were getting worse, and, despite the prevailing mood of exhilaration, among the bravely decent, the admirable handful, some were beginning openly to seethe a little with those poisoned emotions whose prudent management fortitude and sanity had demanded during the decades of resistance.
On my first full day in Prague, before Ivan came to meet me to begin our talks, I went for a morning walk on the shopping streets just off Václavské námÄstÃ, the big open boulevard where the crowds that helped to chant the revolution through to success first assembled in November 1989. In only a few minutes, outside a storefront, I encountered a loose gathering of some seventy or eighty people, laughing at a voice coming over a loudspeaker. From the posters and inscriptions on the building I saw that, unwittingly, I had found the headquarters of Civic Forum, the opposition movement led by Havel.
This crowd of shoppers, strollers, and office workers was standing around together listening, as best I could figure out, to a comedian who must have been performing in an auditorium inside. I don't understand Czech, but I guessed that it was a comedianâand a very funny oneâbecause the staccato rhythm of his monologue, the starts, stops, and shifts of tone, seemed consciously designed to provoke the crowd into spasms of laughter, which ripened into a rich roar and culminated, at the height of their hilarity, with outbursts of applause. It sounded like the response you hear from the audience at a Chaplin movie. I saw through a passageway that there was another laughing crowd of about the same size on the other side of the Civic Forum building. It was only when I crossed over to them that I understood what I was witnessing. On two television sets above the front window of Civic Forum was the comedian himself: viewed in close-up, seated alone at a conference table, was the former general secretary of the Czech Communist Party, Milos Jakes. Jakes, who'd been driven from office early in December 1989, was addressing a closed meeting of party apparatchiks in the industrial city of Pilsen in October.
I knew it was Jakes at the Pilsen meeting because the evening before, at dinner, Ivan and his son, Michal, had told me all about this videotape, which had been made secretly by the staff of Czech TV. Now it played continuously outside the Prague headquarters of Civic Forum, where passersby stopped throughout the day to have a good laugh. What they were laughing at was Jakes's dogmatic, humorless party rhetoric and his primitive, awkward Czechâthe deplorably tangled sentences, the ludicrous malapropisms, the euphemisms and evasions and lies, the pure
jerkish that, only months earlier, had filled so many people with shame and loathing. Michal had told me that on New Year's Eve Radio Free Europe had played Jakes's Pilsen videotape as "the funniest performance of the year."
Watching people walk back out into the street grinning, I thought that this must be the highest purpose of laughter, its sacramental reason for beingâto bury wickedness in ridicule. It seemed a very hopeful sign that so many ordinary men and women (and teenagers, and even children, who were in the crowd) should be able to recognize that the offense against their language had been as humiliating and atrocious as anything else. Ivan told me later that at one point during the revolution a vast crowd had been addressed for a few minutes by a sympathetic young emissary from the Hungarian democratic movement, who concluded his remarks by apologizing to them for his imperfect Czech. Instantaneously, as one voice, a half million people roared back, "You speak better than Jakes."
Pasted to the window beneath the TV sets were two of the ubiquitous posters of the face of Václav Havel, whose Czech is everything that Jakes's is not.
Ivan KlÃma and I spent our first two days together talking; then, in writing, we compressed the heart of our discussion into the
On my first full day in Prague, before Ivan came to meet me to begin our talks, I went for a morning walk on the shopping streets just off Václavské námÄstÃ, the big open boulevard where the crowds that helped to chant the revolution through to success first assembled in November 1989. In only a few minutes, outside a storefront, I encountered a loose gathering of some seventy or eighty people, laughing at a voice coming over a loudspeaker. From the posters and inscriptions on the building I saw that, unwittingly, I had found the headquarters of Civic Forum, the opposition movement led by Havel.
This crowd of shoppers, strollers, and office workers was standing around together listening, as best I could figure out, to a comedian who must have been performing in an auditorium inside. I don't understand Czech, but I guessed that it was a comedianâand a very funny oneâbecause the staccato rhythm of his monologue, the starts, stops, and shifts of tone, seemed consciously designed to provoke the crowd into spasms of laughter, which ripened into a rich roar and culminated, at the height of their hilarity, with outbursts of applause. It sounded like the response you hear from the audience at a Chaplin movie. I saw through a passageway that there was another laughing crowd of about the same size on the other side of the Civic Forum building. It was only when I crossed over to them that I understood what I was witnessing. On two television sets above the front window of Civic Forum was the comedian himself: viewed in close-up, seated alone at a conference table, was the former general secretary of the Czech Communist Party, Milos Jakes. Jakes, who'd been driven from office early in December 1989, was addressing a closed meeting of party apparatchiks in the industrial city of Pilsen in October.
I knew it was Jakes at the Pilsen meeting because the evening before, at dinner, Ivan and his son, Michal, had told me all about this videotape, which had been made secretly by the staff of Czech TV. Now it played continuously outside the Prague headquarters of Civic Forum, where passersby stopped throughout the day to have a good laugh. What they were laughing at was Jakes's dogmatic, humorless party rhetoric and his primitive, awkward Czechâthe deplorably tangled sentences, the ludicrous malapropisms, the euphemisms and evasions and lies, the pure
jerkish that, only months earlier, had filled so many people with shame and loathing. Michal had told me that on New Year's Eve Radio Free Europe had played Jakes's Pilsen videotape as "the funniest performance of the year."
Watching people walk back out into the street grinning, I thought that this must be the highest purpose of laughter, its sacramental reason for beingâto bury wickedness in ridicule. It seemed a very hopeful sign that so many ordinary men and women (and teenagers, and even children, who were in the crowd) should be able to recognize that the offense against their language had been as humiliating and atrocious as anything else. Ivan told me later that at one point during the revolution a vast crowd had been addressed for a few minutes by a sympathetic young emissary from the Hungarian democratic movement, who concluded his remarks by apologizing to them for his imperfect Czech. Instantaneously, as one voice, a half million people roared back, "You speak better than Jakes."
Pasted to the window beneath the TV sets were two of the ubiquitous posters of the face of Václav Havel, whose Czech is everything that Jakes's is not.
Ivan KlÃma and I spent our first two days together talking; then, in writing, we compressed the heart of our discussion into the
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