So Many Heroes

Names

PART ONE

Odyssey: Rowboat to Prague

This apparatus, he said, taking hold of a crank handle and leaning against it, was invented by our former Commandant. I assisted at the very earliest experiments and had a share in all the work until its completion. But the credit of inventing it belongs to him alone. Have you ever heard of our former Commandant? No? Well, it isn’t saying too much if I tell you that the organization of the whole penal colony is his work. We who were his friends knew even before he died that the organization of the colony was so perfect that his successor, even with a thousand new schemes in his head, would find it impossible to alter anything, at least for many years to come.

Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony

Chapter 1

Thursday 14 April 1966—

Friday 7 July 1967

I took my family rowing on Central Park Lake the day I broke the news to them that we would be moving to a magic yellow city with a hundred gold spires and tiny blue cobblestones that workmen hammered back into place every morning. It was the summer of 1967 and Erika, two going on three, wanted to know: Will we be able to see the Empire State Building at night?

Not even by day, I said. But I quickly added that every day they would be able to visit a real castle or choose among four fulltime puppet theatres—two of which were perhaps the best in the world. Every hour, in fact, they could see a Town Hall clock whose twelve mechanical apostles, on a turntable, come out to toll the time while a skeleton clangs a small gong, an elderly courtier nods sagely, and a rooster crows. I even related the ghastly legend (more true than untrue) of the fifteenth-century craftsman who made that clock for an Emperor of Bohemia. The Emperor so admired it that, to prevent his unique masterwork from ever being duplicated, he had the clockmaker’s eyes put out. The clockmaker outlived the Emperor and, when his own day of reckoning neared, he petitioned the Emperor’s son to let him touch his clock once more before dying. The old man was carried to the clock. He passed his hands over it just once—and the clock stopped for two centuries.

But now it works, I assured both my daughters. Then I told them that the Czech schools didn’t bus you there. You were called for by a special trolley that had potty seats.

This was an unabashed pitch to Monica—at three going on four, the opinion-maker—in the hope that Erika would follow. Our rowboat drifted with oars locked and resting. Erika puckered at the enormity of a two-year-old’s precious routine being upended, but Monica nibbled at the bait.

I would like to ride on that trolley, she announced. But is this the boat we’re taking to Prague?

Before I could answer, my wife Valerie cried: Watch your head, Daddy! We’re in a tunnel and going on the rocks!

I ducked and lunged for the oars. I didn’t know it then, but from that moment on, we were Czechoslovaks, paddling upstream in a flimsy vessel amidst the tides and glaciers of steel that seem always to engulf dreamers in darkness.

With Monica born in late 1963 and Erika in late 1964, the base for the dream began to sprout prerequisites. My own standards were threefold: a beautiful city (we are neither suburbanites nor islanders) where my neighbor would NOT be an American writer (I had long wanted to come to grips with the English language in a semi-private confrontation undissipated by incessant cocktail chatter) and where the cost of living would be less than that of New York, Paris, or London. (In 1962, as a childless couple in Manhattan, our break-even income was $6,000 a year; by 1967, as a family of four, it was somewhere between $15,000 and $18,000.)

But why Prague? Why us?

In the spring of 1966, I was thirty-four and had not yet found the city of my dreams when I was handed a plane ticket from JFK to PRG. (Pan-Am and Air India already had regular one-stop jet flights between New York and Prague.) My benefactors were the Friends of the Cincinnati Orchestra who, in the interests of publicity, had invited me to be their guest on a packaged charter-flight Culture Tour of Eastern Europe. I wound up my assignments, filed my income tax returns, kissed my family goodbye, and flew to the first destination, Prague, a week ahead of the Cincinnatians. Thus, I would be on hand to welcome them to Prague and could then travel with them to Bratislava, Vienna, Budapest, Moscow, and Leningrad (though the International Air Transport Association’s affinity rules insisted that I must part from the charter flight in Helsinki and take scheduled transport across the Atlantic).

I landed one night at Ruzyně Airport, whose International Passenger Terminal was a wooden shed. Ruzyně looked like one of those grisly Arctic refueling bases of the pre-jet age, but you knew you weren’t at Gander or Goose Bay when the roof lit up with a neon red star alternating with a hammer and sickle. A taxi took me to the Hotel International, a dour Stalin Gothic mausoleum built in the 1950s at the wrong end of the number 18 tram line, almost an hour from the center of town. The International was not a bad place for sleeping, but its only sparkle came from an East German automatic shoeshine machine with instructions in seven languages. The directions in English began: 1. Insert the coin. 2. Lift a little the feet.

