my wife out of my life, my wife of whom I was still fond and who, after all, was supposed to belong to me to the end of my or her days?
If there were a devil, she chose a suitable quotation for me, it wouldn’t be he who decided against God, but he who didn’t find eternity long enough to come to a decision.
How can a person win love if he can’t come to a decision?
My wife suspects nothing, she trusts me. But she has tormented dreams. She is walking with her class across a snow-covered mountain plain, suddenly all of them increase their pace and she can’t keep up with them. She remains alone in the wind and frost, looking in vain for the way. Fog descends. She realises she won’t ever find her way out again. At other times she climbs a rock with her friends, and when she is at the steepest point they all disappear. Rigid with vertigo she presses herself to the rockface. She can’t move up or down, she calls for help, but no one responds.
She tells me her dreams and searches for an interpretation. She goes all the way back to her childhood, when she used to be on her own, unable to be close to anybody.
I know that she is wrong in the interpretation of her dreams, but I keep silent, I leave her at the mercy of her anguished visions.
But how can a man still believe in love if he has no compassion?
The foreman finished his second beer and unbuttoned himself. I realised that he was not so much worried by the change in atmospheric pressure as by the fact that he might lose his bonus. He ordered a third beer and announced that he’d made up his mind: he’d finally teach that Franta a lesson!
Franta is that young idiot with the tic in his face, the one I don’t understand a word of when he speaks. To my amazement he is also a foreman, he even drives a car and it looks as if he is checking on our work, not by official authority but so he can grass on us. Everyone hates him. Whether because he’s a cripple or because he’s a grass I can’t judge.
Mrs Venus told me that he’d recently had an operation. They’d taken his manhood from him. Franta did indeed have big breasts and his incomprehensible talk was in a falsetto. Last week, the foreman was now telling us angrily, that cripple had grassed on him, that he’d gone to have a beer when he’d claimed he was seeing the doctor. ‘I saw that shit at the final stop of the number 19 yesterday, in that bloody refuse truck of his, so I grabbed him by his collar and dragged him out on the pavement and said to him: “You’ll kneel down right here and ask my pardon, you swine, or else bring a pot along to collect up the bits of your bloody face!” He had to get down into the mud and repeat after me: “Mister Marek, I apologise to you, I’ll never say a word about you again.” “Mister,” I made him say to me, because to him, and to him alone, I’m no Comrade!’
The foreman is an ex-NCO who served some time at the airfield; that time he obviously regards as a heroic and happy one, and he is fond of reminiscing about it – which helps me to recollect my own childhood days. I envy him his memory. Not only does he remember a mass of stories and sayings, but he also knows the names of all the streets in our district, and that’s several hundred. He is as expert about the names and closing times of all the taverns as he is about street-cleaning technology. And they put him on an equal footing with that cripple.
‘You should have made him stand a round of beer,’ the captain remarked. ‘He’d remember that all right, having to dip into his own pocket.’
‘I wouldn’t accept one from him,’ Mrs Venus said. ‘I’d sooner stick to water.’
‘He’s a poor wretch,’ Mr Rada cut in from the next table. ‘What do you want from him?’
‘That one?’ the foreman became heated. ‘He’s a cunning little bastard, he knows very well that if they cut my bonus his will go up. Who d’you suppose grassed on us last month, the day we had that downpour, when we left out Lomnickeho?’
‘He’s a poor wretch all the same,’ I joined in.
‘You didn’t know him,’ Mrs Venus said, her swollen eye flickering between Mr Rada and me, ‘before they did that operation on him. By the time he got down to work it would be midday, and out: in the street the moment he’d catch sight of a skirt he’d whip out that thing of his!’
‘Creatures like him should be done in at birth.’ The foreman knew no pity.
‘How could they do that?’ I objected.
‘And why not? You only bugger about with them all your life, and there’s no time left for normal people. Aren’t I right?’ the foreman turned to the others. ‘And a decent bloke’s got to work till he croaks.’
‘And who’d decide who is normal?’
‘Leave it to the doctors; they can tell pretty well nowadays. Let me tell you,’ the foreman decided to cut short the discussion on euthanasia, ‘that if that damned pervert grasses once more on any one of us, I’ll catch hold of the bastard and kick him all the way down to the Boti c stream and there I’ll hold his bloody head under the water till he sees reason.’
Two and a half thousand years ago it is believed that the Greeks in Asia Minor, whenever their community was threatened by the plague or some other disaster, picked a cripple or otherwise deformed person, led him to the place of sacrifice, gave him a handful of dried figs, a loaf of wheat-flour bread and cheese, then struck him seven times on his genitals with a scourge, and to the accompaniment of a flute burnt him to death.
It was another rainy day, but at the beginning of spring. On the window-sill of the noble town house opposite two drenched pigeons were huddling together, and we were also huddling together, exhausted from love-making. I was beginning to get up because I wanted to get home, where my wife and children were expecting me, my unsuspecting and deceived family and my neglected, abandoned work. By now she knew that cautious movement which was the beginning of my moving away from her, but she didn’t, as usual, say: Don’t go yet! She just started to cry.
I asked what was wrong, but she only sobbed and pushed me away from her. It had been getting too much for her, she no longer had the strength for those perpetual goodbyes, for that coming together and breaking apart, she wasn’t cut out to be a two-man woman, she couldn’t bear the deception, the pretence sickened her, she wanted to live according to her conscience, she wanted to be with the one she loved.
But surely we’re almost continually together.
How could I say something so outrageous when every night I was in bed with another woman?
But that is my wife!
How did I dare say this to her? She was shaking with sobs. She’d never wanted to live like that, what had I made of her? A whore who wasn’t even entitled to see me when she felt depressed or when she needed me but who had to come running the moment I felt like it, whenever I could find the time for her.
I didn’t say anything, I was so taken aback by her grief and anger, and she screamed that I should say something, why didn’t I defend myself, why didn’t I try to convince her that she was mistaken, why didn’t I tell her that I loved her, that I cared for her?
Then we made love again, night descended on the palace outside our window, the drenched pigeons had disappeared. She wanted to hear again and again that I loved her. I kept repeating it with a strange kind of obsessiveness. We made love with the same obsessiveness, and she whispered to me that we had been predestined for each other, that we were resisting our fate in vain, that I was resisting in vain when I longed for her so much.
And I didn’t say anything. I embraced her, I melted into her, and I tried to dispel the unease which was growing within me.
But I didn’t want to live like that permanently. When I got home I told my wife about the other woman.
It was getting on for ten o’clock, the time when we normally left our hospitable tavern. The foreman, who was a great one for precision, looked closely at his watch: ‘One more beer,’ he decided, ‘and then we’re off, even if it’s pissing like from a fireman’s hose.’ And to comfort us he related how exactly thirty years ago it had rained just like this all through the summer. He was encamped down beyond Kvilda, at the back of beyond. Luckily he managed on the second day to pick up a pretty dark-haired girl from accounts at the timberyard. He’d stopped at her office in the morning, and within half an hour he’d done all the calculations for her that she’d have spent the whole day on, so that they could get down to the real business.
The foreman was a good raconteur, and the standard of his story-telling rose with the interest of his listeners. In me he found an attentive listener, for which he rewarded me not only by addressing me more often than the rest but also, as a sign of his favour, by occasionally giving me the better and more profitable jobs. His most grateful listener, however, was the youngster, either because at his age he was the most eager to hear other people’s stories or because fate had prevented him from experiencing most of the things the foreman recounted.
