The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  I’d had that dream more than once. Did you also have dreams that came back to you again and again, Mama?

  My father had them . . . I think I owe you an explanation, Mama. For a long time I wasn’t sure what had happened to my father. I only managed to get an idea after your death.

  Based on what you’d told me about my father’s fits whenever he was given an order, I sought to understand his psychological condition. My colleagues who were specialists in this field told me what you and I already knew: that he had been traumatized by his wartime experiences. As for his hallucinations, they were the result of a kind of mystic ecstasy. The emotional shock my father had experienced as a young man during the Russian Civil War, had shifted his brain in such a way that he found it easy to reach states of ecstasy, mystic states. That is why my father was a brilliant painter: people who are able to have mystic experiences know how to take their art further than others do.

  But the most important thing they told me was this: thanks to this ability to see the world in a different way, such people are able to weather the most terrible suffering, more than most could cope with. In their vision-filled ecstasies, in that world into which they are able to escape, they can create their own paradise that nobody, not even their jailers or torturers, can tear away from them.

  What happened to my father, Mama? Did he survive the gulag or didn’t he? And what was the name of that high-ranking NKVD man who signed his verdict? I’m sure that you found out when we travelled to Moscow together in the late sixties. You never wanted to tell me, you hid that information from me so that I would not seek vengeance and so ruin my life. What was the name of that man, Mama?

  But what does it matter now, that name! It would be of no significance if my wife’s father turned out to be my father’s murderer; the important thing is that he very well might have been. And I have joined his world voluntarily. Now at last I understand those words of yours, Mama: “In a period of calm it’s easy to make the right decisions, but when the going gets rough, it’s difficult, and many people make wrong decisions.” Solitude and exile can also be rough going.

  Who is my father’s murderer, Mama?

  Revenge: how many times have I thought about it! In order to punish evil or just to vent my anger? Vengeance can relieve pain, remove frustration, and give satisfaction to the one who has taken justice into his own hands. But who knows where justice lies? By killing a wrongdoer, would I bring justice to the world? Or would I add to the evil that is already there?

  Peter said, “I would like to eat nothing but potatoes, like Papa did when he was little, and draw endless pictures on toilet paper, like Papa’s papa. And your father, Mama, what does he do?”

  I was watching Katya: she looked at a loss, so Russian in a foreign country she just couldn’t understand and which didn’t understand her. In the US, Katya applied the principles of her native land, which, in this new context, just didn’t work. What’s more, the language cut her off from American society: in the shops, the sales assistants couldn’t understand her properly, and Katya never completely got what they were saying to her, just as she never really understood the advice that they gave her in banks and post offices.

  “My father worked in the highest echelons of the Russian Communist Party,” Katya said.

  I interrupted her, I couldn’t help it. The subject was too painful to me.

  “Katya, your father worked for the NKVD and then the KGB. Why?”

  “He was doing his duty.”

  “His duty to whom?”

  “To those who had ordered him to do so.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “My father believed in the party and in the aims of the Bolshevik revolution. When he was able to join the party, he gave it everything he had. At home, he told us eagerly about the laws and the decisions they made that would lead us into a better future, which is why it was so important to watch out for and imprison all those who were opposed to it. My father always said that he was a soldier of the Motherland, who obeyed orders.”

  I picked up my glass of water and took a couple of long sips. Peter watched me. I counted to ten, and took a long time to reach it. I followed Peter’s gaze: my hand was trembling. Peter held it in his.

  What had I been thinking when I started this futile conversation that was going to lead nowhere? I’d been thinking about happiness. Happiness is when somebody understands us, Bill had said to me once.

  “Peter, what is happiness?” I put my son to the test.

  “Are we at school or what?” Peter put on a cross face.

  “Tell me, what comes into your head when somebody says the word ‘happiness?’” I went on.

