Legends

An uncontaminated smile, as fresh as laundered linen on a clothesline, materialized on Zuzana Slánská’s face. “Yes, he was ahead of his time, which in some countries is counted as a capital crime. The American authorities showed little sympathy for him—one suspects they did not want to see anyone attempt to reform communism, lest they succeed. My husband was declared to be an enemy of the state and condemned to ten years in prison for anticommunist activities. And I became like the poet Akhmatova, queuing at the prison guardhouse through the winters and springs and summers and falls to deliver packages of socks and soap and cigarettes addressed to prisoner 277103. The number is seared into my memory. The wardens took the packages and signed receipts promising they would be delivered. And then one day one of my packages was returned to me in the mail bearing the stamp Deceased, This tendency of bureaucracies in killer states to adhere to normal procedures and regulations has yet to be explained, at least to my satisfaction. In any case, that was how I discovered that my husband, the prisoner Slánský, was no longer among the living.” Zuzana Siánská raised a cold palm to swat away the cigar smoke drifting toward her from the nearby table. “May I have another of your amusing cigarettes? I need the eucalyptus to overpower the stench of their cigars. Oh, Mr. Odum, if one was able to put up with the inconveniences, I must tell you that dissidence was exhilarating.”

“Aside from prison, what were the inconveniences?”

“You lost your job, you were required to crowd into a fifty-square-meter apartment with the two couples already living in it, you were sent off to a psychiatric clinic to work out to the satisfaction of the state what made a dissident criticize something that was, by definition, perfect. When we would gather at an apartment late at night to discuss, oh, say, Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, our small group considered all the angles, all the scenarios except the possibility that the gangsters who presided over the Soviet Union would become freelance gangsters presiding over the territory they had staked out when communism collapsed. Looking back, I can see now that we were incredibly naive. We were blinded by the exhilaration—each time we made love we thought it might be the last time and this turned us into ardent lovers, until the day came when we had no one to make love to. And so we stopped, most of us, being lovers and became haters.”

“And the generic drugs—how did you get into that?”

“I was a trained nurse but, after the trial of my husband, no doctor dared employ me. For years I worked at menial tasks—cleaning medical offices after they shut for the day, removing garbage cans from the courtyards of apartment houses to the street before dawn so the trucks could empty them. Finally, when our own communists were expelled from power in 1989, I decided to do what my husband always dreamed of doing—sell generic medicines to the third world at the lowest possible prices. I met Samat during one of his first trips to Prague and told him about my idea. He accepted at once to fund it as a branch of an existing humanitarian enterprise called Soft Shoulder—it was with his money that we rented the Vyshrad Station and bought the first stocks of generic medicines. Now I eke out enough profit to employ four gypsies and a part-time secretary. I once attempted to reimburse Samat but he refused to accept money. It must be said, he is something of a saint.”

“I suppose it would take a saint to get involved in repatriating the bones of a saint,” Martin remarked.