Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (13 page)

The “uh-huh” and other affirmations came from a well-known professor of literature whom the writer had met two years earlier. They had talked for four hours as they drank a bottle of vodka. The recording came from this particular conversation.

They had never been to Paris together. They had never been on a car journey together. The Mercedes didn’t belong to either the professor or the writer. Procházka didn’t have a car or a driver’s license. Even though the noise of an engine had been added over their voices, an echo could be heard, which doesn’t happen when you’re in a car. It’s easy to tell they were talking somewhere else, in a place with tiling on the walls, for example.

And, in actual fact, the source of the echo was the professor’s tiled kitchen.

“Why exactly are we showing this?” asked the voice-over. “To give you the chance to form your own opinion about the democratic spirit in which those whom you were so eager to believe talk to each other.”

When some “pissed-off miners from Ostrava” called his house, Procházka spent a long time explaining to them that those were his words, but not his opinions. (We know this because there are instructions in the Security Service archives, declassified in March 2001, setting out who was to call Procházka and what they were to say. We know how these tasks went.)

His wife unplugged the phone.

“How pale you are,” she said to the Person Under Surveillance. The PUS made no reply.

They couldn’t sleep.

Suddenly, at four in the morning, they heard the crash of breaking glass.

They ran into the sitting room.

A large mirror had fallen from the wall and shattered against the floor.

Only the hook was still there, high up on the wall.

The writer stared at the hook, then at his wife, and asked what it could mean. She didn’t reply.

Their daughter Lenka says the mirror couldn’t withstand the tension in the apartment, where six people were lying awake, suffering.

For a long time, he refused to believe a recording could be manipulated to quite that extent. “He was a screenwriter, his movies had won prizes. I realize he didn’t edit them, but he must have known what could be done with a tape,” I wonder out loud.

“No, he couldn’t have understood that. He really was just a naive boy from the countryside,” says his wife, Mahulena.

He stopped leaving the house.

The nation believed the television.

Kundera wrote that plenty of people who bitch about their own friends at the first opportunity were more shocked by their beloved Procházka than by the methods of the secret police.

For two weeks, he paced up and down the balcony.

If he did any whispering to himself out there, he could be heard—unbeknown to him—by nine microphones.

Fourteen days after the program was broadcast, he fell ill with a temperature of 42 degrees C [107° F].

He sat and wrote. He typed out hundreds of letters of explanation. To the editors of newspapers, to the radio and television stations. None of them was ever published. So he sent explanations to his barber and to the manager of his favorite Chinese restaurant.

At college, nobody would speak to Lenka—she was the daughter of the man who had betrayed the Spring. So she brought in twenty copies of her father’s letter, and tried to get her fellow students to read his explanations. Her younger sister Iva took copies to high school too.

But their classmates said: “Don’t give us that letter.”

“Don’t destroy people.”

“Why would you even touch those pieces of paper?”

TV director and documentary filmmaker Jordi Niubó listened carefully to the soundtrack of
Report from on the Seine
through headphones (the audibility is much better than without), and today, thirty years on, he is convinced Procházka’s words haven’t been transposed. “He really did say Dubček was naive, etcetera. But he was, wasn’t he? Today anyone will agree that he was. But at the time it sounded like real sacrilege in Czechoslovakia.”

Years later, Dubček himself frankly admitted to having been misled by his own imagination: “The problem for me was that I didn’t have a crystal ball to help me see the invasion coming.”

At 11 p.m. on August 20, 1968, the Russians attacked Prague from the air. The airplanes dropped tanks and guns
at Prague airport. At dawn, before the Soviets seized Dubček and five other people in charge of the country, seven Soviet paratroopers entered his office. “Immediately,” he recalls, “they took up position by the windows and internal doors. It looked like an armed robbery. I automatically reached for the phone, but one of the soldiers pointed his machine gun at me, grabbed the phone, and ripped the cable from the wall.”

They sat Dubček and the others at a large table. Next to him sat his friend, the chairman of parliament Josef Smrkovský (the man whose urn would be discovered on the express train to Vienna five years later). “Indeed,” writes Dubček, “we were pretty well protected as we sat around the table—each of us had a machine-gun barrel aimed at the back of his head.” As they were leaving, he noticed a man called Soják, the head of his chancellery. “I whispered to him to keep an eye on my briefcase, in which there were some official documents: I didn’t want them to fall into the hands of the Russians. At that point I didn’t know Soják was one of the Soviet lackeys.”

Abducted and imprisoned by the Russians (“At the Kremlin I was not allowed to wash off the dust and dirt of the last three days”), he knew his country had been invaded by a gigantic military machine, and that there was no force on earth capable of driving it out. Nevertheless, as he recalls, it was only when he was sitting in front of Brezhnev, with no doubt left in his mind that he had to sign the—forcibly imposed—act of capitulation, that he realized the most important thing: “that in this madhouse nothing made sense—none of the ideals to which I was attached, and which I had thought both sides shared.”

Wasn’t he naive?

Right up to that moment, he had believed those people had ideals!

By the time the Procházka family were sitting in front of the TV set looking forward to the special program, Alexander Dubček was no longer First Secretary of the Communist Party, but ambassador to Turkey. (Three months later, he was an employee of the State Forestry Service in Slovakia.) The First Secretary was now Gustav Husák.

The professor responsible for the “uh-huhs” and other affirmative noises in
Report from on the Seine
was historian of literature Václav Černý. He was twenty-six years old when, in 1931, he became an associate professor at the University of Geneva. He discovered some unknown plays by Pedro Calderón, and was quickly acclaimed as one of the most outstanding representatives of Czech culture in the twentieth century. An inveterate opponent of communism, he was the target of propaganda campaigns from the Stalinist era until his death in 1987. If he took an interest in the Middle Ages, he was attacked for being partial to an age of ignorance; if he turned to the Baroque, he was accused of doing it out of admiration for the Jesuits; and if he wrote about Romanticism, he was charged with being an individualist, which disqualifies a citizen from being a true socialist. Whereas he was only interested in Iberian studies out of reverence for General Franco. After the Prague Spring, he was forced to retire, and his work was only issued by émigré publishers.

