We walked through the city in the wartime blackout. Not a single light pierced the darkness of Nazi-occupied Prague. Malá Strana, where I knew every street and wall and stone, had grown unfamiliar. We walked, lost in the darkened streets, houses were languishing in the shadows . . . houses that came and went, like ocean waves. Andrei had come to see me, from the occupied Sudets all the way to occupied Prague; he had made that dangerous, forbidden journey, just to see me; I couldn’t help but think of that, as we walked.
“Have you noticed, Andrei, how intensely one lives in the dark?”
Andrei was silent, immersed in his own world. I explained, “What I mean is, in the dark we experience everything in a deeper way. Maybe that’s how blind people live.”
Andrei didn’t reply. But I needed to hear his voice! So I asked him another question, “They’ve taken our country away from us. Do you think there’ll be a war?”
He remained silent. Hadn’t he heard me? After a while he repeated my words as if they were a question.
“Have they taken our country away from us?”
“Yes. It belongs to them by day. And at night they forbid us from seeing it.”
Andrei answered in a somewhat illogical fashion, “Can you see that? That miracle? The starry sky above us, here in this capital city?”
To bring Andrei back to earth, I repeated what I’d said, having held the thought. Andrei answered, “The country and the land have grown bigger.”
It struck me that today, as on so many other days, Andrei didn’t have both feet on the ground. I just said, “What do you mean, Andrei?”
“The land is reaching upward, look. It is heading upward to the stars!”
We were going up a tree-lined road, Jan Neruda Street, I think it must have been. I couldn’t see the passersby, although I knew they were there. We had all turned into shadows. But I heard their voices, which sounded more intimate to me than on other occasions. They were human voices.
We made out a distant echo of thunder. A far-away, continuous thundering, which bode no good. The muffled noise was drawing closer. Soldiers on the march. Soon this strident thunder of military boots started to hurt our ears. The soldiers were marching down the middle of the street, and they too had been turned into shadows. But I did not feel close to these shadows, human though they were.
To the rhythm of their deafening steps, Andrei whispered words of consolation.
Once more we lost ourselves in the winding, dark streets of Malá Strana. But the charm of that night had vanished; at least for me. Andrei solemnly let his eyes wander over the starry firmament. As if something special was about to happen, that he had been expecting for a long time. As if he were about to make a major discovery of some kind.
I walked faster, dragging Andrei after me. We reached the top of the mountain. We were at the castle. Under the starlight I could just make out the Loreto church. We went down a few steps, surrounded by dark shadows that were pointing at the sky. I knew perfectly well that they were little baroque angels. Andrei had stumbled against one of the steps and if he hadn’t fallen over it was because he had grabbed one of those stone angels for support.
It was then. Then it happened . . . For the first time I was witness to . . .
“Look, over there!” Andrei said, “He’s coming to me through the sunlight, walking along a pathway of white sand under a hanging garden. The path has a border of white lilies, white Nymphaea are floating in an artificial lake.”
“Sunlight?” I exclaimed.
“Easy, girl, don’t frighten off Gudea. The fact that this great Sumerian should come to me is a very special honor. I wish to prepare myself properly so as to receive his visit.”
His whole face had begun to shine beatifically.
I noticed that, in effect, Andrei was bathed in sunlight, and was now walking as if on a summer’s day, although it was a cold, wet December night. Only in the summer do we move with such freedom and ease. I saw that Andrei had no doubts, he knew exactly what was going on. No, that wasn’t quite it. I saw that Andrei was looking into the very heart of truth and of all that he found correct and good and beautiful. His lips moved and gave out little sounds, without a doubt he was conversing with someone. He was gesturing broadly, his hands flew hither and thither like a butterfly that knows it has to seek the light. He smiled at the other person, he was getting on like a house on fire with him. He took off his coat and jacket, as he felt so hot on that muggy summer afternoon. I went on watching him: it was clear that that conversation had given Andrei something new, perhaps even essential; some revelation, probably a profound and longed-for truth.
The conversation had lasted an hour, perhaps longer. But it’s possible that it had seemed to me to last longer than it really was because I had seen something supernatural, incredible. I was a little afraid.
When Andrei came back from his journey among the ancient Sumerians, he seemed happy and at peace. We were walking slowly over the mountain of Petřín. As dawn broke, I plucked up the courage to ask him, “What did he actually tell you, the Sumerian ruler? Did he give you any personal advice?”
Andrei looked at me, bright-eyed, “Gudea linked my life, my attitudes and my work to his ideals. Everyone must enrich and beautify the world as best he can, and artists more than anyone.”
We had breakfast at the Café Louvre; at that hour we were the only customers. We ordered thick coffee with croissants and raspberry jam. Andrei couldn’t stop smiling, his mouth open and his eyes sparkling.
Afterward we went home to sleep, or, to be precise, I at least needed a few hours rest. Andrei opened a bottle of wine, and, ensconced in an armchair, sang and whistled and drew the trees and peeling paintwork of the houses he could see from the window.
When I woke up, around midday, I realized at once that Andrei had left. On the bedside table, next to his chair, I noticed the bottle of red wine, half-empty, and an empty cut-glass goblet. The goblet was supporting a sheet of yellow paper covered with a drawing.
I discovered a portrait in the drawing: a man with large, expressive eyes, and an alert, wise face, dressed in a black tunic. His face radiated willpower. He had lucid, almost clairvoyant eyes, prominent cheekbones and a jutting chin, characteristics that marked him as an intense, powerful and spiritually vigorous man. The only accessory worn by this serene figure was a strip of cloth, bound about his head like a turban, and marked with cuneiform inscriptions.
Andrei had never done portraits before. I was absolutely sure of that.
Under the bottle I found a piece of paper. A note addressed to me, I thought. I read:
The name which can be pronounced is no longer a name.
In the absence of the name is the start of heaven and earth,
and the presence of the name is the mother of all things.
If we do not desire to do so, we will become familiar with its secret,
whereas if we look for it,
we will only find its surface.
This is the door that leads to all enigmas.
Who wrote this? Where was Andrei?
How would he get home? A sick man like him? How would he find his house in the mountains? How would he manage to get there, he who didn’t live on the earth but in some place beyond? How would he travel if it was forbidden to come from and go to the border areas? I couldn’t stop asking myself these and many other questions.
I picked up the newspaper, to give myself a break from these unpleasant thoughts. On the front page of this Czech newspaper I read: “Let us follow the Führer over the Christmas period! Let us follow him through this era which is so important for Germany and the future of our Reich!”
I was overwhelmed by a feeling of loneliness. I too felt abandoned by everything and everybody.
Not long afterward, they presented themselves at the door. Both had smooth, fair hair, combed to one side. They were thin. They looked like brothers. They were a few years older than me. One wore a gray suit, the other was dressed in brown. They spoke to me in German. I invited them into the living room. They were courteous, well-mannered, polite. With expert looks they examined the sheet music on the piano, my German-language leather-bound collection of Greek philosophers. One of them started to talk about Socrates’ view of the Republic, the other admired—or adored, as he put it—Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. After this brief preliminary chat, my two visitors broke off their reflections in mid-sentence, and got down to their essential order of business.
“Forgive our barging in on you like this unannounced, verehrteste Komtesse,” said the one in the brown suit.
“We come in good faith, you belong to us,” said the gray one.
“I belong to you? Me?” I said, alarmed, not understanding a word.
“What I mean is that you are on our side,” the gray one said by way of clarification.
I still didn’t understand a thing. I decided to wait.
“You’re one of us, that is what we wish to let you know, and that is the reason we have come here,” the gray one repeated, rubbing his hands in satisfaction.
“When it comes down to it, you are German,” the brown one said, smiling as if he could smell his favorite cut of meat roasting in the oven.
“My father was German,” I answered cautiously, “My mother isn’t.”
“We already know that,” the gray one said with a scornful grimace that I didn’t quite know how to interpret.
“That’s good enough,” the brown one dryly cut in, “To be half German, as you are, is to be German as far as we are concerned. Your German father is quite enough to ensure that you can become . . . ”
Both of them fell silent.
“So that I can become . . . ?” I said.
“A citizen of the Reich,” the gray one said.
“Yes, a citizen of the Reich,” the brown one was smiling as if the roast was already carved and served at the table.
“Citizen of the Reich?” I said, surprised.
“Yes, a citizen of the Reich, which is to say officially German, verehrteste Komtesse. We are trying to bring the greatest number of Germans possible into our ranks,” the gray one explained, unsmiling now, serious, severe.
I began to tremble.
“Think it over, gnädige Frau. We do this for your own good. Yours and that of . . . the people who are close to you,” the brown one said, with a courteous smile on his lips, and a fake diamond gleam in his eyes.
