Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales From the Time of the Cult

Strange People

A steel chain, each link polished by proletarian hands, sparkled in ribbons of sunlight that poured through the louvers of the ventilation tower running the length of the factory hall. The chain was hanging from a motionless overhead crane, and the crane operator was dozing in the gondola, her white forearm stretched along the ledge of the cab, her bleached blonde head resting on her elbow. A shaft of sunlight bisected her head and arm.

The shift foreman, Podracký, walked down the hall through band after band of light, as the sun cast stripes on his coveralls. He walked through section three, then section four, moving through blue twilit tunnels, then emerging again into clear, diagonal swathes of light pouring through the half-open louvers.

Now he walked past silent grinding machines and their carborundrum discs, dangling idly from dusty chains. The grinders were sitting on benches by the sorting table; some were reclining on slanting planks, knees up, their arms folded behind their heads, like extras waiting in the wings for their cues.

“If I understand your message correctly,” said the shift foreman, “you don’t intend to continue working. What exactly do you think you’re up to?”

“What you did to us flies in the face of the principles of comradely conduct,” said one of the grinders, nicknamed The Dairyman. He stepped forward. “You’re just like the kids who write ‘Kilroy was here’ on the wall and then run away.”

“In other words, you’re on strike,” said the foreman, raising his eyebrows.

“No, we’re just not going back to work until we can talk to the person who’s meant to negotiate these new quotas with us, according to regulations.”

“Right, then. I’ll send round the shop steward,” said Podracký, and he pulled out a yellow folding ruler, measured the sorting table, refolded the ruler and walked away, slapping it against his thighs to the rhythm of his step. The overhead crane began to move toward him, drawing closer as the blonde operator propelled the vehicle through the shafts of light. She pushed a lever, and, as the crane advanced down the hall, its trolley simultaneously moved across the gantry, the hoist descending on its glistening steel chain. The operator’s ample bosom rippled as she passed in and out of the bands of sunlight. The crane passed over the grinders’ heads.

The Judge brought a helping of blood pudding from the canteen for the senior worker. Then he went back to the pickling vats, where slabs of steel were soaking in hydrochloric acid. He accidentally stepped into a puddle of spilled acid and began to feel the liquid silently working away. He heard his shoe laces snap, so he rested his foot on the rim of the trough and watched as the fabric of his twill trousers began pulling apart. He looked up at the pile of scrap. A welder was patiently cutting his way into the innards of an old Wertheim safe with a blue oxyacetylene flame. Past him, on the scrap heap, some female convicts were unloading freight cars filled with rusty crucifixes taken from village churchyards. Working in pairs, they grasped an iron crucifix at each end, then swung the corroded symbol of Christianity straight into a waiting hopper. Then they loaded the hoppers up with the charred remnants of tanks, iron railings, ornamental grave markers, swan-like enamel bathtubs, sewing machines, congealed wrench sets, all of it scorched by incendiary bombs, because such raids in World War II set the earth itself on fire.

The Judge reached up and grabbed the control pendant hanging from the trolley and pressed a button, but the hoist moved off in the opposite direction.

“Stop it, doctor, stop it, or we’ll crash it into the gondola!” shouted Vindy, the assistant.

The Judge pressed the button, and the hoist came to a halt. Now all he had to do was press the other button. The hoist inched forward, and the Judge followed it along the wobbling boards. Gripping the pendant like a coachman holding the reins of a four-in-hand, he vanished into a greenish cloud of acidic vapor and reemerged on the other side.

“That’s it,” said Vindy. “That’s far enough.” The Judge pressed the button. This time, it was the right one.

On the scrap heap, the female convicts slid open the door of a freight wagon, and fire-damaged gramophones tumbled out, sparkling with teardrops of blue glass, remnants of window panes that had melted when the factory was hit with phosphorus bombs.

“Very well,” said the Frenchman, “but what if we get crappy material, and the entire ingot has to be ground down?”

“It’s all been speed-smelted,” said the grinder with a cruciform scar under one eye. “Last time they fired up ‘Daniel,’ they played music at the furnaces to celebrate the fourteen charges they pushed through in twenty-four hours. That broke the record for a Siemens-Martin, but one of the rollers says to me he’d have all those fuckers and their bright ideas up before a judge, because the billets they rolled from those famous fourteen charges? Half of them had to be scrapped and sent back for resmelting.”

“This place is no very nice at all,” said Ampolino. “At night, the girls here all go to sleep. Me, when I finish this work, I go home. At home, the girls don’t do nothing, and in the evening they all sing and make love. Hey, Frenchman, you agree wit’ me?”

