Vyhľadávanie
PRIVACY
III
I woke up during twilight and in the empty room remained only an old man, as unknown to me then as the evening itself. His head, indistinct in the darkness, was facing me as he supported it on the table covered by newspapers. It seemed to me that his observant look was stolen by my dream.
He must have guessed that I was up, since he moved. He wiped his mouth with his little finger. And while getting up awfully slowly from his chair he seemed to be hunching his back more and more so that, once erect, he was only bending over his shadow right above the tablecloth, while his thick fingers eagerly gripped the edge of the table.
I got up. The old man was heading towards the night table. He didn’t bend his legs in his knees, he only carefully slid them forward and I turned on the light. But the light could have stayed off; I didn’t need it and neither did the old man, I guess, as he was blind. Of course, he sensed the presence of a stranger, but he had no strength to straighten his back and only turned his head up, as if wanting to check me out. His lower lip moved up, almost sticking out. It was shaking oddly. That irregular movement reminded me of a tactile move. I felt that his lip substituted for his eyes and I turned my gaze away from the sight of the toothless mouth.
His very crooked index finger gradually reached his protruding ear. He reached for the bushy hair that sprouted from inside. “Is it you, Vladko?” he asked silently. He smiled. I answered no and also smiled at him. “I’m new here,” I said after a while and the old man’s head began to shake. He opened his mouth, perhaps to speak, but the shaking attacked it as well, his gums collided and in his effort to help himself, he made short, but quite abrupt movements with his hands, as if dividing, or tearing something. His face contracted and again he stuck out his lower lip like a tentacle. He took a step towards me. Strangely, his legs now bent in their knees. He was offering me his hand. As I felt his leather-like hand, I took a look at his thin, frail hair. He added his left hand to my wrist and his runaway fingers were entering under my coat sleeve. The old man stood silently in a pose that looked as if he were expressing his condolences.
A man, about thirty-years old, entered the room. His slicked back black hair was reminiscent of a musician who played in the Štefánka Café. His round face was beaming. He approached the old man from the back and placed both hands on his eyes. “Guess who I am?” he said indulgently, the way one addresses children when one wants to enjoy them. The old man wheezed, bent over as if falling down, showed his gums and joyfully repeated: “Vladko, Vladko.” At that moment a nurse entered the room, too, and asked me to come out into the hallway. The nurse stopped, hesitating as if she couldn’t decide whether to talk to me while walking, or not. I asked her what the matter was. She looked at me with her shy, but focused eyes and then she lowered them, as if I reproached her for something. She kept rubbing her cheek while informing me that my wife got killed in a car accident near Modra. She was looking at a brass door handle. There was a drop of dry white varnish on the handle and I remembered the nurse saying: “the person is already waiting downstairs.”
I followed the nurse, though I didn’t know if she asked me to. We stopped in front of a small room where I took my clothes in the afternoon. An older woman dressed in mourning was passing by the door. She stopped the nurse. I understood from her words that she came to pick up her husband’s clothes. The nurse was already unlocking the door when the woman in mourning asked her why her cheek was so red. It seemed to me that she had asked her and smiled at her only to make sure that the nurse wouldn’t let her wait and deal with me first. At the same time I realized that the nurse’s cheek was red because the nurse had rubbed it while telling me about my wife’s death.
But the nurse turned to me, passed me my shirt, a knitted vest and a tie. The woman in mourning grabbed her sleeve and my fingers have met her wrist. The woman in mourning took a look at me with her small eyes that almost disappeared in her face. Her small, bent nose was covered with boils that reached her forehead, but didn’t cross the first wrinkle. The nurse nervously ripped my suit from its hanger: “I’ll stay here,” she said, “the car is waiting for you.”
I decided not to return to the room, but would change in the toilet, as the room was probably already filled with patients. I put it all on with furious speed and felt as if thousands of people were laughing behind my back like an audience. I worked up a sweat during this simple act of dressing. I could even say that it had worn me down. I can’t say why I took off the already knotted tie. I put it in my inner pocket and then smelled smoke. I guess somebody must have been secretly smoking in the toilets.
