It had been an eventful period. The Cold War had been launched; NATO had been formed; the Cominform had been created and Yugoslavia expelled from it; Germany had begun a miraculous economic recovery; the People’s Republic of China and the State of Israel had been inaugurated; India and Pakistan had achieved self-government; the Soviet Union had exploded an atom bomb and American troops had entered South Korea.
Pavel had steered his way skilfully among the eddies. He had proved to be a successful diplomat. His war years had given him an insight into Western affairs and political thinking, and a genuine liking for the English. He had been trusted and liked by his associates in both East and West. He had spared neither time, energy nor money for his job. He had not sought to profit from it: he had bought no jewellery, pictures or furs to flog in Prague on our return as other diplomats had done. From Press Attaché he had risen to Charge d’Affaires before his recall. He looked forward to a high appointment — a minor ambassadorial post, perhaps — on his next term abroad.
We were given a VIP send-off. Farewell parties were held for us every night for a fortnight. As we took our final leave on Victoria Station, the Soviet Counsellor gave Pavel a gold watch in memory of their friendship and cooperation. It became Pavel’s most treasured possession.
1. Eduard Beneš (1884–1948) was the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia 1918–35. He was President 1935–48 except for a short period after the Munich Agreement in 1938. He resigned again in June 1948 and died in September of that year.
2. Klement Gottwald (1896–1953) was a member of the CP Politburo from 1925 and was the leader of the ‘Bolshevik line’ which finally prevailed in 1929. From 1928 to ’43 he was a member of the Comintern EC. He was leader of the CP in its Moscow exile during the war. He became Prime Minister after the 1946 elections, and then President after February 1948 until his death in 1953.
3. Jan Masaryk (1886–1948) was Ambassador to the Court of St James in the thirties, and then Foreign Minister in Beneš’s London government-in-exile and in the first post-war coalition until his death in 1948. Whether he committed suicide or was murdered is still a matter of controversy. His father was T. G. Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia.
4. Rudolf Margolius (1913–1952) spent the war in Nazi concentration camps. He joined the CP in 1945 and by 1949 had become Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade. He was imprisoned, sentenced and executed along with Slánský.
Chapter 6
Our homecoming, at the end of 1950, was a rude shock. We were not prepared for the changed atmosphere. Gone was the exuberance of the liberation year. People were tight-faced, grim, tired of perpetual shortages. There was tension in the air. Political differences had sharpened; society was once more divided. Arrests had been made of foreign agents, but also of Czech communists. Among them were Evžen Klinger and Otto Šling whom we had known in London during the war. The Party was probing for further enemies within its ranks. Pavel found the Foreign Ministry veiled in unease.
Karel had inherited our previous flat and we were offered a partly furnished flat in a villa in the best residential part of the Smíchov district, called Na Hřebenkách. It was the epitome of Austro–Hungarian magnificence. (Actually, our flat represented only half of the original apartment, which had extended over the whole of the ground floor.) The rooms were huge and high, light and airy. The floors, made of large squares of highly-polished mahogany, glowed redly. Into the panelled walls were laid glass cabinets for the display of precious porcelain. From the ceilings hung enormous chandeliers, comprising hundreds of droplets, glistening like tears in sunshine. The whole of one wall of the central room was windowed and looked out on a garden of trees, grass and shrubs. In front of the window extended a vast oak desk, intricately carved and matching the imposing fireplace in the adjacent room, which was separated by tall, oak doors.
My legs buckled under me and I had a premonition as I sank into a velvet seat attached to the wall panelling. Give this no more than eighteen months, I told myself.
A few days later the first blow fell. Pavel was eating his dinner in silence. It was not his usual animated silence, in which problems were propelled back and forth, unripe ideas were shunted into sidings and fruitful solutions were sent up the main track into the morrow. It was a void, oppressive silence.
‘Is there anything—’ I was about to say ‘wrong’, but that might have provoked merely an irritated denial, so I substituted ‘new’?
