Stefan Heym

by The Eyes of Reason

  Another thought entered her mind.

  “And if you’re concerned about your country, you can help it best by doing what you did before. You’ll be the Spokesman again, and when you return next time....”

  She went on talking. She worked out his whole future, but the picture she drew blurred in the face of the one he saw. He suddenly knew who would win the battle, and he knew there would be no return for him once he crossed the borders. He saw himself ten years from now, still tagging after an aged Elinor, kept in bondage by her like the potential traitor he was, giving stupid little lectures before stupid little women’s clubs in stupid little American towns.

  “Well?” she said. “Why don’t you answer?”

  “What have you done to Vlasta?”

  She drew away from him, and asked bitingly, “Is that all you have to say?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll say good-by to you now, Thomas. I probably won’t be in Prague much longer.”

  “About Vlasta!” he insisted.

  “Go find her,” she said. “What a joke! But it fits in with all you are and have ever done. Thomas Benda, of uncertain mind, chasing after a woman of uncertain sex!”

  She saw him pale. She saw on his face the slow succession of bewilderment, gradual understanding, and then the shock of comprehension. She gave him his coat and hat and opened the door for him.

  *****

  He crawled into his sagging hotel bed that smelled of some disinfectant. He wanted to sleep. He shivered, feverishly. He must sleep. He couldn’t sleep.

  It was a lie. A malicious, miserable lie such as only Elinor’s mind could concoct. It was a lie, he repeated over and again, as if the words, in their monotony, could carry him off to sleep. It was a lie—except that it had the devil’s own logic and answered questions which he had always blocked from his conscious mind.

  He tossed and turned from side to side. The lights of a passing car flashed a weird design at the ceiling.

  Never had a woman been wooed as Vlasta had been; never had a man offered as much and as generously of himself as he had; never had there been such self-effacing, patient, considerate devotion as he had shown; never had a woman been made to feel more deeply how much she was needed and how much she could give and mean—and all Vlasta had had eyes for was Petra.

  He dug his head into the hot pillow. It was a lie! He had senses and nerves and a fine feeling for human qualities. And Vlasta was above reproach. A person could not be both evil and good, could not hide a sickness of this nature and at the same time be like an open book. Or could she?

  Bedsprings creaked in the room next door. A church bell rang interminably, and there was the mad knocking of steam in the pipe.

  Could she? It was a lie....

  He arose as beaten-up as he’d gone to bed. His muscles ached, and the gray, cheerless morning sat on his chest like a nightmare. Another day of search. He would have to go on searching until he found her or until he broke down. Obedient to his duty, he got into his clothes. He ate listlessly. The street pavement received his feet like prisoners brought back to jail. He commanded his legs to carry him on. He forced his lids to stay apart and his burning eyes to see. His tongue was thick and dry with the bitterness from his stomach, his face sagged numbly, his hands dragged in the pockets of his overcoat as something not his own.

  There was no longer any resemblance to a plan in his search or in the thoughts that guided him. He kept on walking. He simply stumbled after the crowds, scanning faces, trying to discern outlines in the spare light of the morning. A wet, slushy snow began to fall, dimming everything. People were converging from many sides, moving in one direction, shuffling along slowly. They hung in dark clusters at the platforms of the plodding streetcars. They came packed on factory trucks whose wheels were muffled by the freshly fallen snow. The crooked alleys and passageways of the Old Town were like whispering tunnels, and here and there was the crying of a frightened child.

  He stepped out of the shadows of the close-set houses; the whitish light over the open space of the Old Town Square blinded him momentarily. There were the jagged walls of the ruined City Hall; the baroque curves framing the square; the double-towered Tyn Church with the tiny subsidiary turrets pointing sharply up into the indefinite clouds; the giant statue of Jan Hus raising its hand in benediction or in warning, and beneath all that, immobile and yet with a motion of its own, swaying and rippling, a sea of faces.