There was more promise however, in a message to call Miloš Forman.

A mutual friend in New York had sent a letter of introduction to Ján Kadár on my behalf. But Kadár, ironically, was in Santa Monica—where, a few days later, he would accept the Oscar for the best foreign-language film.* With Number One away, Czechoslovak Filmexport had simply turned the letter over to Number Two—Forman, whose Loves of a Blonde had just started on its Continental rounds. It was proving to be to the youth of Europe what The Catcher in the Rye once was to a generation of young Americans.

Forman’s telephone was out of order when I tried to call him, but he knocked on my hotel door early the next morning and introduced himself. He was determined to show that Prague’s film industry was not inhospitable to Western visitors.

I am at your disposal for the next two days, he said in fluent English. What do you want to see?

One of your films, I said.

Nonsense, he said. Movies you can see in a dark room anywhere, anytime, and in America you’ll be able to see both with English titles. But Prague you can only see now!

I showed him my itinerary, to which he awarded a rating of standard. So I will show you places not on your itinerary.

My first impression of Miloš, from the way he moved perhaps, was of a smoldering-eyed, dark-maned young lion in a black leather jacket. But that may have been because lions were all about me. A lion was the emblem of the Kingdom of Bohemia and it remains the emblem of Communist Czechoslovakia—with one post-1948 change of headdress: The lion’s crown was replaced by a red star. Since other vestiges of royal tradition remain (the basic unit of money, for instance, is still the crown), this was an affront to taste rather than a bow to ideology. Even to Miloš, who laughs at most absurdity, the red-starred lion was an unpardonable insult, like the Stalin Gothic hotel where we met.

By the rustle he provoked among the lady clerks in that funereal lobby, I gathered that my thirty-four-year-old host radiated a certain animal magnetism. And so, when he had led me to his illegally parked Hillman Minx and zoomed us away with a hot-rod swerve, I asked: Are you married, Miloš?

Of course, he replied.

We sped down the Boulevard of the Yugoslav Partisans and around the Circle of the October Revolution. At the Avenue of the Heroes of Peace, Miloš managed to cut off two rickety old trams with a sharp left turn. Then he shook his left fist at the irate motormen clanging their bells at him and pointed in the opposite direction with his right hand: The entrance to Prague Castle is one block over that way. But it’s on your tour. If I took you there now, you wouldn’t want to see anything else.

I said: Take me anywhere you like, but with one hand on the wheel, please.

The little car slalomed along a steep, winding, cobblestoned hill. When we touched down again, Miloš veered off to the left and gestured at eighteen flights of marble stairs leading up another hill to a marble pedestal. Any statue that stood there would have a perfect view of the curving Vltava (or Moldau, in German) and the city of Prague on both sides of the river. But the pedestal was bare.

Here is where Stalin stood, said Miloš. "It was the largest statue of Stalin in the world and it was unveiled in 1955. I must show you a photo of it some time. Stalin, you know, means ‘man of steel.’ He had his hand inside his coat—in the Napoleonic pose. The Czech joke was: ‘Why is he reaching into his pocket?’ Answer: Because he admired his statue so much that he wanted to buy it for himself. He reached for his wallet and asked how much the statue cost. When they told him, the Man of Steel turned to stone.

The next year, Khrushchev made his speech at the Twentieth Congress about the Personality Cult. Everywhere else they took down their Stalin statues—but Novotný kept waiting and hoping until maybe the early 1960s, when he decided Stalin wasn’t coming back to life. By then, Stalin was an embarrassment, so President Novotný tried to have him spirited away one night. He must have thought that if we woke up and Stalin wasn’t there, we wouldn’t notice or maybe wouldn’t remember.

We sped across the Vltava and swept through a handsome plaza called—in Russian!—Red Army Square. (Prague boasts two Red Army Squares: the Russian-named náměsti Krasnoarmejců, and the other, náměsti Rudé Armády, named in Czech.) Swinging past the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University, Miloš beckoned to the stately concert hall that goes by three names: Communism calls it the House of Artists; Czechs call it Dvořák Hall; Germans call it the Rudolfinium. On its rooftop Hall of Fame were weatherbeaten busts of great composers.

