Luckily, Rudolf himself said he did not want the job. He was not suited for it. He was satisfied with what he was doing. He still had a lot to learn. He had already turned down the offer. He wondered why he had even been considered for such an important job – an inexperienced young man like himself, a recent Party member who had never held any political office or performed any Party function.
Two days later, we were expecting Otto and Milena for dinner, after which we were to go to the theater. Rudolf arrived at the last minute. He said that his refusal to take the job had been rejected. The Party had officially ordered him to accept. Party superiors had explained that his work at the Institute had been carefully watched, that his qualifications were outstanding, and that his knowledge of foreign languages was very useful. The Party needed him. The Party had decided.
Now the choice was simple, Rudolf said. He could either accept the position of cabinet chief in the Ministry of Foreign Trade or resign from the Party and turn his back on everything he believed in. I began to object to this line of reasoning, but Rudolf stopped me.
“You see?” he said. “That’s just like us! As long as everything’s on paper, in theory, we can get excited. But when the time comes to act, we lose our nerve! Who knows if it’s the right thing to do? But don’t ask me to step aside and spend the rest of my life blaming myself for cowardice. You can never get anywhere if you’re afraid of making a mistake. I’m convinced we’re capable of building a fairer and, in the end, a freer society. I have to accept the responsibility that goes along with that conviction. I know you think we’ll have the same terror here as in Russia after the Revolution. But if you took the time to study these things, you’d see that the two countries offer entirely different conditions. Developments here will be totally different. Everything depends on getting good people in decisive positions so that we don’t waste energy and resources and so that we don’t hurt anyone.”
I remember arguing that, as cabinet chief, Rudolf would be nothing more than the foreign minister’s errand boy, forced to carry out policies made without his participation. “Experts like you will have no influence on actual decisions,” I said. “But you’ll be made the scapegoat for anything that goes wrong. Don’t you know it’s always the second or third man down the line who makes the mistakes? It’s only the top guy who gets the recognition for something that works!”
“I don’t care about recognition,” Rudolf said. “Besides, it’s clear I’ll only be there for the interim. I’m basically still a man of the old order. In a year or two, when enough young workers finish up their education, I’ll be glad to give the job up and get back to my books. You know, that’s probably my one real qualification for this job: I’m not interested in furthering my own career; I’ll do honest work.”
Suddenly I was overcome by all the tensions of the previous weeks and burst into tears. The doorbell rang just then, and Otto and Milena came in. Rudolf explained to them what was going on and Milena threw up her hands.
“For God’s sake!” she said. “I’ve known you since first grade. I’ve lived through all kinds of horrors with you. And the first time I see you cry is when your husband makes it to the top! Have you gone crazy?”
We did go to the theater that evening and, for a short while, I pushed my worries aside. We did not talk about the job anymore after we returned home. We lay in bed in the dark for a long time, each listening to the other’s breathing, each knowing that the other was wide awake. Finally, Rudolf said, “I know that the next few years won’t be easy but, after that, if we do our job well, people will be happier and better off. Isn’t that worth a try?”
I felt the touch of his fingers at the corners of my mouth.
“Please,” he said. “Smile just a little.”
What I remember most vividly from this period following the coup is a feeling of bewilderment, of groping in the dark that was doubly oppressive because the darkness was not only outside but inside me as well. How could we have been so credulous? so ignorant? It seems that once you decide to believe, your faith becomes more precious than truth, more real than reality.
My world began to change right away, the day the newspapers announced Rudolf’s nomination to his new post in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. I went for my weekly appointment with the hairdresser. He was a fine fellow and I had always been casually friendly with him and his staff. While Mr. Oldrich dried my hair, one of his apprentices usually played with the baby or took him for a walk in his stroller. This time, no one greeted me with a joke or a smile. Instead, the entire staff stopped what they were doing and stood at attention. My hairdresser himself helped me off with my coat, hung it up, and started dancing around me, offering all kinds of essences and rinses – the same ones he used to dismiss, saying, “Stay away from this junk!” When I blurted out, “What’s the matter with you?” he answered, “Nothing. But everything’s the matter with you. You can’t treat a highly-placed person like yourself as though you’ve herded geese with her all your life!”
That was the first indication of things to come. I had to become accustomed to the fact that, for everyone but a handful of my old friends, I ceased to be a human being. Instead, I became an object of envy, hate, suspicion, or obsequious deference. In the years that Rudolf would hold his job at the Ministry, I would not succeed in making a single friend among the comrades or their wives, and I think that fact illuminates the nature of that time. When ideology takes the front seat, human relations are pushed aside. When every action and thought is geared to the building of a new society, there is little room left for feelings. Feelings are tricky anyway, hard to channel, hard to control: they are distractions from work and constructive effort, better avoided. The only feelings one can safely enjoy are love for the Party and hearty solidarity with one’s comrades. Of course, even here caution is advisable; one should thoroughly examine a comrade before bestowing upon him one’s trust. Only the Party is worthy of unquestioning devotion. I remember an actress, an outstanding artist, who declared to me that anyone whose eyes did not grow moist at the mention of Lenin’s name was not worthy of standing on the stage of the National Theater.
