For seconds on end, nobody said a word. The fire crackled in the stove, a burned-out piece of coal fell through the grate, and the muffled thump made Karel start.
Then Kravat said quietly: “Mr. Benda, you’ve always been slow to understand the changes that have taken place. Your time is up—you can scream against it as much as you want. This is not a personal thing. Vesely’s Cut Glass was not built by your wife’s father; it was built out of the labor and the blood of the glass grinders he hired, men like Blaha—you remember. We’re only taking back what belongs to us. And if you resist, we’ll take it anyhow. We don’t like to use force, but we can.”
Joseph was ashen. “You’ve taken my Works. You’ve already taken all I lived for....Why do you want to take this one little refinery, too—the only thing we’ve got left? Do you want to starve me and my family? Or what?”
Karel saw again his brother’s naked, shivering, scared skin as he had seen it when he’d examined him. The people were so numerous, so big, so powerful—why weren’t they magnanimous, why did they bother with an item like Vesely’s?
“If you’ll let us have the keys,” said Kravat, “we can all have a look at your books and examine your profits and see how you’ve turned the home workers and the small refiners around here into your subcontractors, and bled them, and how you’ve monopolized the glass-grinding business in this area—”
“Thieves!” yelled Lida. “Crooks! Swine!” With catlike speed she had jumped up and thrown herself on the man nearest to her—Czerny, the little team master from Benda—and was hammering at him with her fists.
Karel tore her away. He gripped her arms, but she struggled on. Spittle stood between her gritted teeth, she was panting, and her strength multiplied as her last inhibitions vanished. She wrenched free one hand. Karel heard the rasp of her nails on his face, he felt the smart of pain, and the warmth of his blood trickling down his cheek.
“Judas!” she cried out. “Judas! Judas! Judas!”
He slapped her.
Her body grew limp and he caught it before it slipped to the floor.
“Here are the keys,” said Joseph.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The tragedy of our time is that we are so deeply rooted in it. We line up in columns which none of us formed, we move under laws which none of us made, we are saddled with conflicts none of us started, we are the children of our fathers. No one of us is worse or better than the next man, who is a man of good will, too, but who must act according to the role into which birth, upbringing, inheritance, work habits, surroundings have cast him. How limited, then, becomes the freedom of decision remaining to the individual!
And yet, there comes in everyone’s time the hour when he must decide for himself, the moment when circumstances and objective conditions and laws counterbalance each other, and when the scale is tipped by human will. And this is the moment by which we are judged. The Czech poet Otakar Brezina once wrote, “We feel that the day of judgment lies not in the future, but that it is the continuous present in the cosmos, that every hour is the judge of all hours, that each one of us is unwillingly the executor of justice in the life of the people.”
When that hour comes, we are left suddenly naked. The rules of routine, the voices of teachers and friends, the sound of our fellow marchers’ tramping feet have been stripped from us.
It is the summit of life, and death lurks over our shoulder....—From THOMAS BENDA: Essay on Freedom
THE TRAIN stopped in the open country, just outside of Prague. In the gray distance, a factory whistle went off, its monotone like a dirge in the abrupt silence of the railroad wheels. The conductor, his shaggy fur collar pulled up, walked alongside the train with slow unconcern. The steam from the engine up front hissed white billows over the sooty snow through which the stubbles of last year’s miserable harvest were showing.
The man in the black overcoat and the checkered shawl, who had sat tight-faced and wordless since entering the compartment, pulled down the window and leaned out, “Hey, what is it now? Another one of your strikes, like yesterday?”
“No, mister!” came the voice from outside. “Just waiting for the line to get clear.”
Kitty shivered a little.
“Yesterday, we sat here for fully five minutes,” the man with the checkered shawl explained, tugging at it. “Same identical spot. They should keep their hands off the railways. People have to get around, no?”
Karel closed the window.
“Pardon me,” said the man, “it’s just that you never know what will be next. Resignations, crises, strikes. In Prague, workers all over the streets. In front of public buildings, workers with armbands. Nothing but workers. What is this country coming to?”
The train jerked and rattled on.
“Maybe it’s a workers’ country?” asked Karel.
The man glowered, but did not reply. Then he unfolded a newspaper and buried himself behind it.
They set out to check the few hotels whose names Kitty had heard Thomas mention. The run-down Aurora in Vinohrady was the third one they investigated. Yes, Mr. Thomas Benda was registered, the clerk informed them, but he had gone out and had failed to leave word as to when he would return. Was there any message for him?
“No,” said Kitty.
The clerk sauntered back to a ledger on which he had been working. Kitty turned to Karel with a half-helpless, half-apologetic smile.
He took her arm and pressed it tightly. “Part of our job is done. We know where to find him. He’ll have to come back tonight sometime.”
“Let’s go downtown,” said Karel. From the moment he and Kitty had left Wilson Station, he had been swinging with his emotions, which furled themselves now around the problem he shared with her, and again around the swirl of events in Prague. “Come on, Kitty!” he urged.
