She looked good. Men noticed her; she noticed them and watched them through half-closed eyes. Katya was smiling at me now. No, her smile wasn’t for me. Her coquettish laugh accompanied the words, “I don’t believe a word you’ve said,” spoken into the phone.
I never asked my wife or family to come with me when I went to scientific conferences; I went everywhere alone. Alone! That word that had scared me so before, now felt like some exquisite fruit from the garden of earthly delights.
Not long ago, I’d even gone to Prague alone. You’d told me about Prague and its cafés so often, Mama, about the cloakrooms with long winter coats hanging down to the parquet flooring. I’d gone to Prague to enjoy the various ambiences that spring up around the different café tables, and, above all, to imagine the piano teacher Sylva von Stamitz seated there: a cigarette in a long holder in one hand, and before her, a tall glass half-full of glittering, pomegranate-colored wine.
In Prague I, too, went to the cafés to pass the time, because there I could be alone and enjoy it, without feeling the least bit lonely. Perhaps you, too, searched for a crowded solitude surrounded by people’s conversations and emotions. Perhaps you, too, had become a stranger in your own land.
Anyhow, one day I dropped by a café, which had on one wall a picture of a naked green nymph sitting at a gentleman’s table. Looking at the picture, I thought of something completely different: Aesop’s fable about the jackdaw and the crows. A jackdaw who was bigger than the other jackdaws decided to go and live with the crows. By way of an explanation to the jackdaws he was leaving for good, he said that only the crows were worthy of his company. But the crows didn’t like the jackdaw, and thought that his feathers were ugly and his voice disagreeable, and they attacked him with their beaks. In the end, the jackdaw wanted to go back to the other jackdaws; but they didn’t want to have anything to do with him. So the jackdaw ended up without anyone who would accept him as he was. He was a stranger wherever he went and fell ill from loneliness.
That is a feeling I personally know rather well.
Is it arrogant, though, to search for freer climes? Is it a kind of cowardice, to abandon your country when it’s going through a difficult time?
So I sat there in the café, with that picture of a nymph and a gentleman in a dress coat in front of me. I took my eyes off the picture and looked around to see if I might find Helena somewhere on the premises. Then I noticed three white-haired men sitting at the table next to mine. Two of them were almost bald, and the third had a flowing mane of hair. Two of them . . . seemed to me to have once been my colleagues at work. Exactly thirty-five years had gone by, but I was sure I still recognized them. They were older than I was, and in their elegant suits and ties they still cut handsome figures. In this café, the three of them looked as if they’d stepped out of another world, an old, outmoded world, maybe that of Prague between the wars. I sampled the white wine in my glass, and let myself be carried away by their voices: the voices of Antonín, Pavel, and Dušan.
“In Holland they’ve discovered how to retain the consciousness of recently deceased people.”
Pavel took a sip of his cognac, and stroked his baldpate as if he were smoothing back an unruly fringe, and looked at the others to ascertain whether what he’d said had the desired effect on his friends.
It was obvious that it hadn’t made any impression whatsoever on Dušan. He stared first at the naked green nymph, then looked over at the curtain—a lace curtain turned gray by café smoke, which Prague’s spring breeze was fluttering in the open window.
“Retain the consciousness of the dead?” Dušan said in a low voice, more to himself than to anyone else. “That’s all the dead need. Not to be able to forget. What a load of nonsense!”
A fit of coughing shut him up. When it was over, Dušan gave his companions an apologetic look, but in that noisy café they didn’t seem to have noticed his coughing and probably hadn’t heard what he’d said before it, either.
“It’s not exactly the way you’ve described it,” Antonín stopped reading the newspaper editorial and energetically flicked the ash off the tip of his cigar. “In Holland they haven’t discovered a way of retaining the consciousness of the recently deceased. No, all they’ve done is study what happens after death. What they’ve discovered is that consciousness doesn’t disappear immediately. I’ve read about it too.”
