The Silent Woman

by Monika Zgustova

  “You’ve ventilated the room. You should never do that. It’d kill the patient; what he needs is warmth, energy.”

  Leila went on staring at the none-too-clean floor; she looked as if she were grieving. Nonetheless, flames of hatred leaped up behind her half-closed eyelids.

  The young doctor, whom life had not yet discouraged from seeing the positive sides of others, saw nothing amiss in the nurse’s posture other than a feeling of guilt indicated by her lowered eyelids.

  Kindly, he said, “Put more wood in the stove, Miss Leila, and go to bed. The patient is resting and you need to catch a few hours of sleep as well.”

  But now the doctor couldn’t ignore the open hostility in Leila’s eyes. The nurse answered in a low, metallic voice, “I can look after myself, Doctor, don’t worry about me.”

  The doctor, a Russian, closed the door thinking he’d never manage to understand that nurse. She’s a Georgian, who knows what’s going on in her head, he said to himself. Georgia, he repeated to himself, is a culture that’s so very different from ours.

  The nurse sat at the head of the bed and frenetically, deliriously, caressed the patient’s cheeks and forehead, staring avidly at his barely open lips. “Rest, my love, my only love. I don’t want to make you suffer, I’m only making sure that you never leave me, that you don’t desert me. All I want is for you to be mine. Mine, no matter what it takes, my love.”

  The ends justify the means, Leila thought as she continued to mull over the situation. Who’d said that? Lenin, maybe? Or perhaps it was Marx? Somebody wrote it down and now I consider it mine: the ends justify the means. And Leila remembered that a long time ago, when Andrei was just a political prisoner like any other, without the privilege of rest stays in the camp hospital, Leila had found the means to make it possible for her to protect and adopt this man. He had struck her as being more sensitive and more delicate than almost any other person she’d met.

  She had taken notice of a stocky guard, who everyone in the camp called The Whip. He was from Georgia, like her. They spoke the same language, shared similar customs, and they quickly struck up a friendship and got along well, to the extent that they were practically able to communicate without the use of words.

  The Whip came from the Georgian mountains and, although he was the son of a kulak, he admired the Russian Revolution and blindly followed the Soviet creed. When he was young, he’d been informed that the people he’d be guarding in the work camp were political prisoners, in other words, enemies of Soviet power. He, The Whip, who lived and breathed the Communist dream, truly loathed the prisoners he had to watch over; he felt so much rancour toward them, it was as if they were his personal enemies. In the mine, The Whip rained blows on the belly of anyone he imagined wasn’t working hard enough, and on their return from work, he would shoot at those exhausted men who were so worn out they staggered or tottered.

  This was the man into whose care Leila had entrusted her beloved.

  The Whip spat derisively.

  “Listen brother, this Polonski, this aristo, deserves The Whip’s iron hand. But don’t kill him,” laughed the nurse, with a glint in her eye.

  The Whip got the message.

  After two or three days of The Whip’s iron hand, after a few kicks in the belly from The Whip’s military boots, Andrei was unable to get up. They took him to the camp hospital.

  At last!

  At last, Leila could be with him twenty-four hours a day.

  Now she was caressing his head, his sweaty forehead, her hand slid seductively over his neck and chest.

  “Rest, my darling, be at peace. Your Leila is with you, my love,” she whispered into his ear, her eyes moist.

  From time to time, her patient would open his eyes, look at Leila as if he were a faithful dog, then close them again.

  “Your Leila is with you, my love. Your faithful Leila loves you.”

  The next day, when the patient fell asleep, Leila first made sure that everyone else was sleeping. Only then did she open the window wide to offer up the sick body of her beloved to the icy Siberian cold. As for her, she loved those icy gusts: only they could keep her beloved just as she wanted him: here, bedridden, dependent on her.

  Suddenly the door swung open and the young doctor appeared at the threshold. Today, he wasn’t smiling.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  The nurse got over her shock in an instant.

  “Perhaps you had better explain to me, doctor, what you think you’re doing bursting into the room of a seriously ill patient!”

