Four Sonyas

by Paral, VladimIr

  I walked up to the third floor and rang at the door with the card ARNO RYNOLT, the door was opened by an old woman with a frightened look.

  “I’ve come for Josef Novak!” I fired off right on the threshold.

  “Good heavens,” the old woman was startled, “but that officer from the Security Police told me you wouldn’t lock him up…”

  “I’ve just come from the general. Where is Josef Novak?”

  “He’ll be back in three hours. Please come in.”

  Through the dark, jam-packed vestibule into the jam-packed living room (but it was neat) and on to a tiny children’s room: on the wallpaper scenes from fairy tales, on the shelves perfectly lined-up toys and books, on top of the wardrobe a great big blow-up pink elephant, and over half the floor a child’s electric train set with tiny tunnels, stations, bridges, signal lights, animals, and human figures.

  “My son has lived here for thirty-three years,” said the old woman. “What harm can a boy do who is happiest playing with his train set?”

  I blinked my heavy lashes and it’s a wonder they didn’t come off.

  “Do you have a photo … of your son,” I said when I’d caught my breath again, “one you haven’t submitted to us yet?”

  “I’ve only got one, and the officer gave it back to me already—” and the old woman brought me a photo, the one I had already seen in the hands of the security officer. Manek was smiling at me over his train set.

  With an effort I blinked my fashion-model eyelashes.

  “I beg you for my son,” said the old woman, and she began to moan softly, “he’s all I’ve got in the world now…”

  “The general has authorized me to close this case,” I said after a long time (a hundred years) or a very short one (as when lightning strikes from heaven and then thunder claps). “If you tell me everything, and I really mean everything, I can guarantee that we will leave your son, Josef Novak, alone.”

  “I told your officer everything,” Manek’s mother said softly. “I’m gravely ill … I won’t be in the world very long. My husband died when Josef was three. Since then I’ve lived only for him. I didn’t have a happy life … and so I tried at least to give him a lovely childhood … and to spare him from everything bad. I married again just for my son … The first time it was necessary, but my second husband—”

  “Arno Rynolt.”

  “—my second husband doesn’t like Josef. He oppresses him … and torments both of us. And Josef is afraid of him … but he doesn’t want to leave me alone with him. He loves me just as I do him … He has no friends, he doesn’t go out with girls, he stays home all the time with me … I have a wonderful son. Please intercede for him … He’s still just a child—”

  “Yes … He’s still playing games…”

  “All his spare time. Rynolt keeps him around his plant, mostly to do the dirty work no one else will do, and so Josef has few pleasures: he plays with his train set or drives the car, but that belongs to Rynolt, and so Josef gets it only a few times a year. Josef likes everything on wheels … And he reads lots of books, sometimes we read fairy tales together, just like the days when things were good — he’s still just a boy…”

  “Yes.”

  “If you need to see anything more … Please, take a good look at all his things, at the entire room … I’ll leave you here by yourself. My son comes home from work in three hours.”

  “Thank you. I’ll take a good look around … I think we can settle everything quite smoothly now. Let me just keep this photo for the time being.”

  I needed it, like a pinch on the cheek, to show me it wasn’t just a dream. Manek’s mother left the room, and I was left alone in my husband’s room—that of a ten-year-old boy.

  The train set, the fairy tales, and the blow-up pink elephant … a few hundred-notes for the clerk at the Imperial and for the waiter at Dobris Castle, Mr. Rynolt’s car, and a few letters and telegrams.

  Maybe at least my letters would be there somewhere—

  I found them quickly (it’s unbelievable how quickly the tiny room revealed its secrets), beneath a well-thumbed, illustrated edition of ALICE IN WONDERLAND, which lay at the bottom of a drawer, they were hidden in a black school notebook tied with shoelaces, on its label, written in a childishly uneven hand:

  III. B

  DRAWINGS

  Josef Novak

  and inside, all my letters and telegrams stuck between the notebook pages, which were thickly covered with Manek’s familiar script.

