I take another sip of the hot chocolate; it reminds me of the touch of my grandmother’s fingers. My gaze slides down to the floor, to my feet in two differently colored stockings. One light, the other dark.
I’m in such a tizzy. Like that day, a thousand years ago when I was a young girl in the chateau garden, the garden of my home, on the path by the riverside . . .
Above us a blackbird happily chatted away. I looked for it among the branches to see if it might be carrying a worm in its beak. And then I sank down into mud. Petr took my high-heeled shoe out of the muddy puddle and cleaned it. When he’d finished he made me sit down on one of the low branches of a hawthorn or a plane tree so he could remove the mud from my foot with his handkerchief. He spent a considerable amount of time rubbing away at it. Then suddenly, as if making an offhand remark, he said, “Sylva, she’s a poor woman. Your mother is.”
My mother? Madame la Comtesse? I didn’t understand.
Petr cleaned the mud off my foot right up to the ankle. Then he wrapped the handkerchief around my foot and kept rubbing it. Like a mother swaddling a newborn, I thought. When the handkerchief was all dirty, he scraped the mud from between my toes and wiped the sole of my foot. There was something in that mud that couldn’t be cleaned away.
On the way back from the convent to the chateau, we laughed about my feet, one belonging to a little white girl, the other to a little black girl.
An elderly person likes to sing the praises of the past.
One black foot, one white one. That was fifty . . . no, fifty-five years ago. It’s as if thousands of years have passed me by. The thousand-year-old woman remembers. That could be a title for my memoirs, assuming I should ever want to write them. Clouds of steam have covered all the platforms, the only thing shining is the glass on the stopped clock near the ceiling.
I taste the hot chocolate, again, I feel my grandmother’s supple fingers, the only fingers able to make me feel safe and sound in that haunted chateau . . .
On the way back to the chateau, which belonged to my parents, the sides of the path were lined with yellow and white daisies and poppies and chicory and apple trees. Memories of my return trip come to mind, as do the reasons why I left my home for the convent. There is a single main reason for this, which I’ve never confessed to a soul. My mother often went to Prague to a ball or to the theater, to the opera or to a concert. She would put on her blue theater coat, the one with white ermine fur at the collar and the cuffs, and if she was going to a ball, she would put on the olive-green lace dress, or that sleeveless, pink satin one, and gloves so long they reached beyond her elbows. Often she wouldn’t even say goodbye. I waited for her under the big archway of the entrance gate on the far side of the bridge, and threw myself at Maman’s neck. I smelled her pompadour rose perfume and cried and shouted at her not to go. Maman always disentangled herself from me coldly, “What a pampered child! Back home with you!”
And then there was the case of my father’s house slippers. I embroidered them with little blue flowers with orange stamens and green leaves on a black background. It was a lot of work; if I didn’t get one of the leaves right, I had to unstitch the entire flower. After a few months, everything was ready. The shoemaker put the finishing touches on them. I placed the slippers in a box that I wrapped in silky green paper. The following morning I handed my father the gift, tied up with a golden ribbon. Papa tried on the slippers and thanked me for them, but remained aloof. In the evening, when everyone was asleep, I was feeling hot, so I opened the door that led onto the corridor. Then from papa’s room, I heard his voice answering some question of my mother’s, “What a ludicrous thing, giving me slippers! They’re too small. I like best my usual ones, those really light fur ones!” I hid myself under the eiderdown so they couldn’t hear my sobs.
When I left home for the convent, the night was dark, moonless, but the sky was splashed with stars. We passed through a silent landscape, the only sound was the neighing of the horses and the clip-clop of their hooves against the stones of the unpaved road. From one village to the next, the dogs greeted each other with barks, as our squeaking, creaking carriage moved on. In the sleeping villages behind dark trees and bushes, white houses glowed and I said to myself that on a night like this everybody ought to feel happy. The starry sky above and the unreachable horizon ahead made me ponder my future at the convent, and I imagined it full of veneration, beauty, and tolerance, brimming with magic, silence, and mysteries.
The return journey to my parents’ chateau: a coffee-colored automobile, complete with chauffeur, drove over an asphalt road, with poppies and lilacs growing along the edges, and the apple trees wrapped up in billowy white clouds. From afar I looked at the ruins of a little castle on the hill, two fingers trying to touch the spring clouds, and suddenly our chateau appeared. Years had passed. From a distance, my parents’ chateau looked like a wine-colored glass box, decorated with white ornaments, like one of those boxes that ladies keep in their boudoir for perfumed handkerchiefs and love letters. When we got close, I saw that during my years of absence the plaster had flaked as if it were the surface of a croissant. We entered through the main gate, the arch, and crossed the little bridge where the servants bid me welcome. Well, no, not exactly. Rather, they acted as if they were bidding me welcome, whereas in fact they were watching me as if I were an ogre from a fairy tale.
Maman wasn’t at home, Papa wasn’t either.
In my room, they had placed a big, shiny piano with golden letters on it: PLEYEL.
In the evening, my maid passed on the message: they were waiting for me upstairs. So I went up the palace stairs, up, up, and ever up. Then I climbed a spiral staircase and when I was so high up I couldn’t climb any further, I saw the silhouette of a mature, well-built woman. This lady turned her back to me and walked away to the right. Not knowing what to do, I followed her. The lady entered a room, and I was right behind her. She circled around a long table, I did the same. We skirted that table more than once, more than twice.
The lady went up to the window, and opened it. Then I saw that wonderful thing.
