GRAVE INVASION

A day unlike another was 15 July 1968. A day that God moved a
mountain jam-packed with chemicals through my heart and shook the
Vrbov's foundations.

Vrbov was unusually bright and exotic, deep in sultry July sun of
summer holidays, well above 30 degrees. Hills of potatoes, wheat, grass
and insects seemed an ideal open air theatre, as the sculptural shapes
of stems caught the light. Just outside the village, many families
focused their energy on hay fields. The hay hillslopes looked like
combed, tightly braided bride's hairdos, but in purple green, cut by
rows of meadows.

Opposite our honey-coloured timber verandah and the huge outdoor cross,
Aga and I were just passing the time of the day, helping Mamka dry the
newly mown grass of our meadow. The raking, flower picking, dreaming,
bee and bird watching had been going on for hours. If the flies did not
sit on our eyelids, their buzzing was bursting our eardrums.

As the afternoon crept greyly over my shorts caked in green slime,
Mamka was carving the earth with a silent shovel and Tato was carving
church pews with a screaming electric saw.

I was lost in my dreams: of turning obscure girls into frogs, my
fantasy of flying, and my fear of death. Until the black Polish clouds
met the Slovak side of High Tatra and began to snort soft thunder. All
the sun's warmth left the air, strange odour came from the grass. Then
the sky opened. A violent storm started. The thunder had taken on a
nasal quality. By the time we reached our doorstep, only a few metres
away, raindrops drenched every inch of our clothes and mud was on our
shoes. Pelting big splatters against the windows of our verandah
continued for a long time.

Taken aback, Aga and I crouched down inside, eyeing the
lightning-covered sky with awe. Was anything more frightening than
thunderstorm? Maybe death. There was nothing more soothing than leaning
against your sister watching rain from a comfortable rug. The soaked
window boxes filled with black soil and geranium drew running rivers on
our cream walls outside. Distorted flies and mosquitos tested the
windows as condensation cried down the glass disfiguring every object
outside. Exquisite drops of rain appeared on our golden-green
gooseberries speckled with veins. Redcurrants looked like tiny jewels.
Among five of us, we ate two loaves of bread and drank a good quantity
of leftover butter milk that afternoon. Mamka had few words to me and
Tato about me wearing part of a hollowed-out loaf like a boxing glove.
The spirit of Zummer's bread overwhelmed the scent of moist wooden
walls of the verandah and fermented damp grass on our shoes. Later my
family stained the lips and tongues with blackberries. Of course,
adults used communion cups, small wine glasses, and filled them with
any one of the variety of berry fruit coloured wine from white grape to
strawberry-peach. God wept for the full hour.

I found that he enjoyed the carpenter's life. Sitting on a chair
crafted by my Tato and listening to his stories inside the verandah he
built with his own hands. I was beginning to know all the people that
he knew at work, in church, even his childhood. I could imagine sitting
on the chair listening to my Tato for the rest of my life. I was a bit
sad when it stopped raining as Tato moved back to his workshop.
Everyone knew that if Jozef Imrich promised a job will be done on time,
it would be, for he was a man of his word, as dependable as he was
kind, the sort of individual who never disappeared with the last ten
percent of a project left undone, windows left unvanished, for
instance, or closet doors unhung.

The pale clear sunshine lay like moss on a sloppy surface which
stretched from the garden to the lane. When Tato opened the window, the
juicy scent of spring grass was very powerful. Then I noticed two
drenched figures covered in muddy shoes coming back from the fields.
The storm caught them out in the fields long way from the village and
there they wasted the entire afternoon. However at least they had
returned alive. They brought with them sad news - Magda Hrebenarova,
our neighbour, had been struck by lightning.

The church bell brought the news of Magda's death at twilight. Silence
entered our house. And tears returned to hundreds of red and swollen
eyes. A sudden fog was sweeping over the wall of the church, devouring
the lights behind the stainedglass windows. Nine out of ten villagers
went into the impromptu evening service. The children's section was
calm, like a full cemetery.

