'We'd do the maximum.'
And what if someone were to pay for the operation?'
'I doubt that anyone would.'
'What if I were to pay for it, for instance?'
The doctor stared at him in amazement. 'Why would you do that for someone you don't even know?'
'You also help people you don't know.'
'But that's my job, Reverend. All right, I know what you're going to say: it's your job too. But just let me tell you something. Not long ago we had a fellow in here, about your age, with gangrene in his leg.
Abroad they have a drug to treat it that we don't have yet. It's expensive. About three thousand marks a shot. And you have to have a repeat dose every year. Here there are only two options. Amputation or death. That fellow didn't want to believe it and begged me to save his leg. So I told him about that drug and that he'd have to obtain it himself, and fast. He agreed. Then I told him the price and he burst into tears. He could never find that much.'
'So you amputated the leg?'
'There was no other way; he'd have died before he'd managed to get that amount of money together. The only reason I'm telling you this, Reverend, is so you understand that trying to play the good Samaritan in our business would break a Rothschild.'
The doctor was right, of course. It would take no more than a couple of minutes to give away all the money he had received out of the blue. It was enough to take a look round. People were suffering all over the world, all around them. All the same he said: 'I believe the right thing to do is for you to operate on him here, if you'll agree.'
'We always prefer to fix people up rather than kick them out somewhere else.' He added, 'I can't take it from you. Some of it maybe. We'll have to find the rest from somewhere.'
'We'll agree on the details later, but I wouldn't like anyone to know about it. Not even the lad concerned.'
The doctor shrugged. 'That will be no problem. No one would believe it anyway.'
6
Samuel
The architect Samuel Musil regarded himself as a capable and decent man, a good husband and even a good father to the children of his three marriages — or the last two, at least. The majority of people in his field had no doubts about his qualities as a professional, even though a number of his opponents branded his most famous and prestigious projects as crimes perpetrated on the capital. Lately, people had been blaming him for the skilful way he had operated under the old regime, but few had said so to his face and he was convinced that he had
behaved no worse than most people would have done in his position and that he had never produced anything that was in any way at odds with his 'professional or human conscience' — or so he had claimed in a newspaper interview.
He had spent most of his life under the Communist regime. He used to start the biographical appendix to his personnel form with the sentence: 'I was born into the family of a poor peasant factory worker towards the end of the great economic crisis; after the war I joined the Union of Czech Youth and always sympathized with the policy of the Communist Party.' Admittedly, that sentence, covering the first eighteen years of his life, was not untrue, but in an interview with a newspaper on the occasion of his fifty-fifth birthday he did not repeat a single detail of it, but instead he recalled his years as a boy scout and the fact that his family never joined a co-operative and that his uncle was wounded in the battles on the Western Front. Fortunately, when he was setting up a practice after the fall of the old regime, nobody investigated either his origins or his convictions. All that was required was money, and it really didn't matter where it came from.
Samuel had no brothers or sisters. His mother had a tendency to depression and excessive mistrust, and even one child was an inordinate burden for her. There were days when she refused to speak to him, let alone caress or cuddle him. His father spent little time at home. He used to spend a lot of time at work and found little to entice him home; even in his looks, his son resembled too closely the wife who had embittered his life.
Samuel's schools had been terrible; he started primary school under the Protectorate and attended grammar school during the Stalinist years.
He graduated from university several years after Stalin's death, but even at that time the Kreshchatik in Kiev or the Lomonosov University in the Lenin Hills in Moscow were still regarded as notable achievements of progressive architecture. When he looked at them, however, the only thing that struck him was their bumptious ugliness. He wrote his thesis on the pre-war Soviet avant-garde. He emphasized the principles of the post-revolutionary Association of New Architects who had called for large unadorned surfaces and the construction of abstract geometric forms. These requirements, he maintained, had been the inspiration for Le Corbusier's purism.
He was also taken by the notion that whereas for the baroque the essential stylistic feature was the circle, in the case of revolutionary architecture it ought to be the spiral, as a form moving upwards to the Communist future of mankind. In his view, the avant-gardists had created a genuine revolutionary art which could be looked to for inspiration.
At first — like others of his generation — he had sincerely believed in progress and socialism. He had taken part in two youth building projects, and unlike most of the other participants he had managed to draw some benefit from them in career terms: not only was he able to try his hand at most building work but he also became familiar with architectural practice and soon realized the yawning gulf that existed in his profession between the reality on the ground and what was officially proclaimed.
At the second youth project he made the acquaintance of Katarina. She was a medical student from Slovakia. He managed to get her pregnant so soon that they were married four months after their return from the project. They never set up home together. For three years they barely saw each other twice a month except during the holidays, part of which they were able to spend together. When he got his first job with a design office he was assigned a flat and hoped that his wife would finally join him. She refused, having found another man in the meantime.
His second wife was called Kateřina and worked as a draughtsman. They were ill-matched socially. His wife was aware of it and tried to show her gratitude by her almost maternal care of him and unreserved recognition of his male supremacy. This suited him well and led him to regard his second marriage as successful.
As he grew older his tendency towards pedantry became more pronounced. He demanded order — from his employees at work and from his wife and daughter at home. Order in his terms meant punctuality and strict observance of all his instructions. He could not abide carelessly sketched plans, or to find a towel hung up sloppily in the bathroom in the morning — even a speck of cigarette ash on the table would spoil his mood for the remainder of the day. The sorts of things that ran counter to his idea of order were unplanned events, daydreaming, unexpected guests, dawdling and actions with unconsidered or even dangerous consequences.
Preserving this order enabled him to become an excellent organizer.
He could be relied on totally and because of this quality the directors of the design firms where he worked overlooked the fact that from time to time he would act with too much independence, and that he would always refuse jobs that he felt were beneath him.
Unlike many of his colleagues, who soon realized that nothing was required of an architect other than to build cheaply and not be inspired by anything that might come from the decadent West, he did not sit back but got hold of foreign journals and although he could not put any of the things he read into practice, at least he retained an awareness of what was being built around the world. As soon as the political thaw set in in the sixties, he managed to push through a number of interesting designs for exhibition pavilions.