Andrei didn’t come. Christmas, and the New Year, and Epiphany had gone by. Winter was coming to an end. But the newspapers and the radio went on saying the same thing: “The president of the Böhmen und Mähren Protectorate has announced that it is now obligatory for all Germans, and, for obvious reasons, all Czechs, to salute the symbols of the Reich, the flag, the anthem, etc., with their hats off and a respectful demeanor. Although it is not obligatory, a raised-arm salute would be appreciated.”
Andrei didn’t come.
But those two men, the gray one and the brown one, came back.
I sent them away saying that I didn’t feel very well that day. They promised they would be back soon.
“I want you in a red dress, like a Gypsy girl. You haven’t got one? We’ll buy one. Let’s go!”
He had come with an armful of daffodils, but he had arrived late, after a long time had gone by, as he always did, in fact.
We were crossing the Charles Bridge. From the rainy, springtime sky the baroque statues greeted us with their heads and arms. Full of enthusiasm, Andrei told me that he had started to do portraits, something he’d never attempted before. He painted the Gypsies who lived in huts and dilapidated carriages at the foot of the mountains. He said he admired the way they communicated with each other by means of folktales. A Gypsy girl had caught his attention because of her fire-colored skirt.
We bought a loose-fitting skirt, red as a sports car, which came down to my knees; black shoes with high, but comfortable, heels; a very wide, black leather belt, and a dark-colored jacket with a red velvet rose on the lapel. Andrei paid for everything. I didn’t have that kind of money; two of the three Jewish families who rented flats from me were paying me a lot less now than a couple of years ago. They couldn’t afford any more. Andrei laughed as he paid. Back on the street he said to me, “What use is money? I want your beauty to be well-framed, so that it stands out. From now on, we’ll buy something once a month. In the summer we’ll go to the Vltava baths together; I want to see you in a sky-blue swimsuit: you’ll look like one of those demoiselles that Ingres used to paint.”
“The girls in Ingres’s paintings don’t wear swimsuits,” I protested.
Andrei hugged my shoulders and then, to the rhythm of the spring rain, jumped over the puddles of water.
“Don’t they? All right then, you’ll be . . . a blue butterfly!”
We were heading back home across the Charles Bridge. The red clothes were swinging between us in a net bag like a smoking censer in a church.
“Blue Butterfly!” Andrei whispered in my ear. There was no logic to his words: my brand new skirt was as red as a stoplight!
“I can already see you in your azure blue swimming costume,” he explained, “because I can easily see things in the past and future: I imagine young women when they’ll be old ladies who have trouble getting onto the tram, and elderly men I see as good-looking lads, taking roses to their first dates with girls.”
It seemed strange to me, his seeing girls as old ladies. But I didn’t dwell on it. The wind was lifting up my skirt, playing with it and revealing my thighs. Right in the middle of the bridge we ran into Liza, happy as a lark, and her husband, who had a grumpy look on his face because the wind was also playing with Liza’s skirt and uncovering her knees and thighs and more. Liza, playful, naughty, looked to see if there were any men watching and was pleased to find that there were plenty of male eyes focused on her, because nobody wanted to miss the show; Liza, indeed, had long, slim legs, like a ballet dancer’s, although her face wasn’t so attractive; Liza had small eyes, framed by thick glasses which perched on a nose shaped like a horse’s snout; men didn’t usually take much notice of her and now they couldn’t take their eyes off her. What fun! What an enjoyment! To be the center of attention of all, absolutely all the men, from college students through to stick-wielding grandpas, and Liza, happy as a child, walked on with her scowling husband, yes, he looked like the Japanese god of anger, and he growled to Liza that she should cover herself up if she didn’t want to catch a cold, that she should hold her skirt down at the knee, but she didn’t even consider listening to him, much less obeying him, her husband’s grumbling was inconsequential to her, she, who was exhuberant, enjoying something she’d never experienced before.
When Liza and her husband were some way away, we leaned against a stone balustrade and looked at the river. Andrei was softly singing a song I didn’t know:
Dance and whirl just a little longer
and breathe the perfumed air,
even though you have a yoke on your neck!
And then I saw it. The biblical plague. Locusts, clouds of locusts. Locusts with sticking-out knees had chosen Prague to infect it with the plague.
Along the Charles Bridge, between the rows of dancing statues, walked a whole army of pale, serious, solemn-faced children; they had clearly marked partings that separated their fair, Brilliantined hair that was combed to one side; they wore short pants and tall socks that came up to their bony, prominent knees. Those monstrous knees were bending to the rhythm of a Nazi marching song about joining the struggle; this army of children sang it with frightening conviction:
Die Fahne hoch, die braune Bataillonen, SA marschiert im ruhig festem Schritt . . .
I put my hands over my ears. Andrei sealed them off with his own hands. I bent over the stone balustrade, leaning over the river. I looked at the brownish water as I had looked at the brown battalions of the marching song.
I saw them there, they could be made out in the brownish waves.
There were two. The gray one and the brown one. They had come back. One morning, when I was preparing breakfast for Andrei and myself. Had they really turned up at my home, those two men, or was it a nightmare, caused by my worrying, which, in the years thirty-eight and thirty-nine, made me suffer for days at a time? I had a nightmare almost every night. At the chemist’s, I had heard that while the Nazis were in power, the Jews and the Russians would suffer most. I was being eaten away by anguish for the future of my mother, of Bruno and of Andrei, and, what’s more, my own.
“Have you thought it over, verehrteste Komtesse?”
“What are you referring to?”
“To your becoming officially a citizen of the Reich,” the gray one said.
“I’m sorry?” I was trying to gain time.
“A citizen of the Reich,” the gray one repeated with a smile.
“Yes, a citizen of the Reich, Frau von Stamitz,” echoed the brown one.
“Citizen of the Reich?” I said nervously.
“Yes, a citizen of the Reich, that is to say, an official German,” the gray one explained, seriously now, in a severe tone.
I began to tremble.
“My husband’s still asleep,” I said. This statement made no sense at all, I realized.
“Your . . . husband?” laughed the gray one with unconcealed sarcasm.
“That painter of Gypsies is your husband?” said the brown one, looking in the direction of the bedroom.
“Frau von Stamitz!” said the gray one, shaking his head, as if he was talking to a mental retard.
What do they know? How do they know it? Why do they know it? All this went through my mind.
“Think it over. Take your time, dear lady, it is for your own good.”
“It is only for your own good, we’re not getting anything out of it,” said the gray one with a smile, as if imitating his colleague.
“It is for your own good and that of those who are close to you,” the brown one repeated as if I were deaf.
At the threshold of the door to my apartment, the brown one said to me in a low voice, almost a whisper, while passing his hand over his lower lip, as if wiping it clean: “Just one last little thing, Frau von Stamitz. The greatest service that a woman can render the human race is to help it perpetuate itself with children who are healthy from a racial point of view.”
Now I saw them in the brownish waters of the Vltava, the
gray one, with his white-striped tie, with his small put
penetrating eyes, and the brown one with a gold chain in his
fob pocket and a golden tooth in his twisted smile. While I vomited into the river, Andrei caressed my hair and dried the sweat from my face with his immaculate handkerchief. The May air was cold and I breathed it in deeply through the tobacco smell given off by Andrei’s handkerchief. I rested my head against the stone feet of who knew which saint, like Mary Magdalene. And I longed not to be on the bridge, to not know what was happening, to not have to take any kind of decision, just to be, and nothing else.
I observed the statues, which, a moment ago, had been dancing to the rhythm of the spring; now, black and crude, they grimaced scornfully to remind the passersby of what they already knew: This country is no longer yours! Your national anthem says that this country is your home, but the blonde children with an arrow-straight parting on the sides of their heads, separating their impeccably smooth and Brilliantined hair, with their equally impeccably knotted ties, had camped here, they who knew perfectly well that they were the strongest and the most powerful and the greatest in the world.
I watched the passersby: they crossed the bridge with a weariness apparent in their movements and pace, their eyes empty and indifferent to the fact that that between the tiny drops of rain, rays of spring sunlight were falling. And the phantasmagorical statues were all around us, shaking in a macabre black dance. Der Totentanz.
Arm in arm with Andrei, I walked away from the black statues of death toward Kampa, toward the winding streets of Malá Strana. Toward my home.
One day I was preparing a student for the Music Academy entrance examinations. That day they came back to see me. It was no nightmare. Both men were standing in front of me: the brown one and the gray one.
“Schubert,” said the brown one.
“The Impromptus,” added the gray one.
“Our German music.”
“Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart.”
“The Czech composers are a match for them,” said my student, who still hadn’t lost confidence in the possibility of convincing someone with a logical argument.
“The Czech composers have German schools, that is the only reason why they are a match for them,” said the gray one wearily.
“And you know it,” added the brown one, in an even lazier tone.
I ushered them into another room.
“You are one of us, and that is why we have come,” the gray one repeated.
