A glass of beer is lifted from a plain wooden table by a surprisingly small, delicate hand. A smile passes briefly across the lips, under the walrus moustache, as a deep voice rumbles out some wry observation, before he takes another draught of good Czech beer. So much has changed in the two decades I have known him -- his life, from dissident to president, his dress, from jeans to dark suits, his health, from bad to worse, the whole world around, from communism to capitalism, Warsaw Pact to NATO -- but this image remains, in my mind's eye, the constant, the irreducible Vaclav Havel.
It was like this when I first met him, sitting in the bay window of his old flat high above the river Vltava, thin and drawn after nearly four years as a political prisoner of the communist regime. It was like this last time we talked, in a congress centre that was built for communist party conferences but now awaited a NATO summit. The subject of the wry observation has changed, of course. Back then, in 1984, it was about the secret policeman who followed him everywhere. When Havel went to a sauna, the secret policeman, middle-aged and portly, hurried up to him and said "excuse me, Mr Havel, but I have a heart pacemaker and it's not good for me to go in there. Would you mind waiting while I call for someone else?" Now it was about his fellow presidents, George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac, and whether they would stay for the amazing after-dinner hymn to freedom, combining Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the Marseillaise and John Lennon's Power to the People, that he had specially commissioned for the Nato summit -- and for his own farewell.
The humor, the inner impishness, endures. So does the deep seriousness that is usually revealed in some longer reflection immediately following the anecdote. Then, in 1984, against all the odds, against the outward evidence, against the opinion of most of the world and most Czechs, it was his conviction that the ice of Soviet-style oppression was being gradually thawed from below, by popular disillusionment and the small flame of the dissident movement Charter 77. Now it was about the importance of America and Europe holding fast to our common values, even as we argue about Iraq.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Havel is a born Bohemian, in both senses of the word. For years, he liked nothing better than a late-night, avant garde improvisation -- theatrical, political, or preferably both at once -- in the company of pretty women, good beer and Becherovka, the Czech spirit. But, brought up in the household of a cultured millionaire developer, he is also the politest man I know. Here, in the restaurant of the official congress centre, he insists on offering to pay for the beer and soup we've drunk -- although he has to borrow cash from his bodyguard to do it. This is the kind of detail the playwright-president himself picked up early in his presidency, to illustrate the isolation of the powerful from everyday life. A bemused young waiter takes the money but comes back a few minutes later to say, with a princely gesture, "it's on the house."
A friend who was with Havel in prison told me the guards gave him a rough time because of this extreme politeness and apparent diffidence. They thought they could break him. But they had misread their man. Behind the soft, often hesitant exterior, there is great strength -- both mental and physical. He has nearly died several times over the last few years, from chronic bronchial infections following lung cancer. But he's still here, still fighting for his vision of a more humane world, the last and only one of the heroes of anti-communist opposition in all post-communist Europe, from Berlin to Vladivostok, to have remained at the top throughout his country's whole transition from geopolitical East to West.
So, as he retires from the Presidency, I look back through my notebooks from twenty years to recall the phenomenon that is VH.
May 1986
A police car blocks the entrance to his country farmhouse, Hradecek, in northern Bohemia. I drive on up the road, hide my car and creep down through the damp pine woods to the back of the house. I tap on the window. Surprised, but only for a moment, by my covert arrival, he greets me warmly, wearing a deep maroon T-shirt that says "Temptation is GREAT. Temptation, is his new play, which has just premiered in Vienna. But he won't be able to see it. If he crossed the iron curtain to the west, the regime would never let him back.
We talk all day. He tells me how he hid a manuscript of his latest essay in the woods -- "part of it is still there" -- for fear that the police would confiscate his only copy. (There were no computer back-ups in mid-1980s Czechoslovakia). And how he once crawled out through the woods, did three days of interviews and statements for Charter 77, and then drove back up to his own front door -- to the amazement and fury of the police guarding the gate. We talk about Kafka, Harold Pinter, the philosopher Jan Patocka -- and about the sadistic prison governor. "Hitler was better placed than I am," the governor told Havel once. "He could send you all to the gas chamber." He describes the frustration of having to concentrate all his literary production in a single, weekly letter from prison to his wife, Olga. (The book Letters to Olga, available in several languages, is the wonderful result.) "No underlining!" said the governor. "No quotation marks!" "No foreign words!" One consequence of the censorship was a style so Aesopian that when he rereads the letters today even he sometimes doesn't know what he really meant. Now, however, he is sure that political change is coming -- not from above but from below, from what he calls "the fifth column of social consciousness."
