I loved my wife and children, but I fell in love again — this time with Helena’s colleague. She came to visit me and said she wanted to talk about my novel. She’d even copied out several quotes on index cards. Of course I was flattered; I was still too young to realize the futility of vanity.
We met several times before we started something. She was nine years younger, slender, with auburn hair; she had two little girls and was interested in Indian philosophy. She believed our fates were determined by the alignment of the planets on the day of our birth. She quickly created my horoscope, from which she determined I was a man of love but also scruples. She was interested in everything esoteric: She interpreted cards, poured lead at Christmas, read coffee grounds, and collected herbs. Whenever I suffered from some bodily ailment, she had a remedy. She was a prophetess peering down at me from another time or at least from other parts of the world.
She also possessed a special gift of transforming everything she saw or experienced into a thrilling and impassioned story. The border between her laughter and tears, between happiness and sorrow, was barely perceptible.
She wrote short books in which her entire being was exposed, even if the stories were about other people and from an entirely different period.
Both of us adored nature. I had been deprived of entire summers during childhood, and since then I’ve harbored the natural world in my thoughts like an articulated image in which forests merge with fields and fields with meadows and meadows with ponds. It abounds with nameless fragrant flowers, and anonymous birds warble around.
For her everything was composed of concrete things that she could identify: She knew the name of every plant we encountered; she recognized any bird by its song and knew the name of every bush we later made love beneath.
I believed neither her auguries nor her spells. It all seemed to me a tentative and noncommittal game, whether she was foretelling success and fame or rejoicing over my lengthy lifeline which, at least in this moment, she hoped we would spend together.
In one letter, she wrote:
My dear, my dearest, I am home alone and the snow is falling gently outside. My eyes are hurting me so much that I cannot read, I can’t distract myself with anything. So I close my eyes and feel that I love you, that it is not within my strength to offer any resistance. You have cast a spell over me, stung me, bewitched me so that I am able to think of nothing else but you. And I ask myself: How could I have let this happen? How did you become so close and so inevitable that I am afraid?. . You say that I bewitch you, but you have been casting even more spells over me. You know this well enough yourself. You employ not only your feelings but also your mind, and I cannot resist.
I wrote similar letters to her. At the same time, I was afraid of my feelings, of what I was hurtling myself toward, of what we were hurtling ourselves toward.
I had no desire to prevaricate, so I told my wife about my outburst of passion.
I think she was hurt. Then, for a long time, we scrutinized our lives, our mistakes, and our setbacks. She wanted to know how I planned to continue. What did I want? At no time did I consider staying with both of them. Finally, I promised to end it.
But I do not intend to compose a chronicle of my love life and my infidelities. My wish is not to draw my loved ones into my tale; it’s enough that I drew them into real life.
*
The house in Hodkovičky in which we lived was a little more than forty years old, but it shared the unsettled and crazy history of our country.
In the early thirties, the house was built by the owner of a barbershop. Today, Hodkovičky is one of the most expensive sections of Prague, but back then it was still provincial and modest. It was populated mostly by successful businessmen and craftsmen. There were a few other ostentatious homes on our street, which obviously belonged to people who were better off or at least could afford a decent architect to design their dwellings in a constructivist or cubist manner.
Our apartment was ordinary but also practically designed — the living room windows faced south and north. The building had a basement apartment, but with the passage of time it became so damp that no one used it anymore. There were three-room apartments on the ground floor and first floor (where we lived), and at the top was a small two-room mansard rental, which the authorities refused to recognize as an apartment because the ceilings were too low.
The only son of the owners — this was during the First Republic — rose to the top ranks of the police force relatively quickly. He even spent the years of the Nazi occupation with the police and he was not certain whether he would survive liberation. He fled across the ocean while life in his homeland trundled from abyss to abyss. In a quick series of events, (some) collaborationists were sentenced and deported along with the Germans they had served, willingly or otherwise. The government also announced nationalization, which at first did not concern the barbers’ trade or private homes, let alone small houses.
Meanwhile, the son of our landlords had gotten his footing in the United States and was trying to contribute to his parents’ impecunious household. He sent them dollars, which his mother, like many people, exchanged for Tuzex crowns, which she then sold on the black market — but so openly that she was soon arrested and convicted. In addition to receiving a prison sentence, she had part of her property confiscated. Her husband claimed he had no knowledge of his wife’s activities, and the court surprisingly chose to believe him. Therefore, half the house was confiscated, and he kept the other half. But now that he was alone, he was obliged to move into the mansard apartment upstairs, and tenants were installed in the two lower floors — two families on the ground floor because the government was trying to resolve the housing crisis after the Soviet model by dividing the home in two, with the tenants sharing common facilities.
This is the state in which we found the building in 1965 when we acquired an apartment in exchange for our cooperative apartment that we had been remodeling. The landlady was well into her seventies, but she played the part of a grande dame and covered herself so liberally with cheap Soviet perfume that whenever she walked down the stairs, the cloying scent hung in the air at least half the day. She had a subletter — a quiet, thin, old-world, and well-mannered waiter who sometimes played the accordion or trumpet. The neighbors claimed he was the old woman’s lover, and she provided his lodgings free of charge as well as cleaned his clothes and fed him. This seemed unlikely — a waiter could eat at his place of employment, even if it was just a pub, and taking on the task of sweetheart seemed even more unlikely. One day, however, the waiter disappeared along with his accordion and trumpet, and we never saw him again. A little while later, when I’d all but forgotten him, I received a postcard from him bearing a Danish stamp (it was surprising that the post office had even delivered it). On the card he had written: I’m doing wonderfully, I’m free. Please say hello to all the tenants, even my niggardly and perfumed old lady. Regards. .
So the landlady was left on her own. She was like an old tin can tossed out in the forest and quickly starting to rust. Sometimes she stopped by our apartment, especially if Helena was baking a cake (which wasn’t very often); the old woman knew she would get a piece to taste. Sometimes she even came to borrow a small amount of money, which she never returned. She began neglecting herself more and more and started to look like a witch — understandably in view of everything she’d lived through. But she was also mean. For years, we had a sparrows’ nest just inside the building’s front entrance, so we had to leave the door to the building open even at night (crime was not so bad then). One day she pulled down the nest with the chicks and threw it into the trash.