But is she really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively, so silently? I don't know, and it's not very important. What matters is that she doesn't interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: "It's absolutely the same with me, I ..." and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own "It's absolutely the same with me, I..."
The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I ..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. The whole secret of Tamina's popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying her ear, never saying: "It's absolutely the same with me, I . . ."
2
Bibi is ten years younger than Tamina. For nearly a year she has been talking to Tamina about herself, day after day. Not long ago (that, in fact, was when it all began), she told her she was planning to go with her husband on vacation to Prague that summer.
With that, Tamina thought she was awakening from a sleep of several years. Bibi went on talking, and Tamina (contrary to her habit) broke in:
"Bibi, if you go to Prague, could you drop by at my father's and get something for me? It's nothing big, just a small parcel. It'll easily fit into your suitcase."
"I'd do anything for you!" said Bibi with great eagerness.
"I'll be eternally grateful," said Tamina.
"You can count on me," said Bibi. The two women talked a bit about Prague, and Tamina's cheeks were burning.
"I want to write a book," Bibi said next.
Thinking about her small parcel back in Bohemia, Tamina realized she had to make sure of Bibi's friendship. So she immediately offered Bibi her ear: "A book? About what?"
Bibi's year-old daughter was crawling around under her mother's barstool, making a lot of noise.
"Be quiet!" said Bibi down at the floor, and drew on
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her cigarette with a pensive look. "About the world as I see it."
The little girl's cries grew more and more shrill, and Tamina asked: "Would you know how to write a book?"
"Why not?" she said, looking pensive again. "Of course, I have to get a bit of information on how you go about writing a book. Do you by any chance know Banaka?"
"Who is that?" asked Tamina.
"A writer," said Bibi. "He lives around here. I've got to meet him."
"What has he written?"
"I don't know," said Bibi, and added pensively: "Maybe I should read one of his things."
Lost Letters
law was off to a bad start, Tamina set out to question her at length about her health and about what she was doing, before she could bring herself to say: "I have a favor to ask of you. When we were leaving the country, we left a parcel with you."
"A parcel?"
"Yes. Pavel and you put it away in his father's old desk, and he locked the drawer. You'll recall he always had a drawer of his own in that desk. And then he gave you the key."
"I don't have your key."
"But you've got to have it! I'm sure Pavel gave it to you. I was there."
"You didn't give me a thing."
"It's been quite a few years, and maybe you've forgotten. All I'm asking you is to look for that key. You'll certainly find it."
"And what do you want me to do with it?"
"Just look and see if the parcel is still there."
"And why wouldn't it be? Didn't you put it there?"
"Yes."
"Then why should I open the drawer? What do you think I've done with your notebooks?"
That stunned Tamina: How could her mother-in-law know there were notebooks in the drawer? They were wrapped and the parcel was carefully sealed with gummed tape. But she did not let her surprise show:
"I'm not suggesting anything like that. I just want you to look and see if everything's there. I'll tell you more next time."
3
Instead of an exclamation of joyful surprise, what came through the receiver was an icy: "Well, well! You still remember me?"
"You know I'm not rolling in money. Phoning you is expensive," Tamina said in apology.
"You could write. As far as I know, stamps aren't so expensive there. I don't even recall when I got your last letter."
Realizing that the conversation with her mother-in-
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"You can't tell me what this is about?"
"I can't keep talking, it's so expensive!"
Her mother-in-law started to sob: "Then don't phone me, if it's too expensive!"
"Don't cry, please," said Tamina. She knew her sobs by heart. Whenever her mother-in-law had wanted something from them, she would weep. Weeping was her way of blaming them, and there was nothing more aggressive than her tears.
The receiver shook with her sobs, and Tamina said: "Goodbye now, I'll phone again soon."
Tamina did not dare hang up before her mother-in-law stopped weeping and said goodbye. But the sobs went on, with every tear adding to the phone call's cost.
Tamina hung up.
"You've talked for a very long time," said the owner's wife, aggrieved, and pointed to the telephone meter. Then she calculated how much the call to Bohemia would cost, and Tamina was horrified by the amount. She would have to count every coin to make it to the next payday. But she paid up without batting an eye.
Lost Letters
a group going to the Yugoslav coast. Once there, they abandoned the group and, after crossing the Austrian border, headed west.