“When all is said and done, you are German, verehrteste Komtesse,” smiled the brown one.
“And you are about to become a citizen of the Reich,” said the gray one, expectantly.
“Yes, a citizen of the Reich,” said the brown one.
I began to tremble.
“I have to get back to my student,” I said apologetically.
“We’ll wait,” said the gray one.
That was an order.
I remembered the words of the Minister of Defense that I had heard on the radio, his broken voice, his call to the people: the most important thing is that we remain united. It is vital that we do not allow outside elements to infiltrate us. We will not give in to such confusion. I said firmly, “No. Not today.”
“We will be back, we will come and see you another day. Soon.”
“We’ll be back as soon as we can, verehrteste Komtesse!”
They both said this almost simultaneously. Their words sounded solemn. Like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.
I was carrying a new swimsuit in my bag, a sky blue, two-piece affair. It had started to drizzle, the men pulled their brims lower over their foreheads, the women covered their heads with their hats or with shopping bags, and were frowning, bent forward. As Andrei and I rode the tram that went along the riverside the sun came out again. Even in the nice weather, people ran about on the riverbank as if pursued by rabid dogs. Some made gestures of irritation, others looked at the paving with indifferent, lusterless eyes. In a Prague chock-full of Nazis, nobody enjoyed a leisurely stroll through town. I remembered one day when I was little, while I was walking with the Carmelite nuns on the quayside, at this very place in front of the National Theater, we encountered two young men: one with the right side of his hair dyed green and the left side yellow, the other with green on the left side and yellow on the right. They walked along with their yellow sides next to each other. People turned to look at them, some indignant, others amused. Later, my grandmother told me that they were brothers, two famous writers. Or maybe they were painters, I can’t remember.
But now the sun shone and people still hurried home as if it were hailing.
At the Yellow Baths, I put on my blue two-piece swimsuit. We made ourselves comfortable on the yellow-painted wooden floor. Andrei stared out at the waves. I couldn’t help noticing that life in the forest had made his body wiry, strong.
I lay on my back; the sun warming me and raising me up from the floor, carrying me off in spoonfuls to a golden space where it is never cold.
I overheard a conversation in German, very close by. It wasn’t the smooth, gentle German that the Jewish inhabitants of Prague used to speak: the German that I had once despised but which now struck me as familiar and endearing. The German I could hear now, sounded short, grating, voices accustomed to barking military commands.
Don’t think it! I ordered myself.
But the German came closer and closer; it sounded to me like military boots marching on the paving of my conscience. I couldn’t help but recall the conversation.
“We have come in confidence, verehrteste Komtesse,” said the gray one.
“Make yourself a citizen of the Reich,” said the gray one, “You have German blood in your veins and you, Frau von Stamitz, will be a good citizen.”
“We have brought you papers to sign,” said the brown one.
Just then I had a vision: I could see what I was like inside. Arteries and veins and conduits and blood vessels flow into my heart like rivers and streams into the sea. The blood of my father . . . I saw it as the music composed by Lully for the Sun King. The blood of my mother . . . That was clearly Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. The blood of my grandmother was music for a solo piano, the little-known and highly intimate piece for piano, “The Consolation” from Dreams, written by Bedřich Smetana. All this is me, all these rhythms and tones and spiritual states, all these notes and atmospheres circulate through me and run along my veins and flow together like rivers into the sea.
“We have brought these papers for you to sign.”
I looked inside myself again. The blood of my grandmother, then, was Smetana’s piece for solo piano. And my dead husband? And Petr? And Andrei? What music were they? Bruno Singer is Janáček’s opera The Makropoulos Affair, of course. My students are musical instruments. All of this is me . . . but who am I?
The voices were getting mixed up with my fantasizing, or perhaps it was all just a result of my most hidden fears?
“It is your obligation,” I heard the gray one’s voice say.
“We are telling you that this is an order!” the brown one said while I thought about my veins and blood vessels and arteries.
“It is a moral imperative.”
“The moral imperative that Kant talks about in his Critique of Practical Reason.”
“It is the moral law which is in each of us.”
“It is the moral law which is in you.”
“There will be a war.”
“There will be hunger.”
“Your mother has married a man who belongs to the Jewish race.”
“There will be a great persecution of the Jews, which will be harsh and rigorous.”
“And not only the Jews, but of those related to them.”
“And those who help them.”
“Those who are the friends of the Jews.”
“We will persecute all those who are not with us.”
The blood of my mother . . . Mahler’s Eighth, I said to myself so as not to hear the two voices that were so very insistent. How does Mahler’s Eighth go? Pam pa pa pa pa pa pam pam . . .
“Those who are not with us are against us,” I kept hearing in this nightmare. But then I made out the following words very clearly: “On the other hand, whoever is with us will stand to gain by it.”
“If you, Frau von Stamitz, decide to be with us, we can assure you that you will continue to have students.”
“And all kinds of advantages.”
“And favors.”
“You will not lack for food.”
“Medical insurance.”
“You will not be obliged, as will the Czechs, to work fourteen hours a day in a factory.”
“We know how to look after those who serve us. Verehrteste Komtesse, we most sincerely recommend that you sign these papers. In fact it’s only a mere formality, and in exchange you will be able to live more comfortably and be in a position to help your loved ones.”
Then it happened.
The brown one offered me a pen, the gray one pushed the paper toward my right hand. The brown one gave me an encouraging smile.
I reached out to take the pen from his hand.
At the last moment I hesitated. I looked at the other man.
The gray one had a threatening frown on his face.
Frightened, I thought that if they started punishing the Jews and their families, my mother, Bruno, and Andrei would suffer the consequences. As would I myself.
Without a word, I took the pen from the hand of the man dressed in brown.
“Noooooooo!”
I was so horrified I almost fell into the river.
Andrei looked at me, his eyes shining from the brightness of the sun.
I stuck my fingers in my ears. Even so, I still heard his voice . . . “What’s wrong, Blue Butterfly?” I felt his arms protecting me. His voice hummed Schubert’s song in my ear: Darum Sylvia, tön, o Sang, der holden Sylvia Ehren . . . We sat in each other’s arms like this for quite a while.
It was drizzling again. I took my fingers out of my ears. People were leaving, the conversation in German had vanished.
We continued sitting as before, looking at the river, which was gray with dashes of green.
My sky blue swimsuit, which I wore for the first time that day, got wet in the rain, and stained from the wooden floor.
Andrei went missing. He disappeared. He probably forgot about me in the mountains. When he entered the universe of his visions, he forgot about everything else, even the people closest to him. At those times he knew nothing of me, or indeed nothing of the world at all.
My mother and Bruno Singer also went missing.
One day, I heard an appeal on the radio for citizens to help the tens of thousands of families in the refugee camps, whose survival depended exclusively on charity. I thought of my mother and her husband. I hadn’t heard from them in weeks: my phone calls were not answered, and neither was their doorbell. First I went to the bank to withdraw some money, then I headed to the Refugees’ Assistance Association, on Karolína Světlá Street. A young man in charge of the office gave me a bright, grateful smile and asked for my ID. Reluctantly, I gave him my new document, that of a citizen of the Reich. The man looked at me now with undisguised disgust, and said in a voice full of disdain, “We ’re not accepting anything from you.”
I was headed up Jan Neruda Street toward Prague Castle when I suddenly felt weak and had to lean against a wall in front of the Italian Embassy. The statues loomed up from the baroque palace that housed the embassy, threatening me with their silent cries. They yelled and scolded each other; their stone bodies twisted about in a convulsive, hysterical dance. And one . . . with a raised finger, a forbidding finger of the fanatical Counter-reformist Jesuits. I couldn’t walk past them. I went back down, to where I turned left to take another route up: the New Stairs of the castle. Although it was November, I was by now soaked in sweat and took off my dark brown jacket. I remembered the day Andrei and I bought it, that day we were crossing the Charles Bridge; from the rainy, springtime sky, the baroque statues were greeting us with their head and arms . . . That was before the war. Only a few years had gone by, but I feel as if that walk had taken place in another life.
I climbed the stairs to the castle and thought about this morning. In a small café near where I lived I had had a cup of the dirty water that in wartime went by the name of coffee. I picked up a Czech newspaper, which urged the Czechs to “collaborate sincerely with the Germans,” I looked at a few more: they all said the same thing in as many words. When I paid, I commented on this to the woman who ran the café, “According to the papers, what does it mean to be Czech? To be a collaborator?”
I will never forget the look she gave me. Never.
She looked at me scornfully. Worse: with disgust. As if she wanted to say: it is not for you—a captivator and collaborator yourself—to talk of such things; you’d better shut up!
I promised myself I would never go to that café again.
No, I couldn’t ever go there again, just as I could never go back to the baker’s up the street, to the drugstore, or to the greengrocer’s on Újezd Street, nor to the Kampa gardens when the students were there. They no longer called me the Silent Woman, as they had after my husband’s death. Now on occasion they shouted: you bitch, you evil hag! They spat in front of me.
