All these petty affairs, however, faded in significance before the momentous events taking place on the international stage. The first thing we heard was the distant thunder of a workers’ strike in Poland, and then the Hungarians began to defy the Communist regime. At the same time the so-called Suez crisis broke out. Not a word was to be found about these events in our journal; in our editorial offices, however, the only thing people talked about was the situation in Hungary. The chairwoman of the party organization would call a meeting once a week to discuss the political situation. Worthy Communists cautiously (this was, after all, only a criticism of Soviet Communists) gave us to understand that the enormity of Stalin’s crimes had been exaggerated and could provoke all enemies of socialism. We were to avoid anything that could arouse sympathy for elements that might assume their moment had arrived. Apparently, these elements were prepared to attack the very foundations of Socialist society and the leading role of the party under the pretense of criticizing the cult of personality. At the end of October, the Czechoslovak and Soviet press agencies began reporting appalling news about Communist functionaries being hanged in Hungary, about insurgents murdering their own families, and about how those who had managed to escape from mutinous Budapest were seeking asylum here or even in capitalist Austria.
Father started listening to independent Hungarian radio broadcasts, and when I came home he would change the station to Vienna, so I could listen to the latest news as well. If you didn’t know they were speaking about the same events, you would have assumed there were two different Hungarian republics. One broadcast would talk about counterrevolution, the other about a national uprising; one reported that insurgents had resolved to institute a reign of terror aimed at the people and were determined to do away with socialism, and the other reported that the great majority of Hungarians were enthusiastically greeting the renewal of democracy and freedom. But how could socialism be done away with? Did any kind of socialism ever exist anywhere? Hadn’t terror been used here on everyone who refused to submit?
Now armed militiamen stood in front of and inside our office building just to make it clear that no such insurrection would take place here. Our chairwoman read to us a proposed resolution in which she proclaimed, in the name of the entire editorial team, support for the powers of socialism to halt the orgy of Hungarian counterrevolution.
I did not like this resolution and fled the meeting before it was voted on.
The next day the chairwoman drily informed me that she had signed the resolution on my behalf, since I had obviously been in such a hurry that I couldn’t wait a few more minutes. She knew I would have signed it and assumed that I held the same opinion as she did concerning the events in Hungary. The end of her sentence sounded rather like a menacing question.
The next day — it was already the beginning of November — our deputy editor in chief left for a general factory meeting, and when he returned he told us that socialism in Hungary was under threat; insurgents had started taking control of more territory. They were murdering party members and were planning to occupy parts of Slovakia that were predominantly Hungarian. The situation was so grave that he had decided to do something about it and thus had enlisted the entire editorial staff into the People’s Militia.
I think most of the editors were astounded. I said that this would not do; he hadn’t even asked us. He answered that he’d had no doubts concerning our consent, and with that the meeting ended.
Five years earlier I had been accepted as a member of the party. At the time I was convinced that what we were taught about socialism being the most advanced arrangement of society was a fact. Then I began to understand that much of what was happening was the opposite of what was actually reported, and crimes were being concealed behind lofty words. If I had been consistent, I would have left the party the moment the first flagrant trials of political opponents had begun, or at the latest when they had locked up Father. It’s true that until then no one had asked anything definite of me, at least nothing I had found unpleasant. I had been able to write my thesis the way I’d wanted; I hadn’t been appointed to any party function; I wasn’t in charge of anything; I didn’t harm anyone, and I hadn’t allowed anyone to do it for me. Now, as a devoted comrade, I was supposed to go and stand guard somewhere with an automatic weapon to preserve the status quo, so that those in power would continue to rule. Now I was horrified by the idea that I would be trapped forever in a blue-gray uniform with a red armband, subjected to military discipline and an oath of loyalty from which there would be no way out.
I decided to leave the party and thereby resolve everything. I knew I would face much unpleasantness; I would lose my job, and it would be difficult to find another. But this all seemed more acceptable than promising to the end of my life that I would, with rifle in hand, fight for an ideal I would have no influence on. Much to my surprise, I was relieved.
In the morning, I pocketed my party card with the intention of turning it over to our chairwoman. I arrived just in time for the meeting, where the deputy editor in chief was saying that no collective enlistment in the militia would be accepted. Each of us had to enlist on his or her own. He had also been told that preference was being given to working-class staff members over editors, and some of us might be turned away. Nevertheless, he believed we would all go and try to enlist. Of course I didn’t (as far as I know, nobody from the editorial staff did), and I did not return my party card.
A few days later, Soviet troops brutally suppressed the Hungarian revolution. When the news came that Soviet tanks were rolling through the streets of Budapest, the old good and worthy comrades on the editorial board starting hugging and kissing one another as if they’d just learned they had been saved and redeemed forever. Someone opened a bottle of vodka, and the foreign desk editor shouted effusively, Venceremos!
*
The only thing I truly enjoyed was writing. Lounging about the office, ordering and editing articles, seemed like a waste of time.
I had just finished my studies when the Writers’ Union, in addition to its well-established journals, was allowed to publish Květen, which was supposed to serve primarily as an outlet for the poetry of young authors. In the Czech lands, it was mostly poetry that was considered literature. In the first issue Květen published about sixty poems of would-be versifiers. I was not among those who ventured to write verse, but I still tried to write, using the form of the short story. “Blossom” was sentimental and moralistic. I wanted to discredit the belief that today all painful conflicts were disappearing from human relations. I thought up a story of a girl who falls in love with a handsome young scoundrel who abandons her when she gets pregnant. My heroine’s eyes are opened in the end. It is only in books that everything works itself out. Only there are pain and suffering cleared away as a housewife clears away dirt when she’s expecting guests.
At the editorial offices, besides two well-known authors, was a decrepit, obviously long-retired “professor” who was supposed to oversee the grammar and sometimes the stylistic quality of manuscripts.
I brought in “Blossom,” which I was justifiably proud of, since it differed from stories that were currently being published. The professor called me in a few days later, and I saw my typed copy on his desk desecrated with dozens of corrections in garish red ink. The number of corrections would have earned me an F in school.