The makers of the provocative television show had deliberately not revealed too many of his words. His other recorded remarks were needed for a series of radio programs, entitled
On Professor Černý and Others
. The others, bugged at Černý’s house, were Procházka, Havel and Kohout.

“The wheels have begun to turn,” ran the title of the first program.

They described how the tapes of the conversations had reached the media: “History has many remarkable stories about how things that should have been kept hidden forever suddenly came to light.”

And they went on: “In this instance, some packages just as suddenly appeared on the desks of the managers of the mass media. The sender was anonymous, but the postmark implied that they came from the city on the Seine. However, despite that country’s reputation, the packages didn’t contain bottles of cognac, but tape recordings. On them, we heard some voices familiar to us from the Prague Spring.”

On the tapes, Václav Havel talked about the possibility of creating a social democracy similar to the Swedish model. He said he could see Professor Černý taking part in it.

The professor told Procházka one-to-one that he wasn’t backing out, “but first Dubček has to win. For himself, not for me. For himself! Once he wins, I’ll show my face. If necessary, I’ll even come out against Dubček.”

“A shiver goes down the spine,” wrote a commentator, “when we hear how cynically they traded the fate of the country and its people, with no embarrassment or shame.” And he concluded: “We realize that the bourgeois media are bound to create complex rhetorical constructs around
our series—we’re already familiar with that sort of hysterical outcry. But the tapes could not remain hidden. Once upon a time, these voices spoke words that were like honey for the people’s hearts. But in private they didn’t conceal their hatred for our world.”

As for the bourgeois media, according to
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, for example, Prague was already experiencing George Orwell’s
1984
in 1970.

Not long ago, Jordi Niubó endeavored to find out where the people who signed their names to those productions are today. The documentation for
Report from on the Seine
has disappeared, and there’s nothing left in the television file but the wire binding.

The people listed in the program’s closing titles are either not alive anymore, or nobody knows anything about them. The man who was head of Prague television in 1970 stopped working there in the mid-1980s, and it is impossible to establish where he lives now. According to the newspaper
Rudé právo
, they obtained the recording from radio broadcasts made by someone called Karel Janík. It praised the editor for doing a good job. No such person ever existed. Karel Janík is the secret police.

The man who was Minister for Internal Affairs in those days is still alive. Niubó saw his hunched back in an old people’s home. “He might mistake you for his mother,” the nurse warned him.

It is the late 1950s.

Ludvik, secretary to a certain government minister, and his wife Anna are on their way home from a party. At their front gate, it turns out they’ve lost their keys, so they break into their own home.

The keys are there, stuck in the lock, but on the inside. But they had locked the door behind them—Ludvik had had the keys in his pocket.

Somebody has switched off the electricity. Anna is drunk, and criticizes her husband for not even knowing how to mend a fuse; they start bickering about stupid things, they tussle, and suddenly a fork falls to the kitchen floor. It has fallen between two cabinets. Anna insists on getting it out of there. In the narrow gap between the cabinets, she finds an “ear.”

Ludvik panics, and starts burning all his compromising documents. He throws them into the toilet bowl and tries to flush them away. The bathroom is filled with acrid smoke, but they’re afraid to open a window. They’ve noticed that there are two men sitting in a car, watching their property.

They find another “ear” in the bathroom under the dirty laundry.

The next one is close to the ceiling, on the sill of the little bathroom window.

(After the Soviet invasion, Procházka wrote a short story about an “ear.” It was soon filmed by a friend of his as
The Ear
.

(An “ear” is a tiny chip with an antenna the length of an eyelash. A transmitter.)

Ludvik realizes that his minister, who lives across the street, has been interned in his own home. What’s the meaning
of the lack of electricity in Ludvik’s villa and the three bugging devices they’ve found? They’re sure to be coming for him as well. Anna sorts out some shirts for her husband, and gets him ready for arrest.

Once our hero has revealed his fear, cowardice and lack of character to the audience, the next morning he is not arrested, but appointed minister.

The Ear
immediately became legendary and was marked down for deletion. There was only one copy of the movie, which was known as “detained production No. 1.” It was described as one of the best movies in the history of Czech cinema, and definitely the best ever made by director Karel Kachyňa.

The movie remained in detention for twenty years.

An “ear”—the personification of an invisible being. A complement to Kafka’s ideas. Everyone knows it’s listening all the time, but they can’t talk about it, not even in a whisper; only Anna, through stupidity and to spite her husband, lets herself go round the house shouting: “An ear … A goddamn ear!” In Procházka’s novella, the “ear” is a sacred kind of symbol. “It becomes a sort of god, whose name no one dares to utter,” said one of the reviews.

Procházka never suspected that he himself was being bugged and recorded in the first days of the Prague Spring, after Dubček came to power. He thought they had only started to do it after the Soviet invasion.

Meanwhile, Dubček himself had been presented with a
technological novelty: the prototype of the first Czechoslovak color TV, to try out at home. When he realized there was a bugging device in the TV set, he stopped using it, took it down to the cellar, and deliberately didn’t tell anyone about it. Two weeks later, the man who had given him the TV set questioned him in person: “So tell me, aren’t you watching color TV anymore, comrade?”

In 1968, Procházka’s daughter Lenka was seventeen. She has been in love many times since then. In January 2001, when further Security Service documents were declassified, she found out that three of her boyfriends had been recruited by the secret police, and had made regular reports on their relationship.