The Silent Woman
Page 23
But Jan was dragging me over to the display in the paper shop, where there were only a few rolls of toilet paper, nothing else. A paper shop, a trunk full of enigmas! Jan asked for a notebook to draw in. As soon as we entered, around me, on all the shelves and on the counter, as in a nightmare, all I could see were rolls of toilet paper. The sales assistant shook his head. “No, we don’t have any notebooks. Not one, no. Not white ones, or ones with lines, or little squares. I can give you toilet paper, kid,” he said to Jan, “it just came in.”
“I’m not blind,” Jan replied, but coming from a child it didn’t sound provocative. The sales assistant added, “Or maybe you’d like some sandpaper, little man? We’ve also got some of that.”
Chuffed by the success his verbal skills had had, Jan answered, “You’re offering me sandpaper in case your toilet paper doesn’t work, right?”
I took Jan away, apologizing profusely, but the old sales assistant laughed out loud and gave Jan a sweet wrapped in silver paper, “If you were older, I’d buy you a big jug of beer for answering me like that. So now you know: in a few years’ time, it’ll be here waiting for you!”
We continued walking along the row of poorly lit displays, and in each shop window there was a kind of red flying carpet with gold letters on it: “With the Soviet Union for eternity. The Soviet Union is the guarantee of world peace. The Soviet Union is the model to follow. The Soviet Union is our future. Together with the Soviet Union, toward a brilliant future.”
With Jan’s little palm in my right hand, and both heavy bags in my left, I entered house number five on Slovenská Street. That is where they had sent us after taking the Pink Palace away from me, even the very apartment I lived in, as a punishment for spending my childhood in a Renaissance chateau. I only lived in one part of the building, though, which I shared with my grandmother, I had said by way of a defense, and they laughed in my face and took over the Pink Palace, as well as the Renaissance chateau. They didn’t punish me for becoming a citizen of the Reich before the war. During the war my neighbors had made my life impossible with their contempt; after the war, they broke my windows and once, one night in Kampa Park, they beat me up with their fists and sticks. To the new authorities, the Communists, I had become a class enemy, an undesirable being, someone against whom it was necessary to fight until I learned how to share what I had with the people.
Moving house, going to live in a neighborhood that wasn’t in the city center, all of this forced on me by the new Communist Party government, was, when all was said and done, a break, a relief for me, even though I was moving to a house that was worse than the last one. More than worse. I knew I was now going to live in poverty. I entered the corridor of the house at number five Slovenská Street, and breathed in the coal-cellar smell. The concierge blocked our path with her fists on her hips, wearing one of those navy-blue tracksuits, which hung in spectacularly loose fashion from her prominent knees and elbows. The concierge, all skin-and-bones, with her head covered in little metal curlers and a checkered apron tied over her tracksuit, stared at me with little eyes that went straight through me. I introduced myself, and I offered my hand; she didn’t shake it.
Jan and I walked into an empty apartment. I felt calm, at peace with myself: nobody knew me here, I could go to the baker’s and the butcher’s and the cobbler’s with a clear conscience. Deep inside me I felt Andrei saying in his low voice, “You know, Sylva, when you’re in a period of calm, it’s easy to make the right decisions. When the going gets rough, on the other hand, it’s difficult to see things clearly and it’s easy to make mistakes that you will later regret for the rest of your life.” I felt a tremendous sense of inner tranquility.
“Where’s the furniture, Mama?” Jan asked. “They’ll bring it all tomorrow,” I replied. I sized the place up: Would there be enough space for the piano? It would have to go next to the window. The records, my treasures, I placed carefully in a dark corner; they stood there in a multicolored column. In my mind’s eye I worked out where the Renaissance suits of armor and the knights’ helmets from the Hussite period, and the swords and the lances—those memories of my parents and my childhood—would go. I told myself they would go with the old Chinese tea service, the one from which, as a girl, I had drank hot chocolate, while sitting on a baroque chaise longue. I would place some ornaments on the table, in memory of my grandmother. In this new apartment, I wanted to have a memory of each and every one of my dead. I would carry in Andrei’s paintings personally, and put them under my bed.
In the evenings, instead of a lullaby, I read Jan the memoirs of a famous traveller who had crossed the ocean on a raft. Several animals had accompanied the man on that improvised Noah’s ark of his, including a monkey so nervous that he padded up and down on the raft. The traveller had tried all kinds of tricks to calm the animal down, all in vain. In the end it occurred to him to build it a little house right there on the raft. Only then did the monkey calm down: what it needed was to feel protected.
“Like a dog needing a kennel,” said little Jan, sleepily. He wanted to go on, even as his eyes were closing, “It doesn’t matter that we don’t have any furniture. We’ve got a little house just to ourselves, haven’t we, Mama?”