“Go home,” said the Frenchman, “and don’t pay attention to what nobody says. Me, I figured this place was my new country, but I was wrong. I had to leave home because I got mixed up in antigovernment politics, but where I am gonna go now? We can make a living here, boys, but we can’t make a life. Out in the world people still know how to have a good time. In Singapore, in this little theatre, I see them let a pony have a go at a black girl. Or Shanghai? I see them boil a monkey alive and he goes crazy from the pain and it scrambles his brains, makes a tasty appetizer. Or Cuba? They let kids fool around with turtles before they kill them, and the kids poke their eyes out and the soup is ooh la la. And back home in France? At La Canebière, in Marseille, you sit around at tables and they have these crazy nonstop shows on a rickety stage, and you can get naked and so can your girl, then you put on these masks and get up on the stage and do it in any position you think of and the audience sitting there at the tables cheers you on… but look who’s coming!”

Vindy leaned over the vat and vanished into a cloud of turquoise vapor. He could be heard scraping away at the slabs of steel with a wire brush, and his voice was audible: “Okay now, your honor, just lower that hoist down and we’ll hook it up to the sling. The slag’s already been eaten away.”

The Judge, trusting to beginner’s luck, pressed a button, luckily the right one. The tackle descended into the sickly green vapor, and he heard the hook clank against the sling and the metal basket containing the slabs of steel. Vindy leaned over the vat, and only his trousers were visible.

“Far enough!” he commanded.

The Judge, like the king in a puppet show, released the controls, leaned into the acrid vapor, and fed the hook into the sling from the other side. But he couldn’t keep his head over the vat and straightened up abruptly. He emerged from the vapor holding his arms in front of him. All his mucous membranes were seared and burning; he was blinded by tears and he felt the acid making his nose run.

But Vindy, the assistant, whose membranes and sense of smell had long since been destroyed over the pickling bath, pressed the button, and the hoist raised the basket out of the vat. Hydrochloric acid ran off the slabs of steel, releasing more of its acrid fumes.

“They’re clean!” he shouted.

They turned and watched a tiny figure slowly approaching down the length of the long factory hall, lashed as he went by golden swatches of sunlight, as though he were walking beside a picket fence floodlit from the other side.

The man stopped and planted his hands on his hips. “Look here, comrades,” the shop steward said, “the imperialists are closing in and there’s no time to waste. We have to pour the molten steel of peace down their bellicose throats…”

“Hey, Václav,” said the Dairyman, “we’ve all read today’s editorial in Rudé Právo, too. There’s a different issue here. Why don’t you consult us before you raise the production quotas? Whatever happened to proper procedure?”

“All very well,” said the steward, squaring his shoulders, “but what you’re doing is called a strike.”

“What if it is? The constitution allows us to strike. So yeah, constitutionally, we’re on strike. We’re not working until the one who’s supposed to negotiate higher quotas shows up.”

“But there’s a war on in Korea right now,” said the steward, raising his voice. “Pusan is about to fall. For the last time, are you going to get this shuttle moving?”

“No, we’re not!”

“All right,’ said the steward, “I’ll have to report this to the manager,” and he walked away, while the louvered ventilation tower cast stripes of light, like a prison uniform, across his back.

A breeze carried away the veil of greenish vapor, and Vindy leaned over the stack of metal slabs, while the Judge removed one of his gloves and placed his hand on the wet steel.

“Your honor,” said Vindy, “wipe that stuff off right away! Give it a rinse, quick!”

The Judge hurried along a tottering plank, turned on the tap, but then he slipped and fell up to his crotch in a space between the board and one of the hoppers. He quickly freed himself, though he could tell he’d injured his knee, but he rinsed his hands and looked over at the scrap pile just as a young woman wearing a prison uniform appeared. Her left arm was in a fresh cast, and with her right hand she grabbed an ox bridle, carried it to the hopper, and tossed it in, just as the other convicts were about to add the last of the crucifixes.

“And a-one, and a-two and a-three,” cried a female voice.

The crucifix arced through the air, and one of the convicts jammed the figure of Christ hanging from it into the pile of scrap with both hands.

“She’s doing time for going over the hill, trying to escape the country,” Vindy explained. “Yesterday she got her arm caught in something. But listen here, do you know that when Nezval was just a kid he dragged angels into his poems?”

“Say again?” asked the Judge.

“Maybe he’s a Jew,” the assistant went on. “Seems to me these days his poetry exudes the spirit of the synagogue, of the Antichrist. They say that when he was born the Archangel Gabriel stood over his crib. So if he doesn’t believe in Gabriel, why did he drag that angel into it?”

“No idea,” said the Judge, “but it seems to me that the acid has all drained off.”

