The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  I thought of my mother, light as the lace veil that covered half her face, of how she had winked at me as if we were in cahoots. “Monsieur Beauvisage is in Prague . . . he has become a high-ranking civil servant in the Ministry of Culture. . . he has published two books of poems.”

  I answered my husband, “Next week I’m going to the theater. I already have tickets.”

  Today too, he was crumpling up a handkerchief in one hand.

  “Sylva, there is somebody else in your life.”

  “I had a lot of trouble getting the tickets, they’re for Voskovec and Werich, just imagine! I don’t want to miss their performances, that’s all. If you want to come, all you have to do is try and get another ticket.”

  “I know you’re seeing someone.”

  “Don’t be absurd! I have tickets for the theater and that’s it. What is more, I have obligations toward my students. I, too, now have duties to perform. I will join you in Paris a little later.”

  “I can see through you well enough. You sometimes have such a strange look on your face. Don’t say one more word.”

  We fell silent. I myself even began to believe that I must be seeing someone, if my husband was so convinced that was the case.

  “Not one more word, Sylva. I wouldn’t believe you anyway.”

  He pushed me in the direction of the bathroom.

  “Get undressed,” he ordered, and went out.

  As on other occasions, he soaped me and I leaned back against the white, tile wall. I sat and said nothing, and my husband whispered, “Sylva, I want you to tell me, how did he touch you? Like this, or was it perhaps like this? Where did he caress you, here, or, perhaps, here? And you, what did you do? Did you let him do as he pleased with you? Did you like it when he did so? You didn’t, did you? Sylva, I beg of you, just tell me, how many things did you let him do? This too? Really, my dear?” He whispered in my ear and gasped and stuttered, and went on. “Sylva, this too? But not this, I imagine! Or this too? This too! My dear, that cannot be!” He was almost in tears and I felt guilty and wanted to restore his confidence, even though I didn’t know what he was talking about. “How did he touch you? With his fingers, or with the palms of his hands as well? Or with his face? Like this?” And he looked at the lather spreading over every inch of my skin, and moaned. “I see the traces of male claws, of fingers and palms and nails and teeth and lips. I do not tire of washing you and cannot help but see all the vestiges and marks and signs of a man and his desire, his desire for you,” thus did my husband snivel and howl, and when I saw him like that, I too started to cry. Then he repeated in that pleading tone of voice, “What was it like? Did he do it to you like this, and also like this? But not this, surely? You wouldn’t have allowed him to do that. Or did you allow him? Perhaps you even liked it when he did that to you? No, you didn’t, did you? Tell me, darling, I beg of you. Or perhaps you did?” And I nodded and said yes, yes, yes and wanted only to cease existing. This time I didn’t tell him that it was enough, nor did I eat ice cream, because I pitied my husband so.

  Early in the morning, I heard him open my bedroom door wide. I didn’t need to see him to know that he was standing next to my bed, watching me. I shut my eyes tight. When I opened them, he was no longer there. But for a long while afterward, I heard his voice whispering in my ear, “Sylva, don’t leave me, stay with me . . .”

  I didn’t think about Paris. I often had visions of mother’s half-shut, metallic eyes: noble, cold, haughty. Her lips, under the black lace of her veil, slowly enunciating the same words, “Monsieur Beauvisage is in Prague . . . “

  I developed the habit of taking a daily walk, just after breakfast, around the Valdštejn Palace, where the Ministry of Culture had its offices. It was very close to where my husband and I lived.

  At night, I had strange dreams. In the dark, my husband would appear, looking at me, crumpling a napkin in his fist. His expression was redolent with anguish, and a spark of hatred. And also weakness. Sometimes he turned up with a white lace handkerchief in his left hand. A revolver was hanging off the loosened fingers of his right hand.

  On the days after these dreams, I bumped into furniture and people, having slept little and restlessly.

