The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  The next day I took Andrei to Prague.

  “Good evening, Mr. Polonski. We are so happy, dear Andrei Ivanovich, that you have come to spend a few hours with your fellow countrymen and that, as a good patriot, you are interested in the fate of your old motherland, which has suffered so much in the war.”

  A good start, I thought, giving Andrei an encouraging smile as we headed across the garden toward the main Soviet Embassy building.

  “Patriot, fellow countryman, and always motherland, motherland, motherland,” Andrei grumbled, frowning.

  “What’s wrong with that, Andrei?”

  “What’s wrong with it? Their duplicitous ways, their ubiquitous lies.”

  Andrei kicked at a little stone on the pathway. The dust sugared his right shoe.

  “. . . with your fellow countrymen, Mr. Lukov, and as a good patriot, you are so interested in the fate of your old motherland that has suffered so much . . . ”

  The echoed words of the embassy official sounded strange and absurd.

  A dozen waiters in white carried in bottles of vodka and wine and the corresponding glasses and served these with caviar, smoked fish, blini, and bread, along with dozens of other hors d’oeuvres. We all feasted our eyes on such delicacies we hadn’t seen for a good seven years. But we still couldn’t lay into them. The official who had welcomed us at the entrance, now came into the room and addressed those present, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are delighted that you have accepted our invitation to this little get-together. That you have come here shows that you are good patriots.”

  Andrei turned to me, “He only says ‘ladies and gentlemen’ because that is the form of address we exiles would recognize. Otherwise he would simply have said ‘comrades.’”

  I thought that because of the traumatic experience he had had, Andrei was looking at everything from a negative point of view.

  Then the official relinquished the floor to the ambassador, who was also done up in a black suit. He had very thick eyebrows that joined up at the top of his nose, and almond eyes. He gave his speech in a hoarse, nasal voice, “Dear friends, sons and daughters, all of you, of Greater Russia, the same Russia that has generously agreed to protect so many different nations under its wing.”

  At this point, the ambassador stopped to cough and take a sip of water, as if he had given a long, tiring speech. Andrei took advantage of the pause to whisper in my ear, “He says Russia instead of the Soviet Union because he knows that if he used Soviet terminology with us, he’d spoil everything. You see how crafty they are? I wonder what they want from us, after they’ve all dressed up to the nines and prepared this banquet fit for a king.”

  I answered Andrei with a condescending expression. The ambassador wiped his neck, frowned with his bushy, black eyebrows, and was about to go on when he caught a frog in his throat and started to cough. The speech was adjourned, and as if he had just said grace, it was time to eat. Nobody waited to be told: we relieved our bellies of seven years’ hardship.

  We all devoured those delicacies, all of us except Andrei, who didn’t touch a morsel. Neither did he offer me bites of food and drinks, the way he usually did. He acted dumb, as if the food wasn’t there.

  Next to the window, a singer with a guitar was swaying in time, dressed in a Russian shirt embroidered in bright colors. I took a quick look around the embassy room: there were balalaikas and mandolins, hand-painted Russian plates and paintings of snow-laden, birch tree forests at twilight hanging from every wall. In the glass cabinets I glimpsed a large matrioshka, dismantled to form an army of identical dolls that were each smaller and smaller until they vanished altogether. I smiled at the poor taste of this exhibition. The singer was taking his guitar from table to table. Suddenly I found he was standing in front of me, singing:

  They have taken everything from me: strength and love.

  My body, abandoned in a hostile city,

  can no longer enjoy the sun. And I feel how my blood

  has turned irreparably cold.

  I recognized the verse as one by Anna Akhmatova, a poet I had met in Paris long ago, in another life. Most of the audience were deeply affected, several women were crying, many men had taken out handkerchiefs. I looked at Andrei: he too was impressed. I was astonished to see the frankness with which over three hundred Russians showed their emotions immediately. This was even true of those Russians who had spent twenty-five years here in Prague, where we take care to aristocratically cover up any show of sentimentalism. And this was still true even though most of these Russian exiles came from the old nobility. In contrast, Andrei’s eyes were a snowy, Russian pain, over which rolled the ringing laughter of the bells on a troika.

  As I watched this scene, I thought of what it meant to live in exile: always hearing a foreign language, being obliged to speak it, to laugh and cry in this language. Or, instead, not to accept it and so condemn yourself voluntarily to a life apart. To see around you, all the time, faces that are still foreign to you, even after decades. What can you do? Stay as you were before, not change at all and run the risk of being misunderstood by most of those around you? Or adapt yourself to the majority at the cost of losing your own personality, your deepest sense of identity? Andrei had solved this dilemma by living far from civilization, well away from Prague’s intellectual circles, which he visited infrequently, only to flee quickly back to his mountain solitude like a frightened animal.

  What must it be like, to wake up every day far from everything that you feel is truly part of you? I could see it now, written in the faces of these Russian aristocrats, generals, and artists who, at the first puff of a Russian breeze, cast aside their usual restraints, unable to help themselves, like a river overflowing after heavy rainfall. To experience something that was so much theirs, something that smelled of their forests and their rain, that rain with its peculiar drizzle, which left a taste of autumn on country paths, for them it had to be something worth celebrating. And to savor all this collectively, in the company of those who had at some time in the past breathed the same air and drank from the same rivers, must surely have been worth dressing up for.

