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.”
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 Vys
“I suppose it would take a saint to get involved in repatriating the bones of a saint,” Martin remarked.
“I can say that I was the one who first told Samat about the Jewish Torah scrolls in the Lithuanian church.” Her hand drifted up to her neck to finger the Star of David. “My older sister was deported during the war to a concentration camp in Lithuania. She managed to escape into the steppe and joined the communist partisans harassing the German rear. It was my sister—her partisan name was Rosa, after the German communist Rosa Luxemburg; her real name was Melka—who attempted to warn the Jews in the shtetls not yet overrun by the Germans and the einsatzsgruppen murderers who followed behind them. Few believed her—they simply did not imagine that the descendants of Goethe and Beethoven and Brahms were capable of the mass murder of an entire people. But in several of the shtetls the rabbis hedged their bets—they collected the sacred Torah scrolls and priceless commentaries, some of them many hundreds of years old, and gave them to a Lithuanian Orthodox bishop to hide in a remote church. After the war my sister passed on to me the name of this church—Spaso-Preobrazhenski Sabor, which means Church of the Transfiguration, in the town of Zuzovka, on the Neman River just inside Lithuania near the frontier with Belarus. When I told the story to Samat, he dropped what he was doing—Samat, who was not as far as I know Jewish, went directly to the church to recover the Torah scrolls and bring them to Israel. The Metropolitan of the diocese refused to give them back; refused even to sell them back when Samat offered him a large sum of money. The Metropolitan was willing, however, to trade the Torah scrolls for the relics of Saint Gedymin, who established the Lithuanian capital in Vilnius in thirteen hundred something. Saint Gedymin’s bones had been stolen from the church by German troops during the war. After years of inquiry, Samat was finally able to trace the bones of the saint to Argentina. They had been smuggled there by Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of the war and deposited in a small Orthodox church near the city of Córdoba. When the church refused to part with the bones of Saint Gedymin, Samat went to see a person he knew in the Argentine government; in the Defense Ministry, actually. Samat told me he had persuaded the Defense Ministry to repatriate the saintly relics to Lithuania—”
“In return for what?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. Samat mentioned that he’d been to see the people at the Argentine Defense Ministry. But he never told me what they wanted in exchange for the relics of Saint Gedymin.”
“When did he tell you about the Defense Ministry?”
“The last time he passed through Prague.”
“Yes, and when was that?”
“After he left Israel he went to London to see Taletbek Rabbani. From London he flew here to see me on his way to—”
Martin became aware that Zuzana Slánská’s rheumy eyes had focused on something over his shoulder. He noticed her fingers slipping the Star of David out of sight under the collar of her blouse as he twisted in his seat to see what she was looking at. Radek, holding his deerstalker over his solar plexus, his other hand buried in the pocket of the Tyrolean jacket, stood at the doors of the salon du thé surveying the clients. He spotted Zuzana Slánská and Martin across the room and pointed them out with one of the brims of his deerstalker as he started threading his way through the tables toward them. A dozen men in civilian suits fanned out behind him.