He was an older officer and looked like someone from the countryside (apparently, they’d activated police from all precincts of Prague). He resorted to an explanation I would never forget: “You could have been drinking behind the wheel.”
I blew into the device once again. The officer ripped the Breathalyzer from my hands and said in a direful tone: “Positive.”
I asked if I could see the device, and he said that was not permitted. He seemed both truculent and somewhat embarrassed. Obviously, he was an ordinary traffic cop, and such mendacity was not part of his job description.
They confiscated both my driver’s license and my car keys. They didn’t think about Helena’s set of keys, and she drove me immediately to the sobering station (this time without a police escort) for a blood test. When we explained to the surprised doctor on duty why we wanted the test, he gladly took my blood and promised to send the results as soon as possible.
For the next two weeks I searched for my driver’s license, which was apparently roving around various police stations. Finally, I made it all the way to the head of a regiment of the riot squad. He admitted me, even though it was after business hours. He was in his shirtsleeves with his police trousers held up by wide suspenders, and told me fairly genially that he’d had my driver’s license but he’d sent it to the local station on Peace Square.
The person in charge there actually pulled out my driver’s license and several sheets of supporting documents. He looked them over for a moment and then informed me, “You were subjected to a breath alcohol test. No alcohol was detected in your blood. Unfortunately, your driver’s license was in such a state that it had to be confiscated.”
Although my driver’s license was almost new, their retreat from the ridiculous charge that I was driving drunk seemed to me a small victory.
*
Even in the Soviet Union, the government was treating those who criticized the regime more leniently. Andrei Sakharov was neither executed nor run over by an automobile. He was merely exiled to Gorky. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that “mercenary in the pay of imperialists,” whom Stalin would have had destroyed along with his family and friends, was now forcibly dragged into an airplane and sent to West Germany.
The rulers in Moscow advised the collaborationist government in Prague to likewise banish unpleasant critics.
I can imagine the embarrassment this advice must have aroused. The ruling rabble wanted to punish, discredit, and humiliate their opponents and cast them into poverty. But exile them to lands of abundance and unlimited opportunities? Send them somewhere they would be welcomed as heroes? Where the rulers themselves would like to live if they hadn’t gotten mixed up with the current regime?
But, as usual, they were obedient. During an interrogation, an offer would be proposed, which usually went like this: If you feel so oppressed here, you can move to that free world of yours. Submit a request and it will be approved. When Václav Havel was in prison in the summer of 1979, two seemingly pleasant envoys paid him a visit and suggested it would be possible for him to move to New York. All he had to do was submit a request. He refused and remained in prison for an additional three years.
The regime tried to force others to emigrate. One of its most outspoken opponents was Pavel Kohout. Once, to the surprise of us all, he was allowed to leave in order to direct one of his plays. He left knowing full well that they didn’t have to let him back into the country. Therefore, he refused to give any politically colored interviews while abroad — this was at least one way to keep him quiet. When they let him out a second time with his wife, he was detained on his return trip at the Austrian border and informed that his citizenship had been revoked. He spent the rest of his life in Austria.
*
Writers and artists in general have a proclivity to form personal and professional associations on the basis of generational affinities, personal friendships, or artistic tendencies. Often they consider everyone who does not share their opinions as mistaken, blind, or at least ignorant. There are few environments in which you will find more competitive emulation than an artistic one. In its vindictiveness, contemptuous disdain for values and national culture, and subservience to the occupying power, the collaborationist regime succeeded in doing something that no democratic society ever could: It unified everyone who had been harmed or silenced, everyone who had refused to acquiesce to its demands without regard to artistic or political convictions.
None of my friends belonged to the classic underground (even though Václav Havel knew those authors well), but when the current government was preparing to sentence the underground musical group the Plastic People of the Universe to prison, most of us signed the petition against the trial.
When my friends, under the leadership of “the guard of the Loreta treasure,” Jiří Brabec, were preparing their Dictionary of Czech Writers, perhaps the most remarkable book in our typewritten Padlock series, they included, without differentiation, all authors whose works between 1948 and 1979 had been banned, at least for a time. In all there were several hundred, many more than those who had been allowed to publish the entire time; it was a unique collection of authors who at some time in their lives had managed to resist the felonious power.
At the end of the ’70s, society was much more heterogeneous than it seemed at first sight. Not everyone preferred open resistance, but at the same time many young people were looking for a way to demonstrate their dislike of the prevailing conditions of society. The current leaders were always announcing that they cared about the youth. They even tried to make it clear they were willing to put up with some things — long hair, jazz, and even songs that demonstratively ignored official ideology.
Whereas the censors had destroyed the repertories of the large theaters, a few small stages were allowed to continue. Contemporary life — albeit only via a few allusions — managed to make its way into the Semafor Theater, which had been established at the end of the 1950s. The Jára Cimrman Theater also survived from the end of the 1960s. It was primarily this second theater that I took a liking to. It defiantly ignored present-day politics and the demands the regime made of art. It brought into existence its own special world set somewhere in the idyllic time of the early twentieth century and created wonderful unique parodies, sometimes just for the laughter itself, at other times in order to grasp the absurdity of contemporary life.
The young evangelical minister Svát’a Karásek wrote protest songs, usually based on the melodies of famous Negro spirituals.
Man cannot rule
he gets drunk on his own power
the truth is firmly in his hands
instead of above himself.
Ruler, what are you saying to the crowds
what if you fell silent for once
what if you knelt down for once
with your head in your hands.
Our family visited him at Houska Castle, where he worked as a caretaker (he was not allowed to preach), and he sang his entire repertoire for Michal into our primitive tape recorder. Michal made copies of the songs for his friends.
There was also an entire group of protest singers who joined together under the name of Šafrán. I used to invite the singers over to my house along with my friends.
Several times I drove Jaroslav Hutka, with whom I had become close, to various places in Bohemia where he was performing. It was an extraordinarily powerful experience when the entire auditorium, filled with young spectators, enthusiastically greeted their singer. In 1979, Václav Havel was arrested again. Hutka made use of the similarity of names and composed a song about Havlíček, whom the Bach regime had not imprisoned but rather exiled to Brixen. There was no doubt as to the real meaning of his lyrics.