The Silent Woman Read online

  Please do not get lost again. I beseech you with all my heart.

  Yours,

  The Old Tree

  P.S. The old tree no longer has any leaves or branches, and yet the spring winds have shaken its roots and it has flowered. Both the red flowers and the yellow ones will soon disappear without a trace.

  When I read these words, in the royal garden of my old age, a white flower budded.

  The train isn’t here yet. The only thing I can hear is a young man’s voice over the PA: “Attention, attention! A freight train will be arriving shortly at platform nineteen!” Its locomotive breathes and whispers and snores. What time is it, in fact? One doesn’t want to miss the train, after all. That new, square-shaped clock hanging over platform one must be slow. It says half past eleven. It’s stopped. It’s new and yet it’s stopped. I need to ask the time and look for the platform where his train will be arriving.

  The mother with the pram waves to me from the train and signals me to come over.

  “There’s something I have to ask you. I really have to!”

  “Look, no, I really can’t. Any moment now the train I’m expecting will . . .”

  “Please, I’m begging you . . .”

  On that train he will arrive, the one who is coming to see me. At seventy I’ve started my new life, I wouldn’t miss that train for anything in the world, I am about to say, but the mother has managed to sit me down next to her.

  “I want to ask you,” she says breathlessly, “it’s my grandmother, my grandmother’s making my life impossible.”

  As soon as a new announcement has been made over the PA: “Attention please, a warning for the driver of the locomotive,” I answer her, “Tell your grandmother that young people need to be with those their own age. And give her a piece of advice: every day she should feed the birds and water her flowers. And no matter what, spring will come. And . . .”

  Then I realize that the railway worker has signaled with his little red flag and I hear his whistle blow. I jump out of the train, which had slowly been getting underway. I land unsteadily. I’m dizzy and feel I’m about to fall under the train: Anna Karenina. The wheels turn, huge, threatening. I’m falling, but an inner voice orders me: You mustn’t fall! You have to get your balance back, you have no choice! You must go over to meet the other train! Maybe it is entering the station right now—right this instant! Everything is hanging on a thread, you must do this if you don’t want to lose everything at once!

  Then the railway worker runs over and helps me back to my feet. He takes a large, brown check handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes the sweat from my forehead.

  “If I were you I’d go have a stiff drink to get your strength back!” He tells me and taps his forehead as if to say, crazy old woman, jumping off a train like that!

  But I had to jump, I absolutely had to jump because a train is coming, bringing someone. Outwardly, I simply smile with a mixture of gratitude and guilt.

  I feel dizzy. I remember that I haven’t had anything to eat all day except a couple slices of bread and a few sips of tea.

  I am sitting at a table, drinking hot chocolate. The warmth spreads through my body, right down to the tips of my toes. For a long time now, I have learned to ignore cigarette and cigar smoke, and the reek of piled-up ashtrays in the Prague cafés. But noise is quite another matter. I can’t escape seated men with their glasses of beer in their hands, shouting. The only soft voices here in the café are those of lovers saying goodbye to each other. The noise is so deafening that I can’t even recognize music they’re playing. I can only hear mad, pounding music. Again, I savor my warm, comforting potion.

  My hair! I am flustered. My bun must have come apart when I jumped from the train. I pat it, everything seems to be in place. Now I run my fingers over the pearls adorning my ears and my body fills with joy. I adjust the raincoat collar, caressing the fabric, which has grown old with me. It is too light for this April weather, but I don’t care. It’s so elegant! I run my fingers over it once again: the pearls and the hair and the raincoat, my beloved things . . .

  The café is as jam packed as my own head. Snippets of sentences and smatterings of sensations and some piecemeal images swarm, all taken from my life, which has lasted a thousand years. Two young girls sit at my table and whisper into each other’s ears. I keep smiling: they are pretty, they must be exchanging secrets about men, and I could surely compare their experiences with my own memories of the time when I was as young as they are now.

  But my train! What if I were to miss the train I’m waiting for? I am horrified. But the possibility that I might overhear the girls’ conversation is so tempting! Just a second and then I’ll be off, I promise myself.

