Wenceslas and the Russian Bear

It Was Audible, visible, tangible, yet impossible to grasp. Early Wednesday morning, August 21, 1968, someone knocked at the door of our hotelroom and shouted: "We're occupied!" For a moment, I thought he wanted to cancel our reservation, although the time and method of letting us know seemed somewhat unorthodox; besides, the tone of voice was too emotional for any conventional announcement. Before we could take in what it was all about, we heard the first shots, and the words "We're occupied!" acquired their true meaning. The shots were live and numerous, and they swept us back 23 years and a few months to the time when the Allied Armies entered Germany. The shots declared categorically: Europe knows no peace, it exists in a state of varying armistices. Here, in Prague, an armistice was being broken.

Simultaneously with the memory of machine guns and mounted cannon firing in the streets came the instinctive actions of self-preservation: Get away from the window, look for cover---in the corridor, in the bathroom. How smoothly we slipped back into it all. The hotel opened out onto Wenceslas Square; the firing sounded close. Somewhere glass shattered, for somewhere each bullet, half spent though it may be, must hit and penetrate something.

Our 20-year-old son wanted to be out there, now, and we let him go. He wasn't looking for adventure or thrills, he just had to be there, now. We could understand this and we let him go, unafraid but apprehensive. A little later we went out, too, found him and stayed together. For two days his ears hurt. Soviet soldiers had fired past his ears into the air. He might well have passed one of them in Moscow, Leningrad or Tiflis, on the street, in a theater or a movie, or on the beach near Riga. Now they were firing past his ears into the air, in Prague, and not only into the air. No, this wasn't the movies or TV, no cameras were being turned here; these weren't supers, these were soldiers in action, shattering sentimentality, and here in Prague sympathies were being shattered by order of the Soviet government.

The fate of Czechoslovakia was decided that Wednesday around the Wenceslas Monument, in front of the museum. Politicians probably always think dualistically: subjection or armed revolt. They would have preferred the first; they had presumably allowed for the second; they had not expected the third---a permanent, solid front of resistance, unarmed. This third power, often imagined, was born Wednesday, August 21, 1968, in Prague, and within four days it had become a giant. It, too, was audible, visible, tangible, yet impossible to grasp; it was full of passion, power and imagination, forever beyond the grasp of today's breed of Soviet politician. Might it have been possible to withdraw immediately, leaving the brutal action behind like a bad dream? It was the declaration of bank-ruptcy of Soviet diplomacy, of the secret service and of Muscovitism. Each hour that the tanks---incredibly---remained, another year of trust was lost, so that by 11 that night, the level of trust arrived at was roughly that of 1953.

With staggering audacity, waving the Czechoslovak flag, the young people leaped onto the tanks and defiantly rode along on them, shouting, "Dubçek, Dubçek, Svoboda!" The Czechoslovak flag has the same colors as the flag of the French Revolution. When the tank crews retreated inside and closed the turret hatches, the young people opened the hatches and dragged the men out from their ivory towers, to confront them with unsentimental reality---and to engage them in argument. Certain things that they may have accepted grumblingly in the past now turned out to be useful: a knowledge of Russian and a training in dialectics, and I imagine---I hope---they sowed the seeds of doubt. This third power was a new creation and it created many new things: At least one European flag regained meaning; and here in Prague, the worn-out word "freedom" was recharged. Even monuments became acceptable again and the gospel of democracy was proclaimed.

Now and then, in its efforts to struggle free, a tank resorted to an ugly weapon: The driver would rev up the motor at full speed and clouds of gasoline fumes would envelop Wenceslas Square in blue fog. Tank columns would ostentatiously drive along side streets, crushing cars against walls, reducing curbs and traffic islands to rubble. Their brutish message could have been spelled out to read: The stupidity of arms is triumphant.

At the hotel, people carried on as usual. The waiters were as courteous as ever, seldom showing any signs of nervousness even when the firing echoed right outside the hotel. When someone at the next table asked for white wine, the waiter said: "All we have left is red!" and it sounded as if, for the time being, he couldn't stand the sight of red. In the overcrowded hotel, the guests remained calm. No evidence of panic. Perhaps it was the population's solid front of self-confidence that reassured them.

Journalists were in their element. Were they really? I thought about the difference between journalists and authors; the two men who combined both, Hemingway and Fontane, both war correspondents, were not much help. It seems that one doesn't exclude the other, but even less does one include the other. One journalist told me I had been fortunate. I didn't think so. I would gladly have gone without this fortune.

