Where is the father of my son? Where is Andrei? Where is Andrei Ivanovich, whose father’s name, Jan, I gave to my son? Where is Polonski, the painter?
For seven years I’d been knocking on this door and begging. I beg of you, please tell me, please. That is how I implored them, I, my mother’s orchid, I who she wanted to turn into a chocolate cup made of Meissen porcelain.
Is he alive? Just tell me that, nothing else, I just want to know if I can live with some hope. Some hope, no matter how little!
Tell me he’s alive.
Tell me he’s alive and I will put on iron shoes and I will fill my pockets with iron bread, and I will travel around the world in search of him.
Is he ill? Like Psyche, I will accomplish four impossible tasks. Just tell me that he is ill, and then I’ll know he’s alive and I’ll go to Tartarus, to the kingdom of the dead, to bring him, as Psyche did, the elixir of life.
For seven years I’d been waiting for a letter from Andrei. For seven years I’d been checking my letterbox five times a day to see if there was a letter from him. Seven years. From the moment when Andrei had left, I hadn’t received a single line from him. Silence. Nothing. Seven years of silence. Seven years, seven times three-hundred-and-sixty-five days with nothing to do except wait.
Svidenii ne imeem, we don’t know, they’d told me at the Soviet Embassy when, three months after Andrei’s departure, I’d gone there to ask for some information about him. We don’t know anything about him.
We don’t know, the Soviet consul told me four months after Andrei’s departure. And after five, six, and seven months he said the exact same thing: Svidenii ne imeem. My letters to Moscow, to the Foreign Ministry, and then to the Ministry of the Interior, had gone unanswered.
A letter to Stalin: To the Most Distinguished Mr. Stalin.
No answer.
Another letter, a desperate one this time: Comrade Stalin!
No answer. Not a single word.
I found myself standing in front of the door that had just been closed behind me. In front of the door of the palace of ice. The door of the Černín Palace, the headquarters of the Foreign Ministry.
Just one thing was echoing in my head, the one thing they’d told me, a single rosary made up of a single sentence repeated as if it were a litany, “We don’t know anything. We recommend that you desist from seeking Polonski, the painter, for your own good, although, I repeat, we don’t know anything.”
The day after my visit to the palace of ice, I received an urgent certified letter informing me that I was to go to the Ministry of the Interior on a matter of the greatest urgency. The brown one and the gray one were waiting for me there.
“Have you thought our proposal over?”
“Yes.”
“Do you accept it?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Not at all, not even as an occasional proposal?”
“Not at all. I can’t go on living like this. Leave me alone.”
They had a good laugh. The brown one slapped his knees, the gray one pressed his hand to his belly.
Suddenly, they fell silent, as if someone had given them a secret signal. They became serious, as if at a funeral.
The gray one said, sadly, “You are in a pickle. Ooooh, what a horrible pickle!”
When the brown one spoke, I saw a stick beating against the table.
“You’re playing with us. You have been intimately involved with a Russian, you ask about him all over the office, as if we two here didn’t exist.”
Did they know something? Hope flared up in my brain like a flaming arrow in the darkness.
The two men fell silent.
“Where is he?” I asked; I couldn’t bear it.
They remained silent. I could barely withstand the tension. After a while, the stick hit the table once more.
“You’re . . . an enemy of the people!” the brown one said in a tone of infinite disgust.
“Enemy of the people?” I exclaimed. It was all the same to me. Only one thing mattered, “What do you know about him?”
They said nothing. And they grimaced, mixing secrecy with irony, and made sick-sounding noises.
“What do you know about him?” I asked, urgently.
“About Andrei Polonski?” said the gray one, with repugnance, “The painter of perverse scenes and Gypsy orgies?”
They looked as if they were about to throw up.
I made no attempt to disguise the suspense I felt. Nothing mattered to me. I looked at them, humbly. Like a beggar, begging for some news, a bit of information. Whatever it turned out to be.