Antonín tapped his knuckles against the final authority, the newspaper.
Maybe to cover for his weak memory, Pavel reached a hand out in the direction of the waiter and pointed to his glass to indicate he wanted another cognac.
“I’m thinking about a particular death,” Dušan said all of a sudden, while looking at the flapping curtain, which was spreading tiny flecks of dust into the air, visible only in the rays of sunlight. “I am remembering the death of somebody who had the same name as me, Dušan, and whose father was also called Dušan. The Russians have a word for this kind of double namesake: tiozka.”
A fresh attack of coughing shook Dušan’s body; he turned his face away from his friends. When he stopped coughing, he stayed quite still for a moment to get his breath back. He took deep breaths and watched the curtain as it billowed out and the flecks of dust that floated all around it.
“Do you want me to close the window?” Pavel suggested.
“No need, the fresh spring air is just fine!” Dušan said. “He was seventy years old, that tiozka of mine. At our institute one of our colleagues was called Kočí. Before he called himself Kočí, he’d had a long German surname, but had changed it for a shorter, Czech one. Friend Kočí wasn’t a complete dunce, but he wasn’t that smart either: mediocre from tip to toe, he was. Right at the start of our teamwork at the institute it was obvious that for his scientific work—if his patchwork mish-mash could be described as such—our colleague Kočí was drawing inspiration from texts published by my namesake. As happened all over the place during the Communist regime, meetings were organized pretty frequently at our institute to debate all kinds of matters, always from the point of view of the One True Ideology. You all know this, of course. One day, at one of these meetings, our colleague Kočí said, in reference to my tiozka: ‘Comrades, in my opinion, we should demote Comrade XY’—my tiozka, in other words—‘to a position involving less responsibility. In our managing body, we should avoid people who are not members of the party, and who, moreover, do not actively respect our current political regime or ideology.’ Nobody protested: that was unthinkable, naturally! We were, of course, afraid. To protest would have meant putting our jobs, our futures as scientific researchers, and our children’s welfare on the line. You’re right, Pavel, that’s no excuse, it really isn’t. But in that era we did so many things that . . . Who can say of himself that he bears no guilt? My tiozka. That’s who. After Kočí’s little speech, they forced him to step down from his position as co-director, and after the 1968 Soviet invasion, they sacked him altogether. My tiozka went on researching and writing articles, and I don’t really know how but he managed to keep up with the latest scientific trends in the West. How did he earn his living? He worked laying pipelines through the northern Bohemian mountains, but in the evenings, in a trailer, he studied and wrote. Since he was unable to publish, he passed his scientific articles on to me, and he probably passed them on to other people as well, because soon his reflections and analyses began to appear, incorporated into the otherwise worthless, supposedly scientific articles written by our colleague Kočí. And the director of the institute, ask me who our director was! Have you guessed? After the 1968 invasion, our colleague Kočí himself became the institute’s director, of course he did! Anyhow, to go on: after a short while, our colleague Kočí started to insert whole sections of my tiozka’s research into his own articles for publication, without any kind of acknowledgement, it goes without saying.
“After democracy,” Dušan went on, “our colleague Kočí stayed on in his job, of course, but he had to allow my tiozka to return to the institut
e. That’s right, the new authorities forced Kočí to invite my tiozka back to his job. Afterward, Kočí continually berated my tiozka for having lost touch with the scientific world when he was doing all that manual work, so that his scientific methods were now outdated and useless. But despite all this, he still took my tiozka’s articles and stuffed them away in a drawer for years. Without publishing them, of course. So my tiozka continued to write with no hope of publication, with the only difference that before the fall of the Berlin Wall his work was, from time to time, plundered by somebody else and publicized, whereas now under democracy, he was writing only so that his work could be put in somebody else’s drawer, where he had no access to it. My tiozka understood what was going on, and grew ill from the frustration of it. But why am I telling you all this? What were we talking about?”
