http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/02/ivan-klima-interview
The Czech dissident and acclaimed author spent his formative years in
a concentration camp, the start of a lifelong struggle for freedom.
When Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 he was heading for the
States to teach. But, determined to face the oppressors, he returned
to his country and spent the next 19 years 'in exile' in his own
country. He tells Tim Adams about living, and loving , in momentous times.
Tim Adams
2 August 2009
Ivan Klima grew up knowing exactly what freedom was. Freedom was the
opposite of his childhood. In 1941, when Klima was 10, his father was
sent on the first Nazi transport to Terezin, the "fortress ghetto"
north of Prague, and the family followed. Klima remained in Terezin
for the duration of the war. He had, he says, not been aware that his
parents were Jewish until Hitler came to power.
"Anyone who has been through a concentration camp as a child," he
once wrote, "who has been completely dependent on an external power
which can at any moment come in and beat or kill him and everyone
around him - probably moves through life at least a bit differently
from people who have been spared such an education. That life can be
snapped like a piece of string - that was my daily lesson as a child."
There were other lessons, too, though; lessons in survival, lessons
in escape. Klima had only one book with him in Terezin, The Pickwick
Papers . He read it over and over, and transported himself daily to
the world of Sam Weller and Nathaniel Winkle. Freedom was established
in his mind as storytelling.
He started to write while in the camp, aware that any page he
finished could be his last, and found that the trick of escape worked
even better. He wrote plays and made his own puppets to perform in
them, and then stories about the girls he fancied, daydreams about
his first loves. The sense of liberation he found in these made-up
sentences never left him. "I have always pursued inner freedom,"
Klima tells me now, at his home in Prague. "I have never been censored."
Those early experiences, what he calls his "younghood", are currently
much on the writer's mind. In his adult life Klima has slept with a
scarf over his face, a legacy of Terezin, where the lights were never
turned off; part comfort blanket, part defence mechanism. He's always
had a recurrent dream, he says, every few weeks throughout his life,
that he has once again been captured, imprisoned. He has lately been
reliving that sensation in his waking hours. Klima is 77 now, and
working on a memoir tentatively titled My Crazy Century.
"For maybe 70% of my time I have not lived with freedom," Klima says,
matter of factly, in words that hide years of sacrifice and struggle.
After Terezin there was the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, the
brief hope of the Prague Spring in 1968 - in which Klima was a key
dissident voice - and then the 21 long years of dictatorship and
repression before the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In all this time he
never lost the idea of freedom, or the belief that it could be found
in writing the truth.
Klima lives these days on the edge of a thick forest south of Prague.
His two children and their families each have a house in the same
road; most mornings in season he picks mushrooms among the trees. His
friend Philip Roth once described him, with his "Beatle haircut" and
"carnivorous teeth" as "a much more intellectually evolved Ringo
Starr". The description just about fits still, though his hair has
greyed; there is something resolutely bohemian about him, in every
sense, a very stubborn singularity. He is quick to laugh, but he
takes nothing quite lightly. His 30 or so books are written from the
heart; honest, fearless, romantic, occasionally groping for philosophy.
I had met Klima once before, in 1991. Working for the publisher
Granta, I had edited a couple of his books in translation; we went to
a smart restaurant in west London. I had naively imagined that,
post-1989, he would be in celebratory mood but he was instead wary of
any simple conclusions, and intensely guarded against affectation. He
insisted on eating only a plain bread roll and some vegetable soup,
and studied me with some gruff amusement while I gabbled on about how
it must feel to be free. In response he gestured bleakly toward the
years his generation had lost.
At his home, all these years later, he is far warmer but no less
sceptical. "For the young generation," he says, evenly, "1989 is very
old history already. I sometimes go to discuss with students in
Prague what happened and I often have to explain first what communism
was; they have absolutely no idea."
For himself, he still has a powerful sense of before and after.
"Looking back," he says, "it all seems inevitable now, but that is
not how it felt at the time. There was perestroika in Russia; and in
our country there was such collective hatred against the regime and
the collaborators, who were the most third-rate people. So something
had to change, but that it would go so quickly was a surprise."
