TWO of the gilded youths asked me to join them one night on a party, probably because I had been doing a lot of work for them. I declined because I had promised to work with the accountants, but I was pleased nevertheless. Later they asked me again and this time I agreed to go. I was starved for a chance to be young and foolhardy and debonair.

They met me at the bank after I had finished work at eleven o’clock and swept me along into their formless plans. We were of approximately the same age, in the vicinity of twenty-five. My new suit was of a good cut and passable material, kept in constant press by Mother. I carried myself like an officer and I thought we appeared much the same on the surface. But as I listened to their conversation I felt we were worlds apart. They were still finding it difficult to forget the glamour of the uniforms they had worn during the war, with their red cavalry breeches, patent-leather boots and clanking sabers. They also regretted the absence of lovely Viennese women who liked such uniforms.

For my part, I regretted the loss of nothing I had known in the war. It had presented me with no desk or membership in an officers’ club in Vienna. For me it had been kill or be killed. My French uniform hung at home in a closet, meaningless now. However, I made no show of stressing these differences in our points of view. I wanted too much to find out what their lives and their mental processes were like.

Stefan Horník was fair and blue-eyed. He had been a research student in chemistry before the war, but now he cared neither for pure science nor for the manufacture of textiles, which was his father’s occupation. He loved gypsy music more than anything else in the world and kept insisting that we go to the Gri-Gri where some gypsies from Moscow were featured. He also talked about women, pocket money, the stupidity of his tailor, and his reaction to a new cocktail he had tried once and was eager to try again.

Jiří Mašek was dark and incorrigibly gay. His conversation was dotted with the names of famous people he had encountered through his family’s connections. Perhaps he meant to impress me, but I thought even then how unimportant a man becomes through his own words when his attention is centered on the eminent persons he has met. Jiří was insatiably interested in gossip. He believed every innuendo he heard and repeated it immediately with the air of having been party to its origin. Each morsel that came to his ears he savored delicately, chuckling to himself and then passing it on as though to flatter his hearers. He scorned Stefan’s gypsy music, liking better Blaške’s violin as it sent forth the strains of Viennese lieder at Zavřel’s. He also talked of women, pocket money, the cut of a new suit, and his reactions to the same cocktail Stefan had liked.

I had nothing to add to the conversation. When we went into the first noise-filled room I followed them to the bar and waited for them to order first. Whatever they said I would say too, in order to hide the fact that I had never been in a Prague night club before. I felt uncomfortable because I knew they were watching me, hunting for mistakes, and my old trick of waiting to see what others would do in a strange situation would not be good enough here. I must arrest their fears about the suitability of my companionship in some other way.

I pretended to feel the effect of the first drink before they did. I called for another and another, and as they followed, my plan of action grew bolder. We went on to other clubs and whenever a barman waited for our order I gave the name of a cocktail no one had heard of, using a bawdy word in lieu of a name because I chose to hide my ignorance that way. The supercilious barmen found the tables turned on them when they were put in a position of having to figure out what I meant. Stefan and Jiří thought it a remarkable joke. My monkey business amused them and that was all they asked of me. It also made them somewhat envious because they were bound rigidly within the social customs of their class and dared not try to be original.

They asked me to go out with them often after that, and my circle of acquaintances grew among these young men of the bank. As it grew, my reputation increased. For one thing, I could outdrink them all. My mind never became intoxicated, no matter how much liquor I put into my body, because I watched myself carefully and I knew exactly what I was doing and why. I never let myself take the last drink that would have been too much. When I threw things, and I threw a lot, I knew what I was doing. Nothing gave me more satisfaction than telling exactly what I thought of them all when they believed I was too drunk to recognize my own words. It made me seem more daring and original than ever.

And so the board of directors of the Associated Bank heard of me yet again, for the fathers of many of my companions were their friends. I was being watched closely at my work; they expected to find mistakes traceable to my late hours, but they never found the slightest difference in my efficiency or behavior, because I liked my work and I was young and strong.

One day the head of the securities department of the Associated Bank, whose son was one of my companions and who was himself one of the directors, asked me if I would like to work in his department. He tried to tease me by adding that he felt he might have more control over his son if he could put me where he could see me more often. I was pleased to accept and I spent a week in his department before I was transferred once more. The foreign exchange department had just been taken over by a new director from Vienna and it was expanding rapidly. Someone else decided I was needed there, rather than in securities, so there I went.

