“That’s what Cottex dorms are like?” L.L. was astonished.
“Can it be that a member of the board doesn’t know things like that?” I was astounded myself.
The next morning a real orchid landed in my vase and on the morning of March 28 Engineer Kazimir Drapal, in his function as chairman of the Housing and Social Committee (BaS ZV ROH) in his official quarters (PS-VTEI, PTK, study room and reading room) ceremoniously granted me an apartment in natl. enter. Cottex No. 2000.
(“Now start taking care of us, and right away,” Ida Papoukova said enviously. “We’ve got to have an apartment before the baby comes—” My successor no longer stood around the MISCELLANEOUS shelves, nor did she take walks, her sandals undone she lolled around in the space between Drapal’s light and dark desks. Did this mean that she had done all the reflecting and striving she was ever going to do?
“Woman is the death of the spirit,” sighed Kazimir Drapal, he was holding the book Caring for Infants and running through the shelves.
On the first of April I moved into my apartment (a self- contained studio on the third floor: two red daybeds, a red rug over a wood floor, a wardrobe with doors covered in white artificial fur, two red armchairs next to a glass-topped table with a stained-glass vase, and on the wall Renoir’s painting Lovers in the Grass) just like Cleopatra into Caesar’s Rome, I tossed my suitcase onto one of the daybeds, washed my hands, and went to the main post office to send telegram No. 62:
CLEOPATRA GOT HER STUDIO FROM CAESAR
“I don’t even know how to thank you…” I whispered to L.L., extremely touched.
“You didn’t get anything you didn’t deserve,” L.L. replied with the simplicity and grandeur of the real Gaius Julius.
At that moment a telegraph boy on a motorcycle delivered an express telegram from Prague:
NR. 38 CLEOPATRA EXPECTED 15 APRIL 3:00 P.M. AT DOBRIS CASTLE
With one vigorous pull the soft, thick nylon curtains revealed the entire window and L.L. crawled back into bed for a little while in order to enjoy his view of the top of his newly budding tree: an incalculable number of new leaves were burgeoning forth out of the dark wood — of course, in seven months they would once again turn brown, wrinkle, and fall, but in the meantime. . . Wonderstruck, L.L. counted the number of dreams he’d had that night: one long and three short … Don’t cheat on the count, he snapped at himself with a laugh, you staged those short ones yourself.
L.L. got up, did his exercises, bathed (suddenly I don’t like my own body), shaved (where did Zora put that lotion for wrinkles?), then he opened the window, kissed Zora on the forehead (forgive me, my darling) and his daughter Lanka on the mouth (there are times when I don’t really like being your daddy), let Zora pour him his cup of Indian tea, and plunged his spoon into scrambled eggs.
“Dad, you’ve fallen in love,” Lanka said before Zora could start complaining about her.
“Y-yes?” L.L. was so dumbstruck he almost choked, “How can you tell?”
“Ludvik…” Zora was frightened.
“‘Cause you’re drenched—and how!—with a completely different cologne!” said Lanka, and she burst into laughter.
“It’s a present from Kosmopharma,” said L.L., and he pushed away the scrambled eggs. I bought it yesterday at the square, quite unconsciously … and did I unconsciously put it in the bathroom? And unconsciously use it this morning? And did you just as unconsciously buy flowers and stick them in the bud-vase on her desk? What do a hundred “unconsciously’s” add up to?
“From Kosmopharma, you say?” Lanka smirked, the little beast.
“You know, Lanka,” Zora intervened, “Dad sometimes does get presents from chemical companies…”
“Kosmopharma sent our director a whole case of them and we divvied them up,” L.L. said drily (he still hadn’t touched his eggs).
“Don’t the eggs agree with you, Daddy?” Lanka grinned, my angel and my bitch.
“I must have oversalted them today,” said Zora, “they make me so thirsty…”
“How did you get those red spots on your neck, Lanka?” L.L. asked his daughter.
“Well? Answer your father!” Zora shouted at her daughter.
“From clothespins, Dad. A rum-drop factory sent our school a whole crate of them and we—what did we do? We divvied them up…” Lanka finished her sentence with a falling intonation as people do when they end fairy tales.