  The certainty that Vlasta would be there, in the mass, close but beyond his reach, unapproachable, filled him with nervous frustration. He was being jammed in by those who pressed from behind him onto the square. He could not move, he had become part of a tremendous body, a cell, a particle with no will or power of its own. He had to yield, and in yielding, he gradually felt the slackening of his tensions and a new kind of sensation—his eyes became the eyes of thousands, his heart began to beat with their beat, his feet stamped with theirs, and his breath was part of the thin vapor that rose from all the people.

  The loud-speakers boomed, and a silver-haired man stood up on a platform. Something blinked in his hand—he was waving his pince-nez.

  “The Ministers who tendered their resignation yesterday,” said Stanek, “had formed a reactionary bloc within the Cabinet. Month after month, they prevented all constructive work in fulfillment of the Government program to which all political parties had pledged themselves....”

  “Throw them out!” shouted the people.

  Thomas twisted his head. He saw the standards of the trade unions, the red-and-gold flags of the Communists, and white streamers with hastily painted slogans.

  “They sabotaged the Constitution!” The voice came through again. “They wanted to block our national social insurance, our land reform, our nationalization, our Two-Year Plan! They want to split the people and break up the National Front and break up the Government...”

  “Throw them out!” the cries rose again, coming from everywhere, joining, angry, threatening. “Traitors!”

  The old man waved his hand for quiet. “They have resigned!” The high pitch of his voice was carried by the amplifiers. “They have spoken their own judgment! The people of this country, rising like one man to defend their democracy, their freedom—”

  “Long live freedom!” roared the square.

  “The people demand that the resignation be accepted and that the wreckers of the people’s democracy be retired.”

  “Down with the traitors!” cried a voice, and its echo was taken up and it kept swelling. The banners stirred, and the snow came down in big, slow flakes.

  “Down with the traitors!” Thomas found himself shouting, too.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THIS SUNDAY morning, the Reverend Antonin Trnka had chosen as his text I Corinthians, 13, 2: And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

  He had chosen this because he was sorely troubled. The people he had preached to and known for so many years were arrogating to themselves the knowledge of how the world functioned and the gift of prophecy on their own futures; mysteries no longer existed for them; and they believed firmly that they could move mountains—but he was afraid that in the process much of what he liked and had come to see as necessary, and part of a firmly established order, would be buried under the upheaved boulders of this earthquake.

  There was nothing he could do without creating ill will against himself, except to appeal to the Christian virtues of his people, and to attempt to stay their rash hand by laying into their hearts the seed of charity; for he who believed in charity would hesitate to jump at his brother’s throat.

  How many changes he had seen in his life! An empire gone, two revolutions, war, and occupation; but this was somehow more cataclysmic, more frightening, because it did not come from the outside. It came from within, and yet was beyond his reach.

  So he stood there on the p
ulpit, his hands extended, his voice shaking. “Charity!” he said. “Who can claim that he has committed no sin? Who dares to throw the first stone? And dare we pile up new sins in trying to even the score of old ones? We must forgive—and love one another....”

  Joseph sat in his pew with Lida and Petra. The parson’s words were like a mild rain on the parched sand of his heart and soothed the burning of his fears. Joseph was deeply grateful; he was very much in need of charity and forgiveness, and he hoped that the sermon would have some influence on Trnka’s parishioners.

  He folded his hands and stared at his large-boned fingers. Things had come to a sorry pass when you had to rely on God and the eloquence of a preacher....Joseph’s first twenty-four hours after the announcement of the resignation of Dolezhal and the others had been filled with hope and jubilant excitement; he had cracked good-natured jokes at Lida’s insane urge to be ready and packed; he had designed a new and attractive prospectus for Vesely’s; he had played five sets of Ping-pong with Petra, and on Friday evening he had got himself gloriously drunk singing a great number of war songs, in Czech and in English. He had fallen into bed muttering that he was going back to Prague to place himself at Dolezhal’s disposal.