Hans Wissmuth had already attained something of a reputation in the bank for his singular behavior with the men who worked under him. I had heard of his sophisticated Viennese manners and the way he made cutting remarks with a cynical smile, but I had never seen him. When I went into the outer office of the foreign exchange department I was met by a clattering of typewriters and voices. I had been told to report to Mr. Wissmuth’s secretary, who had his own small office apart from the hubbub in the large room. He led the way to the inner office of the new director.

Like all such offices in the bank, the floor was covered with a Turkish rug of rich design and color. There were brocade hangings at the windows and several fine old clocks on the mantel of the fireplace. It took me a moment to focus my attention on the man sitting behind the desk. He was fairly large, but everything in the room was massive enough to make this single human being appear inconsequential. He was looking vaguely in my direction but he said nothing. The clocks began to chime and count the hour and when they stopped I realized he was scrutinizing me as he might have watched a dog being paraded at a kennel show.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, my voice echoing faintly.

“Who are you?” The words were not peremptory but rather indifferent.

“I was told to report to you. They said you needed a new clerk.”

“So I do, but then, who doesn’t?” He fingered some papers lying on his desk. Then he opened a drawer and took out a pencil. “Can’t imagine why anyone wants to work in a bank.”

I made no reply and the pencil began to tap against the edge of the desk. Suddenly I realized that he had an impediment in his speech, a peculiar quality of voice that made it difficult for him to sound as he felt. What a handicap for a banker! That was why he tried to compensate for it by his cynical remarks.

“Your appearance is in your favor, of course,” I heard him saying. “Your night club record is also impressive.” His eyes fell to my knees and traveled up again. A not unkind smile played at the corners of his eyes. As I watched, the smile turned out to be a squint. He pressed a buzzer beside the telephone and when his secretary came back into the room Wissmuth said, “Lower that blind. And then take this fellow away and show him what to do. I presume he can add and subtract, if nothing else.”

So I worked in the large outer office of the foreign exchange department during the time of the great financial breakdown in Austria and Hungary. Every day the desks were heaped with unfinished sales slips and orders of speculators for the sale of the falling Austrian and Hungarian crowns. We could never go home at night until the desks were cleared.

Several weeks later Wissmuth happened to call for his secretary one day when the man was at lunch. Then he called for someone else to take dictation but I was the only one in the outer office at the time who could do so. I had not seen my immediate superior since the day of my first interview with him, except as he passed through the office; his secretary relayed his instructions to the office staff. Now I picked up a pad and a pencil and went to him. Without looking up at me he dictated rapidly into his collar a long and complicated cable to London. When he asked me to read the message back I was unable to tell him two consecutive words he had said.

He looked up at me then. “Where do you think you are?” he said. “This isn’t one of your night clubs, where you can be as drunk as a lord.”

I made no reply, simply bowing and leaving the room. Without reflecting so much as a moment, I went straight to my desk, wrote out my resignation from the bank and sent it to the personnel director by runner. Within ten minutes I was called to his office. The Associated Bank, he said, was prepared to accept my resignation. But before my request was acted upon, one of the directors had insisted that he be allowed to talk to me personally. Would I agree?

I agreed, and he then proceeded to conduct me back to the office of Hans Wissmuth, who came toward me as I entered the room. The expression on his face was a revelation. I heard him saying that I was the first of his employees possessed of sufficient pride to refuse to accept his way of dealing with people. He held out his hand and when I returned his clasp he asked me to serve as his personal secretary and I accepted. I felt only sympathy and admiration for a man whose bad nature so nearly hid his fine qualities, all underlaid by a sense of deep inferiority.

It was during this period of working for Wissmuth that I met Karel Berounský again, the boy at the Commercial Academy who had scorned membership in Eisenstein’s gang because even then his independence of judgment had made him immune to flattery. He was serving the foreign exchange department in the capacity of public relations expert, for his social contacts were wide and of the best, and our desks were not far apart. He still held a peculiar interest for me because his nature was as nearly diametrically opposed to my own as any one man’s could be. We fell into the habit of lunching together, and occasionally I met him in a group at night, but it required a long period of casual acquaintance before we learned to trust our liking for each other.

I stayed in the foreign exchange department through the crisis of the German mark in 1923. Five telephones stood on my desk and frequently I found myself talking into all of them at once—to Paris about exchange on the franc, to London to get quotations on the pound, to Amsterdam, Vienna and Berlin. Once in the middle of a frantic afternoon, as I switched receivers from ear to ear, I suddenly heard the voice of Uncle in my mind, telling a frightened boy of six that he was an idiot because he couldn’t learn to talk on the telephone. I had to explain to the harried Dutchman in Amsterdam that I wasn’t laughing at him.