“It was the war,” said Karel. “I’m sure all that Thomas did, and said, helped us greatly.”
“They called him ‘the Voice of Czechoslovakia,’ or ‘the Spokesman,’” said Kitty.
Karel lit a cigarette and felt the tang of the tobacco on his tongue.
“Elinor Simpson coined those names for him,” Kitty continued. “And she saw to it that they were inserted in his publicity, and finally the names stuck.”
“Elinor Simpson?”
“The American writer.”
“Oh, yes—” Karel frowned. “Joseph used to talk of her.”
“She publishes a column every day.” Again Kitty spoke as if she were reeling something off. “Some sort of editorial article which is printed in many papers over there. She has lots of influence; people listen to her. She did a great deal for us. We would have starved without her.”
“And she admired Thomas?”
The question seemed naïve; Elinor admired no one but herself. But this was too complicated to explain to Karel in a few sentences. So Kitty only said, “Yes.”
Karel tried to imagine the Simpson woman, her motives, and the relationship that must have developed between her and Thomas and Kitty. “You didn’t like her?” he asked.
Kitty began to clear away the dishes. He let his eyes follow her hands and the brush and brass pan as she cleaned the tablecloth of crumbs. Idly, he debated with himself whether he should press her for an answer; in the end, his lack of ambition won out.
“What will you do today?” her voice filled the pleasant void of his brain. He sighed. “I’ll sit around. Maybe I’ll read a book. Has Thomas received anything new I could borrow?”
“No.”
She had finished her work. The table was bare and white but for the solitary setting that waited for Thomas.
“What would you like to do?” she said.
He believed he heard a trace of reproach. “Yesterday I went to Joseph’s and he let me have his collection of Thomas’s writings from exile.” He talked quickly, as if an accumulation of words could make her feel that his day had been crowded. “Joseph collected every scrap. A fat volume in buckram. I read a few of the English pieces in it, some of the other things that were in Czech, and two or three of the radio speeches.”
She swallowed her question, but he knew what it was.
“It’s so rarely,” he said, “that I’m conscious of how beautiful an instrument our language is. Thomas employs it as a master surgeon uses the scalpel. You won’t believe it—but there were men at the University so skilful that you enjoyed seeing them dissect a carcass.”
There was a lull.
“But you couldn’t finish reading?”
“I’ve got to read slowly, these days.”
Yet he had demanded another book, thought Kitty. He hadn’t been able to go on reading Thomas’s work. Thomas had sweated over it, had written with such pain, such self-discipline....She was hurt, all the more so because she, too, could show nothing for her years in America but that buckram volume of dated material.
“You ought to be thinking of work, yourself,” she said with sudden harshness.
He looked up. Their eyes met, and lowered quickly.
“I have been thinking of it,” he said. “I can’t stay with you forever.”
“That’s unfair!” she cried, and then lowered her tone. “You know I didn’t mean it that way. You know it makes me unhappy to see you—”
“Fall to pieces?”
Her hands came up in protest. The sleeves of her gown fell back and revealed her arms to the elbows. He stared at the smooth texture of her skin, and from there his mind wandered to his good breakfast and the cool white sheets.
“I’ve been thinking of writing to Prague. I’ll apply for a position at the University Hospital. Perhaps I’m still good enough to start on some research.”
“No!” she said tensely. “I want you to stay here. It’s better for you—”
“What’s going on here?” Thomas stood in the doorway. “What’s this nonsense about your leaving us?”
His shirt was crumpled, his pants spotted with old ashes. He seemed to have slept in his clothes, and slept only little. A strand of hair hung over his forehead, and his eyes were sunken above their dark rings.
Neither Kitty nor Karel knew how long he had been standing there, listening. Kitty pulled down her sleeves. Karel lit another cigarette; he had to use two matches.
“Let me have some coffee,” Thomas ordered. “Is it strong enough?” He turned to Karel. “We brought coffee with us from the States, lots of it; but Kitty tries to save it. Weak coffee is as bad as no coffee, just a waste. And we can always buy more. For money you can get everything, even here.”
