The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  “The girls in Ingres’s paintings don’t wear swimsuits,” I protested.

  Andrei hugged my shoulders and then, to the rhythm of the spring rain, jumped over the puddles of water.

  “Don’t they? All right then, you’ll be . . . a blue butterfly!”

  We were heading back home across the Charles Bridge. The red clothes were swinging between us in a net bag like a smoking censer in a church.

  “Blue Butterfly!” Andrei whispered in my ear. There was no logic to his words: my brand new skirt was as red as a stoplight!

  “I can already see you in your azure blue swimming costume,” he explained, “because I can easily see things in the past and future: I imagine young women when they’ll be old ladies who have trouble getting onto the tram, and elderly men I see as good-looking lads, taking roses to their first dates with girls.”

  It seemed strange to me, his seeing girls as old ladies. But I didn’t dwell on it. The wind was lifting up my skirt, playing with it and revealing my thighs. Right in the middle of the bridge we ran into Liza, happy as a lark, and her husband, who had a grumpy look on his face because the wind was also playing with Liza’s skirt and uncovering her knees and thighs and more. Liza, playful, naughty, looked to see if there were any men watching and was pleased to find that there were plenty of male eyes focused on her, because nobody wanted to miss the show; Liza, indeed, had long, slim legs, like a ballet dancer’s, although her face wasn’t so attractive; Liza had small eyes, framed by thick glasses which perched on a nose shaped like a horse’s snout; men didn’t usually take much notice of her and now they couldn’t take their eyes off her. What fun! What an enjoyment! To be the center of attention of all, absolutely all the men, from college students through to stick-wielding grandpas, and Liza, happy as a child, walked on with her scowling husband, yes, he looked like the Japanese god of anger, and he growled to Liza that she should cover herself up if she didn’t want to catch a cold, that she should hold her skirt down at the knee, but she didn’t even consider listening to him, much less obeying him, her husband’s grumbling was inconsequential to her, she, who was exhuberant, enjoying something she’d never experienced before.

  When Liza and her husband were some way away, we leaned against a stone balustrade and looked at the river. Andrei was softly singing a song I didn’t know:

  Dance and whirl just a little longer

  and breathe the perfumed air,

  even though you have a yoke on your neck!

  And then I saw it. The biblical plague. Locusts, clouds of locusts. Locusts with sticking-out knees had chosen Prague to infect it with the plague.

  Along the Charles Bridge, between the rows of dancing statues, walked a whole army of pale, serious, solemn-faced children; they had clearly marked partings that separated their fair, Brilliantined hair that was combed to one side; they wore short pants and tall socks that came up to their bony, prominent knees. Those monstrous knees were bending to the rhythm of a Nazi marching song about joining the struggle; this army of children sang it with frightening conviction:

  Die Fahne hoch, die braune Bataillonen, SA marschiert im ruhig festem Schritt . . .

  I put my hands over my ears. Andrei sealed them off with his own hands. I bent over the stone balustrade, leaning over the river. I looked at the brownish water as I had looked at the brown battalions of the marching song.

  I saw them there, they could be made out in the brownish waves.

  There were two. The gray one and the brown one. They had come back. One morning, when I was preparing breakfast for Andrei and myself. Had they really turned up at my home, those two men, or was it a nightmare, caused by my worrying, which, in the years thirty-eight and thirty-nine, made me suffer for days at a time? I had a nightmare almost every night. At the chemist’s, I had heard that while the Nazis were in power, the Jews and the Russians would suffer most. I was being eaten away by anguish for the future of my mother, of Bruno and of Andrei, and, what’s more, my own.

  “Have you thought it over, verehrteste Komtesse?”

  “What are you referring to?”

  “To your becoming officially a citizen of the Reich,” the gray one said.

  “I’m sorry?” I was trying to gain time.

  “A citizen of the Reich,” the gray one repeated with a smile.

