The publisher for whom I had worked was no longer in business. The old gentleman, embittered but philosophical, had decided to retire. I had found another position, as an art director in a newly-organized publishing house for scientific literature where, for the first time, I became acquainted with a socialist enterprise.
The other editors were all young, almost all Party members, and their zeal knew no bounds. Most of them were still university students who spent their Sundays and holidays on labor brigades; they had each day planned down to the minute in order to manage it all. Unfortunately, none of them had the slightest idea about managing a publishing house and, despite their enthusiasm, they made such a mess of it that within two years the enterprise went bankrupt and was closed.
It was while working with them that I first understood what a committed collective was like and, at first, their dutifulness, their idealism, and their naive belief in the infallibility and virtual holiness of the Party stunned me. I could not understand how people so young could give up the pleasures of private life and identify completely with a prescribed mode of thought. No matter what happened, my colleagues never doubted that what the Party did, it did well. None would ever dream of complaining about the endless meetings and conferences. They obeyed the arbitrary directives issued by the comrades of the Central Committee which supervised our activities to the letter; they uttered the names of these comrades with awe. In this exemplary collective I, for the first time, heard this admonition routinely delivered to the more frivolous members of the Party: “Another date? Aren’t you ashamed to waste time dating when there’s a war on in Korea?”
Only two people at the house did not fit this mold. One was the editor-in-chief, Jiri Stano, a young man of rather dim intellect and minimal industry. His directives were largely limited to invitations to his favorite editors to join him for a swig of liquor that he kept in a large bottle in the drawer of his desk. He was, some months after my arrival, relieved from his duties and promoted to a loftier position. After 1968, he became a pillar of the Party daily Rude Pravo – the Russian occupation version – where his articles suggested that he had not overcome his intellectual limitations but had merely learned to make better use of them.
The second misfit in the collective was Pavel Kovaly, who seemed to be far more interested in skiing and canoeing than in Party life. He soon became my trusted ally and developed an admirable resourcefulness in extricating us from Party meetings. He often walked me home from work, and became acquainted with Rudolf. Whenever we happened to have a free hour or two, he would come by our apartment for a bit of conversation or a game of chess with Rudolf.
At the time there was a film being shown in Prague which Comrade Stano liked to discuss, with deep emotion, calling it the pinnacle of Socialist Realism and a masterful reflection of Soviet life. It was called Cossacks from the Kuban and it featured buxom young women and handsome young men turning hay and harvesting wheat to the accompaniment of a four-part chorus of socialist work songs. Perfect harmony reigned in this classless paradise and one of our editors, in what was obviously a fit of temporary insanity, remarked that the film had struck her as just another grade-B operetta. The remark rendered the collective speechless. The editor was asked to conduct a self-critique at the next meeting and, with the help of all the comrades, to correct her erroneous views. She was asked to continue correcting them for some ten more meetings and, had it not been for the complete exhaustion of everyone concerned, she would still have been doing penance in 1968.
My colleague Borivoj, the other staff artist with whom I shared the room designated as a studio, was an exceptionally nice, friendly young man who, among other things, was a member of the Folk Song and Dance Ensemble. He had gone on tour with the Ensemble several times and had also visited the Soviet Union. He was always bursting with energy that, oddly enough, resulted in very little actual work accomplished, but he was very helpful to me. He saw to it that we had all the supplies we needed, he ran errands, he tended the bulletin board, he kept an eye on the level of my political awareness, and he amused me. Borivoj liked to recall his tours of Russia, to describe the hospitality of the people he had met, their friendliness, the ancient railroad cars that were maintained with such touching care, the godforsaken train stations in the steppe surrounded by beds of red flowers.
We were getting along wonderfully until the day when he rushed into our studio with a cardboard folder from which he produced a color reproduction of an oil painting, that would shortly be seen all over Prague.
“Well? What do you think?” he asked.
The print showed a mass of clouds which were colored a vivid pink – it was hard to tell whether by sunrise or sunset. Against this gaudy backdrop stood a violet tractor dwarfed by the highly idealized figure of the beloved father of all proletarians, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. The effect was overwhelming. Each detail of Stalin’s body was so painstakingly executed that you felt like moving over and letting him jump out of the picture.
“Good grief,” I moaned. “What unbelievable kitsch!”
Unable to take my eyes off the picture, I realized only a few moments later that my colleague had not responded to my comment. When I looked over at him, I saw that his face had turned the same hue of pink as the clouds of the print and that he was gasping. Finally, he recovered enough to roar at the top of his lungs, “So this is how you value me outstanding work of a great Soviet artist, a master of Socialist Realism? Is this your attitude toward the Soviet Union? Is that what you want – another war?” Then he stormed into the office of the editor-in-chief.
I heard him shouting that he could not go on sharing space with a reactionary and demanding that something be done about it at once.
