He felt painfully how sharp she was, and how blunted he was. Had she ever believed him when he told her that he loved her? And he had loved her when he married her; she had been quite beautiful in her way, intelligent, quick-witted, well-groomed, and proud. Of course, there were the unspoken things. Lida was an only child. If one grew up in Rodnik and made glass, it was understood that whoever married her would ultimately control Vesely’s Cut Glass. Peter Benda, arranging the match, never discussed this angle with Jaroslav Vesely or, for that matter, with his own son. It might have been better if he had, Joseph thought bitterly. It might have occurred to him that control can be exercised in reverse.
“Well?” said Lida again.
He twisted so as to get rid of the tight feeling under his armpits. “I just don’t know. There are certain formalities...”
“I think I’m quite presentable,” Lida stated, smoothing her dress along her trim hips.
“Listen, Dolezhal and I are not going to reminisce about London. We’re going to talk business, we’re going to talk glass, we’re going to talk Benda!”
“I know about business,” she answered; “I know about glass; I know about Benda.”
The button, he thought—if I moved the button, the uniform might be a little more comfortable.
Then he said, “I’ll call Dolezhal’s secretary and tell him about it. Maybe it’s all right.”
*****
Petra had grown too fast for her age, despite the poor food of the war years. She had the soft, big eyes of her grandmother Anna Benda who, the vicious tongues of Rodnik said, had been driven to a premature grave. Petra was almost as tall as Kitty; and at this moment, sitting on the window sill, her legs dangling to the floor, she was enviously comparing her own body to Kitty’s.
She wished her bosoms were large and round, and that her hips had the kind of curves that constantly changed when you walked. She had bosoms, too, but they were just beginning, no more than little pointed swellings; otherwise she was all flat and her hip bones stuck out like scoops. She wished she had Kitty’s deep, rich voice, and lips like Kitty’s that were so pretty when they were half open. She wished she had somebody who loved her. She wished she were anyone but herself.
Lida stuck her head through the door and announced that she and Joseph were going out, so Kitty and Petra would have to wait at the hotel for Karel and Thomas. Then, as if suddenly remembering, she rushed into the room, nodded to Kitty, and kissed Petra on the forehead. “We’ll be back about five!” she said, and rushed out.
Petra showed no reaction. She listened to the short, ineffectual sound of the streetcar bells, and to the yowling of the wheels as the cars came down the hill from the Museum toward Wilson Station. She liked Prague. Her mother hated it and had often said so; but she liked Prague and couldn’t stand Rodnik, where she was always alone: most of the time her mother was busy at the office of Vesely’s or around the house, and her father came home late, tired from his work.
Her legs stopped dangling. “What do you think Uncle Karel is going to do when he gets back to Rodnik?”
Kitty, who had been turning over the same question, was startled that the child should ask it, and she felt guilty because she should have been concerning herself with Thomas’s immediate future.
“I guess he will take a long rest,” she said, “and we’ll have to feed him up.”
Thomas hasn’t been eating well since we’ve come home, she thought. Thomas wasn’t working, either, although he had been full of plans and had talked of a new novel while they walked their daily mile around the deck of their ship. It was to be a big novel, something along the line of War and Peace. Even if it should become a work of several volumes, Thomas had insisted he would write it. But he hadn’t started it—not even a plot outline; and in the month since they had been resettled in their house on St. Nepomuk Hill overlooking Rodnik, where he did have ideal conditions for work, he had never mentioned the project.
“Uncle Karel used to take me on beautiful walks,” Petra was saying. “I think he knew every trail in the mountains. And he knew all the stories that the people told. About the spirits of the trees—that’s a fairy tale, of course; trees don’t have spirits, do they?—and how there’s a tree growing for every man, and little trees for children, and when we die, we go home to our tree....Do you think he’ll take me again?”
It was wrong to tell the child of death and of dying, thought Kitty, no matter how you prettified it.
“I suppose he will,” she said. “If you ask him.”
“But he has changed. And I am different. I’m not a child.”
