I cheerfully said goodbye to Lada Tringl (beneath his labcoat he was wearing tuxedo trousers) and to Ivos Rybicka (he kissed my hand!), L.L. had his large metal card file carried to his enormous new office, but I left my bud-vase behind for my successor, thus gladly fulfilling Manek’s last directive (and Lanka’s request as well). As it turned out, I didn’t lose a thing: on my new desk stood two-quart and five-quart vases made of gilded crystal.
Since my wedding night I had behaved toward L.L. as coldly as possible, but now that became difficult … when we were first alone together in the rather grand halls allotted to the plant director, L.L. said with excitement in his voice: “Now, together, we will make SOMETHING of Cottex—will you give me a kiss as an advance against future payment?”
I gave it to him (didn’t he deserve it?) and in my letter to Manek No. 71 I provided a good four pages of arguments for what I’d done (but in fact they were very simple: at that moment I could not help but kiss L.L.). Manek replied in his urgent telegram NR. 54, of its eighty words a good thirty were categorical prohibitions such as NEVER, ABSOLUTELY NOT, FOR NO AMOUNT OF MONEY, I TOTALLY FORBID YOU, and so forth.
Manek churned out letter after letter and urgent telegram after express telegram, half the text would be a confession of love while the other half would contain the strictest injunctions that I couldn’t even set foot out of the house, until finally I got angry (it was when L.L. first collapsed from overwork) and sent off telegram No. 86:
I am at work and I cannot stop working,
to which Manek telegraphed me back:
NR. 84 IS IT NECESSARY TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE LAZINESS OF RAILS BETWEEN THE PASSAGE OF TWO TRAINS QUESTION MARK
and in the next letter he told me he might assign me to write a cycle of five novels about contemporary life in Czechoslovakia, adapt them as a 52-part television series, win a following of a hundred thousand readers and five million viewers, become a professional writer, and go live in his castle at Dobris.
When Manek does give me that assignment, I’ll fulfill it and it will be relaxing compared to what L.L assigns me.
Every new director has incredible trouble figuring out what he should do—but L.L. was not everyone, he knew from the very first day what he had to do to make SOMETHING of Cottex. From the very first day we hit up against obstacles, distrust, ill will, lax standards, inability … and all sorts of things that people simply didn’t know how to do. But how mercilessly he drove himself—L.L. performed superhumanly—as well as others, and with icy calm he reorganized or liquidated whole departments and founded new ones with new people. By the end of May he had collapsed three times from overwork, but by the beginning of June we at least had the apparatus of administration firmly in our hands.
“And now let’s begin, as we must: at the bottom,” L.L. said to me.
“Do you mean the boiler-room, Comrade Director?” I smiled at him.
“You know, I’ve never been there. Mark me down for a visit tomorrow morning, at seven o’clock sharp. And at eleven-thirty a two-day trip.”
“Where?”
“Out in the field. We’ll make a tour of all twenty-six of our legions.”
In the course of two days, L.L. wanted to inspect three Cottexes, plants Nos. 03, 04, and 08, and spend the night “somewhere on the way.” Not without some joy—because No. 08 is in my very own Hrusov nad Jizerou — I developed an itinerary that allowed us to spend the night at the Hotel Hubertus, and so I called “Uncle” Volrab and ordered his whole hotel, “…and the Bridal Suite for our Director!”
“Well well, we’re terribly happy,” Volrab yelled ecstatically into the phone (I could hear the crack of billiard balls from the bar), “there’s a special seasonal surcharge on the Bridal Suite, but your general will sleep there like a baby!”
“We’re bringing along our auditor and he will go over every surcharge individually. And make dinner and breakfast for eight—and no Sana, no peanuts, no twelve-day-old meat.
“Good God, you bet, you betchya,” Volrab was frightened, “I’d never think of serving stuff like that to a chief general director, all my stuff is fresh and delicate—”
“We’ll see. We’re bringing the head of the testing labs, an engineer, and two chemistry Ph.D.’s. And our lawyer.”
