The day after the death of my husband, my mother arrived. She loaded me into the Hispano-Suiza as if I were some kind of parcel and took me to Prague’s main shopping area. She made me go into a very large shop and had me wrapped in black fabric: shoes, blouse, skirt, coat, gloves, everything was black. She dressed me. I stood there silent and still, with that flag of grief. At the end she plunked a hat over my short, blonde hair. A hat that covered my head from my eyebrows to below my ears. Sort of like a priest’s bonnet.
Then I realized. All of a sudden, I understood that I missed my husband. Now I thought only of his polished manners, of his pain and anguish, of those eyes that had so often pleaded with me not to abandon him.
I went home and asked my mother to leave me on my own. My grandmother arrived to replace her.
But that unique word . . . Oblivion . . . Oblivion. The sweet lullaby.
A word I repeated when I left my husband’s palazzo for good, and when our ever-so-luxurious Hispano-Suiza turned up, and when I dismissed the chauffeur, and when I counted my money to see if I could buy myself a little secondhand, chauffeurless Skoda, and then when I reached the conclusion that I couldn’t afford it. When I put my things in order and left them packaged up, ready for the move, I repeated to myself: Sylva, the woman who demands that both society and her intimate circle respect her, must possess the art of making herself as exquisite as an exotic flower!
My huge debts obliged me to sell the palazzo in Malá Strana. Even my own family felt the effects of the Depression. My mother kept only the east wing of the chateau, where she continued to live with my grandmother; she left the rest of the building to the state because she couldn’t afford the upkeep. After my father’s death, I inherited a small mansion, also in the Malá Strana District, on the Kampa Island side; we used to call it the Pink Palace. I turned the first floor into my living area, and converted the rest into rented apartments. So now I had neighbors: Jewish families who, like so many other people, had gone bankrupt after the Wall Street crash.
I filled my apartment with furniture from the chateau: I wished to surround myself with the atmosphere of my childhood. The apartment was so full, there was hardly any space left in it, but I walked past the mirrored cupboards and the corner pieces and the credenzas, the buffets and the sideboards, the side tables and the glass cases and the Japanese jewelry boxes, and with the tips of my fingers and the palms of my hands I felt that piece of exquisite wood and this item of cut glass, and I caressed the lacquered furniture with its encrusted pearl and ivory, and I embraced the lances and pikes and javelins and the rest of the medieval weaponry as if they were tree trunks in the middle of a forest, and I hugged the cold metal of the suits of armor and the helmets that knights had worn centuries ago. Every day I strolled around the apartment, which was permanently submerged in half shadow, because the sun’s rays never managed to penetrate that first-floor apartment in a narrow street in Malá Strana. But I wouldn’t have wanted such sunlight, or too much brightness; I preferred that cold darkness. And the silence: I even played my music quietly, making the piano do little more than whisper. Some evenings I didn’t even switch on the lights, finding that a gas-powered streetlamp, here too, could provide me with enough light. The piano didn’t fit in my room, which was full to bursting with all the furniture I’d put in there, so I had it placed in the living room, next to the window. I played it at twilight; Brahms’s Piano Sonata no. 3 op. 5, and Chopin’s mazurkas tinted the falling shadows, the music that my grandmother, more than my tutors, had taught me to play. My grandmother, who, like my shadow, only seemed to appear when I needed her. When that was not the case, she lived in the east wing of the chateau with my mother, who needed her much more than I did. My mother was alone.
I was, too. For the first time in my life, I was completely free. Nothing had any meaning anymore. The only pleasure that brightened my days was the music I played when it began to grow dark.
I developed a habit of strolling on Kampa Island, where I found both nature, and manmade encroachments on her territory. I found living water and dead water; the dead water of the canals and the living water of the Moldova River.
The Silent Woman, I would hear occasionally when passing a bench full of elderly women. The Silent Woman, my neighbors in Malá Strana used to call me.
Maman came to see me, as she’d done before. We had season tickets for the concerts at the Rudolfinum and a box at the German Theater; before or after the music, we would lunch or dine at the Savarin Palace.
One evening, at the Savarin, we’d finished dinner, but it was raining outside and neither my mother nor I had brought an umbrella. Someone called my name and greeted me in German. I looked up and saw the father of one of my former students. Herr Singer was smiling at me, but under that polite layer of a melancholy smile—melancholy, together with elegance, was one of the characteristic features of Jewish men in Prague—I discerned a different emotion. Herr Singer was taken aback, I would almost say startled, by the change he saw in me. I understood from his look that I had got thinner, that I was pale and looked the worse for wear; Herr Singer found it disagreeable to be a witness to this metamorphosis. In the expression of that attractive man, with his olive skin, who was certainly not slow to appreciate beauty in a woman, I saw my own transformation: death had made me look like I myself was on death row.
Mr. Singer turned his gaze to my mother and in an instant, he forgot about me. I introduced them to each other once more: Herr Singer, Frau von Wittenberg.
Mr. Singer said, “In comparison to the light you ladies radiate, this luxurious French restaurant is now nothing but a vulgar tavern.”
Although a man as courteous as Herr Singer took care to look at both my mother and myself, it was quite clear that this homage was addressed to her.
Herr Singer invited us to dance, “If your state of mourning were to permit it, it would just be for a very little while, right next door, in Venceslau Square, I know a cozy little place where they play jazz music.” Maman looked at me questioningly, her look said, “Come on! You’ve spent enough time in mourning.” Her eyes were shining. At age forty-eight, she was slim, youthful, and enigmatic in a way that only mature and experienced women know how to be. They took me home in a taxi; Herr Singer asked about the possibility of his son taking piano lessons from me once again. Oddly enough, this time my mother didn’t protest. I got out, Herr Singer moved from the front seat to the back, next to my mother. I waved goodbye, but they were so deep in conversation that they didn’t see me.
I went straight to my piano, I played Brahms’s intermezzi. The music enveloped me and, as always, cut me off from the outside world. But on that day, it didn’t satisfy me the way it had at other times. I thought about the conversation in the restaurant. Mr. Singer smiled at me, but in a way in which I knew that he didn’t see me as a woman, but rather as a creature to be pitied.
Why had death changed me so much? Was my husband’s death really such a great loss to me? The marriage, from my point of view, had not been at all satisfactory. I would surely have asked for a divorce, given time. But the death of my husband had changed something in me. I thought about his pleading look; his sort of passion; his jealousy, through which he revealed his love. His sudden death caused by his having gone bankrupt? Or was it rather . . . A voice inside me said: Isn’t it your heavy conscience that’s making you think about all this? All this theatricality, what with the mourning and the dark rooms and the longing for eternal night, is all that not just a pile of sand with which you are trying to put out the fire of your guilt? I answered the voice: Guilt, you say? Guilt for what reason? Back came the voice: For what reason? Why, it’s obvious! For living! You are alive, he isn’t. I said: but you can’t call it living, really. And the voice: too right, now you’re starting to get the idea. This is the last battle between us and the dead, the last struggle for power and at the same time the final vengeance of our dead ones: to make us feel guilty, to make us sad, to make us not live or to live just a little, to live insufficiently.
The following morning I woke up early, took one of my new brightly colored skirts from the wardrobe—it smelled of mothballs—a pair of transparent stockings, and a chalk-white blouse. I got on the phone and made an appointment with Giuseppe. He cut my hair below the ears, leaving some locks of hair blonder than ever, and then added the final touch: a sinfully red piece of ribbon; the very latest fashion. I didn’t go back home until I’d had dinner in a smart restaurant. I switched on all the lights and called Mr. Singer. We arranged for his son to take piano lessons with me again starting the followingMonday.
The piano was next to the window. When I taught my students—most of them the children of wealthy Jewish families, like that of Mr. Singer himself—I used to open the curtains to make it easier to see how the pedal should be used. As my students practiced their exercises and I listened with a view to correcting them, I stared out at the house opposite mine, on the far side of the street. I did this unconsciously. The house was as gray as a raincloud, and thoroughly uninteresting. But one day I noticed a hand raising the blind and opening a window. A woman leaned out and sniffed the fresh air, summer was almost upon us. She glanced out at the street, only to vanish a moment later back into her apartment. The next day, this scene was repeated. The woman leaned out of the window to look down at the street, then very cheerily she waved at somebody, and closed the window. On yet another day, as the woman was looking at the street, a man stood next to her leaning on the windowsill, and whispered something into her ear. The woman bit her lower lip. A gust of wind came along and the couple closed the window. That gust heralded several overcast days full of wind and rain. The window remained closed and I forgot about my neighbors on the far side of the street.
