Love and Freedom

by Rosemary Kavan

  If Pavel had been haunted by the secret police, he was now obsessed by the view and the old crock of a house that he had bought with 2,000 crowns in ready cash and 20,000 crowns ‘worth of frozen assets. He frequented secondhand shops and was for ever bringing home cupboards minus knobs, crippled stools, cracked bowls and collapsible tables, folding beds, straw mattresses and the enthusiastic declaration:’ Just what we need for Kytlice. It only requires a coat of paint (or minor repair) and it’ll be as good as new. It was very cheap. They nearly gave it away.’

  ‘I don’t wonder,’ I would murmur.

  When the fourth table and tenth bed put in their appearance, I took a firm stand. ‘If another article moves into this flat pending transport to Kytlice, I move out!’

  Pavel sighed: ‘The practical English! They have no feeling for romance!’

  The boys, of course, revelled in the freedom of our Kytlice weekends. They built themselves a bunker and a tree house, gathered brushwood and pine cones for firewood, brought water and generally made themselves far more useful than at home. Pavel’s favourite position was to stand, feet astride, on the threshold of his house, gazing with a faraway expression at his ‘land’. I learned to dread that glassy, ecstatic trance: it always signalled the birth of some tremendous NEW PROJECT.

  First, there was the cultivating mania. In soil that you could have scratched off the mountainside with a pin, in an open position, exposed to a searing north-east gale in all seasons, Pavel was convinced that, with the proper treatment and the application of a sort of Marxist Christian Science, we could produce succulent fruit and vegetables that would keep us in vitamins all the year round. I was allotted a slope facing due north, which supported thistles and nettles in exclusive abundance and told to turn it into good arable land. I had long since learnt that no logical argument of mine would move Pavel. He would be convinced only by trial and error: the trials were mine, the errors were his. Several weekends of slave labour by me despatched the thistles and stones, and the seeds were sown. On the following visit the patch was speckled with promising little green heads. Pavel was wild with enthusiasm.

  ‘You see how quickly everything grows here!’

  The next weekend this became abundantly clear: we had a sturdy crop of knee-high weeds. On principle Pavel never admitted defeat, and I saw only one way of securing my release. I bought a tin of weed-killer and emptied it over the patch.

  ‘What have you done?’ shrieked the proud landowner. ‘The soil will sustain no life at all for three years!’

  ‘Never mind, the boys can play football on it in the meanwhile,’ I declared impenitently.

  Then there was the bottling optimism. Pavel planted twenty spindly plum and pear trees.

  ‘It rains here 355 days of the year and the mean annual temperature is the lowest in the Republic. It’s unlikely that the fruit will ever ripen,’ I observed.

  ‘I have thought of that,’ replied my indomitable husband. ‘These are a specially hardy species. I’ve had them sent from the Giant Mountains. They will blossom and bear fruit a month later than in other districts, which is an advantage, for you will be able to finish bottling in Prague before you start bottling here.’

  Actually, our first harvest was two pears and three plums per tree. My bottles soon showed a disinclination to remain inactive on the shelves, and we had to eat them up before they fermented, while there was still fresh fruit available in the shops.

  *

  At Kytlice Pavel threw off his demons. During the week he lapsed, alternating between despondency and rage. His step dragged; grey hairs appeared. Since the arrest of Rudolf Slánský’s brother Richard2, with whom Pavel had been working closely at the Ministry, he had been even more strictly isolated by his colleagues. Moreover, he was sure our phone was tapped.

  ‘If only I knew what was behind it!’ he would cry. ‘And what is yet to come.’

  One freezing December evening I came home at eleven after the second shift. Pavel was sitting ashen and immobile, his meal untouched. He stared at me strickenly.

  ‘What is it?’ I gasped. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Eda’s been arrested,’ he croaked.

