"Well, really."
"What do you mean?"
"Your sister-in-law."
"I didn't know you knew her."
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"Mama does."
Immediately he pictured the alliance that had sprung up spontaneously between those two women.
"So then, you're calling on your mother's behalf?"
The blase voice turned insistent. "I need to talk to you. It's absolutely necessary."
"You, or your mother?"
"Me."
"Tell me first what this is about."
"Do you want to see me or not?"
"I'm asking you to tell me what it's about."
The blase voice turned aggressive: "If you don't want to see me, just say so right out."
He detested her insistence but did not dare put her off. Keeping secret her reason for the meeting was a very effective gambit on his stepdaughter's part: he grew uneasy.
"I'm only here for a couple of days; I'm very busy. I might be able to squeeze in a half hour at most. . .," and he named a cafe in Prague for the day he was leaving.
"You won't be there."
"I'll be there."
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When he hung up he felt a kind of nausea. What could those women want from him? Some advice? People who need advice don't act aggressive. They wanted to make trouble for him. Prove they existed. Take up his time. But then why had he agreed to meet her? Out of curiosity? Oh, come on—it was out of fear! He had given in to an old reflex: to protect himself he always tried to be fully informed in advance. But protect himself? These days? Against what? There was certainly no danger. Quite simply, his stepdaughter's voice enveloped him in a fog of old recollections: intrigues; interfering relatives; abortion; tears; slander; blackmail; emotional bullying; angry scenes; anonymous letters: the whole concierge conspiracy.
The life we've left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court. Living far from Bohemia, Josef had lost the habit of keeping his past in mind. But the past was there, waiting for him, watching him. Uneasy, Josef tried to think about other things. But when a man has come to look at the land of his past, what can he think about if not his past? In the two days left to him, what should he do? Pay a visit to the town
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where he'd had his veterinary practice? Go and stand, moist-eyed, before the house he used to live in? He hadn't the slightest desire to do that. Was there anyone at all among the people he used to know whom he would—sincerely—like to see? N.'s face emerged. Way back, when the rabble-rousers of the revolution accused the very young Josef of God knows what (in those years everyone, at some time or another, stood accused of God knows what), N., who was an influential Communist at the university, had stood up for him without worrying about Josef's opinions and family background. That was how they'd become friends, and if Josef could reproach himself for anything, it would be for having largely forgotten about the man during the twenty years since his emigration.
"The Red Commissar! Everyone was terrified of him!" his sister-in-law had said, implying that, out of self-interest, Josef had attached himself to a stalwart of the regime. Oh, those poor countries shaken by great historical dates! When the battle is over, everybody stampedes off on punitive expeditions into the past to hunt down the guilty parties. But who were the guilty parties? The
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Communists who won in 1948? Or their ineffective adversaries who lost? Everybody was hunting down the guilty and everybody was being hunted down. When Josef's brother joined the Party so as to go on with his studies, his friends condemned him as an opportunist. That had made him detest Communism all the more, blaming it for his craven behavior, and his wife had focused her own hatred on people like N., who, as a convinced Marxist before the revolution, had of his own free will (and thus unpardonably) helped to bring about a system she held to be the greatest of all evils.
The telephone rang again. He picked it up, and this time he was sure he recognized her: "Finally!"
"Oh, I'm so glad to hear your 'finally!' Were you waiting for my call?"
"Impatiently."
"Really?"
"I was in a hideous mood! Hearing your voice changes everything!"
"Oh, you're making me very happy! How I wish you were with me—right here, where I am."
"How sorry I am that I can't be."
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"You're sorry? Really?"
"Really."
"Will I see you before you leave?"
"Yes, you'll see me."
"For sure?"
"For sure! We'll have lunch together the day after tomorrow!"
"I'll be delighted."
He gave her the address of his hotel in Prague.
As he hung up, his glance fell on the shredded diary, now only a small pile of paper strips on the table. He picked up the whole bundle and merrily tossed it into the wastebasket.
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Three years before 1989, Gustaf had opened an office in Prague for his company, but he only went there for a few visits each year. That was enough for him to love the city and to see it as an ideal place to live; not only out of love for Irena but also (maybe even especially) because there he felt, even more than in Paris, cut off from Sweden,
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from his family, from his past life. When Communism unexpectedly vanished from Europe, he was quick to tout Prague to his company as a strategic location for conquering new markets. He saw to the purchase of a handsome baroque house for office space, and set aside two rooms for himself up under the eaves. Meanwhile Irena's mother, who lived alone in a villa on the city's outskirts, put her whole second floor at Gustaf's disposal; he could thus switch living quarters as the mood struck him.
