Around eleven o’clock on the day the meeting was to take place, the aforementioned curator called and told me to come see him right away. I asked if there was a problem with our using the hall for our meeting, and he said that was precisely why he was calling, but he didn’t want to discuss it on the phone.
It was clear what had happened. Members of the secret police had strongly recommended that he not allow us to gather in the citadel.
There were only a few hours left before the meeting was supposed to convene, not enough time to inform everyone that it was canceled; besides, we wanted to have it. Marta Kadlečíková said she had the keys to the apartment of a writer who was now abroad, Jiří Mucha. One of the rooms was large enough to accommodate a few dozen people. She suggested we move the meeting there. We would have to call and inform everyone of the change of venue.
I wasn’t going to say anything over the telephone that would inform the secret police where we were meeting. Two members of the committee had automobiles, and we could assume that several of the attendees also had cars and could drive those who arrived at the citadel by metro.
We did indeed manage to transfer everyone to Mucha’s flat on Hradčanské Square. (It is difficult to imagine a more worthy place than this apartment filled with antiques and pictures by Jiří’s father Alfons Mucha and other masters of art nouveau.)
Nevertheless, State Security somehow found out about our new meeting place and detained several writers, including Vaculík and our Brno colleagues.
A few days before the meeting, I had received a long letter from Václav Havel. It began with an apology:
Dear friends, a concurrence of circumstances has seen to it that I will most likely not be able to participate in your meeting, or that I will be able to participate in a limited capacity. At that time, I am to be meeting with representatives of the People’s Militia where we will probably talk about whether they will fire upon people on the 21st of August. You will certainly realize that this meeting is, at the moment, of utmost importance.
There followed a series of instructions concerning what we should discuss and what to endorse.
Václav suggested accepting everyone into the organization who had been accepted by the PEN Club abroad. These were writers who had been the most persecuted.
The old committee, which has in fact long been defunct, should resign and charge one member with conducting the remainder of the meeting. Then we should elect a new committee to accept new members but not accept anyone who had publicly committed an offense against the charter of the PEN Club by participating in the suppression of the rights of his colleagues to publish. Then Václav asked that we ratify two documents immediately if we didn’t want to make fools of ourselves at our very first meeting: one to demand that the political prisoner Ivan Jirous be pardoned and the other to take a stance on the case of Salman Rushdie (the fanatic Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa, that is, a death penalty on him for apparently offending the Prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses). It would also be good, continued Havel, if we requested the pardon of others imprisoned exclusively for distributing literature or other alternative culture.
Havel’s suggestions seemed to me reasonable, but the meeting was being led by someone who was trying by all means to avoid any political discussion, let alone any protests or petitions. The most peculiar thing was his insistence that we conclude the meeting by seven o’clock (even though we’d begun nearly an hour late because of the location change).
The chair’s attempt to avoid complications and conclude our first meeting in twenty years as quickly as possible met with such resistance, even among the official authors, that he finally gave up chairing the meeting. We understood his reasons when, just after seven o’clock, our friends started arriving after having spent the afternoon locked up for various reasons. Obviously, the secret police had been assured that the meeting would be concluded by then.
We quickly passed the necessary resolutions and elected Jiří Mucha president of the club. I was to be his deputy, but because Mucha was abroad, I was to head the PEN Club for the near future. (Soon thereafter, at Mucha’s request, I was elected president in his place.)
Soon after our meeting, I was called in for an interrogation, where I was asked, at length and almost politely, about the PEN Club, its mission, and its charter. They said they had nothing against our electing Jiří Mucha president. It was now in fashion, added one of them ironically, that every organization have a president, but they knew I was the organizer. They understood our protest against Khomeini’s fatwa on Rushdie; writers should not be sentenced to death for their literary works. They said nothing about our protest against our colleagues’ imprisonment or our announcement that literature should enjoy freedom. Finally, I realized that the only point of the interrogation was to warn us not to elect Václav Havel, instead of Mucha, as president. This would threaten the existence of our club as an independent and nonpolitical organization.
I received this warning approximately three months before the Federal Assembly elected Havel president of the republic.
*
Helena said that a march to Albertov was going to take place on November 17 to mark International Students’ Day and asked if I wanted to participate. I was much less a student now than twenty years earlier when I allowed myself to be convinced to go to Texas as a student, and I was not fond of marches or any kind of demonstrations. I preferred to stay home and write.
So Helena went by herself. At Albertov, she listened to a passionate speech by a student spokesman whom, to her surprise, she recognized as our nephew Martin. Then she traveled with the entourage all the way to the National Theater, where she just barely managed to avoid police truncheons.
I heard the reports (including the false information that Martin Šmíd was dead) on the radio — not the one broadcasting from Prague, of course.
The very next day I called a meeting of our PEN Club at the apartment of Karel Šiktanc. Karel, one of our best poets, never cared to involve himself in politics, so I thought his apartment would be safer than ours. Just in case, however, I arrived at his place an hour early.
In fact, a moment after I arrived, the police appeared in front of the building and were displaying the uncertainty characteristic of the time. They detained several members of the committee and led them off for interrogation. Other, less well-known members had their IDs checked but were allowed inside.
We were the only writers’ organization able, or even willing, to publicly speak out against the events at the National Theater, and in view of our tradition and historical experiences, the position of writers could influence the behavior of the citizens. Therefore, we formulated our proclamation as emphatically as we could. Among other things, we wrote:
The Czech Center of the PEN Club expresses bewilderment and anger at the brutal intervention by the forces of law and order, supported by members of special units, against a peaceful student demonstration. During the demonstration, not a single rock was thrown at the armed units; not a single window was broken; the students sat on the ground with lighted candles and, face-to-face with the armed forces, called out, “Our hands are empty” and “Dialogue, dialogue.”. . The authorities, not for the first time, responded to this call with violence, but this time it was more brutal than in the past.
The Czech Center of the PEN Club appeals to the employees of all news media: Tell the nation the truth about the tragedy that has come to pass. Let the victims have the final word. The PEN Club appeals to all writers and translators to join this call.