Karel’s eyes were searching the hall.
Thomas looked at him. “What’s Joseph up to?”
“As National Administrator of the Benda Works and of the Hammer Works in our neighboring Martinice, I have a fairly responsible position. But there is a position open of almost equal responsibility, and I mean the job of Resident Manager at the Hammer Works. For this job I am going to propose to the District National Committee—because I believe in the nation first and everything else long after that, and because he is a good man—my political enemy, the head of the Works Council at Benda, the brain behind Stanek—Frantishek Kravat!”
The applause was deafening, and it came from all sides. Kravat’s claque and the political friends he had mustered were badly split. Some were startled and dumfounded; but most of them were just as pleased as were Joseph’s followers, who saw the value of the surprise move. Almost everybody liked the dramatic climax, particularly because it brought the goulash soup within reach. Thomas was aware of Karel’s bitter frown; but he, himself, appreciated Joseph’s adroit stroke. The Bendas were certainly talented!
There was no question of further rebuttal from Stanek. Thomas saw Kravat push through the aisle. Kravat’s face was flushed and angry, he was throwing his angular body against the men and women thronging around to congratulate him. He was gaining and breaking through, he had reached the stage, and was jumping up on it.
“Listen to me!” he shouted. “It’s a maneuver—”
“Hurrah for Franta Kravat!” cheered the people. “Hurrah for Joseph Benda! Hurrah for unity!”
Kravat waved for quiet, but the people misunderstood and thought he was acknowledging their cheers, and they gave him more.
“Long live Franta Kravat!” “Long live Joseph Benda!” “No more speeches!” “Stand up there and shake hands!” “Hurrah!”
Thomas, still somewhat reluctant and yet moved by the enthusiasm, climbed up on his bench. “Hurrah for Professor Stanek!” he cried. He smiled apologetically and looked down at Kitty and Karel. Kitty’s eyes hung on Karel. Was she watching him for a cue as to what her reaction should be?
Then Karel was gone. Thomas found him again as he was clambering up on the stage. Joseph was coming toward Karel, hands extended. But Karel brushed past his brother. He walked over to Stanek and Kravat, and Thomas saw the three of them leave the stage together.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE MOUNTAINSIDES were fresh with green, the air smelled new and good. The brooks were peacefully back in their beds, and the dark brown loam of the valleys was nearly covered by the pastels of the seeds bursting forth. Even the district authorities in Limberk were aware of the spring and had promised to repair the road that led from Rodnik over the hills to Martinice.
The taxi driver, careful of the brittle mechanism of his old car, strained with the effort of avoiding the holes which winter and the thaws had scooped into the roadbed. Karel took his eyes off the driver and glanced out of the window. They had already reached the rock that designated the halfway mark between the two glass towns. Cut deeply and jaggedly and in some strange, huge pattern, the rock appeared like a heathen god’s attempt at creating a piece of crystal glass. At this rock Karel and his brothers, like generations of Rodnik children before them, had gathered on summer evenings to repeat the awesome stories the glassblowers had invented about it, and to shiver at the bats swishing out of its crevices. Past this rock, the border had run in those pregnant six months after the German annexation of Martinice and the Sudetenland; and from this rock, he and Thomas had gazed silently at the German outposts.
The road curved sharply. The car swerved and straightened again, and Karel was thrown against Kravat.
“Watch your bag,” Kravat said. “Better put it on the floor. We had trouble enough getting you the stuff.”
Karel complied wordlessly. He had a way of packing his instruments in his kit, and there was no danger to them even if the bag should slip from the seat; but he was tired of explaining to Kravat.
“It’s only a few more days,” Kravat went on with the argument he had started on departing from Rodnik. “If you do it at all, you’d have to do it now.”
“I’m sure you’ll make out all right in the elections, without my dragging family matters into the open.”
Kravat pulled at his tie. He had to wear his tie and his one good suit every day, and he rarely felt comfortable in them. “I thought the goulash soup was enough to convince you.”
Karel used his foot to push his bag into the corner of the car. “It was a filthy trick. The whole thing was. Platitudes and demagogy.”
“I wonder what it takes to get you intellectuals to do something!” Kravat said. He had finally tugged his tie completely awry and was turning his head toward Karel. “Tell me: What?”
“He’s still my brother,” Karel said quietly. “Also, I think people would resent it if I wrote to the newspapers and said that I was against Joseph. People around here live in small communities and they have a sense of family. They’d assume I had personal reasons for such a public declaration.”
“That depends on how you word it!”
In the glass pane which separated the driver’s seat from the rear part of the cab, Karel saw his blurred image: The wavering outline of his gray hair, indistinct eyes, and a double mouth. If Stanek and Kravat had only thought of asking him the night after the meeting in the auditorium—but either they had not thought of it, or had expected him to come forward on his own. Now he simply could not do it.
“What are you worried about?” he asked angrily. “Have you no confidence in people? Don’t you think that after they ate the soup, they got wise to what was being played?”
“It’ll be fifty-fifty in Rodnik,” said Kravat. “We’ve worked hard.”
“And in other parts of the district?”