  I bought myself a powder compact and every day, before heading off to the Valdštejn Palace, I covered up the bags under my eyes with face powder. I was dizzy with exhaustion and lack of sleep, and by this stage neither the philosophers nor Masaryk’s pensées were able to keep a feeling of oppression and asphyxiation at bay.

  One morning on my walk, just as I entered Malostranské Square, I saw him. He was waving his arms about in the middle of a passionate conversation. Monsieur Beauvisage. He seemed more mature and more interesting than before. He wore an unbuttoned black coat, with a perfectly cut dark blue suit underneath. He was walking in the midst of several men who were dressed as elegantly as he was. I started to tremble and turned toward the wall so he wouldn’t see me. I was ashamed of my own exhausted appearance. And I wasn’t ready to meet him.

  In the evening, I walked into my husband’s study without knocking.

  The room was dark. I headed for the desk, and opened the first drawer on the right. There was a pile of papers in there, which I couldn’t make out very well in the darkness. I was about to switch on the table lamp. Then I heard something move inside the room.

  My husband stood up. We were smack opposite each other in the darkness, but couldn’t see the other’s face.

  There was a creak from one of the cupboards filled with books.

  In the street, a car stopped suddenly.

  After a long silence, I said, “I won’t be coming with you to Paris.”

  My husband said nothing.

  We could hear a cheerful group of young people walking down the street. In an instant, their voices became inaudible, but they had increased the tension in the room.

  “Or at the very least, I won’t be coming with you right now.”

  The silence made me afraid, and I was afraid of breaking it too.

  “I know the reason,” my husband said in a low voice.

  The gaslight on the street corner flickered a little.

  “I know the reason,” my husband repeated. “Just as I know the reason for your long morning walks.”

  The gaslight flared up again, then went out. We were now in total darkness. I couldn’t even make out his silhouette.

  He gave a brief laugh, deep and uneasy.

  “I know the reason,” he repeated yet again, “and I know why every morning you do yourself up and comb your hair with such care, why every morning you follow the same route. I also know that you have seen him today.”

  I stayed silent.

  “And that the fact of seeing him has greatly impressed you,” he said in a faint voice.

  I had the very definite impression that this was a dream, a nightmare from which I would soon awake.

  That laugh again. Grave. A grave and heavy laugh.

  I felt that it couldn’t be me standing there, because I would never have put up with this, no, I wouldn’t have been able to take it, so enfeebled I was by such scenes. I felt that it was another young woman there in that room and that I was watching her.

  Suddenly he came up close to me. Or rather, he came up close to that other girl, the one I was watching. He whispered something into her ear. At first I couldn’t make out the words, but he never stopped repeating them. Finally, I heard him plead with that woman, “You have to do it, do you understand me? You have to describe exactly what happened. How he caressed you. Were you dressed or naked? I beg you to tell me. Everything I do, I do only for you. It is for you that I work, I have no other purpose in life. I beseech you to tell me. I have lost thirty pounds, can’t you see that? I can’t sleep, I have not slept one single night, every time I switch off the bedside lamp, I see you right in front of me . . . with him! What was it like? How did he do it to you? Let’s talk about it and perhaps then I’ll get him out of my head.”

  I
couldn’t stop watching that young woman as she stood in the middle of the study, in silence, motionless.

  “How did he do it?” the man pleaded in a whisper, “How, Sylva? How did he caress you? Were you dressed or naked? Tell me, can’t you see that I am suffering?”

  The girl was trembling. Then she said, without thinking, “I was dressed.” She said it to break the silence.

  I saw her husband take her by the hand and pull her away somewhere. She let herself be taken away in silence, she didn’t defend herself. She looked like a rag doll.

  He made her go into the bathroom. He filled the tub. And he closed the door. I know nothing else.

  I arrived in Paris about six weeks after my husband. The first thing I took out of my case was a large padlock with a key. I called for a locksmith to attach it to my bedroom door.

  I felt rested, strong, full of energy. I was becoming myself again.

