He wished he knew whether Karel was a good man professionally. The workers seemed to trust him, but the workers were glad to get any kind of medical service. He needed a good doctor. In Prague, there were plenty of them. He couldn’t go back to Prague, no ten horses could drag him there; he was through with Prague—at least until he knew about the outcome of the plan and about Dolezhal....
He must not think of this. It was behind him. He was in Rodnik and he had already stuck his nose into Vesely’s affairs and spent a whole morning bringing some order into the mess Lida had left. Lida needed a doctor, too. Badly. A psychiatrist. And Petra would hardly speak to him. She was weepy and pale, mourning over Vlasta. But she wouldn’t tell him why Vlasta had gone, and Lida would give him no more than a few hints that made no sense—and anyhow, he couldn’t go and search for Vlasta. The whole world was going crazy, and he was a sick man.
“Come in, please!” said Karel.
The old man, a fresh bandage around his foot, was shuffling out. Joseph got up and followed Karel into the office. He looked around.
“Nice,” he said. “You’ve got it nice here. All this machinery. Use the X-ray, much?”
Karel sat down on a small metal stool and pointed at a chair. He took a form from his desk and began to fill it out. “You’re still covered by insurance,” he said. “It runs a while after you’ve left your job.”
“I can pay you,” said Joseph.
“You’ve paid already, out of your salary.” Karel ran his hand through his hair. “Socialism. It works also for the better classes.”
He pulled up a chair and placed it in front of him.
“Sit down.”
He reached for the round mirror with the hole in its center and strapped it to his forehead.
“Open your mouth. Tongue out. Say Ah.”
“Don’t gag me!”
Karel threw away the tongue depressor.
“Well,” said Joseph with a tight smile, “what have you seen?”
“Nothing, as yet.” Karel held out a glass. “Take that. Fill it, will you?”
“Here?”
“The toilet, unfortunately, is at the other end of this flat. I’ve seen people urinate before, you know.” Karel was watching his brother. Joseph’s hand shook as he took the glass. Joseph turned his back. Why was Joseph here and not in Prague? The Assembly was still in session. Was he really ill, or had something happened to drive him home to Rodnik and into this office?
He took the warm glass from Joseph and poured some of the urine into a test tube.
“About those headaches—what kind of headaches are they? Steady?”
“No, but very frequent.”
“All over your head, or in certain places?”
“Sometimes in the back, but mostly all over.”
“They come in waves?”
“Yes.”
Karel let a few drops of acetic acid fall into the test tube.
“How long have you had the pains?”
“Oh, a few days. Maybe five or six.”
“You were still in Prague when they started?”
Joseph blinked nervously. “Yes, it was in Prague.”
Karel poured urine into a second test tube and added Fehling solution. Then he struck a match, lit the Bunsen burner and heated the tubes.
“What’s that for?” Joseph asked hastily. “You don’t think I’m really sick! I’m strong as a bull—”
“Describe the pains in your heart.” Karel was shaking the tubes and holding them against the light.
“That one’s green!” said Joseph. “Does that mean anything?”
“It means your blood sugar is fine. But then, the Bendas never went in for diabetes. Those sharp, stabbing pains in your heart—tell me more about them.”
Joseph sat down unhappily. His fingers drummed on the metal armrest of the chair. “It’s a terrible tightness. As if somebody had put a strong rubber band around my heart. And my heart pumps like mad, right up into my throat. It’s a funny thing about the heart; you never notice you have one until it gets bad.” He laughed. “Isn’t that so?”
“Take off your jacket and your shirt. There, put them on the cot. Did anything happen to upset you? Any excitement? Strain?”
The tie wouldn’t come loose. Joseph pulled hard. “No,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. The usual politics and frustrations...” He turned, stripped to the waist, and faced his brother. He felt cold and shivered and was embarrassed because his nipples stood up.
“I’m the doctor around here,” said Karel. “If you want me to help you, you’d better give me the truth.”