Kitty silently placed the coffee before him. Thomas savored it and put down the cup. “It’s all right,” he said. “My mouth tastes like an old shoe. Why have you two been fighting? Why don’t you control yourself, Kitty?...America does something to people. You can’t understand it, Karel, unless you’ve been there. I think Kitty was the most even-tempered creature when we married and lived in Rodnik. But ever since the States she has her moods—haven’t you, darling?...You must forgive her, Karel, it hasn’t been easy for her, putting up with me.”
He rubbed the corner of his eye.
“Toast, please!”
Kitty handed him a slice. He buttered it, put jam on top, bit into it, and laid it aside.
“I’ve come to a conclusion!”
He said it with determination, almost optimistically. Kitty perked up. Had he started to write despite the wastebasket full of discarded pages?
“If I tackle this big project—if I start in the days of President Masaryk’s death and lead it to the liberation—show the whole panorama of the war and this country—I’ve got to have a focus, a central theme!”
Kitty sat very still, as if any movement on her part might jar the sensitive mechanism that was Thomas’s mind.
“Humanism has died in this period,” Thomas went on. “The old values have crumbled. But what has taken their place?”
Karel waited. It was clear that Thomas was eager to supply his own answer.
“You know what gave me the idea? That day when you arrived in Prague, Karel, when I went with you to the reception center and stood with you and watched with you the parade of broken people, broken and yet victorious because they had survived. Why did they survive? Why did you survive? Where did this strength come from? That’s the problem, and that’s the novel. Don’t you see it? How do you like it?”
Karel stiffened, only his tongue kept pushing against his lip. Buchenwald—performing post-mortems and writing out medical reports on eighty priests, each of whom had been inoculated with 10 cc. of virulent pus; carving up emaciated bodies and finding and registering the atrophies of the liver, the hemorrhages of stomach, pancreas, and brain, which were the result of intravenous injections of Neosalvarsan as a supposed cure for malaria; slicing into hundreds of cadavers of young men who had been forced by the SS Luftwaffe into compressed air chambers from which the air was suddenly withdrawn—from where had come his strength? And why had he survived—after seven different examinations in seven different Gestapo jails and camps?
There were dozens of answers. Luck; physical constitution; the final achievement of a degree of insensibility which made vegetating preferable to a death he could have administered to himself any day; the fact that Jan Novak had been in the same barracks with him and had talked to him of the reasons for living and the necessity for living; discipline, as enforced by Novak; ruthlessness in letting the weak weaken and the dying die; complete strangulation of outside-world ethics, medical and otherwise....
How could he explain to Thomas what he wanted to bury; how could Thomas understand, and know, and know so much and so deeply as to write about it and to write the truth?
“What do you think of it?” Thomas repeated.
“It’ll be a difficult book.”
“All books a
re difficult. But you’ll help me. It’ll be your story, the story of a man like you, his reactions, decisions, changes. Through him, we’ll see all the others, life, death....It’ll be a great book, because it’s the greatest story of our time!”
Karel saw how much Kitty wanted to add a plea to Thomas’s demand. He wished he could help the two of them. But he was no hero for the books. If Thomas acted as if he had found a hero in him, there were other reasons.
“You don’t believe I can write that kind of book?” Thomas glared. “Because I haven’t been in camp, myself, because I spent these years in America, away from it all, because I haven’t been beaten physically, and starved, and haven’t seen it with my own two eyes—is that why you doubt it? Is that why you want to exclude me?”
Exclude me...thought Karel. What had happened to Thomas?—He’d been uprooted, but who hadn’t? And in a way, this had always been Thomas’s problem; child or man, he had never been secure; emotionally, he had always depended on others, women mostly—their mother, Kitty, and in America, apparently, this Elinor Simpson. Intellectually, he’d always taken an offside view of the world or seen it through the filters of someone else’s eyes—Joseph’s, perhaps, who had taken his youngest brother in hand.
“I’m willing to tell you everything,” Karel placated. “I’ll answer all your questions. I’ll even tell you the things I’d rather forget. But after that, you still won’t have the book.”
Thomas stood up. “Why don’t you leave something to my insight into people and my imagination as a writer? I am a little more than a recording machine, you know!...”
He began to walk up and down.
