I’m tired of driving, he explains.
You don’t have the face of a taxi-driver! she retorts.
I can’t help it … I drive a taxi … and anyway cars are useless in Venice … in Venice you walk.
Zdena pauses, perhaps to wonder what she’s doing.
A taxi-driver. It’s hard to believe, she says.
We’re all living things which are hard to believe, the man says, things we never imagined.
Forty minutes’ respite, announces the driver over the loudspeaker, not a minute more please.
Let the cat stay on my chest. I like her there, Gino. She’s purring. They say cats, when they lie on you, take away static electricity. Fear makes lots of static. She’s not frightened. She doesn’t know. Her warmth is going right into my bones. I can feel her purring between my ribs. Yes, put out the light. I think I’ll sleep.
When Zdena and the bald man, whose name is Tomas, come back into the coach, they are deep in conversation.
What shall I tell her when I see her? I can’t bear lies. All my life I’ve fought against lies—to my cost. But it’s stronger than me. I can’t bear lies.
You have a voice that couldn’t lie. There are voices that can’t lie.
So?
There’s no need to lie. What’s needed is calm.
I haven’t seen her for six years. As you might guess, I blame myself: if I’d been with her, it wouldn’t have happened. I shouldn’t have come back, I should have stayed with her in France. She needed me. Of course I blame myself.
There’s no blame.
She’s so young, so young.
Whom the gods love …
There’s no love in SIDA. I’m a scientist, Zdena says, I know what I’m talking about. No love. Not a scrap.
You mustn’t panic, Citizen.
Citizen! You’re the second person this week to call me Citizen. I thought our ancient form of address was junked.
You like to hear it?
Now it’s no longer used, I suppose I do. When it was used I hated the hypocrisy of it. Today it reminds me of my teens, when I dreamt of going to the Conservatoire.
There’s a silence. Both of them remembering.
So, she’s getting married, the man says.
An Italian has fallen in love with her, and insists upon marrying her. Crazy.
He knows?
Of course.
Why is he crazy?
Be reasonable, he’s crazy.
She doesn’t want to get married?
She wants everything and she wants nothing. They can’t have children. I’ll never know what she feels. Nobody else can know. But I feel it here! She used the Slav word douchá and the way she pronounced it as she put her hand to the base of her neck, indicated that, although she was small, and light as a bird, her longing and her despair were immense.
Outside, the trees are blacker than the sky and the driver has put on an old cassette of a Verdi opera. The honeymoon couple are cuddling and the shopkeepers are opening cans of beer.
Is he unemployed, your future son-in-law?
He sells clothes, men’s clothes.
So he works in a big store.
No, in street markets. He’s called Gino.
That’s short for Luigi.
Yes, taxi-driver!
If I understand, you’ve never met him?
Here’s a photo of the two of them in Verona, my daughter sent it.
She’s very beautiful, your daughter, and she already looks Italian! As for Gino with his big nose, his big teeth and his long wrists, he’s exactly like a young man drawn by Lucas van Leyden. A long time ago, nearly five centuries. I have a postcard of the drawing at home. Lucas probably drew it a few months after meeting Albrecht Dürer—the two of them swapped drawings in Antwerp.
How come you know so much?
Gino and the man in van Leyden’s drawing have the same kind of independence. It goes with their faces—with those teeth and that nose. It has nothing to do with rank. Men like them never have power. They’re riders. Much later the Americans turned the rider into a cowboy, but he’s much older than America. He’s the man in folktales who comes to take you away on his horse. Not to his palace; he doesn’t have one. He lives in a tent in the forest. He’s never learnt to count—
If he sells clothes in a street market, I’d have thought he could count!
Prices, yes, consequences, no.
That’s why I say crazy, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
He knows exactly what he’s doing. More than you or I know what we’re doing. When we do a thing, when we decide to do something, we’re already thinking about what it’ll be like when it’s done, when it’s over. Not him. He only thinks about what he’s doing at the moment.
His passion, apparently, is fishing on the river Po.
His passion is your daughter.
Zdena lowers her head, as if ashamed. The coach passes a castle with lights in every window and hundreds of cars parked outside.
Lucas van Leyden, the bald man says after a silence of several minutes—a silence underlined by the snoring of the passengers already asleep—Lucas van Leyden died before he was forty.
I don’t think Dutch painters of the sixteenth century take taxis in Bratislava—so how do you know?
Every day I bring with me a hundred postcards to look at whilst I’m waiting for a fare.
Zdena raises her head and, for the first time in weeks, she laughs.
The bald man shakes his head and smiles.
Then she says: When I listen to you, I feel you deploy your encyclopaedic knowledge—for that’s what it is—so as not to have to face the pain of it, the cruelty of life.
Under the ancien régime, he says, I used to work for an encyclopaedia.
That explains everything!
Not everything.
Everything about you! She laughs again.
The Encyklopédia Slovenska, he announces.
