when I was with her most, because then I was rescuing her from danger. I’d carry her in my arms from the cell into which she’d been thrown naked to be tortured, and which I’d penetrated in disguise to save her. Night after night I thus performed my loyal, heroic deeds until I fell asleep.
She had brought a small porcelain mug with her from home, the porcelain was almost translucent and decorated with Chinese dragons and flowers. Several times she had given me some herb tea from it, we drank from the same mug and she acted solemnly. One day somebody, as was scarcely avoidable in that constant rush and confusion, knocked the little mug to the floor. When she cried over it I asked her for the fragments, cautiously threw them into the hot stove and watched what was happening to them. It looked to me as if the fire was really digesting them, that the fragments glowed in their own particular way, but later, when I cleared out the ashes, I found the fragments unchanged, perhaps a little sooty but otherwise intact. I fished them out of the ashes, carefully wiped them clean, and kept one of them. The rest I returned to her. I felt some attachment to them or admiration that they should have survived their fall into the fire and its heat. Maybe they will help us; maybe we shall one day be dug out of the ashes equally intact.
In my fantasies I defended her against all evil, but in real life I could not save her. She was assigned to a transport, as were nearly all the occupants of our barracks.
She ran out from the room, which was filled with confusion and tears, where the pitiful remains of the inmates’ belongings were being sorted out and packed in a hopeless hurry; she only had a moment, she wanted to be with her mother who was in despair. We knew of a spot in the recess of the ramparts, the slope there was overgrown with grass and shaded by ancient lime trees. It was quieter there than anywhere else in the fortress. That was where we’d most frequently been with the others, but now there was no one else there. We told each other which of our friends had also been listed for deportation and we reassured each other that the war would be over quite soon, that liberation was so near we need not be too much afraid of anything, and then we’d meet again, we’d all of us meet again, we didn’t quite know where we’d meet but that didn’t seem important. Then we were silent. What was there to talk about at such a moment? We walked round the spot and then she said she had to go back. She stopped for a moment, then suddenly she came close up to me and I felt the touch of her lips on mine. Her breath was on my face and I froze. Then she turned and fled. When I caught up with her she asked me not to come with her any further, we’d said goodbye already.
That afternoon she left. I stood by my window, I was not allowed out. I tried to spot her in the crowd which moved down the street, but I didn’t see her. It suddenly occurred to me that she hadn’t left, that it wasn’t possible that she had vanished, that she was no longer there.
I tore myself away from the window and knocked at the door of the next room, and when there was no answer I opened it. The room which a little while ago had been full of people and voices and things now yawned with emptiness. It seemed to me that I was standing on a rock, on a cliff so high and so steep that the land below me was out of sight. And I was seized by vertigo, I realised that I too was falling, that there was no way out, that it was only a question of time. What seemed solid collapsed in a single instant, and what seemed indissolubly linked to the ground was dissolved.
I escaped from that empty room, lay down on my mattress and closed my eyes. At that moment her face rose above me like the moon and looked down on me from the night sky, serene, remote and inaccessible, and I was engulfed by happiness together with pain and despair.
At nine o’clock precisely we sat down in the Bozenka Tavern. It was a run-of-the-mill place. Nothing enlivened the blackened walls except some slogans and prohibitions. The table-cloths bore the stains of yesterday’s food. In the corner stood an abandoned and battered pool table, its green cloth long faded and become grey from cigarette ash and smoke.
The hauliers’ tavern of my childhood was full of colour. After my friend’s death I did not go in all that often, only when Dad sent me out for some beer, and he only drank about once in a month. Right behind the door a purple pheasant spread its colourful wings, and on the walls were bright pictures of horses and hauliers’ carts, the work of some local painter of shop signs and fairground rifle targets. And the landlord wore a neat clean check apron. When he’d drawn the beer for me he’d come round from behind the bar to place the jug securely in my hands. In the tavern of my childhood there was still a spirit of freedom.
Dad never tried to bring me up, he never ordered me to do anything or forbade me to do anything. Instead he would now and again set out on a walk, along with mother and me, mostly in the direction of the airfield, because Dad, though he loved woods, parks and any kind of water, was primarily interested in machines, and among these chiefly in machines which could fly. When we got to the airfield he would look at the taxiing aircraft, at the massive biplanes and the lightly-built gliders, and at that moment he certainly forgot that we were there with him, he would even chase after men in overalls and talk to them while we were hanging about the windy field.
Dad was interested in anything that flew. He taught me to make missiles from folded paper, not those ordinary ones that are launched in class as soon as the teacher turns his back, but aerial craft which beautifully and smoothly sailed into the air, some of them even rising before circling down to the ground.
We also made kites, and just before all our playing together came to an end we constructed a large model aeroplane from skewers, balsa wood and soft firm paper. We threaded a rubber band through the fuselage; once wound up this would drive the propeller. Dad promised that it would rise high enough to fly over the tower of the church in Prosek.
And when in fact we had carried it to the end of the airfield one Sunday morning and wound it up by the propeller, the little plane made a leap, hurtled forward and a moment later rose up to the sky, where it began to describe a large circle. But it did not complete it, something must have happened, the plane wobbled and suddenly broke up, spun to the ground and crashed.
When we rushed over all we found was a heap of skewers, balsa wood and pieces of carefully stretched paper.
I lamented and mourned our loss, and it was then that Dad said to me: Remember that a man never cries! It was one of the few lessons I ever received from him. He laughed at the heap of rubbish as he picked it up, adding that that was the fate of things, and anyone worrying about it merely harmed himself.
I ordered tea for myself while the others, without having to ask, were each served a large beer. The youngster drank mineral water. Venus produced her cigarettes, extended the packet to her neighbour on the other side and then to me. I thanked her and said I didn’t smoke.
‘Quite a paragon, ain’t you?’ she said. ‘Your wife must be pleased with you.’
‘If I hadn’t got drunk,’ the foreman said, ‘I most likely wouldn’t have got married at all. Because I had a fair idea that marriage is the end of life.’
I didn’t meet Lida until after I’d finished university. There was nothing exceptional about our meeting, it was unaccompanied by any special events or auguries. We just met and found we liked each other. She was only six years younger than me but I felt as if a lifetime lay between us.
What depressed me were certainly not doubts about the rightness of my choice, but the knowledge that I’d made a decision once and for all. I suspected that for me the most blissful prospect was not so much having the person I loved permanently by my side as a need, from time to time, to reach out to emptiness, to let longing intensify within me to the point of agony, to alternate the pain of separation with the relief of renewed coming together, the chance of escape and return, of glimpsing before me a will-o’-the-wisp, the hope that the real encounter was still awaiting me.
Man is reluctant to accept that his life has come to a conclusion in that most important respect, that his hopes have been fulfilled. He hesitates to look death in the face, and there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.
For our honeymoon we flew out to the Tatra mountains.
It was the beginning of windy autumnal weather, the larches were turning golden and the meadows were fragrant with ripe grass. We climbed up to the treeline, to where the forests ended, and above us towered the sharp ridges of bare rock. I lay down in the grass, Lida sang to herself and I felt as if her singing was filling the entire space from the sky down to the base of the rocks, marking out the space in which I would now forever move.
‘You must have been a one, Mr Marek,’ Venus said. ‘When my old man came home pissed I made him sleep with the horses or in the garage.’
‘So when did you have your own wheels?’ the foreman asked curiously.
‘When we were in Slovakia, of course. Mila got hold of an old Wartburg. When we went off with the kids on our
