Her first good deed was to rescue me in the matter of warm clothing. I had been allowed one small case on the plane. The other four pieces of luggage, with winter woollies and sweaters, were to follow by boat. Here, however, was another example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing. The right hand had informed me in writing that delivery would take three weeks; the left hand had no intention of performing miracles; so my warm things reached Prague in spring. In the meantime, I was in danger of freezing to death in my first Central European winter. The only solution seemed to be hibernation until Eva offered me from her meagre possessions a camp blanket to have made into a dress. Its mud-grey colour imparted a corpse-like hue to my sallow complexion, and its bulk and intractability made movement about as easy as the Ablative Absolute. In texture it could be likened only to a hair shirt; I passed the winter in it doing penance for Munich.
1. Eduard Goldstücker (1913–) studied at Oxford 1940–43. He was attached to the London Embassy from 1947–49 and was then posted as envoy to Israel. In 1951 he was recalled and arrested. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1953 along with Kavan, Dufek and Richard Slánský. He was released at the end of 1955, working as professor of German literature at the Charles University, Prague until 1968. Since then he has been professor of comparative literature at Sussex.
2. Vlado Clementis (1902–1952) was a Slovak lawyer and communist MP 1935–38 and 1945–51. He was expelled from the CP for criticizing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Soviet-Finnish war, but was reinstated in 1945. During the war he was the BBC’s Czechoslovak service’s most popular broadcaster. He was Foreign Minister in Prague from 1948 until his arrest in 1951. He was executed a year later.
3. Evžen Klinger was a communist journalist before the war. He was imprisoned in Czechoslovakia from 1949–1956.
4. Otto Šling (1912–1952) fought as a Communist in the Spanish Civil War, spending the war in England. After the war he was appointed Chief Secretary of the CP in the Moravian capital, Brno, and elected a member of the CC. He was executed in 1952.
5. Vavro Hajdú (1913–1977) was a Deputy Minister in the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry by 1950. He was arrested in 1951 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1952. After his release in 1956, he worked at the Institute of Law of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
Chapter 2
‘Bristly lot, aren’t you?’ I remarked to Pavel, on reaching home one afternoon. At the grocer’s shop an argument had been started, as far as I could make out, by a customer who had been short-changed. This had grown into a slanging match between the grocer and his middle-class supporters on one side, and the affronted worker and his allies on the other, and had then developed into a fierce political debate. Farther along the street I had then witnessed a group of Czechs forcing two German women to lick a huge swastika chalked on the pavement. The tufts of peroxided hair strewn about indicated the punishment they had already received. Catching sight of me, one of the men grabbed my arm, brandishing his knife. Pavel warned me I might be mistaken for a German if I went around in a trouser suit with my hair up. I promptly produced my alibi: ‘Nejsem němka, jsem angličanka.’ (‘I’m not a German, I’m an Englishwoman.’) This secured my immediate release and a shower of apologies. Half-a-dozen bystanders rushed up to shake my hand.
‘Bristly?’ Pavel looked blank.
‘Fiery, belligerent.’
‘Can you wonder?’ Pavel asked soberly. ‘A small nation, from its early history menaced by powerful neighbours, its land devastated and its population decimated by all the major European wars.’
‘But we have had our triumphs, too,’ he added.
Pavel was a true Czech patriot. ‘I am first a Czech and then a Jew,’ he declared. (I was to remember these words with painful irony at his trial some years later.) He was intensely proud of his Czech origins. The Czechs had played a crucial part in European history, he told me. During the Middle Ages, the lands of the Bohemian Crown had extended from the Alps to the Adriatic. For centuries Bohemia had held the Germans at bay in their drive to the East. ‘John Hus led the Reformation; Comenius was the founder of modern education.’ Then he broke off. ‘On Sunday I will take you for a historical walk through Prague. When you tread the same cobbles, touch the same stones, see the same skyline as our ancestors, you will feel and breathe our history.’
I assented eagerly. I knew so little about my new country. When I met Pavel I couldn’t even place it on the map. I didn’t want to remain an ignorant outsider: I wanted to belong. And I needed to know Pavel’s roots in order to understand him, as a man and as a Czech.
