by Brian Aldiss
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’
‘He’s a big-wig over there, isn’t he? Member of some scientific council or other. Or so he said …’
‘Well, you sorted out your guest, Ray,’ said Agnes from her chair, addressing her comment more to the window than her son-in-law. ‘Shame to lie to him, though.’
‘How d’you mean, lie?’ He was immediately defensive.
The old woman chuckled. ‘Pretending things are so awful now and were so good before. You know you like the outdoor life. I remember how you used to complain in Birmingham about being cooped up in the office.’
He thought a bit. He had already had one quarrel since lunch, and was grateful that Ruby seemed to have forgotten it. Walking round to face the old lady in her chair, he said, ‘Would you like another slice of Mrs Bligh’s sponge cake before I put it away, Gran? It’s hard not to lie to foreigners, really, isn’t it?’
3
Despatched
Late spring 1986
The street was lined with birch trees whose leaves had already been touched by the drought. Some had withered and fallen as if anticipating autumn, to blow downhill towards the city. In the dying day, the little grey villas standing sentinel on either side of the street were anonymous, as if weighed down under piles of slaty cloud moving in from the west. Their dustbins were overflowing with rubbish.
As Petr Petrik walked slowly up the cobbled roadway, he kept a sharp look-out, pausing before he moved into the unkempt garden of the last house at the top of the street. As usual when returning from work, he walked round the outside of the villa, looking into every window. Starlings scuttled away from underfoot, taking low flight into nearby bushes.
Mrs Emerova, his landlady, was sitting in her kitchen, reading a newspaper under a dim light, clutching her neck below her bun of grey hair in characteristic attitude. She glanced up briefly as he ducked under her sill. His room was empty. The room of Mrs Emerova’s other lodger, Martisek, was empty. Nothing was untoward.
Usually, Petrik did not return until after dark. In the summer, he often slept in friends’ flats.
When he was sure all was quiet, he brought out his key and entered the house. The stale odours of the hall were reassuringly unaltered. He called a hello, and received an answer from Mrs Emerova. The blob of chewing gum in his door hinge had not been disturbed. He opened up and went in.
His room was small and already gathering dusk. As he crossed the floor to drag the flimsy curtains across the window, he checked the room.
A desk and chair were set under the window, the chair jammed against the foot of the bed with its high old-fashioned headboard. A wardrobe of similar vintage to the bed dominated the wall opposite the bed. On his improvised bookshelves, books in German and French mingled with Czech titles. What saved the room from anonymity was a line of photographs stuck to the distemper of the wall, stills from the two films Petrik had directed in his youth, the short feature Faithless Creatures, and his fantastic documentary Sewers of Time. The photographs had curled at the edges, as though growing wings to fly into the centre of the room and take a turn about the plastic lampshade.
Petrik switched on his radio, to listen briefly to a report concerning increased agricultural production in Slovakia before switching off again. He peered restlessly through the curtains, taking in the view of back gardens, and a waste space in which a goalpost stood, sinking into the fading light.
Taking a biscuit from a tin in the wardrobe, he munched slowly, staring at nothing, feeling at a letter in the hip pocket of his jeans without removing it from its place of concealment.
When the biscuit was gone, he unzipped his jeans and began to masturbate in front of a small mirror. To assist the process, he pulled a worn copy of Playboy from under the bed and opened it at the photograph of a naked American blonde.
Petr Petrik was a slender man in his mid-forties. His body was pale and bony, his face long and freckled. His hair was mousy, cut short. Only the fierce stare of his eyes gave him some distinction.
After his orgasm, he zipped up his jeans, put away the magazine, and lay on the bed, which creaked under his weight. He was no more relaxed than before. Taking the letter from his pocket, he began to read it once more, as if determined this time to resolve its mystery.
The letter was typewritten on flimsy paper without a water-mark. It bore no address. It read:
Petr Petrik –
Greetings!
Your motion picture based on Franz Kafka’s life entitled Sewers of Time is considered of worthy artistic merit. An opportunity may arise in the near future to schedule it for some limited showings to selected audiences. This department trusts that the proposal will be of interest to you.
