Stefan Heym

by The Eyes of Reason

  Also, it was a lesson in practical politics. In truth, Joseph had done very little. He had mentioned the matter casually, and only once, in a letter to Dolezhal; but this had been enough. What was power? It was having at your disposal a large but finely spun web, so that if you pulled a string at one end, another string at another end of the web began to tremble.

  The idea intrigued him. There was more to being elected than just getting back the Benda Works. He would have a close look at this web and learn where to twang at the strings and what effects to produce. There must be a tremendous satisfaction in sitting somewhere and exercising a long-distance control over other people who didn’t even know that they were being controlled.

  “Yes?” he said in annoyance over the unannounced entrance of his pale, mousy secretary. That was another thing, too—in Prague, he would get himself a secretary who had shape in front and in back, who wore lipstick and plucked her eyebrows and had her hair permanented.

  “Frantishek Kravat wants to see you,” the girl said, her colorless eyes frightened.

  “About what?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said unhappily. “He didn’t tell me.”

  Joseph grimaced. “I wish you wouldn’t make a tragedy out of everything. You only work here. It’s not your life!” Then it struck him that for a person of her kind the work in his office was her life. He gave her an affable smile.

  The smile, because she was so unaccustomed to it, made the girl even more timid.

  “Come here,” he said.

  She approached the desk awkwardly.

  “You know what I’m going to do?”

  “No, Mr. Benda,” she whispered.

  “I’m going to tell Kravat to fix it with the Works Council so that I can pay you a raise. You’ve been a very conscientious worker, and I like to see people around me happy.”

  “Oh, Mr. Benda!”

  “Don’t thank me! And for God’s sake, don’t cry! You haven’t gotten it yet!...And now, call in Kravat.”

  Kravat came in and stood silently while Joseph marked on the Manila sheet the date of publication and the name of the paper in which Thomas’s statement was printed.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” invited Joseph, “I’ll be through in a second.” Without looking directly at him, he had tried to get a glimpse of Kravat—Kravat’s expression might tell him something of what the man was up to.

  Obviously, Kravat had seen the newspaper before and recognized the big type on the statement Joseph had pasted up. Was there some connection between the appearance of the statement and Kravat’s visit? Kravat was a man with an eye for where people were heading; was he feeling that people were heading a certain way, and that Thomas’s statement was helping to consolidate the direction? Was he reconsidering so as to be able to climb on the bandwagon?

  Joseph threw the newspaper into the wastebasket but kept the clipping on top of his desk.

  “Well, Kravat!” he said cheerily. “What brings you here?”

  “This!” Kravat said, pointing at the exhibit.

  “Ah, this! You know, I half expected you.” Joseph stretched comfortably and nodded toward the crystal cigarette box on his desk. “Take one! Take a couple!”

  Humorous wrinkles showed at the corners of Kravat’s eyes. He thanked Joseph and dug out a fistful of cigarettes, lighting one, and shoving the others into his pocket. “They’re expensive, these days,” he remarked.

  “Quite,” said Joseph. He had not meant Kravat to help himself that liberally.

  “Mr. Benda—did you have anything to do with the publication of that statement?” asked Kravat, and blew a thin stream of smoke through pursed lips.

  “As a matter of fact I didn’t. But why do you want to know?”

  Kravat pondered that information. “Well—everybody will think you did, because everybody knows that you’re Thomas’s brother and that you’re a candidate for election.”

  “What of it? It’s a pretty good statement!”

  Kravat again released smoke. “Yes. Except that it’s not complete.”

  Joseph glanced at the clipping. Freedom is truth, the search for truth, the fearless proclamation of truth. “I’m afraid I can’t see that, Kravat.”

  “With your kind permission, Mr. Benda—your brother says nowhere about whose freedom he is talking.”

  Joseph laid his large hands in front of him, like a challenge to Kravat. “Freedom, my friend, is for everybody! That’s what I stand for, and I think, at the bottom of your heart, you do, too.”

