Under a Cruel Star

by Helen Epstein

  The first six weeks, as we turned the hay and weeded the carrots, everything went well. But then came harvesting and, along with it, the back-breaking work that once again set off a bout of illness. There was no alternative but to return to Prague. A young and sympathetic physician at the clinic examined me and then burst out, “Tell me what doctor certified you fit for field work! I’ll file a complaint against him right away!”

  It took some doing to calm her down. Afterward, I went to the basement workshop to announce my return but this time my boss did not hand me the usual bundle of scraps. He shuffled his feet, cleared his throat, and averted his eyes. Finally he said, “Two weeks ago, I received an order to fire you. I should have written, but I kept postponing it. I felt sorry for you...”

  As soon as I felt better, I started job hunting again, even though I knew it was useless. Some of the personnel directors, who would not have dreamed of hiring me for anything, had a good time playing games at my expense. They sat me down across from their desks, shone a strong light in my face, and posed a series of intricate questions. In my fierce attempt to look innocent, I must have looked as though I had committed a mass murder. But then how does an innocent person actually look?

  My job hunt lasted one week. When the personnel director of a dental clinic where I had applied for a job as a cleaning woman said to me, “What can you be thinking of, Comrade? You can’t work here! We have very high political standards!” I decided, enough! I’m not putting up with any more of this. This is the end.

  My friends helped me out as much as they could. One would bring over a short translation; another some proof-reading or an order for an illustration. Pavel Kovaly who had completed his military service and was back at the publishing house where I used to work had the nerve to tell the editor-in-chief that he had learned how to draw in the army. From time to time he would bring me an order for a book jacket and then sign the design himself.

  But all of this brought in pitifully little money, and I began to wonder whether I was really as indispensable to my son as I had thought. As long as I was alive, he was condemned to unending deprivation and misery. If I died, Marie or Mrs. Machova would certainly take him in, and then he would grow up in a tolerable environment, in a decent apartment, within a family. I mulled this possibility over and over, until one day when I returned home later than usual from yet another search for work, and Ivan came running to me, terrified.

  “Where were you so long Mama? I was afraid something had happened to you!”

  I thought that this was a good opportunity to feel him out. First I calmed him down and promised that nothing would happen to me, that I was very careful. Then I added, “But even if something should ever happen to me, you’d go live with Aunt Marie and maybe you’d have a better time living there than here with me!”

  Ivan stared at me in amazement with Rudolf’s eyes.

  “But then I wouldn’t have my own mother!”

  I took him into my arms and held him tight, more ashamed of myself than I had ever before been in my life.

  Then one morning the inspector from the Labor Department arrived. She sat down at our table, pulled out a file and a questionnaire and said, “I’ve come to investigate how you make a living. You’ve been unemployed since August.”

  That made me so mad that I exploded.

  “I don’t feel like working. I have a rich lover who keeps me!”

  The woman looked at me sadly. “Listen, I understand. Don’t think I like doing this. But I have to file some kind of report on you. I want to protect you. Be sensible.”

  I pulled out a folder with several drawings in it, most of them more than three years old. “Write in your report that I work as a freelance artist,” I said. “Here’s some of my work.”

  Somehow we survived that first winter in our hovel. The second one was worse. Every morning we had to break the crust of ice that had formed overnight in the water pitcher. My health once again took a turn for the worse, and Ivan, too, began getting sick.

  One day Pavel Kovaly came to visit. He stopped in the door, speechless. I was lying in my bed, Ivan in his. We both had the flu and high fever. It was as cold inside our room as it was out on the street, and a few pieces of paper were blowing around, propelled by the north wind. I had not had enough strength to start a fire in the stove, let alone to go downstairs and walk several blocks to a telephone booth to call a doctor. Pavel took a blanket, wrapped it around Ivan, and carried him to Mrs. Machova. Then he came back, wrapped me up in a blanket, and carried me to his mother.

  Several weeks later, Pavel and I were married. It was an odd wedding. This time the bridegroom had the flu and shivered throughout the ceremony. I was so upset that I could barely stand up myself. The few friends who had dared to come wept. Pavel Eisler was my witness and of course Mrs. Machova was there too. After the ceremony, we all dug into our pockets, pooled what we found, and went to the Café Pelikan for coffee and cake.

  Naturally our marriage cost Pavel Kovaly his job. In the months that followed, he helped build socialism underground as an unskilled laborer, assisting a man who fixed water heaters. Since at the time it mattered less how well a man worked, and more how good he was at cheating and falsifying reports, Pavel often earned next to nothing.

  The three of us moved into his mother’s two-room apartment and were relieved when Pavel found another job in a large bakery from which he sometimes managed to smuggle home a couple of rolls for Ivan.

  By then 1956 was drawing closer, a year of great revelations and small changes.

