The Ice Cream Man (8 page)

When they come up to the main room, they play the part of a couple who have made up after a silly tiff. The underlying reasons for these tiffs always remain hidden to outsiders, but they can cause disproportionate, childish, emotional outbursts that make eyewitnesses of the uninitiated. While Esther takes the pork chops out of the oven, puts them on top of the stove, and transfers them to a serving plate, Tomáš stands next to her and cautiously places his hand on the back of her neck below her barley-colored curls. Esther allows his hand to remain there until she carries the serving dish to the table.

“So, tell me what happened next,” Mrs. Němcová urges, using her fork to point to somewhere in the past.

“How do you mean?”

“In Olomouc. You happened to be on the same tram, but that could have been the end of it. It would have been more likely if you’d just gone your separate ways forever and ever.”

“Tomáš can tell the story,” Esther says.

“I was taught never to speak with food in my mouth.”

“So finish chewing first! Mrs. Němcová has done everything here. Mrs. Němcová even knew it was your birthday today.”

“Very kind of you. And astonishing. How could you have known?”

“From your papers. The papers, of course. I’ve arranged so many red-letter days that I made a note of it out of habit: it will be Tomáš Vorszda’s birthday soon.”

“And where did you find those pork chops? It can’t have been easy to get ahold of those.”

“Mrs. Němcová wanted to hear what happened in Olomouc.”

Tomáš takes a bite of meat and starts chewing earnestly.

“So do I,” adds Esther.

“Sounds as though you’ve had to tell the story many times,” Mrs. Němcová remarks.

“Yes, it’s Esther’s favorite story.”

Esther smiles. “Every time Tomáš tells it, I feel as if I’m hearing it for the first time.”

Tomáš pauses for too long, and Esther gives him a significant, almost gloating, glance. The landlady’s jaws cease grinding a crust of bread, and there is an odd silence, a silence as if there were no story at all.

Tomáš swallows and says, “There wasn’t anything strange about it. I just couldn’t get her out of my head.”

Esther should keep smiling but lowers her gaze. Perhaps she manages to deceive them both: perhaps the landlady thinks she is moved, and perhaps Tomáš thinks she is completely unmoved.

“Yes, Esther is a beautiful girl,” the landlady affirms.

“She’s not so beautiful that it would have been enough on its own.” Tomáš grows silent again; perhaps he is thinking, but he may very well have the story all prepared; perhaps he cobbled it together as he listened to Esther’s description of the tram.

“Esther was engaged then.”

“You don’t say!” the landlady exclaims. “Was it serious?”

“You’ll have to ask Esther . . . I’m sure they didn’t get engaged for fun.”

“Oh, dear—were you pregnant?”

“No!”

“Don’t be insulted, I’m only joking! Of course you weren’t, where would the baby have gone? But what sort of man was he?”

“Not an accountant, at any rate.”

“That’s for sure.”

“Well, what then?”

“Must we talk about him? We’re here to celebrate Tomáš’s birthday.”

“You’re right, let’s forget him.”

“We can’t forget him altogether,” Tomáš says. “There on the tram, I didn’t even know he existed. But I ought to have considered the possibility that he might have existed. Never mind the fact that . . .”

“That what?”

“That in those circumstances a girl like Esther shouldn’t have been looking at other men the way she looked at me.”

“Wantonly?”

“Quite the reverse.”

“How can one look at a man in reverse?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“Why did you look at a complete stranger that way, Esther?”

“But it was Tomáš.”

“So you just knew right away that it was Tomáš?”

They are both waiting for her answer. Esther looks at them with her mouth open, and Tomáš is reminded again of that carp whose naturalistic life carries on in the cramped water in a tub, but whose head and tail knock against the sides.

“I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“How I knew it was Tomáš.”

“You don’t need to know, my dear. That’s the mystery.”

“The mystery called ‘woman snares unknown man amid city bustle,’” Tomáš suggests.

“But you didn’t need to go down the aisle, did you?” Esther remarks.

“No, that’s where the mystery lies.”

“Are you starting again?” the landlady laments.

“If Esther can calm down, then I’ll carry on.”

“Go ahead, then!” says Esther.

“I was supposed to get off after a couple of stops, so I did.”

“And Esther, did she get off as well?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“What was going through your mind?”

“I suppose I was so muddled up that the wires from my head to my feet were disconnected for a moment. Only when I was standing at the stop and saw the tram starting to move off and continue on its way did it occur to me that that girl would vanish from my life forever. I knew nothing about her; she might have been leaving the city that same day. I might have been able to forget everything else, but I could not get the look in her eyes out of my mind. That made me think it was possible.”