Afterward, when the stormy weather had passed, I drew the curtain back to see the woman leaning out of her window again. At first glance she seemed to me to be rather ordinary, but later I saw that wasn’t the case. The fact was she had makeup on, and all of the makeup had started to run: from her lips, eyes, and cheeks, and her hair was dishevelled. She must have been a lot older than me, but still a bit younger than my mother. The woman wiped her nose with the back of her hand . . .Oh! Now I saw it: she was crying! Miluška, one of my students, was playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” I opened the window just a touch to let some fresh air in. The woman peered at us; she must have heard the music. What’s more, Beethoven must have caught her husband’s attention, as he, too, appeared at the window. Surprised, he looked at his wife and caressed her tousled hair. He went away and came back with a large handkerchief, all clean and ironed. He cleaned up his wife’s face . . . yes, just as, long ago, Monsieur Beauvisage had wiped my muddy foot in the park at the chateau. Now the woman burst into fresh tears. The man, who looked concerned, disappeared back inside the apartment. She was crying uncontrollably . . . Where did all those tears come from? Gradually she stopped crying. Very gradually. Now she only let out the odd sob. Once she’d calmed down, the man returned to fetch her. He hugged her, kissed her hair, her forehead.
“Is that love?” I asked in a low voice.
“I’m sorry?” asked Miluška, who hadn’t heard me properly. She looked at me, not understanding a thing.
Hugo, my next pupil, took no notice of my mood, and played Haydn without paying attention to anything else.
If someone cries, it’s because they are weak, I told myself. The one who consoles them then is the stronger person. The weak hate the strong: they resist, they seek revenge. They want to feel stronger, but their struggle only gives further proof of their weakness. Hatred, therefore, has no strength to it.
Hugo handed me an envelope with money and left. The relationship between a pupil and a teacher is straightforward. Like that between parents and children, or between an entrepreneur and his employees. But, what about the relationship between a woman and a man?
A week later I saw them again at their window. They were silent. Miluška was playing a Chopin study at full tilt. When she finished, the silence sounded to me deeper and truer than the music that had preceded it.
Goodbye, Miluška, see you next Tuesday!
I closed the lid of the piano and put on a new dress. It was black and white, tight fitting, with a little skirt that came down to just above the knee. The black gloves came to just above my elbow. The new sandals, white and high heeled, hurt me. So what now? I’ll go to a café, I thought, or to the cinema or to visit some friends. Or I’ll go dancing, and break these new sandals in! I just had to flee, to get well away from my home.
“A glass of red wine, please!”
Red wine didn’t appeal to me as much as white, but I wanted the wine to be deep burgundy, so that everything would look right. On the little café table there was a small glass vase in the shape of a tube, with a blood-red rose in it.
Over the reflections of the wine on that white tablecloth, I projected mental images of yesterday’s party: a few poets had read their surrealist verses . . . and on a wicker chair, a single leather glove had been left behind.
On the first chord
the dancers shook wings made of girls’ arms
like moths at the first light of dawn . . .
One of the poets had been reading some of his work, and when the applause died down, he continued:
. . . the knees,
lean knees
like two skulls with silky garter crowns
from the desperate kingdom of love . . .
I stared at that leather glove. I noticed a hole in the glove, as if someone had skewered it with a knife.
All that evening I had felt stabbing pains in my index finger, as if the knife hadn’t been thrust into an empty glove, but into my own flesh.
“What a surreal still life!” laughed one of the young poets who I’d met in Paris. He was trying to start up a conversation with me, about the latest tendencies in philosophy. But my finger hurt and I didn’t feel like chatting.
Now I was projecting images of yesterday’s party on the reflections from the wine. I ordered another glass. When I’d drunk half of it, I said to the waiter, who was flying past me, “Bring me a knife. I don’t want one with a round blade. It’s got to have a point and be really sharp. A knife for cutting meat!”
I took another sip of wine. With the tip of the knife I cut around the shape made by my splayed fingers on the table, my hand and my arm sheathed now in the black lace glove that reached up to above the elbow, where a kind of wainscot of white skin separated the black glove from the edge of my sleeveless dress.
I noticed that the men at all the surrounding tables were watching me.
I stuck the knifepoint into one of the spaces between my black-gloved fingers. Then into the space between the fingers next to it. I repeated this again, and yet again. Several men tensely got up from their chairs and stood, stock-still, as if they were all set to rush to my assistance. I sped up the stabbing. The knifepoint jabbed the wood of the table, again and again. Several pairs of eyes hung in the air, motionless, alert . . .
What beautiful evenings,
when the city looked like a clock, a kiss, a kite
or a sunflower, bending . . .
I was singing the poems from yesterday’s surrealist party as I played with the knife, which was flying through my fingers. Its point scraped my ring finger. No matter. Then it cut my thumb. I didn’t care. More and more men were jumping out of their seats. Once they were up, they didn’t move. Drops of blood were filtering out through the black lace of my gloves. I increased the pace, singing . . .
What beautiful Sundays,
when the city looks like a ball, a letter, a mandolin
or a bell clanging
in the sunny street
the shadows of the pedestrians were kissing each other
and people went on their way strange and anonymous . . .
A man came up to me, without daring to interrupt my game. I didn’t see him. I sensed he was there, but I was concentrating on the knife that was thrusting itself between my fingers all on its own. My black gloves were now embroidered with blood. Silence reigned in the Café Louvre that evening, though it was chock-full.
Suddenly everything around me started to dilute, then vanish into the heavy fog that thickened the more I sunk into it.
I came to in my bed at home. Somebody was bandaging my fingers and a male voice said with a drawn-out, sing-song foreign accent: “Wine and blood, and the virgin point, black though it is with desire, everything under a pink flag . . . You will fall in love with someone, you foreign beauty, and then you will kill your beloved, or you will send him to death or to the auto-da-fé, convinced it is the best thing for you both”
The song melted into the night.
My grandmother was sitting next to my bed when I woke up.
So my nocturnal adventure had been a hallucination, a dream fashioned from that recent surrealist party, I reasoned.
But . . . under my bed sheet, unmoving, lay my left hand, disfigured by thick, white, bloodstained bandages.
About a month after I’d played with the knife, I was coming back one night from a party at the home of some friends, who were distinguished architects. The sky was becoming light, I was humming softly as I walked, a little unsteadily. I stopped in front of my house to look for my keys. Then a man stepped out of the house opposite—I wasn’t expecting that, and it startled me. The man’s hair was long and unkempt, and he wore an unironed shirt that flapped wildly about him. He was dragging along some packages, or rather enormous bundles, the kind that Gypsies or farmworkers carry with them. He was walking slowly; the bundles were heavy. Although it was warm, the man was trembling. I don’t know why I was reminded of the ill-treated horse of my childhood.
I found my keys and went in, banging the beech-wood door shut. Then suddenly, I realized: that man was my neighbor. Yes, he was the one I’d seen at the window opposite. I’d never seen him properly, and besides, he’d always been with his wife. That man was leaving for good, I knew it. I don’t know why, I had the feeling he was leaving me as well.
A few weeks later, a short-haired gentleman with sunglasses appeared at the window opposite. He was kissing my female neighbor’s bare back.
But with the dances and the dinner parties hosted by Prague’s intellectual elite, I soon forgot the man with the bundles, and the woman at the window.
“Waiter, bring me a glass of white wine, please!”
After having placed the book I’d brought—Dostoevsky’s The Idiot—on the café table, I lit a cigarette.
A few steps away, next to the window of the Café Louvre, a man with a shabby briefcase in one hand was observing the café as if searching for someone in particular. He looks familiar, I thought, but I couldn’t recall where I’d met him. Probably at some party or other. When he caught my gaze, I blew out cigarette smoke.
