The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  I climbed the stairs to the castle and thought about this morning. In a small café near where I lived I had had a cup of the dirty water that in wartime went by the name of coffee. I picked up a Czech newspaper, which urged the Czechs to “collaborate sincerely with the Germans,” I looked at a few more: they all said the same thing in as many words. When I paid, I commented on this to the woman who ran the café, “According to the papers, what does it mean to be Czech? To be a collaborator?”

  I will never forget the look she gave me. Never.

  She looked at me scornfully. Worse: with disgust. As if she wanted to say: it is not for you—a captivator and collaborator yourself—to talk of such things; you’d better shut up!

  I promised myself I would never go to that café again.

  No, I couldn’t ever go there again, just as I could never go back to the baker’s up the street, to the drugstore, or to the greengrocer’s on Újezd Street, nor to the Kampa gardens when the students were there. They no longer called me the Silent Woman, as they had after my husband’s death. Now on occasion they shouted: you bitch, you evil hag! They spat in front of me.

  How have they all found out about my signature? About my signature, and the favors I received from the Germans, from the Nazis? In fact, why had I really signed those forms that day, and agreed to become a citizen of the Reich?

  Perhaps because, when I was little, Maman had never tired of repeating that I was a noble, aristocratic orchid, destined to a better life than most people. Yes, in part I had done it because of that. Also because I had never been able to disobey a direct order. Orders must be obeyed, so they had taught me ever since I was small.

  But it was not only for these reasons: hearing before the war that it would be the Jews and the Russians who would suffer most, I had thought that, if necessary, I could help my mother, Bruno, and Andrei.

  My mother and her Bruno. Bruno Singer, a Jewish businessman, a specialist in the world of finance. Bruno, with his wise, intellectual face, a sensitive, refined man, a perfect gentleman, and a wonderful partner when it came to dancing to jazz music . . .

  The last time I saw her, my mother had told me, “Sylva, they’re asking me to leave Bruno, they are demanding it! To spare my life, they are ordering me to divorce him. They have told me that an Aryan woman with a Jewish spouse will be sent to a concentration camp if she doesn’t get divorced in time. But Sylva, if I did such a thing, how could I live with myself? I want to be with him. Nothing else matters.”

  Here too, my mother outdid me. She always did everything better than me. Always.

  What has happened to them? Where had my mother gone? And Bruno? To ask such questions does not mean giving up hope. Not yet.

  And what had happened to Petr, my Monsieur Beauvisage? In the thirties, when Masaryk was still in power, he had been the Secretary of the Ministry of Culture and Education of the Government of Czechoslovakia. After Masaryk’s death, he retired from politics to become a university professor. My mother had relayed all this to me in front of Bruno, deliberately, coquettishly, “I never did quite manage to fully understand Petr’s poems,” Maman added, “at home I have a few of his books. The critics praise them to the skies, but I have to confess that the contradictory images that he uses don’t say very much to me.” Petr’s poems didn’t resonate very much with Maman, and I hadn’t even tried to read them, even though my friends and acquaintances liked them very much. That is to say, my erstwhile friends and acquaintances. Everybody now was keeping their distance from me. But, where was Petr himself? The university had been closed. From the beginning of the protectorate and the war, the Nazis had carried off over twenty thousand people to the concentration camps, mainly members of the Czech intelligentsia. That was how they increased the climate of terror in the country. What had happened to Petr?

  No! I said to myself as I climbed the steps. No! I have to concentrate: I turned my attention to other things. Higher and higher up the steps to the castle! I can’t, I haven’t got the strength to think about . . . that. If only Andrei were here! Why am I going alone? Why is no one with me? So many acquaintances and friends of mine are in concentration camps. And my former students . . . The Jews are in the camps, the Czechs have other things to worry about . . . Those two men, the gray one and the brown one, made sure I had students, they kept their word. “We know how to look after those who serve us,” they had said, and they hadn’t lied to me, but now I have to welcome those locusts with their socks up to their enormous, bony knees, big as balloons, so that they may play Schubert’s Impromptus in my home. The boys of the Hitlerjugend only play German music, of course. They execute each piece with perfect technique, but do so coldly, mechanically, with severity, without one iota of passion or mystery, and what is art without passion or mystery?

