My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (31 page)

This role was a complete contradiction of the young man’s habitually solicitous approach to the girl. True, before he had met her he had in fact behaved roughly rather than gently toward women. But he had never resembled a heartless tough guy, because he had never demonstrated either a particularly strong will or ruthlessness. However, if he did not resemble such a man, nonetheless he had longed to at one time. Of course it was a quite naive desire, but there it was. Childish desires withstand all the snares of the adult mind and often survive into ripe old age. And this childish desire quickly took advantage of the opportunity to embody itself in the proffered role.

The young man’s sarcastic reserve suited the girl very well—it freed her from herself. For she herself was, above all, the epitome of jealousy. The moment she stopped seeing the gallantly seductive young man beside her and saw only his inaccessible face, her jealousy subsided. The girl could forget herself and give herself up to her role.

Her role? What was her role? It was a role out of trashy literature. The hitchhiker stopped the car not to get a ride, but to seduce the man who was driving the car. She was an artful seductress, cleverly knowing how to use her charms. The girl slipped into this silly, romantic part with an ease that astonished her and held her spellbound.

V

There was nothing the young man missed in his life more than lightheartedness. The main road of his life was drawn with implacable precision: his job didn’t use up merely eight hours a day, it also infiltrated the remaining time with the compulsory boredom of meetings and home study, and, by means of the attentiveness of his countless male and female colleagues, it infiltrated the wretchedly little time he had left for his private life as well; this private life never remained secret and sometimes even became the subject of gossip and public discussion. Even a two week vacation didn’t give him a feeling of liberation and adventure; the gray shadow of precise planning lay even here. The scarcity of summer accommodations in our country had compelled him to book a room in the Tatras six months in advance, and since for that he needed a recommendation from his office, its omnipresent brain thus did not cease knowing about him for even an instant.

He had become reconciled to all this, yet all the same from time to time the terrible thought of the straight road would overcome him—a road along which he was being pursued, where he was visible to everyone, and from which he could not turn aside. At this moment that thought returned to him. Through an odd and brief conjunction of ideas the figurative road became identified with the real highway along which he was driving—and this led him suddenly to do a crazy thing.

“Where did you say you wanted to go?” he asked the girl.

“To Bystrica,” she replied.

“And what are you going to do there?”

“I have a date there.”

“Who with?”

“With a certain gentleman.”

The car was just coming to a large crossroads. The driver slowed down so as to read the road signs, then turned off to the right.

“What will happen if you don’t turn up for that date?”

“I would be your fault, and you would have to take care of me.”

“You obviously didn’t notice that I turned off in the direction of Nove Zamky.”

“Is that true? You’ve gone crazy!”

“Don’t worry! I’ll take care of you,” said the young man.

The game all at once went into a higher gear. The sports car was moving away not only from the imaginary goal of Bystrica, but also from the real goal, toward which it had been heading in the morning: the Tatras and the room that had been reserved. Fiction was suddenly making an assault on real life. The young man was moving away from himself and from the implacable straight road, from which he had never strayed until now.

“But you said you were going to the Tatras!” The girl was surprised.

“I’m going, miss, wherever I feel like going. I’m a free man, and I do what I want and what it pleases me to do.”

VI

When they drove into Nove Zamky it was already getting dark.

The young man had never been here before, and it took him a while to orient himself. Several times he stopped the car and asked the passersby directions to the hotel. Several streets had been dug up, so that the drive to the hotel, even though it was quite close by (as all those who had been asked asserted), necessitated so many detours and roundabout routes that it was almost a quarter of an hour before they finally stopped in front of it. The hotel looked unprepossessing, but it was the only one in town and the young man didn’t feel like driving on. So he said to the girl: “Wait here,” and he got out of the car.

Out of the car he was, of course, himself again. And it was upsetting for him to find himself in the evening somewhere completely different from his intended destination—the more so because no one had forced him to do it and as a matter of fact he hadn’t even really wanted to. He blamed himself for this piece of folly, but then became reconciled to it. The room in the Tatras could wait until tomorrow, and it wouldn’t do any harm if they celebrated the first day of their vacation with something unexpected.

He walked through the restaurant—smoky, noisy, and crowded—and asked for the reception desk. They sent him to the back of the lobby near the staircase, where behind a glass panel a superannuated blonde was sitting beneath a board full of keys. With difficulty, he obtained the key to the only room left.

The girl, when she found herself alone, also threw off her role. She didn’t feel ill-humored, though, at finding herself in an unexpected town. She was so devoted to the young man that she never had doubts about anything he did, and confidently entrusted every moment of her life to him. On the other hand the idea once again popped into her mind that perhaps—just as she was now doing—other women had waited for her man in his car, those women he met on business trips. But surprisingly enough this idea didn’t upset her at all now; in fact, she smiled at the thought of how nice it was that today she was this other woman, this irresponsible, indecent other woman, one of those women of whom she was so jealous; it seemed to her that she was cutting them all out, that she had learned how to use their weapons; how to give the young man what until now she had not known how to give him: lightheartedness, shamelessness, and dissoluteness; a curious feeling of satisfaction filled her, because she alone had the ability to be all women and in this way (she alone) could completely captivate her lover and hold his interest.

