“Sure, sure,” said Thomas, his concentration on Vlasta. He had recaptured some of what he had felt before Petra came between him and the girl.
Petra, rubbing her eyes and yawning, appeared at the door of Karel’s bedroom. She looked small in her stockinged feet. “You’re going to stay with us in Rodnik!” Karel greeted her.
“Vlasta, too?”
“Vlasta, too,” he said and promised himself that, for his own part, he would try to hold to the status quo between Kitty and himself.
Karel cleared the cups and saucers off the wax cloth and dumped the ashes into the refuse can in his kitchen. When he returned, Thomas was still in his chair at the table. His face was sagging and his eyes sat deep in their sockets.
“Do you want another cup of coffee?”
Thomas stared at his suitcase which stood in a corner, and said, “I’m going. I should have left with Joseph and the girls.” But he didn’t move.
Karel sat down, careful of the doilies, stretched his legs, and listened to the creaking of the old leather chair.
“I can’t face it,” he heard Thomas say.
“Can’t face what—Kitty?”
“Why do you say that?”
“You like Vlasta, don’t you?” said Karel. “You made it very obvious.”
Thomas pushed Karel’s comment aside.
“Now you listen to me. I like Vlasta. I think she is an exceptional woman. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with Kitty! The two are on entirely different levels....” He waved his hand angrily. “Don’t make faces at me! I’m a writer, an artist! I need people, stimulation!”
“Do you believe that Kitty will understand that?”
“I’m not hurting anyone. All that ever happens is that I get hurt. And if I finally find a person with a feeling for my problems, for what moves me, for what tears me to pieces, you can think of nothing but a coitus!”
Karel shrugged. “Then why don’t you go home?”
“Because she’ll ask me questions.”
“But Kitty doesn’t even know of Vlasta’s existence—unless you’ve written her.”
Thomas snorted. “Questions about the Essay!”
“Your essay—”
With a few steps, Thomas was at his suitcase, tore it open, brought the manuscript to Karel, and dropped it on his lap. “They threw it back at me. Times have changed, they said.”
“Did you try another publisher?”
“No. What for?”
Thomas coming to him and pleading with him to let him write a novel about Karel Benda who had survived....Thomas searching for the truth, for sense and for meaning, and being rejected, always rejected....Karel looked down at the manuscript. He felt at this moment that the refusal to publish it was more an indictment of himself than of Thomas or of the times and their circumstances.
Thomas said acidly, “Perhaps you can think of a pretty phrase I might hand Kitty? Something that will make up to her for two years of skimping and eating leftovers? Something to keep up her belief in me?”
Karel put the manuscript on the table.
“What am I going to tell her?” asked Thomas again.
“I’d like to read it,” Karel said.
“You have any liquor in the house? If I got home dead drunk, there’d be no way she could force me to answer anything.”
“Sorry, I haven’t. And you’re going to go home and tell Kitty the truth, because I know her and I know she can take it and she can help you to take it. You’ve been married a good long while, and maybe—”
Karel stopped. Thomas certainly knew that if he murdered someone he’d be able to go home and bury his head at Kitty’s bosom, and she would hide him and protect him.
“I said I’d like to read your essay, Thomas. Will you let me?”
Thomas massaged his forehead. Barsiny had told him that he fitted in no groove, and although that didn’t get the book published, it was a great compliment. It lifted him high above the crowd; Karel was part of the crowd and distinctly part of a groove.
“I don’t care what you do with it,” he said after a while, ungraciously. “Why do you want to read it?”
Karel looked straight at him. “I’m going to talk politics, Thomas.”
“Talk anything you like!”
“If Humanita rejected your essay after you wrote that statement which was so useful to Joseph and Dolezhal, there must be something in the book they don’t like. And it’s probable that I am going to be interested in what they don’t like.”
“You’re a fool, Karel. You believe in black and white.”