“You see how insolent she is,” Zora started complaining.
“But I’m telling the truth, just like Daddy—” Lanka was enraged.
“Enough of this!” said L.L., and then he stuck a spoonful of eggs in his mouth and courageously swallowed.
“Don’t finish if it doesn’t agree with you,” said Zora. “What else can I make you?”
“Nothing. I’ll take some of Lanka’s,” L.L. said, and he pulled his daughter’s plate over, took a whole onion thickly sprinkled with paprika and, like Lanka, bit into it as if it were an apple.
“It’s got a bite to it, doesn’t it? And it burns, doesn’t it?” Lanka said, snickering at her father’s torments.
Lanka’s jealous of me— L.L. reflected, dumbstruck and enchanted.
The road to Dobris retreated before her in a deferentially broad arc: fenced in by hewn granite pillars festooned with an ornamental black chain, towering over its semicircular ramparts of well-manicured lawns, and majestically laid out among a mass of red walls perforated with long rows of high windows lined with bricks of yellow Baroque stucco, above its grandiose portal were statues lifting a great golden crown into the sky — so Dobris Castle first appeared to me … And emerging out of its gigantic gate to meet me was Manuel Mansfeld, my master M.M., Manek … my husband.
“Manek—”
“My darling. My Sonya,” said Manek, and his dark glasses gleamed with reflected sunlight.
“Oh, Manek, Manek, Manek—”
I wanted to embrace him, but tenderly he pressed my arms in toward my body. “We must be careful,” he said softly and whispered, “Inconspicuous, understand … They’re out to get me—”
Through an open, heavy, metal-sheathed gateway we silently entered an enormous passageway, adorned with a row of stag heads.
“We’re with Mr. Jonas,” Manek called into the window with the sign VISITORS, and we went on into the castle courtyard.
“Can I kiss you here?” I said, and I set my suitcase down on a stone column by the entrance.
“Not until we get to the park,” he smiled at me tenderly, “until then we must—”
“I understand,” I whispered. “But I hope the park isn’t too far away…”
“Just over there—” said Manek, and he motioned with his head.
In the middle of the rectangular courtyard, closed off by three wings of the castle and by a staircase with a stone fountain, was a circular lawn with a magnificent oak tree and an astounding Asiatic gingko tree, and between them, through two large glass doors with an ornamental grill, I saw a slice of the park, glowing in the sun.
“I once painted this scene…” said Sonya.
“You’ve been here before?”
“No. But once in school I did a watercolor painting of the Garden of Eden, and over it I did a pencil drawing of a black grill just like this one…”
“I’ll open it for you,” he said, and he opened one of the glass doors and we passed through a white vaulted hall and, with a soft turn of a small gold key, Manek opened the large grill leading into the park.
“This is the French, the English is right beyond it—”
I threw my suitcase down on a bench near the gate, carefully removed Manek’s dark glasses, set them down on the bench, and with both hands I drew his thin, tanned face close to mine.
He looked the same as he had last summer … a head taller than me, extremely sun-tanned (where had the secret mission taken him?), gleaming gray-green eyes (quite boyish, especially when he smiled), short, thick, dark hair with its first silver threads (how many more since last su
mmer?), combed forward like Mark Anthony in the film Cleopatra, and his beautiful hands with their long, slender fingers … were just resting on my shoulders—
“Sonya, my love … You shouldn’t cry just now…”
I put on his dark glasses (in case I broke into tears again before I pulled myself together), grabbed my suitcase (an expensive one, made of light leather, bought for my trip to join my husband. Inside: the tome Principles of Industrial Programming, homework assigned by L.L., but although I had gazed at its wormlike derivatives and tangles of black, serpentine integrals for the entire train trip, I learned nothing during those long hours, not even a single line— and otherwise only a white lace handkerchief for my husband, my toothbrush, comb, lipstick, and a white lace nightgown) and we went to take a walk in the park. The French was large enough, thank goodness, and the English, laid out around a large lake, was even larger, so that as we squeezed our way under the wall, I could now give Manek back his glasses.
