YOU MAY HAVE missed a headline the other day, in one of the sections of the New York Times that wasn’t about nesting or e-mail: STREET CRIME HITS PRAGUE DAILY LIFE, it told us. Nothing really surprising there. But the subhead to the same story was indeed remarkable: Czech Capital Discovers One Drawback of Democracy.
Democracy! Not, mind you, rampant inflation, staggering unemployment, runaway greed, corrupt politicians, or anything else to do with their new free-market Tinkertoy economy. It was because Czechs could now vote that Japanese tourists and Vietnamese “guest workers” were no longer safe on the baroque streets of the capital of Kafka, and neo-Nazi skinheads were suddenly bashing gypsies. It was because their speech at last was free that they cried for “lustration”—a purge of anyone who ever had a cup of coffee or a Pilsner with a Party apparatchik in the bad old days before Frank Zappa. It was because of self-determination that Slovaks were licensed to hate Czechs, while Václav Havel, the reluctant politician, had to run for another term as president of his very own Republic of Dreams—roughly the size, with roughly the same population, as the state of Pennsylvania—on a platform of “Not So Fast.”
We went to Prague for the first time, in the first place, because of Havel, having discovered in ourselves in the summer of 1990, after years of knowing better, a surprising capacity and an unseemly need to hero-worship. If not a Beckett, he was at least an Ionesco. It had been possible in New York to see Largo Desolato before the Velvet Revolution, and Audience almost immediately afterward, and even allowing for the rose-colored glasses we wore to these performances (the kaleidoscope eyes!), they were thrilling. An intellectual suspicious of his own intellections was at work, while all around him the world wrote another, more surprising narrative.
There is obviously a Czech style, ironic, self-deprecating, and sometimes vulgar, that shows up in Hašek, ˇCapek, Hrabal, and Vaculík, as well as Tom Stoppard’s plays and even Milan Kundera’s pre-Parisian novels. The wonderful thing about Havel was that he had proved to be braver than his own alter egos, that he’d shrugged off ambivalence like a smoking jacket, pointed himself toward a magnetic pole of decencies, and look what happened.
And when we weren’t going to see Havel at a theater, we were reading him in magazines and books—in Letters to Olga (from prison), Disturbing the Peace (a long interview that would be much revised by events) and the New York Review (his correspondence to the world, later published in the volume Open Letters). After writing plays about the breakdown of continuity and identity in the modern world; after starting a human-rights watchdog committee, Charter 77, in Prague; after seeing the magazine he edited censored into silence; after thinking subversive thoughts in front of an observation post, a sort of grandstand on stilts, that the security police built directly across the street from his apartment, after a pair of dress-rehearsal arrests… he was finally sent away for four years of hard labor. His weekly letters to his wife were all he was allowed to write. They began, as you’d expect, asking for cigarettes and socks. They ended as difficult essays on freedom, responsibility, and community. “Whether all is really lost or not,” he said, “depends on whether or not I am lost.” His nation found him.
All right, maybe he wasn’t perfect. From Disturbing the Peace and Open Letters, we gather that he had problems with feminists, though they made him feel guilty. And he misconstrued the peace movements in the West, which had a livelier sense of the possibility of change in Eastern Europe than did many dissidents. But compared to any other successful pol in the modern era, not counting Nelson Mandela, of course, he was downright heroic, an intellectual Ferdinand the Bull. As far back as 1965, he had seceded from what he calls the “post-totalitarian panorama” of “pseudo-history” and “automatism,” the spider web of secret police, anonymous informers, and faceless flunkies. Even when his plays were banned, he chose to behave as if he were free, in a brewery or in jail. He never contemplated leaving his country, although, typically, he wouldn’t hold it against anybody who did choose to emigrate: “What kind of human rights activists would we be if we were to deny people the right that every swallow has!”
His letters, to colleagues in movements like Solidarity and readers of Western magazines, were themselves public examples of “living within the truth,” vivid evidence of the existence of what he called a “second culture” of “free thought” and “alternative values,” a “parallel structure” of underground theaters, shadow universities, and samizdat publishing, that would eventually undermine the police-state “world of appearances,” of “ritual, façades and excuses.” (If the State won’t wither away, Michael Walzer once suggested, we have to “hollow it out.”) By behaving as if we are free—at student protests, on strike, by refusing to vote in the farcical elections, or even by going to a rock concert—we rehabilitate “values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love.” We renew relations with a vanished world where “categories like justice, honor, treason, friendship, fidelity, courage or empathy have a wholly tangible content.” We reconstitute “the natural world as the true terrain of politics,” “personal experience [as] the initial measure of things,” and “human community as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified human ‘I.’”
No wonder the last thing Sam Beckett did before dying was autograph a book for Václav. All writers ought to feel better when one of them makes it really big. In his first speech to the new Republic as its new president, in December 1989, Havel struck a characteristic note: “I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.”