At about that time, one of Rudolf’s colleagues came to visit us and the conversation turned to precisely these matters. “Rudolf, you know how much I like you,” the man said, “and that I consider you a good friend. But if I ever found out you had done anything to hurt the Party, I’d turn against you in a minute and do my best to make you pay for it.”
I remembered this statement a few months later when this same man began to turn up at our home, terrified. He told us he was being followed everywhere by a black Tatra police limousine, and begged us to let him sit down and relax with us for a few moments. He was one of the first prominent Party members to be arrested, and I felt sorry for him, but since he had always seemed a bit enigmatic to me and capable of anything, I was prepared to believe that he might have been involved in some unsavory activities.
About two months after the coup, an older woman whom I did not know called at our apartment. She said she had heard that we wished to move. That was true. Our little hole in the wall had been bursting at the seams ever since the birth of our son. She offered me an apartment in her house in the Letna district which had been left vacant by some people who had emigrated. I liked the place even though it was none too spacious and was quite expensive. The rooms were still filled with the belongings of their former tenants.
I found the family’s former housekeeper in the kitchen. A fat, simple girl who was helping the landlady clean out the apartment, she was sitting over a cup of coffee as I came in. “Lady don’t take this place,” she whispered to me. “It’s jinxed. First there were Jews here – they all died in the camps. The Germans who took the apartment from them got out in the nick of time – the neighbors would have lynched them! And now the people I worked for ran away with only their knapsacks on their backs. Nobody ever leaves this place in an ordinary way.”
The apartment was convenient an
d we needed a place where three people could live. I decided that we would take it.
My social obligations began right after we moved in. I have little interest in entertaining, but I was willing to do it for Rudolf’s sake. Even today I feel gloomy when I remember the dinners and receptions we had to attend as part of our duty to the Party. The men, most of them as fanatically devoted to their work as Rudolf, used these occasions as work meetings and left us, their wives, to amuse ourselves as best we could. I think most of the wives suffered the same agonies of boredom I did.
The wives fell into two categories: the daughters of the working class and those with a bourgeois past similar to my own. The first group, secure in their proletarian origins, were self-assured, loud, and stolid, confident that anything they said or did could be justified by their background. The second group was constantly on guard, each woman afraid of making some politically inappropriate slip, of appearing too intellectual or uncommitted and, thereby, shaming herself as well as damaging her husband’s career. It often happened that, once we had exhausted the safe topic of children, we stood or sat around for hours in cramped silence, maintaining smiles that made our face muscles ache, nodding at the chatter of our working class comrades. Once, after I had been standing in a corner with the wife of one of our leading economists for an hour without exchanging a single word, she could stand the boredom no longer and blurted out, “Have you seen anything interesting at the theater lately?” Then, appalled by the possible ramifications of what she had said, she babbled, “Oh, please forgive me for asking such a bourgeois question!”
In fact, our lack of political awareness soon became so obvious to the authorities that the Party arranged for a special series of lectures on Marxism for us. Many of the wives would bring along their knitting or darning to these talks, to demonstrate their positive attitude toward manual labor.
Those receptions! Perhaps the most startling thing about them was their lavishness. Tables groaned under the weight of rare delicacies at a time when ordinary people were still living on rations. A nouveau-riche snobbery thrived among those very same people who made the most of their working class origins and proletarian principles, and who ruled in the name of workers and farmers. One of these comrades reprimanded me one evening for wearing too simple an evening gown to a reception given by Ambassador Konstantin Zorin. Attendance at Soviet receptions, she said, demanded full formal attire – even though clothing and fabric were still being rationed in Czechoslovakia.
Rudolf had bought a used car that he loved to drive and in which we sometimes arrived at these receptions. This, too, became the occasion for an official rebuke: first for the fact that we chose to arrive in an old car, and second for the fact that Rudolf himself was at the wheel. The new elite considered nothing short of a chauffeur-driven limousine to be appropriate.
I found myself in a cross fire. On the one hand I was constantly and disapprovingly monitored by our concierge and my neighbors, who discussed my every step and once even called a meeting to discuss my shockingly unproletarian style of dress. On the other hand, there were the equally stringent eyes of my comrades in the elite, who were drowning in tasteless luxuries made possible by special ration cards that Rudolf refused to accept. I resolved the problem, probably badly, by ignoring both groups.
