Stefan Heym

by The Eyes of Reason

  The attendant came in and announced, “Your guest, Mr. Novak! and directly behind him Novak saw Kravat.

  Kravat had acquired clothes that fit him and was no longer discommoded by the knot of his necktie; yet, he remained the man who could not be identified with the dark, striped business suit he wore. His head and his hands belonged to denim, and the attendant, who was conscious of these things, regretted the comedown of the former Nobles’ Club.

  Novak led Kravat into the restaurant, to a small table near the window which he had reserved. The tablecloth was of fine linen, but patched, and the silverware, neatly laid out, came from various sets. With a bow, the waiter placed menus in front of them and stood in readiness with his little note pad.

  Novak looked doubtfully at Kravat and said, “We’ll have trouble feeding you right, Franta.”

  “It’s this damned rationing!” confirmed Kravat. “You know, I’ve started to raise rabbits, back home, and on Sundays I go out and forage for leaves and stuff to fatten them up. Now they’ve got baby rabbits, second litter already, and where am I going to get wire netting to build new cages?”

  “You bring us what you think best,” said Novak, handing the menus back to the waiter. And returning to Kravat, “Tell me more about the rabbits. Do you use any particular strain? Have you made any observations on which strains propagate fastest, grow biggest, give the most and best-tasting meat? All this is important. We can’t afford to overlook anything that helps us to keep people’s bellies filled.”

  The waiter brought two plates of anemic soup in which a few noodles led a lonely existence.

  “If we could give out breeding stock of rabbits to unions and organizations, to schools and large families...” Novak said speculatively. “How long till an animal is full-grown? Eh, Franta? How much meat does it give? I kind of like Hasenpfeffer, and there must be dozens of other ways to cook it. And the furs!”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Kravat, fishing for the noodles. “I haven’t had the heart to kill any. They’re so nice to hold in your hands....”

  “You should get married,” Novak said, disgusted, “or buy a canary for your affections.”

  For a while, they ate in silence. When the soup dishes had been replaced by the meat course—the meat the size and almost the taste of a ritual wafer—Novak spoke up again.

  “What’s new, aside from rabbits?”

  Kravat hesitated. “I need your advice.”

  Novak used his one hand deftly to cut his meat and his dumpling; he put down his knife and picked up his fork. “About Joseph Benda?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Frankly, Franta, I guessed you would come with that a lot sooner.”

  With a slice of bread, Kravat mopped up the sauce until his plate was sparklingly clean. “It took me a long while to get on to him. He works hard and he has his fingers in everything, despite the time he has to spend in the Assembly in Prague. He plans production down to its last detail, and he’s a first-rate organizer. He knows glass better than anyone I’ve ever met, and by God, he even got me to believe that he was honest.”

  “He isn’t?”

  The wrinkles on Kravat’s horsy face grew longer and deeper. There was no one word to delineate exactly what Joseph Benda’s methods amounted to.

  “Oh yes, he’s honest,” Kravat said heavily. “He knows he’s got to be, with everybody watching him and with Government accountants coming around every few months to check on his books. Of course, in glass, where you deal with thousands of different small items, he could do things outside the books—”

  “As what?”

  “Chisel on the rejects. Say there’s an order for one thousand vases. Say the average rate of defectiveness is 10 per cent. That means we have to blow eleven hundred pieces to be sure of making a full delivery. But suppose that instead of the anticipated rate only fifty pieces turn out bad—what happens to the other fifty that are over?”

  “He sells them black?”

  Kravat laughed sourly. “Anyone else in his situation probably would. That’s what had me fooled. No, he doesn’t. Every piece of glass that ever was blown at Benda or at Hammer is accounted for!”

  The dessert was a finger’s width of a layer cake made of dark, dusty-tasting flour and cheap marmalade, topped by an ersatz cream smelling faintly of shaving soap, although shaving soap was short, too. Kravat ate it with relish and talked between bites. “Joseph Benda controls the two big furnaces in the Rodnik district, with about two dozen refineries dependent on them. The furnaces are nationalized, the refineries are in private hands.”

