Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (18 page)

He was so terribly afraid of what he might do if he stayed.

After 1989, the editors of
Lidové noviny
posed a question to the performers whose names had appeared on the pages of
Rudé právo
in 1977: “Do you think the fact that you signed the Anti-charter in any way marks you out in public life?”

Musician Petr Janda replied: “No, I don’t. I don’t think I had to be any kind of a hero.”

Slovak comedian and actor Július Satinský: “It doesn’t affect me at all. I’m glad there were a lot of us, and we didn’t know what it was about.”

Oscar-winning movie director Jiří Menzel (who made
Closely Watched Trains
): “I don’t get that impression. But if Mr. Havel, for example, wanted to judge me, I would feel marked out.”
^†
Of course, there’s a rhetorical device hidden in that answer. Everybody knows that Havel is far from condemning anyone.

Let’s take a look at Gott.

To a similar question, he replies: “But the nation doesn’t resent me for having been one of this country’s biggest providers of foreign currency. They say I’m like several factories.”

He says he was forced to appear at the theater, but he didn’t know what it was all about. It was only later when he watched the event on television that he saw how commentary was added, and the whole thing edited and given a new meaning.

“Not once was the term ‘Communist Party’ uttered there,” says Gott in his own defense.

But why did he go? “Of course they didn’t hold a knife to my throat,” he continues. “But, reading between the lines, I realized that I had to go, otherwise …”

“… otherwise you would never sing again,” added the journalist.

“But it’s just like today,” replied Gott, “if you don’t follow the only correct line. In other regimes as well, if you don’t
keep step with the only correct line, it can end badly, too. We can only guess at the reasons for the deaths of Monroe, Lennon, Morrison and others in the country with the greatest degree of freedom.”

The Golden Nightingale knows the inside story. Some time ago, he declared that Israel sponsored Charter ’77. There are a lot of things he knows, but he can’t make public, because “if I write it all down, I’ll be run over by a car.”

A month later, he explained in the press that he isn’t an anti-Semite. All he meant was that the signatories of Charter ’77 were given financial support by the Western powers. “After all, they weren’t able to work normally, they could only get jobs in boiler rooms, or cleaning windows. Do you think they’d have survived on what they earned?”

“But a few people from the West came along and helped them,” says the woman interviewing him.

“Yes, and I’m very glad of it,” concludes Gott.

He has grudges: those who attack him take no notice of the fact that he never sang a single verse in praise of the communist regime. They’ve just harped on about the Charter, the Anti-charter, Husák, Gott and the Party for the past ten years. “Why is it,” he asks, “that the critics, who these days are such heroes, didn’t write all that twenty years ago?”

“You would have had to read those things in underground publications, because they wouldn’t have made it past the press censorship,” notes another journalist.

“ ‘They wouldn’t have, they wouldn’t have …’ ” the singer
mimics her. “Then why didn’t they say it on the radio, on a live broadcast?”

Let’s go back to Helena.

She claims she never signed the Anti-charter. She was on tour in Poland at the time. “They added my name without my knowledge.”

Helena’s case is strange. She was such a big star that—for propaganda reasons—her name (if she herself had added her signature) would have appeared on the front page of
Rudé právo
. Yet she turned up six days after her male and female colleagues, the last one on the list, on an inside page. “They forgot she was out of the country, and when they remembered, they added her name at the last moment. Obviously they’d never print a disclaimer for her,” explains one of her colleagues. “We were all young and stupid at the time.”

Josef Škvorecký, who co-founded the biggest Czech émigré publishing house in Canada, wrote of his own generation: “But were
we
old and wise then? We too were young and stupid, but with just a tiny bit of bad luck, our stupidity was capable of ruining lives, and not just our own.”

A lengthy debate about Helena flared up in the Czech press. (Most of the radio channels play her songs once an hour.)

In letters from readers who defend the star, the same logical argument appears: the general opinion is that the communist daily
Rudé právo
told lies. After all, it didn’t tell the
truth about the Soviet intervention in 1968, or about life in the normalization period. If we agree that it lied about almost everything, then why wouldn’t it have lied about Helena Vondráčková too?

It was Helena herself who put an end to the debate.

She told the press that in those days any sort of protest meant career suicide. “If I had been in the country during the mass signing of the Anti-charter, and if the communists had come to me with it, I would have signed it.”

