Four Sonyas

by Paral, VladimIr

  “I never was angry at you. I want you to know that I’ve always been fond of you—” said Kamila, and with her head held high she walked into the Orts’ yellow villa.

  Deep in thought, Jakub went back home. Kamila’s persistent interest in me is wonderful—what do we really know about women?—and thrilling … the way she longs for me so much … she invited me to come see her after dinner—

  The blood beat in his temples, Jakub ran upstairs to his bedroom and, to calm himself down, he did forty push-ups on the firm blue carpet and then took forty deep breaths … But even this number seemed insufficient.

  Shining through the open window, in the August heat, beyond the graceful swaying of the radiant tops of the apple and cherry trees, was the Orts’ yellow villa, where Kamila, the friend of my happy childhood here in our green valley, longs to have me for the night, Kamila, my boyhood love — for always LOVE, WOMAN, SEX, and MARRIAGE have meant the same thing to me as KAMILA… Now all I have to do is come down the stairs and shout: “I’m going to marry Kamila!” and Dad and Mother would be happy and Zlatunka would be overjoyed and our family and the Orts would live peacefully, without psychoanalysis, kidnappings, or despair, forever as in a fairy tale… All I have to do is cross the garden and ring at my neighbor’s silver-gray gate—

  But when it’s Sonya I STILL LOVE—

  Even though she betrayed me so scandalously just before the wedding and spent the night with someone else — is this what I gave her the freedom to do, to the point that I got down on my knees before her…

  The wedding’s been put off indefinitely so we can have an interval—say a month—in which to test her in all sorts of ways … even though I already know everything about her. Time to pass from analysis to synthesis. Methodically split Sonya down to nothing but molecules of pure womanhood—the more she suffers now, the better for us both—and then after her meltdown rebuild her via an incandescent synthesis from disconnected molecules into the new person I desire.

  How to reach the enormous heat and pressure required … when Sonya laughs disdainfully at everyone, as if nothing could ever touch her? By the methods of scientific terror: form a GANG AGAINST SONYA, which will first of all blow up that flighty serving girl.

  Jakub leafed through his spiral notebook where the flowchart of Sonya’s obliteration and reconstruction was depicted in diagrams and graphs drawn with four different colored pencils, on the left the respective actions taken, on the right columns for commenting on their effectiveness — nothing but filled-in squares of red: today Sonya’s subjugation is one-hundred percent.

  Jakub picked up and once again studied closely (he was a technician) a color postcard of Prague, according to the postmark it had actually been sent from Prague, to the correct address (Sonya Cechova, Valley Street 4, Usti n. L.), with an unusual content, but one that was most acceptable:

  Trust Jakub. Everything he does, however strange it may appear, he does for your good.

  M.M.

  In any event, M.M. is a complete riddle, but the text is of course a welcome one and evidently the actual contents of its message (several times Jakub held the postcard up to the light, felt it over and, in the lab at Cottex, subjected it to all sorts of tests for discovering secret chemical inks and the sort of microdots used in espionage, and neither decoding nor deciphering the text of the postcard on the company’s Saab computer, with the expert cooperation of the operator—and his friend—Dominik Neuman, revealed any hidden message), and so handing it over to the addressee could be expected to produce a positive pedagogical effect.

  At 6:30 P.M. Jakub delivered the postcard from Prague to Sonya and then read to her from his notebook, item by item, her tasks for the next 24 hours:

  “… eighteen: march double-time around the garden. Nineteen: fill out psychotechnical test No. 376. Twenty: write thirty lines of detailed description of all your sensations during the day just completed. Twenty-one: polish all the shoes in the vestibule. Twenty-two: write a summary of the ninth chapter of van de Velde’s The Perfect Marriage—”

  “Jakub,” Zlatunka said caustically, lounging around in her rocking chair, “don’t you see that bitch is laughing right in your face?”

  “We’ll soon put an end to your laughter,” said Zlatunka.

  In the laundry room, with Kamila’s help, she sat Sonya down and used laundry cord to tie her feet to the feet of the chair and her twisted arms to its back, and they wound the rest of the cord around Sonya’s breasts and waist and knotted it tightly in back.

  “So you think that nothing more can happen to you?” said Zlatunka.

