Love and Freedom

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Love and Freedom Page 12

by Rosemary Kavan


  Pavel left with three of them. I slipped some lumps of sugar into his pocket, having heard of their reviving properties during long interrogations. We exchanged a brisk, leaving-for-the-office kiss. No significant utterances, no whispered protestations of innocence or declarations of faith. Just the quick dry brush of trembling lips on a cold cheek, the pressure of a hand that conveyed: ‘Whatever happens, I am with you,’ while aloud I said: ‘Goodbye, darling, see you this afternoon.’

  He was gone. For how long?

  I went into the bathroom for an aspirin to clear my aching head. There was a splotch of shaving soap on the side of the basin. It was shaped like an octopus with one tentacle transfixed in the action of grasping, like Pavel reaching out for the thread of everyday life and finding it severed.

  One of the remaining two security men said in the professional tone of a doctor about to examine a patient: ‘We are obliged to search your flat.’

  ‘If you can do so without causing too much disturbance, I shall be grateful. I can hear my two little boys getting up; I would prefer them not to be alarmed,’ I said.

  The young man nodded. But then Jan entered the room and asked directly: ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘These gentlemen are from Tati’s office,’ I put in quickly. ‘Tati has mislaid some papers and they are looking for them.’ As hardly a day passed without their father searching for some item of major or minor importance, the boys accepted this excuse without comment.

  The morning wore on. I answered questions, read stories to the boys, made fresh tea.

  The older security man, stern and humourless, came over to me. ‘What is this?’

  A packet of white capsules among Pavel’s papers. Poison? The last resort of the arch-spy? I explained that they were tablets for the relief of, of — a technical hitch: I could not remember the Czech word for indigestion — an upset stomach.

  ‘And these?’

  They were pills that Pavel had been taking for his heart, the others were for blood pressure.

  ‘Your husband has a lot of pills,’ he stated accusingly.

  ‘He has a lot of illnesses,’ I replied calmly.

  ‘And what are these for?’ he demanded with irritation.

  ‘Hydrophobia,’ I murmured.

  He noted it down. Then he started to comb the bookshelves, selecting some books and putting them in his briefcase. Probably the authors were now proscribed. Pavel would never descend to book burning to suit the censor’s whims. I translated the titles of the English books. Although mostly by communists, they were suspect. He had not heard of Harry Pollitt or Willie Gallacher, or Palme Dutt.

  ‘Ha, what have we here?’ He thrust a slim volume under my nose. It was a book of lewd jokes accompanied by suggestive drawings. ‘You husband is an expert in pornography?’

  Pavel? What a laugh! Pavel who was uncomfortable listening to dirty stories, whose thoughts were a hundred per cent bowdlerized, who never swore nor used terms of abuse even in his most abandoned rages.

  ‘He borrowed it as an example of a degenerate Western publication and then forgot about it. He hasn’t even read it.’

  ‘A likely story,’ the plainclothes man snorted.

  I asked angrily: ‘Has my husband been arrested for his taste in literature?’

  ‘You will be informed in due course of the reason for your husband’s arrest,’ replied the other coldly. His eyes were pale and ruthless, blank windows on an empty mind; no education, no sense of proportion; he did not require either. He needed only one guideline — ‘enemy of the people’.

  He slipped the book into his case.

  I said: ‘I hope you will take good care of it; I shouldn’t like it to corrupt the morals of the force.’

  My irony was lost upon him.

  They were leaving. The younger one thanked me for the tea. The older one threw him a contemptuous glance and stalked out, taking with him Pavel’s gold-tipped fountain pen and the watch from the Soviet Counsellor.

  I got lunch, sent the boys out to play in the garden, tidied up, translated a page or two, made supper, played with the boys, read them their bedtime story. But it was someone else performing these simple tasks. I was an onlooker. It brought back the time when I had been bombed out. I had seen the visual image of the burning house as a reflection in a mirror, heard the roar of planes remotely, muffled behind a thick, concrete wall. My mind had entrenched itself in a reinforced, reality-proof dugout. I am not really there when something unbearable happens to me. But for years afterwards I suffered the experience acutely in nightmares.

