Thomas sat pressed into a corner, half-hidden behind his newspaper. To his right, at the same table, a man with a golden watch fob was explaining to a younger one how President Benes was about to declare a state of emergency and to call out the Army; and that would be the end of the Communists. A pretty, youngish woman at Thomas’s left put another layer of lipstick on her small mouth and between strokes said to her escort that she, at least, had a passport.
“Much good that will do you,” the man at her side answered. “They are closing the border; haven’t you heard?”
Her hand remained in mid-air.
Thomas sat stiffly aloof. Maybe he should have compassion for these people; after Villner’s condemnation he really belonged with them. Nevertheless, he felt a closer affinity to Villner than to them. There was no chance of meeting Vlasta here; this would be the one place she’d keep away from. And the whole idea of dawdling away his time waiting for Elinor was fatuous. What could she tell him—to get out of her sight, and fast? Hadn’t she warned him not to come crawling back to her, and wasn’t this just what he was doing?
Lida had told him to go ask Elinor, if he wanted to know why Vlasta had left Rodnik. He had puzzled over this; it made no sense; but he might as well do it.
Thomas looked over the top of his paper toward the revolving door. He had to keep this door in sight if he was to spot Elinor the moment she entered. He knew that whatever she might tell him about Vlasta would not bring him a single step further. He knew that he was running back to Mama because he was so utterly alone, and because somebody had to tell him that he was a great author with something important to say, and because her big bosom was the only place of rest he could think of. Out of the slim memory that had remained of her, he conjured up his mother, Anna Benda. She was leaning back in a large chair, a white blanket wrapped around her frail knees, her thin, lovely, sad face wasting away. He had sat in front of her, wanting to caress and to comfort her, but his hands had failed to obey him. And he had realized, then, that he would be without her, and that he would be lost....There was no sense in being ashamed. People were on the march, he didn’t know where to; pretenses no longer counted.
How long had he been waiting here, his eyes glued to the revolving door? The news vendor had come and gone several times, the lobby had become even more thickly populated, before Thomas saw the familiar energetic figure push through the door and stride to the desk.
He got up to go to her. But she was in company. Behind her, a whole clot of men had come in and surrounded her. Some of them were obviously reporters; others had the sleazy look of tipsters and stringers; and there were two or three young men, of impeccable dress, with the sober, discreet, and anemic smiles of junior diplomats.
Thomas held back. He despised this retinue which she always gathered and used to give herself background. But today, she seemed to be using them less than they were using her—the reporters asked questions of her, the informants were trying to get her ear, and the young diplomats stood correctly waiting their turn.
Almost everybody in the lobby was sensitive to any excitement, and she was aware that she held the center of attention. Thomas saw her face grow grave but confident; she lifted her head slightly, and he heard her say, “Gentlemen, if you’ll come with me to my room—I’ll tell you all I know.”
With that, she took her key from the clerk and swept ahead of her train to the elevator. Thomas took the next car and reached her suite before the last of Elinor’s flunkeys had closed the door behind him.
Thomas remembered the chrysanthemum wallpaper and the couch. It was the same room in which he had forced open his gummy eyelids after that horrible night’s binge, and in which she had served him the black coffee; the same room from which she had dragged him to Dr. Barsiny to sell his soul. He settled as far away from her as he could; she had seen him, all right, but did not let on. One of the young diplomats helped her out of her coat and stood next to her as she faced the group.
“Is it true that the President has granted you an interview?” a reporter inquired.
“The President,” she said after half a second’s thought, “is quite obviously interested in having his position understood by the American public.”
“Can you let us know what you’ve been told by Foreign Minister Masaryk?”
“I have not yet been able to see him; but I will. He and I are very dear old friends, he used to practice piano in my house. I understand that Jan is terribly concerned by the present development, as any civilized democrat must be.”
“Do you know whether he’ll resign, too?”
“Resigning has become quite a habit within the Czech Cabinet, hasn’t it?” she asked in answer.
There was some appreciative laughter.
“You’ve had lunch at the American Embassy, Miss Simpson. Have you been told anything about possible Marshall Plan aid for Czechoslovakia?”
“My dear young man! We had a tomato juice cocktail, shrimps à la Newburgh, roast beef with asparagus tips and French fried potatoes, and ice cream and coffee for dessert—”
Some of the tipsters swallowed hard.
“Beyond that, I’m afraid, everything about the luncheon is strictly secret. But you’re an intelligent fellow. You ought to be able to figure out for yourself that the United States Congress would raise the roof off the Capitol if any of our nice, solid dollars were used to back up your Mr. Gottwald.”
“And if the Prime Minister were replaced?”
“No comment.”
There was again some laughter. The junior diplomat frowned.
“What do you think of the situation, Miss Simpson?”
“I’m an American newspaper woman. The internal affairs of your country—”
“Off the record, Miss Simpson, off the record!”
“Off the record, it is my considered opinion that unless the Soviets move a couple of their divisions to your borders—or across your borders—your Communists will get the licking of their lives.”
