The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  VII

  JAN

  A phone call early one morning changed my life abruptly.

  That day in my hotel room, my hair still wet from a recent shower, I was impatiently tying my shoelaces so as to get downstairs in time for a hasty breakfast, when the phone rang.

  I was in Moscow for an international conference of scientists. Back then I lived in airplanes and hotels, in Sydney or Tokyo, London, San Francisco, or Johannesburg. All the hotel rooms were huge, and identical, as were the conference centers, with their headphones and their international audiences. I went from one capital city to the next, without seeing anything of them outside of airports and taxis, hotels and auditoriums. On my transatlantic flights, equations and questions concerning Bellman’s dynamic programming danced about in my head.

  In the evening, after a long day in the lecture hall, my colleagues and I would usually enjoy a drink in the hotel bar and laugh until the small hours. Even so, I reckon all our heads remained full of formulas and axioms.

  I enjoyed living like that.

  So, I was hastening to tie my shoelaces when the phone rang. My first impulse was to ignore it, to make sure I had time for a coffee and bite of something in the hotel restaurant. But the phone went on ringing and ringing, it just wouldn’t let up. Its insistence both irritated and intrigued me.

  “You’ve got the wrong number,” I said, when a certain Yekaterina Somebody introduced herself. I was about to hang up, thinking only of my coffee and the lecture that was going to start in ten minutes’ time. As I was hanging up, I heard the words, “I have not got the wrong number!” coming from the receiver. “Please! I never dial the wrong number!” The lengthy, rapid-fire explanation that followed put me in a bad mood, the lecture of a colleague from Amsterdam was about to start any moment, and I wouldn’t have time for my morning coffee. Then little by little, I realized that I did indeed know this Yekaterina, or rather, I had known her some time ago.

  As I stood there on the phone in my open dressing gown, I recalled an incident at an international conference, back when perestroika and glasnost were making their first timid appearances in Moscow. The Russian organizers had assigned a girl to act as both interpreter and guide for our scientific group: a student named Katya. This was about ten years before the phone rang in my room. I remember that the girl dressed differently from other young women in Moscow: she wasn’t wearing a transparent blouse or high heels—though she did complain that her father wouldn’t let her wear that kind of stuff—and what was more she played tennis and went water-skiing, and one day, a huge black limousine with a chauffeur had given her a ride to our hotel. I immediately figured out what kind of background Katya came from. I found it funny just how easy it was, in Russia, to spot anyone who was from an important Communist family. None of us took Katya too seriously.

  One day, Katya brought her father along to our end of the room at the conference reception. None of us had ever seen anything like it. The arrogant heads of Moscow’s scientific institutes bowed to Katya’s father like servants before His Royal Highness the Czar. The more that sun-tanned man ignored them, the more they fawned over him, humbling themselves at his feet. It was like something out of that Chekhov short story “Fat and Thin.” I was laughing to myself, thinking that although Russia had gone through decades of Communism and Stalinism in the last one hundred years, nothing had changed: everything went on just as before, even under a different flag. Katya introduced her father to her group of international scientists, but he shook his head; he didn’t speak a word of English. When it came to my turn, Katya announced to her father something that one of my colleagues must have told her: that my father was Russian.

  “What does your father do?” that thoroughly uninteresting man then asked me in Russian.

  I’d muttered some vague comment. In English.

  Katya then said to her father, in Russian, “Professor Stamitz’s father was a political prisoner sent to Siberia.”

  How had she found out? I was upset that my colleagues had been so talkative. But the fault was mine alone, and that of the scotches drank in the bars of hotels where fellow conference members were staying.

  Katya’s father swivelled that bulldog head of his toward me and with his eyes fixed on some distant spot, he answered, his voice threatening, “Well, for a few years, in our country certain injustices took place, just as they did everywhere else. The history of any nation is full of dark moments. However, all that is in the past now. These are different times. There’s no point in airing our dirty laundry, in dwelling on old misunderstandings. Katya, dear, what else were you thinking of showing our guests in Moscow? This is a wonderful capital city, all things considered.”

  I had excused myself, saying I was off to get a drink. I needed it. I took a glass of whisky off a passing tray and, going against all my usual habits, downed the lot in one go. Immediately I picked up another one and joined a group of Australian scientists cracking jokes about their mothers-in-law.

