Everything is ready, the wine and the cheese canapés garnished with tiny pieces of carefully sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. I have showered again and put on perfume, and I dried my hair slowly, bit by bit, so that it would come out soft, my white hair that he’s never seen. The last time, at Semyon’s exhibition, he must have seen my hair as it used to be, that light chestnut color, which with the aid of some chamomile, would turn golden . . . My hair that went gray after Jan left. Jan went away and he won’t be able to come back because his home no longer exists, his home has ceased to exist because it has changed so much, into a strange, alien place. He who abandons his home becomes an eternal globetrotter, a stranger with one wish in his heart, a longing that can never be satisfied. He turns into a foreigner whose home is everywhere . . . and yet everywhere means nowhere.
My hair is as white as milk, my face is a finely spun web, a skin of thin snakes covers my hands, Andrei. You have never seen me like this, my love, you won’t know me, I’m not me any longer, this woman is not the Sylva who lived in Paris, where they addressed her as Madame l’Ambassadrice. No, she is no longer the Surrealists’s inspiration, she is no longer Mnemosyne, the goddess of the muses and the deity of beauty, that Sylva whom the painter Semyon and his friends called Solnyshko in Russian, meaning little sun. The seventy-year-old Sylva, whose age pretty much coincides with that of the century, is somebody else now. Who is this solitary woman with a handful of white narcissi on her head, with lace thickly woven by a spider and then engraved deeply on her face?
Sylva is no longer your blue butterfly, her hair is covered now with a layer of frost and her skin is like a blank page on which someone has spilled dry tea leaves. But inside Sylva there is now a garden full of green fruit in the middle of which there shines a single, white, perfumed apple. That apple ripened when I found out you were alive, my love.
Andrei, at home the soft, fresh smell of white lilac awaits you . . . At home, Andrei, where is your home? Where is home for you? The forest in the Czech mountains? The streets of Moscow? Among the coats of arms that cover the low walls of my swallows’ nest on the outskirts of Prague? Maybe it’s in that squirrel burrow, in the middle of which there is a vase full of lilac, tender and white as old age, and next to which there are two candles, one a little shorter, the other just a tiny bit taller, two lit candles, golden, searing, two candles and two flames, our lives, and those two candles will burn and two people will get to know each other again by looking into each other’s eyes. The river of our affection and our compassion and our desire, and the river of our understanding will be different now. It will be a river of old age, a river of shared silence, a quiet, white-waved river.
I head for the station exit. I am leaving this place. I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to be a witness to the change wrought in you. And I don’t want to see my own transformation mirrored in your eyes.
No, that’s not right, my inner voice tells me. You’re deluding yourself. This isn’t right!
So what is it, then? I ask, in a weak voice.
This: that you’re ashamed. Not because your hair has gone gray. You are so shame faced because you are guilty.
A moment ago, through the window of the station café, I was secretly watching the people who were greeting the passengers on your train: I saw everything. I even saw the pillar where we’d agreed to meet. But I didn’t see you, Andrei. I didn’t want to see you, that’s why I didn’t go over to the train, nor did I go up to the pillar, our meeting place . . . in order not to see my man of the forest, weakened, wrinkled, wan.
All because of me.
To the exit! Get out of here! As far away as possible!
Rain and yet more rain is flooding the street, white rain, alluvium swallowing me up. I have to walk, always forward, for a long time, then drop into the first café to have a glass of wine, yes, a good glass of wine, white as the rain, to celebrate the definitive entry that I have just made into the empire of solitude. And when I’ve done that I will walk some more, never turning around, going ahead without staggering, trotting at an even pace, for a long time, and then even more, until weariness settles in. Why am I going, if I came here with such hope, expectation, longing? I don’t know. I only know that I have to do this. I have to go. To flee, fast!
And what about him, what will he do when I go? Has he gone to the pillar, our meeting place?