The junior diplomat nodded seriously.
“Your friend, Deputy Benda, has not been seen in Prague for quite a few days. Is it true that he has killed himself?”
Elinor shot a quick glance at Thomas. “I know the Deputy only slightly, very slightly, and only through his brother, the well-known writer....Thomas! Would you mind answering the question?”
Everybody turned to him. Thomas shrank. The thought of the possibility of his brother’s suicide, of suicide at all, made his nerves grow numb. And yet it was such a logical thought—put an end to it, stop wiggling like a worm on the hook, have peace, black, velvety peace...
“This is Mr. Thomas Benda!” Elinor’s words came to him as through cotton.
“When I was home—yesterday—” he stammered. Then he began to laugh. “My brother Joseph—he’s going to outlast us all!”
“Thank you, Mr. Benda.”
“I think this is about enough,” suggested Elinor.
The reporters trooped off, and she went into a session with her informants.
The Communists were going to resign. The Communists were not going to resign but were proclaiming the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Social-Democratic Ministers wanted to resign, but there was a fight in the Executive of their Party. One of their Ministers had been hit over the head by the Chairman of the Party. It was the Chairman who had been hit. The Minister of Justice, who had accused the Communists of plotting an armed Putsch, had been arrested. No: they had wanted to arrest him, but he had been carried into his office on the shoulders of two hundred loyal followers. The students were in open revolt and planned to march to the President’s Palace on Hradcany Hill to defend Benes with their lives. Minister Dolezhal had conceived the resignation as a great coup, at a dinner of his intimate friends ten days ago. Some of the Ministers had learned only from the newspapers that they had resigned. In Slovakia, the peasants were arming themselves with pitchforks and marching on Bratislava. The Minister of National Defense was reliably reported to hav
e said that he would refuse to obey orders if the President called out the Army. The Minister of National Defense was about to resign. There would be a workers’ demonstration on Old Town Square. Dolezhal’s Party would organize a counterdemonstration, and things would get hectic. There were armed cells of Dolezhal’s followers all over Prague. The Workers’ Militia in the factories was being issued guns, and would try to occupy all public buildings. Zorin, the Russian Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, was in Prague, and Communist heads would be rolling soon; in fact, the Communists had precipitated the whole thing to save themselves from the wrath of the Kremlin.
Elinor sat, chain smoking through her black-and-gold holder, trying to sift rumor from fact, fact from conjecture, conjecture from wishful thinking. She took no notes; her mind was attuned to the pitiful creatures who outdid each other to help her, because all of them felt that, pretty soon, they might need her help. She was enjoying herself. In this milieu, she was able to create the impression—and to believe, herself—that history was not being made on the streets and in the factories of the country, in the caucus rooms and meeting halls of the political parties, in the Ministerial offices and in the Presidential Palace, but right here, in the suite of Elinor Simpson, who had come to save poor little Czechoslovakia.
The diplomats, meanwhile, had separated themselves from the circle around Elinor and were developing their own theories. They talked of the relative strength of the forces, they compared percentages from the 1946 elections; they added the imponderabilia of the intrigues known only to them, and came up with a quite hopeful estimate, whereby they carefully allowed for the possibility of the contrary.
When the tipsters and stringers had been assured of Elinor’s continuing esteem and had moved off, the diplomats joined her. For a while, they maintained the serious vein of their trade talk in which she was just as expert as she was in the throwing of hints to eager newsmen or in the sifting of the material her informants submitted. Then the conversation shifted to the latest gossip about the wives and daughters of native and foreign dignitaries, and after that, the diplomats took their leave, being careful to avoid any knowing glances at Thomas in his corner.
“Well,” said Elinor, “a hard day.”
She took a pill out of her enameled box and swallowed it, twisting her face.
“Come out of your corner.” She thumped her hand on the couch and made room for him.
He sat down, but his manner showed that he was ready to jump at the slightest sign of animosity. He felt exhausted and yet keyed to a pitch, like a gambler at the tail end of his evening.
“What do you know about Vlasta?” he said, jerking out each of his words.
“Vlasta?...Oh, your little schoolteacher! What about her?”
“She’s gone. She’s left Rodnik. I don’t know where she is.”
Elinor raised her brows. “So she has gone!” A flush of triumph worked its way to her face, but she suppressed it. It was a grand day after all; she was going great guns, she was directing lives on every level. “Well, Thomas,” she said, “have you thanked your God properly?”
“You must hate me very much. I understand it. I’m sorry.” He rose and went to the chair on which he had dumped his hat and his coat.
“Don’t leave yet!” she ordered.
He stood, undecided.
“I don’t hate you.” This was her moment. This would make up for all she had suffered in the past, the humiliations, the face of age that had stared at her from the mirror. “You’ve tried to throw me over more than once. You’ve always come creeping back. There must be reasons for that, Thomas; have you ever thought of them? Between you and me are ties stronger than the hoops a wife slings over her husband, or some young filly over her boy-friend....And you know it.”
