My Golden Trades

Afterword

THE TITLE OF this book, My Golden Trades, is meant somewhat ironically. There is a proverb in Czech that runs: 'A trade is a handful of gold,' suggesting that a skilled craftsman will never be poor. But there are other proverbs as well: 'For him with nine trades, the tenth is poverty,' meaning that if you never learn any trade properly, you'll never get rich.

The hero of my book, mostly involuntarily, tries his hand at a number of jobs, none of which he is really suited for. There is no gold in any of them, unless you count the unexpected gains experience brings. The book is autobiographical to the extent that I actually did most of the jobs mentioned in the stories. I took part in archaeological digs, I worked as a messenger and as a surveyor's assistant. I smuggled books and manuscripts. I even drove a train without derailing it (although, as readers who have driven a locomotive can attest, it's hard to have a head-on collision on the railway!).

Nevertheless, these experiences only provided the impulse or the occasion for me to say something I felt I had to say. Surveying, for example, is interesting work, but in and of itself, no job can ever be the subject for a story.

However, as an unskilled surveyor's assistant I got into places I would not normally have seen. I visited the Semtex factory where plastic explosives are manufactured. I saw the country from many church steeples, walked into the middle of vast fields and orchards, climbed at night to the top of lonely, terrifying hilltops and touched the earth countless times. I saw that the earth was suffering, and I decided to write something about it. And so 'The Surveyor's Story' came into being.

I am often asked these days what Czechoslovak writers will write now that the revolution is over. I usually reply that such questions are based on the false assumption that writers, especially banned writers, wrote mainly about repression, the secret police, prison and the cruel and bizarre practices of the communist regime. Not at all: they wrote mostly about the same things as writers everywhere, the only difference being, perhaps, that life sometimes put them in situations writers in a free country almost never experience. That can add colour to writing, nothing more. Something of this book is linked to a reality that (fortunately) belongs to the past. I believe, however, that most of what I have written does not rely on the existence of any particular regime; it is linked to our human existence, to our civilization and its problems. Whether I am right or wrong is something readers must judge for themselves.

Ivan Klíma, Prague, May 1992