Ignorance (13 page)

"You've always worn your hair that way, haven't you? I've never seen you with any other hairstyle."

As if to sidestep the topic, Milada said: "So, are you finally going to make a decision someday?"

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"You know very well that Gustaf has offices in Prague and Paris both!"

"But as I understand it, Prague is where he'd like to live."

"Listen, commuting back and forth between Paris and Prague is fine with me. I have my work in both places, Gustaf is my only boss, we manage, we improvise."

"What is it that holds you in Paris? Your daughters?"

"No. I don't want to cling to their lives."

"Have you got somebody there?"

"Nobody." Then: "My own apartment." Then: "My independence." And again, slowly: "I've always had the sense that my life is run by other people. Except for a few years after Martin died. Those were the toughest years, I was alone with my children, I had to cope by myself. Complete poverty. You won't believe this, but nowadays when I look back, those are my happiest years."

She is shocked, herself, at having called "happiest" the years after her husband's death, and she corrects herself: "What I mean is, that was the one time I was master of my own life."

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She stops. Milada does not break the silence, and Irena goes on: "I married very young, solely to escape from my mother. But for just that reason, it was a decision that was forced, not really free. And on top of it, to escape my mother I married a man who was an old friend of hers. Because the only people I knew were her crowd. So even married, I was still under her watchful eye."

"How old were you?"

"Just turned twenty. And from then on, everything was determined once and for all. I made one mistake then, a mistake that's hard to define and impossible to grasp, but one that determined my entire life and that I never managed to repair."

"An irreparable mistake committed at the age of ignorance."

"Yes."

"That's the age people marry, have their first child, choose a profession. Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it's too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing."

"Yes, yes!" Irena agrees, "even my emigration! That was also just the consequence of my earlier decisions. I emigrated because the secret police

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wouldn't leave Martin alone. He couldn't go on living here. But I could have. I stood by my husband, and I don't regret it. But still, my emigrating wasn't my own doing, my decision, my freedom, my fate. My mother pushed me toward Martin, and Martin took me abroad."

"Yes, I remember. The decision was made without you."

"Even my mother didn't object." "Quite the contrary, it suited her fine." "What do you mean? The house?" "Everything's a matter of property." "You're turning back into a Marxist," says Irena with a slight smile.

"Have you noticed how after forty years of Communism, the bourgeoisie landed on its feet again in just a few days? They survived in a thousand ways—some of them jailed, some thrown out of their jobs, others who even did very nicely, had brilliant careers, ambassadors, professors. Now their sons and grandsons are back together again, a kind of secret fraternity, they've taken over the banks, the newspapers, the parliament, the government."

"You really still are a Communist."

"The word doesn't mean a thing anymore. But it's true I am still a girl from a poor family."

She pauses, and various images go through her head: a girl from a poor family in love with a boy from a rich family; a young woman looking to Communism to find meaning for her life; after 1968 a mature woman who embraces the dissident movement and suddenly discovers a world far broader than before: not only Communists turning against the Party, but also priests and former political prisoners and downgraded members of the high bourgeoisie. And then after 1989, as if waking from a dream, she turns back into what she was when she started: an aging girl from a poor family.

"Don't be offended at my asking," says Irena, "you've told me before, but I forget: where were you born?"

Milada names a small city.

"I'm having lunch today with someone from there."

"Who's that?"

Hearing his name, Milada smiles: "I see he's still jinxing me. I was hoping to take you to lunch myself. Too bad."

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He arrived on time but she was already waiting for him in the hotel lobby. He led her into the dining room and sat her down across from him at the table he had reserved.

After some talk, she breaks in: "Well, how do you like it here? Would you stay on?"

"No," he says; then in turn he asks: "What about you? What's holding you here?"

"Nothing."

The response is so trenchant and so like his own that they both burst into laughter. Their agreement is sealed thereby, and they set to talking with gusto, with gaiety.

He orders the meal, and when the waiter hands him the wine list Irena takes it herself: "You do the meal, I'll do the wine!" She sees some French wines on the list and selects one of those: "Wine is a matter of honor with me. They don't know a thing about wine, our countrymen, and you, dulled by your barbaric Scandinavia, you know even less."

She tells him how her friends refused to drink

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the Bordeaux she provided them: "Imagine, a 1985 vintage! and to make a point, to teach me a lesson in patriotism, they drank beer! Later on they felt sorry for me, they were already drunk on the beer and they kept on drinking, with the wine!"

She tells the story, she's funny, they laugh.

"The worst thing is, they kept talking to me about things and people I knew nothing about. They refused to see that after all this time, their world has evaporated from my head. They thought with all my memory blanks I was trying to make myself interesting. To stand out. It was a very strange conversation: I'd forgotten who they had been; they weren't interested in who I'd become. Can you believe that not one person here has ever asked me a single question about my life abroad? Not one single question! Never! I keep having the sense that they want to amputate twenty years of my life from me. Really, it does feel like an amputation. I feel shortened, diminished, like a dwarf."

He likes her, and he likes her story, too. He understands her, he agrees with everything she's saying.

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"And what about in France?" he says. "Do your friends there ask you any questions?"

She is about to say yes, but then she thinks again; she wants to be precise, and she speaks slowly: "No, of course not! But when people spend a lot of time together, they assume they know each other. They don't ask themselves any questions and they don't worry about it. They're not interested in each other, but it's completely innocent. They don't realize it."

"That's true. It's only when you come back to the country after a long absence that you notice the obvious: people aren't interested in one another, it's normal."

"Yes, it's normal."

"But I had something else in mind. Not about you, or about your life—not you as a person. I was thinking about your experience. About what you'd seen, what had happened to you. Your French friends couldn't have any conception of that."

