“You could have helped me!” she said, swallowing.
“I’ll bring you some water.”
As he started up from his seat, the door to the cockpit came open, and stooping his head, the co-pilot emerged. He was a youngish man, excessively freckled, with eyes of nondescript blue that reminded Joseph of a large order of glass in that color which he had sold to some fancy store in New York. They called it Wedgwood Blue; but it wasn’t Wedgwood.
The co-pilot passed down the aisle, lurched against Lida’s seat and said, “Ah, now, madame! We’ll get out of this rough air in no time at all, no time at all!” Then he pushed on and disappeared into the toilet. Mr. Pokorny and Mr. Kramarsh got up and, hanging on to the shelves where the pillows and blankets were kept, balanced themselves and waited.
Dolezhal came over to Joseph. He glanced at Lida, “Sorry, Mrs. Benda, you’re not feeling so well. Your first flight, I take it?”
Lida nodded mechanically.
“Well,” he said, “it’s the time of the year. We didn’t pick it, you know?” He laughed a little, but grew serious immediately. His face was tense, its large planes showed a net of wrinkles, parchment-like.
“Ready, Joseph?”
B. Prochaska, Joseph kept thinking. The whole thing seemed improbable, now, insane, sure to fail. He hadn’t flown a plane since 1944; he should have told that to Dolezhal. The DC-3 was nothing but the old Dakota transport; but who could tell what new gadgets the Airline had built in, and what kinks this particular crate had? Only Prochaska knew the plane well enough, Prochaska who was responsible for the ship and who would fight.
“Let’s go!” said Dolezhal. It was a command.
The co-pilot came out of the toilet and went forward. He gave Dolezhal a thin, apprehensive smile. Joseph levered himself up, supporting himself heavily on the armrests of his seat.
“That’s fine,” said Dolezhal. “That’s fine!”
The door to the cockpit swung gently with the movement of the plane. Joseph saw the co-pilot slip back into his seat. He saw the frowning profile of B. Prochaska as the captain leaned over to the co-pilot and said a few short words, apparently about the door left open. Mr. Pokorny and Mr. Kramarsh, their right hands in the side pockets of their jackets, pushed through the door.
The beak-nosed man looked up, puzzled. “Do they let you go in there?” he asked of no one in particular. “I always wanted to see—”
“Now!” Dolezhal said to Joseph.
Joseph stumbled forward. Holding on to the narrow walls of the gangway beyond the door, he saw Mr. Kramarsh press a pistol against the back of Captain Prochaska. Mr. Pokorny was talking to the captain, but the whir of the engines was too strong up here to let Joseph hear what he was saying.
Prochaska, however, was talking over the noise. “Stop the kidding!” he said. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
Joseph entered the cockpit.
“Get up, man!” Pokorny admonished. “This thing is loaded. And I shoot to kill.”
Prochaska looked for aid to his co-pilot. The boy kept his nondescript eyes discreetly ahead. Prochaska was still flying the plane. His head was now turned sideways, he was searching over the ground.
“For the last time,” Pokorny shouted, “get up!”
The plane banked steeply. It seemed to slide off, standing on its left wing-tip. Someone in the cabin screamed. Mr. Kramarsh nearly lost his footing. The co-pilot looked white and was trying to twist the wheel on his stick.
Mr. Pokorny grabbed the captain’s collar. Simultaneously Mr. Kramarsh cracked the butt of his pistol over Prochaska’s skull. The captain slumped forward.
The co-pilot had let go of his stick and was holding his hands in front of his eyes. The whole air around the plane was alive with a high-pitched, interminable, inhuman roar. The plane, still on its wing, kept falling.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” cried Mr. Pokorny. “Do something!”
Joseph lay almost flat on his back. He felt violently sick. As through a milky screen, he saw the tangled legs of Mr. Pokorny and Mr. Kramarsh, and the bobbing head of the co-pilot who was strapped in and had to keep sitting where he was. How long yet? Fifteen seconds? Ten?