Immediately, on stepping out of the hotel, they were back in the fever of the streets. The city teetered with uncertainty. Some people were clustering around newsstands, or under the loud-speakers mounted at strategic corners. Others seemed to drift in the general direction of Wenceslas Square. Most of them were not the kind of people usually found at this hour of day in this sedate section of the city: they were drably clothed; they bore the signs of poverty and hard work on their threadbare backs. They must have come from the working-class suburbs farther out; yet they moved with a slow, steady self-assurance, as if the broad streets belonged to them.
A man in a mackinaw, passing Karel and Kitty, said to two others with him, “There’ll have to be an honest-to-goodness general strike yet. You wait and see. None of these one-hour businesses.”
“No,” said his companion, “it’ll never come to that. Gottwald is talking with Benes now. What can they talk about? A new cabinet, of course—”
The third one added, “The President will accept the resignations. That’s as sure as the Amen in church. I tell you, it’s already over but for the shouting....” They vanished in the crowd.
“It isn’t over yet,” said Karel. He was restless, as if the nervous expectancy of everyone around had infected him. “In Rodnik things went so fast, so smoothly, that it’s hard to realize what happened—”
“Very little happened!” Kitty disparaged. “You marched in with a lot of men and took Vesely’s Cut Glass, and I don’t know that what you did was good....”
He looked at her, at the rich, auburn curls which, self-willed and unruly, wriggled out from under her tilted fur cap, at her well-molded shoulders whose lines even her heavy winter coat could not hide, at her hands, capable and warm.
“It was necessary!” he said sharply. “And it was more than just taking Vesely’s Cut Glass. It was a revolution.”
“Suppose Thomas saw us now?” she asked.
He was not sure whether she had accepted his dictum, or whether her mind had merely reverted to her own troubles. He pressed her arm, again, as if through the pressure he could reassure her on both counts, and said, “Thomas will have to see us sometime.”
&nbs
p; A truck, its rear filled with policemen, went by. Someone shouted from the sidewalk, “Long live the people’s police!” The policemen laughed and waved back.
“So many people,” she said. “Almost frightening. Is this what a real revolution looks like?”
“Part of it!” He was still chafing under her doubt. Then he began to feel that she was letting herself be guided. “It’s like an iceberg,” he told her, more gently. “Most of what’s there you can’t see; but it’s there, and it moves. You must try to understand—my reasons, the reasons of all these people. And it’s nothing to be frightened of.”
“I’m not afraid when I’m with you, Karel. But when I’m alone...” She became oblivious of the streets. “I want to be happy, and I’m afraid I have no right to want it so much.”
The trams, black with the crowds coming from Strasnice and Zizkov, rolled down the hill and screeched to a stop. They were apparently being redirected over another route; most of their passengers piled out and continued on foot.
“You’re entitled to happiness,” Karel said.
“And Thomas?”
“Thomas, too.”
Out of a side street a column of workers marched behind flags. They were singing a full-throated melody, not so much defiant as jauntily victorious. For half a minute or so, Kitty fell in step with them; her interest awakened; she tried to read the inscriptions on the banners. Then the buxom women with their berets and the men with their shielded caps pulled ahead.
“From the Kolben-Danek Works,” said Karel, “probably a militia detachment. They don’t even bother to carry rifles.”
“Will there be shooting?” she asked.
“I doubt it.”
She seemed not to be too concerned about any personal danger and went on, “If Thomas, too, has a right to be happy, where does that leave us?”
“We must help him.”
“It won’t be too late for him?”
“I don’t think so, Kitty. I hope it won’t.”
“But there is no assurance?”
“No, there isn’t.”
She took her arm out of his. People were pushing forward and past them; they became separated.
“Karel!” she called out.
He closed up against her and took hold of her.
“I’m afraid,” she said more to herself than to him, “there’ll be a day when I reproach myself....”
From below came the clanging and grating of engines. Smoke rolled up from a gulch, blurring Karel’s view. They were crossing the viaduct on Stalin Avenue, under which the trains passed into Wilson Station. The snow had turned into slush, and he felt the dribbling away of his faith that he could handle the situation with Thomas.
There were the living and the dead, he thought; you cannot reproach yourself for what was done to the dead; that was over and past. And there were the living who already counted for dead: they were no longer part of life as it was going to be lived. Like his brother Joseph. Like his brother Thomas, too.
He was glad there were so many people around him. It blunted the fear that was creeping over into him from Kitty. Yes, he was as frightened as she was. He was frightened of his mind that was running away with his conscience; he was killing his own brothers because they had ceased to fit in with his kind of life.
He managed to smile at Kitty, and they drew together.
The stream of people thickened until, at the corner of the National Museum, it sucked Karel and Kitty into its estuary, the closely jammed reaches of Wenceslas Square. The only island in the rippling tide was the towering statue of the Good King who raised his spear high above the head of his horse and stared into the square’s downgrade expanse.
From the lantern posts, amplifiers carried the voices of the speakers. The echoes, roaring from the people, trembled uphill along the square and were taken up again and again, like a wave renewing itself by striking the shore before ebbing quietly.