*
Sunday was a golden September day. Walking towards the river, we soon reached the embankment. I stopped dead, astonished by the view.
Prague is a visual feast. Built on seven hills, it presents constantly changing panoramas, each one more breath-taking than the next. I was looking at Hradčany, the castle promontory on the far side of the river. At its foot flowed the Vltava, bearing kaleidoscopic reflections under its many bridges. Below the castle wall, hanging gardens and ancient roofs descended to the water’s edge. The crest was dominated by the Hrad whose flowing horizontal lines and smooth facades created an effect of both solidity and grace, while behind it soared the Gothic spire of the cathedral.
This view is stamped for ever on my mind.
We walked along the embankment to the Charles Bridge. ‘The oldest stone bridge in Central Europe,’ Pavel announced as we passed under a medieval tower at the entrance. We crossed the bridge, flanked on either side by a parapet of gesticulating saints. ‘Sixteen arches, 520 metres long,’ Pavel went on. ‘Held together by eggs — an innovation thought up by the architects.’
‘The original eggheads,’ I murmured.
‘Pardon?’
‘Nothing. A stupid pun. It means intellectuals.’
‘Well, that would certainly apply to the Emperor Charles IV1 who built it,’ Pavel enthused. ‘He was a statesman, writer, scholar, linguist and builder. He rebuilt the Castle and founded the cathedral, the New Town and Prague university, the first in central Europe.’
At the far end of the bridge stood another massive tower, part of the old fortifications. These no longer existed, yet we seemed to pass through invisible walls — straight into the Middle Ages, as though through Wells’ time machine. We were in Malá Strana (the Lesser Quarter), one of the three ancient towns that comprise historical Prague.
I was immediately enchanted. The narrow, winding, cobblestoned streets were lined with distinguished Gothic houses. In the sunlight their stone walls became amber and their tall, elegant windows were golden. I followed their concise lines upward and saw that at roof level restraint had been abandoned. Here was a medley of gables: single and multiple, arched and indented, decorated with stucco, or dignified by pinnacles, pillars and parapets; some had dormer windows, some were blind and had been added to give height like crests on Maya temples. From among these flamboyant forms a sculptured population of saints and sinners looked down.
Among the burghers’ houses were also stately Baroque mansions and palaces. Grander, more curvaceous and ornate, they did not make a separate assertive statement but merged democratically into the whole. It was difficult to believe that they accommodated flats, offices and ministries. Gripped by the past, I almost expected to see knights and nobles emerge from them.
We climbed Neruda Street, winding steeply uphill. The tops of the houses leaned toward each other, exchanging silent communications. Over the doorways delicately wrought artisan signs brought to mind the crafts that had once been the city’s pride.
At the top we ascended the New Castle Steps (‘new’ in Prague usually means fourteenth century) to the Hradčany heights. We crossed the square to a wall bounding the right-hand side, and looked down. Below, the full richness of the Malá Strana roofs lay revealed under their rippling sheath of pantiles. There were tall, steeply sloping roofs and short, squat ones; there were hip-jointed and recessed roof
s and roofs that flowed over inset windows like eyebrows over brooding eyes. Even the chimneys had individual characters. The predominant colours were warm: bright red, deep crimson and cinnamon, and the roofs huddled together like comfortable old women gossiping. Needle spires and buttressed towers, crenallated turrets and onion-shaped domes grew out of the riot of roofs.
Far below the river wound like a ribbon; beyond lay the Old and New Towns and the modern centre. The peripheral suburbs merged into misty countryside at the horizon. Looked at as a whole, the panorama was a huge, coherent canvas, its foreground painted in gold and burgundy, fading to a silvery purple haze in the distance. The quality of its beauty was indescribable. It brought a lump to my throat and vague thoughts of human mortality and of the eternity of art. At that moment I fell in love with Prague. It was a love affair that was to last a lifetime, and which inflicted sharp stabs of longing in my later enforced exile.
While I drank in the architectural glories of Prague, Pavel regaled me with its history. His intense emotional involvement in past events — in this changeless milieu — injected me with a sense of living history.