  It was late in the evening. The day that had changed our whole lives had passed quietly. Pavel had not returned home. People disappeared from public life and were spoken of in whispers as though they were dead. Now Pavel had joined these unnamed ghosts.

  *

  By the next evening my numbness had worn off. I began to notice the strange void around me. Nagging suspense and Pavel’s oppressive presence had been removed. Pavel was behind bars. The horror of it flooded over me. What must he be thinking? ‘Why me? What does it all mean? When shall I see my family again?’ When, indeed? How long would he be gone, leaving me alone, solely responsible?

  In our marriage, Pavel had made all the decisions; my life had rotated round his axis. Now I felt like a satellite flung off into space, required to revolve round its own axis, ignorant of its orbit and the forces against which it would have to contend. I heard Pavel’s voice, saying: ‘You’ll never manage on your own.’ My old sense of inadequacy returned and overwhelmed me. I didn’t have the wisdom to guide the boys in a hostile environment, or the resources to withstand repression. I felt afraid of the future, afraid of the police and what they had yet in store.

  I thought of Heda who had borne up bravely all these months. I was not alone. I stood up. The very action of straightening to my full height gave me resolution. I wouldn’t allow ‘them’ to crush me. Intimidation was their trade mark. I would fight back with the only available weapon — courage. If I lacked it, I would fake it.

  I phoned Karel. He came round.

  ‘Why didn’t you call me straightaway?’ he asked.

  ‘Yesterday there was still hope. What can we do?’

  We started writing the first of many letters: to the Ministry of National Security, the Ministry of Justice, the Party Central Committee, protesting at Pavel’s detention, demanding an explanation. These institutions either ignored our complaints or informed us at their leisure that ‘the case is under consideration’.

  Their father’s absence passed unnoticed by the boys for a few days. He had often come home after they were in bed and left before they got up. But on Sunday they asked: ‘Where’s Tati?’

  Should I tell them the truth or make up some feasible story like a trip abroad? The truth would be a shock; a lie would be difficult to sustain. But they might learn the truth from a thoughtless neighbour, and then I would lose their trust. So I said slowly; ‘Some bad men are plotting to overthrow the government. The police have been wrongly informed that Tati knows something about it. They have taken him away to question him. When he has proved to them that he was not involved, they will let him come home again.’

  They looked at me gravely, trying to assimilate this staggering indication of chaos in the grown-up world that until then had appeared to them stable and well ordered.

  ‘Will it take long?’ Jan asked.

  ‘It may.’

  Tears came to their eyes. I put an arm round each. ‘You must be brave the way Tati is being brave. He is lonely and longing to see us, whereas we have each other.’

  The boys grew up suddenly. They were no longer cuddly toddlers but solemn, wise youngsters, prematurely awakened to injustice and a sense of responsibility. They started attending nursery school so that I had more time for translating, and they did simple shopping on the way home. Outwardly they were calm, but one day I overheard Zdeněk saying to a recalcitrant member of his animal family: ‘You be good, or they’ll t
ake you away, like they took Tati.’

  Translating at home enabled me to fit in with the boys’ timetable but the work was sporadic and so were the payments. I would have to get a regular job. Presumably I knew enough of my own language to teach it. The head of the English department of the Language Institute explained sadly that he had had to cut down his staff of full-time teachers but that he might be able to find me a few evening hours in two months’ time. Studying English was discouraged, but we were still selling a third of our produce to the capitalist and developing countries. I looked up the addresses of foreign trade corporations where an English typist might come in useful. The first two were already stocked. At the third, a dapper little man almost embraced me with rapture.

  ‘Do we need an English secretary? Very badly. You have Czech citizenship?’

  ‘Yes, my husband is Czech.’

  ‘Excellent. And you speak good Czech. I was afraid I’d have to send off this correspondence in my own inadequate English.’ He whipped round his desk on small, light feet and picked up a pile of papers in pale, podgy fingers. ‘You wouldn’t glance at them, would you?’

