Four Sonyas

by Paral, VladimIr

  “Do you know where to apply?”

  “That’s just what I was going to ask you.”

  “The best thing is to apply to the Workforce Referral Office of the People’s Commission.”

  “I’ll go there right away. Which way is it?”

  “Go up out of the square, left on Fucik Street, then right—I’ll go with you part of the way.”

  Sonya smiled prettily and the officer accompanied her all the way to the People’s Commission office.

  “Which drying room?” the clerk in charge of workforce matters was a bit surprised.

  “Why, the one where they dry handkerchiefs and damasks,” Sonya explained. “It’s in a great big room and there are drying machines as big as buses, it’s wonderfully dry there and there’s music, and the girls handle a wet pile of the damasks or the handkerchiefs, two by two…”

  “That sounds like Cottonola, right?” the clerk guessed, and then she phoned somewhere and informed Sonya that Cottonola would hire her right away for its drying room, at twelve hundred a month, lodging for singles in the singles dorm, working uniform free of charge, inaugural dues three hundred crowns, Saturdays off, young people’s band, recreation gratis in the factory’s holiday home on the Elbe, and a free pint of milk every day.

  “Is it really possible…” Sonya whispered when the officer accompanied her to the streetcar (she noticed that he took her two stations farther than necessary), he explained to her how to get to Cottonola in terms more appropriate for a winter campaign across Tibet, and at the same time volunteered the information that every Tuesday and Friday he was on duty in the square until eight in the evening and that he then had twenty-four hours absolutely free—

  Cottonola is at the end of town at the base of Strizov Mountain: three friendly-looking buildings with large windows from which music poured out of radios and there was a flock of high-spirited girls like in school during recess, and lawns all around, in the middle of one a swimming pool even—this is where I want to be!

  But the worst of the horrors were over, and it was with renewed courage that the westward voyage was resumed. When, a week later, another and yet another island was sighted, Magellan knew they were saved. According to his calculations, these must be the Moluccas. He fancied that he had reached his goal. But even his burning impatience, his urgent need to be certain about his triumph, did not make him incautious.

  in his magisterial office Engineer Lanimir Sapal was greedily devouring Stefan Zweig’s Magellan, well concealed in a drawer of his magisterial desk, then he gulped down a roll thickly spread with the cheapest type of processed cheese and drank his daily ration of free milk.

  Instead of landing on Suluan, the larger of the two islands, he went to a smaller one, called by Pigafette ‘Humunu’…

  Lanimir Sapal had completed his studies at the School of Chemical Engineering in Pardubice at the age of twenty-one, he was the youngest chemical engineer in the Republic, and after two outstanding months at Cottex’s central laboratories he was sent out for a year to Hrusov branch plant No. 08 to prepare to become the youngest director in the field of textile chemistry. However, starved by long years of study, in the course of which he had scarcely eaten two proper meals and in which he had remained a virgin, the promising engineer was seized by such a mighty interest in love and everything connected with it, that over the next five years he had devoted all his concentrated attention to it, every bit of his free time (and a good part of his work hours), and all his financial resources (quite modest, since his loves did not do much for his technical career).

  When finally Director Kaska personally caught him being intimate with a woman apprentice inside the pressure kettle on a bed of fine strands of the Egyptian cotton called mako, Engineer Sapal was forced to make a quick exit from the mighty Cottex and to take the position of a mere chief of shop rooms at the tiny Cottonola plant in Usti.

  On Massava, a tiny islet of the Philippine group, so small that only with a lense can one find it on the map, Magellan had one of the most remarkable experiences of his life.

  Waiting on New Year’s Eve in a borrowed apartment for his girlfriend of the moment to arrive, the failed engineer Lanimir Sapal buried himself in Nikolay Vasilevich Gogol’s Dead Souls, soon he was roaring with laughter, he ate all twelve of the open-face sandwiches he had prepared, drank both bottles of sparkling wine, roared with laughter, shoved the girl out into the corridor without ceremony when she arrived late, and went on reading until noon on January 1, when he finished the final adventure of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, decided to become a writer, and fell asleep happy.

