Under a Cruel Star

by Helen Epstein

  “Really? What kind of doctor was he?” asked her listener.

  “Oh, you know, one of those dirty Jews.”

  In late January, Marie brought Ivan back to Prague. She had guessed, correctly, that we needed each other now more than anything else. The children of the comrades in Bratislava had been strictly forbidden to play with the son of a traitor, and the boy had begun to feel lonely. But he looked healthy, spoke Czech with a soft Slovak accent, and seemed to me even more precious than before. He was a little startled when he first saw me but said nothing and went to check up on his toys. It was only later that he came over to me and asked, “Mama, why are you wearing black clothes? They’re ugly. They make you look sad.”

  I sat him down beside me and, very carefully, told him that his father had died.

  He listened and looked frightened, but he did not cry.

  “Where’s he buried?” he asked. “I’d like to plant a flower for him there.”

  I told him that his father had died in a foreign country, far away.

  “When you grow up,” I said, “we’ll go there to see his grave.”

  He went into his room, puttered around for a while, and came back.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” he said, “I’ve already grown up a lot. I’ll take care of you.”

  As soon as I could stand on my feet long enough to cross a few streets, I went to the police precinct. I pulled my citizen’s identity card out of my handbag and asked for a correction of my status. The entry “married” now needed to be changed to “widowed.” The pudgy young policeman looked first at me, then at my card and said, “All right. Show me your husband’s death certificate.”

  The official death certificate was precisely what I wanted.

  “I did not receive one,” I said.

  “Then at least the court verdict.”

  “I didn’t receive that either,” I said. “I learned about the trial and the verdict from the radio and the papers, just like everybody else.”

  “But that’s impossible!” exclaimed the policeman. “You have the right by law to...” By that time one of his superiors had stepped up and nudged him in the side with his elbow. The young policeman stopped in mid-sentence.

  “Go to the National Committee,” said the older man. “Ask them to issue you a death certificate.”

  I went to the National Committee’s local office a few blocks away.

  “Certainly,” replied the clerk there. “May I have the coroner’s report?”

  “I didn’t receive one.”

  “No one can issue you a death certificate without proof of death.”

  “Then what should I do?”

  The clerk squirmed with embarrassment. “You know what you can do? Go see the people over at the Central National Committee.”

  By that time I had learned to distinguish between bureaucrats and human beings at a glance. The man behind the desk at the Central National Committee was a human being. I sat down to explain the situation.

  “I know all about it already,” he said. “A death certificate cannot be issued without a coroner’s report. And no coroner’s reports have been issued for any of the men who were executed.”

  My heart started to pound.

  “Do you think it’s possible that they’re still alive?”

  The man shrugged.

  “Anything’s possible these days. Don’t run around anymore. Save your strength. Here, sign a written request. That’ll give me an excuse to investigate the matter. Call me in a week.”

  Weeks and months went by. The answer to my inquiry was always, “Nothing so far.”

  Why were they refusing to come up with a death certificate? Had the trial been some bizarre comedy? Was Rudolf still alive? Was it possible that they were all being interned somewhere? That when the trial had served its purpose the Party had decided to spare the lives of the innocent after all? Friends advised me not to get my hopes up, but I could not help thinking... who knows... maybe...

  I received the death certificate two years later. It is a unique document.

  Date of death: December 3, 1952

  Date of issue: January 5, 1955

  Occupation of deceased: Deputy Minister

  Cause of death: Suffocation by hanging

  Place of Burial: ___________________

  This last point would be clarified twenty years later.

  I learned then that the bodies had been cremated and the ashes turned over to two members of State Security for disposal. They drove in an official limousine and its driver supposedly made a joke. “This is the first time I’ve packed fourteen people into this car,” he said. “The three of us – and those eleven in the bag.”

  A few miles out of Prague the limousine began to skid on the icy road. The agents got out and scattered the ashes under its wheels.

  January, 1953 marked the beginning of the tug of war for my apartment.

  The Ministry sent over a pleasant young man whose name I have forgotten, and a fat middle-aged spinster by the name of Vokurkova, which means pickle in Czech. Comrade Pickle looked over the apartment without much interest but focused her attention on me. She had apparently decided that all I needed to heal my ailing body was a good dose of her militant Bolshevik vigor and revolutionary spirit. She stood in the middle of my kitchen in all her magnitude and delivered herself of an impassioned speech.

  “The only thing that can keep you alive now is hate,” she declared. “Your husband was a traitor and a rat and you should hate him for it! You must repeat to yourself every day: I hate him; I hate him; I hate him. You’ll see how much strength that will give you. Women always think it’s love that moves mountains, but nothing can beat hatred for giving you strength!”

