Under a Cruel Star

by Helen Epstein

  October came and the weather turned colder. I could barely drag myself to work. By the middle of the month, the shop erupted in anger over our working conditions, and we decided to write a piece about our grievances in the company newsletter. I was appointed to write the article. Two days after it appeared, the company manager called me into his office and proposed that I work for the newsletter on a regular basis, for a few days each month.

  “We can’t transfer you directly into the editorial office – surely you understand why,” he said. “And we can’t give you a raise. But at least you’ll get away from the machine now and then and sit in a clean, warm office.”

  That was the first lucky break I had had in months but, by that time, I could think of nothing but how to control the constant pain. That day I had yet another surprise. As soon as I got home the telephone rang. It was my lawyer.

  “A miracle has taken place,” he said. “It defies all laws of nature and I can’t believe it myself but it’s true. I got back your savings bank passbooks. You can pick them up right away if you want.”

  I never found out how this miracle came to pass. Perhaps my lawyer actually did have connections and had been able to pull some strings; perhaps my remark to the inspectors about our stolen automobile had set the National Committee against State Security and someone had gotten scared. I did not know and I was not overly interested in finding out. I am always ready to believe in miracles, and this one was neither the first nor would it be the last in my life. I was completely beside myself with pain. All I understood was that my financial problems had been staved off and that I could now afford medical attention.

  I knew I had to get myself into a hospital, and that was no simple matter. Medicine had become as thoroughly bureaucratized in Czechoslovakia as everything else. According to official procedure, the only doctor I could consult was our company doctor who, in turn, could refer me to a medical center or to a hospital for further treatment. But hospitals were overcrowded, and as long as one was not on the verge of dying, no doctor would write out a referral. For some time, a war had been raging between the hospitals on one side and the outpatient clinics and company doctors on the other: the overworked, underpaid clinic doctors had been sending to hospital both patients who could be cured at home as well as patients who, often because of unnecessary delays, were beyond help.

  Our company physician was an old woman who was herself so seriously ill and preoccupied with her own pain that she could barely bring herself to confront the ailments of others. Any patient who went to see her had to state clearly and succinctly the nature of his illness and what medication he required; she then would obligingly prescribe whatever he suggested. But anyone unable to diagnose his problem and decide upon an appropriate treatment himself was in trouble.

  I decided that the situation called for a radical approach. While still in the doorway of her office, I announced that I had appendicitis, threw off my clothes without being asked, and stretched out on her examining table. When the doctor touched her cold fingertips to what was probably the only part of my body that did not hurt, I howled like a wounded animal. The poor old lady was alarmed but not alarmed enough to send me to a hospital. Instead she referred me to the surgical outpatient clinic nearest to my home where I fell into the hands of another pride of medical science, a young blonde with an oversized bun and calculating eyes.

  She palpated my stomach and took my temperature without once interrupting her conversation with a nurse about some personal disagreement she had had with the director of the clinic. She told me that I had a fever of about 102 and agreed that I was probably experiencing an attack of appendicitis. But before she could send me to a hospital, I would have to go home, eat nothing and stay in bed for a day, and then return the next morning.

  The next morning my temperature was 104 and the pain was becoming unbearable. I called the doctor, told her that I felt much worse, and that I could not make it to the clinic on my own. After a moment of deliberation, she said she was turning my case over to the local General Practice Clinic and that someone from there would come see me at home. She had obviously decided that if anyone had to get involved in a struggle over hospital admission, it would not be she.

  Later that afternoon, an older woman doctor arrived, sat as far away from my bed as was possible without leaving the room and said there was no need to examine me. I had the flu; it was an intestinal flu that was spreading all over Prague.

  “I’ll give you a prescription for some pills,” she said, “and you get yourself a bottle of brandy. Mix half a cup of brandy with half a cup of hot tea and drink one full cup three times a day.”

  Although the fever had begun to affect my thinking, I felt that these instructions were peculiar. I had been in pain for six weeks already, I objected. How could it be the flu?

  “Flu is a lingering illness,” she said, impatiently. “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re not a special case.”

  So Marenka went out to buy a bottle of brandy and to get the prescription filled. I started the cure.

  I woke up with a start in the middle of the night. The whole room seemed to be swimming in a fluorescent blue fog. I lifted my arms and saw tiny drops of sweat form on my pores, grow larger, and then glide down my skin. My head was spinning. I thought: I have to get to the bathroom and throw some cold water on my face or else I will faint. That was my last clear thought.

  Marenka found me the next morning at the other end of the apartment, sprawled out on the floor, stiff with cold. There was a large bump on my forehead where I had hit the radiator while falling.

  This was the last straw for Marenka. She ran to the clinic and screamed to anyone who would listen that she was afraid to stay alone with me in the apartment, that I was liable to die at any moment and then what would she do? The doctor in charge remarked that these pampered ladies were always a pain in the neck but Marenka persisted.

