This would be the most favorable moment.
Why didn’t you want, she said aloud — and with these words she silenced her other sentence — why didn’t you let them take you away, I don’t even remember now from where, the name of that city, what was it. In other words, why did you come home, that’s what I’d like to know, why on earth didn’t you go away with them.
What are you looking for here.
Could you answer that for me.
Irma needed a moment to catch her breath and throw her mind back.
Why indeed.
But why are you asking such an awkward thing.
The question was like a shout for help. After a few days, when she could finally walk on both feet without leaning on anything, she had managed to get hold of a coat. She did not know what Mária was planning to do but had a premonition it was something fatal. She was cold, always cold and shivering, and she took off in her coat, heading who knows where.
It was hard to carry the coat.
How can you ask such a stupid thing, she moaned.
I can’t live without knowing. Answer me.
But how can I answer, for God’s sake. You could exercise a bit of Christian humility.
Mária laughed warmly, which did not mean she was ready to forgo an answer.
In less than a half hour on the empty sunny road, an armed patrol took her back to the hospital barracks.
Mária stood in front of her, motionless in the doorway, and Elisa kept on whimpering.
And then for days she could do nothing but lie on her pallet, helpless and fevered.
The second time, it was the bumpy ride on a wagon with two Czech peasants that took her back. The peasants had set out to plow their field and now had to lose time dealing with her; they were cursing her Jew-whore mother in their unfamiliar language. Ty skurvená židovská děvko. She had to be careful in the bouncing wagon not to let her already injured body slide into the sharp plowshare. They called her rotten Jewish bitch or something like that. She had a hard time arranging these images.
Should have dropped dead, bitch.
They must have been saying something like that when they carefully lifted her off the wagon. Mělas radši zdechnout. First she remembered the coat and the smell of the coarse fabric, and then the servant’s room in whose door not so much the sight but the beastly exhalations of the two bodies held her back, and that is why she wouldn’t let them, did not wait for them to take her away with the others.
Do you have any idea why you are asking me this, she inquired cautiously and quietly. By the way, it’s Prachatice, she said, that’s the name of the place. I’m really interested in why you are so interested in this.
Where on earth is Prachatice, asked Mária in a tone that suggested she found the name itself outrageous. She has this compensation coming to her. After all these years, she has the right to punish Irma a little bit.
How can I tell you.
In her gentle way, Irma Arnót would have been more than willing to answer Mária Szapáry.
From what I can see on the map, and I’ve checked it several times since, the border is about fifty kilometers east of Regensburg.
But her willingness was also nothing but a quiet revenge. As if she were saying in advance to Mária, you’ll regret having asked this question.
They were herding us across the Regen valley, you know, over the pass, I mean the ones who could make it. I don’t remember the name of the pass. Maybe not very far from there. A little bit closer to Budweis, if that means anything to you. It was called Aussig in the good old days of the monarchy. They herded the rest into the hay barn, those who could barely move, and then set the barn on fire. This happened on the next to last day, can you imagine that. And we were allowed to move on.
This sounds familiar to me, this Budweis, maybe from Schweik.*
With this remark they were virtually submerged in a shared smile shining and spreading across both their faces, evoked by and paying homage to the hero of the book they’d read before the war; they even laughed briefly.
Later, that’s where the Czech doctors came from to see us, from Aussig, continued Irma with a cheerfulness left over from the laughter. But I’d really like to know why you’re asking about this.
Mária kept swaying her head.
Actually, I don’t know why I came home, she went on evasively. Of course, that’s a whole different thing, I know, the two things can’t be compared. I can’t give you an honest answer. In the final analysis, historically, we’re both in the place where we belong. Perhaps that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. Some kind of instinct to escape. Raging in me. As though accepting the premise that whatever happens is what should happen, natural the way it is — I can’t accept that.
Maybe that’s what I can’t assimilate — because it isn’t like that.
But she felt it would be useless to insist. Mária would not answer her sincerely, and that hurt.
She relented, let her go.
I’m only asking, she said softly, because I have two kinds of answer.
Well then, tell me the first one and then the second.
No, don’t laugh. I also have a third one, yes, I do.
And when she said this, for the first time the wry smile she had sustained for Mária disappeared from her lips.
And this made her lips tremble painfully.
Those Swedish nurses were not very nice, you know. Or maybe I just didn’t like my shitty life being so dependent on others. They would have taken me in exactly the opposite direction. That bothered me too. It was nothing but a primitive kind of resistance, that’s all. In your big new freedom you realize you have a will of your own, which means you are again your own master, and you don’t want to see the Swedish nurses anymore. You lash out, make repeated accusations because you can’t even stand up. Now I should drop dead, now, because of them, just when I’d almost managed to get through everything.
In retrospect, though, I must add that they were tackling an impossible job, that’s true. There were so many cases of gangrene, purulence, necrosis, whole limbs rotting away on live people. They just had too much to do, much too much. The warmer the weather, the more unbearable the stench became, there was never any water, no surgeon for I don’t know how long, maybe weeks, and no supplies or equipment. Sometimes they got hold of some soldiers to cut firewood, the nights were frightfully cold, or prisoners of war, among whom there were some Hungarians, but most of the time the nurses had to chop the wood. Decent middle-class Swedish women, you know, and they had not the slightest notion what they were up against. And there was some cold fury in them. Maybe that was the way the ordeal affected them, I don’t know. In my barracks we had a very small window opposite where I lay, and I could see from the darkness how hopelessly the sun was shining outside.
But how can you say that, it was spring then, wasn’t it.
It shone despondently. You keep waking up, going to sleep, waking up.
It shone even during the night, but that was the moon.
I don’t know if you ever paid any attention to it, but spring sunshine in our country, and that’s what I know about, is always so stark, so bare, just bare.
You’ll understand in a minute why I want to tell you about this.
But there are these weeks, these spring weeks that don’t exist in other places.
It’s a little incoherent, the way I’m speaking, you’ll forgive me, but all I want to tell you, if we’re already talking about it, is that in other places, from the very first moment it starts, spring is pure brilliance.
In our part of the world it isn’t. There’s something hazy in our spring.
When I was first able to go outdoors and realized we were in the mountains, I saw that it wasn’t so there. The barracks window was dusty, maybe you understand, she said hesitantly. But not a single muscle in Mária’s face responded.