  He thought he could guess at Dolezhal’s schedule; but after the first twenty-four hours things stopped going on schedule. The workers’ demonstration on Old Town Square in Prague ought to have been followed by an even mightier counterdemonstration, by a whole wave, all over the country. Nothing had happened. The tradesmen, the businessmen, the house owners, the bakers, the butchers, the shoemakers, the rentiers—all the small independent people who were the strength of Dolezhal’s Party and whose very independence would be wiped out—were staying home, as if paralyzed, behind tightly drawn curtains. Nothing stirred in the police force, which should have risen against the ruthless rule of the Minister of Interior; the Army generals and colonels and majors, most of whom had been outspoken in their anti-Communist leanings, remained silent; no lieutenant with ten men appeared at any public building to throw out the socializers; there was a rumor that a couple of captains had tried to take the studios of Radio Prague, but the radio continued its staid, unexcited announcements with quiet persistence.

  By Saturday night, all of Joseph’s hopes were ended. Despite his foul mood, he kept his mind clear and saw that the tables had been turned completely. Dolezhal and his colleagues had not resigned for the purpose of renouncing their power; the resignation was to have catapulted them into complete command. But the rump Government, apparently backed by the majority of the workers and the unions, had taken them at their word—You’ve resigned? Fine! Now stay out!—and those God-damned workers took up the demand wherever you looked in the country; they were the only ones who had come out fighting; they were forming action committees and were acting as if every follower of Dolezhal had resigned, too. More, they had begun to remove from his position anyone they didn’t like or trust. The one force that still prevented a rout was the frail little President, who was refusing to accept the resignations and had retreated to his country home. But how long could he go on playing ostrich?

  “Let us pray....” said the Reverend Trnka.

  Joseph bent his stubborn head. He prayed to the Lord for mercy in this adversity, and for protection against the mischief of his enemies; he thanked God devoutly for having counseled him to stay in Rodnik so that he could not be implicated in the events, and he promised to humble himself forever and abandon all ambition if, in His infinite wisdom, God should see fit to seal the lips of Dolezhal and of Duchinsky in all matters pertaining to His crushed and penitent servant, Joseph Benda.

  “Amen!” called the Reverend Trnka.

  Joseph felt cleansed. He carried his head high as he left the church and stepped out on the Market Square. He had put his problem squarely to a Higher Power, and he believed he had obligated that Power sufficiently to bring down Its weight on his side.

  Most of the people went directly from church to the auditorium. The hall was already crowded when the worshipers arrived. It was an emergency meeting for which the call had gone out the night before. There had been no time for banners and streamers; the bare rafters of the ceiling, the whitewashed walls, provided a stark background for the tense faces that extended from the platform to the rearmost corners.

  To Karel, who knew the faces of his people, there was something exhilarating in the anger stamped on them; it was the anger he had seen in Buchenwald on the day of liberation, when the prisoners took over and the guards became prisoners. It was so different from the genial mood of the election shindig; but different, too, from the anarchic fury after the fire at the Hammer Works, which had nearly led to a physical assault on Joseph. It was as if these men and women had matured; for a certain amount of maturity was needed to enable simple people to see the danger to all of them in what had started out as a remote cabinet crisis in Prague.

  His eyes swept along the dense rows. He knew whose stomach was ailing and whose lungs were scarred, who was dying and who was bringing a new life into this world. He had been with them in the bright light of day, moving his hand across pupils opaque with glass blower’s cataract, and at night, at the glowing fire of a stove on which simmered a pot of hot water to boil his instruments. And yet, today, they were like a new people to him.

  Kravat was speaking. His long, horsy features were set, his voice determined. He summarized what had occurred in the capital; he explained the forces that were on the move; he pointed out what was at stake; he called on the people to decide, here and now, as to where they belonged.