Against a background of darkening turquoise blue sky, dozens of volcanoes could be made out, their mounds both great and small like a row of dusky pyramids, and those volcanic hills were spitting clouds of fire and sulphur and lava into the air. The lady positioned herself so that her face was not visible, all of her was in shadows, and from her hair snakes of fire raised their heads. An Egyptian goddess. The queen of fire.
Then a young man came into the room.
They served me dinner at the table of my apartment. I was very hungry and there was only a tiny handful of rice with prawns on a huge plate. I was ashamed to ask for more. Then the door opened and the room filled with the smell of chocolate. My grandmother stepped from behind this aromatic curtain holding a silver tray with a cup and a few books on it. I took the cup of hot chocolate from my grandmother’s supple fingers. In silence, I savored the steaming chocolate.
My grandmother watched me with her opal eyes. She gently stroked my hair with her smooth, soft palms. Although I preferred sitting on my own and in silence, I talked to my grandmother about all the things that I’d once longed to find in a religious place like the convent, but which, when it was all over, I hadn’t found at all.
My grandmother sighed, “Sylva, very few things in life depend on whether we long for them or not.”
By way of demonstration, she told me some of the myths of ancient Greece, and in the books she had just brought she showed me illustrations of classical heroes and heroines, old engravings on silky paper. Before going to bed, she gave me the sign of the cross. Her fingers gave off the smell of chocolate.
Once in bed, I felt strange in these surroundings. I thought about the goddess of fire. Her image would not go away, a beautiful, voluptuous profile danced in reflections of burning lava. I started to play Schumann’s Arabesque, but it didn’t calm me down.
In the morning I awoke at the crack of dawn, and went up the winding staircase in silence to the room where the evening before I had been led by that luxuriant woman who had showed me the beauty of her figure against the foil of the stormy sky. But there was nothing unusual now in that room. Though on the round table, next to the sofa, I did discover a pair of small, decorative combs, the kind used to hold a coiffure in place; their inlaid jewels shone like dewdrops in the brightness of dawn.
Clouds of steam have covered all the platforms. An elderly person is an adorer of old times, I say to myself, and aren’t my memories old? I raise the cup to my lips. The steam has covered all the platforms, the only thing shining is the glass of the stopped clock near the ceiling. What time must it be now? Must make sure I’m not late when the train I’m expecting finally pulls in.
In the silence and darkness of the convent I was astonished by the paintings of biblical scenes; almost all of them were examples of obedience to the will of God or of punishments of those who failed to abide by it. Those images disturbed me. I found it difficult to understand them and I balked at the idea of making them part of my life: God orders the angel to expel—rather rudely, in fact—Adam and Eve from paradise. Why? For having disobeyed an order and eating an apple. Or the flood, what horror that was! The little children who drowned in the waves were guilty of nothing but being born! Why did God punish them? Or Lot’s wife, who was made into a pillar of salt simply for turning around to look at her home. Orders and bans. Must one always obey orders, no matter how cruel?
The story that struck me as being more brutal than all the others I couldn’t get out of my head. God said to Abraham, “Abraham! Take your young son, your only child Isaac, who you love and for whom you have waited so long, and offer him up in sacrifice.” Abraham was prepared to do as he was commanded. Why? For the simple reason that the order came from his god. And God, when he saw that Abraham was so obedient, was happy and rewarded him. Is this kind of blind obedience a good thing? Is it good that, in order to satisfy his god, a man should kill the one he loves more than anything in the world? Is it good to obey a god as egocentric as this, a god who is capable of giving such a brutal order and putting someone to such a cruel test?
There was nobody in the chateau I could talk to about this. I tried to talk with the stable lad.
The young groom, Jakub, was the only person I could spend a little time with and get everything off my chest, talking nonstop, there in front of the stables.
“Why did they send you to the convent?” he asked me one day, with a sardonic grimace that I didn’t really understand. “You aren’t the type of lady who wants to be spending time enclosed with nuns, a girl as pretty as you . . .”
And he laughed again, with those half-closed eyes that made him look like one of the Chinese people on my parents’ tea set.
“Why did they send me to the convent? Nobody sent me there. I was the one who asked to go there,” I told him, without giving a thought to his strange behavior. “I was looking forward to seeing life in Prague, walking along the side streets of Malá Strana, spending time on the benches on Kampa Island.”
All this I said to Jakub, a strong, tanned man who smelled of horses. I was well aware that he wasn’t listening to me, and I didn’t tell him the truth anyway, not the real truth as I saw it. How could I tell him that before I sought refuge in the convent, my mother, the Countess von Wittenberg after her marriage, had been going to the balls and theaters of Prague, and that my father, who had always been Count Wilhelm von Wittenberg, was spending whole weeks at a time in Germany, while I felt quite alone in that huge chateau? How could I tell him that I used to sit in a chair staring at the wall, hoping that someone would come, anyone, even Death if necessary, who would carry me off to his kingdom?
Jakub smoked a cigarette while I told him that I had gone to the convent, to a school run by enclosed nuns, filled with hopes that my new teachers would answer my questions about the meaning of things, that they would show me what the world was and what I was doing in it. I told Jakub that I had gone to all the Masses, praying through the winter with my bare knees on icy stone, wanting my suffering to freeze over my questions, but question after question kept popping up in my head, like spring air that slips through even the smallest gaps into cold, sealed-off rooms. I said to Jakub that I had wanted so much to help the poor and the sick, but had realized that at the convent nobody wanted any help from me, that the only things the sisters were after was my father’s money.