  Again and again his dark and laborious existence had been illuminated by such flashes of happiness, whose intensity compensated him for the stubborn patience with which he had endured so many lonely and care-fraught hours.

  Because the Cottonola dorms did not provide the proper atmosphere for creation, Lanimir Sapal obtained permission from the kind Cottonola director to “study” every afternoon in the empty plant library. And already, by January 2 at 3:30 P.M., he had written on the back of his pay slip

  Lanimir Sapal

  LIVING SOULS

  and gazed fixedly at these words until the late hours of the night. Every day he would leave three, five, and even more novels unfinished.

  As soon as, under press of sail, the three large foreign ships drew near the shore of Massava, the inquisitive and friendly inhabitants flocked to the beach.

  “Can we pick up our allotment of spools?” a motherly- looking woman in overalls suddenly said to him, and once again Lanimir banged shut the drawer with the novel, but too late.

  “Pick them up. But next time don’t forget to knock, Mrs. Matouskova.”

  “We all know you keep a book in your drawer,” said Mrs. Simackova, but then she took pity on her terrified boss and added: “but we won’t tell anybody.”

  The job of chief of shop rooms was such an easy one (unlock the shops in the morning, fill out the issue slips, drink coffee with the chief of storerooms, and then again close up all the shops), that Engineer Sapal was well able to cope with it in spite of the burdens of his literary activity. And because he loved women so—he had forty of them working for him—all forty of them loved their boss.

  And so in ironed canvas pants from his overalls and a snow-white labcoat (uniforms are laundered free of charge by the plant laundry) over his naked body (you have to wash underwear yourself) every day before the morning coffee break and then again before lunch, Lanimir Sapal strolled through his four shops, settled small arguments, drew in red on the poster showing how much his department has exceeded the expectations of the plan (it was now continually above 100%), talked with mothers about their children, gave advice on marital problems and scolded (quite amiably) the sprightly girl apprentices, handed out the free soap and toilet paper, and ruled his forty souls benevolently and in peace.

  The islanders surrounded Enrique, chattering and shouting, and the Malay slave was dumbfounded, for he understood much of what they were saying. It was a good many years since he had been snatched from his home, a good many years since he had last heard a word of his native language.

  Touched, Lanimir drank up his milk and decided that right off that afternoon he would begin to write a novel about a sea expedition (yesterday, after finishing The Ugly Duchess by Lion Feuchtwanger, he had gone to the library to start work on a historical pentalogy entitled The Repulsive Empress), he repressed his sorrow that so far he had never set eyes on the sea (with his royalties from the novel he will circumnavigate the entire globe) and, thoughtfully chewing a roll, he began to work out the title: The Defeated Sea … that’s weak. The Downtrodden Ocean would be better, but there wouldn’t be any laughs in that … How I Was a Diver on a Pirate Submarine—

  “Sir, I’m bringing you a new worker—” said the female personnel officer, and once again Lanimir banged shut the drawer with the novel, but too late.

  “Next time don’t forget to knock—” Lanimir said mech
anically, but then he froze.

  “Good day, sir,” said Sonya Cechova, and she smiled at him prettily.

  “What— what—” Lanimir stammered, he passed his hand through his wiry head of hair (quite without consequence) and hastily swallowed several times to no effect.

  “The director’s sending her to you in place of Majka, the one who ran off to Ostrava,” said the personnel officer.

  “But that’s extraordinarily kind of the director,” it pleased Lanimir to no end to inspect his new subject closely and greedily. “I’m Sapal, chief of shops,” he introduced himself, and when Sonya whispered her name he gave her his hand with all the courtliness of the young Louis XIV. “You’ve been working in the film industry, haven’t you?” he said with his most radiant smile (his colleagues in the singles dorm maintained that Lanimir had thirty-six teeth).

  “In a hotel and in a private home,” whispered Sonya.

  “I’d be glad to get you into films, I’ve got several unfinished filmscripts—” said Lanimir, but he stopped himself in time lest he betray his (well known to all) afternoon literary activities in front of the personnel officer.

