Love and Freedom

by Rosemary Kavan

  Pavel assured me that the roots of social evil could not be eradicated without political change. First, he said, you had to abolish private ownership. Then you put industry into the hands of the workers and divided the big landed estates among the peasants. This would eliminate the exploitation of man by man. Profits would be enjoyed by those who toiled. A planned economy would ensure efficiency, decent wages and full employment. Poverty would be wiped out. A free medical service and social insurance, paid for by taxes and profits from the nationalised industries, would mean that people would need no longer fear impoverishment as a result of illness or old age. There would be no privileged elite: all would have equal rights and opportunities. Everyone would attain self-fulfilment and happiness. He made it sound quite simple.

  Pavel never left my side during the conference. Soon afterwards he appeared on my doorstep and continued my Marxist education. Slowly my life began to centre on Pavel. He was my mentor, my short cut to the brave new world. Furthermore, he epitomised the struggle against fascism. I wept when he described his anguish at the Munich betrayal of his country. My sympathy was mingled with shame, for my family — ignorant of fascism and considering war the worst of all evils — had rejoiced when Chamberlain proclaimed ‘peace with honour’ at the price of Czechoslovakia’s freedom. ‘We should have fought when the Germans invaded,’ Pavel cried. ‘The army was well equipped and ready to a man. We could have held off a German attack for three months. We would not have remained alone. The whole course of history would have been different. But,’ he concluded bitterly, ‘the politicians decided otherwise.’

  Pavel had joined the resistance movement. When the Gestapo discovered his track, he was spirited away by the underground. Without saying goodbye to his widowed mother and brother, he left Prague and was passed from hand to hand over the border into Poland, and thence to Sweden and safety. He had fought with the Czechoslovak Brigade until the fall of France, and then he had escaped to England. The Czechs had had no chance to strike a real blow against fascism: their troops had been employed to cover the French retreat. Gnawed by disappointment, Pavel was eagerly awaiting the Second Front. The constant delays enraged him because, as he said: ‘Every day adds to the hardships and terrors suffered by my countrymen under the Nazis.’

  Pavel was worried about his family: he feared the worst, since they were Jews. His Jewish origin was part of Pavel’s fascination to me. I was deeply moved by the history of the Jews: their persecution, their wanderings, and, above all, their endurance and indestructible sense of identity. Now they were being subjected to atrocities in Nazi concentration camps and Pavel had faced a terrible dilemma. He had been asked by the BBC to broadcast regularly to Czechoslovakia. This would certainly have endangered his family, if they were still free. Nevertheless, Pavel considered it his duty to accept. This made him a tragic hero in my eyes.

  He was also a very active hero. The Czechoslovak Brigade must surely have been the only army in the West where privates with two doctorates were not uncommon and leaves were spent in political activity. Pavel divided his leaves between the Czechoslovak Union of Students, of which he was vice-president, the International Students’ Council, of which he was also vice-president, the Students at War magazine, of which he was editor, the Czech section of the BBC – and me.

  I was thrilled to be involved, even peripherally, in these activities. Suddenly my life as a teacher in a slum school built in the nineteenth century had acquired a view of the wide political world. On a Saturday afternoon in the office of the students ‘magazine, he would say: There are a few jobs that need doing. They’ll only take you half-an-hour; then we can go and enjoy ourselves somewhere.’

  He would then present me with a pile of correspondence to answer, or articles to edit and type, which would have kept an electronic brain busy for a couple of days. Or we would drop into the British-Czechoslovak Friendship Club for a ‘few minutes’. These would extend to hours as Pavel was accosted by kindred spirits with whom he would go into a ‘brief’ conspiratorial huddle. After an hour or so he would remember my existence. Among the many to whom I was finally introduced was Pavel’s friend and idol, Eduard Goldstücker1, with whom he had been involved in student politics before the war and who was now employed by the Czechoslovak government in exile. He was a charming and cultured Slovak with an attractive voice and a slow, emphatic manner of speaking that commanded attention. He was also a droll and prolific narrator of Yiddish jokes. There were two other Slovaks: Vladimír Clementis2 and Evžen Klinger3. Vlado was widely loved as a man and respected as a lawyer who had defended communists in pre-war political trials. After 1948, Pavel was to serve under him at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Evžen, a myopic, bear-like and humorous Jew, was later to collaborate with Pavel on a number of abortive projects. Then there was Otto Šling4, a florid, forceful Moravian, married to a staunch British comrade, and Vavro Hajdú5, a lawyer serving in the army. These men were all pre-war communists; yet they were to end up on the gallows or condemned to a lifetime behind bars in the Czechoslovakia of the 1950s.

