THE LIVING ROOM of the Playwright’s country house was hazy with cigarette smoke and ash escaping the furnace. Thousands of typed pages occupied the wooden floor. Seven of my colleagues and I sat in the narrow spaces between the stacks, typewriters in our laps, copying page after page to add to the disorganized piles of dangerous literature. Every hour or so, my ink-stained hands trembled so intensely I had to pause, drink down the champagne in my cup, and smoke a few cigarettes to ease the jitters.

As I took a drag on my Startka and blew out the smoke, I began to read again through the debut issue of our group’s illegal literary review, Ark, representing a year’s worth of intellectual contraband: poems and essays and novel excerpts from writers banned by the Communist regime. For twelve months we had crossed Prague through dark alleyways to make sure we weren’t followed, met with authors and their allies to obtain copies of their works unseen. We had checked our telephones and light switches daily for bugs, engaged foreign agents, and established our smuggling routes. We had made it to this climactic night without being arrested, a feat that was at once exhilarating and suspicious.

In 1977, hundreds of civic signatories—some of the most significant Czechoslovakian activists and artists among them—signed Charter 77, a document declaring that the Communist government had failed to follow the human-rights provisions determined by the constitution and the Helsinki Accords. Following the government’s harsh response and persecution of the signatories, we decided to do our part in chipping away at the regime by forming the samizdat Ark Assembly. The cultural climate of my country had reached a critical point—after decades of masterful censorship, the government had managed to discourage the average citizen from expressions of intellectual curiosity. Staying safe in the country meant staying away from political opinion and the public sphere. Interestingly, our country’s Communism led to the rise of rabid individualism: Look out for yourself, ignore injustice, and you shall remain free. The efforts of the samizdat network were meant to break through this cultural stalemate. To remind us all of our collective consciousness, to assert that whatever was possible in art—rebellion, revolution, a reawakening of the mind—was also possible in life.

We had gathered works from the foremost enemies of the state, some of them exiled from the country or sitting in prison. In the house of the Playwright we prepared our thirty-page publication for distribution, hoping that our commitment to its content would make up for the poor production values, the pages bound together with crooked staples and stained with ink. I wished we could present the powerful texts aimed at the regime’s inhumanity in a more appealing form, but we didn’t have the luxury of aesthetics. On our typewriters we produced one copy after another until we reached five hundred issues, ready to be delivered to our friends.

The government made great work of turning society against its dissidents: Look at these drunken sexual deviants disturbing the peace while you try to do your jobs and raise your families. I tried not to think about the substantial files the secret police kept on my activities, friends, family. My social circle was closed, as any new people I might befriend would also be watched by the regime—or, worse, they could be spies. With my name carved on the jobs blacklist, I could never decide to pivot to a new career and a “normal,” state-sanctioned life. I lived for this uncertainty. My activities against the government weren’t a flight of fancy, some fickle rebellion. I was fighting for it all, revolution or death.

I set the magazine down and breathed. I knew there would never again be a moment like this in my life. Most likely we were all going to prison. The feeling of invincibility inside this country house was pure delusion, and yet, despite the dangers, I was happy to be there with my only true friends, high on the prospect of fighting back against the oppressor. My coconspirators looked magnificent, ruddy-cheeked and buzzed, kissing one another on the head and neck, belching from the seemingly bottomless champagne at our disposal, editing one another’s paragraphs with admiration and a loud mockery of missed errors. I wished I had a camera to capture it, but the dissidents had a rule against creating photographic evidence. Besides, there had been three secret-police officers stationed across the road from the house for hours, attempting to photograph us through the newspaper-covered windows.

Ondráš fell into my lap and buried his face in my neck. He wore a brown sweater I’d given him for his birthday, snug on his slim body. His breath was sour from the coffee he never quit drinking. We had met years ago at an absurdist stage production. I had just run away from home in pursuit of an acting career. My father and I had reached an impasse over his plans to marry me off to the village priest and my plans to move to the city and live like a heathen. We fought about everything—the way I spent my time, the clothes I wore to the pub, the food I didn’t like to eat. One fateful night, I suggested I might try to become a vegan. In response, my father forced on me a piece of bread slathered with lard. I tossed it in the garbage. He took my refusal to eat animals as an assault on his lifelong values and threw his piece of larded bread at my face, declaring I was under house arrest until my eighteenth birthday.

