A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism by Slavenka Drakulic Page B

necessary distance between the object of my study and myself. In fact, the General doesn’t even know that I am writing this letter. I had to do it behind his back, because he would strongly disapprove of it, maybe even scold me. I only worry that Napoleon, in his simplicity, might bark something to him. But he barks pretty incomprehensibly, and the General is a bit deaf, so I am not really nervous about it.
    Please allow me to make a digression here. I am afraid that I have to use this opportunity to make you aware of an injustice in your domain. I am convinced that I qualify as a character witness at the General’s trial. I personally volunteered to tell the court that he is a good man. I have sent enough obvious signs of my intention. I also sent a letter to the judge. Believe it or not, the response I received was rejection on the grounds of my species! A judge of the criminal court rejected me as a character witness with these words: “We hereby inform you that, as a rule, our court does not accept witnesses of alien origin.” First and foremost, I am not an “alien.” E.T. is an alien. I am a cat! Disregarding this display of ignorance on the part of the said judge, where does your law make this stipulation? He did not even bother to cite the clause that would forbid me to testify, a grave mistake for someone who is responsible for the law.
    I ask you now, Sir, who is really harboring prejudices here, not to use the word discrimination or even racism for the view expressed by the judge? Should I have responded by demonstrating exactly the same kind of prejudice toward your own species and saying that he is only a primate !? I do have my feline pride, you know (although, as I mentioned before, some call it arrogance)! If this judge of yours were a true Polish gentleman in the first place, he would never have allowed himself to offend a lady.
    But let us put this distasteful issue aside. After all, I am not the subject of this letter. I feel that it is my duty to tell you more about the General. So, let me tell you now, if I may, about the crucial moment in the General’s life, about the moment of his decision of December 1981.
    â€œListen, Gorby,” he told me one evening in that agitated mood that sometimes overcomes him. “People should believe me that there was no other way; I did not have a choice in December 1981. It really was a matter of the lesser evil, as is often the case in politics. You, of all creatures, know how rarely I speak about that part of my life . . . I do not like to remember those moments—you call it suppression, no? Oh, if only you had been there, in Moscow on that December night when the Soviet comrades summoned me to a meeting of the Politburo, for ‘consultations,’ as they called it. I still remember the tense, nervous atmosphere in the room. Leonid Brezhnev was sitting at the head of a long table with his bulldog face and beady eyes. He was already very ill, but no less dangerous for it. And Andropov was breathing down his neck. These comrades looked to me like a pack of dangerous dogs, ready to bite. Not much was said, but from their looks I understood the precarious situation Poland was in, with the Solidarity movement’s demands undermining the entire Communist system. They were afraid that the ‘Polish pestilence’—as one of them put it—would spread if it was not ‘contained.’ That reminded me of 1968, of the moment when we in Poland were forced to send our soldiers against our brothers in Prague. How I regret that today! And how sadly it ended there, how we crushed Dubček and his reforms!
    â€œIt should have been clear to me then what was clear to Brezhnev in 1981: that Communism was not a system that could be reformed, and that any such attempt would only bring it down. Gorbachev did not understand that either, unbelievable as it sounds. When, almost two decades later, it was Gorbachev’s turn to