The steely Slovaks recognise the inevitability of death, but in a case
of a young mother a sharp spear cleft through villagers' chests.
Slovaks view death in simple terms as a physical process to be planned
and managed. Our ritualistic culture, where cemeteries are like parks
and where the survivors tend daily the grave, was shocked at the
unexpected event, one of their fellows taken by the cruel forces of
nature. Much later I would reflect that maybe this is preferable than
the crueller forces of man.

It was hard to imagine that my Mamka would never again exchange with
our neighbour Magda: '"Anything you need, just sing out." For months we
felt the veil that dropped on our neighbour's house. After all, here
was a close Slovak family and neighbours, where a loss was mourned for
at least a year.

Inside the temperature-controlled Gothic church, the air was painfully
cold like that of a wine cellar. The Catholic church of St Servac is
normally a spacious building of cream sandstone, with lofty, decorated
interior. The previous yellow paint job seeps through in tawny spots.
The tawny spots and creamy dust smell of time. The time of struggle
between birth and death. On that Saturday afternoon members of the
Catholic community crammed into the sacred place to pay respect to one
of their local daughters, Magda Hrebenarova. The pallbearers entered
through the ancient wooden door, the procession walked passed the
offertory box and placed the coffin in front of altar steps. Opposite a
stained glass window dedicated to St Cecilia, the patron saint of
music, bronze candles flickered in the northerly breeze and from the
echo of the powerful Hildergard's chants. All around were explosions of
weeping, the tears for Janko her husband, Pavel the oldest son, Ferko,
and Ondrej the youngest.

That day the children's section was frozen. No wiggles and giggles over
Mr Rambacher's well-known broken Slovakian or over Mrs Zummerova's high
pitch singing voice. At the core of the service was a sense of communal
grief where several bodies functioned as one mind. The children had the
time to think "Good Lord, this could have been my mother," or "Alas, my
mother was the same age as auntie Magda." Not one child held up five
fingers close to his or her chest. But that did not mean that none of
us had to go to the toilet. Even after the service, no one compared
notes who had cried best.

After we left the cemetery, I couldn't speak for a day. There was
nothing I could say. For the life of me, I just did not understand
death. For months, I did not play among the gravestone or climbed any
trees in the cemetery.

The funeral formed indelible impressions in a my mind. The event is
still so vivid that I feel like weeping, but I manage to control my
tears and wonder what events will so impress on my own children's
delicate minds. Will they have reverence for life and death, for
rituals, for the sanctity of peace ... it is such a different world
that they and I live now, a far cry from Vrbov and village life.

But, I can still hear Father Glatz's words at Magda's funeral, "If the
man dies, will he live again?" That was Job's question. And this was
Job's answer. "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will
depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of Lord
be praised."

There was much more for me to learn following Magda's death. The local
tragedy was soon eclipsed by those involved in the national fervour for
change. Political forces, increasing the stranglehold of communism,
made my generation a rebellious one, and one not willing to suffer
submissively as our parents had done. Magda death foretold the horror
of the coming days.

Prague Spring

When Kubrick's film came out in 1968, the year of Odyssey 2001, seemed
as distant to me as the second coming. I was 10 and I can recall
reflecting that I would be 43 when it finally arrived - unthinkably
old.

In 1968, the year of the unthinkably old flower child, mass student
rebellions flared almost simultaneously - for different reasons - in
Madrid, Rome, Belgrade, Warsaw, London, Berlin, Paris, Prague, Tokyo
and Mexico City. The entire world appeaed to be plagued by a sense of
ennui and futility. Despite all the differences in their national
situations and the regimes they faced, they saw their struggle as one.
They dreamed utopian dreams-of a free society run by workers, where
there would be no great divisions between rich or poor, where war and
violence would evaporate, and where nothing any questions could be
asked.