  “I know when a hamster’s happy: when he escapes from his cage. Remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  “That one day we went away for the weekend and we forgot to close the door of the cage, and the hamster got out and spent three days playing with the edge of the carpet and roamed all over the place. And he preferred nibbling at the carpet than eating all that really nice hamster food we’d put especially for him in his cage.”

  “And what else is happiness, Peter?”

  “I’m telling you. Happiness is being a hamster. He doesn’t do anything, he spends the whole day lying around, and when he gets fed up he takes a little walk, nibbles things here and there, then plays and goes back to sleep. Me, every morning, I have to go to school, then I have a French lesson in the afternoon, then a drawing class and a violin class, and there’s no time left for me to play. Being a man’s a waste of time. I don’t want to be a man.”

  “And what’s happiness, not for a hamster but for a man?”

  “For a man, I don’t know . . . maybe . . . ”

  “Seeing a puppet show? Hamlet?”

  “Yes, and when you come over to see me and stay sitting with me on the floor of the stage and you don’t care that the rest of the audience are kids and you hold my hand and laugh with the kids, not with the grown-ups.”

  “What else is happiness, Peter?”

  “Well . . . Hamlet with the gravediggers.”

  “Hamlet with the gravediggers?”

  “Yeah. With them he’s got stuff to talk about. Not like with that soppy Ophelia, he’s got nothing to say to her. Not to the king, either, or to all those nobles.”

  I quietly returned to my rice pilaf so as to get the idea of my own happiness out of my head. I wanted to think about freedom. My freedom is my son, I thought, the fact that I can bring him up and live in his world. And my freedom lies too in my big No, I thought to myself. In order to divert my thoughts before they started to dwell on the role of tenderness and understanding in my life, I took a swig of wine and went on eating. And remembering . . .

  It was August 20, 1968. Helena and I had shared a kebab similar to the one I was eating now, in one of those little cobblestone squares in Sarajevo, under some trees the name of which I didn’t know. Trees, or maybe they were climbing vines with purple flowers. From a window in one corner of the square came a melancholy tune, full of affliction. A sevdalinka, Helen had told me. The sevdalinka, sad and unhurried, is a traditional Bosnian song about something, or someone, that has been lost. These songs are about paradise lost, when it comes down to it.

  After dinner, we finished the wine that was left in the bottle and langorously let ourselves be caressed by the breeze, which in the evenings flowed through the narrow streets of Sarajevo’s Turkish district. A family had sat at a long table on the far side of the little square. Helena and I were silent, intent on listening to the newcomers’ laughter. One of the women started to sing, the kids had joined in, and then one of the men, and after him, yet another. They all sang in soft voices, almost in whispers, a nostalgic song in their Slavic language, of which we could make out the odd word, like ping-pong balls being bounced our way. Earlier that evening, in a theater surrounded by a garden, Helena had performed Bach’s “Concerto in B-minor.”

  During the perfo
rmance, it seemed to me that her violin was trembling with hidden grief. Helena played with lowered eyes, her chestnut hair falling freely over her shoulders. Helena played, and her music and my thoughts became enmeshed with the call of the muezzin that came from one of the surrounding villages, or maybe a Muslim mother was singing a Turkish song while she darned some socks. This oriental melody, whatever its source, caressed the Bach concerto with its white wing.

  That evening I saw Helena for the last time.

  At the break of dawn the radio announced that the Soviet army had crossed into the borders of Czechoslovakia. Helena wasn’t in her room. I looked for her all day, in vain. Desperate as I now was, that evening I clambered up the mountains that surround Sarajevo, looking for her. I walked nervously along the paths I’d previously taken with her. In that twilight perfumed by pinecones and moss, a few dogs came after me, growling and showing their teeth, but there was no sign of Helena. I searched for her in vain for days on end, looking everywhere. After I left, I plunged into my academic life in the United States, but never ceased to long for her, to look for her in all the women I met. For the woman who simply disappeared one day from the banks of the Bosnia river, like sea foam on sand, abandoned there by the waves.