“Right, so I’ll just shift the load a little. But I’m going to have to dispel the shadow of Freemasonry myself,” Vindy said, spitting out a long string of saliva. “I’ll write a poem and call it ‘How Brother Victor Ahrenstein Carved a Block of Stone by Proxy.’”

“Boys, he’s going to throw the book at us,” said the Restaurateur.

“No, he won’t,” said the Dairyman. “If we don’t get any satisfaction, I’ll go see Poncar. And if he won’t help, I’ll go straight to the top, to Tonda. Wasn’t it Tonda who taught us to stand up for our rights as workers?”

“If someone wants you to walk a mile with them, walk two,” said the Priest, “and if he asks for your shirt, give him your coat as well. ..”

“Yeah, and if someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other,” the Dairyman interrupted him. “Good advice for a saint, but a worker? If he doesn’t go straight for the solar plexus, he’s doomed.”

“We’ve already turned the Church upside down, and there’s more to come,” said the curly-haired Cop.

“Maybe that’s just what will get the Church back on its feet,” the Priest said.

“Maybe, but I’m telling you, in fifty years, there’ll be nothing left of the Church but the churches.”

The Sergeant Major got to his feet, opened a notebook to the sunlight, and said, “Lay off, the holy father here is the only one who’s got his head screwed on, but today, I’m going to have to put a big fat zero in my notebook, because that’s exactly what they’ll pay us for just standing around. So, Mr. Prosecutor, how much time could we be looking at for this?”

“I’m working on it,” said the State Prosecutor, pacing up and down. “They could hit us with the Defence of Public Order law. That one has bigger maximums.”

“But the law’s on our side,” said the Dairyman.

“It might be on your side,” said the State Prosecutor, “but it’s not on mine, because I was tossed out of my job. Of course, if I were still a prosecutor, I could turn all this into a nice little antigovernment conspiracy. I’d accuse myself of being the intellectual mastermind behind this strike, and, as an additional incriminating factor, I’d add that as a former state prosecutor, I knew it was a crime and should have reported it. ..”

“But this is Kladno!” the Dairyman thundered. “We’re totally within our rights! We all work here — defeated classes, communists — we’re doing all this so we’ll all be better off!”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said the Cop. “Before they tossed me off the force, we operated on the Dual Punch Theory. That is, it always depends on who hits who. If a worker slugs a prosecutor, they can lock the prosecutor up because the presumption is he provoked the worker into doing it. But if a prosecutor slugs a worker, even if the worker was asking for it, they’ll throw the book at the prosecutor because…”

“All well and good,” shouted the Dairyman, “but you can’t get away with that in Kladno! You just can’t!” The overhead crane was approaching, its chains clanking.

“Yes,” said the Judge. His trouser leg had now split open to the knee. He took off his shoe and shook the rest of the cloth loose, as if he were removing his underwear. He looked at the scrap pile where the female convicts were loading another hopper with iron coffin lids. They brought over cast-iron angels with corroded wings and faces — angels splattered with blobs of scorched clay — and tossed them all into the hoppers.

Vindy held the control pendant hanging from the traveling hoist in his hands. He walked along the planks behind the moving basket filled with the slabs of steel and held forth: “The thoughts of Itzak Mauthner, sitting at the comptoir in his central office in Náchod: In the spring of 1830, an Ashkenazi Jew from Halič named Mauthner came to Náchod and declared, That house over there will be mine. In 1832, Mauthner the homeowner declared, That factory over there will be mine. In 1839, Mauthner the manufacturer said, I have five knitting mills and I wish to own nine. And thus the firm of Mauthner’s Knitting Mills came into being, a concern belonging to an industrial overlord with no family escutcheon and no traditions, a magnate who, when he bequeathed his industrial kingdom to his sons, had no idea his sons would shroud themselves in the anonymity of a publicly traded company and that the sons of those sons would become press barons.”

Vindy pressed a button, and the crane came to a halt above a freight car on the tracks. A string of silver saliva emerged from his mouth, which he wiped on his spittle-soaked sleeve.

“It’s as easy as pie,” said the Judge.

His shoe began to open up like a water lily.

The crane operator moved through the flickering bars of golden sunlight and into the tunnel of shadows. At the far end of the long factory hall, the crane had seemed tiny but it drew nearer like an aircraft with broad wings and came to rest above the yard engine and the group of grinders. In the gondola, a man in a black-cotton smock — the manager — stood up, planted his white hands on the gondola railing, leaned over, and with a golden sash of sunlight across his chest, spoke as if from a cathedral pulpit.

“Honor to work!” he said, using the official party greeting.

“I’ll honor work if the pay’s decent,” retorted the Dairyman.

