When Martin, the engine driver, returned my books, he talked about crime on the railway. Trains would arrive at their destinations, he said, with only a part of their freight. It was understandable and even forgivable. When oranges disappear from a freight car, they may be the only oranges people in that part of the country will ever see. But of course oranges are only the beginning. Once, fifteen cars loaded with Wartburg automobiles were left on a siding, and several days later, just before they were dispatched, it was discovered that on the side facing away from the station, all the wheels had been stolen.
Martin had applied for a hard currency voucher for a trip to Denmark. As expected, he'd been turned down.
That evening Pavel stopped by to see me, his head still wrapped in bandages. He told me that several of our friends had been arrested on the way home from the ball, and no one knew what had happened to them. As usual, there was no mention of this in the media.
We tried to tune in to some foreign radio station, but
jammers drowned out the announcers' voices.
Jammers are the sound of a life that She — the one in disguise — directs according to Her notions. She knows that man has a different notion of his fate and good fortune, that he wants to win, through his defiance, his right to his own footprint, action, sentence, to a truthful thought that he could declare out loud or at least hear expressed. But She is convinced that She and She alone can decide our fate; say what is good and what is evil. She desires that the sentences she passes stay with us from morning till night, from the cradle to the grave, where one day She will lay us low. All voices other than Her own she brands false; they are banned and cannot be heard even from beyond the borders that She has ordered closely guarded. She has had recorded the creaking of Her joints and the howling of the wind in Her empty skull. She orders that they be broadcast, amplified a thousand times, to drown all sounds of life.
Three weeks later the authorities sent me a message. I went to the local police station where the same young officer who not long ago had explained to me that my request for my keys amounted to the false accusation of a public officer now asked me impatiently why I wasn't taking an interest in getting them back. Did I think that the police were some kind of baggage depository? I was to report at once to the commander of the special operations team.
The barracks of the special operations team was next to the street where I spent my childhood, so I found it with no difficulty. The commander of special operations was small and stocky, almost bald, and he wore glasses. His tunic was undone and underneath it I could see striped braces. He had a fatherly expression.
Yes indeed, he had seen my driver's licence, and yes, he even remembered that there were some keys with it. Three, wasn't it? Two? It was possible. One was bigger than the other. However, since I hadn't requested them for so long… it was now being dealt with at Vinohrady. On Peace Square. Did I know where the station was? Perhaps he'd better give me exact directions.
He backed up to a large map of Prague that hung on the wall behind him.
I said that I had driven around the square almost every day for fifteen years, and I was last there when the railway workers had held their ball.
Yes, that was right: the railway workers' ball, that would have been three weeks ago, wouldn't it? Well, the ballroom dancing season was just about over, and if I was going to go dancing — and he circumspectly let the word that again had forced its way on to his tongue, slip from his lips — I would have to hurry. He shook my hand. When I was already walking through the door, he asked again, with concern in his voice, whether I was sure I'd find the station on the square.
The station was where it was supposed to be, but of course they had neither my keys, nor my driver's licence.
Crime was on the increase, even though the ballroom-dancing season was coming to an end. The paedophile— whom no one, evidently, was looking for — was still at large in our area. A young medical student was raped and strangled on an international express train. And there were stories going round that the director of the automobile factory had given away to influential comrades or, at least, sold for the price of scrap a wagon-load of cars, which naturally did not belong to him.
I paid a visit to a friend of mine, a playwright who alone among my colleagues can publish what he writes and therefore has access to the comrades. He claimed that they had transferred the director to a less responsible position, and that things were beginning to get better. During my visit, a car stopped outside the house and a woman in gardening clothes jumped out.
As I understood it, the woman taught my friend's daughter. The clothes in which she arrived were 'emergency' clothes. She had been wearing them when she returned from her cottage the previous evening — and now they were all she had to wear. Over the weekend, thieves had burgled her flat. What they hadn't taken they had destroyed, systematically. They had pulled the drawers out of the cupboards and dressers and smashed them. They had torn up her fabrics or poured varnish over them; they had burned her passport and bank-books and the parquet flooring, broken her china, slashed her pictures. They had drunk her spirits, and what they didn't drink, they poured over her Persian rug.
It was as though they were taking revenge on her for something, as though they enjoyed the act of destruction more than theft. The police guessed that there was a whole gang of them at work. The noise of the destruction must have been heard in the building, and her neighbours immediately beneath her and on each side of her were home all weekend, and didn't even come out of their flats to see who was making such a racket. What kind of people were they? The things the thieves carried off must have half filled a large truck. The tears in her eyes as she told the story were not only for the vandalism, but for the indifference of her neighbours, who did nothing to protect
her property, and for the apathy of the investigators, who were unmoved by the wasteland her flat had become.
It occurred to me to ask what she taught.
She taught Marxism.
It didn't feel as though I missed being able to drive but oddly enough, at night, highways worked their way into my dreams with increasing frequency. I could read the names of exotic places on the road signs, or sometimes only the number of the roads that stretched through the prairies and clambered up mountainsides. The car was utterly unlike any I had ever driven; I was giving a lift to a girl utterly unlike any girl I had ever given a lift to, and I knew that we would make love as soon as I found an appropriate place. But could such a place be found on the highway? I turned on to a road that led into a wood, but that didn't seem deserted enough either; the trees were tall and widely spaced and offered no shelter, no real hiding place. I drdve out of the wood and on to an empty plateau of sand. There was not a living soul in sight, and even the road vanished. I was still driving, and as the sand crunched under the wheels I felt the girl's naked body pressing against me. She had taken off her clothes. I stopped the car, hastily reclined the seats and transformed the interior into a perfect bed.
As we were lying in an embrace I realized that the car, now driven by no one, had begun to move forwards. I raised myself up, and through the window I saw the edge of a precipice. We were moving towards it. I wanted to grab the wheel and slam on the brakes, but the seats were in my way. There was nothing I could do. The car moved right to the edge of the precipice and I could see the depths below me. I screamed in terror, but no one heard
me. I reached out for the girl, but felt only emptiness. She was no longer in the car, and I was alone as I plunged into the abyss.