  “I forbade you to open the window like that. That could kill him!”

  “The only thing that could kill him is his own crazy behavior. As a nurse, I know perfectly well when the room has to be aired.”

  Leila realized, however, that she wouldn’t get anywhere by quarrelling with the doctor, so she quickly covered the sick man with a blanket and closed the window.

  “There, you see, doctor, I’m following your instructions to the letter.”

  The doctor left. His forehead creased in a worried frown.

  After a few days, when the doctor came to examine the sick man, he found that Leila’s patient had grown so weak he couldn’t even sit up in bed.

  “What is this . . . this isn’t normal!” the doctor grumbled as he listened to the patient’s chest.

  There was little light that day; the patient barely recognized him.

  “Mr. Polonski, what medication is nurse Leila giving you?”

  The patient kept his mouth shut. The doctor saw that he wouldn’t get anything out of him. He asked,“Which Russian painters have influenced you the most?”

  Andrei perked up, “Malevich, Tatlin, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, but above all, the great Chagall.”

  The doctor was unfamiliar with the work of Tatlin and Malevich; on the other hand, he was enthusiastic about the paintings Chagall had done of his native Vitebsk and about the way he’d painted the Russian Revolution.

  “Tell me, Andrei, what medication is Nurse Leila giving you?”

  The patient gestured toward some small bottles on the chair next to the bed.

  The doctor examined them one by one, from the outside and then sniffing the contents.

  “All this is as it should be. Is she giving you anything else?”

  “Doctor, if you knew everything that Miss Leila is doing for me!” sobbed the sick man, “She is so selfless, so unselfish! What would I do without her?”

  The next day, the doctor came back; the patient wasn’t showing any signs of improvement.

  “Is this the only medication she’s giving you? Try to remember, please, Andrei.”

  “Well, if you want to know everything, then . . . But it’s not at all important.”

  “What isn’t at all important?”

  “After washing her hands in the bowl, nurse Leila always takes something from the medicine cupboard, the one where the bandages are kept. She puts a few drops of it into my water glass.”

  The doctor jumped up and went to the medicine cupboard. He took out several small bottles, and examined their contents.

  “That’s it!” he shouted, “What the hell are these doing in the medicine cupboard?”

  “Doctor, promise me that . . .” the patient begged, but the doctor had gone.

  He gave Leila a stern warning that to disobey a doctor and independently administer medication to a patient was a grave breach of conduct. Without mentioning Nurse Leila by name, the doctor recommended to the authorities in charge of the labor camp that they free Andrei Polonski, so that he could get better by himself.

  Leila, who had been eavesdropping from behind the door and overheard the conversation about art, called her ally, the camp guard. The Whip reported the young doctor to the military authorities. His line of reasoning was clear enough: the doctor was spreading anti-Soviet propaganda by talking to the patient Polonski about bourgeois art done by émigrés and traitors to the Motherland.

  The camp authorities g
ave the doctor a choice: either he could accept a transfer, by way of punishment, to another camp, located on a small island in the Pacific Ocean, in the Far East, with conditions even harsher than in this one, or he would get a stamp in his work book declaring that he was unfit to serve as a doctor, and as a result, he would never be able to find work anywhere, ever again.

  The former political prisoner Polonski left the camp before he was properly cured. They sent him off to the Siberian town of Tomsk for a couple of years, and then to a small town seventy miles away from Moscow, where he worked as a boiler stoker.

  Today is the day! Today!

  I got up earlier than usual in order to polish the antique silver cutlery and to buff the cut-glass wine glasses until they shone, to clean everything that had come from the chateau. I bought a bottle of Tokaj wine and another of Rhine wine, and put them in the fridge. I washed the Chinese tea set thoroughly, even though it was perfectly clean. And as I polished and rubbed and buffed these beautiful antique objects, in the shining surface of a knife I caught the reflection of a photograph from my childhood, or rather my adolescence, framed and hung on the wall. In the photo, I was dancing with an extremely good-looking young man, Monsieur Beauvisage. Petr. He has forgiven me my recent skittishness, that loyal and lifelong friend.