November 1989
And the change has finally come. In the subterranean Magic Lantern theatre, the headquarters of what someone has christened the "velvet revolution," Havel dashes around like a character in one of those speeded-up sequences in a Charlie Chaplin film. His always expressive small hands are spinning like twin propellers. He walks with a kind of Chaplinesque racing shuffle. Every ten seconds someone accosts him with a new request. Often he retreats to the small dressing-room from which he runs the revolution. He is at once its director, stage-manager and leading actor. Yet still he finds time, late at night, for a glass of beer and a joke at the basement pub in the back of his apartment block.
Outside, he is daily punching home the message of peaceful change from a balcony on Wenceslas Square, to crowds of three hundred thousand people. Suddenly, some students sport lapel badges saying "Havel for President." They are made, I am told, in Hungary. Politely, shyly, Havel asks if he can have one. Soon the crowds on the square have started chanting "Havel na hrad" -- that is, Havel to Prague Castle, the residence of the president.
"It's a crazy idea" says Olga. Vaclav agrees. But what's the alternative? It's not just the whole logic of his engagement for democracy but also his own instinct, a fascination with politics as well as a repulsion from them, that leads him from the farmhouse to the Castle, from Hradecek to Hrad. He says he's like a literary critic suddenly compelled to write a novel. But aren't most critics tempted to try their hand at the real thing?Meanwhile, there is pink champagne on the stage of the Magic Lantern theatre, and V-for-Victory signs, and a ragged rendition of the Czech version of We Shall Overcome. This is Havel's finest hour. It's also the moment when he's catapulted into a speeded-up film that he can no longer direct or control. He is, as they say, walking with history -- or is it history frog-marching him?
February 1990
From a balcony overlooking the Old Town Square, President Havel reports to the people of Prague on his recent talks in Washington with President George H. W. Bush. He says he hopes he can be a messenger between the White House and the Kremlin. It's a studiedly informal chat, which he ends by saying "Ahoj!", the Czech equivalent of "Ciao!" or "Cheers!" "Up at the Castle," he shows me the vast, hideous, square armchairs bequeathed to him by his communist predecessor as president, set at a huge distance from each other -- the furniture of fraternal animosity. Dashing, still at Chaplin speed, down one of the long, handsome corridors, to a press conference, he stops to show me a great heavy door. Behind it was, he says, the castle torture chamber. "We shall use it for negotiations."
The humor remains -- and so does the depth. In this first year of his presidency, he delivers some of his greatest speeches: enduring reflections on the legacy of communism, on the need for moral renewal, and on Europe. But already I feel how the grand formality of the Castle, the atmosphere of a court, the innumerable problems of transition and the sheer pressure of diplomatic and political business -- your life measured out in twenty minute appointments -- are beginning to engulf him.
November 1994
A modest riverside pub, another glass of beer. Just one table reserved for the president -- no special ceremony or security. He still speaks as the outsider-insider, the writer on stage. He tells me ordinary Czechs talk to him "as if I'm their spy up there." "Tell them what we think," people say. But there's now an embattled irony in his own position. "Them" means the government of another Vaclav, Vaclav Klaus, a forceful and eloquent economist whom Havel himself helped to prominence during the velvet revolution. Klaus stands for things Havel abhors: he's a Thatcherite, in fact plus Thatcheriste que la Thatcher, claiming the free market will fix everything, whereas Havel is an ecologically minded social democrat, deeply concerned about legality, social justice, and the human costs of the transition. Where Havel is the politest man I know, Klaus is one of the rudest. And Klaus now has the power. After the separation of Czech Republic and Slovakia, which Havel opposed, the powers of the president were sharply curtailed. As if in a Havel play of surreal, Pinteresque menace, Vaclav I is now haunted by his ebullient, bullying Doppelganger, Vaclav II.
