A World Apart - Vienna Wind # 1

Vienna: A World Apart
(Wind from the North)

That's what happens to exiles; they are scattered to the four winds and
then find it extremely difficult to get back together again. Isabel
Allende

On 7 July 1980 I became the enemy of the Czechoslovak Socialist
Republic and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

On July 8 my parents died a little. On Radio Free Europe my parents
listened to my obituary. Five years after their daughter, Aga's death
from leukemia, their last born was also reported dead, turning their
world upside down. For more than 40 hours my parents thought I was
dead, the longest hours in my Mamka's life. When my cousin Tibo
eventually informed them that according to the latest reports on Radio
Free Europe I was alive, Mamka just cried.

No words can do justice to the fact that on 8 July I would stand before
the mirror as if I were another person from the one I was on the
previous morning. I would experience a rude awakening to the outside
world, a dark liquid world.

My first thought was, 'What if I'm dead but don't know it?' Where did
the strange nagging voices come of 'How am I ever going to ...' and its
evil twin, 'If only I had ...' come from?

So this was supposed to be my happy morning. I began my new chapter in
life by referring to myself in the third person, not 'I', but 'he'.
Closing my eyes brings only strange darkness and a chilling sense of
emptiness. It was a moment in my life where my eyes and ears questioned
everything. I wanted to drain every river in the world. I wanted to
drain every drop of my perishable dream. The distant past was present
in every moment, and the future had already happened. Coincidences,
errors, accidents, feelings.

My only satisfaction was the fact that the iron curtains of Communism
turned out to be more flimsy than they appeared. I was part of
something much larger than my own life.
It was like a cloud gradually blocking out the sun. The world was
losing its light and meaning. There was a hole within me. I could not
make sense of anything not even of the only communist coin in my
trouser pocket, which dropped to the floor. The sound and air felt like
a great machine crushing the subconscious mind. I had no proof that I
was I. No papers. No face. No mind. My head was filled with an echo of
doubt. I stood near the window and talked to my nonexistent self, a
self hungry for information about the outside world. I became a tale of
two personalities, noting how quickly emotions changed with each
question. My eyes said, 'Where is Ondrej?' 'Am I free?' 'Where is
Milan?' I could not answer; I had a stone in my throat.

As I leaned against the cold metal door of the bathroom and recalled
the helpless shrug of the Austrian guard's shoulders, I mumbled to
myself how terrifying the life of freedom was going to be. I was
drinking in my new insecurities and revelations as the tingles of
anxiety were growing to a nagging, tearing sensation in my
stomach.

You cannot help thinking of Shakespeare's tragedies when you stand
across a mirror staring at a third person who looks like you. A person
who was without doubt the unhappiest soul in the world. A gloomy,
ravaged character who could only think he was just putty in someone
else's hands.

Life imposed on me that I would feel strange and even stranger in the
very depth of my being. I could not really think. I could only feel.
Everything seemed surreal. I knew that I, the stranger, was one lucky
bastard. I knew that. As July 7 unfolded in front of me in slow motion,
I experienced how slamming the mirror with a bare fist feels. I,
perhaps with some embarrassment, can still trace my first encounter in
Austria with blood. I still remember the blood dripping from my hand on
the broken mirror of defeat in victory. All the hopes that had
underlain the heroism of the escape had suddenly been punctured, partly
by their fulfilment and partly by my loneliness. Courage is
seven-tenths context. What is courageous in one setting can be
foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.

'Dear God, help me', I prayed, and that is the first time in adulthood
I acknowledged a need to pray, because I could not do this alone no
matter how alone I felt. Once the hazy veil of tears was lifted from my
eyes, there was no reason to doubt that I was not going to see Ondrej
and Milan the next day. Words of comfort came from strangers,
instilling the false hope that I would see them again. Freedom granted
from heaven it was not. But, there was no reason why I could not feel
the same sense of spirituality as my grandfather, 60 years ago, when he
walked on Austrian soil.

Still, I went to bed only to toss and turn. I slept in waves of nerves
and exhaustion. I was sowing the seeds of uncertainty that would rule
the rest of my life. I had no idea then or any day since what the
morning might bring. The sense of permanent doubt and self-doubt buzzed
inside me loud and clear. I was too scared to think or close my eyes
and even more scared to open them. Our escape was like a text with
several possible meanings, some of them contradictory. I could feel a
convincing story of myself as a victim who had suffered failure and
loss or a story of myself as a success, who had gained freedom and
choice.

The inexpressible smell of Morava River, like some unseen phantom,
lingered around my nose. Guilt can be insidious and to repress
thoughts. I was exhausted by moral complexity. I was plagued by
repetitive thoughts and fantasies about the drowning of Ondrej and
Milan. I couldn't get them out of my mind. These thoughts would fill my
mind even when I was awake. They were in my dreams when I slept. And
the thoughts were insatiable. Whether in dreams or reality I just felt
I had failed. That was probably the hardest thing that was stopping me
accepting what had happened.

Every thought involved a thousand-meter-deep fall into nothing. That
nothingness kept taking my breath away. In my nothingness, I talked to
Ondrej, Milan, Mamka, Tato, opening the door of my bedroom, reading the
magazines, switching off the lights. Gustav Husak, the architect of
Communism of 1980, had his face rubbed into the snow until he screamed;
he deserved it because he made me run away from home. Hundreds of
communists were forced to ski all the way down the steep hill. They
knew that the ice on the lake would collapse under their weight and
they would drown. That was their problem. An ancient well of revenge
scenarios flooded my mind. Because I could cope, and stay calm, and
knew that I would always be a survivor. Because I was alive, and
nothing else bad was ever going to happen to me, absolutely nothing at
all.