  “Yes, a citizen of the Reich, Frau von Stamitz,” echoed the brown one.

  “Citizen of the Reich?” I said nervously.

  “Yes, a citizen of the Reich, that is to say, an official German,” the gray one explained, seriously now, in a severe tone.

  I began to tremble.

  “My husband’s still asleep,” I said. This statement made no sense at all, I realized.

  “Your . . . husband?” laughed the gray one with unconcealed sarcasm.

  “That painter of Gypsies is your husband?” said the brown one, looking in the direction of the bedroom.

  “Frau von Stamitz!” said the gray one, shaking his head, as if he was talking to a mental retard.

  What do they know? How do they know it? Why do they know it? All this went through my mind.

  “Think it over. Take your time, dear lady, it is for your own good.”

  “It is only for your own good, we’re not getting anything out of it,” said the gray one with a smile, as if imitating his colleague.

  “It is for your own good and that of those who are close to you,” the brown one repeated as if I were deaf.

  At the threshold of the door to my apartment, the brown one said to me in a low voice, almost a whisper, while passing his hand over his lower lip, as if wiping it clean: “Just one last little thing, Frau von Stamitz. The greatest service that a woman can render the human race is to help it perpetuate itself with children who are healthy from a racial point of view.”

  Now I saw them in the brownish waters of the Vltava, the

  gray one, with his white-striped tie, with his small put

  penetrating eyes, and the brown one with a gold chain in his

  fob pocket and a golden tooth in his twisted smile. While I vomited into the river, Andrei caressed my hair and dried the sweat from my face with his immaculate handkerchief. The May air was cold and I breathed it in deeply through the tobacco smell given off by Andrei’s handkerchief. I rested my head against the stone feet of who knew which saint, like Mary Magdalene. And I longed not to be on the bridge, to not know what was happening, to not have to take any kind of decision, just to be, and nothing else.

  I observed the statues, which, a moment ago, had been dancing to the rhythm of the spring; now, black and crude, they grimaced scornfully to remind the passersby of what they already knew: This country is no longer yours! Your national anthem says that this country is your home, but the blonde children with an arrow-straight parting on the sides of their heads, separating their impeccably smooth and Brilliantined hair, with their equally impeccably knotted ties, had camped here, they who knew perfectly well that they were the strongest and the most powerful and the greatest in the world.

  I watched the passersby: they crossed the bridge with a weariness apparent in their movements and pace, their eyes empty and indifferent to the fact that that between the tiny drops of rain, rays of spring sunlight were falling. And the phantasmagorical statues were all around us, shaking in a macabre black dance. Der Totentanz.

  Arm in arm with Andrei, I walked away from the black statues of death toward Kampa, toward the winding streets of Malá Strana. Toward my home.

  One day I was preparing a student for the Music Academy entrance examinations. That day they came back to see me. It was no nightmare. Both men were standing in front of me: the brown one and the gray one.

  “Schubert,” said the brown one.

  “The Impromptus,” added the gray one.

  “Our German music.”

  “Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart.”

  “The Czech composers are a match for them,” said my student, who still hadn’t lost confidence in the poss
ibility of convincing someone with a logical argument.

  “The Czech composers have German schools, that is the only reason why they are a match for them,” said the gray one wearily.

  “And you know it,” added the brown one, in an even lazier tone.

  I ushered them into another room.

  “You are one of us, and that is why we have come,” the gray one repeated.

  “When all is said and done, you are German, verehrteste Komtesse,” smiled the brown one.

  “And you are about to become a citizen of the Reich,” said the gray one, expectantly.

  “Yes, a citizen of the Reich,” said the brown one.

  I began to tremble.

  “I have to get back to my student,” I said apologetically.

  “We’ll wait,” said the gray one.

  That was an order.

  I remembered the words of the Minister of Defense that I had heard on the radio, his broken voice, his call to the people: the most important thing is that we remain united. It is vital that we do not allow outside elements to infiltrate us. We will not give in to such confusion. I said firmly, “No. Not today.”

