I have taken refuge within myself, Jan. Of my own free will I have distanced myself from my friends and colleagues, and from the political and cultural debates and discussions that the dissidents organize in the strictest secrecy. Perhaps you will criticize me for this. But the fact is I only have faith in what I can do by myself, I take pleasure only in little, everyday things. I have dug myself in, here in my solitude on the outskirts of Prague. Like someone seeking sanctuary in a monastery, I have fled from a world to which I am not bound, at a time when hypocrisy reigns mightier than ever. During the darkest periods of our recent history, the times of Hitler and Stalin, our moral values began to deteriorate. That process is continuing now, nobody knows the difference between good and evil. In Moscow, Mr. Semyon—you remember him, don’t you, Jan?—told me that a man who survives the gulag or any other system involving the extermination of men by other men, remains devastated by the experience. The world around him becomes a place of exile. It becomes a humiliation that lasts forever, and humiliation is as painful as physical torture during an interrogation. From a world that humiliates me, that humiliates all of us who live in this country, I have taken refuge in myself, as if I were my own convent. I lack for nothing, I depend on myself and myself alone, the gray, rainy autumn sky is as appealing to me as a wonderful sunny day. I lack for nothing . . . No, I won’t lie to you. There is something I do find lacking. I lack tenderness . . .
“What is your son doing now, Sylva?” Petr asked.
Sylva said nothing.
“What is your son doing now?” Petr insisted.
“He lives in America, where he is a prestigious mathematician specializing in cybernetics. He’s doing research into electric cars now,” Sylva said, matter-of-factly.
“An exile,” Petr sighed.
“Yes, an exile,” Sylva repeated in the same weary voice.
“There are so many emigrants . . . when is the stream of people who smuggle themselves out of the country every day, going to stop?”
“I understand them,” Sylva said, thoughtfully, “They want to live as they please, not according to someone else’s whim, and here, they can’t do that.”
“They are weakening us.”
Sylva didn’t answer. With her nails, she traced shapes in the wax that had fallen from the candle onto the plate.
“This exodus is weakening us. Don’t you feel weaker, Sylva?”
With her nails, Sylva drew a flower, a four-leaf clover, a teddy bear with round ears. In her mind, she had gone beyond the conversation. The flame in the dark was whipping at her thoughts.
“You’ve probably had supper, haven’t you, Sylvette? So I’ll gobble all this down on my own,” Petr said, without waiting for Sylva’s reaction.
His job as a parking lot attendant has changed him, Sylva thought, he’s Monsieur Beauvisage no longer, elegant as he was, with that air of poète maudit about him. The atmosphere in which we live has changed all of us.
“Don’t you think, that with all these exiled people, we have grown weaker? Don’t you feel weaker, Sylvette?” Petr toyed with the last morsel of camembert on his fork, before popping it into his mouth. “Yummy!” he said.
Sylva wanted to leave. Where was her handbag? And her coat?
But she was in her own home! She couldn’t run away. She had to stick it out, no matter what. How can a person change so much? she asked herself again.
“How much did it cost you, this French cheese that I’ve gobbled up in no time? Two hundred crowns? How many hours would I need to work to earn this ephemeral piece of food that has only lasted me a couple of minutes?”
Petr picked up a pencil and, drawing highly complex equations in the margins of a page of the newspaper, worked out how long he would have to work in order to earn two minutes of gastronomic pleasure, how many days, how many hours, and probably how many seconds.
“You know, Petr, whoever can, gets away from here, flees from this deathly atmosphere as if from the plague.”
“We don’t have any incentives, or any freedom, that’s for sure, but so what? You can take pleasure in what you find within yourself.”
“That’s not good enough for everyone, Petr. Who can be interested in what you do, if nobody, in the end, cares whether you work or not? How can anyone live like that, especially young people?”
“It’s good enough for me.”
“For you, maybe it is, but a young person needs to face up to the outside world, just in order to know himself. The more there is to face up to, the better.”