"Oh, the French, you know—they have no need for experience. With them, judgments precede experience. When we got there, they didn't need any information from us. They were already

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thoroughly informed that Stalinism is an evil and emigration is a tragedy. They weren't interested in what we thought, they were interested in us as living proof of what they thought. So they were generous to us and proud of it. When Commu- nism collapsed all of a sudden, they looked hard at me, an investigator's look. And after that something soured. I didn't behave the way they expected."

She drinks a little wine; then: "They had really done a lot for me. They saw me as the embodiment of an emigre's suffering. Then the time came for me to confirm that suffering by my joyous return to the homeland. And that confirmation didn't happen. They felt duped. And so did I, because up till then I'd thought they loved me not for my suffering but for my self."

She tells him about Sylvie. "She was disappointed that I didn't rush home the first day to man the barricades in Prague!"

"What barricades?"

"Of course there were none, but Sylvie imagined there were. I wasn't able to come to Prague until a few months later, after the fact, and I did stay for a while then. When I got back to Paris, I

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had a terrific need to talk to her, you know, I really loved her, and I wanted to tell her all about it, discuss it all, the shock of going back to your country after twenty years, but she wasn't so eager to see me anymore."

"Did you quarrel?"

"Oh no. Just, I wasn't an emigre anymore. I wasn't interesting anymore. So, gradually, amicably, with a smile, she stopped calling."

"So who've you got to talk with? Who thinks the way you do?"

"No one." Then: "You."

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They fell silent. And she repeated, her tone almost grave: "You." And she added: "Not here. In France. Better yet, somewhere else. Anywhere."

With these words, she offered him her future. And although Josef has no interest in the future, he feels happy with this woman who so visibly desires him. As if he were way back in the past, back in the years he used to go picking up girls in Prague. As if those years were inviting him now to

take up the thread where he broke it off. He feels young again in the company of this stranger, and suddenly it seems unacceptable to cut short the afternoon for an appointment with his stepdaughter.

"Will you excuse me? I have to make a phone call." He gets up and walks toward a booth.

She watches his slightly stooped figure as he lifts the receiver; from that distance she sees his age more clearly. At the Paris airport he had looked younger; now she sees that he must be fifteen or twenty years older than she; like Martin, like Gustaf. That doesn't dishearten her; on the contrary it gives her the reassuring sense that however daring and risky it may be, this adventure fits the pattern of her life and is less mad than it seems (I note: she feels encouraged the way Gustaf did, years back, when he learned Martin's age).

He has barely given his name on the phone when the stepdaughter attacks him: "You're calling to say you're not coming."

"That's right. After all these years, I have so many things to do. I don't have a minute to spare. Do excuse me."

"You leave when?"

He is about to say, "Tonight," but it occurs to him that she might try to find him at the airport. He lies: "Tomorrow morning."

"And you have no time to see me? Even between two other appointments? Even late tonight? I can get free whenever you say!"

"No."

"I'm your wife's daughter, after all!"

The emphatic way she nearly shouts that last line reminds him of everything that used to drive him wild in this country. He hardens his stance and looks for a biting retort.

She beats him to it: "You're not talking! You don't know what to say! Just so you know, Mama warned me not to call you. She told me what ari egotist you are! What a filthy little egotist!"

She hangs up.

Walking back to the table, he feels spattered with filth. Suddenly, illogically, a thought crosses his mind: I've had a lot of women in this country but no sister. He is startled by the line and by the word "sister"; he slows his step to breathe in that peaceful word: "sister." It's true, in this country he had never found any sister.

"Something unpleasant happen?"

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"Nothing important," he replied as he sat down. "But unpleasant, yes."

He is quiet.

She too. Her fatigue reminds her of the sedatives from her sleepless night. Hoping to fight it off, she pours the last of the wine into her glass and drinks it. Then she lays her hand on his: "We're not happy here. Let me buy you a drink."

They move into the bar, where music is playing, loud.

She recoils, then gets hold of herself: she does want some alcohol. At the counter they each drink a glass of cognac.

He looks at her: "What's the matter?"

She nods toward the speakers.

"The music? Let's go to my room."

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Learning of his presence in Prague through Irena was quite a remarkable coincidence. But by a certain age, coincidences lose their magic, no longer surprise, become run-of-the-mill. The memory of

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Josef does not disturb her. With bitter humor she merely recalls that he used to enjoy scaring her with the threat of loneliness and that here he had just condemned her to eating her midday meal alone.

The way he talked about loneliness. Perhaps the reason the word lingers in her memory is because at the time it seemed so incomprehensible: as a girl with two brothers and two sisters, she detested crowds; for studying, or reading, she had no room of her own and had a hard time finding even a corner to withdraw to. Clearly they had different concerns, but she understood that in her boyfriend's mouth the word "loneliness" took on a more abstract, a grander meaning: going though life without drawing anyone's interest; talking without being heard; suffering without stirring compassion; thus, living as she has in fact lived ever since then.

In a neighborhood far from her house, she's parked her car and starts looking for a bistro. When she has no one to lunch with, she never goes to a restaurant (where, on an empty chair across the table, loneliness would sit down and watch her), but instead eats a sandwich at a

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counter. Passing a shopwindow, she catches a glimpse of her own reflection. She stops. Looking at herself is her vice, perhaps the only one. Pretending to look over the merchandise, she takes a look at herself: the brown hair, the blue eyes, the round outline of the face. She knows she is beautiful, has always known it, and it is her sole good fortune.

Then she realizes that what she is seeing is not only her vaguely reflected face but the window display of a butcher shop: a hanging carcass, severed haunches, a pig's head with a friendly, touching muzzle, and, farther into the shop, the plucked bodies of poultry with their claws lifted, impotently and humanly lifted, and suddenly horror shoots through her, her face crumples, she clenches her fists and strains to banish the nightmare.