Karel looked at the empty bed next to Thomas’s. It was a telling argument; Thomas really didn’t need to say anything.
“Why did you come?” Thomas asked back. “Can’t you let people go their ways in peace? That’s what I object to in the new setup: Everybody who guessed right now regards himself a missionary or an official or what not and mixes in everybody else’s affairs.”
“When did you make up your mind?”
“Today.”
“Are you sure you considered it thoroughly?”
“I’m tired,” Thomas said languidly. “Very tired. And I have to be up and around early. Joseph’s picking me up at eight, so I’d appreciate it if you’d let me have a night’s sleep.”
“Have you considered what it would mean to you—living in exile once more? The first time wasn’t so fruitful, either—”
“You can be in your own country, and be just as good as exiled, just as good as dead.”
Karel sat down on Kitty’s bed, very warily, as if he disliked disturbing its untouched smoothness. “You should give the country a chance,” he said slowly, “and yourself, too. You belong here, you can help us, contribute something!”
“Me?” Thomas latched his fingers behind his head and grinned. He looked both wizened and boyish, a sickening combination. “I’m a traitor, haven’t you heard? I got it from Elinor and I got it from Villner, personally.”
“Villner is a doctrinaire fool. And he doesn’t have the last word in the matter. We’ll go back to Stanek, you and I, and talk it over with him—”
“And make my work a political football again? That’s happened before, you know! A book doesn’t get any better by being kicked with the left foot instead of the right. I don’t want to be in a place where a book is accepted or condemned on the basis of its usefulness in the current political situation.”
“You’ve lived in other parts of the world. Do you know any place where it’s any different?”
Thomas failed to answer.
“So why do you want to jump from the frying pan into the fire?”
“I don’t want to jump. I want to have peace. I don’t want to have to take sides and choose-—between you and Joseph, this crowd and that, this philosophy and the other. Let me go, Karel—let me try...
“But by going you choose sides, don’t you see?”
“Maybe it looks that way to you; it doesn’t, to me. I just want a change of atmosphere. Here, everything you touch clashes with something else—”
He held his palms to his ears as if to shut out the unbearable clang.
“It’ll get quieter soon,” said Karel.
“What kind of quiet?...And I’m sick of being alone. Being alone in your own country is worse than being alone anywhere else. In America, at least, they’ll look at me as a curiosity. Here they don’t look at me at all!”
“But you aren’t alone! There are millions of people here, waiting to hear from you, waiting for you to teach them, to entertain them, to make their lives richer—”
“You and your millions! You know what you’re doing? You’re establishing the world’s biggest kindergarten with sweetness and light everywhere; your sweetness, your light...Oh, let me go!”
Was it worthwhile? thought Karel. Whenever he dug near the root of the problem, Thomas wiggled away. But then he envisaged Thomas living abroad; depending on handouts from Joseph; misunderstood, mismanaged, mishandled; sinking, slowly at first, later more rapidly, until he ended up as a hack without a soul of his own. Worse yet—while Joseph out of the country was merely another bankrupt petty politician, Thomas could and would be used. I love him too much for that, Karel thought, suddenly chafing under his own accountability. If Kitty had been a millstone around Thomas’s neck, she also had been his anchor. Now Thomas was drifting like a big rubber ball, the ebb tide sucking him out to sea; and Karel felt the peculiar panting despair of a swimmer at the limit of his endurance, trying to catch up with the elusive thing bobbing on the waves.
He got up from Kitty’s bed and straightened the spread.
Thomas yawned pointedly.
Karel leaned over him, as a doctor leans over a patient, and said, “I’m sorry I have to tell you this. But Kitty and I were lying to you when we met you in Prague. We did see Vlasta.”
Thomas’s hands shot out and tore at Karel’s lapels and pulled him down close. “You miserable hypocrite—why do you mix in my life! She came to see me and you sent her away! She came to see me and you took me back here, into this—this...” He let go of Karel and pointed at the empty bed, the empty room, the emptiness.
