The Darts of Cupid: Stories (15 page)

"I will," I said, "even if you think it’s screamingly funny."

"You are in a bad mood," he said.

"Am I?" I said.

"And I know why," he said. "It’s because the slippers were not to your taste."

"That’s true," I said, "and in more ways than one."

"Look here," he said, "I will get you a pair of slippers— anything you like—on one condition. You go back now and pack your trunk and move in with me. What’s the good of staying there? You have no comfort, you haven’t got a telephone in your room, and no private bath. And it costs you money. I’ll give you a key and you can go and come as you please and I shall never question you. You will be free. But I’d be much happier if I had you here with me."

"It’s very kind of you—," I said.

"But?"

"But I can’t do it."

He leaned back against the pillows, watching me.

"I can’t afford it," I said. "I’ve got a husband, and he knows I’ve put up at this hotel, and if he phoned or anything . . . I can’t take the risk."

"Don’t ever speak to me of your husband again," he said.

"He comes to the same thing as the slippers," I said.

He said, "You’ll be sorry for that remark."

I did not speak.

He said, "If you won’t leave the hotel, at least you needn’t eat there. They cook with car grease and floor polish, for all one knows. I want you to come here tonight and have dinner with me. All cooked in butter—you can rely on me."

I smiled. I asked, "And what will I have to do to earn my keep?"

"Milostivá paní,”
he said, "you are not for use, you are for pleasure."

THAT EVENING, on entering his room, I went over to the bookcase. It was filled with many-volumed works on history and economics. On the ledge of the stand holding the television set, there was a stack of journals and a single book. I picked it up. It was entitled
Happiness in Married Love
and was written by a gynecologist. I said, "That’s the only worthwhile book you’ve got, as far as I’m concerned. It looks heaven. Is it good?"

"That rubbish," he said. "How should I know? I haven’t read it. I really don’t know how it got here." He gave me the same helplessly resigned smile and gesture as he had that morning when producing the slippers.

"May I read it?" I asked.

"You may," he said. "I’ll see about dinner and you sit with married love in the meantime."

"Don’t you want me to help you?"

"I don’t."

"Goody, goody," I said. "I hate to give the helping hand. I don’t like to receive it, either, which means that my laziness is not really—"

"You needn’t make any excuses," he said. "I’ll tell you straight out that I never want you to touch anything in the kitchen. You could kill yourself if you tampered with it. I rigged it up myself—the hot plates and kettle and grill—in a most unorthodox manner, with high-frequency current which is forbidden in dwelling places, and I have to switch transformers and adaptors all the time because there is only one plug socket." He gave his indulgently resigned laugh and added, "That’s the only practical advantage I got out of reading physics. Of course, I was lucky, I am of poor parents, so they sent me to the university. I was always a heavy gun, already at school, in mathematics and physics, but it’s a disgrace, their legislation, as though the innocent children of rich bourgeois parents could help it that their parents had been rich. Now they’ve realized that some of them are brainy too, and they admit them for higher studies."

"You have a degree in physics?" I asked.

"Of a kind," he said. "But when the radio goes wrong or the television, I am no use, and I have to get it repaired, like everybody else."

He laid the table with two sheets of felt and a cloth. "You are laughing at me now, because I’m so pedantic. But it’s got to be."

Half an hour later he carried in giblet soup, asparagus, boiled chicken, and rice. He poured red wine. "The wine is good," he said. "When I tell you, you can rely on me. Wine I do understand. I was brought up in a wine shop."

"But the asparagus," I said, "you shouldn’t have . . . It must be the first this year—it’s the end of April."

"One must eat something," he said, "and there are no run-of-the-mill vegetables just now, not even ordinary greens for the soup. Mismanagement of transport and distribution. Where are the carrots and leeks and parsley root and parsnips? It’s a disgrace."

"But what do the poor common people do?" I said.

He said, "You mean the people. There is a compote of apricots and cherries, homemade, out of the glass. Do you want it with the meat, or later?"

When we had coffee I said, "Now comes the painful and unavoidable question, the way Virgil put it, when he wrote about washing up, ‘venit summa dies and ineluctabile tempus.’ "

"Don’t worry about it," he said. "That will be seen to tomorrow."