Kitty came to the window and ran her fingers over Petra’s bony knee. “People are children until they are seventeen or eighteen; sixteen, at least, you know!”
“I don’t think so,” Petra said seriously. “Maybe it used to be that way. But when I was eight, I knew about the work Uncle Karel was doing. And I knew that Father was flying in England, bombing the Germans. And I listened to Uncle Thomas’s voice, at night, coming from America. And I wanted to kill the German commander at our house, but Uncle Karel said it wouldn’t help any....” Her hands were busy, tying knots and untying them in the long cord of the drapes. “Now we have peace, and you say I’m a child.”
Kitty knew no answer. Everything had changed here, and the moment you entered the country you had to change. Was Thomas sensing it, too? But Thomas was shutting himself in and telling her nothing of what he was thinking.
Petra suddenly sat up straight. “I will get new dresses,” she said. “Mother thinks my skirts should be longer. Of course we’ll buy them on the black market. I think it’s exciting to buy black. Everything goes on in back rooms, and people are very secretive and they whisper about everything that’s important. Will you come with me and help me select things, Kitty? I want to be dressed like you.” She appraised Kitty’s suit, the flared jacket, the wide collar, the cut of the skirt. “Did you buy that on the black market?”
“No. I bought it at Bloomingdale’s in New York.”
“Bloomingdale’s...” said Petra, lengthening each syllable.
“That’s a department store. They have them in America. Very big. You can buy everything in them.”
“How wonderful! Maybe we’ll go to America, too, some time, and I’ll buy at Bloomingdale’s. Don’t they have a black market in America?”
Kitty smiled. “Yes. For butter, for automobiles.”
“Just like here,” said Petra with satisfaction. “Father got our car black, and it’s a pretty good car, too. It used to belong to the Kreisleiter in Usti; he couldn’t take it along to Germany because he ran out of gasoline. How much was your suit?”
Kitty calculated rapidly. The suit had cost eighty dollars, it was worth forty-five. Eighty dollars in crowns meant—but that was wrong; you couldn’t apply the official rate of exchange, you had to translate the value into the black market course, to be honest.
“About six thousand crowns,” she said hesitantly.
Petra fingered the material appreciatively. “Just like I thought,” she said finally. “You got it in the black market department of Bloomingdale’s.”
Kitty frowned. Things and people had changed, and one couldn’t explain even as natural a transaction as buying a dress at Bloomingdale’s.
Bohumil Dolezhal, Minister in the Cabinet of the reconstituted Czechoslovak Republic, was an impressive man. A large face with ruddy, well molded planes loomed above sloping shoulders; a bushy, gray mustache successfully hid his mouth. His hands were surprisingly small—white, almost feminine. He liked to use them in short, precise stabs as if he were physically driving home his points. The hands fascinated Lida; Joseph’s were like a peasant’s compared to them.
The Minister was cordial. But to Lida, the warmth in his twinkling: eyes seemed as calculated as his story of how he had won a thousand crowns in poker from the chairman of the parliamentary club of Communist deputies. The bank note, autographed, hung framed on the office wall, next to a
picture of Benes. Lida’s eyes were roving between the portrait of the modest, worried-looking little President and Dolezhal’s hands; she wondered how much of the Minister’s cordiality was show, and how much genuine. Joseph had bragged of his friendship with Dolezhal. Whenever they had met in London, so Joseph had pointed out fondly, Dolezhal had shown him off to fellow exiles, to Britishers, to Americans, and even to a few Russians. “What could he possibly gain from me?” Joseph had asked. “I was nobody, to him or to them....”
Lida knew this, and little more. She knew that Dolezhal had fled to London as a fairly minor leader of his party, and had returned a Minister. She had read that he was feared in debate. He never raised his voice, but would deflate an opponent with a few sarcastic remarks which contrasted oddly with his friendly, conciliatory manner.
“I’ll help you, to the limit of my power,” the Minister was saying, and Lida noticed the qualifying phrase. “But let me have the facts!”