During the Nazi occupation, Miloš told me, a couple of local workmen had been ordered to take Felix Mendelssohn off the roof. Which one is he? they asked. They were told: The Jewish one with the long nose and the Semitic features. And so they climbed up and removed Richard Wagner.

Miloš gave a deep bass chuckle at his own story. It was still on my mind after he had aimed the Hillman at a parking space near the National Theatre, led me into the riverfront Café Slavia, bought me a cup of the thick, bitter Turkish coffee that the Czechs drink, and talked about film and family for a while. Thus, when Miloš worked the conversation back to what else would you like to see in Prague?, I was ready for him.

Whatever you want to show to me of the Czech film industry, of course. But also, if there is one nearby, a World War II concentration camp.

As a second-generation American Jew, I had never been willing to entrust this mission to a German guide. I had often thanked fate for my lucky accident of birth and wondered whether, if we had still been living in Central Europe in the 1930s, my parents would have known when to get out. Or, if such an unimaginable situation ever arose again, would I be able to detect the handwriting on the wall? (In 1939, some New York relatives of mine sent money to import some kinfolk from Poland. But the scheming kin used the passage money in their home town instead to open a shop. Both it and they were liquidated.) The best drill I knew for thinking clearly about the unthinkable was to confront the reality of it or as much as is left of it, so that you may possibly smell it coming when and if history starts to repeat itself. Miloš’ story of Wagner and Mendelssohn had reminded me of my nagging obligation to—just once—inspect the hell that Hitler had reserved for me.

The next morning, we set out for the privileged ghetto of Theresienstadt. Miloš told me about it as he drove. In 1941, the Nazis evicted the inhabitants of Maria Theresa’s old fortress town (Terezin in Czech) and the next year they remodeled it into a showcase ghetto. With its own Jewish officials and a semblance of community life, Theresienstadt was used to reassure Red Cross inspectors and other visitors who harbored the notion that Jews were being mistreated. Jews with German decorations from World War I were eligible for deportation to Theresienstadt; wealthy Jews could and did buy their way into protective custody there. Such was Theresienstadt’s repute that two escapees from other concentration camps actually made their way there, where indeed there were an orchestra, family living, and even a Jewish mayor. The only snag was that, every month, a few of the families were shipped out to make way for new arrivals and were never heard from again. And, by 1944, the myth could no longer be maintained. The Third Reich’s extermination needs took precedence over its pretenses.

Sooner or later, the only ways out of Theresienstadt were by the firing squad or transfer to Auschwitz and other death camps. At Theresienstadt itself, 33,500 perished; for another 84,500, it was an anteroom to extermination.

We were almost there when I asked Miloš a question that was inevitable: How was it for you during the war?

He put both hands on the wheel and drove with uncharacteristic restraint. I am half-Jewish, he said after a long minute. My mother died in Auschwitz. My father died in Buchenwald.

I sat there, stunned and sheepish. Then I apologized for the tactless errand I had suggested. Miloš said: It is all right, Alan. I urged that we go somewhere else—a castle or someplace. Miloš stepped on the gas and said emphatically: It is all right.

Theresienstadt is now a state cemetery and a museum: The Memorial to National Suffering. It has been preserved as it was when liberated, a walled city of the dead. Nobody lives there now, except its caretakers. Crossing a moat, passing beneath stone portals painted with the emblem of the Third Reich, hurrying past a sign proclaiming in German that WORK IS FREEDOM, you have left life and decency far behind.

In a barracks the size of my bedroom, sixteen triple-tiered wooden bunks were numbered 1 through 48. I found it hard to imagine forty-eight men living so close together. Miloš said: Then try to imagine four hundred eighty. There were ten men to each bed. In a tiny cell that Miloš shut me into, I spent the longest sixty seconds of my life groping in blackness and colliding with walls. When Miloš freed me, I blinked and said I would have gone crazy in four more minutes. Miloš said: There were eighteen men in here at a time. Crazier! In the museum building, formerly the German soldiers’ caserne, we saw a pair of slippers made of women’s hair and Miloš lost his aplomb for a moment. Fantas-tic, he muttered. Fantas-tic.

On a deserted street lined with trees and paved with gravel, Miloš fell into step behind me. Then, passing a row of officers’ houses, I felt stones pelting my ankles. Miloš was still keeping in step with me, but at a modified goose-step. Before I could say Cut it out!, the houses ended and I was confronted by, of all things, a swimming pool.