Those who regularly eavesdropped on Radio Free Europe, like my Tato,
were perhaps surprised to hear President Johnson's strategy of
'building bridges' in August 1968: 'One great goal of a united West is
to heal the wound in Europe, which now cuts East and West and brother
from brother ... We must turn to one of the great unfinished tasks of
our generation- and that ... is making Europe whole again.' These words
proved to be empty promises as when the struggle began the West refused
to lend a helping hand to my countrymen to make a 'whole' Europe. Never
had the Czechoslovak radio so many foreign correspondents swearing on
the stack of bibles that western assistance would assure that the
repressive Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia did not take place.
Foreign correspondents refused to believe that Russia would be crazy
enough to repeat Hungary of 1956.

The flocks of blackbirds that soared and wheeled above Vrbov seemed
like an alarming omen on that day of the invasion. The raven is the
first bird to be named in Genesis: Noahs dispatched a raven from the
arch to see if the flood had abated but the bird went to and fro
without returning. The black plumage serves to reinforce their
association with death. The blackbirds would enthrone themselves on
weeping willows and telephone wires above the Black Creek.

How can esctasy in mid afternoon shade into despair by dusk? There was
no warning. Most of the mountains surrounding Vrbov disappeared into
the oppressive silver gray clouds that clung like the Russian flag over
the Mayor's windows. When the enormity of what happened to my country
hit as hard as the tanks had minutes before, Czechoslovakia became just
a real estate, a place where Russians parked their tanks and aeroflots.
This was the night when even my Tato's face screwed up into a
knot.

The night the Russians invaded in 1968 is a night that I will remember
with horror to this day. Nearly every summer in High Tatra you can hear
thunder. Our national anthem is based on that summer thunder. If the
thunder heralds rain, Slovak farmers are on the verge of happiness. But
that night the sounds were those of the storm clouds of rape. That
night a roar emanated from the rocky hills echoing upwards and in the
heart of every Czechoslovak. The source of the thunder was not God but
the devil metal of tanks. Throughout the night and into the day, the
roar shook the windows of empty homes as hundreds of vigilant villagers
surged forth and back across the market square, looking for information
and comfort from their fellow villagers. The High Tatra Mountains, my
mountains, became a busy flight path.

No event is so utterly immediate, so nakedly emotional, as an act of
invasion. Suddenly planes roar above your house. The instant assault -
on one's nerves, on one's sense of justice - remains whether you're on
the front line or watching from afar. The deadly bullets fired in
Prague did more than kill or injure a few demonstrators. They
reverberated through every living soul in Czechoslovakia. Dreams were
falling like dominos. The whole world for us went mad. It was the
beginning of the end. That much was obvious. The Great Czechoslovak
dream shattered into a hundred pieces.

The first many Czechoslovaks knew of the invasion was from one of the
announcers at the headquarters of Prague Radio:

'FRIENDS, I THINK THESE WILL SOON BE THE LAST WORDS YOU WILL HEAR FROM
US.'

Suddenly, the minute after this comment, an entire generation realized
it wasn't merely afraid, or a little anxious. It was paranoid. Was
anybody out there to help us? Anybody at all, France, Germany, US,
maybe the Great Britain? For years, and years of communism,
Czechoslovaks managed to contain their paranoia on the interpersonal
level, their imagined lovers were cheating on them, co-workers were
spying or plotting against us, people on the bus were looking at them
strangely and so on. Fear is a self-preserving instinct useful in
helping people escape from marauding bears or co-workers. Even as
explosions rocked Prague underground leaders remained defiant and said
they would fight to the last breath.

But the Russian bear brought with them a super slogan: CONSPIRACY, in
which the most intriguing scenarios were implemented by dark-hearted,
spying organizations. Many sets of initials became universally
recognizable during the twentieth century from SS to FBI to CIA. But
everyone knew the KGB. Even the baker, uncle Zummer, would joke, "I'm
not one to believe that I am on the famous 'enemy list,' but I hope I
am important enough that KGB is out to get me"

The reality of KGB blew away my childhood castles in the air. Until the
false spring, I vaguely knew about the nuclear thing. In the middle of
the unfolding drama, the invasion seemed to be inside me. And no aspect
of life, I felt no matter how trivial, could be normal again. I was
scared, but tears were not an option. I will never forget the noises I
heard on that August night, cracking noises that rumbled like
electrical thunder. I felt my bed trembling, the walls shaking. The
roar was rolling down the road behind the cemetery, the road which
swept past our meadow was choked with khaki-crawling, jolting vehicles,
including tanks. No less than 50,000 Warsaw Pact troops passed through
the village that night and the following day.

