At night I was woken up by the ringing of huge bells, the kind I used to hear when I was little at my parents’ house; the sound came from a nearby village. Bells. They didn’t augur well. They sounded very close, and rang without a break, one after the other . . . Bells? No! This was the thunder of the gods, the Dies Irae.
I got up and from my attic window in the Vinohrady district, I watched the river of huge metal objects that was flooding Francouzská Avenue. The clamor of those hellish monsters silenced people’s fear, their cries and moans. All you could hear were the blows and their echo, the blows of metal against the stone of the street; those monsters were the absolute masters of sleepy Prague, of the city that was now waking up with a shock in the middle of the night amid the roar of those savage metallic beasts. Those iron beasts were bursting into the circus into which our city was being turned, so that its inhabitants could become a source of amusement for a depraved emperor. Morituri te salutant, Caesar!
I picked up the phone, finally hearing its ringing in between the passing of one iron monster and the arrival of another. I could hardly hear anything that was being said over the line, the racket on the street was drowning everything out. I was sure that it was Jan who was calling. My son, who was in Sarajevo, wanted to know what was happening, and how I was, how we all were. And he wanted to tell me . . . to tell me something that, although I couldn’t make it out, I knew what it was, yes, I heard it all right . . . “Mama, I won’t return to a humiliated country, I can’t live in a country that from this moment on will be trembling forever under the heel of a foreign power, more than it has ever done before.” And I knew that Jan was right, and I knew I was signing my own death sentence when I said, “Jan, my child, don’t come back.” Yes, I was signing my own death sentence because I would never see my son again, because I wouldn’t be able to leave the country to see him, and he wouldn’t be allowed to come here to see me. All this I knew perfectly well, as I said those prophetic words . . .
“Life here will be impossible, Jan.”
I couldn’t spend any more time at home; that nightmare had me running out onto the street. The sun had been up for a few hours.
The tanks were pushing their way through the crowds, and people dodged them. Young men circled the tanks on motorbikes at incredible speed, they rode through the spaces between one tank and the next. I closed my eyes: I thought a man in a red T-shirt was going to fall with his bike under the metal tracks of a tank. Finally he shot off to the right, out of the path of the armored vehicle.
Cameras were focusing on the tanks and clicking away. Movie cameras hummed. I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, down there on the street, there was a little boy, holding a stone in his raised hand. He was about to throw it. At the tanks? He was very young, still a child. There was no hatred in his eyes. Only excitement. And tension. He was carried away by the overall atmosphere, by the intoxication of the moment. He was looking forward to an adventure, that little boy holding a big stone in his hand. He was strong. He raised his hand some more. Any moment now he was going to throw it. It was heavy, too heavy to reach the top of a tank. The boy was getting himself all worked up: he made a violent grimace and stuck out his free arm to prepare his aim. He drew back his other arm, to gain momentum and was aiming at the upper part of the tank. The tank officer aimed his machine gun at the boy. To frighten him, only to threaten him, I told myself. Then the boy drew his arm back a fraction. He was getting ready to attack. Or was he? Couldn’t his arm simply have dropped back a little under the weight of that rock? The tank would withstand his attack, even supposing he went ahead with it. They were strong, they were armed to the teeth, but the tank kept on coming and the boy didn’t step out of its way. Step away! I wanted to shout from my vantage point. I wanted to yell: Stop the tank! Stop it! But I couldn’t get a word out. Too late. I shut my eyes.
When I opened them again, there was a flurry of activity in the crowd. The officer was putting the machine gun inside the tank. I saw people’s eyes were wide with horror. I didn’t understand. My brain wouldn’t obey me. I was thinking of only one thing: That was Jan! My little Jan! Where is Jan? Some women were howling, others were crying. Men were tearing up paving stones. The women, too, were throwing stones.
The column of tanks moved away from that place.
Jan!
I gave out a cry that was inaudible, but everybody was screaming and roaring, and I was going away, staggering, far from those swarms of people, I needed to wake up from this nightmare and feel sure that boy wasn’t Jan. Jan had called just that same morning. Jan wasn’t a boy anymore. Jan was abroad, free from danger . . .