  It had been a long while since I last saw Andrei. One day I spotted him in the neighbor’s house. When he finished there, he crossed the road to knock on my door. He came with a bouquet of little daisies in hand, of the kind that grow and flower on park lawns, there are loads of them at Kampa. Before the war he used to bring me roses, but who would dare sell roses now with the airplanes whistling over our heads. Who would buy roses if there was no guarantee of getting home safely with them? Andrei used to give me bunches of gladioli in the summer, armfuls of lilacs in the spring, bouquets of chrysanthemums in the autumn, and always lots of roses all year round. Because he never arrived empty handed, he always brought a gift, and that day he brought daisies with buds as tiny as the haléř, the smallest coin in circulation. He came with a bouquet in his hand and a question on his lips and a greeting in that deep voice of his, but that day I didn’t pay any attention to the flowers or the smile or the greeting. All I could think of was that he had been at the neighbor’s house. I saw red circles float in front of my eyes, then they grew scarlet and then darkened. I slammed the heavy oak door too, so that Andrei couldn’t come in. I heard him ring the bell, then knock with his knuckles and the palm of his hand, and finally scrape at the wood like a little animal while saying my name in a low voice . . . Sylva, Sylva, my love . . . It turned to night and I still hadn’t opened the door. I drank cognac and coffee, and when there was nothing left to drink I smoked some cigarettes that Bruno had left in the apartment a long, long time ago, and I remembered the bouquet of little daisies and wanted to go out on the street and look for the one who carried them. But then once again in my mind’s eye I saw Andrei with the woman across the street: he was smiling at her, she was saying something to him with great tenderness in her eyes, he whispered in her ear, with passion . . . I fell asleep in the chair and when I woke up I ran out of the house, with just a raincoat on, without a scarf or a hat or gloves, because I had woken up with the image of that bouquet. I had rushed down the stairs as if I might still find him somewhere. Indeed, on the ground floor I saw Andrei on the threshold of the empty apartment from which, some time ago, they had taken away a Jewish family, with the grandfather and the grandchildren and everyone. They hadn’t shouted, they had left like shadows, as if they were already no longer there, as if their eyes could no longer see the staircase or the door or the street, as if they were already looking into the heart of horror. Their apartment had been left open. I longed for them to return and told myself again and again that if they left their apartment open, they would come back. The grandfather, dressed in black with a black hat, would return and stroll each day for an hour and a half around the neighborhood as he had before, talking to himself in Prague German, the German the Czech Jews spoke. On Saturdays the whole family would again head off to the synagogue, always on foot, over the Čech Bridge that leads straight to Pařížská Avenue where the Jewish neighborhood is. Yes, all of them together, wearing their very best, the whole family would take part in a Hebrew ceremony, all together. There on the threshold of the Jewish family’s apartment I found Andrei, standing with a small, tremulous smile, round as if he were pronouncing the letter U, as if it were a question or a prayer. As before, I imagined hi
m with the woman across the road and watched the projection of this film of mine, and gave Andrei an icy look.

  When I arrived under the Charles Bridge, it was still dark and a siren started to wail ayayayayayayayaya . . . ayayayayayayayay! That day the pitiful, and ill-boding sound didn’t give me goosebumps, but seemed instead to be the perfect, most suitable musical accompaniment to the way I felt. And as the siren kept warning us—ayayayayayayayaya . . . ayayayayayayayay—that in no time at all the bombs would start to drop, ayayayayayayayaya! I remembered how, not long ago, Andrei had told me that for a long while he had been in debt to Jaroslava and that, finally, he was able to give back the money he owed her, that soon he would pay back the lot and then . . . Andrei had sighed with relief, taken hold of my hands, and led me in a kind of tremulous Russian dance.

