“Will you please be quiet, Alice! Just shut up! Not another word!” Květa shouted. Her tears smeared her understated makeup across her white blouse, producing a remarkable map of her body. The two women lifted Josef from his chair and laid him on the ground. Alice ran to the kitchen to call an ambulance while her mother sat on the carpet beside him, cradling his head in her lap. Every second or two she leaned her face down to his mouth to check whether he was breathing regularly, breaking into fits of dry sobs as she stroked his hair and repeated his name over and over.
When Alice walked back into the room and saw her mother stroking her father’s face, it was obvious he wasn’t breathing. “Mom, Mom,” she said, pressing her shoulder against her, “Daddy’s dead, look …”
Květa went on holding Josef’s head in her hands until the doorbell rang and two men in white coats came in. They said something and Alice said something back. One of them bent over Josef’s body and the other gestured to Alice and Květa that they should go into the next room. From the kitchen, out of the corner of her eye, Alice saw the man stand up from her father and turn his head to the other man to indicate there was nothing else they could do. She burst into tears. Her mother gave her a hug. One of the men from the ambulance thrust a form into her hand, said good-bye, and they left.
The two women remained sitting in the kitchen, snuggled closely together. The mother stroked her daughter’s hair, her tears now dried while her daughter’s tears were just beginning to do their work. Exiting her tear ducts, they emerged on the slope of her nose, streaking down across the valley of her sunken cheekbones before landing, reunited, in the dampness of her handkerchief. Květa unconsciously ran her left hand over her chest, as if trying to remove the makeup from her blouse, the makeup that was supposed to make her beautiful, desirable, and attractive to her husband, who, unwittingly and against her will, in spite of everything time had thrown in their path, in spite of history, in spite of her body’s surprising desires, in spite of their separation and the irritating, annoying, unrelenting buzz of stinging memories, she had never stopped loving all her life.
17. LETTER ABOUT A THIEF
Hi sis,
Yesterday I finally got a proper job. You won’t believe what I’m going to do. At the bank where I work, Mr. Verner told me they want me to write up comments and recommendations for the head of the investment division. Let me explain. In 1991 there was an exhibition in Prague. Judging from the stacks of papers and boxes of newspaper clippings they gave me, it’s obvious people had great expectations for it. It was called the Universal Czechoslovak Exhibition, or something like that. I don’t know what they exhibited, and it’s not even important from the bank’s point of view. What’s important is that it resulted in a debt of several hundred million crowns. You read that right. It’s not a mistake. Close to a billion crowns in debt. And now that Czechoslovakia has divided like a cell into two even smaller countries, nobody wants to pay it, which means the bank where I work is stuck with it around its neck, as they say here. And they gave me the job of writing up a history of the exhibition and other ones like it and proposing a creative solution to the problem for the media. Not a financial solution, mind you — I wouldn’t even know how, since I don’t know the first thing about finance — but a creative solution. I didn’t know exactly what that was supposed to mean, so I asked Mr. Verner and he said they probably had in mind for me to compare it to similar exhibitions, and explained that the 1991 exhibition was held in honor of another exhibition that took place on exactly the same site in 1891. Can you imagine? A hundred years before! And supposedly that exhibition was held in honor of some other exhibition that took place a hundred years before that, in 1791. Can you imagine? Mozart was still alive back then. Anyway, that’s my job. So I started right in on it. Mr. Verner said that if I didn’t know which way to go (meaning “what to do”), I should use history. They’re big on that here, history. Mr. Verner said I could use history to get out of anything. So I’ve got a feeling over the next few weeks I’ll be spending many hours engrossed in the study of local history.
