I went outside and stopped, still behind him, and observed him while I was slowly drawing on my gloves.
He was wearing a silky dark blue raincoat. The tall-crowned, wide-brimmed felt hat made him appear doubly outlandish, used as I was to menswear in London, and in contrast to the hatless men I had seen in Prague. He was leaning slightly forward over his furled umbrella, clasping the crook of the handle with both hands. As I watched, I saw that he was not gazing idly into space. The movements of his head betrayed that he was following the flow of the streetcars, automobiles, and passersby. This calmly alert stance had a balladesque quality, bringing to mind a shepherd on the crest of a hill, leaning on his staff and observing his flock, the distant valley below, and the sky above.
As I stepped soundlessly to his side, he said without turning his head, "It’s only drizzling now, but I’ll put the umbrella up for you. Let it earn its keep."
I laughed uneasily. I wondered whether he had sensed that I had been watching him. I said, "You are taller and broader than I thought. If you are ever out of work, come to London and join the police."
"Why? How is that?" he asked.
I said, "Because for certain duties they need men of six foot two, and they want six-footers in any case. Nowadays they have such difficulty getting men of the right size that they even take shorter ones."
I expected him to laugh. To my surprise, he said gravely, "I’d be too old for them. I’m forty-two. Now shall we go?"
I returned to the hotel on the following morning shortly after eight. It was only an hour later, when I was bathed and half dressed and sitting over my second cup of milk and coffee, that I recovered from feeling dazed and drained, and started to frame questions. By then I already knew that even if I did see him again, I would not dare to ask the questions, let alone hope to receive answers.
There are people who, let us say, have a conspicuous jagged scar on their forehead, and even on first acquaintance one can ask them freely how they came by this disfigurement, and they will not be offended by this frank curiosity. With others, owing to invisible signals they radiate, one senses that one may never intrude on them with such a question. The Russian belonged to this group.
He had taken me up the main road, in the direction of the castle hill, and into a tree-shaded street branching off it that was lined with large houses dating from before the First World War. On the second floor of one of these, he had let himself in with his key into a dark hall and taken me to a room at the end of a long passage. He made not the slightest attempt, as is usual on such occasions, to impress on me the need for silence. It did not surprise me that the room was shabbily furnished with the white-lacquered pieces, cane chairs, and cretonnes belonging to the same period as the building, but only now, as I recalled it, did I remember that there were twin beds. Why, then, had he moved out of his flat for the sake of accommodating "a man and his wife who had come from outside," and why, if the room belonged to some people he "happened to know," was he so careless about making noise? When I reproved him once, for banging the door of the bathroom, he said, laughing, "I should worry." In the morning he had offered me the use of his kitchen and the bath without bothering to ascertain if they were free. And all the time there had been utter silence, none of the irrepressible sounds of a large lived-in flat whose occupants are getting ready to start the day. And yet he had made me get up early, at half past seven, saying that he had to go to work. There was no doubt about it: the whole apartment must have been empty.
He did not ask me whether he could see me again. We had walked briskly in the rain toward the hotel, and he left me at the entrance with a hurried good-bye, milostivá paní. As I visualized him now, hastening away in the direction of the crossroads by the church, it occurred to me that he had not been dressed in the lounge suit and raincoat of the night before, but in flannels, a woolen shirt, and a short gray zippered coat. Why, if he was occupying the room for one night only, had he brought with him a change of clothing?
That day the rain never stopped, and though I pretended to be vexed about it, I was secretly glad, as it gave me an excuse for staying in that night once more. I was halfway through my meal when I saw the Russian standing in the archway of the dining room, still dressed as he had been in the morning. He came to my table, lifted my hand, and kissed it. "I must apologize," he said, "I’m only just now back from work. I had dinner there. Finish your meal while I go home and change; I’ll be with you by the time you are ready for your coffee. But wait for me, I’ll pour it for you."