  The deafening roar of the planes shut off the siren, and my own thoughts. I fled for safety in the direction the river was flowing, warplanes crossing the sky and bellowing among the city’s towers. I saw monstrous black birds cawing and flying close to the bridge where I had hidden myself. Which bridge was that? Karlín, maybe? It wasn‘t providing much shelter, but at least I wasn’t alone, lots of mothers had gone there to seek refuge and were hugging their children. You couldn‘t hear the cries of the infants, just the thundering and the booming and the bombs and the explosions and the detonations . . . I realized that it was I who had caused all this devastation and these detonations, that it was my fault that the streets and squares and alleyways and houses of my city were up in flames, because I was a von Wittenberg like my father and a von Stamitz like my husband, because half my blood was German and because I had publicly admitted that this was so the day I had agreed to become a citizen of the Reich, but I knew now, now that the deafening roar of the planes and the explosions of the bombs had pulled the wool from my eyes, I knew now, all of a sudden, for the first time, that I was not German because I lived among the Czechs, who I respected and loathed at the same time, who I venerated and despised in equal measure, and who I both loved and hated. But I still lived among them, I was one of them, just as Bruno Singer considered himself to be Czech, even though the Czech language was like a jigsaw puzzle for him when he tried to read it, and a tongue twister when he tried to speak it, and he had a terrible time writing business letters in Czech. Yes, for the first time in my life I knew, with absolute certainty and conviction, I saw it as clearly as I saw the earthquake and the volcano of the bombs against the night sky, that I belonged to a specific place: here and now I felt so strong and so firm with my new awareness that I left the shelter, that laughable hiding place, in order to curse the sky that had permitted all that horror and the sky full of black vultures that perpetuated it . . . I ran as fast as my legs could carry me to my Charles Bridge and at the break of dawn I saw the black figures standing out against the pale sky. I saw them threatening that sky, warning it, showing their teeth and nails, raising a finger to a point beyond the evil sky, beyond the sky lit with fury . . . And I calmed down, I knew that I wasn’t alone, that perhaps my mother and Bruno Singer had ended up in a concentration camp, that perhaps I had lost Andrei forever, but that for all this I was not alone in my black desperation, my impotence and my helplessness. Those black statues would keep me company, they were with me and would give me shelter. These black statues thought as I did, as, with their fists and fingers, they would threaten that terrible sky . . . above which there was nothing, nothing at all.

  Or perhaps there was: hell. For me you will go to the city of suffering, for me you will undergo everlasting pain.

  And now it was I who was heading up to that sky, not along Jan Neruda Street, but up the New Stairs of the castle, I was going straight up to the sky, that execrable, evil, abominable sky. At the upper end of the steps I found black stone figures, a gate: they were locked in struggle, trying to murder each other, in a mortal embrace they were stabbing each other with gold daggers.

  I avoided them and went on up, higher, infinitely higher until a magnificent palace of white stone blocked my path, a gigantic, white arch, resting on dozens of classical columns. It thundered, don’t go on, here is your goal, here is the heart of hell! And before being sucked into its black entrails, I read on the sign hanging at the entrance that it was the Černín Palace, headquarters of the Reich Protector, that fearful, terrifying man, on the stroke of whose pen each and every Czech depended.

  . . . Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!

  Winter came. Snowflakes fluttered around the gas lamps.

  What nonsense! It is impossible to see beauty when you are not feeling well. Anyway, the lamps weren’t lit, not the gas lamps nor any others. There was only the howling of the sirens, to warn of the danger of an air raid.

  Unlike most people in Prague, I had all the coal I needed to stoke up the baroque stove in my living room. I could eat soft, white bread, just as I liked it before the war. I had students, as I did before the war, and charged my usual fees: thanks also to those gray and brown gentlemen. The boys with prominent knees and the girls in long white socks sat at my piano and played Wagner and Beethoven like well-oiled machines. Their parents had military postings with the Heereswaffe, which had occupied Prague six years ago.

  In Prague, there were no longer any stout Jewish matrons, laden with gold chains; there were no longer any Jewish lads with ironic cigarettes hanging from their full lips. There were no longer any Gypsy women clinking their glass bracelets and speaking their guttural language, no longer any skinny Gypsy men giving off the odor of strong tobacco.