“Good God, you bet, you betchya,” the frightened Volrab babbled, “Comrade General Doctor, I swear to you—”
I hung up, laughed, and then decided for the first time that this trip was something I would not mention to Manek.
The next morning at 11:29 I walked at L.L.’s side down to the courtyard, where two limousines, Tatra 603’s, drove up: one black (the director’s) and the other silver-gray (for the lesser chiefs), in the latter Jakub Jagr was sitting beside the driver and staring at me fixedly through the windshield.
Because two members of our entourage were still not there (Cottex did not adapt readily to the army-like precision of its new director), L.L. ordered both drivers to honk their horns until the two showed up, he took his place on the front seat of his black limousine, placed me next to him, by the window, and despite the deafening din of the horns, he dictated nine items to me which had come to mind during his trip downstairs, then through the car window he dressed down the two tardies, right on the spot he fined each of them fifty crowns and then gave the sign for departure. The gatekeeper, Archleb, nimbly raised the gate and gave a smart military salute. “Give Archleb twenty-five crowns out of each of the two fines,” L.L. dictated to me.
After two hours of wild driving, we passed through Liberec (including the Hotel Imperial) and then shot on toward Hrusov, by the same highway Manek had taken when he carried me off that night…
“What’s the trouble?” asked L.L. (he was watching me in the mirror). “Did something get in your eye?”
“Yes, Comrade Director,” I said, and I made myself blink.
Not long after, Korenov flashed past and the New Mexico Motel, there’s a river behind it and across the river is Poland … and we shot along the narrow asphalt highway where I used to take my solitary walks when I’d been deserted by Ruda Mach, my first husband, the highway I used to walk along in the rain with the worn-out men’s umbrella Sekalka had given me, to get out of the way of the cars I’d climb down into the ditch where fragrant grasses and gleaming ferns grew luxuriantly.
“Again?” asked L.L. “Take my dark glasses!”
“No thank you. I prefer to see the original colors.”
We were already riding past the home of the fortune-teller who for three crowns had foretold that I would have “much trouble, but also much joy,” and that’s what happened, and “only with the fifth man will contentment come” — I’ll have to count them over again, but already the Hotel Hubertus was coming into view, we crossed the railroad tracks that go from meadow to meadow, past the red gas pump on the square (where, in a cloud of morning mist, my first husband left me with his suitcase and guitar), past the shop windows of the butcher, the greengrocer, and the food store (where I did my first shopping), we honked for the gatekeeper and drove past the factory lawns of Cottex 08 right up to the stairs of the director’s office. Director Kaska ran out to open the car door (he was visibly pale, even though he didn’t yet suspect how much L.L. had on him in thick black binders I myself had put together), L.L. gruffly refused coffee in the director’s office and without delay we proceeded to business. I spent some time alone in the drying room…
The large warm hall was bathed in the rosy glow that comes from the openings of the drying machines as from the jaws of friendly dragons, the girls in nothing but bras and shorts, two by two, were feeding the machines rolls of wet fabric, which then, once dry, smell of ironing and home, of childhood and mama… Again something got in my eye and I made myself blink. Two half-naked girls raised a roll with an elegant movement of their arms and their entire bodies, so beautiful in the rosy glow — it’s a ballet! — they’re dancing their job and their vocation … I wiped my eyes and went back to the director’s of
fice to remind L.L. of the further crimes committed by Kaska, the local satrap, according to the list which was produced in duplicate.
When, late that evening, exhausted as work horses (during the proceedings, poor Kaska required two refills of his anti-asthma medication and he finally had to be taken straight from his office to bed, the next three days his wife answered his home phone), we arrived at the Hubertus, Volrab himself welcomed us on the threshold in a clean (!) shirt, and on all the tables gleaming white cards: RESERVÈ.
“Sonya, darling, so you’ve come back to your old uncle—” Volrab blared, and he was already calling Volrabka to come out of the kitchen: “Come and see, darling, darling Sonya’s come back to us—”
“You’ve exaggerated things a bit, granddad,” I waved aside all his familiarities (luckily L.L. was so exhausted, he didn’t notice a thing) and sent “Uncle” for a bottle of vermouth—”not that French stuff you serve to your customers, but the bottle on the lower shelf you keep for Ziki!”
