Ivan Klíma - My Crazy Century - A Memoir

The next day we were issued a mixer and a vehicle covered with encrusted cement. This was the Japanese that we’d been warned not to ride on. The warning was superfluous because no one would have voluntarily climbed onto it. We also received instructions on the ratio of water, cement, and sand, and the foreman reminded me that I was responsible for everything. If the foundation was not solid, he threatened, the house built atop it would collapse, and its inhabitants, including women and children, could die in the wreckage.

We took turns at the mixer, dragging half-ton bags of cement and pouring their contents into its maw, while the dust lodged itself in our lungs.

At first we tried to convince ourselves this was only temporary, and despite the toil and heat we carried on quite learned conversations. We finally realized, however, that such colloquy was inappropriate given our surroundings, and we began to argue about things like why there was water still flowing into our excavation pit, what grade of soil we were digging, or whose turn it was at the mixer tomorrow. The mixer sometimes stopped working, and none of us knew how to get it going again, so we were losing both time and money, and it was up to me to locate the repairmen. If they did not happen to be in one of the neighboring blocks, they were sitting in the tavern, drinking beer and sometimes playing cards.

The foreman gradually started to see that we were working more and better than he’d expected. But the norms had not been set for college students and probably not even for experienced construction workers. Instead, they were established so that no one could earn more than was necessary for daily subsistence. The employees made up for this by either purloining building material or sneaking off during work hours to make money on the side. We, on the other hand, as the foreman told me, wouldn’t make a thing at this rate. We’d had the misfortune of being assigned to this block.

And there was more misfortune yet to come. During our third week, it rained continuously, and when we finally made it to the work site — it was a Saturday, and the shift ended at noon — we saw that part of our freshly dug pit had collapsed along one side and filled our hole with a considerable amount of new earth. Water spurted from the side, which was probably the source that filled our pit every night.

The foreman arrived, surveyed the destruction, and, as if we were the builders instead of him, concluded that we should have timbered the pit. So we’d have to dig out the earth once again, and of course no one would pay us for this extra work. Then he added that now it would be best to embed the whole thing in concrete, otherwise we’d have a lake on Monday, but we probably would anyway because we wouldn’t be able to get it cemented by lunchtime. He sent me for the pump and said he was leaving to go see his family. Then he took off just like the others who weren’t here working like idiots.

When we came back on Monday morning, the trenches were dry. The foreman stood over them almost in surprise and asked how we’d managed to do it. Then he invited me into his trailer, took a seat behind his unbelievably dingy desk, and asked me if I’d calculated how much we had earned for the previous week.

We’d always made very little, but this week as a result of the repeated breakdown of the mixer, the flooded excavation pits, two days of no work because of rain, and finally the collapsed wall that we had to dig out again, we didn’t even make a hundred crowns apiece.

Then he asked how many times we’d had to use the pump. I said every day we were working last week. He pulled out a worksheet and wrote: manual transfer of pump, sixteen hours. Then he added carpentry work and manual transfer of wood, eight cubic meters.

I objected that we had timbered only on Saturday, and then only a few boards.

“Don’t bother me when I’m working, you little idiot!” he replied.

He thought up several more operations I’d had no idea existed and calculated each of our wages to be three hundred crowns and some change.

At a loss, I started to thank him. “Don’t thank me,” he admonished me, and he added that he wasn’t paying me out of his own pocket. They were swindling us as much as they were him.

This had been my first encounter with those we had been taught were the working, and thus ruling, class — if I don’t take into account those who two years earlier had searched our house.

*

It wasn’t easy to select a topic for my seminar paper, let alone a senior thesis in the field I was studying. I could choose either some sort of historicizing topic of Czech literature: Czech national revival authors (most of them were revivalists rather than writers) or the rural realists, or perhaps I could heap praise upon one of the few prewar leftist authors or one of the many contemporary authors.

At this time appeared a slim pamphlet by a Soviet Slavist named Nikolsky praising the antifascist work of Karel Čapek, an author who until then had been blacklisted because he had been among the major personalities of the democratic republic. A friend of President Masaryk, Čapek had written an angry essay called “Why I Am Not a Communist” (one of my classmates had lent me a nearly illegible typewritten copy), and had attacked the Communist movement, especially in its early stages.

The fact that Čapek was published and praised in the Soviet Union somewhat befuddled those who were determining what was admissible in literature and what was harmful. Finally, his book The War with the Newts was allowed to be published with only minor censorship, and I decided to write my seminar paper on it. Čapek’s political utopia entranced me so much that I decided to study his work further, and I began regularly visiting the university library reading room. Surprisingly, during a time when all “ideologically harmful works” in the area of politics, history, economics, philosophy, and social science, that is, all non-Marxist works, had disappeared from the libraries and bookstores (it was as if authors such as Camus, Hemingway, Sartre, Faulkner, and Kafka had never existed), in the reading room I could request any journal from the polemical anticommunist Nebojsa to anti-Semitic and Fascist tabloids such as Arijský boj or Vlajka .

I spent hours and hours poring over volumes of prewar Lidové noviny, Přítomnost, and dozens of other journals to which Karel Čapek had contributed.

Eventually I was given permission to write my thesis on Čapek, which was supposed to address the antifascist elements in his work. But the works that were imprecisely designated antifascist, as far as I understood them, simply consummated Čapek’s lifelong efforts to warn against any form of totalitarianism, whether it was a technological civilization or the Nazi regime. In the end, my thesis treated Čapek’s entire oeuvre.

*

The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party took place at the end of February 1956. The press wrote about the congress in the usual spirit. The Communist Party members proudly reviewed the successes achieved as they were rebuilding their war-ravaged land and offered dizzying glimpses into the future. The people were following closely behind the country and a Leninist government of the party and the country. But there was nevertheless something astounding: a criticism of Stalin’s economic mistakes! The Soviet Communists also admitted that capitalism might temporarily achieve better economic results than Socialist economics. The congress concluded with elections in which the recommended candidates were unanimously approved.

A short time after, late in the evening Father called us together to the radio, which he’d acquired when he was released from prison. It was usually tuned to the news from Vienna rather than Prague. Although I was slowly forgetting my German, and although the radio was sometimes mostly static, I understood that at some sort of secret and closed meeting of the Central Committee in Moscow, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, had delivered a heretical speech in which he spoke of his predecessor as a criminal who had on his conscience the illegal persecution of innocent people, the torture of prisoners. According to Khrushchev, this all led to mass murder based on lists drawn up by Stalin himself or at least approved by him. Stalin had also apparently underestimated the danger of a German attack, and owing to his military ignorance he was responsible for a nearly hopeless situation on the fronts during the first months of the war. It wasn’t the content of the speech alone that struck me as unbelievable; it was that something like this could be said at the Congress of Soviet Communists, moreover by its highest member.