“Long live Benes!”
“Long live Gottwald!”
Karel’s restlessness, his apprehension over the final outcome, his private concerns, were gone now that he felt himself joined with the mass. There were so many, thousands upon thousands, that he thought the solid structures bounding the square would have to move aside if the mass took it into its mind to stretch its elbows and square its shoulders. The people were rallying, as they had under Zizka and on Mount Tabor against the Armies of Emperor and Pope, as they had a hundred years ago, on the barricades against the Austrians, and again against the SS troops in May 1945. But this time there was no opposition, and if there had been, its machine guns could have done no more than tatter the edges of the packed mass like fraying the cuffs of an old shirt. The mass generated a spirit by which Karel felt himself borne; and Kitty, he saw, was sensing it, too. Her eyes shone, and the harried expression that had become a fixture of her face, had given way to repose.
It was a spirit of strength that showed itself, not in artificially built lines and ranks, not in studied battle cries, but in the spontaneity, the in-between silences, the listening, the patient waiting. The people on the square had been waiting for hours, and there was not yet any visible sign of resentment. Tension there was; it hung in the clouded air like a too heavy curtain too tightly drawn.
“Workers of Prague!” a speaker was saying. “Your discipline and your organization is making possible a peaceable solution of the crisis.”
They were listening. They were patient. They were waiting. They felt the power they were, because each one of the people was a part of it, and because, without their consent, nothing was possible. And Karel was very conscious that he was also a part of it. He’d had a taste of this experience back home in Rodnik; but here it was so much broader, so much more sweeping that he forgot he was a Benda with all that implied for him: the guilt toward people, the constant need to atone.
“The little men who tried to usurp power over the country have been checkmated.”
The people knew that. Standing there on this day, they knew that no one can fight the ocean, the sand, the skies.
“Up to now, however,” said the speaker, “the resignations have not been officially accepted.”
A stir went through the length and breadth of the square, as if all these thousands were shifting their weight from one foot to the other; there was a low humming, not quite a growl; then quiet again.
“But we will have a new government. That much is sure.”
“We want a new government!” The cry rose up, was thrown back from the houses, and returned. “A new government—today!”
Karel was held in the grip of the outburst. He had come a long way for this—from the corpses dissected in Buchenwald, through the loneliness, and the work without pause, to this moment when the people demanded their own government.
“Now you understand what this is, Kitty,” he said.
She nodded, but did not speak. He knew then that she, too, was being lifted into this different life and that, to her, he was its protagonist.
“It has something to do with freedom,” he said. “Not Joseph’s variation. Not even Thomas’s.”
She dug her fingers into his hand.
The speaker went on, “If the will of the people should be defied, we’ll have a general strike.”
“Strike!” The answer swelled from the far ends until it overflowed the square and surged into the side streets and resounded from there.
They could stop every wheel in the city. With others throughout the country, they could stop everything, from border to border. They did not need guns. They were as one man and they were quite clear about who they were and what they could do.
And then the curtain was rent. It came with the wail of a Klaxon and something that looked from the distance like a black beetle pushing its way through loose, fine-grained earth. It was a big limousine, preceded by a few policemen trying to persuade the people to give ground and open up a road. It gathered cheers as it approached. It struggled into the square from the direction of
Wilson Station and finally stopped. A man got out. He walked to the platform near the stairs leading to the museum entrance.
A hush had settled. The man, squat and unhurried, took his place in the center of the speakers’ stand, behind the microphones.
His voice came over the amplifiers, even and cool and sober. “I have an important message. I have come here directly from the President to tell you that he has accepted the resignations which the twelve Ministers handed in last Friday. The President has also agreed to my proposals for the reconstruction of the Government.”
He read the names of the men composing the new Cabinet. That done, he continued, “It was not easy for the President to make this decision. But he has accepted the will of the people, even though it is not in complete agreement with his own wishes.”
There were again cries of “Long live Benes!” “Long live Gottwald!”
The man waited until quiet had set in once more. He went on, “The forces of reaction which planned this assault on our new Czech democracy have been routed. It was a victory, due to the vigilance, the unity, the strength, the determination of our people. And now that the matter has been settled, let us return to our work, to the rebuilding of our country, to the fulfillment of our Two-Year Plan. Let us make this country of ours a country of the working people, a happy country.”
He had finished. No oratory, no grandiose gestures, no flag-waving. Karel was let down. But as the cheers mounted thunderously, carrying the relief, the release from the pent-up agitation, he became slowly aware of how these days had weighed on him. His heart filled with what the people had done. The Israelites must have felt as they did when the waves of the Red Sea closed after the crossing. Karel saw that the man’s simple call to work answered a great need and was eminently fitting.
He straightened and said to Kitty, “We can go now.”
Thomas came out of the registrar’s office at the Philosophical Faculty Building. He had finally discovered Vlasta’s name in the old matriculation lists; but again, the only address given was that of the Declerques Institute.
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