His face was sullen, and he said nothing.
“Don’t you see it, Thomas? This whole idea of socialization—not that it will ever work—it’s a terrific temptation! They want to get the people to sell out their birthright for the pottage of security—jobs, medical care, old-age pensions. In return, they’ll demand only one thing: complete subjection. No criticism. Toe the line. Take orders.”
This was not exactly news to him. He had thought about it when he learned of the Decrees, and before that, when he’d heard of arrests, rather summary court proceedings, and executions. But the executions had been of people who had informed to the Germans, and so it was all right; and for the rest, there was Benes, and the Provisional National Assembly, and a dozen different newspapers with different views, and a number of political parties with their differing philosophies and interests.
“Do you think it doesn’t affect you, Thomas? But I tell you you’ve been writing those travelogues because you knew they were harmless enough and wouldn’t prejudice anyone against you. You could have published them even under the Nazis—right?”
She was right, and she wasn’t. Nobody’s gall would rise over anything in his articles. But that was not why he had chosen to write them. He just hadn’t been ready to tackle a more complex project, by himself.
Why hadn’t he been ready?
“You are not consciously submitting, Thomas—I’m not saying that. But you’re sliding into it. And you were the Voice of Freedom—do you want me to quote some of the things you wrote?”
“When I worked for your American magazines,” he said slowly, “I always had to think in advance of what they would accept and what they wouldn’t. It’s not so much different here.”
“But it is! You’re in your own country, Thomas darling, and you’re a big man in your country. They’ll take anything you say, and listen to you; that’s your responsibility, and you’re shirking it.”
He thought of the night train from St. Louis to Kansas City. “Freedom...”he said bitterly. “What is freedom? Where does it begin, where does it end?”
“That’s it!” she cried. “That’s it exactly! That’s the question that has to be answered—now, and in this country, and by you. Because thousands of people are asking it!”
She closed in on him, speaking tensely. “Freedom is no pretty young girl. Freedom is a gnarled and battle-scarred old man...” Somebody else had said that—who was it, Bryant? It didn’t matter, Thomas wouldn’t know, and the line fit admirably. “Freedom is never secure. You Czechs have been fighting for it through hundreds of years. Write about freedom, Thomas, and you’ll be the greatest man in your country!”
Her eyes had fire, and it was obvious that at this moment she was in love with him. He saw all this with a detachment that amazed him. For the first time since she had come into his house, he was able to think clearly. She had a wonderful nose for news and for ideas that were in the minds of people. The whole secret of her success was this ability to swim with the stream, but to make it appear as if she were swimming slightly ahead of, or even against it.
“Write something about freedom?” he said disparagingly. “An essay, you mean? A tract?”
“Why not?”
Yes—why not? But the very fact that she had led him to the trough made him loath to drink from it. He wished the word freedom had never come from her lips. Why the hell hadn’t she let him discover it himself?
“Because the subject is like an old deck of cards that everybody has played with, including yourself, Elinor. Because I’ve got other matters to worry about. Because I don’t like it.”
But what if I shuffled the deck once more and stacked it in a new way? What if I did write an essay of this kind and came to conclusions quite different from hers?...He could look at this shining thing, this freedom, for which so many men had died, and see what it really was. He could go back to the great philosophers of his country, to Hus and Comenius and Augustin Smetana. He could dig down to the roots of his people, to the revolutions from which it had risen, the battles in which it had bled, to one-eyed Jan Zizka and the men of Tabor, to the early Masaryk, and to those who had died a nameless death in the concentration camps of this war. And the monument he had wanted to build them in the novel he would never write would be all the finer and cleaner for the lack of the curlicues of fiction; it would be a beacon light for his time and his country.
His eyes focused. He noticed the self-satisfied air with which she was studying him. “How long will you be in Czechoslovakia?” he asked gruffly.
