Love and Freedom

by Rosemary Kavan

  ‘So I presume you are once more under investigation?’

  Poor Jan, he was only partly to blame. He was the victim of stress. His organism had reacted to Pavel’s imprisonment with severe headaches. Psychologically he had adapted to continuing tension, but once the pattern had been set, he seemed compelled to create unending stress situations.

  A few courageous people who still remained in high places spoke up for him. The police, however, took their time. Finally, Jan was told he was free to travel. Besides his grant, he had lost a whole term at Oxford.

  Chapter 23

  In the meanwhile I had lost my job. Journalists were the first to be sacked for ‘political unreliability’. Czechoslovak Life, like the rest of the media, was expected to applaud the invasion and current policies. (Ironically, owing to our long production time, my articles on KAN and the 231 Club came out when these organizations had already been banned, and one on students and their programme for social reform appeared in September, after the agreement on the stationing of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia had been signed.) One or two members of the staff hurriedly repented their pre-invasion enthusiasm in an attempt to save their jobs. Our cautious boss survived, of course. Giorgio stuck to his Prague Spring convictions. He and I and many good friends were among the hundreds expelled from the journalists’ union.

  Here I was, unemployed and rooting around for translations again. The clock was being turned back to the fifties. I fought off a crippling sense of defeat. As always when grappling with black thoughts, I crossed the river to Malá Strana. The magic began to work. Evil and tyranny shrank to manageable dimensions. I succumbed once more to the beauty of Prague. Although I now knew Prague well, she continued to surprise me. On every walk I stumbled upon some unexpected touch of bawdy humour or wistful humanity.

  I made my way to U Malířů, one of my favourite medieval taverns, and thoughtfully sipped a glass of Ludmila. Whatever happens, I told myself, Prague’s values remain sane. Its people still love the simplicity of Nature and the timelessness of music. They’re addicted to good food and drink, to good books and company. They’re civilized without having yielded to gimmickry and gadgetry. I defy even the most obdurate misanthropist to feel alienated in Prague. Whatever troubles, the individual is not alone: there are scores of others in the same plight, eager to share experiences, to comfort and advise.

  These reflections were suddenly checked when I noticed a copy of Rudé Právo lying on the table. My own name leapt out of the small print. I quickly scanned a full-page Ministry of the Interior report, and there I learned the awful truth. I was an agent of imperialism! During the Prague Spring, I had passed on information to ‘a certain diplomat’, discovered by the vigilant security police to have been a British spy — after his recall!

  True, I had attended the Jonsens’ receptions as a representative of my magazine and had interviewed guests of honour. In 1968 I had attended film shows and cocktail parties in a personal capacity as a bilingual guest guaranteed to enliven the evening. That was the sum total of my espionage activity. I wondered, was this a new stratagem to ‘prove’ to the public that not the reformists but the CIA and MI6 had contrived the Prague Spring?

  I wrote indignant denials to the editor and the Ministry, to which I received no reply. I waited apprehensively for the pre-breakfast ring at the door. None came. But one or two publishing houses found it impossible to commission translations from me.

  In spite of the gathering clouds, life had its compensations. Zuzana Blühová, a cheerful Slovak student of drama, had taken over Luboš’s place in the Kavan household, Luboš having become engaged to a wise and pretty student of engineering. Jana and Jiří Müller were feverishly trying to submit their theses before the guillotine fell. Most of Jiří’s thesis was written in Zuzana’s room while she supplied cups of black coffee and checked his calculations. In the next room Jirka Holub was numbering pages, retyping passages and correcting punctuation for Jana.

  Jirka had moved in with Jana. Living up to Jirka’s intellectual standards would have strained anyone’s vitality but Jana’s. He was teaching her German and Polish, and they were both attending courses in Hebrew and Arabic. Jirka did not hold with marriage and Jana was called upon to envisage their life together as a common law monogamy with seventeen children, on each of which they would practise different psychological theories and educational methods. The first was on its way.