  The girls talk in whispers and I can’t catch a word of what they say. They murmur into each other’s ears, then burst out laughing. From time to time, they look at me. I do not attempt to read their lips; they would notice that.

  This art deco café is as old as I am. Maybe I’m older, even. It’s covered in huge mosaics from the period of independence, representing flowers and girls. This girl over here is spring. And that one? No, she’s not summer; she’s Phaedra, the enigmatic one, like these two young ladies, like I had once been, and as I perhaps still am for the man who—while I savor hot chocolate in a café and listen to the romantic secrets of two girls—is racing toward Prague in an express train, combing his hair, if he still has any, who at all events is standing up and sitting down again and standing up once more. Oh, how restless he is! I smile.

  All men used to get a little nervous in my presence. They’re dead now.

  We lose, and then we are lost to our loved ones. My loved ones have died. As someone once said, the dead live only in the memory of the living if, when they were alive, they proved themselves worthy of being remembered. Is that true? No. I don’t think so. Their memory will live as long as I do, no matter what kind of people they were.

  They have died, the women and men in my life: my mother and grandmother, my husband and my father, and the elegant Bruno Singer. Did they think of me before they died? Maybe they did. Or perhaps not. Does it matter at all? The only thing worth knowing is that in my own memory they have remained intact. The lives of the dead live on in the memory of the living.

  And the living? There are only a few left to me. The man in the express train is racing toward the sign that reads, Prague Central Station, which I can see through the window. The man is perhaps entering Prague right now. It is time to go and see if his train has arrived. It is due at platform six which is quite a walk from the station café. With all this noise I can’t hear the loudspeakers.

  What’s happened? Has the sun come out?

  A velvety baritone voice has made its presence felt and is now spreading through the café. It expelled the reek and noise and bad language. This male voice is dancing a mazurka on tiptoes. It descends all of a sudden to a low register, then floats up again like summer clouds over a meadow, only to descend once more to melancholy depths.

  “Your hot chocolate, madam,” a waiter is smiling at me.

  I don’t remember having ordered another one.

  “Where did it come from . . . the music?”

  “Schubert, do you mean?” the waiter says, so softly I have trouble making out his words, “I put it on just for a little while. It’s ‘An Sylvia,’ which I like a lot,” and he smiles apologetically, or so it seems, and I have a feeling he’s blushing.

  II

  SYLVA

  I take another sip of the hot chocolate; it reminds me of the touch of my grandmother’s fingers. My gaze slides down to the floor, to my feet in two differently colored stockings. One light, the other dark.

  I’m in such a tizzy. Like that day, a thousand years ago when I was a young girl in the chateau garden, the garden of my home, on the path by the riverside . . .

  Above us a blackbird happily chatted away. I looked for it among the branches to see if it might be carrying a worm in its beak. And then I
sank down into mud. Petr took my high-heeled shoe out of the muddy puddle and cleaned it. When he’d finished he made me sit down on one of the low branches of a hawthorn or a plane tree so he could remove the mud from my foot with his handkerchief. He spent a considerable amount of time rubbing away at it. Then suddenly, as if making an offhand remark, he said, “Sylva, she’s a poor woman. Your mother is.”

  My mother? Madame la Comtesse? I didn’t understand.

  Petr cleaned the mud off my foot right up to the ankle. Then he wrapped the handkerchief around my foot and kept rubbing it. Like a mother swaddling a newborn, I thought. When the handkerchief was all dirty, he scraped the mud from between my toes and wiped the sole of my foot. There was something in that mud that couldn’t be cleaned away.

  On the way back from the convent to the chateau, we laughed about my feet, one belonging to a little white girl, the other to a little black girl.

  An elderly person likes to sing the praises of the past.

  One black foot, one white one. That was fifty . . . no, fifty-five years ago. It’s as if thousands of years have passed me by. The thousand-year-old woman remembers. That could be a title for my memoirs, assuming I should ever want to write them. Clouds of steam have covered all the platforms, the only thing shining is the glass on the stopped clock near the ceiling.