If favourably received, Sewers of Time might qualify along with other works for wider viewability ratings. In such an eventuality, the Saradov Studios might provide a job opportunity in one of its departments.
When you have had time and opportunity to consider this proposal, I shall forward a further communication.
Comradely felicitations,
Lubomir Cihak,
Secretary, Prague Film Academy of Arts
12 April 1986
It was not only the bureaucratic jargon of the letter which was alarming: just being addressed by authority was ominous. Petrik read it over yet again before folding it and returning it to its envelope. Kafka’s writing was still banned. How could his film be unbanned? The letter could only constitute a trap of some kind.
His cousin Jaroslav Vacek would know how exactly to deal with it.
That he should even consider going to see his bullying cousin was evidence of how seriously Petrik took the letter from Secretary Cihak.
While he considered the matter, a light tap came at his door and a voice enquired if he was awake. Stuffing the letter into his bomber jacket, Petrik went to open the door.
Mrs Emerova was generous to her lodger and sometimes offered him a bite of supper. Petrik, knowing something of her history, understood she was lonely and welcomed his company. She smiled at him now and invited him into the kitchen. Mrs Emerova was a tall, thin woman, slightly bent with the years, her square shoulders caving in towards her chest. Her scrubbed face and scraped-back hair, topping her old black jumper, gave her a look of false severity. The old lady liked to laugh until her false teeth rattled; Petrik tried to amuse her in exchange for her soup. He knew her for a good honest woman. Most people were honest; it was the system which corrupted them; but Mrs Emerova was too old to be corrupted. She had survived the Nazis and all that had happened since.
Her kitchen was neat, clean, and rather cold. On the table two plates were already laid: he never refused to eat with her. She served the soup in plastic bowls, and there were helpings of Hungarian salami and potato to follow.
‘How’s the little hunchback?’ she asked, when they were seated facing one another. It was one of her favourite conversational openings.
‘Things haven’t been going well for our unlucky friend.’
Mrs Emerova began to laugh immediately. She remembered the story, but like a child tempted him to tell her it again. Petrik spun it out over the soup; the hunchback’s unfortunate life lasted little more than a minute so far.
‘Well, as you know, he was pretty hungry. Starving, in fact. Couldn’t enjoy a nice tasty soup like this …’
Her teeth began to rattle slightly in anticipation.
‘… So he toddled down to the market square. He joined in with all the other hawkers. And he tried to sell his hump – to a butcher or to anyone who wanted a lump of meat.’
‘Sell his hump!’ The old lady dropped her spoon and rocked back and forth in time to her false teeth.
At that moment, one of Mrs Emerova’s souvenirs of earlier days chimed the hour of six. Her black marble clock stood on the kitchen shelf next to her black saucepan; its face was embedded in a block carved with pillars, steps and pediments; evidently designed to represent an eighteenth-century bastille in which time itsel
f was imprisoned. The tin notes of its strike always made Petrik uneasy, and he paused in his narrative.
‘Go on,’ the old lady ordered, impatiently. ‘Are you really saying he went down to the market place and tried to – to sell his hump?’ She started laughing again at the thought. ‘It would be fatty, like sow’s cheek, wouldn’t it?’
‘Well, there he stood, in the market square, temptingly offering everyone a carving fork, but no one would buy, not even one slice.
‘No one would buy, and the poor little hunchie was very sad. He walked about the square like this …’ Having gulped down his soup, Petrik pushed back his chair and slouched about the kitchen, left foot to the fore, left shoulder hunched, by way of demonstration. ‘Until a little mountaineer from the High Tatras wearing a huge woolly hat came along and tried to use his hump for mountaineering practice …’
This was too much for Mrs Emerova. ‘Oh, I must tell Lotti. I must tell Lotti,’ she said, amid outbursts of laughter.
‘You must tell no one,’ said Petrik, all mock-stern. ‘The life of our friend is a secret between us, Mrs Emerova.’
As they ate their salami, his landlady asked for more details, but he put her off, saying that the great feature of the hunchback’s existence – apart from his hump – was that everyone took advantage of him.
‘It’s like life, you see,’ he explained. ‘Adverse circumstances.’
