The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  And he laughed again, with those half-closed eyes that made him look like one of the Chinese people on my parents’ tea set.

  “Why did they send me to the convent? Nobody sent me there. I was the one who asked to go there,” I told him, without giving a thought to his strange behavior. “I was looking forward to seeing life in Prague, walking along the side streets of Malá Strana, spending time on the benches on Kampa Island.”

  All this I said to Jakub, a strong, tanned man who smelled of horses. I was well aware that he wasn’t listening to me, and I didn’t tell him the truth anyway, not the real truth as I saw it. How could I tell him that before I sought refuge in the convent, my mother, the Countess von Wittenberg after her marriage, had been going to the balls and theaters of Prague, and that my father, who had always been Count Wilhelm von Wittenberg, was spending whole weeks at a time in Germany, while I felt quite alone in that huge chateau? How could I tell him that I used to sit in a chair staring at the wall, hoping that someone would come, anyone, even Death if necessary, who would carry me off to his kingdom?

  Jakub smoked a cigarette while I told him that I had gone to the convent, to a school run by enclosed nuns, filled with hopes that my new teachers would answer my questions about the meaning of things, that they would show me what the world was and what I was doing in it. I told Jakub that I had gone to all the Masses, praying through the winter with my bare knees on icy stone, wanting my suffering to freeze over my questions, but question after question kept popping up in my head, like spring air that slips through even the smallest gaps into cold, sealed-off rooms. I said to Jakub that I had wanted so much to help the poor and the sick, but had realized that at the convent nobody wanted any help from me, that the only things the sisters were after was my father’s money.

  “I wanted the convent to help me think things over,” I told Jakub, finishing the conversation, “but the church asked only for my blind faith. And I didn’t want to grope my way around like a blind person.”

  I know that the chateau’s young stable lad had no interest whatsoever in the story of my disappointment in the convent. He kept smoking and ogling me with those Chinese eyes of his.

  “Come on, let’s go to the stable, I want to show you something,” he said in a voice so shaky I could barely make out his words.

  He opened the stable door.

  I abandoned the sunlight, entering a darkness redolent with animal stench.

  “Oh là là, what is he teaching you, this young man who has just left your chambers with a pile of books, mon enfant?” Mademoiselle Lamartine was notable for her incapacity to hide her inquisitiveness. In fact, she was really called Mademoiselle de Lamartine. She would correct us, and most emphatically, every time we dropped the “de.” Madame de Lamartine, my tutor in French language and literature, had a weakness for perfume. She would wear navy-blue dresses, tie her hair up in a bun, her gold-framed glasses would dance about on her nose, and her whole body would give off a greenhouse aroma.

  “Do you like that boy?”

  “Mais ça alors!”

  “I can see that you’re falling in love with him!”

  “The things you say, mon enfant, c’est honteux!”

  “Ahem, I also rather like this Monsieur Beauvisage.”

  “Is he French, comme moi?”

  “Monsieur Beauvisage, Mr. Handsome Face, is called Petr, and he’s teaching me about the French poets, especially Baudelaire.”

  “Mais non! That’s not possible! I am the one who is introducing you to the French language and the French poets, ma fille! But not a word more about Baudelaire, he is not a suitable poet for young ladies. Tell me about him!”

  Her tone was like the ruler that she just used to slap me on the back of the hand.

  I had no wish at all to turn that ruler into my confidant. What business was it of hers that Petr, or better said, Monsieur Beauvisage, was my tutor in world literature and the Czech language, and that my mother had found him for me? By the way, my mother also rather fancied Monsieur Beauvisage, without a doubt. How she narrowed her eyes when she led him to my apartment!

  “What has votre instituteur taught you? Dites-le moi!”

  The ruler was now striking the table.

  “What has he taught me? Listen carefully,” I said as I began to recite in Czech:

  Come to my heart, soul mute and wild,

  adored tiger, nonchalant monster;

  I want to sink my trembling fingers deep

  into the grave thickness of your mane.