  I spent a lot of time at the Club. It was a unique institution; not an escape from life, like an English Club, but an important component of living. Members entertained their friends, polemicized, studied, played chess, wrote letters, drew up wills. There a newspaper was not something to be idly turned over for scraps of gossip, or something from which one totted up victories and defeats like a cricket score. It was a mine of heterogeneous information and as such was treated with respect. The reader smoothed it reverently over its bamboo frame, adjusted his or her position with the air of one settling down for the night, and proceeded to assimilate it from A to Z, reading in between the lines for good measure. The reader then read the same news over again in French, German, Polish and English, hunting for discrepancies with the zeal of a biologist probing for bacteria. There, conversation was not a bauble tossed from lip to lip, but a morsel chewed voraciously to the core, whether it concerned the intimacies of love or the imponderables of politics. The Club was, in short, a microcosm of Czech intellectual life.

  But I was attracted by Pavel as a man as well as a symbol. He was not tall, but rather chunky in fact, nor was he particularly handsome. But he had good features: straight nose, high forehead, neat ears, stubborn chin, a mouth with a full, sensual lower lip and the upper lip drawn into a thin line. His eyes were his strong point. Hazel brown, they glowed with golden fire: patriotic, political or passionate, as the occasion demanded. In the army he was known as ‘poker face’. One could read his thoughts and feelings only from his eyes.

  Perhaps it was his manner that fascinated me most. He swept through doors (he didn’t open them like ordinary mortals) on a wave of energy that excited me. His whole bearing expressed the conviction that obstacles would dissolve in his path. Being a rather different person myself, I found this irresistible.

  I had always exacted a Platonic code of behaviour from my few English male friends. Pavel bulldozed these inconvenient English rules. We became lovers.

  At twenty-eight, Pavel was an experienced lover. Uninhibited, technically assured, he guided me gently down untried paths. After an initial panic, my response was avid. My parents had shrouded sex in veils of silence, giving the impression that it was a slightly sordid, if essential, adjunct to marriage. I had been prepared to tolerate it, not to fall in love with it. My awakened sexual passion shocked, excited and absorbed me. I imbued Pavel with special powers as the bestower of such delight. After a girls’ school, a women’s college and an all-female teaching staff, he had transformed my life.

  Getting on with the English was one of Czechoslovakia’s war aims, in the promotion of which a thousand or so Czechoslovak soldiers and airmen went so far as to marry English girls. Pavel, of course, did nothing so conventional as to go down on his knees and ask for my hand. He simply told me he intended to marry me. In my novel state of intoxication, love and sex seemed inextricable. I believed myself to be in love with Pavel. His unorthodox d
eclaration: ‘I will not vow undying love — what man honestly can? But one thing I promise, with me you will never be bored’, tipped the scales, and I became engaged.

  Caution, in the person of my mother, said: ‘Wait until the war is over. Go and see his country. You may not like living there. You don’t know what security he is offering you.’ Romance, in my own person, replied: ‘Love conquers all. Once the nightmare of death and destruction is over, what can possibly defeat love?’

  I believed in the power of love. My parents were still romantically in love (and they were to remain in love until their eighties); my many aunts and uncles were still happy after years of marriage. I didn’t give a damn about security, having known nothing else. On the contrary, I abhorred the predictability of my parents ‘lives. I wanted adventure, stimulation, purpose. Life with Pavel promised all these. Separation from my family was my only concern; but Pavel assured me that as soon as international transport was restored, visiting England would be ‘no problem’.

