Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (20 page)

After the war, E.K. turns up in Liberec.

He smiles without opening his mouth.

He works at a bank, and publishes his stories in a social-democrat weekly,
Stráž severu
(“Northern Guard”). For three years following the war, Czechoslovakia is the last democratic
state in the Soviet bloc. The communists only have 40 percent of the seats in parliament, the national socialists are in second place, and then come the peasant parties and the social democrats. The editor in chief at
Stráž severu
is a democratic member of parliament called Dr. Josef Veverka.

On February 20, 1948, when twelve non-communist ministers resign from the coalition government they have formed with the communists—and by doing so initiate the complete takeover of power by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the course of the next five days, later known as “Victorious February”—E.K. writes a letter to his editor:

Early that morning, he leaves the letter on Veverka’s desk,
but the editor will never read it. An hour later, the communist who hands the envelope to the Security Service becomes editor in chief of
Stráž severu
.

The letter ends with the words: “So we’re going to roll up our sleeves and go against the grain. My two daughters’ freedom is worth the effort. Yours, E.K.”

Except that, not long after this letter, E.K. begs the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (the CPC) to accept him as a member.

He assures it: “It was only following the Victorious February that I gave communism proper thought for the first time. To me, communism is like the gospel.”

He stresses: “Please note that I want nothing from the CPC, and I never shall. I can say of myself that no part is being played by any motive of fear or calculation, which has brought so many people to the Communist Party. I have come to my own conclusions independently. I do not know how you will judge my case, but if you do not accept me, you will be spurning a man of good will.”

He makes excuses for the other letter: “I was told about Veverka, and I felt great sympathy for him. On the night I wrote that fatal letter I had worked on
The Tragedy Hunters
until almost dawn, and once I had finished, after drinking an ocean of black coffee, I couldn’t get to sleep. Unfortunately, I ended up in a miserable mood, full of hazy sympathy, and I had to find an object for my feelings. By an unhappy coincidence, I remembered Veverka. It occurred to me that he had a family, that he probably wanted to be a government minister,
and so on. I sat down at my typewriter and wrote that letter, then immediately forgot what was in it. I realize it seems hard to believe, but all manner of things can happen to a writer at night.”

He gives the Party some advice: “Communism should be taught from the pulpit, with a Bible in hand—not in the church sense of the word of course, but by going among the people and teaching them.”

He makes a confession: “I should be sincere enough to admit that I have to study an idea for several years before I can work for it successfully.”

(
The Tragedy Hunters
never appeared—most likely he never wrote a single line of it.)

E.K. becomes part of a wider trend.

Václav Kopecký, one of the chief ideologues of the CPC, is surprised to find that non-communist members of parliament are voting unanimously for communist decrees, and even for the non-democratic constitution of May 9, 1948. “It was quite unpleasant,” he will write years later, “because this sort of unanimity looked like compulsion. The communists even asked some of the MPs to vote against, or at least to abstain, and gave them guarantees that nothing would happen to them—but in vain. They unanimously voted in favor.”

At the end of his request to join the Party, E.K. adds that he is not from a bourgeois family, his father was a servant, and then a clerk, and his grandfather was a tailor.

Except that just after his burst of passion for communism, E.K. flees the socialist country.

The communists aren’t hiding the fact that they will crack down on whomever necessary. The Security Service immediately puts the ministers who have resigned under surveillance. The former Minister of Justice (a democrat called Prokop Drtina) tries to kill himself. The Minister of Foreign Affairs (Jan Masaryk, son of the former president) is found on the flagstones under his window with a broken skull. Some people think he jumped because he disagreed with the new system. Others believe it was the new system that had him thrown out of that third-floor window.
^*

Nobody can leave the country anymore.

When a certain comedian performs for the soldiers guarding the border, he and his family manage to escape to West Germany during the interval. At that particular moment there’s nobody on guard, because they’re all waiting for the second half of the show to begin. The leader of the national socialist youth movement escapes by sliding between the ceiling and roof of the restaurant car of a train going from Prague to Paris. The leader of the social democrats and his wife put on skiing outfits and get across to Austria by pretending to be skiers. The former ambassador to Bulgaria escapes by hiding in a large chest for books, which the Mexican ambassador claims as his personal luggage.

E.K. has still had no reply from the CPC. Someone at the bank tells him he might be arrested for the letter to Veverka, because it was critical of the Czechoslovak people. So, at all the kiosks in Liberec and Prague, he starts to buy up the ignition stones that are in cigarette lighters. He knows they can be used as a currency in Germany. He hides the stones with a friend who is a customs officer, whom he urges to flee the country as well. E.K. confides in him that if he doesn’t escape, he’ll commit suicide. He weeps.

They escape on the day E.K. comes home from the bank and sees a militia car outside his house.

In Berlin, he tells his interrogators that his country is in the grip of the red terror, and that no honest person can possibly live in that communist hell.

Except that two months later he goes back.

In the press, he publishes a cautionary novel in installments.
He signs it with the pseudonym František Navrátil, which in Czech means “he came back.”

The story can be summarized as follows. One night, Navrátil and a friend swim across the Nysa River near Hrádek, on the German border, aiming to get away to London. They wade through swamps and spend hours lying in a field. Navrátil falls ill with a temperature of 39 degrees C [102°F], but nobody will give him a sip of water until he shows his documents. “Maybe because I have nothing to pay with. People in the West have to be bought.”