  I started trembling, and the young man took my arm, leading me out of the room.

  “For heaven’s sake, don’t listen to that old bag,” he said. “She’s just a sour old maid. You were always a thorn in her side, even though she never spoke to you before. Don’t believe a word she says. All of us at the Ministry are convinced your husband was innocent. I know that our section chief Hrubis was interrogated and testified very bravely on his behalf.”

  Before they left, Comrade Pickle informed me that higher authorities had decided to move me out of Prague to a nearby village where I would be assigned “a whole cottage” to myself.

  Mrs. Machova, who was still convalescing from her illness, offered to go out with me to look it over. It was a long trip. When we finally reached our destination in the cold and snow, we discovered that the comrade’s information had been inaccurate – the cottage was anything but “whole.”

  It was a dilapidated hut which had been condemned long before. There was no electricity. The plaster had fallen off the walls, which were damp from floor to ceiling. There was no plumbing. Water would have to be carried up the quarter-mile slope of a steep hill from a neighbor’s well. “If the neighbors allow it,” according to the rustic old man who served as the secretary of the local National Committee.

  There was no possibility of employment in the area. It was clear that under these circumstances my son and I would not have survived more than a few months. There are various ways to commit murder.

  On the train back to Prague, Mrs. Machova came up with a solution.

  “The only way you can lick this,” she said, “is to get the local National Committee to give you a letter stating that the shack is designated for demolition according to the Five-Year Plan. That Plan is sacred. They won’t let anything interfere with it. You write to that lout of a secretary that you want to talk it over with him but that you’re too ill to come back out here and could he please come see you in Prague. We’ll write up the letter ahead of time and buy a bottle of booze. You’ll keep filling up his glass until he signs and then you mail it yourself, right to the Ministry. And don’t fret. There’s nothing crooked about it. It’s all true. And I could see for myself that they didn’t seem too happy about having you in their village anyway!”

 
; That is exactly how it happened. The secretary of the local National Committee came, drank, and signed. I believe that a load fell off his chest when he got rid of me. A few days later, I received a message from the Ministry – they would be assigning me to other quarters. Marenka moved out; the local National Committee assigned her a room elsewhere.

  Then came the Comrade Inspectors from the National Committee in my own neighborhood, who announced that they would return shortly to remove the property they had inventoried for confiscation. They advised me to file a petition for the release of the most basic personal necessities.

  My petition was granted. I was allowed to keep a bed, a table, two chairs, cups, plates, and cutlery for two people, and some pots and pans for the kitchen.

  The removal of our personal property went ahead without a hitch, except for one detail. I had told Ivan that we were going to move to a smaller apartment and that I was selling everything we did not need. He understood, but begged me not to sell the radio which I had bought for the last Christmas that Rudolf and Ivan and I were together. Ivan had fallen in love with that radio and spent hours playing with all the buttons he could push and turn.

  I opened up negotiations with the Comrade Inspectors. I had bought the radio myself, I said, with my own money and I had documents to prove it. I was not protesting the illegal confiscation of my other property, but I wanted to keep my radio. Comrade Inspector deliberated for some time and then said that this was a matter beyond his jurisdiction. He decided to put the case before the highest authority and called the public prosecutor, who gave him the following opinion:

  “Of course she has a legal right to it! But if she has the nerve to press a claim, let her sue us! Just let her try it and she’ll find out a thing or two!”

  When Comrade Inspector repeated this reply from the man who was the guardian of law and order in our country, he blushed to the roots of his hair.

  I noticed at about that time that the doctor at my neighborhood clinic who certified me as disabled every week was becoming more and more nervous. It seemed that he too had received orders not to coddle me but, at the same time, he could not ignore the fact that my condition was still very poor. I knew that as soon as he declared me capable of work the Labor Office would lose no time in finding me. The charge of parasitism was once again hanging over my head, but who would employ me now?

  By chance, I stumbled across a peculiar enterprise. It was located in a small basement littered with discarded cotton wool scraps and various kinds of thread, and run by an elderly man whom I never saw without his winter coat and hat. He passed out tiny hand looms along with armfuls of scraps which the employees took home and wove into ugly, but warm scarves. Most of these people were retired or handicapped and needed to supplement their pensions with a little pocket money. It was impossible to earn more than pocket money this way, even if you worked for twenty-four hours a day, but it was employment. It provided shelter from the Labor Office and the charge of parasitism.

  While I was busy weaving scarves, humanity suffered a horrendous loss. Father Stalin, the man of genius, the leader of all peoples, died. I too did my mourning. I mourned sincerely that this tragic event had not taken place six months earlier, at a time when it might have saved Rudolf.