“This country is good enough for our dissidents. They write their novels and their philosophical essays here. And even if they’re not allowed to publish, they make an effort to keep a smile on their faces.”
“Petr, making an effort to seem happy has nothing to do with real happiness. It is nothing but a contrived grimace.”
“They are bound by friendship, and loyalty.”
“Who is bound?” Sylva smiled wearily.
“The dissidents.”
“Friendship, certainly, now that they have a common enemy. But if they lived in freedom, you’d soon see just how well they’d get along with one another.”
“You’re a pessimist. You can’t deny that these are people who know how to love, who feel that love is an incentive.”
“In the dissidents’ ghetto, promiscuity is a substitute for freedom of expression.”
“You paint everything gray, no, black, Sylvette,” Petr said, shaking his head.
“I know these dissidents of yours well enough. Helena was a young violinist who lost her job in an orchestra because she’s a dissident. She was a friend of Jan’s. There is just as much sadness among the dissidents as there is among the rest of us; sadness and boredom and ennui.”
“Sadness? Are you sure? I would say rather that they share a tragic spirit, a common sense of tragedy.”
“No, Petr. You’re sugarcoating it. Tragedy is energy, flight, zest, pathos, dignity. We live in a dull vacuum with nothing glorious about it at all.”
“You talk as if you were the victim of an injustice, Sylva.”
“No, it’s not that,” Sylva watched the wax circle spread as the candle kept dripping onto the plate, “My fate has not been unjust to me. I look back without regret at all those years of humiliation, first because of the Nazis, and now, for the last quarter century, because of the Communists.”
“Sylva, it is good to regret the negative parts of our lives.”
Sylva didn’t answer until after a long pause. She did so with a cry, albeit one in the form of a whisper.
“If I were to regret all those years . . . what would be left of my life?”
Petr raised an objection, but Sylva paid it no more heed than if it had been distant rustle of tree branches. She looked at the flame, and her thoughts toyed with another evening, long ago.
“Do you still do some accounting, Petr?” she said, smiling at the edges of the sheet of newspaper, packed with equations.
Petr pushed away the newspaper and the pencil. He took Sylva by the arm. His eyes rested on her lips.
“That’s right, I’m always doing sums of some kind. It’s a professional drawback that comes from spending every day charging people for parking spaces. But I also count all the obstacles I will have to cope with before I can have you . . . the way I want to. Like this.”
Petr hugged her with both arms. Sylva saw that he was emotional.
She, on the other hand, was anything but. She dwelled on very different images.
Sylva released herself from Petr’s embrace.
“You always say our, our . . . ” she said, “Our dissidents, our country, our nation. Humph!”
Sylva wrinkled up her nose. Was she capable of loving a nation, a country, a collective? Suddenly, she heard herself say, “Spare me your groups, your collectives. I want to live! I want them to let me live, to breathe! I want to be me!”
“I’m sorry?”
“I want to be me, nothing more than that!�
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“I most definitely believe in working for the good of a collective.”
Sylva told herself that she liked this Monsieur Beauvisage she saw now, with his shining eyes as they were then, in that remote time, in that remote chateau.
“We live in a cemetery, Petr, can’t you see that?”
“What will become of us?”
“You’re like an actor in a tragedy,” Sylva gave a tired laugh.
“No, I mean it. What will become of us?”
Sylva took a long sip of wine. She walked over to the window and looked into the darkness, saying more to herself than anyone else, “It is our fear that allows them to subdue us.”
“Fear?”
“By playing on our fear, they keep us in a state of constant panic. We’re afraid they’ll punish us for a crime or misdemeanour we haven’t committed. We know we haven’t committed it and still we’re afraid.”
Petr stared at Sylva’s glass without seeing it.
“Sure, I’m afraid, me too, but I know I should stop feeling this way. I should get rid of such an obstacle to inner peace.”
