The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  ASSIA

  We met on the train from Boston to Washington DC, where I’d been invited to lead a seminar on the discontinuous function of coordinates. I was looking forward to perhaps spending some of my free time, maybe even a whole day, in the Library of Congress. Assia was looking for the smoking compartment; I tried to help her to find it, but the entire train was nonsmoking. So when we got to Washington we went into a restaurant, right there in the station, which made me think of an ancient Greek temple, a refurbished one, to be sure. There Assia smoked stealthily, placing the ashtray on her knees. Her fingers trembled when she told me that it must be very amusing to be a foreigner and that without a doubt my life was more interesting than that of other people. “That depends,” I replied, “it can also be difficult: your customs and habits are different from those of the country in which you’re living. A foreigner always calls attention to himself because he stands out. You don’t get people’s sense of humor, they don’t get yours.” Assia said that she was a foreigner too; she felt that other people didn’t understand her, and she didn’t really understand them either. “But,” I said to her, “English is your mother tongue, you can make yourself understood.” “I can’t,” she said, “I’ve already told you that I don’t understand other people and they don’t understand me.” “But Assia,” I said impatiently, “there’s a huge difference between not being understood and not being able to use your mother tongue, like me.” Assia looked at me as if I’d whipped her favorite dish away from under her chin. I started to explain my point of view, “The effort of learning English, which I have had to make, has meant that I’ve forgotten much of my Czech, my mother tongue. I’m even ashamed now to write letters in Czech and that’s why I don’t even write to my ex-girlfriend. And my English is worse than broken, as you can hear for yourself.” I said to Assia, “Scientific English is the only type of English I’ve mastered properly, and that has a limited vocabulary and simple grammar because it’s based on a few formulaic sentences.” Assia nodded. Thinking that she had understood me, I said, “Exile, among other things, means that you never really master any language.” Assia went on nodding, and answered, “Yes, that’s me all right.” “Why, are you a foreigner as well? Your name, Assia, sounds foreign.” “My parents were born in the US; myself, I only really know the area around Philadelphia. But I understand your trouble just fine, I’m an emigrant, just like you.” I didn’t say a word more. With the car I’d rented at the station, I gave Assia a ride to the address she gave me, declining her invitation to go in for a drink. Then I went for a spin in the car: the city at night, its long avenues, so wide and spacious with a boulevard running down the center, surrounded by buildings held up by Doric columns, and their Greek staircases, facades, and frontispieces, all of this emerged out of the night, dressed in white. It was like a kind of Acropolis: like gigantic temples with white marble colonnades, and they rose up from the water and shone against the night sky, all white and shiny like stars, or the moon on a summer’s night.

  All those women, girlfriends, fiancées . . . They didn’t realize that a foreigner’s life is nothing if not restless. Anything that a foreigner does is an event, because it involves decisions, choices, adaptation, painful surprises, rifts. They never realized that a foreigner always feels uprooted, and that to put down roots in another country turns out to be an impossible task. He is left floating in the air, always on the move, always subject to change. As an immigrant, he has no political rights and is excluded from any kind of public office. His loneliness leads the foreigner to identify with a cause, an activity, or a person, to which or to whom he becomes violently attached, because it is there that he has found a new country. Those women friends of mine didn’t realize that a foreigner, a human being who feels constantly humiliated because of his poor knowledge of the host language, and because of the lack of comprehension he encounters wherever he goes, suffers from depression, as well as resentment, fury, and even hatred. Foreigners seek refuge in their resentment, they live in it, they turn it into their sanctuary and their flag. Resentment is something palpably present in the foreigner’s volatile universe.

  And then, Mama, I grew tired of casual encounters. Within myself, I went on feeling I don’t know what, something like when Brahms’s concert for piano and orchestra bursts out in the middle of dead silence, with its noisy, relentless beginning. But when it came to sharing this feeling, to sharing myself, I couldn’t find a soul. So I preferred just to go on dreaming.

  Then the day came when I found somebody. One of my students. That, Mama, is to court severe punishment. If you fall in love with a student, they can put you on trial and throw you out of the university.

  Would you like to know how it came about? I’ll begin at the end. This story is longer than the others, because it’s so important to me. Listen . . .

  LESLIE

  One day, her husband came to see me in my office. He was smoking. The smoke covered him the way mist covers a mountain peak. I imagined, in fact I was sure, that he’d come to give me a piece of his mind, after which he would hand me over to the authorities for having succumbed to temptation and sexually harassing his wife. The man talked and talked; I didn’t listen to him, I knew what his monologue was going to be about. Instead of her husband I saw her, Leslie, sitting in his place. We were talking about who knew what, anything to avoid a silence falling between us which would have been too dangerous, too tempting. We talked about hybrid cars, about voltage modulation. Then, later, we chatted about this and that.