“But you know I only serve the best of everything when we entertain general central directors…” Volrab insisted, and he brought a bottle of white Italian Gancia (made in Yugoslavia).
“The local gentlemen showed up when they heard you were back,” Volrab whispered to me, “it’s true you’ve reserved the entire bar—see those signs? I did them myself! And every last one of them’s got the right French È with the turned-around accent mark!—but if you’ll permit me, I’d let them in for just one beer, business is awful bad these days, and clink! clink!—one crown joins another, and right off you’ve got two!”
The gentlemen were grinning at me from the other side of the window: veterinarian Srol, postmaster Hudlicky, and forest ranger Sames, the last was already preparing his thumbs and index fingers for the famous “kiss and pinch.”
“Get rid of them. They’ve had their evenings, three of them in fact. This one’s mine.”
The dinner was, surprisingly, almost good enough to eat, and the wine relaxed L.L. to the point that he ordered champagne (the experienced Volrab served only two glasses with it) and our companions got up and went off to bed (Jakub Jagr gave a doleful look back at me), in part because they were exhausted, in part because the situation was obvious.
And then L.L. warmed up when he was telling what Cottex would be like in future years, I listened to him attentively (I know how to listen to men) and encouraged him (and how to encourage them) — to inspire men is a woman’s job and her vocation. L.L. talked late into the night about the great plans he had and with my intuition (something a woman must have) I could sense that my L.L. would be a great director.
“For the first time in years I’m drinking bubbly on a day other than Saturday,” L.L. smiled.
“But doesn’t this day deserve it?”
“Just this bottle. But in a year’s time, at least a case.”
“And the following year a tanker and then the whole Mediterranean Sea—if you were Caesar, would you give me Egypt?” I grinned at L.L. (my milk teeth—S.-Marie, S-Marikka, and Antisonya—had long since turned to steam) as his S.-Cleopatra.
“You would have had that long ago. I would have taken it for you and invited you to Rome to be the chief of my secretariat.”
I noticed that L.L. had suddenly begun to use the familiar address with me—but does Latin have a formal address? So my Caesar may use the familiar, at least for ten seconds—
“I’d have thrown Brutus out of the anteroom, as if he were just a boy. And during working hours I’d have edited your memoirs of the Gallic Wars—”
I noticed that L.L. had noticed that I had also used the familiar address with him. That was enough — the ten seconds had run out.
“I thank you, Comrade Director, for a lovely day…” To soothe a man and put him to sleep is a woman’s job and her vocation.
“And I thank you, Miss Cechova. Good night.”
“Good night. May you dream about the Mediterranean Sea!”
“Huh,” said L.L.—he hadn’t said that for a long time—and he went off to the Bridal Suite to go to bed.
Volrab brought me, as an “extra courtesy of the hotel administration,” the key to room No. 5, I went to the bar and had a small jigger of rum (that summer I drank it by the bottle), I asked Volrab whether he still locked the kitchen window every night, “But what do you mean, Sonya, you must have dreamed it,” Volrab lied heroically and quite calmly asked me whether I “really” wouldn’t care to come back to the Hotel Hubertus “for an even thousand c-r-o-w-n-s in cash and up front.”
“Go to bed, granddad,” I told him sleepily, it had really been too long a day, and I went out into the corridor to the staircase which I had so many times scrubbed on my knees—
At the foot of the stairs, in the moonlight, stood Jakub Jagr, and in his hands (before it had been a suitcase and a kitchen knife) he now had nothing at all. He was being nice, of course, but I was really too sleepy.
“Sonya, I love you—” (before, he’d cried out: “Sonya, should I kill him?” As time was to show, in both instances he was talking big).
“Should I put on the staff sergeant’s boots again and run around the garden?”
