The symbolic redesign of the Castle compounded the daily tasks spawned by the revolutionary victory over Communism. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, observed King Henry IV, and so it was. Havel instantly had on his newly acquired black desk a mushrooming pile of tasks — new appointments, foreign-policy initiatives, receiving and replying to petitions from individual citizens and their organizations, dismantling the old nomenklatura system, handling the media. The problems seemed all-encompassing. Havel’s tempo of life quickened. Gone were the days of sleeping late, drinking coffee and rum, writing a bit, going to the sauna, making love at odd times of the day. Scores, then hundreds and then thousands of letters began to pour each day into the Castle from congratulators and complainants, a growing number of them (Prince Karel Schwarzenberg later recalled) written in the form of petitions to the monarch.349 The reception was spectacular, sometimes wild. Gifts of all kinds flooded the Castle offices. There were even envelopes stuffed with money — a few with fat wads of greenbacks, which prompted the joke, among the Castle aides, that such gifts proved that the revolution was really a CIA plot after all.
New security structures had to be created. New Castle guards had to be trained to close the gates of the crowned republic at 11 p.m., to escort the security staff from the President’s office, to check that all windows and doors were locked and that staff working late knew the night’s password, then to patrol inside the grounds, Scorpion machine guns, infrared goggles and radio transmitters in hand. New office equipment had to be purchased from scarce funds to supplement the dusty old Czech and Russian typewriters that had been left behind. Scarce and unusable stationery made life more difficult. ‘Someone should retype this,’ Havel said to a colleague after spotting that a letter appointing an ambassador was written on a Communist job form. ‘It’s not your job,’ added Havel apologetically, ‘but you’re the only secretary I can call... It’s ridiculous. Could you please type it on Federal Republic stationery?’350
Personnel had to be recruited — fast. An orgy of patronage went some way towards solving the problem. There were several typical methods used. Havel picked his own inner circle, whom he treated during the first year as a collective presidency. Other key people — Stanislav Milota, Prince Karel Schwarzenberg — were recommended and contacted by Havel personally. It was a time-consuming business and didn’t always work (Havel and Milota went to see the writer Ludvík Vaculík, who decided firmly against coming to the Castle). Others who had been Havel’s acquaintances before the revolution were contacted, and they in turn contacted others whom Havel did not know: it was state-building by nods and winks and word of mouth. A case in point was the appointment to the Castle of V. Valeš, who had been Minister of Foreign Trade in 1968, and who had done time in prison with Havel. Valeš called Komárek; Komárek called Václav Klaus; and Klaus spoke to Dlouhý.351 The tactic of nepotism sometimes produced bizarre combinations — wildly bearded cameraman Stanislav Milota rubbing shoulders with clean-cut bespectacled economist Václav Klaus, for instance — and matters were complicated by the fact that the procedures through which the co-ordination of the newly appointed staff was supposed to take place were initially undefined.
The architecture didn’t help. Many newly appointed aides seemed to take ages to memorize the location of the in-house toilets, while most new staff seemed mesmerized by the labyrinthine structures of the Castle. But the most difficult adjustment that Havel and his inner circle of advisers had to make was getting used to the experience of exercising governmental power. Like John F. Kennedy, Havel had an unusually strong urge to govern, which made the adjustment easier. The heartfelt camaraderie, which sprang up around him instantly, also made everything worthwhile. Havel and his team had the feeling that they were at sea on the same tiny boat, and that they should do everything to avoid sinking it. The unconditional trust and loyalty resulted not only from the euphoria of being on the winning side in a revolution. Solidarity not only came from living in each other’s pockets for eighteen hours each day, seven days each week. Fear also bred solidarity. The first few weeks and months in the Castle understandably felt dangerous. For the first six months, the Castle was partly policed by Ministry of the Interior guards, some of whom were literally hidden away in the woodwork.352 One day Havel demanded that Richard Sacher, the newly appointed Minister of the Interior, come to open up a keyless room situated near the President’s proposed new office. Everybody was shocked when the concealed door was opened. There stood a fearsome-looking soldier on guard, armed with a Scorpion machine gun, listening to the sounds generated by various intercom devices planted in the surrounding rooms. Someone later asked Havel: ‘Do you think that soldier knew who you were?’ Said Havel cheekily: ‘Probably so, because otherwise he would have shot me dead on the spot.’
