456
PARTISAN REVIEW
ear. We were down to nothing again, and we still had the three children, so
my
wife went to work in her old age. By
1960
we were able to come up with the
Jorty thol/sand we needed to buy
the)e~vs'
hOl/se, the one we had been living ill.
We lived there peacifully until
1963,
whw a government proclamatioll
concemil1g the constYllction oj a dam at
K.
was isslled. The Water Board de–
creed that thirtyjtve houses would have to be demolished, mine inclllded.
The wife told me
to
get a move on and find a new place, but I said
to myself, You've got land on the hill. Your sons will help. Build a new
one.
In
1966,
when
~ve
were two-thirds oj the way throllgh building a /lew
house Jor ourselves, the Water Board informed
liS
that their original estimate
had bew erroneolls and that the new hOllse would be IInder water too. We were
advised to sell. Finally they Jorced me into sellillg Jor eight thol/sand by promis–
ing me a state subsidy
to~vards
the pllrchase oj a new hOllse. Bllt I Jailed to filld
a house bifore the elld of that year, and the next year the sllbsidy ran out alld
prices doubled. Mr. Presidellt, I have written to local offices a/ld I have writtell
to national offices. They all claim that my case has beell properly dealt with.
Why is it I always lose?
If
I were to go lip to the attic and put a noose arOillid
my neck, my wife would inherit the hOllse and get twice as much for it. It
would almost pay. AJter the changes in
1968
I applied Jor political rehabilita–
tion, but I never received word as to whether the commission had even agreed to
consider my case.
I ran into Hakl during the spring of sixty-eight and said to him,
Well, Vladimir, what do you make of all this?
You wouldn't do anything now, would you? he said. Not after
saving me from the Germans.
You and your whole family, I said.
They'd kicked him out of the National Assembly and hadn't trusted
him with anything official since the Shinsky trials.
What did you ever do for me? 1 said. We never know when we're
going to die, and our luck can turn from one day to the next. Though
my
luck was always bad.
I am moving into a prifab flat in
0.,
a combined living-room/bedroom
with cooking facilities and central heating. The rent comes to two hundred
crowns a month; my pension is seven hundred crowns. The eight thousand I got
for the house will be gone in three years. I'll have nothing lift.
Mr. President, should you and your office see fit to take 1.lp my case, I
promise to submit a fully documented record of my life. I have written proof oj
everything. I will even hand over my bankbooks, which I saved to show
my
children how frugal and self-sacrificing I was. Now I have nothing, and every–
one else is taken care of. That is what I cannot understand.
Translated from the Czech
by
Michael Henry Heim