“I wanted the convent to help me think things over,” I told Jakub, finishing the conversation, “but the church asked only for my blind faith. And I didn’t want to grope my way around like a blind person.”
I know that the chateau’s young stable lad had no interest whatsoever in the story of my disappointment in the convent. He kept smoking and ogling me with those Chinese eyes of his.
“Come on, let’s go to the stable, I want to show you something,” he said in a voice so shaky I could barely make out his words.
He opened the stable door.
I abandoned the sunlight, entering a darkness redolent with animal stench.
“Oh là là, what is he teaching you, this young man who has just left your chambers with a pile of books, mon enfant?” Mademoiselle Lamartine was notable for her incapacity to hide her inquisitiveness. In fact, she was really called Mademoiselle de Lamartine. She would correct us, and most emphatically, every time we dropped the “de.” Madame de Lamartine, my tutor in French language and literature, had a weakness for perfume. She would wear navy-blue dresses, tie her hair up in a bun, her gold-framed glasses would dance about on her nose, and her whole body would give off a greenhouse aroma.
“Do you like that boy?”
“Mais ça alors!”
“I can see that you’re falling in love with him!”
“The things you say, mon enfant, c’est honteux!”
“Ahem, I also rather like this Monsieur Beauvisage.”
“Is he French, comme moi?”
“Monsieur Beauvisage, Mr. Handsome Face, is called Petr, and he’s teaching me about the French poets, especially Baudelaire.”
“Mais non! That’s not possible! I am the one who is introducing you to the French language and the French poets, ma fille! But not a word more about Baudelaire, he is not a suitable poet for young ladies. Tell me about him!”
Her tone was like the ruler that she just used to slap me on the back of the hand.
I had no wish at all to turn that ruler into my confidant. What business was it of hers that Petr, or better said, Monsieur Beauvisage, was my tutor in world literature and the Czech language, and that my mother had found him for me? By the way, my mother also rather fancied Monsieur Beauvisage, without a doubt. How she narrowed her eyes when she led him to my apartment!
“What has votre instituteur taught you? Dites-le moi!”
The ruler was now striking the table.
“What has he taught me? Listen carefully,” I said as I began to recite in Czech:
Come to my heart, soul mute and wild,
adored tiger, nonchalant monster;
I want to sink my trembling fingers deep
into the grave thickness of your mane.
I added, “But you don’t know Czech, Mademoiselle Lamartine, oh, pardon, de Lamartine. How long have you lived in this country? A good ten years, isn’t that right?”
“I communicate in German, I do not require Czech.”
“And what is German to us! We’ve been an independent country for three years now. Do you want to hear how these verses sound in French? Listen,” I said, and recited them in their original language.
“Mais quel horreur! Such rudeness! Does your mother know what kind of thing this shameless fellow is teaching you?”
“Not only does she know, she is in full agreement with what he is doing.”
“I must talk to her about your education. What else have you learned from votre instituteur?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere! You liked that poem, you really liked it!”
“I have to tell your dear mother about this whole affair, and I need to be informed of every single detail of your studies.”
Mademoiselle de Lamartine was pacing back and forth, stiff as an inquisitor.
Biting her lip, as if wanting to hold something back, she gave me a furtive look and said, “Today we shall practice the past perfect.”
The afternoon before the ball that my parents were giving at the chateau for their friends and acquaintances, I went out into the garden for a stroll. I sat close to the lake’s fountain and the nearby rock, the coziest and most poetic place in the entire park. Like Narcissus, in silence I watched my reflection broken into a thousand pieces on the water’s surface, there where the stream from the rock splashed onto it. This is me, I thought; me, shattered, me, smashed like a water jar on paving stones.
I remembered that on one particular day, with my fellow students at the convent, we went for a walk in Prague; I must have been about thirteen then, and I saw a throng of people burning the Austrian flag in the street. I ran over to the blaze as fast as I could—I, who had grown up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I, the daughter of a German aristocrat—to save the flag from the fire. The crowd hurled insults and shouts of revenge and reprobation at me, and shooed me away. But there was a most kindly gentleman who said to me, “Listen, girl. Listen, you soppy thing,” and he explained that things had changed, that the war had ended with the defeat of Austria-Hungary, and that we, the Czechs, no longer formed part of that empire, but lived now in an independent state, in the Republic of Czechoslovakia.
I didn’t understand a word he was saying.
But soon I realized that everything was changing: the names of the streets and the signs on the shops were now in Czech. On the postage stamps, the old man with the cross expression, Franz Josef, had been replaced by a gentleman with a beard and ruddy cheeks, who was also old and looked like my grandfather when he was still alive and would sit me on his knees and play that game There Go the Gentlemen, There Go the Ploughmen. My grandmother told me that the man with the white beard was our president and that he was called Masaryk, and that he was a philosopher and a wise man, and above all, he was Czech. “Like us,” she said.
Overnight, my mother began to speak to me in Czech. Not like before, when she mixed a couple of Czech words into her German, together with the odd exclamation in French, as if she were adding spices to a sauce. Now she spoke nothing but Czech. My mother also started to learn to write Czech, and became an actress in a Czech amateur theater company. My father spent little time at the chateau, for weeks on end he was in Germany consumed by work.
I looked at my face, deformed by the water’s flow: that was me. I, who had confessed all to the stable lad and followed him into the stable. Afterward, without saying a single word, I washed my hands, sat in front of my Pleyel piano, and played Chopin’s polonaises. That was me, Miss Countess Sylva von Wittenberg.
