The Authoritarians

I live in America now. Of that you’ll hear more. I grew up in a place without democracy. The only truths you knew for certain were those you confirmed with your own eyes, or else conveyed by those you trusted without a microscopic iota of doubt. And they were few.

In Czechoslovakia, which it was called then- though now it isn’t, most of us lived in two worlds. There was the life in public, where we all pretended, often with a cynicism close to the surface, to work and live in accordance with the Party, and its rigid ways. But there were also our personal worlds, where family, private solace, and the pursuit of pleasure were paramount, and propaganda was identified as such and left for dead.

I slept with a woman named Eva. Like me, she was still a student, and also like me worked several shifts a week in the main library at Charles University in Prague, which we both attended. After several conversations at work over a week or so, we met one evening at a café popular with the student body.

Eva was a dark brunet with bangs, the edges of whose creamy face were all smooth. That night she wore a blue denim jacket over a white blouse, and a brown corduroy maxi. Reduta was in a cellar, half stone walls and half plaster, with flyers and posters displayed everywhere. It felt dank, but a lubricous dank. Eva and I sat across from one another, the air above the tables blue with smoke. 

“Are you a pilsner person or a whiskey person?” she asked before we ordered. In our conversations in the library we’d covered such biographical matters as where we’d come from, and the subjects we studied.

“Vodka,” I answered.

A man about our age, with a scruffy blonde head of hair, and wearing a sweater-vest, took his seat on the small stage. He began to strum the guitar, and to sing the words to the Beatles song “Here, There and Everywhere.”

“The Beatles,” Eva said. “The authorities don’t look very kindly on them.” 

“Technically, we’re not listening to the Beatles, only a Beatles song. They usually don’t bother about that,” I said, an allusion to the idiosyncrasies of state security, and their arts and entertainment dos and don’ts.

“When you think about it,” Eva said, “if they can recognize a specific Beatles song, they must have listened to a lot of Beatles. How do you think they keep from being corrupted?”

“The farce goes on,” I responded, drolly. The waitress appeared and we ordered drinks.

“You ever sneak a peak at samizdat,” she asked, her tone suggesting she was a person who had, and that I would be in good company if I had as well. Samizdat was the word we used for journalism, literature, music, art or anything else smuggled in from the West, or copied and passed around in secret. 

“Never,” I said, sarcastically.

She smiled. “You strike me definitely as a culture hound. I wonder what kind of stuff you’d want to get your hands on if you could?” The carefully phrased question allowed me to interpret it as straightforward, if I was comfortable doing so, or as rhetorical, if I did not.

I answered. “If we were permitted to read material from the West, I’d enjoying reading Andy Warhol’s magazine Interview. I’d want some books by Hunter Thompson and Gore Vidal and James Baldwin. As for music, Devo and Lou Reed. I’d like a copy of the Village Voice, and any novels by Kerouac.”  My voice dropping down to a whisper, I added “and Kundera, obviously.”

“You know a lot about the West,” she said, mimicking a sternly disapproving tone.

“No comment,” I replied.

Eva and I drank lustily. Finally, she invited me to her apartment. We wobbled up the stairs from Reduta, to a street turning gray with sleet. Circles of tired yellow light from Prague’s ancient streetlamps stretched in each direction like long dotted lines. We walked several blocks, crunching the icy sprinkles under our shoes. Then we turned down the narrow, winding street where Eva’s apartment was. The dingy facades of the old multi-storied apartment buildings squeezed against the narrow street, making it feel like a deep canyon. 

It was warm and pleasantly stuffy in Eva’s apartment. There was a small living room, a kitchen, and bedroom, all with polished floors and dark molding. We quickly peeled one another’s clothing off, tumbled onto the sofa, and eventually ended up in bed. 

When I awoke, dawn was just beginning to break, though Eva was awake already, sitting up in bed with a textbook resting on her lap. She was studying by the early morning light beginning to filter in. A heavy sleet still peppered the windowpanes, and the radiators clanged and creaked when the steam came up. I was cozy under the covers, despite being in bed with a person I barely knew. There was safety and comfort in the sanctuary of a shared bed. 