“Are you calmer now?” Manek laughed.
“How can I be when I’m with you? And don’t put those awful glasses back on, I want to look at you.”
“I want to look at you, too…”
“But I want more—”
“And I want even more, a close-up—”
And so for a good half hour we squeezed our way under the wall until, giddy with kisses, we finally made it through to the other side.
“That’s what we call the forest steppes—” Manek said. I gazed at the undulating, fairy-tale meadows stretching all the way out to the woods and the mountains on the horizon … and I decided to ask him who were the we he was talking about. Across dunes soft as a carpet and last year’s thick white grass we walked as if on clouds.
“Watch out for the pond…” Manek said, and he took me by the hand.
“That puddle?”
“It’s big enough for tall tales … As a joke, some fishermen dropped a few fry in there and one of them grew into a fish … This was its entire world and it was all alone there … more alone than God in the universe.”
“That’s a frightful idea … What if someone had lowered a mirror into the pond?”
“The fish would have fallen in love with its own image … Or it would have gone insane.”
“Come on, let’s go. What happened to the fish?”
“A local poacher unstocked the pond and made a dinner of it. It’s out of the question for us to have human relations with fish. Do you like to eat fish?”
“Not anymore.”
We came back by a narrow path along the lakeshore, Manek led the way, suddenly he stopped and pointed his arm out over the water. On a silvery rippling surface an old dwarfed tree was growing out from a tiny islet, and above it, high up on grassy ramparts, above the tips of larches and silvery spruces, rose the red walls of the castle and its tower.
“This is our favorite view of it…” whispered Manek.
“Our?”
Manek did not reply, but kept on walking, we suddenly came upon the tall grilled gate and beyond it, in the English park, a cave furnished like a room.
“Here my brother and I would sit around a fire,” said Manek, “and over there, across the lake, the orchestra would play every summer…”
The ceiling of the cave was black with soot, and on the opposite shore of the lake a great stone terrace surrounded by a columnar balustrade rose up among chestnut and oak trees.
“Where are your brothers?” I asked as softly as I could.
Manek did not reply, he took me by the hand and led me through the English park back to the French. The surface of the lake, stretched by the water motion underneath, rolled its fish eyes at me.
At the top of a gigantic century-old tree, a bird was flying among the still bare branches, dauntlessly giving its call, our broad sandy road suddenly emerged from the shade into the full sunlight, the trees were radiant, maples (a thousand little bouquets on a single trunk) and thousands of little parachutes (on each chestnut tree), as well as weeping willows (yellow verticals like strokes of golden rain) and in the moist breeze the joyous whirl of young spiny anteaters of damp Chinese silk on all the larches.
In the sunlight the castle looked pinker and more welcoming. Manek stuck his small gold key into the lock and we were through the grilled gate into the white vaulted hall, down the ground-floor passageway into a room with a low ceiling and grills on the windows. It looked like a deserted country hospital, three rows of tables spread with white cloths, at one of which sat a waiter figuring his accounts.
“Rudolf—” Manek said in a low voice, and with his hand he made a special sign.
“I’ll be right with you!” said the waiter, and he smiled and winked.
Manek took me by the shoulders and led me back to the white vaulted hall.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“A third-category restaurant. It used to be the servants’ hall … Now it’s where writers and poets bolt down hamburgers and low-cal soups.”
“All day long?”
“All day long they tap away at their typewriters like woodpeckers. They’ve made a ‘creative wing’ out of what used to be stables … Before the war European nobility would gather here, the Archbishop of Prague summered here … Our castle has been turned into a factory and an old-age home.”
“Our castle?” I repeated softly.
Manek did not reply, he gazed silently through a glass gate into the courtyard. The waiter came and brought us two glasses of white wine on a metal tray.
“Thanks, Rudolf,” said Manek, and he gave him a hundred-note.
“Anything further, Your Grace?” said the waiter as he gaped at me.
“I told you categorically that I did not wish to be—” Manek reminded him
“Pardon me, Your Grace—I mean: Mr. Mansfeld,” the waiter grinned, winked at me, and disappeared down the passageway.