  Not long after, it was reported in the press that the conviction of a group of Jewish doctors who had recently been sentenced to death in the Soviet Union had been reversed. The report added, laconically, that their confessions had been extracted by illegal means.

  I sat down at once to write a letter to the Central Committee in which I swore that my husband was as innocent as those doctors. I suggested that he had confessed as a result of similar illegal methods of interrogation. Then I made a formal request for a review of his trial. Once again, there was no answer.

  About a month later, obedient as ever, Comrade Klement Gottwald followed Iosif Vissarionovich into eternity. He passed away quietly. It was rumored that the cause of death was an aneurism of the aorta, precipitated by advanced syphilis. The circumstances of his death were quite moving, although, of course, considerably less so than those of Stalin’s. After all, we are a much smaller country.

  We acquired our second workers’ president, Comrade President Antonin Zapotocky. All that changed was that the new president did not drink his beer quietly and in private as Gottwald had done. He liked to mix with the crowds and to play cards noisily and publicly with the soldiers of the palace guard.

  The Party also got a new General Secretary, Antonin Novotny, a man of the future who had won the trust and esteem of the Party primarily by unmasking the Anti-State Conspiracy of Rudolf Slansky and his associates. That had not been an easy job, he would later complain to his friends. “Gottwald just refused to believe me. You have no idea how hard it was to convince him these people were traitors.”

  There were some changes in my life too.

  The Ministry of Foreign Trade finally succeeded in finding me a place to live. They must have scoured the city, because in all of Prague there could have been at best a handful of such hovels. It was a single room with an ancient brick oven in one corner. The floorboards were broken and the window frames and door so rotted out that whenever the wind blew, anything light would start to fly around the room, even with the windows closed. The house was at least three hundred years old. Our only modern conveniences were a bare electric bulb in the room, and a dripping cold water faucet and an indescribable toilet in the hall that were shared by several families on the floor. No other hygienic facility had penetrated the building.

  I put a crate filled with coal in one corner of the room and a large box filled with potatoes and other food in another. I stretched ropes across the ceiling to serve as clothes lines for the laundry which I washed in what had been the baby bassinet. That bassinet also served as our bathtub.

  Pavel Kovaly appeared once again with a tiny cannon stove he had managed to scrounge up somewhere, together with several lengths of pipe. He fitted these ingeniously across the room so that every bit of heat could be captured. Unfortunately, the stove only gave off heat when it was full of glowing coals. As soon as the fire died down, the room would become an icebox. Ivan and I always raced up and down the incredibly dirty staircase with our eyes half closed so that we would not see the cockroaches, almost as large as mice, that were crawling up the walls.

  Before we could move in, I had to see the landlord to sign a lease. He was a very old sick man in a wheelchair, who scrutinized my application through his spectacles for a long time before he looked up.

  “Your name is Margolius,” he said finally. “You wouldn’t happen to be related to the one that was hanged, would you?”

  Silently I thought, Forgive me Rudolf, please forgive me, but I cannot take any more...

  “No,” I said.

  “Well you’re lucky,” said the landlord and nodded his white head.

  My son kept his word. He helped me with everything. Because I continued to be ill on and off for another year, he did the housework when I had to stay in bed. Often, I would hear the noise of children playing downstairs in the street while he was washing the dishes or scrubbing the floor. At the age of six, he was more mature and responsible than many an adult. He rarely asked for anything. On the contrary, he would always insist that he was fine and needed nothing. I remember only one evening when he said wistfully, “All the children in school bring such beautiful red apples for lunch...” But that was precisely at a time when even a few of those apples were an impossible dream.

  Today Ivan lives in London. He is a successful architect and has written an interesting book on art. The buildings he designs have great strength and beauty, and a quiet, serene dignity. He, his wife, and his two children are citizens of Great Britain, the world’s oldest democracy.

  In the spring of 1953, the long-feared currency reform was finally enacted. The currency was devalued at the rate of fifty to one, reducing the tiny remnant of my savings to almost nothing. At that point, I panicked. If
I should not be able to hold onto my job, miserable though it was, we would starve to death.

  Then I had an idea. I would volunteer for an agricultural brigade on one of the state-run farms which recruited volunteers for the summer. That would earn me points at work, and my son would be out in the fresh air. I would manage the work somehow. My former neighbor, Mrs. Honzikova, offered me a room at her mother’s house in a village where there was a large state farm, and I went to see the manager of the scarf enterprise.

  His face lit up when I told him my plans.

  “I’ll report this higher up right away,” he said. “Since all the rest of our workers are either old geezers or invalids, you’ll be our only volunteer, the pride of the establishment. You’ll be all set now. You won’t have to worry about holding onto your job next year.”