It still defied one's grasp. Even three days later, when we were crossing Wenceslas Square late one evening, a pale, bespectacled young man led us over to the tanks parked in front of the Prace publishing offices. He shook his head, raised his fists in impotent rage, drummed them against a gun barrel and wept as he muttered over and over again: "Je suis communiste, je suis communiste," He apologized for being a little drunk, "un peu ivre." It was obvious from his breath that he had been drinking methylated spirits.

There was no alcohol to be bought in the city. All bars, cafés, restaurants, churches, museums, movies and theaters were closed. Whoever decreed and enforced the strict ban on alcohol deserves the Nobel Peace Prize: He could not bring the Czechs and the Slovaks total salvation, but he did manage to prevent total disaster. A few hundred drunks in the city and the permanent simmering point could not have been maintained. The permanent confrontation would have turned into battle fronts. So fury remained cold, a holy, hungry, desperate soberness. During these days, the legendary Schweik died of lack of beer. Jan Hus was present. The Czechoslovaks wanted their communism in both forms: socialist and democratic. Just as for centuries Rome had callously consigned Catholics to a diet of dry bread, so Muscovitism was now consigning the Czechoslovaks to the aridity of the one and only socialism.

It was a marathon council from which the responsible parties were absent and where only the victims confronted one another. And both sides were, in fact, victims: the population and the Soviet soldiers. The ugliest feature of the whole process was that two historically innocent groups were forced into mutual inhumanity. Both devout, both deeply wounded in their trust, they might conceivably pity each other, but on no account might they put this pity into practice. The unthinkable---to join hands against the brutality of the action---would have been the spirit of revolution, the true salvation from counterrevolution; and, perhaps, if there had been Dantonesque Soviet marshals.... But then, most of them are Napoleonic. It was an imperialist, hegemonic action, yet the Soviet soldiers did not seem imperialistic. I searched the faces of a great many of them: They were not at ease, nowhere near as at ease as the German soldiers had been when they invaded Prague and Paris during World War Two. Although they may have been raised to believe in the infallibility of the Kremlin (I have my doubts as to the "success" of this education), they have not been raised as imperialists. Their choice was between going mad or committing suicide, and I wonder what goes on inside people who have faced this choice for three days? No one would have taken them in. A soldier who cannot choose to desert can only cling to his weapon. They were neither exultant victors nor convinced occupiers; they were in an inhuman position---just like the people of Prague, who might theoretically have offered them tea, bread and water and the use of their toilets. Here, there was no more "theoretically": Everything was concrete. And it had to be that way. Twice I saw Soviet soldiers being offered cigarettes during a heated discussion. They accepted them; and in the acceptance, there was more humanity than in the offering, which was not so much a sign of friendly feeling as an automatic gesture of debate. Besides, a cigarette is different from a piece of bread; it is a piece of nothing, and bread is still a symbol.

An elderly lady was walking her dog; a Soviet soldier tried to make friends with it, looking for "humanity" at least in a dog. The elderly lady whistled her dog to heel; not even it was to collaborate or fraternize. This was not cruelty, it was consistent realism; it was not a studied action but a natural reaction. Only the innocent can be that harsh toward one another. The guilty always find some way of making others believe that their corruption is humanity, while, in fact, it is sentimentality. Thus, taking a general prisoner is usually an action carried out among gentlemen. Innocent victims cannot afford this luxury; they turn nasty because they suffer everything at first hand. In a state of emergency, no one is exempt. I believe that this has been applied for the first time to the full and with inexorable realism during those four days in Prague. Those who believe in democracy don't think in terms of privilege. The democratic principle must have been particularly alien to the Soviet (continued on page 96)Russian Bear(continued from page 92) soldiers; their society, including their army, is a society of the privileged---like our own, which, in its VIPs, creates its new aristocracy while continuing to worship the old.

Prague was in a state of emergency, and the population claimed no exemption and no privilege. Nobody complained of the beer shortage, of the line-ups. Friends offered us food, for fear we might not be getting enough to eat at the hotel; whereas, absurdly enough, the hotel waiters apologized on the second evening because there were only four hors d'oeuvres; the third evening, only one: stuffed tomatoes with smoked salmon. Any attempt to reverse the situation and take out food from the hotel would have been defeated by the people's pride. Yes, they were proud: This was another word that had been given new meaning. The madness of a privileged existence in a luxury hotel was respected without grumbling or envy, while at the same time, this excluded the foreigners, the tourists. It would have been quite natural, and not in the least unreasonable, to commandeer the kitchen of some hotel, with the cooperation of managers, chefs and waiters, for the supplying of meals to the third power. But then, there was no revolution; hence, no counter-revolution. Foreigners remained shut out and shut in with their privileges. It was the proud, holy, democratic, sober, solid resistance of realists, unique in Europe, unprecedented in history.