Sleepy and unkempt during the Communist period, Prague came awake before his eyes: it filled up with tourists, lit up with new shops and restaurants, dressed up with restored and repainted baroque houses. "Prague is my town!" he would exclaim in English. He was in love with the city: not like a patriot searching every corner of the land for his roots, his memories, the traces of his dead, but like a traveler responding with surprise and amazement, like a child wandering dazzled through an amusement park and reluctant ever to leave it. Having learned Prague's history, he would declaim at length to anyone who'd listen about its streets, its palaces, its churches,
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and hold forth endlessly on its stars: on Emperor Rudolf (protector of painters and alchemists), on Mozart (who, says the gossip, had a mistress there), on Franz Kafka (who though miserable throughout his lifetime in this city had, thanks to the travel agencies, turned into its patron saint).
At an unhoped-for speed Prague forgot the Russian language that for forty years all its inhabitants had been made to learn from grade school onward, and now, eager for applause on the world's proscenium, displayed to the visitors its new attire of English-language signs and labels. In Gustaf's company offices the staff, the trading associates, the rich customers all addressed him in English, so Czech was no more than an impersonal murmur, a background of sound against which only Anglo-American phonemes stood forth as human words. And one day when Irena landed in Prague, he greeted her at the airport not with their usual French "Salut!" but with a "Hello!"
Suddenly everything was different. For let's look at Irena's life after Martin died: she had nobody left to speak Czech with, her daughters refused to waste their time with such an obviously
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useless language; French was her everyday language, her only language, so it was quite natural for her to impose it on her Swede. This linguistic choice had determined their roles: since Gustaf spoke French poorly, it was she who led the talk within the couple; she grew giddy with her own eloquence: heavens, after so long she could finally speak, speak and be heard! Her verbal superiority balanced out their relative strengths: she was entirely dependent on him, but in their conversations she ruled, and she drew him into her own world.
Now Prague
was reshaping their language as a couple; he spoke English, Irena tried to persist with her French, to which she felt ever more attached, but with no external support (French no longer held much charm for this previously Francophile city), she wound up capitulating; their interaction turned around: in Paris, Gustaf used to listen attentively to an Irena who thirsted for the sound of her own words; in Prague he turned into the talker, a big talker, a long talker. Knowing little English, Irena understood only half of what he said, and as she didn't feel like making much effort, she listened to him rather little and
spoke to him still less. Her Great Return took a very odd twist: in the streets, surrounded by Czechs, the whiff of an old familiarity would caress her and for a moment make her happy; then, back in the house, she would become a silent foreigner.
Couples have a continuous conversation that lulls them, its melodious stream throwing a veil over the body's waning desires. When the conversation breaks off, the absence of physical love comes forward like a ghost. In the face of Irena's muteness, Gustaf lost his confidence. He came to prefer spending time with her in the presence of her family, her mother, her half-brother and his wife; he would dine with them all at the villa or at a restaurant, looking to their company for shelter, for refuge, for peace. They were never short of topics because they could only broach so few: their common vocabulary was limited, and to make themselves understood everyone had to speak slowly and keep repeating things. Gustaf was on the way to recovering his serenity; this slow-tempo babble suited him, it was restful, agreeable, and even merry (they were constantly laughing over their comical distortions of English words).
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Irena's eyes were long since empty of desire, but from habit they still set their wide gaze on Gustaf and discomfited him. To cover his tracks and mask his erotic withdrawal, he took pleasure in good-naturedly dirty stories and mildly ambigu-ous allusions, all delivered loudly and with laughter. The mother was his best ally, ever quick to support him with smutty remarks that she would pronounce in some exaggerated, parodic manner, and in her puerile English. Listening to the two of them, Irena got the sense that eroticism had once and for all turned into childish clowning.
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From the moment she ran into Josef at the Paris airport, she's been thinking of nothing but him. She constantly replays their brief encounter long ago in Prague. In the bar where she'd been sitting with friends, he was older and more interesting than the others, funny and seductive, and he paid attention only to her. When they had all gone out into the street, he saw to it that they were left to
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themselves. He slipped her a little ashtray he'd stolen for her from the bar. Then this man she had known for only a couple of hours invited her home with him. She was engaged to Martin, and she couldn't work up the nerve; she'd refused. But immediately she had felt such an abrupt, piercing regret that she has never forgotten it.
And so, when she was preparing to emigrate, sorting out what to take with her and what to leave behind, she had stuck the little ashtray into a valise; abroad, she often carried it in her purse, secretly, like a good luck charm.
She recalls that in the airport lounge he had said in a grave, strange tone: "I'm a completely free man." She had the sense that their love story, begun twenty years earlier, had merely been postponed until the two of them should be free.
And she recalls another of his remarks: "It's pure chance that I'm going through Paris"; "chance" is another way of saying "fate"; he had to go through Paris so that their story could take up at the point where it had been interrupted.
With her cell phone in hand, she tries to reach him from wherever she is—cafes, a friend's apartment, the street. The hotel number is correct, but
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he's never in his room. All day long she thinks about him and, since opposites attract, about Gustaf. Passing a souvenir shop, she sees in the window a T-shirt showing the gloomy face of a tubercular, with a line in English: KAFKA WAS BORN IN PRAGUE. A magnificently stupid T-shirt, it enchants her, and she buys it.