  I taste the hot chocolate, again, I feel my grandmother’s supple fingers, the only fingers able to make me feel safe and sound in that haunted chateau . . .

  On the way back to the chateau, which belonged to my parents, the sides of the path were lined with yellow and white daisies and poppies and chicory and apple trees. Memories of my return trip come to mind, as do the reasons why I left my home for the convent. There is a single main reason for this, which I’ve never confessed to a soul. My mother often went to Prague to a ball or to the theater, to the opera or to a concert. She would put on her blue theater coat, the one with white ermine fur at the collar and the cuffs, and if she was going to a ball, she would put on the olive-green lace dress, or that sleeveless, pink satin one, and gloves so long they reached beyond her elbows. Often she wouldn’t even say goodbye. I waited for her under the big archway of the entrance gate on the far side of the bridge, and threw myself at Maman’s neck. I smelled her pompadour rose perfume and cried and shouted at her not to go. Maman always disentangled herself from me coldly, “What a pampered child! Back home with you!”

  And then there was the case of my father’s house slippers. I embroidered them with little blue flowers with orange stamens and green leaves on a black background. It was a lot of work; if I didn’t get one of the leaves right, I had to unstitch the entire flower. After a few months, everything was ready. The shoemaker put the finishing touches on them. I placed the slippers in a box that I wrapped in silky green paper. The following morning I handed my father the gift, tied up with a golden ribbon. Papa tried on the slippers and thanked me for them, but remained aloof. In the evening, when everyone was asleep, I was feeling hot, so I opened the door that led onto the corridor. Then from papa’s room, I heard his voice answering some question of my mother’s, “What a ludicrous thing, giving me slippers! They’re too small. I like best my usual ones, those really light fur ones!” I hid myself under the eiderdown so they couldn’t hear my sobs.

  When I left home for the convent, the night was dark, moonless, but the sky was splashed with stars. We passed through a silent landscape, the only sound was the neighing of the horses and the clip-clop of their hooves against the stones of the unpaved road. From one village to the next, the dogs greeted each other with barks, as our squeaking, creaking carriage moved on. In the sleeping villages behind dark trees and bushes, white houses glowed and I said to myself that on a night like this everybody ought to feel happy. The starry sky above and the unreachable horizon ahead made me ponder my future at the convent, and I imagined it full of veneration, beauty, and tolerance, brimming with magic, silence, and mysteries.

  The return journey to my parents’ chateau: a coffee-colored automobile, complete with chauffeur, drove over an asphalt road, with poppies and lilacs growing along the edges, and the apple trees wrapped up in billowy white clouds. From afar I looked at the ruins of a little castle on the hill, two fingers trying to touch the spring clouds, and suddenly our chateau appeared. Years had passed. From a distance, my parents’ chateau looked like a wine-colored glass box, decorated with white ornaments, like one of those boxes that ladies keep in their boudoir for perfumed handkerchiefs and love letters. When we got close, I saw that during my years of absence the plaster had flaked as if it were the surface of a croissant. We entered through the main gate, the arch, and crossed the little bridge where the servants bid me welcome. Well, no, not exactly. Rather, they acted as if they were bidding me welcome, whereas in fact they were watching me as if I were an ogre from a fairy tale.

  Maman wasn’t at home, Papa wasn’t either.

  In my room, they had placed a big, shiny piano with golden letters on it: PLEYEL.

  In the evening, my maid passed on the message: they were waiting for me upstairs. So I went up the palace stairs, up, up, and ever up. Then I climbed a spiral staircase and when I was so high up I couldn’t climb any further, I saw the silhouette of a mature, well-built woman. This lady turned her back to me and walked away to the right. Not knowing what to do, I followed her. The lady entered a room, and I was right behind her. She circled around a long table, I did the same. We skirted that table more than once, more than twice.

  The lady went up to the window, and opened it. Then I saw that wonderful thing.

