Lovers for a Day

by Ivan Klíma

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ he muttered.

  ‘Maybe that coffee did for him,’ she said quickly, ‘and that’s why he’s not been in touch.’

  They were sitting opposite each other – he by now only in his boxer shorts – and drinking coffee. ‘Come to bed,’ he said. ‘Seeing you’re so tired.’

  ‘All right.’

  He knew she would now spend ages washing herself. He hated waiting for her to finish washing, the time he had to stay in the room alone. It wasn’t an ugly room, just empty and alien. There was nothing out of the ordinary, not even a spot on the wall, not even an old radio, or an aquarium with a single blue fish.

  ‘Why the silence?’ she called.

  ‘I don’t feel like talking!’ Now he too felt an oppressive weariness. He always did lying here under a strange eiderdown, when he knew he ought to say something: to say he loved her and why he had come, or about the way things were and were going to be. Or at least to think about her and look forward to her. But weariness would force him to close his eyes, and he would start to fall into the dark sack with coarse sides, always the same material; it enveloped him and didn’t let in the tiniest ray of light, or thought or image, even. He lay there totally still until suddenly he noticed that the coarse-woven side of the bag, the dark impervious material, was moving, slowly, inch by inch, moving almost imperceptibly: an endless grey conveyor belt.

  A few quiet footsteps, the click of the light switch and he felt her body at his side. ‘My little boy,’ she said, ‘my pet. Did you fall asleep?’

  He opened his eyes, and a bright reflection moved across the ceiling before her face got in the way: two big shining …

  ‘Now I’m glad you’re here,’ she whispered. ‘I’m always glad when you’re with me.’

  She waited in case he said something too, but she knew he’d probably stay silent. He never said anything. Sometimes it made her sad. ‘My daddy-long-legs,’ she whispered, ‘my horrible daddy-long-legs.’ Then she touched his chin with her lips, then his neck, breathing quickly and loudly, then his cheeks. Then she moved her lips to his, put her arms around him. And this was the moment, the moment that always made him come back for more. He knew it, she knew it. The soft pressure of her body. He was falling. He could feel himself gently floating. The unbearably light, dizzy fall, now it was for real … Completely and totally happy at this moment. Nothing could equal this moment. Nothing tempted him away from it, everything converged here in this single instant, even though it was so brief and then after there would just be an ordinary old night.

  ‘My little boy,’ she whispered afterwards. She waited but he only breathed wearily. ‘Do you like it here with me?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he whispered. He tried to hold onto the moment but didn’t know how, and felt that even now it was beginning to slip away from him and he was beginning to fall into the night. The woman next to him moved slightly, whispered something, got up and pattered out to the passage. Water splashed noisily into the sink. She returned with a grey washbasin and a towel over her naked shoulder. She put the basin on the chair. ‘Don’t you want to wash yourself?’

  So he had to get up and wash himself while she lay behind him. ‘I don’t know if I feel like sleeping any more,’ she whispered. ‘What if I switched on the radio?’

  Then they lay side by side and the radio cast a dark rhomboid against the wall.

  ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You usually …’ she started. ‘My little boy,’ she whispered, ‘do you love me a little?’

  He said nothing. A horribly sweet tune issued from the radio. Just as well he was able to ignore it. The motionless rhomboid. The cold strangeness of this room, of this night, this music, these words, this loving; he half closed his eyes and tried to conjure up his horse, quietly clicking his tongue at it, but couldn’t even hear a response, it was sleeping somewhere – maybe his horse was worn out by that long day, wearily staring into a night full of stars while his warm nostrils quivered. The world was falling into a dark sack, the same old material. He lay there motionless: if only something, something were to come – a white horse at the corner of the street, Morning Star, something …

  ‘Bohouš!’ she shook him. ‘Bohouš, it’s time you were gone.’

  He leapt up. The grey washbasin was still standing on the chair. The low, cold sun shone into the room …

  ‘There’s bread in the cupboard … And some kind of almond pieces,’ she said sleepily.