  “All right,” the doctor said wearily. “I’ll refer her to the hospital but you’ll see – they’ll send her packing soon enough.”

  I managed to put a call through to Bratislava and Marie offered to come to Prague and pick up my son the next day. Mrs. Honzikova, who had been helping us take care of Ivan from the beginning of my illness, took him into her apartment and promised to look after him until Marie arrived. I did not want my son to see me being carried out of our home on a stretcher.

  Two hospital orderlies arrived that afternoon. They stared at me in disbelief and one of them said, “For God’s sake, couldn’t you have sent for us sooner?”

  By that time, I was having trouble breathing. When Dr. Hulek at the Bulovka Hospital finally examined me, I could only answer his questions in monosyllabic whispers. He gave me a thorough physical examination and, after he had finished writing up my medical chart, the list of my ailments filled a long column which began with nephritis and ended with peritonitis. The only thing that seemed to be missing was appendicitis.

  “Are you sure the doctor prescribed alcohol?” Dr. Hulek asked, several times. “The worst of it is you’re so terribly run down. What on earth have you been doing with yourself? Have you ever seen the people who came back from the concentration camps?”

  I nodded.

  “Right now you’re no better off,” he said. “I’m afraid to stick a needle into you. I can’t even begin to treat you until you’re stronger. Give the nurse your phone number so she can call your husband or maybe your parents. She’ll tell them what kind of food to bring. You won’t gain much weight on what they give you here.”

  There was no way around it. I gathered up whatever strength I had left and explained to him, in halting whispers, why I was so terribly run down.

  Dr. Hulek took exemplary care of me. But during the first few weeks I got no better, and I was tormented by worries about my child who now had no one left to support him. Father in jail, mother in hospital, no grandparents. What would happen to him if I died? Who would take care of him?

  I was one of the most crit
ical cases in the ward, and all the doctors took particular care to give me the attention I needed, especially a Dr. Wicklicka who, whenever she was on duty, prescribed special medicines to make me stronger and never failed to make some sarcastic remark about Dr. Hulek’s medical prowess.

  About the middle of November, still hospitalized, I received another letter from Rudolf. It was the most optimistic of all the letters he had written and the first in which he mentioned the future: “It will still be some time before I return home but we will be together again...” Apparently his interrogation had ended and perhaps it had not gone as badly as I had imagined. I answered his letter with my customary tone of good cheer. I did not let him know I was ill but did write that our son was visiting his cousins in Bratislava and, for that reason, I could not enclose his monthly drawing.

  Marie wrote from Bratislava: “Don’t worry about Ivanek. He looks well and seems happy. He’s learned several new songs here and he sings all the time.”

  A few days later, just as I was beginning to think I was getting better, that flash of pain struck once again, this time settling in my hip and shooting out in all directions like a burning sparkler. I could not lift my arm to reach the nurses’ buzzer or even muster enough energy to cry out. It took a few minutes before the girl in the bed next to mine looked up from her book and saw me. She sounded the alarm, my bed was soon surrounded by white coats, and a syringe jabbed into my arm.

  When I opened my eyes a few hours later, I thought I was still sleeping because bending over me was the blurred face of the inspector from the National Committee, the same one that had bent over me while I was regaining consciousness on the floor of my apartment. But I was not dreaming. Two men were sitting beside my bed and one of them, the inspector from the National Committee, was doggedly repeating my name.

  I nodded to him to let him know I was awake and could hear him. He said that they had been trying to call the apartment and had been unable to reach anyone there. They had been ordered to bring Rudolf some shirts, a sweater, and a suit, and asked for the keys to my home. I motioned with my head to a drawer in the nightstand where I kept my handbag. The inspector pulled it out and found a bunch of keys. Through the haze of morphine I managed to ask, stupidly, “Is he coming home?”

  The inspector shook his head mutely and stood there for a few minutes, staring down at me. I closed my eyes again.

  I woke up with a start in the dead of night. I sat up and said out loud into the silent ward: “Trial!”

  Of course! Why would they send for a suit and shirts if they were planning to send him home? A suit and shirt could mean only one thing: he was going on trial.

  The night nurse came into the room with a flashlight.

  “Come now,” she asked. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  On November 20, 1952, the old lame woman who brought in the newspapers every morning came by as usual. The headlines on the front page swam before my eyes and an odd silence settled over the ward. THE TRIAL FOR THE ANTI-STATE CONSPIRACY OF RUDOLF SLANSKY. For God’s sake, what conspiracy? I thought. Those poor people... At least my Rudolf could not be involved in this, thank God! He had never had anything to do with Slansky.