The S.S. commandant, Jöckl, built it for his two daughters, Miloš explained. Those two little girls playing in water were the last living things you ever saw.

Turning a corner we entered a little park, cool and green on first view, but nothing here was what it seemed. You just passed through the Gate of Death, Miloš informed me. Between 1943 and 1945, no prisoner who goes in here ever comes out alive. There was a gallows just inside the entranceway. But Miloš led me to a dirt strip near the base of a stone wall pocked with bullet holes. Before me flowed a little stream in which I was surprised to see clear water. Admonishing me to stand where I was, Miloš jumped the stream and, in a dozen strides, mounted a rough-hewn platform shaded by a wood-slatted roof. It had looked like a bandstand until Miloš called to me: Here stood the firing squad.

Then he cackled—a cackle more startling than gunfire, and said: Ahaha! You are standing at attention!

Miloš spoke more than truth. I was rigid, body and soul. This chilling psychodrama, unrehearsed and improvised, was my first glimpse of a good director’s instinct for compelling audiences, actors, and everybody around him to experience whatever he feels.

In the New York winter of 1966–67, while Valerie and I were first weighing the feasibility of moving to Prague, a letter of introduction from Miloš to us preceded the arrival of one of his best friends. "Jirka Šlitr* is the most talented person I know, a true Renaissance man," wrote Miloš, who is no paragon of modesty. Then came an invitation to a two-man art show at the Benevy Gallery on First Avenue. One of the two was Jiří Šlitr, who had been granted an exit visa for the event.

At the opening, my wife and I couldn’t get near the art or the artists. A couple of afternoons later, we went back with the children and were captivated by a wall of Šlitr’s line drawings: intricate, inked mazes which you circled and stalked with puzzlement until, in the instant when you achieved perfect focus, there dawned before your eyes the Prague Castle in much of its grandeur or a dull party in all its sullen sprawl.

I dropped a note to him at the King Edward Hotel in Times Square. When he appeared at our home in the Village for dinner several nights later, he bore a gift: the drawing of the dull party that I had especially praised.

But it said ‘SOLD’ by the time we got there, I remarked.

So I made another one, he said blandly in very precise, singsong English.

Jiří Šlitr’s fame in Czechoslovakia was not primarily as a graphic artist, but as co-founder, co-author, and co-star of the Semafor, the liveliest popular musical theatre in Prague. It was there that, back in 1959, he and his partner, Jiří Suchý, had unleashed musical comedies and revues with a jazz beat and a George Abbott pace which signaled a cultural revolution in itself. Until then, Prague staging (of drama as well as musicals) had been very Viennese in tempo: actors standing around on stage holding genteel and rather leisurely discussions, sometimes punctuated by a song. Šlitr composed the music. Suchý, whose straw hat and jaunty singing style had prompted Paris critics to hail him (during an engagement at Jean-Louis Barrault’s Théâtre des Nations festival) as the Czech Chevalier, wrote book and lyrics. He also published volumes of poetry and essays. I had never caught their act, but I knew that in Prague they were known as The Poet and the Painter or just plain S + Š.

For nearly eight years, S + Š had been writing forty to fifty songs per annum. Eighteen of the three hundred and fifty had achieved, on Supraphon Records, six-figure sales—no small achievement in a land of only fourteen million people. S + Š’s earnings were published and marveled at all over Eastern Europe. The press called them crown millionaires. And Šlitr, at least, was intent, almost too intent, on becoming a dollar celebrity too. Which was one reason why Miloš had sent him to me.

Jiří Šlitr was a debonair bachelor with graying hair and a black bowler (his onstage trademark) framing a pair of darting, lecherous eyes. He seldom smiled or laughed, but he registered his constant amusement at life with an umhmm-umhmm-umhmm let’s-get-on-with-it sort of calculating murmur. He reminded me (offstage and later onstage) of a young Jack Benny, though he was already, at forty-two, three years older.

Jirka Šlitr and I became good friends that winter. I asked him what he’d like to see and his interests led us to a New York I’d never really known. We stood on line for two hours in the neon-lit snowdrifts of West 125th Street for the Wednesday night amateurs at the Apollo. We squirmed through a West 78th Street psychodrama as a girl named Phoebe unraveled her penchant for little men. We munched sweet potatoes, bought from a pushcart, on a Sunday stroll through the Lower East Side.

