“But Dr. Benda!” said the foreman. “My father did it that way and my grandfather before him, and they lived to be old men.”
“Your father! Your grandfather!” scoffed Karel. “Your father and grandfather put leeches on their skin! Now we use sulfa. Your father and grandfather ate meat once a week, if they were lucky and had work! Now we aim to eat meat every day. Can you live with one leg in socialism, and the other in the Middle Ages? If you were in such a hurry with the furnace, why didn’t you get asbestos suits?”
He had talked himself into a beautiful rage. And it wasn’t because of their backwardness and their stubbornness, but because they were in league with Joseph. If he could have pinned the blame on Joseph, he would have felt easier and would have known what to do. But he could not fight everybody at the same time.
“Asbestos suits?” asked the foreman, his tone indicating that, since his father and his grandfather had not used them, how should he think of such gadgets?
“We haven’t got them,” Kravat stated tersely. “But that has nothing to do with the case. We must produce so that in a few years, maybe, we will have asbestos suits, and a lot of other things, too. We must build socialism with what we have.”
The workers were crawling in and out of the inhuman heat of the furnace, one after the other, each one carrying out one brick in his hands. They were breaking down the damaged grating piece by piece; and they would rebuild it piece by piece. Their eyes were not burned out of their sockets only because their tear ducts worked overtime and the tears, drying up continuously, cooled the sclerotic in the process.
Karel looked at the gaping hole in the furnace and at these men whom he wanted to stop. He sensed how much of an outsider he was to them, his demands without significance, his interference tolerantly shrugged off.
If he told them that he refused to be answerable for the consequences of their decision, it would mean nothing. Nor would it mean anything if he proceeded to shout about their ruining their health and risking their lives because, to them, all this was rationalized with the word “accident,” and accidents were unavoidable. And if he spoke of their responsibility to themselves and the future, for which their lives were of some importance, they would thank him for his advice and point to the furnace and say: Please let us get on with our work.
And couldn’t it be that he was wrong? It was not just the doctor in him fighting against their barbaric technique; it went back to a trauma of his childhood, and he had no right to set an old nightmare against their daily needs.
“You should have let me know....” he said emptily.
“Next time we will!” promised Kravat. “Next time we’ll build better; next time, maybe, we’ll have asbestos suits; next time, who knows, we’ll be able to control the slag or to control the weather!”
He pulled down his cap and over it the sackcloth soaked in kaolin. It was his turn to go into the furnace.
For a while, Karel waited around. The most he could do was to keep in readiness in case any of the men needed his assistance.
He was hungry. It had been shortly after six in the morning when he had been called to the home of a worker whose child had pneumonia. He had done everything to make the little thing comfortable, and he had told the father to stay home from work and help.
Was it that critical? the man had wanted to know; he had to be at the Works.
So Karel had learned of the furnace and of the repair job due to be started. He had rushed to the Works. He was a fool to show his concern.
“Hello, Karel!”
A grating voice.
Joseph had come in, unannounced, ungreeted. He was unshaven and jowly and old and looked as if he had hardly slept.
Karel included the furnace in a gesture of reproach. “I had an argument with Kravat.”
“So he told me,” said Joseph. “I’m sorry.”
He sounded beaten.
“If you look at it objectively,” he went on, shrugging his shoulders, “perhaps I shouldn’t have permitted it. But the men themselves demanded it. And in my situation I felt I couldn’t afford a long shutdown.”
“Because of the elections?”
Joseph’s eyes became guarded. “No, not that,” he said hesitantly. “You can understand that a former owner as manager is in a precarious position.”
“I guess so,” agreed Karel. Everybody was acting under his own compulsions, his own laws. It was as if there were no longer a freedom of sensible decision.
“It’s all the same now—” Joseph resumed. He did not finish. He was too tired to be caustic.
“You lost?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“I had no chance to read a paper. I had an emergency this morning, and then I came here....The men told me nothing. Somehow, the furnace is life, votes are abstract.”
“We got sixty-five thousand votes in the district,” said Joseph. “It was good, but not enough.” He grimaced, and called, “Kravat!”
Kravat came.
“Tell one of the men to strip,” Joseph ordered, “and make it a tall one. I don’t want to be pinched under the armpits when I go in.”
“You’re going in?” asked Karel.
“Of course!”
“Let me give you a quick check-up, first.”
“Nonsense!” said Joseph. “Did you examine any of the others?”
“How could I?”
“Then don’t bother about me.”
A man took off his array of protective rags; Karel watched his brother put them on one by one. Joseph was slow and deliberate, every move seemed to pain him. Finally, he towered there in his sackcloth, his face tired and quiet. It was to Karel as if he were trying to atone for something.
Joseph got in line with the men waiting their turn. His dilapidated armor was unwieldy and uncomfortable; but it would protect his body against the worst of the heat. He moved his limbs to adjust the clothes; yet he could not make himself feel at ease. In the end he had to acknowledge that what was bothering him was neither the weight nor the smell of the clothes—they smelled a little like burned potatoes; the cause of his vexation was an indistinct sensation of fear, which became sharp and physically painful the moment he realized its existence. I’m an ass, he scolded himself, a sentimental ass; after last night, I should be in bed and asleep. But he had given a promise—a pre-election pledge nobody, including himself, had taken seriously, and which had been made all the more futile by the outcome of the contest.
