I’ve been walking around in the airport. On the first floor of the international terminal, I sat down in a café, at a table with a pink tablecloth. In my mind, I was looking for a solution to an equation, drawing figure after figure with my finger on that same tablecloth.
I was distracted for a while by a quarrel between a foreign visitor and an Asian waitress. I tried to concentrate, but the voices in the café got disrupted with my figures; the noise kept me company, lonely as I was.
For many years in the United States, after a long workday I would return to a dark, cold, and empty house, a house that was not a home.
Every evening that damp, dark silence would grab hold of me. That silence drained my energy and filled my arteries, veins, and blood vessels with a mixture of revulsion and anguish and shame. That silence paralyzed me, right there in the house. Only after a while could I start to distinguish those sounds that are so typical of American houses: the creaking of wood, the scraping of window frames, the cracking noises coming from the ceiling, the knocking in the pipes, the sighs of the central heating. Which is why America is the only country where Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote so much about houses full of ghosts and spirits, could have been born. Don’t you think so, Mama? The fridge would raise its voice with its catlike purring and, once the reloading process was over, you could hear several kicks from it, as if a fat, sour-faced man had become frustrated working on the fridge’s motor and wham! was giving it a good kicking. As I took in those familiar sounds, little by little my anguish dwindled and I could start to move around freely. I left the dishwasher humming away. The central heating brought a crowd of naughty children who wouldn’t stop hitting the pipes in the rooms and corridors.
I had only liked silence when I was with you, Mama. Because with you, the Silent Woman, I didn’t need words to communicate. With you, I never felt alone.
Every evening I switched on the TV just to hear some human voices. Do you remember how, in Prague, we used to make fun of that very same habit when we saw other people do it in their own homes? But automatically I put on one of the TV channels—which all more or less have the same name, WTHA, WTRD, WBAB, WBRJ, WFTY—and each one is specialized in something: one is a news station, another covers sports, yet another deals with newborn babies. Yes, Mama, on one channel children are born twenty-four hours a day in front of a TV camera. From the TV came those clipped, self-confident voices shared by so many Americans, voices giving opinions and verdicts that are far too brief, and conclusions and pronouncements that are so often too firm, too resolute. The TV would keep me company while I got my supper ready.
Mama, you ask if I sought out any female company? Yes. To be honest with you, I get on just fine with women. I had a few relationships. I would love to introduce these ladies to you but of course I can’t. But I’ll write you some brief descriptions of them, as if they were snapshots or postcards.
DAISY
She vaguely reminded me of Helena, especially because of her long, swinging earrings. I invited her to restaurants several times just to be able to look at her and project the features of my Czech girlfriend onto her face. Eventually I stopped doing that, having become interested in the girl herself. One day she asked me, “What are your intentions as far as I’m concerned?” I didn’t understand the question. She explained, “You Europeans are too enigmatic for us plain-speaking, practical Americans. You never talk about your plans for the future.” But I didn’t know my plans for the future, or my intentions toward her. Nor did I want to think about them and neither did I want to know her intentions toward me. When there’s no mystery involved, a relationship just becomes humdrum. During one of our dinners, Daisy revealed her plans for our future together. I know it was a cruel thing to do, Mama, but I never called her again.
WENDY
Wendy, a fellow student at the university, invited me to a café for lunch one day. As we ate, she unbuttoned her jacket, cold though it was, and I couldn’t help but notice that she had a prominent cleavage. I even found it a bit vulgar, aggressively provocative, so to speak. Wendy told me that her husband had gone off on a business trip, and invited me over for coffee and dessert at her place. I got out of it by saying I had work to do. She asked me to drop by in the evening, adding that she’d never been with a man from a communist country before.
CINDY
Cindy, who wore her hair down to the waist, invited me to a dinner party at her place. There were a couple of friends and acquaintances of mine there. Cindy was a considerate, tactful hostess, very attentive to her guests. By the time the main course was served—chicken teriyaki—different kinds of social and political stuff were being discussed. On the subject of the death penalty, Cindy said, “Whoever kills, deserves to die!” Nobody paid any attention. When the dessert came along, we were arguing about what had to be done with countries that actively supported terrorism. Should we wage war on them? Would that be advisable? Or would it be better to avoid that? There was a wide range of opinions, backed by an equally wide range of different reasons. Cindy waited until everyone had their say to share her view on this subject, “Any country that supports terrorism should be bombed outright!” One of the guests objected that a country’s inhabitants did not necessarily agree with their government’s decision to support terrorists. But Cindy wasn’t having any of it, “Bomb that whole damn country! Destroy ’em all!” Spotting my alarm, she immediately changed the subject. She spoke of nothing else but ancient and contemporary art and classical music for rest of the night. But I didn’t accept any more of her invitations.
