The Cowards

by Josef Skvorecky

  ‘Those refugees are really weird,’ I said finally.

  ‘I just hope they haven’t brought all sorts of diseases,’ she said.

  ‘Aw, no.’

  ‘Well, there were epidemics after the last war too, you know.’

  ‘I know, Spanish influenza. But there won’t be anything like that this time.’

  ‘Goodness only knows. You never can tell.’

  ‘No. They’ve got all sorts of drugs and vaccines and stuff like that now.’

  ‘I don’t know. All I can say is God spare us.’ She lifted the lid and took a look at the potatoes. ‘What did you do all afternoon?’

  ‘I went over to Benno’s for a while and then I just watched the crowds for a while and then I went over to Berty’s and then I saw Irena and we … talked for a while …’ I thought about showing Mom the snapshot but decided not to. That submachine gun might frighten her maybe and the war wasn’t over yet and why get her all worked up over nothing? Then I remembered I hadn’t showed my picture to Irena. How in hell could I have forgotten that! I felt so bad about that I almost felt sick to my stomach. But then I figured that I must have been saving it up for later, like an ace in the hole, and that made me feel better again.

  ‘Oh, you saw Irena? What’s she doing these days?’

  ‘Working at the post office.’

  ‘Did she say what she was going to do when … whether she’ll be going to Prague?’

  ‘No. But I guess she will.’

  ‘And what does she want to study?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Medicine, I guess.’

  ‘Medicine?’

  ‘I think that’s what she said once.’

  Mother was interested in Irena because she knew how I felt about her. Quite a lot of people knew because, for one thing, I hadn’t made much of a secret of it and for another thing, Mrs Moutelikova had told Mrs Frintova and Mrs Frintova had passed it on to Mrs Baumanova and Mrs Baumanova had told my mother that Danny had picked out a very nice girl and Mother acted like she didn’t know anything but was glad about it and Mrs Moutelikova told Irena’s mother in the shop that I came from a good family and that Irena better hang on to me because I was such a serious and reliable boy and since nobody took this Zdenek seriously because God only knew who he was and where he’d come from. He was just in Kostelec on a labour brigade whereas I was young Smiricky and all the mothers took me seriously, even Irena’s. Irena was the only one who didn’t.

  ‘What about you, Danny?’ Mother asked me. ‘Have you settled on anything yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You ought to be giving it some thought, Danny.’

  ‘Well, sure. But it’s not all that big a problem, is it?’

  ‘Remember, it’s for your whole life.’

  ‘I know. Well, I guess I’ll study English then,’ I said and smiled. For my whole life? I couldn’t believe it. For a couple of years maybe, but it seemed impossible that I’d always go on doing the same thing my whole life – like a job, I mean. Playing the saxophone, yes. I thought I’d probably do that for as long as I lived, and falling in love with girls and telling them how crazy I was about them, but then I figured I probably wasn’t going to live all that long anyway, and I couldn’t imagine I’d ever fall into one of those ruts older folks slipped into and never climbed out of. Maybe I’d die any one of these days. The idea didn’t worry me at all.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you,’ said Mother. ‘Your father and I won’t stand in your way.’

  She set a plate of potatoes and a salt shaker down in front of me and sat down in a chair on the other side of the table. I started eating and the food tasted good.

  ‘Then you’d be a teacher after you graduated?’

  ‘Yes. Or I’d go on for my Master’s.’

  ‘Master of Arts?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well – what can you do with a Master’s degree?’

  ‘It depends. I could get a job in a library somewhere or maybe as an editor – that kind of thing.’

  ‘You mean you’d like to be a journalist?’

  ‘Sure, that too.’

  ‘I think you’d like that, don’t you?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘You’ve always been good at talking, I mean, and always got the best grades on your essays.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ I said. ‘The main thing is, the university will be open again.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘God grant us good health – that’s all I ask. If only we can all stay well, we’ll manage the rest somehow.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said and pushed back my plate. ‘Well, time for me to be going.’

  ‘Now, Danny, promise me you’ll take good care of yourself,’ said Mother, and her eyes looked worried again.

  ‘I will. Don’t worry,’ I said and kissed her.

  She stroked my hair and said, ‘And come home, as soon as you can.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said and went out into the hall. I looked at myself in the mirror and, in the shadow at least, I looked pretty sharp. I opened the door and stepped into the outside hallway. Mother stood in the doorway.

  ‘Well, good-bye,’ I said and started down the stairs.