  Against a background of darkening turquoise blue sky, dozens of volcanoes could be made out, their mounds both great and small like a row of dusky pyramids, and those volcanic hills were spitting clouds of fire and sulphur and lava into the air. The lady positioned herself so that her face was not visible, all of her was in shadows, and from her hair snakes of fire raised their heads. An Egyptian goddess. The queen of fire.

  Then a young man came into the room.

  They served me dinner at the table of my apartment. I was very hungry and there was only a tiny handful of rice with prawns on a huge plate. I was ashamed to ask for more. Then the door opened and the room filled with the smell of chocolate. My grandmother stepped from behind this aromatic curtain holding a silver tray with a cup and a few books on it. I took the cup of hot chocolate from my grandmother’s supple fingers. In silence, I savored the steaming chocolate.

  My grandmother watched me with her opal eyes. She gently stroked my hair with her smooth, soft palms. Although I preferred sitting on my own and in silence, I talked to my grandmother about all the things that I’d once longed to find in a religious place like the convent, but which, when it was all over, I hadn’t found at all.

  My grandmother sighed, “Sylva, very few things in life depend on whether we long for them or not.”

  By way of demonstration, she told me some of the myths of ancient Greece, and in the books she had just brought she showed me illustrations of classical heroes and heroines, old engravings on silky paper. Before going to bed, she gave me the sign of the cross. Her fingers gave off the smell of chocolate.

  Once in bed, I felt strange in these surroundings. I thought about the goddess of fire. Her image would not go away, a beautiful, voluptuous profile danced in reflections of burning lava. I started to play Schumann’s Arabesque, but it didn’t calm me down.

  In the morning I awoke at the crack of dawn, and went up the winding staircase in silence to the room where the evening before I had been led by that luxuriant woman who had showed me the beauty of her figure against the foil of the stormy sky. But there was nothing unusual now in that room. Though on the round table, next to the sofa, I did discover a pair of small, decorative combs, the kind used to hold a coiffure in place; their inlaid jewels shone like dewdrops in the brightness of dawn.

  Clouds of steam have covered all the platforms. An elderly person is an adorer of old times, I say to
myself, and aren’t my memories old? I raise the cup to my lips. The steam has covered all the platforms, the only thing shining is the glass of the stopped clock near the ceiling. What time must it be now? Must make sure I’m not late when the train I’m expecting finally pulls in.

  In the silence and darkness of the convent I was astonished by the paintings of biblical scenes; almost all of them were examples of obedience to the will of God or of punishments of those who failed to abide by it. Those images disturbed me. I found it difficult to understand them and I balked at the idea of making them part of my life: God orders the angel to expel—rather rudely, in fact—Adam and Eve from paradise. Why? For having disobeyed an order and eating an apple. Or the flood, what horror that was! The little children who drowned in the waves were guilty of nothing but being born! Why did God punish them? Or Lot’s wife, who was made into a pillar of salt simply for turning around to look at her home. Orders and bans. Must one always obey orders, no matter how cruel?

  The story that struck me as being more brutal than all the others I couldn’t get out of my head. God said to Abraham, “Abraham! Take your young son, your only child Isaac, who you love and for whom you have waited so long, and offer him up in sacrifice.” Abraham was prepared to do as he was commanded. Why? For the simple reason that the order came from his god. And God, when he saw that Abraham was so obedient, was happy and rewarded him. Is this kind of blind obedience a good thing? Is it good that, in order to satisfy his god, a man should kill the one he loves more than anything in the world? Is it good to obey a god as egocentric as this, a god who is capable of giving such a brutal order and putting someone to such a cruel test?

  There was nobody in the chateau I could talk to about this. I tried to talk with the stable lad.

  The young groom, Jakub, was the only person I could spend a little time with and get everything off my chest, talking nonstop, there in front of the stables.

  “Why did they send you to the convent?” he asked me one day, with a sardonic grimace that I didn’t really understand. “You aren’t the type of lady who wants to be spending time enclosed with nuns, a girl as pretty as you . . .”