  In February, 1956, a new era began. Nikita Khrushchev, who had long been involved in a power struggle at the Kremlin, had realized that a bold act was needed to strengthen his position. Being a shrewd politician, he also saw that the time was ripe for breaking away from the barbarity of Stalinist rule. In a secret speech delivered to a closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Khrushchev cast the first stone at the God-like image of Stalin and disclosed some of Stalin’s worst crimes. It was only a crack in the wall of terror which Stalin and his henchmen had built, but it was enough to save hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. Political prisoners, some of whom had been rotting in jails and labor camps for many years, were released in all countries of the Soviet Bloc.

  In Czechoslovakia, the prison gates opened quietly, unobtrusively, and through them walked shattered, emaciated people, blinking their eyes in the daylight. They came back to find their homes destroyed, their wives sick and exhausted, their children strangers to them. Former friends avoided them, not out of fear any more, but out of shame and embarrassment. Their health was ruined or gravely damaged; some died shortly after their return. It often took months before they could find housing and work. State Security kept them under constant observation lest they hurt themselves by recounting too vividly what they had experienced in the prisons.

  I first saw Eda Goldstuecker after his release at Pavel Eisler’s home. He had become so small and skinny that he looked like a young boy. He stared at us and at everything around him with a thirsty rapture, as though he were comparing what he saw to what he had been imagining for all those years and was now amazed at how much more beautiful reality had turned out to be than the most accurate memory.

  Among those released were Artur London, Eugen Loebl, and Vavro Hajdu, the three of the fourteen men accused of conspiracy in the Slansky trial who, for reasons that never came to light, escaped the death sentence and were given life imprisonment. Now they were released and rehabilitated without a word of explanation. Because they were alive, they were declared innocent. The dead remained traitors, even though the accusations against the whole group were so intertwined that if one were declared innocent, none could be guilty. Nevertheless, in 1957, a special commission appointed by the Party and headed by Rudolf Barak ostensibly reexamined the transcripts of the trials and concluded that they had been conducted in strict accordance with the law and had served the goals of the Party.

 
; But in those few months after Khrushchev exploded his bomb, and before the Party regained its bearings and tightened the screws once again, most people saw the light. Millions waited, expecting that any day now our Party would finally speak out. We wanted to know the truth and we wanted to hear the truth spoken out loud. But what was the truth? In 1956 in Czechoslovakia, the truth was still whatever served the needs of the Party and the Party meant Comrade Novotny and his allies, inseparably bound together by their crimes. No revelations were forthcoming, and the country, which had just begun to recover from the paralysis of fear, sank into a morass of unspoken guilt and shame.

  Society became polarized between those who wielded power – a power that had become self-sufficient and independent of the will of the people – and all other mortals. A similar split ran through every other aspect of life. Even the thoughts of most individuals became divided into private and public compartments, and the two often had nothing in common. During the day, people put in their hours at work and fulfilling their Party obligations; then they went home, removed their masks, and began to live for a few hours. Lying and play acting became a way of life; indifference and apathy became its essence. Even small children knew not to repeat in school what had been said at home; they learned not to display interest in anything, to become involved with nothing.

  Our own situation improved gradually. My husband, who had a degree in philosophy, managed to get an appointment at the Academy of Sciences through the intervention of friends. I acquired my first major translating assignment. Rather symbolically, it happened to be Arnold Zweig’s novel The Case of Sergeant Grischa, a story of an innocent man destroyed by the machinery of power.

  I have often pondered the devious route that led me to my real vocation. Were it not for my misfortunes, I would probably have spent my life doing illustrations, which were, at best, mediocre. After having translated the first chapter of my first book, I realized with amazement and humility that I was doing what I had been born to do. Enthralled by the beauty of the exact word which blends flawlessly with a clearcut idea, I entered a new world, the company of my authors. And what company it was! John Steinbeck, William Golding, Heinrich Böll, Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, and many more. From that time on, no matter what was happening around me, I could always find refuge in my work, in a world that was, at least partly, of my own creation.

  At first my translations appeared under the name Pavel Kovaly; then, under the names Pavel and Heda Kovaly; finally, after 1963, I was permitted to publish under my own name. We still did not live in an apartment of our own and our lives were anything but easy, yet both of us were working and, gradually, people had stopped avoiding us.

  The Czechoslovak Communist Party managed to evade the issue of the trials throughout the decade of the 1950s and into the early 1960s. What ended that era was not domestic discontent, which it could afford to ignore, but growing pressure from abroad. In Hungary, in Bulgaria, in Poland, the victims of the various “show trials,” as they were now called, had been exonerated long before. It was only in our country that nothing rippled the surface of the muddy pond. Finally, in the spring of 1963, after seven years of stalling and fencing, the Party decided to admit that the Soviet Union had been its model for the execution and torture of innocent people, just as it had been its model for everything else.