“What happens in Prague has nothing to do with my body!” But it was absurd to talk loudly when you had to hold your pants up at the same time.
Karel opened the oblong box with the sphygmomanometer and wrapped the flat rubber tube around Joseph’s upper arm. Then he pumped. He saw Joseph bite his lips. Slowly, listening to the pulse in the big artery and watching the mercury against the scale, he released pressure. The reading was 170 over 80. Prague had nothing to do with the body? What was Joseph hiding?
“What have you seen now?” asked Joseph.
“Blood, as we Bendas know, is peculiar stuff. It talks.” Karel closed the instrument and looked seriously at his brother.
“Don’t try to scare me with your hocus-pocus! Blood talks. Piss turns green. What next?”
“I’m not trying to scare you. I want to find out what’s wrong with you. Come close.”
He reached forward and pulled Joseph’s lids apart and let the tiny, sharp ray of a flashlight fall into the center of his eye. The pupil was overly dilated, but it contracted quickly under the light.
“How deep can you see there?”
“It’s just another test,” said Karel. Novak was right. There was something behind Joseph’s resignation as National Administrator. “A man can’t cut out the core of his life and expect it not to show somewhere. Dizzy spells?”
“Once. On Wenceslas Square. When I saw a brown hat.”
“Whose brown hat?”
“A man’s. I don’t know him.”
“Cross your legs.”
A quick blow with a small hammer. The leg jerked up.
“What made you decide to give up the Works?”
“I had so much to do. A deputy works hard, too.”
“And if you aren’t re-elected?”
“I’m tired.”
Karel plugged the ends of the stethoscope into his ears and held its cold metal disk against his brother’s heart. His brother’s heart...Listen to its beat. It beat fast, about hundred and ten. But what was inside it? What were its cravings, urges, feelings? The stethoscope didn’t tell. Hocus-pocus; maybe Joseph had hit the nail on the head. We know nothing. All we can do is to try and to have pity. But who can afford pity?
He moved the disk upwards. “Breathe hard. Faster. Through the open mouth.”
“It makes me dizzy! I have a heart condition!”
“Cough!”
There were no râles. The skin was goose-pimpled around the disk. Karel felt curiously close to his brother. He couldn’t afford pity, but he felt it anyhow. If only Joseph would talk, tell him, reassure him that there was nothing at the bottom of all this!
“What do you hear?” said Joseph.
“Your chest is in order.”
“I wasn’t worried about my chest.”
“Lie down on the cot.”
Joseph obeyed. Karel sat down next to him.
“Pull your pants down. Yes, you have to. I’m your doctor.”
Joseph watched the blue tattoo on Karel’s arm. Then he winced as he felt Karel’s fingers dig into the soft of his abdomen.
“You’ve been having pains in the stomach, too?”
“Not exactly pains. Just a horrible sinking feeling, as if the bottom falls out. And cramps sometimes, but they go away. What’s wrong with me, Karel? You’ve got to help me. I’m still young. I want to l
ive. There’s so much to live for....”
Karel got up. He came back with a piece of soaked cotton and swabbed the tip of Joseph’s ring finger. Then he pricked it.
Joseph started.
Karel pressed the finger and sucked a drop of blood into a pipette. Then he swabbed the finger once more and released it.
“You may get dressed.”
Joseph dressed in silence. Karel was busy with the blood test and with entries on his form. Joseph wiped his forehead and his lips and sat down. He felt his knees tremble. After a while, Karel put away his pen.
“Well, doctor—the verdict!” He looked at Karel with anxious eyes. He tried to read Karel’s gaunt face, the deep lines that ran from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth and down his chin.
“I’ll give you a prescription. You take one pill whenever you feel the headache coming on, or when you think your heart starts acting up. But that’s just so as to take the bother of it away. Tell me something—what are your plans for the future?”
“Why—isn’t there much future left?”
“Organically, you are perfect.”
“What about my heart?”