  I remembered that one day in 1968 in Prague, on Charles Bridge, I had seen two girls, a slim, dark-haired one, and a voluptuous blonde, both in miniskirts. The dark-haired one was hefting a violin case, but that didn’t stop her from walking at a brisk pace. I followed the two girls over the Charles Bridge and Kampa Island over to Malá Strana, to the U Glaubicu tavern, where they ordered a draught beer each and something to nibble on. The two girls had been aware of my presence for some time and were making fun of the situation. While I was thinking of a way to start up a conversation, the blonde one got up to go to the bathroom and on the way, asked me out on a date. But the one I fancied was the dark-haired one—it was because of her that I’d followed them! All the same, I went out on the date with the blonde one. In the cinema I spent the two hours that the film lasted caressing her breasts and belly and thighs. I got to meet the dark-haired one a week later, when she came over to her friend’s house for a visit. Then, tying a towel around my waist, I took advantage of the fact that the blonde one was taking a shower to ask the dark-haired one out to the cinema. I spent the film sitting there like a piece of wood, and only toward the end did I dare to briefly caress her hand with my fingertips.

  She was a violinist. In August I accompanied her to Sarajevo, where she was performing at a music festival. One evening, Helena’s music excited me in an extraordinary way. During the Bach concert, it seemed to me that her violin was trembling with a hidden, contained grief. Helena played with lowered eyes, her chestnut hair flowing toward the floor. That was the last time I saw Helena. At the break of dawn, news came that the Soviet army had invaded our country. Helena wasn’t in her room. I looked for her all day in vain. Desperate, in the evening I climbed up onto the mountains surrounding Sarajevo, to see if I could find her. A few dogs came up to me, snarling and showing their teeth, in that moss and pinecone-scented twilight. But Helena wasn’t there. I looked for her for days and days, everywhere. I plunged myself into an academic life here in America, but never stopped longing for Helena, and to look for her in all the women I met. Her, Helena, who had disappeared one day from the banks of the river Bosnia like sea foam, pulled away from the beach by a retreating wave.

  Until I found Leslie, a student who came to see me to ask for help with her doctorate courses.

  And now her husband was sitting in my office. He was smoking. Any moment now, Leslie’s husband would report me to the university authorities for sexual harassment.

  As her husband
went on, I only saw Leslie, my friend, coming in to tell me how her scientific research was going. I listened to her melodious Boston English with pleasure, that mezzo-soprano’s voice, and, not really aware of what I was doing, I found myself looking at her breasts. Leslie noticed. She smiled, with goodwill, with joy.

  And I thought about her. My mind was tainted with the memory of my search for Helena, that August of 1968 in Sarajevo. I’d gone to look for her in Ilidza Park: Helena, I assumed, must have gone to the Bosnia River Springs, a place that was sacred to Bosnians, to tell them of the pain she felt because of the attack on our country, there where the water springs forth. They didn’t let me go into the park, night was already falling. But I had to find Helena! When it was dark, I vaulted the fence. The water from the springs was falling over the stones, and, as other streams fed into it, it grew broader and sang its sad song, its litany full of grief, there in the middle of the night.

  I brusquely interrupted my train of thought to encourage Leslie to talk, “Tell me something about your childhood!”

  She told me stories about her and other boys, when they were little. In the summer they visited barns and deserted houses in the woods, and played there, watched each other, exposed themselves mutually. In that very moment, I couldn’t get the image of being in a dark barn with Leslie out of my head: we’d stripped naked, I wanted to feel her warm skin against my hand but didn’t dare touch her directly. I picked up a handful of grain and rubbed it on her body, through the grains I felt it was loaded with electricity, her skin, with the grains I was rubbing around her waist, and over her breasts, then I made her lie down and with my palms full of grain, I massage her belly, her thighs . . . I reached out a hand. I touched her body. No! I didn’t want to imagine the end. I got scared.

  “You’re scared,” Leslie said with a laugh, “What happened to you?”

  I didn’t look at her. She didn’t stop laughing, in little fits of giggles, as she looked at me with shiny, moist eyes. Then she stopped; she too was in some place outside reality. She opened her eyes wide, staring at me in complete seriousness. I knew those sparks in her eyes. They indicated desire.

  I got up and accompanied her to the door.

  “Goodbye,” I suddenly became aware of my voice. And was surprised to find myself adding, “I won’t have any time tomorrow, nor the day after that, nor the one after that.”

  And now, her husband was sitting in front of me. He didn’t stop smoking, sighing. He was saying something about his wife, his wife’s behavior. I made an effort to listen to him.

  “Recently, my wife has been behaving strangely. During the time she used to come over here to ask you for advice, she lived in a state of euphoria. Now she’s fallen into one of desperation. I took her to the California beaches for a few days and she wandered around there in the same dejected mood, like she was sinking into mud.”

  I started to think about myself again, I didn’t want to hear that man’s laments. But his words couldn’t help but brush past my ear, “I’m worried that my wife is seeing someone. A love affair which, at the beginning, had made her very happy and which is now making her terribly sad.” I didn’t really hear what Leslie’s husband was saying. I was thinking about myself: To whom could I explain my hapless life? To whom? To Helena? She’d gone from the picture a long time ago. To Leslie? I’d got rid of her myself. Yet, even so, I really needed to talk!