  After a complicated pregnancy and difficult confinement, Jana gave birth to a large and alert Ilja. The sight of Jirka washing the baby or its nappies with a book of Sanskrit propped over the bath drove away the spectre of the security police. Zuzana and I occupied first places in the hierarchy of ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’, in whose eyes Ilja was the most exceptional child of his generation. Altogether, in that time of bitter national disillusionment ours was probably the most cheerful community in Prague. Jirka struggled to support his family on freelance teaching. A brilliant linguist he had been sacked by the Language Institute because of his ethical views on political consistency; in other words he had refused to condone the invasion.

  When I broke the news that I would have to leave Czechoslovakia and settle in England, Jana was to say: ‘The five years with you have been the happiest of my life. Your departure will be the end of an era. None of us will ever forget the fun, friendship and freedom of your open house.’

  I was to lose all my possessions. Those had also been my happiest days too. I had had companionship I valued, hope for better things and faith in my young friends’ ability to achieve them.

  We filled our glasses to celebrate first-class honours for the two theses — in Jiří’s case prematurely, it transpired.

  Again we raised them to commemorate the banning of the Czech Students’ Union. The reasons given by the Ministry of the Interior were Jan’s speech at Budapest, his foreign policy document (prepared for the last student congress in Olomouc in April 1969 for which Jan returned from Oxford), a letter to the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in support of workers’ councils, composed by Luboš, Jiří and Karel, and Jiří’s articles on the Party in Buchar. The Union had been a symbol of liberty. I had watched over its conception and rejoiced at its birth; I could only grieve at its passing.

  *

  After his Olomouc speech, Jan was warned by his friends to return abroad and stay there legally until things cooled down. In their opinion, if the authorities took action he would be the worst off. Not only had he been in charge of the student union’s foreign relations but he had more contacts with the West than any of the other leaders.

  After his term at Oxford, Jan enrolled at the London School of Economics. This made his stay legal but meant he had to start his degree course all over again.

  Unfortunately, things showed no signs of cooling down. On the contrary, they were hotting up under Gustáv Husák who had replaced Dubček as Party leader in April 1969. A week before their finals Zuzana, Jiří and Luboš were expelled from university for their ‘activity in the Czech Students’ Union’. I felt their disappointment as keenly as if they had been my own children. After the long battle for Jiří and Luboš’ reinstatement, it was cruel that they should be deprived of the fruits of their efforts when the end was in sight. The expulsions were more than a personal defeat: they were part of a process by which all the achievements of the past five years would be whittled away. For a time none of them could find work. Eventually Jiří got a job as a travelling salesman to a group of sacked intellectuals making synthetic rubber toys in an ex-journalist’s kitchen. It was illustrative of Jiří’s popularity that even in this risk-fraught time, thousands of signatures were appended to a student protest at this second expulsion.

  Mrs Müller, up from Brno for the weekend, swallowed this second disappointment with that mixture of pride and sorrow with which she regarded all her son’s activities. ‘Look at him,’ she cried with tears in her eyes and a fond smile on her lips. ‘At twenty-six he has no degree, no flat, no prospects. He owns nothi
ng but a toothbrush and a briefcase.’

  Jiří mildly remonstrated that possessions were a drag and that his prospects did not depend on a piece of paper.

  I raged at this prodigious waste of talent; but worse was to come. As a result of Husák’s ‘loyalty tests’, a third of the Party members were expelled and a multitude of ex-Party and non-Party people found themselves jobless or at least downgraded. (Workers were not exempt, especially those who had been members of workers’ councils, now branded as ‘counter-revolutionary’.)

  Husák seemed bent on creating an era of mediocrity unrivalled even by Novotný’s. His hatchetry echoed the fifties. Science, education and culture were axed with a vengeance. Children whose parents had been active in 1968 were barred from higher, secondary and university education. Courses in ‘dangerous’ subjects — psychology, sociology, philosophy and some Western languages — were banned again. Strict censorship was reimposed: agitprop realism was reinstalled.

  The fringe theatres, traditionally a medium of protest, sought ways of communication through allegory and analogy. The public responded. In fact, as a prominent director confided to me: ‘Audiences read their own interpretation even into genuinely unambiguous lines. They applaud eternal truths ecstatically.’ Fearing the power of words, the authorities would have to abolish all media if they wished to prevent contamination.

