The Drowning Of A Goldfish (6 page)

Like horses in a ring, the cars are circling around the church.

Seated beside her father, the bride is in a stupor. Paralyzed by a glimpse of Medusa's eye, she stiffens into a block of silence.

Father signals to the chauffeur to make one more tour and implores me to reconsider.

There is nothing to reconsider. The verdict is without appeal. In the hope that, one day, I shall be able to excise the tumor, I prefer cancer to plague.

March of this year still reflects the winter: It snows; at dawn, the puddles are covered with crust; the sun shivers in a pellucid sky.

It is the day before spring, and Prague has glorious springs.

We are all there.

All in black.

Even the bride.

We descend through the massive entry of the church Chrám Panny Marie pod Řetézem. This time, the garth is paved with large brownish stones and covered with slippery mud, amplifying the nervous clacking of our feet. The moldy smell of greenish, penetrating moistness slithers into my nostrils, dampening my cheeks and dissolving my bones. My body crumbles like a weathered pillar as I hang on my father's arm.

We enter through the main door. Each one of the four thousand pipes of a huge organ emits a desperate cry when we meet.

I sway under the violent storm of deafening sounds.

The nave is flooded with a crude light: The statues, leprous beggars, hold out their twisted arms towards me; hideous lizards creep on the gold of the paintings; the flames of the candles choke in their own spittle.

One more second and I shall run away!

A vertiginous void looms up on my left. Father has gone. Rudolf, pale, dark rings under his eyes—he would not miss celebrating the end of his life as a bachelor last night—takes Father's place beside me.

The priest at the altar is acting in this farce with burlesque movements. The groom and the virgin stand immobile.

For love there is no one.

I breathe the nauseating scent of withering lilies, the rancid smell of melting candles.

I tighten. I shrivel up. My body is numb.

The sonorous assault of the
Wedding March
invades the church from all parts. The puppets turn. Striding along on the red, plush carpet, they glide out of the church.

My hand is shaken. I am being congratulated. Someone is sobbing in an empty space.

My life as a lady-spouse has begun.

All the ingredients of a lady-spouse's life are rigorously anticipated:

—wedding trip (including wedding night)

—honeymoon

—pregnancy

—raising of two children

—state of uselessness

—widowhood

—death

As far as the wedding trip is concerned, we travel to the village where Rudolf was born.

I love going by train.

Taking a seat by the window, I hang my coat above me and rest my head against its comforting warmth. I curl up in my nest and watch the landscape speeding by; the quickly disappearing people and animals, the trees and the houses pinned forever to their place. And me, I float, I flee, in an imperceptible movement that I can stop at will. The emergency cord being within reach of my hand, I taste the power of God, leaning over the Planet Earth.

Rudolf is sitting opposite me. He is bored and tired. He yawns; I irritate him.

Suddenly, he jumps up and pulls the curtain, pushing the landscape out of my sight.

He is within his rights. I will not challenge this. A lady-spouse does not succumb to infantile impulses.

I met Rudolf's parents at the wedding.

Rudolf's father was entertained so much by the methodical and organized pleasures of the First World War that, when it was over, he adorned his carcass, looking like a balding ape, again with a uniform. He got rid of his name—what representative of law and order would ever like to be called “midget”—and extended, now as a cop, his four thrilling years of military pastime.

To underline his relationship to the village, which had allowed him the pleasure of becoming the pillar of public order, he took on its name and one of its women as his wife.

The name was exquisite and noble; the woman submissive and rich. In addition to endowing him with these precious goods, she gave him a son, precisely nine months after their wedding night.

Thus, he not only proved his virility, but also pocketed a bonus offered to the state's zealous servants for timely, male progeneration.

Velenský of Velen had lived a simple fulfilled life under the motto “Sterness towards the little man, leniency towards the powerful, and blind obedience towards authorities.”

At the end of the following year, his family was enlarged by a daughter. Taking into account the unfavorable view the authorities had with respect to large families, he settled for two children.