  “From you two hardly anything,” Sonya said contemptuously.

  Kamila took a deep drag on her Peer cigarette, brought the glowing ashes close to Sonya’s bare arm and, looking straight into her eyes, put it out against her flesh. Sonya screamed with pain, took a few deep breaths, and then laughed contemptuously.

  “We’ll put an end to your laughter,” said Kamila. “Give those scissors here!”

  Grinning, Zlatunka gave her a long pair of scissors and Kamila ran them over Sonya’s face. “You’ve got really long hair, Sonya,” she said slowly, “we could shorten it for you a little…”

  “No,” Sonya screamed. “You can’t—”

  “Really?” Kamila said. She grabbed a strand of Sonya’s red hair, pulled it taut, and cut it off close to the skin. Then she took another strand and ran the scissors along it, all the way to the scalp.

  “No! No! Anything but that! Please … don’t do that to me—” Sonya screamed, she shook the chair and tugged at the ropes while her hair, strand after strand, fell to the concrete floor, she snapped at the scissors with her teeth, squirmed, and shouted until at last, in tears, she quieted down.

  Naked under my dirty, greasy overalls, barefoot in battered military boots stiff with old sweat, which make me bleed with every step (they’re what I have to wear to march around the garden) and shorn bald (that’s the only part that really hurt me, but it no longer does at all—hair grows back again), but in spite of it all particularly happy: MANEK HAS TAKEN MY FATE IN HIS HANDS and liberated from fate I now feel completely at ease … Like a boat steered in the fog towards a safe harbor by signals from the ether.

  From somewhere out of the unknown, Manek guards my course and fixes its direction and its destinaton … I trust him absolutely, just like he wanted and just like he needs. Manek writes me every day, only postcards (so that Jakub can pass on them), but it’s enough for me to be certain and to be happy to see his daily M.M.

  When I told Jakub that M.M. was my uncle on my mother’s side, I got permission to send him postcards myself. My rigid work schedule allows me only five minutes a day for that (from 9:35 to 9:40 in the evening), but I think about those five minutes all day long. Then Jakub scratches out everything on the postcard that doesn’t strike him right, and I have to write it all over again. At first I went through as many as five postcards at a time, but then I mastered the secret language of love. Its secret is to use the simplest of words.

  I am incredibly happy, even though it’s infinitely worse here than it was in Hrusov … how childishly naive and almost good-hearted were the verses of Uncle Volrab compared with Jakub’s icy heel—and Volrabka was almost kind (even when she lashed me with a wet rag) compared with Zlatunka and Kamila, those two bitches. Of the two Kamila is worse: colorless, insipid, nondescript, boring, dispensable …as if she existed only for my destruction. She comes to see me every day, sometimes even more often … Most of the time she comes dressed in sulfur yellow dresses (to me, yellow is the color of cruelty. Hope is green and for that I live), each time as if surprised again that I’ve lived to see another day.

  But life here has an intense zestfulness. My pleasure comes from petty joys which I never noticed before—perhaps I had as a child—and now I have discovered them anew: from the sun on the grass (it’s a warm, lovely August), from the striping of golden red pearmain apples, from the scent of the soil, from beams of light i
n the morning mist, from a warm potato in my hand, from the breeze… (I’m allowed to write Manek about all of this.) Today I include in my postcard to M.M.: From this moment on, I will live a larger-than-life life.

  S.-Marie now plays first fiddle in me all the time, S.-Marikka has become quiet, even Antisonya has, almost, as if she had suddenly lost all her eternal mockery. And Sonya Undivided sings softly all day long with S.-Marie.

  My task here is to win back Jakub’s love. At first I listened to him alone and accepted everything quietly. But suddenly it appeared to me that Jakub needed to pluck up his courage much more than me. I get as much courage from Manek as I could possibly need (an infinite amount), but Jakub has less and less of it … The less he has, the more obediently I fulfill his commands and the more prettily I smile at him. Manek gave me the task of winning Jakub’s love and it is possible that this will be my final task here. I want to fulfill it as soon as possible … How can I speed things up?

  Unexpectedly, I got help from Dr. Lubos Bily, the little surgeon with the extremely high forehead. While doing some digging around the trees, I unbuttoned the top of my overalls to cool off a bit, and suddenly he popped out from between a couple of trees before I had a chance to button up again.

