Ignorance (15 page)

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love-repose; love-oblivion; love-desertion; love-carefreeness; love-meaninglessness.

The mother has gone into the bathroom, and he is alone: a few minutes ago he thought he had committed an enormous sin; but now he knows that his act of love had nothing to do with a vice, with a transgression or a perversion, that it was an utterly normal thing. It is with her, the mother, that he makes up a couple, a pleasantly ordinary, natural, suitable couple, a couple of serene old folks. From the bathroom comes the sound of water; he sits up on the couch and looks at his watch. In two hours he is expecting the son of his most recent mistress, a man, young, who admires him. Gustaf will introduce him this evening among his business friends. His whole life he's been surrounded by women! What a pleasure, finally, to have a son! He smiles and begins to look for his clothes where they're scattered on the floor.

He is already dressed when the mother returns from the bathroom, in a robe. The situation is very slightly solemn and thus embarrassing, as are all such situations when after the initial love-making, the lovers confront a future they are suddenly required to take on. The music is still

playing, and at this delicate moment, as if it hoped to rescue them, it shifts from rock to tango. They obey the invitation, they come together and give over to that indolent monotone flood of sounds; they do not think; they let themselves be carried along and carried away; they dance, slowly and at length, with absolutely no parody.

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Her sobs went on for a long time, and then, as if by a miracle, they stopped, followed by heavy breathing: she fell asleep; this change was startling and sadly laughable; she slept, profoundly and irretrievably. She had not changed position, she was still on her back with her legs spread.

He was still looking at her crotch, that tiny little area that, with admirable economy of space, provides for four sovereign functions: arousal, copulation, procreation, urination. He gazed a long while at that sad place with its spell broken, and was gripped by an immense, immense sadness.

He knelt by the bed, leaning over her gently snoring head; he felt close to this woman; he could

imagine staying with her, being concerned with her; they had promised in the airplane not to inquire into each other's private life; he knew nothing about her, therefore, but one thing seemed clear: She was in love with him; prepared to go off with him, to give up everything, to begin everything over again. He knew she was calling on him for help. He had a chance, certainly his last, to be useful, to help someone, and among the multitude of strangers overpopulating the planet, to find a sister.

He began to dress, discreetly, silently, so as not to wake her.

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As on every Sunday evening, she was alone in her modest impecunious-scientist studio apartment. She moved about the room and ate the same thing she had at noon: cheese, butter, bread, beer. A vegetarian, she is sentenced to such alimentary monotony. Since her stay at the mountain hospital, meat reminds her that her body could be cut

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up and eaten as easily as the body of a calf. Of course, people don't eat human flesh, it would terrify them. But that terror only confirms that a man can be eaten, masticated, swallowed, transmuted into excrement. And Milada knows that the terror of being eaten is only the effect of another more general terror that lies at the foundation of all of life: the terror of being a body, of existing in body form.

She finished her dinner and went into the bathroom to wash her hands. Then she looked up and saw herself in the mirror above the sink. This gaze was entirely different from the earlier one, when she was observing her beauty in a shopwindow. This time the look was tense; slowly she lifted the hair that framed her cheeks. She looked at herself, as if spellbound, for a long, a very long time; then she let the hair fall back into place, arranged it around her face, and returned to the room.

At the university she used to be seduced by the dreams of voyages to distant stars. What pleasure to escape far away into the universe, someplace where life expresses itself differently from here and needs no bodies! But despite all his amazing rockets, man will never progress very far in the

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universe. The brevity of his life makes the sky a dark lid against which he will forever crack his head, to fall back onto earth, where everything alive eats and can be eaten.

Misery and pride. "On horseback, death and a peacock." She was standing at the window, gazing at the sky. A starless sky, a dark lid.

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He put all his belongings into the suitcase and glanced around the room so as not to leave anything behind. Then he sat down at the table, and on a hotel letterhead sheet he wrote:

"Sleep well. The room is yours till tomorrow at noon. ..." He would have liked to say something very tender besides, but at the same time he was determined not to leave her a single false word. Finally, he added: "... my sister."

He laid the sheet on the rug beside the bed to make sure she would see it.

He picked up the DO NOT DISTURB card; as he left he turned to look again at her as she slept,

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and, in the corridor, he closed the door silently and hung the card on the knob.

In the lobby from all around him he heard Czech being spoken and again now it was flat and unpleasantly blase, an unknown language.

Settling his bill, he said: "There's a woman still in my room. She will leave later." And to ensure that no one would give her an unpleasant look, he laid a five-hundred-korun note on the counter before the receptionist.

He climbed into a taxi and left for the airport. It was evening already. The plane took off toward a dark sky, then burrowed into clouds. After a few minutes the sky opened out, peaceful and friendly, strewn with stars. Through the porthole he saw, far off in the sky, a low wooden fence and a brick house with a slender fir tree like a lifted arm before it.

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