The queue in front of him grew shorter with frightening speed. One following the other, the men dove into the furnace and, not half a minute later, emerged again, their stint done. Joseph’s throat was dry, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and his lips felt as if they were corrugated. He recognized the man immediately before him, although he was looking at him only now. He recognized the bent shoulders which under the disguise had almost ceased being shoulders.
“Blaha!” he said. “How are things?”
“Good, sir! Excellent, sir!” came the muffled answer.
“You’ve been in there already?”
“Once, sir.”
“With your hands?”
“They’re all right for this kind of thing, I guess.”
“It’s hot in there, isn’t it?”
There was a brief pause. Then Blaha said, “Well—once you are in, you don’t feel it so much.”
“Do me a favor, will you, Blaha?”
“Certainly.”
“I—I promised I would help you people with this. But I haven’t got much time. Let me go in ahead of you—”
Cloaked by the sacks, Blaha’s nod was hardly noticeable. But he moved to switch places with Joseph. And there was the furnace, looming larger than Joseph had ever seen it, and a man came crawling out, and Joseph stooped to help him up.
This is it, thought Joseph. The sweat trickled and itched on the back of his neck, but maybe that was because every man’s eyes were directed at him and concentrating on the back of his neck. He force
d himself down on his knees, pulled tight his mask, closed his eyes, and crept forward.
Ah, Blaha had lied! The heat was all-engulfing, all-overpowering, seizing him in a giant, soft, scorching grip. Pins were being stuck into his naked eyes, and his eyeballs were turning into glowing lead bullets. He could not breathe, he would not breathe; he knew, not with his brain, but with the instinct of his nerves, that his lungs would be scalded if he dared breathe in this smoldering air. He wanted to crawl out, but even something as simple as forward and backward was too complicated to think about. He did not think. Thinking was a waste of time. There was only one leitmotif: Every second in here would bring his brain closer to the bursting point.
He saw nothing. Except that the nothing began to take shape. Somewhere a dim, wavering light shimmered in the immense heat. With an effort that made the pumping of his heart jump to his ears, he righted himself on his knees, hit his head against something, his hands went out groping. Through his gloves, he could feel a looseness; he pulled and tugged, but the thing wouldn’t give.
How much time had gone by? Perhaps he was in here too long, perhaps in another second his lungs would boil and his heart fail and the heat would wither him. He felt himself grow panicky and knew that panic was the end. He bit his tongue until the pain of the bite was greater than the pain that came from the swelling of his brain against his skull.
One more tug—his last strength, his last reserve of breath went into it. Then the thing gave, he held it in his hand, he grabbed it tight as if it were gold, or the relic of a saint, or a new life.
How he got out, he never knew. His next conscious moment came when he heard his own voice—a strange voice; but he knew it was his own—say, “Water—water, please—thank you—” and heard himself slurping, and felt the cool wet run down his gullet. A jagged piece of brick was in his hand, and somebody took it away from him and laughed.
Joseph, too, started to laugh. He brushed the sack and the woolen cap off his head, and laughed, and said, “Jesus!” and breathed deeply, deliciously.
“Your wife is here,” he heard the furnace foreman say.
The haze before Joseph’s eyes was clearing away only slowly. Through it, he now saw Lida, ridiculously slim and correct in her high-necked blouse and the conservative dark of her suit, a miniature compared to the hulking, clumsy company in the furnace hall.
She was coming closer. Except for those whose turn in the furnace was coming next, the men let their curiosity get the better of them and tried to be as near to Lida and Joseph as possible, crowding her with their stench. But she was much too excited to object, and the news she was bringing would gain in impact because of the audience.
“Good morning, Mr. Deputy!” she said.
Joseph pressed his lids tight to remove the blur from his vision. When he opened his eyes again, he suddenly saw his wife as sharply focused as on an unflattering photograph. What had she been saying?
She kept on coming toward him with open arms. His protective clothes were still steaming and sticky with the kaolin and caked with the filth and the dust and the particles of breakage that had been inside the furnace. She could not embrace him.
But her face showed a triumphant radiance which silenced the men and made them stop grinning.
“Congratulations, Mr. Deputy!” she said, emphasizing each word.
“Deputy?” he said. “Deputy...”
“They called from Prague. Minister Dolezhal called. It happened on the second count. They assigned you the surplus votes from some other districts.”
Though still benumbed from the stay in the furnace and off balance from the unexpected news, he felt the fact sink in and felt himself begin to cope with it. Already the strain of struggle, the agony of waiting, the pain of defeat, the penance in the furnace, seemed less heavy, and the exhilaration of victory set in—indeed, strain, agony, pain, and penance had been a necessary conditioning without which the victory would have been shallow.
“Long live Deputy Benda!” somebody cried raucously, and the call was taken up by several workers.
Joseph straightened and glanced around. Work was going on at the furnace, and that was as it should be. His brother Karel was keeping himself aloof somewhere, which was unnecessary because this was a time to forgive and forget. Tears were on Lida’s cheeks, and the faces of the men around were expectant.
