‘Then I was moved to Bytíz. That was heaven compared with Leopoldov. I worked on a building site. You should have seen how handy I became with a hod of bricks. I was with a mixed group of politicals and common criminals. There the code was: if you’re a good con, you’re okay; your politics are your own affair. For instance, the governor brought out a new ruling forbidding prisoners to use the open space in their free time. The cons decided on a hunger strike. I was the only communist in our room. At lunch time the others asked: ‘So what, Pavel?’ ‘So we don’t go,’ I replied, and that was that. I was one of them. We won the strike.
‘On Sundays we managed some recreation. Four of us — all of different political convictions — used to play bridge. Cards were forbidden but we kept a pack under the floorboards. A con kept a look-out outside the prison house.’ He smiled in reminiscence, then observed seriously: ‘Prison teaches you surprising things about human nature. When I had a bad attack of angina pectoris, one of the cons attended me with great gentleness. He was a murderer who had killed his own mother and brother! A man whose company I found most stimulating was a Nazi. Another was a Catholic priest. One’s values were turned topsy-turvy.’ Pavel smiled ruefully. ‘Prison is a university of life but as Soukup, a Czech Socialist, used to say: ‘I’m not so stupid as to need fourteen years of it!’ Nowhere else do you explore your own resources so thoroughly or make such lasting friendships. Comradeship is the only nourishment a man’s body and soul receive: without it he would wither within a year.’
Pavel fell silent. Many of those friends were still inside. I touched him gently. ‘You still haven’t told me how your release came about.’
‘I smuggled out another letter. This time to the Central Committee, and that reached its destination. Two younger members came to see me. They were distressed at my revelations. I would swear that they, at least, had no inkling that justice had been violated.’
We found out later that a Politburo commission had been set up at the beginning of the year to investigate the political trials. Its policy, however, had been to admit only to certain distortions of facts, otherwise to confirm at least the partial guilt of the accused. In the cases of Pavel and Eda and one or two others the Commission had been forced to find all the charges false and order their acquittal. Another possible factor in Pavel’s release was that Konni Zilliacus had been invited to Moscow. He was to pass through Prague. Enquiries about his fellow spies in quod would doubtless have embarrassed the authorities.
Pavel ended his narrative on a confident note: ‘Now that some of us are out, we shall be able to secure the release of others.’
1. Bohumil Doubek was the chief of the Investigation Section of the security forces in the late forties and early fifties. He was arrested in 1955 and sentenced to 9 years in 1957, but was released a year later. After this he was appointed Director of the state travel agency Čedok, while many of his victims remained in jail.
2. 25 hellers equals about half a penny.
Chapter 16
After Pavel’s legal rehabilitation, we fondly imagined that political and public rehabilitation, as well as compensation, would follow automatically. In fact, the only confiscated articles we retrieved immediately were the wristwatch and fountain pen that had been in the custody of the Smíchov National Committee. The two comrades fell on Pavel’s neck when he looked in and proudly presented him with two little packets neatly labelled ‘Dr Pavel Kavan’. They had not even deleted his academic title when sentence had been passed. In their own way they had dissociated themselves from the trial.
Pavel never set eyes again on the Soviet watch his Soviet-run trial had deprived him of. In lieu he received a few crowns, the amount for which it had been sold at an auction of confiscated items held by the Central National Committee for their friends. It took an eight-month battle to re-possess the Minx, sadly the worse for wear. Re-housing was to take much longer.
Pavel was itching to get back to work but the Party had not yet okayed a job. This left him with a lot of unconsumed energy which he directed at putting right what had gone wrong while he was away. He went through the boys ‘report books. Zdeněk’s passed without comment. At Jan’s he tore his hair: ‘A two for history, a three for geography and a four for maths. The boy’s a dunce,’ he exclaimed tragically.
‘He’s not a dunce,’ I said soothingly. ‘He’s missed a lot of schooling, that’s all.’