Otherwise, if you can believe it, Mr. Černý died. He was the husband of Aunt Květa and the father of Alice, who I’ve been staying with. Alice and I went to see him a couple of times. He said some strange things about Prague. I think he liked the city but he didn’t like what was going on there. By that I mean what most people call globalization, though it’s really Americanization. I don’t think they’re too clear on that here. Anyway, he came to visit the flat I’ve been staying in with his grandson and they installed quite a nice display case with a collection of some sort of stones, and after that, from what I understand, they had lunch and then he just died. Alice called an ambulance, but even though they came right away it was too late. I didn’t want to ask about it. I just know what Alice told me. The whole week, on and off, I heard crying on the other side of the wall. But there’s actually something else I wanted to write you about. This week Mr. Verner said he was going away on a business trip to Vienna and asked if I could do him a favor by going to a pub and giving his phone number to a friend who he described to me in detail. I asked why he didn’t just call him, but he said he didn’t have his number. When I asked how long they’d known each other, he said more than twenty years. So I went to the pub — actually it was a garden restaurant adjoining a small football stadium — and it turned out to be closed. So I waited around until then I noticed an older man with a gray crewcut standing off to the side. I realized that must be the man I was waiting for, so I went over and asked if his name was Karel. He said yes, so I gave him the number. Then he invited me for a beer, but I declined, since the way they drink in this country is really out of control, and I wasn’t in the mood for any boozy Slavic brotherhood. When Mr. Verner got back, I asked him about it and he said that he and Karel had known each other since August 21, 1968. After I’d handed off the phone number, I walked down from Náměstí Míru to Václavské Náměstí to buy dad a birthday present, and there was a small rally of skinheads and neo-Nazis going on, and the police were standing across the street from them, filming it. There was nobody else commemorating it, apart from that. It wasn’t till a week later that I realized that day was the reason why Mum and Dad stayed in the UK. They call the UK England here — the Scots and Irish wouldn’t be too happy if they found out. Anyway, Mr. Verner told me that night in 1968 he was home alone and went to bed about ten o’clock but couldn’t get to sleep. He had a feeling there was somebody walking round the flat. So he woke up, put on the light, read something a while, then fell back asleep and the next thing he knew he had the feeling someone was shaking him. So he woke up and saw a man standing over him in coveralls, shaking him politely and saying, “Sir, wake up and don’t be afraid.” Before it dawned on him, he heard the man, who was a bit older, apologizing and pointing out the window. “What are you doing here?” Mr. Verner said, and then all of a sudden he heard tractors going down the street. A bunch of tractors at five in the morning? How can that be? he thought. So he went and looked out the window and saw a line of tanks driving down the street, and the windowpanes were rattling like crazy and everything was shaking from the noise. Turned out the tanks were Russian and there were soldiers sitting on top of them in green uniforms holding machine guns. “What’s going on,” Mr. Verner said, “and what are you doing here?” But the man just kept on apologizing: “I’m a thief, Mr. Verner. I came to rob you and I’m really sorry I woke you up, but this is the third column of tanks now, so I decided I’d better wake you, since this looks like either war or the Russians are attacking us. I put back everything I took and left it on the table in the next room and I suggest you call your parents and your wife. I hope you aren’t angry, but I saw your lovely photographs of them, and I also saw you have a phone in the hall, so please give them a call, since either way, whether it’s war or occupation … Well, anyway, I’m off, and once again I apologize, but I truly and honestly wasn’t expecting anything like this.” So Verner said he took the man by the hand and said, “For Christ’s sake, man, don’t go out there. They might shoot you or something.” But the thief still wanted to go, since he was afraid Verner was going to call the police. But after the next column of tanks rolled by, they both realized that the police weren’t working that morning anyway, and the thief took the liberty of asking if he could make a call. So he made the call and then when he came back into the living room he started crying. “My sister lives by the border with Poland and she says they’re up there too. We’re being attacked, Mr. Verner.” So Verner said, “At least tell me your name so I know what to call you. You can’t go anywhere now anyway.” So the man introduced himself as Karel, and Verner said: “Well, Karel, take whatever you need. I can’t take it with me to the grave.” And Karel said, “I can’t. I don’t need it now.” So Verner said: “Did you find the cash?” And Karel said: “Of course I did. Everyone always puts it in a cup on the second shelf in the cupboard. I put it back, though.” “Take at least half,” Mr. Verner said. “I can’t,” said Karel, so Verner went and forced him to take half the money. Then, after the tanks had passed, he walked him out to the intersection and they helped set up some makeshift barricades. But then Karel said he had to go since his wife might be worried. So if you can believe it, they stood there on the intersection and gave each other a hug, and Verner said: “Take care of yourself, Karel. Human life doesn’t mean a thing to those Russians.” And Karel said, “If we survive,” since he was afraid it was going to turn out like the massacre in Hungary twelve years before, “if we survive, meet me at the pub Na Růžku one year from today and I’ll give you your money back. I’m a little hard up right now. Remember: Na Růžku. It’s halfway between you and me.” And ever since then, they meet at the pub every year on August 21st. I asked Mr. Verner how come he didn’t know Karel’s name and address, and he told me, “Cousin, life has taught me to respect privacy. Karel has never told me his address or last name and I’ve never asked. The fact that we’ve been meeting once a year for over twenty years to share a drink or two is more important to me than prying into his private life. Sometimes one of us can’t make it. It’s happened three times or so, and when it does, the one who can’t make it sends a messenger so the other one will know he’s all right. There you have it. And six months ago they changed my number and I’m not in the phone book, so this year I sent you, Cousin.”