The Walls Behind the Curtain: East European Prison Literature, 1945–1990

Eva Kantůrková (b. 1930)

142 | cZEcHosloVaKia Eva Kantůrková (b. 1930) A respected Czech novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, Kantůrková was born in Prague, the daughter of a Communist journalist and writer. In 1956, she received a degree in philosophy and history from Charles University and began a writing career with the newspaper Mladá fronta. Her first novel, Smutečni slavnost (Funeral Ceremony, 1967) was followed by two additional novels, Po potope (After the Flood, 1969) and Pozustalost pana Abela (The Legacy of Mr. Abel, 1971). Both were banned in Czechoslovakia. In 1981, Kantůrková was arrested on a charge of sedition and sentenced to a year in Ruzyně prison. She spent eleven months in confinement before being released for lack of evidence. Her no-holds-barred book about that period, Přítelkyně z domu smutku (My Companions in the Bleak House, 1984; English translation published in 1987), commands attention above all for its focus on female inmates. The book won the prestigious Tom Stoppard Prize. Four years earlier, Kantůrková had published a highly interesting collection of interviews with twelve women whose husbands were imprisoned for political reasons, Dvanáct rozhovorů (Twelve Conversations , 1980). She was one of the founders of the Civic Forum (1989) and was elected to parliament the following year. The following excerpts are from My Companions in the Bleak House (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1987), 3–6, 9–11, 23–29, and have been translated by a friend of the author who prefers to remain anonymous. from My Companions in the Bleak House A dull brownish building on the outskirts of Prague, it has two shorter and lower wings housing the offices, the stores, the changing rooms, the doctor ’s surgery, the library, and a long room misnamed the cultural room, which looks like a deserted village hall and is never, in any case, used. The two longer and higher wings enclose the exercise yard and extend beyond it to form a smaller coal yard, where the entrance to the prison is situated. These two parallel wings contain the cells, and even from the outside their function is obvious , for the only distinctive architectural features are the four rows of barred windows. A corridor runs the length of each floor, with cells for twelve, eight, six, four, or even only for two prisoners opening off it on each side. All the cells are overcrowded, and so there are three prisoners where there should be two, six where there should be four, and so on. The overcrowding can be observed from the corridor through shuttered peepholes in the doors. The bigger cells cZEcHosloVaKia | 143 have two, an extra one bored through the wall and widening inward to give a clear view, even of the toilet, which is of the oriental crouching variety. As you are taken down from the fifth floor after interrogation, or out to exercise in the yard, the deeper you sink into the bowels of the building, the thicker and more stifling the prison smell becomes. During my first two months at Ruzyně I passed through this smell four times each day, to interrogation , back to my cell, to interrogation and back again. The prison officer with me unlocked and relocked numerous iron gates, and each time he let me through first—not because he was a gentleman, but because that is what the regulations lay down. He never said “Madame” as he let me pass first, but I always thanked him as I went forward. Once, under the illusion of our common humanity, I said: “We both have to breathe this fetid air.” That illusion was totally shattered one sweltering day, on my way up to the interrogation cell; 144 | cZEcHosloVaKia in cells facing south women were fainting in the sickening unventilated air. An iron-jawed, short-cropped interrogating officer, sweating his fat out in the elevator on his way to “work” on me, found the sight of me so amusing that he said jovially, “Some people have all the luck, cooling their heels inside!” Only once did the prison smell break through my mask of patience. It was a January morning, and we were being herded down the main staircase toward the exercise yard, our hands hidden under a blanket thrown over our miserable track suits to face the cold, our feet in the shoddy prison slippers packed with wads of cotton against the snow that seeped through the cardboard soles. A...