I ran away from home the next day, slept on the couches of friends who had escaped the village before me, applied to acting conservatories while I waited tables and looked for an apartment. But I was rejected from schools because my parents weren’t members of the party. My server’s wages were just enough to cover the rent for an attic apartment on top of a cobbler’s shop. The fleas wouldn’t let me sleep, and I spent my nights making plans. Everywhere I went, I encountered glue traps set to slow me down, and my rage at the regime reached its peak in those days of my early adulthood. Tired of the poor wages and the harassment from drunken bureaucrats dining at the bistro, I quit waiting tables and began serving drinks at private parties organized by bohemians, hippies, beatniks, all those living outside the arbitrary moral code of the Homo sovieticus. Baby steps into dissent.

At a party organized by a theater group, I met thespians who offered to bring me into their world, much needed patronage. I began to spend all my free time with the group led by the Playwright, and their friendship became too intriguing to pass up. On the day of my eighteenth birthday, I attended the premiere of the Playwright’s latest protest piece, and I noticed the man pretending he wasn’t looking at me. Ondráš.

Despite the brutal effects of the Prague Winter, during which the government had backtracked from attempts to relax the country’s authoritarian laws and begun to terrorize its citizens even more, in those days I remained a committed socialist. I believed in socialism with a human face, the concept introduced by Alexander Dubček, which aimed to retain socialism while eliminating the totalitarian aspects of Communist rule and democratizing the country. A direct challenge to the establishment in Moscow. Freed from the crushing influence of imperialist Russia, a true Marxist Czechoslovakia, led by the workers, could become the leader of the worldwide labor uprising. So went the thinking. However, Ondráš believed that the country could thrive only if the selfish interests of the people were an equal part of the process, that a regulated market in the hands of private ownership was integral to preserving the destiny of socialist nations. He wanted to avoid the bad press that came with food shortages and mismanagement of the planned economy.

We argued loudly during every date until we got tired and took each other’s clothes off. In the end, we were more united than our fights suggested—we were both young and wanted more of a say in what our world should look like.

Now, in the Playwright’s country house, Ondráš refilled my champagne mug and walked to the window facing the road. He peeled off a corner of the newspaper, revealing the vehicles parked across the street, three men in parkas with cameras around their necks.

“No reinforcements yet,” Ondráš announced.

“If you keep looking, they’ll take your picture,” someone called out.

“I’ll be the face of the resistance,” Ondráš said.

“If you’re the face of us, we’re doomed,” I said.

Ondráš’s cheeks turned dark red. Sometimes he was still just a boy.

At last the typing in the room stopped, and we arranged the freshly stapled issues into neat piles sorted by destination. Most of the copies were headed to the godfathers and godmothers of the samizdat network, to be passed along their routes. We planned to leave more copies around university campuses, cultural centers, and movie theaters to reach the wider public. Finally, international agents would smuggle Ark beyond the border so that Czech émigrés and interested foreigners could witness the literature produced by a country fighting for its sanity.

Before we arrived at the Playwright’s house, Ondráš had taken me to lunch at the Golden Tiger pub and asked me to marry him. I found the idea of marriage idiotic and tempting at the same time. My mother had married my father because he’d inherited a wealth of potato fields, and throwing away such prospects in a struggling postwar country was foolish. What kind of life did Babi forfeit because of this forced pragmatism? But the concept of marriage had grown on me as I watched the dissident couples in our circle, how they upheld each other intellectually and spiritually, fought for common ideas, even allowed themselves the freedom of sleeping with others. The country in crisis was an aphrodisiac. I was in love, and my friends swore that marriage made dissidents bulletproof. I told Ondráš he’d have my answer after Ark was out in the world, after our mission was complete. It seemed irresponsible to commit two life-changing acts in such quick succession.

