The girl in the raincoat sat up, looked at her watch, kissed Vitenka and Jacek quickly and, leaving, held the door open for girl twins in attractive Norwegian sweaters.
“Sweet cherrries have rripened—” sang the twins as they sat down on the horsehair mattress, and before they got to the refrain a slim Congolese with a bluish tint put in an appearance and poured out of his briefcase several bottles of byrrh, the lovers climbed out of their retreat behind the suitcases, and the refrain sounded from all nine throats: “—and how it happennned thennn.”
“He had to have a soundproof wall put in for me—” in her white wing Mija pointed out an equally white porous wall, “and I had to promise that I wouldn’t encroach on his side even if there was shooting there.”
Jacek was given an imitation silver cup containing a milk cocktail, and with the tip of his tongue he fished out the floating strawberries. Mija sat down in a wing chair and, stretching, clutched the two wings of the chair, yawning peacefully. For ten minutes they sat in silence.
Jacek put the cup down on the table, picked up a Swiss illustrated magazine, and looked at pictures of a Soviet Air Force review at Tushino, we should study German again sometime, “What does Fahrgestell mean?”
“There’s a dictionary over there. I’d like to sleep.”
“Whatever you like, I only wanted to get away for a moment from that caterwauling.”
“What’s that on your neck—”
Mija got up and sat down on Jacek’s lap, ran her fingers over his neck, and then unbuttoned his shirt, she ran her warm palm over his chest and finally untucked his shirt, he embraced her gently and she tapped him on the nose.
“Do you see those white spots? You’ve got a fungus…”
“I never even noticed…”
“There are dyes that kill that, I can write you a prescription. What color would you like? Red, blue, green…”
“Is it anything serious?”
“No. You’ve just got a fungus.”
“Sometimes I think I’m rotting away. But then again…”
“I’d like to talk to you, but some other time, now I’d rather sleep… Go sit down again, please, button up your shirt and don’t be ridiculous… That sort of thing doesn’t amuse me.”
Mija quietly dropped off to sleep in her chair and her white slipper fell from her foot, through the soundproof wall and the central wall of the apartment the singing of Vitenka’s gang, further dampened by the music from Mija’s record player, sounded as if at a great distance. “That female has no use for anything—” her husband Vitenka vented his resentment when he divided the apartment into its white and purple wings, “Neither for people, nor children, nor a dog, nor a canary, nor food, not even drink, not even for a goddamn boyfriend—”
“For me the sun is enough, plus two thousand a month net,” said Mija, from January to May she drives out in her white twoseater to the southern slopes of the Krusne Mountains and reads and falls asleep in her beach chair or even in the car, at the municipal swimming pool she rents a cabana for the whole year, from June on she drives there straight from her office, pulls a white canvas beach chair out of the cabana, reads in it, and falls asleep in the sun, in November she goes to the Adriatic and in December to Egypt, always the same light, neutral color, the type that never burns—
In the purple room Vitenka had drawn very close to one of the Norwegian sweater twins and had pushed the other one, who seemed willing enough, off onto Jacek, but the gang had made up its mind to head off, “—but someone has to wait here for Milena Cerna!”
“So wait for Milena Cerna,” Vitenka told Jacek, “she’s a wonder, you must know her from the swimming pool, she’s real dark, would you like to see her in the raw? When she rings four times, go into the bathroom and call through the door, “Hi, Milca, take it off!”
Jacek was left alone in the now silent room and involuntarily he began to clean it up: the discarded men’s shirt and a black sock into the top suitcase, empty the ashtrays and smooth out the red sofa so you’ll like it here with me, lying on his back on the sofa he gazed at himself in the mirror hung askew from the ceiling, waiting for his beloved, come here to me in my room—
Four short rings and Jacek ran to the bathroom, already a key was rattling in the lock, pointlessly Jacek turned on the shower, “Hi, Vitak—” a girl’s voice from the other side of the door, “Hi, Milca,” Jacek called as he’d been schooled, “take it off!”