JOANNE
“Liar,” Joanne yelled at me on our first weekend together, when she caught me in the act of writing a letter. “Liar! You told me you needed more time to dedicate yourself to your scientific work!” She looked crestfallen. I’d spoiled the weekend. “You look really great,” I told her one day, after a dinner she’d prepared for the two of us. I was looking at her thoughtful profile, though Joanne was no textbook Hollywood beauty. “Liar!” came the harsh accusation. From her expression, I realized that this was the worst crime anyone could commit in her worldview: to affirm something that did not correspond to an objectively provable truth. A week later, I told her over the phone, “I’ve been trying to get hold of you all afternoon.” I said this to cover up an oversight of mine, not wanting to hurt her just because I’d forgotten to get in touch with her for a few hours. “Liar,” she said knowingly, “I haven’t had any phone calls at all up until now.” Her voice sounded like that of a prosecutor addressing the bench. Then it finally dawned on me that I didn’t belong to her culture. I was unable to behave according to its rules and, even worse, I was offending my girlfriend by ignoring them. I liked Joanne, with her intelligent face and thoughtful expression, but she drifted away from me.
SAMANTHA
We met at a party, where I didn’t know anybody except for the hosts, and she probably didn’t either. Samantha sat in a corner sipping Lambrusco from a glass that would have been better suited to a gin and tonic. I sat next to her with a bottle of beer in my hand. She introduced herself, saying she was a theater critic. Later on, she would invite me to various Boston theaters. After a performance, we would sit cross-legged on the carpet of a Turkish restaurant, cast into shadow. As we slowly sipped red wine from the Turkish coast, we would analyze the play we’d just seen. It fascinated me to see the way Samantha lived her job, the way she spoke about the actors and directors, the things she would tell me, such as how stage fright had been the driving force behind a good performance, or about the inspiration that can fire up an actor once he’s stepped onto the stage, or how a negative review can destroy an actor’s self-confidence. Between us the candle’s flame would tremble, as its dry light would illuminate our fingers and lips, which seemed to float in the shadowy atmosphere. Samantha invited me to the theater more and more often, but even so, every single one of our evenings together still felt like a celebration. After one performance, she asked me if I’d like to have some coffee over at her place. Like a chess player, I imagined the consequences of this move: I envisioned drawn curtains and dawn light filtering through, an unmade bed, Samantha’s hair, tousled, spread over the pillow and her smeared makeup. I said yes. But I left before I could see that woman’s face puffed up by sleep; I wanted to keep her in my mind in high heels when she walked along the carpeted corridors of the theaters, or with her lips painted the color of wine in the half shadow of the Turkish restaurant. That was the last invitation I got.
MEI
Mei, a small Chinese girl, had an important job in the Chicago headquarters of Citibank. She told me to come visit, so I took a week off and ended up spending an entire sabbatical year over there. While Mei was getting herself ready to go to work, I would prepare breakfast for both of us and serve it on the kitchenette counter in her small apartment. We’d sip orange juice, me in my pajamas, she in her gray pantsuit, with her short hair combed to one side, like a boy dressed up as a banker. A little white handkerchief stuck out of her breast pocket, like a spruced up gangster from Chicago in the twenties. Before she left, Mei would give me a kiss and ask about my plans for the day. Mei suffered from a baseless, illogical, and destructive jealousy. At the end of every working day—always a long one, like those of most high-ranking executives—as we had a glass of chardonnay in a bar, Mei would track my line of sight, making sure it didn’t wander over any of the elegant girls and ladies gesticulating with glasses of dry martinis or manhattans or margaritas in their hands. If I decided to check out the headlines of the Chicago Tribune, Mei watched me like a hawk to see what news items I was really interested in. From the bar, or a restaurant, we would head back home in a taxi. Then too Mei would be on the alert in case my eyes drifted over to the sidewalk and settled on any of the pretty women who might happen to be walking there, with their long hair caressing their backs and breasts.
One windy, sunny day I entered a shop on Rush Street that sold Asian products to buy a bottle of soybean oil that Mei and I used for wok cooking. Afterward, a Japanese woman asked me where I’d bought the bottle. We started up a conversation and continued it with a glass of wine in an Italian café next to the shop; the Japanese woman gave me some promising looks.
