Legends

She had led him on foot across the river to the salon du thé on the top floor of a gaudy hotel that had only recently opened for business. From the window next to the table at the back of the enormous room, Martin could see what he’d spotted from the plane: the hills rimming Prague and the communist-era apartment buildings spilling over them. “My husband,” the woman was saying, caught up in her own story, “was a medical doctor practicing in Vinohrady, which is a district of Prague behind the museum. I worked as his nurse. The two of us joined a literary circle that met once a week to discuss books. Oh, I can tell you, it was an exhilarating time for us. My husband was fearless—he used to all the time joke that old age was not for the weak of heart.” She gulped down some of the brandy and puffed furiously on her Beedie, as if time were running out; as if she had to relate her life’s story before her life ended. “Tell me if all this bores you to tears, Mr. Odum.”

“The opposite is true,” Martin assured her. “It mesmerizes me to tears.”

Zuzana Slánská hiked one slim shoulder inside her tailored Parisian jacket. “We were ardent Marxists, my husband and I. We were convinced it was the great Russian bear that had suffocated communism and not the other way around. Our Czech hero, Alexander Dubcek, was still a loyal party-line apparatchik when we began signing petitions demanding reforms. The Soviet-appointed proconsuls who reigned over us could not distinguish between dissidents who were anticommunist and those, like us, who were procommunist but argued that it had gone wrong; that it needed to be set right in order for Marxism to survive. Or if they did distinguish between us, they calculated that our form of dissidence was the more threatening of the two. And so we suffered the same fate as the others.”

Martin could see the muscles on her face contorting with heartache remembered so vividly that she seemed to be experiencing it now. “You must know the story,” she rushed on, barely bothering to breathe. “The one about the NKVD commissar admitting to Yosif Vissarionovich Stalin that a particular prisoner had refused to confess. Stalin considered the problem, then asked the commissar how much the state weighed, the state with all its buildings and factories and machines, the army with all its tanks and trucks, the navy with all its ships, the air force with all its planes. And then Stalin said, dear God, he said, Do you really think this prisoner can withstand the weight of the state?”

“Did you feel the weight of the state? Were you and your husband jailed?”

Zuzana Slánská had become so agitated that she began swallowing smoke and brandy in the same gulp. “Certainly we felt the weight of the state. Certainly we were jailed, some months at the same time and once even in the same prison, some months at different times so that we passed each other like ships in the night. I discovered that when you left prison you took the stench of it with you in your nostrils; it took months, years to get rid of it. Oh, once my husband returned from prison so beat up that I didn’t recognize him through the spy hole in the door and called the police to save me from a lunatic, and they came and looked at his identity card and told me it was safe to let him in, the lunatic in question was my husband. Does it happen in America, Mr. Odum, that the police must assure you it is safe to let your husband pass the door of your apartment? And then one day my husband was arrested for treating the broken ankle of a youth who turned out to be an anticommunist dissident hiding from the police. The journalists from America covering the trial pointed out in their stories that the same thing had happened to the American doctor who treated the broken ankle of A. Lincoln’s assassin.”

From some murky past—from some murky legend?—the story of the Prague trial surfaced in Martin’s memory. “You’re the wife of Pavel Slánský!”

“You recognize the name! You remember the trial!”

“Everyone who followed events in Eastern Europe was familiar with the name Pavel Slánský,” Martin said. “The Jewish doctor who was arrested for setting the broken ankle of a dissident; who at his trial pleaded innocent to that particular charge, but used the occasion to plead guilty to wanting to reform communism, explaining in excruciating detail why it needed reforming to survive. He was the forerunner of the reformers who came after him: Dubcek in Czechoslovakia, eventually Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.”