Then he turned to her. She bore his glance and smiled. Dolezhal smiled back.
“It’s a long story, sir—” Joseph waited, sitting stiffly. “You don’t mind?”
“I’ve postponed a meeting with my section chiefs. I’ve got time.”
“It goes back to before Munich....”Joseph hesitated again.
Dolezhal said philosophically, “Everything in this country, unfortunately, goes back to before Munich.” His remark struck him as very apt; he made a mental note of it, he would use it as an à propos in one of his next speeches. It could be made to sound deprecatory, or accusing, or merely authentic.
His train of thought was interrupted by Joseph’s outburst, “I want justice!”
Dolezhal inclined his head.
“For three generations, my family has owned the Benda Works in Rodnik. We’re as Czech as the hills on which Prague is built. We employed Czech labor. We made Czech glass. But just about five miles from us, there’s the Sudetenland, with another glass town, called Martinice. And there are the Hammer Works...”
Once this Benda got going, he talked very well, thought Dolezhal. Make a note of that, too. Dolezhal could see the story develop with the logic of Greek drama—how the old commercial competition between the Germans in the Hammer Works and the Bendas turned political; how, after Munich, Martinice became part of the German Reich; how the Hammer people cut off Benda’s raw material and stole his accounts. How just prior to the Wehrmacht’s occupation of all of Czechoslovakia, Herr Aloysius Hammer appeared in Rodnik and offered to buy out what was left of the Benda Works for a quarter of a million crowns.
Joseph quoted Herr Hammer, imitating exactly the nasal, broad sounds of the Sudeten dialect: “‘I’ll have you know, Benda, that this is a onetime proposition. When we come again, we won’t bother about an offer. And I’m perfectly willing to have you stay on as manager, at a nice salary....’”
“These Germans!” The Minister stabbed the air. “Always considerate!”
Joseph switched back into Czech. “I threw him out of my office. It was funny to see him pick himself up out of the snow, put on his Tyrolean hat, and shake his fist.”
“He wasn’t so funny when he came back,” said Lida, “and I was left alone to face him.”
“Our women were wonderful,” the Minister said. His tone made it personal to Lida.
“My husband was gone,” she said soberly.
A shade of annoyance showed on Joseph’s face. “I fled in March ‘39, just before the Germans took everything. We were close enough to the Munich border; we saw what they were preparing on the other side.”
“Why did you flee?”
“Because I love freedom,” Joseph said. It was no pronunciamento; it was a statement of fact. “And because everybody in Rodnik knew where I stood. The Germans knew, too.”
A good man, Dolezhal thought, a man of principle. That’s what was needed in a country which had not yet found its bearings. The Minister felt a little glow of satisfaction over the instinct which had made him favor this Major Benda, back in London.
Lida said, “My husband had exposed himself, and his brother wrote all those appeals.”
“The Liberator Appeals,” explained Joseph. “My brother Thomas wrote them; we signed them LIBERATOR; I had them printed, and they went all over the country.”
“Of course!” Dolezhal knew of those scathing attacks on Munich and on all those willing to compromise with it. They had created quite a furore, at the time, and the Hacha Government had made half-hearted attempts to find their perpetrators. And this Joseph Benda was the brother of Thomas Benda, the writer.... “I’ve read your brother’s novel. Very impressive book. He’s back in the country, now?”
Joseph said, “Yes, sir”; but his thoughts went suddenly to Karel, who had come back, too, and a nervous heat rose to his forehead.
Lida was worried that the discussion would stray into the field of literature and stay there. She crossed her legs. “The Bendas never considered their own welfare. My other brother-in-law, Karel, the doctor, was involved in the underground. He got himself arrested and was taken to a concentration camp. That’s how the whole thing happened.”
The color deepened on Joseph’s face; his mouth was set rigidly.
But Lida went on, “The night my husband left, he handed the Benda Works over to me and said: Try to hang on to them. I tried, for almost two years. Perhaps it is a silly story, and we shouldn’t bother you with it—so many small things are involved—”
“Not at all; please, go ahead, madame!”