But Jan wouldn’t be coming home.
That thought stuck its beak into my stomach. Jan wouldn’t be coming back. I wouldn’t see him again. I couldn’t go and see him; the borders had been sealed off, or would be soon. The cage door had closed once again. I would never see him again.
I watched the desperate crowds, but felt sorry only for myself. The rest were nothing but props for my own grief. I looked at the statue of Saint Wenceslas on his horse: both horse and rider had bowed heads. The horse was moving forward bit by bit, reluctantly. It wasn’t trotting, it was stumbling. Everything was sad in Prague. Jan had left and would never be coming back. For the first time, I had understood something that I would have once disagreed with: that a personal concern could be stronger than a collective affliction. On the day of the Soviet invasion, I understood it for the second time.
Once again, they forced me to move, this time to a one-room apartment in a prefab building on the outskirts of Prague. In the library, I’d been relegated practically to the status of pensioner, with the lowest possible salary. So that I, who had lived in Paris, I, who had been addressed as Madame l’Ambassadrice, I, who had conversed with President Masaryk, now lived alone and removed from everything, and only rarely had guests at home, inviting them only so that the four walls in which I lived might be gently touched by human voices and not just by my memories, which were forever floating in the stuffy air of my modest room.
I saw myself . . . I was Sylva, the silent woman whose hair was now white. Since Jan had gone into exile in the United States, my hair had turned the color of milk. Not the Nazi occupation, nor the war, nor the loss of my beloved, nor the terror of the Stalinist years had been able to make my hair snow colored; only the loss of my son had managed to do that.
I haven’t seen Jan for five years.
Five years . . . What are five years when compared to an entire lifetime? What are they, sub specie aeternitatis?
No. Five years are an eternity for a mother.
And Andrei? Twenty, twenty-five, twenty-seven years have gone by without seeing my Andrei. Twenty-seven years that stretch into infinity.
I was gazing through the window of my apartment on the outskirts of the city. When the rays of the setting sun had reached the highest flats and stopped dazzling me, I looked out at the surrounding buildings: what uniformity, not a bit of imagination, just insignificance, grayness, and boredom, Communist buildings! Beauty says nothing to the Communists, they never seek any kind of artistic pleasure. For them, the yearning for creative beauty and aesthetic feeling are the marks of a decadent bourgeoisie and aristocracy, that is to say, their class enemies. The other day in the library, I was leafing through a book on the history of art, and, remembering Andrei and his dreams of Sumerian sages, I took a close look at the Gate of Babylon, which is now housed in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. The writing, in cuneiform script, on one side of the door, says more or less the following: “I am constructing a building of monumental beauty so that its solemn splendor may remain for all time in the memory of the people, so that all humanity may forever admire its sublime magnificence.” By contrast, the Communists have never bothered with this kind of beauty, as if they were afraid of it—just as they fear humor and irony—because they don’t understand it. They aren’t interested in building anything lasting, on the contrary, they tear down monuments dedicated to their own leaders as soon as one disgraces himself. Perhaps nothing will remain of the Communist regime, in a few centuries’ time. Only a few thousand uniform buildings, dull and uninspired, with a provisional feel to them, will bear witness to future generations of the bitterness of so many soulless lives.
Then I saw a red geranium on the windowsill. It rose, content, after the rain, stretching itself lazily, and shaking its branches, aware of its charm. It stood out against the background of gray buildings like a light among shadows.
Five years. Twenty-seven years. Does it make any sense to go on living?
Does it?
Yes, it does. To live for the memory of my son and for the memory of the man who was my great love, to live for my memories like the red geranium in the middle of a street of gray houses.
And, if no memory remained, no recollection, it would be necessary to live for the flower alone.
Twilight was falling. I saw myself reflected in the suddenly darkened window; I saw Sylva with her white hair: the woman whose son and beloved were in exile, each in a different exile. I watched her, that woman who had conversed with President Masaryk, who had lived in Paris, she, Madame l’Ambassadrice.