“Because she confirmed what you know yourself: That she couldn’t love you.”
“You’re lying again!”
“Would she have gone away without seeing you if she loved you?”
Thomas had slid down from the pillow. He was lying sideways on the bed, now, in the fetal position, his arms hooked around his scrawny knees, his face twitching.
The ones that starved to death in their bunks in Buchenwald had often lain like that. In a sense, it was a case of starvation, thought Karel—self-induced, but nonetheless cruel.
“That you gave up your wife, Thomas, and spilled your love on another woman who couldn’t return it, doesn’t mean you’ve lost your capacity for love and for being loved. It’s all part of the same picture, the same illness; the process of recuperation will take care of all of it. And if you should need a crutch to lean on, I think I can serve you better than Joseph can....”
He dimmed the lights, except for the heavily shaded small lamp on the night table between the two beds.
Thomas stretched himself and rolled over on his back. “Give me one of your pills,” he said, “and leave me a prescription for a bottle of them.”
“All right....” Karel went to the bathroom and brought back a glass of water, handed the pill to his brother, and watched him swallow it and gulp down the water. Then he took off his jacket, loosened his tie, kicked off his shoes, and lay down on Kitty’s bed. He would be spending the night in Kitty’s bed, after all, he thought sourly.
“Are you guarding me?” Thomas said, his voice drowsy.
Karel switched off the night lamp. Outside the window, the bare branches of a tree trembled softly against the night. “Guarding you? I have no bed! Petra’s staying at my flat with Kitty.”
“Are you—guarding me?” And then some mumbled words, impossible to understand.
“You’re free to go, Thomas. I let Joseph go, too. So make up your own mind.”
Karel listened to the regular, open-mouthed breathing coming from his brother. He couldn’t tell whether Thomas had heard him or not.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THROUGH the large plate glass of the waiting room, Joseph saw the silver-painted DC-3 the Czechoslovak Airlines. It taxied up the runway from the hangars and stopped, its blunt nose pointing toward the sky. The captain pulled down the cockpit window, stuck his head out, and spoke to one of the mechanics on the ground. The baggage compartment door was opened, a luggage cart was wheeled onto the field, and two men began the loading job with a nonchalance which somehow riled Joseph.
“And where’s your friend?” he heard Lida say.
“He’ll come.”
Joseph almost wished Dolezhal wouldn’t come and so give him a pretense for calling off the whole thing. But then what? Wait until they got around to putting him in Pankrac? Actually, Dolezhal was quite sensible in postponing his arrival to the last minute; it decreased the chance of his being questioned by any of the detectives who surely were keeping the airport under surveillance.
The sparsely furnished waiting room was empty but for a young, pasty-faced woman sitting on the other bench, obviously afraid of flying, and holding a new infant on her lap. Even the girl behind the ticket counter had gone off somewhere, for lack of customers.
The infant, with its beet-red head, started to wail, a thin, catlike crying.
“I hope that doesn’t keep up during the whole trip,” sai
d Joseph. God knows how long they would have to be in the air until they found a decent landing field at a safe distance from the border.
Lida, her eyes swollen, regarded him reproachfully. “Poor little thing; it’s probably got the colic.”
She went over to the helpless mother, picked up the weakly struggling child, and warmed it against her bosom. The baby’s head peeping over her shoulder looked remarkably like a Rhesus monkey’s, except for its coloring.
Through a glass-paneled door leading into some corridor, Joseph noticed loitering customs officials and border police. They seemed to pay no attention to him; but why didn’t they go on to their business, to the international part of the airport building? Their disinterest could be show; they might just be waiting to pounce the moment Dolezhal appeared.
Lida came back to him and sat down, her flat, gray face averted. She was weeping softly, again; the baby, ugly though it was, must have brought memories flocking back to her mind.
Joseph laid his hand on her arm, trying to quiet her.