  On the first page, in large printed characters:

  MANUEL MANSFELD THE FOUR SONYAS: A PROFESSIONAL WOMAN

  On the very first page my own name caught my eye, and soon I was lost in Josef Novak’s fairy-tale romance:

  …we arrived at Hrusov nad Jizerou. R. ordered me to wash the car so he wouldn’t have to buy me a soda, and he and Mama went into the restaurant at the Hotel Hubertus. When it started to rain, I leaned against the wall and through a window I saw Sonya Cechova for the very first time. I decided that she was the one.

  I was attracted by the absolute randomness of my selection, by the advantageous distance from Prague, as well as by the obviously primitive character of this village waitress. The vessel for holding my great synthesis had to be absolutely empty.

  Mother and R. remained in the bar about an hour, during that time I ascertained from the local drunk, Hnyk, who had also taken shelter from the rain, a whole series of exciting facts about the girl I had chosen. Now what I needed was to see her at closer range, obviously without R. or Mama. Therefore, right after that outing to the Giant Mountains, I began to grovel before R. as obsequiously as possible, so that he would lend me his car for my fairy-tale game.

  I had my first opportunity to study Sonya Cechova at close range during the First Floricultural Evening. Under the transparent pretense of a floricultural lottery she had to kiss all the customers in the bar, and she performed this task with such devotion, perhaps even relish, that I congratulated myself on my selection.

  I redoubled my slavish toadying to R. so that he would lend me the car for a visit to the Second Floricultural Evening, and by telephone I reserved the finest room at the Hubertus. I drove to Hrusov firmly resolved to abduct Sonya, without further delay, to the land on the other side of my looking-glass, but this second “floricultural evening” distastefully turned into a brawl, and the biggest brawler, Ruda Mach, simply picked Sonya up and carried her off to his room, thus stealing her away from me. When I left Hrusov the next morning, all I could do was send a kiss towards her window and reconcile myself to failure.

  Under these circumstances, I could hardly continue my undertaking. R. was furious that I didn’t bring back the car till Monday morning and that I drove it straight to work, so that he had to take the streetcar: he grounded me for an entire month. Mama had a severe attack of nerves because I hadn’t stayed away all night since I did my military service twelve years ago. I read her her favorite fairy tales till she fell asleep, and then I carried her to bed in my arms. Mama keeps getting lighter and lighter.

  I tried to patch things up with Vera Provaznikova and to play my fairy-tale game with her. But Vera doesn’t want to talk to me anymore, because she despises me for the way I failed her that time at Prevor Gardens. Why is it that every time I do a perfect job of cultivating a girl and getting her warmed up to me, I have to start sweating and thinking of Mama, and then nothing ever comes of it. Maybe I ought to see a doctor.

  I wasted the whole summer making another unsuccessful attempt with Jitka Klanska. In reply to her ad in Young People’s Weekly, I wrote her a sixteen-page letter full of motifs from classical world literature—this caught her fancy. We wrote every day then, but our meeting in Zbraslav Castle park ended in painful failure. I didn’t lie to her enough, and the stories I made up were lousy.

  Over this entire period, I was getting regular letters from Josef Hnyk, the Hrusov drunk: I had given him a hundred crowns that time in the rain in front of the Hubertus, so
that he would keep me informed about Sonya. Greedy for money which, for obvious reasons, I no longer sent him, he kept on sending me information, and from his only half-literate letters I learned how, over the course of time, Sonya lived with Mach, and then how he deserted her.

  This new circumstance and my failures with Vera Provaznikova and Jitka Klanska turned my attention back to Sonya Cechova. Of course, her surrender to Mach deprived her of the ideal fairy-tale purity, but at the same time it confirmed her absolute mediocrity and her primitive character. To mold a person out of such common clay is the main inspiration of this romance which, employing literary devices, takes a complete nonentity and synthesizes her into a great romantic heroine, and a living one.

  Today’s fashionable, snobbish literary criticism may assert that the novel is dead, but I am making this my Great Experiment, and with its publication in novel form I will demonstrate to the world the immortality of the novel as a literary genre, but, even more important, the continuing influence of longstanding motifs of world literature. Should this strike some people as kitsch, I must point out that certain analogous circumstances can be found in Homer, Shakespeare, Lev Tolstoy, and all the great writers. But in contrast to them, I do not merely imagine my circumstances, I invoke them in their full reality.

