Nevertheless, we practiced this and other such tomfoolery, and the recruits really did lie down with their feet facing the supposed explosion, but almost half of them, perhaps out of linguistic ignorance, weariness, or spite, lay down with their heads in the direction of the explosion. These were immediately pronounced dead and in punishment were ordered by the corporals to run around the training grounds in their gas masks.
One afternoon I stayed at the barracks and wrote a long letter to my beloved Helena. I broke the rules regarding military secrecy by describing the nonsensicalness of the training I was undergoing, but most of all I wanted to know when she was coming to see me, and I assured her how sad I was and how much I was looking forward to her visit.
When I’d finished the letter, I left the activities room and saw a Gypsy whose squad leader had decided to pick on him. He was kneeling in the hallway and scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush. I ordered him to stop immediately and return to his quarters. Then I told his astonished tormentor I would brook no degradation of human dignity or even the assigning of senseless tasks. I could have disciplined him myself, but I decided to lodge a complaint with the company commander, who would punish him more severely.
So I complained to our cobbler. He was somewhat taken aback and informed me that this was how the recruits were usually treated. He admitted, however, that scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush was ineffective, was unhygienic, and did not contribute to improving the combat readiness of our army. He promised to attend the next education seminar and get it through their fucking heads.
He did actually come and speak to us. Because I still knew shorthand at the time, I transcribed his speech word for word owing to its illustrative nature.
We are living in the phase, comrade soldiers, when the general crisis of capitalism is deepening, when a third world war is the best fact, or rather the third phase, which is characterized by the emergence of socialism. This third phase to this day. We see on the one hand the decline of the revolutionary wave, we see the influence of the global gendarme, the United States, but a further aspect of this is our progressive worldwide body. And this is characterized by the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union. This is a characteristic of the era, that is, the influence of revisionism and the danger from the left and the right. But this final phase is different in that the world Socialist body has become the agent of history. Of course there are problems, for instance, in Africa, where we cannot say ahead of time how or which agent or chieftain will develop, but we have a moral duty with respect to it because people are still chewing away at each other over there, comrade solders. But we overdo it, even though that onus is upon us, and therefore such conversations must be undertaken, where the comrade president meets with African chieftains.
Then the commander posed a combat control question: Who was our president?
After a lengthy silence someone suggested Admiral Horthy; someone else came up with Jozef Tiso. I knew how these strange, rarely encountered words unsettled our commander. He looked at us trainees and all of a sudden asked me to tell the soldiers who their president and commander in chief was.
Since time immemorial, military service has combined drills, stupidity, and the unlimited suppression of any manifestation of intellectual ability, individuality, and freedom. The combination of this tradition with Russian brainlessness and Communist illiteracy, however, resulted in something that exceeded all imagination, not to mention common sense.
I conferred with the other trainees. We then summoned the squad leaders under our command and informed them that if we saw any kind of hazing, we would revoke their passes as punishment. The corporals took offense and stopped attending to military discipline, which immediately declined, as did the battle preparedness of our company. Our company, however, was to be sacrificed in the event of war anyway.
*
Father tried in vain to become legally rehabilitated. He secured the testimony of the foremost experts, who confirmed that if the motors had any flaws, the cause was not in the design but rather in the construction or in the negligent way they had been assembled. Witnesses who had testified against him were prepared to now testify that their confessions had been forced. The regional court in Uherské Hradiště, however, confirmed the original judgment with a remarkable explanation:
While the witnesses are now trying to characterize the activity of engineer Klíma in an entirely different way, the court considering the proposal to resume the legal action is not prepared to admit their new confessions. It is possible to explain the change to engineer Klíma’s advantage, in which the witnesses characterize him as properly looking after the enterprise of which he was the director, by the fact that witnesses, as experience has demonstrated, fashion their testimony in such a way as to be most favorable to the culprit after the passage of a longer period of time.
Father once again entered an appeal, and after four years the Supreme Court repealed the verdict saying that Father’s guilt was not indubitable and returned the case to the regional court. The regional court, however, noted only that as a result of the president’s amnesty of January 12, 1957, the criminal proceedings have been halted. Thus his innocence was not confirmed; his guilt had merely been pardoned.
Father felt humiliated by the verdict. His honor had not been vindicated, even though it must have been obvious to any court. He decided to seek rehabilitation in a different way: He started clamoring to be readmitted to the Communist Party, which had expelled him immediately upon his arrest.
Since he considered me a better writer, he had me read over the petitions he had sent to various party offices. In my opinion, he was much too submissive in emphasizing his class consciousness and refuting the ridiculous accusations that he was in touch with Trotskyites or that he had studied at a German technical school instead of a Czech one. In his defense, he wrote that his scientific work had always held first place for him; nevertheless, he wrote, As a member of the party, I always fulfilled my party duties conscientiously and to the letter, and I believe I passed muster among my colleagues who always believed in me entirely.
I should have talked him out of these letters. Why should he beseech those who were in charge when he had been arrested? But it didn’t seem appropriate for me to tell him what to do. Besides, I was too occupied with my own affairs to concern myself with what was fettering his mind and guiding his actions.
When I was fired from Květy, I didn’t know how I was going to support myself. Was I a reporter, a journalist, a literary critic, or perhaps a budding writer?
I still hadn’t produced a book, but I had published around ten short stories, several of which had obviously been influenced by Hemingway.
I offered the collection of stories to Mladá fronta, but I was informed that even if the editors accepted the book, it would not come out for at least two years. Shortly thereafter I received an unexpected letter from the people at the Literary Fund. They had learned that I was preparing a book of short stories. To allow me to complete it in peace, they were offering me a six-month stipend equal to what I had earned at Květy. This fund was to be used exclusively for the completion of the book, and they also pointed out that the stipend could not be extended. At the end of the letter, however, they betrayed their true intentions in a thoroughly unofficial manner: Please accept our offer as it is intended — as an attempt to assist you in your current situation.