New Lives (37 page)

“Let me have a look at you,” Nadja exclaimed, as if she had finally thought of the right thing to say. She was wearing the same brown suit she had on when we had said our good-byes in Dresden. Suddenly she pressed her lips to mine, thrusting her tongue deep.

We took a taxi to the bed-and-breakfast, which was in Vinohrady, a neighborhood of villas. It was all a little dilapidated, but neither the rotting fence nor the rust-eaten garden gate with mailboxes dangling from its chicken wire could diminish the elegance of the house. Walking between tulip beds and fruit trees, their fragrance heavy in the air, we approached the front door, where Frau Zoubková awaited us. She was holding Dora—a bitch both black as hell and somehow weary of life—by her collar. Frau Zoubková's felt slippers made it appear that she shuffled around in them all day just so she could polish the linoleum. Most of the time she moved along close to the wall, and would wait until one of her guests left the kitchen table and made a beeline for the door, only to follow after and erase the trail.

Frau Zoubková occupied the two top floors, living in two rooms adjoining the kitchen on the second, and renting out rooms on the third, each designated with a symbol on the door: sun, stars, moon.

Do I even need to mention that we were given the sun room? The high windows faced south, where we saw, if not the city itself, the suggestion of it just beyond white treetops. The splash of a fountain and the chirping of birds were the only sounds.

I didn't even know the names of some of the fruit that we rinsed off late that evening—under Dora's mournful gaze. More astonishing still: grapes at the end of April—sort of like Christmas cookies at Easter. Nadja liked such comparisons. She gave me a sample of each fruit, and I had to say what it tasted like and reminded me of. Meanwhile I watched Nadja's hands redden under the cold water as they peeled and sliced and constantly shoved things into my mouth, until I couldn't chew and speak at the same time, which set her laughing, and the more she laughed the more nimble her fingers became, the more lively the play of tendons on the backs of her hands…Suddenly I firmly grasped her forearm—not to make Nadja stop, but because it was all so unbelievably beautiful.

I licked the drops from the palm of her hand, let my tongue wander a second time, starting at the wrist and following her lifeline just to make sure I had found them all, and I thought the dry sweetness tasted like grapefruit. Scraps of fruit waved like little pennants from Nadja's fingernails—green, red, white. She shoved fingertip after fingertip into my mouth, brushing them against my teeth. Like a blind woman, she groped across my face, up and down my nose, tracing my eyebrows and lips, while I opened her blouse and pushed up her T-shirt.

We froze when we heard the creak of the wooden stairs, listened—water was spilling onto the tile floor. The sink was running over! Nadja turned the tap off, plunged her hands into the water, scooped the peelings out of the drain, turned slowly around to me, raised her arms, and stretched, as if to show me her breasts. I was just about to kiss her when I felt drops falling on my head. Nadja was still holding the peels in her hands. Dora, the hound of hell, lapped water from the floor.

We went to work like half-naked strangers, tidying up, rinsing off, packing our things, then waited for each other outside the bathroom before climbing those endless wooden stairs up to our room.

I saw Nadja's silhouette against the window. She still had her panties on. It sounded like a confession when she whispered in my ear that she was having her period and we couldn't do it today…I didn't understand why that should stand in the way, why one thing excluded the other, but was likewise—I must admit—relieved.

I learned soon enough how unnecessary my scruples were. Nadja had a gift for making me feel like the inventor of all these unfamiliar caresses.

Then, it was toward morning, there came a moment when I feared I had spoiled all our happiness. Nadja's head had returned to my shoulder, and automatically I said “Thanks”—everything she had done seemed so incredible. But the instant I uttered it, I felt her stiffen, and I knew how wrong, how stupid I had been. Her face appeared above me, she propped her head on one hand, stared at me, smiled, and wanted to know what number she was for me. I hesitated. “Out with it,” she said. I raised my left hand and spread my thumb and forefinger.

Nadja said I couldn't fool her. First she made fun of me, then suddenly accused me of not having waited for her. When I refused to tell her about Katalin, she even turned angry.

