Читать книгу Partner in Three Worlds - Dorothy Duncan - Страница 18

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IT was about this time, when I was still in the nonclassical school, that the pattern of my life changed once again. Grandfather came to live with us, after Mother had visited him in the country and found him unable any longer to support himself by his weaving. He was eighty-five then, and I was twelve.

With no preliminaries of getting acquainted, we understood each other completely. I felt as though I had been looking for him for a long time. Perhaps it was because Mother had made him so real a figure in my imagination through her stories about him from the time before I could remember. He was still very tall and handsome, with a silky white beard that fell to his chest, and blue, straight-seeing eyes. He fondled his beard constantly, parting it and smoothing it together again. The weakening of his eyesight he lamented every few days, but as soon as he began this Mother or I would take his glasses from his nose and wash the lenses. It would be another while before we heard about the weakness of his eyes again.

He loved to examine with minute care every piece and scrap of material that Mother brought into the house. Whether it was a strip of cotton, a linen square, a piece of wool or a scrap of silk, he put it under his old magnifying glass and counted the threads in the warp and woof, explaining to me over each piece how it had been made and what kind of machinery had been used in its manufacture. He admired only the hand-woven textiles, and these with reservations, because none of them measured the quality of his own work. The bits of material made with machinery never failed to send him off into a tirade of condemnation for the machine age we were living in. He hated all machinery with a passion, and he swore at factories as modern devils which were pushing the quality of handcraft aside.

When he came to live with us we had to move from our one room on Palacký Street into a small apartment of two rooms and a tiny kitchen in a house near the coalyards on Nádražní třída. Now our windows overlooked a small garden which adjoined a brewery. Dances and festivals were often held there in celebration of national holidays, but they never seemed a compensation for the loss of the smell of freshly baked bread which I had loved as long as I could remember in our first home.

Grandmother never spoke to Grandfather because he would never speak to her. They were like two fish swimming in a tank who pass and repass in the water but never take note of each other’s presence. Grandmother spent most of her time at the window which overlooked the brewery garden, though she still went out occasionally to meet her friends in a coffeehouse or in the park. Her presence had come to mean nothing to me, as an ugly piece of furniture can lose its power to irritate simply by its familiarity.

Whenever Grandmother went into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, she looked through Grandfather—who used the kitchen as his workshop—as though he weren’t there. She poured out her coffee and set the pot back on the stove, and then she gave a louder-than-usual sigh as she took up her place again at the window. At least once a day the two old people would meet accidentally in the narrow corridor which ran between the living room and the kitchen. When this happened, they both backed away and stood waiting, listening to see who would move first. It was always up to Mother or me to set the signals and send them on their way.

Mother was the angel of our home, interpreting us one to the other and always dividing her attention between Grandmother and Grandfather so evenly that neither could complain of being, neglected. It was like her never to attempt to force either of them to change their ways.

I came upon Grandfather in the kitchen one day laboring over a contraption he had set up in one corner. Its pieces he had carved from cartons, putting them together with glue, and now he was turning the affair into a machine which seemed to please him highly. He called me over to look at it.

“See,” he said, pointing to bits of tin foil and buttons which were serving as weights and counterweights. “They work like this ... so, and so ...” He made them revolve to show me. “I’ll get it yet.”

In all my schooling I had never had any kind of instruction in the use of my hands for carpentering or construction, and I admired extravagantly Grandfather’s ability to make such a contrivance. “What is it?” I said.

He went on tinkering with it, trying to make the buttons and tin foil move as he wished them to do. “It’s a solution of the problem of perpetual motion,” he said. “Or it will be, when I’ve finished with it. No reason why it should be such a problem for mankind. I’m going to try changing this weight, so ...”

I left him absorbed in his invention. He worked on his scheme for perpetual motion almost until he died, but it never once occurred to him that it was one more machine to add to all those he so bitterly condemned.

Everyone who encountered him felt Grandfather’s charm. I suspect my grandmother was no exception. Within no time at all after he came to live with us he had made countless friends throughout the neighborhood, for he loved all men who were honest and he was never afraid to let them know it. Whenever I could find time apart from school or running errands for Mother, I accompanied him on his slow walks through Smichov. And if I couldn’t find him on the street or at home, I knew where to look. He was sure to be in the tobacco shop on the corner, talking to Ludvik, the old soldier who ran it.

Tobacco shops in the empire were state-owned and they were always run by government employees, usually war veterans. This shop at our corner carried the huge Austro-Hungarian double-headed eagle over the door, and the inscription below it read: Kaiser und Königliche Tabak-Regie. Grandfather never smoked, but the shop sold newspapers and there were always papers and magazines lying about, and the old soldier who ran the place was a fine one to talk with about the state of the world. There were also the other customers who came and went and stopped to chat with Grandfather, and I never tired of listening to their conversation.

Though he had never heard of the theories of Marx, Grandfather was always on the side of the worker, and he never failed to tell once again about his own experiences on the barricades in Prague in 1848. He felt that such an experience of early fighting gave him priority of opinion over any opposing point of view. He distrusted the Japanese with bitterness, though he had never laid eyes on an Oriental in his life, and it was from him that I first heard of wars. The late fight between Russia and Japan still worried him.