The weeping became intermittent and finally ceased. She blew her nose, and, crushing her handkerchief nervously, said: “You and your family! Oh, I hate them! I hate Dolezhal, and you, too....”
He nudged her and nodded toward the woman, whose infant had begun to whimper once more.
Lida lowered her voice, but its slimmed volume was bursting with hostility. “Your fine, humane brother Karel. It took him a long time, but now he’s Number One man in Rodnik. And you let him! You let him rob you of your Works, of my inheritance, the house, our child. You and your grand strategy—”
Though at the breaking point, her voice refused to break. She had to say this if she choked over it. “And the great Spokesman, who would mouth your wonderful ideas! That double-talking, seesawing freak who never yet made a decision of his own—”
“Lida, darling! What’s the sense of crying over that, now? It’s life or death—my life, your life—”
“Life...” she whispered. “Without Petra?”
“Shut up, for God’s sake!” he hissed back. “Don’t you think I feel rotten enough as it is?”
The young mother looked up from diapering her baby, her eyes wide with curiosity. Lida walked over to her. “Let me help you,” she said. She folded the triangle expertly and pinned it loosely.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” said the girl. “You’re so kind. I’ve never flown before—and with a baby! My husband has a new job in Bratislava, and his office arranged for the air tickets.”
“He must be an important man!” Lida said patronizingly.
“He is!” the girl proudly answered. “He used to be just a bookkeeper; now he’s been made manager of a big factory.”
The baby’s perfectly shaped tiny feet kicked comfortably. Dirty little Communist bastard, thought Lida. And her own child wasn’t any better—hadn’t Petra turned against her and betrayed her?
“Well!” she said, not even bothering to conceal her anger, “Some get up in the world and some go down, isn’t that so?”
“You were most kind, thank you so much!” the girl was saying, but Lida wasn’t listening; she was on her way back to Joseph.
“So why didn’t you pick up your famous brother, the Spokesman?” she began, on reaching him. “If you had, you would have been two against me! Would that have made you feel better?”
A short, squat man with a swarthy complexion and a beaked nose that seemed to pull his face forward entered the waiting room. He was clutching a shabby briefcase.
“There are people—” Joseph said warningly.
“People, people!” she said under her breath. “Always people! People came and took what we had! But it’s your fault. When I was with Petra, she was mine; then you came, with your brothers, and you had to have her away from me, in Prague; and you brought back that Vlasta woman; and you always took Petra’s side against me.”
“I don’t want to hear any more about Petra.”
Lida glared.
“How could I have taken Thomas with us?” he went on darkly. “Karel was at Thomas’s house, and God knows what he would have done if I crossed his intentions. He’s got the power, now....”
He fell silent. He had deprived his escape of the little sense it made beyond the mere physical dash across the border. Nothing of him would live on; his child was no longer his; his ideas would die stillborn.
Lida sat hunched over her pocketbook, which contained a small fortune. “And what makes you think,” she asked relentlessly, “that Karel is going to let us get away? We still have fifteen minutes until flight time. He’s a sadist, I tell you, like all of them. He’s going to let us dangle, and at the last minute—”
Joseph chewed at the inside of his cheek. This was another fear he had carried with him since last night.
“But maybe not,” Lida speculated. “Maybe he wants us out, because as long as you’re here he won’t be able to enjoy his acquisitions—sensitive soul!”
“Come on, Lida—why do you want to talk about him?”
“I suppose you’d still like to find excuses for what he’s done?”
He shut his eyes and wished to God he had some sort of lids to clamp over his ears, too. And this would go on day in and day out as the weeks passed into months, the months into years, until death do us part....And she would be right in everything she might say! Somewhere along the line he had made one mistake, and out of it had grown all the others in an inescapable chain reaction. But when was it that he had committed this basic error? When he was born the oldest? When he allowed his father to press him into the business? When he returned from England? When?
There were voices behind him. Someone called his name. He started up, wheeled around—
“Hello, Joseph Benda, my friend! You haven’t been waiting too long? I was detained—last-minute business—you know how it is...”