  This was how the gods of Olympus had punished those who had offended them: Tantalus had fruit and water within reach, but as soon as he tried to quench his thirst, they vanished; Sisyphus pushed his rock in front of him toward the summit, but before he got there, the stone slipped from his grasp, rolled back down and he had to start all over again. They punished Ulysses in this fashion for years. And Dante realized one day that he would have to wait fifty moons, fifty months, before he would be free of the difficulties of living in exile.

  To disguise my coolness in that emotionally charged atmosphere, I forced myself to eat and drink. But after a couple of blinis, I couldn’t take anymore. My stomach was no longer used to banquets.

  The ambassador, who had clearly never lacked for anything, chewed away at half a pancake with caviar, and then, after chasing it down with a good swig of vodka, he stood up slowly to finish his speech. He spoke in an uninspired, unamusing fashion, and said nothing clever or interesting. He mumbled his speech in a nasal voice as if he wanted to get it over with, the sooner the better:

  “Dear friends, we are all children of Greater Russia, the same Russia that now protects many nations under its wing. We have emerged victorious from a terrible, cruel, and bloody war, in which millions of our sons have given their lives for victory. We know that all of you, who abandoned Russia for different reasons, have always been with us and have done what you could for this victory. Our motherland lies in ruins. We must raise her up. We must put her back on her feet. We must rebuild her. And so . . . Our motherland does not wish to fixate on your pasts. With great joy our motherland will greet with open arms all those who wish to return and take part in the rebirth of Greater Russia. Our Bolshevik revolution has proclaimed the great ideals of humanity: the building of a society in which we are all equal, a classless society, a society without rich or poor, free of hostility and hatred.”
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  Under the table, Andrei grasped my hand.

  “Free of hostility and hatred?” he whispered, “Why, Soviet ideology and the Soviet system is based on class struggle, on the struggle against the bourgeois enemy, based on hatred, in other words!”

  He was trembling.

  I supposed he was right about that, but I remained silent.

  “We have won the war,” the ambassador went on, “against a terrible evil. Now we are preparing to rebuild our motherland and a society free of hatred. We are waiting for you, my friends, to join us in a brilliant future full of hope.”

  Andrei squeezed my hand. Like that horse in my childhood, which I hugged after they’d beaten it cruelly, I thought.

  “Sylva, come with me, I have to leave. I don’t feel well.”

  I stroked his hand to calm him down, but knew that I could live in Prague no longer and thought that the ambassador’s offer would be a way out for both of us. Andrei could go there and see what the possibilities were, and he could either come back to Prague or invite me to move to his country.

  I told him of my plan.

  When he heard it, he was unable to say a word. He had a bad case of the shivers, like a naked man in a gale. After a long while, he said, “It is not the ambassador who is offering this to us. It is the wish of Stalin himself!”

  “Of course. And?”

  “There’s some evil motive behind it all.”

  I pressed Andrei’s hand, but he didn’t stop repeating, “I want to get out of here. I really feel very bad.”

  A man with a little white beard and an intelligent face, who was sitting at our table, declared that he was going to go back.

  “You are?” Andrei asked in surprise.

  “Yes,” the man said firmly, taking a sip of vodka as if to confirm his decision.

  “But this patriotic speech of the ambassador about the merits of the Soviet Union . . . ” Andrei said in protest.

  “He hasn’t even mentioned the Soviet Union,” said the man with the beard.

  “That makes it even worse,” Andrei’s eyes were bright. “He’s a hypocrite. He’s called the country Russia to fool us with a word we might accept. I don’t know why they really want us to go back.”

  “Mr. Polonski,” said the man with the white beard, seriously, “it is certainly true that this ambassador is nothing more than a bureaucrat who talks like an ass, but I like what he’s saying. A man has to know what he’s living for.”

  “But nobody knows that!” Andrei flew into a tizzy, like a child, “One man convinces himself he’s living for his children, another for his novels or his paintings, like myself, still another believes that he’s living for the cause of universal peace, but deep down none of us know what we’re doing at all!”

  “That is a mistake then. We should all make an effort to find out.” The man smoothed back his hair and stroked his white beard with his long, pale fingers. “Here in Prague we get by, but in the end where is this life getting us? Do we know what it is we’re living for here? Back home in Russia, among our own people, we’ll know what we’re about, and our life will have meaning once again.”

  Andrei took a deep breath and started to explain, illustrating his words with sweeping gestures. “Life is a boat on the high seas that carries you to any coast, destinations that you yourself haven’t chosen.”

  “Mr. Polonski,” said the man with the white beard, laughing in order to hide his irritation, “you are a painter, but perhaps it would be better if you became a thinker specializing in the philosophy of chance fate. You are André le Fataliste, the Russian version of Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste.”

  Andrei stared at the plate he hadn’t touched.

  “Andrei,” I said gently, “do you really think life is tossing us about on the high seas and we are its victims?”

  “We are not always victims.”