Mrs Emerova advised him to look on the bright side of things, serving him an extra spoonful of potato as she did so, to reinforce the advice. He smiled and thanked her. Just as he missed his mother, so she missed her son.
Back in his room and feeling happier for something in his stomach, he re-read the letter from Secretary Cihak, trying to understand its portents. They said things were beginning to change in Russia – but in Czechoslovakia? Never! He fell into a light doze, to be roused by the clump of boots in the corridor outside his room. He sat up tensely, swinging his feet to the floor. For some reason, the sound of those boots always alarmed him.
Mrs Emerova had rented out a part of her bungalow permanently to a man called Martisek. Martisek was a tall man in his forties. A moustache hung across his face like a bird with extended wings, giving him a sinister appearance. He walked with his head thrust forward, as if the moustache weighed heavily.
Petrik and Martisek had never spoken. They avoided each other. Petrik did not wish to know what work the other man occupied himself with during the day. Instead, he sat on the side of his bed with his hands on his knees, listening. It was just possible, he considered, that he hated this man, stranger though he was. ‘Old Boots’ – that was his name for Martisek.
The boots clumped over the worn linoleum. A door on the other side of the corridor was unlocked. Then came the sound of the lock turning on the inside. In a minute, bed-springs gave a creak. Then two separate bumps as the boots were removed and thrown to the floor. A radio was switched on.
‘Old Boots’ was a creature of habit.
It happened in the same way every evening Petrik listened. An intense loneliness filled his soul. He lay back on the bed, picked up a book of poems from beside the bed, and tried to read.
At last he bestirred himself. His girlfriend, Ondrej, would be coming from the university in half an hour. He needed to see her, as much for her own sake as to discuss the best approach to his cousin Jaroslav.
Now that dusk was enfolding the city, rendering it at once more mysterious and more tender, he walked down the street with greater confidence than he had climbed it. At the road junction at the foot of the hill he was in luck. A trolley car was trundling along, its arm sparking against its overhead cable, the very embodiment of normality. Whatever the regime in power, the trolleys kept going. A trolley was entirely apolitical. He jumped aboard and was carried towards the gaunt apartment blocks which ringed the ancient city.
On the third floor of one of these apartment blocks, a flat containing two other women, lived Ondrej Korinkova. Ondrej was married, but her husband had disappeared three months after the wedding, almost certainly arrested and imprisoned for treason to the state, in this case for printing a pamphlet in support of the Helsinki Agreement. The two women who shared the apartment with Ondrej were both divorced; they made their living by cleaning and occasional whoring, when possible with foreigners staying in the smart hotels in the centre of Prague. All three women considered themselves lucky: they had no kids to look after.
Ondrej’s section of the apartment was partitioned off by an old yellow bedspread. It was behind this curtain that Petr Petrik found her, and embraced her. Though still a student, Ondrej Korinkova was in her late twenties, a full-bosomed girl with long lank hair which she had dyed a streaky ginger. Her eyes were as green if she were a true redhead; she outlined them with kohl for emphasis. When Ondrej looked at you, you knew you had been looked at.
Ondrej and Petr made love on her bed, ignoring one of the other women who was sewing sequins on to a dress in the far corner of the room, on the other side of the curtain. They did not undress fully.
About their love-making was a kind of spring-like familiarity, as yet not turning into dull summer of custom. He liked her slight movements; she was not one to throw herself about in a way he found annoying. And he listened with joy, his face to her face, as she neared her perfect pitch, sighing, ‘Please, please … oh, yes, please …’, quite unconscious of what she was saying, breathing that innocent word.
He savoured his own self-control, well able to let her spend herself, whispering, struggling, clasping her arms about him, before he allowed himself to climax in the sunsets of her emotion.
But after, as they sat on the side of the bed smoking cigarettes, Ondrej said, in a light tone, delivering the sentence with a throwaway air, ‘You like me only for the fucking …’
Immediately, Petrik turned on her a look of hatred. She had said such things to him before; he suspected she said it to many men, as if denying to herself secretly that she could be of value for anything else but fucking. ‘Why do you talk sometimes as if we were enemies?’