Having followed the serpentine twists of Karlova Ulice through the medieval Old Town, where names like Rybná (Fish Street) and Uhelný trh (Coalmarket) conjured up vanished scenes of urban life, we had come to a magnificent arcaded square. Standing under the statue of Jan Hus, Pavel described to me with pride and sorrow the heroic rise and eventual fall of the Hussites who had believed in freedom of faith, and for nearly two decades fought to establish a world of justice, equality and education for all.
Later I was to realize this was not a remote and irrelevant chapter in Czech history: its faith, traditions and strong moral sense had become part of the Czech character, just as its tenet, ‘Truth Shall Prevail’, had become the independent Republic’s motto.
Pavel’s mood then darkened. ‘It was in the Old Town Square that the Czech leaders of the rebellion against the Habsburgs were executed. Two years later we were totally defeated in battle, and our country lost its independence for three centuries. In the face of religious persecution, the educated classes went into exile; German became the official language. Czech culture was virtually destroyed. The Czech language was kept alive only as the spoken tongue of the peasants and the poor in the towns.’ I then understood the longstanding Czech hatred of the Germans.
Pavel insisted we retrace our steps to the Kampa district by the river. Among ornate gas candelabra in the streets and Baroque fountains tucked away in unexpected courtyards, he regained his exuberance. Stopping short, he declared: ‘Here, light begins to shine again.’
We were outside a modest stone house, belonging to one Josef Dobrovský2, the father of the National Revival. Pavel’s eyes shone as he tried to describe to me this re-awakening of national feeling, which reinstated Czech as a cultivated language, established the Czech theatre, created a new literature and re-created pride in the past and hope for the future. Although a brief armed revolt by the students and workers of Prague was ruthlessly suppressed, the movement for national sovereignty was kept alive until 1918 when the independent Czechoslovak state was finally constituted.
Pavel communicated his excitement to me. Some of the names of the ‘awakeners’ were familiar to me from Prague’s place names. The main Post Office stood in Jungmann Street3. The park opposite the main station was named after Vrchlický4. Jirásek’s5 bridge was a stone’s throw from our flat. From there I could see the Palacký6 and Havlíček bridges. These names would now have a greater significance for me.
But it was to Old Prague — Staré Město and Malá Strana — that my heart was drawn. Old Prague was to become my spiritual home. I returned there again and again. I would wander for hours alone. There I felt an affinity with the spirit of the place, and a happiness that was rooted in its beauty and harmony.
Our historical walk was followed by a literary walk that took in the National Theatre, built by money contributed by the whole nation during the revival, the ‘awakeners’ Karel Mácha,7 poet, Jan Neruda,8 critic and journalist, and novelist Alois Jirásek, as well as modern writers such as Franz Kafka and Karel Čapek9; we finished up with a foaming tankard of beer at U Kalicha (the Chalice), the good soldier Švejk’s favourite pub.
The musical walk included the Bertramka villa where Mozart composed Don Giovanni for the people of Prague, the Smetana Museum, the Dvořák monument, the two opera houses and the many halls and gardens where concerts were held.
Our educational walk ended up on the Vyšehrad height where Bohemia’s famous dead are buried and the fifth-century Princess Libuše foresaw Prague as ‘a city whose fame would reach to the stars’.
The geography of Prague had made it impossible to adhere to chronology, and I was a little confused as to the sequence of events (I rectified this later from history books). However, I had formed a picture of the Czechs as a freedom-loving, moral and cultured nation, courageous in defence of their ideals and skilled in the art of survival.
*
I was not interested only in past history. I questioned everyone I met on their wartime experiences. They were eager to talk. I learnt of resistance heroes and partisans, of quislings and collaborators; I spoke to survivors of slave labour and concentration camps, and fence-sitters who had avoided involvement and aimed at staying alive.
In reciprocity I, too, was subjected to interrogation. ‘Is your husband Czech?’ ‘Was he an airman?’ ‘What is your occupation?’ ‘Have you any children?’ A woman I talked to in a coffee house asked me to address a gathering of English-speaking ladies on women in wartime Britain.
