EDA KRISEOVA
Dear Mr. President
Dear Mr. Presidellt,
YOIl
nll/st be wondering whom this letter is from,
Chief Constable Blaha
began timidly. He was writing to the head of the state in which he had
lived for the past seventy-two years. Immediately dissatisfied , he crumpled
up the paper, tossed it into the wastepaper basket, and rolled another
sheet into his old Underwood:
Dear Mr. Presidellt,
I am writing to
YOIl
as one soldier to another,
but even as he typed he
knew it was wrong. He stood up, shamefacedly scratching the stiff mili–
tary crewcut that had covered his head since before he could remember.
But he was so upset that he went back to the typewriter and started in
for the third time:
Dear Comrade Presidellt,
I am a chiif constable, retired, and my name is Cestmir Blaha. I wOllld
like to tell
YOIl
abollt the callillg to which I halle delloted my life. I halle always
been a faitliflll servant of ollr workers' and peasants' state, yet now that I am
getting on in years it has tllmed agaillst me.
Having written out his complaint,
Mr.
Blaha fell to musing. He
didn't like the word
state.
State? he asked himself. Which state? It sud–
denly occurred to him he had served every form of state the world has
known - and without so much as crossing the borders of the country he
was born in. He had never taken part in a coup; the regimes had come
and gone against his will, and he defended them all as passionately as he
would have defended the mother who nursed him. But the governments
fell and left him orphaned, and what saddened
Mr.
Blaha most of
all
was
that none of them, none of the governments he served, had ever been
recognized as meritorious and just.
Now Chief Constable Blaha - he was just. He typed a thick layer of
x's over the word
state
and wrote in the word
nation.
When you're a
constable, your mind never stops, and it had fortunately occurred to him
in time that no state, no government cares to hear that there was or will
be any state or government but itself.
I was always true to my oath, nan/ely, 'to serve faithfully, without regard
to race, nationality, or political conlliction.
J
I neller sullied my honor and al–
ways stood up for the poor and downtrodden (the rich didn't need me, so I