  “We will be back, we will come and see you another day. Soon.”

  “We’ll be back as soon as we can, verehrteste Komtesse!”

  They both said this almost simultaneously. Their words sounded solemn. Like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.

  I was carrying a new swimsuit in my bag, a sky blue, two-piece affair. It had started to drizzle, the men pulled their brims lower over their foreheads, the women covered their heads with their hats or with shopping bags, and were frowning, bent forward. As Andrei and I rode the tram that went along the riverside the sun came out again. Even in the nice weather, people ran about on the riverbank as if pursued by rabid dogs. Some made gestures of irritation, others looked at the paving with indifferent, lusterless eyes. In a Prague chock-full of Nazis, nobody enjoyed a leisurely stroll through town. I remembered one day when I was little, while I was walking with the Carmelite nuns on the quayside, at this very place in front of the National Theater, we encountered two young men: one with the right side of his hair dyed green and the left side yellow, the other with green on the left side and yellow on the right. They walked along with their yellow sides next to each other. People turned to look at them, some indignant, others amused. Later, my grandmother told me that they were brothers, two famous writers. Or maybe they were painters, I can’t remember.

  But now the sun shone and people still hurried home as if it were hailing.

  At the Yellow Baths, I put on my blue two-piece swimsuit. We made ourselves comfortable on the yellow-painted wooden floor. Andrei stared out at the waves. I couldn’t help noticing that life in the forest had made his body wiry, strong.

  I lay on my back; the sun warming me and raising me up from the floor, carrying me off in spoonfuls to a golden space where it is never cold.

  I overheard a conversation in German, very close by. It wasn’t the smooth, gentle German that the Jewish inhabitants of Prague used to speak: the German that I had once despised but which now struck me as familiar and endearing. The German I could hear now, sounded short, grating, voices accustomed to barking military commands.

  Don’t think it! I ordered myself.

  But the German came closer and closer; it sounded to me like military boots marching on the paving of my conscience. I couldn’t help but recall the conversation.

  “We have come in confidence, verehrteste Komtesse,” said the gray one.

  “Make yourself a citizen of the Reich,” said the gray one, “You have German blood in your veins and you, Frau von Stamitz, will be a good citizen.”

  “We have brought you papers to sign,” said the brown one.

  Just then I had a vision: I could see what I was like inside. Arteries and veins and conduits and blood vessels flow into my heart like rivers and streams into the sea. The blood of my father . . . I saw it as the music composed by Lully for the Sun King. The blood of my mother . . . That was clearly Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. The blood of my grandmother was music for a solo piano, the little-known and highly intimate piece for piano, “The Consolation” from Dreams, written by Bedřich Smetana. All this is me, all these rhythms and tones and spiritual states, all these notes and atmospheres circulate through me and run along my veins and flow together like rivers into the sea.

  “We have brought these papers for you to sign.”

  I looked inside myself again. The blood of my grandmother, then, was Smetana’s piece for solo piano. And my dead husband? And Petr? And Andrei? What music were they? Bruno Singer is Janáček’s opera The Makropoulos Affair, of course. My students are musical instruments. All of this is me . . . but who am I?

  The voices were getting mixed up with my fantasizing, or perhaps it was all just a result of my most hidden fears?

  “It is your obligation,” I heard the gray one’s voice say.

  “We are telling you that this is an order!” the brown one said while I thought about my veins and blood vessels and arteries.

  “It is a moral imperative.”

  “The moral imperative that Kant talks about in his Critique of Practical Reason.”

  “It is the moral law which is in each of us.”

  “It is the moral law which is in you.”

  “There will be a war.”

  “There will be hunger.”

  “Your mother has married a man who belongs to the Jewish race.”

  “There will be a great persecution of the Jews, which will be harsh and rigorous.”

  “And not only the Jews, but of those related to them.”