“You won’t manage to do it, Petr. Everybody’s afraid. Whatever we do, we always act under the influence of fear. And that’s what is humiliating.”
Petr blinked several times, uncontrollably, violently. Sylva thought that maybe this was a nervous tic left over from his time spent in a Stalinist prison.
“But don’t you think that . . . ”
“Come on, Petr, don’t kid yourself. Our life is nothing but humiliation with a capital H.”
“But, perhaps you can just ignore it and . . . ”
“Ignore what? Ignore that at any moment they can take the few things you have left? Ignore that they have managed to grind you down, to shame you? That they’ve won?”
“What do you mean that they’ve won? They haven’t as far as I’m concerned, Sylva.”
“They have, Petr. They have turned us into exactly the type of people they wanted us to become: run-of-the-mill citizens, bothered only about day-to-day problems, without any grand ideals, or anything to look forward to. We’re capable of denying ourselves everything for months and months because we’re dying to get hold of some Spanish entry visas. Have you any idea of the wasted energy that that entails? When we worry about such things, we’re unable to spend time on things which really matter.”
“Sylva, there’s something you need to know. You’ll have a go at me, I know you’ll say it’s trite, but to be honest it’s what I feel: even in prison, one can be free.”
“That’s a pretty-sounding thing to say. Just try it, Monsieur Beauvisage.”
“You’re a spiteful woman, I knew it. I don’t need to try it, I do it all the time. My work consists of taking people’s money so they can park their cars. Do you know what I like best about this modest little job?”
“I’ve no idea. I mean you’re out there in the freezing cold, they haven’t even given you a shelter!”
“What I like best about the job is that I don’t have to put up a front. If I want to speak ill of the regime, I do so. In your line of work, of course, things are different.”
Sylva looked at the cast iron helmet, staring the armed knight in the eye. The light of the candle’s flame danced over it: the knight had come back to life. Sylva addressed her reply to him, “Yes, everybody pretends to believe in Communism, those at the bottom and those at the top. I don’t. They’ve taken everything I had, they’ve dispossessed me completely. I haven’t got a thing, which is why I feel free.”
“I don’t see the logic of what you’re saying, Sylva.”
Sylva addressed herself once more to one of the resuscitated knights who were trembling to the rhythm of the candle’s edgy flame.
“They took everything away from me, even the piano. They’ve made it impossible for me to move, to travel, they have taken my son and the man I loved. There is nothing else for them to take away. I am nothing, I have nothing, I desire nothing. I’m free. Maybe that’s the irony that lies behind this regime: they take everything away from you and by doing so they liberate you.”
Sylva gave a melancholy smile and went on, “Petr, the other day, in this cupboard here, I found a photo album. There’s not much of a chance I’d run into many of the people in those photos in the streets or concert halls of Prague these days. My mother and my father and my grandmother and even Mama’s second husband, are all dead. Jan and his closest friends are in exile in the United States and Canada and Switzerland. The only one left to me is Helena, Jan’s ex-girlfriend, a woman whose life has been very different from mine. With the photos on my lap, I started daydreaming: I had ended up on the seashore, where there was nothing but black willow trees and black sand under a dark gray sky. I dug a ditch in that sand and filled it with the blood of the dead animals that were lying close by. Then the souls of unknown dead people appeared, along with the souls of others who I knew and will never see again. Those shadows wandered around the ditch full of blood. The inhabitants of the kingdom of shadows, the inhabitants of Tartarus, were coming toward me: figures in white and black and gray, that could barely be made out against the black sand and the black rocks that enclosed the bay. In that strange procession I recognized my father, my mother, and Bruno Singer, my first husband and all the friends and loved ones I had lost. As the shadows of the dead were passing by, my mother stopped, ‘You have brought the wrath of the gods upon yourself, daughter of mine.’