I couldn’t get rid of the inane feeling that rows of laughing viewers, who have set up my life in advance as a sort of destiny, were standing behind me and now were entertaining themselves by watching me come to terms with it. There was laughter but I had had that feeling once already and it seemed funny to me then, as it did now. I experienced it during my Father’s funeral, in the middle of the war. I was walking through the suburb, by the track, and stumbled. The people walking by smiled and told me to “watch out.” I also got the strange feeling then as if those people had planned the death of my Father and my future life and as if their remark about “watching out” was an encouragement to me to finally become angry.
The nurse expressed her condolences to me and then went on with the woman in mourning. She said everything was arranged already.
The taxi was waiting for me near the entrance to the Metropol movie theatre. The driver got out of his car as I approached it. “Is it you?” He asked, or only noted, as if he knew me. And there I realized that I didn’t even know where Marta was, I forgot to ask about that, or couldn’t remember what the nurse had told me. I had to, of course, phone “our hospital ward,” but I found out that I didn’t know the nurse’s name. So I decided to return upstairs.
“I’m sorry, I have quite forgotten to tell you that,” the nurse apologized. We’ve met in the hallway and I didn’t have to look for her all over the place. “She’s in Trnava… in the hospital. You should ask about the car accident at the reception. That will be sufficient.”
I kept closing my eyes in the car. Not because I felt like sleeping, only in order not to see anything, and not to perceive the headlights passing by.
The receptionist in the hospital seemed to have been already waiting for me and wanted to have “the chore off his back as soon as possible.” Without saying anything, he quite quickly took me to the morgue and as soon as I entered it, I noticed Marta. She was lying on a table covered up to her closed mouth with a sheet of plastic. A shock of hair reached down to her left eyebrow.
On a chair next to her head sat a policeman and behind him stood a small and bald doctor and next to her feet was that university student and young author whom I have met at home before this business trip. The young man had a bandage around his head and his eyes were filled with tears. “It was the heart,” said the policeman; he got up, lifted the plastic cover, but quickly lowered it and covered the face of the deceased, too. I didn’t see any blood. The doctor nodded. The policeman, a sergeant, I guess, approached me and expressed his condolences first. Then he continued: “It seems sort of…strange, but I have to do this. Do you know this person?” He turned to the youth and I assented. The sergeant then took out his notebook, asked for an ID and before he looked at it, said: “Nothing happened to the car.” I told him that didn’t interest me.
“We’ll have to perform an autopsy,” said the doctor after the sergeant’s departure. “I think she had a stroke when the car left the road. The young man over here broke his head on the windshield, then he got out of the car and ran to the phone to call Modra.” The doctor blew his nose, pressing his index finger discretely against the left nostril and blew it again. “When we arrived, she was gone.” He looked at me. Our eyes met; his were brown, the colour of thin black coffee and seemed tired. We agreed that I could pick Marta up tomorrow evening after the autopsy and then he asked me if I informed the relatives. “She doesn’t have any,” I said. “Her parents died a long time ago.” I knew that Marta had a cousin somewhere in the Spiš region, but during the eleven years that I have lived with her she had never visited us and they never wrote to each other. “Was she quite alone when you married her?” The doctor asked again. “Yes,” I said, “she was alone.” The doctor got up, took his glasses from his work coat and wiped them hurriedly on his sleeve. “I’ll leave you here…” he whispered. “I have to take a look upstairs,” he sighed. “Please, let the receptionist know you’re leaving.” Then he expressed his condolences. For a while he held my hand in his. It was a soft and hot hand, as if he had a fever. He kept nodding his head and reminded me of the old man in our ward.
But just when I remained alone with the young man for a moment, the doctor returned and approached the young author. “The letter! Did you give him the letter?” He must have disturbed the university student, because the latter gazed at him with his puffed up, wide open, and uncomprehending eyes. “The letter that you kept telling me about, the one I was supposed to remind…” he repeated, but didn’t finish.
“The letter…” the young man whispered and looked at me absent-minded. The door banged. The young man’s mouth moved, spittle appeared on his lip, but he said nothing.
The doctor waited for a while and I don’t know when he left as I was remembering all the beautiful times that I have lived through with Marta, though she has never suspected that. She had no idea that I admired her sincere and passionate search for happiness in this world even though she didn’t like me and couldn’t stand my eyes.