  My mind reeled. The cold, unsentimental Slánský might have violated some ethical or legal norm, but not Eda. Eda could be guilty of nothing. The security police must be on the track of some major conspiracy; but communists like Eda Goldstücker and Vlado Clementis couldn’t possibly be part of it: nothing would have induced them to betray their principles: neither wealth nor power. Was it that a group of post-1948 communists, fascists at heart, wanted to discredit old Party members in order to seize power? Who were the mysterious operators who had jurisdiction over life and liberty, against whom there was no appeal? I had a terrifying thought. Eda and Pavel had studied together and cooperated during and after the war. Pavel had worked with Richard Slánský, Deputy Foreign Minister Artur London3, and Bedřich Geminder4, head of the Party secretariat’s international department. All four were in jail. The trail led to Pavel. Pavel would be next.

  Pavel must have pursued the same thread. He said suddenly: ‘We could get a divorce.’

  We hadn’t slept together for a year; the marriage was virtually at a standstill. But I had shelved the idea of divorce when Pavel’s troubles with the police had commenced. The time had not been right. Now Pavel himself was offering me my freedom.

  I thought, He’s giving me the chance to bow out before the ship sinks. I could say: yes, give me a divorce; let me go back to England where people are not afraid of the concierge-turned-informer, of the ear in the wall, of enemies incurred unknowingly. I could say: I should have given you up during those initial weeks of our marriage when I saw that politics would always be your first love. I should have walked out after you nearly throttled me. I could say: I’m tired of making light of difficulties. I’ve had enough of moods and directives. I want to be understood, considered and cherished. But did you ever promise me that? Have you not fulfilled the one vow you made — that I should never be bored? In that case what cause have I for discontent? Is it your fault that I’m not equipped to handle time-bombs?

  No, no, the fault was mine. I should have recognised my limitations in time. Pavel had not changed. I had changed. I had ceased to love him. I was to blame.

  Aloud I said: ‘You’ve got the jitters because of the political situation, and your verbal fireworks make me frigid. If we were in England we’d go to a shrink and get ourselves sorted out for a few hundred quid. As it is, what we all have to do is to wait patiently for things to improve, and then we’ll live happily ever after.’

  Pavel’s fine, I told myself drowsily. He’s honourable in a system that lends itself to corruption, a slogger under conditions where crossing t’s and dotting i’s passes for work, honest where deception is part of collective security. He continues to have faith under circumstances which others have fled. He has all the virtues in fact. He’s just exhausting to live with, that’s all.

  For the boys’ sake we tried not to let the gathering clouds darken the Christmas celebrations. Christmas is an extremely thorough affair in Czechoslovakia. The energy of the womenfolk and the least resistant of the menfolk is harnessed to the baking of a thousand and one varieties of biscuit for weeks beforehand. Nearer to the event, there are two-foot bun loaves to be plaited and vats of potato salad to be prepared.

  Květa had taken a fortnight’s holiday to be with her mother in Moravia, and I had to cope with this outsize eating festival alone. Three days before Christmas, Pavel came in with a string bag in his hand — an unusual sight. Not that Pavel was unwilling. His standard reply to any request for assistance was: ‘Yes, yes, in a minute,’ but he was too busy saving the world and humanity to find just that minute. The bag, or Pavel, was behaving in a strange manner, jerking and twitching as though afflicted with St Vitus dance.

  ‘Fill the bath with cold water,’ he ordered.

  ‘Is that the prescribed treatment?’

  ‘It’s a carp,’
he explained. ‘Been here since the sixteenth century.’

  ‘I thought only tortoises enjoyed such an exaggerated span of existence.’

  ‘I mean the species. It was introduced here in the sixteenth century when the Třeboň lake was constructed.’

  The carp was accommodated in the bath. The boys spent many happy hours with their boats in its company. They christened it Kája after a Czech fairy story about a carp, and became very fond of it.

  ‘I hope it isn’t another custom to keep the goose on the balcony and fatten it?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘No, indeed, I shall bring it killed from the market.’

  He did. He placed a huge mound on the kitchen table and removed the Party newspaper that was adhering to it. It was a Pomeranian-style goose. Tufts adorned its head, neck, wings and legs. Accustomed to a clean-shaven, de-entrailed pyramid of fowl with the more indiscreet organs neatly parcelled and appended, I presumed this was another aspect of socialist realism.