"Did you eat well?" he asked me twenty minutes later, as he sat down by my side at the same table we had been at the night before. By the time I finished dinner it had become vacant, and an elderly waitress had come up to me triumphantly and asked me to move, "so that the gentleman will not crick his neck trying to find you."
I said, "I got everything I wanted, but I don’t know if I’ve got my memories wrong or if the present isn’t really up to scratch."
He gave me an indulgently resigned laugh. "Now you are disappointed," he said, "just as you were about my name. You are a romantic. Besides, this isn’t a first-class place."
"And besides," I said, "it’s off-putting the way they write the menu. I don’t want to know that Mr. Novotny has checked the prices, or that I’ll be getting a hundred and fifty grams of rib beef, no more no less. It’s like being in a clinic."
"Ah, that," he said. "You know, when I first went to Romania—I was in Romania for two years—and had my first meal there, I was dumbfounded. To start with, they brought the whole tureen for the soup, the way it’s done in Paris, and when I ordered a steak, they gave me more than a quarter of a kilo. I couldn’t believe it. All the time it was like that. I don’t know how they do it; their economy is quite different. Altogether I liked it there. You sit in a place on top of a hill, with green trees all around you, and a band is playing. In the whole of Prague there is nothing like it. They have a gift for luxury, and the women—they are so elegant. They turn away their faces from the countries around them and they look to France. And believe me, Czech men are out of luck there—they despise the Czechs. And they are dainty and beautifully groomed, with eyes like black cherries— nothing like what you see here. These insipid blond Bohemian women—I can’t stand blondes, by the way—with their pale, calculating little eyes, all sturdy cart horses, with large hooves and big fetlocks. Such good dependable comrades and helpmeets—it turns my stomach. Now you can guess why I like you so much, per exclusionem."
I smiled and averted my eyes. I said, "There are ravishingly pretty girls here, and you know it."
"So what if there are?" he said. "Even if they are acceptable in their looks, they stick in my gullet. You meet one, and even before you’ve had time to ask her if she likes her coffee black or white, out comes the hatchet, and she’ll hack away at you—where you work, what kind of position you have, how much you earn. Revolting. You are a different breed. And of course, you are a foreigner."
"I am not," I said. "I was born and bred in Bohemia."
"That may be," he said, "but that doesn’t mean you weren’t born of foreign parents."
"I’m Bohemian through and through," I said. "My great-grandparents from both sides came from the south of Bohemia."
"And where did their parents come from?" he said. "But let’s leave it at that. The main thing is that you are here now. Let me look forward every morning to the night and every night to the morning." I averted my eyes again, and as he passed me my filled cup he added, "At least by now I know how you like your coffee."
We went on talking. In his grammatically perfect Czech, he used literary, sometimes almost obsolete expressions, while I kept falling into the dialectical speech and schoolgirl slang of my childhood, such as, "That’s on cement," when I meant that’s certain, or, "All the frogs in my class," when I meant the girls, or, "I cough on it," when I meant contempt. Each time he shook his head reprovingly, saying, "The expressions you use." And when I laughed, he said, "I know you
think I am a pedantic bore and a puritan. Well, yes, I am."
I said, "You can’t be, really, or you wouldn’t be here sitting with me now. You should be ashamed of yourself. You still don’t even know my name. And it was disgraceful of me to go along with you last night. Like the lowest of the low."
"What a charming little fool you are," he said, "What do you know of the lowest of the low? Now come. I’ll take you to my place."
The house he lived in was on the opposite side of the street, two minutes’ walk away. Like most of the buildings in the street, it had been daringly modern in the time of my youth, with bands of tiles and marble on the façade and no moldings above the windows.
We took the lift up to the sixth floor. "It’s only a garçonnière ," he said, "nothing much, but very comfortable, and the water is always scalding hot, and the heating is so efficient I have to open the windows even in the coldest weather." We entered a large square hall. "The geography is simple," he said. "The doors which aren’t cupboards open here to the bath and here to the other place. There wasn’t a kitchen; I carved it out of the shower closet. And now come in." We entered a modest-sized room. He went over to the radio by the French window and switched it on, saying, "Let it play to earn its keep. I’ll turn it off if you don’t like it."
