Karel’s appearance did not interrupt the work. Many of the men were new or had been hired from other plants not yet in operation; since these men went on working, those who recognized him and might have liked to step down from the platform to greet him could not afford to leave their teams. Some nodded to him; one pointed to the clock on the wall; it would be two o’clock soon, quitting time, he seemed to say, and Karel understood him. They were working on piece rate; any minute taken from the job meant the loss of a few precious crowns.
Karel heard Joseph’s voice coming from the direction of the open annealing kilns which lined the wall of the building. He moved toward it. Joseph, in his shirt sleeves, emerged from behind the last of the ovens. He seemed to belong, to be in his element; he and his work and the work of all these men appeared eminently sensible when Karel compared them to his own existence at Thomas’s house, his aimless walks, his hours and days stretching pointlessly.
Joseph put his arm around his brother’s shoulders. “Nice of you to come and have a look! You should have seen the place when I came back from England—what an unspeakable mess! I put in a couple of months of headaches; but now we’re really rolling along. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”
“It does!” Karel meant it, and he felt that the subject of Thomas was quite unreal in these surroundings. “How are the men?”
Joseph looked at the continuous silent movement around the furnace. To him it was no witches’ dance—every motion had a purpose; every lift of hand, every breath helped to fashion one more piece of hollow glass; every step up there on the platform meant money coming in after all the glass that had been smashed in the war.
“The men?...They’re all right. Not as good as before the war. They need better food, they need a lot of things...” He shrugged. “But so do we all.”
He bent down to pick a goblet out of the trash tub. Holding it against the light, he shook his head and called to the team master at the nearest work hole, “Czerny! Why don’t you watch your men when they put on the stems! We can’t afford this waste!”
The team master said nothing.
Joseph tossed back the goblet. It broke. “We should have no more than 8 per cent rejects, 10 at most. We have 15. I know the men’s problems, I understand the men better than they think. But they believe that now they can do what they please.” He snorted, “Their Works Council doesn’t help them to make better glass. And if they don’t make better glass, they can’t earn more money. It’s as simple as that.”
He called to the foreman for his jacket. He put it on, brushed some dust off the sleeve, and said, “Let’s go to my office. I’ve got some Slivovice, the real stuff, slightly yellowish—you know?”
Karel followed him.
Joseph became reticent the moment Thomas was mentioned; he admitted to some sort of discord between them. Over what?
“God knows! He’s always been peculiar, and America hasn’t improved him. I have a sneaking suspicion he feels too big for his breeches, Our Great Writer and all that....Oh, I know how to handle him; but it takes time, and time I haven’t got.” Joseph gestured vaguely at the pile of papers on his desk and at the furnace hall beyond.
“He used to think the world of you!” Karel said carefully.
“He still does!” Joseph sighed. “He still does. I have the letters he wrote me to England....It’s a terrible responsibility—don’t you see, Karel? I’ve taken it on and I’m carrying it; I’m accustomed to bearing responsibilities!” This last was said pointedly, as if he had never forgiven Karel for going off to Prague to study medicine instead of joining him in the business.
“And Elinor Simpson—what’s she to him?”
Joseph’s heavy lids opened a degree wider, but he didn’t ask the question that rose in his mind. “A most remarkable woman,” he stated instead. “You’ve never met her, have you? Too bad.” He looked up at his father’s portrait. “You probably know how I felt before disappearing to England. The Works, and Thomas—that’s what worried me. The Works I had to entrust to Lida; Thomas, to Elinor Simpson. I’m sure she did well by him.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Karel. “In any event, I’m afraid Thomas has come back needing more than a caretaker. He needs someone he can believe in.”
“That’s nonsense!...What do you want me to do? Who am I supposed to be—the Archangel Michael?”
“Since Father’s death and your coming into your own, you’ve been building yourself up to it—in Thomas’s eyes.”
“I’ve believed in certain principles, and I’ve said so. I’ve tried to live a decent life, and I think I’ve done so. That’s all.”
“Well, that’s all that’s wanted of you!”
The telephone rang. Joseph reached for it, then dropped his hand and let the phone ring.
“I haven’t changed,” he said truculently. “Not that I know of.”
“Then why doesn’t Thomas trust you?”
The ring was insistent. Joseph picked up the receiver. “Yes,” he said, “yes—yes.” His voice sounded tired. “I’ll be right over.” He hung up and turned back to Karel. “That was Lida. I have to go to Vesely’s.”
There was a pause.
Then Joseph pulled himself up and said, “Look here, Karel, I assure you it isn’t a question of trust or lack of trust or disappointment over anything. If you want to help Thomas, you’ve got to spend a lot of time with him, argue a lot of silly problems that he pulls out of a hat, and have patience, patience, patience. I’m running two businesses now mine, and Vesely’s Cut Glass. Even if Lida thinks she’s sitting in the big chair over there, I’m the one who has to run the show. So where am I going to get the time for Thomas? Why don’t you try and sit down with him?’