“So, comrades, we have a plan, and we have to get on with it,” the manager said, stabbing downward with his finger. “Otherwise I’ll have no recourse but to report you to the union council.”

“Who ordered the higher quotas? Who consulted with whom?” asked the Dairyman.

“The Ministry of Heavy Industry.”

“At whose suggestion?”

“At… at our suggestion.”

“There, you see, the fox is in the henhouse! And the ones you should have consulted first you never consulted at all. What are we, just a bunch of statistics?”

“No, I was merely executing a trade-union decision. Now, are you going to get back to work?”

“No, we’re not. Only if you personally put it up on the board that we’re operating under the old quotas until we get a firm agreement, negotiated as per regulations.”

“Right, then,” said the manager, raising his black sleeve till it was immersed to the elbow in a shaft of golden sunlight. “But I’m reporting this to the director’s office and to the trade union.”

“Why are you treating us like this?” shouted the grinder with the cruciform scar under his eye. “Why are you taking a day’s wages out of my pocket?”

“Václav!” said the manager. “I hardly know you any more. You’re an old comrade and you’re coming after me like that?”

“You’re making my life miserable!” the grinder shouted, and he picked up a crowbar, tossed it from hand to hand, scattering little reflections of sunlight around the shop, then hurled it at a stack of cast-iron slabs. The crowbar clanged and clattered to the ground, the echo of its voice dying away among the blue shadows. The grinder ran on to the stack, climbed over the slabs, quivering with rage, and stood there, sliced in two by a band of sunlight.

“But Václav, I’m one of you, I’m a worker too, you know that,” the manager said, placing his hand over his heart.

“Then you should understand what this is about,” said Václav, and he walked to the opposite side of the shop; the gate groaned open, then slammed shut.

The manager threw up his arms and nodded at the operator, who pushed a button, and the crane moved back through the factory hall carrying the manager away in the gondola, his back to the men, while the sun pouring through the ventilation louvers whipped his black cotton smock with golden scourges.

The vapors rising from the pickling vat were unbelievably beautiful and dense. The Judge couldn’t resist. He walked quickly across the plank and thrust his arm into the cloud up to his elbow.

The female prisoner squatted down on the scrap pile, cradling her wounded arm in her lap like a plaster doll and, with her good arm, she picked up an angel — the kind that used to decorate horse-drawn hearses or aristocratic gravesites — and she carried it to the hoppers.

Vindy handed the control pendant to the Judge and indicated its proper use. “Your honor,” he said, “we use this button to raise the load, and this one to lower it. This button is for moving the load forward, and this one is for moving it back. We can’t afford to get them mixed up, so let’s try again. Yesterday, I wrote a poem called ‘Ministerial Night: In Which the Departmental Head Has a Vision of Tantalus at Five Minutes to Midnight.’”

“Thank you,” said the Judge, and took over the controls.

“Or,” Vindy asked, “would you rather hear my poem called ‘How the Miner’s Daughter Forgot Her Proletarian Origins and Succumbed to the Temptations of Eros?” But then he caught himself. “Oh God, I’m always going on about myself. How are you doing, your honor?”

The Judge pushed a button, but it was the wrong one. “Stop! Stop!” Vindy shouted.

The Sergeant Major took a piece of chalk and wrote the number twenty-two on the gate, followed by twenty-eight, drew a line under them, wrote down the difference, and underlined it twice. Then, tapping the chalk on the result — six — he turned to his listeners and said, “They want us to crank through an extra six hundredweight a day! But what if each ingot needs a complete grinding!”

At that moment the gate slid open, and the Sergeant Major, still facing his listeners, tapped his chalk on the forehead of the man who’d just opened it.

“There’s a film crew here, boys,” said the maintenance man, the chalk still poised on his forehead. “They’re looking for workers to have a discussion about current events.”

“Well, in that case, let’s go,” said the Dairyman, and, with the other grinders, he walked out into the sunlight where a van was parked. Some of the film crew were unloading buckets of whitewash. The young director pointed to a wagon loaded with ingots, and the cameraman carried his camera across the rails.

“I hope it’s not like the last time they tried to make a movie in the steelworks,” said the Frenchman. “Everyone was gone home for the day, so the film guys had to bang on buckets and drop tin cans from way up to make factory noises. They talked all enthusiastic about completing their plan.”

“Here’s a good spot,” said the director. “Just slap some whitewash on that wall, and then we’ll set up the aquariums with some fish in them… a spot of greenery over here; make it look like a birch grove… and you,” he pointed at the grinders, “you guys want to be in this, right?”

“Thanks for asking,” said the Judge, stopping the hoist. “Ever since they evicted me — and it’s a wonder they didn’t lock me up — I’ve been doing wonderfully. Do you know, my rheumatism has completely vanished?” He pushed the right button this time, since there was no other choice.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be sending the authorities a thank-you telegram,” said Vindy, and he raised his glove and gave a signal.