Then he felt himself scramble up, push aside the hampering bodies of Mr. Kramarsh and Mr. Pokorny, and reach over Prochaska’s back. His fingers grabbed hold of the captain’s stick. Bracing his foot against Kramarsh’s chest, he managed to turn the wheel to the right, and pulled back the stick and with it the captain’s inert body.
Slowly, maddeningly slowly, the plane righted itself and leveled off.
With his left, Joseph unstrapped the captain. “Take him back!” he ordered Pokorny and Kramarsh, and as the unconscious Prochaska was dragged, feet last, out of the cockpit, Joseph settled in the Captain’s chair. They were a hundred and fifty feet off the ground.
The two American pursuit planes were dipping their wings, signaling.
Joseph raised his hand and waved to them. Underneath him stretched a big city, the buildings in its center looking like teeth drilled open by a very industrious and thorough dentist. Out of the haze to the west rose the large, blurred triangle of the airfield.
The Americans dipped wings again. One of them moved ahead of Joseph. Joseph cut his speed. He lowered the flaps and the wheels and heard the rush of air beat against them.
“Okay, now, Czecho,” a voice sounded through his ear phones. “Use Runway 22. Do you hear me? Use Runway 22. Roger.”
Joseph swallowed. It would be the last time that anyone called him “Czecho.”
He picked up the microphone. “Czecho to Tower. I hear you. Coming in on Runway 22.”
The pursuit plane ahead of him zoomed upwards, back into the sky. Slightly to the right, Joseph saw the dotted white line that marked the start of the runway. He banked the plane gently. Then runway and plane were beautifully aligned. He floated down. There was only the lightest jar as the wheels touched ground.
Joseph fell back, exhausted. His blood was singing in his ears. He felt no elation, no triumph, though he should have been feeling it. Detached, he watched the co-pilot take the plane off the runway and cut the motors.
The silence, then, fell on him like a great white pillow. He unstrapped his belt, but he did not get up. Lida came into the cockpit and kissed him, her lips wet. She still smelled a little sourly. Then he heard Dolezhal’s mellow voice, saw the small hand stab in front of his eyes, “Well done, my boy! You saved all our lives. I’ll always be grateful, you can count on me!”
“How’s Prochaska?” said Joseph.
“Up and around!” laughed Dolezhal. “Up and around and fuming. We had to tie him up a bit.”
Then they all went into the cabin. The beak-nosed man was clutching at his briefcase and asking, “Where are we? Won’t anyone tell me, where are we?”
“Munich!” said Mr. Pokorny.
“But I have to get to Bratislava!”
“That’s your worry,” said Mr. Kramarsh.
The young mother was cradling her child and looking at everybody out of big, frightened eyes. Lida walked past her without even glancing at her; she went past Captain Prochaska, who sat huddled in the last seat, his face masklike in its contempt, a bump the size of a half-tomato on his skull.
Mr. Pokorny unlocked the door and swung it open. Outside, a jeep was driving up, and some Germans in blue work clothes were rolling up a platform.
A tall young lieutenant with a mouth much too small for the rest of him uncoiled himself out of the jeep’s front seat. “Where’s the captain of this plane?” he asked sternly.
Dolezhal had stepped onto the platform.
“The captain, I’m afraid, is a little incapacitated,” he said. “Where’s the commanding officer of this airport?”
“And who the hell are you?” bristled the lieutenant.
“I am Bohumil Dolezhal, formerly Cabinet Minister in the Government of the Czechoslovak Republic.”
“Well,” said the lieutenant, not quite understandin
g what this was all about, “well—well!”
Dolezhal was on the ground. “We’ve taken over this plane and have flown here to seek asylum—and freedom!” he said.
“Well,” said the lieutenant, “I don’t know....” Then it dawned on him that maybe he had a big sensation here, with press interviews and a promotion and a medal. He ordered the soldier in the back of the jeep to get off his ass and mount guard over the plane and its passengers and crew. “Hop in, sir!” he said to Dolezhal.