  Not content with immobilization Husák unleashed a relentless smear campaign against the reformers. Dubček’s ‘socialism with a human face’ was described as a ‘period of dictatorship and terror against the workers and peasants’. The radical students were attacked for having ‘broken up the CSM’. Jan was labelled an ‘anarchist who adopted the methods of the Western New Left’. Most cynically of all, the villains of the fifties were whitewashed while their victims were blackened. Pavel, Eda Goldstücker and several defendants in the Slánský trial were depicted as parasites and cowards who had saved their own skins at the expense of others. Anti-Semitism was again cultivated under the guise of anti-Zionism. A creative genius among the ‘reliable’ journalists invented a group of Zionists who since the thirties had infiltrated the Party in order to influence its foreign policy in the interests of Zionism, and prepare the soil for a 1968 situation. Though at school in the thirties and dead in the sixties, Pavel was named among them. Poor Pavel, he had no peace even in the grave! The label was passed on to his elder son. Jan found that he too had become a Zionist overnight.

  What was Husák’s reaction to the dishonouring of his former fellow jail-birds? He had shared a cell with Pavel at one time; he and Eda Goldstücker had been at Leopoldov together for a long period. According to another ex-inmate of Leopoldov, Husák had ‘formed’ his future ‘government’ while in prison. Ambition of this calibre would hardly be affected by human feelings.

  Sometimes I experienced near-despair. To have come so far along the road to freedom and now to be dragged back to a dark age! How could Husák of all people so dishonour his fellow prisoners? He and Pavel and Eda had been incarcerated at Leopoldov together. Husák knew only too well the true face of the fifties.

  In one respect the seventies differed from the fifties: no one was fooled by the crass propaganda, not even loyal communists. A few people were bought by Husák’s goulash-and-carrot communism which offered consumer benefits as a compensation for lost freedom. Some withstood the drastic turn of the tide with fortitude and wry Czech humour, and endeavoured by political discussion and scientific study in small groups to preserve a continuity of enlightenment. Many turned inwards to their families or their hobbies, their pets and their yoga. But inevitably time wore down their hopes. Months of fruitless job-hunting or of boredom in monotonous or arduous, ill-paid employment, with few mental stimuli in leisure hours, plus continual harassment in one form or other, began to deflate all but the most resilient spirits. A grey inertia settled on the vast majority.

  One antidote to despair is action. Having supported the reform movement since the early sixties, I could not bear to view its destruction unresistingly. I was sure that if any organized resistance existed, Jiří Müller would be involved. My suspicion proved correct. Jiří told me that several underground opposition groups had been formed. Their power was words, their weapon information. Some produced regular broadsheets. These presented facts about domestic and foreign affairs and analyses of current trends. They were able to disclose top-level Party and inter-party decisions, because some unpurged comrades were salving their consciences by top-level leaks.

  The opposition also smuggled into the country and distributed Listy, an émigré journal produced in Rome by Jiří Pelikán1, and Tigrid’s Svědectví, as well as books by authors of the Western left and by Soviet dissidents. With mounting excitement I realized that oppression was being combated — Czech-style — by maintaining the flow of ideas.

  All duplicators and photocopying machines were strictly guarded, Jiří said, no one in the underground had access to one. Therefore typing was the only method of reproduction. This was something I could do. I offered my services to Jiří’s group. He immediately drew from his briefcase a copy of their clandestine monthly Facts, Comments and Events. I fingered it with reverence. It was a symbol of courage on the part of the authors, the typists and the distributors. It comprised a dozen single-spaced, somewhat blurred sheets. It would take me hours to decipher the faint letters and reproduce ten copies. No matter. For the first time in my life I had an abundance of leisure.

  I cannot pretend not to have felt a quiver of apprehension when I started to type as soon as Jiří had left. The clatter of the keys echoed in my quiet room. I imagined the neighbours would hear and wonder. The penalty for disseminating enlightenment was heavy. A minimum of two years in the cooler, Jiří had told me. But I took fresh heart thinking of Pavel. At least I had his guidelines for survival.