The sorted packages of Ark now took up nearly half the room. We began stuffing them into our bags. I disposed of the empty bottles of champagne and checked our field equipment—cigarettes, flasks, IDs, car keys. We looked at the maps one last time, confirmed the diversion plan. The secret-police vehicles were sure to follow us. The fact that they hadn’t yet struck meant only that they hadn’t figured out the nature of our contraband, and their bosses had ordered them to practice restraint. The government’s handling of Charter 77 had caused civilian unrest, and the fízláci decided to switch their tools of reproach from hammer to scalpel. They waited and watched, and our hope was that they’d keep their distance a while longer as we slipped into the long night. Drop the packages before they could catch up.

Our parting silence, after a day of cheer and determination, felt startling and grim. We shook hands, we hugged, kissed, and filed out of the house. The policemen exchanged words on their radios. Glared at us and the bags in our hands without any attempt to keep their directive of secrecy. Ondráš and I got in the back seat of the Moravian Poet’s Trabant, the duffel bags filled with Arks at our feet, while the Poet and the Playwright sat in the front. The Poet started the engine.

We followed the Škoda carrying the second half of our group, a polyamorous trio of actors and our precious literary critic, Hajzl. It was after midnight, the streetlamps had been turned off, and the road was barely visible under the starless sky. Occasionally I dared to look over my shoulder at the cop vehicle following us. We left the village limits, no longer subject to the strict speed limit, and suddenly the engine strained and growled and the Trabant jerked forward at full speed as the Moravian Poet pushed the pedal to the mat.

The road cut through endless wheat fields, with sharp turns that made for a nauseating ride. The Poet jerked the wheel so quickly, we veered off the road and onto the grass, giving the policemen a chance to catch up. The Poet steered us back onto the road and we swerved left to right. I bit my tongue and tasted blood. The drivers behind us realized we didn’t plan on slowing down, and with the squeal of a siren, their presence became startlingly public. The Škoda in front of us disappeared into the darkness. At least this part of the plan was working—our vehicle kept the cops occupied while our colleagues vanished on the country roads.

We entered another village and circled the statue of a forgotten saint. Two yellow vehicles of Public Security appeared like hideous fireflies; the screech of their sirens joined in with the pursuers’. They blocked our path, and the Poet screamed as he slammed on the breaks.

“Looks like we’re done,” said the Playwright.

“That was like a Bond movie,” Ondráš said.

I was disappointed he’d say something so superficial in a moment like this. I asked if we should set fire to the magazines.

“Don’t!” the Poet shouted. “We’ll choke in here.”

Unable to see through the blinding flashes of police lights, I lit another cigarette, some relief before I was captured. If they wanted me, they’d have to carry my deadweight. Cold air penetrated the car and extinguished my smoke. The Playwright was pulled from his seat like a rag doll. A boot crushed his cheek against the ground while someone snapped cuffs around his wrists.

I didn’t have enough time to worry about what came next before some malevolent force gripped my legs and shoulders and I too felt the asphalt beneath my back. I tried to breathe in and grabbed at the uniforms of the men surrounding me. They turned me onto my stomach and pressed my face into the asphalt. The knee eased off my back after my hands were cuffed, then the cops raised me up. Ondráš and the Playwright were leaning against one of the firefly cars, trying to catch their breath, but I couldn’t see our Moravian Poet. I looked inside the vehicle. He was still in the driver’s seat, both of his hands firmly on the steering wheel, his teeth bared like a beast’s.

“Good luck, dipshits,” I told the cops, and the man holding my wrists slapped me across the head.

Two policemen approached, one from each side, and tried to tear the Poet’s hands from the wheel. He screamed again, a bloodcurdling sound somewhere between a howl and a warlord’s battle cry. The men backed away.

“Let’s break his arms,” one said.

“He can’t show up for interrogation with shattered bones,” said the other. “These are politicals. They need to look good for pictures.”

“What, then? Tickle him? Sing him a lullaby?”