Toward evening she returns to the house meaning to phone him undisturbed from there, because on Fridays Gustaf always comes home late; against all expectations he is on the ground floor with her mother, and the room resounds with their Czech-English babble over the voice of a television anchorman no one is watching. She hands Gustaf a little package: "For you!"
Then she leaves them to admire the gift and goes up to their rooms on the second floor, where she shuts herself into the bathroom. Sitting on the rim of the toilet, she pulls the telephone out of her purse. She hears his "Finally!" and, overcome with joy, tells him, "Oh, how I wish you were with me—right here, where I am"; only after she speaks those words does she realize where she's sitting, and she blushes; the unintended indecency of what she's said startles her
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and instantly arouses her. At that moment, for the first time after so many years, she has the sense that she's cheating on her Swede, and takes a vicious pleasure in it.
When she goes back down to the living room, Gustaf is wearing the T-shirt and laughing raucously. She knows the scene by heart: parody seduction, overbroad witticisms: a senile counterfeit of burned-out eroticism. The mother is holding Gustaf's hand and she announces to Irena: "Without your permission I went ahead and dressed up your boyfriend. Isn't he gorgeous?" She turns with him toward a great mirror hanging on the wall. Watching their reflection, she raises Gustaf's arm as if he were a winner at the Olympics, and, going along with the game, he swells his chest for the mirror and declares in ringing tones: "Kafka was born in Prague!"
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She had separated from her first boyfriend with no great pain. With the second it was worse. When she heard him say, "If you go, it's the end between us. I swear—the end!" she could not utter a single word. She loved him, and he was flinging in her face a thing that, only a few minutes earlier, she would have thought inconceivable, unspeakable: their breakup.
"It's the end between us." The end. If he's promising her the end, what should she promise him? His words contain a threat; so will hers: "All right," she says slowly and evenly. "Then it will be the end. I promise you that, too, and you won't forget it." Then she turned her back on him, leaving him standing right there in the street.
She was wounded, but was she angry with him? Perhaps not even. Of course, he ought to have been more understanding, for clearly she could not pull out of the trip, which was a school requirement. She would have had to feign an illness, but with her clumsy honesty, she could never have pulled it off. No question, he was over-
doing it, he was unfair, but she knew it was because he loved her. She understood his jealousy: he was imagining her off in the mountains with other boys, and it upset him.
Incapable of real anger, she waited for him outside school, to explain that with the best will in the world, she really couldn't do what he wanted, and that he had no reason to be jealous; she was sure he would understand. From the doorway he saw her and dropped back to fall into step with a friend. Denied a private conversation, she followed behind him through the streets, and when he took leave of the friend she hurried toward him. Poor thing, she should have suspected that there wasn't a chance, that her sweetheart was caught up in an unremitting frenzy. She had barely begun to speak when he broke in: "You've changed your mind? You're cancelling?" When she started to say the same thing again for the tenth time, he was the one who spun on his heel and left her standing alone in the middle of the street.
She fell back into a deep sorrow, but still without anger at him. She knew that love means giving each other everything. "Everything": that
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word is fundamental. Everything, thus not only the physical love she had promised him, but courage too, the courage for big things as well as small ones, which is to say even the puny courage to disobey a silly school requirement. And in shame she saw that despite all her love, she was not capab
le of mustering that courage. It was grotesque, heartbreakingly grotesque: here she was prepared to give him everything, her virginity of course, but also, if he wanted it, her health and any sacrifice he could think up, and still she couldn't bring herself to disobey a miserable school principal. Should she let herself be defeated by such pettiness? Her self-disgust was unbearable, and she wanted to get free of it at any cost; she wanted to reach some greatness in which her pettiness would disappear; a greatness before which he would ultimately have to bow down; she wanted to die.
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To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
Transfixed, she watched her shattered love, the most beautiful piece of her life, drawing away slowly and forever; nothing existed for her except that past; to it she wanted to make herself known, wanted to speak and send signals. The future held no interest for her; she desired eternity; eternity is time that has stopped, come to a standstill; the future makes eternity impossible; she wanted to annihilate the future.
But how can a person die in the midst of a crowd of students, in a little mountain hotel, constantly in plain view? She figured it out: she'll leave the hotel, walk far, very far, into the wild, and, someplace off the trails, lie down in the snow and go to sleep. Death will come during slumber, death by freezing, a sweet, painless death. She
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will only have to get through a brief stretch of cold. And even that, she can shorten with the help of a few sleeping tablets. From a vial unearthed at home she poured out five of them, no more, so Mama wouldn't miss them.
She laid plans for her death with her usual practicality. Her first idea was to leave the hotel late in the day and die at night, but she dropped that: people would be quick to miss her in the dining room and even more surely in the dormitory; she wouldn't have time enough to die. Cunningly she decided on the hour after lunch, when everyone naps before heading back to ski: a recess when her absence would worry nobody.
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