The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  The Silent Woman

  Monika Zgustova

  Translated by Matthew Tree

  Foreword by Norman Manea

  Published in 2014 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Matthew Tree

  Originally published in 2005 in Czech as Tichá zena by Odeon in Prague; in Spanish as La Mujer silenciosa by El Acantilado in Barcelona; and in Catalan as La dona silenciosa by Quaderns-Crema in Barcelona.

  All rights reserved.

  This project was made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This project is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  This project was made possible, in part, by multiple grants from the Institut Ramon Llull.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First printing March 2014

  Cover design by Faith Hutchinson

  Cover photo by Jordi Folck

  Text design by Drew Stevens

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Zgustova, Monika.

  The silent woman / by Monika Zgustova ; translated by Matthew Tree.

  pages cm

  eISBN 978-1-55861-842-8 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-55861-841-1 (paperback)

  I. Tree, Matthew, 1958- translator. II. Title.

  PG5039.36.G87T5313 2014

  891.8'636­dc23

  2013045005

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  I. Sylva

  II. Sylva

  III. Jan

  IV. Sylva

  V. Jan

  VI. Sylva

  VII. Jan

  VIII. Sylva

  IX. Jan

  X. Sylva

  XI. Jan

  XII. Sylva

  XIII. Jan

  XIV. Sylva

  About the Author

  About the Feminist Press

  Also Available from the Feminist Press

  FOREWORD

  Solitude, Duplicity, and Resilience in Dark Times

  NORMAN MANEA

  Monika Zgustova brings to the American literary lanscape her Czech and Central European upbringing, her adolescent years in the United States, and her current Spanish citizenship. This rich life and her culturally diverse roots are enhanced by her refined talent—an acute critical knowledge and approach to literature, recently iterated in her novel The Silent Woman, which may be seen as a global narrative (moving back and forth from Prague to New York, Sarajevo, Boston, Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, and Detroit) during a large and essential period of the brutal twentieth century and its aftermath.

  At the center of this novel is an appealing and complex female character, the “silent” Sylva, seen first in Prague in 1974, not long after the promising Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion that followed. At that time:

  This woman is not the old Sylva, the one who lived in Paris, where they called her Madame l’Ambassadrice. No, she isn’t the muse of the surrealists, not anymore, she is no longer Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory; this seventy-year-old Sylva, whose age coincides exactly with the year of the century, is somebody else. Who is that solitary woman who wears a bunch of white narcissi on her head, with a lace veil woven so thick that it seems to have been engraved on her face? It is she, Sylva, and it isn’t her. We swim in the same rivers and we do not, we are and we are not.

  Her troubled life—as troubled as the century itself—includes tough moral and psychological tests and traumas, hardships typical of life lived within an oppressive system, be it Nazism or communism. Giving in to the pressure of the sly and brutal agents of power, after prolonged and painful hesitations, Sylva signs opportunistic agreements with the German invaders and with the communist police state.

  The cynical adjustment imposed by a hideous governing power under German occupation, and then under the pressure of the communist dictatorship, was for her a tribute of affection and solidarity with her loved ones. She rightly will later remember, “when the going gets rough, it is difficult to see things clearly. It is easy to make mistakes that you’ll regret for the rest of your life.” It wasn’t easy for her to compromise her own moral ideals. Her regrets are authentic and lasting, indeed, and also forcefully challenge the simplistic and opportunistic way a lot of postcommunist and postfascist rhetoric are selling out now, in our apparently safe environment, in contrast to that bloody historical past, that overwhelming nightmare full of ambiguities and gray zones and of silent human suffering of heroes and villains.

  Zgustova adds a valid warning about the questionable sides of the new pragmatism in the late capitalist free world, which has its own cynical agents of power—the power of money, this time, of course. More trivial and common, and apparently harmless, this trap is still not a spiritually rewarding alternative.

  Sylva’s son, Jan, had his own troubled experience in the communist dictatorship, due to his father being sentenced to the gulag and the dubious social standing of his mother. When he had finished university, “the political authorities hadn’t allowed him to enter the Academy of Music because of his family origins.” Now a cybernetics scientist in America, confronting the temptations of financial improvements by gradually giving up his real identity, he is also obeying, in his own way, the pressure of a new time. Again, it is about trying to satisfy family, this time his Russian wife. The dealers representing the new ubiquitous power of money have their own strategy: “Your salary . . . wow! It’d be finger lickin’ good!” The potential new captive in a free society is hesitating, as his mother did. Yet, Jan does finally sign up, as his mother did in much more difficult times. “For some men a time comes when they have to give a big Yes or a big No. Over and over, I told myself: No. But then I thought to myself that if I worked for the Ford Motor Company from my university, I wouldn’t be betraying my big No, and Katya would stop her nagging. I nodded: ‘OK. Fine. I’m in.’”