I relaxed every muscle in my body to force the men to strain as they dragged me to the car. I wanted to be a burden to the end, like the Moravian Poet. In my interrogation, I wouldn’t talk; in court, I would laugh at the judge, declare that I didn’t recognize the legal authority of a criminal state; in jail, I wouldn’t eat. The men placed me inside the firefly vehicle with Ondráš. I looked at him, but he didn’t look back. He stared out the window as if he were simply a tourist enjoying the Bohemian scenery. Was it indifference I saw? Impossible. The edge of his eyebrow twitched. Why wasn’t he joining us in fighting to the end?

The men who’d captured us sat in the front seats and discussed the previous night’s football match. “It pains me just how fucked you are,” the driver said casually, “going to jail because of poetry.”

I asked Ondráš if he was hurt, but he wouldn’t talk. We rode through the sleeping villages, the bigger towns slowly coming alive as the bakers and grocers prepared for the day’s work, the roads lined by trees with their crowns stripped bare. The small embers of the cops’ cigarettes drew shapes in the car’s darkness. The smoke burned my eyes.

“Looks like your boyfriend might not be so brave,” the driver said. “So scared he’s gone mute.” He turned the radio on to a collaborator pop star singing a love ballad to the nation.

I placed my head on the seat, focused on steady breathing. Ondráš’s expression worried me. Could he turn on us? Maybe he was embarrassed that the police had subdued him in front of me. No, this would pass. We’d get through the interrogations and do our time. Continue to live free and young. But these thoughts didn’t offer the usual comfort. For the first time I considered the possibility that I had bitten off more than I could stomach. The swift cold violence of the police together with Ondráš’s silence unnerved me. Cop cars, it seemed, were designed to make ideals shrivel in the back seat.

We reached the bright lights of Prague, but the policemen parked in one of the darkest streets in the city, in front of a former factory repurposed to host jail cells and interrogation offices. The men led me to a separate entryway as I called out after Ondráš one last time. I told him we had nothing to fear, though I didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t look at me before I was forced alone into a hallway that smelled of sour and sick.

My captors led me into the basement cells, removed my handcuffs, and pushed me behind a green metal door. There was a cot attached to a wall, a bucket, and a gray blanket with red stains on it. In the corner a mouse decomposed inside a glue trap. I sat on the cot, put my hands on my knees, and closed my eyes. Deep breaths. Soon they would claim me for interrogation. I’d never been questioned before, but I’d heard plenty from more experienced friends. The interrogators preferred to torture the men physically and the women psychologically.

There was no reason to keep me here; I’d committed no real violations of the law, no treason. But in the offices above me, some of the most skilled liars in the world were dreaming up the narrative for my heinous thought-crimes. I breathed. I recalled my dream life that would follow the country’s liberation: An Old Town apartment with a desk in the middle of the living room, two typewriters set up facing each other. Ondráš and I could write there all day, read to each other in the bathtub at night.

I woke up not knowing what time it was, my wrist numb because I’d used it as a pillow.

The cell door was open and a guard was saying, “Slavíková, free to leave.” Just like that.

The guard led me by the elbow into a room with windows where he returned my bag and wallet, now emptied of the Ark envelopes and all my cash. He ignored my questions about the fate of my friends and let me out through the same door by which I had arrived.

I stood in the middle of a sunlit street as schoolchildren with backpacks passed me carelessly, as seniors rushed to the store for breakfast milk. With its gray, unkempt walls and the many blacked-out windows, the building behind me was meant to be inconspicuous at first glance but to serve as a petrifying omen. A warning to the nation. Something as ordinary as a rubber factory could be transformed into the most brutal tool of the regime.

I began to walk home, feeling perversely insulted. The cops hadn’t asked for my signature upon departure, meaning that my arrest was not on the official record. They hadn’t bothered asking a single question. Was it a ploy? Was I to be followed, lead them to the rest of my coconspirators, the samizdat sponsors?

I had to face the more probable reason: I wasn’t important. I wasn’t a significant threat, they craved bigger fish than a young woman no one had ever heard of. Despite risking everything just like my colleagues, I was an unimportant link in the chain of dissent. It made me sick. Did I want to be more important and spend years in prison? Perhaps. Perhaps I wanted to be one of the famous martyrs I spent my evenings reading about. I can only present my youth as a defense for this folly, the fetishization of dissident misery.