The gray one spoke in studied tones, drawing out each syllable. That grimace of victorious, mocking superiority remained on the faces of both functionaries, “Mrs. Stamitz, you, who are not a member of the Communist party, who refuse to become one, you, a single mother, which is to say a harmful being in a socialist society, it is you who are asking us for something, and yet you are not prepared to give us anything in return? That is not fair!”
The brown one said, in a low voice, “Comrade Stamitz, whether or not you are a single mother, whether or not you were involved with a degenerate painter and enemy of the people, that doesn’t matter. All I want to tell you is that we know how to protect those people who are of service to us.”
“I can’t do what you ask of me,” I said in a faint voice.
“Do you still love him, that enemy of the people? And your son, do you love that son of yours? And does he love his mother?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“At school tomorrow, the teacher will read out to Jan’s class the story of a bad socialist, so that they may learn to despise you. It will be your story, Comrade Stamitz.”
I was choking, I couldn’t believe what I’d heard, I couldn’t believe they could blackmail me in this way.
I shut up and signed.
At suppertime, I put on a record of Orthodox Russian liturgies. I made potato rissoles. Jan, having wolfed down twenty of them, asked me, “It’s been a long time since you told me about Papa. At school they ask me what my father does and I don’t know what to say, so the kids laugh at me because of it.”
“He lived with the animals in the forest. He too, was a kind of wild creature that was afraid of people.”
“What do you mean? Isn’t he alive?”
That was the last straw. The camel’s back broke, split, cracked apart.
Jan wiped away my tears with the palm of his hand.
“Papa’s got lost in the forest, hasn’t he? When I’m grown up, I’m going to find him.”
“We’ll go together, if you want.”
“You’d be afraid. There’ll be deer, bears, and maybe even wolves.”
“I won’t be scared. If you come with me, I’ll be brave.”
The slate turntable went on turning—here we go again, and again—and filled the little, single-roomed flat with music worthy of the angels, sung by silvery feminine voices and garnet male ones. The kind of voice your father had, I mean has, Jan. Every evening we listened to the Orthodox Russian liturgies, and Jan dreamed about fighting with bears and wolves. Before going to bed, I would tell Jan, by way of a folktale or lullaby, about his father’s childhood: how once a week, his parents would take him to church. Spiritual fathers with endless white beards and black tunics that stretched down to the floor would say the words of the Mass in grave, ever-so-melodic voices. When his father left the church, he would find himself in the middle of the stunning white silence of vast Russian solitude, and he would be blinded by sun, snow, and ice.
And Jan would sleep peacefully in the middle of the chanting and the incense, as the candles made the shadows weak.
The door of the Ministry closed behind me . . . For me you will go to the city of suffering . . . Abandon all hope . . . I took a deep breath, but was short of oxygen all the same. I felt dizzy and had to sit down, but there wasn’t a chair or bench in sight. I leaned aga
inst the wall, but then I had the sensation that the building’s walls were caving in, that I’d be buried under the ruins.
I held the letter with the name of the official to whom I had to supply information, and who would instruct me as to my job. The letter bore as well the time and day of our next appointment: today, in five minutes’ time. Now!
Every day I woke up after a sleepless night, with stomach upsets caused by fear. In the library they had fired almost all my colleagues and had replaced them with new people. Why had they got rid of Jana, Jarmila, and Maruška? The rest of us lived in constant fear, like beasts awaiting their turn at the slaughterhouse. It was just like when the Nazis were here. And the meetings . . . Once they accused me of things in the most humiliating way, yet another time they praised me a little so I began to hold my head high and work with pleasure, but not long after they shamed me again and belittled me in front of all the others. They forced me to bow down, more and more until I was unable to hold my head high.
We vegetated, we existed; we weren’t living. We tried to turn ourselves into shadows, we dressed in gray, shapeless clothes. Even my hair, which I dyed golden in the summer, was hidden under an old hat. What I wasn’t going to tolerate was covering my head with the kind of headscarf used by Russian women working on the kolkhoz, or put on a blue tracksuit or overalls, those uniforms of the new era. The concierges, employed by the authorities, kept an eye out and watched everyone like a hawk and knew every step that was taken in the respective houses—they spied and wrote reports. The concierges always appeared everywhere at key moments, they entered the butcher’s after you’d been queuing for two hours, and miraculously managed to get their own sausages or half a kilo of meat, and were able to pay for it quickly.
