Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (3 page)

The trade unions and the Czechoslovak Communist Party claim that this is the real reason Bata thought up the break—to gain extra unpaid labor. Strikes are suppressed, and people are thrown out of the factory unconditionally.

The press writes about the incredibly high milk consumption in Zlín and the astonishing—for a beer country—lack of interest in alcohol. There is one car for every thirty-five citizens, which is the highest rate in the whole of Czechoslovakia.

Everything is subjected to rationalization: to avoid having to summon unit managers to the phone by shouting over the machines, a bell gives a signal in Morse code. Each unit head has his own Morse signal, which he can hear even in the restroom. The factory buildings have their own numbers, too, to keep you from getting lost. All the doors in the buildings are numbered, and so are the alleyways within the factory grounds.

By crossing 21, you get to VIII/4a.

There’s a poster painter who works in the advertising department. When he and a colleague bring Tomáš Bata the design they’ve drawn, Bata stamps on the poster, without telling them what he was expecting. The second time, he leans the board against the wall at an angle and jumps right into the middle of it (once again with no explanation). The third time, he throws thirty poster designs to the floor, jumps on them, kicks the paper, and finally gives his opinion: “What kind of an idiot painted these?”

The poster painter is called Svatopluk Turek, and in a few years’ time he’ll start writing vindictive books about Bata.

Tomáš is widening his circle of acquaintances, and his firm is now a world-famous joint-stock company. Bata’s personal guest, Sir Sefton Brancker, shows the beaming Tomáš the object that will be the cause of his death.

Sir Sefton is Great Britain’s director of civil aviation and has flown to Zlín to demonstrate the latest single-engine, three-seat airplane made by de Havilland. Tomáš is so impressed that he buys four on the spot.

An airport is established, and Bata’s planes fly all over Europe. Soon, a factory is set up, and Zlín-brand sports airplanes go into production.

As he is flying over town, Tomáš notices a small meadow surrounded by woods. “That would make a fine graveyard,” he tells the pilot.

Tomáš Bata’s son Tomík, aged seventeen, returns from Zurich, where for the past year he has been the manager of a large store. He becomes manager of a department store in Zlín. He quarrels with his father about something. “You’ll be sorry, Dad,” he says, and writes a letter to Bata’s biggest rival in the United States, Endicott Johnson.

He offers them his skills. Then he folds the piece of paper, but doesn’t send the letter. His mother finds it and shows it to her husband, because he has instructed her to tell him everything. Tomáš triumphs: what a fabulous son he has, who can cope with anything!

On the other hand, he has an idiot for a brother. Jan Antonín, son of his father’s second wife, is twenty years younger. Tomáš calls him a blockhead in front of the staff and kicks him, just like he does with the rest of his employees.

A while ago, he ordered analyses of his closest colleagues’ handwriting from London graphologist Robert Saudek. He keeps them under lock and key so the victims know nothing about it. Egon Erwin Kisch will find them in the archives (in 1948 he’ll start his report,
Shoe Factory
, but after writing the first page he’ll die of a heart attack). Graphology Analysis #9—Jan’s—reads like an arrest warrant:

(In six months’ time, Jan A. Bata will be given that free rein by fate. He will terrify people even more than his brother does.)

Meanwhile, Tomáš Bata must create a site for the small graveyard in the forest.

“We are accustomed to regard a graveyard as a place where one comes to mourn. But, like everything in the world, a graveyard should serve life. So it should not look frightening, but like a place that the living can visit in peace and joy. Going there should be like going to a park, a place to have fun, to play, and to enjoy happy memories of the dead.” With these remarks, Tomáš Bata opens the Forest Graveyard in Zlín.

(It probably doesn’t occur to him that he will be the first person to be buried there.)

When, at 4 a.m., he arrives at his private airfield in Otrokovice, there is a thick fog. He insists on flying. The pilot asks him
to wait. “I am no friend of waiting,” replies the fifty-seven-year-old Tomáš.

They take off, and seven minutes later, at a speed of ninety miles per hour, the Junkers D1608 airplane crashes into a factory chimney. The plane breaks into three parts, and a broken rib pierces Tomáš Bata’s heart.

“Tomáš Bata’s orders were sacred. He alone was above them. One day he gave himself an order, and died of it,” writes Kisch.

When his thirty-seven-year-old brother is informed of the disaster, he picks up the phone and calls the factory manager. “This is the Chief speaking,” he introduces himself. Without batting an eyelid, he uses his brother’s title, which those around him regard as blasphemy. It is said that he has taken the news of Tomáš’s death as a sign from God, and has consequently started to imagine that he is the most important man on earth.

At the district court in Zlín, the envelope containing Tomáš’s last will is opened. The company directors, his wife, son and brother are present. Eighteen-year-old Tomík receives cash from his father, Marie Batová receives cash and real estate. A second envelope is inscribed “
FOR JAN A. BATA
,” and is dated a year ago. Tomáš writes that he has sold all the shares in Bata SA Zlín to Jan.

Jan opens his mouth and can’t believe that for a whole year he has been the owner of Zlín and all its foreign branches! (The factory manager, one of the very few people who knew about this idea earlier, had asked Bata the reason for such a surprising decision. “The biggest scoundrel in the family will still steal less than the most honest outsider,” the boss had apparently replied.)