  “Ah!” said Novak. “Nothing petty about him!”

  “Nothing petty,” confirmed Kravat, picking up the last crumbs of the cake, “and nothing outside the law. His job is to see that what the furnaces produce is sold. Except for Government purchases, there are no rules about where he sells it, and as long as the refineries can use more unfinished glass than we can turn out, he has the whip hand over them.”

  “In other words, he’s gone into the refinery business?”

  “He always was in it,” said Kravat, folding his napkin. “His wife owns Vesely’s.”

  Novak scratched his scalp through the hair that grew thick and black at his temples. “That eminently energetic wife of his,” he said, “I always expected great things of her.”

  “She’s grown,” confirmed Kravat. “She’s grown nicely.”

  “So he gives preference to her,” said Novak with a frown that made him look like a satyr disturbed in his afternoon’s nap. “It’s not quite fair to the other refiners, but after all, as long as there is private competition...And I haven’t heard of any squawks coming from them.”

  “He’s a deputy in the second-biggest political Party. They’d better not squawk.”

  Novak nodded, half-amused. “But Joseph Benda should know that he cannot afford to let his wife’s outfit grow out of proportion. Because if it becomes too big, it will be nationalized under the law.”

  “He knows that. He was burned once, don’t forget. He feels about Vesely’s the way the poor man in the Bible felt about his one little ewe lamb; he’s not going to let it grow enough for the Government to covet! No—Lida, in turn, farms out the work. She’s got a whole string of small fellows with three or four grinding wheels that they operate in their homes, cheap, and the difference goes to Vesely’s, meaning to Joseph and Lida Benda.”

  Novak’s hand reached for the saccharine the waiter provided in place of sugar for the ersatz coffee. “There is no law by which we can stop it. As long as we have a private sector of economy, we must expect that little monopolies will try to crop up.”

  “Little monopolies!...You have no idea how this thing has snowballed! When the wholesalers found out that Vesely’s was practically the only refinery able to fill any order, and to fill it on time, they naturally threw their business to Lida. And if the other refiners wanted to continue operating, they had to be like the home workers and become subcontractors of Vesely’s and kick over a good share of their profits to Lida Benda and the Deputy.”

  “What a racket!” said Novak admiringly. “You’ve got to give credit to this system of free enterprise. It’ll take the freedom away from everybody else....Let’s get up, shall we?”

  They walked back to the sitting room. On the way, Novak greeted a number of people at other tables. “Half the Government eats here,” he explained.

  Kravat was awed by the prominence of the other diners.

  “Half the Government,” Novak repeated—“the half that can’t afford the black market prices.”

  They sat down on the historic chairs. Novak offered Kravat a cigarette, stuck one between his own lips, and warded off the offer of a light. Holding a matchbox between ring finger and little finger of his hand, he used thumb and index finger to strike the match against it. Then his eyes lit up with satisfaction. “Took me three months to learn the trick! In another fifty years, I’ll be as good as a two-armed man!”

  Krav
at never before had heard him mention his missing limb, and he felt the reticence toward discussing it which any whole man of sensitivity would feel in the presence of a cripple.

  “If it’s a racket,” he said abruptly, “why don’t you stop it?”

  “How?” asked Novak. “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Your Ministry made Joseph Benda National Administrator in Rodnik and in Martinice—now unmake him!”

  “And precipitate a political crisis? You can’t fire a man of Joseph Benda’s national importance from his civilian job unless you can prove that he’s a crook. And you can’t prove it.”

  He let that sink in. He could sense what was going through the mind of Kravat, who had been pushed into a key position and into the midst of an intrigue. The man was trying to puzzle out the fine distinction between legitimate business practices and highway robbery.

  “I can see how he does it at Benda,” Novak went on. “But at Hammer in Martinice you are the manager!”