Now just look at us in July 1990, on the brilliant cloudless morning of our first full day in Prague, footloose on the Charles Bridge over the swan-strewn Ultava, in the shadow of a gothic tower, swarmed upon by baroque saints, lapped at by Dixieland jazz, levitating to the Castle. Maybe I was full, like Kundera, of too much lightness of being. “Levitating” is an odd word to use when history is so heavy, from the Holy Roman Empire to Stalin’s squat, with time out for Jan Hus to be the first Protestant, for which they burned him at the stake. And it was an uphill hike, as if you had to earn the right to be there, from the Inn of the Three Ostriches and the Leningrad paintpots of the Malá Strana to the ramparts of Hradˇcany and the spires of the Jesuit cathedral of St. Vitus. But Prague exalted. It felt like Mozart.
There was also a fragility I feared for, as Ray Bradbury feared for the fairy towers in The Martian Chronicles, as if the façades were sculpted of smoke. We were traveling through Eastern Europe in a kind of caravan—French journalists with four children, a Washington, D.C., science editor, a delegation of noisy New York opinionizers—that fiddled at each new site with our logarithmic scales, like slide rules. Not all of us loved “Praha” as haplessly as I did. There was too little to eat—no bread after nine at night, no ice cream after ten, no open cafés past midnight—and too much silence, except in our hotel, the Forum, where the Japanese tourists fought it out with the Spaniards for the occasional slice of rare roast beef. But Kafka was everywhere, like Kilroy or McDonald’s. And it seemed to me that in that silence, everyone was thinking, and what I feared for was the dreamscape delicacy of that thought.
Our maps didn’t work. They’d changed the names of subway stops to get rid of “Gottwoldova” and “Cosmonauti.” You probably think the “Defenestration of Prague” was a massacre. What happened was that they tossed a couple of Roman Catholics out of a Castle window onto a dung heap. In one engraving, we saw a pair of feet making their exit, a sideways Assumption. The playwright/president himself has spoken of “the fatal frivolity with which history is made here.”
The night before our levitation to the Castle, we’d gone for a stroll down Wenceslas Square, where three hundred thousand people had taken the keys out of their pockets and rattled them like wind chimes, “like massed Chinese bells,” past the good king’s statue and candles burning for the martyred students, to Staromˇestké námˇesti (Old Town Square), just in time for the changing of the apostles on the famous clock with the bell-ringing skeleton. If Wenceslas Square was a depressing mall of thumping discos and listless moneychangers, Old Town Square was the loveliest urban prospect I have seen in decades of goatlike globe-trudge. We had a front-row seat on the Jan Hus statue to listen to some mopheaded Beatle mimics sing “She Loves You (Yeah Yeah Yeah).”
More than Mozart, the Beatles were what counted in 1990. We met them again on the Castle ramparts, singing “Penny Lane.” On radios in taxis, in elevators at the Forum, in courtyards, wine bars, beer halls, and on the Royal Procession from Tyn Church to the Ultava, we heard “Eleanor Rigby” and “Help!” We chased the shadow of a young artist who was building a Yellow Submarine to sail under the Charles Bridge that September. At Vyšehrad, where Princess Libuse took unto her a hardy yeoman, and so spawned the kings of Bohemia, we also listened to Led Zeppelin and the Fine Young Cannibals.
What did this mean? Havel, that leprechaun, wrote in Disturbing the Peace of his feelings in prison on hearing of the murder of John Lennon. He seemed to care more about Lennon than he did about Kundera, although, typically, he was kinder to Milan than he needed to be. (Kundera has had nothing to say about the Velvet Revolution. Isn’t this strange? Maybe he is too busy thinking about Stockholm. But if V. S. Naipaul was silent on the subject of Salman Rushdie, and John Le Carré craven, maybe writers aren’t any better than the rest of us, after all.) Havel first became a dissident while defending a censored Czech rock group. Not only had Frank Zappa beaten us to Prague, but, on the eve of our departure, Havel made it a point to show up in Spartakiadni Stadion for a Rolling Stones concert. And opening for the Stones was to be a Czech rock musician who had been elected to the new parliament. So: the world’s first rock ’n’ roll president. After which, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
We did what tourists in Prague were expected to do—sleep in a luxury hotel, eat duck for breakfast, visit the Castle, look at graveyards. At Vyšehrad, the well-born were nicely planted (Dvorˇák, for example). In Josefov, it was a different story. Though our guidebook described the Old Jewish Cemetery as “picturesque,” these tombstones cried out of the earth, like teeth around a scream. (And the next-door art of the death-camp children was what they must have seen.) Or we cooled our feet in the Wallenstein Gardens (a labyrinth, a grotto, peacocks). Visited the Smetana (a chambered nautilus of Art Nouveau). Went to movies on the Revolution (student heroism). Ate ice cream at the Slavia (where Sorrow-steeped young Werthers killed themselves isometrically). Snuffled cappuccino at the Europa, next door to a restaurant that was a replica of the dining room on the Titanic (more Czech humor). Bought a ticket to the Magic Lantern (I had to go to the theater where they wrote this script) for a performance of the Kouzelný Cirkus, with horses, clowns, and ballerinas, as if Monty Python’s Life of Brian had met Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. (I’m afraid it’s typical that we should have gone to the Magic Lantern for a circus, late as usual, while Timothy Garton Ash, always on time, had been there for a revolution: “swift, almost entirely nonviolent, joyful and funny.”) And looked for Agnes of Bohemia…
Only to find instead a ten-foot sculpture of a Trabi, the East German People’s Car, on four huge naked human legs, with a license plate that said in Czech: “QUO VADIS?” This whimsical cyborg, symbolizing the artist’s ambivalent feelings about German reunification, had shown up mysteriously in Old Town Square two months before we did. It was allowed to remain during the “cucumber season” only because the mayor of Prague, Jaroslav Koran, was a friend of Kurt Vonnegut’s, a translator of his fiction, and could be counted on to sympathize with hijinks.