‘Mm, yes. A regulation has been brought out. Employees with Western wives have to leave the Ministry.’
‘Do you mean you are getting the sack because of the geographical accident of my birth?’
‘Yep. It isn’t a question of loyalty — you had a very good report from the Embassy — but of security,’ Pavel soothed me. ‘Actually, in my case, notice is not to take effect immediately. I am to complete some major projects before I go.’
Pavel’s indefinite notice dragged on and he continued working with the sword of Damocles hanging over his head, a state of insecurity that was not exactly what his London doctor had recommended.
Having unexpectedly been converted into a liability, I was eager to prove that a bourgeois background was no obstacle to honest toil. Without telling Pavel, I went to the headquarters of the Women’s Union and told them I wanted to work in heavy industry, the heavier the better. The clerk arranged a six-month temporary job at the Tatravagonka engineering works, which produced trams and train wagons. Pavel’s reaction was as dispiriting as I had anticipated. ‘Don’t be absurd! You can’t operate a machine, you’re notoriously cackhanded. Even the egg-whisk falls apart in your hand. You’ll probably maim yourself for life, and where will that leave your family?’
I declined to consider that possibility.
At four thirty in the morning the screech of the alarm woke me. I arrived at the factory gate at ten minutes to six and was directed to the cadre department; there I was told to report to comrade Králík in shop 620. Comrade Králík was standing hands behind his back, surveying his domain. His figure bulged under the faded blue coat. His name by an oversight was Rabbit; it should clearly have been Pig. (I had in mind, of course, a clean, socialist porker.) Small, darting eyes and a snub nose clustered in the centre of a wide expanse of pink flesh, flanked by large red ears standing out at right angles.
‘Ha, another of you come to expiate your sins!’ was his discouraging greeting. I flinched. In a sense he was right, but not entirely. I explained that all I wanted was to do some useful work at grassroots level. Králík shrugged. ‘We’ll put you on Technical Control. They need another hand and you can’t do much harm there. Follow me.’
He led me through the shop, a cheerless building. The air was warm, and heavy with dust and metal particles. The dingy, biscuit-coloured walls were like the tear-smudged face of a grubby infant. The high, mottled windows streaked the concrete floor with dirty light; puddles of yellowy-brown liquid lay around. The machines from which the liquid trickled were a dark greenish-brown.
Striding ahead, Králík threw remarks over his shoulder. ‘You’ll find life here a bit different from what you’re used to. I’m a disciplinarian. Six o’clock sharp the operatives are at their machines and you’ll be in your pen. If you clock in late that means a day off your holiday. You’ve a quarter-of-an-hour for lunch in the canteen any time between eleven and two. That’s generous. At other factories lunch is taken after the shift.’
We reached a small pen presided over by a school-marmish woman assisted by a dark and lively girl.
Králík introduced me. ‘Show her the ropes, Comrade Horská, and keep a sharp look out for sabotage. You can’t trust these foreign elements.’ He left chuckling.
Comrade Horská spoke slowly and loudly as though all foreigners were congenital idiots: ‘Every worker brings the first piece of every batch to us for checking. If we pass an incorrect measurement, all the parts in the batch will be inaccurate. If they cannot be adjusted, they go for scrap and the batch has to be machi
ned again. You must be careful when counting the batches. If a batch is short, assembly is held up until the missing pieces are machined. All these precious hours can never be retrieved, and may mean the failure of the factory plan.’ Luba, the younger woman, laughed good-naturedly: ‘Anka thinks socialism begins and ends at this counter.’
A worker brought me a pin to inspect.
‘This pin is three millimetres short,’ I pointed out diffidently.
‘Christ, that’s nothing to do with me!’ was the polite rejoinder. ‘I get ’em like that, see, I’m a driller. I only want to know is the distance from head to hole correct and is the ruddy hole the right size? The tapering pin goes in here, see. And holds the pin in place. It doesn’t matter if it sticks out half-a-metre beyond.’ He went off muttering: ‘Don’t know a pin from a knitting needle.’