Very occasionally, someone who was not a hotel guest would come in from the street, exhausted, for a rest in the lobby and a drink. In the hotel, there was all kinds of alcohol. A Czech poet sipped his bottle of Pilsen, neither melodramatically nor voluptuously, but realistically, sacramentally, reverently. "Irony is dead," he said on leaving. His eyes had lost the gleam of Schweik. In front of the house where Kafka was born stood a tank, its gun barrel aimed at the bust of Kafka. Here, too, symbol matched reality.

A drunken worker staggered past the hotel steps, shouting, "Communism is dead. They haven't rescued communism, they've destroyed it!" He was surrounded and escorted to safety. There seemed to be a tacit understanding that the occasional drunk be protected with gentle force. The simmering point remained constant; the third power had triumphed. And over and over again, there were the women and the girls arguing with the Soviet soldiers, trying to convince them, pale, beautiful in their wrath and courage, insistent and determined. Yes, she existed all right, the woman of Prague; and now that monuments have reacquired meaning, I hope someday one will be erected to her---in Prague. She is fair, slim, passionate, utterly unfanatical, yet fiery; and she is a realist, a democrat. She wants to live, not under capitalism, not under the hegemony of dogmatic aridity and blindness; her realism is of the earth. I could wish for her eyes to have laser beams.

In the hotel lobby, someone enlightened me on the dialectic of humanity, the leniency toward criminal Stalinists with whom accounts were not to be settled until the party congress in September. Even the murderers among them were not being handled with anything as rough as kid gloves: They were being carefully dabbed with swabs of soft cotton to spare them even the least pain. A pale, blonde Prague girl at the next table said, quite distinctly, "They still haven't found a quisling." And the man I was talking to said, "What's more, in 1956, there were no Czechoslovakian troops in Hungary." He went on to speak about the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia, which now, after years of suppression, was proclaiming solidarity with a Communist regime, intended to remain without property and was casting no wistful backward glances at a bygone feudalism. Counterrevolution?

In four days and much of four nights spent in the streets, on the telephone at the hotel, in private homes, I never once heard a word to justify this pretext. Needless to say, those who believe that socialism is defined in Moscow may bow to the dogma of the infallibility of the Central Committee. The day the Cierna conference took place, Rome published the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Soon there will be Catholics who no longer heed Vaticanism; and I hope that Western Communists publicly, and many Eastern Communists secretly, will no longer heed Muscovitism.

At a former partisan's home, I was told the story of Heinrich, the German Communist who parachuted to join the Czech partisans during World War Two and 24 years later, in March 1968, arrived in Prague wearing the uniform "of those we fought against side by side," offering his support against the counter-revolution. His offer of assistance was declined with thanks. "Now I suppose he's sitting somewhere outside the city and waiting. If he turns up here, I won't know him."

The third morning, unasked, the waiter brought us each two eggs with our breakfast, saying something like: "Take them and eat them. Who knows what there'll be this afternoon or tomorrow?" This unexpected offer of eggs was further evidence of that sacramental realism that no longer distinguishes between symbol and reality. "Theoretically," the waiters would have been justified in treating us as totally superfluous parasites and spectators; but there was no more "theoretically" and, hence, no idealistic supersensitivity. We were human beings and entitled to breakfast. Nowhere was there any servility, just unquestioning courtesy.

When the younger waiters and bus boys took off their tail coats and white jackets, they looked exactly like the young people outside, who were leaping onto tanks, distributing leaflets and newspapers, greeting tanks with catcalls and dashing around on their motor scooters. They were these young people; they might just as easily have been students, workers, journalists, actors or photographers. I believe that nowhere and never in Europe has a nation been so close to democracy.

I asked a Communist official about two pernicious officials of the Writers' Union whom I had met in 1961. "Between January and June," he replied, "---and here again, you have the dialectic of our democratic humanity---they were kicked upstairs. Now they're sitting at home, hiding, not daring to go out, watching and waiting. Nobody will talk to them. Up to now, we've gone easy on them. If one of them were to be appointed chairman of the Writers' Union to replace Goldstücker, he would preside over nothing but empty benches---maybe a few stooges would turn up, but nowadays, even stooges have to hide more carefully than our legal secret radio transmitters."