  I added, “But you don’t know Czech, Mademoiselle Lamartine, oh, pardon, de Lamartine. How long have you lived in this country? A good ten years, isn’t that right?”

  “I communicate in German, I do not require Czech.”

  “And what is German to us! We’ve been an independent country for three years now. Do you want to hear how these verses sound in French? Listen,” I said, and recited them in their original language.

  “Mais quel horreur! Such rudeness! Does your mother know what kind of thing this shameless fellow is teaching you?”

  “Not only does she know, she is in full agreement with what he is doing.”

  “I must talk to her about your education. What else have you learned from votre instituteur?”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere! You liked that poem, you really liked it!”

  “I have to tell your dear mother about this whole affair, and I need to be informed of every single detail of your studies.”

  Mademoiselle de Lamartine was pacing back and forth, stiff as an inquisitor.

  Biting her lip, as if wanting to hold something back, she gave me a furtive look and said, “Today we shall practice the past perfect.”

  The afternoon before the ball that my parents were giving at the chateau for their friends and acquaintances, I went out into the garden for a stroll. I sat close to the lake’s fountain and the nearby rock, the coziest and most poetic place in the entire park. Like Narcissus, in silence I watched my reflection broken into a thousand pieces on the water’s surface, there where the stream from the rock splashed onto it. This is me, I thought; me, shattered, me, smashed like a water jar on paving stones.

  I remembered that on one particular day, with my fellow students at the convent, we went for a walk in Prague; I must have been about thirteen then, and I saw a throng of people burning the Austrian flag in the street. I ran over to the blaze as fast as I could—I, who had grown up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I, the daughter of a German aristocrat—to save the flag from the fire. The crowd hurled insults and shouts of revenge and reprobation at me, and shooed me away. But there was a most kindly gentleman who said to me, “Listen, girl. Listen, you soppy thing,” and he explained that things had changed, that the war had ended with the defeat of Austria-Hungary, and that we, the Czechs, no longer formed part of that empire, but lived now in an independent state, in the Republic of Czechoslovakia.

  I didn’t understand a word he was saying.

  But soon I realized that everything was changing: the names of the streets and the signs on the shops were now in Czech. On the postage stamps, the old man with the cross expression, Franz Josef, had been replaced by a gentleman with a beard and ruddy cheeks, who was also old and looked like my grandfather when he was still alive and would sit me on his knees and play that game There Go the Gentlemen, There Go the Ploughmen. My grandmother told me that the man with the white beard was our president and that he was called Masaryk, and that he was a philosopher and a wise man, and above all, he was Czech. “Like us,” she said.

  Overnight, my mother began to speak to me in Czech. Not like before, when she mixed a couple of Czech words into her German, together with the odd exclamation in French, as if she were adding spices to a sauce. Now she spoke nothing but Czech. My mother also started to learn to write Czech, and became an actress in a Czech amateur theater company. My father spent little time at the chateau, for weeks on end he was in Germany consumed by work.

 
; I looked at my face, deformed by the water’s flow: that was me. I, who had confessed all to the stable lad and followed him into the stable. Afterward, without saying a single word, I washed my hands, sat in front of my Pleyel piano, and played Chopin’s polonaises. That was me, Miss Countess Sylva von Wittenberg.

  One day, after I had come back from the convent, my mother asked me to go up to her chambers. She received me as she

  might a friend, as an equal. Then I knew for sure: the enigmatic Egyptian woman that day in the dark room had been my mother. Over the years that I had been away, she had put on a little weight, and now seemed to me more feminine and better looking than before I had left for the convent. And the mountains behind her? They were volcanoes, it is true, but extinct ones, and above those distant volcanic hills, on the horizon, dozens of lightning flashes had drawn zigzags on the sky. My mother had prepared an unusual spectacle for me. Was it really for me? Or maybe . . .