  I took the drafts, and covered them with red improvements while he exclaimed: ‘Yes, yes, how stupid of me! Sequence of tenses! How time has wrought havoc with it! Ah, the English syntax! The years have snatched it from me, but it returns, it returns! Quite, quite, present tense in a conditional clause. I am as rusty as an old nail, I see that.’

  ‘Oh no, a little brushing up will put everything right,.’ I murmured hypocritically.

  He handed me an application form to fill in.

  ‘Born in London, original nationality British,’ he frowned. ‘That is a certain disadvantage.’

  I pointed out that I owed my perfect knowledge of English to this simple fact.

  ‘True, true. Well, it cannot be helped, ‘he sighed.’ Parents born in England, resident in England. We cannot do anything about your parents,’ he admitted in deep gloom.

  My pen hovered over the set of rubrics reserved for my husband.

  ‘What is the difficulty?’

  ‘Shall I put my husband’s last occupation?’

  ‘Why, is he an invalid?’

  ‘No, he is in custody waiting for some misunderstanding to be sorted out.’

  The cherubic face drew back from mine, deathly pale. My would-be, and now would-not be, employer jumped up, pushed my handbag into my hand and showed me unceremoniously to the door.

  ‘Good gracious, madam, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Wasting my time! In jail — and she asks for a job here! My work is highly responsible.’ He looked around frantically for signs of my having stolen orders of bottling machines for Zanzibar.

  ‘Goodbye, comrade, I hope you find a suitable typist before your foreign customers cancel their orders.’ I departed, blinking back tears of disappointment.

  The coup de grâce was delivered the next day — a note summoning me to the Foreign Ministry’s cadre department. The officer was a competent woman of about thirty-five. She spoke briskly: ‘It is not a personal matter. We have nothing against you. But you must understand, under the circumstances — until your husband’s — er position is cleared up’ (she didn’t believe it would be!) ‘the Ministry — for security reasons — cannot maintain contact with you. You see that, of course, comrade?’

  I did not. I did not see at all how my translations of articles that were checked before distribution could in any way affect the security of the state. I asked: ‘Is it in the interest of the state that my children should starve to death?’

  ‘Indeed not,’ she replied in a shocked voice. ‘You will be able to find work elsewhere, but the Ministry has certain regulations.’

  ‘So has everyone else,’ I remarked, not without bitterness. To find myself unemployable in a state of full employment was an irony that I was in no mood to appreciate, especially as there was no unemployment benefit. The Labour Exchange only offered jobs in industry that I could not accept: my back was still troubling me and the shifts would make it impossible for me to look after the boys. The matter of a month’s rent due nagged like toothache.

  As I came into the flat the phone was ringing. It was Karel. He told me to take down an address. ‘Go there tomorrow, they need a tracer.’

  ‘A bullet?’

  ‘No designs, plans — for the electrification of the railways. You trace other people’s drawings.’

  ‘Sounds pointless, anyway I’ve got no experience.’

  ‘Do you need a job, or don’t you?’ Karel’s carefully modulated voice fairly crackled down the line.

  ‘Like hell I do.’

  ‘Well, what are you quibbling about? Go along and see. Convince them you can learn; it shouldn’t be difficult.’

  In the Kavans’ estimation nothing was ever difficult! If they wouldn’t let me type letters that were going abroad, they’d never entrust me with plans of the railways. Sheer desperation led me to adopt an air of bravado. I strode into the office of a nervous, middle-aged man and without preamble delivered myself of the following:

  ‘Good morning, I hear you are looking for a tracer. I have never done anything like it in my life, but I used to paint flowers rather nicely at school. I have been turned down wherever I have applied for work because I made the grave political error of being born in England of English parents, and my husband is detained on some unspecified charge, of which I would stake my life he is innocent. You must give me a job, first because I have two children and it is surely not feasible under socialism that they should go in want; second, I am not involved in my husband’s case and it is intolerable that a wife should suffer for the problematic sins of her husband; third, I can learn anything under the sun, which will enable me to support my sons. I have even learnt Czech!’

