The weekly newsreels showed clips demonstrating the constructive enthusiasm of the workers. Weavers were using an ever greater number of looms; miners were accepting obligations to extract more and more coal; smelters poured out white-hot gleaming steel by the ton. Also, with the help of youth brigades, new smelting houses and dams were being constructed along the Vltava River. At numerous and apparently unrelated meetings, participants would applaud enthusiastically and proclaim glory to the Communist party along with Comrades Stalin, Gottwald, Slánský, or Zápotocký. The comrades would smile amiably and sometimes during a demonstration bow down to accept a bouquet proffered by a young girl, whereupon the crowd would applaud all the more ecstatically. The newsreels also showed black marketeers covering up hundreds of bolts of cloth, pairs of shoes, or sacks of flour whereby they sought to destroy our market. It was only because of these vampires, we were told, that our goods were rationed.
The hours devoted to Latin in school were cut in half, and our new Latin teacher was an amicable woman who understood that Latin belonged to an entirely different era.
In civics class, instead of Plato’s Laws or even our own, we studied the Communist Manifesto. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.. . The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” The gray-haired teacher, whom we had nicknamed the Snake Charmer, always lectured as if in melancholic contemplation, which contributed to the dullness of her lecture, as if she were saying, “I’m sorry to bother you with all this.” “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
*
They locked up our landlord, Mother told Father when he came home one Sunday. He was apparently in some sort of work camp; at least that’s what his wife had said.
“He was a bougie,” explained Father.
“I didn’t know there were any camps in Czechoslovakia,” my brother joined in.
“Obviously only for people like him.” Father brushed him off. “It won’t hurt him to do a little real work.”
“She started crying when she told me,” continued Mother. “She asked me if I knew what she should do. They hauled him away and didn’t even say where they were taking him.”
“Why wouldn’t they have told her? Why do you insist on believing everything those people tell you?” Father pronounced the words “those people” with a grimace and went over to his desk, which was always heaped with stacks of papers covered with numbers and indecipherable sentences. He made it apparent that Mother’s news didn’t interest him. Nothing had happened that should have upset her. After all, bougies were used to living off the work of others. It was only fair that now they’d be forced to work.
Of course our landlord was an ordinary building contractor, and I saw him almost every day as he left for work.
Every day during first period at school we announced who was absent. Usually somebody was sick and could be gone for several weeks. All the teachers would conscientiously write down the absences, and at the end of the year they would be added up and listed on your report card. Two of my classmates were absent for several days. One of them, Polívka, was the administrator of something like parliamentary elections in our class. We dutifully announced that they were absent, but one day our homeroom teacher informed us that we no longer had to report their absence because they would certainly not be coming back this year. We stared at him in surprise, but he remained silent. Instead, he went to the board and wrote: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer” (Sir William Gladstone). “Write this down if you’re interested: ‘good, better, best.’ Which comparative is this?”
As we stared at him in dumb silence, he explained, “As the brightest would understand, if they were not absent right now: the irregular!”
Several days later, one of our classmates who lived on the same street as Polívka shared the news that both our classmates had been locked up and accused of some horrible antistate crimes.
I would have liked to hear more, but it seemed everyone was afraid to talk about it.
Not long after, our drawing teacher also disappeared. He was of Serbian heritage and had abstained from voting upon a resolution condemning Josip Broz (Tito), who had been until recently the magnificent son of the working people of Yugoslavia (now a traitorous agent of imperialism and a rabid dog). Our teacher had obviously been one of Tito’s many spies. At least that was how our classmate, who, unlike myself, was actually a member of the Communist Party, had explained it.
Our teachers never mentioned their colleagues, just as they never gave us their opinion about what was going on.
*
Graduation was approaching. It was a different kind of graduation from the one our parents had told us about. The teachers were no longer our fearsome overlords but comrades on our shared path to socialism. We wore Union of Youth shirts (everyone was now a member); some of the teachers had stopped wearing ties, while others dressed as inconspicuously as possible; and everyone pretended to be a mere worker in the field of education.
Now education was viewed as a reevaluation of what had previously been presented as the truth. This concerned primarily history. The Americans and English were no longer allies. Masaryk and Beneš were no longer our beloved President Liberators or Socialist Constructors — they were now representatives of the bourgeoisie. History had become the story of class struggles.
The revolutionary spirit had affected even the evaluation of literature. Great poets were now shriveled-up apples or they completely disappeared. Above all of them loomed the marvelous standard-bearer, the author of Red Songs, Stanislav Kostka Neumann, along with Jiří Wolker.
Between the final written and oral exams, our history teacher called me into the staff room and informed me that the party caucus of the school had decided to offer me membership in the Communist Party. We all believe, she said with amicable sternness, that the party will assist you in your aspirations to achieve greater consciousness, and your work will be an asset to the party.
I said thank you.
At home I conscientiously filled out the application. My class origin was not exactly the best. I knew of not a single worker among my ancestors, but on the other hand two of my uncles had been executed and were prewar Communist functionaries and national heroes.
A few days after graduation, I was invited to a meeting of the party caucus, whose members, much to my surprise, were mostly teachers.
I sat through a boring lecture and a similarly unenjoyable discussion of it, but finally my turn came. The history teacher, who was apparently chairperson of the local organization, announced that the district council had approved my membership application. “So, Comrade, we welcome you among our ranks. Never forget that being a member of the party is an obligation for the rest of your life. You must always act faithfully, honorably, and unselfishly to defend the interests of the party, which stands at the head of our entire society on its path to socialism.” She failed to add, “So help you God.”
I received a party ID card and mumbled something; I don’t remember a word of it. Most likely I promised not to disappoint them.