Everything changed. Everything got twisted around. It was like the chaos before the creation of the world. Teachers worked in factories and quarries and sewers. People who often didn’t have any qualifications whatsoever, had chairs at the universities. Everybody had to live where the State told them to. There was work for everybody, but you couldn’t refuse the work they gave you. There were free schools for children everywhere, but they all went to the same type of school, in which the builders of tomorrow’s socialism were trained and indoctrinated. The prisons were filled with innocent people: again. The prisons were chock-full, crammed, bursting at the seams, and their walls eventually collapsed, so thousands of guiltless prisoners were sent into forced labor, to the uranium mines: those who entered even once didn’t live past forty. Deep inside me that old voice began to echo, that timeless voice, the voice at the gates of hell, hoarse from repeating the same words so many times . . . For me you will go to the city of suffering, for me you will undergo everlasting pain, for me you will go with the lost people . . . Before me, nothing eternal was created, and I will last forever. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here . . .
Caught up in the maelstrom, my life changed too: I’d lost the Jewish and German pupils who had come to learn to play the piano, I’d lost the possibility of renting an apartment. I found myself, along with little Jan, without any income. Jan had to eat, but there was little food in the shops, and especially little fruit and vegetables, which all children need.
After standing in long queues in front of dozens of offices, in the end they gave me a job: I would work as a librarian in a little library next to the Water Tower in the Vinohrady neighborhood. That political maelstrom also swept away a lot of books: whole truckloads and trainloads took away tons of books that were now banned, reflecting as they did the bourgeois mindset, or showing bourgeois or capitalist or feudal settings, or relaying pessimistic messages. Those trucks carried off the classics of world literature and of Czech literature, and the poets of the international Surrealist movement and Czech poetism, because they were decadent; the Nazis hadn’t liked these books, and the current leaders didn’t care for them much either. They would permit only works that reflected a spirit of future optimism, and past and present class hatred. If the other lot, ten years ago, had built up their impossible German ideals imagining a world without Jews or Gypsies or intellectuals or artists, the current lot were more or less doing the same thing.
The shelves of the library where I worked were full of the works of new writers, essayists, critics, poets such as František Branislav, Pavel Kohout, and Rudé Pravo.
For two months I walked past the library shelves, pressing my palms against my favorite classics, trembling at the thought that they too might end up in the recycling bin. For two months I c
aressed those favorites of mine with my fingers; they had so far escaped the eye of the censor, but tomorrow they might be candidates for liquidation. Balzac and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Flaubert, Turgenev and Stendhal . . .
And then one day they came. Again, there were two of them: one in a brown suit, the other dressed in gray. These two had puffy faces from all the beer they drank, Slavic faces with high cheekbones. They were even a little more crude and gross than the previous ones. They didn’t talk about philosophy or music. “Come and see us,” they said, by way of a farewell, “in the Ministry of the Interior!” they added, from the doorway of the library.
I didn’t go, but I was troubled by the whole business. During the day I would cross those wide avenues when the traffic light was red; the cars, which barely managed to brake in time, would toot their horns, frantically and furiously.
They came back. “Why didn’t you turn up? Aren’t you one of us? Aren’t you on our side? Do not fail to come and see us. Whoever is not with us, is against us.”
I didn’t go.
In the evenings, I made an effort to pretend that everything was OK. Little Jan looked at me suspiciously. He knew I was suppressing something, but he didn’t ask any questions and stayed on his best behavior. He cut out human shapes from the potato peel, and on Saturday evening he performed a play with potato puppets, just for me.
I couldn’t sleep, not even after drinking a tea of lime tree leaves or a cup of chamomile, not even after an unbelievably tiring day, or with sleeping pills. I read Balzac. I’d finished The Woman of Thirty, yet couldn’t have said what it was about.
The third time, they didn’t turn up in person. They sent me a letter. It was an order: Come to the Ministry of the Interior, Day: May 11, at ten o’ clock in the morning.
I would have to go, as I’d known I eventually would.
There were two portraits on the wall: one of Gottwald, and the other, of Stalin.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here . . .
There was a saucer with some biscuits on the table. “Do help yourself.”
They sat me down in front of the saucer. They both sat on the other side: the gray one and the brown one. A character with peroxide blonde hair placed a gilt coffee cup in front of each of us.
Deep inside me, that voice was echoing . . . For me you will go to the city of suffering, for me you will undergo everlasting pain . . . Abandon all hope . . .
“So you finally came, did you? At last.”
“Yes.”
“You took a hell of a long time to do so, didn’t you, Comrade Stamitz?”
“Well . . .”
“Had to make an effort.”
“Well . . .”
“The important thing is that you’re here with us.”
“Yes, with us, and that’s why we’ve invited you here,” the gray one added after the brown one had said his piece, gleefully rubbing his hands.
“You are Czech, are you not?” asked the brown one, with a smile.
“Czech?” I asked, playing for time, “Only on my mother’s side.”
“We know that,” said the brown one.
“That’s good enough,” the gray one interrupted him, speaking in a serious tone, “That’s good enough for you to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.”
