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7

Mar

Communism: My Part in its Downfall, Episode 4

Posted by admin  Published in Adventures in Writing

Photo: Wikimedia Commons


About once a month between 1989 and 2008 I wrote and recorded short essays for National Public Radio–initially Performance Today, then Morning Edition, and finally, for a decade and a half, for Sunday Weekend Edition. To honor that tradition, I’ve decided to publish a short essay every Sunday morning. Most of them will be original; and if I can swing it, some will even come accompanied with audio clips, so once again people can recognize my voice and ask, “Aren’t you that British guy from public radio?”

In November 1989 I got a phone call from a woman named Marcela. I knew her only as the wife of an artist I had interviewed a couple of times. She told me that she had been born in Czechoslovakia, but had fled the country after the failed Prague Spring uprising in 1968. Now, with Communism under threat all across Eastern Europe, she was going back. She made me an offer I couldn’t turn down: if I helped her write about her return to Prague, she’d act as my translator and help me get stories of my own. Oh, and could I bring as many blank videocassettes as I could carry? She didn’t tell me that carrying blank videotape could have got me arrested….

When the events of that first evening, which already seemed to have lasted forever, finally wound down shortly before midnight, Marcela walked me the three or four blocks to her mother’s apartment.

Otilie, Marcela’s mother, had managed to win one of those tiny, sad prizes in the lottery that was life under communist rule. The three-room apartment had been allocated to her and her husband as being officially the suitable size for a married couple—but when he died of heart failure a few years previously, some official had not done the paperwork (deliberately? Accidentally? One never knew) that would have downgraded her to a single room. As always, though, this prize came with an equal and opposite burden: now she was frightened that if she said the wrong thing in the wrong person’s earshot, she would be evicted and punished for her good fortune.

As for the apartment itself, it was hard to see it as a windfall. The kitchen/bathroom was divided by a curtain to give privacy to someone using the shower or toilet, and as its window was three feet from the next apartment block, it was dark even at midday. The toilet needed fixing; the valve wouldn’t shut off. The water in the kitchen sink was undrinkable, and the whole place smelled of paint, even though the building hadn’t been painted for years. One of the light switches was faulty, and looked as though it might start a fire at any minute. Nothing got repaired because she didn’t have a friend, or the son of a friend, to do it. To put in an official work order with the building superintendent was laughable folly. Everything in Czechoslovakia, Marcela explained, depended on connections.

Nothing worked, and everything depended on connections: oddly enough, I’d hear exactly the same set of complaints a decade later in India. It’s not only communism that can cause a country’s infrastructure to collapse.

Otilie was typical of the older generation of urban Czechs in that she was the soul of hospitality (pressing food and drink on me, pulling out her dead husband’s pyjamas to see if they’ll fit me) but my presence made her very anxious. Spies, she assumed, were everywhere: she was hesitant enough to have me sleeping on the couch, but she was adamant that I should not use the phone. Her husband would still be alive, she believed, had he not been arrested three or four times, held for questioning, subjected to the same routine of ingrained threat as everyone else.

She worried that the activists were just making things worse, that any minute now the reprisals would begin, and would be all the more brutal—yet at the same time she desperately wanted the revolution to succeed, to be the real thing, the final liberation that she and every Czech had been waiting for ever since the Germans invaded, fifty years previously. Like everyone else, she ran the Garman wartime occupation and the Russian postwar occupation together into a continuum of repression and misery.

“If these events are true,” she said, through Marcela, “then I could speak. I could tell people what the regime has done to me. I would be fearless.”

Everyone in Prague, it seemed, felt the same. When Marcela and I left the apartment next morning, the stately, gray city had a strangely scruffy, festive look that for a second I couldn’t explain—and then I saw that every wall, every pillar and post, every booth and kiosk, was covered from about two to about six feet from the ground with pieces of paper.

Some of these were colorful advertisements and announcements, the kind you’d expect to see in any Western city with an active trade in guerilla postering. Most, though, were what the Czechs were calling “testaments” or “witnesses”: they were single photocopied sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 paper, some white, some in color, with a paragraph or three of typing on them, on which anonymous people had done exactly what Otilie wanted to do: they had told the truth. They had written accounts of what the regime had done to them or their families. My husband was imprisoned without trial in 1955,,,, My husband disappeared five years ago…. My son was beaten by the police and has never walked since…. Every wall, as far as the eye could see, had turned into a bulletin board of protest.