That evening, I ate Chinese dumplings at Mei’s place. She asked me for all the details of what I’d done that day. I was in a bad mood, said little, and wasn’t hungry. Soon I realized that I was angry with myself, not with Mei. I was sorry I hadn’t asked for Kyoko’s phone number back there in the Italian café. Dinner with Mei dragged on. The next day I discovered I just didn’t have the stamina to keep on putting up with short, attractive Mei’s jealous scenes.
KYOKO
I had a tough time finding Kyoko. On the day of her piano concert at the McCormac Center, I had a front row seat. At the end of my sabbatical year in Chicago, we got married.
When I had to go back to Boston, Kyoko decided to move to her parents’ home in Tokyo. A month later, I took a holiday as to visit her. She stayed at her parents’ house, and reserved a room for me in a hotel in the Ginza neighborhood, in central Tokyo. I didn’t miss a single one of Kyoko’s concerts: I always bought a front row ticket, and after each performance I’d bring her a bouquet of flowers. Afterward, she would head back to her parents’ place. One day, and this was unusual for her, she asked me to have a coffee with her. She unfolded a petition for divorce over the café table. I didn’t understand. What had happened? Was it because I knew nothing about the way Japanese people thought? Kyoko was stunned by my lack of comprehension. I signed the document, paid the bill, and walked Kyoko to the door of her parents’ house. I continued living at the hotel in Ginza and, as before, I went to listen to each and every one of her concerts, sitting in the first row and watching Kyoko, so slim, with her long hair, dressed in black clothes that clung to her well-proportioned figure. I admired her there on the stage in front of me, when she played Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” At the end of every concert I brought Kyoko a bouquet of white chrysanthemums. After one Sunday concert, I took a plane home and throughout the entire flight, I kept on seeing a fragile woman, her hair hanging curtainlike, as she bent over a black and white keyboard, concentrating, barely stroking it with her fingers. I knew then that I had married Kyoko because of this frangible, black-and-white image.
ASSIA
We met on the train from Boston to Washington DC, where I’d been invited to lead a seminar on the discontinuous function of coordinates. I was looking forward to perhaps spending some of my free time, maybe even a whole day, in the Library of Congress. Assia was looking for the smoking compartment; I tried to help her to find it, but the entire train was nonsmoking. So when we got to Washington we went into a restaurant, right there in the station, which made me think of an ancient Greek temple, a refurbished one, to be sure. There Assia smoked stealthily, placing the ashtray on her knees. Her fingers trembled when she told me that it must be very amusing to be a foreigner and that without a doubt my life was more interesting than that of other people. “That depends,” I replied, “it can also be difficult: your customs and habits are different from those of the country in which you’re living. A foreigner always calls attention to himself because he stands out. You don’t get people’s sense of humor, they don’t get yours.” Assia said that she was a foreigner too; she felt that other people didn’t understand her, and she didn’t really understand them either. “But,” I said to her, “English is your mother tongue, you can make yourself understood.” “I can’t,” she said, “I’ve already told you that I don’t understand other people and they don’t understand me.” “But Assia,” I said impatiently, “there’s a huge difference between not being understood and not being able to use your mother tongue, like me.” Assia looked at me as if I’d whipped her favorite dish away from under her chin. I started to explain my point of view, “The effort of learning English, which I have had to make, has meant that I’ve forgotten much of my Czech, my mother tongue. I’m even ashamed now to write letters in Czech and that’s why I don’t even write to my ex-girlfriend. And my English is worse than broken, as you can hear for yourself.” I said to Assia, “Scientific English is the only type of English I’ve mastered properly, and that has a limited vocabulary and simple grammar because it’s based on a few formulaic sentences.” Assia nodded. Thinking that she had understood me, I said, “Exile, among other things, means that you never really master any language.” Assia went on nodding, and answered, “Yes, that’s me all right.” “Why, are you a foreigner as well? Your name, Assia, sounds foreign.” “My parents were born in the US; myself, I only really know the area around Philadelphia. But I understand your trouble just fine, I’m an emigrant, just like you.” I didn’t say a word more. With the car I’d rented at the station, I gave Assia a ride to the address she gave me, declining her invitation to go in for a drink. Then I went for a spin in the car: the city at night, its long avenues, so wide and spacious with a boulevard running down the center, surrounded by buildings held up by Doric columns, and their Greek staircases, facades, and frontispieces, all of this emerged out of the night, dressed in white. It was like a kind of Acropolis: like gigantic temples with white marble colonnades, and they rose up from the water and shone against the night sky, all white and shiny like stars, or the moon on a summer’s night.