Like everybody else, I dragged myself past the rows of houses like a shadow, so that no one would spot me, so that no one would pay any attention to me, so that no one would spy on me and write a report about me.
Our only pleasure consisted of the absence of any events. We only felt happy when some predictable mishap ended up not happening.
And now they’d asked me, too, to keep an eye on people, to closely observe those around me, to spy on them and write reports about them. That’s why they’d summoned me, that’s why I’d come to them at the Ministry of the Interior. And afterward . . . afterward perhaps they wouldn’t throw me out of my job. Maybe they would let Jan get a place at university. And above all: maybe I could find out what had happened to Andrei.
Where was it I had to go, in fact, in this huge ministry building? I asked myself, full of nausea and loathing.
“Excuse me, sir, is this where I go?” I asked a short man, a visitor like me, and I showed him the name of the official mentioned in the letter.
“Here, on the ground floor? You need to go to the third floor, that’s where the top guys are,” he said, sniffing loudly, he probably had a cold. “Down here is where you come to collect your money, once you’ve done your work. You’ll see, quite a pretty penny!” He winked at me, sniffing even louder, and added in a low voice, “Today I’ve made a small fortune!”
Having given me this information, the man felt important; he widened his stance and puffed out his chest.
At that moment I saw myself as if in a mirror; yes, that man, with his wide, orange tie, that man who couldn’t stop his loud snot-swallowing and who wet his fingers, counting greedily his banknotes, that man with his self-satisfied smile and his hoarse voice was my mirror image. That is how I was, or would be if I complied.
I didn’t pull myself together until I was back on the street, when I’d put some distance between myself and that place, striding away, fleeing as fast as my legs could carry me.
One evening, when Jan hadn’t yet returned home, I sat Andrei’s shadow down on the sofa next to me. With his absent self I could chat away as much as I wanted, tell him anything and be sure that he would listen to me, that he wouldn’t interrupt me, that he would understand me. I’d never have to repeat myself or explain anything that was inexplicable to him. His absent self would accept my stories and my opinions and my philosophy of life in the way that I wanted him to. He would argue with me, though, for sure. I knew Andrei’s replies. They were always unusual, uncommon.
As I listened to the silvery voices of a Russian mass, I told Andrei’s shadow, “They came back to the library one day, rude this time, and absolutely furious. They ordered me to go and see them. I told them my intentions: I would not go anywhere and I didn’t want to see them ever again. Then, Andrei, they moved us to a tiny cubbyhole. Now we live in an attic room, where it freezes over in winter and is stuffy in the summer. There’s a concierge in this house too; this one’s fat whereas our previous one was skinny, but as far as everything else is concerned, there’s nothing to differentiate between them.
“Jan finished his school year with results that were exaggeratedly bad. At the meetings at work they threaten me and put me down. They’ve demoted me three times over, which means my salary has been cut by half; it’s not enough to live on. My life is fear and defenselessness and terror, but Andrei, my life now really is mine! It belongs to me, to me and nobody else! I’ve learned to make three dozen different kinds of potato dishes.
“Meanwhile, Jan and I listen to Russian liturgies and plan our move to the forest to live with the deer, the bears, and the wolves. As you yourself once did, Andrei.
“Someone’s coming up the stairs now, Andrei, with heavy footsteps, it’s Jan, at last. That too, is a kind of happiness.”
It wasn’t Jan. My eight-year-old son hadn’t turned up all day nor that same evening.
I went to the neighborhood police station. They gave me the brush-off. “You’re not looking after your son properly, Comrade!”
That’s when I started to suspect that the people at the Ministry of the Interior had kidnapped Jan to punish me for not having agreed to work as their spy.
There was no news of Jan for two whole days.