“I’ll say this for your brother Thomas—he at least had the courage to come out and say what he thought when he wrote that piece on freedom. We hoped you might counteract—”
“Thomas wrote about freedom, not about Joseph Benda!”
The car bounced, and Kravat was jolted from his seat. Annoyed, he rubbed the top of his head and said, “Manager! Now I’m being driven instead of sitting at the wheel....”
“If you don’t like being manager, why did you accept the job? It must have been quite clear to you that your promotion was just another political trick of Joseph’s!”
Kravat leaned back and smiled. “He offered the job to me once before, as a bribe. I told him I didn’t want it—and I still don’t want it. But this time I had to take it because the Party told me to take it.”
The Party told Kravat, thought Karel. And it is telling me now, through Kravat—whether it has a right to or not.
Kravat sighed. “They said we do not work for only one election. We work for the future. And for the future it is important that we hold positions of responsibility and that we train and develop people to hold them. If you could see your way clear to your responsibilities, Karel—”
“My responsibility is the health of the workers, in Rodnik, in Martinice, anywhere.”
But Karel was pensive. In the end it would be Joseph who was fooled. The coup of kicking Kravat upstairs might have brought Joseph some momentary advantage; yet he had sowed a seed that would grow and grow and choke him.
“He’s not a happy man these days....” said Karel.
“Who isn’t?”
“My brother Joseph.”
“I know,” said Kravat.
Karel looked at him questioningly.
“We’ve been making it hot for him,” Kravat stated, “despite the goulash soup. And besides, Dolezhal has done him dirt.”
“How did you find out?”
“We’ve known it from the day the candidates’ lists were published.”
Oh yes, thought Karel, the ridiculous truth had been very evident from the candidates’ lists. Joseph’s name came out third on his Party’s slate for the district. Dolezhal’s organ
ization was pretty sure of garnering enough votes to elect two men—whether Joseph would squeeze through, was another question. Dolezhal was making use of the Benda strength in Rodnik, but the votes given Joseph would probably benefit only the list’s two top candidates.
Kravat scratched himself. “Wouldn’t it be funny if your brother were defeated and Stanek got in?”
“In a way it would be funny,” said Karel, though he didn’t feel funny about it. “So why do you want me to join in booting him in the pants?”
The taxi was wending through the first streets of Martinice. Kravat pulled up his tie and primed himself for his managerial role.
“Boot him in the pants?” he said. “You won’t believe me, but I don’t feel one way or the other about Joseph Benda. He doesn’t matter—what he stands for, does.”
If it was genuine, Kravat’s supine objectivity was admirable. Karel wished that he had some of it; life would be a lot easier.
They drove into the yard of the Hammer Works. A man came running up, tore open the door, and bowed, “Good afternoon, Mr. Kravat! Good afternoon, Doctor!”
Kravat climbed out first.
The man bowed again. “There was a phone call for you from Rodnik, Mr. Kravat. They want you to call them back right away.”
Kravat hurried to the office ahead of Karel. Karel looked at the buildings, at the thin, transparent spiral of smoke rising from the chimney, and wondered about these Germans who were always filled with imaginary illnesses and complaints. Swinging his bag, he ambled toward the door of the Works office.
He stopped as Kravat came rushing out. Kravat’s tie was wrenched down again, and he had forgotten his hat.
“What’s the trouble, Kravat?”
Kravat brushed him aside. “Driver!” he shouted at the taxi which was just about to pull out. “Stop, driver! I’m going back to Rodnik!” Then, turning to Karel, he ordered, “You stay here and proceed with your work. I’ll send the car back for you.”
“For God’s sake, what has happened?”
Kravat made sure that no Germans were eavesdropping. “Joseph called,” he said; and, lowering his voice, added: “The furnace at Benda has broken down.”
Joseph sat in the furnace hall on a workbench and stared at the furnace.
The workers had been sent home, but the melter who had taken Kravat’s place, the furnace foreman, and the team masters, a desolate cluster, stood at a discreet distance behind him. His strident reproaches were still in their ears: Such a breakdown did not occur overnight! There must have been indications days ago! Weeks ago! Why had they not reported to him? How was he supposed to manage the place if the men he trusted let him down?
Of course there had been indications—plenty of them. But it was difficult to explain why no report had come from anyone; so they had suffered the bitter outpour in silence. They could have made excuses. They could have said that Joseph, busy with his election campaign, had spent only a few hours a day at the Works, and that they had not wanted to take up that little time with their worries and apprehensions. They could have claimed that the daily report sheets, on which the steadily increasing amounts of rejects were faithfully listed, should have made Joseph investigate.
The new melter had noticed that the components which went into the raw glass took longer to melt than they should; but he could have mentioned in his defense that he was not as familiar with the furnace as Kravat had been, and that he had assumed the slow melting was a peculiarity of the installation at Benda.
The masters had observed that frequently the molten glass did not stay pliable long enough to finish a piece on which the men were working; but they could have refused to take blame by stating that any of a half-dozen reasons might account for that.