I watched Sylva as she placed a candle in the dead center of the table, thinking as she did so about another candle, a long time ago, in the Café Louvre in Prague. I watched Sylva as she placed the new candle next to the vase with its red flower. The flame flickered; like the wings of a newborn fly, thought Sylva, smiling because the Café Louvre kept coming back to her, time and again. Then a gust of wind reminded her that she still had to take in the washing if she didn’t want it to freeze during the night.
The clothes were still soaking wet. And icy now. Sylva briskly closed the window. She’d attend to the clothes in a little while. The candle’s flame had settled down so now it radiated peace and tranquillity. That day in the Café Louvre, they were sitting at a round table, Sylva recalled, her eyes fixed on the icy darkness on the other side of the window. Whoosh! A gust of wind had shoved the window open, angrily blowing the candle out.
Sylva took in the clothes that had been hung out on the line, throwing them, wet, into a tub. She closed the window and, moving automatically, put the tub away under the bathroom sink. She checked her watch: she still had time, before the arrival of . . . It didn’t matter who turned up, as it wasn’t going to be Andrei. She turned to the window. It was now completely dark and a few dogs were barking in the street. The sound of barking dogs that she had so much enjoyed hearing in the villages near her parents’ chateau, here, in this block of prefabricated flats, reminded her of the muddy, lonely streets of those bleak outskirts.
What had the dogs been like, in that remote epoch, in Prague of the twenties, that was once so elegant, avant-garde, and free? Sylva made an effort to think of more agreeable memories . . . Another howl of a dog—this time, the neighbor’s lapdog, followed by the shrieks of its hysterical mistress, screaming at it until she was hoarse. Tired out. Like me, Sylva thought, feeling as she did like roaring the way her neighbor did, or even better, howling like that dog. Standing on the linoleum floor, she imagined she was sinking into mud with her shoes on and all, just as she did every morning when she hurried to catch the bus that took her to the last station on the metro line, which took her to the tram station, where she took a tram to the library.
She picked up a box of matches. This was her daily ceremony: hand . . . match . . . flame. Candle . . . flower . . . glass.
The telephone, I must pick it up, Sylva thought, darkly, hearing that piercing ring. If only she could finish her daydream, and mentally project herself to its end, she thought, putting her hands over her ears. The man had said such-and-such and then . . . no. The telephone had broken her dream into little pieces. She would have to put them back together . . .
“Hello? Oh, good afternoon, Monsieur Beauvisage. Are you on your way? No, no I haven’t forgotten, how could I! Really, Petr, supper is almost ready! Well, you could bring a bottle of wine if you wanted . . . From Mělník? Absolutely not! Yes, I told you, of course I’m expecting you.”
Why had she said the supper was almost ready if that wasn’t true? To get him off the phone, of course. Sylva took a board with three or four types of cheese on it, among which there reigned a French camembert with its fabulous cape of ermine, white as snow on a mountain peak.
Sixty-seven years old now. In five or six years, she would retire for good. Would life end then? What would be left of her, she who had lived in Paris working as a cultural ambassador, she who had been able to play the piano like an angel? No one would weep over her grave, no desperate husband. She would leave behind no book of poems, no oil painting of a mimosa bouquet. Just a few candles at the bottom of a dustbin, candles that served as witnesses to her evenings with nothing but the barking of dogs for company.
Quickly, I must get dressed! she thought. Sylva put on a black skirt. For whom was she dressing with so much care? For herself. She released a sigh. She gave herself the once over: Wasn’t the skirt too tight? Not at all! Not for nothing did she practice yoga. On the first day, the teacher had said to them: “Those adept at yoga must always remain calm, relaxed, and also ensure they are on friendly terms with both themselves and others.” When she heard that, Sylva knew she was going to continue practicing yoga. She knew of no other place in Prague where people were so relaxed and friendly. Everybody—with their lack of any kind of future prospects—carried their portion of concern, envy, worry, fear, and boredom with them to work and on the metro, as if they were carrying an eggroll wrapped in aluminium paper. Sylva, on the other hand, went off to do yoga every Wednesday evening with people who were making an effort to turn themselves into calm, friendly souls as they attempted the Cobra Position, the Lotus, or the Dancing Lord Position.