If he doesn’t show up after two days, I thought, I’ll go to the Ministry of the Interior and sign everything they ask me to. I’ll do anything they want just as long as they give Jan back to me! To stop myself from shaking, I imagined what I’d say to him when he turned up. I’d tell him his favorite folktale; I’d read it when I was his age. It was about a prince who could only be happy in his dreams, and only then if he hadn’t previously made his princess sad. The tale finishes with a moral: He who controls the reigns of his beloved’s heart should remember that he is in a beautiful dream and should avoid being woken from it! To awake thus, is to fall from a beautiful day into the darkness of night.
Jan hasn’t come home now for three days. Where is he?
I berated myself for not having kept a closer eye on him. But I couldn’t very well walk all the way to the school gates with him! I spent all my time in the evenings and on weekends with him only, I rejected the invitations from my new women friends and from my men friends. I remembered my own childhood and didn’t want Jan to feel the way I felt then. I remembered my mother, who had often made the trip to Prague to go to a ball or to the theater or to the opera or to a concert. Back then, she would wear her blue coat for going to the theater, with white ermine on the collar and sleeves, and if she were going to a ball, she’d wear the olive lace dress, or the sleeveless pink satin one, with long gloves that stretched to above the elbow. She often didn’t even say goodbye to me, but I would wait for her under the big arch of the entrance, beyond the bridge. I used to throw myself at Maman’s neck when she reaches where I was waiting. I would smell her pompadour rose perfume and cry my eyes out, shouting at her not to go. Maman always brushed me off coldly, saying, “What a spoiled little girl! Home with you!”
Poor Maman . . .
Four days and Jan still hasn’t come home. If he doesn’t turn up this evening, I told myself, the next day I’d go first thing to look for those two men and beg them to let me be of service to them in exchange for getting my Jan back.
Monsieur
Beauvisage . . . how he’d changed! That night he was sitting on my sofa at home. I’d met him at a drugstore in Zizkov, where I’d been queueing to buy laundry soap and toilet paper, mainly so I wouldn’t have to go straight back home after work and resume my exhausting wait.
He’d called out my name when I was in the queue.
“Sylva von Stamitz . . .”
I’d turned around, but hadn’t recognized the man who’d said those words, who’d startled me.
“Sylva, it’s me, Petr, you used to call me Monsieur Beauvisage.”
A man thin as a rake, with just a few white hairs left, but that smile . . . yes, it was Petr.
Now he was sitting on my sofa at home, as far as possible from the door. You couldn’t talk openly anywhere else, it would be dangerous to do so, Petr said. In a whisper, he told me his story, a persecuted writer who had spent two years in the uranium mines.
That’s why I hadn’t recognized him. It had been nine years since we’d last met.
“You know how it works, Sylva? The political trials go on and on, so people can see that the class struggle is intensifying. In recent years, this Stalinist doctrine has become the driving force behind the government regime. The secret police look for class enemies wherever they can. Be careful, Sylva. The police themselves invent conspiracies of Western imperialists or emigré traitors. That’s what happened to me. Once they’ve accused someone, they have to give him the works. I know what I’m talking about, and I also know that they use methods that are often worse than those used by the Gestapo. Nobody knows anything about it, nobody can talk about it—only we know about it, we who have been through it all. The police need confessions whether a crime has been committed or not. To obtain them, they tie a bag over your head and chain your hands and feet. Then they blind you with electric light, beat you until you faint, smash your teeth, put you in a bathtub full of excrement. They apply electric shocks to the most susceptible parts of the body, and if you’re a man they go for your testicles; this type of torture the police call the ‘howl of the calf’ or ‘tomato purée.’ The victims under investigation are made to stand for hours, their faces to the wall, or sometimes quite the opposite, when they are made to walk without stopping. Sometimes there are even fake executions, when they tell the victim to say goodbye to life. And afterward? Those wrecks are no longer human beings: they’ll confess to anything, they’ll sign whatever needs to be signed. Then they must learn their crimes by heart and recite them before the court. On top of this, they’re given drugs before they speak to the court or on the radio so that they lose touch with reality and go on and on about crimes they never committed. Sometimes they even ask for a longer sentence or the death penalty itself.”
The Silent Woman Page 24