“My mother’s shadow looked at the horizon, as did Tiresias, the blind fortune-teller, who was there as well, not very far from my mother. And the Black Lips—Maman—slowly pronounced their verdict, accompanied by an echo from the grave, or so it seemed to me, ‘You have brought the wrath of the gods upon yourself, daughter of mine, because you never used your own head, but allowed yourself to be swayed by the opinions of others.’
“‘What can I do to make up for my errors, Maman?’
“But my mother wasn’t listening. The Black Lips went on weaving their oracular spell, ‘Andrei, the father of your son, has not ceased waiting and hoping that he will see you again; he often weeps for you. Your son is fulfilling his destiny, but he is alone. Alone, daughter of mine, he seeks solace in feverish work and has gained worldwide prestige. And I? My longing to see you and my grief upon discovering that you had forgotten me when I was suffering in the Terezín concentration camp, cut my life short.’
“My mother walked away, and with her the other shadows also wandered off. Those people who knew me waved when they passed by, and immediately disappeared into the mist.
“Only the shadow of my first husband passed in silence, his head bowed. Even dead, he resented me and would never forgive me.”
“I understand you, Sylva,” Petr said, although he didn’t understand a thing, or precisely because of that. He couldn’t understand her because he was thinking about something else. After a moment of silence, he told her about his idea, “In The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal talks about Fabrizzio, who, when he’s imprisoned in the tower, is happier than when he was free.”
“That’s a novel. Don’t tell me you’re influenced by rubbish like that. Freedom is a synonym for happiness, at least it is so for the great spirits.”
“I am indeed influenced by it, and am happy to be so. Fabrizzio was happy because his love was also in the tower, Sylva.”
“Not a love, an illusion. Don’t be naive, Monsieur Beauvisage, it’s been a long while since you were twenty years old.”
Petr got up and approached Sylva. He bowed over her.
“Sylva, would you . . . ? Would you want to marry me?” he said in an uncertain voice.
Sylva didn’t move a muscle. She thought that Petr now looked just as he did a long time ago at the chateau, in a similar situation.
“After fifty years, Sylvette!” Petr added. So he too has been thinking about events back then, thought Sylva. Petr gave a little laugh to cover up the catch in his throat.
Sylva moved away from him,
threw her head back, and sank into the darkness of the past, lit up by the lampposts in the park of the chateau.
Once again, she released herself from Petr’s embrace and sat down at the table.
“Sylvette,” she repeated.
The only reply was the sound of a dog barking and then howling. The window trembled from the gusts of wind. “Sylvette,” she said, quietly. The wind was whistling on the far side of the window, as if threatening her. Sylva took a long look at the candle flame, until spots began to dance before her eyes.
Slowly, she brought her face closer to the candle. She took a breath and released it with a puff.
The candle went out.
Sylva went over to Petr.
“My name is not Sylvette,” she said in a metallic voice, in the middle of the dark. And she added, in the same tone: “Yes, I’ll marry you, Petr.”
Untethered, she ran through the shadows.
A dog howled on the street. Gray light heralded the dawn.
After a short while, the first morning bus passed by, sounding its horn, and, for a fraction of a second, it lit up the wall of the room.
XIII
JAN
“Did you enjoy the kebab and the pilaf?” the waiter asked, hurrying on his way past us to the part of the restaurant furthest away.
I nodded, trying to smile with my mouth full.
“How about the wine, did you like our shiraz? Would you care for another bottle?”
The waiter’s accent was foreign to me; it sounded like he was talking in Persian.
Again, I answered in the affirmative.
Katya went on talking offhandedly into the phone. It was becoming more and more obvious to me that she might never get used to life in the United States. I thought about her and the cake she’d baked for my birthday, on which she’d placed six symbolic candles; Katya, who for Christmas always filled the house with red plants and colorful decorations; Katya, who went shopping at the supermarket and prepared meals and cleaned dishes; Katya, who did the laundry and hung it out to dry and ironed it afterward; Katya, who told Peter to be quiet when I was working in my study at home; Katya, who on my toughest days massaged the soles of my feet to calm me down.
The Silent Woman Page 30