*
Helena saw to it that the entire family (our children, her parents and sister, and my mother) got together now and then. We celebrated birthdays and of course Christmas. Even though our children were grown up, we still decorated the Christmas tree.
After a time, you forget the gifts you have received unless they are truly exceptional, but one present, although it was only promised, was among the most unforgettable. Michal and Jana informed us that their gift would be ready at the beginning of the summer.
Her name was Manka, and during this Christmas we foretold, or at least promised, she would be born in a better world, a free society — but this kept vanishing into the distance.
Soon after the holidays, I stopped by Michal and Jana’s upstairs apartment and was surprised to see bundles of pages of Lidové noviny. They had been tasked with compiling individual issues, something they’d been doing for several months, but they hadn’t told me because they didn’t want me to worry.
I said it wasn’t a matter of my worrying, but this building was probably not the most appropriate place for such activity.
“On the contrary,” explained my son. “This is the perfect place because the secret police think just the way you do.” Besides, they were trying to publish the journal legally. As far as the first point was concerned, Michal was right — the secret police had never entered his apartment.
January 16, 1989, was the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jan Palach. A humanities student at Charles University, Palach had set himself on fire in front of the National Museum in 1969. He’d done it to protest the Soviet invasion, or, more precisely, as he said later when they took him to the hospital mortally wounded, to protest everything that was happening here at that time.
I had wanted to buy some flowers, but none of the flower shops had even a sprig of anything left. Slowly and dutifully for almost an entire afternoon, Helena and I had moved forward in the column on Old Town Square in the direction of the Karolinum. The air in the hall where the coffin stood had been redolent with the aroma of flowers, and everything was silent, just the sound of soft footsteps and intermittent sobs.
For several years, the anniversary had been celebrated with a quiet gathering at the statue of Saint Wenceslaus. The police usually dispersed the people; this time, however, it was the twentieth anniversary, which especially unsettled the reigning power. The police were waiting with truncheons and water cannons for those who wanted to pay tribute to Palach.
During the demonstration, Václav Havel was arrested again, but something had changed. Many prominent people, who had previously put up with police despotism, decided to lodge a protest against the arrest.
*
After the demonstration, when we had been driven from Wenceslaus Square with water cannons, I and a few others dropped into a pub on Vodičkova Street. The waiter briskly sat us down at a table and then said to me (because I was obviously the oldest): “This is the fourth day in a row we’ve had such an unexpected rush. I say: A wet Czech is a good Czech. There’s nothing seditious about that.” After a while, he came over again: “Yesterday a woman showed up at the demonstration and told the police she wasn’t there to protest, she was just going to the cinema. Then she showed them her ticket. They seized it and said, ‘Sure you were.’” I don’t know if I inspired his trust or if he was simply trying to get something out of me, but he came over a moment later and said, “You know, I apprenticed across the street at the Hotel Šroubek.” He pointed in the direction of the square. “Whoever studied the best was sent abroad for a year. I was in London and learned English for a year, not like those who stuff a couple of words into their heads. Foreigners walk in, order some beef, and they bring out a beer. And there were worse things. Those idiotic riot police sprayed water in here until all the chairs were soaked. Once we had a Dutch woman come in. She went to the toilet, flushed, and the entire toilet collapsed on her. A week earlier, we’d had the place painted, and the painters had scraped the walls. Now the Dutch woman was covered with plaster. So we wrapped her in a tablecloth and called a taxi. She showed up a half hour later wanting supper. Of course we had to give it to her gratis. And they want us to be self-supporting? How can anyone prosper under such conditions?”
From my diary, January 1989
*
My agent Bromberg was keeping busy. The last issue of Svědectví in 1988 arrived a little late, and there I saw that my Love and Garbage had been published in England and Holland. I also saw my first review:
In his latest novel, Ivan Klíma has once again demonstrated that he is heir to masters of Czech prose such as Karel Čapek and Egon Hostovský. He is able to endow a simple sentence with the poetic charge of artistic conviction, amazing and enrapturing the reader. He induces that magnificent, blissful feeling that we experience whenever we come across a genuine artistic work. In reading Klíma’s novel, the conviction grows in the reader, from page to page, that one has encountered a Czech author on a world-class level. And this conviction deservedly arouses pride.
I was still not permitted to publish a single line at home.
*
Michal brought me an instruction manual for operating WordPerfect and told me this was a new era of computers, and whoever didn’t know how to use them was finished as an intellectual.
I looked at the instructions and saw an image of a keyboard with many incomprehensible designations such as F1 to F12 along with mysterious abbreviations such as Ins, Del, Home, Alt, and Ctrl. From time to time, Michal would quiz me on cutting and pasting or how to save a new text, and he was usually not satisfied with my answers. He nearly exploded when I called the Ctrl key the central key. (It didn’t matter whether the key was called central, control, or casserole; what was important was its function, which seemed incomprehensible.) All the same, a few months later, he brought me a brand-new and, most important, portable computer as a gift and once again quizzed me on its operations.
Over the next few days, I became addicted to this new device. In the morning, I couldn’t sleep and was at the miraculous keyboard at six o’clock. Not only could I write a new text, but I could even print the whole thing out on the attached printer, and the lines were perfectly aligned as if they had come from a real printing press. Until then I had to rewrite each page several times, cut the pages up, paste them together, type a clean copy, and then correct it again. Now my work flowed astonishingly quickly. During the next few weeks, I completed My Golden Trades and printed out twenty copies to share with my friends. But this amazing device could not alter my situation — I could print more copies, which looked nicer, but they were still only typewritten facsimiles.
*
From the very start of 1989, we met more often than in previous years. At the beginning of April, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian poet known for his rebellious verses, came to Prague. His translator, Václav Daněk, convinced him to skip lunch with the head of the official Writers’ Union and visit us instead. Daněk assured him I would definitely invite more interesting guests. I did indeed invite most of my friends, among them our two celebrated travel writers, Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund. These two had traveled through the Soviet Union and composed their devastating findings and sent them to the Communist Party.