  ‘Good-bye,’ she said. At the landing, I saw her still standing there and blew her a kiss. Like I’d done at noon. Like I’d done every day for as long as I can remember. I decided to go over to Heiser’s place through the castle grounds to make better time. I turned left and headed towards the square. By now the sun was shining only on the tops of the houses on the left side of the street; down below it was already twilight. Refugees were still camping in the square and flags dangled down at them from every side. The windows of the City Hall and the post office and the buildings on the left side of the square glinted in the setting sun, which bathed everything on the square in a lovely yellowish light – the refugee families crouching on the sacks and bundles together with all their children and sometimes dogs, all chewing away on something, and the French soldiers, too, in their dusty blue uniforms. An organ sounded from the church and behind one of the narrow windows in the Gothic bay you could see the glimmer of candles. I went around the church. In front of the door stood a cluster of stock-still people, bareheaded and respectfully silent. The church was packed. They couldn’t get in. As I passed the door, I could feel a wave of heat coming out from inside and caught a few words of some song to the Virgin Mary and the weak bleat of the organ. I could just see the choirmaster sitting up there in the loft going off into a trance over that sloppy music which he’d had to put up with for years, and even worse since he gave violin lessons, and now there he sat probably glad to drown out his fear in that music, scared of what could happen before the Russians arrived and scared of what would happen once they did. I’d taken a few music lessons from him once and always had to wait outside until the kids ahead of me were done with theirs. I only played the piano then, so I didn’t have it bad, but the kids ahead of me scratched away on their violins and the choirmaster would prance around clapping his hands to his head and sighing or shrieking while those kids calmly sawed away, flatting the sharping like so many tone-deaf mummies. That was our choirmaster. And up at the altar, the rector was working his way through his trinitate personae et unitate substanciae without believing a word of it, whispering it, mumbling it, whining it while the choirmaster went after those flat or deflated tones with his index finger on his organ, and everything about the priest was cheap and shabby – his cassock frayed, the monstrance battered – everything around him down at the heels, including himself in his medieval parish house with its weather-beaten image of St Anthony out in front, and still there was really something beautiful about it all and somewhere in the world, in Rome or New York or maybe even in Prague, there were brand new churches whose priests believed in all this and sang about it every day as though each day they were singing it for the very first time, with reverent voices, wonderful, rich voices: vere dignum et justum est aequum et salutare, nos tibi semper, et ubique gratia
s agere It sounded beautiful all that Domine Sancte, Pater omnipotens, Deus: Qui cum ungenito Filio tuo, et Spiritu sancto, unus es Deus, unus es Dominus. I stopped to listen and I could actually hear the priest’s rusty old voice croaking, Oremus – praeceptis salutaribus moniti, et divina institutione formati, audemus dicere: Pater Noster, qui es in coelis – and, oh, how I wished that our Father Who art in Heaven was really sitting up there, looking down at me and taking care of me as if I really mattered, but I knew the earth rotated around the sun and that the sun was only an immense disc belonging to the Milky Way and that it was spinning away in space in an orbit all its own and that, according to Eddington, there were about a hundred thousand million stars in any given galaxy and around a hundred thousand million galaxies in the universe and what good did it do me if the priest said omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est if I simply couldn’t believe it? I looked away from the church and up at the castle, at its three rows of glittering windows, and I started past the parish house up the steep hill. Quickly and without looking back, I climbed the lilac-scented path up past the crumbling castle outer wall, and I didn’t stop till I got all the way up to the circular drive in front of the castle. From there the square below looked flat and crawling with tiny figures headed every which way under the copper disc of the setting sun. There was something about that seductively blossoming May evening that made me feel so strange that I rushed over to the courtyard to leave that view behind. It was dark and damp in the first courtyard. As I passed the well, the door of the steward’s apartment opened and out came Ema, the steward’s daughter.

  ‘Hello,’ I said and waited for her. Her big, potato-nosed face broke into a grin as she came towards me in her pink dress.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. And you?’

  ‘Not bad. Listen, what’re all your noble folks up to these days?’

  ‘They’re just getting ready to leave. You want to take a look?’

  ‘Sure. You mean they haven’t been jailed yet?’

  ‘No. Why should they be put in jail?’

  ‘Well, von Schaumburg-Lippe, for instance.’ Actually I didn’t really know either why they ought to be put in jail. ‘What’s the Queen of Württemberg doing?’

  ‘She’s here, too. Come on, I’ll show you.’

  ‘Oh, I know what she looks like. You showed her to me before remember?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Still – so what? Another look can’t do me any harm.’

