Stefan Heym

by The Eyes of Reason

  She sat up straight. Her eyes were angry and a little fearful, and her voice had lost all superciliousness. “Of course I can. But you won’t need it, you said!”

  “I won’t. No. Thank you.”

  Joseph moved his hands. They were no longer a symbol of strength, but .awkward appendages. This had not been the time for asking for this kind of thing.

  “You’re a sensible people,” she said. “But that’s your weakness, too. If blood has to be shed, for Christ’s sake, don’t be afraid of it: shed it!”

  “Yes, Elinor,” he said meekly.

  “I’d hate to have to run to the Embassy for favors just because you people don’t know what you’re up against!”

  “But we do know!” he assured her.

  “I hope you do,” she grumbled. “Now, I’m willing to help you. Nobody, not even in America, likes to see people roughed up. But that’s exactly what you may have to do. So I’ll angle my stuff to the necessity of it. And that new specialists’ government of yours—they’ll need a loan or something after you take over, because it’s always nice if somebody fresh in power can hand out a giftie. So when the time comes, I’ll write about that, too.

  “That’ll be very important,” he said, suppressing his anger at his own fear and at the way in which she had taken advantage of it.

  “But have you ever thought that I write in English? That what I have to say will be read across the ocean, but not here where it’s most needed? What have you done to prepare your own public for the changes you want to bring about?”

  It was not his department; he had no idea what, if anything, Dolezhal had arranged. “We have our press,” he defended himself. “It has been given directives, naturally—”

  “You’re a sensible people,” she said a third time, and he became sick and tired of having to hear it. “Sensible—but you’ve got to learn. Where’s the man through whom you channel your ideas, who personalizes the issue, who speaks up and to whom the public can turn for guidance? Where’s your spokesman?”

  Joseph was silent. He knew nothing about the finer points of this American publicity approach, and the word “spokesman” conjured up disagreeable associations.

  “What about Thomas?” she asked. “Why is he not being used? If you go all-out after a target, you use everything and everybody you’ve got!”

  He sighed, “Thomas is playing school!” And as he saw her puzzled frown, he elaborated: “I had Petra with me in Prague, at a boarding school. It didn’t work out. Now she’s back in Rodnik, and Thomas is teaching her. He’s very good at it, too, very conscientious, sticks to it every day except Sunday.”

  Her frown deepened. “Spending his time with a kid Petra’s age—what kind of life is that for him?”

  Joseph shrugged knowingly. “He seems to like it. Of course, there’s Vlasta—she instructs in mathematics and the languages; Thomas reserved history and philosophy and literature to himself.”

  “Vlasta...” she said. “Pretty? Young?”

  “Oh, quite....” Not that he’d ever had the time to do anything about it. He hesitated. Her show of amused interest wasn’t coming off too well. Yet he couldn’t afford to arouse her hostility. “Thomas had to find something to occupy himself,” he said placatingly.

  “He finished writing his essay?”

  “Yes,” grunted Joseph. “But Barsiny turned it down. An impossible piece—wild, radical, not at all what you and I hoped it would be. It seems Thomas went completely overboard. The kindest thing you can say about him is that he picked his own corner, and he picked it where no one else wants to stay, and now he’s crawled into it.”

  “And whose fault is that?” she retorted. “Was he ever a man to be left to his own devices, in his work, or in his life? Where were you?”

  The accusation sat badly on Joseph. His broad face grew tight, and he said caustically, “As far as I’ve been informed, he told you to go to hell, too.” Then he remembered that it wasn’t she who needed him, and continued, “Even Barsiny said—”

  “I know everything Barsiny said. He’s coming in a little while, and I want you to be here when he arrives. And Barsiny will print the Essay—who does he think he is, bucking you and Dolezhal?”

  She knocked her gold-and-black holder against the knuckles of her hand and belligerently stared through Joseph. Then her bloodshot eyes began to ache. She’d have to go to Rodnik. She’d have to clear up the mess into which Thomas had got himself—with the Essay, with his infantile retreat from the world, with this Vlasta. She would have gone, anyway, but this made it imperative that she go soon. She closed her eyes.