“I don’t know—besides, Kitty asked that already. You’re not very hospitable, Thomas.” She laughed. She could afford his spite. She could read him as his brother, the doctor, might read an X-ray. He had swallowed the hook, and she saw it lodged deep in his gullet. And she thought, Joseph will be very happy....”Nor are you very subtle,” she concluded.
“Subtle enough!” he said, looking straight at her. She had given him a blueprint, and she was too egocentric not to assume that he must follow it. However, there was no such rule of thumb.
CHAPTER SIX
KAREL dozed fitfully in the corner of the front seat. Each time the old truck lurched on the rutted road leading mountainwards, his head jerked, and he became dimly conscious of where he was, of Kravat at the wheel, and of his own misgivings.
Kravat seemed to be enjoying the excursion. He was humming softly and viciously out of tune; he was steering with one hand and with the other tapping out on his knee the scanty rhythm of the melody he had in his mind.
“If you wreck the truck,” Karel said sleepily, “you’ll be in trouble. It’s the Benda Works truck, and even if you’re the head of the Works Council, you don’t own it.”
Kravat honked the horn and scared a few chickens which, seduced by the Sunday peace of the road, were pecking among the dried horse manure. They cackled and fluttered about, unable to decide which ditch offered them the better safety, and finally split up just in time to avoid disaster.
Karel came fully awake and said, “Everything about this is illegal....”
“So you’ve told me,” Kravat acknowledged.
Karel had told him at four in the morning when Kravat had roused him and shown him the truck downstairs and said, “By tonight, you’ll be a real doctor again, with all the equipment you need, and more.” From the moment they had left Rodnik pitched in darkness, Karel had been struggling against the rules of his upbringing—what was left of them after his life in camp.
The road became steeper, the farms fewer along the precipitous hillsides.
“That’s why I like it!” said Kravat.
“What do you mean?”
“It reminds me of the other things we did together.”
“It’s still illegal,” insisted Karel.
Kravat said, “When the Germans arrested me—”
“They arrested you? When did they arrest you?”
“In January of this year....They took me to Prague and put me in Pankrac Prison, had me up for trial, and sentenced me to death. So there I was in the death cell, worrying whether I’d be shot, or have my head cut off, or be strung up by the neck. I liked the hanging end of it least.”
“The hanging end of it—” repeated Karel.
The truck, laboring and steaming, had reached the top of the climb. The road sloped sharply downward, into a pine-studded valley through whose center a small river meandered, blinking silvery wherever its water hit against one of the many smooth boulders in its course. In the distance, a series of stately buildings, some red-roofed, some green, appeared out of the woods.
“I sat and I sat,” said Kravat, “until, on the fifth of May, the shooting began and the Revolution came and they blew open the doors of Pankrac. And then I found out why I hadn’t been hung or shot or decapitated. You see, the Nazi Government had relieved the Reich Protector in Bohemia, Herr Frank, of his duties. But the new man couldn’t come and take over because the Russians were at the gates of Berlin.”
“That was lucky!” Karel said, because Kravat expected some comment.
Kravat shifted gears. “My death warrant was already on the Protector’s desk—only there was no one in Prague entitled to sign it....You see what comes of excessive legality.”
“I get your point,” Karel laughed.
Abruptly, the laugh died. He shivered. It was to him as if he were riding with a ghost: this vital, solid man at his left, by all human logic, should be dead. The idea was deeply shocking. Somehow, he had assumed that the tall melter who took over the group after the arrest of Professor Stanek and himself had survived the remaining period of the occupation without mishap. Assumed? He had never thought of it! He had been so consumed with his own experiences that the experiences of others hadn’t mattered. Something in him had blanked a part of his mind so as to protect the thin scar tissue growing over the sore of the past. He must have recovered greatly, more than he had realized, if this could make itself apparent to him without his needing to beat his breast or to go into a tailspin.
“With me,” he said lightly, “chopping the head off would have been worst.”
