The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  The Silent Woman, I would hear occasionally when passing a bench full of elderly women. The Silent Woman, my neighbors in Malá Strana used to call me.

  Maman came to see me, as she’d done before. We had season tickets for the concerts at the Rudolfinum and a box at the German Theater; before or after the music, we would lunch or dine at the Savarin Palace.

  One evening, at the Savarin, we’d finished dinner, but it was raining outside and neither my mother nor I had brought an umbrella. Someone called my name and greeted me in German. I looked up and saw the father of one of my former students. Herr Singer was smiling at me, but under that polite layer of a melancholy smile—melancholy, together with elegance, was one of the characteristic features of Jewish men in Prague—I discerned a different emotion. Herr Singer was taken aback, I would almost say startled, by the change he saw in me. I understood from his look that I had got thinner, that I was pale and looked the worse for wear; Herr Singer found it disagreeable to be a witness to this metamorphosis. In the expression of that attractive man, with his olive skin, who was certainly not slow to appreciate beauty in a woman, I saw my own transformation: death had made me look like I myself was on death row.

  Mr. Singer turned his gaze to my mother and in an instant, he forgot about me. I introduced them to each other once more: Herr Singer, Frau von Wittenberg.

  Mr. Singer said, “In comparison to the light you ladies radiate, this luxurious French restaurant is now nothing but a vulgar tavern.”

  Although a man as courteous as Herr Singer took care to look at both my mother and myself, it was quite clear that this homage was addressed to her.

  Herr Singer invited us to dance, “If your state of mourning were to permit it, it would just be for a very little while, right next door, in Venceslau Square, I know a cozy little place where they play jazz music.” Maman looked at me questioningly, her look said, “Come on! You’ve spent enough time in mourning.” Her eyes were shining. At age forty-eight, she was slim, youthful, and enigmatic in a way that only mature and experienced women know how to be. They took me home in a taxi; Herr Singer asked about the possibility of his son taking piano lessons from me once again. Oddly enough, this time my mother didn’t protest. I got out, Herr Singer moved from the front seat to the back, next to my mother. I waved goodbye, but they were so deep in conversation that they didn’t see me.

  I went straight to my piano, I played Brahms’s intermezzi. The music enveloped me and, as always, cut me off from the outside world. But on that day, it didn’t satisfy me the way it had at other times. I thought about the conversation in the restaurant. Mr. Singer smiled at me, but in a way in which I knew that he didn’t see me as a woman, but rather as a creature to be pitied.

  Why had death changed me so much? Was my husband’s death really such a great loss to me? The marriage, from my point of view, had not been at all satisfactory. I would surely have asked for a divorce, given time. But the death of my husband had changed something in me. I thought about his pleading look; his sort of passion; his jealousy, through which he revealed his love. His sudden death caused by his having gone bankrupt? Or was it rather . . . A voice inside me said: Isn’t it your heavy conscience that’s making you think about all this? All this theatricality, what with the mourning and the dark rooms and the longing for eternal night, is all that not just a pile of sand with which you are trying to put out the fire of your guilt? I answered the voice: Guilt, you say? Guilt for what reason? Back came the voice: For what reason? Why, it’s obvious! For living! You are alive, he isn’t. I said: but you can’t call it living, really. And the voice: too right, now you’re starting to get the idea. This is the last battle between us and the dead, the last struggle for power and at the same time the final vengeance of our dead ones: to make us feel guilty, to make us sad, to make us not live or to live just a little, to live insufficiently.

  The following morning I woke up early, took one of my new brightly colored skirts from the wardrobe—it smelled of mothballs—a pair of transparent stockings, and a chalk-white blouse. I got on the phone and made an appointment with Giuseppe. He cut my hair below the ears, leaving some locks of hair blonder than ever, and then added the final touch: a sinfully red piece of ribbon; the very latest fashion. I didn’t go back home until I’d had dinner in a smart restaurant. I switched on all the lights and called Mr. Singer. We arranged for his son to take piano lessons with me again starting the followingMonday.