“Joseph thinks I swallow his wisdoms whole. He still believes that his ideas were at the bottom of my novel and the Liberator Appeals and what have you.”
They very possibly were, thought Karel.
Thomas stopped pacing. “Well, they’re not! They’re not, and—Kitty! Why are you making faces at Karel? You don’t believe me, do you?”
“But I do!” she said. “You are—”
“I know what I am!” he cut her off. “And I know what I’m able to do!”
Karel crushed his cigarette. He felt sorry for Kitty. Whatever was wrong with Thomas, it was evident that he no longer could use Joseph as a crutch, or wanted to free himself, or had to free himself, and was grasping at anything that came his way.
But it would be a tragic mistake for Thomas to depend on him, Karel thought. In the end, there would be that gulf, unbridgeable, full of experiences which could not be perceived by anyone who had not been through them. There would always come a point when he would have to say to Thomas: This I cannot explain.
“I’ll tell you everything,” he said again. “But I’m afraid I’m too close to it—”
“Don’t worry, I have the distance!” Thomas retorted. “If I had lived through what you went through, I wouldn’t attempt to write it—on the other hand, I wouldn’t have lived through it. As it is, the conditions are ideal!”
Karel was tempted to give in. Maybe Thomas could do it! Then he reconsidered. In the last analysis, not a book but a human being was at stake. A human being, his own brother, weak, hard-pressed, troubled, following an old pattern in seeking support—only this time seeking it from someone who couldn’t give it. What Karel feared was the hour of disappointment when Thomas would have to turn away from him and would be faced with nothing.
“Don’t pick me for a character in your book,” Karel said. “You don’t know me, and it’s just as well. Your novel needs a hero, and I’m a wreck. Write about people and things you know.”
“What things? What people?”
“Whom do you think you know best?”
“Joseph,” shrugged Thomas.
“Well!” Karel said encouragingly.
“Joseph!” Thomas sneered. “What do you want me to do—write a satire?”
Karel didn’t reply.
“I’ll give you my estimate of Joseph,” Thomas said. “He’s nothing but a money grabber. He’s a self-centered, self-imagined giant with feet not even of clay but of pigeon dirt. Clear enough?”
Kitty turned to Karel, her eyes dark with anger. “You’re sidetracking him. Couldn’t you help him—after all, he’s asking for little enough—”
Thomas waved her off. “Ah, you’re the same—you, and Karel, and Joseph! The whole damned family disgusts me!”
He walked out of the room. Slowly, the door swung to rest on its hinges.
For a while, Kitty and Karel sat in silence. The anger died in her eyes and something else took its place—a kind of hopelessness which tugged at him just because it seemed so out of character with the Kitty he had known.
“Why did you refuse?” she said, finally. “He was so sure of himself, for the first time since I don’t know when. You might have tried to get over whatever was stopping you....”
“I guess I should have. I’m not much good. I’m very tired.” He fingered a cigarette.
“I’ll get a book for you to read,” she said, getting up.
“Thanks,” he said heavily, “don’t bother. I’ve decided to go out.”
He was a fool to meddle in this matter. He should stick to his soft-boiled eggs and his white bed and the sunshine, but something had to be done about Thomas, and very likely about Joseph, too. And he might as well add himself to the list.
Around noon, Karel walked down the serpentine road from St. Nepomuk, resting frequently, watching the green-roofed belfry of the baroque church on Rodnik’s market square until it became hidden behind the buildings of the town. Continuing through the crooked streets, between the age-mottled houses of the glassworkers, the soles of his feet enjoying the long-missed feeling of the cobblestones, he passed the old bridge spanning the Suska River, turned another corner, and was faced with the newly gilded sign, BENDA GLASSWORKS.
“My compliments, Doctor!” said the gatekeeper, a fixture of his youth. “Coming to visit us again?”
“Been a long time,” said Karel, “hasn’t it? How’s your wife?”
The gatekeeper snickered. “Still creaking! The years haven’t been kind to her. They never are to women. You’ll find Mr. Joseph in the office, I think.”
“Thank you!”
