“This?” I said, laughing in surprise.
“It’s funny to you?”
“Valdštejn gardens. I never expected.”
She put her finger to my lips and said, “The story is serious. No laughing.”
“No laughing,” I promised.
Monika pointed to the dim outline of a building across the garden. “Count Valdštejn was working late that night, past midnight, when he heard the Gypsy girl sing. He hurried to the window, and the vision in moonlight below was so enchanting and her song so moving he summoned his chief steward and told him to bring her to the palace. In his study, the count discovered the Gypsy girl was as beautiful by candlelight as in moonlight. The count being a count and the young girl a young girl, it surprised no one in the palace when a few months later she became pregnant.”
Monika pulled me away from the gate. We walked the riverfront and across Charles Bridge, pacing ourselves to the rhythms of Monika’s story. “The count wanted to set her up as his mistress in a small house in the country, but the chief steward was afraid of scandal. Society allowed the count to sleep with any Gypsy girl he desired, but not to accept one as formal mistress. The count was unhappy but agreed. She was sent back to her grandparents with a small sum of money.
“The news of her arrival and, later, the birth of a baby girl, spread through the village, and from the village to the surrounding farms, and from there to other villages and other farms. One Sunday, the grandparents left the girl alone to attend mass. No one really knows what happened that morning. When the grandparents returned, they found every stick of furniture broken. In the center of the hut lay an old farmer, a butcher knife stuck in his chest. The baby slept unhurt in her crib, but never again until the moment of her death some years later would so much as a cry escape her lips.”
“Old farmer?” I asked, confused.
“Her mother’s husband and murderer. They had never punished him for the crime. You could kill unfaithful wives back then.”
“What happened to the Gypsy girl, I mean she killed the guy, I guess you’d call him her stepfather?”
“A young boy from one of the farms saw her last. He heard her singing and hid behind a tree to watch. She was sitting on the banks of the Vltava, sewing stones into her badly torn dress. When the boy returned with his parents, the Gypsy girl was gone. The villagers say they can still sometimes hear her singing at that same spot. One of them took me there, but I didn’t hear anything. Just wind and water.”
We had strolled to Národní Boulevard by the time Monika finished her story, and as we neared a crude banner stretched across the walk, she pulled me aside to listen to a throb of music coming from stairs at the end of a corridor. The spray-paint lettering on the banner read UBIQUITY. I knew the place as one of the more notorious new nightclubs, a haven for illicit drug use and casual sex run by a couple of North Americans. The moment I explained the nature of the club, Monika wanted to go in, and though I protested that we were overdressed—indeed, anything other than ripped jeans and black leather would be overdressed—I felt relieved that the course of the evening did not lead straight to a shared bed. I was only too eager to strip a relationship down to base desires when the woman was a participant in a game I played for my amusement. Monika allowed me no detachment. She inspired fear as much as love, and, stripped naked, my emotions might prove more powerful than my ability to perform.
The noise in the club was intolerably loud. The first few faces that bobbled past us in the smoke and dim light bore such idiotic grins I concluded free samples of ecstasy were being dispensed. The din crushed Monika’s shout before I caught the words. I assumed she wanted a drink and stepped toward the bar. She grabbed my hand and pulled me in the opposite direction, to the writhing mass at the center of the dance floor. The frantic flail of arm and leg reminded me of ground zero one millisecond after detonation. I shuffled my feet, bobbed my head, and every now and then shrugged my shoulders in rhythm to the beat. Monika had a Mata Hari talent for seductively deceptive movement, seeming to move this way while flowing that, distracting me with a bright gesture of hands to conceal that she had suddenly disappeared behind.