“Who, me? Why?”
“Yes, you. That you are Czech is good enough for you to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, without that entailing any further obligations,” the gray one explained, without smiling, his face serious.
“Well, with just one tiny little obligation, so little that it’s hardly worth mentioning.”
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“It’s nothing, don’t get alarmed. What I mean is, should you see anything, by pure coincidence, by chance . . .”
“Nothing to it,” said the brown one in a nasal voice, “Like falling off a log.”
“This way, it’d be easier for you to improve your standing, Comrade Stamitz.”
“You see, Comrade, you’re in the doghouse.”
“During the war, and before it . . . you know what I’m talking about . . .”
“What are you referring to?” I asked in a faint voice, because I knew exactly what he was referring to. And I also knew that now they were going to air my dirty laundry in public.
“You’re keeping mum.”
“Well . . .”
“Everybody should get what they deserve.”
“You went over to the Nazis.”
“And you did it even before the war started, that’s a fact!”
“And as if that wasn’t bad enough, you had been the wife of a tycoon, in other words, an exploiter of the workers.”
“That was back then, a long time ago,” I tried to say in my defense.
“That doesn’t matter. What matters isn’t the time, it’s the fact in itself,” the gray one said.
“You were the wife of an important diplomat, a representative of the bourgeois republic.”
“You have aristocratic origins.”
“In your family, there hasn’t been a single representative of the working class.”
“Or of the peasantry.”
“So if you want to keep out of trouble . . .”
“Big trouble . . . ”
“It’d be very easy for you to improve your standing, Comrade Stamitz. Your current standing is nothing to boast about, you should bear that in mind.”
They paused.
The gray one cut to the chase.
“Do you regret all that, Comrade Stamitz?”
“Yes.”
I remembered how, fifteen years ago, I had accepted Reich citizenship as if it was a foul communion wafer.
“If you’re sorry about having done it, you could make amends.”
“Atone for it.”
“In a nutshell, make up for it, if you want to.”
“How?” I asked, then fell silent.
“Do you want to or don’t you?”
“I think so.”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“It’ll be easy, Comrade.”
The brown one rubbed his hands.
“Your head can be held high and your heart be cleansed,” said the gray one, finishing his coffee. I didn’t touch mine. I was thinking how Andrei, seven years ago, hadn’t touched those delicacies provided by the Soviet Embassy.
The brown one cleared his throat.
“And don’t look so sour faced. There’s nothing to it! You know the other employees at the library, and what’s more you’ve made friends with lots of people who go there to take out books. Very well, this is what your job will consist of: very occasionally, say once a month, you will have a friendly meeting with my colleague,” he pointed at the gray one, “and you will tell him that everything is in order at the library. And everything probably will be in order, I’m sure it will, but if there should ever be anything that isn’t in order, then you’ll let him know, in a friendly manner. In this way, you’ll improve you own standing and you’ll help others.”
“Help?”
“Yes, you’ll be helping those who stray from our common path.”
“Building up a socialist motherland isn’t easy, Comrade Stamitz, so we all have to do our bit and report those who wish to see it harmed.”
“Do you accept?”
“No.”
“Think it over very carefully. You don’t have to give us a definite answer today. Think it over and come back here in three days’ time.”
When I’d already stood up to leave, he continued speaking, “You have a son, don’t you?”
“Think it over carefully, Comrade Stamitz,” said that Greek choir as I headed for the door.
In the library, I watched the people who, exhausted after a full day’s work, came looking for books, put them in shopping bags, and took them home. I was starting to get to know them.
When three days had gone by, I didn’t go back to the Ministry of the Interior.
I was afraid. Really afraid. Jan was having problems at school, and not only there. One day he was attacked in the park. I was sure that they were behind it all; them, the gray one and the brown one. Was I right to be so sure? I really didn’t know.
Seven years. For seven years, I’d been knocking on the doors of different ministries, asking for news, a snippet of any news, for me, the beggar of news.
For seven years I’d been asking: Where is Andrei?
I was heading toward the sky again.
I was going up the New Castle Stairs right up to the sky, to that foul, evil, abominable sky. At the upper end of the staircase I came across some black stone figures at a gate, figures that were arguing, beating each other, making war. In a mortal embrace they stabbed each other with gold daggers.
I avoided the figures and proceeded to walk up the street, up and ever up, infinitely higher, until a magnificent palace of white stone blocked my path, a gigantic, white arch, resting on dozens of classical columns. Before I was swallowed up in its dark bowels, I was able to read a poster that hung at the entrance, announcing that this was the Černín Palace, headquarters of the Foreign Ministry.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!
I stopped to catch my breath. How many times had I already knocked on this door: Please, can you tell me where he is? Tell me, please, I beg of you! Don’t shut the door on my hopes, give me just one word of news! Where is he? What’s become of him? What have they done to him? Where has he ended up? Where has he disappeared to?