His son was meant for medicine, his daughter for marriage. The fact that his son would have preferred to become a photographer and his daughter a teacher was irrelevant. The limbs must follow the head.

Velenský's son, endowed with the delicate beauty of his mother, copied his father's ethics. He gave him nothing but satisfaction.

Velenský's daughter, as sound in body as in mind, broke away from her family at the age of sixteen.

This minor event aside, the life of the village cop Velenský could have passed for idyllic. Clever enough to manage under a variety of governments, including Nazi rule, he set up a chicken farm for his wife, an undertaking both patriotic and prosperous—did it not save these poor townspeople from famine?—which allowed him to rise to the ranks of the village rich. With shrewd foresight, he did not deposit the money in the bank, its value being too uncertain in those troubled times of Nazi occupation. Instead, he bought land, a form of wealth that even a bomb could not take away from him. He never for a single moment doubted the victory of the Brown Nazi order over the red chaos and, knowing the Nazis' esteem for private property, he was sure he would be a winner. He rented out the land to small farmers who made payments in grain. This, in turn, allowed him to expand his chicken farm, to trade grain, eggs, and chickens for other goods, to acquire more land, and further his social standing.

Everything was meticulously planned. His son, speaking German better than a German, won a competition allowing him to work at a Nazi airport, twenty kilometres from his village. Thus, he avoided the obligatory service in the German Reich, required for all young people of his age, and could look forward to the end of the war. Then, he could start studying medicine at the university.

He did not opt for German citizenship, to which he was entitled since his great-grandmother was German. To fight in the war was not part of Velenský's plans.

Rudolf was a model son. While frequently dating girls from well-to-do families, he never ventured too far. To prepare a successful marriage needs patience. He would save himself for a union worthy of a doctor and certainly, after his studies, he could strike an even better deal. Nothing is more pathetic than an ill-matched marriage, conceived by a stupid teenage romance.

To satisfy his carnal impulses, Rudolf chose a notorious village slut. In case anything went wrong, let her try and prove who was the child's real father!

Rudolf's first sexual experience dated back to his childhood, when he spent his school vacation in a German village in order to learn the language. One afternoon, when he was tossing a ball with his host's daughter, a girl with flaxen, braided hair, it began to rain. They climbed into the loft of a barn, where the darkness smelled sweetly of hay and ripe fruit. He leapt forward, eager to retrieve the ball, which the girl had hidden in her arms and plunged his hands into something soft and round …

An ear-piercing scream of pain made him free his prey and he pulled back his hands in startled confusion.

“Naturally, she was blushing,” he related to me one day.

“You can well imagine how painful it was to her—a virgin! She cried out, confused. ‘It is not a ball, Rudolf!'

“And me, I understood and respected her innocence …”

Rudolf often bestowed upon me little stories of his past and acted the role of a professor. He planned to mold me into an ideal wife, reserved and submissive, concerned with nothing but her husband's needs. He was confident of his final success.

“A man can do what he wants with a woman whom he has deflowered,” confessed he, with a wistful smile.

In Rudolf's arsenal, there was a whole series of stories about women, oblivious of their reputation, who would give themselves up to forbidden physical pleasures.

“He threw this tart to the ground amidst the bushes. It was winter and snow covered the ground …” Rudolf knew my horror of the cold. “He tore off her panties and penetrated her; a job quickly done. Then, shaking the snow off his coat, he left without saying a word. How could a man respect a slut who consented so easily to being laid?”

Another source of intimidation was Rudolf's ex-girl friend Nataša.

“An indulgent nymphomaniac, impudent like Messalina who, in the fury of fornication, did not even try to hide her orgasm!”

When, during a holiday of skiing, she fell and broke her leg, Rudolf left her where she lay. Let her other flirtations take care of her! Rudolf was not prepared to waste his vacation looking after a tramp.

Rudolf's scale of female values swayed between red and white; a chasm gaped between the whore and the lady, and he needed them both.