‘Why? Is there something seriously the matter with him?’ Pavel demanded, now as alarmed as he had been outraged. (Pavel’s abrupt changes of mood were going to take some getting used to after a long break.)
‘He had all the usual children’s illnesses. Then he started getting septic tonsilitis, and inflamed adenoids and middle ear, which led to bronchitis and pneumonia several times. He’s allergic to dust and changes of temperature, and suffers from constant colds.’
‘Why didn’t you have his tonsils out?’ Pavel interrupted.
‘Because he was never well long enough for the doctors to agree to the operation.’
‘He was a healthy enough kid before I went away.’ This was a fact, but Pavel’s tone implied that my neglect had been to blame. I bit my lip.
If Pavel had had his way he would have kept Jan studying an extra three or four hours a day in an attempt to catch up four years’ backlog in as many weeks. I remonstrated that Jan was still convalescing from jaundice. Some marks improved, but continued low marks for maths produced another outburst:
‘Hasn’t the boy any ambition? He’s so phlegmatic about his school work.’
‘Nonsense,’ I retorted. ‘He’s over-anxious. He works himself into such a state about what you’re going to say about his damned marks that he can’t think straight.’
For poor Jan, the novelty of having a father was proving two-edged. I, too, came in for a share of criticism. Why hadn’t I coached Jan or found someone else to? I protested that I had done my best in my limited time. A neighbour had helped with Czech and handwriting; I hadn’t been able to find anyone for maths. Why had I left Zdeněk with Vlasta for some months after I’d recovered from my illness? I explained that he’d been better off there. The headmistress was a friend of Vlasta’s and had treated him kindly. He had also had better food in the country than I could afford.
‘Why didn’t you ask Karel for money if you were short?’ Pavel demanded.
‘I figured if he didn’t offer, he didn’t have any.’
‘Nonsense, of course he did. You could have borrowed from him, I would have paid him back when I got out. It was wrong to be too proud to ask where the boys’ health was concerned.’
I was silent. I couldn’t say I had asked and been given advice instead of cash. Karel had helped in other ways.
I felt myself slipping into my old role, on the defensive, blameworthy. Yet the one transgression of which I was technically guilty Pavel did not hold against me. He said: ‘It’s over now. Let’s not discuss it. But if you see him again, I’ll divorce you and get custody of the boys.’
Pavel had suffered: Pavel deserved recompense. I desired above all that he should be happy. I hoped that I would be able to disguise my own aching emptiness. I had my memories to give me strength and Malá Strana for solace. I had my children; I would never have given them up for Milan. I immersed myself in my family. Life was bearable.
For a time we managed on my earnings. Then for two weeks the supply of agency articles dried up and Pavel became frantic with anxiety. His old prison fears for our security welled up. He was convinced this was another form of political discrimination. I assured him the hiatus was temporary. Unconvinced, Pavel undertook some reconnaissance and came up with a 300-page volume on high-tension circuit breakers to be translated into English. I commented that the title was appropriate to our situation but the content somewhat out of range.
Pavel protested: ‘All you need is a Czech-English technical dictionary. It’s no problem.’
I smiled to hear Pavel’s old slogan, and pointed out that no such
thing as a Czech-English technical dictionary existed. My vicariously dauntless husband was equal to that too. He had a friend who was an electrical engineer and knew some English terminology. We would compile our own glossary of terms. I was still dubious.
Pavel exploded: ‘I find something that will keep the wolf from the door and you find it too difficult before you’ve even tried. Oh well, I might have known.’
I swallowed the bait. With my usual thoroughness I studied six English books on electrical engineering at the university technical library. Soon after I’d got my teeth into the circuit-breakers, straightforward translations which, as the Czechs say, I could have done with my left leg, began to flow in and had to be turned down. By the time I’d paid my collaborator and a typist, and had stuck at the translation for ten or twelve hours a day for nearly six months, my earnings worked out at the equivalent of a few pence per hour. But the translation was awarded an Honourable Mention at the Brussels Expo; whereupon I received a letter addressed to Monsieur Casanova from a French publisher asking me to name my fee for translating technical literature from Czech into French. Pavel drew a breath. I forestalled him.