“I think you’d started to tell us about the death of your namesake,” Antonín said.
“We were talking about life after death, that’s right. Thank you.” Dušan smiled and cleared his throat. “At my tiozka’s funeral, the director of the institute, our colleague Kočí, gave a speech in front of the coffin. At length, in detail, and with great pomposity he praised the highly commendable life of the deceased. People were crying, I saw their tears.”
Antonín’s spectacles flickered in Dušan’s direction, and he scratched his forehead. “What a cheek! Didn’t his friends, his acquaintances, his family, didn’t anyone protest at all?”
Dušan looked again at the curtain, the gray edge of which had just caressed the head of a man seated next to the window. He took a deep breath and his voice was hoarse when he said, “The deceased’s wife, my tiozka’s wife, was sitting in front of me. She only sighed loudly and said: ‘What a beautiful speech!’”
The waiter brought the bill to the three customers, asking them to pay now because his shift was over. They paid, Antonín then resumed reading the newspaper column and stroking his bald head. Dušan watched the gray curtain flutter.
What were we talking about, Mama, before I remembered that conversation between the three men? Oh yes, the emigré’s loneliness in a new country. My friend Bill told me that happiness is when we find somebody who understands us.
In Prague, I visited old friends, and had supper with former colleagues and schoolmates. Everything I saw there struck me as being old, as if it belonged to another life; can you understand that, Mama? My acquaintances told me about their lives, about those twenty years of putrefaction that had my native country in its grip after the Soviet invasion: a gray, dull, humiliating time, everywhere, in shops and on trams, in offices and during the holidays, at work and in restaurants. I wanted to know more details; they answered, “You didn’t live through it the way we did, you can have no idea what it was like.”
I think everyone I spoke to wanted me to feel guilty. My acquaintances didn’t want to hear about the loneliness of an exile, of his marginalization, or of his paralysis due to his poor knowledge of both the language and the cultural background of his new country. They didn’t want to hear that becoming an exile is an incurable illness. My acquaintances had got into the habit of thinking themselves superior, as men who had become exceptional because they’d been victims of a merciless dictatorship and had survived it, left to fend for themselves, while the West grew richer and richer. They were the great victims of the twentieth century, and now they waited for history to do them justice. So in silence I let them talk, without asking any questions, nodding at their stories because they really did interest me.
In Prague, I had tried to solve the mystery of your sudden death, Mama. At just over seventy, your death was premature; indeed, every death is premature. I was told that an unfortunate accident befell you: you inhaled toxic gas from a heating system, and had died together with a male friend of yours. Nobody could give me any further details. I liked knowing that during your last days, you had a man friend. Who was he? I imagine a slim, distinguished gentleman with white hair, the one you introduced me to once when I was little: Uncle Petr, you’d called him. Was it him, Mama? Or could it have been my father? I wish it had been my father there with you, but I’ll never know.
No sooner did I arrive in Prague than I realized I didn’t have any place to go, because you were nowhere to be found, Mama. Up until then, I’d imagined, from my solitary desk in the United States, that all I had to do was go to Prague in order to hear your voice and see your caring eyes, Mama, which never lost any time in discovering the feelings I’d hide behind an impenetrable façade. Since then, nobody has shown any interest in pulling the mask off of the prestigious researcher and happy husband. On the evening I arrived, I went to the apartment where you and I had lived; now a man was living there who didn’t want to let me in. Only then did I start to understand that if I wanted to be with you again, the only option was to do so by means of an internal monologue. I also traveled to the chateau of your childhood, where a guide was showing a group of tourists your Venetian colored-glass chandeliers, your Bohemian cut-glass wine goblets, the silver cutlery, and the Japanese cabinets that had belonged to your father’s grandmother. In that old chateau, the image I had of you took on a kind of solemnity, a grandiloquence, a distant, almost foreign beauty. I saw you standing there in the dead center of those rooms, their walls covered by the paintings of Dutch Old Masters. You, noble, distant, untouchable. You were filled with the atmosphere of that old chateau, which, like everything that belongs to a remote past, one conceives of as something unquestionable, absolute, full of a lost, impenetrable wisdom.