Karel stood up. His gaunt shoulders were tired and hunched, but his eyes were wide awake and held Thomas.
“There’s a whole scale of grays between black and white,” he said. “But somewhere, light ends and darkness begins. There is a border line, and you’re either on one side of it or on the other. That’s what I want to find out.”
“Let me know where you file me away, will you?”
“I will,” said Karel. “And give my love to Kitty.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SMALL wine restaurant was perched against the steep side of Hradcany Hill. In summer, many people came to it, to sit for a while on its porch and enjoy the view of the Moldau’s curving band and the crooked chimneys, the many-fingered towers, the patinaed roofs of the city. They would have a glass or two of native wine, or perhaps beer, and then move on to make room for other excursionists. At this time of the year, however, the restaurant was most often empty; its porch was closed off, the arched, smoke-discolored ceiling of its interior was never quite lit by the lamps at the few tables occupied by guests.
Dolezhal had picked the place because he was reasonably sure that no one who knew him would think of coming here, and because there were enough tables to insure getting a secluded one.
“So Petra is back in Rodnik again?” he said over his second glass of wine. “Too bad. She was like a bright light in these dark times.”
Joseph explained uncomfortably, “I’ve had to take her back. The atmosphere here in Prague, you understand....There’s too much going on which Lida and I felt was not good for her.”
The Minister’s beautiful gray hair had lost some of its sheen; perhaps the events were affecting his glands, perhaps he had run out of the right kind of oil, or he no longer had time to have scalp treatments.
“That’s our trouble,” he said, “the things that are going on are no good for our children, for ourselves—or for anybody. But there’ll be an end to that!”
Joseph had his eyes fixed on the Minister’s small white hand that kept sliding up and down the slender stem of his glass. Joseph knew that this twosome with Dolezhal would be somehow decisive. He had suspected it when the Minister, as if by chance, had run into him at the former Stock Exchange and had suggested a little walk to let the winter air cool their heated brains. When the walk extended without anything of importance being said, when he observed Dolezhal looking back frequently, when their way took them across the river to the other side of town and up the hill, Joseph was positive that Dolezhal had assigned him some prominent part in some momentous matter. He had felt complimented and at the same time anxious. Something had to be very wrong if the chief of the Party, with so many reliable, experienced hands available, felt compelled to enlist the help and confidence of such a junior member of the organization as himself.
“You know General Duchinsky, don’t you?” Dolezhal asked, without preamble.
“He was my commanding officer in England.”
“Do you still see him?”
“I met him last when the budgetary committee discussed the military appropriation. He was submitting some figures to us....”
“But you’re quite friendly with him?”
“Not socially. Even in England, you rarely could get close to him. However, we always got along. Why do you ask?”
The Minister’s hand came away from the glass and stabbed toward Joseph. “Because we need him!”
> “What for?”
“Don’t be so damnably slow!” Impatience jarred Dolezhal’s voice. “Don’t tell me you have no idea that something is bound to happen and that it is far better if we make it happen!”
Joseph smarted under the tone of superiority. “I’m not in the inner councils of the Party!” he said, and quietly refilled the Minister’s glass.
Dolezhal scratched his mustache and said nothing. This was a fine time to have to smear balm on hurt egos! But he needed Duchinsky, and Joseph was his only reliable contact to the Air Force General.
“I told you enough when we withdrew your nice little bill,” he grumbled. “Do you want to have socialization of everything written into the new Constitution?”
“What has the new Constitution got to do with Duchinsky?”
“Do you want to help us or not, Joseph Benda? Something has to be done before the pressure on us grows too heavy to fight. And for that stage of the game, we must have the Army either on our side or at least completely neutralized.”
“A coup?”