  Joseph sat on the edge of his chair, not daring to move, and intensely conscious of the ludicrousness of his situation.

  Barsiny appeared, oozing the thick air of a man who has only the best intentions and who can’t help it if they’ve been spoiled. He had in his pockets the opinions of his readers and a sheaf of quotes from the Essay, and he treated Elinor and Joseph to a strategic selection of Thomas’s views, each one of them sufficient to outrage the sensibilities of his listeners.

  “Now, can you publish a book of this kind?” was his refrain. “I don’t know what got into Thomas Benda—all this is diametrically opposed to the wonderful statement he gave us when you were here the last time, madame.”

  He showed his yellow teeth in what was intended as a smile, and spread his hands in apology.

  Elinor glanced castigatingly at Joseph. But he didn’t notice it; he was absorbed by the reading and his own dismal thoughts. What his brother had written was vastly more reprehensible than the half-cocked ideas of an off-sider which were to be expected from a Thomas unsupervised—it was a condemnation of his own stand, his own work, his own struggle; and coming at this juncture, it hit him with peculiar force.

  He felt defrauded and maligned. Why had he worked so hard to hang on to the Benda Works and to build up Vesely’s, why was he now up to his neck in an action so precipitous that his nerves twitched and his brain recoiled from thinking it through to the end—if not to enable Thomas to sit at his desk with an income assured, and to create the great literature a man of his gifts should write? Yes, Thomas had refused himself before; his desertion after the fire at Hammer was unforgivable. But an artist had no place in dirty day-by-day business, and you couldn’t very well demand of Thomas that he defend the retention of the Sudeten-Germans against which he had screamed.

  Now, however, as Barsiny’s fatty voice laid bare the full extent of Thomas’s heresies, as it became clear to Joseph that the boy had not just grown away from him, but had turned traitor to the family, to religion, to all the things that were sacred and not to be doubted, to the very freedom the book was supposed to defend—there was only a gray, dull sense of loss, and the foreboding of something evil. Thomas might speak for no one but himself, yet he was a barometer for the mood of the times and the people.

  Elinor, of course, couldn’t see it. All she thought of was that her poor little Thomas had been left motherless and fatherless and so had stumbled off the safe road.

  “You would publish the Essay, though,” she was saying to Barsiny, “if we took out all those objectionable quips and made it a decent book?”

  Joseph settled back and watched Barsiny squirm. From the moment the publisher had entered, making loud, cordial noises and at the same time displaying his subservience to the famous Elinor Simpson and the influential Deputy, Joseph had disliked him, and his dislike had swelled as he noticed the undertone of glee with which Barsiny had read the quotes from the “Essay on Freedom.” As far as Joseph was concerned, he no longer cared whether Thomas was ever again published anywhere. But it pepped him up to hear Elinor lay down the law to Barsiny, and to see someone else being pushed against the wall, for a change.

  Barsiny was scratching his wheat-colored pate. “It will be impossible, madame!” His eye caught Elinor collecting breath for a good, long tirade, and he said quickly, “I mean, you know Mr. Thomas Benda! He has a mind of his own! Don’t yo
u think I have tried? An author of such reputation! I didn’t like to lose his book. He will never agree, we will never convince him—”

  “I will convince him,” said Elinor.

  Barsiny stopped scratching. He remembered how she had pulled the advance statement out of Thomas, and he began to feel seriously troubled.

  “You worry about sticking to your contract,” Elinor went on coolly, “and about speedy publication. I worry about Thomas Benda.”

  Barsiny’s eyes shifted. He couldn’t tell the woman, especially not in the presence of Deputy Benda, that he wanted to wash his hands of the whole matter, and that if she cut out the half of the book disturbing to her, a second half would remain which would disturb a lot of other people he had no intention of antagonizing.

  “Don’t you think, Joseph,” she asked, “that the book, properly rewritten, would be of great help in the coming days?”

  “Yes,” said Joseph, “I’m sure of that.”

  “Well, Dr. Barsiny?”