  But that night I searched for her. At first light, I hurried through the streets of Bascharsha, Sarajevo’s Muslim neighborhood. People were going to work, and I kept bumping into them by accident. By the time the sun had covered the city, I had collapsed into a café chair, exhausted, fighting off my dizziness. A woman brought me some coffee so thick you could bite into it. A young man put a piece of baklava in front of me, that ever so sweet Balkan dessert, along with a glass of water. I couldn’t make out the passersby. I saw only gray shadows walking absurdly ahead. I know only one thing for certain: Helena was not among them.

  Sarajevo, I said to myself as I drank that Turkish coffee, this city so full of the steeples of Catholic and Orthodox churches, and dozens of synagogues decorated with Hebrew letters written in gold, and Turkish mosques with thin towers, white as sails on the sea. In the evenings, when Helena was rehearsing, I would order a glass of earthy red wine that gave off a smell of holm oak barrels and of melancholy nights, and sip it with the starry sky above me. Those nights were humdrum yet unforgettable, like the inhabitants of that country. I became lost in thought observing the mirror image of that street—a fragment of the world, my entire world right at that moment—reflected in the cupola of the mosque opposite. I had no sense of the passing of time. When the shadows passing in and out of the café started to order grilled meat for lunch, I stood up and left a few coins on the table by way of a tip. The woman in charge gave them back to me, laughing. She too, was one of the shadows.

  The best place to look for Helena was Ilidza Park: my girlfriend must have gone to the source of the Bosnia River, that place that was sacred to Bosnians, to tell of her sorrow at the assault on her country to the river’s springs. I wasn’t allowed into the park as night was already falling, but I had to find Helena! After dark, I jumped over the fence. The water from the springs fell onto the stones and grew wide as other streams fed into it, then sang its song in the middle of the night, a litany of grief.

  I spent the next few days looking for Helena in Sarajevo and the surrounding area. All in vain.

  Then I realized that, immersed as I had been in my own anguish, I had forgotten about the grieving for my own country invaded by Soviet tanks. I felt I was a selfish person who didn’t have the right to share that sorrow with my countrymen. But I had to make an effort to believe this self-confession of mine, which I supposed noble, like all confessions.

  Two days after all that had occurred to me, I joined the queue in front of the American Embassy in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, where I asked for political asylum in the United States. As I was a young scientist and had obtained good professional qualifications in Prague, after a considerable wait, my request was granted.

  Katya was back on her phone. I signaled to her that I’d like to talk to her. She closed the clamshell.

  Perhaps in order to express my enthusiasm before starting this conversation with Katya, I gestured in a rather rough way and knocked over my glass of wine. Peter smiled. Katya leaped off her seat and began to brush herself with the napkin as if she’d been engulfed by an entire swarm of furious bees. Peter put his napkin over the red wine that had spilled onto the white tablecloth. The waiter turned up in an instant with a clean glass, filled it, tidied up the table a little, and everything was just as it had been before. Except that Katya was still on her feet and all the restaurant’s customers were staring at her in astonishment. I blushed. Calmly and decisively, Peter said, “Sit down, Mama, what’s wrong? Why are you standing up?”

  But Katya stayed as she was: a statue built of indignation.

  Peter, with his innocent, ten-year-old’s voice, said, “Do you want everyone to stare at you, Mama?”

  When the place filled once more with the buzz of laughter and voices, Katya sat down. I agreed with Peter: Katya made that scene to become the center of everybody’s attention. It had been her minute of glory. But I didn’t have time to think this through, because Katya immediately removed Peter’s napkin in order to reveal the full horror of the wine stain.

  “You always find a way to put me in a bad mood!” she said, contemptuously, without looking at me, and went on rubbing her thigh as if she were putting soap on a huge wine stain.