Looking around, I thought it odd that the hall should have been of such impressively large dimensions, considering the smallness of the flat—all the more so as his entrance door was the only one on that side of the landing. On entering, I would have guessed it to be a four- or five-room flat, opening out from those doors which, according to him, were merely cupboards.
While he put away my coat I surveyed the room. It was lined with new-looking sideboards and paneled cabinets of dark red-flamed tropical wood with frosted glass insets, and contained a very wide divan, a desk, and glass-topped tables. The floor was covered with linoleum patterned to look like parquet. The room looked as though it had been furnished in the course of a five-minute visit to a store and, since there were no pictures or other ornaments, this time limit had run out before he had remembered to think of these.
Returning and seeing me pacing about, he smiled, pulled out drawers, and slid back panels and showed me cutlery, each piece in a nest of felt of its own, and tea and coffee and dinner sets for twelve, of a dim-flowered china of decent quality and discreet bad taste. The tableware and the room itself were the kind my charwoman in London and her husband would have longed to possess and would have bought on the installment plan. The china would never have been used and the room would have been called their front parlor.
He said, "And here is the roof terrace, if you want to come out and look for a moment. Not exactly an inspiring view even when it isn’t raining—the part of golden Mother Prague of the hundred domes and spires which the tourists never see."
I followed him out to the spacious flagged terrace and looked at the distant factory chimneys of the industrial sector, which I knew bordered one side of the river, though I could not glimpse the water. "Then the terrace doesn’t earn its keep?" I asked.
"It does," he said. "I air my bedding there when it’s fine, the way it’s got to be done. You can rely on me."
Closing the French window and drawing the curtains, he said, "The other day a friend came to see me. He’s living it up in a luxury flat on the quaiside, with the old bridge and the castle hitting him right in the face every time he puts his nose outside his window, and he said, ‘Come on and join the Party and be one of us and you’ll live the way I do. It’s going to last another ten years, and then I’ll commit suicide when it cracks.’ At least he was sincere. But I’d rather stick to my shabby view. I will not join. I will not sit and nod my head and say yes and amen. Again and again they’ve come and begged me to join. They sent me to Marienbad too, once, to the ideological seminary. I took along some old newspaper cuttings and every time the lecturer imparted a new piece of official interpretation, I got them out and said, ‘If you please, but last year or two years ago the official view was different; how is that feasible, with all due respect?’ Till they told me they could do without me. In the Party, about two percent of the members are idealists and genuinely convinced. Mind you, I’ve nothing against the regime by and large, taking a generous view of it, but I won’t be one of them. And the way they run their economy is a disgrace."
"I can’t judge it. I don’t know anything about it," I said.
"Where is the caviar?" he asked, facing me in full indignation. "I haven’t seen any caviar for a year. That’s just to give you an example you will understand."
"I haven’t seen caviar for much longer," I said, and burst out laughing.
"You are a little fool," he said, "but that’s as it should be, and a woman who is not a fool is not a woman. Now what would you like to drink? I can’t do any serious drinking in the bars and other public places because they don’t have the genuine stuff. What would you care for? White Label, Queen Ann, two vodkas—not Polish, heaven forbid—and Courvoisier." He slid aside a panel.
"Golly," I said, "that’s from the Tusex shop, isn’t it, where you pay with hard currency? That must have cost you a fortune."
"You could break my heart with your innocence," he said. "You are like Little Red Riding Hood who’s come to visit the wolf. For one thing, nothing costs a fortune. You forget we are in a people’s democracy. And besides, this is not Tusex stuff. They have decent liquor here, but not this. Now what may I give you?"
"Nothing," I said. "I’m very cheap that way. I only like a glass of red wine at night with my dinner, that’s all."
He said, "In that case, if I guaranteed you your daily glass of red wine, would you stay with me?"