I said, "Better get it over with now. I’m quite used to it from London, and shared misery is halved misery."

He said, "Maybe, but you forget we are in a workers’ democracy. Someone will attend to it tomorrow. I’ll only stack away the plates and dishes now, and you can’t help there either, because the kitchen is too small for two. The best thing for you, altogether, is to keep away from the kitchen."

I said, "For ever and ever, amen."

He was not amused, but nodded gravely. I thought that his utter lack of humor and irony was probably typically Russian, so different from the Czechs, who never fail to insert a bitingly disrespectful and sarcastic comment. It also occurred to me that I had never seen him burst into genuine openhearted laughter. Unlike most people, who have several kinds of laughter, he had only one kind, of the indulgently resigned sort, which was no more than a symbolic show of amusement. I wondered whether this lack of spontaneity was not due to his speaking in Czech, and I recalled the fire with which he had been aflame, in those first few minutes, when he had spoken to me in Russian.

There was yet another thing which made me wonder. On all those occasions when he had informed me that we were in a people’s democracy, he had stated this in such a way that it was impossible to tell whether he jeered or approved. Was he coming at me with butter, or with dripping? But soon I ceased to wonder. He had crowned an excellent meal with excellent coffee, and I was filled with the drowsiness of well-being.

When I told him that I would be going to the theater on the following evening, he said, "Then you will get back to the hotel by ten, and I’ll wait for you in the coffeehouse. But I want you to understand once and for all, I hate eating out and I hate eating alone, and I want you to eat here with me. I am limited in what I can do, but everything I do is first-rate, I promise you. And when the warm weather sets in at last, I’ll make you some cold supper dishes. I’ll make a brawn of pork and veal, and the aspic will be crystal clear—I pass it through muslin, you can rely on me—and with it I’ll give you a sauce
tartare,
but a proper one. When it comes to
sauce
tartare
I can look anyone straight in the face and needn’t bow my head in shame."

"Is that the one with crushed egg and chives?" I asked.

"No, that’s rémoulade," he said. "And now you are laughing at me again because I’m so pedantic. But I don’t mind. Go on, laugh. Why have you suddenly turned serious?"

"Because I’ve just been thinking," I said. "When it turns really hot, I shan’t be here anymore. I leave the first week in June."

"Don’t leave," he said.

"I can’t stay on," I said, "and you know why."

"I do know," he said. "We had this the other day. You can stay here with me and get a divorce in absentia. And your husband can whistle for you. As long as you are here with me, he can’t get at you."

"You forget that I am British," I said.

He said, "You are British and you are wrong. A people’s democracy is beyond the reach of the capitalist states."

"There is a British consul in Prague," I said. "What is he here for—to pick his nose?"

"The expressions you use," he said. "But yes, that’s exactly what he is here for."

"How do you mean?"

"Because," he said, "you are here in the country of your birth. The British cannot protect their nationals if they happen to be in the country of their birth. If you were put in prison here, nobody from over there could interfere."

"I know," I said. "I was warned about that before I came out here. But I didn’t think you knew."

"You are a little fool," he said. "It’s no secret—it’s printed on every British passport."

"I can’t leave my husband," I said.

"Nonsense," he said, "you’ve left him already as it is."

"Don’t be ridiculous," I said. "I only came out here for six weeks. And what’s wrong with that? It’s my hometown, and to him it’s nothing—he would only be bored."

"You are exactly what I want," he said. "And you are not what your husband wants or he wouldn’t have let you travel alone. Do you think I’d ever let you travel alone?"

I did not reply.

"You needn’t decide," he said, "but I can take the decision out of your hands. Come to bed now."

