The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  “Have you tried to express yourself to them?”

  “I can do so, at least a little, through my drawings. Sylva, a man who has survived the gulag—or a Nazi concentration camp—ends up being incapable not only of making friends, but even of understanding anybody who hasn’t shared a similar experience. One option is to kill yourself, as a few of us have done. We survivors can only live with those who have been through the same thing, who live in the world as strange, incomprehensible beings to others. Those who have survived the gulag or any other such attempt to exterminate mankind, are scarred for life. For us, living in this world is like living in exile, and it is humiliating for us; we are permanently humiliated. And humiliation is as painful as the physical torture of interrogation, it is merely a different kind of pain. We have been exiled a second time, but now we are exiles in freedom.”

  He stopped talking. I said nothing. Once again, that Tiresias with his cane turned his knowing, blind eyes to us. He was breathing fast, excitedly, as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t get the words out. His eyes were shot through with pain. When he looked into my eyes, he lowered his gray lashes.

  On the way back to the hotel, Jan and I were silent.

  Jan didn’t feel like talking the flight back to Prague either. He stared at things without seeing them. He couldn’t imagine how grateful I was for his silence.

  On that journey back to Prague, I seemed to hear what I heard more than twenty years ago; through the racket made by the wheels of the departing train, you Andrei, whispered, simply and full of confidence, “Blue Butterfly!”

  XI

  JAN

  “Here you are, gentlemen, three kebabs, one with french fries, two with rice pilaf. The wine’s on its way!” chanted the waiter in his heavy foreign accent. He had enough experience waiting tables to know that the rice dishes were for the adults and the one with french fries was for the kid.

  I’d chosen that Persian restaurant on Seventy-Second Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan for our little private party. That afternoon, we’d been to see a puppet-show version of Hamlet. Our son, Peter, whose ninth birthday it was, lapped up the show from close up, seated at a corner of the stage with a few other kids. His mother, Katya, was sitting in the seats without even having bothered to take off the fur coat she’d wanted for so long, and which I’d given to her recently for her thirty-seventh birthday.

  Peter . . . Does that name ring a bell, Mama? It makes me sad that Peter, my son, wasn’t born while you were still alive. I named him after that friend from your youth, that man who, half a century ago, calmed me down after the police had released me. “Peter,” you said to him back then, “in a period of calm it’s easy to make the right decisions, but when the going gets rough, it’s difficult to see things clearly and it’s easy to make mistakes that you’ll regret for the rest of your life.” I didn’t understand them then, but I have remembered those words of yours as if they were engraved in my memory. From time to time I’d think about them, and each time I came to the conclusion that people should always be on the alert so that they don’t make the wrong decisions, ones they will later regret. I haven’t lived through anything like the experiences you’ve had, Mama. You once told me that gentleman, Uncle Peter, had saved my life. I don’t know anything more about that, we never spoke of it again, but I wanted my son to bear that name, in honor of the man you told me had done so much for me.

  That Persian restaurant . . . Now I am walking along a long airport corridor and the flight I’ve been waiting for still hasn’t landed. Flight OK 2901 from Prague to New York has been delayed by approximately two hours, that’s the information I have been able to glean from the rather cryptic messages on the airport arrivals screen, and I’m racking my brain for the address of that restaurant so that you can imagine what kind of place it is, Mama. But what am I babbling on about? You never traveled to New York.

  It was Saturday evening, the restaurant was chock-full of people wanting to have fun and eat well and laugh and joke and tell stories about their lives. At one of the tables, there was a married couple whose son was eating reluctantly, the woman never stopped talking into her cell, and the man made feeble efforts to cover up his boredom, trying repeatedly to start up a conversation that wasn’t going to happen. It was my family and me.

  My wife, Katya, was complaining about the American way of life, above all as it was lived in our little university town full of professors and scientists who weren’t at all worldly, and among whom she had no admirers. To some extent, I felt sorry for Katya, she who always looked as if she had just stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine, always dressed up. When Katya recited her litanies of complaints, I usually kept silent. I love this country because of all it has to offer me, things I could never find in the city where I was born. American law guarantees the freedom of the individual. This country full of powerful lawyers with their endless court cases—a country, to be sure, often criticized for its puritanism and materialism—works well in social terms because the law holds sway over the powerful at all levels, and everyone is equal before the law.

  That solitary husband, although surrounded as he was by his family, removed a piece of meat from its skewer and reflected back on a scene that had repeated itself several times in the course of his life.

  I was sitting at a table with two men who were showing their whiter-than-white, perfectly aligned teeth as they laughed and took bites of their sandwiches, rinsing each mouthful down with milk and Coke, respectively, as they patted me on the back and shoulders and emitted little sounds of pleasure.

  Suddenly, the tanned one said:

  “Let’s talk about the possibility of you working for Ford.”

  “In the future, is what we mean,” said the sporty one.

  “Not right now,” said the tanned one.