  Barsiny was smiling again. He had begun to add up time: The weeks and months it would take to rewrite and reorganize the manuscript, if Thomas should prove to be unprincipled enough to do it—the slow process of editorial preparation—the problem of typesetting, printing, binding—the distribution to the stores. Who knew what the situation would be after all that was done? Who knew how many fresh reasons could be found for stopping publication, if that was desirable?

  “If you can furnish an acceptable manuscript, madame, we’d be only too happy—”

  “Thank you, Dr. Barsiny. And may I say you acted wisely in preventing Thomas Benda from rushing into this—this—”

  “Adventure?” suggested the publisher.

  “Yes, adventure. I’m glad there was at least one man,” she went on pointedly, “who cared enough to look after Thomas’s interests.”

  “My authors’ interests,” said Barsiny, “are my own, too.”

  “Obviously,” she said.

  On that note, the publisher took speedy leave. After he had gone, she ordered drinks for herself and Joseph, and raising her glass, announced, “That’s how simple it is. Here’s to our Spokesman!”

  Then she took another pill.

  The maid at Joseph’s house, remembering Elinor, took her in and led her to a locked door. The maid knocked once, then a second time, and finally there were shuffling steps from the bolted side and a voice which Elinor was unable to recognize.

  The maid said something about the American lady’s having come back to Rodnik. The voice gave an order through the closed door, and the maid moved off shaking her head and mumbling to herself.

  Elinor, left alone, waited in the hallway. She could make nothing of the situation, and she grew impatient. But before she had fully resolved to investigate the house by herself—and to find Thomas—Lida, her hair straggly, her face smudged, her eyes shrewdly winking, opened the door. “In here!” she said anxiously. “Come in here!”

  The room, which Elinor had never seen before, was none too large; it probably had served as one of the boys’ rooms in Peter Benda’s time. Now it was bare of furniture, except for an old chair and a large, well-worn table that showed many recent scratches. All along the walls stood suitcases and crates, some empty, some half-filled with packages and wood shavings and strips of newspaper, some already nailed closed or securely locked. The shade over the single window was drawn; a bare electric bulb suspended from the center of the ceiling cast a thin, sharp light which made the straight lines of the boxes and suitcases and trunks create angular, abstractionist shadows; the air was heavy and saturated with the musty smell of a storage attic.

  The room and its disheveled occupant gave Elinor an eerie sensation, as if on crossing the threshold she had entered a world of changelings and spooks. And this wasn’t the Lida she had known—the immensely efficient, clever, hard manager of a factory and a big household!

  “I’m packing!” said Lida, swinging herself on the table and letting her legs hang. “You can help me if you like.”

  She had torn her stocking on a nail or on the rough corner of a crate, and the wide run was like a gash on her leg.

  “I’m about half-through. It’s a lot of work. First you have to think of what you want to take along, then you have to get it together so that no one notices, and then it must be packed for a long trip. You never can tell how baggage is smashed around. It used to be that they were careful on the railways, and the trucking companies were reliable—but now? And you can’t even take out insurance. It’s all nationalized, and they’d report everything to the police.”

  “When are you leaving?” asked Elinor in the soft tone in which you question the mad.

  “I don’t know. But it will be soon. There will be a great change and they’ll be knocking at our door, and all I can tell you is that we’d better be gone by that time!”

  “Does Joseph know about it?”

  “Does he?” For a moment Lida’s voice, which had sounded almost senile, was full and rang with the scorn she had used so effectively in the past. “Joseph knows nothing. Tomorrow, he says, we’ll get back the Benda Works, and the Hammer Works, everything; but to get them back, we must first hand them to the rabble. I ask you, Elinor, is there rhyme or reason in that? Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of their senses....Enough of this chitchat. Help me pull this forward!” She jumped off the table and began to tug at a large, metal-enforced trunk. “This will hold quite a bit,” she explained.

  “It will, no doubt,” said Elinor, frightened. And since it was better to humor such people, she pretended to help Lida, grunting and groaning and sweating in her elegant fur coat.