“Rudolf Jonas,” Manek said, touched, “our good old faithful servant…”
“Our?”
“I guess it’s a fitting time to introduce myself to you,” Manek said distractedly, and he pointed to the mat on the stone floor, so large and thick that it was in fact a kind of carpet, there were two large red letters on it: CM, “read it.”
“C— M—?”
“That is one of the few authentic objects left here…” Manek said, “and these are the initials of our family.”
Then it came to me: after receiving Manek’s telegram CLEOPATRA EXPECTED 15 APRIL 3:00 P.M. AT DOBRIS CASTLE I went straight from Cottex to the town library and read that “Dobris Castle was built between 1745 and 1765. The architects, Jul. Robert de Cotte and G. M. Servendoni, worked in the Late Baroque style, the park is decorated with statues by the Prague Rococo sculptor Ignac Platzer. Until 1945, it was part of the domain of the Princes Colloredo-Mannsfeld; now it serves as a place of work and rest for the members of the Czechoslovak Writers Union”—
“So you’re—”
“The last descendant of my family.”
“And your brothers—”
“They all fell in battle. I am Manuel Leopold Josef Ludvik Maria Colloredo-Mannsfeld, sole lawful heir and reigning prince,” Manek said matter-of-factly.
I had to sit down at the corner of an enormous dark table. Lost in thought, Manek paced through the angular white columns and every so often glanced through the gate into the courtyard.
“He’s here already,” he said all of a sudden, “come here and hide—”
A cream-colored Wartburg drove into the courtyard and right up to our gate. Concealed behind a column, we watched a short, stout, white-haired man with a white moustache bang the car door shut and go into the hall, with short quick steps he crossed the mat bearing Manek’s initials and ran to the staircase.
“He’s after me,” Manek said, and he grinned.
“Who is he?”
“A colonel. We must go. But let’s not leave the wine behind for him,” and calm and cool, Manek handed me a glass of white wine.
&nb
sp; “Shall we clink?”
Manek looked at his watch, it was five minutes before five. “I never drink before five,” he said, and he took me by the shoulders and quickly led me to a small dark- colored car.
We drove around the circular lawn through a gateway in front of the castle and then joined the stream of cars on the highway to Prague.
“Won’t he come after us?” I asked Manek when some four cars had passed us on the smooth asphalt (I kept looking back).
“Who?”
“The colonel…”
“Rudolf will stall him for at least twenty minutes. That will give us enough time,” he said, after a short distance he turned off onto a side road and came to a stop in a small asphalt parking lot.
“Should I take my suitcase?” I asked.
“Yes. We’ll hide here till tomorrow.”
HOTEL TRIANON was written over the entrance of an elegant yellow edifice, Manek seated me in a high-backed, leather-upholstered antique chair and went up to the reception desk with his red I.D.
After a brief negotation (I saw him give the clerk a hundred-note) he nodded to me, we went upstairs to the second floor, and Manek unlocked the door to room No. 15. The light-colored period furniture, a tall mirror, glass doors onto a balcony, and twin beds side by side.
“You might want to freshen up,” he smiled at me, throwing his black briefcase on a chair. “I’ll wait for you down in the bar.”
I was grateful to him for this brief moment of solitude. I unpacked our bags; it didn’t take long. I took Principles of Industrial Programming out of my suitcase, smiled at the wormlike derivatives and the tangles of black, serpentine integrals, which I now know as I do so many other new things—What had I known when Manek took over control of my life? And what had I been— I set Principles down on Manek’s night table so I could boast of my progress.
My toothbrush, comb, and lipstick on the little shelf above the washbasin, and I put on a little makeup (a good thing I was meeting Manek just now, when my hair had grown back so beautifully), then I opened his black briefcase, stuck his toothbrush in the sole cup, next to mine, I put his electric shaver on the night table (so he wouldn’t have to look for it) and then, full of love, I placed his dark-blue pajamas (brand new) on his bed and on my own I placed my brand-new white lace nightgown … How many times have I prepared for my wedding? … This is the last time.
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