  After about an hour, I had reduced our Christmas lunch to stark nudity and gingerly set about dissection. I removed the head and feet and was about to throw them away, when Pavel pounced on them.

  ‘What are you doing? You strip off only the scaly skin and then make soup.’

  Pavel then explained in the tone he reserved for the young, the old, and the obtuse: ‘The neck you will stuff and bake, the liver you will boil in fat to have delicately on bread. The stomach you will chop with rice. The rest that is not suitable for roasting you will throw in the soup.’

  The next point was the assassination of Kája, for which neither of us was morally armed. We had to call in the concierge. Kája became a streak of speed on sensing his approaching end. The boys shrieked with laughter as the concierge wheezed over the bath, lunging unavailingly at the jet-propelled Kája. Finally, I suggested pulling out the plug. Poor Kája had no defence against this stratagem and was soon writhing on the bread board. At the first blow with the meat beater, he leapt into the air. His imbricated coat of mail flashed pure gold and his eye gleamed tawnily. Suddenly, he succumbed and lay helplessly on his side. Another blow and he was still, and immediately looked as though he had never been anything but dead. But only after the concierge had deprived him of head and tail, and he lay there bereft of personality, could I regard him with detachment.

  At Christmas Eve supper Zdeněk asked timidly: ‘Is it Kája?’

  ‘Well, yes, it is.’

  They signed and even Jan, who normally had the appetite of a roadmender, pushed his plate away and said dispiritedly: ‘I’m not hungry this evening.’

  ‘Why didn’t you leave him in the bath?’ asked Zdeněk tearfully.

  ‘You can have your boats tomorrow, anyway,’ I promised.

  ‘It won’t be the same without him,’ Jan sniffed.

  ‘Would you like me to buy you some goldfish after Christmas?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ they chorused, brightening.

  ‘Well, eat up your fi — your supper and I’ll get you an aquarium next week.’

  ‘Goldfish cost 250 crowns a pair,’ Pavel muttered.

  After our supper of fish soup, Kája, potato salad and biscuits we adjourned to the next room for the tree ceremony. The boys stood at the door and gasped with wonder. One candle was already alight: the star at the apex shone in the darkness like a real Star of Bethlehem. Pavel’s lighted taper crept from wick to wick and touched the tips of the sparklers. Little creamy fingers trembled; tiny stars leaped and waned. The tree grew bigger and bigger. It towered and filled the room with its magic. The coloured glass balls, fish, birds and mushrooms flung the flickering light back and forth in sharp jabs of silver, gold, blue, crimson and yellow. The tinsel chains intercepted the flashes and flipped them to the silver-clad sweets and chocolates. Fantastic shadows capered on the walls. Round the bole of the tree heterogeneous shapes were vaguely outlined: satisfaction, surprise, disappointment, smiles and perhaps a few stifled tears — all reduced to anonymity by the uniform Christmas wrapping paper.

  We stood motionless until the candles had shrunk to amorphous blobs of wax. Pavel pinched the last tottering wick; the snap of the electric light switch brought us back to the present. The boys moved bemusedly toward the pile of gifts. Each held his first parcel for a long time, loath to break the spell of conjecture. The emergence of the first mechanical toy — a Russian dancing bear — transformed the atmosphere to one of predatory curiosity: and eager fingers tore at the wrappings.

  At length, shiny-eyed and surfeited, they allowed themselves to be coaxed into bed, together with toy tractors, pecking hens and goods trains.

  Eva and a boy-friend, Karel and a girl-friend (he had contrived to get himself married and divorced in our absence) called in. Stoked with Hungarian white wine, the savoury varieties of the thousand and one biscuits, and Turkish coffee, we let ourselves go, Czech-style. That is to say, we told political anecdotes and literary and linguistic jokes. Having no hearth to gather at, urban Czechs are forced to assemble at round tables in their rare moments of relaxation. This in itself lends a conference atmosphere and imposes a certain standard of enjoyment. Indulgence in nonsense is out of the question. You will never find a Czech Edward Lear.