During our walks and talks, we bounced ideas off each other and he was frequently humming little snatches of his own catchy melodies. Now and then, I would ask him about them and he would quote an intriguing Suchý lyric or two. "Life to me is but a shabby vest/ Gray and boring as you plainly know, he would chant softly on the IRT. Or: A rather topical blues song for a girl: ‘My love gave me a sweater made of barbed wire.…’" Šlitr’s music reminded me of Irving Berlin at his Suppertime best.

By the time Šlitr was packing to go home, several letters and cables had crossed the Atlantic and it was agreed that in Prague I would collaborate with S + Š on an American version of one of their plays, a musical fable of money and greed that hit me like funny Kafka. Miloš Forman, who had directed it in Prague, endorsed the project and asked for first crack at directing our American version.

Umhmm-umhmm-umhmm, was Šlitr’s response to the good news about Forman. "Wouldn’t we be better off with some famous Broadway director like Joshua Logan? I mean, I want it to be a big hit."

So do I, I replied quickly, so let’s stick with Miloš.

The next summer Šlitr went west again, this time for an extended engagement at the Czechoslovak Pavilion of Expo ’67 in Montreal. I flew north twice to visit him and there I also met two of his best friends from Prague. One was his frequent wine-drinking companion: the puppeteer and film animator Jiří Trnka.

Šlitr’s other companion was named Sylva. Just turning thirty, Sylva’s skill with languages enabled her to perform in English or French (and she was doing both in Montreal) or German or Russian or Polish or Serbo-Croatian as well as Czech. At Expo, she was the onstage hostess in the Czechoslovak Pavilion’s Kinoautomat, or Computerized Cinema of Consensus.

Perhaps you saw her there, too, telling you to push the green button on the arm of your seat if you want [the hero] to let the lady into his flat and the red button if you want him to keep her out. The majority vote will decide which way the film goes next. You have thirty seconds. All right, stop the computer! And here Sylva would fulfill everyone’s occasional fantasy—for, lo and behold, the computer would (after making its instant tabulation) stop.

Then the show would go on—but strictly in accordance with the audience’s wishes. For the computer and the movie were programmed to tell a complete and logical story no matter how the audience voted at each of the six crises when Sylva interrupted the continuity.

Sylva had not set out to be a stage performer when she studied history and languages at Charles University in the 1950s. She had contemplated a career in journalism. But it was difficult to write for newspapers, she told me in Montreal, "if your thinking and feelings were different from the official line. So I took an opportunity that came along to perform with Magic Lantern at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. Later, I traveled with the Black Theatre of Prague whenever it went abroad on tour.

"I also write children’s stories and—being one of the lucky ones who can travel outside our country—I used to write occasional foreign dispatches for the Czech press. But I stopped doing this when I mailed back a story on the Wall from our Berlin engagement. I said the Wall was ugly, which I didn’t consider a controversial observation. But, when my article appeared, it said the Wall was not only necessary, but beautiful.

After I came back to Prague, my friends said to me: ‘How could you have written something like that?’ I decided I would never give anyone a chance to do such a thing to me again.

Sylva’s romance with Jirka Šlitr had been going on for seven years. Even though it was ending in Montreal that summer, we didn’t know it then.

In Montreal, we also met Sylva’s and Šlitr’s and Trnka’s boss, Miroslav Galuška, forty-five. A dashing, silver-haired, jut-jawed Boy Scout of a Slav, Galuška bore a startling resemblance to our own General William C. Westmoreland. Galuška was a onetime film writer who became a diplomat, Foreign Ministry press chief (1952–58) and then Ambassador to the Court of St. James (1958–61) before taking up journalism as deputy chief editor of the official Communist party newspaper, Rudé Právo.* President Novotný always considered Rudé Právo his own house organ and Galuška was being groomed for editor-in-chief until his own independent brand of Marxism-Leninism asserted itself. (Lenin, after all, promised the end of all administrative pressure on the press and the introduction of full freedom.) In 1963, Galuška was shunted to the less influential chief editorship of a new weekly called Kulturní Tvorba (Cultural Creation). By his sixth issue, Galuška had earned a political (and perhaps even personal) kiss of death: a denunciation by President Novotný. Already, however, Galuška had enough admirers and Novotný enough insecurity that it was deemed punishment enough to shift him out of sight in 1964, by banishing him to Canada as Ambassador/Commissioner General in charge of the Czechoslovak Pavilion for Expo ’67.