There was almost no choice but to keep standing in the street, partly
because there was a safety in numbers, partly because it seemed to take
repeated exclaiming, "Oh my God." for the horror of it to sink in. It
couldn't be real. Every sound was cause for alarm. Each sound was
making the nation feeling more vulnerable and victimized than any
single day since Hitler's invasion fifty years before in 1938. Like
during the second world war, everyone flinched when planes went
overhead, and everyone started stockpiling.

The horror arrived in episodic bursts of chilling disbelief signified
by trembling voices on the radio. My cousins' wives, Viera and Mila,
who once wouldn't speak to one another cried in each other's arms.
Everyone started preparing for something, but didn't quite know what.
Perhaps the loudest lingering question was "Why would this
happen?"

On 21 August 1968, no one imagined that those troops would continue to
patrol the village for the next 21 years trying to put the genie back
in the bottle. Many times over the years, I have tried to replay that
August day in my mind. At best, the three sevens are dim, mixed with
symbols of death and confusing recollection. Suddenly, I found it
harder to be very trusting, to reach out to people, wanting to be close
to people. It was not a dream that Russian bears stepped beyond their
border and shots were fired at my countrymen. And then there was Bobbie
Fischer, chess master saying that, "Communism was a mask for
Bolshevism, which is a mask for Judaism.'

As the day unfolded, the black birds rose and fell on surges of sound,
while The London Times wrote headlines that screamed 'A Savage
Challenge to D?tente:' Czechoslovak independence was the great
international liberal cause of the day. Some newspapers claimed to have
a presentiment that one day this small country will astonish
world.

"A few hours after it happened, the Czechoslovaks staged a haunting
protest. They froze. Whenever they were, at work or in the streets,
they stood still in a silent outcry against the invaders. When news
spread of what the Russians had done, the world, too, froze for an
instant."

From this moment on, the whole of Czechoslovakia appeared to become
tuned to the Radio Free Europe. Headlines of papers and the wireless
often reported the opposite. The State-owned paper said: Czechoslovakia
liberated. Liberated again. Radio Free Europe said: "Czechoslovakia
raped." Raped in a snap. Rape is a crime of power, not passion. August
of 1968 reads like Shakespearian plot. Bloody vendetta, power struggle
and a dull acceptance of rape. Slavs have many words for rape and every
time we say rape we cry a little. For the memory of rape lasts much
longer than rape itself and hurt as much. Some boys somewhere deep in
their heart, longed for a catastrophe like this and somehow imagined,
while panting up the hill in the churchyard that they were sneaking
away from their parents to join some partisans in the forest. Some boys
wet themselves wherever they happened to be. Fear grew and grew in many
hearts.

For several hours, the decibel level of excitement in children voices
matched the distress on our parents' faces and the strength of our
parents' grips on our little hands. Yesterday, parents were concerned
with small things: how to buy the next pair of shoes or save for a trip
to High Tatra. Today, every parent was too shocked to worry about your
marks at school. Everyone, everywhere, was trying to reach everyone,
everywhere. The public outpouring of grief here dwarfed anything evoked
by funerals in Vrbov. On street corners families and neighbours mostly
huddled and hugged. Some shared tales of reassurance, others shared
their fear. There was a weird sense of unreality about the whole thing.
The full enormity of what had happened soon sank in. When two boys
erupted in raucous laughter as they pulled faces immitating their
parents' expressions the effect was like someone farting or playing a
saxafon in church. Thse two boys had lost not just the freedom to laugh
but the peace of innocent minds. Their loss of innocence was also the
world's.

