Ivan Klima’s My Golden Trades was published (and translated by Paul Wilson) in 1992, three years after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. At the time Klima was already getting asked what Czechoslovak writers would write about now the country was no longer a communist state controlled from Moscow:
“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, 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 put them in situations writers in a free country almost never experience.”
The stories in My Golden Trades, however, predate the revolution, and, as Klima suggests, they are not about repression but do often feature elements of that repression in their telling. Most obviously, the central character is a writer (Klima says in an afterword that “the book is autobiographical to the extent that I actually did most of the jobs”) but he has to take up a number of different ‘trades’ in order to satisfy the state (just as in Love and Garbage the protagonist has to work as a street sweeper). In each story he has a different ‘trade’ though in the first, ‘The Smuggler’s Story’, the work is not only unremunerated but illegal. In the story a businessman, Nicholas, (who is allowed to travel abroad) smuggles books back for the narrator, at least partly because his wife, Angela, is an admirer of literature. Soon he is bringing more than one copy so that the narrator can distribute the books to his friends. Whereas Nicholas takes smuggling in his stride, the narrator is a much more nervous character as, for example, when he takes two bags of books on the tram:
“I looked so suspicious, so desperate even, that people began staring at me, which didn’t add to my peace of mind.”
Klima alternates this story of smuggling with the historical example of Jirik Vostry who was arrested in possession of illegal books (of a religious nature) in 1732. Vostry is, of course, much braver than the narrator, who finds himself stopped by the police on the way home from Nicholas’ house with three bags worth of books hidden in a laundry basket. A similar police stop also occurs in ‘The Engine Driver’s Story’ when intellectuals distrusted by the state attempt to go to the railway workers’ ball (“they believed no one could object to them attending a function organised by a group as politically correct as the railway workers”) but are prevented. The narrator is stopped (and breathalysed) not once but twice, and on the second occasion told he is over the limit:
“It made no sense to show the tube to me [he is told] because to my untrained eye, the colouration would be imperceptible.”
With such Kafkaesque logic the police have soon confiscated his keys and licence. Here the story of the ball is contrasted with the opportunity he gets to drive a train, pressing the alert button “as a sign that I was still alive.”
In ‘The Painter’s Story’ the narrator revisits his childhood when he thought he might become a painter with a day when he decides to head into the countryside to paint. On the way he meets a young woman, thinking only “the girl would also have looked good in my picture.” Later he sees her body on the railway track below:
“The men were carefully avoiding a pool which had soaked then girl’s blue blouse and skirt… What could I do? I turned my eyes to the heavens, hoping they were not empty, and whispered a prayer.”
The two elements of the story come together when the girl’s mother asks the narrator, as the last person to see her, to paint her daughter. In ending the story in this way Klima explores not only death but memory with the careful, even hesitant, reflection that characterises the narrator’s thoughts throughout.
In the remaining stories (there are six in total) the narrator takes on a particular job. In one he works on an archaeological dig, in another he is a courier, and in the third he is a surveyor’s assistant. The reason for each employment is necessity, as in ‘The Surveyor’s Story’ when he receives a letter denying him artists’ social insurance. Initially he is confident that, with only two years until retirement, he will be fine, until a friend explains:
“If…I did not hold a documentable job for at least a single day during those two years, I would have the same right to a pension as someone who had never done a day’s work – which is to say, none at all.”
The most touching of these stories is perhaps ‘The Courier’s Story’ where the narrator befriends a woman who works in one of the offices. The friendship is brief but meaningful, its poignancy highlighted by another moment when the narrator is told he does not have to contribute to a collection for a man whose wife has died as, “You didn’t know her after all.” For Kilma, we have a loyalty that goes beyond long-standing relationships, as is also demonstrated by a story from the narrator’s past where he acts as courier when an acquaintance comes to his home to hide for the police. As with all of KIima’s work, it is the humanity of his characters that shines through.