comments (Jan/Feb 2010)

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One day in October 1989, in a Prague fish restaurant long since privatized, Vaclav Havel sat down to be interviewed by a British journalist. Asked about the ongoing events in the Communist bloc, he voiced—with my modest help as his translator—his pleasure at the direction things were taking in the round-table Poland, reformist Hungary, and even the once impregnable East Germany. The evidence of the crumbling of the system was everywhere around us, in the shape of hundreds of Trabant cars deserted unsentimentally on the streets of Prague, by East Germans voting with their feet for a future in the West. Yet, asked when the moment of truth might arrive in Czechoslovakia, Havel, in his—for a playwright—atypically undramatic manner, would not be drawn out. “I am not sure,” he said. “It might take a month, maybe a year, perhaps a long time. We might not live to see the day. One simply cannot tell.” Several weeks later the day arrived. Very few people had been able to predict it with any more precision than Havel. . . .

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