Relegating dissidents to influential posts abroad is a Czechoslovak habit which often backfires. Galuška had immediately set about fitting his punishment to the crimes he had committed. Rallying his artistic friends, he had organized a sparkling jewelbox of a pavilion that was the hit of the fair.

When Galuška had left Prague, it had been made abundantly clear that his was a one-way ticket to Montreal. Returning to Czechoslovakia would be tantamount to hanging himself. At the time I met him in Montreal, he was even looking rather cursorily for a newspaper job somewhere in Canada. But he had made such a record for himself that he was thinking much more seriously of returning home in triumph when Expo would end in the fall of 1967 and lending his weight to the forces that were already chipping away at the Novotný monolith.

One such force was Jiří Suchý, who—in Šlitr’s absence, but with his consent and collaboration—had been moving their Semafor Theatre farther and farther into the realm of political satire. On my next exploratory visit to Prague, I met Jirka Suchý for the first time. On this planet, he was the same statistical age as Forman and myself. But it must have taken several eons elsewhere for that maniacal smile to ripen into pure green-cheese lunacy, for that shy moonface to glow, for those shifty eyes to beam inner madness.

On a rainy Saturday, Suchý took me home to his apartment in Prague 6, a quarter-mile from the Formans, for an afternoon of cold cuts, open-faced sandwiches, Pilsen beer, phonograph records, and talk about friends, acquaintances, children, and our collaboration. The Suchý flat was an eclectic fantasy of antique and modern. I was ushered into a sitting room where low-slung modern furniture of the kind no grown man can relax in had been covered with a white fur that made it not only bearable, but comfortable. Around me were some Old Masters and medieval church art, plus an unadorned mahogany-paneled wall before which a movie screen could descend from above. The motif of the Suchý apartment was the unexpected: In each room, you felt obliged to ask where to put yourself. But, once you had found your niche, everything worked.

This livable museum was a happy collaboration between Jirka Suchý and his auburn-haired wife Běla, who sometimes designed theatre costumes and record jackets but who mostly devoted herself to their handsome son, Kubik (short for Jan-Jakub and named after Rousseau, not Astor). Kubik’s being two weeks younger than our Erika—and the Forman twins’ age lying part way between Monica’s and Erika’s—promised good playmate insurance if we could live in Prague.

To live in Prague takes considerable doing. A foreigner is entirely dependent upon some ministry’s or organization’s sponsoring him or at least certifying that there is a national advantage to his presence. As a freelance person, this posed a problem for me. The Suchý and Šlitr collaboration was still being negotiated, so Dilia, the state literary and theatrical agency, could not yet intervene on my behalf. By suggesting that he wanted me to collaborate on a screenplay with him, Miloš Forman had lined up Filmexport—the Government corporation that negotiates foreign distribution for Czechoslovak films—to make phone calls and appointments for me. But Filmexport was reluctant to commit anything to writing. Forman and Filmexport had agreed that, under the circumstances, my best bet for a sponsor would be the Ministry of Foreign Affairs press department. My credentials as a journalist were more imposing than as a playwright or screenwriter.

Filmexport says that, even if they or Dilia were to sponsor you, they could never pry loose a decent flat for you and your family, Miloš informed me. But once the Foreign Ministry accredits you, then you’re eligible to have the Diplomatic Service find you a flat just the way they would if you were a new attaché at an embassy here. You might have to pay in American dollars, but you could be worse off. And once you have press accreditation, the Ministry of Interior semi-automatically grants you permission to reside here.

Thus, in mid-1967, I paid my first visit to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague’s largest palace, the Černín. In a rear courtyard, still off limits, of this sprawling building, the body of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk was found on the morning of March 10, 1948. The Černín Palace was built between 1669 and 1720 for Humprecht Černín, a wealthy landowner and onetime Ambassador to Venice, who, like many Prague aristocrats, needed to be situated influentially close to the Castle, then as now the seat of the State. Unlike his more complicated, scheming rivals, Count Černín, owner of more than a dozen estates in Middle Europe, allowed his empire to be administered by a staff of exactly five clerks, who were responsible for his chateaus, lakes, farms, books, paintings, and sculptures. I know, Černín is quoted as admitting, that these clerks pinch from me, but they value their jobs and are diligent in them. If I had one hundred clerks, I would have one hundred thieves pinching from me, and that might be my ruin.