The doorbell. With a final glance at the mirror, Sylva smoothed her thick, dark eyebrows. She looked through the spyhole. Petr was standing in front of her door, frowning and touching his gray hair with nervous eagerness. Sylva opened the door. Petr gave her a hug, looking at her with his round eyes that still had a touch of ingenuity in them; and his face lit up.
“It’s so dark in here! Are you meditating or something?” Petr asked as he walked in, already looking for a light switch. “Can I put on a light?”
“No!”
Sylva took the bottle from him and looked at the label: a young wine from Mělník.
“There wasn’t anything better,” Petr said by way of an excuse, noticing her stern expression. She said nothing.
Sylva shook her head, smiling as if she were forgiving someone she considered inferior. Suddenly, a bird started to flutter about inside her, then it opened its beak and . . . Sylva felt a tremendous urge to drink wine, glass after glass, to drink and laugh and find herself in Paris—a twenty-year-old pianist again with a brilliant future. She wanted to forget the mud of the Prague outskirts, the solemn faces that accompanied her daily on the bus, the metro, the tram, and in the streets, to drink with a musician, a violinist, of course, to raise a toast and gaze out on the lit-up Parisian boulevards from a first-floor restaurant, to clink glasses happily amid the lights of the metropolis. She picked up a corkscrew and a bottle of Tokay. As for the other bottle, they would wait and see.
“Let’s travel!” Petr said, taking Sylva’s glass away from her and opening up a travel brochure. “How about a trip to Spain? We might be able to get visas.”
The blackbird inside her opened its beak once more. In her mind’s eye, Sylva saw the golden clouds of mimosa cuttings which her colleagues sometimes gave to her on the eighth of March, International Women’s Day. But now she was imagining an entire mimosa tree, the golden fleece of the Argonauts, a forest in Paradise comprised only of mimosa trees, lit up by the sun.
“Are there mimosa forests in Spain, like the fir forests here?” she asked.
“Maybe, I couldn’t really say, but I’m sure there are forests of palm trees.”
“And why go to Spain, why not to Paris?”
“I want to see the Costa Brava, to sleep in a white hotel listening to the sound of the waves. And then later, to have a whole day with nothing but sun.”
His teeth shone in the candlelight, as if the southern sun had already given him a tan. Behind him, Salvador Dalí was lifting up the edge of the sea to discover what lay underneath. The Costa Brava . . . She would go to Dalí’s house, and touch it with her fingertips. The walls would be baking hot from so much sun. Sylva would place the palm of her hand on a white wall and let herself be filled with all that sweet heat, so that she would never feel cold, ever again, not even when she got up in the morning when it was still dark and hurried over the puddlesto the bus stop, her hair still a mess, or in the evening, when she took the same route back and finally opened the door of her damp little apartment on the outskirts of the city. She took a long sip of wine.
Petr got up and began to stride back and forth: two paces here, two paces there, at one point, feeling a helmet that had once protected the head of a knight, or tapping the torso of a suit of armor. On the chair next to the window were a few sheets of paper. Petr bent down to read them, more out of whimsy than any real interest:
The era of imposed oblivion, the dark era of forced blindness, the era of having to walk blind and deaf and dumb among the shadows, has arrived.
As he read, Petr remembered that Sylva had told him that a woman doctor the authorities allowed, very rarely, to take part in certain scientific conferences in western Europe, had offered to smuggle out a letter from Sylva to Jan, which the doctor would post to America from somewhere abroad. As he read, Petr realized she had searched with some difficulty for the most suitable words, that with a considerable effort she had composed these sentences to describe her situation and everybody else’s, now, five years after the Soviet invasion. Petr felt that Sylva had written all of this reluctantly: she was aware of the extent of the tragedy affecting all Czechs, she didn’t want her son to suffer on her behalf, and, nonetheless, she tried to give her son the most precise information possible.