  The piano was next to the window. When I taught my students—most of them the children of wealthy Jewish families, like that of Mr. Singer himself—I used to open the curtains to make it easier to see how the pedal should be used. As my students practiced their exercises and I listened with a view to correcting them, I stared out at the house opposite mine, on the far side of the street. I did this unconsciously. The house was as gray as a raincloud, and thoroughly uninteresting. But one day I noticed a hand raising the blind and opening a window. A woman leaned out and sniffed the fresh air, summer was almost upon us. She glanced out at the street, only to vanish a moment later back into her apartment. The next day, this scene was repeated. The woman leaned out of the window to look down at the street, then very cheerily she waved at somebody, and closed the window. On yet another day, as the woman was looking at the street, a man stood next to her leaning on the windowsill, and whispered something into her ear. The woman bit her lower lip. A gust of wind came along and the couple closed the window. That gust heralded several overcast days full of wind and rain. The window remained closed and I forgot about my neighbors on the far side of the street.

  Afterward, when the stormy weather had passed, I drew the curtain back to see the woman leaning out of her window again. At first glance she seemed to me to be rather ordinary, but later I saw that wasn’t the case. The fact was she had makeup on, and all of the makeup had started to run: from her lips, eyes, and cheeks, and her hair was dishevelled. She must have been a lot older than me, but still a bit younger than my mother. The woman wiped her nose with the back of her hand . . .Oh! Now I saw it: she was crying! Miluška, one of my students, was playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” I opened the window just a touch to let some fresh air in. The woman peered at us; she must have heard the music. What’s more, Beethoven must have caught her husband’s attention, as he, too, appeared at the window. Surprised, he looked at his wife and caressed her tousled hair. He went away and came back with a large handkerchief, all clean and ironed. He cleaned up his wife’s face . . . yes, just as, long ago, Monsieur Beauvisage had wiped my muddy foot in the park at the chateau. Now the woman burst into fresh tears. The man, who looked concerned, disappeared back inside the apartment. She was crying uncontrollably . . . Where did all those tears come from? Gradually she stopped crying. Very gradually. Now she only let out the odd sob. Once she’d calmed down, the man returned to fetch her. He hugged her, kissed her hair, her forehead.

  “Is that love?” I asked in a low voice.

  “I’m sorry?” asked Miluška, who hadn’t heard me properly. She looked at me, not understanding a thing.

  Hugo, my next pupil, took no notice of my mood, and played Haydn without paying attention to anything else.

  If someone cries, it’s because they are weak, I told myself. The one who consoles them then is the stronger person. The weak hate the strong: they resist, they seek revenge. They want to feel stronger, but their struggle only gives further proof of their weakness. Hatred, therefore, has no strength to it.

  Hugo handed me an envelope with money and left. The relationship between a pupil and a teacher is straightforward. Like that between parents and children, or between an entrepreneur and his employees. But, what about the relationship between a woman and a man?

  A week later I saw them again at their window. They were silent. Miluška was playing a Chopin study at full tilt. When she finished, the silence sounded to me deeper and truer than the music that had preceded it.

  Goodbye, Miluška, see you next Tuesday! />
  I closed the lid of the piano and put on a new dress. It was black and white, tight fitting, with a little skirt that came down to just above the knee. The black gloves came to just above my elbow. The new sandals, white and high heeled, hurt me. So what now? I’ll go to a café, I thought, or to the cinema or to visit some friends. Or I’ll go dancing, and break these new sandals in! I just had to flee, to get well away from my home.

  “A glass of red wine, please!”

  Red wine didn’t appeal to me as much as white, but I wanted the wine to be deep burgundy, so that everything would look right. On the little café table there was a small glass vase in the shape of a tube, with a blood-red rose in it.

  Over the reflections of the wine on that white tablecloth, I projected mental images of yesterday’s party: a few poets had read their surrealist verses . . . and on a wicker chair, a single leather glove had been left behind.