At breakfast Dora plopped down between our chairs. Frau Zoubková gave us knowing nods. If we had left any traces in the kitchen they were long since wiped away.

Like somnambulists Nadja and I found the city's loveliest spots, took the train up to Petrin Hill, got out halfway up, walked through the spin-drift of blossoming cherry trees, and lay down in the grass.

Near the Moldau, just a few hundred yards from the Charles Bridge, we inadvertently stepped through the arch of a portal and found ourselves in an enchanted park, at the far end of which were wide stairs leading up to a terrace of brown sandstone, where a copper beech stood. I was about to touch its leaves—from a distance I had thought they were withered—when we heard something rustling behind us. We spun around and saw two peacocks, both fanning their tails simultaneously.

When I brought Nadja to her train, all that was left of her baggage was one suitcase, and we barely spoke. We crossed the train station without a word. On the platform where her train was due any moment, Nadja remarked that next time I would have to tell her about my manuscript, she wanted to know all about it, since after all it would be her job to smuggle it into the West. If there was one thing still lacking in my happiness, it was those very words.

Back in Jena, the first sentence I wrote to Nadja took on a tone that set me on my way without any larger concept, without my even really having to think about it. As I folded the pages I was already formulating the first lines of letter number two.

I wrote Nadja every day, on a typewriter now, and was amazed that my everyday life was not at all as unliterary as I had thought.

Once I had received her first reply—the pale blue envelopes came rolling in every four or five days—in which she labeled my letter “wonderful prose,” I began to lay carbon paper between my pages.

I had started too late to cram for a three-subject exam looming up ahead: the literature, art, and history of Rome, plus the languages, and tests on eighteenth-century German drama and political economics (or was it dialectical materialism?). That left me no time for
Vivat Polska!,
not unless I interrupted the flow of my letters—and if I had put off telling Nadja about my daily life until later, the tone would have been ruined. And so the only work I did on my novel was to report to Nadja how well I was progressing on it. At regular intervals I noted the conclusion of a chapter.

That's funny, don't you think? You can see, can't you, that, given everything you know about me, my behavior was totally untypical? Why, particularly at that time in my life, did I toss my manuscript in the corner? Yes, love, you'll say, yes love was to blame. Yes, I did love Nadja. But even love has to fit in with all the rest somehow.

I no longer know which letter it was, but after only a few days I was already convinced that I was writing an epistolary novel. And it was powerful! If my letters found their way to Nadja—or so my calculation—the work would essentially write itself.
²⁰⁶

I found myself once again in a situation much like the one in Oranienburg. Everything I saw and did became literary material. Without my intending it, each letter unfolded as a kind of narrative. I was surprised how widely disparate events suddenly wove themselves together as if they were part of some plan of composition. The moment I took the lid off my Rheinmetall, I drifted into storytelling. I barely had to make any corrections, because I was able to enhance my experiences without a second thought, almost automatically. If you know where the roulette ball is going to land, of course you bet on the right number.

I loved Nadja, I loved Jena, I loved my life, and everyone could see how love had changed me. Only Vera had nothing to say.

Nadja and I met in Prague, Brno, or Bratislava every two or three weeks, sometimes for only a few hours. We had invented a secret code for our telephone calls, only to get trapped in it ourselves. For our third meeting—in the middle of my exams—I waited in Bratislava for Nadja, who was spending the week in Vienna, where her mother had moved by that time. Her train was supposed to arrive shortly after mine. When notice was posted that it would be an hour late, I took a taxi, asked the driver to recommend a hotel, paid for the night in advance—the two hundred marks were equal to my entire monthly stipendium.
²⁰⁷
When I returned to the station, the train was now announced as two hours late. That abbreviation for Vienna South Station, which stubbornly stayed posted even while all the other names of cities changed, became my curse that night. Ever since, I also know that
nástupiště
means “platform” and
příjerdy vlaků
is “arrival of trains.” I nursed a hopeless lust for revenge and worked up a nasty critique of the station's murals—a commentary that I hoped would make me look brilliant in Nadja's eyes—where Sputnik was skewering the dove of peace high above the heads of all peace-loving peoples. After two hours I felt nothing but an intense hatred and asked for nothing more than that the three sinister figures slinking away at the left side of the mural would turn around and empty their submachine guns on all those socialist faces gazing happily into the future, mow them all down, from the blond steelworker to the granny clad in black. After five hours I begged a cruel Olympus to have mercy on me on last. We had been robbed of five hours, a quarter of our time, a lost evening, half the night.