  In the Paris apartment assigned to the ambassador, right underneath the Eiffel Tower, I organized a music school with the help of other teachers. I gave piano and chamber music lessons, with emphasis on teaching Czech music: Smetana and Dvořák, of course, but also Janáček, who was, most undeservedly, less well known. I had ten trunks sent to me from Prague, full of books by Czech authors, mainly Božena Němcová and Karel Čapek and Jaroslav Hašek, but also works by Czech avant-garde poets. I invited the most important French publishers to dinner at the embassy and talked to them about Czech literature. So it was that a number of Czech authors ended up signing contracts for French editions of their books. Once the books were out, the embassy organized literary salons. My Parisian friends and acquaintances started to address me as Ambassadrice. Madame l’Ambassadrice.

  One night, after a reception with the Minister of Education, I was waving away a clinging layer of cigarette smoke. Suddenly the door opened and my husband peeked at me through the gap. I slammed it shut and fastened the bolt.

  That night I was woken by some strange noises. A kind of sighing from behind my door.

  The maid I questioned the following morning shook her head, flustered.

  At the chemist’s, they assured me that the best brand of earplugs was Quies. I bought three boxes containing ten each. I slept better than ever.

  My days were full of feverish activity. I never forgot Masaryk’s words about organization being, when it came down to it, a form of politics. I felt that I was not living in vain.

  •

  One day I received an envelope that had been delivered by a diplomatic courier. It was from Prague, from the Ministry of Culture. I quickly broke the wax seal:

  Gracious Madam,

  We know of your cultural activities in Paris, which are so praiseworthy, and we would like to express our appreciation for everything that you are doing.

  This was written on a typewriter. Then there were a few lines written by hand:

  P.S. Thank you, Madame l’Ambassadrice. We are proud to have people like you working for us abroad.

  With my warmest regards.

  Yours,

  Petr or Monsieur Beauvisage

  I had trouble breathing from the happiness I felt. I had to go out. I took off over the Champ de Mars.

  That night, despite the earplugs, I heard a light but persistent knocking. Then there was silence, and I went to sleep. But after a while it came back. Knock-knock-knock.

  The maid I questioned the following morning opened her eyes wide in surprise. She obviously thought that this lady was going crazy.

  Knock-knock-knock, I heard it every night.

  With thick layers of face powder, I once more covered up the bags under my eyes.

  During an official dinner at the embassy, a foreign diplomat praised my coiffure.

  “But you don’t look too well,” that gentleman added, attentively.

  “She works too much. She should stop being so active, it exhausts her,” my husband answered.

  The Minister of Health suggested a thorough checkup. The following day, he said his secretary would call me and introduce me to the head of a reputable clinic.

  My husband thanked him warmly. I, too, showed my gratitude for his suggestion.

  That night I packed my luggage and ordered a taxi.

  Twenty-four hours later I arrived at Prague’s Wilson Station. This same station where I am now drinking the cocoa that reminds me of the cup of bedtime hot chocolate that my grandmother used to bring me.

  I arrived the next day at Wilson Station, at platform three, I think, with my face black from the soot of the train and a smile as fresh as snow.

  From the bedroom of our palazzo in Malá Strana, I made preparations by phone to continue my activities as cultural ambassador in Paris, but from Prague. It took me a few hours to sort out my things, and then I wrote a letter to my husband: I told him that I preferred to be attended to by my doctors here in Prague. I went to Jan Neruda Street to buy a stamp, and, as I was posting the letter in the blue postbox on Valdštejn Square, just opposite Valdštejn Palace, people turned to look at this woman laughing to herself.

  Returning, I closed the door and lowered the blind.

  I slept until the afternoon of the following day, and then again from early that night, through the following midday.

  Then I filled the bathtub with piping hot water and lowered myself into it. I soaped myself all over with a rose-scented soap until I was like the queen of the bubbles that were spreading all the colors of the rainbow around me. I blew at bubble after bubble, tossed them into the air with my hands, and made them fly over my nose and mouth and breasts and belly. My world became a fragile paradise full of pastel colors that changed hue every fraction of a second.