As you probably know, Jan—the new Communist authorities, the neo-Stalinists, are setting culture back twenty years, back to the depths of the fifties. Many Czech writers have gone into exile abroad, as have the most important musicians, painters, film directors, and scientists. There has been an entire Czech exodus. The other day I read these words in a samizdat publication: “Before forcing him to drink a cup of poison in punishment for having offended the local deities, they offered Socrates the possibility of exile. The philosopher said that he preferred to take heed of the laws of his own city, where he has lived up until now as a citizen of the world, and only afterward would he go into exile, through the Greek sky, off to the cosmos.”
Son, I feel something similar. Despite which, I am deeply grateful to you for your offer to join you in America and to remain with you there. I don’t know if I will be able to express my thoughts clearly enough. My whole life long, I have obeyed orders, I have satisfied other people’s wishes, and so it was that I gradually lost touch with myself. I didn’t know who I was, what I was like, or what it was I had to do. With this disjointed way of going about things, I hurt myself, but above all I caused a great deal of pain to those around me. If only you knew what I have been guilty of! My first husband killed himself; it was my fault that your father was sent to the Siberian gulag; during the war I betrayed my country. And all because I obeyed the dictates of those who were not the people I should have listened to. I married a man I didn’t love, I made your father go back to Russia to prove that he loved me and I became a citizen of the Reich out of fear because I lacked the courage to realize what it was I had to do at that time, the kind of courage that my mother had in spades. Now, at last, it would seem that I have found myself. I firmly believe that no one will ever be able to order me to kill that which I love most.
I have taken refuge within myself, Jan. Of my own free will I have distanced myself from my friends and colleagues, and from the political and cultural debates and discussions that the dissidents organize in the strictest secrecy. Perhaps you will criticize me for this. But the fact is I only have faith in what I can do by myself, I take pleasure only in little, everyday things. I have dug myself in, here in my solitude on the outskirts of Prague. Like someone seeking sanctuary in a monastery, I have fled from a world to which I am not bound, at a time when hypocrisy reigns mightier than ever. During the darkest periods of our recent history, the times of Hitler and Stalin, our moral values began to deteriorate. That process is continuing now, nobody knows the difference between good and evil. In Moscow, Mr. Semyon—you remember him, don’t you, Jan?—told me that a man who survives the gulag or any other system involving the extermination of men by other men, remains devastated by the experience. The world around him becomes a place of exile. It becomes a humiliation that lasts forever, and humiliation is as painful as physical torture during an interrogation. From a world that humiliates me, that humiliates all of us who live in this country, I have taken refuge in myself, as if I were my own convent. I lack for nothing, I depend on myself and myself alone, the gray, rainy autumn sky is as appealing to me as a wonderful sunny day. I lack for nothing . . . No, I won’t lie to you. There is something I do find lacking. I lack tenderness . . .
“What is your son doing now, Sylva?” Petr asked.
Sylva said nothing.
“What is your son doing now?” Petr insisted.
“He lives in America, where he is a prestigious mathematician specializing in cybernetics. He’s doing research into electric cars now,” Sylva said, matter-of-factly.
“An exile,” Petr sighed.
“Yes, an exile,” Sylva repeated in the same weary voice.
“There are so many emigrants . . . when is the stream of people who smuggle themselves out of the country every day, going to stop?”
“I understand them,” Sylva said, thoughtfully, “They want to live as they please, not according to someone else’s whim, and here, they can’t do that.”
“They are weakening us.”
Sylva didn’t answer. With her nails, she traced shapes in the wax that had fallen from the candle onto the plate.
“This exodus is weakening us. Don’t you feel weaker, Sylva?”
With her nails, Sylva drew a flower, a four-leaf clover, a teddy bear with round ears. In her mind, she had gone beyond the conversation. The flame in the dark was whipping at her thoughts.
“You’ve probably had supper, haven’t you, Sylvette? So I’ll gobble all this down on my own,” Petr said, without waiting for Sylva’s reaction.
His job as a parking lot attendant has changed him, Sylva thought, he’s Monsieur Beauvisage no longer, elegant as he was, with that air of poète maudit about him. The atmosphere in which we live has changed all of us.