“The German commander of Rodnik lived in our house. That helped me to hold on to the Works. And I know everything about glass, of course.”
Joseph wished she would stop—or give her report differently, without bringing in Karel or Petra. She had repeated the story to him at least a dozen times since the day of his return to Prague. He knew she would start with the wounded man who was brought to Karel in the middle of the night. Karel had treated him. Then she would go on with the SS coming for Karel. She would work herself up to a description of Petra mad with fear and hurt.
“Children always know too much,” Lida was saying. “Petra went into the room of the German commander, where he sat at his desk, and she clawed at his sleeves and screamed that if he didn’t let her Uncle Karel go, her father would come flying over from London and kill every German in Rodnik with his bombs, and every German everywhere else. I rushed in, too late.”
It was easy, after that, for Herr Aloysius Hammer from Martinice. For all his money and influence, all that old Vesely could do was to keep Lida and Petra out of jail.
Joseph had to admit that Lida had told her tale expertly. She had avoided the melodramatic and kept to understatement. She had known what details to embellish, and when to let the stark facts speak for themselves. If, like Dolezhal, he were hearing it for the first time, he would be moved, too. Only he had sat in on all the rehearsals; now he saw the staging, and it disturbed him.
No, he was really ungrateful. Never in his life could he have brought emotion into Dolezhal’s eyes; Lida was fighting for something that was close to her heart and to his.
“And then I came home,” Joseph said—“home from the war, to Rodnik. Just the shell of the Works was standing, and the dead furnace. Nothing is deader than a dead furnace. You kick open a work hole. There’s slag inside; cracked chamotte pans; some hardened, brittle glass, oddly shaped, dust-covered...”
Dolezhal looked grim.
Joseph pulled in a deep breath. “So I started all over again. I mortgaged my soul and my wife’s property and worked till I thought I’d drop dead.”
“And you mean to say,” Dolezhal said angrily, “that after all this there still is doubt about restoring your factory to you?”
“Yes,” Lida answered simply.
Dolezhal scribbled a line on the desk pad in front of him.
“There are all sorts of authorities,” Joseph threw in, “and none of them seem to know just what their authority covers.”
“That�
��s a new Government,” Dolezhal shrugged. “We’ll straighten that out in time.”
He took the receiver off one of the three phones standing like fat black soldiers on the left-hand side of his desk.
“Won’t you come in for a moment, Jan?” he spoke casually into the phone. “I believe I have a little matter for you.”
The man who entered shortly appeared in all things to be the contrary of his chief. It struck Joseph that their heads were not only formed by different methods, but made of different materials. He could visualize Dolezhal’s face in marble; the other’s would have to be carved in wood. It was a dark, live, deeply lined face, with hollow cheeks, a beak nose, and sparse, straight, black hair that thickened only at his temples.
“Ministerial Councilor Jan Novak,” Dolezhal introduced: “my right hand.”
Joseph saw that Novak’s left sleeve was empty and neatly tucked into the outside pocket of his jacket. He looked away quickly, but Novak did not seem to mind the double meaning in the Minister’s remark.
“The Bendas have come to us for help,” said Dolezhal. He outlined the case. Mr. Benda wants only one thing from us, and he put it very nicely and succinctly: Justice. Jan, I want you to see that he gets his justice.”
The stab in the air that had coincided with each mention of Justice had no visible effect on Novak. He said, “Very well, sir, I’ll go to work on it.” His eyes, strained from too many nights spent reading documents and files, focused on Joseph, took in the shoulder patch, the ribbons, the insignia.
Again, the uniform failed to protect Joseph, and he thought uncomfortably that he should have dressed like a normal human being.
“That’s all that is wanted?” asked Novak, his eyes still on Joseph.
There was a slight pause.
Dolezhal had called in his Councilor too soon—Joseph knew it now that Novak was in the room. This would have to be all that was wanted, he decided, at least for today. He would come to Prague another time; he could see Dolezhal again, it would be easier on a second meeting...
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