I knew of the artist who sculpted the cyborg, David Cˇerný, though I’d never met him. He was a friend of my stepdaughter’s, from before the Fall. And also the pilot of the Yellow Submarine scheduled to ship out at the end of cucumber season. He’d created, as well, a Student Slot Machine: You drop in a coin, and the Student, shooting up an arm, shouts: “Freedom! Freedom!” And, since statues in Czechoslovakia are always going up and then toppling down again because of various revolting developments, David had also invented an all-purpose Headless Dignitary, a windmill with mugshots of various Important People stuck on each of its blades, so that, no matter which way the ideological wind was blowing in whatever political weather, there was always someone to salute. Barely born in 1968, entirely innocent of Prague Spring, David and his tribe had lived by their outlaw wits in ironic opposition, in transit underground on discarded Metro tickets to sly conceptual jokes. They didn’t know whether to believe that Havel was real. Nor would they even meet with us, their plutocratic elders, credit-card utopiaheads. Like Peter Pan, they ran away. Like the Mystery Cat in T. S. Eliot, Macavity’s not there.
But David did show up in the world news before our next visit to Prague. Perhaps you recall the briefly famous pinking of the Prague tank in 1991. Some artists who weren’t named in the first small story in the Los Angeles Times were arrested for having painted, a shocking pink, the Soviet tank that sat as a monument to the Red Army’s liberation of Prague in 1945. One of the artists claimed to have a permit for painting the tank pink, but it proved to be a forgery. This sounded to some of us, in New York, a lot like one of David Cˇerný’s subversive jokes. But the story disappeared, and so did David, who was supposed to visit the United States that month.
There followed a couple of unsigned postcards from places like Switzerland and then a copy of the English-language expat journal Prognosis, from which we gathered that the pinking of the tank, on April 28, 1991, took forty-six minutes and forty liters of paint, and it looked “like a child’s toy or a newborn child.” Czech soldiers took twice as long to repaint the tank its primary color, on April 30, so that it looked again like James Joyce’s “snotgreen scrotum-tightening sea.” On May 15, twenty members of the Czech Parliament slipped out at night to paint it pink again. And Václav Havel, that Captain Kangaroo, lost his temper. David Cˇerný and his friends were suddenly on trial. With the surprising connivance of Vonnegut’s buddy, the mayor of Prague, they were accused of “criminal hooliganism” under Paragraph 202 of the Czech penal code—the same notorious statute that had been invoked to arrest Václav Havel in the Evil Empire days. If convicted, they faced two years in prison.
After the second pinking of the tank, Havel wasn’t the only dignitary to stamp his foot. “A vile act!” raged Soviet foreign minister Vitaly Churkin. Poor Alexander Dubcˇek, whose personal experience of Red Army tanks went back to 1968, was dragged out of retirement and hustled off to Moscow to apologize, on television, to the Russians. “Where will it end?” asked the president of Brigadoon, missing the point. “Will we have the St. Wenceslas statue painted red, St. Vitus Cathedral in blue, all the paintings in the galleries spray-painted?” He seemed to forget his own defense, in 1976, of the Plastic People of the Universe, at whose trial he demanded to know—I quote from Open Letters—why “no one present could do the one thing that was appropriate in this situation: stand up and shout: ‘Enough of this comedy! Case dismissed!’”
A pro-Cˇerný “Pink Coalition” of artists, students, and members of KAN—the Club of Non-Aligned Party Members—then clashed with right-wing shock troops from the Movement for Civic Freedom and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia. A dozen rock bands gathered on June 1 in Wenceslas Square for a designated Pink Day. Two separate bank accounts were established in Prague to pay Cˇerný’s fines. And by signing a petition that was Pro-Pinking, some sixty deputies to the Federal Assembly and another thousand assorted luminaries violated yet another statute, Law 165, which prohibits “the approval of a proven crime.” Meanwhile, the Soviet tank itself had disappeared from its Smichov pedestal, and was said to be hidden away behind armed guards in an unnamed Prague museum. Perhaps the New York Times would blame this, too, on democracy.