‘If you say: “That’s no problem; all you have to do is to brush up your French,” I’ll knock you unconscious with the honoured circuit-breakers!’
A more positive result was an offer to translate a book of fairy tales for the Czech publisher Artia. Pavel, inconsistent as ever — he either expected too much or too little — asked discouragingly: ‘Do you think you’re up to it? That’s very different from technical and political stuff. For that you need real literary talent.’ (He was genuinely astonished when I made a success of the translation and was given another commission — a hitherto unpublished story by Karel Capek.)
While I had been struggling with electric currents, Pavel had been negotiating the sordid matter of compensation for unjust imprisonment. He finally announced that he was to be paid half of his lost salary.
‘You agreed? You let them get away with robbery?’ I demanded. ‘One injustice does not rectify another. Either you are entirely innocent and therefore are entitled to full back pay or you are partially innocent and deserve only half pay.’
Pavel demurred that the state could not afford such a large sum.
‘Bullshit — I mean rubbish.’ (My enriched vocabulary was not to Pavel’s taste.) ‘Fair damages can’t ruin the country: the Prime Minister has just announced an appreciable growth in the economy. I suggest all Party functionaries contribute a percentage of their salaries until this debt of honour is paid.’
Pavel muttered that he thought that his freedom would mean more to me than money.
‘Of course it does, but …’ I gave up.
The ultimate exercise in cynicism was the deduction of thirteen crowns fifteen hellers per day for Pavel’s ‘keep’ in prison.
He, and the other released communists, still had no job and no proper status. The leadership was protecting itself by shrouding the show trials and their victims in silence. However, it was forced to take nominal action by the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s personality cult. A second commission was appointed to investigate the Slánský trial while perpetuating the thesis that Slánský was the Czechoslovak Beria. The Central Committee was informed officially that Pavel Kavan, the three others released with him and Artur London had been acquitted of false charges and reinstated as Party members. No public announcement followed.
Pavel badgered the commission, in particular over a former cell-mate who was seriously ill. The man died in prison while the commission was debating his release. Pavel grieved for his friend and raged at the commission’s slowness.
Now that his political rehabilitation had been carried a step further, Pavel was offered a post. His appointment as assistant to the editor of the State Publishing House of Political Literature came as a surprise: the other ex-prisoners had been tucked away in libraries and such innocuous corners where they could have little impact on the public. Pavel, of course, would have made an impact on an institute for deaf mutes. It was not in his nature to feel his way. He plunged head first into controversial waters.
Enthusiastically, he expounded his project to me: ‘A series of paperbacks giving our — Czech — commentaries, analyses and immediate reactions to international events without waiting for Moscow to formulate its attitude.’
I goggled. True, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had recently stated that roads to socialism might differ according to conditions and that any tendency to impose its own model was alien to each of the parties. But to take the declaration at its face value when the Czechoslovak leadership had ominously ignored it and, moreover, to interpret it as a green light to independent thinking struck me as dangerous, if laudable, lunacy.
Pacing up and down, Pavel happily developed his scheme. ‘The series will be written for the man-in-the-street, giving him the background, causes and possible effects of developments. No jargon. Plain facts, clear statements and graphic style. The only problem is: who can write in that way? Who can still use his own political judgement?’
‘Only your friends who’ve been in cold storage for the worst of the brainwashing period,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, yes, of course. Evžen Klinger and Vavro Hajdú. They’re foreign affairs experts. Then there’s Jiří Hronek. He can turn out a political book in a fortnight. And Heda shall design the jackets.’
Three weeks later a haggard, unshaven Evžen staggered in.