According to the will, Jan is to manage the business at home and abroad. For quite a while he says nothing, but then he comes to his senses. Just in case, he adds to the deceased man’s statement that a year ago he bought it all “under a verbal contract.” By law, a verbal contract is exempt from taxes, and thus the whole thing can appear to be true—there doesn’t have to be any evidence of the transaction at the tax office.

Two Bata representatives fly to North Africa to investigate the potential for sales there. They send two conflicting telegrams back to Zlín. The first one says: “No one wears shoes here. No market opportunity. Am returning home.”

The other one telegraphs to say: “Everyone here is barefoot. Vast market potential, send shoes as quickly as possible.”

Bata shoes conquer the world, and the company acquires its own mythological status.

In the new era, statistics will be quoted constantly: in Tomáš’s time, there were 24 enterprises, and in Jan’s 120; in Tomáš’s time, there were 1,045 stores, and in Jan’s 5,810; in Tomáš’s time, there were 16,560 employees, and in Jan’s 105,700.

The world crisis of the 1930s is underway. The company makes an excellent scapegoat.

In Germany, import duties on shoes go up, and it is announced that Jan Antonín Bata is a Czech Jew. Dozens of caricatures of him adorn the Nazi press:
RABBI BATA SAYS IT ALL
! The manager of Bata in Germany comes to Zlín to check up on the family background. They are Catholics for seven generations of cobblers; there are no documents going further back. He returns to Berlin and issues a statement to the press about Bata’s origins. He is interrogated by the Gestapo. Jan decides to sell his German factory at once. In France, a factory has been in operation for a year, but it has to be closed because the competition starts up an incredible campaign:
BATA IS A GERMAN
. Huge photographs on the walls show Jan as the stereotypical Prussian, with fair hair and blue eyes. In Italy, the competition spreads a rumor that Bata has been attacking Mussolini in the Czechoslovak papers. In Poland, they say a secret Soviet commission visits Zlín each year:
BATA HELPS THE SOVIETS
.

For five years, in spite of the crisis, Czechoslovakia holds first place for the export of leather footwear worldwide.

The poster painter Svatopluk Turek publishes a novel called
The Shoe Machine
. The name Bata does not appear in it, but everyone is convinced it is a savage attack on “Batism.”

Jan Bata sues Turek, and the court orders the destruction of all unsold copies of the novel. Two hundred gendarmerie
posts conduct searches in all the bookstores in the country. (Turek claims Bata’s storekeepers do what the gendarmes say because he has such a privileged position in the country.)

Plenty of periodicals defend the book. Then Bata withdraws its advertising from them;
Právo lidu
, for example, gets it back when it follows a positive review with a new, negative one.

The Shoe Machine
will be reissued twenty years later when the regime changes. Then Turek will find more than eighty reports informing on him in Bata’s Zlín archive. Bata was clearly trying to corner him. Later on, Turek will write that he was visited by Bata representatives who declared that if he did not give up work on his next book about Batism, he would be forced to commit suicide.

Jan is fascinated by numbering. For instance, the streets are called Zálešná I, Zálešná II, Zálešná III and so on up to Zálešná XII. There are more Podvesná streets than any other, seventeen in all.

Bata announces an international architectural competition for a house for the worker’s family to live in. Almost three hundred architects enter. The winner is Erich Svedlund, a Swede. One house for two families. They will only have to work two hours to earn the weekly rent.

“The worker with his own home undergoes a complete transformation,” Jan tells his managers.

The enlightened bourgeoisie in the West have held these views for forty years now. A small house with a garden makes
a worker the actual head of a family, worthy of the name; he becomes moral and sensible, he feels tied to a place and has an influence on his relatives. At the same time it is thought that a worker who is deprived of communal accommodation, such as barracks shared with other families, will turn his back on collective demands and syndicalism.

The little houses are egalitarian and modernist. Five-yard-high (and thus small) red brick cubes, a style with no roots in tradition. People call them
batovky
, the same word they use for the shoes. On the ground floor, the family has 193 square feet for a living room, a bathroom and a kitchenette; upstairs, there is another 193 square feet for the bedroom. Thank God there are small gardens.

(“It’s tragic living here,” Jiřina Pokorná of Bratři Sousedíků Street—wife of an electrician trained at the Bata school—will say in sixty-seven years’ time. She is seventy now. “I’m going to die soon, as you can probably tell by looking at me, and all my life I’ve never had a proper kitchen, because this nook in the front room, sixteen square feet—that’s not a kitchen, is it?”

“Why is it so small?” I ask.

“They did everything to make sure life didn’t happen at home!”

In sixty-seven years, Jiřina Pokorná will be sitting outside her little red house in the garden, drinking beer quite legally.)

The houses are so close together that the residents can’t help keeping an eye on each other, like it or not.

On top of that, the
batovky
on Padělky II Street are identical to the ones on Padělky IX, for example. A time-traveler from the early twenty-first century would think one and the
same street was automatically reproducing itself, like in a computer game.

“Ah, a self-duplicating town,” sighs a delighted guest who visits Zlín. He is the “prophet of twentieth-century architecture,” designer of some inhuman “machines for living,” and his name is Le Corbusier. He was president of the jury for the competition in Zlín and Jan will ask him for a plan for the whole town too. Le Corbusier has just designed the Centrosoyuz building in Moscow, and in a few years he will be entrusted with the design for the UN building in New York.

Some time later, Jan Bata will boast to him of an idea on an even bigger scale: “I want to build copies of Zlín all over the world!”