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By Root 689 0

At 5 p.m. we reach Havel’s house at Hradecek, near Trutnov. A Union Jack is pinned to the outbuilding. Olga and Václav come out smiling and welcoming but worried because we are so late: had expected us at one, but we stopped off to eat lunch at a merry ‘Cinska’ restaurant i.e. Chinese restaurant run by Czechs. Olga is very thin, in black trousers, with white hair that frames a noble face, strong nose, lovely blue-grey eyes, altogether a beautiful woman. Havel is small, really small, very energetic, bustling about, grinning, sandy hair thinning but a good deal of it still around his attractive rather cherubic face, sensual big mouth. I can easily see the attraction for women (as with Harold, it’s the magnetism of energy). Klaus Juncker has told Harold on the telephone: ‘Václav is a charming man but look out for Lady Antonia.’ Harold to me: ‘Was he serious?’ Me: ‘I hope so!’ We are installed in the living room where among the CDs is the same Jessye Norman I am currently playing at home. Bottles of Czech champagne are opened.

Havel himself was only just out of prison and the dreadful news of the deaths of the young at Tiananmen Square were filtering through to us: altogether it seemed a perilous time for civil liberties world-wide. If some seer had gazed into the future and told me that we were camping out with the future President of Czechoslovakia – in only six months’ time – I would not have believed him (or her).

9 June cont.

Eggs and black caviar provided. We all toast Václav. He gets out a piece of paper and in a rather manic way (he says later ‘I am a pedant’) reads out a schedule which has already been destroyed by our late arrival. Nevertheless he reads it all out. It includes, I note, an hour and a half interview with Harold on the state of the theatre … Je verrai as Louis XIV was fond of saying.

Then we are shown our rooms. Some embarrassment when Diana and Kari (in fact cousins and friends) are jointly given Olga’s room. Kari, gallantly: ‘Alas, she never liked me.’ In fact he sleeps as a kind of janitor on a mattress in the upper half of this barn-like structure. Václav and Olga will climb a red ladder and sleep in the loft: they’re used to people sleeping over, it’s the dissident way of life. Harold and I are greatly honoured to be ushered into Václav’s workroom, which used to be the woodshed, now adapted into a pleasant light ground-floor room, glass doors on to the great outdoors. Table with large pink notice on it: HERE WILL BE MY NEW COMPUTER CALLED HAROLD. (A lot of us had contributed financially to this computer after the police took the first one.) Havel says Harold is the first contributor he has met. Large photo of Graham Greene on the landing, with a note from him pinned to it; also Beckett (Harold’s own heroes); plus Jack Kennedy. A favourite poster in various forms is ‘All You Need Is Love’ including one with a picture of two rhinos mating. Václav points on the landing to a samizdat collection of books worth ‘100,000 kroners. They didn’t take it at the last search because they didn’t have a lorry; the time before they took everything.’

Dinner, pork and beef, salad, strawberries and whipped cream followed by the interview – and it does last for almost exactly an hour and a half, nor does Harold protest, thanks to his being under Havel’s spell. At dinner, the charming Urbánek, an ebullient silver-haired seventy-year-old, and Harold agree that in effect anything good is ‘left wing’ and if ‘left wing’ people do bad things, then they become ‘right wing’. How convenient! Everyone argues. Kari says he could argue equally that left wing still has a meaning and that it doesn’t. Urbánek remains romantic about the notion of ‘left wing’ as does Harold. (In this at least Harold agrees with the English fogies of the right who denounce him.) Myself I distrust all these labels; by their fruits, ye shall know them, says I. It’s something Harold and I argue about: even if you can get away with Stalin being ‘right wing’, you just can’t with Pol Pot if language has any meaning at all. Harold tries to deal with