It is evening in the village. The last tractor had rattled down the
road, the rooks were screeching and wheeling above their tall poplar
trees. Most people saw only those tractors or busses that were going to
run over them in the next minute if they don't pay attention. No one
paid attention to the lavender sky. Behind the coal-black hill the sun
set in ocherous splendour and I could scarcely believe my childish hope
that this could never happen to me. Because I was not a boy who wets
himself, and because I wanted to believe that Vrbov ten-year olds did
not even cry. I have never told anyone about the day when I and my
friends Tono and I cried as we sat on a park bench. I cannot find the
right words how on a evening of the invasion our parent seemed to be
frightened of every shadow in the dusk. I cannot show how my Tato was
also pushing himself through the line to put his hands on the few
remaining bags of flour. I cannot tell what my Mamka felt all I know is
that at this time of life preferences towards freedom and capitalism
and antipathies towards communism were easily implanted, and grew to be
ineradicable moral sentiments. In the church that night, even Father
Glatz was not exactly sure what emotions he was feeling. It was the
first time in my life that my parents and Father Glatz looked old to
me.

In my books, Lennon did beat Lenin. Maybe I didn't know much about
Lennon yet, but I could tell on some level that I was entering an
underground world that played neatly into boyhood fantasies I had
developed reading Kafka on the bankc of the Black Creek.

For the first time in their life many teenagers were exposed to quotes
in samizdat magazines about altruism and heroism. If not for these twin
radiant badges of our humanity, there would be no us, and we know it.
John Stuart Mill also knew it, "War is an ugly thing, but not the
ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and
patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight; nothing he
cares about more than his own personal safety; is a miserable creature
who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the
exertions of better men than himself."

For the first time in my life our baker Zummer did not bother to
produce the smell of freshly baked. He even failed to lit a fire. The
smell of his chimney was replaced with tar. As the morning ticked
along, the smell was even stronger after the tanks disturbed the warm
surface of the road. Parents walking on melting tar roads with
umbrellas on this sunny day went unnoticed. We learned first hand about
the truth of Dostoevski's statement that defined man as a being who can
get used to anything. After all, man is that being who invented the gas
chambers of Auschwitz less than 100 km away from Vrbov, but he was also
that being who entered those gas chamber upright. Some people for the
first time experienced a fluid sense of spiritual communion. As people
started to get a feeling that they lived on a Titanic, a spiritual life
came to be lived underground under the iceberg. Once underground
activities were fought on many fronts, as many agreed that inhuman act
must not go unpunished.

What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward's attack on our
country?

What was it you hoped we would learn? Whatever it was, please know that
you failed.

Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your
cause.

Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve.

Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together in our
velvet underground.

Russians were like fish that hated the very sea in which they swam, the
vodka that bore a grudge against the decanter: Decanting from
liberators to traitors.

The many ways people found courage and others came together to help one
another may be the only redeeming factor of this horrible rape. All
Czechoslovaks needed love, care, prayer and their own personal ways of
showing defiance and that they would not accept defeat. The invasion
was an attack on Czechoslovak values and dreams. The values on which
many nations were founded: political and economic freedom, liberty,
self-determination, the democratic will of the people, resistance to
tyranny.
The qualities that comprise a way of life many of us have chosen:
freedom, opportunity,
prosperity, optimism, community, justice, religion, energy,
achievement, fun.

The event which made the big Russian bear snap and tear our roads and
hearts was the publication of the so called 2000 Words Statement on 27
June 1968. The document, written by Ludvik Vaculik, himself a communist
party member, called for deepening of the political reforms even at the
cost of jeopardising the leading role of the Communist Party. The
material, which expressed the fear of a slow-down of the
democratisation process was published in several newspapers and
addressed to entire nation. It analysed the decline and decay of the
past twenty years, and the betrayal by the Communist party of trust it
enjoyed after the Second World War. It is not important in communism,
how things really were, but it was important what they seemed to be to
the public and that was controlled by the media. It encouraged the
nation not to rely on reforms from the top, but to actively enforce
them at the local and regional levels. It also acknowledged the threat
to the democratisation process by foreign forces, in particular the
joint-army training of the Warsaw pact armies held quite coincidentally
in mid-May.