But surely even now, at seventy, life can begin again! There’s still time! Life has trembled in me like a blackbird in spring, it’s shaken itself like a sparrow in a puddle of water, and it has opened its beak. I go back to the station, I head for the platform. I walk over to the café where we were supposed to meet, where we must meet, by the pillar. I lean on the café’s closed door. I look at the pillar: Is it the same one in front of which Andrei said goodbye to me thirty years ago? I think of the brook on Andrei’s mountains; I am the stone, he, the water. The stone remains, the water, in its eternal movement, goes back to where it came from. Just a furtive glance, just to see Andrei, and I’ll go. Just one look, like Lot’s wife. One single look, and I’ll be turned into a pillar of salt!
I shouldn’t do it. I can’t. I can’t think it over, I only know that I have to leave. To flee, fast!
It’s raining, it’s pouring down, the rain is black now, people are restless, pushing and shoving each other with elbows and umbrellas as if they were medieval weapons. What would have happened if I’d stayed at the station? I see myself, looking at our pillar . . . I see myself, leaning against the wall, looking at the pillar with its peeling paint, I watch it as if my life depended on it. A pillar, which stretches vainly up into the sky, because nobody’s leaning against it. It supports the entire vaulted roof of the station, the vault that shelters dozens of platforms from the elements. A simple, bare, old pillar. A pillar to which somebody has walked up, and waited a long time, before leaving. A solitary pillar.
Now that I am moving away from you once and for all, Andrei, in my mind’s eye I see, between the drops of black rain and the lilac-colored ones which the sky never ceases to pour, another look. I see eyes staring at the pillar. From a corner full of cobwebs, an old man is watching the column. His lips are parched and his eyes, sunken. But on his eyelashes, waiting and resignation, uncertainty and hope. And the glow of the last ember of life left burning. The old man’s look, edged by white lashes, is fixed on the old pillar as if it were a goddess to whom he had come to make an offering. A look like the white wings of a seagull. A look like the flame of the candle in the Café Louvre. A look like the flame reflected in the glass from which we both once drank. As I make my way through the heavy, lilac curtain of the rain, I see myself in the station . . . I am not taking my eyes off that pillar either; then they settle on the old man. Our eyes meet. We don’t move, we don’t breathe. And, finally, on our lips appears a barely perceptible smile . . .
That might have been the case, if I hadn’t left the station. But I had no alternative.
The canapés, prepared for him, garnished for him, are getting dry. In vain did I polish and buff everything, in vain did I put on my pearl earrings. In vain did he pack his luggage, and search for gifts and buy the ticket. In vain did he take such a long journey. Now he must be sitting there on the platform, two heavy suitcases in his hands, full of gifts that he has been choosing for a long time. I see him in my mind’s eye: an old man on the station, rubbing at his eyes, thinking that this is impossible. Where are you, Blue Butterfly? No. Sylva isn’t there. Sylva hasn’t come. He is alone.
Alone, forever.
As am I. Two solitudes. Two rivers that flow separately. Two candles that have gone out.
Heavy black drops are falling, drops of tar. I am dripping wet. Where’s my umbrella? Could I have left it at the station? No. It’s in my hand, still rolled up. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that I am soaked through if he is stuck on the platform, alone, disappointed, desperate.
Far away!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MONIKA ZGUSTOV
A was born in Prague and lives in Barcelona, Spain. She has published seven books, including novels, short stories, a play, and a biography. Her novel Silent Woman was a runner-up for the National Award for the Novel, given by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and will be published by Feminist Press in 2014. Zgustova has also received the Giutat de Barcelona and the Mercè Rodoreda awards in Spain, and the Gratias Agit Prize given by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague. She has translated more than fifty books of Russian and Czech fiction and poetry, including the works of Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, into both Spanish and Catalan.
ABOUT THE FEMINIST PRESS
The Feminist Press promotes voices on the margins of dominant culture and publishes feminist works from around the world, inspiring personal transformation and social justice. We believe that books have the power to shift culture, and create a society free of violence, sexism, homophobia, racism, cis-supremacy, classism, sizeism, ableism and other forms of dehumanization. Our books and programs engage, educate, and entertain.