“I’ve come to ask you about Vlasta. Lida said—”
“All in its own good time, Thomas! Her troubles aren’t what’s upsetting you—you’ve always looked at life only as it affects you. It’s you who are troubled.”
True, he admitted to himself. But she hadn’t yet told him to get out of her sight. In a way, he was grateful.
“Tell me,” she urged. “Tell me what has brought you back to me.”
He gripped the back of a chair and half-leaned over it. “Everything’s gone wrong,” he said dully. “I feel like a human punching bag that’s been pummeled until its sides have split and its stuffing oozes out. I’m either ahead of or behind my time, I don’t know which. I used to have roots in my country; I came back and the soil had changed. There were years when I was close to my brothers and worked with them and felt with them and fought alongside them; now they’ve fallen out and grown away from me, or I have grown away from them, God knows. I still have a wife, and I’ve made her unhappy; can I help it if she’s turned into a fixture that gets on my nerves? Once I had pride and what I wrote was read and believed in—and now? Where do I belong? This noon, on the square, the people were singing our National Anthem. It starts with a question: Where is my home?...Where is it, Elinor?”
Here, she wanted to say, with me! She was made of flesh and blood. She wanted to spread her arms and ask him to come to her, she wanted to be mother and sweetheart and all he needed—but she controlled herself. He was groggy, now, but was he pliable? He was the only man who had managed to use her: he had taken her idea of freedom and written a parody on it; he had trampled on her heart whenever she’d been foolish enough to show it to him; he had turned from Kitty to Stanek to Vlasta in the steady effort of shutting her out; and finally he had flaunted his spite and told her openly to step out of his life. What did he think she was made of—rope, like a foot mat?
She cultivated the little flame of anger in her until it rose steeply; the memories she called on served a purpose, they helped her to remain level-headed and to stop her sentiments from flooding her like the ripples of a brook washing over a cast-off old tin can and sinking it. And what angered her most of all was the fact that she was forced to dig up the memories and to think, think, think, instead of letting herself go, drinking the moment down to its last dregs.
“I can’t say that you don’t deserve what you got, Thomas. Do you know what’s going on out there? There’s a battle on, and everything you and I ever wanted is being fought over.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know. But—”
“No buts any more. You can’t come to me and simply declare bankruptcy and expect to be mothered and to get away without paying at least ten cents on the dollar!”
He smiled, “I’m afraid I haven’t even got that much.”
“We’ll soon see,” she said. She stepped to the window and opened it. The smoke left by her guests drifted out, and from Wenceslas Square, half a block away, came the muffled noise of the crowds.
Softly, she closed the window. “Sit down, Thomas.” Softly she spoke, “The freedom you wrote for when you were in America, the freedom that you were supposed to write for in your new book, the freedom that permitted you to write at all—that freedom will be choked by tomorrow or day after tomorrow unless Dolezhal wins.”
He saw himself shuttling from one side of Wenceslas Square to the other, from one contradictory slogan to the other. Everybody, including Elinor, talked of freedom, and nobody knew what it was.
Her eyes shone as she came over to him. “You ask me where you belong....As if you didn’t know!”
“Elinor!” he pleaded. “I beg of you, don’t try to push me again—”
“But I must!” she said, almost regretfully. “Today may be the last time I can do it, the last time when pushing you anywhere makes any sense. You have a terrible responsibility, Thomas. You’re a great writer!”
Thomas looked up at her. A great writer—that’s what he had come to hear. She must have sensed what he had wanted. She was assuring him—and coupling her assurance with new demands.
“I can only write the truth as I see it,” he defended himself.
“The truth—as in your essay? Where you counted the pimples on the
face of our democracy and insisted on calling them cancers? There are only two kinds of people, those like us, and the others who want to take away what we have. You feel homeless because you’ve betrayed us—”
She shrugged.
“I betrayed you...” he said quietly.
“I mean, objectively speaking—”
“A traitor...”
“Yes.”
He sat silent. Villner, too, had accused him of treason. Maybe both of them were justified, objectively speaking. But if they were, he wanted no part of the whole thing.
“Do you have any idea of what happened to Vlasta?” he asked.
“Vlasta...!” She waved away his question. “Outside, our world is burning—and you want Vlasta. Go out there, stand where you belong, and fight!”
He saw the red splotches on her face.
“It’s not too late yet,” she said tensely. “The Essay has not been printed; you can still speak! Forget about Vlasta, forget about Kitty, all the weights that hold you down. There’s a part for you in what’s unrolling itself out there, a big and important part, perhaps a decisive one.”
He felt her eyes bore into him, her hands clasping his shoulders.
“I can call up Dolezhal, tell him you want to publish an appeal through the papers—”
She noticed his stiffening.
“Oh, don’t be worried. If things go wrong, I’ll get you out. You’ll come with me.”
She sat down next to him. He smelled her perfume and the warmth of her body.
“You and I...” she said. “I’ll make life wonderful for you, exciting....Think what we can mean to one another. You will create...”
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