In the morning I looked out the window at the yellowish dawn; the air reeked of sulfur and God only knew what other chemicals. There was a line to the toilet in the hallway, and the bathroom was crammed as well, but I was used to all this from Terezín.
As soon as the truck had dropped us off on a plain suffused with stinking haze, we set off uphill to the work site. The individual blocks were marked with numbers. In some places we saw construction ditches, and in others the ground was as yet untouched. Every now and then we’d pass grubby caravans and wooden shanties that stored work tools and bags of cement. When we finally found the block assigned to us, we saw that although the ditches had indeed been prepared for laying cement, they were flooded with water. Now I understood why we’d been told to wear rubber boots. When my coworkers looked over the terrain, they asked me, as the group leader, to protest immediately, for this was obviously the worst block of all. But our foreman had already arrived, a gaunt middle-aged beanpole of a man with a face Jack London would have described as weather-beaten and features usually referred to as craggy. He welcomed us with overt animosity and ordered us to get a pump from the storeroom and pointed to one of the wooden shanties. So instead of lodging a protest, I set off with two of my coworkers. Of course it was a manual pump and, as we soon ascertained, partially broken. No matter how hard we tried, it would spit out only a tiny stream of water. The entire time we spent in this inhospitable place, we referred to the area around the excavation pits as the shore.
The foreman skeptically observed our vain efforts as if asking himself what could be expected from a group of inexperienced students.
When he learned I was the group leader, he read to me the list of equipment issued to us from the storeroom; took me around the excavation pits, which were only slowly emptying of water; and showed me the staked-off area we were supposed to dig. He even specified the depth we were to reach, which I was to strictly monitor because he would check it himself. Then he addressed us all and pointed out that we had to work hard, damn it, otherwise we wouldn’t earn enough for the mountain air we were breathing. He addressed us as little idiots and used this epithet every time even though he should have called us comrades.
The next day we were issued a mixer and a vehicle covered with encrusted cement. This was the Japanese that we’d been warned not to ride on. The warning was superfluous because no one would have voluntarily climbed onto it. We also received instructions on the ratio of water, cement, and sand, and the foreman reminded me that I was responsible for everything. If the foundation was not solid, he threatened, the house built atop it would collapse, and its inhabitants, including women and children, could die in the wreckage.
We took turns at the mixer, dragging half-ton bags of cement and pouring their contents into its maw, while the dust lodged itself in our lungs.
At first we tried to convince ourselves this was only temporary, and despite the toil and heat we carried on quite learned conversations. We finally realized, however, that such colloquy was inappropriate given our surroundings, and we began to argue about things like why there was water still flowing into our excavation pit, what grade of soil we were digging, or whose turn it was at the mixer tomorrow. The mixer sometimes stopped working, and none of us knew how to get it going again, so we were losing both time and money, and it was up to me to locate the repairmen. If they did not happen to be in one of the neighboring blocks, they were sitting in the tavern, drinking beer and sometimes playing cards.
The foreman gradually started to see that we were working more and better than he’d expected. But the norms had not been set for college students and probably not even for experienced construction workers. Instead, they were established so that no one could earn more than was necessary for daily subsistence. The employees made up for this by either purloining building material or sneaking off during work hours to make money on the side. We, on the other hand, as the foreman told me, wouldn’t make a thing at this rate. We’d had the misfortune of being assigned to this block.
And there was more misfortune yet to come. During our third week, it rained continuously, and when we finally made it to the work site — it was a Saturday, and the shift ended at noon — we saw that part of our freshly dug pit had collapsed along one side and filled our hole with a considerable amount of new earth. Water spurted from the side, which was probably the source that filled our pit every night.
The foreman arrived, surveyed the destruction, and, as if we were the builders instead of him, concluded that we should have timbered the pit. So we’d have to dig out the earth once again, and of course no one would pay us for this extra work. Then he added that now it would be best to embed the whole thing in concrete, otherwise we’d have a lake on Monday, but we probably would anyway because we wouldn’t be able to get it cemented by lunchtime. He sent me for the pump and said he was leaving to go see his family. Then he took off just like the others who weren’t here working like idiots.
When we came back on Monday morning, the trenches were dry. The foreman stood over them almost in surprise and asked how we’d managed to do it. Then he invited me into his trailer, took a seat behind his unbelievably dingy desk, and asked me if I’d calculated how much we had earned for the previous week.
We’d always made very little, but this week as a result of the repeated breakdown of the mixer, the flooded excavation pits, two days of no work because of rain, and finally the collapsed wall that we had to dig out again, we didn’t even make a hundred crowns apiece.
Then he asked how many times we’d had to use the pump. I said every day we were working last week. He pulled out a worksheet and wrote: manual transfer of pump, sixteen hours. Then he added carpentry work and manual transfer of wood, eight cubic meters.
I objected that we had timbered only on Saturday, and then only a few boards.
“Don’t bother me when I’m working, you little idiot!” he replied.
He thought up several more operations I’d had no idea existed and calculated each of our wages to be three hundred crowns and some change.
At a loss, I started to thank him. “Don’t thank me,” he admonished me, and he added that he wasn’t paying me out of his own pocket. They were swindling us as much as they were him.
This had been my first encounter with those we had been taught were the working, and thus ruling, class — if I don’t take into account those who two years earlier had searched our house.
*
It wasn’t easy to select a topic for my seminar paper, let alone a senior thesis in the field I was studying. I could choose either some sort of historicizing topic of Czech literature: Czech national revival authors (most of them were revivalists rather than writers) or the rural realists, or perhaps I could heap praise upon one of the few prewar leftist authors or one of the many contemporary authors.
At this time appeared a slim pamphlet by a Soviet Slavist named Nikolsky praising the antifascist work of Karel Čapek, an author who until then had been blacklisted because he had been among the major personalities of the democratic republic. A friend of President Masaryk, Čapek had written an angry essay called “Why I Am Not a Communist” (one of my classmates had lent me a nearly illegible typewritten copy), and had attacked the Communist movement, especially in its early stages.