Afraid of drawing attention during their time with the group, they took only one large suitcase each. At the last moment, they had not dared to take with them the bulky parcel containing their letters to each other and lamina's notebooks. If a police officer of occupied Bohemia had made them open their baggage at cus-toms, they immediately would have been under suspicion for bringing along on a two-week seaside vacation the entire archive of their private life. And knowing that their apartment would be confiscated by the state after their departure, they did not want to leave the parcel there, and so they deposited it at Tamina's mother-in-law's, in a drawer of the soon-to-be-unused desk left behind by her deceased father-in-law.
Abroad, Tamina's husband had fallen ill, and lamina could only look on as death slowly took him. When he died, they asked her whether she wanted to have him buried or cremated. She told them to cremate him. Then they asked her if she wanted to keep him in an urn or preferred to have the ashes scattered. Having no home, she was afraid she would be carrying her husband around all the rest of her life like a piece of hand luggage. She had his ashes scattered.
I imagine the world rising higher and higher around Tamina like a circular wall, and that she is a bit of lawn down at the bottom. Growing on that bit of lawn, there is only a single rose, the memory of her husband.
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4
Tamina and her husband had left Bohemia illegally. They had signed up with the official travel agency for
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Or I imagine Tamina's present (which consists of serving coffee and offering her ear) as a raft adrift on the water, with her on that raft looking back, looking only back.
After a while, she fell into despair because the past was becoming more and more faint. All she had left of her husband was his passport photo, the other photographs having remained in the confiscated Prague apartment. Looking at that pathetic stamped dogeared full-face photo of her husband (like a criminals mug shot), she saw that it was scarcely like him. Every day, she engaged in a kind of spiritual exercise be
fore this picture, trying to visualize her husband in profile, then half profile, then three-quarter. Recapturing the lines of his nose and chin, she was horrified every day to notice the imaginary sketch showing newly questionable points introduced by the uncertain memory that was doing the drawing.
During these exercises, she tried to evoke his skin, its color and all its tiny blemishes—warts, growths, freckles, small veins. It was difficult, almost impossible. The colors her memory supplied were unreal, and with such colors there was no way to simulate human skin. So she had settled on a special recollection technique of her own. Whenever she sat facing a man, she would use his head as material for sculpture: gazing intently at him, she would imagine remaking the contours of the face, giving him a darker complexion and putting warts and freckles on it, reducing the ears' size, coloring the eyes blue.
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Lost Letters
But all these efforts only showed that her husband's image was irrevocably slipping away. At the beginning of their time together, he had asked her (ten years older than she, he had already gotten some idea of human memory's wretchedness) to keep a diary that would record their life. She had resisted, declaring it would make light of their love. She loved him too much to admit that what she considered unforgettable could ever be forgotten. Finally, of course, she obeyed him, but with no enthusiasm. The notebooks showed it: there were many empty pages, and the entries were fragmentary.
5
She had lived with her husband in Bohemia for eleven years, and the notebooks left at her mother-in-law's were also eleven in number. Not long after her husband's death, she bought a school notebook and divided it in eleven sections. She of course managed to recollect a good many half-forgotten events and situations, but she had no idea in what part of the school note-book to enter them. The chronological order was irremediably lost.
She tried initially to recover memories that could serve as reference points in time's flow and become the
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underlying framework of a reconstructed past. Their vacations, for example. There must have been eleven of them, but she could recall only nine. Two had been lost forever.
Then she tried to distribute the nine rediscovered vacations among the eleven sections of the school notebook. She could manage that with certainty only for years marked by something exceptional. In 1964, Tamina's mother had died, and a month later they had vacationed sadly in the Tatras. And she knew that the year after that they had gone to the Bulgarian seashore. She also recalled the vacations of 1968 and the following year, because they were the last they spent in Bohemia.
But if she succeeded after a fashion in reconstructing most of their vacations (though she was unable to date all of them), she completely failed to recollect their Christmases and New Years. Of eleven Christmases, she found only two in her mind's recesses, and of twelve New Years she could recall only five.
She also tried to remember all the names he had bestowed on her. Only during their first two weeks had he called her by her real name. His tenderness was a nonstop nickname machine. As the names quickly wore out, he incessantly gave her new ones. In their twelve years together, she had had some twenty or thirty, each one belonging to a specific period of their life.
