I share my days with Milena, an elderly cleaning woman who also sells souvenirs in the museum shop. She pretends that she doesn’t know that I live here. But why then, I ask you, did she try to kill me with her broom the very first time she saw me, an ordinary little mouse? Well, not kill perhaps, but scare me off. As I had no other place to go, she reconciled herself to my existence. Perhaps she thought that, after all, I am an underdog just like her? Now she leaves crumbs of bread and pieces of apple and cheese near my cabinet every evening before she leaves. Often, when we are alone, she is talking to me. She calls me Bohumil! She says, “You know, Bohumil, what happened to me today?”—and then goes on with her story. I usually stand on the windowsill and listen to her, keep her company. It took me some time to understand that since there is nobody around, Bohumil is — well, me!
She went out to smoke a cigarette now; she won’t be back for a while. The only thing I hold against Milena is that she’s a heavy smoker, even though it’s bad for her health. And for mine, too. In fact, I discovered that I have an allergy to cigarettes. Although she often opens a window to the courtyard to let out the smelly air. It’s an old habit from when she used to work in the state archive as a secretary. Not as a cleaner, mind you. Milena studied English and French. Speaking of air, she says that any institution that has anything to do with the Communist state, even this one, smells of dust. Perhaps from too many papers, documents about God knows what and God knows whom. Milena used to worry, you know, if her husband was registered in the files of the secret police. Of course he was registered! Like, he was a “security risk”! “Any state that has to depend on police reports about citizens like him, just an ordinary engineer in an electrical plant, is pathetic!” she used to say to her friend Dáša, a cleaning woman from the casino downstairs. But obviously, this is how it was; every citizen was considered to be a “security risk” back then. However, in the new democracy, because of so-called privatization, her Marek lost his job. That’s why she works here; they need the money.
I cannot say that I mind living in this museum, although it was really more interesting living in the grammar school. I learned a lot about Communism by listening to the lectures of a history teacher there. Perlík was his name. I heard that he was also a poet, a kind of dissident intellectual, and that he even spent some time in jail when he was young.
You don’t have such a museum in Würzburg, you say, and your knowledge of Communism is almost nonexistent. Well, since you are here in Prague as a tourist, I could show you around. I consider myself qualified to be a guide here, but the sad truth is that the museum would not employ a mouse. I can tell you that the more time I spend here, the more I realize how important this museum is. I remember Professor Perlík’s words that the time would soon come when kids would say: Communism, what’s that? A religion? A maker of cars perhaps? And from what I heard from him, this is simply not right, Communism shouldn’t be remembered just by the likes of the professor or Milena, who survived it. It should be remembered for its bad sides and good; there must have been something good one can say about it, although that’s not a popular view to hold these days, I gather. For example, people could get a solid education, they say. Or there’s the fact that the Communist USSR fought against the Nazis in the Second World War. Yet Milena says that watching Hollywood movies one gets the impression that it was the Americans who won it all on their own!
No, life under Communism should not be forgotten, although that is exactly what I see happening. In this museum shop, by the way, you can buy a history book about the dark past for only five euros. It’s cheap. And it is only a hundred pages long, in large print. “The older I get, the more I appreciate it,” says Milena. You can read here, for example (I heard someone reading it with my own ears!), that the wife of President Klement Gottwald was rather fat, or that the wife of Antonín Novotný (the man who later became president himself) took the china and the bedsheets from the flat of Vladimír Clementis. Of course, only after he was executed in the purges of the fifties. You can also learn — as I did — that 257,964 people sentenced for political reasons were rehabilitated in 1990.
Some visitors don’t care at all about such facts; they just purchase posters, stamps, T-shirts, and USSR military caps, along with wax candles in the forms of Stalin, Marx, and Lenin. These are the single most popular souvenirs sold in the shop, I can tell you, maybe because they are the cheapest. I admit that I can hardly imagine the excitement of a person watching Stalin slowly melt down into a puddle of wax, but there are buyers who enjoy such symbolic acts.
As you come in, you inevitably notice busts and statues of Marx, Lenin, Stalin. A young man, a Czech, was here recently. Looking at Marx, he said: “Is that some Orthodox priest?” You could say that Marx, with his beard, did indeed look like one. You could also say that he was rather orthodox in his views and, in some ways, even like a priest, preaching his doctrine. But even I was astonished by the young man’s ignorance. What would Professor Perlík have made of his question? He would wonder what they teach them in history class nowadays, and would probably tell the boy, Well, read about him, you durak! That means stupid in Russian, but they don’t teach them Russian anymore. It is sad, although understandable. From my limited perspective as a mouse, a language is a language. It is worth learning regardless of the historical circumstances, no? But what can such an ignorant person read here in the museum about a historical figure like Karl Marx and the origins of Communism? See, here it says that he was “a bohemian and an intellectual adventurer, who started his career as a romantic poet with an inclination toward apocalyptic titanism, a sharp-tongued journalist”—as if that would somehow disqualify him from writing Das Kapital! Or look at this text about Lenin: “From the very beginning, Lenin pushed for the tactics of extreme perfidiousness and ruthlessness which became characteristic of all Communist regimes of the time.” What can I tell you? I know from Professor Perlík’s lectures that in Communist times, Lenin was glorified much too much, and that textbooks were even more seasoned with such descriptions and with the same kind of cheap psychology as this one! But the professor would probably say that there is no need for ideology nowadays and that we need history instead.
You know, sometimes when they come to this room with paintings from the Soviet school of socialist realism, with busts and a spaceship and a school class and a workshop — all in one room! — I can see how disappointed visitors are. I peek out at them from my cabinet, and our visitors look to me like those people who love to visit freak shows with a two-headed goat or a bearded woman — that kind of thing. Of course, I see why they are disappointed — there is no Stalin in a cage, not even a mummy of Lenin! They see only a heap of old things here, more like a junkyard, which in fact it is. Exhibits here are from flea markets and all kinds of garage sales, even straight out of rubbish bins. See, here Communism is finally reduced to the rubbish heap of history! Isn’t that what the velvet revolution in 1989 was all about? That is what I would like to tell them when they make faces, like, Is that all you have here? What more would they want to see?