  This morning, when I left the building where I live, the wall of prefabricated buildings across the street, which was usually as threatening as a row of heavily armed gray warriors, was hidden under a gray veil of mist. It was drizzling gently, so I sat down on my bench. The red one. A sparrow immediately came over to me.

  A sparrow!

  On that other day, a bird had also come over to me, yes, I think it was a sparrow too. That day, not so long ago, maybe two years, when in my letterbox I found a note from the post office, telling me that I had to pick up a telegram that had just been sent to me.

  My first thought was Jan! With trembling legs I hurried to the post office.

  It was closed.

  All night, purple visions of car accidents alternated with white scenes of hospital rooms.

  In the morning, the post office delivered the telegram. I ripped it open in a flash.

  It had nothing to do with Jan, but nothing else was important to me.

  In the telegram there was just a single sentence, written in French:

  JE SUIS VEUF, JE SUIS SEUL, ET SUR MOI LE SOIR TOMBE.

  No signature. I recognized the verse by Victor Hugo. “I’m a widower, I’m alone, and the evening is falling upon me,” I translated the beautiful Alexandrine line into my own language.

  Who had sent me this mysterious telegram? I couldn’t fathom it.

  Back at the post office, the clerk flicked through a large book for a moment. When she’d finished, she announced, in her tired, official voice:

  “This telegram was sent from Moscow, madam.”

  Sometime later, I received a letter. It must have been some six months ago. Somebody was looking for me. A man. I sent him a dispassionate reply; I didn’t want him to know my innermost thoughts. And he answered me back.

  Dear Sylva,

  I am so pleased that you answered my letter! Your answer has given me reason to believe you also remember me and the happiness that we shared such a long time ago. “Dear,” this standard term of endearment strikes me as so wonderful when coming from you, or rather from your pen. When I read the word, I felt a kind of physical warmth.

  You mentioned memories. For my part, I assure you that the times I spent with you were the most beautiful I have ever experienced in my life. Back then, I thought I would always feel as good as I did during those moments.

  Do you remember the present you offered me? You don’t? I’ll tell you about it: One evening, in a café, the Café Louvre in Prague’s city center, I was admiring your black lace glove, and you too as you toyed with it. For many years I have kept that glove which was my only possession; over many decades, whenever I felt like it, I took out your long, black lace glove with its bloodstained fingers, and laid it out before me. Whenever I see that bloodstained black lace, I hear you, Sylva, I see you and feel your presence.

  I would like to know about your life in more detail, and, of course, I hope to see you again. I would meet you anywhere, no matter how far I had to travel.

  Please do not get lost again. I beseech you with all my heart.

  Yours,

  The Old Tree

  P.S. The old tree no longer has any leaves or branches, and yet the spring winds have shaken its roots and it has flowered. Both the red flowers and the yellow ones will soon disappear without a trace.

  When I read these words, a white flower budded in the royal garden of my old age.

  Half a year ago I followed his second letter with my reply, my doubts, and then, his third letter came. In the fourth, you wrote to me, my love (by then you had started to use the familiar form of address), that from a distance you had followed the lives of your fellow inmates in the forced labor camps. That you didn’t go out much, you didn’t see anybody, you lived in a little den, and at night you stoked boilers. You wrote that you weren’t looking for anyone, and no one was looking for you, that you didn’t have any friends. But you did keep up with people you felt close to, and you knew how Semyon’s artwork was progressing.

  You wrote in one of your letters about an art exhibition of Semyon’s in Moscow. You wrote about the dozens of people, or rather, the human wrecks who attended the opening:

  Men and women with pallid faces, all of them were my twin brothers and sisters. Just then Semyon came in, leading a young woman into the gallery. At least, she seemed young to me. She wore an ivory dress that came down to her knees, and her golden curls fell freely over her shoulders. That woman wore pearl earrings. I knew those pearls well. It was as if a ray of afternoon sunlight had broken into that dark basement where we, the gray shadows, were living, as if a ray of sunlight had broken through to show us that life exists. A young man in his twenties accompanied the woman. Her son. I approached her, in order to look at the pearl earrings she wore. Those were the ones: my last gift to you, Sylva. Your son has your hair, your golden skin, your lips. But he has my build; I used to be like that, before, when I lived in the forest. And your son has my eyes. You, Sylva, didn’t recognize me. I’m not surprised. You weren’t expecting to see me, you thought I was dead. What’s more, you couldn’t have recognized me. I was one of those human wrecks.