The foreman had known that during the last week or so the finished glass had frequently contained irregularities—traces of undissolved quartz surrounded by the slight halo of de-vitrification, or the twin spiral lines of cords that might imply bad mixing or insufficient melting temperature. He had such pieces weeded out, even at the risk of shortages in serial production; but he could have told Joseph that everyone knew the wind had an influence on the draft in the furnace, and the wind, more often than not since the thaws, had been bad.
Yet none of them could make himself believe that these excuses were valid. The real reason for their hesitancy to report lay deep in their make-up. The furnace was more than a machine, more than a provider which, if shut down, would cause the loss of four or six weeks’ work for themselves, for every man at Benda. It was more, too, than an irreplaceable aid in filling their quota of production and in helping their people to pull themselves out of the morass of post-war shortages and post-war misery. The furnace was actually something personal, its heat like the heat of their bodies, its characteristics as marked and as intimate as the habits of the members of their families—if you saw your old father begin to ail and waste away, it took time for you to admit it, even to yourself.
Then, on Friday morning, the crisis had come. All the gas the generator could furnish was being pumped through the grating; yet the temperature inside the furnace continued sliding. When it sank below eleven hundred degrees centigrade, the liquid glass in its pans turned into a sluggish mass too difficult to blow.
Joseph happened to be at the Works. The foreman’s dejected manner, the gloomy faces of the masters pressing behind him into the door of the office, told Joseph the story almost before the foreman could blurt it out.
His first thought was: My furnace! What have they done to my furnace! His second: Why couldn’t this have come a week from now, or three days from now? Why today, forty-eight hours before election Sunday? What a windfall for the Kravats, the Staneks, and all their little agitators! How they would spread the word through the glassmaking towns: A fine Administrator, who lets our national property go to seed! And not enough time to oppose their last-minute slanders with the truth! The truth was that not yet a year ago he, himself, out of his own pocket, had spent over a half million crowns to rebuild this furnace, the best, the most up-to-date that could be built—so why should he have neglected to care for it? The truth was that under certain circumstances the gas which fed the flames had a tendency to deposit particles on the chamotte grating and to clog it up—how could any man, particularly the Administrator, be held accountable for the forces of nature? But lies could be dripped into men’s ears, truth had to be pounded into their brains.
Dimly, he saw one way out. In some manner the very people who would attack him must be involved in the decisions which had to be made. That’s why, acting on instinct more than on deliberation, he had called Kravat; or, perhaps, it was that in the collapse of something so close to the meaning of his life he wanted near him a person, albeit an enemy, who also had a love for this structure of brick and mortar. He did not know. Everything was so mixed up.
He sat and waited and mourned. Everything, animate and inanimate, conspired against him. The nation for which he had fought had stolen his life’s work from him; his brothers had turned their backs on him; if his wife was capable of love, no inspiration came to him from it; his child was lonely and refused to open herself up to him; the Party he had chosen was using him for its own ends; and now the soft wind that came from the hills on which he had grown and for which he had longed in the years of his exile, had slagged up his furnace and blown down his plans.
What was he struggling for? Why didn’t he strike off his ambitions and accept the facts as they had come to be—remain an official, do a routine job, live on ten thousand crowns a month, leave the worrying to others, and design new models of glass when the spirit moved him? Even a horse that has run is led to its stable and allowed to rest. Only man, his kind of man, had to go on racing, always trying to keep ahead, counting, weighing, and scheming, until ulcers caught up with him and he bled out his guts.
He heard Kravat behind him talking to the foreman, but he did not turn around. Kravat finally sat down next to him. He looked at Joseph’s large h
ands lying flat on his knees; then he followed Joseph’s fixed stare and, for a while, neither of them spoke.
“If I told you that this hurts me inside”—Joseph broke the silence—“you’d laugh at me.”
“It happened all of a sudden?” asked Kravat.
Joseph shook his head. “Nothing happens all of a sudden. It’s just that our eyes aren’t fine enough to notice a gradual change until it has reached a certain point.”
Kravat resisted the sadness and resignation in Joseph’s voice. “Don’t worry!” he said harshly. “It’s not your furnace—not any more.”
Joseph winced. But it was this rough, factual statement which released his coiled-up thoughts and gave him the gimmick he needed.
“It’s not my furnace,” he repeated. “Nothing here belongs to me. That makes it simple, doesn’t it? We’ll stop work and wait till the furnace cools off completely. Then we start the repair job. It’ll take six weeks, or thereabouts. It’ll cost the Government five or six hundred thousand crowns. It’s nothing out of my skin. This socialism is really a blessing in disguise!”
The deadly logic in Joseph’s words set Kravat’s teeth on edge. All right, nobody would starve; the men would get unemployment insurance. But six weeks’ worth of glass would go down the drain, and they’d never be able to catch up with the losses.
“Are you serious about that, Mr. Benda?” he asked.
“If the furnace breaks down, it has to be cooled off and torn apart and rebuilt and slowly reheated.”
“But it can be done differently!” Kravat said sharply. He was disgusted. Up to now, it had not occurred to him that the breakdown of the furnace could be turned into an argument against nationalization. He could see Joseph using it, too. This easy dismissal of all other possibilities in favor of an arbitrary shutdown of the furnace and the Benda Works smacked of sabotage.
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