  *

  As a means of transport the Dakota left much to be desired. The passengers were seated on canvas chairs chained to the fuselage. Every nut and bolt shook with an unnerving clatter and the temperature in the cabin was zero. I returned to the past for comfort.

  I remembered our wedding, eight months after Pavel had left for France when the long-awaited Second Front had at last been opened. As I kissed him goodbye, I pleaded: ‘Look after yourself. If anything happens to you, it will be the loss of nine men — soldier, student, activist, official, editor, journalist, translator, broadcaster and lover.’ ‘Or a cat with nine lives — I’ll preserve the ninth till last,’ he joked.

  When he was gone there were months of anxious mail-watching. I received snippets of news between what were, for Pavel, extravagant outpourings of affection. (There’s nothing like damp, cold shelling and a diet of corned beef to soften even a hard-boiled activist.) The Czechoslovak troops had not been sent to the front, as he had hoped, but had taken over the siege of Dunkirk. In one letter Pavel wrote: ‘One of my nine lives has gone … A jerry took a pot shot at me. I had absentmindedly picked up my beret instead of my helmet. Anyway, he got my badge instead of my brains, you’ll be relieved to hear …’

  Concerning his more spectacular role in the siege, for which he was decorated, Pavel was modest, even reticent.

  When my father returned from his special duty trip, Pavel applied for compassionate leave. It was April 1945. On his way to Calais on a borrowed motorbike he had an argument with a Frenchman. This resulted in him losing his way and hitting a tree. Consequently he arrived in England one day late and the wedding had to be postponed by a day. We were fitted in between two other ceremonies by a reluctant and adenoidal clerk who did not hold with English girls marrying foreigners. He made a last ditch bid for my freedom, whispering hoarsely: ‘Id’s nod too lad to chage your bind.’

  We were rushed through a chocolate-coloured door to the dim, cheerless ceremonial office. A thin man with the air of a funeral director gabbled the brief words with one eye on the clock. He fidgeted impatiently while Pavel searched his pockets first for his glasses, presumably to check the identity of the bride, and then for the ring which I remembered was in my handbag. I still had the price tab, £5.5s., dangling from my finger when we were bundled through the exit.

  My marriage altered my status as well as my state. I found that I had shrunk overnight from an unassailable British subject, legatee of all the pink bits on the world map, to a desirable alien attached to a mutilated blob in the heart of Europe. I thus became immediately suspect and was required to report my movements regularly to the police.

  True to type, Pavel spent the first half of his wedding night bringing me up to date with the political situation. The new Czechoslovak coalition government, formed at Košice in Slovakia, had mapped out a socialist programme somewhat on the lines he had already expounded to me. ‘It’s a promising start,’ he declared. He was then ready to turn, with a light heart and high hopes, to the more orthodox practices of wedding nights.

  *

  The wail of a child and the sharp reproof of its mother set my thoughts on a new track. What would marriage with Pavel be like? During two years, the longest time we had been together was three days — our honeymoon — and those had been spent largely in taxis. Suddenly I felt I hardly knew my husband.

  I shivered. The cold was aggravating my period pains. I began to feel sick and, as the plane descended, reached for a paper bag. After four hours in the air, the plane at last flopped to the ground and bumped to a standstill. The last to leave, I lurched uncertainly down the steps. There was Pavel, larger in diameter and looking clerkish and sedentary in horn-rimmed spectacles and a crumpled suit; the dashing distinction of his army days had been discarded with his battledress.

  ‘What in the name of God have you been doing?’ he asked, a greeting that hardly did justice to the reunion of the pining lover with his mate.

  The airways bus was about to sneak off. Pavel urged his civilian limbs into a sprint and managed to stop it. The driver leaned out of the window and held forth at length on the impossibility of waiting a single second for incompetent travellers ignorant of the whereabouts of their luggage. He had his timetable, his obligations to the other passengers, to the new Republic and to his wife and children.

  I was to find out later that officialdom’s response to any request, major or minor, was invariably a point-blank no, accompanied by a pious invocation to the regulations. This precluded either decision or action, both anathema to bureaucracy. Experience soon taught me to disregard this negative, and either to remain polite but firm, or else to rave like a lunatic. Bureaucracy then tore itself to pieces trying to meet my wishes; it waived laws, rules and ancient customs and, with the air of risking its neck in my interests, furtively drew from a locked safe the required document, permit, receipt or stamp.

