Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (16 page)

Absolutely nothing.

She became pregnant, but got too upset in court and miscarried in the eighth month; the doctors saved her from a state of clinical death. “Your child was killed by stress,” they said when she opened her eyes.

“ ‘What child? What stress?’ I thought. I could only think of one thing: there was some Coca-Cola on the windowsill and I wanted to drink it. Something had wiped my mind clean. Later on, whenever I had to talk about the past, I found
a way to avoid it because I couldn’t remember anything and whatever I said sounded unreliable. The trauma gradually passed, but even now I have to say everything twice or I don’t remember it. Apart from song lyrics.”

She used to go back to Prague and walk about the city aimlessly. “When you’re walking fast, your thoughts aren’t as intrusive,” she explains. At the same time, the writer Bohumil Hrabal was travelling up and down Prague in the #17 tram. He’d been interrogated at the Department of Security, and didn’t want to be at home, where they might be able to find him again. In the tram, he used to consider ways of departing this world.

Marta roamed Prague with the presentiment: “Something’s going to fall on me, a balcony, a cornice, or a flowerpot. A while back, a woman was killed by a falling cornice.”

“ ‘There are lots of old houses in Prague,’ I would tell myself. ‘The occasional balcony is bound to fall.’ But luck passed me by in every way.”
^*

•   •   •

Meanwhile, luck didn’t pass Helena by.

She performed at festivals in Split, Bratislava, Istanbul, Knokke and Bucharest. Her crowning achievement was the Grand Prix Sopot ’77 for “Malovaný džbánku” (“The Painted Jug”). The song was composed by Jindřich Brabec, who wrote “A Prayer for Marta.”

On November 3, 1994, the historian Timothy Garton Ash was sitting in the concert hall at the Lucerna Palace in Prague. He later wrote:

He continues:

For Helena, 1994 was a wonderful year. Wonderful, because after all that time she appeared with Marta again. And wonderful too, because she began recording on her own again.

When decommunization began in the Czech Republic, Helena faced a desert. “New, younger people joined the recording labels and radio stations, and they told me: ‘Miss Vondráčková, you must bring along a demo tape. We’ll listen to your singing, and then perhaps we’ll make you an offer.’ Out of self-respect I couldn’t do that,” she says, and falls silent.

For four years, she didn’t release a new record.

After a pause, she says: “Did they write about the Polish folk singer Maryla Rodowicz in Poland too, saying she collaborated with the regime?”

She suddenly asks: “What are you most afraid of?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Illness, perhaps.”

“Because what drives me nuts lately is people who are prepared to do anything for money. I find them really frightening.”

For years, Helena’s name was linked with that of the communist prime minister Lubomír Štrougal. According to rumor, they had a lengthy affair.

Another rumor said that Štrougal had bought her a sheepskin coat, and that when his wife found out about it, she had knocked out all of Helena’s teeth with a champagne bottle. From then on, apparently, she had teeth made of expensive porcelain, paid for—naturally—by Štrougal.

After 1989, she received the first of many anonymous letters addressed to “
Štrougalka
[‘Štrougal’s woman’]…”

“I get lots of anonymous letters that dub me
Štrougalka, Štrougalova milenka
[‘Štrougal’s darling’] or
stará Štrougalová
[‘old Mrs. Štrougal’],” wrote Helena in her last book.

“Štrougalka, now it’s your turn!” one of them said.

“Were you his
milenka
?” I ask.

“I’ve never even met the man. I only ever saw him on the TV news. I spent ages wondering where that rumor could have come from, and suddenly I got a letter that shed some light on it. It was from a married couple living in a small place called Příbram, who happened to like me, and were upset whenever someone spoke badly of me. They suggested that I take a close look at Štrougal’s daughter, Eva Janoušková. She looked very much like me: she was tall, with a similar way of dressing, she had an identical hairstyle, and even drove exactly the same car in the same color. A green Fiat sports car. She was extremely close to her father, often went to receptions with him, and they used to say goodbye by kissing each other on the cheek in public. Years later I met her, and she greeted me with the words: ‘Hello, my alter ego.’ That explains the whole mystery.”

Ludvík Švábenský, a jazz musician who was Helena’s boyfriend for seven years, recalls that whenever he went to a concert or a public reception with her, he felt awful. He didn’t know who he really was—boyfriend or bodyguard … In the eyes of all the Party types, he was a nobody; they looked straight through him like thin air. “They were desperate to shine in Helena’s presence, they besieged her almost to the point of indecency, and she would whisper: ‘Luděk, help!’ ”

A later incident occurred in the bar at the Hotel Praha, by which time she was a married woman; everyone knew her husband, Helmut Sickel, and they knew she was very much in love with this German musician, in spite of which the Czechoslovak Communist Party secretary for culture lay across the grand piano, trying to embrace her, panting heavily. The comrade had one single ambition: to talk to Helena.

And she was nothing but nice and kind.

Everybody could see her smiling.

Helena was always smiling.

Marta’s father was a cardiologist who was the head of a hospital. She graduated from high school in Poděbrady, and dreamed of studying medicine or philosophy. The school gave her an order, telling her in writing that she had “a duty to become acquainted with the laboring professions.” The workplace would transfer her to higher education if she achieved a positive report. It was 1959, and Marta’s first job was at a glassworks. To begin with, she ran to the bar to fetch beer for the factory workers, then she picked out glasses and bottles that were below standard. For three years, she kept insisting that she wanted to go to college. “The manager told me that higher education was for the working class, but I wasn’t a member of that class,” she says, “so I escaped into singing.”

She entered music contests and won them. She became a local star, and began singing in a café.