All those women, girlfriends, fiancées . . . They didn’t realize that a foreigner’s life is nothing if not restless. Anything that a foreigner does is an event, because it involves decisions, choices, adaptation, painful surprises, rifts. They never realized that a foreigner always feels uprooted, and that to put down roots in another country turns out to be an impossible task. He is left floating in the air, always on the move, always subject to change. As an immigrant, he has no political rights and is excluded from any kind of public office. His loneliness leads the foreigner to identify with a cause, an activity, or a person, to which or to whom he becomes violently attached, because it is there that he has found a new country. Those women friends of mine didn’t realize that a foreigner, a human being who feels constantly humiliated because of his poor knowledge of the host language, and because of the lack of comprehension he encounters wherever he goes, suffers from depression, as well as resentment, fury, and even hatred. Foreigners seek refuge in their resentment, they live in it, they turn it into their sanctuary and their flag. Resentment is something palpably present in the foreigner’s volatile universe.
And then, Mama, I grew tired of casual encounters. Within myself, I went on feeling I don’t know what, something like when Brahms’s concert for piano and orchestra bursts out in the middle of dead silence, with its noisy, relentless beginning. But when it came to sharing this feeling, to sharing myself, I couldn’t find a soul. So I preferred just to go on dreaming.
Then the day came when I found somebody. One of my students. That, Mama, is to court severe punishment. If you fall in love with a student, they can put you on trial and throw you out of the university.
Would you like to know how it came about? I’ll begin at the end. This story is longer than the others, because it’s so important to me. Listen . . .
LESLIE
One day, her husband came to see me in my office. He was smoking. The smoke covered him the way mist covers a mountain peak. I imagined, in fact I was sure, that he’d come to give me a piece of his mind, after which he would hand me over to the authorities for having succumbed to temptation and sexually harassing his wife. The man talked and talked; I didn’t listen to him, I knew what his monologue was going to be about. Instead of her husband I saw her, Leslie, sitting in his place. We were talking about who knew what, anything to avoid a silence falling between us which would have been too dangerous, too tempting. We talked about hybrid cars, about voltage modulation. Then, later, we chatted about this and that.
I remembered that one day in 1968 in Prague, on Charles Bridge, I had seen two girls, a slim, dark-haired one, and a voluptuous blonde, both in miniskirts. The dark-haired one was hefting a violin case, but that didn’t stop her from walking at a brisk pace. I followed the two girls over the Charles Bridge and Kampa Island over to Malá Strana, to the U Glaubicu tavern, where they ordered a draught beer each and something to nibble on. The two girls had been aware of my presence for some time and were making fun of the situation. While I was thinking of a way to start up a conversation, the blonde one got up to go to the bathroom and on the way, asked me out on a date. But the one I fancied was the dark-haired one—it was because of her that I’d followed them! All the same, I went out on the date with the blonde one. In the cinema I spent the two hours that the film lasted caressing her breasts and belly and thighs. I got to meet the dark-haired one a week later, when she came over to her friend’s house for a visit. Then, tying a towel around my waist, I took advantage of the fact that the blonde one was taking a shower to ask the dark-haired one out to the cinema. I spent the film sitting there like a piece of wood, and only toward the end did I dare to briefly caress her hand with my fingertips.
She was a violinist. In August I accompanied her to Sarajevo, where she was performing at a music festival. One evening, Helena’s music excited me in an extraordinary way. During the Bach concert, it seemed to me that her violin was trembling with a hidden, contained grief. Helena played with lowered eyes, her chestnut hair flowing toward the floor. That was the last time I saw Helena. At the break of dawn, news came that the Soviet army had invaded our country. Helena wasn’t in her room. I looked for her all day in vain. Desperate, in the evening I climbed up onto the mountains surrounding Sarajevo, to see if I could find her. A few dogs came up to me, snarling and showing their teeth, in that moss and pinecone-scented twilight. But Helena wasn’t there. I looked for her for days and days, everywhere. I plunged myself into an academic life here in America, but never stopped longing for Helena, and to look for her in all the women I met. Her, Helena, who had disappeared one day from the banks of the river Bosnia like sea foam, pulled away from the beach by a retreating wave.
Until I found Leslie, a student who came to see me to ask for help with her doctorate courses.