  I had already become used to surveillance since our return from London. I was experienced in speaking in riddles over a tapped phone. I now learned to exchange written messages in bugged flats, to recognize unknown collaborators by signs, to reach destinations by devious routes and to throw off shadowers. I wore my oldest, least conspicuous clothes on delivery days. Even so, I was stopped by the police on my third errand and asked for my identity papers. One of the two scrutinized the little red book, embossed with the Czech lion, muttered ‘Kavanová’ while exchanging meaningful glances with the other. I waited for the familiar ‘Come along with us’, wondering with detachment what tale I’d think up if it came to a search. But the significant tone was merely a feature of psychological warfare against the citizenry. He listed through the pages. Suddenly he shouted: ‘Ha! You have no proper employment, I see!’ trying to catch me out on the parasite article.

  ‘If you’ll examine the pertinent page again,’ I said, ‘you’ll see that firstly my last work contract was terminated according to the regulations and secondly, I am the widowed mother of two children and have reached the age at which employment is no longer statutory for that category.’

  ‘You are a housewife, then?’

  I nodded. It seemed the most innocuous definition.

  ‘Then this document is not in order! It should specify your exact status.’

  He was wrong. The document contained several rubrics for employers’ rubber stamps but none for other specifications. However, the citizen was at a hopeless disadvantage in any encounter with the police. They were not guardians of the law. They were the law.

  ‘I’ll have the omission rectified at the registration department immediately, comrade,’ I murmured meekly.

  The scraggy one sniffled loudly. He had been left out. ‘What’s in your bag?’ he demanded peevishly.

  ‘Shopping,’ I replied airily. I pulled the handles apart, revealing an earthy assortment of unwrapped, slightly sodden veg. ‘And today’s Rudé Právo. That’s an interesting speech of Comrade Bilak’s, isn’t it?’

  The stalwarts mumbled their agreement. Obviously neither of them had read the Party gospel. U
ninterested in its contents (had they but known about the sheets interlarded among its pages!) they exhorted me again to correct my registration, returned my document and left.

  Liaison between the underground and the West was essential. It seemed obvious that I should become one of the links inside the country, and Jan one of the links outside it. I must confess I did not feel exactly cut out for this job. It always took me some time to collect myself out of a deep sleep when Jan phoned me at 1 a.m. to deliver some seemingly nonsensical message. (At least my remonstrances must have sounded convincing to the secret police!) Then slowly the code would float into my head and I would formulate my coded reply.

  Smuggling was the last of the many occupations I undertook without previous experience. There were occasional mishaps. Accepting a case of ‘subversive’ material on a main highway in broad daylight was something I would not have cared to repeat too often. Neither was my favourite nocturnal pastime dragging a rubbish bag of contraband’ through Prague in the dead of night. The black plastic dustbin liner was obviously foreign. The nature of its contents was recognisable from the bulges. I felt as conspicuous as a murderer trying to dispose of a corpse. I dared not take a tram or even a taxi. Many taxi drivers were fired intellectuals, but there were also police informers among them. So I went on foot choosing narrow, ill-lit streets and hugging the houses. If I was stopped by the police, I’d had it. There was no way I could explain away the possession of new books on controversial — or even non-controversial — subjects in English, Russian and German.

  We had extended our service to include books. Up-to-date information from the West enabled dissidents, at least in private, to continue their studies and research or at least keep abreast of their field. It was also a means of maintaining morale. Then there were the books by the Western Left which enabled the dissidents to follow trends of political thinking outside. My guardian angel — evidently a dissident sympathiser — got me home safely in the small hours and I would drop thankfully into bed. One morning, however, my collaborator did not turn up. I spent several anxious days waiting, alone. I had given Zuzana, Jana and Jirka what furniture they needed and was now living in a single-unit flat with a minimum of belongings; it was hopeless for concealment. Accommodating ‘subversive’ literature was like living with a time bomb. Eventually, I was relieved of it. My collaborator explained that he had been checked by the police, leaving another dissident’s flat. He had thought it wise to lie low for a while. Jan used the Samizdat we smuggled to him as a basis for articles in the Western press. What happened to the material that came in I do not know. Ignorance was the best protection in dealings with the police who were stepping up their activities. I received frequent warnings to clear the deck when a dissident’s flat was raided. A round-up of political suspects would be expected.