  “So you don’t think it’s necessary to make any decisions?”

  “It is. But from the moment when you told me your story, how you accepted citizenship of the Reich, I haven’t stopped thinking about how hard it is to recognize, in difficult times, whether our choice is the correct one or not.”

  “My story? I have always silently obeyed one order or another. Should we obey orders given by a moral authority over those of our conscience?”

  “Our conscience changes according to the times and the circumstances. You, Sylva, are not happy with your choice, but if you had made any other, you would have ended up in a concentration camp—I’m sorry, I didn’t want to remind you of that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Go on.”

  “In ’38, after the European powers had decided in Munich to betray the agreements they had made with Czechoslovakia, the Czech people decided to fight the German occupiers, even though that meant a lot of bloodshed, but the Czech president made a decision to do the opposite in order to avoid the inevitable bloodbaths that would have resulted. From that moment on, the Czechs have hung their heads in shame. The Poles who, guns in hand, a year later offered resistance to the German tanks, now hold their heads up high, but the Nazis killed many Poles, and razed their capital. Which one was the correct decision?”

  “To offer resistance.”

  “To assassinate Heydrich, the cruel Reich Protector in Prague, at the risk of one’s own life, was undoubtedly a heroic, honorable, and righteous act. But because of this assassination, the Nazis razed two villages to the ground, installed a reign of absolute terror, and started to deport Czech citizens en masse, as well as the Jews, to the concentration camps, your mother and her husband among them. From this point of view, was it right to assassinate Heydrich? Yes or no?”

  “Yes, it was,” I answered, “I think so.”

  “But you’re not sure. Take my example. I was convinced the czar’s regime in Russia was unjust and that the revolution was in the right. I enlisted voluntarily in the Red Army, and voluntarily I fought for the success of the revolution. With what result? Today the Red Army is doing horrendous things. Now I know that the regime imposed by the revolution is as unjust as, or more unjust than, that of the previous one, that it is itself terror personified. And I also know that the experiences I underwent in that army were so terrible that I almost died because of them. You see? This is another outcome of a decision dictated by one’s own conscience.”

  “So what must one do, then?” I asked.

  “Think about the consequences of each step, each decision. Like a game of chess.”

  “So calculating?”

  “Not exactly calculating. Lucid. Rational.”

  “You, a Russian, are invoking rationality?”

  “It’s precisely because of that that I have to mention it: to prevent the Russians from spreading further evil around us.”

  Andrei looked at the ambassador of the USSR, who had tucked his napkin into his collar like a child, and was chewing away enthusiastically. As he observed him, Andrei said gloomily, “You know Sylva, in a period of calm it’s easy to make the right decisions. But 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.”

  The singer resumed with his guitar. Again he sang the songs the audience had liked the most:

  Inscrutable you are and always new.

  And each day I obey you more.

  But, cruel friend, your love

  is a test of iron and fire.

  During the song, Andrei hugged my shoulders and whispered into my ear, “The next decision will be made by you, Blue Butterfly. Shall we live together? If so, where shall we live? You yourself must tell me. I have given you my word, Sylva. And I want to keep my promise. I am aware of your difficulties here. You don’t want to go on living in Prague? Then we shall leave here together. Tell me what we must do. I know that your choice will be the correct one.”

  “And if I say that you should go back to Russia and that I will join you later on?”

  “Then I will do as you say. I trust
in your good judgement.”

  I kissed him on the cheek.

  IX

  JAN

  The following day, I didn’t have any news from Katya. Nor the day after, nor the one after that. She was probably waiting for me to get in touch with her. I didn’t feel like doing so; I no longer found that sort of game amusing.

  What should I have done? I realized that for a long time I’d been acting the fool, simply because of a vague feeling, with no basis in any concrete fact, that I had finally found a home. Because of a wish to keep you close, Mama, and because of my memories of silent evenings together and our walks through the parks of Prague, I’d turned into a simpleton. I took the first plane back to the States.

  One day I was walking back home from my classes, thinking about an argument that had taken place the evening before at a dinner party with some friends and colleagues. We’d been talking about science and art. Some defended the idea that to search for solutions in an exact science such as mathematics was akin to an adventure. Others disagreed, “What about art? Art, with its magic and enchantment, nothing compares to that! This was why Cicero preferred to make mistakes with Plato rather than be right all the time with Pythagoras.” I inclined to this latter viewpoint. Edith, a colleague from my department, didn’t agree. “God is in mathematics,” she averred, “mathematics is the highest art form there is!”

  “It is an art!” I added, “In mathematics, style is just as important as in literature, music, or painting. A stylistically well-structured equation is, for me, an aesthetic experience, more enriching than any other kind.”

  I was thinking about all this when I got home and checked my mail to see that one of the letters was from Katya: she’d bought an airplane ticket and would be coming over to visit next week. Then I remembered my promise to show her America.

  How unfortunate! I had successfully managed to forget about Katya, considering her as I did to be one of my life’s minor episodes. But how could I not keep to my promise, especially now that she’d already bought her ticket? In fact, this girl must be seriously interested in me, I told myself again and again, this being an idea I found very attractive.