I suffered from a peculiar sense of distorrted time. While I planned
revenge against Gustav Husak, everyone around me only knew only one
Gustav, Gustav Klimt, the father of 14 illegitimate children, who, like
me, feared voices in his head. The dark furniture of my mind was all
rotten. I merely drifted in what Milan Kundera might term'unbearable
lightness'. I needed a Kundera, or better yet, a Havel to describe my
life's twisted deviation. I didn't know what I wished to do or how to
search for meaning in the existential vacuum. Words failed me
here.

Memories failed me too. I wished I had my Tato to tell me what to do.
'Tell me, Tato, what is the best move in the Austrian world?' To be
sure, any kind of answer would be an oversimplification of my
situation. . Inside the Austrian police station near a large reception
desk a photograph of Rudolf Kirchschlager, an Austrian politician, hung
on one of the walls. Feeling lost and forlorn sitting on the cold bench
of the Austrian police station, I recalled learning at school that
there was no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one's native
land. It was a saying belonging to many centuries earlier, but it
captured my feelings at this point, and many times beyond it

It was dawn, July 8, 1980. And in a small cell across the way from the
reception desk I sat with Bessie, clinging to the familiarity of her
form, her smell, my only connection with my home. I felt nauseated and
haunted. It was as if my greatest fears hadcaught up to me. The Morava
River tried to drown me yesterday. That was hard to even
comprehend.

I woke up several times during the night and each time it dawned on me
that yesterday was not a nightmare. It had really happened. I recall
wondering for hours how our escape could have been executed better. My
whole body dreaming, remembering, thinking. Once I woke when a bright
light was pouring in on me, and I started to open my eyes. I didn't
know where in the world I was. I felt like screaming in pain but I
didn't scream; instead I turned the yell inward as I had taught myself
to do. The room seemed empty, and I didn't even know where the room was
- it was all just floating in empty space, and I couldn't say what
planet or star I'd landed on. All that was running through me in that
one second was the loneliness of being this tiny insignificant particle
in the universe, and how a life weighs nothing in all that light, that
what happened at Moravsky Jan actually did happen. I tried to stave off
sleep, but when I finally dozed off, the nightmares were always the
same. I was back at the Morava River, naked and breathless, trying to
outswim the tidal wave of sewage. But in my version, my Mamka and Tato
were there, and I could not save them.

When I opened my eyes these were the concentrated moments filled with
unknown fear. And I hated myself for being scared. I stayed in this
strange bed, my eyes stinging and I wanted to cry, alone and thinking
Ondrej and Milan were in some other police station together. A sense of
betrayal meant I could not even cry. I was too scared to think about
Milan and Ondrej by now making it to Vienna together, and to scared not
to think about them. In spite of myself, I could hear our loud voices
saying, 'Plavaj' (swim) and my first migraine approached as surely as
rain, the migraine that crushed whatever I was and replaced me with
itself.

The silence of the cold and dark morning was broken by the sound of
lisping Austrian voices fading in and out through invisible gaps in the
wall. The window rattled in an unfriendly way. The memories flooded
into my mind, obliterating the present so I would experience myself
back in the river, and feel again the original horror. My dog, Bessie's
tail vibrated frantically, not comprehending my sweaty forehead. As I
lay there, reliving the nightmare of the escape, sweat slithering down
my shivering spine. I did not have the presence of mind to take Bessie
to the toilet.

My mind was now plagued by doubts I never knew existed. Death seemed
better than sleep. I was surrounded by an incomprehensible language and
an unknown world of water. Much as the water envelops the planet, so
sleep hides one third of a human life. Water and sleep have tides and
cycles, risings and fallings, and each may be calm at one moment,
stormy and filled with sudden, hidden horrors the next. For both sleep
and the water have their shallows and shelves that drop without warning
into sunless trenches. While both sleep and the water are familiar,
each remains a strange and secret place.

Many strange questions swirled voraciously inside my head, shaking my
sanity, my senses. I could hear the voice of my Mamka asking me why I
had done it. I wanted to rush into her safe embrace, feel the security
of her arms around me, taking me away from this mess. Why? Why? Why? If
only I did things for one reason as a time. If only I was capable of
dissecting and explaining my motivation to myself, let alone to Mamka.
Logic had nothing to do with wanting to drink from the dangerous river
of capitalism rather than from the secure teacup of Communism.

I went numb. Fighting panic as ice tore like electricity through me, I
felt like a squashd insect under a microscope, a huge eye stalking me
from above, and sensed my own guilt and failure melting in my heart
like a huge block of ice. I sat there with mud between my toes, grit in
my hair, fear in my mind. The air around me reeked with B.O. Fear of
suffocation filled my brain cells and stomach. And my lips moved
against the will of their surrounding facial muscles.

This was not how I had imagined the first moments of freedom would
feel. I did not immediately recognise even that I was free, which was
understandable, given my position in the police station cell. As I
gritted my teeth, my courage was seeping away like the strength of my
muscles as I struggled to swim across the Morava.

(To be continued in Wind 2)

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Can you ever think too much about freedom?
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