The town hall there is enormous, historic, and just opposite, on the second floor, is the Town Hall Café, the one with the girls, at a tobacco stand that shone like a goldsmith’s, Ruda bought a pack of Egyptian cigarettes called Simon Arzt, its tobacco was as yellow as chanterelle mushrooms and its smoke was sweet and blue, he rubbed his hand over his rough chin and turned into a barbershop that looked like a café. Damn, the barbers here are women, this is a new experience for me, and what women … here was a chick right out of a picture book (the guys in Ostrava would really go crazy!) and I end up with one who’s all oil and water.
“With steam and birch twigs, or without?” said the prissy miss.
“The whole works. Whatever you’ve got—” Ruda Mach smiled at her.
“I give manicures too,” the prissy miss grinned, “but that comes to twenty-five c-r-o-w-n-s, young man!”
“I just happen to have that much and enough left over for bubbly and two silk stockings, young lady!”
“Two stockings!” she said and then came out with a contemptuous “Fffff!”
It doesn’t matter, I’m doing better at home, Ruda Mach rejoiced (right now Sonya must be sitting at the beauty parlor, I’ll give her a hundred crowns to pay for it) and steamed, shaved, trimmed, massaged, rubbed with cream, perfumed, and powdered, Ruda drank a small Hunter’s Brandy on the ground floor of the Town Hall and then, refreshed, went out into the street.
This here Liberec is really great — Ostrava it isn’t, but then it’s cleaner. And they’ve got streetcars and there’s a theater … well, but any decent town has all those things.
And look, ads just like in Ostrava: they’re looking for bricklayers, masons, even insulators. How much could I make: 2,500-3,000, that would do, hiring allowance 1,000, housing allowance 500, uniform allowance 300, non-resident allowance 17 a day — Christ, that would all be in your pocket before you even picked up a shovel! And for singles, lodging right away, for couples up to 6 months’ wait … Christ!
In the wine-cellar Ruda devoured four “tartar sandwiches,” made with raw meat, onions, and lots of pepper, and drank a glass of wonderful Hungarian Fortuna “bubbly.” Here they even pour champagne into glasses — what a nice racket they have!
And at the travel bureau an enormous poster showing a blue-blue sea with cream-colored whitecaps and it said: Only one seat left for our week-long trip to the Costa del sol … 1,350 crowns per person. I’ve never been to the seashore, never been on a plane — and I’ve got those 1,350 right here in my pocket…
All of a sudden Ruda felt warm (it was hotter here than way up in Hrusov), and to avoid wasting time he took a taxi “to the best swimming pool you’ve got!”
And it was enormous, behind a dam a big blue lake with cresting waves just like at the seashore … And the babes there, Christ, all of them blondes in pointy bikinis with cigarettes in their painted fingers, one of them wore a gold necklace in the water…
With all this Ruda developed a thirst, went back by streetcar (when was the last time I jumped on a trolley!) to the city, and tossed down a double Hunter, it’s a very powerful aperitif, and now that’s enough monkey-business, time for yum-yum and then back home again.
But as if out of spite, in front of the butcher’s was a musical instrument shop the equal of which could not be found in Kosice or even in Ostrava … and in the window an entire forest of guitars.
Ruda barged into the shop and tried out guitar after guitar, absolutely happy he strummed one after another and at last paid 920 crowns for the most expensive one in the shop.
He would have liked to set himself down somewhere and strum away the whole evening — but he had to go back to Hrusov — meanwhile the Hunter was doing its thing, and Ruda barged into the butcher’s, they’ve got warm salami here, that’s great! He propped his new guitar against the white tiles of the counter and ate, as an experiment, twenty dekas of salami with two poppyseed rolls—salami as thick as your leg—then fifteen dekas without any rolls, then ten more dekas with one roll, then another ten dekas without any rolls and, to finish things off, another fifteen dekas without.