  After the conference Katya sent me a Christmas card every year, which I answered mechanically, as I did dozens of others.

  Now I was standing rigid in a Moscow hotel room staring at the wall, with my left shoe unlaced. The wallpaper was peeling. It surprised me that the newspapers visible in the cracks were written in Cyrillic, though that was logical given that I was in Russia. The woman’s voice on the receiver was telling me something in an overdone English accent. Katya said she found out about the conference and had tried to find me. She was inviting me that evening to a concert in a church, performed by a choir in which she sang. Just to get her off the phone, I said I’d try and make it.

  When I arrived, I was trying to determine a way of calculating the speed of hybrid vehicles, but without expensive and unreliable measuring instruments. However, the atmosphere of that Orthodox church soon stopped me mulling over my calculations. In that church, so different from the pomposity of its baroque counterparts, everything was beautiful, everything was pure and delicate, everything was dark and comforting. My eyes went from one candelabra to another; they were round and the candles in them burned with flickering flame. The more I became absorbed in the music, the more my childhood came to mind, the parks of Prague with their lawns full of daisies and dandelions, where I used to play when I was small.

  I remembered what you told me about my father, Mama, and what he had told you: that once a week his parents had taken him to church. It was there that my father had discovered the deepest beauty, you said.

  At that moment in the church, Mama, I saw all that, and was able to recall my childhood, bit by bit. That evening, I soaked up the music you had once listened to so often, the chants of Orthodox liturgy. I didn’t spot Katya immediately. I thought that maybe she wasn’t singing that evening. After a short while, I recognized her as one of five angels with long hair, all of them dressed in dazzling silver tunics. That music took me back to our house on Francouzská Avenue. Yes, it was the first time since I’d emigrated that I really felt at home.

  After the concert I went to see her in the vestry. She’d changed her clothes and was now chatting with some friends. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do now. Katya was busy conversing with her colleagues and her eyes passed over me with the most absolute indifference, as if she hadn’t recognized me. I felt ill at ease. I was drumming my knuckles on a tabletop: Would it be too daring to ask her out for a coffee? She’d probably reject the offer.

  But Katya got there first: it was she who invited me to have a drink at a late-night bar on the corner. I don’t remember what she was wearing, I still saw her in that silvery tunic, surrounded by celestial chanting.

  After a long preparatory ritual, during which I drank two glasses of whisky, and Katya drank three French cognacs, she, seated on a red velvet sofa, started to tell me her life story. In a sad voice she told me how she’d been married three times, to a Russian, a Hungarian, and a German. “From East Germany?” I asked her.

  Katya gave a little shiver of a
bhorrence, “No way! No! From West Germany, of course!”

  The late-night bar struck me as a nice place, exciting, full of hidden sensuality and exotic music. At that moment I felt that the world was my oyster. It was in this happy mood that I remembered Katya’s father, who as from the lofty heights of a Roman Caesar, observed his servants as they fawned at his feet. I was so happy and relaxed that I laughed out loud.

  “You’re laughing at my misfortunes,” Katya said, indignantly, while, slowly, she removed the brown shawl that had wrapped her body until then.

  Only now did I realize that Katya was dressed, perfumed, and made-up with tremendous care. Her fine sweater, the color of a latte, clung firmly to her most feminine body, her golden jewelry glimmered in the bar’s shadows, although hardly less than did her hair, nails, and glossy lips. Her makeup heightened the smoothness of her skin, unmarred by spots and wrinkles. The features of the sheltered little girl she must have been now mirrored the eyes of the young woman she was now, who so far had seen only a little of life, even if she had had three husbands. But in her look, I couldn’t help but see certain qualities that put a brake on my enthusiasm: there was something cold and calculated, as if she had set herself an objective and wouldn’t give up until it was achieved. Katya was no beauty, but her hothouse-flower movements, the care she’d taken with her appearance, the clothes from top European designers, gave her the look of a pretty, well-cared-for young woman.

  I made a flattering comment about her hands. She laughed, saying that what she most liked doing was stretching out in the bathtub and painting her nails. “But you’re laughing at all my misfortunes,” she said again, irritated.