“At last!” he said, as if we’d had an appointment.
I took a sip from the glass the waiter had brought and quickly paid the bill before the man could beat me to it.
He’d sat down opposite me, having put his briefcase on the floor, and was now watching me in silence. I pretended to read my novel. I thought about how all the men I’d ever met had tried to start conversations. This one remained silent and looked at me with curious eyes.
I drank quickly, wanting to leave. The wine went to my head.
The man picked my glass up by its stem and took a sip. I looked at him, surprised and offended.
“I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you in any way,” he said.
I didn’t say a word. After a pause, he said, as if to himself, “An elegant woman reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot . . . that’s something you hardly ever get to see.”
He had a bass voice, like an opera singer’s, and spoke with a strong foreign accent. All the same, the implied judgement in what he had said made me look at him disapprovingly. But he paid that no mind and went on. This time he addressed himself directly to me, “It’s quite a coincidence you are reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot because the other day somebody showed me a reproduction of a Holbein painting of a dead Christ taken down from the cross. Dostoevsky must have seen that painting, and been so impressed by this painting that he wrote some reflections on it in The Idiot.”
“I haven’t reached that part yet,” I said apologetically.
“With reference to that image of Christ, Dostoevsky says that after seeing the painting a believer could lose his faith.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I’ve asked myself the same question. Dostoevsky doesn’t explain why. Later, when I was able to look carefully at the painting, I understood: the dead Christ is more human than divine, in fact Christ is simply a man steeped in misery, shorn of his hopes and aspirations, without questions or doubts. He is bereft of any kind of greatness, even the greatness conferred by freedom. He is a man lonelier than the Christ in Haydn’s The Seven Last Words, who is afforded the ultimate consolation of tragedy. Holbein’s painting is neither a majestic tragedy nor a pleasant drama in adagio e cantabile, but an absolute vacuum. Holbein’s Christ is a man stripped of all attributes save that of insignificance. It is as if the painter were telling the spectator: this is you. Then the spectator will become aware of his own terrestrial misery, so far away from the solemnity of the divine. He might lose his faith: his god has died when what he needed was an immortal god.”
My companion picked up the book and leafed through it for a while. After a silence, which to me seemed long, he said happily, “We shall now have dinner.”
“I haven’t got time for dinner,” I answered sharply.
I didn’t know why he looked at me with such alarm. You could read his eyes like a book. Like the eyes in the stable at my parents’ home.
He got up and helped me up from my seat.
“I’m going home,” I said, as sharply as before.
“Fine, fine.” He drew out the vowels.
He walked me along the streets of the Old Town. We came up to the riverside docks.
“Here, please do go in.”
He leaned back against the wall to let me pass. In that dark street, his face was a shadowy chamber with two windows behind which stretched a green, transparent sea, lit up by the rays of the sun.
He took me by the elbow and led me into a small basement restaurant with a gothic arch. The place was full, I noticed with relief, but the restaurant’s owner seemed to know my companion and managed to fit a little table for two from somewhere, covered by a white tablecloth.
“I’ll stay, but only for a little bit,” I said.
The owner placed a bottle of red wine between us, followed by a huge portion of roasted meat and mountains of rice garnished with fresh parsley.
I noticed that this good-looking man, so different from the glasses-wearing intellectuals with their pale, weak faces, ate in the most exquisite fashion.
He held the ends of his cutlery in his long fingers; slowly, he cut away little pieces of meat, placing them in his mouth like a swallow feeding its young. When he raised his hands they seemed no more than the wings of a bird. He ate slowly, with pleasure, but his main concern was for my own comfort. He was aware of every move I made, he served me wine and water. He got up to help me sit more comfortably. He served me pieces of meat, and lettuce leaves, and did all this with the utmost discretion.
“You are a Polish prince.”
“No.”
“A Hungarian duke, then.”
“No.”
“Then you must be a count.”
“No.”
“But you are an aristocrat.”
“No.”
“I have noble origins and I can detect them in others.”
“In Russia, there has been a revolution.”
He made his hands fly up then let them fall, sliding, down to his sides. Russia . . . the revolution . . . an explosion . . . chaos . . . many things destroyed. It was a simple, clear, eloquent gesture. And beautiful. An expressive watercolor sketched with only a couple of brushstrokes.
“Your father was a prince, then?”
By way of reply, his hands flew up again, only to fall straight back down again, like the broken wings of a swan. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t be asking this sort of thing.
Should I never again ask then? Did I imagine there was supposed to be some kind of a future for us?
“His name was Ivan,” said my companion, “So mine is Ivanovich.”
“Ivanovich, that sounds like it came out of some Russian folktale.”
“My childhood was a bit like a Russian folktale. My parents took me to the churches. To the Russian Orthodox churches.”
“To pray there, I suppose. I know about all that! The saints, God!”
“God, yes, expressed as beauty. And beauty expressed as God. My parents took me once a week. It was there that I discovered true beauty. Spiritual fathers with endless white beards in black tunics that reached all the way to the floor. They spoke the words of the mass in low, melodic voices. When I came out of the church, I found myself in the middle of a stunning white silence, the silence of endless Russian solitude, blinded as I was by the icy sun, by snow and ice.”
I took large sips of the country wine from Mělník, my companion served me some more rice. After having spoken about the icy solitude of Russia, he fell into a long silence; he was clearly in a world of his own. Bit by bit, this enigmatic foreigner’s silence, his absence from my world, started to bother me.
“Mr. Ivanovich, do you have no intention of asking me who I am?”
“No. I know who you are. You are Venus, born out of silence.”
His words affected me deeply. I’d never heard anyone speak like that. Perhaps words that were similar, but none said in this way. The men in the intellectual circles that I frequented, invented poetic metaphors and hurled them into women’s laps as if they were bouquets of violets. But they did so because they were enamored of their own cleverness. When they addressed a woman, deep down they were really only talking to themselves. Yet this man spoke in such a simple, frank manner, and his words were addressed directly to me.
He excused himself and went over to the owner of the restaurant. They argued for quite a while. The owner shook his head obstinately: no, absolutely not. My companion pointed to the paintings on the walls; his eyes shone as he did so. I realized that those paintings were made by him.
At first glance they seemed abstract. A chaos of colors and shapes. But looking more closely, I could see there was a hidden order and harmony to them. I could see the leaves and branches of a forest in them, in purple and violet and mauve and blue, and I could make out the roots of the trees, the moss and earth-colored stems. These paintings were not done merely by the painter’s hand, but by his inner self. An inner self that was, no doubt, chaotic and turbulent and tempestuous, but also, ultimately, idealistic and pensive, searching for its center. All this ran through my mind in a fraction of a second and I can’t say for sure that I was right. But those paintings transmitted strong anguish, and a need to find refuge in a world other than the real one.
The restaurant’s owner, a young man, continued shaking his head. No, no, and again no. My companion lowered his eyes. On my way to the bathroom, I took a hundred crown note from my bag, and slipped it discreetly into the restauranteur’s hand. I gave him a look that indicated he shouldn’t let on. He gave me a look that meant OK, and patted my companion on the back, saying, “OK, Andrei! It’s a deal, you old rogue, but my restaurant will go to the dogs thanks to you!”
When I returned from the bathroom—I’d been about to refresh the coral color on my lips, but this time the habit struck me as useless, unnecessary—Andrei was waiting for me with my black coat in his hand. He helped me to put it on.
Outside, it was raining. The drops wet my face and filled me with joy. On Charles Bridge we broke into a run. It was raining cats and dogs. We stopped, breathless, halfway across the bridge. We were alone. We looked for our saints. I wanted mine to be serene and sensible. Andrei chose weirder, more eccentric saints, whose arms were pointing up at the sky.
Suddenly, he got up onto the paving that lined the bridge and froze into the same position in which the saint he had chosen was twisted.
I was dumbfounded.
In the end, I said, inadvertently, “Get down, don’t do this to me!”
“‘Don’t do this to me,’” he repeated enthusiastically as he got down, “It’s a beautiful language that allows one to express oneself so. Fantastic!”
