Under a Cruel Star

by Helen Epstein

  Then came the unfortunate trade agreement with England, for which he had received the congratulations of Gottwald himself. This had now been transformed into the most treacherous act of his career, an act of sabotage which had dealt a near-fatal blow to the Czechoslovak economy.

  How could they have forced him to such testimony, my Rudolf who had never, in all the years I had known him, ever lied about anything? How could they have made him vilify his parents, who had been murdered in Auschwitz? What had he suffered before he broke down? How had they crushed him? At one point, I heard Rudolf’s voice say that he had been trained in espionage in London during the war when, of course, he had spent the entire war as a prisoner in German concentration camps. This item was dutifully reported in the Party newspaper the following day, but later edited out of a book in which the transcript of the trial was published.

  Toward the end of the broadcast, I could no longer take it in. The nurse wheeled me back into my ward without a word.

  The next morning, Dr. Hulek had me brought into his office. He looked at me unhappily. “Please forgive me,” he said. “But I’ve received an order to discharge you immediately. It’s a terrible thing to do. You still are in serious need of hospital care. But I don’t have the power to keep you here. I have to obey orders.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be better off at home. But could you send me in an ambulance?”

  “I’m so sorry. Unfortunately...”

  Later I learned what had happened. The Party had ordered general meetings of employees at all institutions and enterprises, including the hospitals, where a resolution had been read demanding the death penalty for all those accused in what came to be known as the Slansky Trial. At the hospital where I was a patient, the vote was taken by a show of hands, and Dr. Hulek alone did not raise his hand in favor of the resolution.

  That did not escape the attention of the comrades. Among the most vehement was Dr. Wicklicka, the physician who had shown me such concern until she discovered my identity. She had attacked Dr. Hulek in public, accusing him of keeping me in the hospital to shield me from the rightful wrath of the people, thereby helping an enemy of the Party and of the working class. This was such a dangerous accusation that even the chief surgeon became frightened. Poor Dr. Hulek, a mere staff physician and the father of three children, had no choice but to act on their orders.

  I went back to my ward and slowly started packing. Within a few minutes I had fallen back onto my bed, soaked with sweat. How on earth would I get home? They had brought me to the hospital in an ambulance, dressed in a robe, covered with a blanket. I had no dress, no stockings, no shoes, not even a coat. Outside it was winter. My usual salvation, Mrs. Machova, was lying in another hospital, herself seriously ill. This time I would not have dared to call her anyhow. She had a husband and a child. Finally I remembered the former secretary of my first publisher, an elderly single woman who had always been kind to me. She was now retired and had no family to protect. This was someone I would probably not hurt. I called to feel her out. She agreed to pick me up in a taxi and to bring along an old coat and a pair of shoes.

  The trip home sapped all my remaining energy. In order to manage the few steps from the front door to the elevator, I had to crawl on all fours. But when I finally lay down in my own bed, I felt relieved. I no longer had to pretend. I no longer had to control my anxiety. At last I was alone. I could prepare for whatever was coming.

  The trial of the fourteen men took only one week. Now it was over and everyone waited for the verdict. On November 27, I got up in the morning, put on Rudolf’s robe, and shuffled into the abandoned nursery. I lay down on Ivan’s bed and switched on the radio. By that time I had become totally oblivious to the things around me, to myself, even to the pain that had returned in full force. And then a voice spurted out of the radio set, flooding the room from floor to ceiling until it forced out the last glimmer of light, the last bubble of air.

  “In the trial of the Anti-State Conspiracy... Rudolf Slansky, death penalty... Vlado Clementis, death penalty... Ludvik Frejka, death penalty... death penalty... death penalty... Rudolf Margolius, death penalty.”

  I do not know how long I lay there, motionless, without a thought, without pain, in total emptiness.

  At the same moment Marie was sitting by her radio set in Bratislava, in the kitchen, with her mother. Her children, Ivan, and a few friends from the neighborhood were playing noisily at the other end of the apartment. A different voice came from her radio set, but the words were the same. Marie’s old, ailing mother cried out. None of the other children noticed. Only Rudolf’s son came to the door of the kitchen and asked, anxiously, “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” said Marie. “Grandmother wasn’t feeling well. But she’s better now. Go back and play.”

  Ivan looked at her seriously and said, “I’m so glad. I got scared. I thought someone had died.”

  The doorbell rang and rang. I lay on Ivan’s bed without moving. I could hear the sound quite clearly but I did not understand what it meant. It was as though my brain did not know what to do with the information that my senses registered. It was a long time before I slipped down from the bed and crawled, inch by inch, to the door. I reached up for the doorknob.

  Pavel Eisler stood in the doorway. He bent down, picked me up, and carried me into the bedroom. Then the bell rang again. This time it was the composer Jan Hanus, who was Rudolf’s closest friend. It had always seemed to me that there was a kinship between the two men that could not be explained by friendship alone. They were like two houses built in different styles but of the same stone. Jan sat down at the foot of the bed and spoke to me quietly. I could not take in the words, only the soothing melody of his voice and the expression of his kind, beautiful face.

