by Lily Pond
A Baffling Choice
Ivan Klíma, translated by Gerald Turner
MARIE ANNA PAVLŮ WAS ALMOST TWENTY-SIX years old and worked as a nurse in a creche. There was nothing striking about her appearance or behaviour. She had a pleasant face, a petite figure and a slight, almost deferential, stoop. She used no make-up and dressed simply, choosing darker shades of green and blue. Her most colourful feature was her hair which had a coppery sheen in the sun. Her expression was enlivened with a smile, particularly when dealing with children. The more attentive parents noticed that children tended to cry less when Marie welcomed them.
She had scarcely reached adulthood when she married Jakub Pavlů, a programmer. They had met at college. He was a good dancer and enjoyed company but drank moderately. He used to sing when he was in the mood—he had an enormous repertoire, as if he had an add-on memory in his head. Before they were married they used to leave every Friday afternoon with a group of his friends and go to a weekend chalet site. The little chalets were huddled together so closely that every word from the neighbouring cabin—every breath—was clearly audible. When she and Jakub made love there—it was the only place they could make love at the time—she uttered no sound at all. He assumed that she was shy because of the lack of privacy: it didn’t occur to him that she was not aroused by him. Subsequently, when they were already living together, her mute passivity might have become more noticeable, but by then he was used to it and accepted the fact that his wife was timid and reserved by nature. Besides, he was not one of those men who think about giving their partner sexual pleasure.
A son was born two years after their wedding and they named him Matous. He was a quiet baby who seldom cried, and when Marie spoke to him he seemed to understand what she was saying but was simply unable to reply. However, he did start to speak earlier than little boys usually do. Before he was even three Marie became accustomed to chatting to him as if they were the same age. It seemed to her that he was capable of sensing her mood, so that he would laugh if she was feeling fine and try to humour her when she was miserable. Then he suddenly fell ill with thymic asthma and almost suffocated to death with the first unexpected fit of coughing.
From that moment Marie lived in fear of another bout returning and killing her little boy while she was asleep. She would often leap out of bed at night and run to listen to his breathing. Afterwards she would find herself weeping inexplicably. She was simply aware of a vague sorrow that life should contain so much alienation, suffering and death. She felt sorry for other people’s children who were brought to her every morning half asleep and crying, and for her own Matous, whom she too delivered up to strangers even though she knew he would prefer to stay with her.
She herself had had little contact with her parents as a child. Her mother, a bad reporter on a bad newspaper, was away on assignments most of the time. Her father was a drunkard and a gambler who moved out shortly after Marie was born. She only saw him a few times a year. She was mostly in the care of her maternal grandmother, who also lived alone, but remarried when Marie was ten years old. Although in his sixties, her grandmother’s new husband was still a vigorous man. He was rather boisterous and talked a lot. He also spoke more loudly than other people, so that at first Marie was scared of him. He had barely moved in before he was decorating the living room—her favourite place—to suit himself. He unpacked books from tea chests and decked the walls with glass cases of moths, landscapes in oils by Romantic masters and several antique puppets. The room no longer looked like the one she had been used to. Whenever she was in it she was overcome with a feeling of dejection and slight dread as if in anticipation of some unwelcome surprise.
Her step-grandfather soon became fond of her and actually seemed to brighten up in her presence. He enjoyed chatting with her and wanted to hear all her news each day. He gave her the impression he was genuinely interested in her prattle. Back in what was for her the inconceivably distant past, he had been a teacher of natural history. He had taught for only a short time—three years after the war they had sacked him on the grounds of political unreliability. Since then, he had earned his living in all sorts of jobs—ending up as a museum attendant. “I started with natural history collections and ended with them!” And he would laugh as if fate had played a clever trick on him. Everything he said seemed to turn into a succession of weird or funny stories and encounters, or homilies and words of wisdom. Often she wouldn’t understand them, but there were sentences or images that stayed in her memory. Sometimes when they went for walks together he would sniff with delight scents she had hardly noticed and point out to her the natural markings in a stone she had been oblivious to. He would encourage her to listen to the scarcely audible sounds of the forest, and at dusk would make her look up at the sky. “Stargazing raises the spirits and brings relief at moments of trouble, because it puts everything—all your joys, quarrels and heartache—into proper perspective.” He would impress on her that one must never despair whatever happens, because life gives everyone a chance to make their mark through some deed or other—to shine, to rise above the seeming futility of human existence. The opportunity might come at any moment, and often it was unremarkable because it could easily involve something small rather than something large. It might be to do with the life of a woman, or the life of a tree; it might mean relieving the suffering of a person, or a bird, or of the water, or the air.
When she was fifteen, her grandfather suffered a stroke that left his legs paralyzed. He would move around the flat on crutches but refused to let her help him. He used to sit in the big wing chair and tell her stories in a faltering voice. A few weeks later he suffered another stroke and lost the power of speech entirely. When she came to visit him in hospital he definitely recognized her, but his mouth was no longer capable of smiling. She leaned over and kissed him and then burst into tears. How much suffering the departure from this life can entail which no one else can relieve, even when the one departing is the person you love best of all.