  In her Czech refuge, Sylva said, “During the darkest periods of our recent history, the times of Hitler and Stalin, our moral values began to deteriorate. That process is continuing now, nobody knows the difference between good and evil.” Monika Zgustova’s intense and acute questioning of the contradictions and conflicts of the social-political environment and of the individual’s traps doesn’t stop at the “end of history,” what some fashionable commentators called the collapse of European communism.

  The novel summons mainly exiles and focuses on a generalized estrangement in our current modern and mercantile society. Sylva feels more and more exiled in her own country, where she was born into an aristocratic family of mixed ethnicity (Czech and German), under her father’s name, von Wittenberg; where she spent her childhood in a magical chateau in northern Bohemia and married a bizarre German diplomat—the cultivated, polite, impotent, jealous, anxious, count Heinrich von Stamitz—who committed suicide; where she was assiduously courted by her French teacher nicknamed Beauvisage; and where she developed a tense, erotic, and affectionate relationship with a Russian modernist painter, the sensitive and arduous Andrei Ivanovich Polon
ski. Andrei also came from aristocracy, first engaged on the side of the Communists, then with the White Army, and ending up as a marginal expatriate in Prague. He returns to his homeland, only to be immediately arrested by the Soviet secret police and sent to a concentration camp in Siberia, where he works in terrible conditions. Sylva’s son is the result of this profound and sad relationship with Andrei, shattered by the frosty and criminal Soviet exile that followed his Czech exile.

  In this novel, Zgustova creates a significant group of interesting and memorable characters. She describes them with a nuanced understanding of the inner life and with a lucid, intelligent scrutiny of the never simple choices human destiny offers in such bleak, hostile circumstances. All inhabitants and wanderers of this remarkable novel live in the Kingdom of Shadows that dominated the planet and its calendar for too long a period.

  The Silent Woman is the work of a sensitive, cultivated, skilled, and original writer who deserves our full attention and admiration.

  I

  SYLVA

  At seventy, your life is over. Or a new one begins. That’s what I thought not long after hitting seventy, which is when I got his letter. I had never received a single letter from him before. Not even back then, years ago. Twenty-five years ago, or more.

  The very idea of a quarter of a century suddenly makes me smile. A young mother passing by with a pram looks at me where I’m sitting, and, not seeing anything worth smiling about, acts as if I don’t exist.

  Through the steam filling the station I can make out a glass door. A woman is reflected in it. The skin on her face resembles fine cobweb, a tangle of slim snakes covers her hands. This woman is not the old Sylva, the one who lived in Paris, where they called her Madame l’Ambassadrice. No, she isn’t the muse of the surrealists, not anymore, she is no longer Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory; this seventy-year-old Sylva, whose age coincides approximately with the year of the century, is somebody else. Who is that solitary woman who wears a bunch of white narcissi on her head, with a lace veil woven so thick that it seems to have been engraved on her face? It is she, Sylva, and it isn’t her. We swim in the same rivers and we do not, we are and we are not.

  Rather than feeling old, I feel immortal, and I feel like laughing.

  Some elderly people can offer no more proof of their having lived than their own death. That is not my case. But I have often envied that kind of person.

  Yes, my new life started half a year ago, when I received his letter. How I had waited for that letter back then—a thousand years ago. Yet it arrived much later, long after I had stopped expecting it. When I turned the envelope over to see who the sender was, I paused upon reading the name. I thought: at last! He took his time. Holding that letter I felt as young as when I wore my hair long—sunset colored as it then was—when I had my life ahead of me. A life in which he would be a part. A new life is about to begin, I thought.

  He had taken twenty-five, no, thirty years to get in touch with me. Meanwhile, imperceptibly and unexpectedly, as silently as a ballerina advancing on tiptoes, old age had slipped inside of me.

  “Wait, don’t rattle the door like that; I’ll give you a hand,” I say to that young mother. The train is rusty and the platform, deserted.

  A railway employee came out of an office door and, as soon as he sees two women making futile attempts to open a train door, he slips straight back into his office. At that precise moment, a male voice, sounding like it’s coming from a better world than the one the station belongs to, can be heard: “Attention, please! Train number one four two from Benešov, Čerčany, Říčany will soon be arriving at platform three, line twenty-two. This train line terminates here.”

  “You know what we could do?” I suggest to the young mother, “We could each try to open one panel of the door. If you pull on the one on the left, I’ll pull the one on the right. One, two, three!”

  She thanks me profusely as I help her get the pram and the baby into the train, and I detect a flicker of guilt on her face. Just a moment ago, she was probably thinking, that old woman is completely gaga, smiling to herself for no reason at all. Now she is waving to me from the other side of the dirty glass and I would bet anything that she thinks I am a kindly grandmother. She’s wrong. Nothing is as we imagine it. I am neither kind nor gaga. I’m only old. Old age is a sickness and it has to be fought. She knows nothing about that yet. She doesn’t know why I behave as I do. I only helped her because I’m waiting. Do you know how a person feels when she is waiting? When she’s waiting and she doesn’t really know what she is waiting for? When she doesn’t know what the awaited one will be like? Have you ever had to wait for a lover you thought you’d lost ages ago?

