invited for the opening night of a play of mine, I got on a tourist excursion steamer down the Mississippi, and there was a black band playing on board. A colourful company was celebrating something, I don’t know if it was a wedding, the birth of an heir or somebody’s saint’s day, or the fact that a manned spacecraft was then on the way to the moon which their not-too-distant ancestors may have revered as a deity, but I could feel that close to them, and under the influence of their music, I was slipping into another, more carefree and less knowing age.
This mood persisted even the following day when, at the home of the producer who, like me, was a native of Prague, we watched the television screen in the evening and I saw those strange bulky figures bouncing with light steps about the wasteland of the moon, while from the street came delighted cheers; I thought then that man, as he had always longed and as my father had promised me, had really got closer to heaven. It seemed to me that mankind was entering upon a new era full of promise.
During the interval the youngster came over to us, and because my wife knows more about music than I do I let them talk to each other while I went to the bar to get ourselves something to drink.
When I got back towards the end of the intermission the youngster was about to leave for his place just below the stage. My wife took a glass of juice, took a sip, and before the musicians started up again told me what she’d learned from the youngster about his life; needless to say, she’d learned more in those few minutes than I had in several weeks. His father, it appeared, had left his mother before he was even born, and because the mother was a little odd he grew up in children’s homes. His mother was now dead and his only relative was a stepbrother with whom he didn’t get on. She’d guess that the youngster was a sensitive boy but, because of his circumstances, had never completely grown up, almost certainly also because in his life he hadn’t yet met a man with whom he wished to identify. I ought to bear this in mind, maybe he’d attach himself to me.
I couldn’t think why the youngster should want to attach himself to me of all people, but I promised to watch out.
The master of ceremonies announced the next composition, a Gershwin medley. The musicians started up. At one point the clarinettist on the stage made use of a brief pause, held his instruments out: towards the audience, motioned to someone, and a moment later we saw the youngster jumping up onto the stage and taking the clarinet.
‘Surely that’s him,’ Lida said in surprise. She doesn’t see too well at a distance and moreover she has a poor memory for faces.
From his borrowed instrument the youngster conjured up the glissando which opens the first theme of the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. I could see his pasty face turn red, either with excitement or with the effort.
Winter that year was severe. The sky remained blue and cold, the frozen snow crunched underfoot and the air stank so revoltingly that one regretted not being a fish. I went to see Dad nearly every day, he was picking up rapidly. He was once more working on his calculator. Don’t you go thinking that I’m written off, he said to me, and immersed himself in his world of numbers, where he felt most at home. He no longer designed new motors, he’d come to the conclusion that there were too many in the world already, but he was searching for some new solution, for better machines for that better world which he was perhaps seeing with his mind’s eye. Sometimes he’d put on his fur-lined coat and go out with me to walk down the chilly ugly street. The fate of the world had not ceased to interest him. He confided his fears and disappointments to me. It grieved him that socialism had not brought freedom to the people and that technology had not lightened their drudgery but was instead threatening them with annihilation. We stopped at the dairy. Here Dad thawed out because the pretty girl behind the counter smiled at him pleasantly, asked him how he was getting on and assured him that he was looking wonderful. Dad at any rate still believes that women are good creatures. Sympathetic and worthy of attention and love. He’d have gone on chatting to the dairy girl, but I was in a hurry to get to my own good creature.
We’d had to abandon the attic studio with its view of the palace opposite, and we now met in her basement workshop, where – long, long ago – I’d first set eyes on her. From outside the window came the continuous footsteps of strangers passing by and from the corners came a smell of mildew and mould. On the stone floor stood a storage heater. It was only seven years younger than me and just as stubborn, sometimes it worked and at others, for unfathomable reasons, it didn’t switch itself on at night at all. Fortunately the thick medieval walls stopped the place from freezing up completely.
She is waiting for me. She hasn’t even taken off her coat but her lips are hot. Again she presses herself to the tepid metal shell of the heater and I hurry to make some tea while she tells me her news. Listening to her I feel that the incidents I look for in vain are all homing in on her, all her encounters seem to have a special and higher meaning, something essential to tell her, to open, at least in part, a view into the infinite spaces of other people’s inner lives.
As she speaks I watch a little cloud of her living breath rising from her mouth. The room is in semi-darkness which obliterates even those little lines which I would probably not have seen anyway with my long-sighted eyes. She seems to me tenderly and soulfully beautiful. I know that I still love her and I suspect that she must love me too if she’s staying with me in this inhospitable and cold basement.
She notices my glance and presses herself against me – together we slip into the icy bed. But her body is warm, we cling to each other, ecstasy blots out the outside world, at this moment it doesn’t matter where we are, we are in the seclusion of our love and we know that there isn’t a palace in the world whose solitude we would exchange for this place of joint occupation.
Her slight body ceaseless rears against mine, she trembles with delight, her eyes grow misty. Devoutly she begs me not to leave her, again and again she wants me, she knows no respite in love-making any more than in her work, any more than in anything she undertakes, she sweeps me along like a vortex, she rouses in me a strength I never suspected I had. My head spins, I am in ecstasy, I am on earth solely for this moment, for this action.
Yet even so the moment must come when we are exhausted, when the chill that’s seeping from the floor and the walls gets between us, enters her eyes. I know that she’s asking herself how long I intend to make love to her without giving her any hope, without finding a solution which would bring her out of her icy loneliness. But she only asks what I’m going to do tonight.
I say that I will work, even though I know that my answer will seem unsatisfactory to her if I don’t decide to stay with her. I want to know what she’ll be doing.
Why should I care? I wasn’t going to stay with her anyway, after all, there was my wife waiting for me at home, I have to be with her, act the part of the faithful loving husband, create an atmosphere of home. Yes, of course, I also had to work, make money so I could keep the lady, my wife, in appropriate style. Also I mustn’t forget to buy something for dinner so she needn’t put herself out, and bring her a little present so she should know what a fine model husband she has. All she wants to know now is why she should plunge with me into this sacchariney sticky filthy mess of ours? She curses the moment when I crossed her path. Why didn’t I say something, why didn’t I at least speak up in my defence?
I reached out for my cold shirt and she screamed that I should push off, that I should get back as fast as possible to that sacred cow of mine who has ruined her life. She’ll still try to save herself, to dig herself out of the shit I have dragged her into.
Outside, darkness had fallen, and its icy maw swallowed us up instantly. The snow had turned grey and seemed to collapse under our feet. We got to the metro station and she asked: When shall I see you?
As always, Hope was looking down on us from her stone plinth with her invariably gentle, even warm, smile.
Tomorrow I have to take Dad to the doctor. How about the day after?
She took hold of both my hands: I really won’t see you all day tomorrow?
The youngster finished his part and handed the clarinet back to its owner. Somebody clapped, my wife clapped too, the youngster bowed awkwardly; when he jumped down from the stage his face was back to its usual pallor.
The concert was over. The people around us were pushing towards the exit. It had got cold outside, and a brilliant full moon stood in the cloudless sky.
To us, who’d stayed behind on earth, the astronaut Aldrin said then:
I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her way!
The producer in St Louis casually mentioned to me that eighteen years earlier, after he’d escaped, he’d been sentenced to death in his native country for some fictitious political crimes. Now they wanted to rehabilitate him. When on that memorable day we went to bed at three in the morning he said: A pity, back home they couldn’t even