The rain had turned to a drizzle. I felt exhausted, as if I hadn’t slept for a week.
“I’m going to bed.”
We crossed the bridge, tired. We stopped to look at the reflection of the strange lights on Petřín Mountain in the Vltava River.
“Where do you live?” I asked him.
The man stood in front of the statue of a baroque saint, his fingers opened wide, his belly sticking out, and his head leaning coquettishly to one side.
I was busy looking at a luminous dot on the waves of the flowing river. That’s my star, I thought.
“Where do you live?” I repeated, insistently, weary, “I mean in Prague. You must live somewhere, surely?”
He looked at me, suddenly silent.
I got irritated.
“Tell me where you live!”
The man was trembling a little.
“Do you want me to leave?” he said.
“I want to know where you live, that’s all!”
“A long, long way away.”
“Where?”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“Shut up and follow me,” I said, sternly.
He gave me a frightened look.
Maybe he hadn’t understood. I turned my back to him and repeated the order. My tone sounded positively military.
I don’t know what was happening to me. Was I enjoying playing games with this man’s evident fear?
He watched me with his eyes wide open.
I was enjoying this game more and more.
The man was blinking fast, an anguished expression on his face. I felt like a general.
“I’m a general,” I shouted at the man. I had entered completely into the spirit of the game.
He shut his eyes as if he were about to be hit. Even in the half-light, I could see he’d gone pale.
“I am a harsh, cruel officer,” I was walking noisily along the bridge’s pavement.
The man didn’t dare breathe. His fear spurred me on.
“Let’s march,” I shouted at the top of my lungs, “March, and keep your mouth shut!”
I marched a few steps ahead.
I heard a muffled cry, like that of a wounded seagull.
I turned around.
The man was leaning on the edge of the bridge. He looked at me, his eyes filled with horror.
A moment later, he turned and disappeared into the mist.
Again, I heard that cry like a wounded seagull.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, staring out at the night and trembling. After a long while, at the edge of the bridge I found the briefcase, left behind by that man who had just lost himself in the darkness.
The following day I went to the Café Louvre. I found a friend there, who was celebrating a new role she’d just landed at the National Theater. She couldn’t stop exclaiming, “I’m going to play Nora!” and sent a glass of champagne over to my table.
The day after, I put on a pink jersey and woolen skirt of the same color. To read, I brought poems by Nezval and Seifert to the Café Louvre, of course. I smoked an entire pack of cigarettes. When mine were finished, men at neighboring tables offered me theirs.
On the fourth day I told myself that I wouldn’t go back to the Café Louvre for at least a week, and went to the theater to see my friend play Nora.
On the fifth day, I attended a dinner thrown by a well-known journalist and translator. People there were talking about the short stories of a Czech writer in German, one by the name of František or Franz or Frank Kavka or Kafka. An actor read a few out loud, from the German original. It sank in: Odradek, that’s me all over.
On the sixth day I couldn’t stand it any more and went to the Café Louvre for a drink. To avoid staring obsessively at the door, I read the text hanging on the wall in a red wood frame:
Got problems that seem unbearable? Go to the café!
He’s stood you up and you feel like hell? Go to the café!
Shoes worn out? Go to the café!
Always scrimping and saving and never treat yourself? Off to the café!
None of the men you know cut the mustard? To the café!
About to kill yourself? To the café!
Hate and despise people, even though you can’t live without them? To the café!
Got debts here, there, and everywhere? To the café!
On the seventh day I thought: Do you long for something and not yet know what it is? To the café!
On the eighth day Miluška and five other students turned up. In the afternoon, I was having tea with my mother and Mr. Singer, and I realized that the two of them saw each other every day.
At midnight I couldn’t resist it anymore.
The briefcase contained a few coins, a pencil, a white handkerchief, clean and ironed, and a little pad full of drawings and addresses and phone numbers. It also contained a train ticket to a far-off city in the mountains, and another to a village the name of which meant absolutely nothing to me. And one thing more: a small package wrapped in a white napkin and tied with light blue ribbon.
You can’t do this! I said to myself, you’re sticking your nose into another person’s private life. I unwrapped the package: it contained a black piece of cloth. I spread the cloth out on the bed. Before me was a long, black lace glove; there were dark stains like clay on the fingers: dried blood.
I stepped off the bus that brought me to the skirts of the high mountains, carrying that leather briefcase worn by time and use. Two elderly ladies with black scarves on their heads, after recovering from the distaste my presence had evidently caused them, gave me the directions I needed.
The sky was very low, drops of humidity were forming pearls in the air.
An ancient carriage was coming down the unpaved mountain path, heading straight for me. Next to it walked a Gypsy patriarch wearing a black hat, and behind him two elderly Gypsy women were swaying along. One of them wore a purple scarf around her head, the other one’s scarf was electric blue; they didn’t try to hide their curiosity as they stared at me. When they came close, the carriage stopped and they asked me in harsh, foreign Czech what I was up to in this area where many of the people born here had left because there was nothing left but hatred. The Czechs against Germans, the Germans against Czechs, or of both Czechs and Germans against the Gypsies. I mentioned Andrei’s name. They looked at each other. One of the women shrugged and pulled the blue scarf from her face, saying, “Oh! Oh!”
I stared first at one and then the other, visibly perplexed. The Gypsy woman with the purple scarf said, “Do you really have to go there? Are you sure you can’t give it a miss? Had any children by him, have you maybe?”
I blushed.
The Gypsy man waved from the old carriage, full of boxes and bundles and sacks and paper cones. I noticed that on top of that pile of bundles, there sat a violin and a kind of puffed out mandolin.
The blue Gypsy woman repeated her guttural “Oh! Oh!” again.
The purple Gypsy woman gave me a long farewell wave and said, “He’s a good man.”
And the Gypsy man hissed, “You be careful!”
They left, following a turn in the road and waving and nodding goodbye. The carriage swayed and the Gypsy women headed down to the valley, moving like dancers.
He’s a good man. Be careful. These words echoed in my head.
Then three woodcutters passed by; they also looked askance at me, the intruder.
Then a farmworker, whose trousers were covered in patches, overtook me on the path. He was leading a goat by a piece of string. He shot me a venomous look before disappearing around a bend.
Next a tall, blonde man came down from the mountain. He suddenly abandoned his cart in the middle of the road and ran toward me.
“Venus born out of silence!”
He hugged me as if we’d known each other all our lives. In silence I handed him his briefcase; he made a gesture as if to say forget it, the same gesture the Gypsy patriarch had made a moment ago, as if to say that I shouldn’t have come such a long way to bring it to him. He took me by the elbow, the way he’d guided me through the streets of the Old Town that night in Prague.
He showed me the bushes and trees of the area, and invented new names for each and every one of them.
He showed me the tumbledown house where he lived.
It started to rain. He thought it an ideal moment to take me for a walk in the surrounding countryside. The forest was steeped in the odor of that pouring icy rain. When the rain started to come down in thick curtains, we hid ourselves away in a cave that Andrei knew as well as he had known that underground restaurant in Prague. He spoke about the stones, he picked them up and showed them to me, and I could see clearly the paintings hanging on the walls of that Prague tavern. We sat down on a wide stone. My fingers slid over the wall of the cave as we looked out at the forest that the frozen rain had dressed in cut glass.
Andrei, in a voice from another planet, said, “Let us think no more of the glory and shame of the world. We have everything!”
Yes, we had everything we could have wished for then. We said nothing. In that silence, our closeness grew and grew.
Andrei asked in a soft voice, “Perhaps you’re hungry?”
Without waiting for a reply, he took out of his pocket a piece of bread wrapped in a handkerchief. With those long, fine, white fingers he broke it in half and gave me the bigger piece.
His eyes sparkled when he saw how hungry I was. When I’d finished my piece of bread, he carefully put the crumbs that had fallen from his own piece into my mouth, slowly, one by one. He caressed my lips with the tips of his fingers as he did so. When we’d finished, we drank from the icy brook that came down from the high mountains. That sip of water filled my body with a deep cold, and my spirit, with peace and freedom.