Experiences like this were commonplace. Sometimes Havel responded by horsing around with his bodyguards — forcing them to work into the wee hours of the morning as he danced and drank at friends’ parties — or by pushing the security system to its limits, just for the hell of it, without disrespect for its personnel. He seemed determined to prove the famous maxim of the eighteenth-century philosophe Helvétius that men sometimes strive after power so that they can enjoy themselves. During a visit to a Czech village pub, Havel suddenly said to Joska Skalník: ‘You wanna see something? Follow me!’ Pretending to go to the toilet, the two escapees climbed out of an open back window and began strolling, hands in pockets, down a country road, belatedly followed by scrambling, nervous security men in their macs and on their walkie-talkies.353 Havel was also skilled at the night-time art of giving his bodyguards the slip — for instance, by pretending to go to bed, waiting for them to fall asleep, then tiptoeing out to a pub for a few drinks. Generally, security was no laughing matter. Guarded only by unarmed karate experts, the group members initially chose to work from one cramped room.354 They felt like conquerors in enemy territory. Even the straightforward experience of going to the toilet — down the long, red-carpeted corridors lined with Ministry of the Interior soldiers clutching sub-machine guns — was hemmed in with so much anxiety that the word relief assumed a new meaning. Fear made coping with the extraordinary work pressures that much more difficult. So did the lack of free time. It is commonly pointed out — using the obvious example of the imposition of clock time in early modern industrial factories — that those who exercise power over others always seek to determine their daily rhythms, their shared definition of the flows and constraints of time. But it is equally true that power over others extracts a price: the powerful have little or no free time as well.
From the first day, the Castle resembled a time-consuming machine. Havel and his team ran constantly, at high speed, feeling all the while that it was impossible to keep abreast of events. Consequently, everybody in the inner circle lost their private lives, and their sleep. Havel’s average of three or four hours per night was typical. Nobody had any time for themselves, or for others outside their immediate circle. Tempers sometimes flared within the presidential group: sometimes those who exploded were simply allowed to exercise their right to explode so as to calm down naturally, or they were grabbed and physically shaken until they regained their senses, or they were ordered to go home to bed to rest. Everybody seemed to develop extra and thicker skins, to become more brusque, less patient, more prone to cause others to cry. Outside friendships became strained. Those with families at home found themselves so consumed and exhausted by their posts that they had little or no time to attend to their children or their partners. Children complained loudly and sometimes turned aggressive. Relationships suffered, partners found it hard to put up with their parvenu politicians, and at least one marriage became a casualty of prolonged absence.
So time-starved power bred mental and bodily stress, which was worsened by the sheer volume of situations and problems to be defined, judged and resolved. Lawyers sometimes sobbed uncontrollably. Secretarial staff couldn’t cope. A good administrator was defined as someone who didn’t break down sobbing until two in the afternoon. Everybody quickly recognized that some matters were insoluble. Life within the newly established Office of Amnesties and Complaints, for instance, threw up some extreme, but not atypical cases. A small example: embarrassed confusion descends on the Office of the President when an angry letter arrives, addressed to Havel and written by a man whose daughter had just been murdered by an individual personally amnestied several weeks earlier by the President. A bigger example: twenty-five former nomenklatura staff working within the Castle are fired, upon evidence that they have worked to obstruct justice and tarnish Havel’s public image. And an example that is full of political danger: with 7,000 letters per month flooding into the Office of Amnesties and Complaints, it is decided to try to deal collectively with certain complaints by hosting open public meetings in the regions. In Bratislava, more than a thousand citizens crush into an auditorium to meet the President’s aides. The venue is carefully chosen to provide an easy back-exit escape route leading to the railway-station shunting yards, where if necessary the presidential aides will sleep that night in empty wagons. The atmosphere is riotous. Many complainants are irate. Each of them expects that after more than four decades of publicly suppressed injustice grievances can and must be righted immediately. As soon as proceedings are opened, many citizens become hysterical, demanding that the omnipotent President pick up his magic telephone to solve problems personally. The wrathful citizens suddenly become calm at the moment one of the aides shouts: ‘Listen! You are right! There is no justice in this world.’