While her father was the senior registrar, they lived at the hospital. When he reached the age of fifty, he went off with another woman. His former family was offered an apartment belonging to the widow of Lieutenant-Colonel Mašín; he had been shot by the Nazis, and his two sons had fled the country before Stalin’s death and joined the US army. The authorities had decided to punish his widow by evicting her from her apartment. Before a Party committee, Marta’s mother declared that she wasn’t going to move in when Mrs. Mašinová left. She found herself an empty apartment
opposite the widow’s, on the same floor, and made friends with her.

“Yes, Mom had a strong character,” admits Marta. “But it was just by chance that I was the one who sang the ‘Prayer.’ These days, whenever someone tells me I’m some sort of symbol, I run away. After all, any singer could have recorded the ‘Prayer.’ I’m not politically involved nowadays either. I’ve just been through a few things. I knew how to tell black from white, and I’ve always been guided by that.”

According to Marta: “Jan wanted to leave. For America. Everything here disappointed him. ‘You’re good at singing jazz,’ he said. But I didn’t want to sing in an American bar—I believed I’d soon be back on the stage here, because in two years the Russkies would go home.

“And I waited ten times longer than I thought I would.

“I stayed here. Havel stayed, lots of people did.

“I demanded a divorce.

“The divorce dragged on for ages, I got the feeling I wasn’t meant to exist.

“By then, I even felt scared waiting for the tram. I felt as if the driver was going to get out and say: ‘Miss Kubišová, you may not get on board. This tram is not for you!’

“Once I was sitting alone at home, and I thought: ‘I’ll turn on the gas.’

“ ‘After all, I can’t have a child.’

“ ‘I can’t sing.’

“ ‘I can’t even get divorced normally!’

“ ‘I am a big mistake.’

“And, at that point, a kind of strength kicked in. It came from the animals. I looked at my dogs. ‘My God,’ I thought. ‘What about them?’ And I came to my senses.

“When Hrabal used to travel about Prague on the #17 tram, he drew strength from animals, too. I read that it was from swans. Because the seventeen goes along the Vltava.”

She found a soothing job. She had a hot iron, a special knife, and a roll of PVC. She cut out a pattern and produced figurines. She assembled little bears out of plastic. There were left and right arms in separate heaps. The legs were all in one pile, because there was no difference between right and left. She had to press them firmly into the bears’ bodies, which made her fingers ache badly. “For six years, I either cut or pressed. And the doll-making cooperative that was willing to give me a job was called ‘Direction.’ ”

She worked alone at home, glancing at a small television set. The work was not humiliating.

Jan Procházka’s daughter Lenka spent twelve years cleaning a theater. She was forced to give up studying journalism in the radio department. The actors whom Lenka knew from her diction workshops would avoid her in embarrassment when they saw her there with her floor cloth and bucket. And Lenka says she’s grateful to them for that. But for Marta, sitting at the kitchen table, nobody had to change their route.

During the normalization, Cardinal Miloslav Vlk spent eight years washing store windows.

The philosopher Jiří Němec was a night watchman for five years.

The writer Karel Pecka worked for six years in the city sewers.

The critic Milan Jungmann spent ten years cleaning windows.

Radio journalist Jiří Dienstbier was a stoker at a boiler house for three years.

Journalist Karel Lánský laid tiles for twenty years.

Historian Jaroslav Valenta, a member of the Academy of Sciences, became a proofreader at a printing house.

For the public statement he made opposing the Soviet occupation, legendary Olympic athlete Emil Zátopek, the track and field star of the late 1940s and early 1950s, was forced to work in a uranium mine.

Journalist Eda Kriseová found herself on a list of authors who couldn’t publish, but thanks to friends in high places she became a librarian. She worked alone, so that nobody would be obliged to talk to her. So, in the afternoons, she used to go and talk to the patients at a mental hospital. “There were two nurses caring for seventy patients and they couldn’t cope. Nobody ever talked to those people, so I thought: ‘They’re more desperate than I am, I’ll help them.’ But it was they who helped me. They opened up the world of storytelling for me. Thanks to those patients, I went on to write two collections of novellas. I realized that, in Czechoslovakia, a hospital for the mentally ill was the only normal place, because there everyone could say what they really thought with impunity.”

Just like Eda, Marta has no regrets.

What about regret for all the opportunities that will never come again?

What she was forced to do was no loss. “A person grows
wiser,” says Marta. “Not because he’s washing windows, but because he’s living a life he would never have touched if he were only an artist.”

“I’ve got a child,” she adds, “and if I had stuck with singing, I probably never would have had her.”

She got married again. To another director, also called Jan. She looked after herself properly. She was careful to avoid stress. She gave birth to a daughter, Katarína. Her husband was happy, and started calling the baby girl Kačenka. “It was Easter Saturday, and our daughter was eighteen months old,” says Marta, “when my husband called home to say he wouldn’t be back for the night. ‘Kačenka has a new little sister,’ he said. And so for the past twenty-two years I’ve been happily divorced.”

Maybe Marta is right. Maybe any other female singer of the time might have sung the “Prayer.”

However, ten years after the “Prayer,” she and the singer Jaroslav Hutka were the only ones who weren’t afraid to write a letter to Johnny Cash.

He was due to appear at the Lucerna on the day when the trial of Ivan Jirous was taking place. Known as Magor (meaning “Loony”), the wrongfully arrested Jirous was the inspiration behind the band Plastic People of the Universe. This was the most oppressed, the most outrageous, the most legendary and the most indomitable rock group in the history of Central Europe. What Kubišová and Hutka wanted was for Cash to tell the West about it.