Joseph saw the jeep bounce off over the field, leaving dust and a smell of oil and gasoline in its tracks.
“Might as well sit down,” he said, turning back into the cabin of the plane. Lida’s disappointed face loomed large at his side. She was opening her mouth to speak, and he knew she would make him squirm, and he wished he had the courage and the energy to shut her up.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The schism between the ethics of life and the ethics of art goes back to the age when the design on a piece of furniture became design for its own sake, when ritual turned into drama, when the work song was split and the music divorced from the labor in the field, when words that called for action were emancipated from daily life and transformed into entertainment. Since then, art has presupposed a leisure class, and until today leisure has been available only at the expense of those who work to give it to others. Ironically, the moment a class achieved the desirable state of parasitic existence and could afford leisure, it has been wont to be forced out of business.
Now God has given man, among other troublesome properties, a conscience. The average Homo parasiticus manages to shed it; but the artist without conscience ceases to be an artist. The artist must become a critic, a gravedigger to the class which has nurtured him and of which he is an admittedly second-rate member, which buys his books and his paintings, listens to his music and his plays, and bedecks him with the court jester’s bells.
And then, when he has helped to cripple the hand that fed him—what?
I hope my readers will bear with me if I, as a Czech, quote a German authority. It is a German who long ago fought his way to world citizenship: Heinrich Heine. He felt this schism so deeply that, about a hundred years ago, he wrote:
It is with the greatest concern and apprehension that I make the confession that the future belongs to the Communists—and this is not merely a pretense! Indeed, only with horror and disgust can I think of an epoch in which these sinister iconoclasts will come to power; with their callused hands they will smash mercilessly the marble statues so dear to my heart; they will break all the whimsical toys and fragile works of art so beloved by the poet; they’ll cut down my laurel groves and plant potatoes in their place; and alas! my Buch der Lieder will serve some greengrocer as raw material for paper bags, into which he will pour the coffee or the snuff for the old women of the future. Oh yes, I can see all that coming, and I am gripped by an unspeakable sadness when I think of the ruin with which the victorious proletariat threatens my poetry and the whole old romantic world.
And yet, I’ll also confess quite openly that this same Communism, so inimical to all my interests and inclinations, exercises a fascination on my soul against which I cannot defend myself; a voice rises up inside of me in its favor, a voice which I cannot silence.
It is the voice of Logic. I am caught in the web of a terrible syllogism, and if I cannot disprove the premise that all men have the right to eat, then I am forced to subject myself to all its consequences. When I begin to think of this, I am in danger of losing my mind; I see all the demons of truth dance triumphantly around me, and in the end, a magnanimous despair takes hold of my heart and I proclaim loudly: This old society, it has been judged and condemned long ago! May justice be done! May it be destroyed, this old world, where innocence was annihilated, where cynicism flourished, where man was exploited by man!
And blessed be that greengrocer who one day will make little paper bags out of the pages of my poetry and who will pour into them the coffee and the snuff for the poor, good old women who in our present world of injustice are generally denied such comforts.
Poor Heine! He was wrong about the details—his books were not burned by the proletariat—but he was intrinsically right in predicting that the intellectual and his ideas will be subordinated to the greatest good of the greatest number in a society in which potatoes take precedence over laurels.
After that may come another age, I hope,, in which the schism can be bridged, in which art and life once more are integrated—but I’m afraid it will be after my time....—From THOMAS BENDA: Essay on Freedom
“I’M GLAD you came that promptly,” Novak said, ushering Karel into his office.
Behind Novak, Karel saw a round-faced, bespectacled man who stood in a half-expectant, half-attentive pose, slightly stooped, a heavy gold watch chain dangling across his paunch.
“You wouldn’t have phoned me if it weren’t urgent,” said Karel, “you would have written. I came as soon as I could. It wasn’t easy for me to get away again. I’ve got a backlog of patients—”
He stopped. He began to realize that Novak and the other man were appraising him. It irritated him.