When she first met Jakub, her grandfather was already long dead, but it struck her that the moment her grandfather had spoken of had finally arrived. Something would change in their lives to rid them of triviality and the pathetic striving after ephemera. But nothing of the sort happened.
It was several years before they moved into a flat of their own. It was on the seventh floor of a thirteen-storey panel-built block. The windows looked out onto equally unprepossessing concrete walls. In place of lawns, the areas in between the blocks of flats were filled with piles of earth, planks and stone. As it was only a few minutes’ walk to the creche where she worked, she spent her life amidst the half-finished housing estate. She tried to furnish the flat as simply as possible and made up for the lack of belongings with fresh flowers. She took proper care of her husband and her little boy even though it took up most of the time she might have had for herself. She cooked every day and baked home-made bread, buns or tarts for Sundays, the way women did in the old days.
Her husband just took it all for granted, and showed no sign of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. He was sparing with his affection not because he didn’t love her, but because he was convinced that it was the husband’s role to be reserved and condescending towards his wife.
For several years this was the pattern of their life together; for her it was quiet, monotonous and lonely. She knew none of the other tenants, even though they were mostly of her own age. Jeans and jeanjackets, trainers, tinted hair, the same deodorants and make-up, the same greetings said with the same intonation—everything and everyone became indistinguishable. Only in the flat below theirs lived an old man who was different from the others both in age and appearance: he walked with the aid of crutches.
On the odd occasion that they met by the lift in the hallway, she would hold the door open for him until he had manoeuvred himself in. As the lift went up, the old man would keep his gaze fixed on her. Several times she thought he was about to say something to her, but he apparently th
ought better of it or realized that he wouldn’t manage to say all he wanted to by the time they reached his floor. Once she found him carrying a large box. When the lift stopped at the sixth floor, she helped him carry the parcel to the door of his flat. As soon as he opened his door, a mixture of organic and chemical smells wafted towards her. From inside the flat she could hear a parrot squawking and a fat tom-cat came and rubbed up against the old man’s legs. The man started to thank her and she quickly said goodbye. As she was closing the door behind her she read his name on the door. It struck her that he must have been a very good-looking man in his youth. Everything about him was powerful, but most of all his hands, neck and chin. He still had a thick head of hair, even though it was nearly white. What had happened to him to make him need crutches? Then she stopped thinking about him.
The very next day she met him again in front of the flats as she was coming home from work. He greeted her and she smiled at him. She met him three more times that week—an odd coincidence, if it was a coincidence. On the third occasion, he was carrying a bunch of roses and as he was leaving the lift he handed them to her.
“But you can’t have bought them for me!” she protested.
“Maybe I did,” he said and hobbled out of the lift.
The scent of the flowers filled her with a sense of vague expectation. When she put them into a vase she could not help smiling at her own feelings.
She baked some tarts for the weekend and set some aside, putting them in a chocolate box and then wrapping the box in tissue paper.
The old man lived in a single room that was more like a workshop or studio. Alongside a work bench stood a wooden press and a guillotine whose blade pointed upwards and made her feel queasy. Along the walls there were untidy heaps of books and papers. And the shelves and chairs were piled high with things too. The tom-cat was sleeping on the divan surrounded by a heap of discarded clothes. She noticed a number of unframed paintings—old-fashioned, romantic subjects that seemed out of keeping with the newness of the painting. Only then did she become aware of a painter’s easel and on it a portrait in progress. She stared in consternation at the unfinished face. There could be no doubt: it was her own.
“I never studied painting,” she heard him say from behind her. He laid the box she had brought him on a table without opening it and hurriedly started to clear one of the chairs. “I spent my whole life binding books. This is a new thing. I was attracted by the way you looked. You have so much noble beauty. Unfortunately I’m unable to capture it. There’s something of our Slav forebears in you. …” The chair was now empty but she did not sit down. She apologized for arriving unannounced and quickly left.
Back in her own flat she rushed to the mirror and gazed at herself for a moment before realizing that in reality her eyes were much smaller than in the painting. She tried to open them as wide as she could and smiled at her reflection.
The next day she picked up her son from kindergarten in the early afternoon as usual. Matous talked incessantly. She usually enjoyed his mixture of childish notions, make-believe and actual experience but today she found she was unable to concentrate. When in the distance she caught sight of the old bookbinder waiting in front of the flats she took her son to the sandpit so that she could go into the building on her own. He greeted her and hobbled after her into the lift. “I tidied the place up today,” he announced to her as soon as the lift started to move. “Wouldn’t you like to drop in for a minute or two?”
Her portrait was now covered with a clean sheet and the clutter had disappeared from the chairs and the divan.
After all there was nothing wrong in visiting an old invalid who was obviously lonely. She sat down by the window in order to keep an eye on the sandpit—and also to conceal her embarrassment. She refused his offer of refreshments.
The bookbinder laid his crutches aside and sat down with difficulty. For a moment he gazed at her mutely, but then started to ask her questions. Was she happy with her life? What sort of childhood had she had? Had she chosen her profession because she enjoyed being with children? It was his belief that people who looked after children fulfilled a noble mission.