‘That husband of yours certainly stirs things up,’ he complained wrily. ‘You start off by firmly rejecting his crazy ideas, and before you know where you are, you’re in them up to your neck. We survived clink but he’ll be the death of us! I’ve had about three hours’ sleep a night since I started this damn thing but the job’s finished.’ He drew an MS out of his briefcase. ‘Pavel thought a book on oil, the key to the Suez crisis, leading to the question of liquid fuel replacing solid, would be a useful publication.’
The next series came out after the drastic events in Hungary. The Drama of 1956 was writen by Hronek in December under the pseudonym of Politicus, Pavel’s latest idea being that his collaborators should write under the same name. The book, in an edition of 12,000, was out in February, a miracle for Czech printing. The Central Committee was alarmed. Here was a group reaping political success — a faction. A faction, moreover, that consisted of cult victims who would rise to prominence once the truth about the trials was made public.
‘Policy is made here, not in the Publishing House of Political Literature,’ the Central Committee told the chief editor and the series was banned.
‘It was fun while it lasted,’ Hronek sighed.
In ordinary circumstances they would have made a name for themselves. They suffered from being men of ideas at a time when original political thinking was anathema.
*
Prison had given Pavel time to think: he had emerged with open eyes. He re-appraised society and discovered how far it had deviated from original socialist concepts. He was forced to admit that he, too, had become sectarian after 1948. Party discipline had clouded his judgement, as it had that of others. He saw that only the restoration of inner-Party democracy would guarantee social progress and the prevention of further miscarriages of justice. He became convinced that a movement towards change could be initiated only by a politically aware rank and file able to take a share in decision-making. This would never come about without free discussion within the Party and a re-interpetation of Marxism. He concluded that only enlightened Marxists could create enlightened socialism. This kind of thinking was adopted by other Party reformers many years later.
Pavel didn’t wait for a change of heart in the apparatus. He was impelled by a sense of urgency. He himself turned to the rank and file. He directed the Party school for the publishers’ employees and put across his ideas to them. He addressed the wider public through the non-Party Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scien
tific Knowledge.
Paradoxically, he was now a greater threat to the apparatus than he had been as a prisoner.
He had become not only a more flexible Marxist but a more open-minded human being. He no longer divided people into sheep and goats; he cultivated non-communists as well as communists as friends. He also erased the division between a man’s and a woman’s work, which he had applied rigidly until then. While out of work he tackled shopping and cooking. (Incidentally, the boys were far more tolerant of his culinary disasters than of mine.) Above all, Pavel valued family life more highly than before he went to prison. Even when he was working again he found time to be with the boys, taking them to football matches, teaching them chess and discussing history, literature and politics with them by the hour.
In many respects, though, he was still the same impractical Pavel, as our first weekend in Kytlice was to demonstrate.
*
On arrival at Kytlice Pavel organized his team. Jan was to gather up the pieces of tarpaulin that had fallen off the roof. Zdeněk was to weed the flower bed. I was to rake off the dead grass from the meadow behind the house. This proved surprisingly difficult, but I plodded on, determined not to mar our rustic idyll by provoking complaints.
In his role of foreman Pavel came to inspect our progress. He set light to my biggest pile of dead grass. In a second he was prancing like the proverbial cat on hot bricks as flames licked around his feet. My laughter was stillborn, for a wind sprang up and carried tongues of fire over the field toward the forest. I seized a spade and flayed the burning stubble. Then I heard an ominous sound behind me, like the splatter of bullets on armour plating. I wheeled. The little nursery of firs that flanked the forest was alight.
Trying to stay calm, I shouted to the boys to bring water. The firs were now burning with a fierce white brightness, scattering a rain of golden needles. Pavel and I wielded our buckets with unabated energy but the odds were against us. The boys gallantly ran to and from the well, which was thirty yards away. It was a losing battle; until the wind veered. That gave us a breathing space in which to put the firs out of action. I took toll of the casualties: ten trees mortally damaged and a score of lighter cases. We then subdued the meadow. A forest fire and a further jail sentence for sabotage had been averted.
Love and Freedom Page 22