One day, after I had come back from the convent, my mother asked me to go up to her chambers. She received me as she
might a friend, as an equal. Then I knew for sure: the enigmatic Egyptian woman that day in the dark room had been my mother. Over the years that I had been away, she had put on a little weight, and now seemed to me more feminine and better looking than before I had left for the convent. And the mountains behind her? They were volcanoes, it is true, but extinct ones, and above those distant volcanic hills, on the horizon, dozens of lightning flashes had drawn zigzags on the sky. My mother had prepared an unusual spectacle for me. Was it really for me? Or maybe . . .
“Do you know, Sylva,” she said to me, steeped in a cologne that I didn’t recognize, as fresh and gentle as the singing of angels, not like the reek of the stuff Madame de Lamartine used. She was wearing a rather sporty white, pleated skirt, and a sky-blue shirt in a gentleman’s cut. It was an effort for me to concentrate on what she was saying because I was watching her in silence, entranced. “Do you know, Sylva,” she was saying, “you come from a distinguished and eminent family, your grandfather was not only a great violinist, but also a great Czech. It is due to him that Czech culture has not fallen into oblivion and has not died under the pressure imposed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that is to say, the pressure of German culture. You are from an eminent family, Sylva, and that makes you different from other people. Your origins make you elevated and noble. You must assert yourself, daughter, you must assert yourself both before the eyes of those around you and in your own eyes, because if you know how to show what you are worth, if you are clearly aware that you are elevated and noble, others will respect you and treat you like a great lady. I once read about a beautiful and proud aristocrat who lived over one hundred years ago, a Spanish woman who was the muse of the painter Goya. She said that whenever she entered a soiree, the musicians had to stop playing. They couldn’t help themselves; they were so stunned by her beauty and comportment. Look at these flowers, if I had filled this vase with a bunch of daisies of the type that grow on the roadside, or with a posy of poppies and other wildflowers, my visitors would think I was vulgar and tightfisted. This is why every day I make a fresh arrangement of two dozen magnificent orchids. You too must be like an orchid, beautiful and noble, cold and inaccessible, a flower that does not give its scent away to the first comer, but rather keeps its perfume to itself.”
I was watching my mother. She was like a Meissen porcelain cup, a prodigious object whose signature was marked in gold: two swords and the hallmark. It was this distinction that made Meissen cups different from the other tea and coffee sets that were used at the chateau: the set from Vienna had a crossed, closed V on it; the one from Sèvres, two LLs; the one from Berlin, two bars. My mother paused, paying attention to the orchids in their large vase, and then went on.
“Life has taught me the secret that I shall now go on to share with you, Sylva. Listen well, daughter: the woman who wishes to have the respect of both society in general and that of her immediate circle in particular must possess the ability to become as exquisite as an exotic flower. In the morning, in the dawn’s first light, you must be like a white flower, fragile and innocent. Throughout the rest of the day too, for that matter, you must continue to be like a bud that the gardener has just cut from his favorite orchid—a flower as white as marble, which the painter would place on a tablecloth of cream-colored damask, the folds like baroque angels, the sun’s rays playing with them, dying them the tenderest shades of pink. And in the evening? In the evening and at night you will transform yourself into a flower that is dark, but no less exotic. Yes, daughter of mine, at night you must transform yourself into a flower that exudes a scent of sandalwood and poppy, a poisonous flower placed in a slim, blood-red vase. Like serpents of paradise, the most exquisite and antique jewels will be wrapped around the vase, and their rubies and diamonds shall project their inscrutable and enchanting luster onto this flower.”
I didn’t take my eyes off the huge vase full of delicate pink orchids.
“To ensure that others respect you,” my mother went on, “we must start with your appearance. What you need is a new coiffure and a brand new wardrobe. And a new way of addressing others. You’re stilted; you speak very little. I don’t want you to turn into a silent woman. Starting tomorrow, you will be given lessons in Czech and world literature by a student who is on summer holiday and can teach you these subjects.”
“The express train from Ostrava has been delayed,” announces the man on the PA, interrupting my recollections. This voice is clear, friendly, and despite the urgency of the warning, gentle. A sensitive man, no doubt. The trickle of water from the rusty tap on the wall has reached my feet. People would hardly notice that. A gentle dribble, thin as a snake, that goes where it wishes and takes possession of anything it wants, quite unnoticed. This is the only truth I know: old age. It came in on tiptoe without knocking, and ever so lightly, rested like a snowflake on a chair, and stayed with me.
The time came when I couldn’t take the convent anymore. My father had me released without uttering a word to me. When I got back home, neither of my parents were in. And in the evening, the Egyptian goddess and a young man. In silence, the convent schoolgirl left the room.
I always leave, everywhere I go. I flee. Silently, so as to pass unnoticed.
Who am I? I asked myself, staring at the water. Who? A German or a Czech? A countess, or the progeny of a musician—a man of the people? A little daisy like the ones people press into books to dry them out, or a proud orchid, like my mother wanted me to be? A future Carmelite nun or a coquettish, young woman? The daughter of an aristocrat, or a lady pianist specializing in Chopin’s nocturnes, which she and she alone can play like an angel? Girlfriend of the stable boy or Fräulein von Wittenberg?
I am all of this, I think, and I continue to contemplate the uneven surface of the water in which I can make out the fragments of my face.