  I was still under the spell the church had worked on me, which helped to protect me against the too-dark shadows of that vulgar late-night bar, as I now saw it, where I found myself conversing with a girl who used her clothes to accentuate her physical attributes, convinced of her own sophistication.

  “No, I’m not laughing at your misfortunes, Katya. In fact, I want to invite you to stay with me for a few days in the States, if you’d like that.”

  Her eyes sparkled. She told me her heart was palpitating and she placed the palm of my hand over it by way of a demonstration. Some men sitting at the bar noticed this, and couldn’t take their eyes off us. I was burning up under those masculine stares and wanted to remove that hand quickly, but Katya held it down firmly. After the men tired of looking at us, and when Katya lowered her eyes in an especially seductive fashion, I tried to caress her. It seemed to me that was what she was after.

  “Only when I come to the States,” she said, laughing and slapping my hand, not so much because she felt abashed, but rather because she wanted to make things more difficult for me. Finally, she invited me to Saint Petersburg to spend the summer, which was just beginning. This invitation cheered me up because, above all, it opened up the possibility of living in the city where my father was born.

  In Saint Petersburg, Katya stayed at the place of some friends of hers, whereas I took a room in the Astoria Hotel. My stay there grew longer and longer. The feeling of being at home that Katya had stirred up in me, tied me to the place more and more. That is also how I felt during Katya’s twenty-seventh birthday party, which was a kind of midsummer night’s dream, vulgar and cruel.

  May I project this party before you, Mama, as if it were a film?

  Katya’s body flew over the water, doubting for a second whether to fly higher or fall happily headlong into the waves.

  A geyser of water droplets broke through the surface. Under the Nordic pines, some colored smudges began to shift, to form groups and scream and shout. The falling woman’s body had disappeared under the surface of the water, only to emerge and quickly return to the riverbank.

  Katya dried herself hard with a towel, but still not well enough to stop the goosebumps from appearing on her skin. The sun was frozen at a great height over the horizon, but had now acquired a twilight pink color. It hadn’t moved for a while, it was difficult to know what the time was.

  “What time is it?” Katya asked.

  One of the smudges, the blue one, what I discerned was the color of a young Italian man’s T-shirt, showed her the time on his cell phone.

  “A quarter to ten?” Katya burst out laughing and couldn’t stop.

  “What are you laughing about now?” asked the green smudge, a woman.

  “We’d arranged to meet Jan at eight, in the wood between Komarovo and Zelenogorsk.”

  Katya combed her hair with her fingers and looked at the gray cloud shaped like a cluster of baroque women. And like Rubens women, this cloud also had a luminous aura. It looked as if it was about to rain.

  Katya tapped a number and waited. A long beep could be heard, followed by a mechanical voice asking her to leave a message. Abruptly, Katya snapped the phone shut.

  I was trying to light the fire, but the smoke kept getting in my eyes. By contrast, the group of people one hundred feet to our left had made a bonfire that was burning beautifully, as was another fire made by the party to our right. I got to the forest over half an hour before our agreed meeting time, and chose a pretty spot under four tall birch trees. From there we had a view of a little bay with a small, sandy beach that seemed to have been hurled down from the sky. When I arrived, the forest was empty, but my presence must have attracted other visitors: one after the other they appeared on the scene, parking their cars not far from my birch wood oasis, before preparing their shashlyki. To make matters worse, some of them left their car doors open and switched on their radios. Really loud! To my left, a man sang in a hoarse bass voice, and to the right some fashionable little song was being howled out in looped refrains.

  I looked at my watch: Katya and the others should have been here by now. Maybe they got caught up someplace else, chatting. Let Katya have a good time with her friends, it’s her birthday! I unloaded all the food I’d bought at the market that morning. I had taken special care choosing the cheeses, the spices, the fresh herbs, the red cabbage and all the other types of greens for the salads. And the wine! I spread a white picnic cloth on the grass and laid out plates bearing pomegranate-colored Georgian salads, some ivory-colored Georgian cheese, Georgian mint and basil, pickled garlic, and yet more herbs for the meat. I looked at my watch: they should have been here a long time ago! I inflated the mattress and placed it next to the cloth.