“Rise and shine, lover,” Eva said, when she noticed me awake.

“I’d rather not,” I grumbled.

She chuckled, and nudged me gently with an elbow. ““I have morning classes today, and reading that I have to finish,” she said

“Not me.”

But I realized etiquette and consideration required removing myself so that she could have her apartment to herself. Nevertheless, my eyes drooped, and I dozed several minutes more. She didn’t intervene, but when she got up to go to the bathroom, her book slid onto the floor and landed with a loud whop. When she returned, I remained lying there, fully awake, but reluctant to put my feet onto the cold bare floor. She picked the book up, and got back underneath the covers again.  Turning to me she barked, “Catch up and get ahead,” sarcastically repeating one of the old musty Party youth organization slogans. You had to join the SSM, as it was called, if you had any hope of attending university, or having a decent job.

“It doesn’t sound any less idiotic now than it did then,” I groused.

“Aww, not feeling nostalgic?” she cooed. In a country like ours, everyone had more or less a similar childhood, and the same memories. A bond, albeit involuntary.

“It sounds now like something Reagan would say,” I told her. Even if we didn’t like our own system, and found much to inspire us in the West, Reagan and his bunch did not. We found our inspiration in Allen Ginsburg and Malcolm X. 

“The older generation,” she answered, shaking her head and grinning.

“Old fat fucks,” I said, shoving myself out of the bed at last. Before I left, Eva suggested we get together later in the week, when our nights off from the library fell in synch again.

I slept more when I got home. When I was out of bed, I buttered some bread for lunch before setting off for the classes I had in the afternoon. In the evening, after some supper, I reported to the library as I normally did. The reference librarian, who was my supervisor, told me immediately she’d received a note from one of the deans instructing me to come to his office as soon as I arrived. So off I went. 

The building was nearly empty when I got there, no assistant still at the desk outside his office at so late an hour. His door was open, and he waved me in. “Alex Skvorecky?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Have a seat.”

He was a thin man with a bald head, grayish clammy skin, and an unflattering five o’ clock shadow. As soon as I was situated in the chair in front of his desk, he took a tape recorder out of a drawer, then pressed the button to activate it. We listened to all of the conversations I’d had with Eva, beginning at Reduta, and everything we’d said in her apartment.

Everyone understood there was surveillance. Yet it was obvious this recording hadn’t come from any public surveillance. Eva had taped me herself. Tape recorders were next to impossible for an average citizen to obtain. This one had to have been given to her. Perhaps she taped nearly everyone, then turned over anything of interest. No person was too small or insignificant for sanction. Eva might even have been caught up in something herself, or someone in her family was. Or, she was simply one of the true believers who lived among us still- for all intents and purposes, them.

“Old fat fucks,” the dean said, repeating my words. “As you can see, I am quite fit. And not very old either.” The pettiness and vanity were exactly as one expected. There was no pretense. Though he may have worked for the university, ultimately he worked for them, as anyone with any position of authority did.

“Just being silly,” I said weakly, petrified.

“And when you referred to the measures the state employs for keeping us all safe as farce? This strikes me as considered political rebuke. I see a committed reactionary posture.”

“It just had to do with the Beatles, that kind of thing. I wasn’t referring to all of the government’s security measures. I understand how necessary they are, of course.”

He opened the middle drawer of his desk, took a cigarette out of a pack inside, and a lighter from his jacket pocket. He lit the cigarette and closed the drawer.

“I’m intrigued, Mr. Skvorecky, by your mockery of our aspirational slogans. Catch up and get ahead you scornfully ridicule. I have to ask, do you indeed find it idiotic that we should aspire as a society to live on an economic par with the West?  In the early days it was a struggle. And yet, you view us all as idiots.”

“I was just waking up, and I was grumpy. I do want us to live on an economic par with the West. I hope, with a good education, to make a contribution to that myself.”