For those who read it, it should immediately be clear why Navrátil came back. There is no refugee camp in Germany which our heroes have not visited. Nowhere do they find help or a crust of bread. “We only help people who are useful to us,” they hear. “When you talk to them about ideals,” he confides in his readers, “they start to smile pitifully. They have no ideals—instead of using their brains to think, they use the contents of their pockets.”

Fainting with hunger, they reach Hamburg on foot. In the suburbs, they look into a window and see a married couple quarrelling. “How can they be quarrelling when they have their own table, their own floor, their own ceiling, and their own language? What fools people are.”

The authorities are so pleased by this account, which appears in the weekly
Květen
, that Navrátil also broadcasts it as radio talks. Then he describes his escape in a novel entitled
The Runaway
, which is publicized by the authorities.

“I think he had to write it,” says his daughter nowadays. “He came back to us, because Mom couldn’t manage, but he was extremely scared of being punished. That book was
his way of buying himself out of the ordeal that might have befallen him.”

Except that the regime announces an amnesty for runaways, who are no longer under any threat (something his daughter can’t have known about, as she was a little girl at the time). E.K. takes advantage of this.

Even children run away from Czechoslovakia. For example, in the month after the Victorious February, the secret police in Budějovice alone catch eight boys on the border. The European press publicizes these escapes, and the authorities have to make a grand gesture. Thus, E.K.’s future ordeal is cancelled.

Except that, despite the amnesty, E.K. wants to show extra gratitude for being treated so leniently. He offers to cooperate with the Security Service.

But before this happens, he tells a friend about his escape, and the friend informs the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which summons the writer to meet with Major Bedřich Pokorný in Prague. The Voice of America describes the Major as “the republic’s red executioner,” and the executioner himself describes his own investigative methods as “pins and screwdrivers.” The Major is acquainted with the great lyric poet Halas and is capable of lecturing on French painting and its influence on Czech art.

Pokorný calls ten journalists in to the Ministry, who are to listen to E.K. They are impressed by his story.

“At that point I realized my political mistake,” as K.F. will later confess. “Solely because the people’s organs and Major Pokorný treated me very decently after my return.”

It is Pokorný, deputy head of the Department for Special Operations, who suggests that he write (as Navrátil) about his escape and his return.

He also suggests that he write a separate book about him, the Security Service major, and the screenplay for a movie. The Major already has a title for it:
I Came to Shoot
.

E.K. sees him as his protector. “In the evenings,” he will later say, “he often sent a car for me, and we would discuss Marxism, a topic in which the Major was an excellent teacher for me.”

(Not long after this, the Security Service will arrest its own major. For using Gestapo methods during interrogations and for tolerating former Gestapo collaborators among the secret police officers. The penalty: sixteen years in jail.)

In the meantime, Pokorný allows E.K. and his family to move to Prague and gets him a job at
Květen
. That is where E.K.—now as K.F.—writes about the Five-Year Plan.

At this point, despite already having committed to writing the book about Pokorný, he spontaneously suggests that he can also recruit informers working for several other journals.

Except that he immediately tells everybody in his circle that he is an agent and is trying to form a network.

(When he is later arrested for this—betrayal of a state secret—he will insist on a single explanation: “I said it because I
wanted to feel that I was a better person than those to whom I was saying it.”)

Except that there is one thing he never talks about at all: a month after returning from Germany, he informs on a woman, whose life he destroys in the process.

She is Žofia V., a rich widow, owner of a tenement house on the Vltava River next to the National Theater, where she used to receive senior SS officers. As there are rumors going around about K.F., implying that he is a Western agent, the woman seeks him out and asks him to help her escape. She would like to get as far away from Czechoslovakia as possible in a month’s time. She thinks that she’ll be smarter than Ida L.—recently featured in the press—who was arrested with well over six pounds of twenty-dollar gold coins glued to her chest with sticking plasters.

K.F. promises to help her, and goes to reveal all to the Major.

Pokorný virtually jumps for joy at the fact that his good deed towards K.F. has paid off; this is a big case that will earn him praise, and next morning they’ll be locking up Žofia V.

Except that in the evening K.F. goes to warn her.

They meet in a café. “I had pangs of conscience,” he will later admit, “and I advised her to get away immediately, not in a month’s time. She said she hadn’t amassed enough jewelry yet, and left. As if she hadn’t absorbed the fact that next day they were going to imprison her.”

She is arrested at dawn. A week later in jail, she swallows poison and dies.

Eduard Kirchberger was born in Prague in 1912.

At the same time and in the same place, the world’s first Cubist sculpture of a human head was created.
^†

These two facts have no connection.

Nonetheless, E.K./K.F. is a Cubist personality. If, in a Cubist picture, the planes are fragmented by countless sharp edges, then, in his life, the successive “except thats” are the sharp edges.

Everything that for the moment seems certain instantly changes direction. His personality—like an object or a figure in Cubism—is in a state of repeated fragmentation.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been, if not for fear.

Fear is highly relevant.

Early in 1951, some Prague intellectuals, who are enemies of the system and have been removed from their professions as a punishment, are building a railroad bridge across the Vltava, which to this day is known as the Bridge of the Intelligentsia.

The CPC now starts to lock up Party comrades, even before they have committed any misdemeanors. Major Pokorný says that it’s not only dead traitors who are suspicious. “If
someone is alive, he’s always a suspect, because foreign agents can contact him,” he explains to his subordinates.