“Don’t you think, that with all these exiled people, we have grown weaker? Don’t you feel weaker, Sylvette?” Petr toyed with the last morsel of camembert on his fork, before popping it into his mouth. “Yummy!” he said.
Sylva wanted to leave. Where was her handbag? And her coat?
But she was in her own home! She couldn’t run away. She had to stick it out, no matter what. How can a person change so much? she asked herself again.
“How much did it cost you, this French cheese that I’ve gobbled up in no time? Two hundred crowns? How many hours would I need to work to earn this ephemeral piece of food that has only lasted me a couple of minutes?”
Petr picked up a pencil and, drawing highly complex equations in the margins of a page of the newspaper, worked out how long he would have to work in order to earn two minutes of gastronomic pleasure, how many days, how many hours, and probably how many seconds.
“You know, Petr, whoever can, gets away from here, flees from this deathly atmosphere as if from the plague.”
“We don’t have any incentives, or any freedom, that’s for sure, but so what? You can take pleasure in what you find within yourself.”
“That’s not good enough for everyone, Petr. Who can be interested in what you do, if nobody, in the end, cares whether you work or not? How can anyone live like that, especially young people?”
“It’s good enough for me.”
“For you, maybe it is, but a young person needs to face up to the outside world, just in order to know himself. The more there is to face up to, the better.”
“This country is good enough for our dissidents. They write their novels and their philosophical essays here. And even if they’re not allowed to publish, they make an effort to keep a smile on their faces.”
“Petr, making an effort to seem happy has nothing to do with real happiness. It is nothing but a contrived grimace.”
“They are bound by friendship, and loyalty.”
“Who is bound?” Sylva smiled wearily.
“The dissidents.”
“Friendship, certainly, now that they have a common enemy. But if they lived in freedom, you’d soon see just how well they’d get along with one another.”
“You’re a pessimist. You can’t deny that these are people who know how to love, who feel that love is an incentive.”
“In the dissidents’ ghetto, promiscuity is a substitute for freedom of expression.”
“You paint everything gray, no, black, Sylvette,” Petr said, shaking his head.
“I know these dissidents of yours well enough. Helena was a young violinist who lost her job in an orchestra because she’s a dissident. She was a friend of Jan’s. There is just as much sadness among the dissidents as there is among the rest of us; sadness and boredom and ennui.”
“Sadness? Are you sure? I would say rather that they share a tragic spirit, a common sense of tragedy.”
“No, Petr. You’re sugarcoating it. Tragedy is energy, flight, zest, pathos, dignity. We live in a dull vacuum with nothing glorious about it at all.”
“You talk as if you were the victim of an injustice, Sylva.”
“No, it’s not that,” Sylva watched the wax circle spread as the candle kept dripping onto the plate, “My fate has not been unjust to me. I look back without regret at all those years of humiliation, first because of the Nazis, and now, for the last quarter century, because of the Communists.”
“Sylva, it is good to regret the negative parts of our lives.”
Sylva didn’t answer until after a long pause. She did so with a cry, albeit one in the form of a whisper.
“If I were to regret all those years . . . what would be left of my life?”
Petr raised an objection, but Sylva paid it no more heed than if it had been distant rustle of tree branches. She looked at the flame, and her thoughts toyed with another evening, long ago.
“Do you still do some accounting, Petr?” she said, smiling at the edges of the sheet of newspaper, packed with equations.
Petr pushed away the newspaper and the pencil. He took Sylva by the arm. His eyes rested on her lips.
“That’s right, I’m always doing sums of some kind. It’s a professional drawback that comes from spending every day charging people for parking spaces. But I also count all the obstacles I will have to cope with before I can have you . . . the way I want to. Like this.”
Petr hugged her with both arms. Sylva saw that he was emotional.
She, on the other hand, was anything but. She dwelled on very different images.
Sylva released herself from Petr’s embrace.
“You always say our, our . . . ” she said, “Our dissidents, our country, our nation. Humph!”