“Would you like to stay with me? Stay! Please, stay!” he repeated, like a child begging for a toy.
I wanted to stay, he knew that.
“I’m going to look for the bus,” I said as I watched a white cloud against the background of the darkened sky.
Andrei followed my gaze.
“That cloud is like human life, ever changing, fleeting, and free.”
I forgot the whole world. I waited for Andrei to ask me to stay, again. I had the words “Yes, I’ll stay” on the tip of my tongue.
“I’ll take you to the bus stop,” he said. His voice was full of sadness.
After a short silence he said, “Time grips the curves of the mountains, deep and untameable.”
Under the chains of rain we reached a wooden shack: the bus stop.
“Goodbye.”
Why was he saying goodbye to me? I wanted him to stay with me.
“Goodbye,” he repeated, and we shook hands.
No. Andrei, the mountain man who sometimes talked as if he lived in a world other than this one, didn’t understand that I didn’t mean what I had said; I wanted to stay.
A moment passed. He said, in a low voice, “Look, the dark pools reflect the mountains, and above them floats the cloudy sky. You, the woman born in silence, are leaving, and everything will be the way it always has been. Yet there are so many things I would like to tell you. You are leaving, and if we meet again some other day, amid the darkness of the clouds, I know that you’ll listen to me. I know it.”
And he walked slowly away through the pearly rain.
He spoke and behaved differently than most people. But here in the middle of nature, I didn’t find it odd. The wind made the mountains and the forests echo, and the twilight air, lit by the shine of the rain, felt fresh against my cheeks and plunged me into a state of nostalgia.
“Sylva,” Andrei said, standing in front of me once again, “why do people go to sleep just now? And why would you leave now when the rainy evening is full of such sad beauty?”
“I’m glad you came back here, Andrei.”
“There was something I forgot to tell you. Do you recognize this?” He started to recite something in Russian, softly, taking long pauses during which I had the feeling it was silence itself that was speaking the lines. I listened more to the melancholy of his Russian than to the actual meaning of the words. The poem was something about snow, prison, a bell.
Mountains surround the jail. As does an ocean of snow.
The blanket is as cold as iron.
The dream has turned to ash.
All the same, not everything can be chained down:
From where do the peals of that bell come?
After a long while, I asked, “Where did they come from, Andrei?”
He said nothing.
The downpour was thick. The wind stirred yellow and green leaves into the rain.
A pinecone fell onto the roof of the shack. It shook Andrei out of his thoughts.
“I served in the Red Army. In the cavalry, you know.” He was narrating this slowly, reflectively, remembering.
If I had paid careful attention to what he was saying, I would have realized that those events were of the utmost importance to him. But the only voice I was listening to right then was that of my own curiosity. The revolution, the war . . . What did war mean to me? War is death. With my lack of experience, it didn’t occur to me that for someone else, war, imprisonment, and death could be closely linked to life.
“And what was there before? I mean before the Russian War?” I asked.
“Nothing. A vacuum.”
“The life of a young aristocrat is a vacuum?” I laughed.
“Look at that stream,” he said, changing the subject.
Why did he always change the subject? Why did he avoid talking about his past?
“What do you see there?” he asked.
“Stones and water,” I answered.
“Yes. The stones last, but the water flows, the stones are silent, but the water makes a sound. Where is it heading?”
“I don’t know.”
“Toward the distant sky, I think,” Andrei said, following the direction of the stream.
“What kind of life would a young aristocrat have led, in the Russia of the czars?” I grimaced.
“When I was little, I longed for Sunday to roll along, when my parents would take me to church. Long Orthodox masses, enigmatic and emotive, full of liturgical chanting, the light given off by the candles, and the gold on the walls, and full, too, of the lively colors of the painted icons, the strong smell of incense, full of half shadows and mystery.”
“And after that kind of childhood?”
“My parents’ palazzo overlooking the Fontanka canal, and in the summers, a chateau in Repino. After that the Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, and then the Berlin Academy of Arts, and when that was over, back to the Saint Petersburg Academy.”
“What did you learn there?”
“In Berlin, I discovered the art of the oldest civilizations in the world. I learned how to admire the sculpture of the ancient Sumerians. The Sumerian ruler Gudea, who lived roughly two thousand two hundred years before Christ, was a whole revelation to me: he seemed to me to be the personification of spiritual beauty as I’d known it when I was little, in Russia.”
He stopped and said nothing: he was mulling something over.
“The Red Army. The cavalry division,” he said after a while, in a serious voice.
“Tell me how a young aristocrat and a refined artist from Saint Petersburg ended up with the Bolsheviks in the Red Army.”
“That is easy enough to explain: I believed in the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution,” said Andrei, without a trace of irony. His eyes were fixed on the darkness of the forest.
I longed to continue teasing him, but was starting to listen to something inside me, “I too, a long time ago, believed in—”
“I wanted to help the revolution. I volunteered for the Red Army.” Andrei cut me off.
I was happy now, because I could identify with that; I, too, had wanted to help the world, when I was with the nuns in the convent.
“Of course, just as I did, living with the nuns in the convent!”
“It would be easier to flatten these mountains and dry out the stream from which we’ve drunk than to satisfy the hearts of men,” he said, very quietly.
He ran his long fingers over his forehead. Looking at his white hands, I tried to imagine how that young and refined aristocrat must have felt in combat, he who had been used to hunting for sport and the museums of Berlin.
“You were already an experienced rider, that must have been an advantage,” I smiled at my image of a slim, elegant horseman, riding through the parks that belonged to the summer palaces of Peter the Great.
Andrei was lost in thought. He hadn’t heard me.
“The wind fills the vacuum of the mountains,” he said finally.
“How did an intellectual from the nobility go about joining the revolution?”
“In the cavalry regiment?” Andrei paid no heed to my irony, he continued seriously, forthrightly. “We Reds were waging war against the Whites, then I found myself in the middle of a large group of Cossacks. They knew how to do just about everything: kill a sheep for supper, skin it and disembowel it, roast it. They practically flew along on horseback, like Ilya Muromets, like mythical heroes. At the beginning, for me, a city intellectual, a Cossack was like a fairytale firebird, beautiful and all-powerful. The Cossacks knew how to seduce women, how to sing and dance. They knew how to carry their guns as if they were leading beautiful ladies off to dance a polonaise in a ballroom. They knew how to kill: they knew how to kill sheep, hares, goats. And ultimately men.”
“Have you known death?” I asked, sighing.
He didn’t hear me. The colors of the autumn were playing a nostalgic melody.
“Have you known death?” I asked again. “I have,” I said with a sigh. We were back on a subject I knew something about.
The wind was combing the thick branches of the fir and pine trees. The mountain range shifted in the distance and melted into the horizon.
“One day my commander ordered me to follow him. We rode for over fifty versts and caught up with the Thirty-Third Division in a small Ukrainian village. My commander knew as well as I did that the soldiers of the Thirty-Third Division, who were almost all Cossacks, traveled everywhere completely drunk, and wherever they arrived they ransacked the village and rumor had it, murdered all the inhabitants. My commander burst into a house that was low to the ground; I followed him in. A wounded man was moaning on a bed. He was Jewish—those Ukrainian villages were almost all Jewish. In a corner, a woman was sobbing and covered in blood. They’d raped her. On the floor I saw a dozen corpses. And in the middle of all this, two of our own soldiers from the Red Army, and a nurse, were filling sacks and trunks and washtubs and boxes, whatever they could, with the belongings of these dying people.”
“What happened to the two soldiers and the nurse?”
“The commander shot dead the Cossacks who were ransacking that house. The nurse fell on her knees before him pleading for mercy, not for herself, but for her children. The commander let her live. He got out of there as fast as he could, with a bunch of drunken Cossacks at his heels. I stayed behind. During the attack on that house, our soldiers, some of whom were after my commander, broke into the other rooms. In one, a Jewish family squeezed into a dark corner, trying to hide there. They pulled a man out of that group. They told me to finish him off. The man trembled like a leaf; he was short, stout, a typical family man with big eyes behind metal-framed glasses. I could see nothing else except those eyes full of terror.”