But how to rediscover the lost link between a nickname and the rhythm of time? Only rarely does
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Lost Letters
Tamina manage to find it. She remembers, for example, the days after her mother's death. Her husband insistently whispered her name into her ear (that time's name, the name of the moment), as if trying to wake her from a dream. It is a nickname she remembers and can confidently enter in the section headed 1964." But all the other names are soaring outside time, free and mad like birds escaped from an aviary. That is why she so desperately wants to have that parcel of notebooks and letters.
She knows, of course, that there are also quite a few unpleasant things in the notebooks, days of dissatis-faction, arguments, and even boredom, but that is not what matters. She does not want to give back to the past its poetry. She wants to give back to it its lost body. What is urging her on is not a desire for beauty. It is a desire for life.
For Tamina is adrift on a raft and looking back, looking only back. Her entire being contains only what she sees there, far behind her. Just as her past con-tracts, disintegrates, dissolves, so Tamina is shrinking and losing her contours.
She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.
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Lost Letters
Hugo had bad breath, but apart from that, lamina rather liked him: he was a quiet, shy young fellow, about five years younger than she. He would come to the cafe once a week, now looking through a pile of books, now at Tamina standing behind the bar.
"Yes," he said.
"I'd like to know the subject of one of his books."
"Don't forget, Tamina," replied Hugo, "that no one has ever read anything by Banaka. Anyone who reads a book of Banaka's is considered an idiot. Everyone knows that Banaka is a second-rate or third-rate or even tenth-rate writer. Believe it or not, Banaka himself is such a victim of his own reputa-tion that he looks down on people who read his books."
She stopped trying to obtain Banaka's books, simply deciding to go ahead and arrange Bibi's meeting with the writer. From time to time Tamina lent the room she lived in, which was empty during the day, to a tiny Japanese married woman nicknamed Joujou, for her trysts with an equally married philosophy professor. The professor knew Banaka, and Tamina made the lovers promise to bring him along to her place one day when Bibi would be there, visiting.
When Bibi heard the news, she said to her: "Maybe Kanaka's good-looking and your sex life's finally going to change."
6
Why then hadn't she told her mother-in-law long ago to send her the parcel?
In her native country, correspondence with foreign countries passes through the hands of the secret police, and Tamina could not accept the idea of police officials poking their noses into her private life. And then her husband's name (which was also hers) had surely remained on the blacklists, for the police took an unfailing interest in any document pertaining to the lives of their adversaries, even those who were dead. (Tamina was not mistaken on that score: our only immortality is in the police files.)
Because of this, Bibi was her only hope, and she was willing to do anything to further their friendship. If Bibi was to be introduced to Banaka, Tamina thought her friend should be familiar with the plot of at least one of his books. It was in fact absolutely essential for her to slip into their conversation remarks like "Yes, that's just what you say in your book" or "You're just like your characters, Mr. Banaka!" Tamina knew that there wasn't a single book at Bibi's and that reading bored her. So she wanted to learn a bit about Banaka's book to prepare her friend for her meeting with the writer.
As Tamina was serving a customer his coffee, she asked him: "Hugo, do you know Banaka?"
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Lost Letters
7
It's true that Tamina had not made love since the death of her husband. Not on principle. Her posthumous fidelity, on the contrary, seemed almost ridiculous to her, and she never boasted about it. But whenever she imagined undressing before a man (and she imagined it often), she saw her husband's image before her. She knew she would see him if she actually did so. She knew she would see his face and see his eyes watching her.
It was obviously incongruous, it was even absurd, and she was aware of that. She d
idn't believe in the life after death of her husband's soul, nor did she think she would offend his memory by taking a lover. But there was nothing she could do about it.
She even had a peculiar thought: It would have been much easier than it was now to be unfaithful to her husband when he was still alive. Her husband had been cheerful, brilliant, strong, and she, feeling much weaker, had the impression that, try as she might, she would have been unable to wound him.
But now everything was different. Now she would be harming someone unable to defend himself, who was at her mercy like a child. Because now that he was dead, her husband had no one but her, no one but her in the entire world!
That is why, the moment she even considered the possibility of physical love with another man, her husband's
image suddenly appeared, and with it an agonizing yearning, and with that yearning an immense desire to weep.
8
Banaka was ugly and found it difficult to awaken a woman's dormant sensuality. Tamina poured him a cup of tea, and he thanked her very respectfully. Everyone felt at home at Tamina's, and Banaka, turning to Bibi with a smile, quickly broke into the rambling conversation:
"I gather you want to write a book. A book about what?"