Stories of moments like these were swapped among Havel and his advisers, often eliciting the wild laughter of relief. There was a shared sense, confirmed by the gloomy atmosphere in the Castle when they arrived, that totalitarian power was nervous, unsmiling, insecure, uptight. Humour seemed to be confidence-building, rebellious, democratic. Each joke was a tiny revolution. The memorable lighter moments came thick and fast, as when a camera found Havel at his Castle desk, under the gaze of two naked women striding across a wall-mounted canvas by Jiří Sopko. ‘What did I sign?’ he asks, frowning. ‘Wait a minute... I was naming an ambassador, but I’m recalling him!’ Havel laughed, adding: ‘It’s all so absurd.’355 Then there was the big cock-up over a precious letter that had been addressed to Havel at the Castle. Havel got wind of a man who so objected to his casual placatory remarks about the need for reconciliation with Germany that he began a hunger strike. Havel — aware that he might be said to be culpable for a death that would get widespread publicity — summoned the protester to his office to discuss the matter. The protester, Havel and his aides sat around in a circle to do business. The man explained that he had fought against the Nazis in Dukla Pass, that he therefore found repulsive Havel’s remarks about the ‘morally unacceptable’ Czech expulsion of ethnic Germans at the end of World War II, and that he was now convinced that Havel was preparing to sell the country to the Germans.
After lengthy discussion, the man accepted Havel’s appeal to abandon his hunger strike. He confirmed his decision a few minutes later to a Czechoslovak television crew in the President’s office. After receiving a letter personally signed by Havel, the man left the Castle. Everybody felt relieved. But the following morning, Havel’s aides received a telephone call from the same man, who was waiting downstairs with the security guards, at the stairway entrance to Havel’s office. An aide went down to see what was the matter. The man was shaking and pale. He explained to the aide that he hadn’t slept a wink because of the letter he had been given. ‘But what is wrong with yesterday’s letter?’ asked the aide. ‘It is a letter from Gorbachev to President Havel,’ came the reply. Realizing that the petitioner had been given the wrong letter, the aide invited the man upstairs to pick up the correct letter. Havel spotted the two men. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘Our friend was given the Gorbachev letter by mistake,’ said the aide, who did not notice that at that moment the grey-suited Soviet Ambassador was sitting all ears on a nearby sofa.
Then there was the first state visit by Havel and his aides to Poland. It felt a bit like a re-run of the Charter 77 and Solidarnošć meetings a decade earlier, but with a difference or two. As Havel and his long-haired advisers descended the aircraft steps that led on to soft, red carpet, with a brass band playing the old Czechoslovak anthem, the Polish guards glared at the revolutionaries. ‘They’d have made us into Siberian sausages if they’d had a chance,’ recalled an aide. Sweet revenge came that evening, at a state dinner attended by everybody’s old enemy, the Polish President General Jaruzelski, whose nickname was ‘the crow’. Every effort was made to get him drunk. The revolutionaries succeeded. ‘All things considered, you’re not a bad guy,’ slurred the famous writer and public intellectual, Adam Michnik, towards the end of the evening, Havel and the others chortling loudly. ‘But you should give up and step down,’ continued Michnik. At which moment President Jaruzelski lurched towards the floor, rescued from a nasty bump by several pairs of dissident hands.