How have they all found out about my signature? About my signature, and the favors I received from the Germans, from the Nazis? In fact, why had I really signed those forms that day, and agreed to become a citizen of the Reich?
Perhaps because, when I was little, Maman had never tired of repeating that I was a noble, aristocratic orchid, destined to a better life than most people. Yes, in part I had done it because of that. Also because I had never been able to disobey a direct order. Orders must be obeyed, so they had taught me ever since I was small.
But it was not only for these reasons: hearing before the war that it would be the Jews and the Russians who would suffer most, I had thought that, if necessary, I could help my mother, Bruno, and Andrei.
My mother and her Bruno. Bruno Singer, a Jewish businessman, a specialist in the world of finance. Bruno, with his wise, intellectual face, a sensitive, refined man, a perfect gentleman, and a wonderful partner when it came to dancing to jazz music . . .
The last time I saw her, my mother had told me, “Sylva, they’re asking me to leave Bruno, they are demanding it! To spare my life, they are ordering me to divorce him. They have told me that an Aryan woman with a Jewish spouse will be sent to a concentration camp if she doesn’t get divorced in time. But Sylva, if I did such a thing, how could I live with myself? I want to be with him. Nothing else matters.”
Here too, my mother outdid me. She always did everything better than me. Always.
What has happened to them? Where had my mother gone? And Bruno? To ask such questions does not mean giving up hope. Not yet.
And what had happened to Petr, my Monsieur Beauvisage? In the thirties, when Masaryk was still in power, he had been the Secretary of the Ministry of Culture and Education of the Government of Czechoslovakia. After Masaryk’s death, he retired from politics to become a university professor. My mother had relayed all this to me in front of Bruno, deliberately, coquettishly, “I never did quite manage to fully understand Petr’s poems,” Maman added, “at home I have a few of his books. The critics praise them to the skies, but I have to confess that the contradictory images that he uses don’t say very much to me.” Petr’s poems didn’t resonate very much with Maman, and I hadn’t even tried to read them, even though my friends and acquaintances liked them very much. That is to say, my erstwhile friends and acquaintances. Everybody now was keeping their distance from me. But, where was Petr himself? The university had been closed. From the beginning of the protectorate and the war, the Nazis had carried off over twenty thousand people to the concentration camps, mainly members of the Czech intelligentsia. That was how they increased the climate of terror in the country. What had happened to Petr?
No! I said to myself as I climbed the steps. No! I have to concentrate: I turned my attention to other things. Higher and higher up the steps to the castle! I can’t, I haven’t got the strength to think about . . . that. If only Andrei were here! Why am I going alone? Why is no one with me? So many acquaintances and friends of mine are in concentration camps. And my former students . . . The Jews are in the camps, the Czechs have other things to worry about . . . Those two men, the gray one and the brown one, made sure I had students, they kept their word. “We know how to look after those who serve us,” they had said, and they hadn’t lied to me, but now I have to welcome those locusts with their socks up to their enormous, bony knees, big as balloons, so that they may play Schubert’s Impromptus in my home. The boys of the Hitlerjugend only play German music, of course. They execute each piece with perfect technique, but do so coldly, mechanically, with severity, without one iota of passion or mystery, and what is art without passion or mystery?
It had been a long while since I last saw Andrei. One day I spotted him in the neighbor’s house. When he finished there, he crossed the road to knock on my door. He came with a bouquet of little daisies in hand, of the kind that grow and flower on park lawns, there are loads of them at Kampa. Before the war he used to bring me roses, but who would dare sell roses now with the airplanes whistling over our heads. Who would buy roses if there was no guarantee of getting home safely with them? Andrei used to give me bunches of gladioli in the summer, armfuls of lilacs in the spring, bouquets of chrysanthemums in the autumn, and always lots of roses all year round. Because he never arrived empty handed, he always brought a gift, and that day he brought daisies with buds as tiny as the haléř, the smallest coin in circulation. He came with a bouquet in his hand and a question on his lips and a greeting in that deep voice of his, but that day I didn’t pay any attention to the flowers or the smile or the greeting. All I could think of was that he had been at the neighbor’s house. I saw red circles float in front of my eyes, then they grew scarlet and then darkened. I slammed the heavy oak door too, so that Andrei couldn’t come in. I heard him ring the bell, then knock with his knuckles and the palm of his hand, and finally scrape at the wood like a little animal while saying my name in a low voice . . . Sylva, Sylva, my love . . . It turned to night and I still hadn’t opened the door. I drank cognac and coffee, and when there was nothing left to drink I smoked some cigarettes that Bruno had left in the apartment a long, long time ago, and I remembered the bouquet of little daisies and wanted to go out on the street and look for the one who carried them. But then once again in my mind’s eye I saw Andrei with the woman across the street: he was smiling at her, she was saying something to him with great tenderness in her eyes, he whispered in her ear, with passion . . . I fell asleep in the chair and when I woke up I ran out of the house, with just a raincoat on, without a scarf or a hat or gloves, because I had woken up with the image of that bouquet. I had rushed down the stairs as if I might still find him somewhere. Indeed, on the ground floor I saw Andrei on the threshold of the empty apartment from which, some time ago, they had taken away a Jewish family, with the grandfather and the grandchildren and everyone. They hadn’t shouted, they had left like shadows, as if they were already no longer there, as if their eyes could no longer see the staircase or the door or the street, as if they were already looking into the heart of horror. Their apartment had been left open. I longed for them to return and told myself again and again that if they left their apartment open, they would come back. The grandfather, dressed in black with a black hat, would return and stroll each day for an hour and a half around the neighborhood as he had before, talking to himself in Prague German, the German the Czech Jews spoke. On Saturdays the whole family would again head off to the synagogue, always on foot, over the Čech Bridge that leads straight to Pařížská Avenue where the Jewish neighborhood is. Yes, all of them together, wearing their very best, the whole family would take part in a Hebrew ceremony, all together. There on the threshold of the Jewish family’s apartment I found Andrei, standing with a small, tremulous smile, round as if he were pronouncing the letter U, as if it were a question or a prayer. As before, I imagined him with the woman across the road and watched the projection of this film of mine, and gave Andrei an icy look.
When I arrived under the Charles Bridge, it was still dark and a siren started to wail ayayayayayayayaya . . . ayayayayayayayay! That day the pitiful, and ill-boding sound didn’t give me goosebumps, but seemed instead to be the perfect, most suitable musical accompaniment to the way I felt. And as the siren kept warning us—ayayayayayayayaya . . . ayayayayayayayay—that in no time at all the bombs would start to drop, ayayayayayayayaya! I remembered how, not long ago, Andrei had told me that for a long while he had been in debt to Jaroslava and that, finally, he was able to give back the money he owed her, that soon he would pay back the lot and then . . . Andrei had sighed with relief, taken hold of my hands, and led me in a kind of tremulous Russian dance.
The deafening roar of the planes shut off the siren, and my own thoughts. I fled for safety in the direction the river was flowing, warplanes crossing the sky and bellowing among the city’s towers. I saw monstrous black birds cawing and flying close to the bridge where I had hidden myself. Which bridge was that? Karlín, maybe? It wasn‘t providing much shelter, but at least I wasn’t alone, lots of mothers had gone there to seek refuge and were hugging their children. You couldn‘t hear the cries of the infants, just the thundering and the booming and the bombs and the explosions and the detonations . . . I realized that it was I who had caused all this devastation and these detonations, that it was my fault that the streets and squares and alleyways and houses of my city were up in flames, because I was a von Wittenberg like my father and a von Stamitz like my husband, because half my blood was German and because I had publicly admitted that this was so the day I had agreed to become a citizen of the Reich, but I knew now, now that the deafening roar of the planes and the explosions of the bombs had pulled the wool from my eyes, I knew now, all of a sudden, for the first time, that I was not German because I lived among the Czechs, who I respected and loathed at the same time, who I venerated and despised in equal measure, and who I both loved and hated. But I still lived among them, I was one of them, just as Bruno Singer considered himself to be Czech, even though the Czech language was like a jigsaw puzzle for him when he tried to read it, and a tongue twister when he tried to speak it, and he had a terrible time writing business letters in Czech. Yes, for the first time in my life I knew, with absolute certainty and conviction, I saw it as clearly as I saw the earthquake and the volcano of the bombs against the night sky, that I belonged to a specific place: here and now I felt so strong and so firm with my new awareness that I left the shelter, that laughable hiding place, in order to curse the sky that had permitted all that horror and the sky full of black vultures that perpetuated it . . . I ran as fast as my legs could carry me to my Charles Bridge and at the break of dawn I saw the black figures standing out against the pale sky. I saw them threatening that sky, warning it, showing their teeth and nails, raising a finger to a point beyond the evil sky, beyond the sky lit with fury . . . And I calmed down, I knew that I wasn’t alone, that perhaps my mother and Bruno Singer had ended up in a concentration camp, that perhaps I had lost Andrei forever, but that for all this I was not alone in my black desperation, my impotence and my helplessness. Those black statues would keep me company, they were with me and would give me shelter. These black statues thought as I did, as, with their fists and fingers, they would threaten that terrible sky . . . above which there was nothing, nothing at all.
