Czechs find a way — ‘stealing to survive’

Press, 9 January 1986, Page 15

Czechs find a way — ‘stealing to survive’

Prague was the second stop on the Eastern European tour by the Takaka freelance writer, ROBIN ROBILLIARD. There, a brave Czech woman came to her rescue.

Prague started badly. My overnight train from Warsaw arrived to a thunderstorm. “All hotels are full,” said a listless clerk at the tourist office.

“Please, may I sleep on your floor for two nights?” I asked the one Czech name I knew. A cheeky request. Police permission is required to have foreign guests to stay.

But Jarmila Marsalkova, secretary of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, had known I was coming. She had sent me a welcoming cable.

“You will stay where you are until I collect you in 60 minutes,” said the very capable voice on the telephone.

It took that hour for my hostess to travel, by bus and metro,, across the city. It is a journey this 66-year-old does every week-day to mind three grandsons after school. Jarmila had had a heart attack two months earlier, but that would not stop her exhausting herself, not only for her family, but also, as she has done throughout her life, for her country.

At university she had studied economics and become an idealistic member of the Communist Party. At the end of the Second World War she spent six years setting up the International Union of Students, to fight for the independence of colonised people. “Membership, at the start, covered the political spectrum. It was the cola war of the 19505,” says Jarmila, regretfully, “that divided the world’s students into text and Right camps” As the wife of a Government

minister she had brought up two children and for 28 years was Secretary for Health, helping to take Czechoslovakia to the forefront among socialist countries in welfare legislation.

“Housekeeping was easier when my children were young. There were no queues. Instead of big supermarkets, we had small shops, open from 5.30 a.m. selling fresh rolls for breakfast. Milk and butter used to be delivered.”

I went to the local supermarket, dreary with its lack of variety. Queues were held up as I pointed to puddles out the window, to demonstrate that I wanted mineral water and not six bottles of brandy.

In the neighbourhood sports complex I watched a jazzercise class where the dynamic instructor seemed to be showing off for me, as well as to his giggling pupils. The complex included an indoor pool, gymnasium, and saunas. Hair driers were being used by two fathers to dry small daughters’ hair.

Jarmila’s flat has four small rooms and she had fixed up a hose to flush the lavatory: “I’ve been waiting 10 weeks for a plumber.” When I suggested a bribe to speed the tradesman’s arrival, common practise in Czechoslovakia, this gentle woman was horrified. She was equally disapproving of washing hung on balconies. “My generation would not have dreamed of such a thing. Washing should be hung in basements.” jarmila’s apartment block is cooperatively owrffid. She had contributed her share* of the capital. A monthly payment of 600 korunas

($104) covers heating, water, gas, and electricity. This is cheaper than paying rent for a State flat, for which there are waiting lists of 9 to 12 years.

Jarmila’s monthly pension of 3000 korunas ($516) is twice the national average because of her previous high salary. She had bought a larger co-operative flat for her daughter, and given her original, more central flat to her son, “although he and his wife lived with me for the first nine years of their marriage.”

Jarmila is now on her own, out in this stark new suburb of grey, six-storey buildings where the only flower bed and the only mown grass lie outside her block. She is on its household committee. No-one else cares.

It is also Jarmila’s job to collect the quarterly fees, based on salary, from Party members in her district, and to talk to the Women’s Union about peace.

Her job with International Physicians occupies 10 to 12 hours a week, “preparing papers for international congresses, making bookings for delegates.” There are 500 physician members in Czechoslovakia.

Jarmila’s street was lined with vehicles; every tenth Czech owns a car. But by 3 p.m. on Fridays there is a mass migration to the countryside. People return on Sunday night to “put in time,” as a western diplomat called it, for the next 4% days.

“The standard joke in Prague,” he told me, “is ‘l’m employed but I don’t work.’ Exhortations to increase productivity vuon’t impress the work force.”

Since 1970, free plots of land have been distributed in the country to people who want it. They build the cottages themselves, using cheap loans. “And by stealing materials from the State,” adds the diplomat. “The saying is,” he explains, “that the person who doesn’t steal from the State deprives his children. A doctor will have no conscience in asking a mason to steal him bricks in return for a medical favour. What Czechs are doing, with this alternate economy, is

surviving the shortages.” At a personal level, he insists he has never known such integrity as amongst Czechs between each other. “There’s very little street crime.”

jarmila has a country house, built by her husband before their divorce. Not that she has time to rest. She visits the sick in the country hospital, takes people cakes on their birthdays, organises excursions for old people. I asked Jarmila, the Communist, about religion. “I was a Protestant when I was young. Not that anyone cares now,” she adds, “if you go to church or not.”