  “Do you know, Sylva,” she said to me, steeped in a cologne that I didn’t recognize, as fresh and gentle as the singing of angels, not like the reek of the stuff Madame de Lamartine used. She was wearing a rather sporty white, pleated skirt, and a sky-blue shirt in a gentleman’s cut. It was an effort for me to concentrate on what she was saying because I was watching her in silence, entranced. “Do you know, Sylva,” she was saying, “you come from a distinguished and eminent family, your grandfather was not only a great violinist, but also a great Czech. It is due to him that Czech culture has not fallen into oblivion and has not died under the pressure imposed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that is to say, the pressure of German culture. You are from an eminent family, Sylva, and that makes you different from other people. Your origins make you elevated and noble. You must assert yourself, daughter, you must assert yourself both before the eyes of those around you and in your own eyes, because if you know how to show what you are worth, if you are clearly aware that you are elevated and noble, others will respect you and treat you like a great lady. I once read about a beautiful and proud aristocrat who lived over one hundred years ago, a Spanish woman who was the muse of the painter Goya. She said that whenever she entered a soiree, the musicians had to stop playing. They couldn’t help themselves; they were so stunned by her beauty and comportment. Look at these flowers, if I had filled this vase with a bunch of daisies of the type that grow on the roadside, or with a posy of poppies and other wildflowers, my visitors would think I was vulgar and tightfisted. This is why every day I make a fresh arrangement of two dozen magnificent orchids. You too must be like an orchid, beautiful and noble, cold and inaccessible, a flower that does not give its scent away to the first comer, but rather keeps its perfume to itself.”

  I was watching my mother. She was like a Meissen porcelain cup, a prodigious object whose signature was marked in gold: two swords and the hallmark. It was this distinction that made Meissen cups different from the other tea and coffee sets that were used at the chateau: the set from Vienna had a crossed, closed V on it; the one from Sèvres, two LLs; the one from Berlin, two bars. My mother paused, paying attention to the orchids in their large vase, and then went on.

  “Life has taught me the secret that I shall now go on to share with you, Sylva. Listen well, daughter: the woman who wishes to have the respect of both society in general and that of her immediate circle in particular must possess the ability to become as exquisite as an exotic flower. In the morning, in the dawn’s first light, you must be like a white flower, fragile and innocent. Throughout the rest of the day too, for that matter, you must continue to be like a bud that the gardener has just cut from his favorite orchid—a flower as white as marble, which the painter would place on a tablecloth of cream-colored damask, the folds like baroque angels, the sun’s rays playing with them, dying them the tenderest shades of pink. And in the evening? In the evening and at night you will transform yourself into a flower that is dark, but no less exotic. Yes, daughter of mine, at night you must transform yourself into a flower that exudes a scent of sandalwood and poppy, a poisonous flower placed in a slim, blood-red vase. Like serpents of paradise, the most exquisite and antique jewels will be wrapped around the vase, and their rubies and diamonds shall project their inscrutable and enchanting luster onto this flower.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off the huge vase full of delicate pink orchids.

  “To ensure that others respect you,” my mother went on, “we must start with your appearance. What you need is a new coiffure and a brand new wardrobe. And a new way of addressing others. You’re stilted; you speak very little. I don’t want you to turn into a silent woman. Starting tomorrow, you will be given lessons in Czech and world literature by a student who is on summer holiday and can teach you these subjects.”

  “The express train from Ostrava has been delayed,” announces the man on the PA, interrupting my recollections. This voice is clear, friendly, and despite the urgency of the warning, gentle. A sensitive man, no doubt. The trickle of water from the rusty tap on the wall has reached my feet. People would hardly notice that. A gentle dribble, thin as a snake, that goes where it wishes and takes possession of anything it wants, quite unnoticed. This is the only truth I know: old age. It came in on tiptoe without knocking, and ever so lightly, rested like a snowflake on a chair, and stayed with me.

  The time came when I couldn’t take the convent anymore. My father had me released without uttering a word to me. When I got back home, neither of my parents were in. And in the evening, the Egyptian goddess and a young man. In silence, the convent schoolgirl left the room.