Karel’s long hands clasped and unclasped. “I can’t. Maybe later I will—not now.”
“On second thought—” Joseph’s face broadened in the sly grin of the peasant, “on second thought, I don’t know that I want you to. You’d fill him full of your radical ideas, and that would be the worst thing for him....” He stretched. “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something! And now, you must excuse me—I’ve got to run. There’s the Slivovice! Make yourself at home!”
He grabbed his hat.
Karel poured himself a glass, sniffed at it appreciatively, and put it down again. If he hurried, he might still catch some of the men in the plant to whom he should say hello. He had kept away from these men, from everybody in Rodnik. He didn’t want to stir up the past; it would be awkward to try to warm up in what were to become normal times the relationships formed when the enemy was in the country. Besides, it would be embarrassing for Joseph.
He had learned much from these men during the underground. It had been difficult at first—a Benda was a Benda, in Rodnik. But he had been the doctor; he had come into their homes and delivered their babies when the midwife couldn’t deal with it; he had listened to the rattling in their chests when they developed emphysema of the lungs; he had filled out death certificates and signed insurance claims. He had gained their confidence finally, but only after he had swallowed the lesson that, in many ways, they knew more than he did, and were clearer in their heads and had fewer hesitations and were more ready to sacrifice than he. Then he had begun to learn: From Otakar Blaha, the grinder, from Frantishek Kravat, the melter, and men like them—and from Professor Stanek, who was an intellectual like himself. He had learned about people and he had learned to study—he had never read as much as in the nights when he could hear the boots of the German patrols on the cobblestones of Rodnik. And he had been quite happy, then, come to think of it, although he was risking his neck, and although his doctor’s car was being used to transport men he did not know and material he did know to be highly incriminating.
Some of these men were dead. The others he had avoided. But having shown his face in the plant, he could avoid them no longer.
He found the furnace hall empty. A restful, warm stillness had settled down in which nothing moved except the thin, ghos
tlike strands above the furnace, The witches’ dance was over; only the fire glowed white through the cracks where the doors to the work holes did not close properly.
“How are you, Doctor?”
Karel whirled around.
“I’m up here!” The voice came from the other side of the furnace. “Come up here, why don’t you? I’ve got to watch this.”
A face rose beyond the furnace, the high forehead glistening with sweat and reflecting the sharp light of the fire from the open work hole before which the man was working.
“Kravat!” said Karel.
The face disappeared; the voice mumbled something.
Karel came around the furnace. Frantishek Kravat was stirring the melting glass in the pan inside the furnace; the hair on his chest trembled in the heat; his face was now hidden behind the protective shield which his teeth, clamped hard on its mouthpiece, were holding in place.
Karel blinked shortly into the flame, then closed his eyes. The square of fire still wavered in front of his lids.
The melter dropped the shield on his chest. “You’ve come back?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve thought about getting up to St. Nepomuk and dropping in on you.” Kravat picked up his shield and turned back to the furnace.
Karel watched the play of muscles in Kravat’s lower arms as the melter handled the iron bar and stirred the golden mass.
“Why didn’t you?”
Kravat grunted.
“I kind of expected one of you would come and visit.”
Kravat shook his head.
“Why not?”
Kravat had finished stirring. He took a shovelful of the coloring powder out of a box at his feet and threw it into the furnace. “Times have changed,” he said. “But you might have paid old Professor Stanek a call—he’s back, you know?”
“So I’ve heard.” Karel sucked in his lip. The melter stood upright, leaning on his bar, tall and angular and bathed in the stream of light from the furnace. “I was in camp, a long time,” Karel said finally.
The melter nodded slowly. “We know. We know what you did and how they questioned you and how you said nothing. We have a book for you. It was hard to get—we had to order it in Prague. It hasn’t come yet. Engels’s Origin of the Family.”
“I’m a Benda,” said Karel wryly. “I’m an expert on the family.”
“This book treats it from a different aspect.” Kravat took up his shield, and resumed work at the furnace. His shirt began to show dark patches of sweat. After a while, he stopped. “You can’t leave the glass alone for a minute....A book is nothing. It’s what we feel—that you’re back with us, and that you’re alive....I’m not a speechmaker, never was—”
Karel began to laugh. “Franta!” he cried—“You fool, you God-damned, silly fool!” But he meant himself, too, sitting in the villa on St. Nepomuk, waiting for Christ knows what.
Kravat’s face showed nothing of what he was thinking, but in his voice was an undertone of sympathy as he said, “You’re not looking too well. What are you planning to do, now?”
“I wish I knew. I’ve got to take it easy, and I can’t stay here, and I don’t know where to go. Perhaps to Prague.”
“Rodnik is your home!”
Karel shrugged.
Kravat prodded, “The houses of your brothers aren’t large enough?”
“You can’t go on living as a guest.”
“You’ve got a share in the Benda Works!”
“I haven’t asked Joseph for money.”
“That’s stupid. He’s got it. This plant is back in full production and the glass is sold as fast as we can make it.”
