So that very day I got down to it and continued writing my contribution every evening for the rest of that week.
I wanted to talk in more general terms, not simply to report on what emerged from my daily study of the files.
In the twentieth century, unlike in the previous one, so many people were murdered behind the front lines that you'd think mankind must have suddenly gone berserk. But the innocent have always been murdered. According to the Bible story, the Israelites slew the inhabitants of Ai in the field and in the wilderness to which they had pursued them. 'For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed all who lived in Ai,' it says in the book of the same name.
That's how things were and still are. Unlike animals, people think and feel, so they are aware of their victims' anxiety when they kill them. They are aware of their own desire to live and preserve their stock, and they can guess that those they kill have the same desires. In order to kill without remorse or fellow feeling but instead with a sense of a job well done, it is necessary to regard the victim as one of the damned, a lesser being, or as a lethal and treacherous foe. By destroying him and his descendants, the killers are serving the rest of mankind and protecting the faith or the great goals they espouse.
Why was it in the twentieth century that theories emerged about the damned that had to be wiped out in their millions and why did they receive massive support?
An explanation can be found in moral decay, or rather the decline of religion. During the almost two millennia that Christianity exercised a spiritual influence there was much cruelty of course. At the time of its supreme power, the Church demanded total obedience and discipline and cruelly punished apostasy, but gradually it established limits. The trouble is that in the twentieth century Christianity responded to the questions people were asking with diffidence or perplexity, and that must inevitably have affected their faith. They either lost it or it assumed nightmarish forms that had little in common with the original belief in Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah. And the belief in a miracle that happened, or in a God who was concerned for the world, gradually dissipated.
But the majority of people needed to believe. They wanted saints to revere. They needed a God and rituals. The time was therefore ripe for latter-day, barbaric pagan religions which the great nonreligious movements started to revive. The Nazis and the Communists alike presented their leaders as gods, whose images must be present at every celebration, of which they invented untold numbers. Party congresses, secular holidays, anniversaries of their own victories, elections and even show trials with death
sentences were all transformed into ritual celebrations intended to fire the emotions of the faithful and stun and numb their reason.
These new faiths also demanded obedience and discipline, but they were devoid of mercy and did not establish any inviolable limits. They revived human sacrifice in proportions without precedent in human history.
Of course it would be possible to find economic and historical reasons for what happened. Consternation at the massacres of the First World War, anxiety due to the uncertainties associated with the industrial epoch, a longing for a better organization of society. Nevertheless, for people to become an enormous, unthinking and obedient mass ready to do anything their leaders ordered, it needed a boundless belief in something that seemed superhuman and redemptive. Its prophets knew that every new belief needs to define itself in terms of those who reject it, who are then declared damned. It was necessary to kill kulaks, Jews or counter-revolutionaries, shoot priests, behead kings, poison infants and execute more and more victims in order to validate the new religions.
It was only when I'd touched on the spiritual basis of terror that it seemed to me appropriate to give an account of what happened here and explain why so many members of the intellectual elite — poets, lawyers, journalists or academics — willingly supported the Communist terror. Finally in my contribution I would deal with what the seminar organizers no doubt particularly expected from me: the efforts to trace the ringleaders of the terror campaigns and bring them before our none-too-willing courts for judgement.
On Saturday I was packed and ready to leave for the bus when Kristýna called and I detected even more sadness in her voice than usual. So I said something that immediately flabbergasted me. I promised her I'd cancel my trip and come and meet her. What made me do it? Was it love for her or my subconscious fear that I wouldn't make the grade when confronted by all those experts?
6
I wake up. I'm lying in my own room on my own divan, but someone is breathing quietly at my side and someone else's hand is lying on my thigh. You're here with me, little boy. You said such lovely things to me as we were making love and when we were falling asleep.
It's a long time since anyone said 'my love' to me or called me their little girl, after all it's ages since I was a little girl; no one has touched me or stroked me until I fell asleep. I've been neglected.
The divan is too narrow and I'm afraid to move lest I wake him. I could get up and go and sleep in Jana's room but I don't want to leave him.
I wonder where my daughter is sleeping. I oughtn't to have let her go; I ought to keep an eye on her at night, at least. She promised to call me, but she didn't. Unless she called when I was wandering around Prague. I know she's beyond my control now. She needs a father. Maybe this young man next to me might help play that role, but I'm afraid to bother him with it, and also I can't be sure how my daughter would take it. Maybe she'd accept him as a pal or flirt with him, or maybe she'd refuse to have anything to do with him.
If I hadn't let Jana go, he wouldn't be lying alongside me now.
The yellowish light of the street lamp shines in the window. I raise myself slightly and study his face. It's peaceful and somehow childlike. It seems guileless to me, which is odd for someone in his line of activity. Maybe I'm projecting my own feelings, my own hopes, on to him. I have no son. Maybe I could have had one, or more than one, but I allowed them to be aborted. Maybe one of them would have looked like him.
I'll never have a son now — I'm too old. My lover could still have lots of sons or daughters, but not with me. He must realize that. I ought to ask him if he wants to have children, but what could he reply? If he said yes it will be tantamount to telling me
he'd have to find another woman. Maybe he doesn't hanker after children. My first and only husband didn't want a child. It was I who eventually persuaded him, no longer wanting to destroy the life that he had engendered in me.
There must have been a time when men longed to have heirs to whom they could pass on their land, their business or their estate — these days most of them don't have anything to pass on.
I'll ask my young man anyway.
I feel love for him and make believe that he loves me too. He lavishes more care on me than all the men I've ever known. He gave me an enormous rainbow shell that made a sound when he blew into it. A shell because I'm a Pisces. I happened to mention that I'd broken my sunglasses and he brought me a new pair the very next day. Admittedly they don't suit me, but I wear them anyway because they're from him. He brought me back a silk scarf from some official trip; it is sky blue and there is a skein of flying geese woven into each corner.
'Where are they flying to?' I asked him.
'To freedom.'