I go to stand before the sink and sponge under my arms and between my legs. The dress I pull on clings to my skin. I put a kettle on the stove and light a flame under it. I stand still, listening to the music. I look up once more at the faded lithograph on the wall showing John the Baptist standing in the River Jordan, his arms stretched up as though about to lift into the clouds. The piece ends. I pour myself tea. I stand out on the balcony and sip it. It is long before work. The light is fragrant, the air also — there are two white and ocher butterflies dancing just out of reach.
There is the Svět and the forest. The sky beyond the forest is yellow. Industrial towns are hidden over there, at the root of monstrous chimneys. They grow on the proclamation of the Communist moment. The rain falls acid on them, the trees in their municipal parks die, and I have seen frogs there burst in toxic ditch water. My town is older and much smaller than those industrial towns. It follows the orders handed down from Prague, but it does not grow in consequence. It was not created under any red banner. It has its own memories. Here and there it follows its own logic. The chimneys here are short and few: Our famous town zoo has a chimney, the brewery has a chimney, so also does the Christmas-decoration factory, where I work. My town is not poisoned. It is saved from the industrial towns by a ring of forest, where men march now between secret military bases.
The industrial towns pull men and women from their beds with tidal force. These workers rattle out of the industrial towns at dawn, on trams that spark out over fields of beet, and alight at factories, foundries, and the square mouths of coal mines. I once took such a journey. It was odd to be moving across fields on a tram, with no buildings in sight. A man sat across from me, arms folded, in the beret and knee-length leather coat of 1950s worker fashion.
“I pour steel,” he said, out of the silence, “into blocks that are made into pylons, to hold up power lines.”
He stared at my breasts — not in lust, but looking through me, seemingly occupied by a memory that meant something to him.
“Please look away,” I said.
“What’s that?” he said. “Was I looking?”
“I cannot bear your look any longer,” I said.
His eyes fell to his boots, but with the same blank expression.
The white and ocher butterflies are gone. I stand here on the balcony and look out over the back of my town. I see the roof of my factory. I see the River Labe flowing in its channel. I see the town walls, the steeples and turrets within, the bright prick of the golden eagle atop the plague column, the castle, the brewery. I see a brewery worker cycling along the gravel road that runs around the end of the Svět to the zoo. I watch him pedal through the parkland, around the fateful bend, dropping out of sight in the fruit trees around the baroque chapel of St. Michael.
THE CASTLE AND THE ZOO are reflected in the Svět, which looks natural, but was man-made centuries ago, when they flooded the flats with marsh water. The men who crisscross the Svět call themselves fishermen because they harvest the carp, but they are more like farmers, sowing seed and fertilizer on the face of the waters, as on a field. The Svět stands a little higher than the streets of my town, so that when they used to cut and drag blocks of ice from the pond in winter, they wore down the banks containing it, and caused the waters to spill out, flooding the deep cellars with thrashing fish. The Svět and the forest have their own rhythms. Winter, spring, summer of storks lifting languidly from their nests on the brewery roof, autumn of short copper days — my autumn of dreamlike afternoons reading in the town library, looking at the departing birds, and the maple leaves swirling up against the boards of the outdoor ice-hockey rink, in which boys play out games in the sand with tennis balls, waiting for winter.
IT IS LONG BEFORE WORK. There are no fishermen or farmers out on the Svět. There is only a corrugated red float drifting from a campsite on the far side. There is a haze over the brown water. I cannot see as far as the marsh at the end of the Svět, or the clearing by the sawmill in which the archangel Raphael is nailed to a tree, where yesterday I went to place wildflowers, as the drovers once did, and saw a couple riding unsteadily on a tandem bicycle, and in the next moment a pair of dragonflies locked together in flight. I sip my tea and listen to Brahms. My dreams are exposed now, in this light. They fade. I was sleepwalking again and awoke shivering on the stairs. I have a memory of ascension, but nothing more.
I walk from my panelák to the Svět, to swim before starting work at the Christmas-decoration factory. I come to my secluded place. I slip off my dress — I am that suicide or rusalka, made slender and pale from the chemicals of the factory. I wade out. Cattails scratch my skin. Mud stirs about my calves and at the back of my knees. The water comes up to my hips. I push off. It is tepid in here. I swim out and tread water and look back now, at finches and buntings flitting on the shore, and warblers singing tunes from the highest bulrushes. A muskrat slips in with me, from a hole in the bank. Coots and tufted ducks are about me. Something moves between my toes, some tench’s fin. I swim far out to the float. I climb up naked onto it and drift together with it across this brown water without current, whose bottom holds treasure and hollows where cavemen lit fires an age before the Svět was flooded into being.
I am an orphan, a factory girl living alone. I have no telephone. Messages are left for me with neighbors, or at the factory, or written in the margins of postcards sent to me from surviving relatives in other parts of ČSSR. I dip glass decorations in paint to be hung from Christmas trees. I attend to my friends and the small responsibilities of my town. I paddle naked on a corrugated red float across the Svět on this morning of Midsummer’s Day. My birthday is of no great consequence. My life will leave no lasting mark. It will be no more than the mark of a cuff button on one’s wrist that quickly fades, or these few ripples vanishing as I slip from the float into the water. It is nothing to be sorry about. I am like the swallows around me on the Svět. I touch the world, I rise again.
I backstroke to the shore, watching clouds as I go. I dry myself among irises and take a path to the factory that leads by the statue of a Jesuit standing on the head of a whale or a mighty carp, such as are netted in the Svět once in a generation, and by the Spořitelna Savings Bank, which has above its doorway a stone statue of a fisherman cradling a carp. I step lightly on the bridge over the Labe to the factory. I see my colleague Eva waving to me.
“Amina!” she calls.
We go in arm and arm, into Christmas colors and fumes. I HAVE WORKED autonomically in the factory all day. I feel awake now in my girlfriend’s arms, on a lawn in the parkland sloping away from the chapel of St. Michael. We have drunk some wine. Mosquitoes and horseflies are on our skin. We can hear the evening train passing through the forest. We can smell each other, and the brewery, and the bog and quicksands that circle the old town walls. The trees above us are swollen in the heat. The crickets are loud. My girlfriend rolls off me.
“Did you hear what happened on the Svět this morning?” she asks.
“No,” I say.
“A brewery worker cycled out there before work with his pockets filled with stones,” she says. “He rowed out to the deepest part of the Svět. He jumped in. He sank. He thought himself dead. His lungs closed to the world. When his feet touched the bottom, he found his body was not in agreement with his mind. His legs began walking with a will of their own — all the way to the shallows! His head became exposed. Despite himself, he began breathing. A boat laying down fish feed spotted him thrashing in chest-high water, ducking himself, then up again. They weren’t sure what they were looking at. He was dazed, they said, with a bloody nose. They drew close. He lashed out at them. His mind was quite made up against living.”