My contact in the Černín Palace was an equally philosophical youngish man named Milan Glozar, whose brown suit, tinted hornrims, and droning voice would mark him as a loner in any suave gray diplomatic corps, East or West.

From the outset, Mr. Glozar assured me that there would seem to be no problem about your coming to work and live here. He also informed me, in a manner indicating considerable awareness of Western economics, that I had stumbled into an income-tax paradise:

The only Czechoslovak taxes I would have to pay would be the ten per cent that is automatically withheld from all income earned from Czech sources. Aside from the occasional reprinting of my writing in Czech translations, I had no expectation of earning crowns but, in case I did, my 10 per cent tax deduction would very likely make me eligible for the virtually free National Health.

As for income earned anywhere abroad from American (or other Western) firms, I would be exempt from U.S. taxes on the first $20,000 of 1968 income, if I arrived in Prague no later than New Year’s Eve and maintained bona fide residence abroad for the full tax year. If my 1968 earnings abroad happened to be, for example, $28,000, I would merely have to pay the tax bill that comes to the head of a family of four struggling to get by on $8,000 a year. After three years of residence abroad, my annual exemption would rise to $25,000.*

Mr. Glozar said I must give his ministry an autobiographical letter telling why and how I wanted to live in Czechoslovakia as well as the vital data about my family … a letter from some professional organization (the Society of Magazine Writers would do) vouching for me … tearsheets of five or six articles of mine … and a half-dozen passport photos of each of us. (There were no forms to fill out, which should have made me wary.) Mr. Glozar estimated that we would have all our papers in order by the end of September 1967, a month before we planned to leave Greenwich Village. He anticipated no trouble at all.

I could already spot the first cloud on the horizon, however, when the amiable Mr. Glozar mentioned that he would not be around to steer us through diplomatic channels. In the fall he would be going to England as press attaché at the Embassy in London. But even before then he was taking all his accumulated vacation time for the summer mushroom-picking season. In Central Europe, mushrooms are not only a foodstuff, but a pursuit and a passion. When they mature, all other activity stops.

I’ve been told, I remarked, that if I ever have any doubts about a mushroom, I should ask a Czech because he’s never wrong.

Mr. Glozar leaned back skeptically and said: "An average of sixteen of our people guess wrong every summer. They get mushroom poisoning, which is—if you eat the right, or rather, wrong mushroom—a ten-day agony with no cure except certain death. The mushrooms you’ll buy in stores here are safe, but I am now going to give you the soundest advice anyone can give you for living in Czechoslovakia: Never, never buy mushrooms from a little old lady who comes around selling them."

He pointed to an item in Rudé Právo and said: She’s killed three people in one village already this week, and the police are still looking for her.

On this happy note, my session with Mr. Glozar ended. I was so exhilarated by the apparent absence of bureaucratic hurdles that I walked the whole mile-and-a-half back to my hotel sizing up the sights of my city as I went.

No sooner had I opened the door of my room at the Alcron Hotel than I realized that my luggage had been searched.

When you’re searched or burgled, your first fear is that the culprit may still be on the premises. And, behind the Iron Curtain, even when you establish that he’s not, you still can’t be sure you’re alone; particularly at the Alcron, your room may be watched or monitored.

I needed privacy to sort out my reactions. Was my visitor a customs agent, the secret police, or just a prying maid? To whom should I protest? Or should I protest at all, thereby establishing myself as a troublemaker even before coming to live in Prague?

To think my way through to a simple conclusion (viz.: Having proved to whom it may concern that I had nothing to hide, I might as well ignore the incident), I adjourned to my adjoining john, which seemed like the safest place for solitary meditation. Fully clothed, I sat down on the green plastic toilet seat without opening the inner lid. When I stood up a few minutes later, I saw that my weight had forced the lid through the seat. The lid was now dangling downward into the water.

I couldn’t leave it or use it like this. But if I sent for a repairman, they—whoever they were—might link this strange event to their search. So I decided to repair the damage myself.

It took me half an hour to squeeze the toilet lid back through the toilet seat. In doing so, I not only dispelled all the nervous energy released by my discovery, but I also caught my right arm between lid and seat, thereby inflicting two long gashes on myself. For the rest of 1967s long hot summer, I had to wear long-sleeved shirts to avoid looking like a bungled suicide. My Alcron toilet-seat scars healed and faded, though my family doctor said they will never go away entirely. But, he consoled me, man is not made of Formica alone.