The young man opened the car door and led the girl into the restaurant. Amid the din, the dirt, and the smoke he found a single unoccupied table in a corner.

VII

“So how are you going to take care of me now?” asked the girl provocatively.

“What would you like for an aperitif?”

The girl wasn’t too fond of alcohol, still she drank a little wine and liked vermouth fairly well. Now, however, she purposely said: “Vodka.”

“Fine,” said the young man. “I hope you won’t get drunk on me.”

“And if I do?” said the girl.

The young man did not reply but called over a waiter and ordered two vodkas and two steak dinners. In a moment the waiter brought a tray with two small glasses and placed it in front of them.

The man raised his glass, “To you!”

“Can’t you think of a wittier toast?”

Something was beginning to irritate him about the girl’s game; now sitting face-to-face with her, he realized that it wasn’t just the
words
that were turning her into a stranger, but that she had
completely
changed, the movements of her body and her facial expression, and that she unpalatably and faithfully resembled a type of woman he knew all too well and inspired some aversion in him.

And so (holding his glass in his raised hand), he corrected his toast: “Okay, then I won’t drink to you, but to your kind, in which are combined so successfully the better qualities of the animal and the worse aspects of the human being.”

“By ‘kind’ do you mean all women?” asked the girl.

“No, I mean only those who are like you.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t seem very witty to me to compare a woman to an animal.”

“Okay,” the young man was still holding his glass aloft, “then I won’t drink to your kind, but to your soul. Agreed? To your soul, which lights up when it descends from your head into your belly, and which goes out when it rises back up to your head.”

The girl raised her glass. “Okay, to my soul, which descends into my belly.”

“I’ll correct myself once more,” said the young man. “To your belly, into which your soul descends.”

“To my belly,” said the girl, and her belly (now that they had named it specifically) seemed to respond to the call; she could feel every bit of its skin.

Then the waiter brought their steaks, and the young man ordered them another vodka and some soda water (this time they drank to the girl’s breasts), and the conversation continued in this peculiar, frivolous tone. It irritated the young man more and more to see how well his girlfriend
knew
how to behave like a loose woman; if she was able to do it so well, he thought, it meant that she really was like that; after all, no alien soul had entered into her from somewhere in space; what she was acting now was she herself; perhaps it was that part of her being that had formerly been locked up and that the pretext of the game had let out of its cage. Perhaps the girl supposed that by means of the game she was
disowning
herself, but wasn’t it the other way around? Wasn’t she becoming herself only through the game? Wasn’t she freeing herself through the game? No, sitting opposite him was not a strange woman in his girl’s body; it was his girl, herself, no one else. He looked at her and felt growing aversion toward her.

However, it was not only aversion. The more the girl withdrew from him psychically, the more he longed for her physically; the alienation of her soul drew attention to her body; yes it turned her body into a body; as if until now it had been hidden from the young man within clouds of compassion, tenderness, concern, love, and emotion, as if it had been lost in these clouds (yes, as if this body had been
lost
!). It seemed to the young man that today he was
seeing
his girl’s body for the first time.

After her third vodka and soda the girl got up and said flirtatiously: “Excuse me.”

The young man said, “May I ask you where you are going, miss?”

“To piss, if you’ll permit me,” said the girl, and she walked off between the tables back toward the plush curtain.

VIII

She was pleased with the way she had astounded the young man with this word, which—in spite of all its innocence—he had never heard from her; nothing seemed to her truer to the character of the woman she was playing than this flirtatious emphasis placed on the word in question; yes, she was pleased, she was in the best of moods; the game captivated her. It allowed her to what she had not felt until now:
a feeling of happy-go-lucky irresponsibility
.

She who was always uneasy in advance about her every next step, suddenly felt completely relaxed. The alien life in which she had become involved was a life without shame, without biographical specifications, without past or future, without obligations; it was a life that was extraordinarily free. The girl, as a hitchhiker, could do anything:
Everything was permitted her
; she could say, do, and feel whatever she liked.

She walked through the room and was aware that people were watching her from all the tables; it was also a new sensation, one she didn’t recognize:
indecent joy caused by her body
. Until now she had never been able to get rid of the fourteen-year-old girl within herself who was ashamed of her breasts and had the disagreeable feeling that she was indecent, because they stuck out from her body and were visible. Even though she was proud of being pretty and having a good figure, this feeling of pride was always immediately curtailed by shame; she rightly suspected that feminine beauty functioned above all as sexual provocation, and she found this distasteful; she longed for her body to relate only to the man she loved; when men stared at her breasts in the street it seemed to her that they were invading a piece of her most secret privacy that should belong only to herself and her lover. But now she was the hitchhiker, the woman without a destiny. In this role she was relieved of the tender bonds of her love and began to be intensely aware of her body; and her body became more aroused the more alien the eyes watching it.