“All right, physically. But there are really two hearts. The one that I can check on, and the other which the writers and poets and priests talk about. That heart is somewhere near the breaking point. And it affects the organic heart, and the brain and the blood and the stomach and the eyes—everything. The pills won’t help you. You can go to the Tatra Mountains or to Karlsbad; in fact you should—but that won’t help, either. What has happened to you? Where does the strain come from? Don’t you want to tell me?”
“Have you ever been followed?”
“Followed? Right up to Buchenwald. You mean that kind of followed?”
“Yes! By people who want to check up on you! By people who think…”
“Think what?”
Karel had a good face, a kind face, an understanding face. He was a doctor, a brother, and his eyes were like deep wells into which you could sink yourself and your pains. And he was the enemy, too.
“My imagination must have run away with me. My nervous condition, my other heart, you know?” Joseph forced a laugh.
Karel felt the nexus snap.
“I’m through!” Joseph proclaimed. “I’m through with politics, with big affairs; I want to live in peace.” And if Dolezhal did succeed?
“That’s fine,” Karel said professionally. “That’s a wise decision.”
“Yes,” said Joseph. “Anyhow, we ought to know soon....”
“Know what?”
“About the future. Whether I’m all right. You don’t think I should see a specialist?”
“I don’t think it is necessary,” said Karel. “But you can do as you please.”
He took Joseph to the door and let him out and closed the door behind him.
Karel was restless. A big weather was brewing; Joseph’s malaise was part of it, and maybe Vlasta’s disappearance, too—and other things. He could feel it, but he could not yet see what the shape of the clouds portended. He wondered what Novak had done with his information.
CHAPTER TWELVE
There are two sides to freedom: demand and obligation. Those who most frequently use the word for their own purposes usually forget the obligation implied in the concept of freedom.
And what is this obligation? I have been able to find no stronger or more concise formulation than the one promulgated by the Apostle Paul in 2 Thessalonians 3, 10: “If any would not work, neither should he eat....”—From THOMAS BENDA: Essay on Freedom
THOMAS arrived at Wilson Station. He sent his suitcase on ahead to the Aurora by porter; then he stepped out into the wet, chilling wind of the street.
And there he hesitated. Up to this point he had been driven by the relentless impact of Vlasta’s disappearance, by the subtle scorn with which Lida had plied him that afternoon when he had come to teach school and had found Vlasta gone, by the sudden emptiness inside him—a pit without bottom into which his energies and his morale seemed to drain. But he hadn’t laid out any course of action beyond ascertaining from the stationmaster in Rodnik that a girl fitting Vlasta’s description had bought a ticket to Prague, and beyond telling Kitty that he was going to ask Vaclav Villner about his essay. He doubted if Kitty believed that this was the whole truth; it did not matter. It did not matter what people thought and what Kitty felt. In the few short weeks, Vlasta had grown to be the pole around which his daily life circled, the token of his independence and inner security, the fountainhead of stimulation and inspiration, the one person in the world for whom he wanted to keep on living and go on working. Perhaps, he thought, this was too frenzied, too unhappy, too monomaniacal an approach—perhaps it was morbid to channel all one’s relationship to the outside through the eyes and the approval of one single individual; but that was as it had turned out to be.
Where was he to begin? Vexed, he realized how little he knew of the woman he had elevated to this decisive peak. She had roomed at the Declerques Institute, and had left there; but had she had some residence aside from that? Did she have friends, relatives, casual acquaintances with whom she might have found a roof and a bed? He and Vlasta had never talked about that; the ordinary things which fill the conversations of ordinary people had rarely been mentioned between them. Neither had money matters, though he knew that she was poor—he had visions of her in the most desperate need, huddling in doorways at night, the soles of her shoes torn, her beautiful, sensitive hands numb and chapped from the raw cold. Of course, this was a maudlin picture. There must be, in this big city, homes for the homeless and places where they could get a bowl of soup; and Vlasta had gone without cracking up through worse things than the loss of a job. But to Thomas it was equally depressing to speculate on her sitting somewhere quite comfortably and not in need of him at all.
