Yes, Ivan. I remember a pretty story that Božena once told me a pretty story about a very special night that she had spent with a man, with a lover, in the mountains. I would give my entire life for a night like that. But she is even admired by Ivan’s friends, Klácel and Hanuš. Both of them are jealous. I saw one of the scenes Hanuš made; he gasped, red-faced, and kicked the walls and the furniture with almost as much fury as Božena’s husband does. On another occasion I saw Hanuš, that ultrasensitive man, had puffy red eyes, just like me when I can’t sleep at night and cannot cope with the sadness of my useless existence.
Božena, I could ruin you, that is to say, your dreams, like Vítek when he cut down the willow tree! But I’m not going to do it, there’s no need. The police will take care of it.
You also received many passionate letters, often from men who you didn’t think much of. Not long ago, your husband showed me one of them. I had to make an effort not to burst out laughing when I saw the veins in his neck popping and those feet of his in worn-out house slippers. When he gave the wall a good kick he yelled ow ow ow ow! like a piglet and grabbed his big toe. I can imagine the scene he must have made with you when he found the letter. He reckons that that graceless letter was from one of your doctors, from Lambl, when in fact it was the work of that dolt from the beer factory who you keep at a distance. Lambl was a bright spot among the men with whom you became intimate, Božena. Were you aware of that? I suppose not, because even though you liked him, you didn’t feel the same passion for him that you did for some of the others who treated you badly.
Lambl helped and defended you. He invited you to meet his mother and then you went almost every day to their home on Saint Francis Quay and read aloud to them from your recent work: Slovak folktales; At the Castle, At the Village, a novel of which even George Sand, whom you admire so much, would have been proud.
Lambl clung to you more and more tightly while another man entered your life, the young doctor who is looking after you now, the one with the Oriental air about him. Johanna and Sophie were jealous of your relationship with Lambl; I envy you your new friend, though I do not envy you.
One morning, he was at the door. His eyes shone, his mouth was laughing. He said: “Strong as life, sweet as love, bitter as death and oblivion. What is it?”
She and Vítězka, who had opened the door, were having a cup of tea. She sat at a low table made from a drawer. She had wrapped herself in a dark blue velvet dressing gown tied with a wide sash. She wore her hair loose.
“What is it? Beautiful words, a poem. But I can’t guess the answer.”
“It’s tea. It has to be that way, according to an Arabic proverb. I would have a cup of it with you ladies, if you would allow me to do so.”
“Well, I . . . I’m going to fix my hair; I look a fright.”
“Don’t go anywhere. Yes, it’s true you look a fright. A beautiful one. Too beautiful.”
Božena didn’t know how to react. She shook her head. How he’s changed! Is it him? What’s happened to him?
Suddenly the animal lurking inside her emerged, bristling.
“Do have a cup of tea, friend. My friend Vítězka will keep you company,” she told him, icily. “Unfortunately, I have to go. I’m late.”
He was bewildered.
“I was joking. If you want to fix your hair, please do so. If you want to tidy yourself up, tidy yourself up, and I will happily wait for you. I have come back several days early, just for you,”
The strange beast opened its mouth to bite.
“I cannot possibly stay. I have a meeting with my publisher. But Vítězka is excellent company.”
No, those words were not hers. That wasn’t she.
But it wasn’t he, either.
While she changed clothes and combed her hair restlessly, the beast still squirmed.
Later, hurrying along the street as fast as she could go, as if fleeing from something, she felt a touch of satisfaction blended in with her desperation. But this satisfied sense of pride grew weaker and weaker, until it disappeared altogether, and despair occupied all the available space on the throne.
Guten Tag, Fräulein Zaleski. Do you know who Father Štulc is?”
“Of course. The priest who writes patriotic verse with a strong Catholic bent.”
“What are his verses like?”
“Dull, superficial, rhetorical.”
“Who does this priest see?”
“I know, above all, who he can’t stand: Frič and the revolutionary’s circle of young literati.”
“That is to say, the same circle that is also frequented by Němcová, even though she is older?”
“That’s right. Father Štulc has admonished her bitterly.”
“What is there between them, exactly? All Prague is talking about it, but it seems that nobody can say for sure what’s going on.”
“Somebody showed Father Štulc one of Němcová’s letters, addressed to one of the members of their circle.”
“Who?”
“To Mr. Jurenka, a student of medicine.”
“Do you know what was in the letter?”
“I have made a copy. It is a love letter.”
“Ach so! And what else happened?”
“Father Štulc used the letter to put moral pressure on the writer. He upbraided her time and again. And that isn’t all. The Father tried to oblige Němcová to accompany him publicly in an open carriage, all the way across Prague, to confess at the castle.”
“Like a heretic?”
“Precisely. To make a show of her failings and of her shame before the inhabitants of Prague.”
“Father Štulc’s intentions were excellent. Němcová is a kind of heretic. Of the same type as that dog Havlíček. I see that the Catholic Church has not altogether forgotten its inquisitorial past. Fortunately, the Catholic Church is on our side, and our regime depends to quite an extent on its support. What else happened?”
“Father Štulc threatened to make public the contents of Němcová’s letter if she didn’t ride with him in an open carriage to make her confession and show that she was renouncing the vanities of this world for ever more.”
“And Němcová?”
“She refused.”
“She wasn’t afraid of the threat?”
“She was certainly afraid of it, as anybody would have been.
But she refused to give in.”
“I will now read your copy of the letter in question. It is addressed to that young man who is soon to be a doctor. Wait for a while in the lobby, Fräulein. If I need you again, I shall call for you.”
The following day the young doctor ordered her to undress and untie her corset. He had always helped her. This day, however, he was distant. He cleaned the glass cups coolly. And so the days passed. She didn’t dare to so much as open her mouth; he remained stubbornly silent, as his palms and fingers moved with the same professional skill over her body.
I like to dream that we will go to some place together, to the mountains, for example,” says the difficult-to-read copy that Fräulein Zaleski made of Němcová’s letter to her man friend, “to spend a few happy days together. But as reality is not within my grasp, I take pleasure in my dreams.” Can this be of any importance to the police? I shall read a little more. “When I don’t have reality, let me dream! How many times have I satisfied my longing for the sea, in dreams? How many times have I dreamed of joyful landscapes? Dreams have brought me people I love whom I will never see again. In dreams I can live as I wish and be happy. Why complain about them only being dreams, if these feelings will be with me for the rest of my days! I am grateful, deeply grateful for this kind of dream.”
No, I am ashamed to read on. I do not wish to eavesdrop. But I am a defender of our Austro-Hungarian fatherland. How many enemies it has!
About Němcová: she is a sensitive woman. How must I go about destroying her? It isn’t easy. When her son Hynek was dying in a Prague hospital, while she was on a trip to Hungary, we re-rout
ed the letter from the doctor that was meant to inform the mother of her son’s critical condition. We were hoping that the son would die without his mother being able to take her leave of him. But at the last moment she found out about him, rushed to Prague, and during his last forty-eight hours she held her son in her arms. Fräulein Zaleski gave me a report about Němcová’s period of mourning. But even that wasn’t enough to crush her spirit. She goes on writing; her novels and stories continue to be published, and people like them. I see that Fräulein Zaleski has marked a passage in one of them: “The ignorance of woman is a whip that she entwines in order to hurt herself. Until women are aware of the tremendous importance of their mission, men will not be able to build the future on a solid foundation either. If this building process is to succeed, women must work together with men. Women have to raise themselves up and sit on the throne, governing side by side with men.”
Time and again, I can see that this woman is a danger to everyone. To annihilate her, we will have to seize everything that is of value from her, everything that she treasures, that she loves. First of all, her children. Those who are still around will be crushed by misery. Second, the man she loves. What is his profession? Fräulein Zaleski says that he has just qualified as a doctor of medicine. Excellent! We will send him to Galicia, to deal with cholera there. If only everything were so simple! As far as her husband is concerned, she isn’t at all close to him, but just in case we’ll send him to the Tyrol. That only leaves her friends. Here we need more detailed information for this campaign I am in the process of launching. Fritz, send in the informer!
The door was opened by Božena’s daughter Dora, who was in the kitchen doing the dishes. She pointed to the bedroom; her mother had locked herself in. I could hear her voice and that of a man, low and coarse. Lord only knows who that was. Dora made such a racket with the pots and pans that I couldn’t make out a single word. I decided to wait.
My eyes wandered over the different colored glasses and bowls standing on the kitchen shelf, inexpensive objects that Božena valued greatly nonetheless. Every day she dusted them and rearranged them differently, depending on her mood. The blue vase was usually placed at the back. Today, however, it all but hid the gray and cream-colored bowls and glasses, standing apart from the rest as if shouting, “Look at me and nothing else!” The sight of the collection of glasses strengthened my conviction that Božena was upset, that in her agitation she had played with her favorite objects without bearing in mind the aesthetic impression caused by their arrangement.
Finally Dora stopped washing the dishes; the voices coming from Božena’s room could now be heard clearly enough. The man’s voice was Němec’s, saying: “What are we going to do to get winter clothing for the children? Haven’t you noticed they’re trembling from the cold? The only winter coat we have, the brown one, is worn by me. I don’t have anything else, and even then I look like a straw man. My underclothes are falling apart; nobody darns them. You’re the one who does the least of all. You wander about the place with your head in the clouds.”
She replied: “When you were off in Hungary and I was alone with the children, I felt very lonely and even got to the stage of desiring you, but I learned to do without a lot of things.”
“I keep having the most terrible dreams,” he broke in which was when I realized that her husband wasn’t listening to her. “The other day I dreamt that I’d died and that the coffin you’d had made for me was made of our beds.”
“Since I was a young girl,” Božena said, without knowing what he had just said, “I have yearned to learn, felt a desire for something higher and better than what I found around me, and felt an aversion to everything coarse and commonplace. That is the reason why we do not succeed as a couple, and the reason behind my misfortune.”
“What does this studying, what do books, papers, and pens offer you? Nothing. They don’t even provide you with enough to eat. You’d be better off forgetting about all that silly nonsense and start learning how to be a good housewife.”
She replied, “Few women have had so much respect for the dignity of the institution of marriage as I had and continue to have, but I was soon obliged to lose my faith in it. How could I have done otherwise? All I see around me are lies, cheating, gilded servitude, obligations; that is to say, vulgarity. You have had my body, but my desires are always elsewhere.”
Then something fell to the floor and broke. The mirror? A glass? The medical cups? It was as if Božena’s words had been validated. I put the blue vase behind the light-colored glasses. Then I left.
She summoned up her courage and complained to the doctor: “For weeks I’ve had a pain here at the foot of the spinal column.”
He didn’t seem to have heard her, although even she had spoken quite clearly and in a raised voice.
The next day, the doctor carried something in his left hand that looked like a wrapped plate. He left his medical bag on the floor, untied the string, and indeed, it was a plate, deep and full of ointment.
“I prepared it for you. It’s the best medicine for bones and muscles.”
She was so surprised she didn’t even say thank you. He turned his back to look for something in his bag and then took out a book: Stories by Božena Němcová.
“Would you be so kind as to sign this book for me?”
With her face practically touching the pages, she wrote a most sincere dedication.
“My handwriting is like an old lady’s! The truth is I’m not used to writing in this position.”
They both laughed and he moved his chair closer to her and told her how, many years ago, he had helped his grandfather, a village doctor, to write prescriptions. Instead of a doctor’s unintelligible handwriting, the prescriptions were written in a child’s clumsy scrawl.
One or two weeks went by. He brought her plates of ointment, and sat next to her, not taking his eyes off her. Only from time to time did his gaze slip across her shoulders, her lips. He takes care of me as if I were a newborn baby, Božena told herself. The beast began to rouse its limbs, shake off its sleepiness, and howl. She made an effort not to pay it any attention. Stubbornly, she repeated to herself: like a newborn baby.
One day, when he was applying the salve, she noticed that his hands were trembling. He decided to leave off with the ointment and sit next to her, his eyes on her. Today his eyes are full of fine red veins, Božena told herself, and are more moist than usual. He looked at her for a long while and his hands didn’t stop trembling. The beast inside her yawned, got up on all fours, and started to sniff. Then it gave out a strident, protracted howl. A white membrane covered the doctor’s eyes.
You sent all your admirers packing because of this one . . . Oh, Božena! A student of medicine, eleven years younger than you! You clung to him with the desperation of a woman who is aware that this is her last chance to be happy, or rather, the last opportunity to dream of happiness. Not long ago you wrote in a letter about that young man, good-looking but haughty, empty, and common: “For you, he is nothing special, but for me he is unique, I would rank him before any one of you all. I would like to weave a crown of stars to place on his head so that everybody might appreciate his brilliance. I do not seek to know if he deserves it or not, because I love him. Perhaps in the future, more than one woman will love him, but none with such sincerity, such devotion as I. I suppose that one day he will know how I loved him, although he will never know the depths of my suffering.”
Yes, he is a conceited, superficial, and a coarse man. But despite everything, do I not like to dream of him, too?
The student of medicine became a frequent visitor. She is happy. Her inner bliss is written all over her face; she seems younger and more beautiful. In the afternoon, she shares the leftovers of a frugal lunch with her young friend; at the table in her study, adorned with flowers, she offers him biscuits to go with tea. She has taken pains to tidy up the small, damp apartment, and those of us who visit her are so dazzled by her enthusiasm that her beaming smile bl
inds us to her poverty and hardship.
The doctor usually sits at her table, clumsily handling her treasures with his peasant’s fingers—a little bust of Goethe, which Purkyně gave her; a framed portrait of George Sand, from Doctor Čejka—and keeps helping himself to biscuits until he’s full to bursting. As he now lives close by, he waits to see when Němec heads off, then invites himself into Božena’s home. If there’s something to eat, that cheers him up at once. She watches him eating, adoring him as if he were a deity.
Her happiness has lasted for two months. For two months this apprentice doctor has been proud of the attentions of this woman whom his friends adore and who enjoys such tremendous prestige in Czech cultural circles. The fool who has concocted a story about knowing the Orient, has moved to a place close to the block of apartments in which the Němecs live and has turned their marriage into hell. Němec, always sensitive, always jealous, has sneaking suspicions about the relationship. The inhabitants of Prague really have something to talk about now. But she doesn’t give a hoot for their gossip. She trembles at the thought of losing her happiness.
One day, when I was also present, the young man appeared and said: “Why don’t you put a different dress on? Doesn’t it bother you that I’ve seen you like this so often?”
She answered that outward appearance was not the most important thing. Then she spent entire nights mending her old blouses.
The following day the student arrived, sat on her old patched-up sofa, smoked a cigarette, and got up to go. Božena looked at him, completely at a loss. When he had his hand on the doorknob ready to leave, she finally brought herself to ask where he was going.
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