  It was time to gather firewood. I looked at my watch again: they should’ve . . . a long, long time . . . I took a handsaw and headed off into the forest. The deeper I got, the deeper I sank into the mud, and the wood I found was damp. I kicked the pinecones out of my way, while whistling Beethoven’s Sixth, The Pastoral. Pastoral symphonies, I thought, could only have been written two centuries ago, before all the city people started to picnic on the banks of the lakes and on the beaches. Beethoven’s undulating melody filled my head and I imagined Napoleon with his three-cornered hat and Josephine in her hoop skirt both sitting in the forest on inflatable mattresses, with cans of beers in their hands, next to a parked pink Lada from which a rap group bellowed. I raised a lonely toast to Napoleon and Josephine, posthumously to their health, then looked at my watch once more. I quickly picked up the wood I’d found and went back with it to the laden picnic cloth. I made the fire, I blew on it. Nothing. I looked at my watch. Smoke and still more smoke. I felt like putting out the whole bonfire with a single kick.

  “We’re here, darling!” Katya shouted from the car window as she pulled to a stop, and then ran over to me with strawberries in one hand and raspberries in the other. She covered my mouth with her hand so I couldn’t complain about her being so late.

  The sun was slowly approaching the horizon, dying the diners’ faces, first yellow, then an apricot color, and finally the color of wild roses.

  “The last bottle!” announced the man in the red T-shirt, reaching out for the bottle opener. But Katya didn’t let him open the bottle.

  “And the shashlyki? Jan, with all this seawee
d it’d be a miracle if you could get a fire going,” she pointed at the smoking wood “Let’s go to Repino and have them roast some shashlyki for us at the beach restaurant!”

  I folded the cloth and placed the empty basket in the car, and Katya, paying no attention whatsoever to the parcels containing her birthday presents, stepped away from the multicolored group and turned to the Italian dressed in blue, “Tommy, lend me your cell. No silly questions!”

  After a moment, she left a voicemail recording in a different, tender voice, “It is now eleven o’clock or quarter past eleven at night. We’re going to Repino. to the beach, to roast some shashlyki. I’m just mentioning it because if, by some coincidence . . .” and then she hung up abruptly, like a naughty little girl.

  I took the packages containing the presents to the car, and packed them carefully in the trunk.

  Alone in the car a couple of hours later, I looked at the time, though there was no longer any point in doing so. It was as if the watch were my only companion. Katya certainly hadn’t strapped herself to my wrist. In the thick, gray light of that almost phantasmagorical night, I could clearly make out the dial: ten to one. So I had ten minutes to cross the Neva before the bridges split into two halves that would rise up into the air, to allow the big ships to enter the city.

  When I arrived in the Saint Petersburg suburbs, at a neighborhood of cloned buildings, I glanced once more at my rear-view mirror: the reflection showed a plump woman in an apron, coming out of the gray edifice to the left. Again I recalled the sandy bank of the Repino Sea, and quickly tried to erase the image. But I couldn’t help it. I saw myself walking along the beach toward the sea, in the west the sky was taking on a dark orange hue; it must have been around midnight. I was carefully carrying a platter with shashlyki, skewers of lamb that a restaurant nearby had roasted for ten roubles and then poured hot sauce on them. I saw Katya with her friends, sitting on parallel benches at a long wooden table. A night wind was blowing and Katya was curling up on herself against the cold. I approached her. Katya’s teeth were shining pink in the twilight, even at that distance. Suddenly she got up, clapped her hands, and screamed, “Hurrah! Wonderful! Bravo!” and the rest of the group joined in. I felt like the main character in a movie, the one with the red sports car faster than his enemy’s, the one who shoots the bad guys before breaking through the glass door, leaving a glittering cascade of shards behind him. I got closer and closer, with a big Formula One champion’s smile on my face, but when I was almost there, I realized that neither Katya nor her friends were looking at me, that their enthusiasm was for something going on behind me. I turned around. Behind me was Il Mammone, the tubby, bald Italian who Katya had introduced to her crowd not long before. I put the grill with the roasted meat on the table. But nobody paid any attention to me, that multicolored swarm’s attention was focused exclusively on the bald man, who was giving his daughter a piggyback ride. Then, shrieking like a pack of hyenas, everybody dove into the meat.