Breathlessly, silently, he advanced to the door and opened it a crack, his glance ran to the mirror on the ceiling, in it was Milenka Cerna like Goya’s Maja desnuda on the red fabric, your beloved waits for you in your room—
Quietly Jacek closed the purple door and walked through the foyer to the white one, now locked, where the sound of soft music could be heard, tomorrow Mija would go to the southern slopes of the mountains and would place herself in the sun, which is needed to live—
With a child you can’t divide your apartment that way, of course, and when in the foyer she shouted, “Daddy gwab me—” how many miles of soundproof wall would he need… perhaps the fifteen between Usti and Decin would suffice.
“Tomorrow I’m going to Brno,” Jacek said to Lenka, “please put two white shirts in my bag, and no lunch.”
“Lie this way… and put your hands behind your head…,” Jacek whispered to Nada in the room overlooking the Decin harbor, “I’ll go to the door now and quietly steal back…,” for a while he stood in the dark foyer, Good Lord, all this should have died out in us long ago—
The next morning Jacek sent Nada off to work, threw back the bedcovers, fetched himself a bottle of milk and some stale rye bread, extraordinary expenditures await us, then he made the bed, swept, and with a cigarette in hand leaned out the window, from under his fingers a bluish ribbon floated up to the clouds, and the cool wet breeze from the harbor, on the docks men leaned on steel cables and one of them all by himself pulled in toward the jetty the prow of a 700-ton barge, the cry of gulls and multi- colored flags on poles.
Sell this two-section chest and buy a three-section one secondhand, it would do for two, buy a folding bed at the bazaar and these two blankets would fit into Nada’s chest, a mattress—or just find a canvas army cot, we never slept as well as we did on that, and in the daytime you can stand it up in the foyer—only inexpensive things secondhand from the bazaar, but in the new apartment everything of good quality and new, so a cot then and instead of a three-section chest a lean-to beside the two-section one: two suitcases on top of one another and a metal coat tree in the corner.
“Wellll—” Nada dragged it out like an expert as she inspected Jacek’s drawing on the board, “you can see the third year of technical school in that and even something of the fourth year—Ouch! you’re wrenching my—no, seriously, you could earn a living with that. I’ve got a surprise for you, but I’ll tell you later, because now… I can’t… concen—” and so on to the end of our twenty-four hours.
“And now for your surprise,” she said, lying on the cushion, he went to the window to tie his tie. “I’ve got a job for you—and it’s right around the corner, it’s called Wood-Pak.”
“What do they make?”
“All kinds of shipping containers and so forth. They’ll take you on at once as a draftsman and in time they’ll have an opening for a supervisor, you know, when you haven’t had any experience yet… I know a Mr. Dvorak who has designs on Sternfeldova, the manager of our cafeteria, and it’ll definitely work out.”
Cross the ends, Wood-Pak would hardly be the acme of technology, make a loop, shipping containers are actually crates, pull the other end through the loop, is it really for the birds that he holds a degree in chemistry from Brno, tighten it, a career as box maker arranged by Mr. Dvorak and the cafeteria manager, pull it tight around his neck. Time has become an express train making up its time now that it’s running on level ground, should he get off at thirty-three and start all over again as a student…
“You’re awf
ully kind, Nadenka.”
The convoy had entered the harbor, the men had run to their stations on the docks, the steel cables from the barges whistled through the air, and now they were being tied to metal posts, and Jacek shivered.
“So bye-bye and good night, darling—” he whispered.
Holding a cigarette he leaned out of the window of the train, hygienic ceramic ware in slat boxes was being rapidly unloaded in a pile right onto the gravel, on the other track a car full of girls on an outing, the boxing material cracked, and the train pulled quietly out, hi there girls, and a couple of them waved, look here, Mr. Jost, what has the railroad done with those boxes, sort it all out again, OK?, and Jacek waved at the girls’ car, he sat down on the warm green imitation leather, but it was too hot, in the corridor he leaned out the open window, the April river rushed on, flooding beaches and meadows, this is its high point, ta-ta-ta-dum, that’s how time drips from the calibrated bottle with our business card on it, Nadezda is wonderful, I’ll come with my suitcase and we’ll start a new life, ta-tata-dum, or a new fiction, ta-ta-ta-dum, or keep both and cultivate an isosceles triangle, water it regularly, and shudder at the thought that one of its two sides will break—and which one will that be—but is that all life allots to a man who’s thirty-three, where has that sketch of the Brno Opera gotten to, the grass and the sea, when will this train dump us out, is this the overture ta-ta-ta-dum, or is it our NEVERMORE—
II — seven
Jacek was the first to step off the crowded local, he read the time off his wristwatch: the trip here takes 52 minutes.
