It seemed that the government did not want me to succumb to indolence. The day after my return from Bratislava, our doorbell buzzed. When I opened the door, I saw an entire pack of fellows whose profession was obvious even before they presented their warrant to search the house.
The piece of paper headed RESOLUTION explained the reasons for the search:
Upon the resolution of investigators on 22 April 1975—document number 11/120-1975—according to article 160, paragraph 1 of the criminal code, the initiation of prosecution for the punishable offense of national subversion, which was to be committed in a manner specified below. After initiating prosecution, a suspicion arose that the apartment of the aforementioned individual contained written documents pertaining to the investigation of the punishable offense, which will be demonstrated.
It is necessary to determine how this occurred.
The document bore the stamp of the general prosecutor. The method by which I was supposed to have committed the punishable offense of subverting the republic was not provided. This was not surprising. I was, however, somewhat surprised that these henchmen were accompanied by a “disinterested” witness (the criminal code required that an independent witness be present). He had the fine Jewish name of Kauder (obviously they had thought up this name especially for me, since that was the name of my ancestors), and for all his disinterestedness, his features looked more coplike than any of theirs. I was still drowsy from sleep and did not protest and allowed them to come in. Helena was more intransigent and yelled at them that no one was allowed to trample around in his shoes. Amazingly, the entire commando squad took off their shoes and thereby were immediately deprived of some of their superiority. This reminded me that the true horrors of the Stalinist years were over.
This was the second house search I had experienced. I had simply gotten mixed up in the first one and was worried that the snoops would discover my notebook from my military preparation class. This time I was worried they would find and confiscate the novel I had begun.
They discovered it, but fortunately I was writing in ink instead of typing it — typed documents attracted their attention more than handwritten ones. The chief of the trespassers wanted to know if the manuscript was mine, and when I said yes, he asked what I was writing about. Of course, I should have said it was none of his business, but I chose a more conciliatory answer and replied that I was writing something of my experiences from the war. This seemed to diminish his suspicions.
Just as with the house search preceding my father’s arrest, I had the feeling that they had no idea what they were looking for. (It obviously had something to do with our visit to Bratislava; perhaps they assumed we had prepared some documents for Dubček, some sort of new “Two Thousand Words,” and they were trying to track down copies.)
Vaculík once told me that after a house search, it was as if a dark force had swept through the apartment, and he felt as though he should call a priest to have it consecrated. A house search, especially if a person knows he’s not hiding any weapons, drugs, or other sort of contraband (even though the greatest contraband in a totalitarian society is any kind of uncensored declaration, whether written, spoken, sung, or painted), arouses more disgust than fear — as if a revolting insect had been crawling all over everything, leaving behind a sticky phlegm or spiderwebs.
Hour after hour they searched impotently through drawers, wardrobes, and especially my bookcase, which contained around five thousand volumes in Czech, Slovak, Polish, German, English, and Russian (they didn’t notice the volume of Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin). Most of it was fiction, but there were also essays as well as works of history and philosophy. What could they find that was subversive? It was beyond their powers to recognize it, and they would need dozens of boxes to confiscate all of it. They took a dislike to an English translation of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. I also had a copy of the novel in Russian, but they left that alone (obviously they didn’t know Cyrillic). They commandeered everything if they thought it was samizdat, or if the title looked suspicious, and piled it all on the daybed.
They also noticed a framed original of one of Had’ák’s caricatures, which had been published in Literární listy. It was a replica of a Soviet poster of a Red Army soldier pointing at the viewer. Had’ák had replaced the Russian text, Have you signed up as a volunteer? with the inscription, Have you also signed the Two Thousand Words? The large and threatening You was spelled in both Cyrillic and Latin.
Was I aware I could be tried for sedition?
I objected that I could hang on my walls at home anything I wanted, couldn’t I? It was inciting neither my wife nor myself to sedition.
The chief informed me that my penchant for such impertinent remarks would soon pass and tossed the picture onto the pile of confiscated artifacts.
Whenever my wife or I went into another room, one of the rogues followed us, but the children could move about at will. Michal felt sorry for the caricature and, without any of the search team noticing, grabbed the picture and slid it under the daybed. Michal truly did evince extraordinary enterprise, for he himself was actually in possession of the greatest piece of “contraband.” He had been preparing copies of a large portrait of Dubček for his friends. He managed to place the pictures in a large envelope of photographic paper. When one of the snoops grabbed it, Michal stopped him and warned that the envelope contained still unused and sensitive material that would be destroyed if opened. Surprisingly, the fellow put the envelope back in its place. Michal also managed to disconnect the telephone, so we looked on with not a little schadenfreude when the boss of the search unit — most likely in the expectation of further instructions — vexedly attempted to compel the silenced instrument to function.
Finally they went down to the basement, where the lowliest of them poked around with a shovel in the pile of coke to make sure it wasn’t concealing a printing press or a machine gun.
When the head miscreant ended the search, he ordered a typewriter to be brought in, and one of his subordinates started typing up the individual items they were confiscating.
The chief suddenly noticed that the picture was missing. He started yelling at me and demanding to know what I’d done with it. As he perfectly well knew, I pointed out, he hadn’t let me once out of his sight.
He apparently considered berating children inappropriate and was too lazy to look through the entire apartment again for the picture.
The list, which was also signed by the disinterested witness Kauder, contained fifty-six items. Among the documents that were supposed to prove subversion of the republic were manuscripts of the poetry collections of Karel Šiktanc and Oldřich Mikulášek, books by Pavel Kohout, the text of a fairy tale by Jan Trefulka, bound (but incomplete, owing to the events of 1968 and 1969) issues of Literární listy and Listy, as well as 28 sheets of typed letters from the writer Václav Havel addressed to Gen. Sec. Dr. Husák; three sheets of Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac then begat Jacob, Jacob begat Judah and his brothers. .