folk rituals, and when Jaroslav asked me (as a sentimental reminder of the days when I had played in the band with him) to grab a clarinet and sit in with the other players, I refused. I suddenly saw myself playing in the last two May Day parades with Prague-born Zemanek at my side singing and dancing and waving his arms.
I was unable to take the clarinet, and all this folkloric din filled me with disgust, disgust, disgust....
5
Having lost the right to continue my studies, I also lost the right to defer military service and was certain to be called up that coming autumn. To fill the time, I signed up for two long work brigades: one, repairing roads near Gottwaldov; the other, towards the end of summer, helping with seasonal labor at a fruit-processing plant; but autumn finally came, and one morning (after a sleepless night on the train) I reported to a camp in an ugly, unfamiliar suburb of Ostrava.
I stood in a courtyard with the other conscripts of my unit, strangers all; in the gloom of initial mutual unfamiliarity, the harshness and the strangeness of others comes sharply to the fore; that is how it was for us; the only human bond we had was our uncertain future, and conjecture was rampant. Some claimed we were to be given black insignia, others denied it, still others didn't know what it meant. I did know, and that possibility horrified me.
Then a sergeant came and took us to an outbuilding; we poured into a corridor and along the corridor into a large room hung all around with enormous posters, photographs, and clumsy drawings; pinned to the far wall, the large letters cut out of red paper, was the inscription WE are building socialism, and under that inscription stood a chair, and beside the chair a little old man. The sergeant pointed at one of us and told him to go sit in the chair. The old man tied a white cloth around the young fellow's neck, dug into the briefcase that was leaning against a chair leg, pulled out an electric haircutter, and plunged it into his hair.
The barber's chair inaugurated a production line designed to turn us into soldiers: after being deprived of our hair, we were hustled into the next room, where we were made to strip to the skin, wrap our clothes in a paper bag, tie them up with string, and pass them in at a window;
then, naked and shorn, we proceeded across the hall to another room, where we were issued nightshirts; in our nightshirts we went on to the next door, where we received our army boots; in boots and nightshirts we marched across the courtyard to another building, where we got shirts, underpants, socks, a belt, a uniform (there were the black insignia!); and finally we came to the last building, where a noncommissioned officer read out our names, divided us into squads, and assigned us rooms and bunks.
That same day still, we formed ranks again, went to supper, then to bed; in the morning we were wakened, taken out to the mines, and, at the pit head, divided by squads into work gangs and presented with tools (drill, shovel, and safety lamp) that almost none of us knew how to use; then the cage took us below ground. When we surfaced again with aching bodies, the waiting noncoms assembled us and marched us to the barracks; after the midday meal we went out to drill, and after drill we cleaned up and had political instruction and compulsory singing; and for private life, a room with twenty bunks. And so it went, day after day.
During those first days the depersonalization that had overwhelmed us seemed utterly opaque to me; the impersonal prescribed functions we carried out took the place of all manifestations of humanity; the opacity was, of course, merely relative; it stemmed not only from the situation itself, but also from the difficulty we had in adjusting our sight (it was like entering a dark room from broad daylight); with time our sight improved, and even in this penumbra of depersonalization we began to see the human in human beings.
I must admit, however, that
I was unable to take the clarinet, and all this folkloric din filled me with disgust, disgust, disgust....
5
Having lost the right to continue my studies, I also lost the right to defer military service and was certain to be called up that coming autumn. To fill the time, I signed up for two long work brigades: one, repairing roads near Gottwaldov; the other, towards the end of summer, helping with seasonal labor at a fruit-processing plant; but autumn finally came, and one morning (after a sleepless night on the train) I reported to a camp in an ugly, unfamiliar suburb of Ostrava.
I stood in a courtyard with the other conscripts of my unit, strangers all; in the gloom of initial mutual unfamiliarity, the harshness and the strangeness of others comes sharply to the fore; that is how it was for us; the only human bond we had was our uncertain future, and conjecture was rampant. Some claimed we were to be given black insignia, others denied it, still others didn't know what it meant. I did know, and that possibility horrified me.
Then a sergeant came and took us to an outbuilding; we poured into a corridor and along the corridor into a large room hung all around with enormous posters, photographs, and clumsy drawings; pinned to the far wall, the large letters cut out of red paper, was the inscription WE are building socialism, and under that inscription stood a chair, and beside the chair a little old man. The sergeant pointed at one of us and told him to go sit in the chair. The old man tied a white cloth around the young fellow's neck, dug into the briefcase that was leaning against a chair leg, pulled out an electric haircutter, and plunged it into his hair.
The barber's chair inaugurated a production line designed to turn us into soldiers: after being deprived of our hair, we were hustled into the next room, where we were made to strip to the skin, wrap our clothes in a paper bag, tie them up with string, and pass them in at a window;
then, naked and shorn, we proceeded across the hall to another room, where we were issued nightshirts; in our nightshirts we went on to the next door, where we received our army boots; in boots and nightshirts we marched across the courtyard to another building, where we got shirts, underpants, socks, a belt, a uniform (there were the black insignia!); and finally we came to the last building, where a noncommissioned officer read out our names, divided us into squads, and assigned us rooms and bunks.
That same day still, we formed ranks again, went to supper, then to bed; in the morning we were wakened, taken out to the mines, and, at the pit head, divided by squads into work gangs and presented with tools (drill, shovel, and safety lamp) that almost none of us knew how to use; then the cage took us below ground. When we surfaced again with aching bodies, the waiting noncoms assembled us and marched us to the barracks; after the midday meal we went out to drill, and after drill we cleaned up and had political instruction and compulsory singing; and for private life, a room with twenty bunks. And so it went, day after day.
During those first days the depersonalization that had overwhelmed us seemed utterly opaque to me; the impersonal prescribed functions we carried out took the place of all manifestations of humanity; the opacity was, of course, merely relative; it stemmed not only from the situation itself, but also from the difficulty we had in adjusting our sight (it was like entering a dark room from broad daylight); with time our sight improved, and even in this penumbra of depersonalization we began to see the human in human beings.
I must admit, however, that
Similar Books
