Of course there were 122 sheets of foreign correspondence in green folders that seemed to them auspiciously dubious and 1 letter of two pages, typewritten from 16 March in English, addressed Dear Isaac, in a plastic folder with the business card of Rabbi Isaac Newmann, Barnet Synagogue (to the disappointment of the investigators, who probably had it translated, the letter contained nothing except news of how the children were doing in school and what we’d been reading lately).
Helena insisted on verifying once again that everything was written down, which, after a moment of hesitation, the chief allowed, but he required Helena to sign that she herself had requested the verification and that everything was in order.
Then the members of the search team donned their shoes and as they were carrying the confiscated items to the car called out threateningly, See you later.
*
Although the search team had departed and there was nothing among the things they had confiscated that was illegal even according to our oppressive laws, in the evening when we went to bed, the arrogant faces of the police kept flitting before my eyes. What was their intrusion supposed to mean or prefigure? Were they trying to frighten me? Or had they finally found something for which I could be punished? The next day I was laid out once again with the spasms that had afflicted me before my recent gallbladder operation.
So I went, as I usually did when an attack of colic set in, to see Dr. Šetka at the hospital on Charles Square. He prescribed a strict diet.
Because the experience of the house search was still fresh in my mind, I complained about it to him. I added that they could lock me up; this was just a prelude.
Besides being an excellent specialist, the doctor was sympathetic to my plight. He said the colic attack was obviously due to nerves and offered me asylum in the hospital for a few days. If I were in the hospital, he assumed, they wouldn’t come to arrest me. And then. . then we would see.
And so I became a patient. The doctor prescribed a gallbladder diet and said he would conduct a couple of unpleasant examinations of my pancreas and stomach.
Over the next few days, my memory of the shadowy figures faded, my pains went away, and I felt absolutely fine. My asylum, however, continued. The doctor was perfectly willing not to rush the examinations.
The facilities of the general hospital were in a worse state of neglect than those of the hospital in Krč, where I’d been employed as an orderly. The building was from the eighteenth century, and it was swarming with beetles and cockroaches that crawled over the floors and walls and especially in the drawers of the night tables where patients stored their food. The rooms had high ceilings and were so spacious that plenty of beds were squeezed into them — a patient would never be wanting for company.
To my left lay a well-built old man who said he had been member of a Czech unit of the Red Army. I didn’t know what was wrong with him; he probably was just old and doddery and had no one to care for him. The doctor prescribed him no medication or examinations, just a healthful diet. The Czech Red Army soldier told me about the battles — or, rather, skirmishes — he had participated in; he recalled hearing Trotsky speak (and all sorts of situations where Czechs were present). The president had even awarded him a medal for his services. It was in the drawer of his bedside table if I wanted to have a look.
When I opened the drawer, it was not the pointless piece of beribboned metal that intrigued me but the mass of hard-boiled eggs the drawer contained. The hands of this warrior, who had been present during Lenin’s reign of terror and had been weakened by age and life, shook so badly that he was unable to peel the egg he received each day for breakfast. Apparently, he’d once asked a nurse to peel an egg for him, and she retorted that if she had to peel everyone’s eggs or butter everyone’s bread, she’d never be done with her work by evening. From that time on, I peeled his eggs and buttered his bread for him.
I spent three weeks in the hospital. The kind doctor informed me that all the tests had come back negative. My colic was definitely due to nerves — not surprisingly given my recent stressful conditions. Nevertheless, he suggested I eliminate fatty and fried foods from my diet and then added almost in a whisper that none of “them” had been asking about me, so they would probably leave me be. If there was any immediate danger, however, I should not hesitate to come back. More tests could always be arranged. He looked again into my file and noted, “You also suffer from hay fever? Maybe you could apply for partial disability. That’s always a good thing,” he added. “They seem to behave more decently toward the infirm.”
I thought it improbable I could be considered an invalid, but if I did become one, my employment worries would be assuaged. I would have a legal income and could not be accused of parasitism. I started to hunt down doctors’ confirmations attesting to my condition. The allergists were very charitable and slightly exaggerated my difficulties when they wrote that during the hay fever season — which in my case lasted from March to September — I was unable to work for longer than four hours a day.
Because I’d been in a concentration camp during the war, I came under a special doctors’ commission, which had apparently been given orders to be kind to survivors.
I concluded that the searchers had only wanted to frighten me or perhaps they’d learned that I really had nothing to do with the people who went to visit Dubček.
I now spent most of the time working on my novel.
*
At the beginning of January 1975, a repulsive and intellectually sterile literary tabloid, which in the spirit of the Communist newspeak called itself Tvorba, printed a conversation with the Prince of Czech Letters. To the horror of his readers, he expressed support for Communist policies. Hrabal announced:
I do not want anyone to brandish my name about who does not wish our country or our people well, people I live among and am fond of. . I am not a political person; it takes me a while to become acquainted with everything, but there is one thing I have come to understand welclass="underline" the XIV Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was a challenge and a summons to all writers of this land to enrich the lives of our people. . As for me, I do not wish to stand aside but rather to contribute to creating, in my own way, relationships among people the way they should be among Socialist people. I think that it is important to today’s Writers’ Union that all honorable Czech writers understand that the most important thing is what our readers say about our work and not what some foreign broadcast reports.
He added that he could not conceive of the present, or even the future, without socialism. Then he spoke with incomprehensible enthusiasm about some kind of Slavic standard-bearer and then about soccer.
To endorse policies that suppressed every attempt at free creation was depressing as well as indecent. But I told myself that if by this embarrassing and blatant act of sycophancy, Hrabal was redeemed and allowed to publish — and this was the only conceivable reason for him to have done something like this — the newspaper article would be forgotten while his work would persist. Not everyone, however, was willing to accept such a justification for Hrabal’s actions. A group of admirers of the underground, under the direction of Ivan Martin Jirous, known as Madman among his friends, burned several of Hrabal’s books on Kampa Island. (This was an ostentatiously stupid act. The public burning of books, even fiction, is an expression of villainy worthy only of Nazis, Communists, Muslim fanatics, and other such bearers of barbarism.)
Hrabal explained to his friends that they’d come to him from Tvorba themselves with the text already prepared. He tried to keep them at bay, but they harangued him and said that readers were awaiting his works, and they only wanted him to espouse his support for socialism. This couldn’t go against his own views, could it? He said he’d argued over every sentence, but they finally got the better of him and stuck in that bit about the Communist Party congress and their damn union.