The New York Review Abroad (38 page)

Day Fourteen (Thursday, November 30). 4 PM. Plenum. The first topic is the internal organization of the Forum “coordinating center.” Ivan Havel, whose subject is cybernetics, has produced a most impressive and logical plan, now displayed on a blackboard on stage. Suddenly the theater looks like a lecture room: the revolution has become a seminar.

One of the issues being discussed in the corridors is how to change the composition of the Federal Assembly. Once again, there is the conflict between the moral imperative of democracy and the political imperative of swift, effective action. There is a legal provision by which members of parliament can be “recalled,” that is, removed, on a vote of the parliament itself, and replaced by new nominated—not freely elected—members. This method was used to purge the parliament after the Soviet invasion. Now Professor Jicinský, a constitutional lawyer who was himself removed from the parliament by this method, proposes to hoist the Communists with their own petard. Others say: but this is undemocratic, there should at least be free elections in the vacated constituencies (as, incidentally, has happened in Hungary). But this would take much longer, and time is what they do not have. They need a more representative assembly, now. So can you take an undemocratic shortcut to democracy?

Meanwhile, a Forum delegation has the first direct, bilateral meeting with Party leaders. The Party side is led by Vasil Mohorita, who, as head of the official youth movement, licensed the students’ demonstration that started it all, and then agreed to a statement condemning the use of violence against the demonstrators. Perhaps he is the looked-for partner in the Party?

After the television news, there is a long interview with Zdenek Mlynár, a leading member of the Dubcek leadership in 1968. He was
invited to Prague from his exile in Vienna by the new Party leader, Karel Urbánek, and rushed to a meeting with him after crossing the border in the dead of night. In their desperation, the Party leaders are turning for advice to, and hoping to win back, the old Communists, whom they expelled (some half a million of them) and defamed after the invasion. Mlynár is introduced on television as a “political scientist from Innsbruck.” He gives a highly eloquent performance, stressing the importance of the international context, as at all the previous turning points in Czechoslovakia’s history, in 1918, in 1938, in 1948, in 1968.… What he does not spell out is the concrete steps needed to dismantle the Communist system. At the end of the interview you feel that he is still ultimately pleading, like Dubcek, for the concepts of 1968, for a reformed communism called “socialism with a human face”—in short, for an idea whose time has gone.

Later in the evening, I walk with the theater director Petr Oslzlý through the impossibly beautiful streets of the old town, to the small Theater on a Balustrade, where Havel’s first plays were performed in the early 1960s. Today, like all the other theaters, it becomes the setting for an improvised happening. After a short talk by an economist, and a discussion with an exiled choreographer about how theaters are financed in the West, there is a Czech country-and-western group. In what might be called Czenglish they sing: “I got ol’ time religion.…”

Day Fifteen (Friday, December 1). Pavel Bratinka sits in his stoker’s hut at the metro building site, with a huge pile of coal outside the door, a makeshift bed, junk-shop furniture, and he says: “On the whole I favor a bicameral legislature.” He has been studying these issues for years, politics and law and economics, writing articles for the underground press, and occasionally for Western publications. With him, one has that rare experience of someone who has really
thought his political views through for himself, not taking anything for granted. He is therefore unmatchably confident of the positions he takes up: positions which in American terms would be considered neoconservative. I have known him for several years, and always treasured his explosive intellectual wrath. But this conversation is unique. For while we still sit in the grimy hut, Pavel in his enormous, leather-reinforced stoker’s trousers, I think that, within a few months, he will actually be sitting, in a smart suit, in the new lower house of a real parliament.

5 PM. Plenum. Several people have been nominated already for the “crisis staffs” over the weekend. Are there any more volunteers? This is a critical weekend, since Sunday is the deadline set by the Forum for the announcement of the new government, and they will then have to react to Adamec’s list. Effectively, almost anyone from among this miscellaneous group could appoint himself to participate in the crucial decision. But everyone is simply exhausted after a fortnight of revolution. Their wives and children are complaining. And damn it, it is the weekend. So the list of volunteers grows only slowly.

