At the end, I stepped back from my impassioned tone and pessimism and concluded with a belief that our machine-age civilization would perish, but after a while
mankind will return to human space and time from a world of planetary dimensions. People will enjoy silence and hear birdsong. Of course their lives will be more difficult and precarious. The foolish dream of utopians who believed that man would be made happy by being freed from the need to work will be forgotten, as will refrigerators, air-conditioning, aircraft, nuclear reactors, printing presses, artificial lungs, automatic washing-machines, television sets, rockets, and bugging devices. This crazy century, when man, in a meaningless effort, raised himself so high that he managed to escape the planet, will increasingly blend with legends and fables from an earlier time. One day, future scholars or priests will declare it to have been a mirage, a fiction perpetrated by ancient poets, or one of the many illusions shared by vast numbers of people. Perhaps scholarly debates on the subject will take place, but it will not affect most people because it will not touch their lives, their potentials, their goals, or their happiness.
And what about their happiness? I see no reason why they should be any less happy than we who have lived in this singular and crazy century.
*
State Security had apparently agreed with the party bigwigs that it was necessary to expel from the country everyone who was disturbing the image of a contented society. During his interrogation the rock singer and artist Vlastimil Třesňák was burned with a cigarette and became so frightened that he asked for permission to emigrate. Michal and I visited him the day before his departure. He was taking all his things in a single suitcase he had found in a scrap yard — three meters of canvas, nine half-squeezed tubes of oil paints, a camera, a guitar, and a typewriter. No clothes, no valuables, just an extra shirt and three pairs of new socks.
One of my friends, the talented author Karol Sidon, did not consider political activity an important part of his life. Immediately after the occupation, Karol wasn’t even forbidden to publish. At the time, he wrote mainly dramas; one about coal miners was broadcast by Czech Television. Then the small Rubín Theater took up his new play, The Latrines. At the time, every play had to have official approval. A whole group of party members came to the preview, led by the head of the ideological department himself. Karol later told us how he had been overcome with the sense that he had suddenly found himself in the times of Nazi occupation and that the gestapo had come to the theater. In a sudden panic, he couldn’t wait for the end of the performance and, although it was pouring outside, fled from the theater without even picking up his coat from the cloakroom.
This play and his disdain of the authorities exiled him among the banned authors. He secured a job, however, at a tobacconist’s at a lucrative spot on Jindřišská Street.
One Saturday, a defamatory article about Ludvík was published in the illustrated magazine Ahoj along with intimate photographs the State Security had confiscated. Karol carried out what I would call a unique and, at the same time, touching act of nonviolent protest: From each issue of the magazine in his shop, he cut out the article with the disgraceful photographs.
He was interrogated, but it was such an odd act of resistance that they couldn’t find anything in the law to charge him with, so they just arranged for him to be fired from his job, and he couldn’t find another one. They even made it impossible for him to work at water resources near Mníšek or as a grave digger. Finally they forced him to emigrate.
*
Czech writers to L. Brezhnev
The chairman of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union sent a congratulatory letter to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Chairman of the Highest Soviet of the USSR, L. Brezhnev, for receiving the Lenin Prize for Literature. The letter states: It was with great joy that we learned you had been awarded the Lenin Prize for your trilogy
The Small Land, Rebirth,
and
Virgin Lands
We hold your books in high esteem. They are an outstanding contribution to the history of the present time as well as a shining example of a party approach to the calling of literature. In Czechoslovakia, your titles have met with extraordinary interest not only among writers, but throughout our society, as can be seen by the print run of book and magazine editions of your books — around two million copies. Your books have indeed become the subject of tens of thousands of conferences, seminars, and discussions, which are still continuing and in which millions of our citizens are participating.
Czechoslovak News Agency
*
In our day and age book-writing has become so poor, and people write about matters [to] which they have never given any real thought, let alone experienced. I therefore have decided to read only the writings of men who have been executed or have risked their lives in some way.
Søren Kierkegaard, Diary, 1844
*
I don’t remember exactly when I started working as a mailman.
Because my plays and books were being published and performed abroad, I was often invited to meet various diplomats. When I got to know them a little, I sometimes asked them to carry out a manuscript, whether it belonged to me or one of my colleagues. Usually they were happy to oblige, even though they were breaking the rules and risking their careers. I will not name names, but we were assisted by Swedish, American, and Canadian diplomats. The English cultural attaché was prepared to bring in any sort of literature but opposed taking anything out. He was most likely afraid that I’d foist some espionage material on him. There is one man whose name I must mention, however. At the beginning of the 1980s, I met a councilor in the West German embassy named Wolfgang Scheur. He was a remarkable person with willingness to assist those who, in his opinion, needed help. Thanks to strangers, he himself had managed to escape Hitler to Palestine, where he spent more than a year in a refugee camp. Later he ended up fighting against Hitler as a volunteer.
He offered to take something out or bring something back in if we desired.
In this way, I soon found myself behind an invisible counter of an invisible post office, and Wolfgang became a special courier who at least twice a month carried out letters and primarily manuscripts whose number was increasing with all the new samizdat series. On the way back, he would transport bags of Czech books and magazines that had been published abroad.
Wolfgang had a rather good idea of what conspiracy involved. He was constantly on the lookout for cars tailing him, and when he was certain he wasn’t being followed (as far as one can be certain in this time of surveillance), he would drive to our home, where the gate and doors were always unlocked, run upstairs with two or three full bags, take from me a bag with outgoing mail, and be gone in less than a minute. On occasion, when he was not so certain, he would call to pass on regards from his wife or something along those lines. This meant that the bags were waiting at his place on Hradešínská Street.
My amateur delivery service was fraught not only with dangers but also with difficulties. If I didn’t find someone at home, I couldn’t leave the package in the mailbox or with the neighbors. I also couldn’t call ahead of time. In many cases, the addressee’s telephone had been disconnected, and even if it worked, it would not be wise to announce my arrival beforehand.