Luba remarked dryly: ‘Železný’s soon forgotten that not so long ago he knew as much about drilling as he did about bear-keeping.’
After a substantial lunch in the canteen, Železný fell into step beside me.
‘Where’d they direct you from?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Who gave you the push?’
‘No one, I wasn’t employed before.’
‘Oh, I thought you were a formerly.’
‘A formerly?’
‘A former teacher, lawyer, researcher and so on.’
‘No, this is my first job.’
‘Got the wrong pedigree, eh? Father had his own business?’
‘Good heavens, no!’
‘Is he German? You’ve got a bit of an accent.’
‘No, English.’
‘Ah, that explains it. Your husband fought in the West and this is the only kind of work you can get. Don’t let it worry you; there’s thousands of us. General sort of swop over. The highly qualified professional people are laying roads, building bridges and operating machines, and the dumb clots — whose fathers used to dig, sweep or brick-lay — are on top, telling the others where to lay the roads, what to produce and how to spend the country’s money. The consequence is the roads look like ploughed fields, we make things we can’t sell and the bridges can’t be used for traffic. There’s one called the Bridge of the Intellectuals over the Vltava at Bráník built by doctors of law. The bridge is all right, but the dolts in the top drawer forgot to plan a road leading to and from it! Then they wonder why the economy is going downhill like a ten-ton lorry with the brakes off.’
There was an India rubber quality about Mr Železný. He was round; he bounced as he walked; his face slipped into a variety of cheerful grimaces. He looked as though he would rebound to safety if he were dropped off the top of a cliff.
Having found an audience, albeit an incredulous one, Mr Železný continued: ‘I’m here under the Desk-to-Bench campaign. “Too many fat backsides warming too many office stools. We need more hands at the bench, the seam and the furnace,” they said. Seventy-seven thousand of us were re-directed.
‘I’m not complaining about the job: I don’t earn less. It’s the principle I object to. First, I don’t take kindly to being directed; second, this is a waste of good will and good people. What industry needs to increase productivity is more qualified technicians and engineers, not clerks, artisans and judges.
‘The joke is, a Party member gets to be foreman, supervisor or such and goes bonkers over a lot of papers he can’t get the hang of, and the works gets flooded with half-a-million screws and not a nut in the place, except the one behind the desk. Am I boring you?’
‘No, no. It’s very interesting.’
‘Well, you see that tall lanky miller with specs. Looks standoffish? That’s Dr Brugel. He was de-actionized.’
‘Paralysed?’
‘Not exactly. Put out of action by an Action Committee in 1948. They were set up to purge the reactionaries, or that was the general idea; but hit a Czech, particularly a communist Czech with an idea, and he’ll swallow it hook, line and sinker, plus the bloke at the other end, if you get me. They sorted out everyone who they decided was a potential menace: Catholics, Sokolites, ex-Scouts. Brugel was a lawyer. The legal profession caught it good and proper. The lawyer’s job is to protect the individual, so where the individual hasn’t got any rights, it’s a waste of good money paying lawyers, isn’t it? They said: “Sign or get out!” and stuck an application to join the CP under his nose. But Brugel had principles. “I’m a Catholic; you’re atheists,” he said. “I support your social policy but I cannot join a party that denies God.” So he was declared politically unreliable and flung out on his ear.’
I was disturbed by Železný’s revelations. I had envisaged a socialism that would eliminate, not generate, injustice. But when I voiced my doubts to Pavel he dismissed them with the axiom: ‘When you cut down a forest, chips fly.’
Rising so early in the morning simply to count other people’s products was a disproportionate effort. Despite Pavel’s gloomy prognostications, I was determined to get on to a machine. I badgered Králík. One day he came up to the pen, just before the end of the shift and shouted: ‘Hey, you, Comrade Englishwoman, there’s a batch here wants doing quickly. If you care to stay on, you can have a go.’