Joseph managed to press out the two fateful words. His heart pumped against his chest with sudden vehemence. He was stupid to ask such a question. As if he didn’t know! As if, underneath, he hadn’t thought of it many a time—from the day when Kravat forced him into the humiliating pre-election debate with Stanek, to the horrible hour when his own workers almost rose to lynch him, to Karel’s warning that he’d better resign. Democracy was a wonderful thing as long as you controlled it and made it function your way; once it turned against you, it ceased to be desirable. And yet—if it came to that—if force, guns, planes had to be used against his own people who had stood with him around his Christmas tree...
He had learned of democracy in school. From his first conscious years, he had soaked up the tradition of the Czech fight against the Imperial Austrian police. He had left his own country, given up his own factory, to make war in the name of this democracy....
“A coup!” Dolezhal said deprecatingly. “Don’t worry your head about that! Everything will be done according to parliamentary rules and regulations. We’re experts in that.”
“Then why do we need Duchinsky?”
“Once you were in some sort of underground business against the Nazis and the Hacha Government. Did you inquire into the reasons for every order you received?”
“But that was different!”
“In what way was it different?”
Joseph considered. He had lost his Benda Works then and he had lost them now. He thought of the mob at the meeting. It had been a touch-and-go situation—but you didn’t call in Duchinsky and the Air Force! That was the difference.
“Perhaps you do not know the people as I know them,” he said. “I meet them every day in my work in the industry. Sometimes, they go off half-cocked; sometimes, they need curbing; yet on the whole, I think, they’re reasonable men and women....”
There was a lot Dolezhal could have said about people and their reasoning and how it worked. All his worries stemmed from the fact that these nice, reasonable people had taken it into their heads to deprive Joseph Benda of everything he and his father and his grandfather had worked so hard to build up, and that this was happening all over the country. But the Minister did not bother to argue that.
Instead, he said, “A propos industry—for a while, you are going to cease meeting those people of yours in your daily work. You’re going to resign as National Administrator of the Benda Works and also of the Hammer Works in Martinice, whatever has remained of them.”
Joseph set his elbows on the table, hard. A little of the wine in the Minister’s freshly filled glass spilled.
Dolezhal reached for his paper napkin and dried the wet spots. “You don’t like that? After the fire, you wanted to!...”
First Karel, now Dolezhal—they were cornering him from both sides. “It’s out of the question,” said Joseph.
The Minister’s small hands became ironically expressive. “My Councilor Novak has become a very powerful man. He suggested it, and I should like to oblige him.”
“And I won’t do it!” Joseph stated hoarsely.
“Don’t make a scene, the waiter will hear you!” Dolezhal placed the crumpled napkin on the ash tray.
“I won’t do it!” Joseph repeated.
“Oh yes, you will. You will resign because—”
“Minister Dolezhal! I’ve always been loyal and followed orders. I accepted the low position on the ballot, knowing that, if at all, I’d squeeze in by the skin of my teeth, and that you were using me for my following in Rodnik. I let you take away the one decent thing I wanted to put through—my Lex Blaha. But I refuse to be the sacrificial lamb permanently and to be offered up to the whims of your Councilor and his crowd. Why, not two weeks ago, my own brother Karel, the doctor—you know of him, he belongs to that crowd, too—he comes to me and what does he ask? That I resign!”
“They always run in packs,” Dolezhal said with equanimity.
“Which doesn’t make them any less dangerous. They must be pretty well-organized if they dare to use you for what one of their own kind couldn’t put over!”
An eloquent gesture of Dolezhal’s stopped in mid-air. “And what makes you think we’re not well-organized? Do you presume I don’t know that any attack on you is an attack on our Party, an attack on me? Hasn’t it occurred to you that I might have thought of that?”
“If I resign,” Joseph said stubbornly, “it’ll be their victory.”
“You mean, it’ll look like their victory.”
“It’s the same thing from where I sit.”
“If you would only let me finish what I want to say!...You will resign because in a couple of months you will come back to Benda and to Hammer—not as manager, not as National Administrator—but as the man who owns them.”
Joseph sat very still. There was a slight obstruction in his throat, and his breath came in little wheezing sounds to which he was listening.