  The rest of Christmas was passed in compulsory consumption of the food laid in: plaited bun loaf for Christmas Day breakfast; goose soup and roast goose, bread dumplings and sauerkraut for Christmas lunch, plus biscuits; cold goose, potato salad, and biscuits for supper. The goose turned up in various guises for a week, while the dripping cheered many a lean supper table in the frugal period between Christmas and pay day.

  *

  When the festive season was over the secret police claimed another victim — Rudolf Margolius. I went to see his wife, Heda, immediately after his arrest.

  Heda’s face was drawn, and she was chain-smoking. I had only ever seen her bubbling with high spirits. Her charm, original mind and quick wit had always made her the centre of attraction, whether among writers and artists, ministerial dignitaries or personal friends. The change moved me deeply. I searched for comfort — for her and myself.

  ‘The police can’t detain people indefinitely,’ I said. ‘And no court would convict Rudolf.’ Rudolf, against whom, in a city that thrived on gossip, I had never heard a word of censure.

  Heda sighed. ‘Then perhaps he will leave the Ministry. I have begged him again and again to resign and take a less exposed position, but he always replies that as long as the Party needs him he will remain.’

  Heda had had more than her share of tragedy. She and Rudolf and her parents had been sent on one of the first transports to the notorious Lódź camp in Poland. Later Rudolf was moved to another camp. By her presence of mind she saved her parents from the gas chamber several times, but when the end came she could only look on helplessly while they were dragged away. She herself had escaped. She had crossed the border into Czechoslovakia and walked to Prague, thinly clad in the depths of winter. After the revolution she and Rudolf had found each other. They thought their troubles were over. Now, it seemed, they might only be beginning. I left Heda full of foreboding. Rudolf was one more link with Pavel. Pavel had been questioned on the trade agreement Rudolf had negotiated with Britain, and on his ‘contacts with Margolius’.

  1. Rudolf Slánský (1901–1952) was a member of the CC and Politburo of the CP from 1929. He was in Moscow during the war and the Secretary-General of the CP until 1951. He was demoted to Deputy Minister until his arrest later that year. He was the main defendant at the show trial of 1952, after which he was executed.

  2. Richard Slánský was a diplomat before his arrest and a university professor in Prague after his release.

  3. Artur London (1915–86) fought in Spain as a communist. From 1940 he worked with the French resistance, but was deported to Mathausen in 1942. From 1949 he was Deputy Foreign Minister until his arrest in 1951. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1952, but was released in 1956. Since 1963 he has been living in France. His book about the t
rial, On Trial, was made into a film by Costa Gavras.

  4. Bedřich Geminder (1901–1952) joined the CP in 1921 and worked for the Comintern for many years. From 1946 he led the International Department of the International Secretariat. He was arrested and executed with Slánský in 1952.

  Chapter 8

  Pavel’s indefinite notice at the Ministry came to an abrupt end. He was assigned to the legal department of the Barbers ‘and Hairdressers’ Corporation, dealing with complaints of burnt scalps, singed hair and cut throats, filed by dissatisfied customers. I had resigned from the factory because of a strained back and was now combining translating with housework, Květa having finally left us. Several months had gone by with no further arrests. So the five a.m. ring at the door bell on July came as a paralysing shock. We looked at each other dumbly. It could only be the security police. Somehow I found my dressing gown and went to open the door. Five impassive, broad-shouldered young men in standard leather coats stepped into the hall.

  ‘Your husband is wanted for questioning,’ one of them explained, not discourteously. ‘A routine procedure.’

  Of course, entirely routine, even the early hour.

  ‘I’ll make a cup of tea.’

  One of them followed me into the kitchen. Pavel, too, kept up appearances, chatting to one of them while he washed and shaved. It would have been impolite to interrupt the conversation, therefore it had to be continued in the bathroom. He left the toilet door ajar. We both acted as normally as possible, as though we could ward off the abnormality of what had already come to pass that way; as though the right frame of mind could contain a situation in which we were so palpably helpless.