Or perhaps there was: hell. For me you will go to the city of suffering, for me you will undergo everlasting pain.
And now it was I who was heading up to that sky, not along Jan Neruda Street, but up the New Stairs of the castle, I was going straight up to the sky, that execrable, evil, abominable sky. At the upper end of the steps I found black stone figures, a gate: they were locked in struggle, trying to murder each other, in a mortal embrace they were stabbing each other with gold daggers.
I avoided them and went on up, higher, infinitely higher until a magnificent palace of white stone blocked my path, a gigantic, white arch, resting on dozens of classical columns. It thundered, don’t go on, here is your goal, here is the heart of hell! And before being sucked into its black entrails, I read on the sign hanging at the entrance that it was the Černín Palace, headquarters of the Reich Protector, that fearful, terrifying man, on the stroke of whose pen each and every Czech depended.
. . . Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!
Winter came. Snowflakes fluttered around the gas lamps.
What nonsense! It is impossible to see beauty when you are not feeling well. Anyway, the lamps weren’t lit, not the gas lamps nor any others. There was only the howling of the sirens, to warn of the danger of an air raid.
Unlike most people in Prague, I had all the coal I needed to stoke up the baroque stove in my living room. I could eat soft, white bread, just as I liked it before the war. I had students, as I did before the war, and charged my usual fees: thanks also to those gray and brown gentlemen. The boys with prominent knees and the girls in long white socks sat at my piano and played Wagner and Beethoven like well-oiled machines. Their parents had military postings with the Heereswaffe, which had occupied Prague six years ago.
In Prague, there were no longer any stout Jewish matrons, laden with gold chains; there were no longer any Jewish lads with ironic cigarettes hanging from their full lips. There were no longer any Gypsy women clinking their glass bracelets and speaking their guttural language, no longer any skinny Gypsy men giving off the odor of strong tobacco.
Eventually my knobby-kneed students abandoned their classical music lessons at the piano and took to whistling a military march . . . Die Fahne hoch, die braune Bataillonen . . .
I went out to look for them, starting with my mother and Bruno. I stopped at the city of Kladno, at the home of my mother’s sister, to stay the night. During the night I heard a strange noise. Gunshots? I couldn’t sleep. There was no way I could get myself to doze off, in that house in Kladno. What was that strange sound I heard all through the night?
It started to get light. I raised the blinds.
The sky was an intense turquoise and the sun was starting to shine. And outside my window some pink, sweet, large cherries were ripening. I stretched myself out on the bed again to look at that miracle. The fruit was bright under that blue sky. I couldn’t help but marvel at this prodigy of nature. I spent a long while enjoying that calm, early summer morning. Suddenly in the distance I heard a drawn-out melody, sung by a women’s choir. There was something strange about this chanting. I shivered. It was a terrifying melody. The cherries still gleamed in that sunny morning. The melody grew closer and closer. I was filled with horror, I don’t know why. I stared at those big, bright cherries through the leaves and branches. The choir moved in my direction, women’s voices, that wept and lamented and howled. The door of my room was opened. My aunt said, as if unable to believe herself what she was saying, “The Germans have executed all the men in Lidice, the next village over, and then they burned and razed the houses to the ground.”
I didn’t have the strength to go through with the journey I’d planned.
When I returned to Prague, it was dark. What could I do for my mother? Me, the frightened orchid who couldn’t even make the memory of the dead seem beautiful.
At a stop in front of the Prague National Museum, I was waiting for the number twenty-two tram when I saw him. Was it him? In the dark I couldn’t be sure . . . “Petr, is that you? I’m sorry, sir, I thought . . .”
“Sylva!” His face lit up. “You’re not going to be all formal with me, are you?” Finally, I’ve found a friend, I thought happily. And suddenly I saw that the sparkle in Petr’s eyes had gone out, like the lights in an opera house. “No, Madam Sylva,” he said coldly, you haven’t made a mistake, it’s me all right.
He looked at the ground as he said it. So he knew about me too? This man, to whom I still had so much to say, whom I still needed so much. How many things I had to tell him! But he said nothing, he simply stared impatiently at the tracks to see if a tram was coming. “My regards to your mother, Madam Sylva,” he said in the end, to break what would otherwise have been a very long silence.
“My mother?” I opened my eyes wide. “She, well, she . . .” Once again, Petr lowered his gaze. Like the statue of Saint Wenceslas’s horse right next to us, I thought, and like Saint Wenceslas himself, and everyone in this whole country who had all looked at the ground and their hung heads. “Your mother too?” whispered Petr.
“Yes,” I said in a low voice. Petr said, almost inaudibly, “My wife too . . . They took her away too, and she never came back.” Then the number twenty-two tram arrived, and Petr got on it. Sylva, how could it be, how could you, how . . .” I read his eyes and his furtive lips. I didn’t dare to get on the same tram. I stood in front of the open door and when the tram pulled away, I saw his lips move. Shame on you, I read there. But he probably hadn’t said that, he had probably done nothing more than bid me an automatic, courteous goodnight.
The shadowy innards of that palace of white stone ejected me like a white whale spitting out an irritating bone. I was dazzled by the brightness of the day. The Černín Palace, headquarters of the Reich Protector, it read on the sign posted on the white building.
“We know nothing about them, and you would be wise to stop looking for your mother and her Jewish husband. It would be in your own interests. As I told you we don’t know anything about them, nothing whatsoever.”
I also recalled the words of the young man at the exit, a member of the Gestapo with a face so white he had surely never exposed to wind or sunlight, “Frau von Stamitz,” he had said, “since you are a citizen of the Reich, I will do what I can to find out what has become of your mother.”
I shut my eyes, so dazzled was I by the white palace that reflected the brilliant sun. Again and again I read the words on the sign.
The trees of Petřín Mountain were in bud. The fruit on the trees of Petřín Mountain was growing ripe. Then trees of Petřín Mountain turned a fiery red. I noticed all this on my walks upward, ever upward, toward that palace of white ice where pale automatons told me time and again that they knew nothing. And I always found one, usually the youngest, who promised, “As you are a citizen of the Reich, we’ll try and find your mother.”
The trees of Petřín Mountain were in bud. Later, the buds opened, and then they became flowers, then fruit. The fruit fell to the ground. Then the trees blossomed again. Why? Who asked nature to dress up so fancifully, so graciously, when the Nazis were burning villages and taking men and women to nobody knew where?
How did Andrei put it? “To know that I do not know is wisdom. To ignore the fact that I know is a sickness.” I knew, but I pretended that I didn’t.
I went down to the muddy path; the bus was driving away with a rusty, clanking sound.
The footpath, which led from the base of the mountain to the high sierra, was a steep climb. Icy rain fell, and I hid the bag under my raincoat in which I carried the letters addressed to Andrei that had been sent to my house; especially the letter that contained the invitation, the invitation on which I had placed so many hopes.
I made my way up through the undergrowth, stepping over stones and branches as big as the arms of a giant. No one was keeping this path in a reasonable condition. I looked around me at all the houses and chalets and huts and farmhouses, all in ruins. Here, far from the big cities, a war between rats had taken place, the rat families had exterminated each other: first the Czechs against the Germans, then the Germans against the Czechs, and then the Czechs against the Germans again.
Against the greenish sky, I could make out a house with broken windows, holes in the roof, and a half-demolished chimney. The chimney was like a finger pointing to the heavens . . . it’s your fault, bloodthirsty sky! I didn’t dare enter. I trembled just to think what I might find there.
Bacchic laughter bubbled out of a clearing in the fir trees, something was moving there. Yes, it was heading toward the path. I had asked for directions to Andrei’s house. The black figure now twisted and laughed as it ran toward me, and embraced me only to step back a moment later and move away from me. Then the scent of its breath, familiar and perfumed with liquor, came back to me. The figure moved its laughing face closer.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“I’m the guardian,” the laughing man sang out.
“The guardian of what?” I asked.
“The guardian of the animals,” he sang, “of the boars and the roe deer, of the squirrels, and the mice and the goats. I’m the guardian,” sang the giggling man and now he was embracing the narrow waist of a birch tree as he danced a wild polka, and then he vanished once more into the shadow of the forest, jumping and singing and giving out euphoric cries, leaping all over the place . . . When he’d gone, I kept my eye open for that figure dressed in dangling, torn rags, with a bottle of spirits in his hand. I would have liked to have taken a swig, as I did years ago from the bottle of the Gypsy patriarch, on this very bend in the path, I thought, there was his house, already in ruins, then and now abandoned, like everything around me, all this mountain scenery inhabited by a single inebriated man . . . a man who, seeing what atrocities had taken place, had gone mad.