  Hnyk’s report concerning preparations for a Third Floricultural Evening gave me the impulse to renew my experiment. I reserved the Bridal Suite at the Hotel Hubertus, begged R.’s permission to use his car and, according to a scenario I’d come up with many years before, obtained the services of the reception clerk at the Hotel Imperial in Liberec for two hundred crowns a month, and reserved two single rooms at the hotel.

  Only a couple of days remained, so I had to crawl before R., not on my knees, but this time on my belly, to get him to lend me his car to make the trip to Hrusov that Sunday. I took out all my savings and the hundred-notes went flying out of my hands. I had to give two hundred crowns to Volrab, the manager of the Hubertus, so I could carry Sonya off to my Bridal Suite, from which, according to my great literary models, I could properly and with her consent run off with her to Liberec.

  Sonya’s consent to running off with me confirmed my hypothesis, and it was in this spirit that I designed my behavior toward her throughout the time of our stay together in Liberec in a composite of the styles of Dumas-Remarque-girls’ novels. In this beginning stage I naturally had to develop models that resonate in accord with the reader’s subconscious idea of a naive girl.

  That happy day in Liberec, I was able, in conversation with Sonya, to utilize my years of reading literature, even travel writing. The strongest impression I made on her was my description of sunrise on Mount Everest as written by Lorenz and Wassermann. According to principles of the most basic psychoanalysis, I first gained her confidence by getting her to talk about herself. My success was so striking that, after twenty-four hours of direct contact, Sonya clearly longed to give herself to me. But again my perennial weakness made its appearance before the final step and I spent the whole night locked in my room, soaked in sweat, thinking about Mama and, in terror, of how furious R. would be when I came back with his car even later than last time.

  For that reason I was relieved when, after that terrible night, Sonya suddenly disappeared from the Hotel Imperial. Of course, it would not have been difficult to predict her further development, but at the same time I was sorry to give up an experiment so successfully launched. So I left my photo with the slogan I WANT YOU TO BE GREAT with the bribed reception clerk, made arrangements with him to give the photo to her and to forward her letters to me, told him not to reveal my address, and hurried home. R. beat me with a cane and Mama had a terrible attack because of my almost two-day absence from home. She was afraid I might never come back. When I carried her to her bed, already asleep, she again felt significantly lighter.

  Entirely in accordance with my suppositions, Sonya eagerly began to write me at my Liberec forwarding address from her imprisonment at Jakub Jagr’s. In her long as well as in her brief letters she desperately begged me to carry her away, which was, of course, quite impossible. I must confess that the passion and depth of her feeling exceeded my suppositions, and when I received her telegram, “I am waiting at the Hotel Imperial,” I realized that, as in one of the Arabian Nights, I had released from the bottle a djinni mightier than myself.

  In order to bring things back into balance, I commanded Sonya by telegraph to return to Jakub Jagr and win back his love. This did not mean the end of my experiment, however, because on the one hand, a merely technically trained and hence only half-civilized engineer in Usti n. L. could never compete with my fairy-tale heroes, and on the other hand, I was making it possible for Sonya to honorably marry Jakub Jagr, who in spite of his limitations seemed to be a decent young man, able to provide her with a home and everything she needed.

  To Sonya’s further complaints I replied only with postcards bidding her to have trust in Jakub Jagr. But the seed of the great heroines of world literature, a seed I had sown in the soul of a simple village waitress, suddenly sprouted. I began to feel sorry for my seedling, who was suffering under the small-town Jagrs even more perhaps than I was under R., and so by telegraph I permitted her to leave and find a job in a textile drying room, a job she longed for so, and to begin a new life. My actions with regard to her went on being unselfish and honorable, and through my remote control I likewise made possible the wedding of Jakub Jagr to Kamila Ortova, a marriage that Sonya’s presence had seriously threatened.

