Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street
Page 1
Innocence
or, Murder on Steep Street
Heda
Margolius
Kovály
Translated from the Czech
by Alex Zucker
First published in Czech as Nevina aneb Vražda v Příkré ulici in 1985 by Index, Köln, Germany. Second Czech edition published in 2013 by Mladá fronta, Praha, Czech Republic.
Copyright © 2013 by the Estate of Heda Margolius Kovály
English translation copyright © 2015 by Alex Zucker
Introduction copyright © 2015 by Ivan Margolius
Translator’s Note copyright © 2015 by Alex Zucker
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously.
All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and
are not to be construed as real.
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kovály, Heda, 1919–2010.
[Nevina. English]
Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street / Heda Margolius Kovály; translated by Alex Zucker.
“First published in Czech as Nevina in 1985 by Index, Köln, Germany. Second edition in Czech
published in 2013 by Mladá fronta, Praha”
1. Motion picture theaters—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Czechoslovakia—
Fiction. I. Zucker, Alex, translator. II. Title. III. Title: Murder on Steep Street.
PG5039.21.O8485N4813 2015
891.8’6354—dc23 2014042467
HC ISBN 978-1-61695-496-3
eISBN 978-1-61695-497-0
Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.
INNOCENCE
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
PART II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
INTRODUCTION
Ivan Margolius, son of Heda Margolius Kovály
In the mid-1960s, the Czechoslovak political situation was becoming less traumatic: when the Communist regime started to loosen its grip, foreign travel was being gradually allowed and everyday produce became more available. We were living in our new apartment in Strašnice. It was on the second floor of a building constructed using the typical concrete panels so ubiquitous in the suburbs circling Prague’s famous historical center. We had managed to wangle these living quarters following the official court annulment of the verdict against my father and as compensation for our inner-city flat, which had been confiscated by the Communist authorities after my father’s judicial murder in 1952. Heda was working on a translation of “The King in Yellow,” a story by Raymond Chandler, first published in 1938. As I studied for my university exams in the bedroom, she worked in our living room, first writing the translation out long-hand with a blue ballpoint pen in lined notebooks, then typing up a clean copy. Now and then she’d ask for advice, shouting through the walls: “What word would you use for ‘a big, tall man’ if you were talking with your friends?” After a few moments I’d respond: “Habán?” “That’s what I thought,” she’d shout back cheerfully.
My mother, Heda Bloch (1919–2010), was born into a Jewish family in Prague. Her life was carefree until the Third Reich occupation of Sudetenland in October 1938, which led to the takeover of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Two years later, she and her first husband, my father, Rudolf Margolius, together with her parents, were transported to the Łódź (Litzmannstadt) ghetto in occupied Poland.
In August 1944, on the ghetto liquidation, they were all transferred to Auschwitz, where Heda lost her parents, who were led away to the gas chambers on arrival. Heda was also separated from Rudolf, who after several weeks in Auschwitz was relocated to Kaufbeuren and Mühldorf in Germany, digging trenches and working on construction of secret underground aircraft hangars. He eventually ended up in Dachau. Heda likewise was moved to labor camps in the Gross Rosen area. When the eastern front was approaching in February 1945, the women prisoners were organized into a death march from what is now Poland to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. Heda escaped from the march and managed to reach Prague, where she hid, with the assistance of the Czech partisans, till the end of the war.
In the early days of May 1945, in the time of the Prague Uprising, Heda helped by carrying ammunition during the fighting for the liberation of the city. Rudolf had survived Dachau, escaping the march out of the camp. On encountering the US Army he acted as an interpreter and leader of the Garmisch-Partenkirchen survivors’ collection camp. In June 1945, Rudolf and Heda were reunited in Prague.
With optimism and hope for a better and just society, Heda and Rudolf Margolius began their post-war life in Prague. Rudolf became a member of the Communist Party. During the war his parents had been shot following their transport to Riga. He had endured humiliation and suffering in the Nazi labor and concentration camps and was impressed by how the Communists helped other detainees there. He had resolved to help create a prosperous welfare state without social class divisions and racial prejudice. Heda perceived, though, that the new politicians gaining power were corrupt and dishonest with their extreme behavior and drastic policies. However, Rudolf, full of determination, managed to persuade her of his point of view. With reluctance, Heda joined the Party too.
After the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, Rudolf became deputy minister of foreign trade, in charge of economic agreements with the capitalist countries. Over the next four years, despite the efforts of many experts and partly due to the enforced exports of Czechoslovak goods, foodstuffs, and mineral resources to the Soviet Union, the centralized economy began to fail, and the Czechoslovak Communist Party and its Soviet advisers sought scapegoats.