I went to the theater the next evening, as I had intended to, and after that, several times more, and though his attitude toward art in general was one of respectful indifference, each time he tried to discourage me from seeing that particular performance. "You are going to the Viola tonight? Yes, avant-garde cabaret, I know. And avant-garde it certainly is, the avant-garde of expressionism, the way it was done in Berlin thirty years ago." Or, "Tonight it’s opera, isn’t it? Oh, yes,
The Bartered Bride.
I might have known. That’s a phenomenon for you. They play it year in, year out, at least once a week, and every performance is sold out. You haven’t seen it since before the war. You’ll be thrilled to see the eighteen-year-old Marenka sung by a well-preserved post-climacteric lady. Altogether, when one goes to the Prague opera nowadays, one gets the impression that all young women born in Bohemia and Moravia in the last twenty-five years were born mute. Of course, it may be better in Bratislava, for all I know. The Slovaks have more get-up-and-go, I believe. Why don’t you take a plane to Bratislava and have a look at what’s cooking in their culture pot?"

I said, "Oh, the Slovaks—I cough on them."

"I wish you wouldn’t use these expressions," he said. "But the way you said, ‘Oh, the Slovaks,’ with that hatred and contempt—now at last I know that you are really and truly from Bohemia."

"How do you mean?" I asked. "Of course I am really and truly—I told you so, didn’t I, the first evening I met you."

"So you did," he said pleasantly, "but I didn’t believe you."

"You didn’t?"

"I did not. I also didn’t believe you when you told me you had flown in from London the day before," he said, still with the same pleasantness.

"You didn’t believe that either?" I asked.

He said, "No, but I know now that it was true."

I said, "But if you had asked me, I could have shown you my passport. It’s written in my passport that I was born in Prague."

"I wouldn’t have wanted to see your passport," he said, "even if you had offered to show me."

"Why on earth not?"

"What is a passport? A passport doesn’t mean anything."

I felt deeply flustered. I said, "No, of course not. I hadn’t thought of it, but I suppose you are right."

He said, "You are a charming little fool, and the less thinking and supposing you do, the better."

I felt my face turning hot under his glance. Though his voice had remained smoothly pleasant, his countenance had lost the benevolence of the lion at rest. Was he warning me not to try guessing why I should not enter the kitchen, or whether there were doors hidden behind the built-in wardrobes in the hall, or all the other questions which kept coming to mind? I forced myself to laugh, and said, "If I stay with you much longer, I’ll stop thinking altogether and become a complete cow. I’m well on the way already, as it is, what with you giving me these marvelous meals and coffee—and the rest . . . I don’t know how to explain it."

"You needn’t explain," he said, in the tone of curt finality he had used that first evening about the pumpkin. "You have calmed down beautifully. If I may be zoological, when I first met you, you were restless and questing like a goat, and now you are serene like a ewe."

"Now you are talking like Khrushchev," I said. "Once he made a speech about foreign countries, and he said, ‘This particular hen shouldn’t be cackling just now.’ "

"Oh, Khrushchev," he said. "I met him once and he shook hands with me. That was in Hungary when he came on a state visit. I happened to be a rather high . . . official at the time."

I noticed the hesitation and kept silent, adding it to the collection of facts about him which I had gathered. On the whole, ordinary conversation was not possible with him, because I could not ask him any questions. Mostly he expanded in monologues about the economy of the country and its mismanagement, and I soon stopped trying to follow his words and merely listened to the sound of his voice. He had a deliberate and decisive way of speaking, and owing to the shifts of his Russian accent, his full, hard baritone had a quality like the glitter of brocade. And yet I was not bored. I fell into a daze of well-being, of feeling secure and at peace, and I only roused myself from this languor when he said, "Now I’ll see about the dinner," or, "Now I’ll give you a last cigarette and then I’ll take you to bed." This feeling of being bewitched in his company never left me, and it was underscored by the fact that we were sitting in a room on the top floor, as though in a lighthouse or in a shepherd’s hut on top of a hill, each of us alien to the character of the room, each of us not belonging to the city beyond, and enjoying luxuries which were unobtainable to the common herd.

By then it was obvious to me that whatever his work, it was not an office job; he did not get up at the same hour every morning. Moreover, I could not picture him doing any kind of sedate work. I could never rid myself of my first impression, of seeing him as a balladesque shepherd figure observing his flock; this open-air look of his was due not only to his deep pink out-of-doors complexion but also to his powerful body, recalling that of a dockworker or wood-cutter.