  “But in the future, hell, why not!” said the sporty one, grinning and raising his glass of milk.

  I didn’t say anything. I waited.

  They watched me carefully.

  I remained silent. There was nothing for me to think over, so I simply waited to see what would happen next.

  “John, we’re talking about a chance for you to work with us.”

  “I have no intention of leaving the university or my academic work.”

  They looked at me as if I were some kind of unusual animal.

  The tanned one said, in a low voice, “I guess you realize, John, that with Ford your salary would be way higher than what you’re getting at the university.”

  I was silent for a while. Then I repeated, “I do not intend to abandon the university and the research I’m doing there.”

  The sporty one reeled off a figure in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It struck me as being so fantastic, so out of proportion, that I couldn’t even make the connection between it and myself. I didn’t understand what was really going on, so decided to say nothing.

  But later, I said no again. Running through my head were those verses you’d taught me, Mama: “Whoever refuses does not regret it. If they ask him again, he’ll say no once more. Yet, despite everything, that ‘no’—which is exactly what had to be said—will terrify him all his life.” I repeated these verses to myself, and thought about Helena and wondered what she would have said about all of this. I think she’d have been proud of me.

  “Think about it long and hard, John. It’d be crazy not to accept an offer that even the ten greatest universities in the world could never, ever beat.”

  Katya was talking on her cell, Peter was playing with his french fries, which had long since grown cold. I pretended that I was eating with enthusiasm, while letting myself be carried away by the torrent of my own thoughts. All my life I’d been working with mathematics, either pure or applied, in other words, I’d been working with an exact science. From the start I’d known that the very structure of the exact sciences offered hope, not to mention security—the results of scientific research were objective, objectively valid, applicable, and
capable of being objectively valued. The starting point of the exact sciences is a collection of axioms, the correctness of which is beyond any doubt. The exact sciences operate within parameters that are absolutely verifiable.

  Yet little by little, I was starting to have doubts. A new discovery? To what extent can any discovery really be called new? After all, any new development has been based on long-accepted axioms and can only exist on that basis! The acceptance of the axioms as truth is based on long and exhaustive research, and only afterward can they been accepted as established fact, as if they were the Ten Commandments. But I was thinking about the laws of Newton, those axioms of physics: in some cases they had since become invalid, until Einstein turned up and made some small corrections to them, but by correcting them he founded a new branch of science. Doubting as I was, I thought about medicine: in medical journals I had read that medicine isn’t a science but rather an empirical collection of facts, which is why it is unable to guarantee a cure that is absolutely one hundred percent.

  So in what way is science infallible?

  There among the laughter and liveliness of the restaurant, I suddenly glimpsed a blue memory. Yes, that letter had been written on paper of a sky-blue color. That was not long after having dinner at Jill and Bill’s place. Peter hadn’t been born yet, but he was on his way and Katya and I were planning to marry soon. That morning, Katya was in the shower when I glanced over the handwritten lines; the letter was written in Russian. I shouldn’t be doing this, I told myself, but went on reading anyway. It was a draft of a letter and, without a doubt, Katya would later write a neat version of it, and then send it. Behind me I heard the splashing of the shower as I read this letter, the first page of which was missing:

  Do you remember, Sasha, the day you burst into my home shouting: “We’ve got to split up!” I looked you up and down, coldly, “Don’t make a scene. Go away. Come back in three days’ time and we’ll talk about it then.” And I added, “That is, if I still feel like seeing you in three days’ time.” Then and there you sent me crashing to the floor, Sasha, and if I forgave you it was because of the things that happened right there, on the floor. Do you remember? I had never been with you that way before, and we went on, in the shower, on the sofa, on the balcony, until nightfall, do you remember? I don’t know what your wife said to you that day. And do you remember that evening, too, when you threw me onto the snow on your way back from a restaurant near Moscow? With you things were always stormy, passionate. Every time we saw each other you told me you couldn’t stand the situation we were in, that you would get a divorce the very next day. You repeated these words to me a thousand and one times and like that you made it impossible for me to discover other men . . . discoveries that were more than possible, as I’d found out. I met an Italian who lived in Saint Petersburg, who everyone called Il Mammone, above all I met a Russian emigré in the United States named Mikhail, a businessman, and not a gangster like you. And then there was an American. Yes, him. The one I told you about, during my last visit to Moscow, as I kissed your sportsman’s thighs, hard, yet tender. I kissed your thighs, starting at the knees and working my way upward, and you Sasha, repeated, first in a whisper and then shouting and panting, that you loved me and were going to marry me.

  Now that I’m writing to you, I remember your body, without a gram of fat on it . . . those arms that lifted me up as if I were a feather, that muscular belly that I so liked to caress . . .

