On the way home, eggless, I paused to watch a group of people clearing the rubble away from a war-damaged building. They were clearly not labourers. One of them called out to me teasingly: ‘Don’t stand there gawking. Come and join us.’
Me? I hesitated. Why not? Physical labour would be a pleasant change from teaching English, and it would certainly not require fluent Czech.
‘Dobře, přijdu.’ (‘All right, I’ll come.’) I was handed a pick and set to with a will to the accompaniment of encouraging grins. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood. The ring of picks on stone and the squeal of barrow wheels were interspersed with jokes and snatches of song. I warmed to the atmosphere.
All too soon my hands were blistered. A young man bound them up with his handkerchief. ‘Not to worry,’ he said. ‘It happens to all of us at first.’ They were students, housewives, white and blue collar workers, who had answered the call for voluntary labour. Similar patriotic brigades had sprung up all over the country. In addition to their regular employment, the ‘brigaders’ worked in factories, cleaned schools and universities (which had been used as barracks by the Germans), repaired roads and helped farmers on the land. Now that their German overseers were gone, the whole nation was plunged into a fervour of constructive activity. The following days I hurried through my chores so that I could return to the site. I was enjoying myself. Sweeping away the ruins of the past was practically and symbolically the first step towards building the brave new future.
My conversations on the site improved my Czech. Thus emboldened, I resolved to see Prague on my own. My method was to start from the centre, take a tram, get off at a random stop, look around and return by the same route. This was not as simple as it sounds.
Until I became acclimatized, I considered myself lucky to survive a ride in one piece. In the first place, there were no queues. As the tram drew to a standstill, a mass of grimly determined citizens surged forward. Elbows were much in evidence, hats tended to disappear. Perfect equality existed between men and women, young and old. Having missed a tram or two, or having been swept into the wrong tram, by observing old-fashioned courtesy, I went native and acquired a certain rugger skill in dealing with scrimmages.
Boarding and alighting were carried on simultaneously, so that it was just as exhausting to fight one’s way off as on. Having touched down on the pavement, one often got carried back into the tram by the ingressing mob. The conductor usually possessed a peculiar sense of humour and started the tram moving while the oncomers and outgoers were still sorting each other out. Consequently, between stops the tram resembled a planet throwing off heavenly bodies at top speed. There was no limit to the capacity of these trams: they might be overflowing but they were never full. At every stop they picked up a few more satellites who hung on by toes, teeth and magnetism. No one ever dreamed of waiting for the next tram. The mere suggestion would have been taken as a sign of madness; just as the courageous cry: ‘Eight standing only; the rest off the tram!’ would have been a signal for lynching the conductor. I came to the conclusion that this mode of travelling was highly profitable for the haberdashery trade: one rarely emerged with the full complement of buttons, gloves and belts.
Many of the conductors were women, awesome women. If the London policemen were selected for their height, the Prague tram conductress was surely hired according to weight and pugnacity. With the waist measurement of a kettle-drum and the voice of a sergeant-major, she ploughed her way through the sweating bodies like an elephant in a nursery of saplings. The passengers bowed in her path: those not permanently deformed straightened up in her wake. If smaller and weaker specimens dropped out of the tram’s open end as the pressure wave hit them, they went unnoticed and unlamented. These little trips introduced me to a quantity of Czech ribs as well as a number of Prague suburbs.
One morning as I set forth, a middle-aged woman pounced on me from a door on the ground floor.
‘I’m Marešová, the concierge for this block,’ she announced. ‘You must be the English lady, Mr Kavan’s wife?’
‘Yes, I am Kavanová,’ I said. ‘How do you do, Mrs Marešová?’
‘It could be worse.’