  Ema grinned. ‘It’ll be some day when Danny Smiricky doesn’t have time for a look at things.’

  ‘Well, you know me,’ I said.

  ‘Come on then,’ said Ema. You could see her corset or girdle or whatever it was under that pink dress of hers. She had mammoth hips topped by an unusually short torso – a real steward’s daughter type from the outside, anyway, she looked custom-made for living in a castle tower. We passed through the second courtyard and stopped in front of the stables. Three open carriages stood there, the horses harnessed and ready to go. A cluster of castle kids had gathered to stare. The count was already seated in the first carriage – an old guy, over ninety, with a neck like a giraffe and a head that wouldn’t stop shaking. Next to him, her knees covered by a thick green blanket, sat the countess. They stared dully in front of them. Across from them sat two young girls as ugly as they come.

  ‘Who’s up in the first carriage with the count?’ I asked.

  ‘Countess Hilda and Countess Elis,’ Ema said.

  I looked at them, both redheads, and then over at the second carriage where a butler in ordinary clothes was just helping a fat, grey-haired old lady wearing a black shawl up and in.

  ‘The one that’s getting in now is the Marquise von Stroheim, one of the count’s cousins,’ Ema said.

  The old lady sat down and as she did the carriage rocked slightly. Kozak, the castle gamekeeper, leaned out of a window over the stables and in his vest and with his sleeves rolled up settled down to watch the proceedings. His wife was at the next window and the two of them looked down without a trace of regret or respect. A young man with a little beard sprang up into the carriage, spread out and tucked in a blanket around the marquise.

  ‘That’s Count Hohenstein, her nephew. He’s engaged to the queen.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said. He looked pale and ordinary and completely insignificant.

  ‘I wonder what she sees in him, anyway,’ I said.

  ‘He’s a nobleman. A blue blood.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said. Well, that kind of thing probably meant a lot to those people. And maybe there really was something appealing about locking yourself up in your own private world like that and gradually becoming extinct. Which reminded me that I had blue blood in my veins, too, and why my ancestors couldn’t have taken better care of it was beyond me. It made me mad. So here I was now, just another ordinary mortal on my way to meet Mitzi down below this castle.

  ‘The one sitting across from her is the marquis, her husband, and next to him is the Princess von Blumenfeld. She’s an old maid,’ Ema said.

  The marquis was fat and redfaced and the princess looked pale and drawn. They were all bundled up under blankets and steamer rugs. Mr Kozak spat from his window and lit his pipe. The marquis called out in German to somebody in the house. Princess Renata came out of the door followed by her two little kids in loden coats. She looked German and bony and wore a transparent raincoat over her dirndl. The old butler lifted the kids into the carriage and then helped the princess up.

  ‘What’s keeping the queen?’ I wondered.

  ‘She’s probably still busy giving instructions to the housekeeper. She’s got more energy than all the rest of them put together.’

  ‘Isn’t the housekeeper going with them?’

  ‘Yes. But the staff won’t be leaving till tomorrow morning.’

  Everybody was already seated in the carriages. They were all just waiting for the queen. The coachman of the third carriage was letting a harness strap out a notch. The ramparts cast their jagged shadow across the courtyard and the last sliver of the crimson sun shone from the edge of the horizon straight up to the door. I kept my eye on the door and just as the shadow reached the threshold, the Queen of Württemberg appeared, all made up and wearing a light brown suit, as beautiful as Greta Garbo, her hair shining in the copper glow, and said something in German to the housekeeper bowing behind her and then, with a few elegant womanly strides, went over to the carriage, jumped in, and called out in a firm, deep voice, ‘Los!’ The coachman cracked his whip, the first carriage rolled off, the second right behind it, and then the third. There was a creak of wheels and out they went through the gate and down the drive and in the last carriage I could see the copper-coloured hair of the queen who didn’t turn to look back, and then there was only her glow as she passed through the gate and she was gone. She impressed me, that Queen of Württemberg, and I felt sorry for her. But Ema was standing beside me.

  ‘Well, there they go,’ she said, and giggled. Mr Kozak left his window and the castle kids rushed out through the gate after the carriages.