The young man’s eyes were fixed on Marta as he stood uncomfortably with his hands hanging in the air. Suddenly, as if a spasm ran through his body, he rose on his feet and a desperate wail surged out of his throat; he ripped the plastic from the head of the deceased, kissed her hair with his eyes closed, infinitely gently and devotedly. His face, wild with pain, looked childlike and pure. But in the middle of this expression of love he suddenly stopped. He turned to me with horror, backed up to the wall and I thought that he would fall on it. He was lifting his hands, as if surrendering, and again he looked grown up, pressing against the wall. I heard the noise of his elbows against the wall and there was terror in his eyes. I looked at Marta’s mouth and on him. Why did he stop? Because of my presence? He moved Marta’s head a bit to the left with his caresses. There were dark shades around her closed eyes. It seemed now as if he suddenly betrayed her.
We left the hospital together late in the evening. It was drizzling. In the express train we kept quiet and in Bratislava I took the young man to the station restaurant and ordered two bowls of tripe soup, two small glasses of beer and a shot of rum for each of us.
After the fifth rum, the young man pressed my hand. “I want to tell you everything, everything,” he whispered, but I didn’t want him to.
“I beg you…I have to tell you all. I have to!” He said violently and loudly. He smiled innocently in the middle of suppressed weeping. He said that he didn’t know if Marta really hated me so much, or loved me “somehow in a special way.” Apparently he never understood her. She used to sit together with him often lost in thought, without saying anything. Occasionally he found her distressed and when he came she would calm down and it happened that she would fall asleep with her head on his chest. At those moments he would observe her and it seemed to him that she would change from her calm sleep into some sort of worry or even fear. She would press his hand or her mouth would move and once he had a notion of how a crown of white flowers around her head would suit her. That image suggesting her death scared him, he would wake her up and she would only smile then and whisper to him to leave her, for she wasn’t sleeping, or even thinking, she was being happy. When they drove in the car for the first time, she had asked him if he knew why it was good to have a car. She didn’t wait for an answer before telling him that when in the car a person feels like constantly escaping. When he asked her why she would want to escape, she told him that he wouldn’t understand, and he noted that she smiled in a good-natured way and immediately changed the topic. This didn’t satisfy him and he kept on enquiring, but she was absent-minded that evening and asked him if he didn’t feel good with her and why would he want to spoil everything. When they were saying goodbye to each other that evening, after their first drive together, she jokingly remarked that if she died first, she would always protect him. He stopped her mouth with his hand, he remembered that exactly, and then she asked, laughing, if he would even remember her when she was no longer there. He had an impression that she had a heart problem, since when they were having an argument about illnesses one day, she let it slip out, remarking that she had spent almost a year and a half in a hospital before getting married to me. I didn’t know anything about it, but would have married her despite that.
The he continued somewhat like this. He reflected if he should break up with Marta. When he reflected about it alone, it seemed to him immoral to steal someone’s wife; he felt bad about it, but as soon as he met her, he had no courage to tell her if only because Marta repeated to him her fear that they would part just like that, for no reason, the way they have met. He admitted that he had considered leaving her for “not being able to get to know her,” because he had no idea what she was thinking about and considered him an inexperienced boy, though, on the other hand, that was the most beautiful thing about their relationship, since he saw in her his mother. He wondered if Marta didn’t behave to him in this “unfathomable” manner in order to “keep” him. But he finally denied that. Maybe she was as sincere with him as she could and what he had asked of her, that “confession from the depth of the soul” she just couldn’t provide. Perhaps she didn’t play any games with him, but he saw it as “eternal coming together and escaping.”
In the evening he decided not to “break up” with her. In the car Marta was reproaching him for not “keeping his promise.” He was supposed to bring her some story of his, one that he kept promising to bring for a long time. She was smiling while driving, teasing him. He warned her a bit nervously, but also jokingly, to pay more attention to her driving.
