Night after night, I dreamed the same dream. I would be sitting in some public place – a restaurant or cafe or concert hall. Suddenly a door would open, Rudolf would come in, and then stop. I would sit in my chair as if I were nailed to it and could not move. He would stand there looking at me, never coming even one step closer.
Once a month, I received a letter from Rudolf and, once a month, I was allowed to send him a reply. Those letters had to be strictly personal of course. Not a word about where he was or what was happening to him. We both knew that as much as one careless reference might prevent the letter from being delivered. From what Rudolf wrote, I could see that he had decided to focus completely on the past. He wrote a great deal about his son and I could see how much he regretted not having spent more time with him. His letters revived hundreds of moments that I had already forgotten.
“Do you remember,” he wrote, “how we first met?”
It had been a beautiful spring day. I was about twelve years old and ran across the street to buy a bag of marbles. A young man wearing glasses was walking in the street toward me. He looked at me intently and smiled.
It seemed odd to me that a grown-up man was paying me such attention and still running I looked back at him over my shoulder. He was standing in the street watching me.
That evening Rudolf went out with a group of his friends, which included my older cousin who was much taken with him at the time. While they were dancing Rudolf told her, “I met a little girl today whom I’m going to wait for. When she grows up, I’ll marry her.”
Twenty-year old Rudolf Margolius in Podsedice, Czechoslovakia.
Some time later we met again – at a tea party given by that same cousin. As soon as I walked in Rudolf came to my side and, from that moment on became my great friend. He helped me when I had trouble with my homework and put in a good word for me with my parents when I misbehaved; he took me to lectures and to the theater and waited patiently for me to grow up. Our relationship had the strength of a love that grows out of trust and long understanding. In spite of everything that had separated us, we always knew that we belonged together and that it could never be any other way.
It was a great comfort to me that Rudolf was able to find happy memories in our difficult past and that these memories were helping him survive. Several times he wrote about our spring in the woods, so clear and cool to which we used to walk and then sit motionless for hours waiting for the young deer to come and drink. Years later I went back to that village and looked for our spring, but there was nothing left. All I found was a hollow among the tree roots full of dry leaves.
In the letters I wrote to Rudolf I described our everyday life as cheerfully as I could. Every night I made notes of the day’s events so that I was sure not to leave out anything of interest, and I tried hard to give him the impression that we were doing well. In each letter I mentioned some event mostly taken from our experience during the war that had required strength of will, self-confidence, and courage. I think he understood what I was trying to tell him – that those qualities would help him now as they had then, and that just as I had stood by him always, I was with him now.
We both lied in those letters. We lied in all the things we did not say. But, in those things we did say, we revealed to each other the only truth that matters.
I never sent my letters by mail. I delivered each one of them myself to a special department at Police Headquarters in Bartolomejska Street. I still do not know what I expected from those very unpleasant visits but I told myself then that they gave me an opportunity to reach at least the most superficial layer of the power structure. Maybe I would be able to find out something. Maybe I would meet someone able and willing to make Rudolf’s ordeal a little easier. Each time I came to deliver a letter at Headquarters, I had to pass several checkpoints guarded by uniformed police, who questioned me at length. Most of them were women who rarely missed an opportunity to insult and humiliate me, so that entering that building came to feel like descending into a lion’s den. I had an arrangement with Mrs. Machova that I would call as soon as I left the building. If ever I did not call, she was to hurry to my apartment and get Ivan out. From the start, I had worked out a detailed plan to prevent my son from falling into the hands of the police were I ever arrested. When both parents of a child were jailed, the child was placed in an institution, subjected to every kind of hardship, and taught hate and contempt for his parents.
The security agent who took my letters always treated me with an appropriate degree of rudeness, but after a while we established an odd relationship that reminded me of the stories from the first world war, about soldiers in opposing trenches who called out to each other just like ordinary people in those moments when the firing stopped, only to pick up their rifles a few minutes later and shoot at one another. I think that security agent found my perseverance amusing. From his comments I concluded, probably wrongly, that he saw Rudolf personally, and eventually I came to regard him as an intermediary, a connecting link between us.
I had been trying for some time to find a way to help Rudolf. I was convinced that there had to be a crack somewhere in the monolith of State Security – it was just a matter of finding it. Then, late one evening an older woman wearing a kerchief appeared at my door and, after making sure we were alone, said, “You don’t know who I am and I won’t tell you that or who has sent me. I have just come to warn you not to try anything. You can only do harm. There is a man who knows your husband well and knows he is innocent. He has inside information about the case and wants to help. But for the time being, nothing can be done. He asked me to tell you this: Your husband’s file is marked with the letter S.”
That was all. The woman left without another word.
The letter S? What did that mean? I racked my brains in vain. The next day, right after work, I dropped everything and ran to see the Eislers. Pavel knew a thousand times more about Rudolf’s activities than I did. Maybe he could figure it out. But he could not.