Surrounded by this panorama of support, the people of Prague seemed buoyant. When I accidentally bumped into someone on the street and we both instinctively apologized, Marcela stared in amazement. When she was last in Prague, she said, she fell and dropped all her shopping, and everyone around her simply ignored her. Once she bumped into a man and he spun round and yelled, “Watch where you’re going, you stupid cow!”

The only time we saw the old attitude was in the official Czech tourist bureau, where we went so I could change some money. There were no signs telling anyone where to go to do what, so Marcela went up to a woman at the front information desk. The woman was looking down at some papers on her desk. Marcela asked a question. The woman didn’t look up, didn’t even acknowledge she’d heard anything. Marcela tried again, even more politely. No response. It was a remarkably chilling experience, to feel so completely ignored, to feel the invisible threads of common humanity so severed. After four or five attempts, Marcela gave up.

“It used to be like that everywhere, all the time,” she told me.

Next we had to go to the Foreign Journalists Center so I could get press credentials. It was the classic tiny, dark office I’d read about in Cold War novels by John Le Carre. In one corner was a teletype machine and a stack of official press releases, out of date and irrelevant. Two small, dusty bureaucrats stared at me from behind glass. As I held out my passport and the complicated, poorly-translated form I’d labored to complete, I assumed they’d grill me, put me under surveillance so they could see who was talking to me. Not at all: they only thing they showed any interest in was my $15 fee.

Nobody would ever ask to see my stamped press pass. In theory I was supposed to register with the police, too, but in a rare moment of bravado, I decided not to bother.

In truth, I had bigger worries on my mind. Some time around midday, the Swissair flight with my delayed baggage was supposed to arrive at Prague airport, and I’d have to explain to Czech Customs which I was carrying a primeval computer and another dozen illicit blank videotapes.

We took a taxi to the airport. The Swissair desk—colorful, neutral—were on top of the situation, but didn’t have my bag: they had switched it to an earlier flight on Ceskoslovenske Aerolinie (you can do the translation) and it was probably already waiting for me, right over there at Customs. They handed me a small chit with a baggage number on it.

I crossed the terminal with my heart pounding in my ears. Keep calm, I told myself. Don’t radiate panic. Don’t draw attention to yourself.

I was starting to wish I had some training in this kind of thing–a lifetime’s experience in drug trafficking, maybe.

To my surprise and confusion, the Customs area was abandoned. There wasn’t even anyone to ignore me. It was just like the scene at the border: the soldiers, the guns, the dogs—vanished. All that was left was an untidy heap of luggage on the floor—and, astoundingly, my bag was among it.

What should I do? Marcela, too, was frozen. We looked around. Were we being observed from behind a pillar? On camera? Should she separate herself from me so only one of us got caught?

The airport, the city, the whole country seemed to be caught in a bizarre moment in history, a moment that, for the first time in decades, lacked menace—and yet seemed all the more menacing for that weird and unexpected absence.

Eventually, I did the thing that everyone was just working up the courage to do. I thought, “Well…,” bent down, picked up my bag, and, trying to look as though nothing was wrong, as if nobody was watching, as if this was what was entirely business as usual, walked out of the airport.

More next Sunday. To see the preceding parts of this story, click here. Alternatively, can I entreat you click here and order a copy of my latest book, Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment?

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Tags: communism, essay, NPR, writing

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7

Feb

Culture or Bust

Posted by admin  Published in Adventures in Writing


The Lady’s Last Stake, by William Hogarth. Licensed through Creative Commons.

About once a month between 1989 and 2008 I wrote and recorded short essays for National Public Radio–initially Performance Today, then Morning Edition, and finally, for a decade and a half, for Sunday Weekend Edition.
I’ve decided to bring that genre back. I’m going to publish a short essay every Sunday morning.
Most of them will be original; some (kind of like A Prairie Home Companion) will be pieces that aired previously, have been rescued from a file originally created on an IBM PCjr and have had 338 lines of weird formatting removed. (Seriously, how can an apostrophe be represented by seven keystrokes, including characters from Old Norse?) And if I can swing it, some will even come accompanied with audio clips, so once again people can recognize my voice and ask, “Aren’t you that British guy from public radio?”