But at a service attended at St Vita’s Cathedral it was only the glorious music that reached out to fill the vast Gothic space. There were less than 20 worshippers.

It is music, more than any other art form, into which Czechs have withdrawn in their total disaffection with politics. “After the Soviets made it clear in 1968,” says the diplomat, “with the massive weight of their tanks that Czechoslovakia was a buffer satellite, people realised they had limited political freedom, that it was pointless trying to introduce democracy into the arid Communist State.”

But rearing children is ant. “Although this, too,” the diplo-' mat says, “results in contradic-

tions. Children learn at school about Marxism and Communism, only to hear their parents say ‘that’s all nonsense.” There’s a dilemma for parents in having to instill scepticism in their children without destroying their souls.” Yana, Jarmila’s daughter, aged 35, an editor of an agricultural bulletin, earns 3000 korunas ($516) a month. Theo, her husband, earns 1000 korunas more ($172) researching veterinary drugs. Food, costing 2500 korunas ($432) a month, is their biggest expense, Yana told me.

At 18 she had worked in England for three months, for a veterinary’s family. “That’s when I learned that Westerners work harder than we do. The vet was called out at all hours.”

The freedom of Anglo-Saxon schooling had also surprised. “A British friend’s children walked on flower beds in a park. Our children,” says Yana, “are disciplined to behave, to be more formal.”

Only small children in Czechoslovakia are hugged and kissed. Andrew, aged 13, and Martin, aged 10, are already too old. “We shake hands,” their mother said.

Andrew frowns a lot. He was soon to sit the examination to decide his future schooling. But he is bright and is expected to be among the top 30 per cent to go to the Gymnasium, to prepare for university. Others will go to special trade schools. Martin smiles all the time. He does not like to read. He would rather play with George. It’s George, aged 5%, who is the character, the only son who did not sit angelically at the table. George had been selected, from kindergarten, for a special music course. “But I didn’t want to do it.” He

beats his parents at chess. Parents are publicly reprimanded at monthly P.T.A. meetings if their children misbehave. “It’s usually the children of solo parents who are difficult,” Yana says. Illegitimacy and divorce are on the increase.

“We do what we can to help solo parents,” says Jarmila. “They get priority in housing and kindergarten entry. And solo parents get full pay for three years after a birth. A married parent can stay home, on full pay, for two years.” Health care for everyone is free, including dentistry and pharmaceuticals, although medical care, this family agreed, is declining — “as doctors leave the country.” A major health problem is pollution. “In February,” says Yana, “the snow in Prague can be black.” It is compulsory for city children to spend three weeks a year in the mountains. Their teachers take them. “My grandmother can come,” Martin offered, when his teacher asked for helpers.

The education standard is also declining, according to Yana. There is a complaint about predominance of women teachers. “And an unsatisfactory teacher, in our system, cannot be sacked.” But the preschool care in Czechoslovakia is described by western diplomats as “fantastic.”

“In 1948,” Yana told me, “it was thought that kids put into collectives would be unselfish, co-opera-tive. The result was the opposite. The kids grabbed everything. They were resistant to parents.” Pre-school establishments are up like houses, including household gadgets, but with lowdown switches. Boys at six sew on

buttons and do the vacuum cleaning; small girls use hammer and screw driver. “But no-one is being taught to dam,” says Jarmila, disapprovingly. There is another so-called problem. Men are now so capable that women tend to sit back and let them wash the nappies. “But what’s wrong with that?” asks Yana. “If I’m tired I ask Theo what is for supper.”

Of more serious concern to Theo is the restriction, through censorship, of what he can read, and the frustration, in his job, of not beingable to keep up with world developments because of western embargoes on high technology. He longs for a fellowship to study in the United States. “I’ve written to 100 universities, but they consistently refuse me.” He seems naively unaware that inhabitants of the Eastern bloc are considered enemies by many people in the West.

Jarmila, too, has her blind spot. “People in Czechoslovakia have everything they need,” she kept on insisting. When I argued late one night when both of us were tired that they had not got freedom of speech, press, and movement, jarmila looked shattered, hurt.

“These original ideologues cling to their blinkers,” a diplomat explains. “They don’t want to recognise that Utopia hasn’t been reached.”

But even Jarmila was extraordinarily nervous when, seeing me off at my train, she realised she had forgotten to report my stay with the police. “If they ask at the border where you stayed, say you slept at the railway station.” Which would have been trufr if this 'dear, kind .woman rescued me. But I wasn’t asked.