“I won’t,” said the Judge, “but somehow, I’ve become a simpler person psychologically.” The chain with its shiny tackle descended into the cloud of greenish vapor rising from the hydrochloric acid. “Before, I used to drive everywhere. Now I take the streetcar. I used to drink imported beer — Bernkasteler or Badestube. Now I drink Kozel from Velké Popovice. Instead of going to the club, I go to the warming hut, and so on. .. In tens of thousands of years, mankind hasn’t essentially changed. The thing is, my friend, I was neither prosecutor nor defence attorney. I merely listened and drew my conclusions from the two sides arguing their case before me. You know, I’m still as keen on Dreiser and Picasso and Chaplin as I ever was, but today I’d put my landlady up against any of them. Every morning, she dresses three children who are still half-asleep and drags them off to the nursery and toward evening she picks them up and brings them home again. To me, that woman is a greater piece of work than the Dove of Peace, or Monsieur Verdoux, or An American Tragedy…

“What if your landlady were a communist,” said Vindy, ejecting a thread of silver spittle from his mouth. “What would you say then?”

“But that’s precisely what she is, and how!” said the Judge, bending over and brushing the remaining bits of slag off the slabs of iron. “I know what I’m talking about, my friend. My parents ran a boarding house and had seven children.”

“Well,” said the Dairyman, “we won’t tell our mothers anything, and then we’ll take them to the movies and surprise them.”

“Right, then,” said the director. “Sit around on these ingots, some of you lean against the wagon, one of you hold this map and pretend to be pointing something out, and the rest of you read the newspaper. When I give the signal, you’ll all start pretending to have a lively discussion about what you’ve just been reading.”

One of the film crew pulled some freshly cut birch saplings out of the van and began arranging them, while the director motioned him to shift the branches to the right, and then a bit more to the left, and then forward a bit, perfect!

“It’ll be just like the Feast of Corpus Christi,” said the Restaurateur.

“In other words, you’ve been saved,” said Vindy and he leaned over, whisking off the steel slabs.

“You could say so,” said the Judge, while the acid gnawed away at what remained of his shoe. “Now I live alone in a tiny room. I call it my submarine room. Every day I bring bits of wood home from the factory — leftovers from broken crates, small pieces of Russian birch they packed the Russian chrome in, Norwegian oak veneer from the ferrosilicon crates, sometimes pieces of German fir from the nickel crates — and then I sit at home in my submarine and the walls are sweating from the humidity, and I sit there as if I’m in a sauna and stoke the fire with Norwegian and Spanish oak and German fir and watch until the flames have consumed everything… then I gaze into the dying embers until the warmth is gone and all that remains is an amorphous-looking structure. Sometimes I bring back pieces of wood with company names branded into them, stoke the fire, and the letters no longer make sense. .. I gaze into the open stove and watch the flames licking away at Fiskaa Norway… Metalwerke Saxonia… Made in Yugoslavia… Meeraker Sverige… the fire dissolves and scrambles the words and their meaning and in the end, everything just burns up and is gone. .. And I think how wonderful it is to have been forced into this situation. .. I’d never have had the courage to do it myself,” said the Judge. He lifted his head from the cloud of greenish vapor.

“What do you do on Sundays?” asked Vindy, as he maneuvered the hook into the sling and then pushed the button.

“On Sunday my landlady dresses up her three children, and I take them for a walk through Julius Fučik Park. They let me keep one good suit, so when I go out walking, I’m still Judge Hasterer out to take the air. But most of all, I enjoyed living with my daughter. When they moved us out, we got a room that was one sofa length each way. We called it The Chapel. Every morning, we’d comb the plaster out of each other’s hair, and the soles of our feet were covered with plaster too. The main waste pipe for the entire building ran right through the middle of our tiny room, so every time someone flushed a toilet or let water out of the sink, we’d hear it cascading down past us. There was a bathroom next to where we slept, and the taps were right where our heads rested against the wall. If our neighbors got up before we did and turned on the taps, we’d both have the same dream — that water was pouring out of our heads. And there were other nice things about our little chapel. There was some kind of research institute next door where we could hear gigantic machines drilling or cutting up enormous pieces of steel all day long, and I’d imagine that our little chapel was a giant tooth being endlessly drilled by a huge dental drill, and, do you know, it made my molars ache.”

As he was talking, the Judge walked along the boards behind Vindy, who was pushing the steel along in an iron barrow.

“The acid’s fagged out,“ said Vindy. “Time for a new demijohn.”