Sylva wrinkled up her nose. Was she capable of loving a nation, a country, a collective? Suddenly, she heard herself say, “Spare me your groups, your collectives. I want to live! I want them to let me live, to breathe! I want to be me!”
“I’m sorry?”
“I want to be me, nothing more than that!”
“I most definitely believe in working for the good of a collective.”
Sylva told herself that she liked this Monsieur Beauvisage she saw now, with his shining eyes as they were then, in that remote time, in that remote chateau.
“We live in a cemetery, Petr, can’t you see that?”
“What will become of us?”
“You’re like an actor in a tragedy,” Sylva gave a tired laugh.
“No, I mean it. What will become of us?”
Sylva took a long sip of wine. She walked over to the window and looked into the darkness, saying more to herself than anyone else, “It is our fear that allows them to subdue us.”
“Fear?”
“By playing on our fear, they keep us in a state of constant panic. We’re afraid they’ll punish us for a crime or misdemeanour we haven’t committed. We know we haven’t committed it and still we’re afraid.”
Petr stared at Sylva’s glass without seeing it.
“Sure, I’m afraid, me too, but I know I should stop feeling this way. I should get rid of such an obstacle to inner peace.”
“You won’t manage to do it, Petr. Everybody’s afraid. Whatever we do, we always act under the influence of fear. And that’s what is humiliating.”
Petr blinked several times, uncontrollably, violently. Sylva thought that maybe this was a nervous tic left over from his time spent in a Stalinist prison.
“But don’t you think that . . . ”
“Come on, Petr, don’t kid yourself. Our life is nothing but humiliation with a capital H.”
“But, perhaps you can just ignore it and . . . ”
“Ignore what? Ignore that at any moment they can take the few things you have left? Ignore that they have managed to grind you down, to shame you? That they’ve won?”
“What do you mean that they’ve won? They haven’t as far as I’m concerned, Sylva.”
“They have, Petr. They have turned us into exactly the type of people they wanted us to become: run-of-the-mill citizens, bothered only about day-to-day problems, without any grand ideals, or anything to look forward to. We’re capable of denying ourselves everything for months and months because we’re dying to get hold of some Spanish entry visas. Have you any idea of the wasted energy that that entails? When we worry about such things, we’re unable to spend time on things which really matter.”
“Sylva, there’s something you need to know. You’ll have a go at me, I know you’ll say it’s trite, but to be honest it’s what I feel: even in prison, one can be free.”
“That’s a pretty-sounding thing to say. Just try it, Monsieur Beauvisage.”
“You’re a spiteful woman, I knew it. I don’t need to try it, I do it all the time. My work consists of taking people’s money so they can park their cars. Do you know what I like best about this modest little job?”
“I’ve no idea. I mean you’re out there in the freezing cold, they haven’t even given you a shelter!”
“What I like best about the job is that I don’t have to put up a front. If I want to speak ill of the regime, I do so. In your line of work, of course, things are different.”
Sylva looked at the cast iron helmet, staring the armed knight in the eye. The light of the candle’s flame danced over it: the knight had come back to life. Sylva addressed her reply to him, “Yes, everybody pretends to believe in Communism, those at the bottom and those at the top. I don’t. They’ve taken everything I had, they’ve dispossessed me completely. I haven’t got a thing, which is why I feel free.”
“I don’t see the logic of what you’re saying, Sylva.”
Sylva addressed herself once more to one of the resuscitated knights who were trembling to the rhythm of the candle’s edgy flame.
“They took everything away from me, even the piano. They’ve made it impossible for me to move, to travel, they have taken my son and the man I loved. There is nothing else for them to take away. I am nothing, I have nothing, I desire nothing. I’m free. Maybe that’s the irony that lies behind this regime: they take everything away from you and by doing so they liberate you.”