Dolezhal, a brand-new sports cap sitting horizontally on his hair like a pancake on top of a cauliflower, pushed his little wife forward and propelled her toward Lida.
“Margot dear! I want to introduce you to Lida Benda, of whom I have told you so much—and only the most flattering things!” he added, his firm glance directed at the flaccid area around Lida’s eyes. “And where is my little Petra?”
“We’ve had to leave her behind,” said Joseph.
“You’ve. had to?” A shadow of uncertainty flickered over his set face. “You must tell me about that, Joseph—but not now. We must—”
The Airlines girl had returned to her counter. A loud-speaker announced the imminent departure of the flight to Bratislava. The young mother, her baby asleep in her arms, stepped to the counter to check in, as did the man with the beaked nose and the briefcase. At this moment two men with soldierly bearing, though in mufti, appeared at the door. They looked over the scene and then came toward Dolezhal.
Joseph stood rooted in his tracks. It was six minutes before flight time.
Dolezhal laughed boomingly. His hand stabbed at Joseph, “What’s the matter, my boy? Nervous? Ah, flying makes some people nervous, doesn’t it, Margot dear? Mr. Pokorny—Mr. Kramarsh—“ the two bowed stiffly, “Mr. and Mrs. Benda—and you know Mrs. Dolezhal, of course....Mr. Pokorny and Mr. Kramarsh are going with us—to Bratislava. They’ve been working hard, too.”
Then he shepherded his party to the counter, casting a glad eye at the girl behind it. She was really quite pretty, and her uniform accented the softness of her hair-do.
The baby was crying again, but the muffled roar of the propellers drowned its whining. The air was bumpy. Lida’s mouth was a thin scar in her face; she sat pale and concentrated on the misery of her soul and the convolutions of her stomach. Prague lay behind them, its last outskirts had melted into the dim horizon, and they were flying over an undulating land, whitish gray and dark-spotted where the snow had already been soaked into the ground, crossed by the black lines of the roads and the trees alongside them, by the tiny, straight strings of the railroad tracks, and the m
eandering curves of the rivers and brooks.
Joseph studied the landscape. They were flying southeast, at about a hundred and seventy miles an hour, with fairly strong headwinds. He was not yet captaining the plane, and there was no real reason to worry about these items. He was just trying to avoid looking at the two empty seats ahead of him, Petra’s and Thomas’s. The muscles of his neck began to ache from the awkward turning of his head toward the porthole; he settled back in his seat and stared forward, past the painful memory of the seats, at the door to the cockpit.
Under the inscription captain, a name-plate was inserted: B. Prochaska. There was no name-plate under co-pilot—the man was apparently so new in the service that none had been made for him. Joseph thought idly about this B. Prochaska—what kind of man he was, what he would do in a few minutes. Prochaska was probably an old Army flyer, possibly had even been in Joseph’s squadron. There had been several Prochaskas, it was not an unusual name. There was a likelihood that, because of this background, Prochaska might play along; if he was intelligent, he would. Neither Mr. Pokorny nor Mr. Kramarsh looked like people who would accept a No without getting tough about it. Still, B. Prochaska, whoever he was, might cause a good bit of trouble. He might refuse to get out of his seat, there might be a struggle, the plane might get out of control....Joseph felt the moisture in the palms of his hands. During the war, he had always wondered how it felt to be in a crashing plane. It didn’t take long, but those last seconds—were you conscious to the end? What did you try to do when the earth rushed at you, what went through your mind? Or did your brain snap mercifully and black you out?
And I, with my bad heart, he thought suddenly. No: Karel had said his heart was all right, and it must be, to have lived through a day like yesterday. Only his nerves were blasted, and the next minutes wouldn’t improve them.
Without warning, Lida bent forward and retched. She had held on too long, and had missed the chance to grab for the paper container under the seat. Joseph looked on passively. A sour smell rose from the floor.
Stefan Heym Page 57