We pondered it for weeks, guessed and speculated, sifted through all of Rudolf’s actions, acquaintances, and contacts, even the most unlikely possibilities.
Not one of us imagined that the mysterious “S” stood for “Slansky Case.”
Life in Prague, from which I was almost entirely excluded by this time, had acquired a totally negative character. People no longer aspired toward things but away from them. All they wanted was to avoid trouble. They tried not to be seen anywhere, not to talk to anyone, not to attract any attention. Their greatest satisfaction would be that nothing happened, that no one had been fired or arrested or questioned or followed by the secret police. Some fifty thousand people had so far been jailed in our small country. More were disappearing every day.
I still had no idea where Rudolf was being held. In one letter he mentioned that sometimes, at night, he could hear a nightingale sing and, from this, I deduced that he was not being held in Prague. But it took me a long time to find out about the prison in Ruzyn, which deserves to be ranked alongside the most notorious Nazi torture chambers.
Next to my suffocating fear for Rudolf and for the future of my child, I was most troubled by the impossibility of earning a living. No matter how hard or how long I worked, I could not manage to make enough money to cover our basic needs. My landlady developed a habit of coming into our apartment when we were away and carting off anything of value, just in case I would not be able to pay her murderous rent. These periodic raids so enraged me that I began to sell off my possessions myself, rashly, at ridiculous prices. I was sick with worry, and maybe the reason why my machine worked so poorly was that it was rusting inside from all the tears that had rolled into it.
From time to time, my son would ask when his father was coming back home, and I always managed to come up with some convincing answer. I read him the parts of Rudolf’s letters that his father had written especially for him and, whenever he wondered why his father wrote home so infrequently, I would write out a letter from him mysel
f.
Summer came. Ivan, who was pale, skinny, and tense despite all my efforts, badly needed some country air. Rudolf had one relative who had survived the war, his cousin Marie, who lived in Bratislava. Her husband had been thrown out of work because of his connection with Rudolf and was now supporting five people on a tiny income. I knew how difficult their life was and did not want to ask them for help, but one day I received an unexpected letter from Marie herself saying that she was taking her children to the country to visit their grandmother and that she would like to take my son along with them. This was a stroke of luck I had not dared dream of. I promised to send along as much money as I could and sent Ivan off to fresh air.
As soon as my son left, I redoubled my efforts to find additional work, but it was becoming increasingly hard to find. By now I had become more dangerous than the plague and fear – the fear of people who lived or worked around me – locked me into an ever stricter quarantine.
During this time, I was notified that Rudolf had been expelled from the Party. That was a bad sign; evidently his interrogation had taken a turn for the worse. Because his ouster was announced in the local Party organization, my own situation worsened as well. Until then, the people on our street had simply ignored or avoided me; now a wave of hatred began to swell. Women particularly would stop and stare at me with venom, whispering among themselves as I walked by. Sometimes a comrade concierge would spit onto the sidewalk after I passed her door, loudly, making sure I noticed. I felt thankful that my son was away in the country. While he was gone, moreover, I saved money by living on bread and milk which I bought at stores I passed on my way home from work. Entering stores in my own neighborhood had become a severe test in self-control.
Prague was sweltering with midsummer heat and my isolation was complete. My friends had left for their vacations, my child and Marenka were both away, and my one-sided nocturnal conversations with Rudolf had become stifled by fatigue and despair.
One afternoon, the doorbell that had been silent for weeks suddenly rang. Two people stood at the door, a man and a woman. They introduced themselves as inspectors from the local National Committee who had come to secure the property of Dr. Rudolf Margolius. Stunned, I let them in. Confiscation of property? Surely that was not done until after the conviction! Had Rudolf been tried already without my knowing about it? What was the verdict? What had they done with him? Where was he? Then the room went dark, the red carpet swung up toward me and hit me on the head.
I came to in a puddle of cold water with two grotesquely distorted faces floating above me. My two visitors helped me into the bedroom, brought towels from the bathroom, covered me up with my bathrobe, and then retired to the living room for a conference. I kept trying to call out to them, to speak, but somehow I could not get out a word. My teeth were chattering, it seemed, as loudly as my machine at work. The two faces returned to bend over me. I managed to grab the woman’s hand and to pull her closer.
“What happened to him?” I whispered.
She stared down at me, uncomprehending for a minute. Then she understood.
“But nothing!” she said cheerfully. “What an idea! No reason to get so scared, silly!”
They explained to me that Rudolf had not yet been tried, that they had only come to take inventory, to make sure that nothing would disappear from the apartment. That way, in the event that my husband was convicted and the sentence entailed confiscation of his property, the State would sustain no loss. It was simply a routine preliminary measure, they assured me. They knew nothing about my husband’s case. Then they took pains to impress upon me what an important and responsible act they were about to perform. My presence and full attention were required so that I would not be able to complain, later on, that anything was out of order. Since my state of mind clearly prevented any such attention at the moment, they would only take a rough inventory now and return the following morning. They would give me an official note to excuse me from work the following day.