In some strange, unexpected and unwanted way, the president has again become a dissident, a dissident from his own government. "I say what I think," he tells me. He has a different vision of what the Czech lands should stand for in Europe. He insists that he can still be an intellectual as well as a politician: "then I wrote essays, now I write speeches." I'm sceptical. I think his position, and the battle with Klaus, radically constrain the extent to which he can, as he himself put in in a trademark dissident phrase, "live in truth."
He also talks of a need for a "broader vision" in European politics, of statesmen and women taking the longer view, as did De Gaulle, Adenauer and Churchill. This he definitely has -- for his own country, and for Europe. Who else can compare? Kohl? Mitterrand? John Major! As the great post-1945 leaders emerged from the crucible of war, so the great post-1989 leaders emerge from the crucible of anti-communist resistance and revolution. It's Havel who keeps demanding that something must be done to stop the genocide in Bosnia, while West European leaders wriggle and duck. Havel who reminds us that Europe is about more than tariffs, butter mountains and currencies. And Havel, above all, who convinces the Americans that Central Europe must be brought into Nato.
November 2002
So now he's hosting a Nato summit in Prague. The room formerly used by Leonid Brezhnev is assigned to Nato's Secretary-General, George Robertson. Brezhnev must be turning in his grave.
We sit in the conference centre, looking across the river to the Castle that looms, illuminated, imposing and lovely, above Central Europe's most beautiful city. But this evening, above the Castle itself there is a huge, crimson, neon heart, slowly pulsating. The heart is Havel's symbol -- he puts it next his signature on letters to friends -- and this is his farewell gesture. Some Czechs mutter that it's kitsch and undignified, especially since in the Czech lands a red, neon heart is usually the sign of a brothel. But Havel doesn't give a damn, and I think he's right. Against the night sky, it looks magical.
He's 66 now, and a sick man; stiffer, stouter, slower, more formal than the electrifying dissident playwright I met back in 1984. The rumbling voice is interrupted by rasping bouts of coughing. He's been through a lot, and it shows.
"No more speeches!" he cries, when I ask him what he'll do in retirement. Then we discuss, as we often have before, how he might reflect, as a writer, on his experience of high politics. But next day he delivers one more remarkable speech. He talks about the shared values of Europe and America, how the eastward enlargement of the Euratlantic community must continue to include all the new democracies of Europe, and the tension between the imperative of resisting evil and the value of sovereignty. We need to "weigh on the finest scales," he says, whether war on Iraq would be liberating people from a criminal regime, as we did in Kosovo, and protecting humankind against its weapons, or just another example of the kind of "brotherly help" that Brezhnev gave Czechoslovakia when Soviet troops marched into Prague in 1968. Pretty sharp, for a President hosting a NATO summit. The moralist and dissident still shines through.
31 January 2003
Some time this weekend, the crimson heart over the castle will finally be turned off. Havel will probably go to his house on the Algarve, where the climate is better for his lungs, to recuperate and reflect. Many Czechs have long since grown tired of his moralizing. "Dix ans, c'est assez" French students chanted at De Gaulle in 1968; and thirteen years as president is more than enough. Great men often are ungratefully dismissed. The tone of the farewells in Prague is respectful, not reverential. But one day the Czechs will realize what a huge service Havel has done to their country and to Europe.
Without him, they would not have had that magically peaceful transition from tyranny to liberty. Without him, the break-up of Czechoslovakia might have been much messier and more painful. Without him, all Central Europe might not now be enjoying the unprecedented security of NATO and the imminent prospect of joining the EU. He is the only leading figure of the transition to have stayed the whole course. And all the while he has kept -- not always, but still often enough -- the distinctive, probing, quizzical voice of a great political writer. When the Czechs wake up to that, they will start planning his statue. He will be depicted, I trust, quietly smiling, with a glass of beer in his delicate right hand.
Timothy Garton Ash is the author of The Magic Lantern: the Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague and History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s.
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