Once I was safely behind the door of my apartment, I ran a bath. Submerged in the water cleansing me of the filthy prison cell, I lit a smoke. Thankfully, I didn’t own a radio, which allowed for some moments of silence and comfort, the world on my terms without the intrusive thoughts of strangers. I brushed my teeth twice and dressed. Inhaled the fresh breeze coming through the open window. A much better start to my day than the fecal stench of an unwashed jail cot. I left and walked to the house of the Moravian Poet’s girlfriend, who hadn’t been with us that night due to illness, to make phone calls.

WITHIN TWO DAYS, we knew that our colleagues from the second car had been arrested too. Every issue of Ark had been confiscated and burned, all our efforts turned to ash. The Playwright and the Moravian Poet, already known and admired among Czechs, were to be put on trial as our ringleaders. The rest of us were unknown to the public and thus unworthy of the expense of publicized prosecution. To my horror, there was no news of Ondráš. I couldn’t sleep, lived only on coffee. I pictured Ondráš’s ravaged body in jail, how he shivered as he starved, the threats to his family shouted at him in a room without windows.

Every day I rang Ondráš’s doorbell to see if he had been released. No answer. Weeks into my struggle to learn my lover’s fate, I picked up a newspaper and found a page-long letter of apology to the nation. A strong condemnation of the group who’d produced literary propaganda on behalf of Western agents. The letter’s author regretted his misguided attack on the republic, explained that he’d been seduced by a group of perverted heathens bent on disassembling the social contract and ushering in a new era of foreign-sponsored anarchy. Under the letter appeared a familiar signature and finally a name that I read over and over—Ondráš Louka. Former editor of the propagandist magazine Ark.

I hurled the newspaper into the street, where its pages separated from one another among the slow-moving cars. A uniformed policeman approached and asked why I felt the need to loiter. I walked away lest I throw him into the street too. Ordinarily I walked the city feeling affection for its citizens. My political efforts were not undertaken to carve out some glory for myself (though I couldn’t deny my addiction to adrenaline) but to remove the constraints on our collective lives, the specter of the police state that starved our minds with fear. I felt compelled to love my neighbor, even the informer. But on that day I could only conjure hatred and mistrust for humankind, for the coward dormant in all of us, the milksop poltergeist that awoke within the people you thought you loved and turned them into the enemy’s megaphone.

I jumped onto the busy tram and elbowed my way through the crowd. At Ondráš’s street, I got out and waited in front of the entrance to his building until a neighbor walked out and let me in. I went up to the third floor. Seeing his name on the door to his apartment made me sick. I knocked with my knuckles, then my fists. I pulled off my shoe and beat it on the door until neighbors began to gather on the stairwell. Finally, Ondráš emerged.

“Let me in,” I said.

“I can’t be around you,” he said. “It’s part of the deal. They’re watching me.” I pushed against him, but he wouldn’t budge, his body blocking the doorway. “I can no longer congregate with—”

“The heathens? The perverts?”

He reached his hand out to me and I batted it away with the shoe.

“Fine,” he said. “Come inside.”

“I don’t want to.”

“What do you want, then?”

“For you to be someone else.”

He shrugged like a little boy caught stealing from the pantry. “I can’t throw my life away over some short stories,” he said. “In a month people will forget about me and I can go back to living a normal life. They’ll let me keep my job. That’s worth a bit of shame.”

“A normal life. You goddamn idiot. No one is alive in this place.”

“Don’t be a child. We’ll have more chances to change the world down the road.”

“I suppose I should’ve taken your religion of self-interest more seriously,” I said with a laugh.

“We are born alone,” he said.

I scoffed and turned around, slipped my torn shoe back onto my foot, and walked downstairs. I would never see Ondráš again. I turned his words over in my head. Perhaps he was right. We are born alone. We are knowable only to ourselves. Each friendship, each love, is an act of resistance against this truth. I’d lost my new family as quickly as I had found it. The only protection against such loss is detachment.