“Speech!” hollered the same raucous voice.
Joseph laughed and shook his head. He felt flushed and a little faint; the sleepless night, the morning’s exertion, the shock, were catching up with him. He wanted to tear off the borrowed rags and the sackcloth; but he decided against it. Cincinnatus had been chosen from the plow. He was being called from the furnace.
“Doctor!”
The cry pierced everything.
Within a second, Joseph found himself standing alone but for Lida whose horror-dilated eyes followed the men. He stood motionless, knowing everything that had happened, knowing it down to its last detail although the massed backs of his workers hid from him furnace and body and doctor and all.
Then he pushed himself forward, elbowing aside whatever barred his way.
Before the manhole broken into the furnace knelt Kravat, holding on his lap the half-naked, strangely bent and shrunken figure of a man. Kravat’s long, grief-stricken face was lowered so close to the other’s that Joseph was unable to see whose it was. Or perhaps something in him refused to admit that he knew those warped hands and those shoulders.
Karel, who had been working over the body, got up. He rolled up the rubber tubes of his stethoscope and in a cracked voice ordered, “Stretcher! And a blanket...”
“It’s Blaha?” asked Joseph.
“Yes.”
“Dead?”
Karel did not look at his brother. “Quite.”
Mechanically, Joseph began to strip off the clothes he had worn in the furnace. “We must take care of his children,” he said. It sounded fatuous.
Kravat still knelt like a statue, but his face, stiff and distorted, had come up. Ashamed of their gaping at death, the men turned from Kravat and the corpse, and inched back.
Karel’s throat was choking; his fingertips still retained the feel of the bony body aged before its time and unnaturally hot from the furnace in which it had ceased functioning.
His mind was a wasp nest of useless thoughts and too-late’s. In concentration camp he had learned that death was not the chooser....Would Blaha be alive if I, the doctor, the man, had done what I should have? Would they have stopped the hasty repair of the furnace if I had shouted more loudly and insisted more stubbornly? Would Joseph have made any different decision if I had publicly condemned him? Would another manager have run the plant in another way if I had thought of using my contact with Novak to get Joseph out of the job?
I am guilty, and Joseph is, and Kravat is, and the men themselves are, together with their fathers and their grandfathers. But Joseph most of all, because he is the only one who has gained by Blaha’s death. Just as my father was guilty of old Matjey’s.
“What a price to pay, Mr. Deputy,” said Karel.
Joseph flinched.
“His heart gave out,” Karel went on, remorseless against himself as much as against Joseph. “He was bent, and he had crippled hands, and he went in, and with those hands of his, he tried to break loose a brick—and tried—and tried.”
Joseph pressed his fists against his temples.
“Look at him, Mr. Deputy! Look at him the way he lies there. I hope you’ll never forget him. I hope he’ll ride your conscience to hell and gone!”
“Don’t blame me!” Joseph roared. “Blame yourself! You’re the doctor! Blame Kravat! He agreed to everything! Blame that damned socialism of yours that forces men to do more than they can!”
“Joseph!” Lida chided shrilly. “In front of the men—”
“I liked Blaha,” said Joseph. “I’m the only one who ever did anything for him. A man who wouldn’t hurt a fly...”
“So you killed him. Because your furnace mustn’t get cold, because your glass must be made—”
“It isn’t my furnace! It isn’t my glass!”
It wasn’t Joseph’s furnace, Karel thought, and it wasn’t his glass, and it wasn’t his fault. But whose fault was it?
“There was a time,” he said slowly, “when I should have stood up and spoken up. About you, Joseph—about your having the nerve to want to become a leader—a leader of the people—”
He didn’t care who heard him or how widely this got around. This was no family quarrel. This was bigger than the family, bigger than three brothers of the same blood, bigger than the Bendas and Rodnik.
“You’re a fraud, Joseph! You gave Blaha a job because you wanted to be popular. You wanted to be popular because you wanted to get elected. You wanted to get elected because you want this furnace back for yourself” and only for yourself, and no one else!”
“That’s a lie!” Joseph’s voice carried through the whole hall. He would have thrown himself at Karel, but some of the men stepped in between them, and the stretcher-bearers were coming.
“Kravat!” said Karel. “Get up!”
He and Kravat placed Blaha on the stretcher and covered him. Two men gripped the ends of the stretcher and lifted it. Karel walked alongside it, away from the broken furnace, through the hall which had been his youth, out through the doorway and into the sunlight of the yard.
Involuntarily, he closed his eyes.
The whole matter was thoroughly bad. Brother was set against brother, as he had predicted; but who was he to condemn Joseph, with the blood of Blaha on his own hands as well? Poor Blaha—thin ribs and a wizened old race, and the smell of burning still on him.
Karel opened his eyes. They could bear the light now, and things fell back into perspective. Accidents happen. Work goes on. The smokestack must smoke, and fire must burn, and men must blow glass and learn from their experiences.
He saw Joseph come out of the furnace hall. Lida walked ahead, as if leading him. Joseph held himself upright, his broad shoulders squared once more to the tasks he had set himself.
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