The evening of the third day, the Soviet soldiers were faced with the worst ordeal of all: ridicule, a weapon with which they could not retaliate. On an insurance company's building, the inscription: "We regret that we are unable to insure Soviet soldiers against insults." Fictitious letters on posters: "Dear Ivan, come home quickly, Natasha is already sleeping with Kolya." Even more malign: "Dear Ivan, Dad has sold his felt boots for booze, your uncle has been eaten by a bear. Hurry home. Love, Momma." The first field kitchens were rumbling through the streets in the darkness. It was the evening when suddenly all street signs, all house numbers and all name plates in Prague were removed. It happened very fast, word being passed from house to house and acted upon immediately. I was in someone's apartment about seven that evening when another tenant in the building gave the word and my host at once stepped outside his front door, unscrewed his name plate and tossed it onto the hall table. Next day, the only house numbers and street signs I could see were on the house where Kafka was born and in the nearby streets. The tanks were parked too close.

Among intellectuals, the chief topic of conversation was whether or not to stay. The word "emigration" was taboo; besides, it would have been inappropriate. Those who emigrated from Germany in 1933 had reason to fear the man in the (continued on page 190)Russian Bear(continued from page 96) street and the neighbors. In Prague, democracy was born in the street, and one's neighbors were democracy's staunchest support. Rumors of arrest were not confirmed; and yet, how far would they go, what was in store? Stalinism was at the door, visible and tangible. Its methods had not been forgotten. Would Dubçek, Svoboda and Cerník stand for it? As yet, no one knew what they had had to stand. Trust in them was unshaken, but what and how much would they be able to endure for how long? Politics behind closed doors, when tanks stand at every street corner, in front of every ministry, every newspaper office, every radio and television station. Both alternatives unthinkable: to demand the suicide of a whole nation or to compromise. The situation was unprecedented; the third power---whose solidarity would surprise even those returning from abroad---was also unprecedented. How could politics behind closed doors establish contact with this third power? The question of emigration remains open and will continue to remain open for a while yet, because the situation is unprecedented, because the man in the street stands behind the intellectuals and it is not inconceivable that he, the man in the street, might prefer to know his intellectuals to be out of the country than in the country and in prison. And what about wives, children, mothers, grandmothers and mothers-in-law? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps an as-yet-invisible third power will demolish Muscovite infallibility. Perhaps; but when, when? Perhaps the monument to the woman of Prague was being cast during those first three days, to be sunk for a time in the Moldava, in honor of which Brecht wrote one of his finest poems and from which Soviet soldiers were drinking, in which they were washing, the men who, "theoretically," had not deserved to be ridiculed.

On the fourth day, the Soviet soldiers would hardly talk to anyone, nor would they allow themselves to be photographed. The sun was shining; it was Saturday. Many Prague citizens were out for a walk. We were out from seven in the morning until eight at night. Lists were displayed outside the houses; signatures were being collected for the new, illusory catchword "neutrality."

We got hold of a taxi and were driven around the sights. It was like a bad documentary on Prague: Hradcany Castle, Loreta, view over Prague from the stadium, past the Belvedere (tanks blocking the entrance), to the ghetto, to the synagogue, to the Faust building; close by, St. Ignatius Church was open and we went in. The taxi driver was courteous, spoke German and was well informed. He casually mentioned that the Soviet Union owed Czechoslovakia 450 billion crowns for uranium; Dubçek was asking for this money now, in order to restore the economy, and that was why there were tanks in Prague. I felt a bit jittery when he drove through an intersection under the very nose of the evening tank patrol. We walked the rest of the way.

The Jan Hus monument on the Alt-stadt Ring (the old town square) had been blindfolded. A young man, obviously a West German and not a journalist, was caught photographing it. A Soviet soldier crossed the square from the Hus monument toward him as he stood in the colonnade. Holding his machine pistol to the young man's chest, the soldier demanded the camera. The soldier looked uncomfortable. We felt uncomfortable. I would have handed over the camera at once, even at odds of 100,000 to 1 that he wouldn't shoot. It is so easy to press the hair trigger of a machine pistol, even if only through tension. I advised the young man to hand over the camera. He refused. A group quickly formed and the Soviet soldier, surrounded, became more and more nervous. He was a nice-looking lad, sensitive and obviously acting on orders. A handsome young gypsy woman pushed up the barrel of his machine pistol so that it no longer pointed at the young man's chest but at the door of the Týn Church. At the same time, she was shouting angrily at the soldier, no doubt to the effect that this was no way to behave, to point a gun barrel directly at a person's chest.