I ADOPTED THE DEFEATED, individualistic mood of my countrymen. Walked around in a haze, head down, refused to speak lest a pair of informer ears were listening nearby. I drank an abundance of rum from morning to night and ceased to read the smuggled books the Poet’s girlfriend offered me. I stopped going to the dissident parties, annoyed with the married men’s double meanings, the ways in which they leered now that I was unattached. Sex seemed inconvenient. Food tasted like paper. What’s a revolution without gasoline? We glorify the strength of ideas, but in fact, ideas are as fleeting as a flash of lust. Ondráš had preached liberty or death for years until he faced a bit of danger and retracted everything. How could anyone else be trusted not to do the same? Soon I realized I wasn’t much better than him. Revolutionary thought is kept alive within the individual only through the shared faith of others. Ondráš capitulated because his tormentors made him feel alone. I capitulated because Ondráš made me feel the same.

As I distanced myself from the dissidents, I lost access to the resources they shared. The only work I could find was cleaning at a hospital outside Prague. I left the apartment above the cobbler’s shop and moved into a cheap studio I shared with a coworker. My new flatmate and I also shared a passion for escape through alcohol, each enabling the other to consume crippling quantities of vodka daily without fear of judgment. The world was ending, and it seemed reasonable to have a bit of fun, if you could call it that, on our way out.

During this hazy period, I also reconnected with my parents. One day, I simply boarded a train to Hluboká and appeared on their doorstep. My mother embraced me unconditionally and began to plan a party to make up for all of my birthdays we’d failed to celebrate. My father and I returned to the relationship we’d always had, polite and cold, until Babi was able to defuse the hostile tension between us. Neither my father nor I ever acknowledged my absence and what had caused it. Though everything else in my life had gone wrong, at least I had the comfort of my mother, the safe refuge of our family home.

Although I visited my parents occasionally, mostly I stayed in Prague. Toward the end of the summer of 1981, more than two years into this mind-numbing existence, I was in my flat alone, getting buzzed before my shift, when I saw a pool of water traveling from our toilet to the living room. I ran to the neighbors to use their phone. About an hour later, two men arrived, one of them tall and strong, a basketball player and a former engineering student who’d gotten kicked out of university and assigned to plumbing after his father refused to join the party. We exchanged phone numbers.

I found comfort and adventure in Jirka’s bed, though it was only physical, as I didn’t care for his mockery of books and intellectualism in general. “Who’s gonna save the country, Adi? The smart people?” Soon I found out he was quite resourceful in the outside world. He’d been part of an international smuggling network for years, a part-time job to help him save money to emigrate. Jeans, Belgian chocolate, Western electronics were his bread and butter. Jirka’s education, though interrupted, helped him figure out new ways to install secret compartments in vehicles and airplanes. When he’d heard enough pillow talk about my disillusionment with love and humanity, he proposed a solution: A brand-new life. Jirka offered to get me to America to earn the all-powerful dollar. To smuggle me through Yugoslavia and into Italy, through the Iron Curtain and into the West, where I could travel freely. Maybe I’d meet some rich American to marry, he joked. Fuck love and fuck socialism with a human face. Get paid.

My answer could only be yes. Just like that. I had nothing holding me home. Not even the pleas of my mother, who begged me to return to the village and make peace with my father, could change my mind. I was to find my luck across the Atlantic. My nights with Jirka changed. The plan brought us closer; we were no longer just casual lovers. He improved my English, repeating phrases into the early hours of the morning: “Keep cool, baby. Can I use your restroom? Take me to the hospital.” He brought me textbooks and tapes. With every new word I learned, my decision to leap into the unknown became more real.

So much has happened since then. I can barely remember the thrill of the dissidents smoking and laughing at nothing as they typed up their pages, I can barely feel the burn of hatred for Ondráš’s betrayal. The Playwright Who Became Prisoner, our fearless leader, was killed in prison, became the Playwright Who Was Martyred. The Moravian Poet found great fortune and success as a professor in Canada. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them.

What I do remember are my hopes for the future, how much I demanded of life back then. How could I have strayed so far from these endless ambitions, the sacrifices I made to fulfill them? I asked the apparition of my daughter at the edge of my bed, I reached for her, I begged her for answers and for comfort…