The street on which we now lived had a peculiar character. During the war, many Germans had taken over its large expensive apartments. After liberation, they had been superseded by a strange assortment of newly-rich Czechs who had joined the Party out of sheer expediency. Few actual workers lived on our street, but there were several shopkeepers and tradesmen who evidently believed that, in order to hold on to their livelihoods, they had to pose as hard-core Bolsheviks, aglow with class enthusiasm. It happened at almost every local Party meeting that some woman who owned a laundry or a grocery store would rise to her feet and declare ingenuously, “Comrades, if you only knew how dearly I love our Party,” and then sit down again.
Once, just before May Day, someone inquired shyly whether it would not be wasteful to squander miles of good fabric and countless pieces of lumber on May Day parade decorations when these scarce commodities could surely be put to better use in our postwar economy. This brought the owner of the local dairy shop to his feet. “What’s this?” he demanded. “Who is it that dares to suggest that anything for the glory of the Party is wasteful? I say, comrades, let’s have even bigger and better decorations – cost be damned! We’ll show the capitalists!” But all this bluster did not help him; his store was nationalized just a few months later anyhow.
The chairman of our local Party organization was a strange, stunted character with a long, horse face, and he had a plump wife who also vaguely resembled a horse. Both were endowed with a pathological venomous curiosity and spent their days and nights probing into the most intimate details of the lives of the people who lived on our street, Communists and non-Communists alike. This opportunity for snooping into the lives of other people was, I think, something that attracted many to the local Party organization. Gossip had become a virtue and an obligation. A Communist was duty-bound to be aware of everything taking place around him, and I knew many people who spent whole days standing in the street or by their windows so as not to miss a thing.
It may seem strange but, at the time, these things did not upset me very much. They made the atmosphere unpleasant, but it all seemed more ridiculous than ominous. By then, I had few illusions left about people, and I was not about to let my life be soured by such trivia. They were far outweighed by Rudolf’s conviction that we were on the right track and that no obstacle was insurmountable.
Occasionally, people came to us for help, complaining of an injustice. Mostly these were older people, tradesmen whose shops had been confiscated but who were not eligible for social security since they had been self-employed. Now they were looking for other jobs or for pensions, and frequently Rudolf was able to help them. There were others who came because they wished to leave the country, but these Rudolf could not help. The borders had been closed in 1948 after the coup. Of all the injustices and inanities perpetrated during those years, the closing of the borders was among the worst. Why not let people leave? Why keep them against their will? One comrade from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained that it was only a temporary measure. “The Republic can’t afford to lose members of its labor force,” he said. “For many people, the decision to leave is rash. They don’t understand the situation and are prone to an entirely unjustified panic. Once they realize they have nothing to be afraid of, they’ll be glad they stayed. Then we’ll open the borders up again and people will travel where they want.”
For many people, especially young people, 1948 was a year which also saw the realization of long-held hopes. There was more than enough work for everyone. Even housewives began to look for jobs – some out of necessity but others for the satisfaction of taking part in public life. People worked enthusiastically, even on holidays and Sundays, and many spent their evenings studying. They made plenty of money, often more than they could spend, and bought up everything in sight.
Tax-supported national health care was instituted, as were old age pensions and free vacation plans for workers. The nationalization of private businesses was causing some bad blood, of course, but we were told that this was to be expected; it was a difficult step that was imperative for the expansion of our economy. Whenever I looked out the window of a train at the landscape striped with tiny privately-owned fields I had to admit it was true – private farming had no future. No one, at the time, could have imagined how the crude, ruthless process of collectivization would damage our agriculture, that it would be fifteen or twenty years before the new nationalized farms would break even.
Sometime in 1950, a friend whom we called Karlicek came from the country to visit us in Prague. Before the coup, Karlicek had owned a large farm not far from Prague which was now nationalized. He was a good man and a superb farmer whom the villagers liked and welcomed as
a friend whenever he came to visit and to observe the downhill slide of his once-prosperous farm. He stormed into our apartment one day and started shouting at Rudolf, “When one of my cows produced less than ten liters of milk, I sent her to the slaughterhouse because she consumed more than she produced. And you know what they’re doing now? They give a medal to a cow that’s producing four liters! You idiots!”
At about the same time, Prague wits were beginning to define socialism as a system designed to successfully resolve problems that could never arise under any other political system.
Yet Rudolf plunged into his work with such enthusiasm that some of it rubbed off on me. The people with whom he worked seemed equally industrious and intelligent and, as far as I could see, their mission of developing trade relations with the West had started off auspiciously. I was particularly pleased with the help Czechoslovakia was extending to Israel and the fact that Rudolf was instrumental in that program. But, other than that, I knew few specifics about Rudolf’s work. Everything was Secret and Top-Secret and, after a while, I stopped asking questions about his projects. His world, symbolized by the briefcase that no one was allowed to touch, was becoming closed to me.
Under a Cruel Star Page 9