  I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, snippets of images and thoughts fluttered through my mind like butterflies in high summer, and Mahler’s “Song of the Earth” echoed in my head, a contrast to the cities around me, bursting with clouds of smoke and soot and pollution and filth. The beautiful fog of modern capitals: the fog that requires us to cleanse dirt away, reminding us of the benefit and comforts in this act. I remembered how that had to be done in earlier days and what many people still had to do. Whoever wanted to be clean had to go to the public baths: to make the trip there, on foot or by train, and then wait in a long queue until their turn was called. I stretched myself out further in the tub, sniffing the moist, rose-scented air.

  I breakfasted on a cheese omelette made with three eggs and toast with honey and jam, and a huge teapot full of black tea; once I’d finished, I slung my coat over my shoulders and caught a moving tram. The girl sitting next to me was reading The Illustrated Weekly. As she turned the pages, my eyes ran over the print, pausing at words or sentence fragments that caught my attention. I especially liked that “the writer Joseph Kopta is playing nursemaid to his son Petr” and also that “the emancipation of women, within the context of marriage, in their professional lives, and in the way they dress.” I let these new ideas flow over me.

  The tram reached the Prašná Brána stop and I jumped onto the pavement. I bought a washing machine with a built-in spin dryer, the latest model, a labor-saving device for both me and my maid. That’s also a way of emancipating women, I thought. In several shop windows I looked at hats whose design was inspired by African hairstyles; in Paris, these little hats were all the rage, designed and created by Agnès. I entered a shop, the salesgirl proffered trinkets and earrings “of a type favored by the cannibals,” as she put it. So, together with my purchase of a suit with a skirt that barely reached to the middle of my knee, I also bought a wide leather belt, decorated with African-inspired feathers, and a small sweater with a geometric pattern. Giuseppe fixed my mikado so that it took on a more angular shape. Everything was getting shorter: distances and hairstyles, skirts and marriages, chacun à son gout.

  I bought tickets to see a new opera, Leoš Janáček’s The Makropoulos Affair, and also some for the Russian ballets.

  Prague at night was delivering light from streetlamps an
d bright advertising and lit-up shop windows and colored signs and lightbulbs and blinding flashes. Elegant crowds filled the center of the capital, heading for the theaters and the concert halls and the cinemas and the jazz dives and the dance halls, to forget, albeit just for that night, the recent financial crash and the economic depression that had come in its wake. Prague seemed to me to be new, surprising. I saw a pair of men who had dyed their hair green.

  I ate dinner on my own, sitting at a round table in the Café Louvre, which was painted a dark pink with neoclassical motifs on the ceiling. I had trouble getting a table. I noticed men were looking at me. I finished my glass of wine and after I’d left, I devoured my city with my eyes, from the seat of a taxi. The headlights lit up a huge S, and we were already hurtling, my young driver and myself, into that suicidal S. Then came a bridge into a never-ending space, and my taxi driver and I conquered it at high speed, with our wheels and lights, and all of this spurred my desire to fly, to throw myself at the unknown, into infinity.

  The next day, after skating in the open air in Grébovka Park, I went back home; I tossed the skating boots into the air, out of sheer euphoria. An icy wind was blowing and I tucked my white ermine scarf right under my chin, protecting my neck and nape, and setting off my long, white woollen sweater. Despite the icy wind, I walked along the street with nothing on my head, so eager was I to show off my new boyish hairdo. The icy wind made me walk faster, but, cold though I was, on the way I took a detour: I felt an urge to cross Valdštejn Square.

  From the gate of the Valdštejn Palace a little group of elegant men was emerging, they wore long, dark winter coats, with hats pulled over their foreheads. One of them separated himself from the rest, a good-looking man. A young woman was waiting for him with a pram. The man took the pram and pushed it in front of him with one hand, putting his free hand around the woman.

  I stopped. It was Petr.

  He was talking to his wife. Then I felt his eyes on me. He came to a halt and stopped talking.

  I stayed where I was.