When the tempo slowed to a less frantic beat, she caught my hand and pulled me tight against her body. Her womb felt hot as a kiln. Despite my best efforts to maintain carnal discipline I swelled the space between us. I shifted my waist to an oblique angle, embarrassed by my body’s betrayal of etiquette. Monika laughed and squirmed her hips into mine. “I feel you” sounded in my ear like a child’s accusing whisper. Her breath stirred the hair at the base of my skull. I let my hand slip from its safe perch above the small of her back to the cleft of flesh below and with firm pressure guided her onto my thigh. I’ve always received high technical marks, though sex rarely touches me. My body moves with the vigor of a conductor’s baton coaxing music from an orchestra; no matter how thrilling the music, the baton itself remains stiff and insensate. But that night and in that public place, her lips splitting simultaneously across my neck and thigh, Monika splintered my certainties like a dark wave snaps a stick of timber. Though I strained to conceal my wild trembling, Monika must have guessed my condition. I surrendered control and gushed. A hand roughly grabbed my shoulder. I turned to the strobe-lit face of Monika’s brother.
“Sven! Come dance with us!” Monika cried, so innocently even I believed her.
Sven brushed me aside. I was too discomposed to know what to do or think. He shouted something incomprehensible, face strobing incandescent and black. I recognized the language as Danish by guess more than ear. It could have been Hungarian for all the sense it made to me. Dazed, I smiled and shrugged my shoulders. The response seemed to make him angrier. He stepped closer and shouted again. For a moment, I thought he might hit me. Monika slid between us and, taking my arm, led me a few steps distant.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go now,” she said.
“Is something wrong?”
“Nothing at all,” she answered, though I knew she was lying.
“Your brother, what was he saying?”
“He’s been drinking too much, that’s all. I have to make sure he gets home.”
She extended her hand. I looked at it a moment before I realized that despite what had happened between us on the dance floor, I was expected to politely shake it good night.
7
Prague was a cornucopia of amazing sex stories at the time, of outlandish couplings comprising every imaginable position, location, number, and nationality of participants. Both sexes recounted their adventures with competitive passion. Though I’d frequently entertained friends, acquaintances, and strangers with amusing anecdotes about one erotic escapade or another, I didn’t know how to begin talking about Monika or the disturbing emotions she evoked. A mild but persistent nausea unsettled my stomach. Concentration evaporated at the briefest memory of word or gesture. Moments after sitting down to a task, I would catch myself staring out the window in Monika-induced reverie. I so rarely had feelings that I didn’t know how to discuss them, but more than ever before felt driven to talk. As evening approached, the anticipation of seeing her for dinner that night so agitated my nerves that I could no longer tolerate the cramped silence of my apartment.
Jo’s was the most dependable bar in which to find English-speaking company at any given hour. The beer was cheap and everybody liked its owner, an affably randy Canadian notorious for having vowed on his thirtieth birthday never to sleep with another teenager. Cheap beer drew the expatriates, and prominent mention of the expatriates in guidebooks drew slumming tourists. The bar was typically crowded and loud, but the few faces I recognized that evening I didn’t like, and none of the strangers seemed interesting enough to warrant more than brusque dialogue. I was uncertain how to act when meeting Monika again, not knowing if I should acknowledge the previous night’s sexual encounter on the dance floor or pretend with good manners that nothing had happened. I was on the verge of confessing my dilemma to a backpacker from Sea
ttle when I spotted Andrew and his guitar poking through the crowd at the entrance. I naturally assumed he looked for me and raised an arm to signal my presence. The arc of Andrew’s gaze passed without deflection. I shouted his name. He ducked out the door before I finished the second syllable.
By the time I breached the crowd and gained the street, Andrew’s figure was already distant, striding toward Charles Bridge. When I caught him by the elbow, he claimed he hadn’t seen me at the bar and hadn’t heard me shout his name. I stared at him with the theatrical disbelief of an arched eyebrow. He glanced at his feet and fiddled with a latch on his guitar case, while staring at an invisible mark over my left shoulder.
“Come back to Jo’s. We’ll have a drink,” I said.
“Can’t. I have a lesson.”
Like half of the twenty-something Americans in Prague, Andrew taught English at a local high school which paid him according to his qualifications, which is to say miserably, as Andrew not only hadn’t taught English before, he hadn’t taken so much as a grammar course since his own high school years.
