of the Russian occupation, leaving the country was still easy to do, and they could say goodbye to their friends without fear. But they had too little time to see all of them. On a momentary impulse, two days before they left they went to visit an old friend, a bachelor, and spent some emotional hours with him. Only later, in France, did they learn that the reason this man had been so attentive to them over time was that the police had selected him to inform on Martin. The day before they left, she rang a friend's doorbell without having phoned ahead. She found her in a deep discussion with another
134
woman. Saying nothing herself, she listened for a long time to a conversation of no concern to her, waiting for some gesture, an encouraging word, a goodbye; in vain. Had they forgotten she was leaving? Or were they pretending to forget? Or was it that neither her presence nor her absence mattered to them anymore? And her mother. As they were leaving, she did not kiss Irena. She kissed Martin, but not her. Irena she squeezed hard on the shoulder as she uttered in her resonant voice: "We don't go in for displaying our feelings!" The words were supposed to sound gruff and manly, but they were chilling. Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn't expect much from her reunions.
By now she's been walking for a good two or three hours in those leafy neighborhoods. She reaches a parapet at the end of a little park above Prague: the view from here is of the rear of Hrad-cany Castle, the secret side; this is a Prague whose existence Gustaf doesn't suspect; and instantly there come rushing the names she loved as a young girl: Macha, poet at the time when his
135
nation, a water sprite, was just emerging from the mists; Jan Neruda, the storyteller of ordinary Czech folk; the songs of Voskovec and Werich from the 1930s, so loved by her father, who died when she was a child; Hrabal and Skvorecky, novelists of her adolescence; and the little theaters and cabarets of the sixties, so free, so merrily free, with their sassy humor; it was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.
Leaning on the parapet, she looks over at the Castle: it's no more than fifteen minutes away. The Prague of the postcards begins there, the Prague that a frenzied history stamped with its multiple stigmata, the Prague of tourists and whores, the Prague of restaurants so expensive that her Czech friends can't set foot in them, the belly-dancer Prague writhing in the spotlight, Gustaf's Prague. She reflects that there is no place more alien to her than that Prague. Gustaftown. Gustafville. Gustafstadt. Gustafgrad.
Gustaf: she sees him, his features blurred through the clouded windowpane of a language she barely knows, and she thinks, almost joyfully,
136
that it's fine this way because the truth is finally revealed: she feels no need to understand him or to have him understand her. She pictures his jovial figure, dressed up in his T-shirt, shouting that Kafka was born in Prague, and she feels a desire rising through her body, the irrepressible desire to take a lover. Not to patch up her life as it is! But to turn it completely upside down. Finally take possession of her own fate.
For she has never chosen any of her men. She was always the one being chosen. Martin she came to love, but at the start he was just a way to escape her mother. In her liaison with Gustaf she thought she was gaining freedom. But now she sees that it was only a variant of her relation with Martin: she seized an outstretched hand, and it pulled her out of difficult circumstances that she was unable to handle.
She knows she is good at gratitude; she has always prided herself on that as her prime virtue; when gratitude required it, a feeling of love would come running like a docile servant. She was sincerely devoted to Martin; she
134
woman. Saying nothing herself, she listened for a long time to a conversation of no concern to her, waiting for some gesture, an encouraging word, a goodbye; in vain. Had they forgotten she was leaving? Or were they pretending to forget? Or was it that neither her presence nor her absence mattered to them anymore? And her mother. As they were leaving, she did not kiss Irena. She kissed Martin, but not her. Irena she squeezed hard on the shoulder as she uttered in her resonant voice: "We don't go in for displaying our feelings!" The words were supposed to sound gruff and manly, but they were chilling. Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn't expect much from her reunions.
By now she's been walking for a good two or three hours in those leafy neighborhoods. She reaches a parapet at the end of a little park above Prague: the view from here is of the rear of Hrad-cany Castle, the secret side; this is a Prague whose existence Gustaf doesn't suspect; and instantly there come rushing the names she loved as a young girl: Macha, poet at the time when his
135
nation, a water sprite, was just emerging from the mists; Jan Neruda, the storyteller of ordinary Czech folk; the songs of Voskovec and Werich from the 1930s, so loved by her father, who died when she was a child; Hrabal and Skvorecky, novelists of her adolescence; and the little theaters and cabarets of the sixties, so free, so merrily free, with their sassy humor; it was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.
Leaning on the parapet, she looks over at the Castle: it's no more than fifteen minutes away. The Prague of the postcards begins there, the Prague that a frenzied history stamped with its multiple stigmata, the Prague of tourists and whores, the Prague of restaurants so expensive that her Czech friends can't set foot in them, the belly-dancer Prague writhing in the spotlight, Gustaf's Prague. She reflects that there is no place more alien to her than that Prague. Gustaftown. Gustafville. Gustafstadt. Gustafgrad.
Gustaf: she sees him, his features blurred through the clouded windowpane of a language she barely knows, and she thinks, almost joyfully,
136
that it's fine this way because the truth is finally revealed: she feels no need to understand him or to have him understand her. She pictures his jovial figure, dressed up in his T-shirt, shouting that Kafka was born in Prague, and she feels a desire rising through her body, the irrepressible desire to take a lover. Not to patch up her life as it is! But to turn it completely upside down. Finally take possession of her own fate.
For she has never chosen any of her men. She was always the one being chosen. Martin she came to love, but at the start he was just a way to escape her mother. In her liaison with Gustaf she thought she was gaining freedom. But now she sees that it was only a variant of her relation with Martin: she seized an outstretched hand, and it pulled her out of difficult circumstances that she was unable to handle.
She knows she is good at gratitude; she has always prided herself on that as her prime virtue; when gratitude required it, a feeling of love would come running like a docile servant. She was sincerely devoted to Martin; she
Similar Books