  Eventually my knobby-kneed students abandoned their classical music lessons at the piano and took to whistling a military march . . . Die Fahne hoch, die braune Bataillonen . . .

  I went out to look for them, starting with my mother and Bruno. I stopped at the city of Kladno, at the home of my mother’s sister, to stay the night. During the night I heard a strange noise. Gunshots? I couldn’t sleep. There was no way I could get myself to doze off, in that house in Kladno. What was that strange sound I heard all through the night?

  It started to get light. I raised the blinds.

  The sky was an intense turquoise and the sun was starting to shine. And outside my window some pink, sweet, large cherries were ripening. I stretched myself out on the bed again to look at that miracle. The fruit was bright under that blue sky. I couldn’t help but marvel at this prodigy of nature. I spent a long while enjoying that calm, early summer morning. Suddenly in the distance I heard a drawn-out melody, sung by a women’s choir. There was something strange about this chanting. I shivered. It was a terrifying melody. The cherries still gleamed in that sunny morning. The melody grew closer and closer. I was filled with horror, I don’t know why. I stared at those big, bright cherries through the leaves and branches. The choir moved in my direction, women’s voices, that wept and lamented and howled. The door of my room was opened. My aunt said, as if unable to believe herself what she was saying, “The Germans have executed all the men in Lidice, the next village over, and then they burned and razed the houses to the ground.”

  I didn’t have the strength to go through with the journey I’d planned.

  When I returned to Prague, it was dark. What could I do for my mother? Me, the frightened orchid who couldn’t even make the memory of the dead seem beautiful.

  At a stop in front of the Prague National Museum, I was waiting for the number twenty-two tram when I saw him. Was it him? In the dark I couldn’t be sure . . . “Petr, is that you? I’m sorry, sir, I thought . . .”

  “Sylva!” His face lit up. “You’re not going to be all formal with me, are you?” Finally, I’ve found a friend, I thought happily. And suddenly I saw that the sparkle in Petr’s eyes had gone out, like the lights in an opera house. “No, Madam Sylva,” he said coldly, you haven’t made a mistake, it’s me all right.

  He looked at the ground as he said it. So he knew about me too? This man, to whom I still had so much to say, whom I still needed so much. How many things I had to
tell him! But he said nothing, he simply stared impatiently at the tracks to see if a tram was coming. “My regards to your mother, Madam Sylva,” he said in the end, to break what would otherwise have been a very long silence.

  “My mother?” I opened my eyes wide. “She, well, she . . .” Once again, Petr lowered his gaze. Like the statue of Saint Wenceslas’s horse right next to us, I thought, and like Saint Wenceslas himself, and everyone in this whole country who had all looked at the ground and their hung heads. “Your mother too?” whispered Petr.

  “Yes,” I said in a low voice. Petr said, almost inaudibly, “My wife too . . . They took her away too, and she never came back.” Then the number twenty-two tram arrived, and Petr got on it. Sylva, how could it be, how could you, how . . .” I read his eyes and his furtive lips. I didn’t dare to get on the same tram. I stood in front of the open door and when the tram pulled away, I saw his lips move. Shame on you, I read there. But he probably hadn’t said that, he had probably done nothing more than bid me an automatic, courteous goodnight.

  The shadowy innards of that palace of white stone ejected me like a white whale spitting out an irritating bone. I was dazzled by the brightness of the day. The Černín Palace, headquarters of the Reich Protector, it read on the sign posted on the white building.

  “We know nothing about them, and you would be wise to stop looking for your mother and her Jewish husband. It would be in your own interests. As I told you we don’t know anything about them, nothing whatsoever.”

  I also recalled the words of the young man at the exit, a member of the Gestapo with a face so white he had surely never exposed to wind or sunlight, “Frau von Stamitz,” he had said, “since you are a citizen of the Reich, I will do what I can to find out what has become of your mother.”

  I shut my eyes, so dazzled was I by the white palace that reflected the brilliant sun. Again and again I read the words on the sign.