“And how are you going to achieve that?” he finally asked.
“It will be done according to parliamentary rules and regulations—I told you!” Dolezhal was complacent. “It’s all planned, and part of it is giving them enough rope to hang themselves. Politics, to be truly effective, must be played with finesse.”
His mustache tittered.
“Let them think they’ve won out over you, Benda. Don’t you see the humor in the situation?”
Joseph began to see it. He, himself, in his own rough way, had pulled political fast ones—but he had ladled it out; the Minister was doing it by the soupçon.
Dolezhal raised his glass.
Joseph laughed, at first uncertainly, then with more and more abandon. Some of his wine got into his windpipe; he coughed, and struggled to clear his throat, and was abruptly serious. “And if it doesn’t work out as you said it would?”
“You’re not alone in this, Benda, and neither am I. This thing is so big that I couldn’t go into its ramifications if I wanted to. Tremendous! Bigger than this little country!...Now about Duchinsky—” he stabbed at Joseph. “Duchinsky won’t be too difficult because he’s a career man, and because he served in England, and because he is ambitious....”
“I see.”
“Still, be careful. Don’t ever forget what is at stake!”
“I won’t forget,” said Joseph.
But Duchinsky was not quite so easy as Dolezhal had made Joseph assume.
They had a famous old time exchanging memories; they talked of the blackout on Leicester Square, of the great show their squadron had made over the Channel and over Europe, of how the times had changed; and General Duchinsky spoke lovingly of his wife who was a British girl and a first cousin of Lady Chittenden, and who was at present spending a few weeks with her relatives in Devonshire.
However, on the main subject, which Joseph broached slowly and with great circumspection, Duchinsky remained reserved. He was ambitious and a careerist, all right, but he seemed to feel that h
is career was assured regardless of which party or combination of parties staffed the Cabinet.
He expanded his broad, beribboned chest and smiled all over his round, cheery, efficient-looking face. “I’m a soldier, my dear Joseph Benda. I can fly a plane, I can take apart its engine, I can organize, I can tell you where to hit and what to bomb with how many planes and how much explosives to achieve a certain tactical or strategic result. But I’m not a politician.”
That was a lie; and they both knew it. Any high-ranking officer who had fought with an army-in-exile, who had had to wangle supplies and matériel from foreign quartermaster services, had to be a politician, just to stay alive and to keep on fighting. And if anything, politics within the Army had increased after the war: there were the Russian and the Western schools who differed in their conception of strategy and discipline, in their philosophy and individual tastes, depending on whether they had served on the Eastern front or in the West; there were the hangovers from the old Austro-Hungarian officers’ corps, and those who had stayed in the country during the Nazi occupation, some of them having gone into the underground, and others having survived by compromising. If a man like Boris Duchinsky had managed to float on top of this hodge-podge of differing interests and loyalties, and if he could get and hold as important a command as his, he had to be a very good politician indeed.
Duchinsky knew where his interests lay. With his background, he was a natural to side with Dolezhal. Then why his reticence? It brought back Joseph’s doubts. Were the pressures too great, already? Was Dolezhal provoking something that couldn’t be carried through?...No, that was nonsense; Dolezhal was not the man to undertake anything for whose success the chances were less than excellent. Joseph wished to God that the Minister hadn’t been so secretive. Who was on their side? On whom could they count? There was the Party organization, of course, with its many fronts among students and women and shop owners, and what strength it had among the trade unions; there were the Catholics, particularly in Slovakia, with the inestimable influence of the clergy through the pulpit, through the confessional, through welfare organizations and social groups and bedside visits; there were the peasants who were deathly afraid that the land they had just received would be taken away once more for some wild experiments in collectivism; and there were, no doubt, a good number of middle-of-the-road socialists who wanted their reforms handed to them peacefully and who, for all their radical words, were mild and comfortable fellows.
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