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?