Andrei fell silent. I didn’t take my eyes off him. “That little man trembling with fear said, ‘Kill me, but spare my wife. Sir, I beg of you to make sure that nothing happens to her, but shoot me dead right now,’ and he pointed to his chest.”
“And then?” I asked softly.
“I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t. But I saw the pogrom that they launched afterward.”
“They?”
“They, the Red Army. Our people. The Cossacks. I saw the whole thing. Everything.”
“And then?” I asked after a long stretch of silence.
Andrei said nothing.
The bus came and left.
Eyes full of terror. I knew them. In that instant, I saw them again in Andrei’s face.
The heavy rain didn’t let up, but I could see in the distance a single white cloud against the dark sky.
“Then? After many other similar massacres I fled from the Red Army. I hid in the forest. I became familiar with its secrets. But I couldn’t stay there forever, so in the end I joined the White Army.”
“The Whites believed you were sincere?”
“The same evening I turned up, the Whites had condemned a young boy to death. A deserter, like I’d been. That boy was full of panic. They led him over to a tree, and tied him to it. He kept begging for mercy. He talked about his mother, who had no one else in the world but him. He was crying so much, sobbing like a little child. They killed him anyway; five men shot him dead.”
“And you? What happened to you?”
“In the beginning, the Whites wouldn’t trust me. Then, when they saw I was . . . ”
“That you were what?”
“After that they did what they could to be rid of me.”
“That you were what?” I repeated.
“Eventually I also managed to flee from the Whites. I made it to Prague, where Masaryk’s government gave me a grant as part of the Czechoslovak government aid program to support exiled Russian intelligentsia.”
“So you lived in Prague!”
It had stopped raining, we stepped out of the hut. Behind Andrei’s head, over the dip in the hills, a bright cloud flew. Andrei turned and followed my gaze.
“That white cloud, free as it is, is pushing the wind,” he said.
He turned up his coat collar, then did the same with mine. He smiled.
“Yes, it was in Prague that I discovered my Venus born of the rain. And of music. You played the piano and sang. I watched you through a curtain of rain.”
His face was soaked by the wetness in the air. Two rows of mountains protected Andrei from the outside world.
Stepping away from me, he said something that surprised me. At that moment I remembered the Gypsy woman in blue, who could only say, “Oh! Oh!”
Andrei said, “I pray to the god of the mountains that he carry away all sadness. And that he fill us with warmth to dry out all the evil and pain in the world.”
“A god who fled Prague for the mountains.” I tried to smile when Andrei came back to where I was standing.
I tried to fill him with light, just as he wished. But above all I wanted to get rid of that image of the woman at the window, the neighbor opposite, who until recently had cried and laughed standing next to this very man. Now I knew why Andrei’s face was so familiar to me.
“How do you know I ran away?” Andrei was stunned. “Who told you?” he roared.
This change of behavior frightened me.
“Have you been spying on me?” Andrei asked, beside himself.
I remained silent, scared.
I didn’t understand the sudden change in this man. His face had gone dry and white.
“What are you, an informer?” he went on howling.
“Are you a spy? Always on the lookout for me?” Andrei bellowed.
I stepped away from him. The Gypsy’s words ran through my head, “You be careful!”
“Have I got it right, then? Were you running away from something when you came here?” I made an effort to smile.
Andrei himself was shaking.
“Tell me everything, Andrei, if you want to,” I whispered to calm him down, “I’d like to hear it, your story really does interest me.”
Another transformation took place. Now, Andrei watched me the way the horse from my childhood looked at the carter.
I took his hand. At first he flinched, then he gradually quieted.
Once he had calmed himself, he stroked my hand, so delicately it was as if he weren’t touching a human hand, but rather the white fluff of a dandelion.
His gaze fixed on the distant peaks. He said, “These mountains are black without their knowing it, the night is gray but doesn’t realize it. And I, unthinkingly, am tottering through the empty darkness. My soul follows, flying, at a distance.”
After a moment, he said, “Did I run away? I walked along a Prague street until I reached the city limits; then I walked along a very long road. At the feet of the mountains I found an unpaved path that led me here. Is that running away?”
He flinched again, jerked his fingers out of my hand, and sprang to his feet. He kicked at a stone.
“So now you are going to report me, to tell them everything!”
I remembered my “That’s enough!” that had such a strong effect on my husband, all that time ago. With him, it had been like a magic word.
“That’s enough!” I shouted.
Andrei stood stock-still.
“Enough! I’m fed up with all of this!” I was letting off accumulated steam.
With a long, pained howl, Andrei vanished into the forest.
I set off after him. The trees calmed me. In the forest, the rain only whispered. Nothing broke the silence, no footsteps, no sighs. Only the song of the rain, sliding through the branches.
I pushed myself forward through the wet forest, bumping into the tree trunks. Trees stay stiff and upright, I thought, they don’t dither the way people do, who twist about, deform themselves, make contortions. The rain caressed my face and hair. It was almost dark by now. Nothing stirred. The only thing I heard was another bus, arriving and then departing.
In the street, the snow was mixing with rain. It was Christmas.
I was watching the window of the woman who lived across the street; the candles were flickering on the Christmas tree. A bald man with a thin line of a mustache, like a bank clerk’s, was having dinner with her. Yes, maybe my neighbor’s new friend was nothing but a clerk, but she had a Christmas tree in her home, and the atmosphere was warm, cozy, and gay. My neighbor and the man with the thin line of a mustache were keeping each other company. Although I had company for the holiday, I was alone.
“Now that your grandmother is dead,” my mother mentioned this fact—which I found so difficult to accept—so casually, so without sentimentality, “we will celebrate our Christmas dinner at your home, Sylva, and we will decorate the tree here too.”
Mr. Singer, the father of one of my students, and my mother’s new husband, gave a discreet yawn. Not a single move made by Bruno Singer escaped my mother’s notice. She straightened up fast as a cat.
“Bruno would prefer to celebrate Hanukkah. Wouldn’t you, Bruno?” I said jokingly, although I knew that my mother’s husband didn’t celebrate the Jewish holidays.
Bruno Singer stroked his thick, shiny, chestnut mustache.
“You know perfectly well, Sylva, that I am an atheist.”
I poured more tea into the old, Chinese porcelain cups.
“A good thing Grandma can’t hear you,” I said, as if Grandmother were in the next room.
“Your grandmother has not lived to see these terrible times,” sighed Bruno Singer as he picked up his cup by the handle. As he moved I could see how much thinner he’d become. I remembered just how astonished he’d been, a few years ago, at the change he saw in me after my husband’s death.
At that time I could only think of the past: it had become an obsession of mine. Bruno Singer, on the other hand, only had eyes for the future. It scared him. Would his Jewish firm withstand the Nazis’ lack of self-restraint? I looked out at the street and at my neighbor’s window through the slush. Her Christmas tree was glowing.
Bruno Singer went pale. Who was that knocking at the door? Since the Germans—the ones from Germany, of course, but also our Germans, the ones who until recently had formed part of our own country—had begun shouting hostile slogans in the streets and raising their right arms while they slammed their military boots to the ground, and clenched their teeth in puffed-up expressions of disdain and proud violence, since then anything at all would send Bruno Singer into paroxysms of fear.
The knocking at the door grew louder and louder. My mother took her husband’s hand. I quickly went to answer it.
On the landing in front of the door, Andrei leaned against the wall. I hadn’t seen him in a long while.
I hastened to put my mother and Bruno’s fears to rest. With a wave of my hand, I told them I had a visitor, that there was no cause for concern.
I introduced Andrei to my mother and her husband. They looked at him, surprised. There they were, both with cigarettes in holders, their shoes shined to perfection, shoes with square toe caps, in accordance with the latest fashion, both of them were wearing French colognes. They stared at this bearded stranger who had come down from the mountains as if he were a genie that had just popped out of its lamp.
I asked my mother to accompany me to my room. There I told her that I needed time alone with Andrei. I suggested that he and I could take a stroll around the neighborhood, and that she and Bruno could finish their tea undisturbed.