  Rudolf Margolius (right) and Jan Hanus,

  during the mobilization of the Czechoslovak Army in 1938.

  The telephone on the night table rang. It was the lawyer.

  “Mr. Bartos,” I gasped. “How is it possible –”

  “But Mrs. Margolius, what did you expect? After all, your husband confessed.”

  Rudolf... Rudolf...

  I hardly remember anything of the week that followed the sentencing. In my bedroom it was always night. Only now and then a face came moving toward me out of the darkness, a few words. Dr. Padovcova’s hand holding a syringe that erased everything for a few hours... the voices of two comrades from the shop where I worked, “You are fired effective immediately...” the shocked face of Karlicek, our farmer friend, and his voice, “That woman is on her last legs. What will happen to the child?”... and once, unexpectedly, a man in an Army uniform, Pavel Kovaly, who had gone AWOL in order to come see me.

  On the evening of December 2, two men appeared in my bedroom. I recognized one of them as the agent who used to take my letters to Rudolf. He said, “You have a last opportunity to speak with your husband, but if you are too ill to come with us, stay in bed. We’ll just leave.”

  I began to scream. I begged them not to leave, to wait for me, to give me a minute; then I would be ready to go. They looked at each other, then one of them said, “All right,” and they went out to sit in the next room.

  I tried to hurry up but things slipped out of my hands as though I had lost the ability to coordinate my movements. When, finally, I was dressed, I was trembling so hard that I fell back down on my bed. The agents came back into my bedroom, held me up by my elbows and led me, step by step, to the car waiting in front of the house.

  I looked out the window and saw Prague covered with snow, the streets deserted. It was a long ride. We stopped at a side entrance of the courthouse in Pankrac where the two men helped me out of the car and led me down a long corridor to a tiny cubicle. There they ordered me to wait. Voices filtered through the thin gray wall. In the next room, probably a cubicle just like mine, a woman was talking excitedly, resentfully, as if arguing with someone. “I don’t want to talk to him. He’s a traitor; he deceived all of
us. Even me. I have nothing to say to him!”

  “Mrs. Frejka,” a man’s voice said, probably the voice of the security agent, “Mrs. Frejka, be human. That man is going to die tomorrow...”

  Just then the door flew open and the two agents again pulled me up by my arms and led me into a larger room, empty, and divided in half by a double barrier of wire mesh. Then, behind that fence, two policemen appeared with Rudolf between them.

  I threw myself onto the wire mesh and hooked my fingers through the loops. I saw Rudolf’s face crisscrossed by the wire pattern as though by a tissue of scars. But then, in just moments, the black web began to dissolve. I looked straight into his eyes and saw no despair, no fear, only a strange, distant calm. It was the calm a man finds only at the very bottom of suffering.

  He looked at me for a long time before he spoke. Then he said, “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come!”

  I could not utter a word. Are you already so far away from me Rudolf that you could imagine that I would not come?

  He kept looking at me silently. I thought: What must I look like to him? Skin and bones, worn out by illness and pain.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he said.

  “Tell me about Ivan,” he asked, and I started to talk. I told him everything I could think of about our handsome, cheerful little son who sang all day long.

  After a while we were both smiling.

  “Today I had a long conversation with Minister of State Security Bacilek,” Rudolf said. “He promised he’d take care of you and the child, that he’d get you a good job, that he’d help... And now listen, this is important: I want you to have the boy’s name changed. He must not be made to suffer on my account. Don’t argue with me. Just do it. It’s my last wish.”

  We were silent again. Then he said, “Come, let’s have a cigarette together.”

  A security agent leaped to my side with a cigarette and a lighter.

  “You know,” said Rudolf, “I’ve been sharing a cell with a man who loves music as much as I do. We’ve been trying to remember together and now we can whistle the entire Dvořak cello concerto.”

  We smoked for a while without saying anything, looking at each other.

  “Don’t question the trial. Believe it!” Rudolf said suddenly. “Please. Think of Ivan, not of me.”

  “Don’t say anything. I understand it all. Don’t worry about me or the boy. I’ll raise him well, I promise you. I’ll bring him up to be a good man.”

  “And forget me, Heda. Find him a new father. Don’t stay alone.”

  “I know I have to take care of the child but, believe me, I’d rather go with you... It would be easier than living... I’m with you anyway. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Have you noticed that all the important events of my life have taken place either on the third or thirteenth of the month?” asked Rudolf. “Tomorrow is the third and I’m three times thirteen years old.”

  “Three times thirteen hard years,” I said. “But you had at least one good thing: a woman who always loved you and believed in you.”

  I paused, then turned to the agent who was standing beside me and said, “I’ve brought my husband photographs of our child. Can you give them to him?”