  I always leave, everywhere I go. I flee. Silently, so as to pass unnoticed.

  Who am I? I asked myself, staring at the water. Who? A German or a Czech? A countess, or the progeny of a musician—a man of the people? A little daisy like the ones people press into books to dry them out, or a proud orchid, like my mother wanted me to be? A future Carmelite nun or a coquettish, young woman? The daughter of an aristocrat, or a lady pianist specializing in Chopin’s nocturnes, which she and she alone can play like an angel? Girlfriend of the stable boy or Fräulein von Wittenberg?

  I am all of this, I think, and I continue to contemplate the uneven surface of the water in which I can make out the fragments of my face.

  At six in the evening, a lady with a white, rococo coiffure arrived. The coiffeuse. Not our usual coiffeuse, but the one who would create something special, worthy of the ball to be held at our home. She would have to curl mine and Maman’s hair, so she said, but my grandmother would have none of it; it went against her principles, she insisted. I saw the disdainful look my mother gave her. The curling tongs, those pliers for frizzling one’s hairdo, left our hair dry and burned and brittle; our hair was so curled we looked like a pair of ewes. The coiffeuse had given my mother a Greek chignon, as she called it, that hung down over the nape, and she ran around her with a hand mirror so that Maman could see it from different angles. All the while the coiffeuse screaming at the top of her lungs, “Oh, what a profile, you look like the empress, Madame von Wittenberg! Yes, you’re the spitting image of the Empress Elizabeth!” When she’d finished, she burned my hair again, and then my ear, and tied the hairdo down with such force my eyes nearly popped out of my head. I felt I looked a fright, with two different ears, one ending in a point, and the other hanging too low.

  The modiste brought me my dress for the ball, which was as yellow as a dandelion. Once it was on, I couldn’t breathe. The modiste added a lot of ornaments that made me look like a caricature of Madame de Pompadour. Blushing from shame, and my eyes red from crying, I made my way to the ballroom.

  What brilliance! I couldn’t make out the girls’ faces, blurring as they did into the lights and candelabra. The brightly colored dresses seemed to dissolve into huge bunches of exotic flowers. I had the impression that a shining treasure had been put on display before me. Seated on my chair, I watched all those fireworks and floated on the waves of Strauss’s waltzes. How could I have spent so many years on my knees
, praying in the shadows of the convent!

  Seated silently in the midst of all that musical commotion, I realized I had never once danced with a gentleman. Only with other girls in my lessons, but they didn’t like dancing the part of the gentleman and would tread on my feet. My mother flew from one pair of arms to the next. My aunt and my cousin, too. I was the only one still sitting. As always, my parents paid no attention to me. I ought to have complained, given that this was my coming out in polite society! Yes, I would complain, but to whom?

  I saw myself as a tall tree, a slender palm tree in the desert. Everybody could see me, everybody could see how ashamed I felt.

  I was scrawny. Not thin, but rather bony. My mother was svelte and feminine, and tanned from so much tennis playing and swimming. I was as white as a drop of milk. My hair was a light chestnut color; it wasn’t blonde or brunette. Altogether, I was poorly outlined. Transparent.

  Each of the girls dancing around me was different, unique. Their shoulders and arms were rounded, their cleavages were cut from alabaster, their hips and breasts were well delineated, their waists flexible and their smiles, alluring. I, on the other hand, was just a piece of wood, like a stick or a shelf, a dull little girl. Like a page, like a little boy dressed up as a girl. I was proud. I tried to convince myself that I was a cold and distant orchid. But around me everything was joyful, only I was waiting for something else.

  I’m going to go, I told myself. From here, too, I will flee in silence. I will sit at the piano and play one of Bach’s sarabandes. But where would I end up? I would have to go back to the convent. I would go with my face all covered up and would live for an ideal, nothing else.

  “This is your first ball, is it not?” a curly-haired man asked me in German. He was shorter and much older than I was, and his tummy stuck out. He was looking at me through thick glasses set in a gilt frame.