  At seventy, can one start a new life? And what if doing so depends on another, unpredictable person?

  •

  Last night I got the shivers. I lit the stove and cozied up to it with a glass that I’d poured a couple of fingers of beer into. They say it soothes the soul. Behind the books on the shelf, I’d hidden the typed pages of a samizdat novel; tomorrow I must pass it on to the next reader, I told myself. But I dwelled on the clothes that I would put on tomorrow. I only had a few items to choose from. In such wet weather I’d put on a raincoat, of course, and a light brown scarf. I have a pair of shoes the same color, though they are badly worn out. I took a pair of earrings from the lacquered Japanese cabinet. They were a gift from him. With the sale of his paintings, I imagine, he had bought me real pearls. I haven’t put them on in thirty years. I never had occasion to do so. No, come to think of it, I did put them on once! Yes, one single time, some seven or eight years ago.

  They match the color of my hair, I told myself. Before they stood out, but now they melt into it. I gathered my hair right up to the nape of my neck: perfect, an elegant, modern style. The raincoat is the same color as the earrings; it is old and battered, but those pearls shine and gleam.

  A new life, isn’t that too much to expect?

  It was when I began feeling weak yesterday evening that I remembered I hadn’t any supper. I placed a couple slices of bread on a side plate, having cut off the crusts; the glass, with what was left of the beer, stood next to it. My supper was lit by a small lamp, and I suddenly lost my appetite, so busy was I gazing at that still life with a painter’s eyes. Even after thirty years, once again I was looking at the world with an artist’s eyes. Two slices of bread and a glass of beer, lit by a feeble bulb hidden behind a coffee-colored cloth.

  Such is the world. My world, my world entirely. Two slices of crustless bread, a half-finished glass of flat beer. I require nothing else.

  I live as I see fit, which is the reason I am not poor. When I lived surrounded by luxury, fitting myself into other people’s scheme of things, I was not rich.

  Every day bears me gifts. Today, it has offered me this still life. Now, at seventy, I have my little pleasures and no longer expect any grander ones.

  Yesterday the plumber came, and could hardly squeeze past my large upholstered cupboards, the helmets, lances, and suits of armor that decorate my little living room and hall. Lady, he said, “you live in a tiny apartment on the outskirts and you’ve got it bursting with furniture that’s fit for a king. I answered, in all honesty, Do help yourself if you like anything. I don’t need them anymore. He didn’t want anything—the items wouldn’t fit into his place either, he told me.

  No, I don’t need them. They are mementos of what was. Right now I want a couple of slices of bread and a glass of beer. And that’s it. Nothing else, nobody else. But is this enough to be starting a new life with?

  This morning, at the crack of dawn, I don’t know if it was the light or the birdsong that woke me. I placed the crumbs of the leftover crust on a saucer on the windowsill and offered it to the sparrows, taking care to make sure the saucer was out of the wind and sheltered from the rain. The geranium was soaked. I closed the window and drank my morning tea with the bread left over from supper.

  Finally, when I left for the day, the pr
efabricated walls of buildings— usually so threatening, like a row of armed, gray warriors—were hidden behind a gray veil of dampness. It started to drizzle as soon as I sat down on my bench, the red one. Immediately, a sparrow flew over to me. I threw it a few crumbs and that little sparrow walked right up to the toe of my shoe. Then I realized that I’d put a stocking of a slightly different shade on each leg. And that my hands were shaking.

  On the way to the metro, I grinned at my stockings. People turned to look ill-humoredly at me. And that made me laugh all the more.

  One day, it must have been half a year ago, I received a letter. Someone was looking for me. I answered coolly; I didn’t want him to understand how I felt inside. And I got a reply:

  Dear Sylva,

  I am so pleased that you answered my letter! Your answer has given me reason to believe you also remember me and the happiness that we shared such a long time ago. “Dear,” this standard term of endearment, strikes me as so wonderful when coming from you, or rather, from your pen. When I read the word, I felt a kind of physical warmth.

  You mentioned memories. For my part, I assure you that the times I spent with you were the most beautiful I have ever experienced in my life. Back then, I thought I would always feel as good as I did during those moments.

  Do you remember the present you offered me? You don’t? I’ll tell you about it: One evening, in a café, the Café Louvre in Prague’s city center, I was admiring your black lace glove, and you, too, as you toyed with it. For many years I have kept that glove, which was my only possession; over many decades, whenever I felt like it, I took out your long, black lace glove with its bloodstained fingers, and laid it out before me. Whenever I see that bloodstained black lace, I hear you, Sylva, I see you and feel your presence.

  I would like to know about your life in more detail, and, of course, I hope to see you again. I would meet you anywhere, no matter how far I had to travel.