  But let’s get back to the facts: there we were, stretched out on the floor, and I was kissing those magnificent thighs of yours, moving higher and higher, and then, just at that moment, I raised my head and said quietly, “You say that you love me? You’re not the only one. I have a lover who wants to marry me.” And you, you slapped me hard and left. I loved you with passion for that, Sasha, because it was proof of your erotic frenzy for me. But I won’t marry you even if you did really get a divorce. No Sasha, I don’t want to marry a Russian, not even a rich one like you. It’s not that I’m bothered about how you earn your money, no, that’s your business. I simply do not want a Russian. I don’t trust Russians. I don’t trust them because I know them, I know myself, I know there is nothing solid inside us. We all lead potentially doomed existences, like the characters in a Dostoevsky novel.

  You say that you aren’t doomed? Not yet you aren’t, but we’ll see. I simply don’t believe you.

  Sasha, please understand. I’m not doing this for myself. You know that I want to have a child, you’ve always known that. I want to have a child in the best possible conditions: I want to give him everything, I want him to grow up in a civilized, Western country, with good schools and even better teachers, as well as the best possible health care.

  I want to be a housewife and look after a family. Even though my American is of Czech extraction, which is rather a pity, I’ll soon have him forgetting about his roots. At home we’ll speak in English only, and I’ll learn to cook American dishes. We will be an American family. We’ll be winners, the kind of people who have nothing but opportunities ahead of them and live exactly as they please, and not the kind who end up being life’s slaves.

  My American isn’t a smart operator like you, Sasha. He’s a bit of a wimp when it comes to making money, and in other aspects too, but I’ll change him, you can bet on that. I’ve already started. For a long time he didn’t want to make any decision as far as our relationship was concerned, so I’ve made him take one now. What’s more, I’ve discovered that he has a chance of earning a lot more money than he does at the moment. Why doesn’t he do it? Because he’s a typical intellectual and says that he has to dedicate himself to what he calls his mission. But when our son is born, I’ll make sure he takes good care of him! I’ll force him to earn some real money, and I know that you know I mean business, because you do know me, you certainly do!

  You ask me to come and see you again in Moscow, you say that you’ll run to me carrying anything I should ask of you between your teeth. Every night, yes, every single one of all the many nights that make up the year, I long for your ancient warrior’s body. I dream of what I would do with you: I’d begin right where I left off the last time, with your hard, muscular thighs, covered in golden hairs. I would kiss you, my tongue would caress you, higher and higher . . . But I’m not going to do it, Sasha. I’ve decided to be faithful to my husband. He doesn’t know anything about you. He will never know. I don’t want to make any mistakes. But Sasha, my love, promise me just one thing . . .

  The splashing of the shower came to an end. I quickly put the sheet of paper back in its place, and locked myself in my study.

  Once Katya had left the house, I went back into the bedroom to finish reading the letter, but all I found was the polished wood surface of the bedside table. The sky-blue letter had disappeared.

  I dismissed the whole thing with a wave of my hand. What did the bedtime adventures of Katya’s histrionic ex-lovers mean to me! Indeed, I felt relief at not having to choose between my curiosity and a deeper sense of decency, which ordered me not to read letters that aren’t addressed to me.

  But on that day I had certainly committed a grave error: I should have learned something from what I’d read. If I’d done so, I could have foreseen many of the things that happened later.

  I had slowly been eating the Persian kebab and was thinking about another dinner, one that took place not long before I read Katya’s letter, when she and I were eating in a restaurant, planning our wedding. That memory is salmon colored, as were the walls of that small, poorly lit restaurant.

  I had little interest in talking about the details of our future wedding ceremony. I took advantage of a break in the conversation to recite some verses that had influenced me greatly:

  For certain men the day still comes

  in which they have to say the big Yes or the big No.

  It’s instantly clear which one is ready with his Yes,

  and as soon as he says it he moves forward

  to honor and conv
iction.

  Whoever refuses does not regret it. If they ask him again,

  “No,” he’ll say once more.

  Yet, despite everything, that “no”

  —which is exactly what had to be said—

  will terrify him all his life.

  Katya didn’t get it. The poem probably wasn’t very clear. I boasted to her then that from time to time I received visits from two men who were trying to persuade me to work for them at the Ford Motor Company.

  Katya stared at me with wide-open eyes.

  “You have to accept this offer,” she said, breathlessly.

  By way of an answer I gave a little giggle.

  “You have to accept this offer,” Katya repeated, as if hypnotized, “Remember we’re going to have a baby, John!”

  At night, I dreamed that the sporty one and the tanned one, those two men who had never known the meaning of failure, were sitting at a table with Katya, who also looked tanned and sporty, and wore the happy smile of a woman who knew that she had been born for success. They sat at the restaurant with the salmon-colored walls, opening their mouths wide to take bites out of their multilayered sandwiches. They talked like conspirators and laughed and patted each others’ backs, drinking milk and giggling with pleasure.

  Throughout this I was sitting at a table in the corner, and I wasn’t looking at all sporty. I was pale, joyless, with graying hair, slumped over and resting my cheeks in my hands. I was drinking red wine and whispering to myself, “He who refuses does not regret it.”