Stalin — The one that will destroy destruction.
The weekly newsreel showed the crowds at the funeral. You could hear the oaths of loyalty to his eternal memory, and black crepe seemed to blanket the entire world, which was apparently drowning in tears.
Tatyana confided to me that she’d made a tragic mistake with Tomáš. She had succumbed to the atmosphere there on the Ostrava Brigade. Life, however, is built not from bricks and mortar but from feelings and understanding. And now during these difficult and dismal days, she had realized it.
On the bench, looking out over the embankment and castle arrayed in black, we embraced each other and kissed.
On top of all this, President Gottwald died a few days later.
Once again crowds swarmed the funeral; oaths of loyalty were sworn to the sacred memory of the first workers’ president; there were more black banners and tears. Cinemas and theaters were closed, and the only thing on the radio was funeral music.
We had no news of Father — where he was, what had happened to him, why they had taken him away. We didn’t even know what we were going to live on.
Aunt Hedvika, who always talked about the great Stalin with such enthusiasm, stopped by. She said Father had certainly done nothing wrong, and she offered to contribute at least a little money until he returned. Then my aunt, the one who had lived so many years in the Soviet Union and revered Stalin as a giant among men, said something that astounded me. Vilík is lucky the Leader has died. Maybe everything will change now, and these disgraceful trials will cease.
*
Mother had become desperate. She kept looking out the window as if thinking she would catch sight of Father, who couldn’t be kept in prison, since he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Because she was the sister of national heroes after whom a Prague square had been named, she steeled her resolution and wrote a letter to the new president of the republic. She said she’d known Father from their early student days and was quite certain he’d never done a single dishonest thing in his life. She knew that work meant everything to him, and every day he worked well into the night. She also knew that when he was working in Brno, he was attacked, and only because he’d urged people to do honest work. Such aspersions, however, have no place in our republic.
She racked her brain over every word, even over the closing. She knew she should end with the comradely Honor to Work, but that greeting never passed her lips, so she wrote just With Deep Regards.
Mother never received an answer to her letter, but about five weeks later we found a letter from Father in the mailbox with the stamp Uherské Hradiště. Father wrote that he was thinking about all of us and we shouldn’t worry about him. He was lacking for nothing and hoped we too were healthy and were somehow getting by.
The letter was written on gray paper, which immediately brought to mind the notes we were allowed to write from Terezín now and then.
Paradoxically, it was during this time that my probationary period expired, and I was to be either accepted or rejected as a member of the Communist Party.
At the meeting, my admission to the party was the last item on the agenda. In the lecture hall, shrouded in tobacco smoke, the chairman acquainted the party members present with my case. I was an excellent student. For reasons of health, I hadn’t gone on the summer work brigade. I had a good relationship to the collective. As far as my class origin was concerned, I had a white-collar background, but my uncles were national heroes and loyal members of the party who had fallen in battle against the Nazis. Now, of course, my father had been arrested, apparently for political reasons, so it would be necessary to consider carefully my possible membership.
I was given the floor in order to discuss my father’s situation.
I said my father was the victim of some sort of mistake or a false accusation. He would definitely be proved innocent.
A comrade addressed me from the floor and asked about my relationship to socialism.
I replied that I believed in its future.
The comrade was not satisfied with my answer. My father had obviously not believed in socialism and hated it. Was I prepared to disown him if it turned out he had committed a crime against the state? I was not prepared for anything like this. It was unthinkable that my father would get mixed up in any criminal conspiracy, and I answered heatedly that my father would never perpetrate anything like that.
The comrade from the floor held his ground and demanded a straightforward and unambiguous answer: yes or no. To my great surprise, the chair intervened. He said I had indeed provided an answer, and there was no need to anticipate the judgment of the court. Since no one had any further questions, they took a vote on whether or not to admit me. I was certain there was no way I would be accepted, and it was with amazement that I observed my classmates, the young assistants from various departments, staff members of the dean’s office, even the cleaning women raising their hands.
So I was accepted, and the chair invited me up to the table and congratulated me. My mood, however, was not at all celebratory. Instead I was oppressed by anxiety. It was as if I had been accepted into some kind of merciless holy order that could demand of you anything, even the renunciation of your own father.
*
Father hoped that we would somehow manage to scrape out our livelihood without him, which of course meant that I was supposed to manage it somehow. We had no savings (even if we had any, they would have been worthless after the currency reform at the beginning of the summer). Mother continued to believe the diagnosis according to which she wasn’t even supposed to be alive. Just as the mistaken doctor had advised, she tried to avoid any effort. She suggested that she could at least do some knitting at home, but there was no yarn to be had. She could also translate from French, but no one showed any interest.
On the bulletin board at the department I noticed an opening for a student assistant. Obviously no one had thought it worthwhile to apply. They paid only two hundred crowns a month for attending to library loans and cataloging book acquisitions.
I got the position and was at least able to pay for lunchtime meal tickets at the cafeteria, and for supper I always waited until the last minute before the kitchen closed, since the kindhearted cooks would give away part of the leftovers. So almost every evening I would bring home at least ten slices of lightly salted bread and a usually large military mess tin full of dumplings and some kind of sauce or at least thick soup from the very bottom of the pot.
My brother, who with surprising obstinacy had wiped from his memory everything related to our stay in Terezín, sometimes complained that the food from the mess tin reminded him of something unpleasant. Mother usually just nibbled on a piece of bread and said she had eaten some potatoes earlier. I had no idea what Father was eating. In my foolishness, I told myself that today’s prisons could in no way resemble wartime concentration camps.
But we couldn’t live like that for long. I knew I would either have to give up my studies or find some other, more lucrative source of income. But what did I know how to do? I had excelled in mathematics in high school, but I was already starting to forget it; and German, which I had picked up during the war, was also fading from my mind. I could paint a little, but I’d abandoned this hobby as well. All that was left was my writing.
Without a letter of recommendation, I set out after the holidays on a pilgrimage to the ever smaller number of newspapers and magazines and asked if they wanted me to do any reviewing. To my surprise, they offered me several books as a test. (Only later did I learn that lying around editorial offices are a great number of books, which almost every reviewer with any sense avoids.)