Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (25 page)

The word “lie,” like the word “truth,” is banned in art, and during the normalization neither of them can be used. Another iconic director of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Věra Chytilová, has been unable to use the words “I think” in a movie. “I think that …” the actor said quite slowly, but the pre-screening inspection committee ruled that he shouldn’t think so meaningfully, because that could be interpreted in various ways. And at another point, when a man locked himself in the bathroom and shouted, “I’m trapped,” Věra Chytilová had to cut the entire scene out of the movie.

So Evald Schorm’s latest picture is called
Nothing Really Happened
.

Zdeněk Adamec goes up the wide museum steps.

It’s eight in the morning and it’s cold, at the beginning of March.

Seriously ill, Evald Schorm dies a month before the premiere of the movie.

Coincidentally, it is scheduled for January 19, at the movie theater in the Lucerna Palace on Wenceslas Square.

But that day, no trams or subway trains are running there. It was on January 19 twenty years ago that Jan Palach died, and in the square several thousand demonstrators have just been surrounded by militiamen.

There is no audience at all for the premiere of
Nothing Really Happened
.

In May,
Gazeta Wyborcza
comes out for the first time in Poland—the country’s first independent newspaper—but in Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel is still in jail. But by November, when the Civic Forum is formed, he is at the head of it. Actors, philosophers, journalists and doctors join … She joins too. “But I have lots of fears—after all, I’m not a politician,” she says.

“Thank God, Mrs. Moserová, none of us are politicians,” her colleagues reassure her.

Just like Torch Number One, Zdeněk Adamec soaks himself, from the head down.

He jumps onto the stone balustrade and fires up a cigarette lighter.

He leaps.

Contact with the air in motion causes the fire to engulf his entire body evenly.

Seventy-one-year-old Jaroslava Moserová writes her memoirs,
Stories: People You Never Forget
. She sets up
www.moserova.cz
, as she needs to account for the past twelve years.

She has been vice president of the Civic Forum, Czechoslovakia’s and then the Czech Republic’s ambassador to Australia and New Zealand, and vice president of the Senate of the Czech Republic.

She has also been president of the General Conference of UNESCO, which supports education. Jaroslava Moserová believes there are simple ways to help even the poorest parts of the world. If there aren’t enough resources for education, the first thing you need to do is set up a radio station. The radio will be an attraction, and at the same time it can teach people about hygiene and birth control.

Now Moserová is a senator for the ODA, or Civic Democratic Alliance, representing the Pardubice constituency. The ODA competes with Václav Klaus’s Civic Democratic Party.

Her party doesn’t have huge support. So what if they wanted to reduce annual tax returns to a single sheet of A4?
(People liked that.) So what if they wanted to register same-sex partnerships? (Not everybody liked that.) When at the same time they wanted complete exemption from paying rent. (Hardly anybody liked that!)

Jaroslava Moserová only won because people in Pardubice reckoned she was a decent woman.

Zdeněk Adamec falls four yards away from the spot where Palach set himself on fire.

His lips are burned, but he is still trying to say something.

Later it will be reported that, like Torch Number Two—Jan Zajíc—Zdeněk Adamec drank corrosive acid to stop himself from screaming.

Now and then, Jaroslava Moserová comes up against a certain issue.

It concerns the fact that in 1977 she did not sign a document which was very important for any decent person to sign. Especially as the campaign and the document were initiated by the boy in the photograph, the one in short pants, who thirty-six years earlier had been too young for a serious conversation with the Moserová sisters.

Why didn’t she sign Charter ’77?

Jaroslava Moserová could give an answer in the style of Bohumil Hrabal: “I have so much trouble dealing with myself,
and so much trouble with my own friends and relatives that I haven’t enough time to follow changing political events in any way. I don’t even know what the people who want those changes are talking about, because the only thing I would want to change is myself.”

She could say something of the kind, as Hrabal did, and she would probably be understood.

But Jaroslava Moserová says: “If the Charter had come to me, I certainly would have signed it, but as it didn’t come, I didn’t go looking for it.

“So I admit: I was being cautious.”

At the suggestion of a rather overly self-confident journalist from Poland that a person is only what he pretends to be, and it’s impossible for her nowadays as a politician and diplomat never to have told a lie, Jaroslava Moserová replies that there are situations in which a politician cannot always tell the entire truth, but he should never tell a lie.

At least in her opinion.

As she’s always done—for decades—she goes to church.

In the Senate, they say she is quite appalled by Klaus, who said a while back that for him the Church is the same sort of organization as a walking club.

Zdeněk Adamec is lying in a pool of water, doused by the firefighters, and the temperature is below freezing.

People stand there helplessly. None of the curious onlookers calls an ambulance.

Three doctors only come after a call from the firefighters. They carry him to an ambulance.

He lives for another thirty minutes.

Jaroslava Moserová tells a friend that Milan, Tomáš and the grandchildren are the best things that have ever happened to her. She tells her family she has decided to stand as president of the country.

She prepares a speech to give to parliament: “I know that dishonesty is what offends young people the most. And they blame us, the politicians, for the rise of immorality. In a way, they are right …”

And she ends it like this: “In our country, politicians aren’t trusted. I hope this will change. Please have trust in me.”

The serious press isn’t interested in her. Not a single analysis of her electoral chances or her views is published, and nobody does a major interview with her.

But a journalist from a women’s glossy magazine tells a reporter from Poland that the candidate, as a plastic surgeon, could have far fewer wrinkles than she does.