  “You’re beautiful, Sonya…” he whispered, and then he turned quite pale, as if struck by a wave … and from then on he showed up more and more often and stuck around me longer and longer, completely obsessed with the sight of me.

  And I was clever enough to arrange for Jakub to see us together from his room (concealed behind his curtains, he watches me for hours on end).

  S.-Marikka is encouraging us to use jealousy as a way of awakening Jakub’s love.

  And S.-Marikka is having success: Lubos (Dr. Bily wishes me to call him that) stands beside me wherever I please and as long as I want him to (sometimes he even forgets to visit Zlatunka) and Jakub’s curtains often tremble … I think I’m doing a fine job of fulfilling my task, and I’m enjoying it … it is my job here and my vocation.

  For the first time Jakub excused me from having to trot around the garden, now, instead, I read to him every day from van de Velde’s The Perfect Marriage.

  The warm August breeze gently raised the tips of the checkered tablecloth on the garden table, where Zlatunka, Dr. Lubos Bily, and Kamila Ortova were slowing devouring their vanilla ice cream topped with whipped cream. A few yards away, Sonya, in her overalls and army boots, was digging up another hundred square yards of lawn.

  The company at the table was quite bored. Slowly Kamila tapped another Peer cigarette out of her father’s golden pack, mechanically she reached for her silver lighter—then suddenly she threw it onto the tablecloth.

  “Sonya! Run and get me some matches!”

  Sonya put down her spade and walked off toward the white villa.

  “Why are you banging that spade around like that — is it yours?” Zlatunka squawked. “Pick it up this minute — and do it on your knees—”

  Sonya smiled, bent over to take the handle of the spade, knelt and picked it up, carefully leaned the tool against the trunk of a tree, and went for Kamila’s matches. Dr. Lubos Bily turned pale as chalk, rose violently from the table, and stared at his fiancée, wonderstruck, as if he had just seen her for the very first time.

  When Sonya brought the matches and placed them on the garden table, Kamila and Zlatunka lit their cigarettes with Kamila’s silver lighter and blew their first puffs of smoke right in Sonya’s eyes.

  “What are you gawking at? Don’t you have work to do?” Kamila snapped at Sonya.

  “Clear out and get these matches back to the kitchen on the double!” Zlatunka yelled, and she blew the blue smoke of the Peer export cigarette right in Sonya’s face.

  “I’ll take the matches back myself,” Lubos Bily said raspingly, and he took the matchbox off the table and threw them on the ground at his fiancée Zlatunka’s feet.

  Then he walked slowly over to Sonya, who had already begun to dig again, and tenderly but firmly took the spade out of her hand.

  “Let me finish it, I have to have it all done by evening,” Sonya said with a smile.

  “I won’t let you,” said Dr. Bily, and he turned to the facade of the white villa and called out, “Mr. Jagr! Kindly come out—I know you’re standing behind those curtains!”

  The second-floor curtains fluttered reluctantly and in a little while Engineer Jakub Jagr, his ears quite red, appeared between the opened shutters.

  “Lubos, what’s going on—” said Jakub.

  “Not Lubos, Engineer. I’m Dr. Bily to you. I am forced to strenuously advise you that what you are doing to Miss Cechova here falls under the criminal code. I am a physician and I have a professional code of conduct to follow. Will you allow me to make an investigation now, or do you prefer to wait five minutes, when I will have the assistance of the police?”

  “I’ll be right down—” Jakub was greatly alarmed and in a minute’s time he was running across the lawn. “Lubos, I didn’t really realize…”

  “Do you see her feet? Who made her wear those frightful boots, and without stockings? — They last did that in the concentration camps!”

  “But I really had no idea…” Jakub stammered.

  “But it doesn’t bother me,” Sonya smiled. “And it doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

  “You require immediate care and then a few days of bedrest. I will take you to the hospital and arrange things so you will never have to come back here,” Dr. Bily said in a single breath.

  “No,” Sonya smiled. “I want to stay here with Jakub.”

  “It might really be better for you, Sonya,” Jakub rattled off with dismay in his voice, “if you went with Lubos, I mean with the doctor…”

  “I want to be with you,” Sonya said to Jakub, and she smiled at him prettily.