We were in Bulgaria, by the sea. A young woman, her head propped up on her arm, tanned and smooth, her eyes half open, was basking in the fire-hot sand. She had the listless beauty of upper class Poles, remote and sensual at the same time.

“Well, well … I wonder what she is dreaming about, the little slut,” gasped Rudolf, with a shrewd connoisseur's wink.

I was collecting and recording. Selections would wait. My file would take shape much later.

With a short, gasping whistle, the train spits us out on a little stop, lost in the fields, encrusted in a dirty snow.

Rudolf's father appears through the billowing steam. He fixes our luggage to his bicycle and peddles away. We follow, trotting along a narrow path, in a plain defined by abruptly protruding mountains in the distance.

The wind, a greedy leech, invades my coat and clings to my neck; its grasping suckers lift up the borders of my shawl.

Suddenly, the clouds are swept away; the icy rays of a frozen sun slice my cheek with razor sharpness. I shiver and have a burning desire for warmth.

With a little flower-bed by the road and a sizeable vegetable garden at the rear, the house is brand new and built of bricks. The tiled roof warmly reflects the sun; the mellow thatched roofs belonging to the past … and the poor.

The retired cop Velenský is a rich man. His new wife supplied the house and the garden, a real gold mine for those who know how to exploit it. Not one inch is wasted. Lettuce, radishes and beetroots are grown, according to the season. Everything will be traded at the market in the neighboring town.

The retired cop Velenský is a resourceful man.

The communists took away his fields and gave him a handsome pension.

Is he not a combatant for the new order? A fighter of the first hour against the German invaders? A man of order, useful to every regime?

The retired cop Velenský beams with satisfaction. To do one's duty does not imply to ignore on which side one's bread is buttered.

“Whatever the government, be in accordance with it, Rudolf. Follow and be obedient; their head is bigger than yours. They will tell you in time what is required from you,” he advises his son.

We are seated at the table. The kitchen is dark. To prevent the heat from escaping, the windows are nailed and the frames are stuffed with yellowed newspaper.

A bare bulb casts a meager, dirty light on the plastic tablecloth. The air is heavy, greasy, and sour … just like the food that we are being served.

The retired cop Velenský is the very image of a miser. His compulsive greed is at the core of his torture; it squeezes his heart, it consumes his brain, it eats away his soul.

Even fields are no longer a sure value! Where shall one put one's money in these troubled times?!

In cold sweat, Velenský takes his money to the bank. Is it secure there?! Will he not lose it?!

He calculates; he speculates and looks around. The comrades, are they doing the same? The government will certainly not deceive its cherished followers, its very support, its own defense! With them it stands, without them it falls.

Some comrades buy houses—the stupid ones. The clever ones confiscated them from the “enemies of the working class” when there were still some houses left. The government will not touch the comrades' private property! Only a fool will cut off the branch on which he is sitting.

What a shame that one is allowed only a single house, whose proportions have, furthermore, to correspond to the size of one's family—exception to the rules being gladly granted to prominent Party members. Unfortunately, this is not the case of the retired cop Velenský!

“Money is so difficult to spend,” grudges Velenský. In fact, it is hardly needed. Food is grown in the garden, a pig is slaughtered, salted, smoked … plenty to eat throughout the year. To drink, there are apples for cider and prunes for “slivowitz.” Good clothes are saved for the church on Sundays and for the occasional National Committee meetings. “And they last so long! Impossible to wear them out!” grumbles the retired cop.

“Just let those city queers spare us from their culture, seeing silly places, movies, concerts, plays! We have a radio, even a television! We know what to think! We shall stay in slippers at home! In peace! Live our own lives!”

We are sitting at the table in our slippers. Shoes wear out a carpet. The carpet is beautiful, a genuine Persian which triggers silky reflections of my childhood. It was exchanged for a piece of pork with an “enemy of the working class.”

I chew. I swallow. I gag.