At six in the evening, a lady with a white, rococo coiffure arrived. The coiffeuse. Not our usual coiffeuse, but the one who would create something special, worthy of the ball to be held at our home. She would have to curl mine and Maman’s hair, so she said, but my grandmother would have none of it; it went against her principles, she insisted. I saw the disdainful look my mother gave her. The curling tongs, those pliers for frizzling one’s hairdo, left our hair dry and burned and brittle; our hair was so curled we looked like a pair of ewes. The coiffeuse had given my mother a Greek chignon, as she called it, that hung down over the nape, and she ran around her with a hand mirror so that Maman could see it from different angles. All the while the coiffeuse screaming at the top of her lungs, “Oh, what a profile, you look like the empress, Madame von Wittenberg! Yes, you’re the spitting image of the Empress Elizabeth!” When she’d finished, she burned my hair again, and then my ear, and tied the hairdo down with such force my eyes nearly popped out of my head. I felt I looked a fright, with two different ears, one ending in a point, and the other hanging too low.
The modiste brought me my dress for the ball, which was as yellow as a dandelion. Once it was on, I couldn’t breathe. The modiste added a lot of ornaments that made me look like a caricature of Madame de Pompadour. Blushing from shame, and my eyes red from crying, I made my way to the ballroom.
What brilliance! I couldn’t make out the girls’ faces, blurring as they did into the lights and candelabra. The brightly colored dresses seemed to dissolve into huge bunches of exotic flowers. I had the impression that a shining treasure had been put on display before me. Seated on my chair, I watched all those fireworks and floated on the waves of Strauss’s waltzes. How could I have spent so many years on my knees, praying in the shadows of the convent!
Seated silently in the midst of all that musical commotion, I realized I had never once danced with a gentleman. Only with other girls in my lessons, but they didn’t like dancing the part of the gentleman and would tread on my feet. My mother flew from one pair of arms to the next. My aunt and my cousin, too. I was the only one still sitting. As always, my parents paid no attention to me. I ought to have complained, given that this was my coming out in polite society! Yes, I would complain, but to whom?
I saw myself as a tall tree, a slender palm tree in the desert. Everybody could see me, everybody could see how ashamed I felt.
I was scrawny. Not thin, but rather bony. My mother was svelte and feminine, and tanned from so much tennis playing and swimming. I was as white as a drop of milk. My hair was a light chestnut color; it wasn’t blonde or brunette. Altogether, I was poorly outlined. Transparent.
Each of the girls dancing around me was different, unique. Their shoulders and arms were rounded, their cleavages were cut from alabaster, their hips and breasts were well delineated, their waists flexible and their smiles, alluring. I, on the other hand, was just a piece of wood, like a stick or a shelf, a dull little girl. Like a page, like a little boy dressed up as a girl. I was proud. I tried to convince myself that I was a cold and distant orchid. But around me everything was joyful, only I was waiting for something else.
I’m going to go, I told myself. From here, too, I will flee in silence. I will sit at the piano and play one of Bach’s sarabandes. But where would I end up? I would have to go back to the convent. I would go with my face all covered up and would live for an ideal, nothing else.
“This is your first ball, is it not?” a curly-haired man asked me in German. He was shorter and much older than I was, and his tummy stuck out. He was looking at me through thick glasses set in a gilt frame.
Our dancing was lackluster. It didn’t matter. At last somebody had asked me to dance.
“How did you know?” I asked in surprise, but mentally corrected myself: a noble orchid should not have reacted in such a way. I decided to say something cold and elegant.
“It’s obvious,” he said with indifference.
“I do not understand you, sir.”
He danced on his short legs with sureness and aplomb. He pressed me closer. When I said something to him, he didn’t look me in the face but fixed his stare on my cleavage. That made me feel both piqued and proud. He was the only man who had shown any interest in me. He held me firmly. I found him repugnant, and yet reassuring.
“As I said, you could see it at first glance.” He sighed. “How warm it is! Shall we take a seat?” He bowed before me. “Farewell, my lady, may you have an enjoyable evening.”
I wanted to go home!
At home? But I am at home!
I wanted to go home to the convent.
The corners of my mouth sagged downward. Quick, to the powder room! Or better still, I’ll flee to my chambers.
I made my way through the crowds.
All of a sudden, he took my hand and put his arm around my waist. My fat little waltzing partner! I smelled cigar smoke and sweat. That little man stood on tiptoes and leaned into my ear. He didn’t look at my face. He was staring at the cleavage of my ball gown.
“What is your name, silent Miss?”
“Sylva.”
“Sylva, from Latin. It means forest. Yes, that name suits your personality.”
I hadn’t known my name had that meaning. I smiled.
He went on, in a low voice.
“You are still very young, but one day you will turn into a bonbon, all chocolate outside and cognac on the inside, remember that!”
A woman with more experience would have slapped him then and there, not only for being impertinent, but for the ungraciousness of his metaphor. I, a foolish convent girl, stared ahead of me, thinking, he’s German, he’s just spoken to me in Czech with a heavy accent. Does he know what he’s saying? I felt like hitting him with my fists; I felt so powerless. It was this same powerlessness that made me burst out laughing.
“Is it too warm for you, Miss Sylva?”
I stopped laughing. Why was everybody going on about the warmth?
I turned around, bad temperedly.
Monsieur Beauvisage!
We danced the next waltz. Monsieur Beauvisage was telling me something and asking me questions, but I wasn’t listening. I let him lead me to the rhythm of the waltz. We spun around and around, and the lights and the brightly lit candelabras were burning in the beaming faces of the girls and the flames of the gladioli in the vases turned into long ribbons that floated around us, fanning us and linking us together.