  “But she’s supposed to go to the drying room,” said the rather slow personnel officer, “in place of Majka, who ran off to Ostrava—”

  But Lanimir didn’t hear a word she said, he kept hold of Sonya’s hand and Sonya smiled at him prettily.

  “So if you’ve said everything you two have to say,” said the personnel officer after a rather long interval of silence (but one crackling with static electricity), “I will take the girl to the doctor, to the stores, to the insurance office, to the firemen—”

  “Well then, tomorrow morning at six—” Lanimir sighed.

  Wrenched out of cascades of inspiration by the siren’s honk, he noted down in the columns of expense slips such fleeting observations as almond fissures in the bewitchingly flaming grass, aureate inclines of unspeakable sweetness, an explosion of Titian gold on the crown of Diana the Huntress, and many others, he hurriedly locked up the already empty shops (he had never left work so late), and at an economical trot he ran across the dusty street to the singles dorm.

  The single men in Cottonola (five specimens in all) inhabited the second floor, in what had once been a two-room apartment (the women had the same space one floor up). In one room confirmed bachelors Vit (chief of the color shop) and Cenek (development technologist) had lived together for years now, while the other’s inmates changed several times a year. At the moment Lanimir was living there with lab assistant Pavel Abrt and draftsman Lumirek.

  “What an incredible chick!” Lanimir shouted at the threshold of his room.

  “That sort of thing hasn’t interested me for a long time now,” said Lumirek (he was all of sixteen years old) with profound contempt.

  Pavel Abrt was already asleep (he could fall asleep in an unbelievably short time after coming home from work).

  “Only of course she isn’t a chick, but a phantasm! A nymph! A chimera!” Lanimir shouted while kicking off his pants.

  “Phooey—!” Lumirek was disgusted.

  “Hrr—hrr—hrr—hrr—” Pavel Abrt was a happy sleeper.

  Meanwhile, already naked and once again (perhaps for the thousandth time) firmly determined not to throw pearls before swine, Lanimir rushed off to the bathroom (shared by both rooms) in order to use the icy shower to whip himself up to peak performance during his afternoon literary shift.

  But in the bathtub, lounging around like a hippopotamus, was the forty-year-old Vit, an enormous tanned muscleman overgrown with black fur from his ankles all the way to the top of his head, where he was beginning to grow bald.

  “What a fantastic chick, but also a phantasm, a chimera, and a nymph!” Lanimir announced.

  “Where?” said Vit, and he opened his right eye.

  “From tomorrow on at my office.”

  “I’ll have a look at her this evening.”

  “She’s reserved for me.”

  “I’ll have a look at her this evening.”

  “How long are you going to use the bathtub?”

  “Till I’m done with my bath,” said Vit, and he closed his right eye.

  Lanimir sighed and went into the adjoining kitchen (shared by both rooms), where thirty-nine-year-old Cenek was preparing his one and only warm meal: numerous cups of Georgian tea (he got bread and lard from his parents in the country, and salt from Pavel Abrt, who brought it from the lab for all the members of Vit’s gang, so that each month Cenek spent—gnashing his teeth—scarcely fifty crowns. That’s how he could own a Skoda, but since he was too stingy to pay for a driving school, Vit—for the fifth year—drove the car around with his brood of chicks).

  Lanimir set a pot of water on the stove for his daily, extra-strong coffee (a shot in the arm for his afternoon literary séance).

  “Why do you boil so much water for nothing, pal?” Cenek was outright angry. “You know how much gas that basin of yours guzzles to get water up to the boiling point?” (Singles share the cost of gas.)

  “It’s not a matter of boiling, but just of heating up,” Lanimir objected, “and it’s the minimum, indispensable volume required for a single cup of Turkish coffee.”

  “But you poured in a good two hundred cubic centimeters!”

  “Less than two hundred.”

  “But a hundred and fifty is enough for Turkish coffee!”

  “Sure, but don’t forget to take into account the steam pressure, the steam loss at the boiling point—however brief—and the water occluded on the bottom and the walls of the vessel,” Lanimir pointed out (unlike Cenek, who was a graduate of a technical school, he held a diploma from a college of chemical engineering).