Everything was deserted. There was not a light to be seen. Or a flower on a windowsill. Or a lace curtain flapping at some open window. Only broken glass. No homes now. Only ruin, collapsed. Defeat, death. Homicide, fratricide. Cain and Abel. Abraham and Isaac.
A cat. And then another, and two more, came out to see me and caressed my legs with their fur. More and more cats, dozens of cats came looking for me from among the holm oaks, dragging themselves along, winding their way through the underbrush, and then suddenly slipping back into the low thickets. I picked one up in my arms, I hadn’t felt such tenderness in a long time, my face nuzzling the warm, shivering fur. The cat leaped from my arms. “Cat!” I said, “I’m looking for Andrei, I’m bringing him his mail and a small loaf of bread.” The cat understood me, he led me to a house, yes, it was this one, this was his house! He entered the dark interior, the cold humidity smelling of mold and cats.
The house was uninhabited! Where was Andrei? What had happened to him? Had they taken him away too? Or did they murder him, like the others? But he wasn’t German, or Czech, or Gypsy. Why, then? He had friends of all nationalities, but he was good friends, very good friends, with the Gypsies . . . The others might hate him for precisely that reason. All of them.
Darkness, damp air, the stink of an uninhabited house. Nothing but cats everywhere. I explored further and further into the house, I ran into all kinds of objects, and hit against a table. Feeling with my hand, I found a box of matches and quickly lit one, and the first thing I saw was a candle. The candle flame flickered—the wick was probably damp—as I crossed the rooms, which this sickly light was unable to illuminate properly. Suddenly, I noticed something on the wall, a dark stain, and I held the candle up to it. Before my eyes was a large painting . . . Gypsy children and a Gypsy couple dancing, all in red and yellow and orange. On the opposite wall was a Gypsy nativity scene, done in blue.
On the third wall I made out an image of male figures, arranged next to each other in a kind of ritual dance or holy ceremony. They wore long, priestly robes and were touching each other with stretched out fingers. All the priests were the same, all looked like that wise ruler of the ancient Sumerians: Gudea. Gudea, who from time to time, visited Andrei. On the fourth wall there was a big, dark stain.
I was in a chapel with frescoes painted on its walls, a chapel in which I was holding up a little flame. I sighed, then cried out. After a moment, I heard, by way of reply, some muffled sounds.
It was probably only some animal from the forest; why should I be afraid? I thought in an attempt to put myself at ease. I crossed the room to the door. The sounds were coming from somewhere to the right, from a small room with a tiny window sunk into the wall.
I noticed the pile of horse blankets on the floor. That was where the sounds were coming from. My fingers trembled and tried to disobey me when I reached out my hands to that pile.
Underneath was a human body.
Andrei was weak. For days he had had nothing to eat or drink. He hadn’t even got up in days.
“Why?” I asked him.
“I couldn’t.”
“Why couldn’t you?”
“I just couldn’t, not after everything that happened here,” he said. After this . . . He made a sweeping gesture with his hand.
On the wall of the room in which Andrei was lying I felt a pair of eyes watching me. There was a painting: a dark man. A man with large, expressive eyes and an alert, wise face, dressed in a black tunic. His only adornment was a strip of cloth, wrapped around his head like a turban, and marked with cuneiform inscriptions.
“At night . . . did the Sumerian ruler come?” I asked with a sigh.
“Yes. And Gudea said, ‘The name which can be pronounced is no longer a name. In the absence of the name is the start of heaven and earth, and the presence of the name is the mother of all things.’
And then the Sumerian ruler added, slowly, very seriously, ‘The enigma can be glimpsed only when we do not search for it.’”
I understood that this was the vision of a dying man for whom the world had plunged into all the horror it is capable of producing.
I wanted Andrei to take some food, and the sooner the better. I had brought a little loaf with me, but he wouldn’t allow me to give it to him.
“We must celebrate your arrival.”
My coming here had given him strength, and he dragged himself along with faltering steps, leaning against the walls. He made me sit down in front of the house while he made preparations for the party.
When he finished Andrei came over to me, took my arm and escorted me inside like the lord of a castle with his beloved. Staggering still, he ushered me into his chapel where he had built a small bonfire, the way he had been shown by the Gypsies, who also built fires on the floors of the half-demolished houses where they lived. The holy fire of the most ancient of the nomadic peoples, as Andrei put it.
On the walls were the three colored frescoes and one dark one. Now, while the reflections of the flames danced on the walls, I realized that the dark painting represented shadow. Everything was dark, except for the face of the white, illuminated face of a Gypsy woman. She was a moon-woman in the shadowy firmament. I couldn’t take my eyes off that painting. The shining Gypsy woman was leading her people far away, nobody knew where.
Andrei threw two cushions onto a ragged mat that was laid out on the floor. I now saw that he had stoked that little bonfire with some chairs that he had broken into pieces. Outside the forest was drenched, the trees were dripping rainwater. On the mat Andrei had put a couple of plates, my loaf of hard bread, a water jug, a bottle of spirits, and two eggs.
“They’re rotten, Sylva.”
He dusted off the cushion he’d offered me as a seat, and helped me to sit in a cross-legged position.
“It doesn’t matter. They’re eggs!” I said.
He settled down next to me, so weak he couldn’t even cross his legs. He handed me the plate with the two eggs, which he had adorned with a pine sprig.
“Eat them, my love.”
When Germany lost the war, I stopped receiving the rations I had been getting as a citizen of the Reich. Famished, I refused the plate offered by Andrei.
“No. Both eggs are for you. You need them more than I do.”
Eventually, each of us drank a rotten egg. I doubt if I have ever savored any other food as much in my entire life.
The fire crackled and the golden sheen highlighted the delicate features of Andrei’s face. Part of his face shone, the other was submerged in shadow. His pale green eyes glowed, his teeth glimmered above the smooth, gilt hairs of his beard. He spoke in a curious fashion. He said something; his deep voice made it sound important. Then he paused. There was complete silence, and then Andrei, without moving his lips, hummed a melody full of sadness, in a high key that broke at the end to fade away in a deeper tone. It was like the chanting that accompanies traditional Orthodox liturgies. His frescoes too evoked the spiritual atmosphere of a small Orthodox chapel.
With this strange chant, Andrei was telling me that before my arrival he had been convinced that he would never get up again.
“You can’t imagine the horror of what went on in these mountains. Sylva, you know that I have already experienced this kind of thing once before. In the Ukraine, twenty-five years ago, remember? But a second time . . . no, I couldn’t bear it a second time.”
But this time Andrei was different. He wasn’t worried about saving his own skin.
I embraced him to calm him down, he couldn’t stop shaking. He had the same look in his eyes as when he was suffering one of his attacks of madness. I hugged him close. He resisted. He was stronger. The man from the forest. The madman from the forest. The madman among madmen.
I made an unusual effort. I steeled myself to chat away merrily.
“What about these cats, these dozens of cats?”
“They belonged to the people who lived here in these mountains. With so many . . . well, let’s say dying, the cats went wild in order to survive. In the winter, they came to my house to find food and warmth. Until recently each cat belonged to a neighbor, to a home. There were twenty-six, from twenty-six now demolished or half-demolished houses. Now there are only twenty-one cats, I think, although I haven’t counted them for some time. I know them as if they were my own children.”
He didn’t want to talk to me any more about the cats, about the people who had been his neighbors. Those who hadn’t died had to forget the dead in order to survive.
I loosened my hold on the man. Andrei had taken my hand in his, and little by little his shivers and convulsions slowly subsided.
We sat looking at the fire. The firewood sang its sad song.
“Sylva, I don’t want to stay in these mountains of death.”
“We’ll go to Prague together.”
“I can’t live in Prague. You know that.”
“Then we’ll go to Russia together. Why not?”
From my bag, I took one of the letters I had brought him, which I had already opened in Prague to see if it was urgent.
“They’ve invited you to the Soviet embassy, to a reception.”
“Don’t be so naive, Sylva. They’re laying a trap for me.”
“They just want to talk to you.”
“Don’t trust them.”
“They’re counting on you, read it!”
“Sylva, it’s a trick.”
I told myself: Andrei won’t do anything for me. I’m nothing to him. And another sensation imposed itself over this fleeting thought: I needed to cling to something safe, to someone who would take me far from Prague and save me from this destruction.
“It’s considerate of them to invite you, Andrei.”
“Have you taken leave of your senses, Sylva?”
“Don’t you think it’s nice of them to offer you an opportunity to start your life over again?”