With ice cream confections in hand, we walked through the chateau garden. I led my companion over to the artificial lake, with its fountain set in rock. Then I realized a couple was already sitting there and that we might be bothering them, but we had already taken our seat.
I had never seen so many stars in the sky. It was as if I’d asked Saint Peter for them and he had arranged for an entire army of little angels to light tiny lanterns in the sky, and to keep on lighting more and more.
As soon as we sat down, Petr started to talk a blue streak, then recited:
To exist in shame, spindly, fearful
shadows, sprawling and feeling the walls;
nobody waves to you any more, ill-fated ones!
Leftovers of humanity, forever past your prime!
“Do eat, Petr, your ice cream will melt,” I interrupted him.
He pushed the saucer away. He was lost in thought.
“Petr,” I said, “why did you recite those verses about spindly shadows on such a marvelous night?”
“For just that reason. Old ladies are marvelous too, more so, even.”
“I’m sorry?”
“They have an admirable inner life. All that suffering. Because there are so few people who are able to grasp the beauty of it.”
“Look, Petr, is it really necessary to talk of spindly old ladies, precisely now, when we have flowering gardens at our feet and the starry sky above our heads?”
I wanted us to continue in silence, without talking.
“What you’re talking about is the kind of beauty that anybody can comprehend. A banal beauty, which bad poets and young ladies’ private diaries have thoroughly trivialized.”
I blushed. Petr went on, “Read the works of Baudelaire and Božena Němcová, Miss Sylva, and you will find that true beauty lurks in the humblest of things, in everything that at first sight seems so poor and unflamboyant.”
I thought to myself that I too, should look for the hidden beauty that Petr so admired. I couldn’t take my eyes off the bench where the young couple embraced each other. The young man was caressing the arms, shoulders, and breasts of the girl. She wasn’t moving, or even breathing, so as not to spoil the magic of the moment. I looked away.
My eyes turned to my own cleavage. I’m still a little girl, I thought; and lightly, as if without meaning to, I rested my head on Petr’s shoulder. He didn’t move, but he stopped reciting poems.
I looked once again at the couple on the bench, on the side of the artificial lake. The girl had also rested her head on her sweetheart’s shoulder, as if she were my mirror image. The young man went on caressing her. His hand was deep in her cleavage.
I looked at Petr out of the corner of my eye; could he, too, see what was going on? He was sitting with his eyes closed, as if he were asleep, but he wasn’t sleeping.
I could hear the frogs croaking.
A white ghost shifted in front of us. It moved fast, almost at a run.
“Sylva, home with you! That’s enough, I don’t want to see you here.”
Petr’s eyes opened wide. We heard a horse whinny, followed by a dog barking.
In the distance, a waltz started up. Petr sat up. I stood up slowly, then Petr did the same.
“May I accompany you, Miss Sylva?” he said in a low voice. These words were addressed to me alone.
I was about to say yes.
“No thank you, Petr,” my mother broke in, “Sylva knows the way back home perfectly well, in fact it’s just a moment away. Go and dance for a little bit longer, darling.” Soothing words expressed with an icy voice.
Petr was looking at me. He followed me with his eyes as I walked away.
When I was at a distance, I turned around. I could see nothing but the gigantic, black trunks of the beeches and oaks.
The bench was empty.
The days went by, arid as a dried-up riverbed. I had to do something. I didn’t know what.
I requested an audience with my father. He made me wait for quite a while before receiving me in his study, which smelled strongly of cigars and musty air. He wore a shiny, silk dressing gown that changed color every time he moved.
“I didn’t want to waste your time, Papa. Please, would you be so kind as to let Monsieur Beauvisage know . . .”
What was I about to say? And why?
“Monsieur Beauvisage?”
My father came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the room and looked at me with hard eyes.
I didn’t have time to think.
“It’s a nickname, Papa.” I gave a nervous laugh.
“Monsieur Beauvisage? So you also find him attractive?”
Also?
“I didn’t know he was a writer,” I said aloud.
“A provincial scribbler, I dare say.”
“Papa, could you . . .”
“You haven’t answered me.”
“I’m sorry, but what is it I haven’t answered properly?”
“Well . . . It doesn’t matter. You are the apple of my eye, Sylva.”
“I don’t want to waste any more of your time, Papa. Would you be so kind as to tell Monsieur Beauvisage that I will not be requiring any lessons from him for some time.”
“I will indeed inform him, word for word.”
I heard a creaking noise. My father was stretching his fingers to ease the tensions in the knuckles. I noticed that sound, so typical of my father, and wasn’t sure I understood my own message. Why didn’t I want to see Monsieur Beauvisage? What would life in the chateau be like without my tutor?
“Sylva,” my father said in a low voice, as he lit a cigarette, “don’t you think it’s absolutely crazy, this thing your mother’s got about the Czech language? Although it was the last thing anyone would have expected, she gets it into her head to take private lessons. But as she’s a Czech from a family of musicians, she must speak the language well enough.”
“I wouldn’t know, Papa.”
“I’ve no idea,” I repeated, “because my father kept on watching me with an enquiring look on his face. “Perhaps she’s unsure of her grammar, or maybe she doesn’t know how to write Czech properly, remember that she went to German schools. You won’t forget to forward my message, will you, Papa?”
“Of course not, ma chérie.” He caressed me.
“Sure?”
“Very sure.”
For a little while, he drew circles on the carpet with a leather-slippered foot, staring at the window. Finally he said, “Wait, don’t go just yet. There’s something I wanted to say to you.”