  “Still, there’s too much water in there by half,” said Cenek, “and the occluded water — that’s the water that makes the pan wet, right?”

  “Basically…” and Lanimir, drinking his literary coffee, expounded to the ever inquisitive Cenek the physical and chemical principles of occlusion, insofar as he recalled them from the Pardubice polytech, and wherever he’d forgotten something he improvised (which was considerably more interesting).

  His literary coffee close on the heels of what he had experienced inspired in Lanimir ideas for so many new novels, that without warning he stepped into the bathtub between Vit’s powerful legs and loosed the cold water on himself. Vit closed his right eye and submerged.

  A few minutes later, Lanimir picked up the key to the factory library and, his hair still damp, he reached his sanctuary. At his entrance, the spines of the books quivered, just as the earth trembles when a farmer sinks his plow into it.

  Lanimir Sapal sat at the head of a twenty-four-foot-long table, placed a stack of payroll sheets in front of him, like a sword he drew out a well-bitten pencil, sharpened it against the striking side of a matchbox, and hastily wrote in large letters:

  Lanimir Sapal

  A PHANTOM OF BEAUTY

  A Novel about a Woman

  and remained over the sheet of paper until late in the evening.

  “So you’re the one who’s here in place of Majka, who ran off to Ostrava,” Sonya was greeted by the dorms’ housekeeper, the widow Anezka Sbiralova (more frequently called “Sbiralka” or (most often) “Grannie.”

  “Yes, if you please,” whispered Sonya, and she smiled prettily at Sbiralka.

  “One look at you, girl, and I can see you won’t be here very long!”

  “But I like it here very much, ma’am.”

  “Just wait till you get your bearings,” said Sbiralka, then all of a sudden she bent over to Sonya and hissed sharply: “The men here are no damn good.”

  “I’ll try to cope.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly got the figure for it. Bet you won’t last. Majka had a figure too and she ran off to Ostrava.”

  “But why?”

  “‘Cause the men here are no damn good.”

  Sbiralka took Sonya up to the third floor and showed her Majka’s old bed
(a beautiful red daybed and at its foot, her own chest made of light-colored wood), she was to share the room with Ivanka and Barborka.

  “Ivanka’s a clever bitch,” said Sbiralka, “but all the same it doesn’t help her much. Barborka is a real broad, but that doesn’t help her much either. Because the men here are no damn good for nothing. Marie Junkova and her Petr Junk live in the other room—he’s the only one here who got married. He isn’t from hereabouts, though, he’s from our golden Moravia. But you’ll be running away yourself before long. But till then—take off your shoes soon as you come in, don’t smoke in bed, clean the tub after yourself, don’t keep bags of greasy food in the window—or you’ll find out what a shrew I can be!”

  Sonya unpacked her two dresses and hung them in the common wardrobe—how many dresses these girls have and how lovely they are!—she put her regular nightgown into the chest (the other, from Manek, she left in the bag), then tenderly she rubbed her hand along her soft red daybed—at last I’ve lived to have my very own bed!

  With her comb and toothbrush she ran into the bathroom, the girls here have a parfumerie just like in a movie, I’ll buy lots of perfume too when I’m rich — twelve hundred crowns a month plus overtime!

  And I’ll bet I can live here for a handful of crowns, Sonya rejoiced in her lovely kitchen with its gas stove — and even a real fridge! For breakfast, tea and crackers are enough, lunch is two crowns eighty at the plant cafeteria, and for dinner you can make do with a bottle of milk and a slice of bread…

  “You’re that new one in place of Majka, right? I live on the other side of the wall, and my name’s Marie Junkova,” said a beautiful blonde with a smile like a Madonna and with a baby in her arms, behind her stood a handsome brunet (with blue eyes…), Petr Junk, her husband.

  “Forgive me for poking my nose into all your things…” said Sonya (she was just poking her nose into the fridge).

  “But everything’s yours as well. We’re here to welcome you, and we hope you’ll like it here with us—” the beautiful Marie Junkova smiled, and the handsome Petr Junk smiled at Sonya too.