“Tastes differ!” Kravat shrugged and drove across a small bridge and made the truck screech to a halt in front of a gingerbread two-story house on a side street beyond the town square.
The town was emptier, and more quiet and more deserted, than even a Sunday noon in a small spa out of season warranted. The larger buildings—the Grand Hotel, the Splendide, and the Hotel Zur Post, whose German sign had been incompletely painted out—were shuttered and their doors firmly locked. Only the Villa Rosa, from whose flagpole a faded Czech flag flapped in the breeze, showed signs of life. Some of its windows were open; over their sills were spread fat red or blue checkered featherbeds, or colorful peasant quilts; from balcony to balcony stout, broad-cheeked women were chatting, leaning over the balustrades. These were the wives of the Czech officers of this border garrison; their men lounged on the front stairs or read newspapers on the ground-floor veranda.
They seemed to have the town to themselves. The German owners of the large hotels had fled; the lesser Sudeten folk, the small shopkeepers and tradesmen, kept out of the way, hoping that by making themselves as invisible as possible, they would be overlooked and forgotten.
Kravat got out of the cab of the truck and looked about with the pride of anticipated ownership, a trait which Karel had noticed in him frequently in recent days. With a sweep of his long arms, whose thick wrists protruded from the sleeves of his worn jacket, Kravat said, “All this will belong to us. We will send the workers here, and the workers’ wives and children, and we’ll teach them to enjoy these things that they never had. We’ll make this a trade-union resort—what do you say, Doctor?”
“And who’s going to pay for it?”
“We are! Take us, for instance, at Benda. We make glass, we sell it—what are we going to do with the profits? Your brother Joseph doesn’t get them any more—you don’t get them—I don’t get them! The union will rent a hotel from the Government, buy the food, hire the help—it’s very simple.”
“Now, Kravat, it isn’t as simple as that!”
“But it is! You eliminate the private boss, and things reduce themselves automatically to their essentials. Work, and what you do with the results of your work, become a matter for you to decide. That’s why it’s simple.”
Karel smiled quizzically. He liked Kravat’s direct approach, but he doubted that life would ever function that way, even under the new conditions. Not that he wanted to be the one to disillusion Kravat. If Kravat, in his enthusiasm, had forgotten the jealousies of people, the petty ambitions, the eternal tendency to backslide, to beat your neighbor over the head instead of considering him as your brother, these things would make themselves felt soon enough, and quite forcefully.
A soldier, rifle slung over his shoulder, ambled up, placed his foot on the running board of the truck, and inquired casually what they wanted in town.
Kravat pulled a paper out of his pocket. Karel glanced at it as the soldier slowly deciphered it. It was a typewritten document made out by the District National Committee in Limberk, entitling the worker Frantishek Kravat and the physician Karel Benda of Rodnik to enter, for the purpose of taking inventory, house Number 367 in the spa of Singeruv Mlyn, premises formerly owned by one Medicinae Universitatis Dr. Reinhold Rust, who had left the country.
“Taking inventory?” the soldier asked hesitantly.
“Sure,” said Kravat, lighting a cigarette and offering one to the soldier. “We’ve brought the truck along with us to expedite the matter. I guess this Dr. Rust traveled light and the stuff he left behind is pretty heavy.”
The soldier pocketed the cigarette carefully. “I guess you’re right,” he said, and, pointing his thumb in the direction of the frontier, added: “They traveled light. Bastards.”
“Bastards,” agreed Kravat.
“How will you get in?” asked the soldier. He was gazing toward the elaborately inlaid door. It seemed securely locked.
Kravat looked straight into the soldier’s eyes and stated, “That’s your problem. You’ve seen the letter from the Government. We’ve got to take inventory.”
The soldier shoved his cap half over his forehead.
“Think, man—think!” Kravat encouraged him.
“There was a housekeeper—” the soldier mumbled finally. “She lives somewhere down the road.”
“Well, go get her,” said Kravat, “and hurry up! We’re on Government business!”