  The trouble was that Joseph was partially right. But not everybody could be trusted with the use of freedom. “I have a proposition,” Kravat said heavily.

  “You have?” Joseph’s voice was hopeful, but he lowered it instantly. “That resident manager’s job in Martinice is still open!”

  Kravat made a wry face. “No,” he said; “it’s about that statement your brother wrote. We want a discussion on it. A public discussion. You, Mr. Benda, against our candidate, Professor Stanek.”

  Since Joseph was still too perplexed to answer, Kravat went on, “Make it a large meeting. Invite everybody in town.”

  “If you want a public discussion,” snapped Joseph, “have it with my brother. I told you I had nothing to do with the publication of that thing.”

  “But you’re the candidate, not Thomas.”

  Joseph glared at Kravat; Kravat looked noncommittal.

  “Who had that brilliant idea?”

  “Several people,” admitted Kravat. “I among them.”

  “I’m not a clown. I’m not a performer. This is a political campaign, not a circus.”

  “Oh yes,” said Kravat, shoving the tiny stub of his cigarette into one of his cheap holders; “but it would make a bad impression if we called the meeting and you didn’t show up....”

  There would be a great pleasure, thought Joseph, in having the power to put certain people in jail, and in hearing the jail door clang shut, and in knowing that those people would be muzzled for a while.

  “Of course I’ll show up!” he said evenly. “And so that you know you won’t have it all your own way, I’ll bring some of my friends along, too!”

  Kravat stamped out the sorry end of his cigarette. “Fair enough,” he said. “After all, we’ve got a democracy so we can talk about these things.”

  “Yes—that’s what it is for, isn’t it?” said Joseph, and shoved the stiff sheet with the clipping into his desk.

  He did his work as always. He commuted between Rodnik and Martinice; he compiled cost sheets and revised prices and tried to cut corners; he met with committees and cast his vote, sometimes on the majority, sometimes on the minority side; he ate and he slept and on Sundays, he took Petra walking.

  But inside him was unrest, and the unrest grew as the weeks passed, as the snow melted and the Suska River flooded its banks, as the crocuses showed their delicate cups above the ground and the sap rose in the pines, as the meeting day approached. Despite his commitment to Kravat, he had called up Prague and inquired from Dolezhal what the Minister would think if he were to crawl out from under. Dolezhal had laughed. “My dear boy, words are a political weapon just as much as money, or influence, or organization. Learn to use them! Do you believe I could get out of a debate in Parliament? But remember, words are the most pliable of weapons, and that all is fair in this kind of fight.” That’s what Dolezhal had said, and it had left Joseph straddling the old predicament.

  Then he had wanted to see Thomas, ostensibly to get some additional ideas on the statement; in reality, to try to ring his brother in on the performance. Let Thomas speak on the abstract, idealistic end of the thing; he, himself, would tackle its practical implications; and with the high regard in which the people of his country held an author, even if they did not understand him, they would listen and get bored, and the whole disputation would end up hanging in the air.

  But the moment Joseph mentioned the statement, Thomas refused to see him; apparently, it was as sore a subject w
ith Thomas as with himself.

  Joseph made vain attempts to surmise what Stanek would say. He knew Stanek; he had worked with him, too, in the crammed, event-filled months between Munich and the conquest of Czechoslovakia; he could visualize the Professor mounting the platform—truly, no formidable opponent! Of course, the old man had a sharp tongue and a sharp wit; but against that, he could set his dignity and his achievements. Considered soberly, Stanek, an intellectual, was less a man of the people than himself, with a grandfather who had started out as a peasant, and a father who began as a small manufacturer with a style of living not so different from that of any other citizen of Rodnik. He had his roots with the people; Stanek, in books.

  No, he did not dread Stanek, and he did not fear what Stanek might say. What he was afraid of was a weakness in his own position.