I have it at home. You were an editor?
I tried to keep the painters for myself. I was a general editor.
And now?
What do you expect? L’ancienne encyclopédie! There’s no money. We were turned out into the street, and each of us was given fifty sets of the encyclopaedia to sell. If we succeeded we could keep the money for ourselves.
I bet they were hard to sell.
I didn’t sell one set. I kept my car and I became a taxi-driver.
You lose your job working for an encyclopaedia, Tomas, and I begin composing a dictionary of political terms. We’re political enemies.
My wife makes dresses … No, don’t … yes, do … cry …
I haven’t cried once.
Then cry, my dear, cry.
Her sobs come faster, and so as not to be heard, she buries her mouth in her companion’s jacket. Later she tries to speak but she can’t find her voice. Then she says:
… and what a black mountain
Has blocked the world from the light.
It’s time—It’s time—It’s time
To give back to God his ticket.
The coach hurtles down the motorway. The shopkeepers drink their last beer. The bride lays her head on the crotch of her sleeping husband. And Tomas puts his arm round the woman from Bratislava who quoted Tsvetayeva.
Soon all the passengers will be asleep and the driver will switch off the music. It’s easier for him to stay awake with the music off.
I was standing at the bar in Piraeus. There was nobody else there. Yanni had gone to bed. I’d missed the last train back to Athens and I was waiting for Yanni’s grandson to take me up to the terrace where I was going to sleep. In the deserted bar the voice I heard was drunk.
Get it straight, pain is what you give, not receive. They’re dirt, the ones that get it. They can’t defend themselves, this shows they’re dirt. See how they talk. Pain is what you give when you have to. And the payoff is you’re Master. Being on top is being alive. They think they’re alive but they’re not. They weren’t
made properly, they’re Bastards. They fiddle. Fiddle and plead. Listen to them and you’re lost. Left to themselves, they’d live longer than us. Hesitate and the men’ll slit you. With the women you know what to do. They only hate if you let them hate. Get in before they hate. If you don’t show who you are, you become dirt too. Get in. Feel them go limp. Men and women, not for the same reasons though. Each one gone limp makes you stronger. Better the first time to be with companions. You don’t know your strength yet. And if you don’t know your strength, you’re weak. That’s true in any language. Afterwards it’s routine. You say to yourself—I’ve done it once, it’s done, so what the hell? I’ve done it a dozen times, so fuck the women. I’ve done it twenty times. It makes no difference. You get a rage shaking you. Too late then. We all go through that one. Then the rage goes, and you know for sure who you are and what you can do. Being Master is being alive—until you’re dead. Amen.
In the hut on the riverbank where Jean Ferrero is sleeping, the Po is audible: it makes a noise like lips being licked because the mouth is too dry. Yet rivers never speak and their indifference is proverbial. The Alamana, the Po, the Rhine, the Danube, the Dnieper, the Sava, the Elbe, the Koca, where some lost soldiers of Alexander the Great fought stragglers of the Persian army in a skirmish of which there is no record—there’s not a great river anywhere for which men have not died in battle, their blood washed away in a few minutes. And at night after the battles, the massacres begin.
The coach driver is driving slowly, for the visibility is poor. The wipers barely clear the windscreen and they scrape like rakes. The headlights illuminate a wall of falling snow, beyond which he can make out nothing. He slows to walking pace, and finally stops, puts on the handbrake and switches off the engine.
With the engine cut, the noise of the sleeping passengers sounds louder: snores, the bubbling of deep breaths, murmurs like those of an organ after the organist has stopped playing. Outside the coach, silence, a silence of feathers.
Zdena stirs, opens an eye, screws it up, rubs the misted window with her left hand. Rubbed, it reveals nothing different. Snowflakes falling, so close together they touch one another.
We’ve lost our way. She says this to the man against whose shoulder she has been sleeping.
The bald man opens his eyes and takes in the snow.
We must be near Packsattel, he says. What I don’t understand is why we have stopped.
Because we can’t go on.
She leans against his shoulder, still half asleep.
We should be able to go on, she says, we should, and we don’t. They say communism is dead, yet we’ve lost our nerve. We have nothing to fear and we are frightened of everything.
For something to die, the man says, for something to be dead, it has first to be alive. And this wasn’t the case with communism.
You had a Party card!
So one can’t talk of it being dead. To talk of it being dead is a stupidity.
Are we going to stay here forever? Stay here forever. Ever. Forever?
Sshh … I’ll tell you a story. Can you hear me?
“Let me sing of sorrow from the top of the mountain,” Zdena plucks with little pinches at the material of the man’s sleeve. That’s also Marina Tsvetayeva, you know?
Once, Tomas says, once there was a man called Ulrich. He lived in the Koralpe which is probably near where we are now. This was fifty years ago.
Around the time Marina hanged herself, Zdena says.
