When the doctor heard the story of pastry chef Marek Svoboda, as reconstructed for him from the notebook of the policeman who had brought him to the psychiatric hospital, he wasn’t pleased in the least. Peculiar behavior wasn’t enough to have a man institutionalized against his will. Certainly, he said, the officer could understand that. If it were, they’d have to lock up half the people in the city. It didn’t appear to be mental illness so much as what’s known as a borderline case, somewhere in between a disorder and harmless eccentricity. The policeman was unhappy. They didn’t have anything on the guy, which meant not only they’d have to let him go, but also they’d have to apologize, and of course he was the one who’d failed to get him into the nuthouse. The conversation wasn’t moving in a promising direction. As the doctor rummaged around in a drawer, trying to find the intake forms, the officer, grasping at one last chance, interrupted him.
“Pardon me, Doctor,” he began, “but the chief told me the person he spoke to said Mr. Svoboda had been here for treatment before. Is that true?”
“Yes, it is,” the doctor replied.
“And what was he in for?” the officer asked.
“That’s confidential,” the doctor said. “I’m sure you understand that I can’t tell you.”
“All right.” The policeman decided to try a different tack. “Could you go ahead and take a look at him anyway? He really is acting strange.”
The doctor slid shut the drawer he had been searching in vain for the intake forms, and nodded. It was starting to get light.
Pastry chef Marek Svoboda sat in a chair across from the doctor looking calm and focused.
“Hello, Mr. Svoboda, or should I say good morning?” the doctor said. “I’m Doctor Lukavský. It seems you had a busy night.”
The pastry chef gazed back at him, but didn’t seem inclined to respond.
“Well, Mr. Svoboda, the police think your behavior isn’t entirely typical and that I should evaluate you in light of what happened last night. What do you think about that?”
The pastry chef didn’t answer, staring at the branches swaying outside the window. He seemed to be mulling it over.
“Do you think the police have the right?”
The pastry chef smiled faintly and stared straight at the doctor. “My name isn’t Svoboda.”
“Pardon me,” the doctor said. “I must have missed something. It says here: Marek Svoboda. Profession: pastry chef.”
“That was my name,” the pastry chef said. “That’s what it used to be.”
“Aha,” the doctor said. “Then what is your name now? So I’ll have my records straight.”
“My name is Jesus Socrates Amenhotep Hitler, dear brother,” the pastry chef said.
“All right,” the doctor said, writing down the full name on a sheet of unlined paper where he was taking notes. He was going to need those patient intake forms after all. Looking at his watch and concluding the head nurse might be there by now, he stood, opened the door to the hallway, and called to a passing orderly. “Excuse me, could you bring me some forms from the nurse’s office? Three-one-fives, thanks.”
The policeman, sitting on a bench next to the office, thought to himself, There we go. Now we can get rid of this guy without any scandal.
3. AFTER THE WEDDING — FIRST MEETING WITH FATHER
After the wedding, Maximilian moved in with Alice and her parents. Meanwhile, her father repaired the cottage and they all watched captivated as he sawed beams, hammered nails, and mended the roof with precise, crystal-clear movements, movements that splintered apart into thousands of mirrored fragments, transforming his precision into a blurry silent slow-motion film the moment he climbed down from the roof and put away his tools in the meticulously organized wooden cupboard. As soon as he stopped work on the cottage, his hands began to shake like the leaves on an autumn tree, quivering before they break away from the branch and begin their waltzing descent to earth. The newlyweds had been planning their honeymoon for the end of summer, but in August Russian tanks came rolling into the country, leading them, like so many others, to consider leaving Czechoslovakia for good. It was their first fight. Maximilian wanted to leave, but Alice couldn’t imagine leaving behind the country where she had been born, never to return. No longer being able to see their garden, their flower beds, the proud radishes, tomatoes, and tulips at their cottage? Giving birth to their child in another country? Obviously a child born in Germany, England, or Canada would be German, English, or Canadian, not that that in itself would matter, but she would never be able to fully understand her son or daughter. Added to that was the fact that all the tanks and demonstrations against the invasion left her cold and indifferent. First she discovered that her occasional rheumatic pain had settled down. Then she felt better every day than she had the one before. And finally she discovered that she was expecting. One day, as she was putting jars of preserves away in the kitchen cabinet, she opened one of them, sank her index finger in and scooped out a thick, yellowy, fragrant chunk of apricot. Maximilian, spotting her as he passed through the room, opened the sideboard, took out a teaspoon, and handed it to her. But she just shook her head with Olympian detachment. Little by little Alice began to understand something she had never noticed before. Every beginning, the true beginning of anything with nothing preceding it, is a little like birth, just as every ending is a little death. Feelings like those deserved the rank of cliché, she thought, a distinction of honor earned in combat on the battlefields of the body and mind. Ordinary experience, of the sort nearly everyone has, endlessly repeats until it loses all its uniqueness, and that was exactly what she was feeling. She saw the desire for originality as utterly absurd and alarmingly useless. The only thing that mattered, whether the baby was a boy or a girl, was that it be healthy. Paging through a disreputable oversized magazine with its weekly ration of curiosities from India, the latest advances in technology from the United States, and dispatches on hunters in Siberia savoring the meat of a thousand-year-old frozen woolly mammoth, tucked between a new recipe for mutton and modern fashion trends in Milan, Alice discovered an article on medieval paintings. Two of the illustrations depicted prideful saints and the third, the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation. Printed in color around the Madonna’s head was a halo in a shape that reminded Alice of a bubble. Yes, a bubble, Alice thought. You could even say a bubble of God’s grace. That was what Alice felt: the bubble of pregnancy was also a bubble of God’s grace. The worst thing about it was that she didn’t even feel guilty anymore for not feeling guilty. Their country was occupied, there were tanks in the streets. Her husband wanted to emigrate, her mother and father were sad and timid, and after a few weeks of quick anger they had quickly and timidly grown old. But it made absolutely, positively no difference at all to her, since she was expecting a child.