She shrugged her shoulders and regarded the tip of her cigarette. ‘There’s enmity in every relationship.’
Afterwards, he took her out to a café he knew she liked on Jindrisska. It was already crowded. Ondrej enjoyed crowds, and passed whispered comments on other customers. He bought two glasses of red wine, and they smiled as they silently toasted each other.
He asked her what she had been doing with herself, rubbing his leg against hers under the table.
‘I’ve been reading all day,’ she said. ‘I sat by the river and read. I was swallowed up by it.’
He smiled at her. ‘Something in your words makes me sad.’ Or perhaps it was the café. It had deteriorated since they were last here. The place was dim; some overhead bulbs had failed and not been replaced. The Russian vine on the terrace had ceased to flower. It might have been a railway canteen.
She chose not to respond to his remark. ‘I have read an English poet all this afternoon,’ she said, speaking stiltedly in English, not Czech.
‘Shakespeare? Sturge Moore?’
She reverted to her native tongue to say, ‘Samuel Coleridge. Early last century. It gives you an illusion of liberty, reading about that time. Coleridge walked all over England. Also, he was a drug addict, like me. He had an unhappy love-affair, like me. He was free to wander all over Europe, unlike me.’
‘You’re quite a free spirit, Ondrej,’ he said lamely. He sipped his wine. She was so young. He did not want to think of his wasted student days.
‘You know what?’ She gave him one of her intense stares. ‘Coleridge has written this remarkable book whose name I can’t pronounce. He’s talking about a play he dislikes. He gives it a real slating. I guess it was shit. And he talks about materialism, and do you know what he says? He says materialism may influence the characters of individuals and even of communities to a degree that almost does away with the distinction between men and devils. Isn’t that grea
t? And he goes on with a smashing bit of prophecy, “It will make the page of a future historian resemble the narration of a madman’s dream.” Don’t you think he was thinking of dialectical materialism?’
‘It’s a good guess, anyway,’ he said, looking round the café to see who was listening to them.
‘I must try to get you interested in Samuel Coleridge some day,’ she said, laughing lightly. ‘Do you want to go and hear some jazz at Stompie’s?’
As they walked down the boulevard, he apologized for being so abstracted, but was reluctant to say why. ‘You know the Saradov Film Studios?’ he said.
‘Sure. They turn out shit.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Saradov turned out trivial films on safe subjects, many so pedestrian they were not even exported to the other countries of the Warsaw Pact, except Bulgaria. The Bulgarians watched anything. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, many of the best script-writers and film-makers left the country. Others, like Petr Petrik himself, were forced to find other jobs. Yet the tradition of good film-making remained alive, sitting on a dusty back shelf.
Just supposing that this secretary, Lubomir Cihak, wanted to open the cultural door a little …
He had heard Cihak’s name mentioned, generally with scorn. The man was always associated with hardline policies; the assumption was that he knew nothing at all about the movie business. Why should he be thinking about resurrecting Petr’s old movie about Franz Kafka, with all its heavy overtones, politically slanted, of paternal repression? It was a mystery.
Perhaps his formidable cousin Jaroslav could solve the mystery.
When he and Ondrej were in the noisy jazz club, he tried to phone his cousin Jaroslav. Hardly surprisingly, he could not get through. The line seemed to be engaged.
The following afternoon it rained. Ondrej had arranged to meet Petr at six in the evening. The two friends who shared her apartment were going to see how business was doing at the Intercontinental. She joined them on impulse. She had gone to bed with foreigners before; it was nothing special, but she enjoyed seeing smart rooms, lying between fresh sheets, and maybe taking a luxurious bath too, if the man was agreeable – most of them wanted the women promptly out of their room once the trick was over. Westerners were worst in that respect, regarding ‘Commie girls’ as somehow inferior as human beings. Russians and Soviets generally – particularly the brutes on visiting Georgian delegations – regarded the girls as ‘Western’, and sometimes presented them with gifts of vodka, over and above the pay. Arabs paid most, gave grander presents, were cruel and haughty. All in all, Ondrej preferred Western men. In her limited experience, they used better soaps and were less inclined to haggle over the price.