  “That’s true,” agreed Kravat, with an awkward smile. “When I took over, there was nothing. Now our plan, taking into account that we have two furnaces at Hammer, foresees over twice the production of Benda, and we’re fulfilling the plan—despite 85 per cent Sudeten-German workers! I’m a production man, production was our target; so I was happy when Joseph Benda reserved the business end for himself. He kept the old bookkeepers—Germans. He kept the old shipping department—Germans. And they keep their mouths shut and follow orders, because they are Germans and because they’re shivering with fear of being transferred across the border.”

  “He’s still got all those Germans in there?”

  “They’re difficult to replace, he claims.”

  “Two and a half years after the war?”

  “Two and a half years after the Revolution,” echoed Kravat. “The Germans he can hold in the palm of his hand. With Czechs he might have trouble. It’s not even funny.”

  For a minute, the Councilor sat studying his empty left sleeve.

  “If every man in the country”—he said finally—“if every man in the world carried on his body a scar to remind him every waking moment of what that war meant, we’d have an easier time of it.”

  He rose.

  “Go back to your furnaces, Kravat, and attend to your production.”

  The strain was beginning to tell on Dolezhal. He held on to an even temper while he was in his office in the Ministry, or in the lobbies and on the Cabinet bench in Parliament, at conferences, sessions, and functions of state. But at home, with his narrow-shouldered, thin-breasted wife whose sweet face, over the years, had frozen into frightened servility he let himself go. The acidity of his wit, untempered by political considerations, was merciless. He compensated for the defeats, which he had to accept, by maintaining a terroristic dictatorship over the one citizen who was his subject without question: his wife.

  Joseph was unable to guess at all the causes of this behavior, since he still believed in the unshaken political mastery of the Minister; but he saw the effects, and sympathized with Mrs. Dolezhal. On the evenings which he and Petra spent at Dolezhal’s home, he tried to soften the blows whenever he could. This was not easy. He had to be most diplomatic, because he was firmly convinced that these evenings were indispensable to his career. At the same time, he resented being pulled in as a witness to the Minister’s browbeating, although he was aware of Dolezhal’s need for relief from the daily pressures.

  The childless man had taken a fancy to Petra. Petra had come to acquire a distinct loveliness, a combination of the doe-like qualities of her grandmother Anna and the ruggedness and sensitivity of the Bendas. Gone were the protruding hipbones and knees, the unwieldy gawkiness of the adolescent. “Look at her!” the Minister was fond of saying. “Look at her, Margot dear. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had borne me a child like that!”

  Margot dear, after such requests, would show tears in her pale tortured eyes, and say, “Yes, it would. But God, in His infinite wisdom, did not bless us.”

  “Don’t cry!” the Minister would then reply. “Tears over things that cannot be remedied indicate a lack of dignity. Come here, Petra. What would you like? I’ve seen a charming little garnet necklace in a store, an antique, but of very simple design, and just the thing for that graceful neck. You don’t mind, Joseph, if I spoil the child? I’ve none of my own....”

  Petra soaked up the Minister’s compliments. These evenings were an exciting break in the disciplined routine at the boarding school of Mademoiselle Declerques, where her father had placed her. Mademoiselle Declerques personally supervised every detail of her dress and coiffure before permitting her to leave for the command performances. Mademoiselle made no bones about the advertising value of her star boarder’s correct carriage and manners.

  Petra had enough intuition to suspect that she was part of a game in which everybody gained but poor Mrs. Dolezhal. Her father needed the Minister, and the Minister needed her; and although she felt a kind of revulsion at the occasional pat of the Minister’s small white hand, she tolerated it because being admired was such a new experience, and because she liked gifts and colors and richness and change.

  She looked at Mrs. Dolezhal and wondered what the pathetic woman had been like twenty or thirty years ago to have captured a man like the Minister. Despite his great age—for Petra, old age started at forty so that Karel was still safely ensconced within the limits of possibility—Dolezhal was a handsome man with his large, classic features, his healthy coloring, and his bushy, impressive mustache. Perhaps he had married Mrs. Dolezhal for her money—but that was improbable; wives with a fortune, as her own mother could prove, usually were well able to keep their husbands under their thumb. No, Mrs. Dolezhal once upon a time must have been quite pretty, and Petra shuddered when she thought of what could become of a woman unloved.