After all, an interview in her magazine has to have a really stunning picture to go with it!

Senator Jaroslava Moserová hears about the death of Zdeněk Adamec a month after losing the election.

She is sitting in the conference room at Wiston House in Wilton Park, Great Britain. She’s taking part in a world anti-corruption conference.

She opens her laptop, logs on to www.pochodnia2003.cz, and reads:

And the final sentence of the letter: “Don’t portray me as a madman.” Jaroslava Moserová closes her computer. The thought that occurs to her is that none of the countries here at the world anti-corruption conference has presented a sensible remedy for it.

The press notes that in his farewell letter the boy did not make a single mention of his parents.

A famous writer points out that Zdeněk Adamec’s sacrifice is like a repetition of Jesus’ sacrifice.

A famous bishop writes that, on reading Zdeněk’s
statement, we would instantly like to label his story as “pathology.” Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg is a sense of pointlessness among the younger generation.

Next day, people lay flowers and messages at the site of the suicide. They burn votive candles.

They also lay flowers and light candles for Palach.

Foreign tour groups line up to have both islands of flowers visible in their photographs.

Unfortunately, there is some resulting confusion. At the site of Palach’s death, messages appear saying: “Zdeněk, you’re right!”

On the evening of the third day, there’s a gantry standing by the museum steps. A crew is fitting it with television spotlights.

It’s as bright as day.

The cameras are on standby.

There’s a crowd of people. Right in the middle stand three men in smart black overcoats, who have just got out of a car. One of them is holding flowers.

Everything is ringed with red-and-white tape. A policeman is keeping watch to make sure nobody crosses it.

There’s an atmosphere of anticipation. “There’s going to be a broadcast about that boy,” the passers-by explain to each other, and each of them cranes his neck as high as possible.

They ask the policeman for details. “Is it a ceremony? In honor of that Zdeněk guy from Humpolec?”

“Zdeněk who, sir?” says the policeman. “They’re making a biopic about Hitler here. The Canadians are filming it.”

“But this spot was covered in flowers and candles. What happened? Have they put out the vigil lights? Removed them? Three days after his death, that’s awful!”

“Nobody put them out,” the policeman explains patiently. “Take a look over here, please—they’ve shielded the candles behind a car, so they won’t appear in the film. As you know, a contract’s a contract, this sort of movie can’t be called off. A movie’s a movie, sir. The movie has to be made.”

It is March 27, 2003.

The Komedia Theater in Prague (with the Tragedia Café inside it) presents Franz Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
, directed by Arnošt Goldflam.

In this staging, the main character’s problem is not that he has changed into an insect, but how he’s going to go to work in this state.

In 2007, when
Gottland
was published in the Czech Republic, someone demanded that it be pulped.

It wasn’t the general public, or the authorities of course, but a representative of the Gottland museum.

The Czech publisher received a summons to stop selling the book immediately and to withdraw it from bookstores. The Gottland museum sent letters to all the wholesalers in the Czech Republic, warning them that it was illegal to sell this book “because it’s against the principle of competition—the word
Gottland
is exclusively reserved for Karel Gott’s museum.”

In the entire Czech Republic, this appeal only upset one bookseller in Ostrava, who hid the book in his storeroom, and on his website replaced the title
Gottland
with
Gxxxxxxd
.

The Czech and Polish publishers declared that they weren’t going to change the title, and decided to continue selling the book. For although you can patent a trademark, nobody can impose a ban on words used in literature. The book’s title is a part of literature, which has to be free.

Faced with the publishers’ uncompromising attitude, the museum withdrew its claims.

The bookseller in Ostrava put the book back on his shelves.

In August 2008, the owner of the Gottland museum, a
businessman called Jan Mot’ovský, who also owned the Gott restaurant, went missing while on a business trip to France.

In November 2009, after less than three years in operation, following a decision by the wife of the owner, who still hadn’t been found, the Gottland museum was closed.

Souvenirs from the former museum can be bought on the website
www.gottland.cz
.

In 2006, the Czech president, Václav Klaus, did something for Karel Gott that perhaps no Polish president would ever agree to do for any artist. Out of admiration, he wrote the foreword for Gott’s autobiography.

But that’s nothing.

In his foreword, the president commented on Gott’s sexuality. “I’m not disappointed as far as Karel Gott’s potency is concerned,” wrote Václav Klaus.

On an Internet chat site, the star once confessed to having had sex with 462 women (as of February 24, 2002). “And I had no desire to get married to all of them,” he added.

When the president was due to award state decorations “For Merit,” a group of parliamentary deputies across the political spectrum signed a petition calling on him to decorate Gott too, for “excellent representation of the Czech Republic worldwide.”

The right-wing vice-chairman of parliament said that he didn’t listen to Gott’s music, but whenever he saw him, he simply had to take his hat off to him.

The left-wing minister of finance explained his signature on the petition in a single sentence: “He’s my mom’s favorite singer.”

(However, I have a different explanation for the petition
signed by deputies of all parties: I think that, subconsciously, each of them respects Gott for his model sex life. Gott is a god to women, and in the Czech Republic even the men who don’t like him respect him for this.)

In fall 2009, Karel Gott was awarded the “For Merit” medal.

Some Czech reviewers and readers have written to me or told me in person that the title
Gottland
is unfair to their country. They don’t think of it as the land of Gott, and it’s hard for them to swallow this piece of provocation.

So I started explaining at public events that Gottland can also be understood as God’s land, which is best typified by a quotation from a poem by the Czech poet Vladimír Holan: