by Pavel Mandys
Those two stayed up the entire night, in silence, and only at dawn—when they saw a stream of armored vehicles and trucks with very young Russian soldiers on the hulls, rolling through the promenade—did Auntie Magdalena speak up.
“Well, this is the end,” she said in a voice that could break with each word, and she was right. At least as far as the Mautnic family dynasty was concerned.
For Hedvika, however, it was only the beginning. That morning, she entered the apartment in their house for the first time, and this momentous event was being saluted by the raised barrels of Russian tanks, aiming at the windows of their apartment, as is evident from the first images in her baby photo album. Father evidently had no idea whether he should first photograph the newborn or the tumult of the people swearing at the Russian soldiers; whether he should focus on the livid faces of the citizens of Prague or the confused faces of terribly young Red Army soldiers, which were taut with nervous tics and ready to crack. It would take so little for the entire situation to turn into a massacre. It would take so little for an excited Ivan to press something inside the metal belly of the tanks, and a shot would fly through the windows of their apartment and forever silence the quiet happiness of Hedvika’s parents and the persistent defiance of Auntie Magdalena. That day, no shots were fired; no catastrophe took place—nevertheless, it visited their family soon enough.
First, her mother was called off her maternity leave back to work. Due to the noble ancestry of Auntie Magdalena, Hedvika’s mother was demoted from the offices of a construction company to a cold screws-and-bolts warehouse, and shortly thereafter, they fired her father. Nobody would hire him, except the ironworks in Kladno from which he would return home progressively skinnier and stooping: month by month, he was disappearing right in front of their eyes until one day, he never came back. He got an attack of dyspnea and fell into the melting furnace. They stopped production because of him, and even though they cooled down the furnace as fast as possible, they of course did not find anything there. So they were sent from the ironworks a symbolic bag filled with metal shavings with a letter where the director wrote his condolences in one sentence, and also threatened that—should they discover that the father’s carelessness was in fact a case of sabotage—they would demand from them the lost earnings incurred by stopping production, which the Czechoslovak people had been robbed of.
Just to ensure that all of this would not be insufficient, a year later they found the auntie lying under the basement stairs. Considering her age—she was then almost ninety—the doctor, pointing meaningfully at the cane lying nearby, concluded that the death was an unfortunate accident. The bruises on her neck and arms and her terrified, protruding eyes did not interest anybody.
To this day, Hedvika cannot forget the image. She was standing among them, then six years old, and was looking at the auntie’s bulging eyes, at her mouth distorted with horror, at the face so dissimilar to the kind face—the one she knew so well—creased with wrinkles and framed with fine, always tidy white hair.
“Auntie is an elegant and educated lady,” her mother used to say. “Listen to Auntie and always learn from her.”
Languages, etiquette, natural history—she was supposed to learn all of that from her aunt, but the moment the door closed, Auntie conspiratorially winked at her and from under her bed, she took out a puppet theater folded in a large box. Entire Sunday afternoons, which her parents spent with friends, Hedvika watched puppets running on the headboard of her aunt’s old-fashioned bed.
“Once upon a time, there lived one Baron Mautnic,” one of Hedvika’s favorite stories began. “One day he accepted an invitation from the Náprstkovo Museum to lecture about his collection of zoological curiosities to ladies and damsels from the American Club of Prague Ladies. One of them, an orphan, who was once taken in by the Náprsteks and who then later would take care of cataloging the museum collections, asked many smart and well-informed questions. And it was precisely those questions that brought the baron to look somewhat deeper into her eyes . . .” The eyes must have been the thing that captivated Baron Mautnic about her aunt.
Hedvika moved from the window to the huge shelving cabinet which took up one entire wall in the room. Some time ago, there used to be a showcase cabinet to exhibit Uncle’s collections; today, there was a bookcase from which one of the movers—a youngster in an I Love USA T-shirt, with long, curly, greasy hair—was taking one row of books out after another and packing them into containers. Hedvika looked at one of the framed wedding pictures standing in the middle of one of the shelves.
A faded double portrait of the Mautnic newlyweds from 1908 captured an aging dandy with a bald crown, but with very ample sideburns and full lips, alongside a very young girl barely twenty years old, with boyish features and a severely tied bun. The only thing that caught attention in her simple, utterly unadorned face were her lively, earnest eyes peering straight into the camera.
What was it that the wealthy and respected Baron Mautnic saw in Hedvika’s auntie, a girl from the orphanage of Vojta and Josefka Náprstek? She had asked herself this a hundred times. Did he succumb to her youth? Or was he interested in her encyclopedic knowledge in the field of natural sciences, her healthy common sense, and her calm disposition? Whatever it was, shortly after the construction of the house was finished, he brought her in, disregarding the rumors which the unequal marriage caused among the respected burghers bound by ossified monarchical morals. Nevertheless, he was celebrated that much more by the Czech Patriotic Association, which praised his good heart since he so magnanimously took under his wing an orphan with no dowry, and his forward thinking since the auntie was considered in those days to be one of the most emancipated and educated young women in Prague.
“It was truly a modern marriage. The young girl became not only a good wife to the aging scientist, but also an irreplaceable colleague with whose help he organized his extensive collections and published a few studies of exotic fauna,” continued the puppets in the fairy tale. “Studying together compensated for their childless marriage, and if Baron Mautnic hadn’t disappeared one day in an African primeval forest, where he went to follow up on his research, they would have lived happily ever after,” Hedvika remembered what she always declaimed in unison with the puppets at the end.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of something breaking. The photograph that she had just been looking at was now lying on the floor among shards of broken glass.
“Careful!” Hedvika shrieked, too late.
The young man, instead of apologizing, only grinned. “Nothing to worry about, madam,” he said, and as he was putting the picture in the container, he added: “Besides—glass shards bring luck!”
Hedvika thought that his madam didn’t sound at all as derisive as baroness, which the tenants still used to address her. Moreover, she needed good luck now more than ever.
* * *
Just a short while later, the bookcase was empty. The large shelving cabinet stood there suddenly naked, and the movers—who had already emptied the neighboring apartment—were now removing the last pieces of furniture from her apartment. Their steps echoed in the empty room as if in a cave.
“That painting—just take it down and lean it against the wall. I’ll bring that one with me,” Hedvika said when she saw one of the movers taking down the portrait of the house that used to hang above her aunt’s bed. The portrait of the house as a member of the family, the portrait of the house as the focus of the entire world.
“So that’s it, the floor is empty,” the grumpy foreman eventually announced, his words vibrating for a while in the hollow space. “Everything is put away on the upstairs floor and everything that you marked we’re taking to the dump. Here’s the invoice.” He inspected her with a cold look. Surely he must have thought she would now take out a thick bundle of korunas and hand him the cash with a dismissive gesture, as if to say, Keep the change.
But instead, Hedvika opened her wallet and sheepishly counted out
the sum they had agreed upon in advance. Even if he wasn’t that unpleasant and deserved a tip, she still wouldn’t be able to give him one.
The owner of the house, and she’s this stingy. She glimpsed the shadow of contempt in his face as he was tucking the banknotes into his pocket. Then he turned and left without a word.
Hedvika felt awkward, but what she really found painful was the empty wallet.
The moment when she would find herself out of options had just occurred; tomorrow morning the masons were coming, and she did not have a penny for them. Now she truly had no other choice but to climb up to the attic, ring the bell of the apartment in the turret, and agree to the disgusting offer of Doctor Šimek. That notion made her anxious; she was drowning in it just as her house had been drowning not that long before in the Vltava.
“When the going gets tough, look at this painting,” her auntie used to say. “This is your home, your place in this world. This house is all that remains of the family line of Baron Mautnic. Soon it will belong to you. Take good care of it and it will take care of you in return.”
Hedvika would really like to take care of the house. For her auntie and her mother, who had for years reproached herself for not being able to take care of the Mautnic home that she’d inherited from the aunt. They got her on the first try—due to a mandatory fitting of a lift—and they seized the house from her. As a result of the incurred arrears of the reconstruction works in the amount of 1,215 Czechoslovak korunas that was not paid in full on the due date, the real estate thus becomes the property of the state, the official notification read, over which her mother had cried many a night. To whom she owed this much—she never knew. The reconstruction was organized by the National Committee, and all the invoices they had sent to her she duly paid off—every last penny. Except the last one, which she had never received.
“That house has cost us so much already that it’s high time it pays us back somehow,” Hedvika said aloud to herself, and crouched down to the painting, which had been taken down and placed on the floor.
Against the blue-colored sky on the painting, the house soared with carefully rendered details. Garlands, tracery on balcony railings, every window different—exactly as it was in reality. And then she paused. She took a handkerchief out of her pocket and gently wiped a fine layer of dust off the painting. Then she bent over, and with her eyes centimeters from the canvas, she studied it thoroughly. And indeed—on the uncle’s floor, the one she was crouching on at the moment—there was a figure standing in a window. Painted with the tip of a thin brush, a tiny figure of a young man with familiar features. He was looking at her through the window panes, red-cheeked with a rich thatch of black hair (which in his wedding picture was long gone from his forehead and only a white crown circling the top of his head remained), with a scarf tied like that of a romantic poet, and wearing a tight suit the color of dark-red wine. She had no doubts that it was Baron Mautnic.
From where, however, was he looking at her? Surprised, Hedvika glanced around the room. The light entered through only one window.
Again, she carefully looked over the painting.
There was no doubt—the corner room on this floor should have two windows, according to the painting.
A second later, a warm gust of Indian summer wind wafted in—the air smelled of the nearby water and the first rotting leaves—and Hedvika, leaning on the parapet like a gymnast on uneven bars, bent out the window until she almost fell out, curious what the façade would reveal.
Exactly where the space inside was blocked with the huge bookcase lining the entire wall, there was indeed another window on the outside.
* * *
It took her a few hours.
A few times she thought that she’d give up. That she would bring an axe the following day and ram through the bookcase to the other side. But then she found a lever hidden under one of the shelves so cleverly that it clung to the small cantilevered beam; she needed only to touch it lightly and it moved so smoothly, as if somebody had last used it just a day before. A portion of the bookcase opened up in front of her and uncovered a passageway, tall and wide enough that an adult could get through.
Hedvika hesitated for a moment but then, slowly and carefully, she entered.
The darkened room surprised her at first with dry air infused with old age and decay. It hit her nose with such vigor that her hands unconsciously covered her face. Then she groped about for the door and opened it wide so that fresh air could get inside. Along with it, more light filtered in and revealed a narrow room filled with various objects from the floor up to the ceiling—paintings, sculptures, furniture. At the far end she noticed a bunk on which there were carefully aligned boxes of various sizes in rows marked with letters of the alphabet. Beside the bunk there was a rocking chair, and in it rested something which seemed to be, at first glance, a tangle of bunched-up clothes. Only when Hedvika really focused did she see that from the tangle protruded a shrunken, dried-up head with empty eye sockets and a collapsed chin revealing a grisly, wide-open throat. Bony hands were tied to the back of the armchair and sticking out of the sleeves of a khaki suit; she noticed how, on slender ankles covered with dried skin, heavy traveling shoes hung on.
Hedvika shrieked and jumped back, hitting the back wall of the bookcase with her shoulder. A long belt with metal spikes fell on the floor with a thud, and around it, with a quiet sigh, photographs and newspaper clippings glided down. What in God’s name is it—a mummy? And the peculiar installation that she just broke—what was it supposed to mean?
With a wildly beating heart, she looked away from the corpse in the rocking chair. While she was rubbing her shoulder, she scanned the collage sprawled around the backside of the bookshelf like a spider’s web. It consisted of strange objects such as straps, whips, and handcuffs on a nail driven in near the door, and all around were affixed newspaper clippings and colored pictures ripped from calendars, or black-and-white amateur snapshots evidently taken in the room where she was standing. They showed naked young men, and some of them featured various creatively arranged groups of them—almost like a horse cart or a pack of hounds. Others revealed enlarged details of their genitals. All those groupings were dominated by the figure of Baron Mautnic with a whip in his hand, festooned with trinkets.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Hedvika exhaled in shock. What she had just seen stunned her more than the mummy sitting in the rocking chair.
Again, she glanced around the strange lair in astonishment. Slowly, the realization came to her that she had discovered an unknown chapter of the Baron Mautnic family; a chapter which the Sunday puppets never mentioned. What—hidden from the world—happened here, what secrets did the Mautnic family have? she wondered.
And then her gaze fell on a small writing desk under the window covered with transparent paper. Lying there, too, were small, haphazard heaps of magazine clippings, and more black-and-white pictures. Finally, a diary was resting on top of the pictures, right in front of the chair; all one needed to do was open it, grab a pen, and start writing.
Hedvika took a few hesitant steps toward the table and tremulously opened the diary.
September 10, 1925
It’s shortly after his funeral. What a farce! The coffin without the body, the only survivor without sorrow. Sorrow! Ha! Disgust and hatred are what twisted my face during the ceremony, not pent-up tears. And in order not to have to pretend anymore, I avoid everybody. I instructed the staff not to interrupt my solitude and sorrow, and visitors are refused before they have time to introduce themselves. “The baroness does not receive visitors,” I hear the footman’s tragic voice from the entrance, “she is in mourning.” And so finally I have time to gather my thoughts.
So first—I do not regret anything.
His death—and it was, thanks to that frog, fast and painless—is for me deliverance. No guilty thoughts encroach on my peaceful sleep at night; he got only what he deserved! How could I give that asshole any heirs when he would barely loo
k at me, when he preferred to bring into his burrow boys from the neighborhood? Let him roast in hell for all those insults he would hurl at me, let him roast, the lecher!
And second—nobody will figure this out anyway. Mr. Boháček, JD, has fulfilled his mission perfectly, and the news he sent from that wilderness could not be verified by anybody here. And who would not believe the consular stamp? As soon as a document is kissed by a stamp, there’s nobody here who would ever question the news certified by it. There’s no hope, it said, so the officials clicked their heels, the baron was pronounced dead—and my life can finally start!
I will no more be just a faithful wife indulgently overlooking the bestialities of her husband. I will no longer be just a trained poodle, a walking card file, a handy secretary—the next study will bear my name and the world will finally learn that I too . . .
* * *
Hedvika trembled with excitement.
The history of the Mautnic family line suddenly changed, assuming different contours, and her uncle’s mummy—the most peculiar specimen of his own collections of zoological exhibits, gaping at her from the corner of the room—did not mortify her at all anymore. The idea that he got what he had coming resonated in Hedvika’s head when she turned again to the pages of her auntie’s diary.