Karel walked a few steps into the yard, then stopped. He had to stop. His heart was racing, and a sudden pain behind his eyes nearly blinded him. There was no reason for his heart’s behavior except the onrush of his lost childhood, the many times he had come through this gate, sometimes with Joseph, more often alone. Their father had favored these visits, setting aside regular hours for conducted tours, leading the way through the plant, a son at each side, showing them every detail of production, explaining every step, and afterwards testing them on what they had seen and learned. Peter Benda wanted his sons to take an interest in the business early; but while Joseph had tried to get out of the duty as often as he could, Karel had always attended, sometimes coming uninvited, standing at the foot of the furnace platform, watching the workers blow the fiery bubbles and shape them, observing the strained faces, hollow cheeks filling, foreheads reddening, eyes bulging.
He had come not because he liked it, but because he was afraid of it and hated it. He had been afraid of the fire and the heat and the dance of the men and the hissing of the steam. He had feared the men, too; suspecting that he was being groomed to be their boss, they were always wooing his favor, stopping their work to teach him the use of the blowpipe still wet with their spittle, and offering him beer from the large pitcher which was the common property of every work team.
He had been drawn there and hated it and had not dared to show his hate to his father until the day Peter Benda brought him to the Works to watch the repair of the glowing hot furnace. They had to pull old Matjey out from under the grating, burned brittle. Dr. Moser, who had come to look at the shriveled, stinking, burlap-covered body and to pronounce it dead, gave the screaming boy a sedative. But he had gone back to the Works, even after that—despisin
g his father because Peter Benda, upright and strict and strong-voiced, had given no sign of guilt or atonement. And so he had cut up the tail coat.
Karel’s heart quieted down, the gray spots disappeared from his vision. He walked on, into the smaller house to the right of the furnace building, to Joseph’s office.
Joseph was not in. Karel glanced at their father’s portrait which hung on the wall facing Joseph’s desk. The old man looked out of it with hard eyes, his square face restrained and severe, his chin set against his wife, his sons, the world. Why on earth did Joseph keep the picture there? Joseph must have disliked their father as much as he had.
Underneath the portrait stood a cupboard with the collection of originals Joseph had designed. There were vases and goblets and ash trays and cocktail sets, all in good taste, all with a rugged quality, an individuality, and some of them really first-rate. It was difficult to see Joseph as a creative man, an artist—yet he was, after a fashion. Joseph rarely talked about this part of his work; perhaps he did not consider it work, but a diversion; he practiced it only in his free hours. There was, thought Karel, a subconscious connection between the portrait and the cupboard placed below it. That’s how the old man had roped Joseph into the business—via the detour of its creative end.
A shed connected the office with the furnace hall. Karel remembered the layout as if he had not been away from it the greater part of his adult life—in Prague, and in the camps. Carefully, he picked his way between the discarded forms of singed beechwood, the large-handled wooden troughs filled with the colored shards of the cullet, the piles of many-shaped, dustcovered glass articles waiting to be shipped to the refineries or to be smashed and ground into cullet and to be remelted and used, once more, as raw material.
He passed through the shaky door and stood in the furnace hall. He caught his breath. There was the same unearthly light that had permeated the experience of his childhood—this mixture of strident yellow pouring out of the work holes of the furnace, and of gray filtering through the narrow unwashed windows high up. On the platform around the furnace was the same witches’ dance as some fifty scantily clad, perspiring men raised and lowered, balanced and swung, turned and twisted their long iron blowpipes; the same gleaming pipe ends, flashing white and yellow and orange and red and purple; the same slowly cooling, always changing bubbles of glass. There was the same smell, a mixture of fire and water and dust and glass and iron and sweat and burned wood and beer, a conglomeration of evaporations. And in the hot air above the furnace, around the electric wires and the large cross made of chamotte bricks, incredibly fine strands of glass still wafted in eerie cobwebs—glass that had escaped from the furnace in gaseous form and had hardened. In the center, crowned by the squat, whitish gray dome and its pious cross, stood the furnace as he remembered it, filled with flame and pans of white-hot, thinly fluid glass. There was the same absence of human sound, only the steady roar of the fire broken by the occasional sharp crack of a pipe struck against metal to knock off a glass completed, or the tinkle with which the glass fell into a shard-filled container.
Stefan Heym Page 5