“What?”

“Well . . . life.”

“Life!” the landlady repeats, puzzled.

“I have this theory that people are born twice. The first time, nature pushes people into the world. The second time, people have to push their own way through.”

“What do you mean, through? And what’s on the other side?”

“That’s where life is.”

“So she was getting away from you. Did you run after the tram?”

“No.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“But it couldn’t have ended there.”

“No, indeed. Because it had started long ago.”

“Now I’m completely confused!”

“He thinks he’s so clever!” Esther snaps. “I was engaged to him.”

The landlady frowns. “To whom?”

“Tomáš!”

“You mean there, on the tram? Wasn’t it a different man?”

“No! Such a silly . . . that’s always such a silly joke, Tomáš, no one ever gets it, and if somebody gets it, it gets even sillier . . .”

“It wasn’t a joke at all.”

“Tomáš is right,” the landlady says, nodding. “That was a lovely little story. Why are you so annoyed now?”

“Pure mathematics,” Tomáš explains. “Esther has only one role in it, but I’ve got two.”

Esther casts a long glance at Tomáš. “When you stop to think, there is something funny about it. Yet another example of how a strange man is always so all-powerful and such a threatening rival to another man. Where does that come from? Statistically speaking, most men are pitiful creatures.”

“In view of that fact, it is nothing short of a miracle that Esther found me. Firstly: I’m not a pitiful creature. And secondly: I’ve never been to Olomouc.”

“Where?”

“Olomouc.”

“But the tram was in Olomouc.”

Esther buries her face in her hands. “No one can bear listening to you anymore, Tomáš, and those who are still listening don’t understand a thing.”

“Except you,” says Tomáš. “You understand me.”

The wine is absorbed into Esther’s bloodstream and whispers as if to make everything clearer, deeper, and more intense. Esther would drink a great deal more if there were more to drink; she would surely drink too much, but of her own free will, and she would drink still more simply because Tomáš thinks she ought to drink less, and so everything could be under Esther’s control, more so than it ever was when she was sober. But of all the feelings inside Esther, the one the wine amplifies most of all is fear. Her fear begins to leak out like sulfur from a broken tap, and soon the landlady’s scavenged pork chops are floating atop it, and her lipstick is so smeared that it looks even worse than it did at th
e start. She tries to wipe it with the back of her hand every time Tomáš looks away, and soon Esther could just as well tear her hair out without Tomáš noticing that either. Perhaps it is due to the candlelight: the glowing flames and roses attract everyone’s gaze. They are genuine, but Esther is covered in paint and trussed up in a garter belt. Esther goes to cut a slice of apple strudel, and Tomáš turns his chair toward the landlady, leaving only the back of his shirt and his suspenders facing Esther. She sees the shirt creases and the movement of the creases every time Tomáš shifts his posture. Her fear makes Esther see the sorts of things she doesn’t even know she has seen: how very little Tomáš has trusted her, how Tomáš has woken her up in the middle of the night, blinding her with his flashlight and shaking her more roughly than she would ever have believed Tomáš capable of doing and shouting, “Name! Date of birth!” and bellowing, “For the last time: Who is your husband?” while Esther cannot manage to get a single sound out of her mouth, not even a wheeze, the way it is in a dream when you try to call for help. So Esther actually thinks it was all just a dream and Tomáš has never shouted or pulled her hair, and there is a reason why she dreams those dreams about Tomáš, and that reason must be a good one, and so there is nothing to be ashamed of.

A radio is crackling loudly on top of the chest of drawers where the table linen is kept. It emits no fateful newsflashes, no statesmen’s speeches, not even “Lili Marleen” carried over the waves to various parts of Europe; there is just crackling, however much the landlady jabs at the ivory-colored buttons or spins the dial. The gramophone is kept in the landlady’s boudoir. She brings it out into the main room, along with a stack of records, in honor of Tomáš’s birthday. The landlady does this on the spur of the moment, once they have eaten the pork, the potatoes, then the apple strudel for dessert. The music has a strange effect on Esther; it feels awkward to look anywhere other than at the floor in front of the tallboy, where Tomáš is whirling around, his hands on the landlady’s waist; yet it feels just as silly to look at another part of the room where nothing is going on. Esther twirls her empty glass in her fingers for as long as she can without giving off an air of boredom or melancholy, then gets up to busy herself. She takes the serving dish over to the sink and pours the pork fat into a storage jar, wipes off the dish with a piece of newspaper until the landlady notices what she is doing and orders her away from the stove, and returns to the table, smoothing her hair.