  Happy now, Sonya found a job in the drying room of the Usti firm of Cottonola, a job she greatly liked (how I envied her--), and she also found a group of good friends, so I had little left to do but give fatherly advice and tell her to take the degree exam. And in the same fatherly spirit I commanded her to leave her friend Jarunka Slana, who seemed to be a bad influence on her, and to once again start a new life. If only I could manage to do it myself.

  At first I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that Sonya had found a new job in the Usti firm of Cottex, which controlled R.’s adjustment center in Prague, where I have been suffering now for twelve years. Sonya’s first job at Cottex was as a helper in the kitchen, then as librarian (in twelve days she had gone further at Cottex than I have in twelve years—), but I was thrilled to find out that the powerful L.L., member of the board of the entire nationwide concern and thus a superior of my tyrant, R., was trying to obtain her as his secretary.

  For twelve years now I have been trying to extricate myself from dependence on R., at least in terms of my basic subsistence. Naturally I could find a thousand jobs in Prague—but R. would never let me take one, and because of Mama and the apartment I have to obey him. If, however, a superior ordered R. to release me, and in such a manner that R. would have no idea the initiative came from me, I would get eight hours of freedom every working day … at least eight hours every day of the new life I granted to Sonya so generously from afar. And in time, perhaps, a new apartment where I could take Mama.

  By telegraph I commanded Sonya to get the job of secretary in L.L.’s office—his personal secretary—at any cost, and then I led her toward that goal, step by step, employing numbered instructions in sequence. Thanks to Sonya’s comprehensive reports, I was quickly in a position to strategically and tactically command the terrain and to battle, by remote control, for my freedom. True, my manipulation of Sonya thus ceased to be disinterested, but I was asking her for only a fragment of what I had already given her several times. On the whole, my relation to Sonya continued to be honorable, for I had not advised her to do anything that was not in her own personal interest.

  Controlled by signals from the world of great amours, Sonya blossomed forth like a true fictional heroine, able to do even the impossible. In truth I had mobilized my own private Cleopatra, and my injections from the fountainheads of world literature even had an effect on Sonya’s surroundings, for instance, on L.L., who after many years of lethargy suddenly woke up and, according
to the classical slogan “Veni—vidi—vici,” captured the Cottex throne like a fairy-tale Caesar in the realistic circumstances of a provincial center. When in April Sonya received an apartment from him (in a few months she had succeeded where I had failed for twelve years, and Mama for thirty—), I decided to reward her with a meeting.

  The winter before, I had come across an army buddy, Rudolf Jonas, now a waiter at Dobris Castle, so I asked him to play a small fairy-tale role for two hundred crowns. For Sonya’s complete conquest, I called the Hotel Trianon and reserved a room with twin beds.

  I know Dobris Castle and its park from Sunday outings with R. and Mama, and I thoroughly prepared myself for my meeting with Sonya. I read twelve novels that take place in castles and among the world of the aristocracy, from the lending service at work I borrowed a sun lamp and tanned myself for ten minutes every day, I pulled together all my savings and, most important, I groveled before R. so he would lend me his car.

  This essential requisite was suddenly taken from me, however. Because I had forgotten to brush R.’s light-colored trousers, which he unexpectedly picked to wear, he refused to give me the car for the day I’d prepared for so long, April 15.

  I was tense and anxious all morning, and after hours of torment I finally made up my mind. Before the end of the shift I went to the garage, started R.’s car up, and drove off without his being aware. For the first time in my life I had resolved to disobey R. It was a truly historic day for me. When I touched the starter, I felt like a true Caesar. I cast my die and crossed my Rubicon.

  When, in my best suit and with all my savings in my pocket, I sped along the expressway out of Prague, it occurred to me for the first time that the mighty whiplash of world literature across the reflections in a series of mirrors had affected me as well.

  Sonya was someone completely different than she’d been the summer before. My remote control had turned her into a fairy-tale princess. As if all the fictional heroines I had fed her with had joined together and come back to life in her, that night she performed a miracle by transforming me, in my thirties, into a man. And like Pygmalion in the fairy tale, I fell in love with my creation.