Sylva gave a melancholy smile and went on, “Petr, the other day, in this cupboard here, I found a photo album. There’s not much of a chance I’d run into many of the people in those photos in the streets or concert halls of Prague these days. My mother and my father and my grandmother and even Mama’s second husband, are all dead. Jan and his closest friends are in exile in the United States and Canada and Switzerland. The only one left to me is Helena, Jan’s ex-girlfriend, a woman whose life has been very different from mine. With the photos on my lap, I started daydreaming: I had ended up on the seashore, where there was nothing but black willow trees and black sand under a dark gray sky. I dug a ditch in that sand and filled it with the blood of the dead animals that were lying close by. Then the souls of unknown dead people appeared, along with the souls of others who I knew and will never see again. Those shadows wandered around the ditch full of blood. The inhabitants of the kingdom of shadows, the inhabitants of Tartarus, were coming toward me: figures in white and black and gray, that could barely be made out against the black sand and the black rocks that enclosed the bay. In that strange procession I recognized my father, my mother, and Bruno Singer, my first husband and all the friends and loved ones I had lost. As the shadows of the dead were passing by, my mother stopped, ‘You have brought the wrath of the gods upon yourself, daughter of mine.’
“My mother’s shadow looked at the horizon, as did Tiresias, the blind fortune-teller, who was there as well, not very far from my mother. And the Black Lips—Maman—slowly pronounced their verdict, accompanied by an echo from the grave, or so it seemed to me, ‘You have brought the wrath of the gods upon yourself, daughter of mine, because you never used your own head, but allowed yourself to be swayed by the opinions of others.’
“‘What can I do to make up for my errors, Maman?’
“But my mother wasn’t listening. The Black Lips went on weaving their oracular spell, ‘Andrei, the father of your son, has not ceased waiting and hoping that he will see you again; he often weeps for you. Your son is fulfilling his destiny, but he is alone. Alone, daughter of mine, he seeks solace in feverish work and has gained worldwide prestige. And I? My longing to see you and my grief upon discovering that you had forgotten me when I was suffering in the Terezín concentration camp, cut my life short.’
“My mother walked away, and with her the other shadows also wandered off. Those people who knew me waved when they passed by, and immediately disappeared into the mist.
“Only the shadow of my first husband passed in silence, his head bowed. Even dead, he resented me and would never forgive me.”
“I understand you, Sylva,” Petr said, although he didn’t understand a thing, or precisely because of that. He couldn’t understand her because he was thinking about something else. After a moment of silence, he told her about his idea, “In The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal talks about Fabrizzio, who, when he’s imprisoned in the tower, is happier than when he was free.”
“That’s a novel. Don’t tell me you’re influenced by rubbish like that. Freedom is a synonym for happiness, at least it is so for the great spirits.”
“I am indeed influenced by it, and am happy to be so. Fabrizzio was happy because his love was also in the tower, Sylva.”
“Not a love, an illusion. Don’t be naive, Monsieur Beauvisage, it’s been a long while since you were twenty years old.”
Petr got up and approached Sylva. He bowed over her.
“Sylva, would you . . . ? Would you want to marry me?” he said in an uncertain voice.
Sylva didn’t move a muscle. She thought that Petr now looked just as he did a long time ago at the chateau, in a similar situation.
“After fifty years, Sylvette!” Petr added. So he too has been thinking about events back then, thought Sylva. Petr gave a little laugh to cover up the catch in his throat.
Sylva moved away from him, threw her head back, and sank into the darkness of the past, lit up by the lampposts in the park of the chateau.
Once again, she released herself from Petr’s embrace and sat down at the table.
“Sylvette,” she repeated.
The only reply was the sound of a dog barking and then howling. The window trembled from the gusts of wind. “Sylvette,” she said, quietly. The wind was whistling on the far side of the window, as if threatening her. Sylva took a long look at the candle flame, until spots began to dance before her eyes.
Slowly, she brought her face closer to the candle. She took a breath and released it with a puff.
The candle went out.
Sylva went over to Petr.
“My name is not Sylvette,” she said in a metallic voice, in the middle of the dark. And she added, in the same tone: “Yes, I’ll marry you, Petr.”
Untethered, she ran through the shadows.
A dog howled on the street. Gray light heralded the dawn.
After a short while, the first morning bus passed by, sounding its horn, and, for a fraction of a second, it lit up the wall of the room.