That’s how the day ended.
I often wondered what would happen if I waited for her downstairs and followed her when she went off by herself. I didn’t think of talking to her; I’d only follow her from a distance and learn where she went every evening. But only on very exceptional occasions did I bring myself to do this, because, to tell the truth, it was better not to. To watch her as she passed by the boarded-up store windows, walking on the empty sidewalk, then turned into the almost completely dark Szófia Street, and then ceased to exist until the next day.
But there were weekdays when I couldn’t resist going downstairs two or even more times. It was an achievement if I went to the shop only once. I had no money, either, could barely buy a double espresso. At other times I’d gain two full consecutive weekdays not going downstairs at all and not even looking out the window; I wanted to feel how strong I was. Now it’s really over, I’d say to myself, she no longer interests me. But it was at just those times I felt most strongly my loss and my ridiculousness. In fact, all I’d done was waste two days, and it would be even more ridiculous to waste any more.
Because when I went back to the store, she rewarded me with a glowing countenance. As if asking me, why didn’t you come if you wanted to see me. As though asking me, why are you playing this game. And the entire agony would begin anew if her countenance was overcast. I could not be certain about anything: was she telling me or asking me these things, did she reserve her maddening reticence only for me. Her face lights up at the sight of everybody. But I could be certain that she was even more beautiful than I had envisioned her in those endless hours when I wanted to forget her beauty and therefore pretended I wasn’t thinking about her.
This is how our story began.
I didn’t notice that it had already begun, because I was not daydreaming about what would happen if I could touch her. Rather, I was contemplating what would happen if I forgot her. If I could eject her from my mind. What would happen if I never went back, if I left her to her fate, if I could convince myself that I neither had nor could have any need for such escapades.
I should look for other kinds of adventures. As if I my old self still existed, the same person from whom I could expel this other self, or my attraction to her, or my insatiable interest.
I can’t say I made no efforts in these directions.
I thought it was some sort of sexual urge from which one could break free. But I could not satisfy this urge, because I longed for nothing and no one, or rather, I couldn’t make my usual fantasizing in this area work with her in mind.
Nobody else interested me, yet somehow I had to deny this.
I made great efforts to be at least interested in others, as they had to some extent interested me before, but any person I engaged in conversation instantly ceased to interest me. And this happened because of her, but I did not understand how and why such a light-minded little promise in my life had become so weighty. Attraction had not been an obstacle before; one should expect at least that much from attraction. But now it was as though it pricked me at my most sensitive point. I could not cope, no, no, with the temptation of waiting for someone else. I should evade or avoid the ominous experience I am about to acquire. Except I don’t know what to do with the insistent sense of urgency.
Neither did I know what to do with the threat that without this experience I’d forever remain alone and my wounded pride would destroy me.
Nothing was happening as I had imagined it would; I knew this too, of course. As if I had to tear myself away from the fatal conviction that I’d been born into a world in which what I wanted to have happen, what only I and no one else wanted to have happen, would simply not occur. A world in which every intention missed its target, every action went astray. As if, using my head, I had to break through a wall that I myself strengthened every day.
Naturally, I had no such thoughts, because what I’m talking about was neither a thought nor a way of thinking; it was just there, hanging in the air, like a zeitgeist. Hope did not vanish, it was somewhere else, impossible to know just where. Elsewhere. Helplessness coursed though the brain cells, and inevitably I had to believe it was my own helplessness. A birth defect or something I developed because my mother had abandoned me. Others are deserving of love and find each other, or from the start possess the ability to love, which I lack. I just stood there with the glass in my hand. She reached for it; I wouldn’t give it to her. All that was missing were six words. Where should I wait for you.
Without an answer, I simply couldn’t leave the store.
She wanted not a word. She waited, resisted, with both hands in the air to take my glass, but with her hand she forbade me to spit out my question.
Others drank their coffee and left their glasses all over the place. I always returned mine properly and put it down on the counter in front of her; otherwise, she’d have to go and collect it. Sometimes she came out from behind the counter, stacked the glasses into little towers, the plates into piles. Perhaps as early as during my second visit she noticed my consideration and responded in kind; she took the glass from my hand and we both nodded, tipping our heads a bit. Sometimes she said, oh, very kind, how nice, really nice of you. I didn’t understand why she had to make fun of me.
And the next day, in revenge, I wasn’t going to bring the glass back to her, but she stopped me with her voice.
You brought it back yesterday, why not today.
Perhaps she felt she was overstepping a boundary; after a while she wordlessly accepted the situation and watched as if to see whether I was really like that or only pretended to be and wanted her to like me, and was trying to deceive her.
And then even the small nod was abandoned.
I’d have liked to say in gratitude that today’s coffee was especially good. Or some such little foolishness, lightheartedly, as people somehow expect from one another. The glass wobbled awkwardly on the saucer and I didn’t say anything. Because it seemed as if my hand were shaking. I did not want the inapt sentence, I didn’t want other people’s sentences. My grandmother had, with the best of intentions, stuffed my head with all the commonplaces, and they would have worked well in appropriate situations, but I wouldn’t let them.
If she took the glass from me, the tips of my fingers involuntarily touched the tips of hers.
Sometimes she, sometimes I, successfully avoided this involuntary contact, the game being no longer about that but about the avoidance of it. As if both of us preferred the contact to be voluntary yet neither wanted to risk it. I couldn’t do it now, anyway. At the same time, it would have been impossible to stretch the moment out longer under the boss’s eyes, because Klára did not want anything like this to be happening in the shop. As if with her eyes she was asking me not to involve her in a dangerous situation in front of the wicked boss.
In that case, I preferred to take on my own humiliation again; all right, I’ll resign myself to leaving once again without the redeeming words.
I saw everything, I understood everything, I realized what I had to do, yet I did not leave.
The insatiable little child reached the end of his wishes and the three small bags filled with candy, fudge, and jelly beans were lined up next to the scale. The boss could openly raise her eyes to look at me.
She gazed at this lunatic for a long time.
Now I could only hope that a customer would come in and distract her so she’d turn away. Because she wouldn’t turn away to deal with the child, she let him stand there, in front of the counter, jingling the coins in his hand. The glasses the boss wore were small and round, and the thick lenses, when looked at from up close, enlarged her eyeballs. Her alarm was directed at me, but her gaze was always frightened, as if she feared everything and everybody. Her thin bony body was full of emotions. She sucked in her upper lip, the lower one protruding hideously as if she were ready to pucker it, her jaw set and taut. She wore a much-laundered yellow cardigan over her white work coat, perhaps to break the impression of a uniform, to be a little different from the other woman, and as we stared into each other’s alarmed eyes, the yellow of the cardigan particularly bothered me. Because of the emotional knots in her body, she pulled up her shoulders. Her voice was hoarse from heavy smoking, and the humorless edge of her words was at once a defense and an attack; a malicious woman.