His language was slightly overblown but what impressed her most was his interest in her life. A sudden sense of intimacy filled her with alarm and she swiftly made her excuses and hurried off to find her son.
She would call on the old bookbinder from time to time and bring him some cakes she had baked. For his part he would present her with either books or flowers. She read the books but they meant little to her as their subject matter was too far removed from her usual reading. She never stayed longer than a few minutes in the bookbinder’s flat, but those short moments increasingly bean to fill her thoughts.
She now knew everything about the bookbinder’s life that he considered important for her to know. He was sixty-five. He had moved there from a village where his sister still lived. Originally he was to have taken over his father’s farm, but in the last days of the war his leg had been blown off by a mine and he had almost bled to death. At the age of twenty he had felt that his life was at an end. In time, however, he had come to realize that there were doors still open to him, in spite of his misfortune. Doors to knowledge and mystical experience. All he had to do was muster the strength to break free of the external world with its passions and strivings and start to open the door to a higher bliss, to the vision of God. One door did remain closed. He could never start a family of his own. As the years went by, he gradually lost those close to him and he lived out his days in solitude, only visiting his sister during the summer. He was usually away at this time of year.
“Why are you still here, then?” she asked.
“But you know perfectly well why,” he replied.
It sometimes occurred to her that he made rather too much of the tranquillity and contentment he had achieved. She had the feeling that the equanimity on which he laid such stress merely concealed a deep longing as well as the wounds he had suffered in the distant past. At other times, she found his statements completely baffling. She could not understand his enthusiasm for the religion of the ancient Aryans and the mores of their Slav forebears, nor why he suspected the Jews of conspiring against all other nations. She didn’t know any Jews anyway, let alone any Indians, and the concerns or practices of the ancient Slavs were alien to her. None the less she listened attentively to the old man as if wanting to make up for all the years when no one had listened to him.
At the end of spring, her husband was due to leave Prague for a week on business: whenever she thought of his departure she felt a thrill, though she wasn’t quite sure why. The evening after Jakub’s departure, she waited until her son was asleep and then changed into her best clothes. She sat down in front of the mirror and gazed at her face for a long time. She tried to apply some eyeshadow, but her hands trembled too much. Instead she went into the bedroom where her son was sleeping, kissed him on the forehead and then tiptoed out onto the landing. The noise of television sets was audible as she passed the other flats, but when she lightly pressed his doorbell it seemed as if the sound could be heard through all thirteen floors.
He came to the door. “Is something wrong?”
She shook her head. She sat down on the chair, where she usually sat—on the occasions when she did sit. The bookbinder brought a bottle of wine and two glasses. “Have you the time today?”
She noticed that there was a new picture of her on the wall but she was unable to concentrate on it.
“Has your husband gone?”
She nodded.
“A pity I’m so old,” he lamented, “and a cripple in the bargain.”
“That’s not important, is it? The main thing is I really enjoy being with you.” She was at a loss what to do. She stood up and turned towards the door, but stopped disconcerted in the middle of the room. “Do you think I should go?”
“No, definitely not!”
She didn’t look at him. Several dark cobwebs hung from the ceiling a
nd the sound of music came through the wall.
The old man came over to her and kissed her on the neck. “It’s a long time since I have been with a woman. Many years.”
She put her arms around him. Suddenly all the embarrassment and uncertainty left her. She went over to the ottoman, took off her clothes and waited for him to join her.
He came and sat by her, gently calling her by the names of different Slav goddesses while stroking her forehead, her cheeks, her neck and her breasts. His words and his touch aroused a deep longing in her. She whispered words that came unexpectedly into her mind, as if she were weaving charms for herself and the old man. When at last he lay down beside her it was as if she had waited her whole life for this moment and she became aware of an unfamiliar delight that went on growing until she could bear it no longer and she let out a cry loud enough to penetrate all thirteen floors and rouse everyone, whether awake or asleep.
The bookbinder caressed her body with his coarse hands and waves of bliss washed over her again and again. “I love you,” she whispered, “I love you.” At that moment she overheard a strange barking sound coming from beyond the wall. Her son was suffocating.
She rushed out onto the landing half naked. When she opened the door she was greeted with total silence. She went numb at the thought of her son lying there lifeless, having choked to death while she wickedly indulged her passion.
But Matous was asleep and breathing peacefully. One of his pillows had simply fallen off his bed onto the floor. “Oh, my poor little lamb!” She knelt down and touched his forehead and the wisps of his hair that had grown damp as he slept. “Mummy will never leave you on your own again!” She stretched out on the rug, put the child’s pillow under her head and closed her eyes. Red spots danced before her eyes, swelling up and then dwindling again. Gradually butterflies’ wings emerged and flittered above her, combining to form romantic landscapes. Then everything faded and went dark and out of the darkness emerged the figure of the old bookbinder. His face was bathed with light and, with a sudden sense of happiness, she realized that the light was coming from her.