Did you commit suicide, Mama? I’ll never know for sure. You were a strong-willed woman. You must have been to raise a son on your own under Stalinism, and to accept that your old age would be lived in solitude, without the support and devotion of your son. You must have had the most extraordinary willpower. So perhaps you were also strong in death, if you yourself chose its time and manner.
On that Friday afternoon, an afternoon like so many others, as I was heading off from your chateau in the direction of Prague, while the sun could just be glimpsed through the low, leaden clouds, I instantly realized that for me, one life was coming to an end and another was about to begin. Yes, Mama, even at age fifty, one life can end and another begin. I was returning to Prague in a rented car, driving along narrow roads flanked by apple trees, and I felt reborn, not into a better life necessarily but definitely into a different one, one in which you would no longer be there. It was with an almost painful nostalgia. I was deluged by the perfumes, tastes, and ambiences I associated with you: the cup of hot chocolate on Sundays, and the steam coming off it, which I used to imagine would eventually join the heavy-looking clouds beyond the window. Our walks on Petřín mountain, with its carpets of leaves, as you would hum a tune from Janáček, I think from that series that has to do with a path laden with grass. On Sunday afternoons, there would be our visits to that oddly preserved little world of the homes of your mother’s friends, where I as a little boy discovered the charm of Prague between the wars: the fragile steps taken by the elderly ladies rendered silent by the thick Persian carpets, the polite gestures used by those present, the Sèvres porcelain tea set, the amber liquid that made a singing sound when it was poured into my cup, blending into the majestic melodies of Schubert’s Fantasias, which somebody was always playing on the piano.
I drove along the narrow roads, leaving behind those little villages with their melancholically beautiful names. I realized that the life into which I had just been born, the one in which you would have no part, would nonetheless be filled with the smells and tastes and ambiences that we had lived through together. I realized that for one to be able to evoke one’s most deeply buried sensations, a certain distance is required: distance in both space and time, to be sure. But above all, it is most profoundly called forth by the distance that death interposes between the present and the past.
But let us get back to the present. Peter was thumbing his nose at me and sticking his tongue out at me, making sure his mothe
r couldn’t see him. Not long ago, Katya had seen a photo of Helena, and she’d pulled a face too. With an indifferent grimace and a superior manner, she’d pushed the photo away.
That photo had dropped out of an envelope that had arrived shortly after my return from Prague. It contained a letter, or rather a note in a handwriting that I knew only too well and that I read with much fondness.
“I know you’ve been in Prague. Word travels fast! Why didn’t you let me know, damn you? Apart from anything else, I’ve got a present for you: a kind of journal or memoir your mother entrusted to my keeping not long before her death, asking me to pass it on to you.”
In the same envelope there was also a newspaper clipping with a photo of Helena playing—once again—in Sarajevo. “Does this photo jog your memory?” Helena had written in the margin.
It was just then that Katya, issuing a sneer, had said, “So this . . . is the one?” as if she was staring at some sort of monster. To thirty-seven-year-old Katya’s eyes, did a woman aged fifty-six look like some kind of Homo neanderthalensis? I thought just the opposite. Helena hadn’t changed: at fifty-six, she was no longer a Spring Girl, but rather a Summer Woman, the Goddess of the Harvest. Helena was the woman of a hundred smiles, the lady of the thousand looks, the violinist of ten thousand melodies.
Helena told me that soon the quartet she played in would be traveling to the United States and that she personally would bring me your memoirs, Mama. When I read this, a tree sprung up in the barren field of my mind and dozens of green leaves sprouted from it.
I decided to go to New York City, to the JFK airport, to pick up Helena in person. On my own. With a flower.
The Silent Woman Page 31