I heard the professor out. My story wasn’t bad, but it was sloppily written. I had to rework it and eliminate all the literary clichés.
Offended, I replied that they didn’t have to publish my story at all if they didn’t want to. The professor said it was up to me and handed me my manuscript.
I came back a week later with the rewritten story and humbly submitted it again.
Although literary theory bored me and I avoided literary discussions, my story satisfied the requirements that my fellow poets and literary critics were to designate only a few weeks later as literature or poetry of the everyday.
Květen was subject to somewhat less supervision because of its small circulation, and a collection of authors, heterogeneous in both their opinions and their ages, gathered there.
Because I had already published several short stories, I was seen as a young prose writer and thus appointed to the editorial board.
It soon got around that I was participating in the publication of a literary monthly.
Despite their similar names, Květy and Květen offered two different views of the world, and these two magazines were like two islands separated by an ocean. It became obvious that I could not work for both of them for long. This conflict was soon resolved. I wrote and published in Květen a lengthy essay titled “Cadre Critique of Karel Čapek, Czech Writer.”
I began the article with a quotation from Čapek’s article “What Is Culture?” published in Přítomnost in February 1934: “In my opinion, all education has at least one common end: to teach something about the experiences, knowledge, and values humanity has thus far produced and not lose or fall beneath them.” I continued:
What a modest request! Nevertheless, it has recently been compromised. Our education has run wild and our thinking has ossified. We have clipped the wings of our own spirit; we have eradicated from the world of philosophy, literature, and art everything that does not correspond to the compartment in which the world was supposed to fit.
For a while no one noticed the essay, but then a new editor in chief was installed at Květy. He called me into his office and had in front of him my Čapek essay. He asked if I’d written it and whether I truly stood behind everything I’d said. When I assured him that otherwise I wouldn’t have written it, he asked if I thought that I could remain an editor at Květy, and he answered for me that I couldn’t. He was ordering me to pack all my belongings that day and never show myself there again.
Thus ended my editorship at Květy after less than a year. Květen was banned two years later.
Essay: The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, p. 475
10
I met my future life companion all but symbolically on a bridge. It was a very hot day, and I was coming back from Smíchov. I saw a former classmate walking toward me, a member of our singing trio, accompanied by a redhead whose pale skin was flushed from the heat. I greeted my classmate and learned that the redhead was named Helena. She was in her first year studying Czech and was also a marvelous singer.
Without even glancing at me, the redhead said she sang only in the University Art Ensemble and that we had met once already. I had already graduated and was accompanying her to the cafeteria, but because there was a long line, I had sneaked my way to the front and forgotten about her. She’d been quite offended.
I recalled no such event. Surely she’d confused me with someone else.
Standing in the oppressive heat was unpleasant, and since I wasn’t in any hurry, I offered to walk with them.
At one point, Helena stopped before an ostentatious building and invited us inside to her apartment where we could cool off a little.
She lived on the fifth floor of this magnificent structure from the beginning of the century.
Inside, she brought out a large jug of water sweetened with syrup. We sat at a square black table and talked about the department and our professors. Helena didn’t do a lot of talking. I, on the other hand, discoursed expansively on how my longest prose work to date had been published in the magazine Nový život, but the censors had confiscated it because I wrote about the student May Day celebration. It was unfortunate I didn’t have the text with me or I would have gladly read at least a few passages from it. I thought the story quite compelling and heaped praise on my writing to make it clear that I would someday be a writer, the most admirable vocation I could imagine.
Helena did not look at me once the entire time, at least not when I was looking at her.
When I got home, I realized I wanted to see the redhead again. I rang up my former classmate and asked if she happened to have the telephone number of “that redheaded girl who had invited us for a soft drink.” She did, and all I needed now was an excuse to call her.
Fortunately, the lock to my briefcase was missing. It was unlikely that I’d lost it at the redhead’s apartment because I hadn’t opened it there, but perhaps it was a plausible pretext.
When she answered the phone, she assured me that she hadn’t found any lock.
When I finally managed to say that I’d like to see her anyway, I’m sure she assumed that I had simply invented the story about the lock, but she nevertheless admitted it might be possible.
I suggested that since she had hosted me, it was my turn. I pointed out that a trolley went from her place almost directly to my building. I’d wait for her at the stop just in case.
She hesitated before she finally agreed.
I waited impatiently. She arrived a half hour late, explaining that she could never keep track of time.
We met again several times; I even went to see her in Louny, where she spent her holidays with her aunt. We set out on a long trip to Mount Oblík in Slovakia. Right at the foot of the steep hill, a Gypsy woman (there were still no Romani living in Czechoslovakia at the time, only Gypsies) stopped us and said she would tell us our future. I saw that my companion was eager to hear about what lay ahead for us, so I consented. The Gypsy read our palms and foretold a beautiful and happy life together — a little boy and girl, a long journey (an illness, which would turn out okay; in fact, it would make us stronger) — and she finally told us we would be rich. In anticipation of enormous wealth and grateful for two children, I bestowed upon the clairvoyant a whole twenty-five crowns.
*
On one of our outings along the cliffs of nearby Beroun (on the way we held hands and talked), I wrote Helena a long-winded declaration, perhaps in the belief that my literary skill would win her over forever.
Monday morning, the last of September 1957
Just a single sentence,
A message:
to a hazelnut whose shell is judicious but whose heart yields life, and the shell, therefore, must burst, and I believe that only a great love is stronger than the will (Yours) and the shell;
and to the child in muddy slippers on the wet grass bending over an ear of corn, Your thoughts are like a mountain spring that cleanses me entirely; I will stay by Your side until night and rain and wind arrive; I will allow only the stars to come inside; to stay with you forever;
and to the girl with tender fingers that walk as she does along unfamiliar paths, at times slightly atremble