whether it was the law expert Pavel Rychetský; someone from his family, including his first wife; or Petr Pithart, who transferred his law erudition to the field of contemporary historical events.
*
I’m reading the criminal code from 1951, which Communist lawyers quickly cobbled together (based on the Soviet model). The legendary first chapter, according to which they executed dozens and dozens of innocent people, is chilling reading. Almost every paragraph, whether it deals with treason, sabotage, or espionage, allows for the death penalty, for instance, for putting the country at risk, and finally: “if there is any other especially aggravating circumstance.” How did the agents of State Security, and later the judges, construe these especially aggravating circumstances? Could it be, perhaps, class origin?
Leaving the republic without permission (when permission was for most citizens unattainable) incurred a punishment of up to five years, if, of course, the fugitive did not have on his person a piece of paper that could be construed as treasonous or espionage material. In any case, even without this paper, contingent conviction was precluded. Anyone who “belittled the reputation of the president of the republic or his deputy” faced three years’ imprisonment. As we know from Švejk, the Austro-Hungarian law codes had already come up with this one.
From my diary, April 1975
*
Of course there were days when I put off writing. One spring day, Vaculík talked me into going to visit some of his friends in Bratislava who shared our fate of being prohibited writers. The sense of solidarity would boost their spirits, claimed Ludvík. (There were only a few banned writers in Slovakia, certainly because the leader of the country was their countryman.) Ludvík had no idea that on the same day several Czech politicians, who had also been expelled, had set out to Bratislava to visit Alexander Dubček, a man who, although he had pusillanimously signed the Moscow Protocol, was still considered, even by the State Security, a symbol of the Prague Spring reform movement.