From a poor, once conceivably blacktop road a good half-mile of magnificent, four-lane divided highway shot out to the right, and a row of fluorescent streetlights towered above plowed fields. From a distance, Interchem looked just like an atomic reactor. The employees’ glass-and-concrete bus stop would have been an ornament to any second-class airfield, the laminated-glass entrance an ornament to any first-class one. Projecting ten stories out of the runway-like concrete strip was the silver fairy tale of a freestanding apparatus. Ex-classmate Bachtik was master of it all—two-and-a-half acres worth a hundred million crowns.
The highest level of the hydrogenation tower like the captain’s bridge of a carrier, and the job of first lieutenant open. Captain Bachtik had never been in any way distinguished—save that he’d made his decision to leave Cottex at just the right moment.
With a damp hand Jacek grasped the quivering rail, here one could accomplish things, so come on, don’t be afraid, we send our leading technicians to be trained first in the Soviet Union and in England, I know both those languages well enough, of course you do, and you can fool around here to your heart’s content, I’d introduce a central computer and monitors, that wouldn’t be bad at all, in the meantime there are all kinds of people here, but I’ve already commanded a squad in which half the men were convicts, I remember you could be a stickler for discipline, just give me a free hand and things here will go as at a launching-pad— “Time to come down,” said Bachtik, and he began to descend the stairs.
“Just let me fool around here a moment longer…”
A surrealistic domain of silver and from the mountains a moist wind blew, Jacek climbed down the winding metal stairs, once more around the tower and then once more around.
“So what do you think?” said Bachtik down below.
“It’s wonderful…,” Jacek sighed.
“Better than your two-bit plant at Cottex?”
Jacek sighed deeply.
“I can hold the job for you till the first.”
“I’ll… I’ll give you a ring.”
“You’re yellow.”
Jacek trailed across the runway behind a futuristic, bright-orange, electric-powered truck, toward a glassed-in pavilion which could have taken off without much modification. With a familiar, guilty smile, Pharmacologist Karel Zacek led Jacek between banks of philodendrons and club chairs.
“Come on,” he whispered, “no more of this sitting in the corner.”
“Here you’ll have the entire floor—” The year before last, Pharmacologist Zacek was master of half a desk and half a Romanian lab assistant, a girl he’d knocked up. Here he has a palm tree, a Phoenix canariensis, right by his door.
“On this floor I’ve got part of the physical chem lab. The rest of it and the organic are downstairs, the inorganic upstairs, and the qualitative in the pavilion.”
In front of a row of illusory machines under plastic covers, a row of empty chrome chairs sparkled, and a girl in a surgical smock was crouching in a corner.
“You’ve even got a real Beckmann thermometer here…,” Jacek whispered.
“Two of them and an infrared spectrophotometer,” Zacek smiled wanly.
“Can I sit down with this for a moment?” tenderly Jacek pulled off the rustling cover and piously touched the switchboard. “If I were to come here, would you give me this machine?”
“I’d be awfully happy to give you all of this.”
“The whole floor?”
“The whole building and the pavilion over there. I’m going to Prague.”
“I’ll give you a ring on Monday—”
“I’m flying to London on Monday,” Zacek smiled guiltily.