Klima was in attendance in the Magic Lantern theatre as the Velvet
Revolution was created by Vaclav Havel and his friends, mostly
writers, in the extraordinary days of protest against the government
in November of that year. At one point he was invited to address the
audi ence from the stage. It was, he says, the first time he had been
allowed to speak in public in his home city for 20 years. It was an
intensely emotional moment.
"I said something simple about the situation and there was tremendous
applause," Klima recalls. "The strange thing was that afterwards many
people came up and said that they had not known I was living in
Prague all these years. Blacklisted writers had been made
non-existing persons by the regime. People thought we lived in exile;
in a way we did."
That speech and the events that followed, which saw Klima's comrade
Havel installed as president, and many of his friends, writers and
academics, suddenly reinvented as ministers of state, represented
that most unexpected thing in Klima's life: a happy ending.
Encapsulated in the joy and surprise of that ending was all the
defeated hope that had gone before.
If 1989 was the best of times, the worst of times, Klima says, was
1970. When the Russian tanks had rolled into Prague in August 1968,
Klima was in London, en route to a teaching fellowship in Michigan.
Shaken by the news, he carried on to the States with his family, and
when the teaching stint came to an end a year later he was faced with
the toughest decision of his life. Should he stay in exile in
America, as many Czech dissidents did, or should he take his family home?
"Everyone said: don't go back, they will send you to Siberia," Klima
recalls. "But I just felt there was no sense for me as a writer to
stay abroad, missing not only the language but the connection with
the people you best understand. I could admire Americans but their
problems were not my problems."
Klima returned in March 1970 at the height of the Soviet-backed
purges. "It was very frosty," Klima recalls. "They banned everyone
who had been involved in the Prague spring; 400,000 people lost their
jobs, nearly all highly skilled people, teachers, lecturers, everyone
from radio, TV, trade unionists." Klima was blacklisted as a writer,
and prevented from working except in menial jobs. He had his passport
removed, his driving licence taken away, his phone cut off. He was
threatened with prison if his books were published abroad and a law
was passed which allowed the state to take foreign royalties
deposited in bank accounts.
Klima began to fight back against these privations straightaway. "I
organised a reading the week after we got back," he says. "I invited
about 45 guests, which I'd worked out was the most I could get into
our living room. And I prepared meatballs, 'Klima-balls' as they came
to be known. There was some wine, and somebody read something that
was newly written. That was how it went on, every week. I remember
Havel read two of his new plays; Kundera, who was still in Prague at
that point, came and read some things."
After about a year, Klima's friend Ludvik Vaculik (the author of A
Cup of Cof fee with my Interrogator ) brought along a man from
Ostrava to one of the gatherings, a writer who had spent a year in
prison. The man, who later committed suicide, had signed an agreement
in prison to work with the secret police and he passed on the names
of everyone who was there, and pictures were taken of people coming
in and out. "So from that point," Klima says, "we were known."
The writers were followed, and their houses searched. Meetings became
more difficult but, Klima says: "We were determined to be in close
contact." Someone suggested circulating typewritten pieces of
writing, and books, as a way of continuing to spread ideas - samizdat
("self-published"). Novels or poems or plays were typed up -
originally by Vaculik's girlfriend - copied, and circulated among the
friends, to begin with in editions of 14 copies, later 50 or 60 and
eventually, in an underground network of printing and binding and
copying, several thousand.
As he explains all this, Klima goes to the bookshelves that line his
living room and starts pulling down thin volumes, typed double-sided
on air-mail paper. "This is one of Havel's plays, this is a volume of
Jaroslav Seifert's poetry." A neatly bound history of dissent.
"In the end we managed about 300 titles in 18 years," he says. At
first the police tried to confiscate individual samizdat copies
during house searches but the words spread too quickly; they could
not cope. It was a secret policeman's worst nightmare. "It was also,"
says Klima, "really what kept us going."
Klima was for many of those years, along with all the other purged
intellectuals, working in various jobs - ambulance driver, surveyor,
road sweeper - which became the starting point for much of his
fiction. He also moonlighted as a smuggler: getting manuscripts out
to western publishers through friends in embassies or visiting
students and getting hard currency payment back in. In this way
Klima's books, and the books of his friends, stayed in print in more
than 20 countries, though not their own.