  Yet he was no impostor! He had the right principles and he had the right answers! He was for freedom for everybody, including himself, including the freedom to own his own business. He was for the widest social legislation, for helping the workmen when they became sick or old or unemployed; and if he was elected, he personally would push a law to pay for the retraining of men like Blaha who had been incapacitated through their work. He was for the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people, so long as no one was unduly hurt in providing it. He was against anyone telling anybody else what to do and what to say and what to think and how much to earn.

  That was his program. That was the program of the Party in whose ranks he stood, Dolezhal’s Party, and there could be no doubt that it was a just and equitable program.

  Then why was he afraid? Why did he protest so much? Why didn’t he sail into the meeting on the strength of his confidence in his Party, his program, himself, and in his ability to carry his audience?

  He started afresh. To anyone else, he might pretend that he was primarily interested in the nation, the people, democracy, welfare, social progress—and he was, yes!—but deep inside he knew that Joseph Benda, first of all, stood for Joseph Benda. This was his weak point. He was in mortal fear that somebody, a Stanek, might find it out or guess at it intuitively and put his finger on him and say so.

  He cast about for defenses. This program of his, the ideals of democracy—were they not exactly the ideals for which he had fought before the war, and in the days of Munich, and during the war? He had had no doubts then, no hesitations, no fears; and no voice outside or inside of him had nagged him with superfluous, harassing questions. Even the lost members of his squadron, those whose bodies were salvaged and those of whom nothing had remained to be buried—he had mourned them, but never, never had it entered his mind that they could have died for anything but the purest and best of causes. Could it be possible that at that time, too, Joseph Benda had fought only for Joseph Benda, that the liberation of his country had meant to him the liberation of the Benda Works, and that the abject misery of his people had been identical with his inability to make glass at a profit of 6 per cent and over? What was he—a monster?

  When Joseph thought that far—and mostly, this thought occurred to him at night—he could no longer sleep, he turned and tossed in his bed, his pillow grew hot, and he did not dare to punch it and smooth it for fear of waking Lida.

  All right, then, let it be true. But weren’t the others exactly like him? If he wanted to hold on to his own, weren’t they out to grab it from him? And hadn’t they grabbed it already—the Novaks, the Kravats, the Works Councils, the unions, the nationalizers? Hadn’t they taken away his Works and reduced him to a puppet dangling from their wires? They, too, pretended; they, too, used his slogans—but in reality, they wanted to enrich themselves and they were enriching themselves, sometimes as individuals, always as a class.

  If anyone needed to be exposed, it was these demagogues. Unfortunately, the class they represented was in the majority; if he exposed them, he would only help to drive the mass of innocents into their arms. But in no case were their moral rights any better than his.

  And now, on top of all that, they challenged him and forced him to defend himself—in front of his own workers, on his own home grounds, in the town whose leading citizen he still was. If democracy meant that a man could be cornered by people his inferior, and be driven into cheapening himself before people his inferior—then democracy was a sham. Kravat and Stanek and Novak had made a sham of it, because they were using its forms for their own aims. Well, he could do the same.

  Go to the people!...Was it possible that a public contest of hypocrisy between him and old Stanek could ever prove the value of a program or a party or a man? It was absurd!

  What the country needed was a government of men who knew what was best for it, who by their education, training, experience, and broad-mindedness were pre-eminently capable of discharging their responsibilities, who were experts in their fields and in the art of taking and holding power. And the sooner such a government was established, the sooner the country returned to sanity and did away with the excesses of democracy, the sooner the sham game was brushed off the table, the better it would be for everybody, even for those poor glassworkers who would come to the meeting to have their ears shoveled full of double talk!

  When he had reached this final conclusion, Joseph would begin to feel happier. It occurred to him, once or twice, that what he dreamed of was a kind of dictatorship—but it was a benevolent one, and, after all, whatever name you gave to the outward forms, when had there been a time in history at which the people did not have to be led by their betters?