Heda feared for Rudolf’s safety and tried to make him leave his post, but he insisted that he was ordered by the Party to carry on in his duties as there was no one to replace him. In January 1952 he was arrested following the detention of the Communist deputy leader, Slánský. Accused unjustly of “anti-state conspiracy” and sentenced in a show trial, Rudolf was executed in December 1952.
The Slánský Trial, in which eleven out of fourteen innocent defendants were sentenced to death for the fabricated offenses of spying and sabotage, became one of the most significant episodes of the Communist rule on the European continent in the 1950s. Its outcome affected not only the fate of our family, but lives of thousands of other Czechoslovak citizens and even peoples of the neighboring countries. The trial’s purpose, after Yugoslavia’s defection in 1948, was to deter any deviation from the Soviet camp. The Soviet Union’s paranoia about the vulnerability of its borders and its security, which persists to this day, had to be satisfied by a solid protective zone of loyal Communist coun
tries.
Heda survived because of her determination to fight back despite all the obstacles placed in front of her: if Hitler had not managed to destroy her, then the Soviets and the Communists would not do so either. As a persecuted wife of a “traitor” and a political undesirable, she had managed to look after us both, scraping a living by designing book dust jackets and weaving carpets.
In 1955 she married her second husband, Pavel Kovály, who suggested, because of Heda’s knowledge and love of languages, that she should try her hand at translation. She translated into Czech the books of well-known German, British, and American authors and passed them on to publishers, initially using Pavel’s name to submit her work, as she herself was not allowed to earn a living.
In August 1968 Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia and Heda fled the country. By then I was living in London, having left Prague in 1966. As soon as I had discovered all the details of Rudolf’s fate I decided I could no longer trust, and live in, the country of my birth and sought refuge in Britain, the oldest democracy. By then Pavel was lecturing in Boston, Massachusetts. Heda joined Pavel and subsequently worked at the Harvard Law School Library beginning in the fall of 1975.
She wrote her memoir, Under a Cruel Star, first published in 1973, soon after coming to the United States, on my insistence; I demanded to know her story and knew the world audience would also benefit. The book was so well received and respected that Clive James included a chapter about Heda in his book Cultural Amnesia (2007), a survey of significant personalities of the 20th century.
Heda translated many authors, including Arnold Zweig, Heinrich Böll, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Arthur Miller, Edna Ferber, Budd Schulberg, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Kingsley Amis. But perhaps the author she admired most was Raymond Chandler. She rendered into the Czech three of his novels, Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window; and The Little Sister, and her translations are still being printed by Prague publishing houses to this day, fifty years later. It was Chandler’s style of writing she liked so much: his depiction of characters and their way of speaking, as well as his scenic descriptions and strong sense of place. That inspiration led her to start working on crime fiction of her own, based on a period she had lived through herself. She used her own painful and extraordinary experience and, with this non-traditional crime fiction approach, tackled a subject that is hardly ever treated in the Czech or world literature.
She began writing the story in the early 1980s, and being rather modest, decided to bring it out under pseudonym of Helena Nováková (Helena was Heda’s middle name), the same name as one of the main heroines of the story. Nevina (Innocence) was first published in 1985 by Index, a Czech émigré press based in Köln, Germany. This was in the post-invasion time of so-called “normalization,” a return to stricter living conditions in Czechoslovakia, and she did not want to create any difficulties for her friends living in Prague. That is the reason for the book’s initial obscurity. On return to Prague in 1996, Heda corrected the original book publication, penning her name on the title page as the real author. However, the book remained on her library shelves and only after her passing was Nevina republished in Prague, bearing her rightful name, in 2013.
Innocence is set in Prague in the 1950s, at a historical moment of extreme political oppression. Since the bloodless coup in February 1948—when the Czechoslovak Communist Party and its leader, Klement Gottwald, replaced the government, which had been led by the pre-war democratic parties and President Edvard Beneš, successor to Tomáš Masaryk—the majority of Czechoslovak population had been living in fear.
In the late 1940s and 1950s the political atmosphere was highly charged in Communist Czechoslovakia. The Communists introduced censorship, restricted foreign travel, and purged the Ministry of Interior’s democratically placed personnel, installing their own people in key positions even prior to the coup. State Security, encouraged and coached by secretly imported Soviet advisers, began to use Soviet-inspired methods to suppress personal freedom and reinforce one-party ideology and alliance to the Soviet Union. Many citizens used to the democratic regime the country had enjoyed during the prosperous period between the wars had to reorient their public face to conform to the Soviet-inspired policies and restrictions.