I reflected: English people, when asked: ‘How are you?’ give the standard answer: ‘Fine thanks,’ even if they have just lost their nearest and dearest. But Czechs never admit to being well off even if they have won a fortune. To a general enquiry their replies are in a minor key: ‘Bearing up’. ‘Mustn’t grumble’, or further down the scale: ‘I just about keep from stealing.’ The more guarded fob one off with ‘Thank you for asking’, or simply ‘Thank you’, to which one attaches one’s own interpretation. One may also be given enigmatic replies like ‘As fit as an old slipper’; ‘It’s for the cat’; or just ‘Oh well, you know how it is.’
Having cornered me, Mrs Marešová released a volley of Czech that went something like this: ‘I suppose you’ve settled down by now. That’s a nice flat you’ve got; but no one stays there long. At the beginning of the war a wealthy Jewish family lived there. They bribed the Germans and managed to keep in circulation for a bit but, in 1943, they were transported to Terezín. The parents and the little girl ended up in the gas chamber; the older daughter died of pneumonia in time.
‘Your flat was taken over by a German doctor and his wife. He was at Buchenwald for a time doing medical experiments on the inmates. Most of them died, but them as didn’t went mad or paralysed. Well, when the Russians came and he saw Hitler had lost his perishing war, he and his wife committed suicide. The police found them on that red couch in the lounge. All togged up in their best clothes and sprayed with scent. They probably thought they’d be a bit high by the time they was found. Seems like the flat’s got a curse on it. Let’s hope to goodness you’ll have better luck!’
With this pious invocation Mrs Marešová gave me a friendly nod and let me go.
*
My spirit deflated, I crossed the park into Vodičková Street. An alert pedestrian prevented my extinction by an oncoming military vehicle. Well-meaning friends in England had warned me that Prague would be overrun by hordes of Russians terrorizing the population. I had kept a wary look-out, but among the many strange uniforms it was difficult to identify them. Eventually I discovered that the least impressive uniforms covered Soviet soldiers and that the Russian was square, flat-headed, short-legged, and genial. Only when mechanized was he a menace. The motorized Russian drove at breakneck speed with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the hooter. This saved time and exonerated him from blame. On the whole the Czechs were genuinely grateful to the Russians and tolerant of excesses committed by the liberating army on its march towards Prague. Nevertheless, I had narrowly escaped the fate predicted for me by my English friends. I thanked my saviour and walked on with a philosophical shrug.
At the end of the street I turned into Wenceslas Square, which isn’t a square at all but the main boulevard. Devoted to feeding, clothing and enlightening the populace, it was relieved from the prosaic by a colourful mural on the Wiehl House and rows of lime trees growing out of circular gratings. Its enchantment was revealed at night, when necklaces of white lights gleamed between the trees and the National Museum. But by day it was uncompromising and solid, like a hospital matron.
Rounding the corner I almost bumped into a ginger, freckled figure. A red-headed Czech is about as common as the edelweiss in East Anglia. He, in turn, saw before him a brown-clad beanstick with an Edwardian hair-do, by all standards a horticultural rarity. We had seen only photos of each other, but it was a fifty-fifty chance. We seized each other’s hands and exclaimed simultaneously: ‘My sister-in-law, isn’t it?’ ‘My brother-in-law, isn’t it?’
Karel, now demobbed, had nowhere to go. I took him home and allotted him the fateful couch, trying to ward off the ghosts. He was a full-time student, along with tens of thousands of other Czechs deprived of higher education by the war. By all accounts, the classes and lecture rooms were as crowded as the trams. Karel
would have chosen to study drama (like his brother he had a flair for histrionics) but Pavel had decreed economics, and he had always obeyed his elder brother.
Feeding my two men became my main occupation. The initial problem was to discover which shops sold what. All the windows displayed photographs of Beneš, Stalin and other personalities, also pictures of the war and the May revolution and views of Prague. There was almost nothing to sell, except food, and that was limited in variety and quantity.