Sensibly, he decided to make his first stop at the main post office and to have a look at the Prague directory. He crossed the park in front of the station and walked the two blocks to the large, drab, high-windowed building. He wondered faintly about the great number of people on the streets who clustered in smaller or larger groups and seemed to be immersed in discussions, some excited, some dispassionate; but he gave them no second thought. Neither did the presence at the entrance of the post office of two policemen, looking taller than their height in their olive-drab greatcoats, raise any misgivings in his mind.
Inside the spacious hall along whose walls ran the counters and windows of the clerks, all was quiet. At the place marked Informace he got the book. It was an old book, greasy, much-handled, with whole pages mutilated. “There is no other,” said the man, “they haven’t printed any since the war.”
And how much had happened during the war and afterwards! People killed, displaced, removed....Thomas scanned the columns: Regner—Regucik—Regvitsky....His hands tore at the page, turned it over: Rehabek—Rehagen—Rehapil....Softly, he closed the volume and returned it.
“Found it?” said the man.
“No.”
“You don’t know how many people have come here and looked at this book!” said the man sadly. “Family of yours?”
“No.”
He could go to the police. Vlasta would have to register with the police to get her ration tickets. No, that wouldn’t work. She might not yet have registered. Or it might take months until the information traveled from the local precinct to headquarters. And wherever he inquired, the police would ask him: What is your authority? Why do you want her? Are you a detective? A claims collector? A relative? Under what circumstances did she disappear? What do you suspect? Murder? And some reporter would pick up the story and write a cute item: Novelist Searches for Pretty Schoolteacher. And Vlasta would read it and smile a little and withdraw further.
The newspapers—there was an idea! But it had to be done discreetly....He could place a few lines in the classified columns, not of one paper, but of all of them. Vlasta R.—Urgent you communi
cate with Thomas B. at Hotel Aurora. That sounded inconspicuous enough, and she would understand—if she bothered to read the small ads.
He left the post office and turned towards Wenceslas Square, where the big newspapers had their offices. As he approached the square, the crowds were packed more densely, traffic had slowed down, and the air was filled with shouts and song. An amplifier truck stood in front of the corner building where the Communist Rudé Pravo had its large window displays. Its loud-speakers were blaring a catchy tune, a Red Army march Thomas knew from the war. Some men were singing along, excitement on their faces; others were trying to talk over the noise.
He made an attempt at elbowing through the crowd so as to reach the ground-floor store in which they accepted advertisements for insertion; it was impossible. The space above the door, usually reserved for the latest sports results, was hung with hurriedly lettered news releases. The Cabinet was about to meet. Some of the Ministers were demanding that the Minister of Interior revoke his order to replace eight high officials of the Prague police.
Thomas frowned. All this turmoil over eight policemen! It sounded crazy. Then the music stopped and he caught snatches of what the people were saying.
“What about the Constitution? How much longer do they think they can hold up on that?”
“They want to break up the National Front!”
“That’s cockeyed. Why should they do that?”
Thomas still was endeavoring to push through.
“And the nationalization? Nothing but sabotage!”
“We don’t want a police state! Down with the Minister of Interior!”
“Hah, what do you want this country to become? We’re overrun with speculators as is, you dirty black-marketeer!”
“Nationalize everything!”
“At least down to fifty workers!”
“Thirty!”
Thomas was listening, almost against his will. He felt the smell and the hot breath of the people, the uncouth dialect, the plain words. Some of their excitement transmitted itself to him, although he was not clear as to who wanted what. The faces around him gained individuality. Wedged in between them as he was, he saw their stories plainly—the war and the deprivation, the work and the passion, greed and resignation, suffering and search. He tried to find a meaning and was acutely aware of how much he missed Vlasta. With her at his side, he could have thrown himself into the turbulence and enjoyed the current and gained and kept direction; without her, he was like a leaf drifting.
Stefan Heym Page 46