In this climate of growing economic and political difficulties, suitable scapegoats were sought to keep discontent in check. More than two hundred fifty thousand citizens were arrested and imprisoned for allegedly working against the Party and terror gripped the country. Public show trials and secret military tribunals were staged; a large number of people accused of spying and sabotage were sentenced to death, hard labor, or long-term imprisonment. Corrupt Party officials used this perverted approach to retain power, instigating verdicts of guilt of sabotage or espionage when a colleague’s removal was to their advantage. Accused loyal Communists accepted their charges without a fight, believing falsely that by doing so they would further the good cause of the regime. Citizens tried to emulate their leaders’ bad behavior in order to survive. People had to adopt a double life, a public one in which they supported the Communist regime, and a private one, rigorously guarded, where they expressed their true opinions and misgivings only to close relatives and friends. Even then they had to be careful because some family members reported on one another to the State Security, either out of desperation or to improve their economic or social status. Society and community structure, friendships, marriages, family links, and employment relationships suffered as a consequence, reshaping the whole character of the nation.
Heda’s novel, Innocence, was inspired by Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, who seeks out the guilty amongst the innocents within the corrupt and decadent American dream society. In a way, Marlowe’s struggles are similar to Helena Nováková’s efforts to make her existence worthwhile in an environment devoid of respect for human life. The innocence theme of the book came from Hemingway’s quote in A Moveable Feast, according to which all real evil starts from innocence. Several personalities in the book see acts like lying, misrepresenting, informing, and betraying confidences as inconsequential, trivial matters, thus diluting the difference between guilt and innocence. Even murder is perceived as an accident for which no one is to blame.
In the intensely complex psychological drama, the heroine, Helena Nováková, is an almost-autobiographical portrait of Heda during her most trying times, when her first husband was arrested and then murdered in a political show trial. She depicts how she felt and thought, how the ordinary people around her behaved, how they tried to overcome the stranglehold of the Communist regime. Similar to the characters in Albert Camus’s fictional universes, all of Heda’s characters are guilty to various degrees, although they all declaim their innocence.
Heda uses Helena’s friend Šípek’s words to describe subtly in Orwellian theme how Communist Czechoslovakia treated its peoples and justified its actions: “Experts agree that animals are almost like people . . . as long as they’ve got a nice place to live and something to keep them entertained, they can do without freedom . . . In a good zoo, where they’re well-fed and have a chance to socialize, most animals are happier than they would be . . . in lonely and dangerous freedom.”
In Helena, Heda expresses private notions, fears, and attitudes she could not have written in such detail in her memoir. The novel Innocence allowed her to reveal much more of her inner mind and feelings, her views on life and morals in a fractured incarcerated society. It is a true companion to her memoir.
Bedford, September 2014
All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
PART 1
1
I got off the tram at Můstek and walked the rest of the way. It was a windy day in early spring, the kind when a person ought to be out in a field or in the woods, and every moment not spent boxed-up indoors is precious. Even though I
was in a rush, I took the time to stop and look at a couple of shop windows.
So what? No use driving myself crazy over another minute or two. I was in for a tough shift today anyway. Me, always so careful to stay out of conflict and keep to myself. Of all people, why did the boss have to go and pick me?
A curtain of shadow dropped behind me as I stepped into the cinema lobby. I swiveled my head to look at the display case for Fotografia, the state-run photography studio. A bride in a veil holding a bouquet. The same one for six months now. When they first put her up she looked beautiful. Now her blissful smile had turned as sour as yesterday’s milk. A moment in time, snared in a lasso, strangled as it tried to escape. To the left, set in a long blank wall, was the gray-painted metal door that led to the projection booth. I stopped a moment, hesitating.
Janeček, poor guy, was in for a tongue-lashing from the boss, and maybe the head office too. Twenty-eight and single, with six years’ experience as a projectionist, he had turned up four months ago with a recommendation from the job placement office. Didn’t talk to a soul. None of the ushers had managed to break him. Those girls tried every trick in the book. Especially Marie. She was eating her heart out having an unmarried man within reach who wouldn’t climb in the sack with her. Janeček was a good worker, too, punctual and polite. God only knows what got into him yesterday. Must have mixed up the reels or something. The movie started halfway through, in the middle of a chase scene: cars speeding around the curve, tires squealing, faces flashing past. At first the audience figured it for an unusually creative opening sequence, but then the whistling started. The boss was out of town at a conference for three days. She called after the screening to see if everything went all right, and when Marie told her about the slipup, the boss asked to talk to me.