“Sonya—”
“I know my name is Sonya and not, let’s say, Kamila. So have a rum at the bar, write your wife a postcard, and read The Perfect Marriage,” she told him with a yawn, and then she went off to her first honeymoon chamber to go to bed. Two beds by the wall, as before, the wall still scratched in the spot where Ruda Mach had hung his guitar… I remembered that now I have my own apartment, thought about Manek tenderly (I won’t use the familiar address with L.L. anymore), and fell right to sleep.
Early the next morning we drove out of Hrusov (the mist rising from the fields below the railroad tracks blurred the road behind us), we carried out inspections of Cottexes 03 and 04 as if they were raids, and with a rich plunder of (well-concealed) millions, which from now on will pour in in even greater amounts (and in the meantime we’ll be coming back again), we happily started back toward our home base in Usti.
A man waiting at the door to my apartment showed his official identification as a lieutenant in the Security Police.
“Do you know this man?” he asked me just as he was landing on my red daybed (on the one that was Manek’s), and he pulled out a photo of Manek smiling at a model train—
“The picture isn’t very clear…” I said to gain time.
“Could it be your M.M.?” the officer replied caustically.
“It could be.” If he had the photo and knew Manek’s initials…
“What’s his name?”
“He has a number of them. I call him Manek.”
“Could his name possibly be Josef Novak?”
I looked at him in silence.
“So go on sending telegrams,” said the officer. “But don’t forget the position of responsibility you now have. And your duty as a citizen is to immediately report anything that could lead us to a crime.”
“If I knew anything like that…”
“Come and tell us.”
“If it would help you…”
Ruda Mach woke up in a strange kitchen, rubbed his eyes, and wondered where he’d landed this time, but he was already getting up and looking for the pieces of his clothing, his shirt on a table, his trousers underneath the bed, and his shorts on the chandelier, goddamn it, I’ve been up to my old tricks again, the kitchen was full of smoke and smelled like a stable, some woman was asleep on a chair, another was coiled up in a knot by the door, and at her feet a shining flashlight.
Goddamn it, thought Ruda Mach, and he dressed quickly, checked his wallet (not a single crown: did those two rip me off or did I shell out that much yesterday? But it’s today now and I don’t give a good fart), he picked up his guitar, stepped over the woman lying by the door, in the john (they don’t have water anywhere else) he drank out of the tank, jumped down from the toilet seat, and ran out—it was a morning out of a painting!
In June the mo
st beautiful place to be is in the mountains, where I was this time last year, Ruda Mach thought as with his guitar in hand he trotted through sleeping Ostrava and remembered Sonya—I’d never had such a beautiful girl before, or since. And anyway, I need some fresh air.
He passed the gatekeeper’s lodge (of an immense chemical enterprise) and across its enormous grounds, dug up by truck tires, over the gravel and tracks of a railway siding he came to a gigantic, half-built shed, where for three months now he’d been walling up a hundred-thousand-liter tank, he stripped to his shorts, smoked a fine Simon Arzt Egyptian cigarette, and got to work.
When the siren honked at ten o’clock, he lay down with his morning snack (a pound of smoked corned beef, without bread, and a bottle of beer) on a pile of shavings, soaked with sweat (his shorts felt as if he’d just climbed out of a pool), when he finished eating he got out his wallet and spread it out on his scraped-up knees.
From the left, “pleasure” half he dug out a letter from Jarunka Slana, who was in Usti, then he took out his waxed calendar, with his nail he put an end to yesterday and he thought deeply about the days to come. Above the dug-up plain of bare earth, in the blue sky, a silver distillation tower gleamed like a rocket ready for liftoff.
Finishing half a Simon Arzt cigarette, he went to the office and told the section chief that instead of his current twelve-hour shifts he’d be working sixteen hours starting today, and till ten at night he whizzed through his work at an accelerated tempo, at the station cafeteria he ate four franks and drank four beers, went to his dorm (since Christmas he’d been living in a wooden barracks with forty men), stripped to his shorts, and sat down on a pal’s bunk for a game of cards.
But Ruda wasn’t enjoying the cards very much, so he sat down by the window and strummed his guitar, suddenly a stone rattled the windowpane and the silhouette of a woman appeared behind the wire fence.
“Ruda…” she called softly.
Four Sonyas Page 36