Under the circumstances one might think that catering would have been simplicity itself. Not a bit of it. Take the ration tickets, for a start. These had to be collected from the National Committee every month on a certain day, a different day for every month. This was a feat requiring time, patience and persistence. The National Committee dealt with all problems, from housing and the registration of births, deaths, marriages and repatriates, to vouchers for keeping hens or radios. All these offices changed their headquarters from month to month but not the labels on the doors.
The first time I went for our tickets I took my stand outside door No. 130 on the first floor at nine o’clock in the morning, as directed by Information on the ground floor. The door was locked. Time passed, so did many flying figures. I was to find that though officials dashed along corridors in a purposeful hurry, inside their offices efficiency was less marked. They invariably took some time to find one’s card, or to find that they had lost one’s card. This was the worst possible fate for no one believed that a person existed unless he or she could prove it on paper. This meant that people had to carry around not only an identity card but also a birth certificate and copies of their parents’ birth certificates in order to prove not only that they had been born but that they had parents. If these documents had been issued in a foreign country, both the originals and Czech translations of them were necessary. If any of these documents had been lost, affidavits to that effect were necessary, suitably signed and stamped, proving erstwhile possession of them. And if an affidavit were lost, then another affidavit confirming the erstwhile existence of the original affidavit was necessary, and so on. A foreign wife was required to produce her marriage certificate as well, because no one credited that she would be in this charming chaos unless she had a very binding reason. Then there was the certificate of domicile, which stated that you had successfully proved your existence and identity, and were therefore entitled to live …
Eventually I was taken pity on and informed that ration tickets were now dealt with on the third floor, door No. 303, but that they were issued in the afternoon between two and six o’clock. In the afternoon, I attached myself to the crowd at No. 303, only to be told, after an hour’s heaving and shoving, when I had at last got within sight of the door, that this month the districts had been sub-divided and I now belonged to door No. 305 or 306. At each of these doors I was mystified by the announcement that this door had jurisdiction over the area enclosed by the following roads. I didn’t recognise any of them. My heart sank. Usually my attempts at establishing the whereabouts of a particular street met with responses such as: ‘Barricade Street? Let me see. Ah, yes, formerly Heydrich Road and before that Beneš Avenue. It runs between 5 May Avenue, that was Linden Avenue and used to be Masaryk Road, and Liberation Square, before that General Syrový Square and before that Washington Square and in the time of Francis Joseph, Empire Square.’
Not very hopefully, I turned to a fellow ration hunter. Wonder of wonders, he actually knew our street. My heart leapt, but sank again as he said: ‘The other door, Miss.’
I took my place as directed. People arriving after me said something in emphatic Czech and pushed in front of me. Obviously they had priority. Nearly everyone had priority. I watched dispassionately while the priorities argued among themselves. Towards evening, when there was no one left, I tumbled into the room in a state of collapse.
The quantities represented by the main ration tickets were scaled according to occupation. I, as a mere housewife with no children, was barely suffered to exist. Pavel was slightly better off, though as a penpusher he was only in the ‘light worker category’. Karel, as a student, fell in between. No such system as registering at a particular shop existed, therefore it was advisable to shop early. At daybreak you had to present a jug into which haif-a-cupful of bluish milk per capita was ladled from a churn. By the time the sun was up, you had to have joined the crowd at the baker’s, and for the rest of the day you had to emerge at hourly intervals in pursuit of pickled cucumbers, red peppers, sauerkraut or pig’s blood, delicacies that you were usually told were coming later, coming still later or had come but had just been sold out.
I had never had so much of so little. We lived on a diet of be-whiskered carrots and multi-ocular potatoes with a knob of meat on Sundays. I found, though, that others enjoyed roast joints and home-made cakes. They had relatives in the country or contacts on the black market. We had neither. I mentioned this deficiency to Eva who promised to procure me anything I could pay for. I ordered a kilo of sugar.