Here’s one for the over-forty set, those who remember Alastair Cooke and the old Masterpiece Theatre pomp and circumstance. I used to do a lot of this kind of satire; when this one was broadcast I got a phone call from a listener complaining that she had started laughing so hard she drove off the road and nearly hit a tree. I find myself wondering: is this funny as text alone, or would you have to hear it aloud?

The most recent acquisition for the Masterpiece Theatre anthology series on PBS is A Fall of Peacocks, adapted from the novel by Dame Evelyn Pier-Support. It stars Richard Burton as the bottle of gin, Elizabeth Taylor as the disastrous blancmange, Margaret Thatcher as the war memorial, John Cleese as Big Ben, the Right Honorable Members of the House of Commons as the flock of sheep, their Lordships of the House of Lords as the living dead and Winston Churchill as the barrage balloon. Music is by three little old ladies.
As our story opens in Episode One, Henry has brutally murdered the Dukes of Cumberland, Westmoreland, Warwick, Smethwick and Chiswick, and now nobody stands between him and his ambition to open the batting for England. Felicity, who came home to discover her mother dressed up in the butler’s uniform, has left in search of the First World War. Gerald’s brain damage turns out to have a silver lining, as he can now become a stockbroker after all.
Episode Two. The plot thickens. The twins, Edgar and Laetitia, have reached that awkward stage, when they start…asking questions and…wearing each other’s underwear. Old Lord Flintlock has caused much merriment in his club by flogging the Postmaster General to within an inch of his life, and everyone has pretended not to notice when the King’s ear fell into his soup over luncheon. But who will inherit Sphincter Manor?
Episodes Three through Sixteen. Conversation over tea.
Episode Seventeen. Roger is beaned by Nicholas at the polo game. He loses his memory and becomes convinced he is Twiggy, thereby arousing the passion of the Duke of Greengage. His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury drops by on his way to India, and is garrotted in the shrubbery. In Rome, meanwhile, the Emperor Lascivius makes his hedgehog a Congressman and banishes the entire imperial family to a small boarding school in Wales.
Episode Eighteen. The Headmaster spanks Lascivius Major, Jones Minor and Matron, and muses on the loss of the African colonies over an unusually large helping of spotted dick*. An unexploded bomb is discovered under the tea cosy, and is safely defused by Julia, who has picked up a thing or two while the boys were away at the front. When Tristram is called to Wuthering Farm to draw a tapeworm from old Mr Wurzel’s llama, Mrs Hall is irate at the thought of another fine dinner of pigs’ offal getting cold.

The series ends some time in November–a happy ending, all in all. The Indians get back India, Lord Sphincter gets back Sphincter Manor and the yokels get back their yokes. The war is won, the Empire is lost and nothing will ever be the same again, except the next series of Masterpiece Theatre. I’m Alastair Brookes.

This first aired on National Public Radio…uh…well…back in the day.

* As Bob Edwards explained in his outro, sounding more than a little incredulous, this is a steamed suet pudding with raisins, much beloved in English boarding schools.

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Tags: comedy, essay, humor, NPR, writing

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30

Jan

Special Offer! 25% off 30%!

Posted by admin  Published in Adventures in Writing

Subscribe to this site and get a signed copy of my latest book, Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment, at 25% off the cover price!

Here’s how it works. When you sign up for email notifications, I get an automated message with your email address. I send you an email confirming you’re interested in a signed copy of 30%, and ask for your mailing address. I mail you a copy of the book; you mail me a check. Yes, there’s an element of trust involved on my part, but I actually like that.

Questions? Email me at timbrookes@burlingtontelecom.net.

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29

Oct

My New Book: 30% Chance of Enlightenment

Posted by Tim  Published in Adventures in Writing

30PercentCover
It’s true: many years in the writing, the story of my journey to India on assignment to cover the monsoon–an assignment that went so completely wrong that within two days of arriving I’d been officially banned from every office of the India Meteorological Department. A bit of a blow, as I was there to interview meteorologists.

And yet it turned out to be one of the greatest adventures of my life, a slightly out-of-control cross-India trek that ended up with me in a state of obsession bordering on either genius or madness, in which I was granted what I still believe to be divine insights into the spiritual nature of water.

Either way, you’ll never look at the Weather Channel in the same way again.

To find out more, to get a free download of Part I of the book, and to order a copy or five, click here to switch over to www.thirtypercentchance.com.

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Tags: monsoon, water, weather forecasting

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