His fiction dwelled on his preoccupations, which were often about how
to live a "normal" life in a repressive system. The most successful
of his books, the semi-autobiographical Love and Garbage , dwelt on
his time as a street sweeper when he was torn between his love for
his wife and an affair with another woman.
"Living in truth", he suggests, was often easier for him politically
than romantically - but then, at the time: "Love and infidelity and
reconciliation seemed to affect almost everybody." The impoverished
reality of lives seemed to exaggerate romantic fantasies.
"For myself, I always liked women," he says. "I fell sometimes in
love, which was always a great thing. But I am too very happily
married; just last year we celebrated 50 years together. 50% of
people of my generation are divorced. In my opinion to divorce is to
choose to enter again into the same situation, but with more pain all around."
Klima has sometimes written about the events of 1989 in the
breathless tones of a love affair, notably in his book Waiting for
the Darkness, Waiting for the Light . The central character, Pavel, a
television director who has seen his career ruined by the communist
regime, gets caught up in the frenzy of the November revolution.
"The air was acrid with the smell of tired human bodies..." Pavel
observes. "And that strange, almost exultant mood that seemed to
bring everyone, including him, closer together. This feeling of
solidarity had surprised him. He wasn't prepared for it..."
In the crowd Pavel meets a woman he once loved and she kisses him
spontaneously. Some time later Pavel tries to remind the woman of the
closeness they felt on the night of revolution.
"It was the moment that did it, Pavel, the time," she explains in the
light of day.
"Is that time over now?"
"A time like that can't last for very long."
How long did the euphoria of those November nights in 1989 last for
Klima himself, I wonder.
He smiles. "How long did I enjoy the feeling? It is interesting that
a man very quickly accepts freedom as a normal thing," he says.
"Though we had fought for it for so long, after a few weeks or months
we did not think about it. Rather you start to see things you would
like to change, things that make you angry, corruption and so forth,
environmental problems, the obsession with the market, which is
another form of unfreedom, so the feeling does not last long. But the
changes, democracy, that does last."
Klima was offered official posts in Havel's government but he refused
them all. "For me," he says, "the only sense for my activity was to
do all I could to remove that horrible system; when it happened that
was enough. And all I wanted to do then was to get back to my
writing, now with the possibility of publishing."
In the weeks after 1989, Klima's books were rushed into print in
Prague. Love and Garbage sold 100,000 copies, his stories, My Merry
Mornings , sold 150,000 copies; there were queues in all the
bookshops around Wenceslas Square. Now his books sell around 4,000
copies each.
"This is normal," he says, of the change. "The difference is now if I
want to say something I can go to radio or to a newspaper and say it
and no one is listening, they are all too engaged in the latest
talent show. Back then all I had was a typewriter, but everyone was
desperate to read what I wrote."
Klima has lived too long and seen too much to have any bitterness
about that - it is just the way things are.
"We never expected to enter paradise that November," he says, just
before I leave. "But we did have freedom."
--
Reality Czech: Key Klima facts
Born 14 September 1931, Prague
Family Married Helena, a psychotherapist, in 1958. Two children,
Michal, a newspaper editor, and Hana, an artist
Key books My Merry Mornings (1985), Love and Garbage (1986), Judge on
Trial (1991), My Golden Trades (1992), Waiting for the Dark, Waiting
for the Light (1994), No Saints or Angels (2001)
He says "There are some differences between a dictatorship which is
strong and one which is tired. By the late Eighties ours was a tired
dictatorship. They were no longer killing people and they made every
effort not to arrest people. In this condition of a dictatorship you
could find your own freedom. You could not become rich, you could not
travel except maybe to Hungary, but you could write."
They say "During the early Seventies, when I began to make a trip to
Prague each spring, Ivan Klima was my principal reality instructor.
He took me around to the street-corner kiosks where writers sold
cigarettes, to the public buildings where they mopped the floors, to
the construction sites where they were laying bricks, and out of the
city to the municipal waterworks where they slogged about in overalls
and boots, a wrench in one pocket and a book in the other...." Philip Roth
.
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