I wasn’t going anywhere. But I realized that this was a cultured person’s way of saying, one more thing, and then you can go!
“Listen, Silent Woman,” said my father in the direction of the window, as if addressing his message to the apple and plum trees in the orchard. “Remember what I am about to say to you, ‘Whereas all other creatures walk with their heads bowed, looking at the ground, Man has a face at his disposal, with which to observe the horizon, and a head, with which he can look up at the stars.’ That was written by Ovid, a lucid poet, whose life ended sadly, in exile.”
I strolled through the village next to the chateau, looking for the things that were in the poems Petr had quoted to me.
I saw elderly men and women. I saw beggars. I saw cripples, both male and female. I saw huts full of destitute people, run-down cottages, wretched hovels. I went in, leaving a couple of coins. The inhabitants eyed me, both surprised and suspicious.
I saw a man whipping a horse. The beast was standing stock-still, its head bowed, and its eyes full of woe. The horse could not defend itself as the carter whipped it with all his strength. I rushed over to the horse and hugged it. I kissed it. In the deep, sad gaze of that fine beast, in its tears, I saw the eternal suffering of the universe. In those horse’s eyes, I saw the misery of all those who were born only to be beaten.
I walked over to the chateau garden. I wanted to summon Jakub, so that he could buy up all the whipped horses.
Twilight was falling. The crickets were singing, but the croaking of the frogs was louder.
I headed over to the river to see them. As I ambled along the bank, my feet sank into the mud more than once. The mosquitos were buzzing, there were whole clouds of mosquitos. I saw a blackbird carrying a clay-covered worm in its beak. The worm twisted about, trying to get out of the beak that trapped it, but the blackbird had a firm grip. All the frogs jumped into the river.
As I walked back home, that blackbird was singing on the branch of a beech tree.
It was getting dark. I was afraid I might get lost. I started to run, my face lashed by branches.
I finally found a path that led to the chateau garden. It took me directly to the fountain. I would have liked to avoid that artificial lake, I don’t know why, but there it was, right by me.
Nightfall.
A couple was sitting on the bench, like the last time.
I felt a sudden desire to rest on my bench, to examine the surface of the lake and look at my face. Maybe in the milky light of the half moon, I would discover a change in the image I saw, in comparison with the last one I saw there that had been smashed to pieces. Perhaps I would find those pieces now stuck together with the glue of my new experiences, my new thoughts.
I sat at the edge of the little pond. From their bench, the couple couldn’t see me, there were bushes between us. I looked down at the water: I saw the shiny surface and, on it, a dark stain. My head. None of my features were distinguishable. Only a hole as dark as the night itself.
I moved away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the couple on the bench, the man embracing the woman passionately; she was responding to his caresses. This was doubtlessly a couple from the village; the garden had recently been taken over by the state, and anyone could enter as they pleased.
The frogs resumed their croaking. I left. I smelled a whiff of jasmine.
In the morning, as I was taking a walk with Mademoiselle Lamartine, repeating my lesson, I stepped off the path. On the bench, I found a pair of little combs, the kind used to decorate a coiffure and keep it in place. Encrusted with precious stones that shone brightly in the light of day, they seemed to be gleaming. Then I remembered the night of the volcanoes that spat fire, and the bright morning that followed, which was so like today.
I knew that Jakub wasn’t listening to me, but I so wanted to get it all off my chest!
“I saw a man whipping a horse,” I kept explaining to the stable lad, “That animal was standing stock-still, with its head bowed and its eyes full of suffering. A horse can’t defend itself.”
The stable lad looked at me, unconcerned.
“Couldn’t we do something? Maybe buy that horse? I’ve already told my parents, but . . .”
“But?”
“But nothing. I mean, you love horses.”
“We’ll see,” he answered, nonchalantly.
I noticed that now, apart from indifference, the stable lad felt a sort of abhorrence for this capricious little lady before him. I had seen that expression before on the faces of those I had visited in the wretched hovels in the village.
“You will try and buy that horse, won’t you?” I insisted.
“We’ll see.”
We usually dined from twelve to two. The maid laid the dining room table, and we all sat down to lunch, even my grandmother, who usually preferred to spend her time in her chambers. That summer my mother often turned up for lunch looking fresh, cheerful, youthful, her eyes full of optimism.
Every day, from two to four, Petr came to the house to give my mother lessons. My mother kept her door locked during the two hours that Monsieur Beauvisage spent in her chambers.
One day I walked past Maman’s apartment. I couldn’t hear a thing. No dictation. No creaking door. Not a word. Silence. The following day, I did the same thing again. Nothing. As if there were nobody at all behind that door.
The third day, I forbade myself to walk past Maman’s door, but I couldn’t hold out: I went past on tiptoes, barefoot, back and forth, time and again. Nothing, just a heavy oak door.
Then one day I came across my father outside Maman’s door. He too was pacing in silence, back and forth, again and again.
Once I had to walk along that corridor at four in the afternoon, on the dot. I saw Monsieur Beauvisage closing the oak door behind him, heading for the staircase, his head bowed.
“Petr!” I whispered.
He didn’t turn around. He only bowed his head a little lower.
“Petr!” I repeated, a bit louder.
The back of his neck was disappearing around the curve of the staircase.
When I reached Maman’s door, this time, for the first time, I heard something. My mother was crying.
I found the stable lad at the entrance. I reminded him of the incident with the whipped horse and of his promise.
“We’ll see,” he said once again.