So the world outside Prague began to emerge in my imagination as a reality. It must not be thought, however, that I had any actual grasp of politics or diplomatic affairs. I believed what I was told in school about the glories of the empire and the value of our close association with the Kaiser’s Germany. What went on in Washington or London or Peking we never heard about, and if we had it would have seemed as lacking in interest as a news item originating in the Lama’s temple in Tibet today.

When the German naval program began to show fabulous increases in new construction in 1907, no one talked about it in the tobacco shop because it was not an item of news. On the other hand, a fire in one of the coal mines in our own country kept the shop talking for days. One of Ludvik’s nephews perished in it.

I tried to say something to make Ludvik feel better, but I found it difficult to guess what it would be like to have a dead nephew. Ludvik said, “My own brother’s boy, to get it like that.”

Not wanting to add to the old soldier’s hurt, but rather wanting to take his mind off this thing which involved relationships I couldn’t understand, I said, “Did you ever have a father?”

Ludvik forgot his grieving for a moment and looked at me sharply. “I should hope so,” he said. “Everybody’s got to have a father.”

Someone came in for a pipeful of tobacco and when he had gone out again I said, “Not everybody.”

“We won’t argue about it,” Ludvik replied. “Here comes your grandfather.”

It was on May Day in 1908 that the Kaiser and a lot of other German sovereigns assembled in Vienna to congratulate the Emperor Franz Josef on the sixtieth year of his reign. The Kaiser’s entourage passed through Prague on its way to Vienna, but the city saw nothing of it. We were a provincial town then, and the royal party was guarded from any contact with us. Not long before there had been street disturbances in Berlin, caused by agitation in the Reichstag for a reform of franchise. Kings and princes and potentates all over the world sent congratulations to Emperor Franz Josef that May. We heard about that in school.

When I talked about it at home Mother said, “He’s not your emperor. You’re a Czech. We’d have our own king now if they hadn’t beaten us at the Battle of the White Mountain. Someday we’ll be free again.”

But her words meant little to me. I didn’t feel oppressed by Franz Josef. My troubles were much smaller ones, and much closer home. “Watch out, Jan,” she went on, her voice calm and sweet in contradiction to the strength of her words, “a boy becomes what he admires. You must learn to distinguish good men from bad ones, even when they’re in high places. Most people in the world believe whatever they’re told, and they mistake ceremony and pageants for greatness. You must learn not to do that.”

In June, conversation in the tobacco shop turned to the wreck of the French military airship in Ireland, and Grandfather clucked at the foolishness of trying to fly through the air, as though the good Lord hadn’t meant men to keep their feet on the ground. A German zeppelin made a first voyage with fifteen passengers. When it crashed two months later after sailing four hundred miles, Grandfather felt doubly justified in his complaints about the ways of men.

Next spring there was another Balkan crisis. It was terminated by Russia’s formal recognition of Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and there was a celebration throughout the empire. Our school closed for a day. But Mother said it was a robber’s feast. It seemed to occur to no one else that trouble between ourselves and our neighbors could ever be settled any other way.

When Queen Wilhelmina of Holland gave birth to a daughter, Ludvik happened to see a minuscule notice of it in the back part of a newspaper. When I asked a leading question in response to his announcement, Grandfather decided it was time to give me some basic instruction in the natural processes of life. He handled the subject with firmness and finesse. Ludvik helped by explaining that Holland was a small country, though the Dutch Empire was important any way you looked at it because it was spread among islands in the Pacific, and they were rich with foods and minerals that Europe couldn’t do without. Between them, they left with me the impression that sexual instinct had originated in the South Pacific with girls who had brown bodies and hands like warm water caressing the bow of a canoe. I also gathered that sex was more or less confined to tropical islands.

The German Kaiser and Kaiserin went forth to Vienna and back again, and three hundred and fifty warships were mobilized for naval maneuvers in England. We heard nothing about either event, and if we had, we would have seen no connection between them. France announced an intention of spending $500,000,000 on naval construction to cover a ten-year period and a cabinet crisis followed in Berlin. When a queer man who really read the papers talked about these things in the tobacco shop one day, Ludvik pointed out that if some people didn’t watch their steps they’d be making a war before they knew it. He didn’t actually believe his own words, but Grandfather counteracted such nonsense by proving how a war in the twentieth century was impossible.

It was in that spring of 1909, when I was thirteen years old, that I was faced with a major decision. No happenings in the outer world could possibly assume importance in the face of it. What was my future career to be? The majority of my classmates were going on to the Kadettenschule as a matter of course. But even had I been drawn to a military career by the glamour of uniforms and social prestige, such a course would have been out of the question for me. One required references for admittance to the cadet’s school.

There was a further choice of three more years at the nonclassical school in preparation for an engineering or technical course at the university, or entrance at once into one of the specialized academies in Prague which gave college degrees. A university education was eliminated from consideration because of its expense and the extra time it would require. Besides, mathematics had always been my hardest subject. There remained, then, one of the specialized schools.