For several years, journalists have tried hard to get to the bottom of what Marta Kubišová really thinks about Helena, Vašek and Karel. What they would find most attractive would be bitter comments.

But Marta keeps quiet and doesn’t make judgments.

She says that Gott is a vocal phenomenon.

“And what about the people who crossed the street at the sight of you? Can you ever forgive them?”

“But I don’t know whom I would be supposed to forgive. I’ve always had bad eyesight and I never used to recognize anyone from more than six feet away. Two years ago, I finally had laser surgery, and at last I can see properly. So thank God, I was extremely short-sighted in those days.”

About Gott, Marta says he is a man with a flawless soul.

It was he who acted as godfather to Marta Kubišová’s new album of Czech blues in 1996.

He popped the champagne and sprayed the first CD with it.

He said that this little disk was just a small payback for the twenty-year debt that could never be repaid.

He was cheered.

Karel is a superb public speaker.

In July 2006, his museum was opened in Jevany, just outside Prague. With a neon sign saying
Gottland
over the entrance.

No living artist—at least in the Czech Republic—has ever had his own museum before, with full-time guides giving tours in three different languages.

Karel Gott is sacred in a desacralized reality.

A world without God is impossible, so in the world’s most atheistic country, which is the Czech Republic, the sixty-seven-year-old star plays an important role.

The role of
mein Gott
.

On top of that, in recent years it has been possible to commune with him very closely. Every single book about his love life has been a best-seller:
When the Lovers Weep
(1999);
Marika, or How a Young Girl Found Happiness—Three Years with an Idol
(1999);
In Bed with Gott: A Guide to the Golden Nightingale’s Love Life
(2000);
From the Secret Diary of Marika S, or There’s Only One Karel Gott
(2001); and
The Composer of Fragrant Lingerie
(2002).

The Gottland museum is in a villa which Gott bought as his summer holiday home. Even though it’s a weekday, the parking lot is full of tour buses from all over the country. There’s a crowd of old people on the steps. They’re upset because only twenty people are admitted at a time, every twenty minutes. Most of the people here are over sixty. Most of them prefer to stay here propping each other up, rather than stepping aside to sit down at the terrace café. There they stand, nervously waving their tickets in their work-ruined hands. It
looks to me as if they want to go inside right away. As if here and now, this minute, they want to confirm that their lives have been all right.

They loved Gott, and they made it through communism along with him.

If he “had to keep step with the correct line,” then what were we to do?

Getting inside Gottland is like obtaining a seal of approval: the past is okay.

We pass through the “Maestro’s” kitchen (that’s what the guides call him). “He cooked here often, usually fish dishes,” they say. “In the top drawer, you can see the original knives and forks he used when he was already a famous singer.”

We all peer into the top drawer.

Let’s return to Marta.

At the back of the Church of Our Lady before Týn, near the Old Town Square in Prague, one of the oldest theaters in Europe is run in a basement. It is called Divadlo Ungelt—the Ungelt Theater. Dating back to the fourteenth century, it was a little theater for customs officials, who had their office and accommodation next door.
Ungelt
means “customs duty.” The auditorium has thirty seats; it looks like the smallest theater in Europe as well.

Marta Kubišová gives concerts there. Milan Hein, the owner, adores her strong alto voice, which isn’t aching to win anyone’s favor. Unlike Helena, Marta is reluctant to sing
slad’ky
—schmaltzy songs aren’t in her style. She kicks off the evening with a blues number, with lyrics by Pavel Vrba:

At 10 p.m., the small crowd exits the Ungelt Theater into Malá Štupartská Street and collides with a marijuana-scented cloud. Opposite, there’s a nightclub. There are drug dealers standing around, or sitting in the road and smiling. Through the club’s windows, in the red lamplight you can see the drag queens, lip-synching to playbacks of famous female singers.

In three of the windows, there are three Helena Vondráčkovás.

It’s 2002.

The editors of the weekly
Respekt
have received a letter from a reader who was four years old in 1977.

He thinks that any band that wants to sell well should put some effort into the task. Whenever he goes to a bookstore he can never find anything about Charter ’77. The young reader feels that the performers’ caution and conspiratorial habits are the reason why “the band Charter ’77” has such poor publicity.

“The band Anti-Charter,” he claims, “has much better PR.”