Mrs. Němcová starts to laugh so hard that she muddles up her dance steps and has to return to the table, patting her chest.

“That’s enough, that’s enough now, before I have a heart
attack . . .”
The landlady’s eyes alight briefly on the ripe-smelling pork bones that have been sucked bare. “What are you doing, my dear?”

Esther rapidly pulls her hand away from the candle flame and lets it drop beneath the table.

“I burned a hair.”

“It’s giving off a terrible stench.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Come here.” Esther hears Tomáš’s voice behind her.

Esther puts both hands around her wine glass and looks down, feeling the man’s hand coming to rest on her shoulder. “Why?”

“Why do you think? Wouldn’t you like to dance a bit?”

“I don’t want to. Dizzy.”

Esther raises her glass to her lips (it is empty), and Tomáš grasps it and guides it back down to the table.

“Then don’t have any more to drink if you feel dizzy.”

That almost makes Esther start to laugh; for a moment, she imagines a sharp-eyed viewer could see what they are doing. Soon they will be drinking without glasses, without mouths even, like the mime artists in the Old Town square. It is even odder to feel the man’s touch: there is nothing fictional about that, about the fingers trying to loosen Esther’s fingers from the glass. It is not easy, but it has to look easy—Tomáš ends up using calculated force so as not to shatter the glass, so fiercely are the little muscles and tendons of Esther’s fingers working against him.

“I’m not up to any twirling about right now. The world is spinning around enough.”

“This isn’t a mazurka.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Because this life has started to make me grieve.”

“Now? Why just now?”

“Aren’t I allowed to grieve at all? I didn’t even weep at the funeral.”

“What’s the matter with Esther?” the landlady wonders.

“What funeral?”

“You’re drunk! The child’s! Have you forgotten?”

“Have you started dwelling on that now?”

“Is Tomáš drunk?” Mrs. Němcová laughs and begins to recount the sort of parties they used to have in the house, how she would sometimes bundle men and women out to the hillside to do their business and have a rest. All sorts of things used to happen out there on the slope when trouser legs and skirt hems got muddled up as couples and the uncoupled searched for one another, for their shoes and their shoelaces. Esther should be listening politely and carefully to the landlady now, but she has had enough and gets up from the table with such resoluteness that her chair legs scrape along the floor, and even the landlady’s chatter ceases.

“I’m going to bed now.”

“Aren’t you going to dance with the birthday boy?” Tomáš asks.

“You can go out for a smoke.”

“Does Tomáš smoke?”

“I don’t know!”

“Don’t you know?”

“Some people smoke in secret.”

“But can’t you smell it? On his fingers, his breath, his hair?”

Esther’s neck muscles tense up, and she is on the verge of asking,
Well, did you smell it? Didn’t you have enough of a sniff of him?
But then she turns in the direction of the man.

“So you want to dance, then?”

The man no longer looks so certain, because he can see in the woman’s eyes that if Esther does not get what she wants now, once and for all, she might take such umbrage that she’ll march to the other end of the table and from there cross the floor to the tallboy and touch the landlady’s gramophone without permission, start pressing buttons and fiddling with levers in the landlady’s air-traffic control tower, thereby creating instant confusion in the air; pilots would crash into each other and plunge to their deaths, and Tomáš would still understand nothing but simply stand there amid the flames and smoke as if they did not affect him, as if he were not hearing any music at all, and Esther would have to set an example; she would twirl around the floor a couple of times, and her skirt would become a spinning top that swished against one of the landlady’s porcelain cups in its path, setting the cup in motion as well, the blue, red, and yellow floral garlands that resemble no real flowers and that prove the widow Mrs. Němcová is as much of a cheat as everyone else. But then finally a sound would make Tomáš understand that something had broken, and that he should lead Esther to their room so as to avoid any more major accidents, that the landlady’s house would remain standing and not sink into the history flowing through the bottom of the valley, and then he would see—something Tomáš on no account wishes to see—whether anything more can happen after that, when they are both already in a state of excitement and Tomáš has to keep hold of Esther for as long as she keeps struggling, and Tomáš’s hands have ever more work to do when words start coming out of Esther’s mouth at such volume that they threaten to go through the wall
(“You said you could shut me up if you wanted, you said you had other means”)
, and even though Tomáš can also see that Esther would never do something so thoughtless as to rock the boat that they must both row safely to shore, his certainty has now vanished and been replaced by an irreparable breach, because Tomáš can see the point toward which things might progress, and at that point no means will be available to Tomáš besides the ones he cannot use.