He inhaled from his cigarette, pristinely bumping ash off the end of it into the ashtray with his index finger. “You’re aware the Party provides you with an education, aren’t you Mr. Skvorecky?”

“Yes. I’m grateful.”

“It doesn’t strike me that you are I’m afraid. We’re terminating your enrollment here. Perhaps we’ll revisit your education at a future time. A few years of menial jobs could be immensely educational. That is the kind of work left to those without education or credentials here in Czechoslovakia. Perhaps it will serve to strengthen your commitment to the rest of us.”

And that was it. In fact, as he correctly anticipated, I worked the next three months on road-paving crews in Lidice, where I lived with my parents again. Then I worked several months on a neighbor’s farm. At this point, my parents reached the reluctant conclusion that the best course for me was to emigrate. Seeing me deprived of an education was too much. They understood only too well the risks that came with remaining there, and the obstacles thar lay ahead of me, even without disrepute with the Party. Life in Czechoslovakia for ordinary people came with the bleakest of limitations.

And so, my sniffling mother and father helped to get me packed, gave me a small amount of money, and sent me off. My eventual destination was my aunt and uncle living in Connecticut. It had been arranged for me to travel initially with a man named Jan, a journeyman electrician, who regularly travelled back and forth across the Austrian border. He was a beefy man with a flush face, who wore a flat cap, and a checkered flannel shirt under his drab parka. We travelled in the dented old gray Tatra 613 he owned, starting out an hour before dawn.

The drive to the border was several hours, during which we were mostly silent, other than polite conversation about my parents. While a hard-to-obtain visa was necessary to travel to Western countries, only a passport was required for crossing into fellow members of the Warsaw Pact. Unfortunately, I hadn’t a passport either. Getting one would have taken forever, even if the government was willing to give me one.

Fortunately, soldiers at the checkpoints tended to be lenient with workers who crossed frequently to make a living. And by travelling along as Jan’s assistant, I ought to be able to go through. In fact, when we pulled up to the gate adjacent to the guard tower, Jan was familiar with the solders who approached the car. They glanced at my identity papers, made small talk briefly with Jan, and the gate was opened.

The plan had been for Jan to drop me at the train station in the nearby city of Linz. From there I was to travel southeast, disembarking near the border with Italy. But Jan decided he would take me all the way to the border himself. “I know the exact point to go across,” he said. While Czech border guards might allow me out of the country without a passport, the Austrians wouldn’t let me out of Austria, and they might arrest me. 

After an hour of driving in Austria we stopped to eat. An hour after that, we began a sharp ascent into higher terrain. We passed through Innsbruck, and continued farther into the mountains.  

Several kilometers from a large chalet, Jan turned off down a dusty road. We travelled another kilometer, at which point the road veered off to the right, where a rustic house was visible among the trees. Rather than continue toward it, Jan stopped the car. “This is the place,” he said, pointing into the forest. “Like I said, it’s about a two hour walk down into the valley. The border passes through the forest, and once you begin to see the farms ahead you’ll be in Italy.”

And so, with my rucksack filled with clothes, bread, water jugs and sardines, I started out. A short distance into the forest I came to a trail, which I remained on from that point on. The descent of the slope occasionally was so severe I had to brace myself with my feet, or hang onto the trunk of a tree. The forest was a mix of tall poplars and blue firs, and there was no sound other than the occasional drilling of a woodpecker, or the breeze swaying the limbs above me. 

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, I walked out of the forest into a large pasture, several farms in view just as Jan had mentioned. At this point, I used the A22 highway to guide me, which I could see threading along the ridge high above. I continued over farmland, past grazing cows and red barns, until I came to the small town of Bressanone. 

Though I could speak only a little Italian, I could speak English, and that was how I communicated. I managed to get directions for the bus station, and there bought a ticket for the five o ‘clock bus to Bolzano, where I hoped to spend the night. It was a thirty-minute ride there.