“You’re not angry with me about my laughing fit in church, are you?”
“I don’t have time to talk about it,” he said, and hurried off. I twitched as I watched him weave through the crowds, burned by sparks of paranoia. Andrew was lying. Had he been in a genuine hurry, he wouldn’t have stopped at Jo’s Bar. When he saw me at Jo’s, he fled, and fled again after I caught him on the bridge. He didn’t have a lesson. He found my company so repugnant that he fled in revulsion.
I’d never followed anyone before, but as I’d seen over a hundred films with character A trailing character B, it wasn’t a difficult skill to master. It never would have occurred to Andrew that I followed. There was little risk in his turning suddenly to recognize me in the crowd. He strode so briskly it was a strain to maintain both silence and the proper distance when we entered the snaking streets of the Gothic quarter. At Staroměstksé náměstí I slowed, knowing that against the backdrop of cake-colored baroque and gray Gothic structures I could easily keep him in view. At the far end of the square, beneath the bronze figure of Jan Hus, a woman stood and waved. Even at that distance I recognized her as uncommonly pretty, if a bit wholesome for my tastes, with wheat-colored hair hanging to the small of her back. Andrew greeted her with a kiss that lingered too long for a teacher-student relationship. He had lied about the lesson. When they turned together and walked hand in hand from the square, I saw expectation had fooled my eye. The woman walked with awkward determination, lurching to the right and straightening again with each step. I narrowed the distance between us when the layout of the streets allowed. As they neared their destination, a bar and café called Hogo Fogo, I dashed to the corner and peered. At that distance, no more than twenty feet, I could make no mistake. The woman’s right leg was noticeably thinner and ended in a shoe several sizes larger than her left, compensating for the deformity of a clubfoot.
My fears about the loss of Andrew’s friendship evaporated. His character was naturally noble, at least in comparison to mine, and I contemplated the possibility that he was drawn to the weak, crippled, and monstrous from an instinct to heal or reform. Those of noble character have dark secrets of their own. I had heard stories of men who could scarcely contain their excitement around women with one or more amputated limbs. Perhaps weakness and deformity in others hardened certain of his tissues while softening his heart.
The possible solutions to the riddle of Andrew and the clubfoot so beguiled my thoughts that when I saw Monika waiting for me at Restaurant Parnas I nearly failed to purse my lips when she deftly parried my hand to kiss me on the mouth. The swift intimacy of the gesture surprised me as a statement of romantic fact, like the greeting of one lover to another. If it was not technically correct to call us lovers at that moment, we seemed lovers in some future moment I hoped was fast approaching. As we drank champagne and waited for the appetizers to arrive, the slender elegance of her hand, lightly bronzed by candlelight, so dazzled that I reached to touch it, but Monika chose that very moment to withdraw the hand to her lap, and I, fumbling to give some new purpose to my sudden reach, nearly dashed the champagne bottle. At first, I thought little about the incident except my clumsiness, not suspecting that Monika used gestures as an agent of control and would not be subject to the gestures of others. I trickled a few drops of champagne into her glass, which, like mine, had not been in any immediate need of refreshing, and thinking back about her story of the night before, remarked, with hidden petulance, “It’s a long shot, isn’t it, your laying claim to Count Valdštejn? I’d think other people would have stronger claims than an illegitimate great-granddaughter.”
“I’m not just his great-granddaughter,” she said, and coughed violently into her napkin. From her crimson flush and wild eyes I feared something had stuck in her throat. She hid her face until the fit quieted and her breath returned, but when the napkin dropped away she wouldn’t approach my glance. “You see, the count’s blood runs twice in my veins,” she said.
“What kind of riddle is that?”
Monika took several cautious sips of water, seeming to debate her response with each. “I’m sorry, but it’s a little shocking,” she said.
“I don’t mean to pry—” Though of course I did.
“The count is both my great-grandfather and grandfather.”