And now her husband was sitting in my office. He was smoking. Any moment now, Leslie’s husband would report me to the university authorities for sexual harassment.
As her husband went on, I only saw Leslie, my friend, coming in to tell me how her scientific research was going. I listened to her melodious Boston English with pleasure, that mezzo-soprano’s voice, and, not really aware of what I was doing, I found myself looking at her breasts. Leslie noticed. She smiled, with goodwill, with joy.
And I thought about her. My mind was tainted with the memory of my search for Helena, that August of 1968 in Sarajevo. I’d gone to look for her in Ilidza Park: Helena, I assumed, must have gone to the Bosnia River Springs, a place that was sacred to Bosnians, to tell them of the pain she felt because of the attack on our country, there where the water springs forth. They didn’t let me go into the park, night was already falling. But I had to find Helena! When it was dark, I vaulted the fence. The water from the springs was falling over the stones, and, as other streams fed into it, it grew broader and sang its sad song, its litany full of grief, there in the middle of the night.
I brusquely interrupted my train of thought to encourage Leslie to talk, “Tell me something about your childhood!”
She told me stories about her and other boys, when they were little. In the summer they visited barns and deserted houses in the woods, and played there, watched each other, exposed themselves mutually. In that very moment, I couldn’t get the image of being in a dark barn with Leslie out of my head: we’d stripped naked, I wanted to feel her warm skin against my hand but didn’t dare touch her directly. I picked up a handful of grain and rubbed it on her body, through the grains I felt it was loaded with electricity, her skin, with the grains I was rubbing around her waist, and over her breasts, then I made her lie down and with my palms full of grain, I massage her belly, her thighs . . . I reached out a hand. I touched her body. No! I didn’t want to imagine the end. I got scared.
“You’re scared,” Leslie said with a laugh, “What happened to you?”
I didn’t look at her. She didn’t stop laughing, in little fits of giggles, as she looked at me with shiny, moist eyes. Then she stopped; she too was in some place outside reality. She opened her eyes wide, staring at me in complete seriousness. I knew those sparks in her eyes. They indicated desire.
I got up and accompanied her to the door.
“Goodbye,” I suddenly became aware of my voice. And was surprised to find myself adding, “I won’t have any time tomorrow, nor the day after that, nor the one after that.”
And now, her husband was sitting in front of me. He didn’t stop smoking, sighing. He was saying something about his wife, his wife’s behavior. I made an effort to listen to him.
“Recently, my wife has been behaving strangely. During the time she used to come over here to ask you for advice, she lived in a state of euphoria. Now she’s fallen into one of desperation. I took her to the California beaches for a few days and she wandered around there in the same dejected mood, like she was sinking into mud.”
I started to think about myself again, I didn’t want to hear that man’s laments. But his words couldn’t help but brush past my ear, “I’m worried that my wife is seeing someone. A love affair which, at the beginning, had made her very happy and which is now making her terribly sad.” I didn’t really hear what Leslie’s husband was saying. I was thinking about myself: To whom could I explain my hapless life? To whom? To Helena? She’d gone from the picture a long time ago. To Leslie? I’d got rid of her myself. Yet, even so, I really needed to talk!
“You know . . .” I started a sentence, but I was speaking to Leslie’s husband. There was nothing I could do about it though, I just had to talk. “You know . . . Exile may well be a mind-broadening experience, but deep down, it’s an incurable illness,” I began. And the words bubbled up from inside me like the Bosnia River streaming over the stones. I couldn’t stop talking to the husband of my woman friend, about my two women friends, Helena, and the other one, Leslie, who I didn’t mention by name, but simply described her. All of a sudden I found there was an expression of surprise, consternation, on my listener’s face; he’d even stopped smoking. The smoke had melted away and I could see his eyes. They appeared to me to be suddenly relieved.
“So it’s because of you!” sighed Leslie’s husband, unruffled, cordial, steady. “I was suspicious of other men, but this would never have occurred to me. A foreigner! A professor from who knows where . . . from the East! A stranger!” he said to himself, looking at my fair, graying hair, and unconsciously patting his own thick, black mane. “So there’s no danger, then, and there never has been,” or that’s what I think I heard, though I’m not entirely sure. But the smile spreading over the whole of Leslie’s husband’s face was a clearer expression of his sense of superiority than anything he might have said.
Leslie’s husband leaned back happily in his armchair, he didn’t need his cigarettes anymore. While I went on talking, he listened, then he got up and cheerfully headed for the door.
I didn’t stop talking, addressing myself to the empty chair.