  There can be no doubt about where I belong in this hour, thought Karel. He was no specialist in political analyses, no pundit; neither were the people. The charting of developments he had to leave to the professionals; but he had seen the oncoming clash with the cleavage in his own family and with the fight over control of the Benda Works. With the resignations in Prague, Joseph’s resignation as National Administrator fell into its proper perspective, and so did the hypertension of his nerves. Here also lay the explanation to Barsiny’s refusal to print Thomas’s book; everything, from Kitty’s unhappiness to Petra’s idolization of Vlasta, had its roots in the titanic struggle that was now breaking into the open. And suddenly he understood the anger of the people—not as a political phenomenon, but as something deeply human. They, too, each in his own way, had been affected. The way the bacilli traveled through stomach and lungs, the forms which birth and death took, the blindness in the sun and the hurry call at night, family relations and nerves, what kind of food was served and what words were spoken over the supper table, and the bed you slept in and the pictures on your wall—nothing, nothing stood by itself, or could be considered outside of this struggle. But he wanted stomachs and lungs to stay healthy; he wanted men to keep the light of their eyes; he wanted families to stay together and nerves to be able to do their duty; meat on the table and people talking to each other without rancor; clean, decent beds and houses; Van Gogh’s sunflowers instead of the cheap, gilded print of some saint or other—he wanted this struggle to end; he wanted sanity and work that was meaningful, and some measure of happiness for himself and for the others.

  “So I propose,” Kravat was saying, “that as other cities have done, we in Rodnik also nominate an action committee to safeguard the people’s property and our democratic institutions. This committee should be composed of representatives of all political parties, and even those who do not belong to any party. It should be composed of men and women whom we know and who by their work and their standing in the community have proved that they are capable of defending the interests of the people, of cleaning out the strongholds from where the predatory attack was launched against our achievements.”

  Karel listened to the applause. It was strong and even, but businesslike, too, and it stopped the moment Kravat’s short gesture cut it off.

  “There is work to be done,” Kravat said, “and no time to be lost. Nominations!”

  Kr
avat was named, and Viteslav Czerny, the team master who once had voted for Joseph Benda. Then somebody called, “Dr. Karel Benda!”

  Karel had been prepared to support the Action Committee and to go along with its decisions. Though on another level, this was very much like the time when the people prepared for defense against the Nazis; a new authority was emerging from the people, and whoever sided with the people had to follow it. But he had not expected that they would want him to be part of the new authority. And was he ready not only to accept orders but also to help rule on what orders should be given?

  “We all know Karel Benda!” he heard Kravat say. “He’s fought in the underground with us, he’s been in concentration camp, he’s worked alongside us on brigades; and as our doctor, he has filled a place where he was bitterly needed. We’ve had our differences of opinion—but he is here today, with us. Well, Karel—do you accept? Do you accept although we may have to take measures that could be painful to you, personally?”

  There was none of the usual humor in the wrinkles around Kravat’s eyes. Kravat had been extremely fair; he had left the door open for an honorable retreat. Perhaps, too, he feared that Karel might be too soft for service on the Committee.

  Karel felt the people turn toward him, he felt their expectancy and, as he wavered, he saw the expectancy change to doubt and vexation.

  “I accept,” he said.

  The hands went up. The vote was unanimous.

  Karel stacked his few supper dishes. The Committee had spent all afternoon debating the concrete effect of the Prague events on the situation in Rodnik. The discussion had been neither pleasant nor smooth, temperaments and attitudes had clashed over what steps were to be taken first and what could be delayed, who could be relied on and who, at least for the time being, had to be removed from key positions. But there had been no argument over what was to be done with Joseph Benda; only firm Ayes to Kravat’s terse, plain proposal. Karel’s Aye had been as clear as the other men’s, and it had sobered him. After that, he had not contributed to the suggestions that were being kicked around—the necessary business of evolving an emergency government and of applying the new power suddenly became nerve-racking and filled with picayune detail.