  “That’s prohibited.”

  “Won’t you allow us even to shake hands?”

  “That’s prohibited.”

  I stretched a finger through the wire barrier as far as I could, trying to touch Rudolf’s hand, but could not reach it. Rudolf smiled.

  We spoke a while longer, with a growing awareness of each passing minute. One of the uniformed policemen on Rudolf’s side looked at his watch. Rudolf nodded.

  “I just wanted to tell you one more thing,” he said hurriedly. “I read a good book while I was here. It was called Men of Clear Conscience.”

  I do not know whether he said anything after that. All I could understand was that these were our last moments, the very last.

  Rudolf backed away toward the door and, just as he stepped through it, the expression in his eyes changed suddenly, and what appeared in them for that brief moment I will carry within me as long as I live.

  When the door closed, my knees gave way. I hung by my fingers from the wire mesh and one of the agents bent over to catch me before I fell. But he had barely touched me when something inside me rebelled. I broke away from him and marched, ramrod straight, through all those corridors and out to the waiting car. When we arrived at my house, I got out of the car myself and walked up to our apartment alone.

  Then came the night. All that night long, a huge hammer kept moving before my eyes, hammering a splash of blood to a stone wall with regular strokes, pounding down, pounding down...

  Before dawn, I fell asleep for a few minutes just at the time, I later learned, that Rudolf was dying without a single word.

  More than thirty years have now passed and that night is still not over. It remains to this day as a screen onto which my present life is projected. I measure all my happiness and all my misfortunes against it, in the way that the height of mountains and the depth of valleys are measured against the level of the sea.

  I have asked myself more than once: What if Rudolf had died of some protracted illness? What if he had been suffering for months on end from intolerable physical pain with both of us knowing, as we knew then, that he had to die? Would it have been any easier? I think so. We all can bear the pain that comes from being flesh and blood, transients, doomed to die. But it is impossible to be reconciled to suffering that man inflicts in cold blood on his fellow man.

  After Rudolf’s death, I spent several weeks lying in my bed as though it were a coffin. The streets of Prague were seething with rage. Rumor had it that I had been kidnapped together with my child and taken abroad, that I was in jail, that I had committed suicide. The truth was that there was not much life left in me. Once a doctor from the local clinic came to have a look at me, examined me as though he were impatient to get away, and said, “This is a difficult thing. You aren’t resisting the illness. You don’t really want to live.”

  That was not true. I knew I had to live. I had to take care of my son. But I had no strength left, and every day I felt worse. Then one night my landlady, regretting her former cruelty perhaps, showed up in my bedroom with a Dr. Urbanek, a physician whom I had never met before. He gave me a thorough examination and then said, “I’m going to prescribe a rather risky treatment but it’s the only thing that might work. If it doesn’t help, you’ll have to go back to the hospital. Otherwise...“

  He wrote out a few prescriptions and then sneaked out as furtively as he had come. I found out later that he had been transferred to a position somewhere far out in the country, I hope not as a punishment for having saved my life. Marenka had to walk all over Prague for days before she had all the prescriptions filled, but from the time I began to take the medication, my illness was arrested and began its retreat, although it would be a year before I would be well again.

  Sometime during this period I received the news that I had been expelled from the Party.

  A few weeks later, I was able to walk again. I decided that I would go outside dressed only in mourning. I could not afford to buy anything new, but I found an old black coat in the closet and a pair of black shoes. Marenka and I dyed everything else. Dozens of spiteful stares followed me as I shuffled along the sidewalk, stopping every now and then to lean against a wall and catch my breath. I knew that I might be assaulted, that a stone might come hurtling toward me, because that had already happened to some of the widows and children of the executed. But, much to my surprise, I began to sense for the first time that my street had split into two camps.

  Much later, a woman told me, “You know, people aren’t all that mean. It’s just that they don’t think. To gang up on a public enemy is a deep-rooted custom of the country, almost a national tradition. But people have a completely different reaction to a widow in mourning, especially if she looks as wretched as you did then. And once they start op
ening their minds, there’s no stopping the process. It began to dawn on some people that had you not been absolutely sure of your husband’s innocence, you wouldn’t have had the guts to challenge the Party by wearing mourning for him.”

  No one dared socialize with me, to be sure, but I could observe the reactions of the people at our local clinic where the doctors reluctantly agreed to give me some attention and an occasional prescription.

  One of the saddest phenomena of that time was the reemergence of anti-Semitism which usually remains buried deep below the surface in Bohemia and erupts only in response to a signal from above. I remember a conversation I overheard at the clinic. Two old women were talking about their respective illnesses, as is usual in the waiting rooms of doctors.

  “I tell you, I was so sick,” said one of them, “and they sent me from one doctor to another and none of them helped me a bit until that one. He fixed me up in no time. He took such good care of me that if it hadn’t been for him I’d be six feet under by now!”