Two more sentries were dispatched across the square as reinforcements. They looked less sensitive. A young Czech asked the young man in German, "Do you really have a camera and did you use it?" "Yes," said the young man. "Just give it to him," I said. The young Czech said, "I don't think he should give it to him." My wife said, "Why don't you show him your passports?" We did. This caused delay, easing of tension, confusion. The young Czech talked, talked, talked insistently to the first soldier in Russian, while more and more gypsies gathered around with their children. In their dark eyes, I saw something for which I would have given several hundred cameras: life and the joy of living. Suddenly, the sentries turned on their heels and walked back toward the Hus monument. They had failed to carry out orders, and I have no doubt they have received at least a reprimand, probably worse. The young man had kept his camera. The gypsies were beaming. I shook hands with the young Czech. My wife and I both then found that our knees were trembling. For the first time in 23 years and a few months, we had once again seen how senselessly someone could have died. And all because of a camera. I had no use for the young man's courage.

We sat down on a bench, under trees, in the sunshine, on Saturday afternoon. People were sitting there peacefully, only a few paces from the tanks. A boy had come out with his pet, a little owl. He wore a broad leather arm band with a chain attached to it, and the little owl jumped on his head, shoulders and arms, while the neighbors' children stood around. I envied the boy---an owl is something I have always wanted. Strange: Somehow, undeniably, one had got used to the tanks. People sat quietly on their benches, smoking and chatting in subdued voices. Children clambered around on a jungle gym, played in the sandbox. The slogans on house walls had become coarser; to put it politely, the fecal and anal elements predominated. A tank soldier replied in phallic terms: With an unmistakable gesture, he sat himself astride the gun barrel and gave a coarse laugh. Only one person laughed with him, the others were too tired; or maybe they felt embarrassed.

The only people left in the hotel were journalists. They stood on the steps in front of the hotel, waiting. A group of fresh journalists arrived. They were tired and hungry; you could tell at once that they were old hands at trouble of all kinds. By the elevator, two Americans recognized each other. "We've met before, haven't we?" "That's right, two years ago, in Saigon." "What d'you think---is this going to be a European Vietnam?" Shrug of the shoulders.

The elevator came. The elderly operator was a living image of better days. Gray-haired, sensitive, courteous, unobtrusive. A relic of the Hapsburg days. He might have been a cabinet minister or a cultural attaché; but who can tell in a democracy? Maybe he really was an elevator operator by profession. He accepted tips calmly, but that proves nothing; cabinet ministers sometimes accept tips, too.

Sunday morning, the hotel lobby was almost empty. In a baronial armchair sat a girl printing slogans on wastepaper. She looked in need of sleep, her make-up just a trifle askew. It was quiet and sunny, and down here in the lobby, the firing---already part of the morning ritual---sounded more remote. We had long given up moving back from the window at the sound of shots. We were reluctant to leave, but our Czech friends insisted. The correspondent of Der Stern took us to Smíchov station. We had no trouble getting there---driving between tanks.

Much kissing, much weeping, at Smíchov station. And for the first time since Tuesday evening, there was beer. People were standing in line at the station buffet and going off with their pint mugs. From Prague to the German border, there wasn't a single tank to be seen from the train. Just two soldiers at a level crossing somewhere. Was Czechoslovakia really occupied? The forests of Bohemia are deep and vast, the villages so quiet. At Pilsen, many passengers rushed to the station buffet to turn their last Czech crowns into Pilsen beer and came back with six, eight, ten bottles.

Beyond Pilsen, in the lovely river valley, we looked in vain---as we had done on the way to Prague---for the little station of Malovice that had figured so prominently in my wife's family stories. Her father had been a lawyer with the state railway in Pilsen and the family had spent much of the summer in the waiting room at Malovice, or deep in the woods, by the little river, collecting mushrooms; and their Czech grandmother would tell them stories and bring home flowers and herbs from the forest, once even a crow. There were two trains a day; and with the evening train, the engineer used to bring my father-in-law a mug of beer from Pilsen. It can't have been very far from Pilsen; for, according to tradition, the foam was still on the beer. It is probably on a branch line. We didn't find it on the way back, either. Like a dream, it remained buried in the Bohemian forests.

In our compartment were two Czech matrons chatting in a mixture of Czech and American. They were old but still had that pinkly gleaming silver hair, those crazy gingerbread glasses, too conspicuous underwear and embarrassing décolletés. I wished they were wearing head scarves and shawls and steel-rimmed spectacles, like the Czech grandmother in our family photos. They would have looked much prettier.

There were other Czechs on the train, too, even some emigrants. At the border, not a single suitcase was opened. But every hollow space in the compartment was opened up and a flashlight shone into every last corner by a man in plain clothes. And the water tanks were tapped and all the toilets minutely searched.