In Bolzano I got directions to the local hostel, then walked there without delay. I ate bread and sardines sitting on the cot, and exhausted, fell asleep oblivious to any conversations or movements around me. The following morning, I boarded the first bus I could get to Milan. I was in Milan by shortly after noon, where I immediately telephoned my uncle in Connecticut. I informed him I had arrived safely, and instructed him where to wire the money for the flight to America. I explored Milan the rest of the day, slightly stunned by the liveliness of a Western city, shops brimming with goods, and a public talkativeness in great contrast to the public reticence of the place from which I’d come. I spent the night in a hostel again, and when the money arrived early the next day boarded a bus to the airport. There I bought a ticket for JFK.

I’d never flown before, and I spent the flight frightened half to death, but intrigued as well, and buoyant with expectation.  I arrived at customs bearing neither a visa or passport. I offered up instead the identity papers I had brought from Czechoslovakia, and declared that I was defecting.

*

I had spent the first part of Saturday morning doing work in the office, and was on my way home, walking up Eighth Avenue to the subway at Columbus Circle. An ill-paid immigration lawyer couldn’t take all of Saturday off.

Bleak as life in Prague had been, it could not compare with the impoverishment and violence rife in the places from which most of my current clients came. Nor was their acceptance so automatic. In my early days as an immigrant a white European like myself was welcomed as a “victim of communism.” These days, the brown-skinned refugees from juntas or hunger or cartels, were greeted with none of the same warmth, and in some quarters reflexive hate. It caused my work to be both more gratifying and more exasperating.

That Saturday afternoon, when I reached Columbus Circle, I could see a small, voluble crowd gathered in front of the Time Warner buildings. Closer, I could see that some in the crowd were carrying signs. They read CNN is fake news, CNN is an enemy of the people, and such.

I walked by slowly, paying attention to what was being said, and peering into the crowd. The speaker used the words “law and order” more than a few times, and I decided to stop. There soon followed references to “dangerous, violent protests” and “unfairness” toward the then president. There then was a pivot to the need for “consequences” for “the out-of-control media” and to “put America First”.

As I scanned the faces of the cheering crowd, my eyes came to rest on that of a woman I thought I recognized. When she turned her face more in my direction I remembered: Eva. But, was it really? The hair was gray, but worn in a similar style. If it was her, she had aged well. A form of trauma, I told myself, caused the youthful face to be preserved so vividly and disturbingly in my memory. And yet, I was far from certain. It had been thirty-one years for goodness sakes. 

If Eva had in fact come to America, I was certain it was only after the wall fell, when people such as her were being revealed, and openly despised. Though seldom legally found culpable for anything. I suspected that if indeed it was Eva standing there, she retained a fondness, and warm nostalgia for the accusation: enemies of the people. It was one heard frequently when I was growing up, deployed against every form of dissent, and any source of objective information.

At one point, the woman turned around completely, seeming to notice me, and then look at me for some time. A look of recognition? Just as likely, simply curiosity about this particular stranger’s reason for stopping. Not only was I altogether uncertain whether it was actually her, I’d no idea whether I wanted it to be or not. Would I have approached the woman in an attempt to verify as much? Had I been reasonably certain, would I have remonstrated her for ruining my life? Ultimately, if anything, and certainly unintentionally, she had accelerated it in a positive direction. Not that I was thankful to her. I had blame for myself as well. Whether it was the insouciance of youth, or the fraught bravado of a young man, I had suspended my vigilance just long enough. Even if I had only misplaced it while under the glow of human intimacy, there was no excuse.  One retains the primary responsibility for one’s freedom after all.

And so, after several minutes, I moved on. Slightly shaken, and destined to wonder about the face I’d seen for who knew how long now, I continued on to the subway. Going down the steps to the 59th Street station the song from the night thirty-one years before returned to me, and I quietly hummed it: Here, There and Everywhere. Lovely- and still with a bitter aftertaste.

The train arrived, its brakes shrieking as it slowed to a halt beside the platform. I darted into a car, the passengers inside a vivid snatch of the messy, polyglot, wildly variegated city I loved.