  ‘I haven’t got time,’ he said testily. But he opened the cupboard and quickly cut a slice of bread.

  ‘Will you come again this evening?’ she asked when he was dressed.

  ‘Don’t know … Maybe I’ll go somewhere with Ladya.’

  ‘Do come,’ she said. ‘I know you will anyway.’

  The trams were stiflingly full and his legs were weak from lack of sleep. He hadn’t even managed to wash …

  *

  The time clock, the unsmiling watchdog of your days. Six-ten, there’d be words again. He dashed past the watchman and across the grey yard full of swirling ash. Workshop number one, past the rumbling presses, Anča cutting tin as usual, one more door and he could already see them in that never-ending never-changing row … one big and three small cogs in the right hand, two small axles in the left, slide them on, let them click into place, test them, then take four screws and screw them into the holes, hang it up.

  The foreman’s gaze was fixed on the clock: six-fifteen. Jesus it’s only six-fifteen. He grabbed one big and three small cogs in his right hand, two small axles in the left. He fitted them. Then he took four screws and put them in the holes. He passed the first box on to Marie. She turned to him and smiled slightly. The foreman’s getting fed up; there’ll be a bit of peace at last. The conveyor belt moved quietly. Take it off, hang it up. Marie’s screwdriver squeaked. He could hear the clip-clop of hooves. He cantered along a totally white road through an alley of cherry trees with damp leaves. Steam rose from the meadows.

  (1963)

  LINGULA

  1

  The student canteen was a long, bleak hall in the basement and its walls, apart from the glass one at the back, had blind alcoves instead of windows. The canteen committee, it is true, had added some hand-painted commandments in an effort to conceal its drabness,

  NO SPILLING OF FOOD! NO LEAVING OF DIRTY CROCKERY! NO SMOKING!

  However they did little to cheer the place up and Tomáš and his friends used to carry their lunches to the glass wall. It was airier there and brighter and the table under the tenth commandment had one short leg and nobody sat there, so it was the perfect place for dumping coats, briefcases and empty soup dishes.

  They got used to the spot – the last table in the second row – and cut a large scorpion out of cardboard, writing on it the words,

  BIOLOGY – RESERVED!

  Just beyond the glass wall lay a small garden: two lilac bushes, a low acacia bush, a white magnolia and a forsythia. Blackbirds and a pair of turtle-doves nested there. The students paid little attention to it, simply tossing their leftovers to the birds in the winter, and one day were almost surprised to find that the acacia was putting out its first leaves just as they were studying the viciaceae family.

  When the lilac was starting to bloom they arrived to find an unknown girl sitting at the table with the short leg. Her hair was almost white and combed into a beehive. Her eyes were olive-green beneath dark brows and her neck was long. She sat as erect as a statue and held her knife and fork with such elegance that she could have been sitting in the Hotel International, or on a film set.

  They did not take their eyes off her the entire time she was eating while she spared them not a single glance, as though unaware of anyone sitting nearby, or of the tenth commandment above her head that read,

  BE CONSIDERATE TO YOUR COMRADES!

  When she finished her meal she wiped her mouth on her handkerchief while gazing blankly into the
distance. Then she got up and looked around briefly. She couldn’t help noticing them now, but she made no sign and left, walking away from them in her stiletto-heeled shoes, with the short, quick steps of the ideal secretary.

  They stayed at lunch longer than usual, droning on about the girl: her legs, her hips, her breasts, her eyes. They couldn’t just let her disappear like that. Tomas was at the time the only one of them to have any free moments, so the task fell to him, even though the general opinion was that it was probably beyond him. The next day they caught sight of her from a distance. She was sitting at the same table. Opposite her was some guy at least fifteen years her senior – balding, stylish little spectacles perched on his snub nose, one corner of his shirt collar turned up.

