'I’ve always felt very european'

I was born in Prague. When I was 16 years old my par­ents took me into exile. We went to India and then from there to the United States. That is where I stud­ied and lived for over five years. Then I came to Barcelona. That is the sim­ple story!

No, I knew noth­ing. My par­ents de­cided they couldn’t live in Prague any­more. After the Russ­ian in­va­sion, things where get­ting very dif­fi­cult over there and my fa­ther would most prob­a­bly have lost his job. It was in 1974; we went on a trip to India. It would have been con­sid­ered a crime to just leave the coun­try, so we needed to go on an or­gan­ised trip. But on this trip there were 60 peo­ple and only four went back! In New Delhi my par­ents got tick­ets to New York.

They felt it was a place where every­one could get a job. My fa­ther was a world-fa­mous lin­guist and he knew peo­ple there. He also felt it was a good place for us chil­dren to be, as every­one is from some­where else.

It took me about a year to ad­just; I missed my grand­par­ents and friends. Life in the States is re­ally dif­fer­ent; they do things very dif­fer­ently there. But after that first year it was okay, and I made many in­ter­na­tional friends at uni­ver­sity.

Hav­ing been there, I was fas­ci­nated with India, and so I started with In­dian Stud­ies. It in­volved lan­guages like Hindi, San­skrit, and lit­er­a­ture and re­li­gion. Lots of cul­tural things about India. Then I went into com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture. I be­came a writer and a trans­la­tor, and I now speak six lan­guages!

I wanted to come back to Eu­rope. I re­ally felt like a Eu­ro­pean when I was in the United States. I felt I could live al­most any­where in West­ern Eu­rope. I de­cided to go back to Eu­rope after I had fin­ished my stud­ies. I was about 22 years old when I de­cided to come to Barcelona. When I ar­rived here, I con­tacted some of the news­pa­pers El Pais, La Van­guardia and I asked if I could maybe write for them about cur­rent af­fairs, and I still write for them now.

I wrote it in Cata­lan, and it is being trans­lated into Span­ish and Ara­bic. Of all places, in Syria. This book is about women who spent some time in Stalin’s gulag work camps. About eight years ago I was in Moscow and a friend, who is a writer, told me that there was a meet­ing of dif­fer­ent peo­ple, men and women, who had been in these camps. I was very cu­ri­ous, so I went along. I saw many women there, more than men. The women that I saw were very cheer­ful, the men weren’t as cheer­ful. I thought, we ac­tu­ally don’t know much about women in the gu­lags, we know more about men. I was cu­ri­ous to talk to them, so I asked them for an in­ter­view, to start with maybe just for an ar­ti­cle. In the end, I in­ter­viewed nine women and re­alised I had ma­te­r­ial for a book.

It was very hard for me to un­der­stand this at the be­gin­ning. There were some women who wanted to for­get the whole ex­pe­ri­ence, which I can un­der­stand more. But, why would you want to re­peat an ex­pe­ri­ence that was be­yond hor­ri­ble? But I do un­der­stand it bet­ter now. The ex­pe­ri­ence was so in­tense, it was ab­solute hell. But when they had a pos­i­tive ex­pe­ri­ence, like a good friend­ship, it was the best, it was bet­ter than we would ever know. It was for life. There are no friend­ships like this in nor­mal life. And when they were happy, they were ex­tremely happy.

Yes, they had to work 14 hours a day, in tem­per­a­tures that went down to -30 de­grees. The most ter­ri­ble ex­pe­ri­ence for them was when the guards would call on them to build some­thing, putting huge stones on top of one an­other. Then, the next day, they had to go back and they were told to de­stroy what they had built the day be­fore. It was tor­ture, and when there was no sense to what they were doing, then that made it very hard to han­dle. They could with­stand most things if there was some sense to it, like build­ing a house or rail­ways. But with­out mean­ing, it was very tough. One thing I should men­tion is that what helped them very much was cul­ture. There were very few books in the gu­lags but when there was one, they read it so ea­gerly and it was so im­por­tant to them. They didn’t have paper, so they in­vented po­etry and wrote it in their heads. They would mem­o­rise it and re­cite it to each other. They could mem­o­rise thou­sands of verses.

It will be a book about Gala Dalí. It will be about her most pri­vate life. Her re­la­tion­ship to Rus­sia, and a focus on her child­hood. We know very lit­tle about her. We know what she was like with Dalí, but I want to find out what was be­neath the mask.