  In a rage, Dr. Lubos Bily cursed abominably, pushed the confused Zlatunka away, jumped into his sturdy American car and, with a hundred-and-fifty-horsepower roar, stormed off down Valley Street in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

  Zlatunka flung her cigarette on the grass and beat her fists against the checkered tablecloth.

  “Jakub…” Kamila said softly to the crushed young engineer.

  “Leave me alone,” Jakub told her, and he didn’t look at her again. For a while he rubbed his sweaty forehead, then he sent Sonya to bed and disappeared into the white house.

  A little later he came out again in the company of the staff sergeant, who was nervously plucking his gray, crewcut hair. The two men disappeared into the garage, but their barking made it through the heavy garage doors all the way out to the garden.

  Just before dinner, at 6:42, Jakub handed Sonya another postcard from M.M., authorized her to write further postcards to M.M., even letters, and waived his right to censor them.

  “Can you forgive me, Sonya?” he asked softly.

  “And can you forgive me?” Sonya said with a smile.

  At 6:44, Jakub, Mother Jagrova, and Zlatunka were already sitting in the dining room over their four plates of steaming soup and Sonya, wearing an apron, was circling the table, all ready to wait on them.

  At 6:45, the staff sergeant entered the dining room, sat down at the head of the table, and commanded sharply:

  “Hm! Bring a fifth plate!”

  Sonya moved nimbly, but the staff sergeant stopped her short:

  “Hmm! Not you, Sonya. Take off that apron and come eat with us—ha! Zlatunka will bring you a plate—hmm! Hmm!”

  “Yes, Daddy,” was all Zlatunka could say, and then she brought Sonya a plate.

  “Tomorrow, Mother will give Sonya decent shoes—hm!” he went on giving orders. “Three pairs at least, for going out—ha! And send her to the hairdresser’s in town—ha! And pay her three hundred crowns—ha! Ha!”

  “Yes, Dad,” said Mother. “Three pairs of shoes, to the hairdresser’s, and three hundred crowns.”

  “But, sergeant, sir—” Sonya said with a smile (of the kind made famous al
l over the world by the fiery Marikka Rökk in her film musicals—ha! Ha!).

  “Ha! Ha! Hmm! Nonsense. Be quiet and eat. We don’t talk during dinner—hm. From tomorrow on you are freed from physical work—ha! Two walks a day—ha! And you can help me arrange my file cards on aviation—ha! Ha! Ha! Eat up now. Dobrou chut!”

  “Dobrou chut,” answered the flabbergasted Jagr women, Jakub said it as if only to Sonya, and Sonya smiled at him prettily.

  Late that evening Zlatunka locked her door and packed her big brown leather shopping bag with Sonya’s green dress, Sonya’s two pairs of shoes and nightgown, one of the Jagr family’s blue bath towels, then she added her own beautiful Italian sweater, two hundred-notes and then, after a brief hesitation, a third.

  She stole quietly out of her room and spent a long time listening to the familiar sounds of her home — Kamila and I have lost the game, but that fanatic Kamila doesn’t realize it, from now on then without her and even, maybe, against her — Zlatunka breathed in with determination, crept to Sonya’s door, and gave it four quick little knocks (Jakub’s signal, which she had overheard).

  The door opened almost immediately and Sonya (in her nightgown) took a step backward. With a finger to her lips, Zlatunka went into Sonya’s room and hurriedly closed it behind her.

  “I’ve come to ask you to forgive me—” Zlatunka spoke with apparent effort.

  “That’s all?” Sonya said with a smile.

  “I was impossible to you — but it was Kamila who put me up to it! She’s incredibly wicked and she goaded me to do what I did … She’s always playing nasty tricks!”

  “Don’t you realize I don’t give a damn?”

  “Forgive me, Sonya … It’s been hell for you here and I’ve thought it over and decided to help you go free. Here in this bag is everything you need for the first few days, till you find something—even money!—and I’ll get you out myself. For tonight I’ve got you a room at the Hotel Bohemia and tomorrow morning you can start looking for a job right away—”

  “My job is to be here and here is where I’ll stay … for a while yet.”