I laughed. He said, "Truer things have been spoken in jest." I did not reply. He said, "If you won’t have a drink, I shan’t have one either. I think we can both do with an early night. I won’t go to work tomorrow, so we can sleep long. I’ll only look in on them at midday for half an hour or so, to see what they have been brewing up in the laboratory."
On the following morning, as I sat up in bed, he said, "If you want to go to the bathroom, don’t get up yet for a moment," and he rose, went out, and returned at once. "Here, put these on," he said. "I don’t want you to catch cold. I don’t know how I came to have them, but here they are," and he placed before me a pair of ladies’ slippers. They were of the most common kind, gray felt with brown and black checks. When I met his eyes, he made a gesture of resigned helplessness.
He was still in bed when I came back to the room, fully dressed and with my hair plaited and coiled at the nape of my neck. "I’ll have breakfast in the hotel," I said, "just to make a good impression on them."
"You are a little fool," he said. "As though they didn’t know you spent the night elsewhere. And will you really go through the business of taking your hair down and undressing and putting on your nightgown, just to impress the chambermaid with your virtue?"
"I will," I said, "even if you think it’s screamingly funny."
"You are in a bad mood," he said.
"Am I?" I said.
"And I know why," he said. "It’s because the slippers were not to your taste."
"That’s true," I said, "and in more ways than one."
"Look here," he said, "I will get you a pair of slippers— anything you like—on one condition. You go back now and pack your trunk and move in with me. What’s the good of staying there? You have no comfort, you haven’t got a telephone in your room, and no private bath. And it costs you money. I’ll give you a key and you can go and come as you please and I shall never question you. You will be free. But I’d be much happier if I had you here with me."
"It’s very kind of you—," I said.
"But?"
"But I can’t do it."
He leaned back against the pillows, watching me.
"I can’t afford it," I said. "I’ve got a husband, and he knows I’ve put up at this hotel, and if he phoned or anything . . . I can’t take the risk."
"Don’t ever speak to me of your husband again," he said.
"He comes to the same thing as the slippers," I said.
He said, "You’ll be sorry for that remark."
I did not speak.
He said, "If you won’t leave the hotel, at least you needn’t eat there. They cook with car grease and floor polish, for all one knows. I want you to come here tonight and have dinner with me. All cooked in butter—you can rely on me."
I smiled. I asked, "And what will I have to do to earn my keep?"
"Milostivá paní,” he said, "you are not for use, you are for pleasure."
THAT EVENING, on entering his room, I went over to the bookcase. It was filled with many-volumed works on history and economics. On the ledge of the stand holding the television set, there was a stack of journals and a single book. I picked it up. It was entitled Happiness in Married Love and was written by a gynecologist. I said, "That’s the only worthwhile book you’ve got, as far as I’m concerned. It looks heaven. Is it good?"
"That rubbish," he said. "How should I know? I haven’t read it. I really don’t know how it got here." He gave me the same helplessly resigned smile and gesture as he had that morning when producing the slippers.
"May I read it?" I asked.
"You may," he said. "I’ll see about dinner and you sit with married love in the meantime."
"Don’t you want me to help you?"
"I don’t."
"Goody, goody," I said. "I hate to give the helping hand. I don’t like to receive it, either, which means that my laziness is not really—"
"You needn’t make any excuses," he said. "I’ll tell you straight out that I never want you to touch anything in the kitchen. You could kill yourself if you tampered with it. I rigged it up myself—the hot plates and kettle and grill—in a most unorthodox manner, with high-frequency current which is forbidden in dwelling places, and I have to switch transformers and adaptors all the time because there is only one plug socket." He gave his indulgently resigned laugh and added, "That’s the only practical advantage I got out of reading physics. Of course, I was lucky, I am of poor parents, so they sent me to the university. I was always a heavy gun, already at school, in mathematics and physics, but it’s a disgrace, their legislation, as though the innocent children of rich bourgeois parents could help it that their parents had been rich. Now they’ve realized that some of them are brainy too, and they admit them for higher studies."
The Darts of Cupid: Stories Page 14