Andrei kept his mouth shut.
“Say something, Andrei.”
“Do you want me to get killed over there?”
“You can’t tar all the Soviets with the same brush.”
“What are you babbling about, Sylva, my love!”
“What other option is left to us, nowadays?”
“They’re after me. I know it.”
I caressed his soft hair. In him I saw the fawn from my childhood, fleeing desperately. Andrei grew calmer and calmer, until he became gentle and tender, and, half asleep, he whispered, “When I was fleeing from the Reds, before reaching the Whites, I slept in the forest, in the fields. A Ukrainian peasant took me into his home and dressed my wounds and cured my chilblains. He kept me in his stable. One day he came to see me with a bottle of zubrovka in his hand. He told me his story: ‘The Whites held me prisoner by mistake. Eventually they let me go. For those six months I was unable to say a word to anyone. Six months without wanting to live because of the humiliation of being held prisoner. Only after six months of living in a black vacuum was I able to return to my life.’ That, Sylva, was all the Ukrainian peasant told me. Just that, not one word more. It was the only day he felt like talking, but thanks to his story and then later to my own experiences, I understood there was nothing so terrible or humiliating as lacking freedom.”
The house smelled of mold, dampness, and cats.
Andrei whispered in my ear, “I want to be free and unfettered, like a cloud passing through the sky moves without obstacles all its life, desiring nothing, satisfied with everything everywhere. It is nothing in itself, yet roams the whole earth, without leaving a trace. Now, today, it is resting among the mountains, somewhere near us.”
At that moment Andrei was transformed into a passing cloud. But he was also the fire warming us, and he was the stone wall against which we were leaning, and the four walls that sheltered us.
The flames crackled and the wood snapped. The light projected reflections on our faces, the forms of exotic flowers and phantasmagorical trees.
Andrei, calm now, murmured, “There is no way home. In these azure-dressed mountains I am far from the world . . . Not even the Gypsy women come to see me anymore, or the inhabitants of the village in the valley. Not even the birds visit me. All I see is the curl of blue smoke from the candle, which I always light thinking of you, Sylva.”
Andrei was falling asleep still whistling his words about the clouds and the blue mountains and the valleys, but I wasn’t listening to him, I, too, was whispering my version of the truth into his ear, my secret story, like a lullaby . . . “Andrei, there is something I’ve never told you. I never told you that I became a German citizen of the Reich. Right from the start of the war, Andrei, I was officially German. That’s why they didn’t send me to a concentration camp, Andrei. The way they did Bruno and my mother. They died there, Andrei, for sure. By contrast, I am still alive. Andrei, this is what I have hidden from you . . . Andrei, now that the war is over, in Prague they will hunt me down and kill me, just as the Czechs expelled or killed the Germans from these mountains. I have to get out, Andrei, I have to flee, to escape to some place, even if it’s Russia.”
Andrei, half asleep, said, “But Sylva, don’t you realize that going to Russia would mean going to our deaths?”
But I didn’t listen to him. I could only think about fleeing, I couldn’t go on living like a hunted animal. I had a burning stigma on my forehead and I felt that everyone could see it, that everyone was pointing it out. And that wasn’t all: I was obsessed with the idea of putting Andrei to a test, the test that would show me once and for all how important I was to him, whether he was capable of doing something for me or not.
In his dreams, Andrei must have seen my furtive and half-formed thoughts because he said in a low voice, “Sylva, you don’t know what Soviet Russia is like.”
“Maybe now, after the war, after so much misery and losing so many people, maybe things have changed.”
Andrei was silent.
“Let’s try it, Andrei. If it doesn’t work out, we can always come back.”
Andrei was silent.
I insisted: “I can’t live here now.”
Still Andrei remained silent for a long while. Then he said, in a faltering voice, “My love, you are the most important thing to me. I want you to feel happy, and I want to share that happiness with you. If you can’t live here, that means that we will have to leave. Today you have saved my life, and this life that you have given me, I wish to spend all of it with you. I will go wherever you say. I will go wherever you wish me to go.”
The fire was almost out. Andrei was sleeping deeply now, lulled by my caresses. The embers hissed and barely lit the frescoes on the walls. My eyes wandered from the embers to the painted figures, as if their movement were to have some influence on what was going to happen next in my life.
The next day I took Andrei to Prague.
“Good evening, Mr. Polonski. We are so happy, dear Andrei Ivanovich, that you have come to spend a few hours with your fellow countrymen and that, as a good patriot, you are interested in the fate of your old motherland, which has suffered so much in the war.”
A good start, I thought, giving Andrei an encouraging smile as we headed across the garden toward the main Soviet Embassy building.
“Patriot, fellow countryman, and always motherland, motherland, motherland,” Andrei grumbled, frowning.
“What’s wrong with that, Andrei?”
“What’s wrong with it? Their duplicitous ways, their ubiquitous lies.”
Andrei kicked at a little stone on the pathway. The dust sugared his right shoe.
“. . . with your fellow countrymen, Mr. Lukov, and as a good patriot, you are so interested in the fate of your old motherland that has suffered so much . . . ”
The echoed words of the embassy official sounded strange and absurd.
A dozen waiters in white carried in bottles of vodka and wine and the corresponding glasses and served these with caviar, smoked fish, blini, and bread, along with dozens of other hors d’oeuvres. We all feasted our eyes on such delicacies we hadn’t seen for a good seven years. But we still couldn’t lay into them. The official who had welcomed us at the entrance, now came into the room and addressed those present, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are delighted that you have accepted our invitation to this little get-together. That you have come here shows that you are good patriots.”
Andrei turned to me, “He only says ‘ladies and gentlemen’ because that is the form of address we exiles would recognize. Otherwise he would simply have said ‘comrades.’”
I thought that because of the traumatic experience he had had, Andrei was looking at everything from a negative point of view.
Then the official relinquished the floor to the ambassador, who was also done up in a black suit. He had very thick eyebrows that joined up at the top of his nose, and almond eyes. He gave his speech in a hoarse, nasal voice, “Dear friends, sons and daughters, all of you, of Greater Russia, the same Russia that has generously agreed to protect so many different nations under its wing.”
At this point, the ambassador stopped to cough and take a sip of water, as if he had given a long, tiring speech. Andrei took advantage of the pause to whisper in my ear, “He says Russia instead of the Soviet Union because he knows that if he used Soviet terminology with us, he’d spoil everything. You see how crafty they are? I wonder what they want from us, after they’ve all dressed up to the nines and prepared this banquet fit for a king.”
I answered Andrei with a condescending expression. The ambassador wiped his neck, frowned with his bushy, black eyebrows, and was about to go on when he caught a frog in his throat and started to cough. The speech was adjourned, and as if he had just said grace, it was time to eat. Nobody waited to be told: we relieved our bellies of seven years’ hardship.
We all devoured those delicacies, all of us except Andrei, who didn’t touch a morsel. Neither did he offer me bites of food and drinks, the way he usually did. He acted dumb, as if the food wasn’t there.
Next to the window, a singer with a guitar was swaying in time, dressed in a Russian shirt embroidered in bright colors. I took a quick look around the embassy room: there were balalaikas and mandolins, hand-painted Russian plates and paintings of snow-laden, birch tree forests at twilight hanging from every wall. In the glass cabinets I glimpsed a large matrioshka, dismantled to form an army of identical dolls that were each smaller and smaller until they vanished altogether. I smiled at the poor taste of this exhibition. The singer was taking his guitar from table to table. Suddenly I found he was standing in front of me, singing:
They have taken everything from me: strength and love.
My body, abandoned in a hostile city,
can no longer enjoy the sun. And I feel how my blood
has turned irreparably cold.
I recognized the verse as one by Anna Akhmatova, a poet I had met in Paris long ago, in another life. Most of the audience were deeply affected, several women were crying, many men had taken out handkerchiefs. I looked at Andrei: he too was impressed. I was astonished to see the frankness with which over three hundred Russians showed their emotions immediately. This was even true of those Russians who had spent twenty-five years here in Prague, where we take care to aristocratically cover up any show of sentimentalism. And this was still true even though most of these Russian exiles came from the old nobility. In contrast, Andrei’s eyes were a snowy, Russian pain, over which rolled the ringing laughter of the bells on a troika.
As I watched this scene, I thought of what it meant to live in exile: always hearing a foreign language, being obliged to speak it, to laugh and cry in this language. Or, instead, not to accept it and so condemn yourself voluntarily to a life apart. To see around you, all the time, faces that are still foreign to you, even after decades. What can you do? Stay as you were before, not change at all and run the risk of being misunderstood by most of those around you? Or adapt yourself to the majority at the cost of losing your own personality, your deepest sense of identity? Andrei had solved this dilemma by living far from civilization, well away from Prague’s intellectual circles, which he visited infrequently, only to flee quickly back to his mountain solitude like a frightened animal.