They stopped in Modra. They went to a restaurant and ordered coffee. The place was empty, there were only three men sitting there, looking like office workers returning from a business trip. They were drinking a bottle of wine. They were not drunk. He had an impression that they were satisfied with something, since they didn’t seem to be either celebrating, or just having a bottle of wine. Marta excused herself and he reflected if he wasn’t an egotist and forcing Marta to “admire” him. He remarked that something like that he would “immediately kill” in himself. He said he didn’t know how he focused on the conversation of the three men sitting behind him. They talked about women and one of them was cursing them. He was a thin, skinny man with eyes behind thick glasses. The young man admitted to me that he would have loved to have “destroyed him with his words” for those statements. At that moment Marta returned and he still observed the man. He was very angry with him. Marta asked him what the matter was, but he only said: “wait.” Then he turned to her.
“Tell me about something,” she apparently asked him and told him that the coffee made her feel bad. He considered that statement somehow too lofty and he was quiet, under the influence of her loftiness. “Well, tell me something! Do I have to beg you for it?” She smiled and so he began to talk and she adjusted his tie. At that moment he saw her face from close up. She seemed so superior to him and he said somehow absently: “What would happen if we parted?”
He immediately regretted that, took her by the hand and tried to resurrect in her face her former maternal interest in him, the one that seemed to him as her superiority. She kept quietly drinking soda water. He told her how he managed to overcome the “problem of parting,” and said he would marry her if she got a divorce.
They got into the car while he kept asking her questions. Marta concentrated on the driving. Suddenly she turned to him: “I have a letter in my bag, I have to take it to the hospital and give it to him,” she smiled at him for a long time, sadly, as if betraying herself with something. “I have to explain something to him,” she added and then she checked her hair. She was smiling in anticipation of the journey to come. “So we are not going to be together forever, are we?” she asked him and he tried to talk her out of it.
At that moment the car went into an ordinary skid. Marta closed her eyes. He remembered that. Then he felt the glass on his forehead.
He begged me to pardon him, saying, “Life didn’t have any meaning for him any more,” and so on.
I told him that he was wrong, that life had both meaning and significance. “Even now?” He asked, “When you are ill and have lost your…and have lost your…” He didn’t finish, but I knew that he meant Marta. He almost shouted. He wasn’t shaking with pity and sorrow, but with anger and I felt how close he was to hatred. He even began to swear at me, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I told him that what he was doing wasn’t right and that he was betraying himself, since his hatred already suggested that he was interested in life. I asked him if his life stopped being meaningful to him because he lost Marta. He didn’t answer me, but said that the letter in which she wanted to explain something to me was lost. He was looking at me as if he were saying this only to test me if I would get angry. I again offered him a cigarette and asked him if I did claim the letter when he brought the matter up. Of course, I didn’t wait for an answer and suggested to him to get some sleep, that I would see him home. I told him that the pain would subside by tomorrow and he would see things differently. At first he resisted, but after he agreed, we left the station together with other travellers.
It was already in the morning and I trembled with cold. I was holding the student by his elbow and as we went I noticed a woman who was looking around and saying: “I don’t know what’s going on.” A woman who walked with her agreed and adjusted her kerchief.
Then we set out for the Hlboká Road and the two women walked ahead of us. They probably also went to the student residences.
And as we climbed the hill and felt the first wide wave of dampness from the trees after the thaw and met girls hurrying to the city, somewhere above us, above the crowns of the trees, someone sang a few notes of a tune that mixed with our strides. Then the song died down and it seemed as if the singer watched us, hidden by the height, the branches and the misty day. And suddenly the melody sounded sharper and more penetrating. It was calming, though I couldn’t understand it, since I don’t know the words of the song and have never heard it before.
And I thought about everything that life brought me.
Everyone loves his wife for some more or else concrete reason, but there are some who love for less definite, or even an indefinite reason. And that reason may have been the fact of having seen her, having met her, that she simply existed. It seems I loved Marta for a similar reason. I saw her, I looked at her with my own eyes and she wanted me to marry her.
And that “more definite reason”, for which my love for her multiplied, if one could say it like that, was her glorious arrogance. That’s what I would call her insistent desire to be happy. Maybe she had guessed from the very beginning that I could ensure her existence and would make no claims on her at all.
Glorious arrogance is what I call her desire for happiness because she dared to make from me a “spring board” to the aims that she hoped would make her happy. That arrogance—whatever we call it—I find interesting; I don’t condemn it. It proves that Marta was very unhappy and alone. I tried to suggest with the little that I gave her during her life that things wouldn’t make her happy. I don’t know if she understood that.
Translated by Peter Petro