That evening, stirring two heaping spoonfuls into his ersatz coffee, Pavel broke out: ‘Buying on the black market during the occupation was a necessary act of defiance; now it is sabotage of the economy. How can we plan our economy when large quantities of every item disappear from normal distribution? Until the black marketeers are rounded up, the only way to thwart their racket is to purchase only goods over the counter.’ He turned to me: ‘I hope it would never occur to you to buy anything beyond our lawful rations.’
My gaze was rooted to the guilty sugar bowl. I said nothing, but proved my patriotism thereafter by supping on black bread spread with mustard and washed down by saccharine-sweetened ersatz coffee. From the bitterness of its flavour and the sparseness of the lawns, I assumed that this beverage was distilled from burnt grass.
Since my arrival not a word had been said about Pavel’s posting; it came as a bombshell when he announced one evening in bed: ‘We’re leaving for Belgrade on Saturday.’
This was Tuesday. I sat bolt upright. ‘How long for?’
‘A couple of years.’
‘But, couldn’t you have mentioned it before? I mean I’ve got to pack, and, and …’ I stuttered.
‘Well, you don’t have to start now,’ muttered Pavel sleepily. ‘Time enough on Friday. We’re only allowed a small suitcase each. We shall travel by special bus with armed guards. We have to be prepared for bandits on the way.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said calmly, as though handling bandits had been a subject taught at college.
All Friday afternoon I struggled to fit the maximum number of belongings into two battered suitcases. I had just managed to close them — by sitting on them with kilo weights in my pockets — when Pavel came in. ‘The bus has broken down. We can’t leave until Monday.’
On Monday Pavel set off to ascertain developments. I waited in travelling clothes, swallowing a Kwell every hour and with my impatience rising every few minutes. In the afternoon he brought the news: ‘A spare part has to be made, something for the cooling system. It’ll take several days.’
‘I’ll take longer than that to repair my cooling system,’ I told him lightly. ‘You Czechs go in for spectacular delays on your continental travels.’
Pavel went on as though he had not heard, which was his way of treating remarks against which he had no watertight argument. ‘In the meanwhile I hope I can persuade them to send Černý instead. He speaks Serbo-Croat and I’d like to finish my studies.’ Pavel had a habit of bringing out important decisions, which he must have been turning over in his mind for some time, as though they had just popped into his head.
I dropped a kiss on the end of his nose and asked mildly: ‘Darling, would it be too much to ask that, as one of the interested parties, I be put into the picture a little in advance of the actual moves?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Pavel in hurt surprise. ‘I always tell you everything. You know I couldn’t complete my law studies before the war because I got involved in
politics. But now I’m a married man with the responsibility of a family.’
I opened my eyes wide. Surely in that instance I would be in the know?
‘Not now, but some time,’ Pavel reassured me. ‘I must think of the future. I’d be better off with a degree.’
Pavel’s uncle, who had helped support him, had advocated law as a suitable career for a bright young Jew. Pavel did not intend to practice law but the title of doctor would confer higher status as well as higher pay.
On Wednesday Pavel phoned: ‘Darling, you can unpack; they’ve given way. I shan’t be going abroad for at least a year.’ With admirable control I refrained from comment both on that day and on the following day when the decision was reversed once more. The powers-that-be kept up this daisy-petal policy — you will, you won’t, you will, you won’t go to Belgrade — for a further fortnight. When the subject had lain dormant for several days, I ventured to ask: ‘How’s the situation now?’
‘What situation?’ asked Pavel, reluctantly withdrawing his head from an enormous tome.
‘Our situation, darling. You know, the little question of to go or not to go to Belgrade.’
‘Oh, that was settled ages ago. The bus left last week with Černý. Can’t you see I’ve already started?’
‘What?’
‘International law. I’m taking my second State exam in December.’
1. Charles IV was King of Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire (1348–1378), and is a Czech national hero.
2. Josef Dobrovsky (1753–1829) was a Jesuit priest who produced the first systematic study of the Czech language and culture.
Love and Freedom Page 4