I had never spoken in public before. My nervousness took a not unusual form. Owing to the shortage of toilet paper, my notes were non-existent before the meeting opened. As I entered the hall the audience was turned towards the platform like poppies to the sun. The woman in the chair introduced me. There was a burst of applause, not for me personally but for Britain and the British war effort. I was reassured. From the anonymous mass I selected three faces and addressed myself to them, I forgot my stagefright. I talked to them as if they were friends. I told them how British women had spent the war: working in industry, serving in the forces or with St John’s ambulance corps, eking out the rations, enduring raids, parted from husbands, sons, sweethearts and sometimes from children evacuated to safer areas.
I described my own experiences. I had been bombed out, barely escaping with my life; I had spent many tense hours in shelters with my charges, listening to the drone of the vis overhead; I had grieved for pupils who had been killed, and comforted those who had lost relatives in the raids. Our school had later been evacuated and I had been made responsible for emotionally disturbed children abandoned by their mothers while their fathers were overseas. My audience responded with sympathy. Question time went on for hours; no one wanted to go home. Afterwards I thought how easy it had been to establish bonds: women have the same human interests everywhere.
This talk led to others at other clubs. But it was fringe activity. I wanted to be politically involved. I asked Pavel how I could join the Communist Party. He was discouraging. ‘What can you do in the Party? Meetings and political school will be in Czech. First you must master the language.’ Yes, of course. I intended to learn Czech anyway: without it I would remain a stranger in my new homeland.
My initial zeal was somewhat chilled by the discovery that the task would take at least a lifetime. To begin with, Czech words on their own are absolutely useless. You simply do not know whether you are coming or going, nominative or accusative, until you have learnt by rote an imposing array of inflexions. There are seven cases. On top of that every single thing is either animate or inanimate, masculine or feminine or neuter, and for good measure hard or soft as well. So beginners face 98 declension endings before they can think of saying (in Czech): ‘The new pen of my old aunt is in the back yard.’ They may then approach the rest of the 689 morphemes. Most of them jump out of the window or, a wiser alternati
ve, throw their grammar book out of the window, before getting this far.
The undaunted may proceed to the conjugation of verbs, divided into six classes and cluttered up with aspects, so that if you want to run somewhere, you have to make up your mind beforehand whether you intend to run for a short distance or long, and whether you are resolved to make a habit of it, or get it over with once and for all. There are minor pitfalls even in connection with prepositions. For example, there is a divergence of opinion between the Czechs and the English as to whether pedestrians are in or on the streets and as to whether one goes to or into the theatre; the English tend to leave you in the vicinity; the Czechs take you right inside.
The last page of the grammar book in no way signifies an end to tribulation. There is still the business of pronunciation. Though liberal with its declensions, Czech is grudging with its vowels: the spoken language thus resembles a series of coughs, splutters and hiccoughs. It is my belief that the Czechs deny themselves an abundance of vowels in order to stress the stamina of their race. Only a nation of great stamina could survive continual utterance of such breath-depriving sounds.
‘You must acquire a feeling for the living language,’ Pavel insisted. After that, I was obliged each day to listen to one poem and an aria from a Czech opera, and to translate a paragraph from the Communist daily. As a result, I gained a mixed vocabulary. I could state — with some truth — ‘I wandered in a strange land’, voice somewhat outdated sentiments, like ‘Man has the sower’s yearning’, and draw on a selection of anti-imperialist epithets.
Many were the misunderstandings. I went into a grocery shop and asked: ‘Have you eggs?’ The assistant looked at me doubtfully and beckoned me to follow him. We entered the back of the shop. I presumed I was being given priority treatment as a foreigner and was about to be introduced to some under-the-counter eggs. The assistant said: ‘Please’ and indicated a door. It was marked W.C. The Czechs having no w, call it a V.C., which was roughly how I had pronounced the word for eggs. I dispersed the veil of misapprehension with an imitation of a clucking hen. ‘Now do you understand? Eggs?’ ‘Ah, yes, eggs’, beamed the assistant. ‘Yes, we have no eggs. Next week.’
Love and Freedom Page 3