“Living quarters are available for singles the day they come in,” the manager of the living quarters said as he led Jacek through a vast opaque glass corridor right out of a spy or sci-fi film, “family apartments in nine months.” Glass bricks went all the way back to the showers and naked men with wet hair promenaded with towels thrown over their arms like overcoats, behind a white door a hotel-style room for three and everywhere green upholstery, “I might be able to put you in here—,” a gray-haired roommate was in bed reading a thin volume of James Bond 007 with the help of the thick tomes of a three-volume dictionary, and under a propped-open window a fellow was whispering Russian words, “—or upstairs on the second floor, where the upholstery is blue.”
“Engineer Jost? Comrade Bachtik has ordered me to drive you to Usti—” a well-tanned, dapper young man in a gray-blue uniform said as he opened the door of a large silver-gray limousine for Jacek, “—you say your factory’s here between these house lots?” he marveled later when he couldn’t find the entrance to Cottex in the gap between wooden fences.
In the just beginning drizzle Jacek jumped over puddles across the ridged mud of the courtyard to the wooden annex of the technical division, and he sank down into his wicker chair. Nine-by-twelve feet of creaky boards and a roughed-up desk of soft wood from the days of the Germans, promoted by the painter’s brush to “stained oak,” on a plant stand a half-century-old Urania typewriter and, behind a curtain of local manufacture, five bookshelves, six-by-fifteen feet of files full of letters that had come in and copies of nonsense that had gone out, a chemical engineer ten years later—
It was raining hard now and under the overhang of the roof of the electric plant two men had run for cover, a seventy-year-old fireman (also a chemical engineer, before the war the manager of sugar factories: “How much a year do you make here, Mr. Jost? Twenty thousand? Well, let’s see, I made two hundred and twenty thousand in Louny, then in Kralupy two hundred and seventy thousand, in Roudnice only a hundred and ninety thousand, it’s true, but in Lovosice I made four hundred and thirty thousand plus—”) and a fifty-year-old guard (after the war a high functionary: “I had all those directors called together and I said to that bunch, goddamn it, gentlemen…”), they crouched together and pressed their backs against the wall, at that moment a heavyset tattooed man rolled a reel of cable three yards high through the gate and pushed it heavily forward, it got stuck in the mud, the fellow roared at the two hasbeens under the overhang, the pair rushed out, and all three together rolled the enormous reel out into the cloudburst.
Slowly Jacek lit a cigarette, by degrees he leaned with his entire weight against the right side of the back of the chair, gradually he stiffened the whole side of his body from that point of co
ncentrated pressure down to his knees, and very slowly he moved that whole side left a couple of inches, so that his buttocks rested on the seat in a new position, cool and newly pleasurable, as when in bed one lets his cheek slide down on the pillow.
Vitenka Balvin looked in the door and a short while later Petrik Hurt, the boss, to ask about the big limo Jacek had just pulled up in, but all he had to do was press his fists to his temples twice and look tormented: this pantomime signaled the state known as “Jacek’s got neurosis” and the fact that it was necessary to spare him for the rest of the shift.
We too will spare ourselves, Jacek lit another cigarette, stretched the left side of his back and then shifted to the right, twenty-seven more years till our pension and we’ll have our whole life saved up, so that then we can mourn it all in one piece—Jacek leapt up from his chair, kicked it, and paced back and forth for the remainder of the shift.
Petrik Hurt jumped off the streetcar at the main square just before the stop and out from behind the column that carried the huge poster advertising Candy’s orchestra, Verka Hurtova came running to meet him, Petrik’s third wife and his “true love,” as Petrik unashamedly claimed, but that third marriage had cost him two furnished apartments for the preceding wives and eleven hundred a month support for their five children, costly enough if one succeeds only the third time, but Petrik didn’t complain, “My first wife and I understood one another sometimes, with my second we were both content, but only with Verka did I find out what true happiness is—,” and for seven years it had been uninterrupted, he wouldn’t have found it if he’d have only switched once…
There was still a lot of spare time, Jacek went to the window of the notice agency, SERVICE TO THE PUBLIC, and read the PERSONALS column, the 25-year-old refined wom. of girl. appear. with own furn. apart. was still available, also the native of Usti likes the woods; Child is no obsticle!, it must require a very special taste to make a spectacle of oneself in the main square.
Catapult Page 6