These were three. The Export Academy sent its graduates into the African colonies of Germany and Holland to expand the plantations there. The Commercial Academy concentrated its teaching in the field of business and merchandising. The Agricultural Academy devoted its efforts to training in modern methods of farming and stock raising.

I dismissed the Commercial Academy at once because I had no interest in trade or the market of buying and selling, and Mother agreed that she had no desire to see me in such a bourgeois world. Between the Export Academy and the Agricultural Academy my choice wavered back and forth. One week my thoughts were colored with a passionate desire to live in Africa. I saw my life filled with adventure and exploration in foreign lands, far from Smichov and all it stood for in my mind. Sometimes, when I let my imagination drift toward Africa, I felt a twinge of compunction for my selfishness in considering such a life because it would mean leaving Mother behind. Then I would turn my consideration to the Agricultural Academy and I would think for long hours about the possibility of becoming a farmer. I saw myself riding a beautiful mare over lush fields of ripening grain, enjoying the finest food I could conjure in my mind. And at the end of every sun-filled day I would return to a spacious farmhouse and Mother. The Agricultural Academy was my final choice.

So Mother wrote to Uncle and told him how proud he would be of my decision. Her letter brought a prompt reply. Uncle pointed out that I must bring myself to realistic thinking at once. The only possible school for me to enter was the Commercial Academy where he had begun his own memorable career many years ago. If eventually I should do well there, and prove myself worthy of his recommendation ... if I remembered also to do nothing to oblige him to deny any connection with the family ... there was no reason why I couldn’t find an appropriate place in some bank in Prague, to follow the illustrious path he himself had chosen. And remember, he added, that I must speak only German in future. There was no place for the Czech language in a business career.

When mother had finished reading the letter aloud, from her corner Grandmother continued to make the clucking sounds with which she had been punctuating each period. I began to feel lightheaded, as though I were going to be sick, and then I lost my temper. It wasn’t the first time it had happened in Mother’s presence and it was not the last. But she looked surprised and hurt, as she always did, and eventually I grew calmer and went to get a cup of coffee from the stove. I remembered what Grandfather had said the first time he saw me in a tantrum: I would have to learn somehow to live with other people, and if I didn’t learn by myself the world would soon teach me. Others were unlikely to forgive me as quickly as Mother would. That made me ashamed, but already I knew subconsciously that the world was unlikely often to see me naked with fury.

Mother was restless that summer of my last year at the nonclassical school. One evening in late June I came upon her reading a letter which she hid in the folds of her blouse as soon as she saw me at the door. I got out my books to study as usual, but the lines on the page of the algebra text blurred under my eyes and my mind wandered off to other matters. After awhile I said, “I forgot. I told Grandfather I’d meet him at Ludvik’s. I guess I’d better go.”

Mother said nothing but she watched me as I snatched my cap and hurried away. Out on the street I put my hands in my pockets and began to whistle a new waltz the band had been trying out in the brewery garden under our window. Had Mother believed my falsehood? I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps I’d better find Grandfather and spend a little while with him in the shop. But instead of stopping at the corner, I walked on.

The night was hot and Prague stewed in its own humidity. Couples walked arm in arm under the dark chestnut trees, hesitant to entrust their desires to steamy sheets. Children played tag in and out of purple-dark lanes, unrebuked by parents who wondered why the young were insensible to temperature. Priests moved along quickly in their black broadcloth, anxious to reach the cool bowl of a church from whatever missions had detained them. On the boulevard the night looked crumpled.

Slow-moving crowds poured along the pavements, their voices beating through the heat like blood pounding in the ears of a feverish patient. I listened, and smelled the hot breath of the city night, and was at home in my own world.

An era that had lasted for nearly a hundred years was dying of internal rot, but no one knew it. An era that had come to be taken for a norm had three more years to run. Man had been given a memory without the counter-ability of projecting himself into the future, and so the era was expected to continue forever, world without end. Some hoped, some dreamed, some planned, but no man could be sure that three years, and no more, were left. To those who read the papers that hot Prague night, the world that stretched wide beyond the hemming hills was filled with massive happenings, but nothing was so real as the weight of the heat.

I decided to cross the river and after awhile I was on the Karlův most. I let my hands slide along the cool gray stone of the parapet until I reached the statue of Sainte Ludmila. Mother had told me so often of the night when she had meant to jump into the river with me, I thought I could remember it, too. Now a cool breeze began to sweep down the valley of the Vltava. My nose went up to smell it, and everyone else who felt it began to move a little faster through the night.

The summer was only begun. Three years more, but a multitude of small events and overblown men must be disposed of first.

When I got back to our apartment Mother watched me for a few minutes and then she asked me to stop wandering about and sit down. She took the piece of white paper from her blouse and told me it was a letter she had received that morning from Uncle. He had answered her second request that I be allowed to go to the Agricultural Academy in the autumn. In a few words, couched in business clichés, he reminded both Mother and me that the time had come when I must finally take over the burden that he had been carrying for so many years. It was my turn to keep us alive. He repeated that he trusted I would not force him to cut us off before I was prepared to be the wage earner of the family and their sole support.

There was no display of temper this time when Mother had finished reading. The matter was settled for us and we knew it. There was nothing more for either of us to say.