“Let’s do a brief rehearsal,” said the director, looking at his watch. “We still have a shoot in Chomutov. You take the map, that’s it, open it up, and you, open the newspaper… and when I signal the rest of you to shout, ‘Americans, go jump in the ocean!’ I want you,” he said, pointing to the Prosecutor, “to say ‘That’ll be the day!’ in a skeptical tone of voice.”

“Not doing it,” said the Prosecutor, raising his hand. “I’m in enough trouble as it is. If anything’s going to help me out here, I’d rather say, ‘Yankee go home!’ ”

“All right, that’s perfect. ‘Yankee go home’ it is,” nodded the director. “Now we’ll do a couple of framing shots, and then we’ll go straight to film. It’s going to be called Lunch Break in Our Factories.”

“But we’re not eating anything,” the Priest objected.

“Then get something,” said the director.

“We’ve already had our lunches. We can pretend to drink from empty cups, like the chorus of musketeers in Dalibor, but a salami sandwich would… ”

“Absolutely,” said the director, rolling up his sleeves. “But time’s flying. Move the aquariums up against the wall, and meanwhile, go buy yourselves some salami and rolls.”

“You buy it, and expense it,” said the Cop. “Aren’t we worth it?”

“Jesus!” sighed the director, rolling his eyes.

Vindy pointed the way, then jumped up on the edge of the vat and down the other side. The Judge, holding the control pendant, followed after him with the hoist.

“Stop! Stop!” cried Vindy.

The Judge pressed the button, but it was the wrong one. There was nothing he could do but press the right one.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Vindy said. “But tell me about some of the other times when you were happy.”

“When I’d go to the small paint factory next door for firewood. They let me have old aniline-dye barrels — purple, red, green, blue, yellow — and I’d bring them back to our courtyard and chop them up. My hands got stained with whatever color had been in the barrel, and I’d touch my face and the back of my neck, and my daughter would laugh at me and say I looked like a parrot. Then we’d have a fire in the stove, and each time the flames were a different color.”

“Does the little yard engine that makes all that beautiful smoke go by here?” asked the film director,

“Every hour.”

“Damn! That would have made a great backdrop! But go and fetch some plates, and I’ll send for salami and rolls.”

The assistant director brought in some apprentice steelworkers and coached them for supporting roles in Lunch Break in our Factories. One group was supposed to look at the aquariums with interest and talk to each other about the fish, while the second group would emerge from the birch grove, run up to the workers in the middle of their discussion, and sing the popular motivational song, “We’ll Command the Wind to Blow and the Rain to Fall.”

The director took a piece of chalk and drew a diagram on the gate of the scrap-metal division. He and the assistant director choreographed the shooting plan. The gate slid open, while the apprentices stood around watching, and the director, chalk in hand, tapped the forehead of a man in an English-style suit walking through the gate into the sunlight, along with the factory manager in the black smock, and the shop steward in dirty coveralls.

“Right, we’re ready to go live,” the director said, and the grinders emerged from the factory hall with empty mugs and pails and picked up the salami and rolls in their free hands, and some opened their newspapers and sat leaning against the ingots while a group of apprentices bent over the aquariums looking at the fish, and the rest took up positions behind the little birch grove.

Vindy gave a signal and the hooks descended, clinking against the demijohn’s green glass.

“And now, a little something from me, Doctor,” he said, clearing his throat. “A poem to the great Jaroslav Vrchlický: No region lay beyond the reach of thy poetic soul on thy vasty pilgrimage through life. In verse, you made our history manifest, the obverse and reverse of all our eras, and thus, in winged words, you elevated and elated us, your brethren…”

As Vindy recited his piece, the senior worker arose from his plank in the little shack, kicked the door open, then sat down, looking through the window at the pickling vat shrouded in its cloud of greenish vapor. He cut his blood pudding into sections, counted them, carved himself an equal number of bread slices, then skewered a piece of blood pudding and a slice of bread with his knife, thinking how comical the Judge looked standing there, and wondering if he was confused about the buttons on the control pendant only because he, the senior worker, had been mean to him and whether it wouldn’t be better to try to get on the Judge’s good side because he was, after all, a judge, and the whole damn factory — all of Poldi Kladno — was full of people from professions and jobs and trades of all kinds, and the whole working-class character of the steelworks had gone down the drain, and the conversations you heard in the changing rooms were something else these days, a lot of eggheads had come in, and it was the same in the canteen, the guy in coveralls was really a colonel or maybe even an attorney general, and we had to be nice to them, because was it their fault that they ended up on the losing side?