See our complete list of books at
feministpress.org
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS
Dacia Maraini
The Silent Duchess
A Novel
Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. Set in Sicily in the early eighteenth-century, the novel tells the story of Marianna, the daughter of an aristocratic family and the victim of a mysterious childhood trauma that has left her deaf and mute, trapped in a world of silence. In luminous language that conveys both the keen visual sight and the deep human insight possessed by her remarkable main character, Dacia Maraini captures the splendor and the corruption of Marianna’s world and the strength of her unbreakable spirit.
“Maraini brilliantly conveys the mixture of luxury and squalor in which the Sicilian aristocracy lived. . . . The Silent Duchess manages totally to overpower the reader with its narrative urgency. . . . Since she won the Prix Formentor in 1963, Dacia Maraini has produced nothing finer than this.”
—Evening Standard, London
“The Silent Duchess has a subtlety of perception, a delicacy in probing emotions and above all, an elusive feel for history itself. . . . The narrative has the richness of a saga. . . . This history of a woman’s quest for dignity is an astonishing achievement.”
—The Independent, London
eISBN: 9781558617834 | ISBN: 9781558612228
Riverbend
Baghdad Burning
Girl Blog from Iraq
In her riveting web blog, a remarkable young Iraqi woman gives a human face to war and occupation. In August 2003, the world gained access to a remarkable new voice: a blog written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad, whose identity remained concealed for her own protection. Calling herself Riverbend, she offered searing eyewitness accounts of the everyday realities on the ground, punctuated by astute analysis on the politics behind these events.
“Anyone who cares about the war in Iraq must read this book.”
—Susan Sarandon
“Feisty and learned: first-rate reading for any American who suspects that Fox News may not be telling the whole story.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Riverbend’s commentary [is] passionate, frustrated, sarcastic and sometimes hopeful. . . . It offers quick takes on events as they occur, from a perspective too often overlooked, ignored or suppressed.”
—Publishers Weekly
eISBN: 9781558616165 | ISBN: 9781558614895
Muriel Rukeyser
Savage Coast
A young reporter in 1936, Muriel Rukeyser traveled to Barcelona to witness the first days of the Spanish Civil War. She turned this experience into an autobiographical novel so forward thinking for its time that it was never published. Recently discovered in her archive, this lyrical work charts her political and sexual awakening as she witnesses the popular front resistance to the fascist coup and falls in love with a German political exile who joins the first international brigade.
“At first Savage Coast is a train-of-fools comedy; later, it’s a cross-cultural love story Hemingway would have envied for its suddenness. The ambitious and passionate young Rukeyser wanted to record everything she witnessed in Spain.”
—New York Times Book Review
“What a treasure! Muriel Rukeyser takes us back to those crucial days when Spain became the first international battleground against fascism and hope for democracy, to tell a powerful story of personal, sexual, and political awakening. Savage Coast is bound to be an instant classic.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
eISBN: 9781558618213 | ISBN: 9781558618206
Monika Zgustova
Goya’s Glass
The Duchess of Alba, known as Goya’s muse, recalls the passions of youth on her deathbed in the royal court of eighteenth-century Madrid. A young woman defies the protocols of her arranged marriage and pursues love—and the life of a published writer—until her readers condemn her as a danger to society in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nina Berberova escapes persecution during the Russian Revolution and flees to Paris, where the intelligentsia naively covet the promise of a Soviet Union. These three women attempt to find passion and intimacy in worlds that rarely accommodate female desire. Goya’s Glass is an unforgettable novel of guilty pleasures coursing through history.
“Monika Zgustova’s concerns are close to my own: the fate of the individual in the hands of totalitarianism. She is an outstanding writer, whose fiction invokes the politics and culture of people throughout history.”
—Vaclav Havel
“Three centuries, three solitudes, three unbridled passions, three indomitable women—Monika Zgustova is a born storyteller. Goya’s Glass is a magnificent achievement.”
—Josef Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls
eISBN: 9781558617988 | ISBN: 9781558617971
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