Finally, sometime after midnight, the train from Vienna pulled in, but without Nadja. There were still tears in my eyes as I begged the hotel for my money back. They took pity on me. I grabbed my bag and boarded the next train for Brno. Between two and three in the morning I searched the station there for Nadja. Alarmed by the notion that she might have been detained at the border but would arrive on the next train, I leapt on a train heading back to Bratislava. I was lucky no one checked my ticket. From Bratislava I called her mother, who, although I had roused her out of her sleep, said, “Ah, my boy,” in a deep voice and gave me the number of the Hotel Jakub in Brno.

The people at the Hotel Jakub knew all about our story. A waitress preceded us into the breakfast room and with the gesture of a magician who has just pulled off a trick, garnered loud applause for the happy ending of our crazy trip.
²⁰⁸
Wasn't that the stuff novels are made of? With the help of Nadja's few schillings, we played the Western couple. Every waitress, every museum guard was drawn into our tale, made a confidant—we found our audience in every passerby, in every person who sat down at our table.

Once, it was in Prague, Nadja made me feel very unsure of myself.

I would have stepped on the yarmulke if Nadja hadn't bent down for it in time. She fastened it to my hair with a hairpin—she kept such utensils stowed in her purse. I think Nadja was curious about what I'd look like in a yarmulke. And since we were only a few steps away from a synagogue that we intended to visit, I kept the skullcap on.

Back on the street, I forgot to remove it. After we'd taken a few steps—Nadja had linked arms with me—a man spoke to us. He asked where the synagogue was and stared at my yarmulke. I almost tipped it as if it were a hat.

Why had he addressed us in German, Nadja asked him. Her pronunciation was somewhat like Frau Zoubková's, except it had a more cutting tone. Why had he thought we would understand German, or that we would prefer to speak it.

He nodded. With a will-o'-the-wisp look in his eyes and trembling lips, he searched for an apology. Nadja, still linked arm in arm with me, took a half-step forward and directed an open palm toward the synagogue.
“Geradeaus!”
she rasped. He gave another nod, smiled suddenly as if redeemed somehow, and exclaimed, “Shalom!”

Nadja pulled me on ahead. I was waiting for some reaction on her part, perhaps even a laugh. The longer she kept silent, the more uneasy I grew. When I looked at her, we both came to a halt. Nadja was a stranger, sad and proud; yes, almost haughty.

She didn't want me to take off the yarmulke, said it looked good on me. The next day we were talking about her mother, and Nadja said there had also been Jews in her family. I don't know if that's true. The yarmulke is still lying here among our caps and scarves.

I had given scarcely a thought to my exams. I believed in my good luck and passed each one, if just barely. The panel obliged me by honoring my term papers.

The longest time that Nadja and I spent together was eight or nine days in August.

We had rented a room from a Slovakian woman in the Jizerské Mountains. A picture of John F. Kennedy in a silver frame hung in the stairwell.

Nadja was apparently determined to clarify our relationship. On our first hike up to the TV tower at Liberec, she asked me how I viewed our future. I said I wanted to finish my book (on which I hadn't worked for months). Then, if that was truly her wish, I could apply for an exit visa. Those four syllables lasted forever. They crumbled in my mouth like a moldy piece of candy. Nadja asked whether that was truly what I wanted. Yes, I said. She said that she would marry me. I said that would be the simplest way.

We hiked through the dying forest,
²⁰⁹
and it was too late before we realized we had been misled by a faded signpost, which had indicated the remaining distance to be nine instead of nineteen kilometers.

By the time we reached the restaurant at the TV tower, my throat was so dry it took me two attempts to order a
pivo.
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