She bowed her head. In a very low voice, she replied, “There’s going to be a war. I can smell it in the air. I’ve already been through one and I know how the atmosphere grows saturated with war fever. Sylva, during war, you come to realize what is most important to you: your children. The lives of your children are the most important, more important than your own life.”
Maman went on talking. Her words sounded something like the litanies recited by the nuns of my childhood. I didn’t listen to what she was saying, I knew she was having a go at my relationship with Andrei.
On Kampa Island, Andrei was chasing after the falling snowflakes.
“Why have you come? What did you want to say to me?” I asked.
“I’m here with you. Isn’t that enough? Do we need words?”
“What did you want to talk about? I’d like to know.”
“I haven’t seen you in a long while.”
“Just tell me, don’t keep me in suspense!”
“I haven’t seen you in a long, long while.”
From the Bridge of Legions we walked down to Hunters’ Island. We went right across it, then circled to Kampa Island. I remembered when my husband and I sometimes had dinner on Hunters’ Island and that during the meal we had listened to a quartet playing Dvořák. That kind of dinner struck me as being impossible these days.
The snowflakes drew thousands of milky ways against the darkened sky.
“Is your father Jewish?” Andrei asked me.
“He’s my mother’s second husband. My father is dead. Bruno Singer is Jewish, yes.”
“As was my wife.”
I didn’t say anything. The snowflakes had ceased their dancing and now fell lazily to the ground, heavy and lethargic. In the midst of the snow I imagined a young, dark-haired woman arm in arm with Andrei, coming home from a concert; it was snowing softly, the night was brilliant and icy, yet the girl wore her ermine coat open so that her long pearl necklace glimmered in the golden brightness of the streetlamps.
“She died in my arms,” Andrei said.
I leaned on the bridge railing. As if on a huge movie screen, the dark-haired girl’s face unfolded before me, pale and intelligent even as she died. This evening is ruined, I thought.
“Was that long ago?” I asked, not really interested in the answer.
“She died in my arms. With her dying breath she asked me never to forget to recite her Kaddish. And I haven’t been able to do that,” Andrei said quietly, “That was seventeen, maybe sixteen years ago. And I haven’t recited her Kaddish in a very long time. She died in my arms,” he repeated, as if talking to someone who couldn’t hear him.
I didn’t say anything.
Andrei went on, “The Reds hated the Jews, the Whites didn’t care for them either, and the Czechs . . .”
“Czechs and Jews live together in peace!” I said, defensively.
“Maybe. But the Czechs hold a grudge against the Germans.”
“Does that surprise you? They’re taking over our country!”
“That animosity already existed, I saw it on the mountain where I live.”
In the fragile, naked, black branches of the island’s park, I saw Bruno Singer’s face, distorted by a grimace of fear. And I saw my mother’s hands clasped together: What would happen to her Bruno? What would happen to me?
“No!” I shouted, fighting off the embrace of Andrei’s black anguish, “No! You’re a very strange man, Andrei! You see everything in the worst possible light, please go!”
I saw lightning bolts in his eyes. Andrei leaped onto the edge of the bridge. He took hold of a streetlamp and knocked his skull against it. There’s impotence for you, I thought.
“I see everything in the worst possible light?” Andrei said, hoarsely, “But everything is terrible, horrifying! Everything is truly hellish!”
“What is it that’s so bad?”
“This world! What else? This whole world!”
The figure standing on the balustrade of the bridge turned to face the river.
“If even you can’t understand me, then who—”
“Andrei, please, forgive me! Come down here, I beg you.”
There wasn’t a soul in sight. Just the snowflakes and the mist.
When, after quite a while he raised his head, I realized that the clouds had broken. The stars were shining light on our desperation.
Andrei was calming down. He sat on the balustrade, one leg in, the other out. The mad song of the massacre had stopped ringing in his ears. But can anyone who has heard it once, ever forget it? When he spoke his words came out weighted with pain.
“Do you remember I told you the story of that day during the Russian Civil War? When the Cossacks tried to make me help them ransack the houses? I refused. One of them told me: ‘For centuries these cursed Jewish landowners have exploited us and grown fat and rich at our expense. Now it’s our turn! Comrade Lenin tells us to steal from he who has stolen from you! All the revolutionary leaders teach us to hate the class enemy and to seek revenge against him.’”
I thought that all revolutions were spawned by hatred. What else could they lead to if not more hatred and violence?
“In one house, I could hear weeping. I rushed over. Three of the Cossacks jumped on me then and one of them threatened me. ‘Are you wet behind the ears, you idiot? Who do you think you were about to help, you young fool? The enemy of the revolution! The kulaks! The Jews! Not one step more, if you don’t want me to smash your face in, you snake!’
“But I could still hear that weeping, those screams. I wanted to go in and find out what had happened.
‘Damn it!’ another Cossack yelled at me, ‘Here’s what you wanted. Don’t go telling anyone, you scheming bastard!’
“He opened the door of the house with a key and pushed me inside. He locked the door again, from the outside.
“I couldn’t see anything, everything was dark. The weeping and the sobbing and the screaming for help was all in pitch darkness: to say that was hell, Sylva, is not to say enough. Slowly, I adjusted to the shadows. What I found there was horrifying. Corpses thrown one on top of the other, the moans of the dying, the cries of the wounded: all of it . . .”
Andrei jumped off the balustrade and shook me.
“All of it was in a huge pool of blood, you understand? No, you don’t understand! You can’t begin to imagine it, you’d be a monster if you could. And there was also . . .”
He began walking quickly along the bridge.
“What?” I asked as I ran after Andrei.
“There was a woman. A girl. Our men had raped her. Before her father’s eyes. The girl told me she had begged them to do it in another room, not there where her father was lying in a pool of his own blood. They ignored her. They raped her: a dozen men, right there in front of her father!
“Many of the wounded started away from me in fright: I was wearing the same uniform as their killers. Others took my hand and asked me to help them and their loved ones. That night I discovered I was in the very heart of hell. All night I stroked the cheeks and soft hair of that Jewish girl. At the break of dawn she took my hand and said, ‘I am your wife.’ Then she died. That was my wife, who died seventeen years ago.”
Andrei was walking briskly, waving his arms, and talking to the stars. He sat on a snow-covered bench, which gave onto the Vltava. The silhouettes of the poplars and the chestnut trees were chasing the stars on the river.
Andrei spoke as if talking to our footsteps, “I believed in the ideals of the revolution because I was drawn by the dream of equality and justice. I believed that those crimes would be investigated and that the people who had committed them would be tried and punished.”
“Did they punish them?” I asked, ever so quietly.
“A government commission traveled from Moscow to investigate the killings and the pillaging perpetrated by Red Army soldiers all over Ukraine. Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews had all been the victims of these attacks. These commissars, a few ministers of our new country, arrived in Ukraine. They investigated, and then, by way of conclusion, Comrade Kalinin, one of the leaders of the revolution and of the new government, said, ‘Comrades, it is our pleasure to state that all present have spoken with the utmost frankness and sincerity. We will now leave for Moscow, where we will make a final decision on these matters.’ That’s how they dealt with the whole affair. Not one more thing was done.”
The Vltava flowed dark and solitary.
“Don’t you get it, Sylva? I’d believed in their slogans!”
“What did you do?”
“I had to flee, I didn’t have any choice.”
“From the Reds to the Whites?”
“Yes. And don’t mock me, although you are right to mock me. The Whites were no better than the Reds. But I didn’t want those people who were betraying the dreams of so many to stay in power.”
“So since then, you’ve done nothing but flee, is that it?”
“You’re right, after that I fled from the Whites to Prague, as I told you. A good woman took me under her wing when I got here.”
I offered my face to the snowflakes, which were pouring once again from the black vacuum of the sky.
“And then . . . For days at a time, I sat next to the window and stared at a red geranium. Jaroslava told me I was full of terrible anguish. You know Jaroslava, don’t you?” Andrei waved at what I supposed to be my neighbor opposite, “She was the one who insisted that I should be seen by a doctor. After some arguing, I agreed. I went to see the doctor.”
He stopped and stared at me. He was trying hard to use his eyes to express all that he wanted to say. As if now he didn’t even trust the spoken word.