We saw the photographs in Pravda (Truth) and followed events in the
daily paper. We listened to broadcast speeches. None of that was the
real revolution. Having known a family whose uncle was shot dead by one
of the Brezhnev's bullets was real. Many years ago a Chinese theorist
said: "Kill one, frighten 10,000." The most horrid thought of all
finally dawned on everyone: no one was safe.

Czechs and Slovaks are slow to anger but robust when angry.
Czechoslovakia became the target because of its virtues. Principally
democracy and freedom.

My Tato had developed a habit of listening to Radio Free Europe. The
need for truthful information was felt almost like a physical need such
as hunger or thirst. Time was thought of as either when the Radio Free
Europe was on the air or off. This special sense of time persisted even
at moments of great stress, emotional shock or illness. I never forget
when an announcer with a slight accent said, "In some ways the invasion
set Czechoslovakia free. Now it owes Russia nothing." "How have you
been?" foreigners asked. "Fine," my country said. At death's door, in
the grip of a black depression, Czechoslovakia always said fine. We had
to pay the price for the new found freedom. It was like being engaged
to freedom and three days before the wedding you get dumped.

My nation that has been betrayed many times. It has lost its innocence
many times, but this was a period to discover all over again that the
country still had something left to lose.

Spots of tank oil were spreading in the puddle everywhere. In the
puddle, I saw, squirrels moving, the street moving, and people moving
in the street; and I neighbours with bags under the eyes and the whole
mad world moving. My new universe was there in that little pool. My
universe had an aghast change of heart on 21 August 1968.

My old world was a typical Slovak universe: dinner at seven, animals
fed, dishes washed up and children in bed by nine. In the Dubcek's
Vrbov, where squirrels ate handouts impudently above park benches,
squirrel hunting seemed like poor sport even to us children. In the
Russian's Vrbov squirrels knew the meaning of fear. They leaped to the
tree at the first sign of movement. They baaaaaed to one another like
lambs on speed, sounding the alarm. They flattened their bodies against
trees, rotating slowly to keep the trunk between them and the hunter,
or just dive into the nearest knothole.

The churches were full for weeks and no one forgot they were alive
there. The invasion made people realise the lesson of history which
proved that to win a war was only to win untill the next battle. It
made me realise the impact of crises on the human soul. All that
mattered was God and Dubcek. No one exhibited impatience and none
showed any inclination to leave. Parents did not want to be alone just
with their children. There was be a return to the mood of the Second
World War, remembered popularly as a time of neighbourly
closeness.

Parents stood in small knots outside the church, pub, general store or
cinema in various stages of dress and undress and watched with
unbelieving eyes the Russian tanks roar past. Mothers, some in
see-through gowns, were wondering how they would explain the
inexplicable to the innocent children. Parents had never appreciated a
hug so much in their lives. The most independent 10-year-old was
suddenly experiencing an intense sense of vulnerability checking with
his parents whether it was fine by them if he played with friends for
10 minutes. Mothers waited until they nade it to the nearest pillow to
hide their tears.

Every cutting of Dubcek's comments in underground newspapers went in a
shop window so the people in queues were kept up to date. While the
Czechoslovakian station called on the population to remain calm, go to
work, and send children to school as usual, every one sensed war
mentality in the air and as soon as shops opened, panic buying and
preparation for war began. Hundreds of pigeons shared the same sense of
panic as a matter of right with the people in long lines. In towns all
over the country shopping often seemed more akin to performing
interpretive line dance. In these lines for consumer dancing some
people came to know the value of literature, the value of "a line of
words." As there was demand for shoes and God, there was alos demand
for the merchants of hope, writers and their books. People also talked
about Havel who made my village see that the theatre of the absurd and
laughter was the currency of hope. While Solzhenitsyn made everyone see
the dark side of communism, that inner evil that has the potential to
manifest itself in each and every one of our politicians. Communism
required that citizens under its rule must live within a lie. They need
not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life
with it and in it. The villagers were ashamed to repeat that they
accepted the truth about the lie with a sense of shame.