“Action!” said the director, raising his arm, and the camera whirred; the grinders munched on their sandwiches, shouting at each other with their mouths full: “The fortress at Pusan is about to fall! Jump into the sea, you imperialists! We’re going to pour the molten steel of peace down your gullets!” The apprentices pointed at the fish, and the group emerging from the birches danced along the tracks, singing: “We’ll command the wind to blow and the rain…”

“Cut!” said the director. “And now we’ll do a medium shot from above.”

He helped the cameraman climb up on a wagon loaded with ingots, and the assistant carefully handed the camera up to him.

Again, the camera whirred, and the grinders rattled their empty dishes and shouted slogans, and the apprentices ran out of the birch grove and leaned over the aquarium again, until the director waved his arms and said, “Cut! That’s it — we’re done! Thank you!”

Vindy’s voice carried high over the acid vapors: “Greatest among poets, you sang the praises of our meadows and entered the pantheon of the Muses, Jaroslav, to join the company of giants. Today, your footsteps lead to glory everlasting… though not for everyone… for in these times, caught in the onrush of daily cares, we’ve spurned your legacy, oh master, or yet because the fleeting glory of this gilded age has blinded us. .. E’en so, with each new spring the orchards garb themselves in blossoms new, and our spirits do ascend once more from chaos unto order…”

Vindy removed his cap, revealing hair as thick as a lambskin hat and a head so large that the cap had to be slit at the back and refastened with a large safety pin. The senior worker emerged from the wooden shack, spat out a piece of blood pudding that had lodged between his rotting teeth, then stepped across the boards and walked past the hoppers and through the cloud of greenish vapor. When he emerged from the room where the demijohns of acid were stored, tongues of green vapor were licking at his coat and trousers like tiny flames.

Across the tracks came the manager, the shop steward, and the man in the English-style suit, who in the meantime had put on a worker’s cap.

“This is the Trade Union rep, in person,” said the manager.

“He made the time — tore up his busy schedule, in fact — to come to see you personally,” said the shop steward.

“Look here,” the union man said, “I’ve learned with great regret that you’re not on board with the notion that we must all work to bring socialism closer to fruition.” And because he saw in himself a reflection of the president and First Citizen, he tugged his cap further down over his forehead. ‘What would the author of Red Glow over Kladno say if he heard about this?”

“Good question,” said the Dairyman, raising his empty tankard. “What would Tonda Zapotocký say if he knew you’re having us meet quotas you haven’t negotiated with us according to regulations? Tonda was never against us! I was just a boy when he played the accordion with my dad, and in the evenings he taught the workers never to give in.”

The union rep turned around, took two steps, reached into to the aquarium, scooped up some water, and dabbled it on his forehead as though anointing himself with holy water. Then, in a fascinated tone, he said, “What kind of accordion was it?”

“A Helikon,” said the Dairyman, “and he’d go for a drink with my dad to Secka’s. Tonda was a mensch.”

The union rep took the map from the Priest’s fingers and studied it. “You can’t talk that way,” he said. “You’re playing into the hands of the aggressors. If I’m not mistaken, I heard you say during the shoot that you all understood quite correctly that Korea is bleeding and needs our weapons. But what am I hearing now?”

“Exactly the same thing as the shop steward here and the manager heard,” thundered the Dairyman, “You’re treating us like little boys, and that’s a dereliction of party morality! What the hell’s going on here?” the Dairyman shouted, pounding his tankard on an ingot.

The union rep glanced at the shop steward and the manager, leaned delicately against the aquarium, studied the little red and golden fish, then turned around. “But you can’t behave this way,” he said wearily. “We can’t be talking back, we can’t be disobeying government directives.”

“Then, comrade, you should take it up with comrades Krosnář and Zapotocký, because they taught us that the ones upstairs are there to listen to us down here. ‘Face to face with the masses,’ wasn’t that the slogan?” The Dairyman waggled his hand, then turned to the grinders, as if expecting each of them to agree.

The Judge jumped up on the edge of the vat, holding the lines of the control pendant like the reins of a four-in-hand, his white legs protruding from his disintegrating overalls. He walked behind the hoist from which the green demijohn full of hydrochloric acid was suspended. Encased in wicker, the demijohn hung in the air like a green moon. When he saw the senior worker, he teetered for a moment on the rim of the vat like a tightrope walker, but then walked on, pressed the button on the pendant, and brought the hoist to a halt.

The senior worker nodded. “I see you’re getting the hang of it,” he said.

“Indeed,” said the Judge.

Vindy placed a steel bar across the mouth of the vat, raised his hand, and the Judge pressed the button, the right one, lowering the demijohn. Vindy kept his hand in the air until the demijohn settled on the bar and began to tip. He uncorked the neck and the greenish, acrid liquid bubbled into the vat, while the demijohn kept tipping until it was upside down.