Salami like that—and it was the real thing!—deserves the best beer there is, and around the corner is the Plzner Beerhouse, Ruda sat down at the corner of the bar and downed one beer after another (where would that lunatic Volrab dig up a keg of real Pilsner!), relishing its creamy foam, he put the third mug down on a coaster and unbuttoned his shirt all the way down to his navel, and after the fifth he started to strum his new guitar, in a little while (by then it was getting dark outside) the whole bar was singing and the whole bar was sending Ruda drinks for free, then things started getting a bit confused, someone pushed someone and then someone took me off somewhere (the way things are I can’t make it home and it’s pitch dark), that someone was some sort of woman or maybe there were two of them, we were sitting in some sort of kitchen, or whatever it was, and of all things I seem to remember a funny sort of table covered with oilcoth with violet birds on it, and I woke up in the morning on someone’s sofa.
The women were actually three in number and all ugly as Monday morning, and their kitchen stank like a stable. Ruda checked his wallet (it’s lucky for them they didn’t rip me off!), took his guitar and, since the door was locked, crawled out through the window over the toilet, jumped down on the garbage can, dusted himself off (it didn’t help much), and took a long drink from the pump in the backyard.
And then get on home — with his guitar Ruda trotted through sleeping Liberec, at eight I’ve got to see the Cottex director, two fellows loading cans of milk told him that the Jablonec trolley connected with the main highway going north, Ruda rode the streetcar out to the edge of town and at the turnaround jumped down from the platform onto the highway, which he liked and which turned out to be the right one.
On a truck hauling sausage casings he got as far as Korenov and above a cheerful little stream he waited for another connection, the highway at the end of summer had a quality that touched his heart, Ruda played his guitar and gazed at the wet stones and the ferns golden in the morning mist.
A great guy in a funeral van set Ruda down right by the gate of the Hrusov Cottex — how is it that now it seems so tiny … Ruda clocked in at 7:42 and slowly finished smoking a Simon Arzt above the white rocks of the Jizera falls.
“I hope you had a fine day off, Mr. Mach,” Director Kaska said in his office, he coughed and stuck into his mouth a contraption for asthma, a rubber balloon in a tube (mountain air does have its limits).
“So what have you thought up for me, Director?” asked Ruda Mach.
“Well, you see, the planning people are drawing up plans—I gave them their orders yesterday, so it will take them roughly a week—but I have something special for you, something quite nice… You know, it’s my own little dream, one I’ve never had time for so far, but now that we’ve got you with us…”
“So what did you dream up for me, Director?”
“You see, we’ve got women working in the bleaching room and you know what they learn in the kitchen — if they put salt in their dumplings instead of sugar, pigs can still manage to eat them, but when they mix acid with lye in the bleaching room, you have a mess on your hands that costs you ten thousand. And that’s just the job I have for you. In a word, pick your colors and paint all the pipes in the bleaching room: blue for water, green for alkali, red for acid, white for steam, yellow for gas…” “Purple for air, right?”
“We don’t have any air pipes in the bleaching room…”
“That’s a pisser. I’d paint them purple with green dots and orange stars and for each vent I’d add a guardian angel with golden hair and rosy cheeks…”
“Then the job doesn’t appeal to you—”
“Painting pipes— at our plant in Ostrava apprentices do that. And only when there isn’t any regular scutwork for them to do!”
“I’m really sorry, I was so looking forward…”
“When I take on a job, it’s got to be
a real job! No scutwork for Ruda Mach, Director!”
“Well, whatever you say, but it’s too bad… Of course I can pay you an average wage for the few days it will take the boys from planning to work things out, and in the meantime you can simply take a breather…”
“And gather cranberries and sage for an infusion to clear out my lungs—no!”
“Stick around and I’ll find you something else…”
“Oh, sure. I’ll go pick up the paints. Write out a requisition for it.”
“That’s really fantastic, Mr. Mach, you’ve made me very happy! You’ll see what pleasant work it will be, and how grateful our girls and women will be to you…”
Ruda picked up the paints and began to mix them in the bleaching room, beginning with red. When he opened the can of thinner, he was overwhelmed by that awful stench of chemicals, a real pisser, yuck! With disgust he painted a few yards of piping, and when the fumes of the thinner (in Ostrava they issue us masks for this kind of work!) filled his lungs, in rage he threw down his brush and went to “air himself out” on his meadow.