I didn’t understand. I longed to comprehend it all in the silence of that stare, but I didn’t know how.
“What did the doctor say?”
“He was a neurologist. He told me that I had to start treatment immediately. That I couldn’t go home, that they’d keep me there. He said something to the nurse and the door opened. Two men walked in. Each of them took one of my arms, and they held me down by force. I knew I couldn’t shake them off, so I didn’t offer any resistance.”
“And then?”
“I asked calmly to go to the lavatory. Those two waited in front of the door, but they waited in vain.”
“Don’t tell me you escaped?”
“Someone who is forever on the run always knows how to escape. It’s like a sixth sense. I escaped through the window. And I went on escaping: on foot, by train, on trams, by bus, and when there were no other means of transport left, I went up into the mountains.”
“And in the mountains?”
“There I stayed. I found refuge there.”
I saw a scene from my childhood: my father is riding at full tilt, chasing a fawn. I saw that fawn and the huge dogs that were after it.
My mother and Bruno Singer had left my apartment a while ago. The gaslight in the street lit the icy flakes that fell and broke against the paving stones.
I was playing Chopin’s Nocturne in E minor.
The music was my way of meditating, of relaxing myself, or of calming someone down. Andrei lay on the sofa, silent, motionless. His fit was over. I had cleared away the broken crockery and swept the entire apartment. I’d done it quickly, without making a noise, while he slept, worn out. Shards of glass and porcelain were everywhere, the floor covered with them, as in A Winter’s Tale. Now everything was neat and tidy, nothing would remind him of how . . .
Later when he woke, Andrei made strong, Russian tea. He took it without sugar. I also drank that bitter tea. We drank. After so many years of being alone, I’d lost the habit of speaking in the plural. Or even of thinking in the plural.
We drank the bitter tea.
Chopin’s Nocturne in E minor.
I closed my eyes, playing it from memory. I thought back on what had happened: Andrei had come looking for me in the bathroom. It was the only room that his frenzy had spared. I was sitting on the edge of the tub, covering my ears with my hands. He kissed my eyes, but didn’t seem to be aware of what he was doing. He took me into the bedroom. He’d caressed me with his fingertips, without looking at me. He kept my eyes shut, as I did, later, when playing Chopin’s “Nocturne in E minor.” Andrei had moved away from me only once. He removed the white lace curtain from the rail at the window, and he wrapped me up in it, all of me, from my hair down to my toes. “You’re a bride,” he whispered into my ear, “you’re a bride.”
Then he kissed me through the holes in the lace. When he reached my feet, day had already broken. And it was nighttime once more when he took me in his arms again, all wrapped up in white lace. “You’re a bride,” he said again and again until he fell asleep.
I’d fallen asleep after him, only to wake up before he did.
Half asleep, I swept up the splinters of glass and the shards of porcelain and pottery. Once everything was clean, I covered my ears again. In my mind, I’d never stopped hearing that deafening racket. I locked myself in the bathroom with my ears firmly covered. My tears had cleansed me from within, carrying off with them all that uproar, all that madness. And then . . . bride . . . bride . . . I heard this word inside myself.
I’d felt I needed to see him most urgently.
In the bedroom, I spotted the blood at once. In the night Andrei’s nose had bled. Without knowing why, I covered my ears again. With my hands on my ears, I looked down at that sleeping body.
I hid the blood under a white towel. Andrei had stopped bleeding by now. I lay back down beside him. I put an arm over his sleeping body. He has to be protected, I told myself. Asleep, he held my hand and made himself comfortable under my arm as if it were a warm eiderdown.
And now we were drinking bitter tea. I was playing Chopin’s Nocturne in E minor.
The phone rang. I ignored it.
The phone went on ringing for quite a while, before falling silent.
I desired nothing, I needed nothing, I wanted nothing. I was full, like a pitcher full of sunlight. Full of his eyes, full of his warmth, full of music.
The phone started ringing again.
“Bruno has gone off to fight the Germans,” my mother’s voice said over the receiver, “He’s just left with a friend on a motorbike, they’re going to look for weapons.”
“To look for weapons,” I repeated mechanically. It seemed logical enough to me.
“Yes, Sylva, to look for weapons. There’s going to be a general mobilization.”
Maman spoke in a strange, almost solemn way.
“The weapons,” I repeated. “The Nazis have started to occupy Prague. It seems to make you happy.”
“They all, we all, want the same thing: to defend our country,” she answered vaguely.
I said nothing. I was thinking that Andrei had left too soon. He’d left. And I was thinking about something else too: the week before, an entire Jewish family had committed suicide, one of the families renting an apartment in my building. I remembered again that Andrei wasn’t there and that I didn’t know when I’d see him again.
A moment later, I heard Maman’s voice on the receiver again.
“Am I happy that the Germans have started to occupy Prague? No I’m not at all happy about it. But now Bruno knows what he wants. The time of uncertainty has passed, the months and years of fearing things yet to come, are over. The time of passivity is over. Now Bruno is going to look for weapons with which to defend the Czech people against the Germans.”
“But his mother tongue is German.” It was true.
“Sylva, what’s wrong with you? Does it matter what his mother tongue is? Of course it doesn’t! Are you still asleep? You sound like Verdi’s La Sonnambula, the sleepwalker!”
Before my eyes swam Bruno’s swarthy, intelligent face, but now it was hidden by the shadow of an army helmet, one of many helmets belonging to the Czechoslovakian army. No, I couldn’t imagine the refined Herr Singer as a soldier.
I moaned inadvertently, because I didn’t know what to say.
On the other end of the line, I heard a squeak like the badly oiled wheels of a cart. It was my mother, answering with a laugh that echoed her own mood.
When people have no words, they emit only sounds. Like animals, so they say. Like objects, in fact. Instead I started to play Brahms’s last Intermezzo, Opus 119.
I had no words.
Months later, my mother called to let me know that there wasn’t going to be any mobilization.
“Right now the Minister of Defense, Jan Syrový, is on the radio. He’s said that this is the most difficult moment of his life. Do you want to listen to him, Sylva?” and she placed the receiver close to the radio. I heard a grave, broken voice:
“Everyone has abandoned us. To retrace our steps and accept the situation as it is today, now that the three Great Powers have betrayed us, cannot be considered a dishonor. So we wish to call out to our people, to ask them to overcome their heavy heartedness, their grief. The most important thing is that we are all united. It is vital to ensure that foreign elements do not impinge on us. Do not succumb to confusion.”
Then Syrový said, with greater emphasis, “Do not stray from the correct path. Now, within our new borders, we will strengthen our community and our national identity. All this is in our hands, and in yours. With your help we will achieve this. We trust in you, so do trust in us!”
My mother pressed the receiver back against her ear.
“Our leaders have decided not to fight the invader. You know, Sylva, by doing this they have taken away Bruno’s only feeling of freedom, and his power to decide for himself.” She added, in a low voice, that both she and Bruno felt their country no longer belonged to them.
“I haven’t left the apartment for days,” I whispered back into the receiver.
“Prague is now full of Nazi uniforms, Sylva.”
All of a sudden, she said something that made me think of the words spoken by Defense Minister Syrový, “Sylva, I don’t know what to do. The only thing I know is that in all this chaos and uncertainty, I’m going to be at Bruno’s side, no matter where he goes.”
“I understand,” I said in a quiet voice.
“Sylva,” my mother went on, “life has taught me that there are three commandments. Sadly, I haven’t always obeyed them. I’d like you to remember them. Always have the courage to take risks. Think everything over to see what lays on the horizon. As long as you are alive, do something that will be useful for the generations to come. You won’t forget this little legacy of mine, will you, Sylva?”
I didn’t leave my home. Why would I do so? Andrei wasn’t in Prague anymore. How could he get back to me now, when the Germans were strutting through the streets, humiliating all those who didn’t belong to their nation?
For the first time I understood something that I would never before have been in agreement with—that a personal concern can be more important than a collective sense of grief.
The fact was, Andrei had gone.
But he existed!
A white geranium was blooming in the flowerpot on the windowsill, illuminating the world around it. In the breeze, the geranium’s white petals mixed with the snowflakes.