“But this plays straight into the hands of the reactionaries,” said the union rep. “By the way, we’ve heard that the former owner of an industrial bakery in Kladno gave his daughter a million crowns for a wedding present. How can that be, I ask, when we all started out with five hundred a month?”

“You’re missing the point, comrade. History will swallow this baker up. Maybe he sold his house and his fields. Maybe he had diamonds and gold coins stashed away. But enough of this, boys,” said the Dairyman, raising his tankard. “Enough! Comrade, you’ve got our shop steward here, and our manager. Just work it out with them the way it’s meant to be done. Send the production manager down here to negotiate the higher quotas directly with us. Even if you don’t know the proper party guidelines, I do. We know very well what the government needs. Come on, boys, let’s go for a beer. There’s no talking to this secretary here, not yet anyway.”

He lifted his tankard and walked off, followed by the grinders. When they reached the tracks, they looked around, and the Dairyman turned to the film director and his men, who were just climbing into the van, and said, “What you just heard? That’s what you should have made your movie about, you peckerheads. The aquarium and birch trees would have been perfect.”

The union rep watched the gang of grinders leave and gave a weak little smile.

“I’m telling you,” whispered the shop steward. “The comrades here in Kladno are sharp as razors.”

“Who the hell was that?” asked the union rep, as the manager slid open the factory hall’s gate.

The female convicts were taking a break on the pile of rusty crucifixes and angels and some other pieces of scrap. The yard engine pulled the loaded hoppers off to the smelting ovens and returned with empty ones. One prisoner with a stoop found some loose metal pickets, handed one to another prisoner, and assumed a fencing stance; the other prisoner faced her and they began making ridiculous lunges at each other. The prisoner with the stoop was driven back up the pile scrap by her opponent, who forced her over the top of the pile and back down the other side, while the other women hooted, clutching their sides, hugging each other, hanging on each other’s shoulders like dray horses resting against each other on lunch break, roaring and howling with laughter.

“I’m going to die,” shrieked Lenka.

“Here’s what I know,” said the shop steward. “The Dairyman — we call him that because he owned a milk bar, but he voluntarily shut it down and went to work in the mines, then came here as a grinder — he’s our best worker and a dedicated communist but what can I say? He’s a Kladno boy. When a mother’s in the pink, none of her children want to fetch her wood and water, but when she’s sick, the children fight over who gets to help out first, if you catch my drift.”

“When she’s sick, when she’s sick…” said the union rep thoughtfully. “But when she does get sick, that might also be too late, don’t you think?”

“Girls! Girls!” the young guard said quietly, standing there, pale and ashen-faced, his fingers hooked into his Sam Browne belt.

At a signal from Vindy, the Judge pressed the right button, and the demijohn turned upright again. The Judge then continued along the edge of the vat, pressed the proper button and the demijohn moved on through the acrid vapor.

“Very good,” said the senior worker, and he smiled.

Vindy walked over the wobbling planks to the demijohn and into the cloud of vapor now enveloping Judge Hasterer. “Things are improving in the realm of the spirit!” he shouted.

The crane clanked along the length of the hall, and the sun was already so low in the sky that the ribbons and bands of light from the ventilation tower had shifted from the walls to the ceiling, where they glowed like golden sword blades. The crane pushed its way through blue shadows and semi-darkness, and the load binder raised his arm, his blue coveralls blending in with the blue shadows in the hall. He stopped the union rep, who put his finger to his lips and watched as an old worker lifted up a crowbar, lay it against his cheek as if aiming a rifle, and when the crane operator drew closer, he shouted: “Bang!”

The union rep watched the blonde operator fling her arms in the air as though she’d been winged, then lay her bleached head on the edge of the gondola, sagging for a moment, and then gently rising to her feet, rattling the chain. She laughed at the worker as her crane rumbled over his head.

“There are some strange people here,” the union rep said, as he turned to watch the crane recede down the factory hall. “So, just to be perfectly clear,” he said, and he looked a moment longer at the receding gondola, then put his arms around the shoulders of the steward and the manager and stuck his head between them. “First, send the production manager down here right away to negotiate the higher quotas. Next, put a message up on the board that the old quotas apply, for now. And third, how old did you say this Dairyman was?”

At that moment, the public address system started broadcasting a waltz, and the female convicts tossed aside their pickets. They converged on the wagons and began dancing with each other on a patch of hard clay. The girl with her arm in a cast ran down as well and, lifting her cast in the air, embraced it with her healthy arm and waltzed with herself.

“She’s one of them defectors,” said the senior worker.

“That, sir, is my daughter,” said the Judge, bowing slightly.

“Now girls!” said the pale, somewhat alarmed guard. “Girls!”