  The Central Committee prepared a document, titled “A Communication,” which was made available only to Party members and which was read behind closed doors at meetings of all the Party organizations. The document conceded that all the people who had been convicted at the trials were innocent, that their confessions had been extorted by illegal means, and that during the interrogations a range of brutal and inhuman procedures had been used. The victims had been subjected to drugs as well as to physical and psychological torture.

  The document also pronounced most of those who had been sentenced to death, including Rudolf Margolius, as fully rehabilitated in the view of the courts as well as in the eyes of the Party.

  Only carefully selected Party officials were permitted to see the text of the document, and those Party members to whom it was read were strictly forbidden to discuss it. Despite that prohibition, I heard almost all of it verbatim by the following day. For me it meant, above all, that the time had come to address the most difficult issue of all – how to tell my son the truth about his father.

  For years, Ivan knew nothing more than the fact that his father had died. My friends had argued all along that I should tell him everything. One should never lie to children, they said. When he finally finds out what happened, he’ll turn against you; he’ll never forgive you. Still I had decided to risk it. Better that he would hate me, I thought, than grow up hating the whole world, living with such incomprehensible injustice, always aware of being branded and excluded. There had, of course, always been the danger that a stranger would tell him or drop a hint, but the isolation in which we lived had protected him. We saw only a few friends, who had been careful to shield him.

  I had, with great reluctance, carried out Rudolf’s last wish and changed Ivan’s family name before he started school. Thanks to our changes of residence, Ivan’s new schoolmates and their parents knew nothing about us.

  Just before Easter, I thought again about telling him. He had a few days of vacation, which would give him some time to recover before going back to school.

  One evening, I sat down with Ivan, my heart throbbing. But there was no way out. He was fifteen, almost an adult now; he would be able to take it. I told him everything I could, as honestly as I knew how. He listened in silence without looking at me, his head sinking lower and lower down over the table where we were sitting. He did not ask a single question. I knew I was smashing his world to bits, but I could spare him nothing, protect him from nothing.

  The next few days were hard. Ivan kept his silence and avoided me.

  Then one day he came to me of his own accord and said, “So Father really died for his convictions, didn’t he?” Then he began to ask questions.

  A load fell off my heart. The worst was behind us.

  In mid-April of 1963, I received a summons to appear before the Central Committee. I spent the whole night before trying to choose the most effective course of action. I knew that they could not arrest me now, no matter what I might say, but I decided that the situation demanded dignity and an icy calm.

  It did not turn out that way. The cowardice, the hypocrisy, the dishonesty, the shabbiness with which the Party officials tried to gloss over the past – all that could not be faced with calm and dignity. Hundreds of people had been murdered “for the good of the Party.” Innocent people had been forced to confess to crimes they had never committed. And now those very people who had administered the torture and who had used the most contemptible methods of breaking people down were, once again, invoking “the good of the Party” to avoid admitting their own responsibility and guilt.

  The Party had ordered the victims of the political purges to sacrifice their lives. Now it was ordering the executioners to cover up their crimes and hold on to their privileged positions.

  It is astounding how terrified such men of action are of words. No act is too sordid for them to carry out, no act disturbs their sleep, so long as it is not called by its proper name, so long as it is not put into words. In this lies the great power of words, which are the only weapon of the defenseless.

  The whole Central Committee building danced before my eyes as I walked in. After a short wait, I was ushered into an office where two comrades, utterly insignificant Party bureaucrats, were expecting me. I remember only one of them, a man named Jerman, who had gained a certain notoriety in the fifties by publishing a pamphlet in which he analyzed the depravity of the criminals associated with Slansky. Apparently Jerman had been selected to deal with the survivors because he had such command of the issues surrounding the trials.

  “Who am I supposed to speak to here?” I said. “Take me to see the secretary general of the Centr
al Committee.”

  “The Party entrusted us to go over the whole matter with you,” Comrade Jerman replied pompously. “We will, of course, forward any comments you may have to the proper authorities.”

  “But I’m not willing to chat with just anyone,” I said. “I consider that the case of Rudolf Margolius is important enough to be dealt with by the highest representative of the Party.”

  “Don’t worry. Every word you tell us will be heard by the Comrade General Secretary.”

  That, I felt sure, was true. I knew that there had to be a recording device hidden somewhere in the room, taking down every word that was spoken. I haggled with them for a while longer but eventually, I had to give up. It was clear that Comrade Novotny had no intention of risking a confrontation with one of his victims.

  “All right,” I said. “I see that I’ll have to make do with you.”

  Comrade Jerman pulled a printed brochure from one of his desk drawers and in a solemn, official tone, began to speak.

  “In accordance with the instructions of the Party, we shall now read to you a communication which has been brought to the attention of all members of the...”