  Then I skimmed down to the list of the accused. There were fourteen names. Eleven of them were followed by the note “of Jewish origin.” Then came the words “sabotage,” “espionage,” “treason,” like salvoes at dawn.

  One of the names on the list was Rudolf Margolius. Rudolf Margolius, of Jewish origin.

  With unusual clarity I heard the woman in the bed beside me whispering to her neighbor, “You have to read this – it’s Der Stuermer all over again!” and then the voice of the lame news vendor in the corridor, “You have to read this to see how those swine sold us out to the imperialists, the bastards! They should all be hung! In public!”

  Dr. Hulek appeared in the doorway, syringe in hand.

  “Lie still. Don’t think.”

  I do not know what kind of shot he gave me, but it did not succeed in putting me to sleep. After a while I stumbled out to the washroom and stood there throwing up until a nurse found me and took me back to bed. Up until that day, I think, none of the women in the ward knew who I was. Now it must have become clear. If only they would not start talking about it! If only I could be alone!

  Day after day, the newspapers carried detailed testimony from the accused, who not only made no attempt to defend themselves, confessing to all crimes as charged, but even kept introducing new accusations against themselves, heaping one on top of another.

  Is this all or is there more you did to betray your country? Did you sell out your people to the enemy in other ways?

  There is more. In my limitless hatred for the popular democratic order, I also committed the crime of...

  Aside from the official record of the courtroom proceedings, there was other reading matter, often more shocking than the trial itself. There was the letter-to-the-editor from Lisa London, the wife of one of the three men tried who would be sentenced to life imprisonment. She wrote about a man with whom she had lived for sixteen years, with whom she had raised children and fought against the Nazis in the French Resistance, and the authenticity of her sorrow and despair was clear, “I lived with a traitor...”

  Another letter-to-the-editor came from a child, from Ludvik Frejka’s sixteen-year-old son Thomas: “I demand that my father receive the highest penalty, the death sentence... and it is my wish that this letter be read to him.”

  I cannot be sure now whether those were his exact words, but their meaning is exact. It is hard to say whose fate was more tragic, that of the father who went to his death accompanied by those words or that of the son who would have to go through life with the memory of having written them.

  Every day, Rude Pravo, the Party newspaper, also carried commentaries on the trials from the pens of various intellectuals. Some were incompetent hacks such as Ivan Skala, a so-called poet whose sole claim to immortality lies in the vulgarity of his outbursts against the accused, and whose article about Rudolf ended with the line, “To a dog, a dog’s death!” But even noted, respected writers such as Karel Konrad, Ivan Obracht, and Jarmila Glazerova volunteered their poisonous opinions.

  The women on my ward kept silent. At night I would sneak out of bed and huddle on a bench in the corridor by myself. Eventually the nurses got used to it and stopped trying to get me to go back to bed. Occasionally one of them would drape a blanket over my shoulders. I could feel the quiet hospital simmering with hatred. What could it be like, how much worse would it be, outside?

  Then one night I heard a nurse speaking behind a partially closed door.

  “Back home in my village,” she was saying, “when a thief stole a goose, he denied he had done it to the end – even if he had been caught red-handed. These poor people are standing up confessing to all kinds of horrible crimes and accusing themselves of things nobody’s even asked them about! Who knows what they did to them? The whole thing stinks to high heaven!”

  On the fifth day of the trial, Rudolf was slated to testify. I could not stand the tension in the hospital anymore. When Dr. Hulek made his rounds that morning, I begged him to send me home. He would not hear of it.

  “I know how you feel,” he said. “But I can’t in good conscience do it. You’re still listed in critical condition. It’s absolutely out of the question to discharge you.”

  The trial in its entirety was being broadcast over the radio. I waited in the corridor until the nurse whom I had overheard talking the night before came in and pleaded with her to let me listen in her private room. Reluctantly, she agreed. That evening, she picked me up in a wheelchair and took me there.

  Up until that evening, I had managed to hold on to a glimmer of hope. Rudolf was the only man on trial who was not a veteran Communist; he had joined the Party only after the war. He had never been part of the group around Slansky; he had never held a high position in the Party. There were many other ways in which he did not fit into the gr
oup of the accused.

  And then, after almost a year, I heard his voice.

  As soon as he began to speak, I knew things were very bad. He spoke in such an odd, tense, monotonous voice that, at first, I thought he had been drugged. Then I realized that he was simply reciting something he had memorized. A few times he stopped short, as though he were trying to remember his lines, and then he started up again, like a robot.

  The things he said! First about his parents, then about himself, finally about his work. Lie after lie. He had joined the Party only in order to betray it. He had devoted his energies to nothing but espionage and sabotage. He had enriched himself by taking bribes and, as a mercenary in the employ of the imperialists, he had plotted far-reaching conspiracies against the Republic and its people.