I followed him with alacrity. Králík gabbled instructions: The bolt fits here onto this jig; adjust the ends so that the drill passes through the aperture, press the starting button, apply the self-act lever, halfway through raise the drill slightly to release the swarf, switch on again but before the drill penetrates to the outside and scorches, take it through slowly by hand. See that the holes are perfectly perpendicular; this batch is for a job that’s going to the Soviet Union. And — er — take care. You know the Czech saying: “Clumsy flesh has to go!”’
With my courage like a lump of cheese in my throat, I gingerly set the machine going. I had reckoned without the jet of suds. Suddenly, it became afflicted with a nervous twitch and poured its obnoxious liquid into my boot. What did I do first: stop the machine or quell the jet? Mistakenly I grabbed the jet. There was a noise like sizzling bacon and blue smoke rose from the drill hole. I stopped the machine and tried to lift the lever. The drill was stuck faster than Carver Doone in the bog.
‘Well, how’s it going?’ Králík’s gentle bass boomed in my ear.
Humbly I explained about the jet.
‘Let’s have a look at it,’ he grunted. ‘Ježíšmarjá, it only needs the stop-cock tightening at the joint. H’mm it won’t grip, worn smooth. Well, tie it up with rag. Use your imagination, girl!’
That was the last piece of advice I had expected to be given on the shop floor. Králík separated the drill from the machine. ‘Take the jig over to the locksmiths. They’ll get the drill out for you. They’ve got the right tools.’
I staggered off to the locksmiths under the crushing weight of the jig. Ten minutes later I was back at work with a newly-ground drill and the conviction that this would be my first and last set of holes for the construction of communism.
The rest of the batch went without mishap. There were only three pieces left. My confidence rose above the plimsoll line, then the machine let out an ear-jarring shriek. The lever was free. I set the drill twirling again. A second screech. I put the bolt aside and finished the remaining two.
‘That was a pip in the steel,’ Králík explained. ‘Very bad for the drills.’
And for the nerves, I added silently. I braced myself. ‘May I carry on tomorrow?’
Králík hesitated, then said: ‘All right, you can stay on while Mlýnek is off sick.’
‘For Chrissake, what are you doing, Bek, you clumsy ox?’ Our supervisor’s angry voice sounded above the din early the following morning. ‘This pile’s millimetres out.’
Bek, a tubby turner, retorted: ‘The first piece was okay — Technical Control passed it. Something must have come loose in this old bag of tricks.’
‘It was in perfect order until you took it over,’ Králík roared. ‘If there’s anything wrong with it, it’s your own
damn carelessness, or more likely wilful damage. What can one expect from a former hotel-keeper? You’ve lost your own business, now you’re ruining ours. From now on, you’re off machining and on sweeping.’
After the shift I went to look for Táborský, an elderly, taciturn fitter.
‘Would you do me a favour, comrade.’
‘Ugh, what?’
‘Would you look at the machine Bek’s been using?’
The fitter gazed at me through shaggy eyebrows that grew over his eyes like a Sealyham terrier’s, concealing his thoughts more thoroughly than his clamped lips. He slowly raised an eyebrow and revealed one brown eye, in which there was a glint of something — could it be understanding? He nodded. Then he went over to the machine, examined it and tried it out.
‘Inaccurate,’ he pronounced.
‘Could the defect have been caused by careless treatment?’
‘Could’ve — over many years.’
‘But that little chap, Bek, had only been on it three months.’
‘Mm, machine’s got to wear out some time. This one’s pretty old. Needs a thorough overhaul.’
‘Then why isn’t that done?’
‘I’m only the fitter for two shops. The supervisors won’t allot sufficient time for machine maintenance, especially when they’re running two or three shifts. It’s pretty general. It’ll catch up on them in the long run, though. Then, instead of expanding capital goods production, they’ll be replacing what’s got worn out through neglect.’
This was an unusually long speech for Táborský. I pressed my point: ‘So it can’t be proved that Bek was to blame?’
Love and Freedom Page 8