  Then she was outside the door. She heard Lida click back the lock. She felt the weakness in her calves and the pounding of her heart. What had come over the Bendas? If Lida—the rational, practical Lida—could lose that much of her bearings, how much of Joseph’s brave words could be trusted? And hadn’t he, too, hinted at flight when he inquired about an American visa? Was this what she’d flown across the ocean for—a story on disintegration and breakdown and defeat?

  Elinor refused to accept it. Too great a part of herself was tied up with this family, and with this nice, clean, cultivated little outpost of the democratic way of life, for her to treat what she saw as just another news story.

  *****

  She found Thomas in the other wing of the house.

  It really was a schoolroom, with a blackboard, a desk for the teacher, a bench for Petra, a map strung up at the wall, and some extra chairs, one of which was occupied by a young woman who, she realized, must be Vlasta.

  If Thomas was surprised, he didn’t show it. He didn’t rise. He pressed his finger against his mouth and motioned for her to take the empty chair next to him.

  “We’re having a very interesting discussion on Hegel,” he whispered and, looking at his wrist watch, “there’ll be another twenty minutes of it, then the classes are over for today....No, Petra, you can say hello to Elinor when we’re through.”

  The Vlasta person was in the middle of some apparently deep contribution to the lecture. Elinor saw that her entry into the room had no effect on the girl beyond a slight smile which might just as well pertain to what she was arguing. Petra’s attention had returned to her teacher, and she was hanging on Vlasta’s lips.

  “Now come on, Thomas!” Elinor said angrily. “Break it up and let’s get out of here. It’s nearly two years since I’ve seen you—I’ve traveled around half the globe—I have to talk to you!”

  He was not looking at her. His eyes seemed to caress Vlasta’s face even as he inclined his head to answer. “You know, this Hegel!” he said sotto voce. “He’s open to so many interpretations! I sometimes think he intentionally wrote double talk.”

  After that, he took up the lecture, throwing the ball as often as he could to Petra, and pausing considerately whenever he felt Vlasta wanted to air her views on the dialectics of Professor Hegel. Since the whole discussion was c
onducted in Czech, Elinor could do nothing but sit back and observe, and digest her encounter with Lida, and try to fight down her rage over Thomas’s behavior.

  There was a triangle whose apex was this Vlasta girl. The girl was not, as she had assumed when Joseph brought up the name, only another Kitty, one of those broad-hipped young Czech females who are pleasant to sleep with and cuddly and loyal and never any problem. That type would have been easy to handle; Vlasta was different, and yet there was about her something familiar—perhaps it was the way she held her head, perhaps her hair so closely fitted to her skull.

  Elinor scrutinized her. She was not yet able to determine what it was; but it would occur to her, given time and any small thing to set off the right train of thought—a motion, an intonation, a casual look.

  And she had time; Thomas had made that abundantly clear. Thomas was obviously mooning. It was pitiful to watch. He was showing off and trying to catch Vlasta’s eye; from his facial expressions and gestures Elinor could see that he was being witty; there was a boyish eagerness about him whenever Vlasta deigned to say a few words; and when he garnered one of her rare approving nods, he settled back in his chair to conjecture happily on his good fortune. Lida, at least, was driven by a fear which was probably justifiable—but this drooling idiocy! It was the counterpart to the stupidities he had written into his book, and everything in Elinor itched to get her hands on both the author and his work and to set them straight.

  Elinor’s eyes wandered along the other side of the triangle, from the apex to Petra. Petra was apparently unaware of Thomas’s antics; or she was so accustomed to them that she was no longer affected. Petra seemed inattentive at times. Elinor wished her Czech were not limited to ordering a small light beer at the bar of the Alcron or inquiring after the nearest ladies’ room; words gave a person away, and she was almost sure that Petra was directing her answers not toward Thomas, but toward Vlasta. Damn it, that side of the triangle was by far the more interesting! Every so often the long lashes that veiled Vlasta’s eyes would lift, and from under them a half-hidden glance would focus on the pretty young thing pretending to study Hegel. And the pretty young thing with her soft brown curls and her up-tilted nose and her smooth cheeks would receive the glance and stir slightly and moisten her red lips and bend her head deeper over her text.