  “You know . . .” I started a sentence, but I was speaking to Leslie’s husband. There was nothing I could do about it though, I just had to talk. “You know . . . Exile may well be a mind-broadening experience, but deep down, it’s an incurable illness,” I began. And the words bubbled up from inside me like the Bosnia River streaming over the stones. I couldn’t stop talking to the husband of my woman friend, about my two women friends, Helena, and the other one, Leslie, who I didn’t mention by name, but simply described her. All of a sudden I found there was an expression of surprise, consternation, on my listener’s face; he’d even stopped smoking. The smoke had melted away and I could see his eyes. They appeared to me to be suddenly relieved.

  “So it’s because of you!” sighed Leslie’s husband, unruffled, cordial, steady. “I was suspicious of other men, but this would never have occurred to me. A foreigner! A professor from who knows where . . . from the East! A stranger!” he said to himself, looking at my fair, graying hair, and unconsciously patting his own thick, black mane. “So there’s no danger, then, and there never has been,” or that’s what I think I heard, though I’m not entirely sure. But the smile spreading over the whole of Leslie’s husband’s face was a clearer expression of his sense of superiority than anything he might have said.

  Leslie’s husband leaned back happily in his armchair, he didn’t need his cigarettes anymore. While I went on talking, he listened, then he got up and cheerfully headed for the door.

  I didn’t stop talking, addressing myself to the empty chair.

  VI

  SYLVA

  The day after the death of my husband, my mother arrived. She loaded me into the Hispano-Suiza as if I were some kind of parcel and took me to Prague’s main shopping area. She made me go into a very large shop and had me wrapped in black fabric: shoes, blouse, skirt, coat, gloves, everything was black. She dressed me. I stood there silent and still, with that flag of grief. At the end she plunked a hat over my short, blonde hair. A hat that covered my head from my eyebrows to below my ears. Sort of like a priest’s bonnet.

  Then I realized. All of a sudden, I understood that I missed my husband. Now I thought only of his polished manners, of his pain and anguish, of those eyes that had so often pleaded with me not to abandon him.

  I went home and asked my mother to leave me on my own. My grandmother arrived to replace her.

  But that unique word . . . Oblivion . . . Oblivion. The sweet lullaby.

  A word I repeated when I left my husband’s palazzo for good, and when our ever-so-luxurious Hispano-Suiza turned up, and when I dismissed the chauffeur, and when I counted my money to see if I could buy myself a little secondhand, chauffeurless Skoda, and then when I reached the conclusion that I couldn’t afford it. When I put my things in order and left them packaged up, ready for the move, I repeated to myself: Sylva, the woman who demands that both society and her intimate circle respect her, must possess the art of making herself as exquisite as an exotic flower!

  My huge debts obliged me to sell the palazzo in Malá Strana. Even my own family felt the effects of the Depression. My mother kept only the east wing of the chateau, where she continued to live with my grandmother; she left the rest of the building to the state because she couldn’t afford the upkeep. After my father’s death, I inherited a small mansion, also in the Malá Strana District, on the Kampa Island side; we used to call it the Pink Palace. I turned the first floor into my living area, and converted the rest into rented apartments. So now I had neighbors: Jewish families who, like so many other people, had gone bankrupt after the Wall Street crash.

  I filled my apartment with furniture from the chateau: I wished to surround myself with the atmosphere of my childhood. The apartment was so full, there was hardly any space left in it, but I walked past the mirrored cupboards and the corner pieces and the credenzas, the buffets and the sideboards, the side tables and the glass cases and the Japanese jewelry boxes, and with the tips of my fingers and the palms of my hands I felt that piece of exquisite wood and this item of cut glass, and I caressed the lacquered furniture with its encrusted pearl and ivory, and I embraced the lances and pikes and javelins and the rest of the medieval weaponry as if they were tree trunks in the middle of a forest, and I hugged the cold metal of the suits of armor and the helmets that knights had worn centuries ago. Every day I strolled around the apartment, which was permanently submerged in half shadow, because the sun’s rays never managed to penetrate that first-floor apartment in a narrow street in Malá Strana. But I wouldn’t have wanted such sunlight, or too much brightness; I preferred that cold darkness.
And the silence: I even played my music quietly, making the piano do little more than whisper. Some evenings I didn’t even switch on the lights, finding that a gas-powered streetlamp, here too, could provide me with enough light. The piano didn’t fit in my room, which was full to bursting with all the furniture I’d put in there, so I had it placed in the living room, next to the window. I played it at twilight; Brahms’s Piano Sonata no. 3 op. 5, and Chopin’s mazurkas tinted the falling shadows, the music that my grandmother, more than my tutors, had taught me to play. My grandmother, who, like my shadow, only seemed to appear when I needed her. When that was not the case, she lived in the east wing of the chateau with my mother, who needed her much more than I did. My mother was alone.

  I was, too. For the first time in my life, I was completely free. Nothing had any meaning anymore. The only pleasure that brightened my days was the music I played when it began to grow dark.

  I developed a habit of strolling on Kampa Island, where I found both nature, and manmade encroachments on her territory. I found living water and dead water; the dead water of the canals and the living water of the Moldova River.