  She was referring to another dinner, this one with some friends from my department. Back then, Katya had said those very same words to me in front of my colleague and his wife, “You always find a way to put me in a bad mood!” My American friends were left speechless by that bitter sentiment, spoken by my wife in front of other people. From that moment on, my colleague’s wife eyed her with abhorrence. Only when we were saying goodbye did she allow her back into her good graces, it seemed: Katya talked about our son Peter and how much he took after me.

  That evening, when we got back home, Katya told me a few stories, laughing easily as if she were a completely different person. I immediately forgave her previous lousy mood and hugged her.

  “Now I have the right to ask for three wishes, but I’ll stick to just one,” she’d said, laughing. “I’m a modest girl.”

  Once again, she flashed those white teeth of hers at me. That happened so rarely that I promised Katya to grant her a wish.

  She whispered in my ear, “You will take that job at the Ford Motor Company. For Peter’s sake, I’m not thinking of myself. We have a son, John, remember that!”

  Not long afterward, they came to see me: the tanned one and the sporty one, both in their best, impeccable dark suits. They invited me for a meal in a French restaurant.

  When we’d taken our seats, the tanned one said in a low voice, “I guess you realize, John, that with Ford, your salary would be incomparably higher than the one you’re getting at the university.”

  Maybe if I stayed on at the university, I thought, and did something for Ford at the same time, I wouldn’t have to go back on my big No, I wouldn’t have to betray myself.

  “John, what if you decided to work for us from your office at the university?” It was as if the tanned one had read my thoughts.

  “You’d be earning a good salary with us,” said the sporty one, finishing the sentence.

  “You’d make your wife happy.” The tanned one winked at me.

  “We’d make sure you had an experimental research center at your disposal,” the sporty one said, temptingly.

  “An electrical motor and two measuring devices, a salary for a technician, or two, if you need them.”

  “And then there’d be your salary . . . Wow!”

  “It’d include frequent trips to our main office in Detroit.”

  “Your salary . . . Wow! It’d be finger lickin’ good! Good enough to lick those fingers twice!” exclaimed the tanned one.

  For some men a time comes when they have to give a big Yes or a big No. Ove
r and over, I told myself: No. But then I thought to myself that if I worked for the Ford Motor Company from my university, I wouldn’t be betraying my big No, and Katya would stop her nagging.

  I nodded, “OK. Fine. I’m in.”

  XII

  SYLVA

  At night I was woken up by the ringing of huge bells, the kind I used to hear when I was little at my parents’ house; the sound came from a nearby village. Bells. They didn’t augur well. They sounded very close, and rang without a break, one after the other . . . Bells? No! This was the thunder of the gods, the Dies Irae.

  I got up and from my attic window in the Vinohrady district, I watched the river of huge metal objects that was flooding Francouzská Avenue. The clamor of those hellish monsters silenced people’s fear, their cries and moans. All you could hear were the blows and their echo, the blows of metal against the stone of the street; those monsters were the absolute masters of sleepy Prague, of the city that was now waking up with a shock in the middle of the night amid the roar of those savage metallic beasts. Those iron beasts were bursting into the circus into which our city was being turned, so that its inhabitants could become a source of amusement for a depraved emperor. Morituri te salutant, Caesar!

  I picked up the phone, finally hearing its ringing in between the passing of one iron monster and the arrival of another. I could hardly hear anything that was being said over the line, the racket on the street was drowning everything out. I was sure that it was Jan who was calling. My son, who was in Sarajevo, wanted to know what was happening, and how I was, how we all were. And he wanted to tell me . . . to tell me something that, although I couldn’t make it out, I knew what it was, yes, I heard it all right . . . “Mama, I won’t return to a humiliated country, I can’t live in a country that from this moment on will be trembling forever under the heel of a foreign power, more than it has ever done before.” And I knew that Jan was right, and I knew I was signing my own death sentence when I said, “Jan, my child, don’t come back.” Yes, I was signing my own death sentence because I would never see my son again, because I wouldn’t be able to leave the country to see him, and he wouldn’t be allowed to come here to see me. All this I knew perfectly well, as I said those prophetic words . . .