  ‘Yes. Well, I’ve got to be going, too. Thanks,’ I said, and shook Ema’s hand.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘So long,’ I said, and walked quickly out through the gate and down the drive. I turned left, past the ball courts, jumped over a ditch, and plunged into the woods. It was almost dark under the trees, but as I went on light sifted through from the far side. I walked across the soft pine needles. At the rim of the woods there was a large grassy clearing. I sat down and looked at the Heisers’s mansion and the factory buildings below. The sun still lit up parts of the town down in the valley; most of it was already in shadow though. In the shadow of Castle Hill the Heisers’s place was turning blue. The long grey factory sheds behind it were fading out in the evening haze. From a long way off, coming in from the east, I could hear a faint rumbling a
nd the muffled bark of gunfire. The stars in the eastern sky glistened as if they were wet. In the west, the horizon glowed pink. Again I heard faint but distinct bursts of machine-gun fire. You couldn’t see anything, though, just a piece of the silent town below and the Heisers’s handsome mansion.

  I lay down on my back in the grass and looked up at the moist little stars that had started to twinkle shyly in the darkening sky. Right over me and a bit off to the east, the beautiful constellation of Orion’s Belt stretched splendidly out across the heavens, all laid out in the same great pattern as always. To the left I saw a feeble reddish little star – the red giant Betelgeuse – and it seemed very odd that there was that ball bigger than our entire solar system and thinner than air, shining up there calmly and quietly in the remoteness of space, like a drop of raspberry juice on a patch of green moss, while down here below me was Kostelec and revolution and every once in a while the sound of gunfire rolling in from Germany. The sky and its little stars were calm and still, but down in the town there was a stifled rustle and a peculiar kind of springtime tension, like just before a thunderstorm. I could feel the cool blades of grass under my head and the hard ground under my back. I closed my eyes and started thinking about life and how I’d live it and thought of Mitzi, but only as an overture or transition into the new kind of life I was going to start in Prague, and I thought about how I’d tell her, Mitzi, I’m crazy about you, but then it struck me I’d used that line on every girl I’d ever met and I wondered whether I’d use it again on the girl I was going to meet in Prague and knew I would because it was the only one I knew and I’d used it on everybody and it had usually worked, though it hadn’t helped much with Irena, because girls are basically all the same and I had the feeling I was far superior to them all, that I was just playing around with them, secretly laughing at them, and I wondered whether I’d feel the same with that girl I was going to meet in Prague and I was sure I would because she’d be just another girl no matter how pretty and smart and amoral she was because I just couldn’t believe that besides me and boys and girls, there could be a fourth sort of people on earth or some kind of female counterpart of me. I mean, who’d come anywhere close to being a match for me. The whole idea struck me as being ridiculous, absurd. And then suddenly my thoughts got all tangled up and I was somewhere else and everything shifted and turned crazy and fast and I drifted off far, far away and suddenly I was cold and the sky above me was black and littered with cold white stars and I realized I’d fallen asleep so I sat up and I could see cracks of light shining out through the badly blacked-out windows of the houses on the hill and the dome of heaven was mirrored in the swimming pool down on Jerusalem Street and you could hear that springtime buzz coming up from the town and then I realized Mitzi had stood me up so I got up, even though I was half frozen, and said to myself, Mitzi, you bitch – so you didn’t even bother to show up, did you? Well, that sure takes care of that, but it really didn’t bother me now and I headed down through the grass towards the Heisers’s. I looked in through the window of the salon which wasn’t blacked out and saw Mrs Heiserova. She walked towards the window looked out into the dark, then turned and said something to somebody inside. You couldn’t hear a word, you could just see her mouth moving. Mitzi wasn’t in the room. The light from the window sort of melted away in the darkness. I turned and started back towards town. She’d given me the brush-off and now she was probably sitting up in her little room laughing at me. A machine gun was chattering away again in Germany. It was a warm night, more like summer than spring. Anyway, it served me right. Why couldn’t I be faithful to Irena? Why did I have to turn to look at every skirt that went by, why didn’t other girls leave me cold when I was so in love with Irena? Maybe that was asking too much of me. I wondered whether the sight of another girl would ever leave me cold and decided it wouldn’t, ever. Or maybe when I finally met that girl in Prague. But I knew that even then they probably wouldn’t. Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t to be blind to other girls. What point would there be to that? The trick was, not to be blind, but to stick to one girl. That was what counted in life and maybe that was the way it should be. To stick to one girl, even though you liked them all, and be happy with her and have tender loving feelings for her and stay with her for as long as you lived. With Irena. Or that girl I was going to meet in Prague. I was in love with her already, just because she was alive, because she must be out there somewhere, just waiting for me, maybe. There must be girls somewhere who know how to love just one man, body and soul and always, and how to be faithful to him too.