What must it be like, to wake up every day far from everything that you feel is truly part of you? I could see it now, written in the faces of these Russian aristocrats, generals, and artists who, at the first puff of a Russian breeze, cast aside their usual restraints, unable to help themselves, like a river overflowing after heavy rainfall. To experience something that was so much theirs, something that smelled of their forests and their rain, that rain with its peculiar drizzle, which left a taste of autumn on country paths, for them it had to be something worth celebrating. And to savor all this collectively, in the company of those who had at some time in the past breathed the same air and drank from the same rivers, must surely have been worth dressing up for.
This was how the gods of Olympus had punished those who had offended them: Tantalus had fruit and water within reach, but as soon as he tried to quench his thirst, they vanished; Sisyphus pushed his rock in front of him toward the summit, but before he got there, the stone slipped from his grasp, rolled back down and he had to start all over again. They punished Ulysses in this fashion for years. And Dante realized one day that he would have to wait fifty moons, fifty months, before he would be free of the difficulties of living in exile.
To disguise my coolness in that emotionally charged atmosphere, I forced myself to eat and drink. But after a couple of blinis, I couldn’t take anymore. My stomach was no longer used to banquets.
The ambassador, who had clearly never lacked for anything, chewed away at half a pancake with caviar, and then, after chasing it down with a good swig of vodka, he stood up slowly to finish his speech. He spoke in an uninspired, unamusing fashion, and said nothing clever or interesting. He mumbled his speech in a nasal voice as if he wanted to get it over with, the sooner the better:
“Dear friends, we are all children of Greater Russia, the same Russia that now protects many nations under its wing. We have emerged victorious from a terrible, cruel, and bloody war, in which millions of our sons have given their lives for victory. We know that all of you, who abandoned Russia for different reasons, have always been with us and have done what you could for this victory. Our motherland lies in ruins. We must raise her up. We must put her back on her feet. We must rebuild her. And so . . . Our motherland does not wish to fixate on your pasts. With great joy our motherland will greet with open arms all those who wish to return and take part in the rebirth of Greater Russia. Our Bolshevik revolution has proclaimed the great ideals of humanity: the building of a society in which we are all equal, a classless society, a society without rich or poor, free of hostility and hatred.”
Under the table, Andrei grasped my hand.
“Free of hostility and hatred?” he whispered, “Why, Soviet ideology and the Soviet system is based on class struggle, on the struggle against the bourgeois enemy, based on hatred, in other words!”
He was trembling.
I supposed he was right about that, but I remained silent.
“We have won the war,” the ambassador went on, “against a terrible evil. Now we are preparing to rebuild our motherland and a society free of hatred. We are waiting for you, my friends, to join us in a brilliant future full of hope.”
Andrei squeezed my hand. Like that horse in my childhood, which I hugged after they’d beaten it cruelly, I thought.
“Sylva, come with me, I have to leave. I don’t feel well.”
I stroked his hand to calm him down, but knew that I could live in Prague no longer and thought that the ambassador’s offer would be a way out for both of us. Andrei could go there and see what the possibilities were, and he could either come back to Prague or invite me to move to his country.
I told him of my plan.
When he heard it, he was unable to say a word. He had a bad case of the shivers, like a naked man in a gale. After a long while, he said, “It is not the ambassador who is offering this to us. It is the wish of Stalin himself!”
“Of course. And?”
“There’s some evil motive behind it all.”
I pressed Andrei’s hand, but he didn’t stop repeating, “I want to get out of here. I really feel very bad.”
A man with a little white beard and an intelligent face, who was sitting at our table, declared that he was going to go back.
“You are?” Andrei asked in surprise.
“Yes,” the man said firmly, taking a sip of vodka as if to confirm his decision.
“But this patriotic speech of the ambassador about the merits of the Soviet Union . . . ” Andrei said in protest.
“He hasn’t even mentioned the Soviet Union,” said the man with the beard.
“That makes it even worse,” Andrei’s eyes were bright. “He’s a hypocrite. He’s called the country Russia to fool us with a word we might accept. I don’t know why they really want us to go back.”
“Mr. Polonski,” said the man with the white beard, seriously, “it is certainly true that this ambassador is nothing more than a bureaucrat who talks like an ass, but I like what he’s saying. A man has to know what he’s living for.”
“But nobody knows that!” Andrei flew into a tizzy, like a child, “One man convinces himself he’s living for his children, another for his novels or his paintings, like myself, still another believes that he’s living for the cause of universal peace, but deep down none of us know what we’re doing at all!”
“That is a mistake then. We should all make an effort to find out.” The man smoothed back his hair and stroked his white beard with his long, pale fingers. “Here in Prague we get by, but in the end where is this life getting us? Do we know what it is we’re living for here? Back home in Russia, among our own people, we’ll know what we’re about, and our life will have meaning once again.”
Andrei took a deep breath and started to explain, illustrating his words with sweeping gestures. “Life is a boat on the high seas that carries you to any coast, destinations that you yourself haven’t chosen.”
“Mr. Polonski,” said the man with the white beard, laughing in order to hide his irritation, “you are a painter, but perhaps it would be better if you became a thinker specializing in the philosophy of chance fate. You are André le Fataliste, the Russian version of Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste.”
Andrei stared at the plate he hadn’t touched.
“Andrei,” I said gently, “do you really think life is tossing us about on the high seas and we are its victims?”
“We are not always victims.”
“So you don’t think it’s necessary to make any decisions?”
“It is. But from the moment when you told me your story, how you accepted citizenship of the Reich, I haven’t stopped thinking about how hard it is to recognize, in difficult times, whether our choice is the correct one or not.”
“My story? I have always silently obeyed one order or another. Should we obey orders given by a moral authority over those of our conscience?”
“Our conscience changes according to the times and the circumstances. You, Sylva, are not happy with your choice, but if you had made any other, you would have ended up in a concentration camp—I’m sorry, I didn’t want to remind you of that.”
“It doesn’t matter. Go on.”
“In ’38, after the European powers had decided in Munich to betray the agreements they had made with Czechoslovakia, the Czech people decided to fight the German occupiers, even though that meant a lot of bloodshed, but the Czech president made a decision to do the opposite in order to avoid the inevitable bloodbaths that would have resulted. From that moment on, the Czechs have hung their heads in shame. The Poles who, guns in hand, a year later offered resistance to the German tanks, now hold their heads up high, but the Nazis killed many Poles, and razed their capital. Which one was the correct decision?”
“To offer resistance.”
“To assassinate Heydrich, the cruel Reich Protector in Prague, at the risk of one’s own life, was undoubtedly a heroic, honorable, and righteous act. But because of this assassination, the Nazis razed two villages to the ground, installed a reign of absolute terror, and started to deport Czech citizens en masse, as well as the Jews, to the concentration camps, your mother and her husband among them. From this point of view, was it right to assassinate Heydrich? Yes or no?”
“Yes, it was,” I answered, “I think so.”
“But you’re not sure. Take my example. I was convinced the czar’s regime in Russia was unjust and that the revolution was in the right. I enlisted voluntarily in the Red Army, and voluntarily I fought for the success of the revolution. With what result? Today the Red Army is doing horrendous things. Now I know that the regime imposed by the revolution is as unjust as, or more unjust than, that of the previous one, that it is itself terror personified. And I also know that the experiences I underwent in that army were so terrible that I almost died because of them. You see? This is another outcome of a decision dictated by one’s own conscience.”
“So what must one do, then?” I asked.
“Think about the consequences of each step, each decision. Like a game of chess.”
“So calculating?”
“Not exactly calculating. Lucid. Rational.”
“You, a Russian, are invoking rationality?”
“It’s precisely because of that that I have to mention it: to prevent the Russians from spreading further evil around us.”
Andrei looked at the ambassador of the USSR, who had tucked his napkin into his collar like a child, and was chewing away enthusiastically. As he observed him, Andrei said gloomily, “You know Sylva, in a period of calm it’s easy to make the right decisions. But when the going gets rough, it is difficult to see things clearly. It is easy to make mistakes that you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”
The singer resumed with his guitar. Again he sang the songs the audience had liked the most:
Inscrutable you are and always new.
And each day I obey you more.
But, cruel friend, your love
is a test of iron and fire.
During the song, Andrei hugged my shoulders and whispered into my ear, “The next decision will be made by you, Blue Butterfly. Shall we live together? If so, where shall we live? You yourself must tell me. I have given you my word, Sylva. And I want to keep my promise. I am aware of your difficulties here. You don’t want to go on living in Prague? Then we shall leave here together. Tell me what we must do. I know that your choice will be the correct one.”
“And if I say that you should go back to Russia and that I will join you later on?”
“Then I will do as you say. I trust in your good judgement.”
I kissed him on the cheek.