The meeting wakes up when a burly farmer arrives, having just successfully disrupted an official congress of agricultural cooperatives. He reads out—no, he elocutes—a rousing statement, beginning, “We the citizens …,” and calling for everything from freedom to fertilizers. Then he asks for speakers from the Forum to come out into the countryside. People in the country, he says, think Charter 77 is a group of former prisoners.

After seven, Havel and Petr Pithart return, also exhausted, from their five-hour-long negotiations with the Czech (as opposed to the federal) prime minister, František Pitra. Here, too, the central issue was the composition of a new government, and changes in those arrangements (e.g., for education) which are within the competence of this body. Finally they have agreed to a joint communiqué, after
arguing for an hour over one word—“resignation.” Havel says: You must understand what it means for these people to sign a joint communiqué with us, whom for twenty years they have regarded—or at least treated—as dangerous criminals.

The early hours. The king of Bohemia arrives back in his basement pub. “Ah,
pane
Havel!” cries a girl at a neighboring table, and sends over her boyfriend to get an autograph on a cigarette packet. Havel is a Bohemian in both senses of the word. He is a Czech intellectual from Bohemia, with a deep feeling for his native land. But he is also an artist, nowhere happier than in a tavern with a glass of beer and the company of pretty and amusing friends. Short, with light hair and moustache, and a thick body perched on small feet, he looks younger than his fifty-three years. Even in quieter times, he is a bundle of nervous energy, with hands waving like twin propellers, and a quite distinctive, almost Chaplinesque walk: short steps, slightly stooping, a kind of racing shuffle. He wears jeans, open shirts, perhaps a corduroy jacket, only putting on a suit and tie under extreme duress: for example, when receiving one of those international prizes. Negotiations with the government, by contrast, do not qualify for a suit and tie. His lined yet boyish face is constantly breaking into a winning smile, while from inside this small frame a surprisingly deep voice rumbles out some wry remark. Despite appearances, he has enormous stamina. Few men could have done half of what he has done in the last fortnight and come out walking, let alone talking. Yet here he is, at one o’clock in the morning, laughing as if he made revolutions every week.

Day Sixteen (Saturday, December 2). A shabby back room, with a broken-down bed and a girlie calendar on the wall. On one side, the editors of a samizdat—but soon to be legal—paper. On the other
side, Havel, the head of the Stockholm-based Charter 77 Foundation, František Janouch, and, from Vienna, the chairman of the International Helsinki Federation, Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg, with tweed jacket and Sherlock Holmes pipe. Arrangements are to be made for the newly legal paper. The Prince takes note of their needs. At one point, there is talk of some fiscal permission required. Havel takes a typewritten list of names out of his bag, and finds the name of the finance minister. “Does anyone know him?” he jokes. Silence. Schwarzenberg says: “What kind of country is this, where one doesn’t know the minister?”

Suddenly people have red, white, and blue badges saying “Havel for President.” They are made, I am told, in Hungary. Havel shyly says, “May I have one?” and pops it into his pocket.

In the evening there is a ceremony on the stage of the Magic Lantern to thank the staff for their help, since on Monday they are to resume more normal performances. After short speeches, the lights go down, a fireworks display is projected onto the backdrop, and everyone joins in signing the Czech version of “We Shall Overcome,” swaying from side to side with hands raised in the V-for-Victory sign. Then we drink pink champagne. Emerging from the auditorium, I see a solitary figure standing in the foyer, with half-raised glass, indecisively, as if pulled in four directions at once by invisible arms. It is Havel. We sit down on a bench and he rumbles confidentially: “I am just engaged in very important negotiations about …”—at which point a pretty girl comes up with another bottle of champagne. Then someone with an urgent message. Then another pretty girl. Then Prince Schwarzenberg. I never do get his account of those vital negotiations.

Day Seventeen (Sunday, December 3). Another stage, another founding meeting, this time of the new writers’ union, in the Realistic Theater. Havel says a few words and is just slipping away when they haul
him back on stage, and tell him he must be chairman of the new union. Elected by acclamation, he makes his racing shuffle to the microphone and says thank you, yes, thank you, and he is frightfully sorry but he really has to dash … which he does, for they are about to make known the proposed composition of Adamec’s new government.