A great deal might have been done about it. The temper of the time did not allow for lack of enthusiasm, let alone criticism. That nothing was done was probably due to Rudolf’s position and, in part, to the intelligence of the editor-in-chief who had replaced Stano and who was, despite twenty years in the Party, a rather sensible woman.
The anniversary of Victorious February was celebrated every year by a gala reception for several hundred guests at the Prague Castle and, in 1950, Rudolf and I were invited. The splendid halls were illuminated; all the historic treasures of the kings of Bohemia were on display. The refreshments were exquisite and a group of folk musicians in national costume provided the entertainment. The short, very fat wife of the president, Marta Gottwald, resplendent in a kelly-green gown with a train, waddled between rows of obsequious bowing backs. The intellectuals among the guests seized the opportunity to besiege the buffet.
I was standing with a group of Rudolf’s colleagues in one of the smaller salons when Klement Gottwald himself stumbled in on the arm of the Speaker of the National Assembly. The President of the Republic was sloshed; the Speaker was actually holding him up. Gottwald picked a path across the room straight toward me, lurched to a stop, and babbled, “What’s the matter? You ain’t drinking! Why ain’t you drinking?”
The men around me signaled frantically for a waiter and, when one leaped forward with a tray, I took a glass of wine. So did the president. We both drank up. The president waved his empty glass in the air, stared at it for a moment, then fixed his bloodshot eyes on me and started babbling again, exactly as before, “What’s the matter? You ain’t drinking! Why ain’t you drinking?”
The Speaker of the National Assembly was the first to regain his presence of mind. He laughed, managed to produce a few innocuous words, and started to maneuver the president out of the room. I stood there with the glass in my hand, feeling my knees shaking beneath the folds of my evening gown. That purple-red face, those dull, drunken eyes drowning in fat, that hoarse babble – this was our president! I spotted Rudolf in a far corner of the room and shot him a pleading look. We left soon after.
I spent the rest of the night sitting on the edge of the bathtub with a wet towel wrapped around my head. My ears were ringing with the rhythmic cheer of our Communist
Youth Organization: We are the future of our nation; we are Gottwald’s generation! And I remembered the tall, gracious figure of President Masaryk who had walked those magnificent Castle halls long ago, in the days of our innocence.
That episode badly jolted Rudolf as well. For some time it had been rumored that Gottwald drank, and that he had taken to drinking out of desperation over the Soviet failure to keep their word to let us run our country our own way. The president was ostensibly drowning in alcohol his pangs of conscience over the direction in which he had led his country. In February of 1948, much had been said about putting matters into the right hands. Now, two years later, it seemed as though matters had somehow slipped into the wrong ones.
By 1951, the atmosphere in Prague was almost as bad as it had been during the war. No one dared to speak out loud, and hardly a week passed without news of someone’s arrest. The worst days were Thursday and Friday – my recollection is that the Central Committee met on Thursdays – and wherever a doorbell rang on those evenings, everyone turned pale. People who had not joined the Party now enjoyed a temporary respite; under the direct guidance of Soviet advisors whose task it was to purge the ranks, arrests made were mostly of Party members. There were a number of suicides, some quite mysterious, some entirely understandable. When one prominent official was told that two comrades in civilian clothes had come to visit and were waiting in his sitting room, he did not even bother to hear what they had to say. He took his revolver out of a drawer, left his house by the back door, and shot himself. It was later said that the two men had not come to arrest him but only to ask some questions. Or perhaps they had just dropped over for a glass of beer – who knows?
I was growing desperate. I wanted Rudolf to quit his job at any cost. I wanted to convince him that, if he stayed on, he could prevent nothing, improve nothing, that he could only destroy himself. “No person with any sense of self-respect,” I argued, “can continue to be party to what’s happening.” But Rudolf, nervous and troubled, continued to stand his ground.
“On the contrary,” he kept insisting. “If all the decent people leave now, things will get even worse.”
I did not want to give up. I kept pleading with him, trying to prove my points, begging. We never quarreled, but for months on end we did not exchange one personal remark, one intimate word. I knew I was making him suffer even more than he was already suffering and reproached myself for it. But I could not stop.
“What if they arrest you too?”
“That cannot happen,” Rudolf would say. “Look, of course I don’t believe that all the people who’ve been arrested have committed crimes. But it stands to reason that they must have made some serious mistakes. People cannot be held in jail for no reason at all. You have no idea how easy it is in this atmosphere to make a mistake, or to overlook something. And that can later be construed as intentional, as an act of sabotage. I’m sure that when the investigations are over and it’s clear that there was no wrongdoing, they’ll be released. It’s tough, but that’s the risk we took when we accepted our positions. Don’t worry. My affairs are in perfect order. I’m so careful, no major mistake can slip by me.”
“Rudolf, I beg you...”
“And I beg you! You’re my wife. Show some confidence in me!”