  In this case, having wasted a good quarter-of-an-hour vigorously saying nothing, the driver suddenly jumped down from his perch. Once on the same level as Pavel, he came to terms with him, and even joined in the search for my case, showing a great interest in its make, history, contents and owner. He found it eventually in the west-bound heap and prevented it just in time from stowing away to America.

  Within an hour I was in my new home, a two-roomed flat in a secluded spot with an all-night garage on one side and a printing works on the other. It was chock-a-block with heavy, frowning German furniture. Suits and shirts thrown carelessly over the backs of chairs proclaimed the absence of a female hand. Pavel, following my gaze, declared cheerfully: ‘Thank goodness you’re here at last. Now the place will soon be ship-shape.’

  He showed me to the kitchen and left me to prepare a meal. A cursory search revealed only some stale bread and a knob of margarine. I took these into the dining-room-cum-lounge, remarking that I couldn’t find anything to go with them. ‘I don’t wonder,’ Pavel replied. ‘We used up all our rations in a slap-up meal for your expected arrival last week. Eva even baked a cake, but in a few days it went somehow.’

  Eva was a distant connection of Pavel’s family, as far as he knew the only one, besides Karel, his brother, to have survived the war. He had seen Karel, who had fled from Dachau and, after incredible hardships, reached the Soviet Union. He had fought his way back to Prague with the Czechoslovak Eastern Brigade. After a few days in Prague, he had returned to his regiment to be officially demobbed.

  ‘And your mother?’ I could hardly get the words out.

  Pavel shook his head. ‘Oh Rosemary, I couldn’t write to you. It was too terrible. Our unit liberated Buchenwald. My mind still reels from the sights we saw. Among the names of those who were sent to the gas chamber I found my own mother’s, together with my aunts’ and uncles’ and cousins’. The whole family. For weeks I couldn’t sleep picturing their sufferings.’

  I sat stunned with horror and pity. I wondered if grief was made worse by a sense of responsibility. Although it was unlikely that Pavel�
��s broadcasts had decided his mother’s fate — all Jews were scheduled for the ‘final solution’ — the cruel question must surely have persisted. His face was twisted into tortured lines. I put my arms round him and he leaned gratefully against me. Then he straightened up and said firmly: ‘So now I have told you. I don’t want to refer to this ever again. We must put the past behind us.’ Brave words, but Pavel was to bear the scars of the past for the rest of his life. It was months before he uttered his mother’s name again. Then he spoke of her with pride, telling me how she had faced widowhood and greatly reduced circumstances with fortitude and had worked to support her two sons.

  The door bell rang. Pavel went to open it and ushered in a woman of about thirty. It was Eva. She grasped both of my hands: ‘So you are here at last! Welcome! Welcome! I hope you will be very happy here.’ We sat down. In the absence of anything else, I offered her a cigarette. She accepted hungrily. Noting that the ashtray was full, I rose to empty it, but Eva stopped me. She picked out the stubs and popped them into a matchbox which she put into her handbag.

  ‘There’s no cigarette ration for women yet,’ Pavel explained. ‘And only two a day for men. So we all collect toppers and roll the tobacco into fresh cigarettes.’

  ‘I can live without everything except a smoke,’ Eva sighed.

  ‘In the camp she bartered her belongings for cigarettes,’ Pavel put in, ‘Then, when she had nothing left, her soup, which was often the only food they got.’

  ‘The soup was water,’ Eva replied. ‘Water for cigarettes is good business.’

  She was an odd little figure. Her chapped hands and feet and a distended abdomen spoke eloquently of the concentration camp. Her camp number was tattooed indelibly on her arm. Her hair was just beginning to grow again after an attack of typhus. A few teeth were missing — a blow from an SS-man. But she had beautiful eyes, warm, wise, friendly and forgiving. She had seen humanity at its worst but she had never stopped loving people. She became a staunch friend who stood by me through the difficult times that were to come.