Where the Cottex factory meadow ends at the confluence of the millrace and the river, in a wild triangle of never-mown prairie, buried in yard-high grass, Ruda Mach smoked a Simon Arzt from the Egypt of the pyramids, sphinxes, and the date palms from the Nile and the Red Sea, the warmest of all the world’s seas (the mornings are already cold and it’s all downhill from here), his brassbound wallet open in front of him he scratched out the next day on the waxy face of his calendar and reflected on the now dug-up furrows of the time spent in Hrusov (and on the untouched columns of untouched days).
Then he counted his money (it’s enough, and I won’t save up for a dump in this place), and out of the “pleasure” section of the wallet, like a sword from a scabbard, he produced his school map, folded sixteen times (and out tumbled a postcard from his pal Pepa from Iraq, that’s down there somewhere near Egypt, hey Pepa, why didn’t I go there with you…) and he spread the map out on the grass. The blue ovals of lakes, scattered over the republic like kiosks at a fair, smiled at Ruda, the Liberec lake isn’t even here and it’s so big, what about this one or that one over there or this one here (he suddenly felt a longing for a lake, any sort of lake), anyplace there’s some decent work for Ruda Mach, I’m still a bit too good to wield a brush, Director, just make sure the girls in that bleaching room of yours show up for work, Ruda thought a little about Sonya, such a young girl, with her whole life ahead of her, lazily he stretched out his front paws and with his face propped on them thought with pleasure of his new guitar (his mind suddenly made up).
I felt really bad when by half-past two all the men had come out of the Cottex gate — and Ruda was not among them. Until the gatekeeper finally told me that he had gone off hitch-hiking somewhere…
“He needed to go somewhere,” says S.-Marie “and he’ll certainly bring us back a lovely present, a pleasant surprise…”
“Just so the surprise won’t be unpleasant,” Antisonya grins, “and just so he does show up—”
S.-Marikka is angry, furious.
I lay by the swimming pool for an hour or so (glad I didn’t have a watch: I would have looked at it so often that I would have gone out of my mind) and I kept lifting my head to see if he was coming… My husband didn’t come. From the pond a chill passed through the yellowing grass of the fleeting summer, and that melancholy feeling like long ago, the sorrow that my holidays were coming to an end…
Following S.-Marikka’s advice I ate both my lunch and Ruda’s. (S.-Marie didn’t approve of this and Antisonya taunted me, saying that only aging has-beens stuff themselves to dull the pain) and all at once it occurred to me that Ruda was probably drinking his beer in the bar already, so I ran back to the Hubertus — in the bar Hnyk was guzzling beer all by himself. So Ruda must surely be waiting in the room and grinning about the present he brought me … in the room just Antisonya grinning at me out of the mirror.
I tried to calm down and then, at the usual hour, I prepared our dinner (cheese croquettes with spinach)… My husband didn’t come home at the usual hour, nor by nightfall (lucky I don’t have a watch!), he left me alone all night.
An entire night with the four Sonyas was terrifying.
I stayed in bed almost till noon… why clean up, shop, wash, cook — why bother to get up at all?
But that’s my job here and my vocation! And so, with everything at home ready as it should be, at two o’clock I stood with the other women at the Cottex gate, and when the siren blew and the men began to come out, I even smiled—
And that’s obviously why Ruda came. My husband— but how awful he looked, his clothes were rumpled and his sleeve ripped — he laughed and showed me his new guitar.
“It doesn’t matter at all, at least I had some peace and quiet to look after things at home…” S.-Marie answered on my behalf.
“Next time I’ll take you along,” he promised.
Something has happened to my husband. Of course Ruda can’t be expected to do menial labor like some sort of apprentice. A small plant like the Hrusov Cottex can’t offer Ruda what he needs to feel fulfilled. And obviously we can’t go on living in a hotel forever. But something else has happened to my husband.