We walked over to the stables.
He opened the door. I was swallowed up by the darkness, and overwhelmed by strong animal smells.
The stable lad came up to me. I was getting used to the dark. I looked into his eyes. They were green and glinting like a cat’s. Through the reek of the horses, I could smell his sweat. He took me into his arms—thick and strong as tree trunks. I pressed my body against his.
He felt me up, roughly. So this is what it’s like, I thought, as his expert fingers ran over my body. Like this, and nothing more? I remained silent and still.
I pushed him away.
In a hoarse voice, he said, “Go away, I don’t want anything to do with you! First you get me all worked up and then you go cold as a dead fish. You know where to go, you pampered, little girl! I’ve had enough!”
Puffing, he pushed me out of the stable.
The sunlight dazzled me. I felt dizzy.
I patted a dog as it wandered along the path. That smooth skin, that tender warmth, but the dog responded with violent barking. I felt like a stranger in my own home.
I tied my hair back into a ponytail and sat down on the bench in front of the house. It wasn’t yet four in the afternoon.
Monsieur Beauvisage. The only person with whom I wished to speak. In his presence, I felt the way I did when I changed out of my party dress and tight-fitting dress shoes to put on some casual clothes and comfy slippers for wearing in the house. Although this meeting with Monsieur Beauvisage was making me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t take my eyes off the belltower clock.
The bells were ringing.
Together we left the chateau garden and stepped out into nature. On the bank, the frogs and birds were silent, it was a muggy day. Only a sparrow chirped feebly, as if welcoming us into his green kingdom. We found all the splendor overwhelming. The weeping willows rustling above the water, the century-old beeches standing in two rows, their branches spanning the space over our heads. Above us, a blackbird began chatting. I looked for it among the branches to see if it was carrying a muddy worm in its beak. Then my feet sank into the mud. With difficulty, Petr removed my heeled shoe from the puddle and cleaned it. That done, he made me sit down on a low branch of a hawthorn, or perhaps a plane tree, to rub the mud off my foot with a handkerchief. Like a mother swaddling a newborn child, I thought.
•
I closed the door behind us, gently.
In silence I led Petr to the bathroom. He stopped at the threshold. “We will wash my foot,” I repeated more than once, tugging at Petr’s sleeve.
He stepped away.
“Sylva, I can’t go in there. The only person who could do that would be your husband.”
“Husband?”
Petr was silent.
“And I am not him,” he said in a low voice.
The parquet floor of the antechamber looked black now. Night was falling.
In the distance, in the streets, the sound of a funeral march could be heard.
We were silent. The light was fading.
The funeral march grew closer. It was purple in color and filled the entrance. The drawn-out sound of the trumpet, a melody that came to an end, started up again. We stood still. Bewitched. Only the trumpet continued singing its grief.
From the door came a light sound; we turned our heads.
Maman, all fresh, was shining on the threshold of the room. Madame la Comtesse, the Queen of the Night, was watching us with a haughty, scornful expression.
“Sylva, there’s something I want to tell you immediately, that’s why I’ve barged in like this. But . . .”
At this point, my mother opened the door wide and in an icy voice that clashed with the cloying and falsely friendly tone that she had used with me, “Monsieur Beauvisage must get out of here. Right this instant. What I have to say is not for his ears.”
Maman ignored him. She addressed only me, once more with her saccharine voice, “A gentleman, a most well-positioned and wealthy one, as it so happens, the Czech ambassador to Budapest, has asked for your hand in marriage, Sylva. After a close analysis of all the pros and cons, your father and I have given our consent to the count. Count Heinrich von Stamitz has already requested a formal transfer to Prague, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I know that in all probability you will be, if not happy, though I would dearly like you to be, then at least fortunate with the count, who, after the creation of Czechoslovakia, uses the Czech translation of his name: Jindřich. You are a flower that must be cared for in the most luxurious conservatory of them all.”
My mother repeated the gesture of holding the door to the corridor wide open.
“Goodbye, sir.”
With heavy feet, slowly, Petr headed for the door.
“Say something, Sylva,” he stammered, his voice faint, as if he were sick. In his confusion, he had addressed me using the familiar form.
Still I said nothing. The Silent Woman, as my father had called me the other day.
“I don’t even know him,” I said, finally, to my mother.
“But you do know him, Sylva,” she assured me with that sugary voice, “You danced with him, ma petite. It was after our ball at the chateau that he asked for your hand in marriage.”
I smiled at Petr. The look I gave him said, I only danced with you! Surely my mother is doing a bit of playacting, and has prepared a surprise for us.
But Petr didn’t react. He had gone pale.
“Fare thee well, sir,” said my mother. Snowflakes fell from her words, landing onto my neck and shoulders.
Petr gave me his hand and whispered a few words into my ear. Even when he whispered, his voice sounded like an old man’s.
“I want you to be my wife, Sylva. I’ll write.”
The door shut behind him, hesitantly.
“You are a flower, Sylva. I will not allow you to marry the first comer, a beggar, a vagabond, a third-rate scribbler,” said my mother. Then she repeated, in a metallic voice, “You are a flower which must be cared for in the most luxurious conservatory of them all.”
The doorknob clattered behind her, clearly and decisively.
Alone, I gazed down at my feet, one black, the other white. I turned to look at a huge vase full of orchids that were coldly white as if sculpted from alabaster.
I shut my eyes, full of hate. I saw a carter whipping a horse in the middle of a street in our village.
I felt like vomiting.
I decided I had to get out of here.