  It was an inspired performance.

  Sympathy and apprehension chased across Mr Němec’s face. As a human being he was on the side of the young mother in distress. But, I learned afterwards, he was a Catholic and therefore his perch was precarious: could he endanger it further by such a politically doubtful acquisition? His colleague, a younger man, put in quickly: The political responsibility lies with the cadre officer.’

  The chief opened a slim black box, asking: ‘I suppose you know what these are?’

  I answered: ‘They look like dental instruments, but they are probably what you use for your drawings.’

  In despair Mr Němec handed me a ruler and pencil. ‘Draw me a line,’ he said.

  I executed it with a bold, optimistic stroke.

  ‘H’m, a steady hand. Looks promising. We’ll take you on a month’s trial, if the cadre department agrees.’

  The administrative offices were in the main building a few streets away. A motherly woman in the personnel department handed me the familiar form. I filled it in and she offered to take it in to the cadre officer and put in a good word for me. I waited, clenching my hands, willing him to sign it. She emerged smiling, and said, ‘It’s all settled.’ (Later, that cadre officer lost his job for carrying out his function in conformity with his conscience rather than the regulations.)

  I sped back to the technical offices.

  ‘You may start tomorrow,’ said my new boss. ‘We are short-staffed.’

  I didn’t get a wink of sleep. My confidence dropped to zero again. Arithmetic and geometry had been my worst subjects at school, accuracy my weakest point. I’d never hold the job down. I’d be tramping the streets again at the end of the month.

  My first drawing the next day was marked TOP SECRET. The very illogicality of that struck a hopeful note.

  This was my first contact with apolitical technicians. There were no sons of the ex-rich or collaborators among them. Although they could not claim affiliation with the working class, they were not intellectuals and none were Jewish. They had never been outside the country, and they didn’t have relations living abroad. They were unassailable. They lived under the regime with reservations but without fear.
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  Mirek Podchůzka, a young man with thinning hair and a thickening waistline, greeted his new assistant with a groan: ‘A female! What luck! I’d as soon expect a nun to catch syphilis as a woman to do accurate work!’ He asked abruptly: ‘Have you heard the one about the priest and the Stakhanovite milkmaid?’ and he related a lewd joke.

  Fortunately, smut and vulgarity lose their impact in a foreign tongue. Words that would have died on my lips in English had become everyday fare at the factory. Mirek failed to bring a blush to my cheeks. I racked my brains for a suitably near-the-bone counterpoint. The only joke I could remember was the one about the two lords fishing off a pier. One caught a beautiful mermaid, looked her over and tossed her back into the sea. ‘Why?’ asked his friend in astonishment. ‘How?’ enquired the first laconically.

  Mirek chuckled condescendingly. He pinned a crumpled plan of the Main Station (marked TOP SECRET) onto a drawing board and fixed a piece of tracing paper over it. ‘That’s the part we are concerned with at the moment. We have to work out where the suspension points require fitting with stitch wires to make them more flexible and where ordinary droppers will do. For Gawd’s sake don’t muck it up! We’re dead short of tracing paper. Božka, who’s in charge of the stores, is worn out sleeping with the paper storemen in order to get us extra rations.’

  For the rest of the day I airily scattered ‘crap’ around and invited Mirek to ‘kiss my fanny’ whenever pen, ink, nib, compass or one or other of his instruments mysteriously disappeared. After three days of teasing, singing salacious songs and attempting to confuse me with instructions and counter-instructions, to which I retaliated in like vein, Mirek gave in and asked: ‘Care for a drink on the way home?’

  In the small wineshop a stone’s throw from the office, he confided: ‘I was afraid that having a female among us would spoil the fun. I can’t stand females who snivel when you pull their legs and faint at unexpurgated expressions. You know what Hašek’s secretary asked when he first dictated the word ‘shit’ in Švejk? ‘Shall I dot it?’ ‘If you’ve ever seen dotted shit, you may,’ he replied. A woman who can swear like a trooper and support two kids without moaning is all right by me. So here’s to “tykání”.’

 

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