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Two days after his visit to his father's grave, on a bright sunny afternoon, Jan Masaryk went to see Benes at his peaceful country home. They remained alone for an hour, talking. During the two intervening days Masaryk had complained repeatedly of insomnia. When he left Benes' country home for the 60-mile drive back to Prague, Masaryk offered his bodyguard a cigarette. "I can't smoke on duty," said the guard. "You can smoke with me," said Masaryk. He took a puff or two, stamped it out, and slumped in sleep. He awoke as his car reached Prague's outskirts, surprised to learn he had slept an hour.
The Damned, Damned Communists. That night the lights in Masaryk's third-floor apartment in Czernin Palace burned all night. Next morning, his father's old worn Hussite Bible was found open by his bed. The upturned page was part of the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, and verses 22 and 23 of chapter 5 had been marked. They read: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law." His body was found at 6:20 by a guard on the stone-flagged court 60 feet below his bathroom window.
Most of the indications pointed to suicide. Some skeptics insisted it was another case of Bohemia's famed "forcible defenestration."* Whether it was suicide or murder, the fact was that Jan Masaryk had become enmeshed in exactly the kind of trap his father had warned against: he had been destroyed by trying to compromise with forces with which no man could compromise.
In Prague, death clothed Jan Masaryk with a renewed dignity. Two weeks before, Prague residents had muttered: "He's no fighter. Must be staying because he likes the job." But while his body lay in state in Czernin Palace, people did not conceal their feelings. Five peasant women leaned over a balustrade in the palace; one of them said loudly: "The damned, damned Communists killed him. They are worse than the Nazis."
The Broken Wheel. At the funeral a children's choir sang Thomas Masaryk's favorite folk song, a simple ballad with a haunting tune, Ach Synku, Synku (Oh, My Son, My Son):
Oh, my son, home so soon?
Have you been plowing, been plowing?
Have you been plowing all afternoon?
Father, the wheel broke, Father, the wheel broke, We'll have to strengthen each spoke.
*At Lake Success last week, Chile filed charges against the Soviet Union with the U.N.; accused it of threatening world peace by instigating the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. The U.S. announced it would support the Chilean demand for a Security Council debate.
†Thomas Masaryk's first book, printed in German in 1881, was an examination of the causes of "suicide as a mass phenomenon." He later put some of the material into a collection of essays called Modern Man and Religion.