  She was eating like a duchess. He slurped his soup noisily, his face almost in the soup bowl.

  ‘Do you like it?’ they heard him ask.

  ‘Yes.’

  For a long time the two of them said nothing and then she asked, ‘How about you?’

  ‘Of course – I’m here with you!’ He stopped eating and bared his brownish teeth.

  ‘Stop it – I don’t like that sort of talk.’ They ate the rest of the meal in silence. Then he took away the dirty plates while everyone congratulated Tomáš because against someone like that he was in with a chance.

  Over the next two days they found out that the fellow lectured in family law, was divorced and had a two-tone Skoda Spartak, but about her they discovered nothing. Nobody knew her or had seen her before. Apparently she wasn’t a student but simply attached to the lawyer, and after that first day had only appeared in his company.

  Soon they got used to her and stopped listening to what the pair at the next table were saying. They were almost always silent anyway – he was still as unappealing and she as perfect as ever; when they finished eating he would clear away the dirty plates and she would remain seated a few moments gazing blankly after him. Then she would follow him and they would go upstairs, holding hands.

  She was dubbed ‘Tomáš’s girl’ with friendly mockery: she had been assigned to him and he assigned her to himself too, even though he’d yet to say a word to her. The problem was that fellow didn’t budge from her side and she never gave Tomáš a chance to speak to her. By now nobody even expected him to try. Only he thought about it, imagining the moment when he would do it. And since that was so easy to imagine he also imagined the moments that would follow: the two of them sitting together on the terrace of the Brussels Restaurant – music, the midnight dance floor, her olive green eyes, her full lips, kissing her as they danced, then beneath the bridge on the quay, and then in the entrance of the house where she lived, inside, kissing her as she sat on some unfamiliar fine-legged chair, and then making love on an unfamiliar couch – a long, lingering moment. Then he would start all over again.

  ‘What are you doing this afternoon? Do you know you could spend it in the company of a fascinating man …’ No, that wouldn’t work. She wouldn’t even respond. He stared at his textbook. The fasciola and opisthorchis genus: heart-shaped bodies with two suckers …

  ‘You must be made from the foam of the sea. Let me look at you for a moment. Just a single moment! Just gaze!’ She would hardly refuse. But it would look as though he were totally infatuated with her.

  ‘You have a head like a hoopoe.’

  ‘Like a what?’

  ‘Hoopoe!’

  A slightly bewildered laugh.

  ‘It’s a bird. With a magnificent head. Though nothing to compare with yours!’ That sounded promising.

  The term’s lectures were finished and they no longer all went to lunch together. Some days they didn’t set foot outside the student residence but lived on bread and tinned cod in tomato sauce, with poppy-seed buns and potted mushrooms from their mothers, while chatting away about the four features of the dialectic, the unfortunate Belinda Lee, the latest show at the Semafor, about how Fuchs yelled so loudly the last time he failed his annual exams that the cleaning woman on the floor below dropped a jar containing a rare specimen of Chinese crab and the crab and the alcohol skidded over the floor as if alive and the old dear nearly had a heart attack.

  Then there was only a day and a night left before the exam. Mulling things over, they revised worms in their heads – he had just got to the order of brachiopods, stupid little sea worms he’d probably never lay eyes on. Maybe today of all days she had come on her own – it would make a wonderful change from these wretched worms! But on the day before the exam?

  He thought he might shave, at least. Then he polished his shoes. After all, the canteen was only twenty minutes away. He put on a new shirt – the latest style. He looked quite interesting (he might just borrow a silver cigarette-lighter), he’d enough money, a full hundred crowns he’d been saving for emergencies.

  The day was unbearably hot, and the crowded tram was sweaty. He cursed all the idiots around him and resolved that if he actually managed to catch her he would speak to her, even if the dean himself was sitting at the same table.

  He saw her from afar – her bright green blouse, the light blond hair. She was sitting at the wobbly table, and the chair opposite was empty.