* The Shop on Main Street

* Jiří = George. Jirka = Georgie. Šlitr is pronounced Schlitter.

* Rudé Právo is Red Justice. Wherever feasible, I don’t use Czech or Slovak names that are meaningless to the reader. The trade unions’ daily, Práce, is identified as Work; the People’s (Catholic) Party paper, Lidová Demokracie, is called People’s Democracy herein. But certain other names remain in Czech. In translation the controversial weekly Literární Listy becomes too trivial (Literary Leaves) and the orthodox daily Rudé Právo too ironic.

* This exemption, alas, was abolished in 1978.

Interlude Hotel without a name

Even before my room was searched, I had never relished staying at the Alcron in whose cavernous lobby, otherwise known as the yellow submarine, the transient and fluctuating Prague press corps of Western newsmen sit interviewing each other. An air of transparent corruption pervades the place through good times and bad, renovations and modernization. On that same visit, each of my first four mornings would start off on the wrong foot with the porter handing me a message to please check with reception.

The reception clerk was a bald, epicene young man. Rubbing his hands with glee, he would greet me in English with the same venal spiel: "Ah, Mr. Levy. I’m terribly sorry and I know you have a confirmed reservation. But we absolutely need your room. You’ll have to vacate it by noon today unless something happens."

I was so naive that, when my shocked protests were of no avail, I said: Well, Filmexport made my reservation so I’ll go over there and see if I can make something happen at that end.

It would be just as easy to make something happen right here, the clerk purred unctuously, but I was too outraged to take the hint. I marched over to Filmexport, which must have used bribery or pressure to make something happen. My room was reprieved but every morning the same ritual recurred.

After four days of this, I went to bed so braced for my morning confrontation that I popped awake at 6 A.M. I dressed and shaved hastily to get out of the Alcron before my nemesis came to work. He wouldn’t dare evict me without serving notice first! I sneaked past the porter and onto the street. Heading past Wenceslas Square, I cut through a maze of arcades in the Lucerna, Alfa, and Black Rose passages and was hopelessly out of sight when a familiar purr accosted me: Ah, Mr. Levy. So glad I met you on my way to work. I am terribly sorry and I know you have a confirmed.…

But how do you know you need my room when you haven’t even come to work?

They called me at home last night, he said, without blinking an eye, and told me they absolutely needed your room today. But I decided not to make you nervous and ruin your sleep by calling you then.

I never stayed at the Alcron again. But the next time I came to Prague, I dreaded walking past it for fear I would see the same clerk still contemplating his empty palm.

On the next to last of my exploratory visits to Prague, I arrived in late afternoon without a hotel reservation. Miloš Forman whisked me off from the airport to the Golden Jug in Old Town Square for a banquet of cold cuts and too much wine. Only after dinner did we start searching for a room for me, but we soon learned that every hotel from Class B-minus to Class A-Plus De Luxe Special was booked solid.

We wandered from one to the other. After being rebuffed at the Hotel Paris, we almost overlooked another hotel in the shadow of the Powder Tower, the gunpowder storehouse that is the gateway to the old town of Prague. But I glanced through the front window and spotted reception desk, porter’s desk, mailboxes, and keys—all the trademarks of a traditional hotel lobby. Aside from one night clerk on duty, the lobby was deserted—which augured well for vacancies.

What about this one? I asked Miloš.

He seemed startled for a moment, but then the wine stirred his blood and he said: Why not try? In we went and Miloš informed the clerk in Czech that I needed only a tiny room for one night.

To my surprise, the clerk replied: This is not a hotel. And you both must leave.

That’s no way to treat a distinguished guest from America, Miloš responded with amiable belligerence, just because he isn’t a Communist Party official.

The clerk’s body tensed and he looked both ways while Miloš blandly recited my curriculum vitae, exaggerating copiously. But the clerk kept interrupting to insist that this wasn’t a hotel and we must leave immediately before someone comes. We were only a few blocks from Franz Kafka’s birthplace, but I felt as if we had discovered his permanent home.

I offered the clerk a small gift and Miloš began to recite his own biography, but the man was incorruptible, and very scared. When we heard someone coming down toward the lobby, the clerk turned to me with desperation and said to me in English:

"So now I know who you are. And I have seen Mr. Forman’s photograph many times. I have also seen all his films, so I must beg