  When Thomas and Kitty arrived at the Rodnik Municipal Auditorium, the hall was already quite crowded. Outside, a drizzle was falling. Inside, the damp clothing of the people was steaming in the warmth of their bodies. The auditorium was a bleak affair with a beamed ceiling and a wooden stage where the traveling theater troupes performed when they came to town and where, twice a week, the movie screen was set up; along one wall were placed the ladders and ropes and bars and other paraphernalia of the local Sokol which used the hall on the remaining evenings as a gymnasium.

  Thomas looked at the proscenium. The organizers of the meeting had tried to relieve the gloom of the hall by means of bunting and flags and slogans painted on streamers; but since the slogans had to be impartial, they lacked punch, and the dim lights made the bunting drab instead of gay. The shrill shouting of the many children tumbling between the rows of seats gave Thomas the feeling that he was caged in a zoo. He tried to distinguish words and sentences in the drone of voices—all these dreary people had come from their dreary homes to hear about freedom and about the statement he had written. He saw Lida already entrenched in the front row, with Petra, head bent, fidgeting with self-consciousness, at her side.

  “Do you want to sit up there?” Kitty asked.

  “I’m not looking for the limelight, tonight.”

  “But we should say hello—”

  “It will hold,” Thomas assured her and led her to the rear of the hall where people were standing before a long table on which soup dishes and boxes filled with spoons were stacked.

  A little man was going from one person to the other and spreading the word that Joseph Benda was contributing the food for the evening.

  “Goulash soup!” he explained. “And thick! No skimping with Joseph Benda!”

  “Well, he’s got it, hasn’t he?” remarked someone, and a deep-throated voice inquired pointedly, “Yes, but what about beer?”

  The little man got excited and said that this was a serious meeting about questions of state, and that drunks and bums should keep out of it.

  “You would sell your vote for a glass of beer!” accused a woman, and the deep-throated voice came back, “What do you mean—my vote? My soul!”

  “Of all the godlessness!” an old man said reedily. “In my time we paid for food, and were grateful we got it!”

  “Listen, Daddy—those times are over! Now a man is a man, and they’ll give us goulash soup and a lot of other things, too. That’s the Revolution—
”

  “But it’s nice of Mr. Benda, nevertheless, to treat us to goulash soup! What do the Communists give us? Leaflets!”

  The little man, who had gone away, returned waving his hands. “There will be beer, too!”

  As if to confirm the announcement, four heavy-set fellows came in, dragging big baskets.

  “See?” shouted the little man. “The glasses!”

  “It’ll be thin beer,” somebody predicted. “Thin and cheap.”

  “No, no, no!” cried the little man. “The very best!”

  “Buttering us up—that’s what it is! Pretty raw, I say!”

  “What do you care as long as you stuff your belly and pour it down your guzzle?”

  “He means well! Joseph Benda’s always had a heart for the workingman!”

  Thomas could see that Kitty was enjoying the rumpus. And there was something wholesome in this skepticism and this interest in food and drink; a people that could weigh the merits of a goulash soup and be concerned about the grade of beer was unlikely to get drunk on slogans, including the ones Barsiny and Elinor had pulled out of him.

  Up front, seats were being clapped down, people were calling for quiet, children were caught by the scruff of the neck and clamped in tight between their elders. The Reverend Antonin Trnka, pastor of the Rodnik church, appeared on the stage.

  The Reverend was nervously stroking the lapels of his black coat. He had agreed to chair the meeting because he had been told that everybody believed in his political neutrality and because, as a man of God, he was likely to be respected even during the heat of argument....He was not so sure. It was true that he had few opinions and rarely expressed those he had; but the crammed, squirming humanity inside the auditorium was different from the sober, orderly men and women under the somber roof of his church, and it filled him with apprehension.

  Thomas found seats for Kitty and himself somewhere in the middle of the hall, next to a couple of hefty women. He noticed that the Reverend was bowing to him, and he returned the greeting. Poor Trnka, who never saw him in church! He really should make it a point to attend services some Sunday!