The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [antikvár]

In February 1948, Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to address the hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens packed into Old Town Square. It was a crucial moment in Czech history—a fateful moment of the kind that occurs once or twice in a millennium. Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with dementis standing next to him. There were snow flurries, it was cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. The solicitous dementis took off his own fur cap and set it on Gottwald's head. The Party propaganda section put out hundreds of thousands of copies of a photograph of that balcony with Gottwald, a fur cap on his head and comrades at his side, speaking to the nation. On that balcony the history of Communist Czechoslovakia was born. Every child knew the photograph from posters, schoolbooks, and museums. Four years later dementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately airbrushed him out of history and, obviously, out of all the photographs as well. Ever since, Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone. Where dementis once stood, there is only bare palace wall. All that remains of dementis is the cap on Gottwald's head. It is 1971, and Mirek says that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. That is his attempt to justify what his friends call carelessness: keeping a careful diary, preserving all correspondence, taking notes at meetings where there is discussion of the current situation 3