collective entity, or he was not, and could only want to be one; in that case, he would always consider himself guilty of not being one).
Looking back on my state of mind at the time, I am reminded by analogy of the enormous power of Christianity to convince the believer of his fundamental and never-ending guilt; I also stood (we all stood) before the Revolution and its Party with permanently bowed head, and so I gradually became reconciled to the idea that my words, though genuinely intended as a joke, were still a matter of guilt, and a self-critical investigation started up in my head: I told myself that it was no accident those thoughts had occurred to me, that the Comrades had long been reproaching me (undoubtedly with reason) for "traces of individualism" and "intellectual tendencies"; I told myself that I had taken to preening myself on my education, my university status, and my future as a member of the intelligentsia, that my father, a worker who died during the war in a concentration camp, would never have understood my cynicism; I reproached myself for letting his working-man's mentality die in me; I reproached myself on every possible score and in the end came to accept the necessity for some kind of punishment; I resisted one thing and one thing only: expulsion from the Party and the concomitant designation of enemy; to live as the branded enemy of everything I had stood for since early childhood and still clung to seemed to me a cause for despair.
Such was the self-criticism, and at the same time suppliant plea, I recited a hundred times to myself and at least ten times to various committees and commissions and finally to the plenary meeting in the lecture hall of the Natural Sciences Division, at which Zemanek delivered the opening address on me and my errors (effective, brilliant, unforgettable), recommending in the name of the Organization that I be expelled from the Party. The discussion following my self-critical statement went against me: no one spoke on my behalf, and finally
everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion not only from the Party but (and this I had not expected) from the university as well.
That night, I took the train home, but home brought me no comfort, because for days I was unable to work up the courage to tell my mother, who took great pride in my studies, what had happened. But the day after my arrival, Jaroslav, a school friend who had played in the cimbalom band with me, dropped by and was delighted to find me at home: it turned out he was getting married in two days and immediately asked me to be his best man. I couldn't refuse an old friend, and so I found myself celebrating my downfall with a wedding ceremony.
On top of it all, Jaroslav was a dyed-in-the-wool Moravian patriot and a folklore expert, and he availed himself of his own wedding to satisfy his ethnographic passions by arranging the festivities around a structure of old popular customs: regional dress, a cimbalom band, a "patriarch" and his flowery speeches, the rite of carrying the bride over the threshold, songs, and any number of details to fill up the day, all reconstructed more from textbooks of ethnography than from living memory. But one curious thing caught my attention: friend Jaroslav, the new head of a flourishing song and dance ensemble, clung to all the old customs but (presumably mindful of his career and obedient to atheist slogans) gave the church a wide berth, even though a traditional wedding was unthinkable without a priest and God's blessing; he had the "patriarch" give all the ritual speeches, but purged them of all biblical motifs, even though it was precisely on these motifs that the imagery of the old nuptial speeches was based. The sorrow that kept me from joining the drunken wedding party had sensitized me to the chloroform seeping into the clear waters of these
Looking back on my state of mind at the time, I am reminded by analogy of the enormous power of Christianity to convince the believer of his fundamental and never-ending guilt; I also stood (we all stood) before the Revolution and its Party with permanently bowed head, and so I gradually became reconciled to the idea that my words, though genuinely intended as a joke, were still a matter of guilt, and a self-critical investigation started up in my head: I told myself that it was no accident those thoughts had occurred to me, that the Comrades had long been reproaching me (undoubtedly with reason) for "traces of individualism" and "intellectual tendencies"; I told myself that I had taken to preening myself on my education, my university status, and my future as a member of the intelligentsia, that my father, a worker who died during the war in a concentration camp, would never have understood my cynicism; I reproached myself for letting his working-man's mentality die in me; I reproached myself on every possible score and in the end came to accept the necessity for some kind of punishment; I resisted one thing and one thing only: expulsion from the Party and the concomitant designation of enemy; to live as the branded enemy of everything I had stood for since early childhood and still clung to seemed to me a cause for despair.
Such was the self-criticism, and at the same time suppliant plea, I recited a hundred times to myself and at least ten times to various committees and commissions and finally to the plenary meeting in the lecture hall of the Natural Sciences Division, at which Zemanek delivered the opening address on me and my errors (effective, brilliant, unforgettable), recommending in the name of the Organization that I be expelled from the Party. The discussion following my self-critical statement went against me: no one spoke on my behalf, and finally
everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion not only from the Party but (and this I had not expected) from the university as well.
That night, I took the train home, but home brought me no comfort, because for days I was unable to work up the courage to tell my mother, who took great pride in my studies, what had happened. But the day after my arrival, Jaroslav, a school friend who had played in the cimbalom band with me, dropped by and was delighted to find me at home: it turned out he was getting married in two days and immediately asked me to be his best man. I couldn't refuse an old friend, and so I found myself celebrating my downfall with a wedding ceremony.
On top of it all, Jaroslav was a dyed-in-the-wool Moravian patriot and a folklore expert, and he availed himself of his own wedding to satisfy his ethnographic passions by arranging the festivities around a structure of old popular customs: regional dress, a cimbalom band, a "patriarch" and his flowery speeches, the rite of carrying the bride over the threshold, songs, and any number of details to fill up the day, all reconstructed more from textbooks of ethnography than from living memory. But one curious thing caught my attention: friend Jaroslav, the new head of a flourishing song and dance ensemble, clung to all the old customs but (presumably mindful of his career and obedient to atheist slogans) gave the church a wide berth, even though a traditional wedding was unthinkable without a priest and God's blessing; he had the "patriarch" give all the ritual speeches, but purged them of all biblical motifs, even though it was precisely on these motifs that the imagery of the old nuptial speeches was based. The sorrow that kept me from joining the drunken wedding party had sensitized me to the chloroform seeping into the clear waters of these
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