  “And those who help them.”

  “Those who are the friends of the Jews.”

  “We will persecute all those who are not with us.”

  The blood of my mother . . . Mahler’s Eighth, I said to myself so as not to hear the two voices that were so very insistent. How does Mahler’s Eighth go? Pam pa pa pa pa pa pam pam . . .

  “Those who are not with us are against us,” I kept hearing in this nightmare. But then I made out the following words very clearly: “On the other hand, whoever is with us will stand to gain by it.”

  “If you, Frau von Stamitz, decide to be with us, we can assure you that you will continue to have students.”

  “And all kinds of advantages.”

  “And favors.”

  “You will not lack for food.”

  “Medical insurance.”

  “You will not be obliged, as will the Czechs, to work fourteen hours a day in a factory.”

  “We know how to look after those who serve us. Verehrteste Komtesse, we most sincerely recommend that you sign these papers. In fact it’s only a mere formality, and in exchange you will be able to live more comfortably and be in a position to help your loved ones.”

  Then it happened.

  The brown one offered me a pen, the gray one pushed the paper toward my right hand. The brown one gave me an encouraging smile.

  I reached out to take the pen from his hand.

  At the last moment I hesitated. I looked at the other man.

  The gray one had a threatening frown on his face.

  Frightened, I thought that if they started punishing the Jews and their families, my mother, Bruno, and Andrei would suffer the consequences. As would I myself.

  Without a word, I took the pen from the hand of the man dressed in brown.

  “Noooooooo!”

  I was so horrified I almost fell into the river.

  Andrei looked at me, his eyes shining from the brightness of the sun.

  I stuck my fingers in my ears. Even so, I still heard his voice . . . “What’s wrong, Blue Butterfly?” I felt his arms protecting me. His voice hummed Schubert’s song in my ear: Darum Sylvia, tön, o Sang, der holden Sylvia Ehren . . . We sat in each other’s arms like this for quite a while.

  It was drizzling again. I took my fingers out of my ears. People were leaving, the conversatio
n in German had vanished.

  We continued sitting as before, looking at the river, which was gray with dashes of green.

  My sky blue swimsuit, which I wore for the first time that day, got wet in the rain, and stained from the wooden floor.

  Andrei went missing. He disappeared. He probably forgot about me in the mountains. When he entered the universe of his visions, he forgot about everything else, even the people closest to him. At those times he knew nothing of me, or indeed nothing of the world at all.

  My mother and Bruno Singer also went missing.

  One day, I heard an appeal on the radio for citizens to help the tens of thousands of families in the refugee camps, whose survival depended exclusively on charity. I thought of my mother and her husband. I hadn’t heard from them in weeks: my phone calls were not answered, and neither was their doorbell. First I went to the bank to withdraw some money, then I headed to the Refugees’ Assistance Association, on Karolína Světlá Street. A young man in charge of the office gave me a bright, grateful smile and asked for my ID. Reluctantly, I gave him my new document, that of a citizen of the Reich. The man looked at me now with undisguised disgust, and said in a voice full of disdain, “We ’re not accepting anything from you.”

  I was headed up Jan Neruda Street toward Prague Castle when I suddenly felt weak and had to lean against a wall in front of the Italian Embassy. The statues loomed up from the baroque palace that housed the embassy, threatening me with their silent cries. They yelled and scolded each other; their stone bodies twisted about in a convulsive, hysterical dance. And one . . . with a raised finger, a forbidding finger of the fanatical Counter-reformist Jesuits. I couldn’t walk past them. I went back down, to where I turned left to take another route up: the New Stairs of the castle. Although it was November, I was by now soaked in sweat and took off my dark brown jacket. I remembered the day Andrei and I bought it, that day we were crossing the Charles Bridge; from the rainy, springtime sky, the baroque statues were greeting us with their head and arms . . . That was before the war. Only a few years had gone by, but I feel as if that walk had taken place in another life.