  On the first chord

  the dancers shook wings made of girls’ arms

  like moths at the first light of dawn . . .

  One of the poets had been reading some of his work, and when the applause died down, he continued:

  . . . the knees,

  lean knees

  like two skulls with silky garter crowns

  from the desperate kingdom of love . . .

  I stared at that leather glove. I noticed a hole in the glove, as if someone had skewered it with a knife.

  All that evening I had felt stabbing pains in my index finger, as if the knife hadn’t been thrust into an empty glove, but into my own flesh.

  “What a surreal still life!” laughed one of the young poets who I’d met in Paris. He was trying to start up a conversation with me, about the latest tendencies in philosophy. But my finger hurt and I didn’t feel like chatting.

  Now I was projecting images of yesterday’s party on the reflections from the wine. I ordered another glass. When I’d drunk half of it, I said to the waiter, who was flying past me, “Bring me a knife. I don’t want one with a round blade. It’s got to have a point and be really sharp. A knife for cutting meat!”

  I took another sip of wine. With the tip of the knife I cut around the shape made by my splayed fingers on the table, my hand and my arm sheathed now in the black lace glove that reached up to above the elbow, where a kind of wainscot of white skin separated the black glove from the edge of my sleeveless dress.

  I noticed that the men at all the surrounding tables were watching me.

  I stuck the knifepoint into one of the spaces between my black-gloved fingers. Then into the space between the fingers next to it. I repeated this again, and yet again. Several men tensely got up from their chairs and stood, stock-still, as if they were all set to rush to my assistance. I sped up the stabbing. The knifepoint jabbed the wood of the table, again and again. Several pairs of eyes hung in the air, motionless, alert . . .

  What beautiful evenings,

  when the city looked like a clock, a kiss, a kite

  or a sunflower, bending . . .

  I was singing the poems from yesterday’s surrealist party as I played with the knife, which was flying through my fingers. Its point scraped my ring finger. No matter. Then it cut my thumb. I didn’t care. More and more men were jumping out of their seats. Once they were up, they didn’t move. Drops of blood were filtering out through the black lace of my gloves. I increased the pace, singing . . .

  What beautiful Sundays,

  when the city looks like a ball, a letter, a mandolin

  or a bell clanging

  in the sunny street

  the shadows of the pedestrians were kissing each other

  and people went on their way strange and anonymous . . .

  A man came up to me, without daring to interrupt my game. I didn’t see him. I sensed he was there, but I was concentrating on the knife that was thrusting itself between my fingers all on its own. My black gloves were now embroidered with blood. Silence reigned in the Café Louvre that evening, though it was chock-full.

  Suddenly everything around me started to dilute, then vanish into the heavy fog that thickened the more I sunk into it.

  I came to in my bed at home. Somebody was bandaging my fingers and a male voice said with a drawn-out, sing-song foreign accent: “Wine and blood, and the virgin point, black though it is with desire, everything under a pink flag . . . You will fall in love with someone, you foreign beauty, and then you will kill your beloved, or you will send him to death or to the auto-da-fé, convinced it is the best thing for you both”

  The song melted into the night.

  My grandmother was sitting next to my bed when I woke up.

  So my nocturnal adventure had been a hallucination, a dream fashioned from that recent surrealist party, I reasoned.

  But . . . under my bed sheet, unmoving, lay my left hand, disfigured by thick, white, bloodstained bandages.

  About a month after I’d played with the knife, I was coming back one night from a party at the home of some friends, who were distinguished architects. The sky was becoming light, I was humming softly as I walked, a little unsteadily. I stopped in front of my house to look for my keys. Then a man stepped out of the house opposite—I wasn’t expecting that, and it startled me. The man’s hair was long and unkempt, and he wore an unironed shirt that flapped wildly about him. He was dragging along some packages, or rather enormous bundles, the kind that Gypsies or farmworkers carry with them. He was walking slowly; the bundles were heavy. Although it was warm, the man was trembling. I don’t know why I was reminded of the ill-treated horse of my childhood.