The soldier trotted off.
“They’re very helpful here.” Kravat slapped Karel’s back. “You’ll be a real doctor yet!”
Karel, the slap having knocked the breath out of him, coughed. “You’re taking advantage of him. He’s a peasant from somewhere in the sticks, and he isn’t quite clear about what inventory means. If I had known of this letter and what’s in it, I’d never have come with you. You’ll get the boy into trouble, and us, too.”
“What good is an inventory if the things you find aren’t put to use?”
“See the commanding officer, at least, and get him to agree.”
“Why should I? He’ll only refer the matter back to the District National Committee, and it’ll take us three months more to get at the stuff. Meanwhile, our people will be sick, and you won’t be able to treat them because you’re waiting for another piece of paper and a new set of stamps.”
Kravat had him there. If Kravat’s information was correct, this locked house contained everything for killing pain, cutting sores, mending limbs, delivering, and saving lives—except that none of it belonged to him or Kravat, even though it no longer belonged to Dr. Rust.
“Listen,” Karel said in a last attempt to clear himself, “these hotels, the mountains here—you said you wanted this to be a health resort for the workers. So they’ll need Rust’s equipment right here. You’re stealing from one set of workers to give to another....”
This time he had Kravat.
“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” Kravat said. “You intellectuals, you trap a fellow like me. It’s not fair. I want to do the right thing—”
The soldier, leading a frightened woman, was coming up the road. Kravat was folding and refolding the permit he had managed to get from the District National Committee.
Karel looked at the small wad of paper in Kravat’s fingers. His mind was picturing the wonderful equipment this Dr. Rust must have owned to satisfy the rich merchants and prosperous officials who had flocked from Germany during the war to this quiet, secluded spa in the mountains—the X-ray machine, the fluoroscope, the compact little miracle that took your electrocardiogram, the microscopes, the pincers and scissors and syringes and needles and lamps and surgical tables...
The soldier, hurrying the woman, was almost upon them.
“Kravat!” Karel said, “it will take a long time before this workers’ resort is organized. By then, we should be in a position to furnish them new equipment.”
>
“You mean, first things come first?”
“Definitely.”
Kravat sighed with relief and sat down on the running board.
Karel ordered the woman to open the door and strode into the abandoned house of Dr. Rust.
That God-damned Sudeten-German spa specialist!
Karel sweated and strained, getting the fugitive doctor’s heavy equipment out of the office, down the stairs, and onto the truck. He shamelessly commandeered the soldier to aid Kravat and himself in dismantling, lugging, and moving—which also kept the man from going back to his post and talking to his sergeant or lieutenant about the strange inventory. No time was wasted on crating. Over the protest of the housekeeper, Kravat appropriated the Sudeten doctor’s bedding and blankets and pillows, dumped some on the dirty floor of the truck, and used the rest to wrap up the booty. As a last thought, Karel dragged down Rust’s medical library, more than a hundred books, and threw them on the back of the truck.
Finally, Kravat chained up the backdrop. Karel, knees shaking, face pasty with sweat and dust, surveyed the haul. It was rich beyond expectation and, in a country stripped bare by the Germans, of inestimable value. The drugs alone could be weighed only in lives. All of this loot meant lives.
It awed Karel. The heavy load flattening the worn-out springs of the truck began to rest even more heavily on his shoulders. What he had contracted for with the committee of the Benda Works Council was a few hours of routine checkups, nothing complicated; the difficult cases would be handed to the understaffed little hospital in Limberk. But with what he had there on the truck, and with half the country’s doctors exterminated, with the universities shut down for years by the Germans and no new doctors filling the gaps, he might as well forget the arrangement and meet his obligation. He’d have to become a twenty-four-hours-a-day doctor.
“Let’s start!” he said tersely.
The soldier saluted. The truck rumbled off, away from the pleasantly peaceful little houses and the blind windows of the dead hotels.
Stefan Heym Page 11