  Which of those devastated men could have been Andrei? The old man that looked like Tiresias, the blind seer of Greek mythology? Could that have been Andrei? No, for God’s sake! Andrei, the forest hero who hunted firebirds!

  But how will I recognize him today? After so many years, so many decades of suffering . . . Had that been him?

  At seventy, your life is over.

  Or does a new one begin? I am trembling in this steam-filled station. It’s cold, it’s been raining nonstop and this cold wind has been blowing for three days. But if I’m cold, it is, above all, just because I’m here waiting.

  At home, everything has been left ready: the antiques are shining, even the helmets and lances, the medieval suits of armor and the cut-glass goblets, everything that I have known since my childhood in that elegant, spacious chateau in northern Bohemia, all those objects now piled up uselessly in my little hidey-hole on the outskirts. I’ve polished everything, I’ve dusted the plants and I’ve brightened up the room with a few white lilac stems that give off the perfume of spring, which is late this year. I have adorned the table with a book, just one, the one that says . . . in all the terrible periods of human history, in a corner somewhere there is a man who has dedicated himself to his calligraphy and to the stringing together of unusual and exquisite words. Yes, I have chosen that book, because that person is myself. It is I who is sitting in a silent corner, and history gallops past me, as I busy myself with the rosary beads of words and the pearls of musical notes.

  Yes, this is my daily route, this is my life, this is my daily trip to the
library. Recently I’ve been going on foot from home to the tram stop and from the tram stop back home, indeed I’ve been dragging out the walk as much as I can because when I do so, I see all kinds of admirable and marvelous things, I see the light and colors and shadows on people’s features, each face is a symphonic poem or a quartet or a sonata or a trio. In those faces I read, or rather listen, through them, to the fierce passions of Mahler and Beethovens’ symphonies, from other faces come the tensions and anguish of Shostakovich’s chamber music or the profound grief of Dvořák’s Stabat Mater. On occasion I’m lucky enough to fall into the tender, autumnal melancholy of Schubert’s lieder, and only rarely do I have the good fortune to overhear Mozart’s exultant glee. And so I walk and listen to the music that people release and let flow, I who had once owned a Pleyel piano, a box in the National Theater and the German Theater, and the very best recordings on disc. Now I have nothing, but music plays on inside me in a way that is clearer and cleaner than before. I only have to go out into the street and I can already hear an entire concert, spontaneous and unexpected and unusual, I do not need to look for music in the concert halls, I don’t need to go to Prague’s old city center, with its self-evident charm: I prefer to discover beauty and music and poetry there where we normally do not expect it. In the morning I walk under the gray walls of prefab panel houses and the laundry drying on lines that tells me what its owners are like. The clotheslines sway to the rhythm of Lully’s Versaillesque marches, and the tempo of the fairy steps in Purcell’s operas. When I pass those same walls again in the evening, the windows lit up in different colors allow me once more to imagine the people who live and love and suffer behind those blue and ochre and green and yellow panes. As I do, I am accompanied, as he plays his magnificent compositions on the violin, by Johann Sebastian Bach himself.

  I no longer need to look at the Vltava River from Charles Bridge in order to search its waters for Smetana’s symphonic poem. I have only to look at a tree trunk, here on the outskirts, or a blade of dry grass. I need only catch sight of a muddy puddle and a rusty length of pipe to hear the symphonic poem Vltava in them, to hear the piano and the violin of the river of my life, and I can even hear the infrequently pressed pedal of the piano, the violin’s broken string, the cello’s wrong note, all those false sounds that have formed and still form part of the flow of my river. They cannot ever cease to belong to the symphony of my life.