I stayed in bed after they left, staring up at the ceiling. Toward evening, the bell rang again and, of course, in marched Mrs. Machova. She sized up the situation right away.
“Damned robbers!” she said. “They know how hard up for money you are and they’re afraid you’ll sell some of the furniture. Then there’d be nothing left for them to steal. You should have sold all of it long ago.”
That was true. But I had always wanted to preserve something of a home to which Rudolf could return.
Mrs. Machova now went into the closet, pulled out our biggest suitcase, and packed up two rugs, neither one of them large but both quite valuable. They were the same rugs my mother had left with Mrs. Machova ten years earlier, before our deportation to the concentration camps.
“One pack of thieves didn’t get their hands on them and a second pack should?” she grumbled. “I’ll see about that.”
“Don’t do it,” I said. “You can’t carry the suitcase out of the house – the whole street is watching. If someone takes it into his head to denounce you, you’ll end up in jail too.”
“I’m not taking it out,” she said. “I’m going to wait here until the whole house is asleep and then I’ll hide it in the basement. And don’t you tell those louts tomorrow that you have a place in the basement!”
Still grumbling, she moved around the other rugs to make the absence of the two she took less obvious. Then she brought two old tattered mats up from the storeroom, “just in case they counted pieces,” and stuffed into the suitcases a few more things she knew Rudolf and I were fond of: a wooden baroque candlestick, a little terracotta statue, two or three pieces of antique glass.
The next morning, I managed to pull myself together enough to help the comrades in the execution of their official duties. Their harvest was not rich. We had not accumulated any treasures in the six years that had passed since our return from the concentration camps. Under Czechoslovak law, the property of a married couple is held in common and half of it belongs to the wife. But the comrades sealed up everything except my clothes, my son’s crib and his toys, and a portrait of my grandmother. Comrade inspectress, a woman well along in years, embellished her work with obscene comments and jokes directed at her colleague who was older still.
I mentioned that they were lucky: the police, at the time they had arrested Rudolf, had confiscated the keys to our car and to the garage. Otherwise, I said, I would have sold the car long before. I said this deliberately because I knew that agents of State Security had been using our car for their own purposes, driving it all over Prague. As long as the National Committee had decided to confiscate, should they not also confiscate our car? Comrade inspectress’s eyes lit up. She pulled me aside and whispered, “I’ll see to it that your car is released if you’ll sell it to me cheap.”
It was one of my rarest pleasures of the time to give her a crushing glance and to say, very loudly, “But Comrade, that would be dishonest!”
My son came back from the country tanned and healthy. It seemed to me that he had grown up a lot during those few weeks. He was reluctant to go back to nursery school and Mrs. Honzikova, the mother of his best friend in our apartment house, invited him over several times a week to spend the entire day. Her husband, a former bank employee, had been working in a factory for a long time by then.
“What else can they do to us?” she used to laugh. “Compared to all the problems I have trying to feed three kids on my husband’s pay, jail would be a real vacation!”
She was young and pretty and she accepted life with all its trials cheerfully, like a bird in the sky. She was yet another proof to me that nothing limits a person more than what was then called “a clearly-defined world view.” The people who, in my experience, proved most astute and dependable in a crisis were always those who professed the simplest ideology: love of life. Not only did they possess an instinctive ability to protect themselves from danger but they were often willing to help others as a matter of course, without ulterior motives or any heroic postu
ring.
The shop where I worked was located partially underground. The walls were thick and a cold dampness rose from the stone floor summer and winter alike. Early in September, the weather was still warm outside but the girls sitting at their machines were already bundled up in sweaters and shawls. None of them shivered as much as I did and, eventually, my colleagues all chipped in to buy me a pair of warm plaid carpet slippers, the kind worn by old grandmothers in the country. But not even those slippers and a heavy old sweater helped: I was still freezing.
One night after the end of my shift, I was all alone in the shop trying, once again, to catch up on my work, when I felt a flash of blinding, searing pain. I doubled up on my chair, fighting it with clenched teeth and, after a while, the pain eased. But from that time on, some lively little rodent settled inside me, a tiny mouse that gnawed and gnawed, quietly at first, but persistently.
The following Sunday, I stayed in bed but felt no better for it on Monday. There was nothing I could do except wait it out and hope it would clear up by itself. I certainly could not allow myself to get sick. Medical care was free in Czechoslovakia, and I would continue to receive part of my salary even if I were sent to a hospital. But I would not be able to continue chasing after my extra jobs, and those were the ones that made ends meet. I could not afford not to work. Not even for one week.
Under a Cruel Star Page 14