“You mean he, ah, he …” I stuttered, with fitting hand gestures.
“Yes.”
“But how?”
“When his lover—my great-grandmother—drowned herself, their baby was taken to the palace.”
“The count adopted her?”
“He gave her to a scullery maid, put her to work in the kitchen as soon as she could walk. She never said a word growing up, never cried once since that day the old farmer was murdered. At fifteen, she was as beautiful as her mother. One day, the count lifted her skirts from behind. The girl fought, but as she couldn’t cry out or protest—”
“He knew who she was?”
“You think incest stops people? I think it turns them on.”
Monika lightly traced the outline of my fingers, a gesture so arousing I crossed my legs beneath the table to constrict the sudden swelling of blood and allow concentration.
“He used her a month or two, no more than three,” she said. When the girl’s condition was discovered, the chief steward quietly married her off to the gardener’s assistant, a shy and muscular young man frequently scolded for having his feet on the earth but his head in the sky. It was to everyone’s great surprise that the girl and the gardener’s assistant fell deeply in love soon after their arranged marriage. The gardener’s assistant, who had never felt confident enough about his intellect to talk about any subject in public more controversial than the weather, discovered his tongue in the girl’s silence. Her inability to contradict him with anything more than a glance, which most often adored, encouraged him to express his views and discover that, despite his long silence, he held strong political convictions. One of these convictions was a sense of injustice at the aristocracy’s wealth, which led him by degrees to socialism. The groundskeeper overheard the gardener’s assistant talking one day about Marx and accused him of communist agitation. The two began a fierce argument that came to blows. When the chief steward investigated the incident, he attributed the assistant’s new political views to jealousy over the parentage of his wife’s child.
A baby girl was born to the couple during the summer of 1938. The gardener’s assistant was promoted to gardener, and his political temper cooled in the new heights of his career. Two months later, the Munich pact was signed, ceding the Czech Sudentenland to Germany. In spring of 1939, the Nazis marched into Prague. Jews, Gypsies, and Socialists were declared enemies of the regime and sent to concentration camps at Theresienstadt and Buchenwald. The count was interrogated and given the choice of collaboration or death. The count chose collaboration. When the groundskeeper reported that a Socialist agitator and his
Gypsy wife served at the palace, the count did not attempt to dissuade the Gestapo from their fascist duty.
The gardener’s assistant died two days later in interrogation. The chief steward managed to hide the baby with a family in the country, but the mute girl was sent to Theresienstadt. A rare survivor who met her there said that a few days after the girl’s arrival, an SS officer drew his pistol and shot her through the heart. A few months later, the count was taken to Gestapo headquarters, where he fell out of a third-story window.
“Fell?” I repeated.
“It’s an old Czech riddle. If a body is discovered below an open window and no one saw the fall, did it jump, slip, or get pushed?”
“We should write a screenplay,” I said.
“About?”
“Your family. A feature film, maybe a miniseries. Julia Roberts for the Gypsy girl,” I suggested, amazed myself at how perfectly suited she was for the role.
“And Tom Cruise?” she asked, laughing.
“The gardener’s assistant. Of course we can’t make him an outright Communist, but maybe a young entrepreneur type with a social conscience, someone who tries to rise above his station—maybe he wants to open his own greenhouse raising vegetables or flowers or something—but is cruelly slapped down by the count, who is still in love with the Gypsy girl. We have to play with the ending a bit too. I like throwing the count out the window, but we can’t pay Tom and Julia three million apiece just to have them die in the end.”
“But that’s what happened.”
“We’ll give it a slightly different twist. Tom disguises himself as a German officer and finds Julia in the concentration camp. The SS guy wants to shoot Julia on the spot, but Tom, he suggests they let her think about it overnight and hang her in the morning. Imagine the suspense! Tom Cruise—maybe we can make him part Jewish too—disguised as a German officer in a concentration camp, with Julia scheduled to hang in the morning! Then they escape! Over the border, to Switzerland!”
Gypsy Hearts Page 7