Karel shook his head.
“We need a doctor,” Kravat said flatly. “Old Moser is dead. The Nazi who took his practice ran off, not that he was much good. The nearest doctor is in Limberk. There’s nobody here.”
“I know.”
“Think about it!” Kravat jammed the bar once more into the pan and stirred the shimmering sirup. Then he lifted the end of the bar and through his shield watched the drops of glass drip off it, like honey from a spoon. Satisfied, he withdrew the bar and closed the work hole.
“A doctor,” said Karel, “isn’t just hands and a head. All I have is an old black bag with a stethoscope, a thermometer, two rolls of gauze, and a tube of Vaseline. The Nazi ran, but he shipped off his equipment first.”
“Go to your brother! Get the money!”
“You can’t buy that equipment today, with all the money in Czechoslovakia! A doctor without instruments is like a glassblower without a furnace, or a grinder without a wheel. Where am I going to get a fluoroscope, an X-ray machine, microscopes, or even something as simple as a surgical knife?”
“Do you want to stay here?”
“Somebody’s living in my old apartment. A family—can’t throw them out.”
“I asked you—do you want to stay here, and work?” The melter’s tone had changed. He was almost impatient, but with the impatience of authority.
“And if I said Yes?”
“I told you, times have changed. They’re going to change more. We need a Works doctor at Benda. We’ve never had one, but he’s needed. We need a doctor for the refineries. We need a doctor for Rodnik. We’ll get you a house if we have to build it with our own hands. And we’ll get you the equipment if we have to steal it.”
“Who’s We?”
Frantishek Kravat lifted his bar and banged open the next work hole. He said nothing because his teeth were once more holding the protective shield.
Karel waited. When the shield dropped down to the melter’s chest he repeated, “Who’s We?”
“The union, the Works Council, all of us...the people...” Kravat said offhandedly. It did not occur to him that Karel needed a few seconds to understand anything so obvious.
CHAPTER FOUR
IMPERVIOUS to the screeching of the carborundum wheels biting into the crystal glass, Otakar Blaha bent to the geometrical precision of his grinding. His hands were holding a heavy bowl to the wheel turning vertically in front of him. The bowl, weighing a good eighteen pounds, was one of a series of six ordered from Vesely’s by some potentate in Egypt or Syria. There was only one man in the refinery who could handle these difficult pieces, and that man was Otakar Blaha.
He was a little, wiry man whose squinting, near-sighted eyes were trained to follow sharply the most intricate curves and lines and dots and crosses and stars. He had developed an uncanny sense for the glittering, cool beauty of the abstract figures he had been cutting into furnace-blown hollow glass for some fifteen years; and his pleasure in this beauty made him forget the pain that sometimes welled sharply from his sore, red, swollen elbows to the tips of his fingers.
He saw no other beauty. He had no time to raise his head to the hills beyond the factory or to the clear, pale blue square of sky framed by the window facing him. He was oblivious to everything—to the other eight men sitting with him behind the tubs and wheels placed parallel to the window wall, to the room’s dank smell which, despite the open window, shut out the crisply pleasant autumn air.
Blaha tackled a new section of his bowl. He had to lean more heavily on his elbows which were resting on the board of wood that lay across the rim of the tub. He bit hard. Sometimes he had the feeling that his elbows supported the full weight of his work, that only the elbows were working while the rest of his body floated lightly in space together with the stars and rays he was cutting into the glass.
The water in the tub beneath the board was cold and gray with glass dust and particles of sand. The board itself was wet and slippery. Above the board, suspended over the continually turning wheel, was a water tap. A piece of string leading into a small paper trough extended from the tap to the cutting edge of the wheel. A thin stream of water flowed along the string, dampening the cutting edge, cooling the wheel, cooling the screaming glass, and wetting down the dust to keep it from flying into Blaha’s lungs. The water collected in the fre
shly cut grooves of the glass, not in sufficient quantity to fall by its own weight into the receiving tub, but just enough to drip along Blaha’s wrists and raised forearms and to stay at his elbows. So his elbows and arms and hands were cooled and remained cold, had always been cold ever since he could remember; he rarely noticed it and never gave it a second thought.
But today, the cold seemed to numb him; his hands trembled, his fingers felt dead; he had to slow down his work, pause, and hold up the heavy piece of lead glass before placing it back to the wheel.
He was frightened. Fourteen hours of work had already been invested in this bowl. There was no making mistakes for a glass cutter; what is cut, is cut. He was being paid by the piece, and he was being paid at a good rate. One hesitation of the hand, one slip of the elbows, and he would feel it in his pay envelope come Friday.
He put down the bowl. He got up from the high stool on which he had been crouching. With shaking fingers, he lit one of the four cigarettes he allowed himself per day, and walked up and down behind the row of grinders. They were working steadily; even the young boys who were hardly out of school and were learning the trade by cutting only the same simple lines around a glass or a little ash tray did not look up from their task. He envied them. What did these small pieces weigh? Nothing.
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