  Her father was talking to the Minister about business, some law or something that apparently had failed of passage. “You’re right,” Dolezhal was saying in a tone almost like the one he used for Mrs. Dolezhal, “I owe you an explanation on Feldstyn’s motion....”

  Petra was filled with sadness for Mrs. Dolezhal; she went over to the sofa in whose corner the little woman sat, pulling at a much-creased embroidered handkerchief. The light, diffused by the crystals of the chandelier her father had presented to the Minister, was casting tiny, ever-changing speckles over Mrs. Dolezhal’s gray face and dress. Petra sat down next to her and said, “You know, I really don’t like garnets at all.”

  “Margot dear!” Dolezhal called over, “I want you to take good care of our young friend. Please, do make an effort at entertaining her!”

  Since he immediately turned back to Joseph, Mrs. Dolezhal did not think she should answer him. Instead, in a low voice, she said to Petra, “I guess I am not very entertaining.”

  “But you are!” exclaimed Petra. “You are! What shall we talk about? I can tell you of the girls at Mademoiselle Declerques’s, or about Mademoiselle herself—she is very funny. We call her the Crow because she never wears anything but black and sticks her head into everything....”

  The Dolezhals’ salon was a large, heavily curtained affair designed to hold sixty or seventy people comfortably. It gave guests a chance to move around and talk sociably, or to break up into small groups and have confidential political chats. Joseph and the Minister, who had settled at the other end of the room, could hear no more than a mumbling of Petra’s intentionally gay report of life at Mademoiselle Declerques’s.

  “It was I who sent Feldstyn into the Chamber!” Dolezhal’s hand stabbed toward his own chest. “Sometimes it is necessary to act quickly, even at the risk of leaving one of our own people out on a limb. Sorry it had to be you.

  “I want to know why!” Joseph protested. He turned around to make sure that Petra was absorbed in conversation. “You’ve made me ridiculous in front of the whole House. You’ve given Feldstyn, who dislikes me anyhow, the chance he was waiting for. And you’ve defeated a
bill that would have been a perfect talking point in the next elections!”

  The Minister answered obliquely. “This Blaha you mentioned in your speech—was he a friend of yours?”

  Joseph looked at his hands. Of course, the first thing Feldstyn had done was to report Stanek’s quip to Dolezhal.

  “If you want to know,” he said with a sudden brutality that impressed Dolezhal, “I helped kill the man.”

  There was a pause.

  “Margot dear!” said the Minister loudly, “why don’t you offer Petra some chocolates?”

  I wish he would stop calling her “dear,” thought Joseph. He heard Mrs. Dolezhal go for the sweets, he heard the crackling of the paper in which the candy was wrapped. Then Petra’s muted chatter began again.

  “I presumed there was some personal issue to your bill.” Dolezhal took up the matter. “But there’s a fight on, as you very well know!” His voice, free from the restraints of office, became sharp. “A fight over life and death!”

  Mrs. Dolezhal and Petra at once grew still. The Minister controlled his voice again, but his hands hacked the air. “Life and death, I say! And I can’t have your God-damned conscience come between my moves. I’m going to use your bill as a trade-in.”

  Joseph had participated in too many political horsedeals to have any basis for objection. Yet now that his own brain child was to be bartered, it hurt.

  Dolezhal’s face was kindly. “Perhaps if I tell you what is afoot, you’ll feel better. Perhaps you’ll even thank Feldstyn and me for what we did. They’ve finally come out with it, in a top-level conference over that section of the new Constitution. They’re pushing for nationalization of all enterprises down to fifty workers.”

  There was no need to explain who they were. They were all that Joseph had hated since—ages ago, it seemed—the one-armed Mephisto in Dolezhal’s office had for the first time uttered the threat against his life’s work and meaning.

  “Do I have to tell you what it means?” Dolezhal’s mustache seemed to cave in over his bitter mouth. “It means that they want to take away the economic foundation for our political existence. It means the destruction of our Party. It means ultimate and final defeat.”