  He quickly collected a lunch and made his way over to her with his plate.

  In her low neck-line hung a decorative coin on a bronze chain; her skin was smooth, so fine and smooth. ‘Is this place free?’

  She looked up in surprise. ‘Watch out,’ she said. ‘You’re spilling your soup.’

  He tried to match her table manners, but she had had a head start and two dumplings remained on his plate when she finished her meal. There was no time to waste.

  ‘On your own today?’ What a daft thing to say. How utterly trivial.

  ‘I suppose he’s examining,’ he added quickly.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ She stacked her plates and stood up.

  ‘Wait,’ he blurted out.

  ‘What would you say to an afternoon stroll?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘What else are you doing this afternoon?’

  ‘Going fishing.’

  ‘That’s no fun.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Something you’ve never experienced before. An original and unforgettable evening!’

  ‘You were talking about the afternoon a moment ago.’ She picked up the plates with one hand and her handbag with the other and walked away – those short, brisk steps of the ideal secretary.

  He hurried after her, up the staircase and then along the hot, overcrowded street. This chance would never come again. He tried desperately to come up with something clever, witty and slightly ironic to say, something charmingly self-assured – but remained silent.

  The lights at the intersection were red. ‘Well,’ she said with her eyes fixed on the red light, ‘will we be going in the same direction for much longer?’

  ‘For ever,’ he said, despairingly, ‘unless you want to destroy me utterly!’

  They crossed the intersection, a taxi appeared from the direction of the Powder Tower. She hailed it resolutely.

  The driver leaned over the front seat lazily and half opened the back door.

  He dashed to hold it open from outside.

  ‘Where to?’ asked the man behind the wheel as she got in.

  ‘The Golden Well,’ he said, then quickly jumped in and the taxi drove off.

  Tight-lipped, she stared ahead. He now caught a slight scent of lilac and was overjoyed: it must have worked. Action is always better than blathering.

  The car crossed the river, turning several times into ever narrower streets. ‘Sixteen crowns!’ declared the driver and quickly cleared the meter.

  ‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said. ‘Your cheek really is something extraordinary!’

  He felt flattered. ‘So come on up! There’s no point hanging about down here.’

  ‘A truly unusual afternoon,’ she said, scornfully. ‘Sitting on a terrace and gawking at our city’s famous “hundred tower
s”. And a glass of wine with you into the bargain! Was that the best you could dream up?’

  ‘I would have dreamt up something better, but you didn’t give me enough time.’

  ‘Well you have plenty now.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll think up something original. But let’s go and sit on the terrace first.’

  After they had climbed the 160 steps he called over the waiter and coolly ordered a bottle of champagne – I’ll find out what it tastes like, at least.

  The city was truly beautiful. Some of the windows shone like flame and small, old-fashioned tram cars moved soundlessly along the distant embankment. The familiar towers soared upwards and a haze of smoke and exhaust fumes hung over everything.

  ‘We could introduce ourselves,’ he suggested.

  ‘Such an incredibly original gambit,’ she said. ‘My name’s none of your business. And yours doesn’t interest me in the least.’

  He raised his glass, determined not to be put off. ‘You’re extraordinary. Really extraordinary. And fascinating.’

  She looked past him and over the low railing at the dark, sooty roofs. ‘And now tell me what you really want.’

  ‘I told you. To spend the afternoon and the evening with you!’

  ‘What would be the point?’

  ‘I don’t know … We could both be happy, perhaps.’

  ‘You can stop that kind of talk. I’ve heard it too many times.’

  ‘Won’t you tell me something about yourself?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Are you a student?’

  She remained silent.

  ‘Do you love him?’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘You’re not happy, are you?’

  ‘You say the same thing to every girl and she’s amazed you could possibly know. Is that it?’

  ‘But you’re not. I can tell!’

  ‘You can stop talking like that immediately – or I’ll leave you to sit here on your own.’