Late in the spring of 1951, Rudolf became seriously ill. The doctor diagnosed his illness as complete nervous exhaustion and ordered rest. With that doctor’s help, I finally managed to convince Rudolf to request permission to leave his job. I was so relieved when he agreed to do it that I even planned to give up my own job and drop my studies at the University. We would move out to the country. But my relief was short-lived. Rudolf’s resignation was not accepted. He was merely granted a leave of absence for a few days and then everything returned to the way it was before.
One Saturday afternoon, Pavel Eisler came rushing into our apartment.
“Eda Goldstuecker has disappeared,” he said. “Nobody knows where he is. Have you heard anything?”
Eduard Goldstuecker was one of Rudolf’s and Pavel’s oldest friends. He had returned a few days earlier from Israel, where he was serving as the Czechoslovak Ambassador. Relations between Israel and the Soviet Bloc had been deteriorating and we all knew that this had put Eda in an increasingly precarious position. But we had heard nothing about him and did not want to guess.
A few days later we found out that he, too, had been arrested. Rudolf did not say a word but, for several nights afterward, I would hear him pacing back and forth through the apartment, back and forth, while I lay in bed unable to sleep, staring helplessly into the darkness. Why do people’s best intentions turn against them? Why hadn’t we been able to foresee the consequences of our decisions?
“Rudolf,” I asked timidly. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that so many of the people who are being arrested are Jews?”
Rudolf, usually so quiet, exploded. “For God’s sake! Don’t tell me you believe that the Communists are anti-Semites! How can you still not understand? You really should drop everything else you’re doing and do some serious reading for a change!”
I believe it was in November of 1951 that the secretary general of the Party, Rudolf Slansky, was arrested. My husband had always intensely disliked Slansky. He considered him a dogmatic extremist, a vain and ruthless man, pathologically hungry for power and recognition. He had always avoided Slansky as much as possible and I knew that he had no official or personal connection with him. Slansky’s contact in the Ministry of Foreign Trade was Rudolf’s boss, the minister himself, so that my husband rarely had to encounter the almighty secretary general face to face.
When Slansky was arrested, we thought it meant a change was coming. It seemed logical since we assumed that the secretary general had been the one who had masterminded the reign of terror. But, in fact, just the opposite happened; the secret police, now known as State Security, intensified their rampage.
Late one Saturday night, I was sitting with Rudolf by lamplight in the window nook of our living room. It seemed to me that something of our former understanding was returning, something of our former confidence in each other. Our conversation was more relaxed. We managed to find words that held the same meaning for both of us. Our anxieties were now drawing us together just as our hopes had once done, and I dared to say what was on my mind without fear of hurting or angering him.
“I can’t believe,” I said, “that something inherently good can turn into its exact opposite just because of some mistakes or personal failures. If the system was fair and sound, it would provide ways of compensating for error. If it can only function when the leadership is made up of geniuses and all the people are one hundred percent honest and infallible, then it’s a bad system. It might work in heaven but it’s a foolish and destructive illusion for this world. Look at all those idealists who wanted nothing more than to work for the well-being of others; half of them are in jail; the other half start trembling every time their doorbell rings. It’s all one big fraud – a trap for naive, trusting fools.”
Rudolf got up and paced the room a few times. Then he stood by the window with his back to me, opened the curtains and looked out into the darkness for a while.
“Heda,” he said, “you know how much my work means to me. I’ve given it all that’s good in me. And it’s not only that. I thought that with this job, life had offered me a chance to do some good, to make up for our passivity in the past. I know I’ve been a bad husband and a bad father for the last two years. I’ve neglected you for the sake of my work. I’ve denied myself everything I love. But there is one thing I cannot give up: I cannot give up my conviction that my ideal is essentially sound and good, just as I cannot explain why it has failed – as it apparently has. I still believe this is a crisis that will pass. If you’re right, if it really is a fraud, then I’ve been an accomplice in a terrible crime. And if I had to believe that, I could not go on living... I would not want to...”
That was our last conversation on the subject.
The year 1951 was drawing to its close.
Rudolf Margolius with four-year old Ivan.
One evening, during the first week of 1952, we left home to attend yet another official reception. All these affairs have long since merged into one and I no longer remember where it was held. As we got into the car, I said to Rudolf, “Look at that man standing on the corner. I’ve seen him there every time I’ve left the house the past few days.”
Rudolf laughed.
“He probably likes some girl who works in the store across the street. What’s the matter with you? You need a rest. Ask for a vacation and take the boy to the mountains.”
At that reception, I remember receiving the special attentions of Comrade Minister Siroky, the head of the cabinet. He took my arm, pressed the palm of his hand against mine, and strolled around with me for a long while – something he had never done before. Comrade Morozov from the Soviet Trade Mission was also especially cordial. As usual, the vodka was running in streams, and toasts were made to the health of a large number of people who would have served humanity best by not having been born.
Under a Cruel Star Page 11