I brushed off his rumpled clothes and sewed his sleeve, Ruda joked for a while as always, but then grew serious and sighed:
“You women are all like angels… Hm. But if I had wings, I’d fly with them…”
I was extremely kind to my husband (not even the slightest hint of reproach!) and later that evening I even ran out for a bottle of rum for his grog (which I never liked to prepare) and Ruda drank the grog again what he called “Jamaican” style, like our first night together, when everything was still innocent, pure, and full of expectation…
Ruda had gotten drunk in Liberec (I know everything about him) and now he’s drinking again… but is alcohol the thing that happened to my husband? With fright I realized that it was something else… something even worse for me.
Late into the night Ruda sat at the window and played his guitar (he’d suddenly forgotten the child’s harmonica I’d given him) and he kept talking on about his South Sea Islands, where one day he would sail and make his living repairing motorboats and water skis, all day long on the white sand of the beach under the sun, now and then he would pluck a coconut from a palm tree, cut into it with his machete (he showed me how), and drink its cool, delectable juice, then eat the creamy pulp — and one could live that way all year long. When he finally fell asleep, I wept: there was no room for me in those South Sea islands of his…
My husband kept going to Cottex, and every day he came home from work more enraged, one day out of rage he painted his entire arm purple and then grabbed at me horribly, like a zombie… He sat in the bar till it got dark and the rest of the time he spent at the window playing his new guitar.
And so I had to get a hold of myself, get the better of my feelings for my husband’s sake—that is my vocation—and beg him to find work somewhere else. And work for me as well.
Ruda didn’t answer and kept on going to Cottex. Until one day he brought home his pay, gave me a thousand crowns, and said, “Tomorrow I’m leaving.”
“Good.”
“Wait for me here. As soon as I land something, I’ll write you.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“I will write to you.”
In the morning I made him tea for the very last time (and I didn’t cry: that is my vocation) and came down with him to the front of the hotel, where I felt so weak I had to lean against the cold, dewy rail.
“You’re great,” my husband said to me.
“I love you.”
“I will write to you.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
“So long,” said Ruda Mach, and he left, his suitcase in one hand and in the other his new guitar, from the meadow under the railroad tracks a dense white mist rose up as far as the highway, Ruda began to whistle and vanished int
o the whiteness, my first husband.
No letter came from Ruda.
At 3:50 P.M. Engineer Jakub Jagr walked past the fence of the garden next door, the Orts’, with its silver-gray gate, and he walked through the blue gate into the Jagrs’ garden and entered his house.
On the hallway his mother and his sister, Zlatunka, glanced up at him from their rocking chairs (his father would come here from his room at 6:45 sharp).
“How’s work?” asked his mother.
“Nothing special,” said Jakub.
“You’ve got a letter,” said his mother.
“The address is complete, but written by somebody who must have been plastered,” said Zlatunka.
From the table at the foot of the staircase Jakub picked up the newspaper (his father had read it between ten and eleven o’clock and in the evening it had to be returned to him for his documentary clipping) along with the letter postmarked Hrusov, went upstairs to his room on the second floor, and double-locked the door behind him.
For a full minute he looked around his room (the tightly-woven, firm, thin carpet bouclé, bright blue in color, but darkened near the window by the thousandfold marks of a naked, exercising body, metal furniture and a narrow metal bed with dazzlingly white bed linen, on the wall a spring exerciser for the biceps, a sculpture of a tiger’s head, and the flat planes of two walls covered with a good 355 square feet of technical books, scifi, and mysteries), and fully absorbed in his unusually flat dagger, he cut open the envelope (the writing did indeed testify strongly to the writer’s use of alcohol) of the letter from our paid informant in the bar of the Hotel Hubertus:
To the Right Honorable Engineer Jagr!
Heartfelt greetings. This morning Ruda Mach deserted your Miss Sonya, quit his job at Cottex, and he’s already cleared out of here. Heartfelt greetings and send me at least 50 — Thanks!
Heartfelt greetings!
Josef Hnyk
(or send me 75 instead - Heartfelt greetings!)
Four Sonyas Page 15