“I suppose you know why I’ve asked you here?” said Novak.
“I’ve read the afternoon papers.”
Novak introduced the other man. “This is Inspector Konecky of the Security Police. They’ve asked my advice because of my knowledge of the Rodnik situation. I suggested the present procedure; I felt it might save all of us time and embarrassment. Shall we sit down?”
He offered cigarettes and reached for the pack of matches on his desk. It took him longer than usual to strike one.
Karel watched the cigarette smoke curl along the desk and rise toward the window. His irritation grew. He had expected Novak to question him—but in a friendly, informal manner. Why the police?
“Then you’ve read about the plane?” said Novak.
“Yes,” Karel replied hesitantly. “It was quite a surprise to me.”
“We’ve known about it since yesterday—first the disappearance of the plane; and then we received word from Munich.”
“You’ll get the plane back, though?”
“Oh, yes. But that’s not the point.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Karel. But what was the point? The fact that the theft of the plane was annoying and humiliating and gave the foreign press something to write about?
The inspector was now balancing a note pad on his stubby knee. “Do you mind?” he asked Novak.
Novak shrugged. “Go ahead!”
“Were you very close to your brother, Dr. Benda?”
Karel gazed at the policeman’s pencil. Thomas was right—there were no simple answers; at any rate, none so simple that they would make sense in an official report.
“My brother considered me his enemy, Inspector.” He frowned. “The worst enemy he had.”
“But you didn’t consider him your enemy?”
Karel held himself back. “I understood him very well....”
“Perhaps I can explain—” said Novak.
“I get the picture,” Konecky interrupted. “You see, Dr. Benda, I spent last night reading reports, and this morning I talked to people who knew him—other deputies, business associates, former fellow officers—”
“What do you think of him?”
Konecky twisted his watch chain around his finger. “It is not my business to surmise. I merely gather facts and arrange them in a certain order. But I would say that his is a very ordinary case, thousands of men of his background are like him, except that the means he employed were not ordinary...
“Kidnapping the plane certainly was extraordinary—but do you class him as a criminal?”
“Don’t you?” Novak asked cuttingly.
“If man is the product of his environment—” Karel began.
“So were the guards at Buchenwald products of their environment!” Novak crushed out his cigarette. “Where does that lead us?”
Konecky moved in his chair. “If you don’t mind....”
“Excuse me, Inspector!” Novak rose and stepped to the window.
The policeman leaned forward over his paunch. “Dr. Benda, did you have any advance information that your brother was planning to leave?”
It wasn’t only the inspector who was waiting for the answer. Somehow, this answer seemed very important to Novak as well. Karel wished he could oblige Novak. He wished the whole post-mortem were over and done with. What was it good for except to transform him from a witness into a defendant?
“Did you?” pressed Konecky.
“Yes.”
“Oh—” the lines on Novak’s face grew rigid, “I see.”
Konecky asked, “How did you know, and when?”
“The day before my brother’s flight, Petra, my young niece, came to me and implied as much. She refused to go with him, and I arranged for her to remain in Rodnik. She’s in Prague with me now.”
“The kid had more sense than you!” Novak threw at him.
“And why didn’t you notify the police, or the head of your Action Committee—you are a member of the Action Committee, aren’t you?” There was nothing lenient about Inspector Konecky, despite his spectacles and his comfortable padding.
“I also learned from Petra,” Karel went on doggedly, “that it was Joseph’s plan to take with him my other brother, Thomas Benda, the writer. I succeeded in persuading Thomas to remain.”
Novak came toward him, his eyes dark. “You held Petra, and you held Thomas; but you let Joseph escape.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Karel lifted his hands and let them fall back on his knees. “I could answer you by asking: What does it matter? Joseph has cut himself off from the country, and the cut is final, and it closes the case. We’re well rid of him, and of Dolezhal.”
The inspector fingered his chain.
Karel looked at Novak’s silhouette. “What am I—accessory to the fact?” he demanded.
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