  I found my keys and went in, banging the beech-wood door shut. Then suddenly, I realized: that man was my neighbor. Yes, he was the one I’d seen at the window opposite. I’d never seen him properly, and besides, he’d always been with his wife. That man was leaving for good, I knew it. I don’t know why, I had the feeling he was leaving me as well.

  A few weeks later, a short-haired gentleman with sunglasses appeared at the window opposite. He was kissing my female neighbor’s bare back.

  But with the dances and the dinner parties hosted by Prague’s intellectual elite, I soon forgot the man with the bundles, and the woman at the window.

  “Waiter, bring me a glass of white wine, please!”

  After having placed the book I’d brought—Dostoevsky’s The Idiot—on the café table, I lit a cigarette.

  A few steps away, next to the window of the Café Louvre, a man with a shabby briefcase in one hand was observing the café as if searching for someone in particular. He looks familiar, I thought, but I couldn’t recall where I’d met him. Probably at some party or other. When he caught my gaze, I blew out cigarette smoke.

  “At last!” he said, as if we’d had an appointment.

  I took a sip from the glass the waiter had brought and quickly paid the bill before the man could beat me to it.

  He’d sat down opposite me, having put his briefcase on the floor, and was now watching me in silence. I pretended to read my novel. I thought about how all the men I’d ever met had tried to start conversations. This one remained silent and looked at me with curious eyes.

  I drank quickly, wanting to leave. The wine went to my head.

  The man picked my glass up by its stem and took a sip. I looked at him, surprised and offended.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you in any way,” he said.

  I didn’t say a word. After a pause, he said, as if to himself, “An elegant woman reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot . . . that’s something you hardly ever get to see.”

  He had a bass voice, like an opera singer’s, and spoke with a strong foreign accent. All the same, the implied judgement in what he had said made me look at him disapprovingly. But he paid that no mind and went on. This time he addressed himself directly to me, “It’s quite a coincidence you are reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot because the other day somebody showed me a reproduction of a Holbein painting of a dead Christ taken down from the cross. Dostoe
vsky must have seen that painting, and been so impressed by this painting that he wrote some reflections on it in The Idiot.”

  “I haven’t reached that part yet,” I said apologetically.

  “With reference to that image of Christ, Dostoevsky says that after seeing the painting a believer could lose his faith.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I’ve asked myself the same question. Dostoevsky doesn’t explain why. Later, when I was able to look carefully at the painting, I understood: the dead Christ is more human than divine, in fact Christ is simply a man steeped in misery, shorn of his hopes and aspirations, without questions or doubts. He is bereft of any kind of greatness, even the greatness conferred by freedom. He is a man lonelier than the Christ in Haydn’s The Seven Last Words, who is afforded the ultimate consolation of tragedy. Holbein’s painting is neither a majestic tragedy nor a pleasant drama in adagio e cantabile, but an absolute vacuum. Holbein’s Christ is a man stripped of all attributes save that of insignificance. It is as if the painter were telling the spectator: this is you. Then the spectator will become aware of his own terrestrial misery, so far away from the solemnity of the divine. He might lose his faith: his god has died when what he needed was an immortal god.”

  My companion picked up the book and leafed through it for a while. After a silence, which to me seemed long, he said happily, “We shall now have dinner.”

  “I haven’t got time for dinner,” I answered sharply.

  I didn’t know why he looked at me with such alarm. You could read his eyes like a book. Like the eyes in the stable at my parents’ home.

  He got up and helped me up from my seat.

  “I’m going home,” I said, as sharply as before.

  “Fine, fine.” He drew out the vowels.

  He walked me along the streets of the Old Town. We came up to the riverside docks.

  “Here, please do go in.”

  He leaned back against the wall to let me pass. In that dark street, his face was a shadowy chamber with two windows behind which stretched a green, transparent sea, lit up by the rays of the sun.