Ulrich had a chalet high up in the alpage, a four-hour walk from the road. Every summer he took his goats and his two cows up there. In the morning he would go out barefoot over the grass and collect with a shovel all the cow-shit he could find and dump it in one heap. He did this like Hoovering a carpet at home. All the men in the alpage did the same, for cows won’t eat grass where shit has rested for days, and in the ferocious immensity of these mountains every square metre of green grass is precious.
With the coach stopped, the snowflakes stick to the windows to make the effect of crochet-work lace curtains. Calm now, Zdena nuzzles her ear against the man’s shoulder.
One year, earlier than anybody expected, the snows came, continues the bald man. So Ulrich decided not to fight his way down but to spend the winter in the chalet. He made a tunnel through the snow to the stable and barn where the hay was stacked. He stayed on the mountainside all winter and not one of his animals died.
The bald man rests his hand on her hair. Her hair is short and curly with traces of gray at the roots. She is on the verge of sleep.
In the valley the villagers were frightened for Ulrich. The other men had all come down. If Ulrich spends the winter up there, they said, he’ll go mad. When the spring came and the snows melted, some of the villagers climbed up to see Ulrich. He welcomed them in, he offered them fire-water and he appeared to be completely himself. We must wait and see, the villagers said on their way down, these things take time.
With her hair between the fingers of his large hand, he prevents her head lolling and falling too low, and this gentle tugging on her scalp keeps her just awake enough to hear some of the words.
The next year, before the snows came, Ulrich decided not to go down to the valley but to spend the winter with his animals on the mountainside. And this is what he did. He saw to it that there was enough hay and they all survived. In this way the years passed. Sometimes the snows came early, sometimes late, but Ulrich never again came down to the village for the winter.
One summer, years later, the village schoolmaster was walking high in the mountains and he came upon Ulrich and so he asked him: Ulrich, why do you never come back to the village when the snows come? And Ulrich replied: Imagine, Mister Schoolmaster, imagine how hard it would be for a man to spend six months in a village surrounded by people who are convinced he is mad! I’m better here.
The bald man can feel the woman’s regular breathing. Sleep, little mother, sleep.
Hold me tight, Gino.
One evening, says a voice speaking in Spanish, a healthy twelve-year-old boy from a poor family of landless peasants on the borders of the Río Cuichal didn’t come home. The father looked for his son for days, and finally said he must have been kidnapped. There were other cases he had heard about. Yesterday this boy was found in the town of Tlatlauquitepec. Cross-questioned, he said all he could remember was waking up in a bed with figures in white coats looking down at him. Examinations showed he had been operated on. Today he has only one kidney. The second one was stolen for a transplant. The networks who cut out and sell stolen organs—taken from the young because they are healthier—are paid in U.S. dollars. I’m not giving the boy’s name because his family, to whom he returned on the borders of the Río Cuichal, are frightened of reprisals.
Hold me tight, Gino.
The signalman wriggles out of the sleeping bag whilst the boys are still asleep. John the Baptist lies naked on a mattress in the corner, his sex like a fledgling on a black nest. Outside in the early light it’s impossible to see the other side of the Po. Jean pushes his bike off its stand, opens the choke and presses the start button. He follows the track where last night he took the boys up and down for rides, until he gets to the ferry, then he takes the road for Ferrara.
When Zdena wakes up there is no more snow and the coach is in the bus station of Trieste. The sun is up and the seat beside her is empty. She glances at the luggage rack: he has taken both his hat and his battered dispatch case.
Have I time to go and wash? she asks the driver, who is eating cherries from a paper bag and spitting the stones out of the window.
The driver looks at his watch. We leave in four minutes, he says.
The coach-load of passengers from Bratislava is more alert than yesterday. Today they are in a foreign country which, until recently, was a forbidden one. They are in Italy—land of fruit and wine, of elegant shoes, jewellery, corruption and sunshine. The newlyweds are impatient to go to bed in their Venetian hotel. The shopkeepers are impatient to g
et down, to take note of every difference and to buy whatever they can.
The driver starts the engine. Zdena climbs up into the coach, panting.
You can’t leave yet, there’s a passenger missing!
If somebody misses the bus, says the driver, it’s not the bus’s fault.
Please, wait two minutes more, I’m asking you.
You know how long we have in Venice to turn around, lady, before I drive back? Eight hours, no more, and I need some sleep.
That’s wrong, says Zdena, you are entitled to twenty-four hours.
Entitled! You want more than eight hours, they scream, then drive for another coach line, not ours!
It’s against the security regulations, argues Zdena.
Who cares?
I know he was going to Venice, he told me so.
He’s not the first man, sweetheart, to vanish in Trieste.
He had a ticket for Venice!
He was the first passenger to get down. You were still asleep!
Please, one moment more. You can make up the time on the autoroute.
There’s a speed limit.
Who cares? You just said it. Who cares?
She opens her handbag and slips a couple of hundred-koruna notes under the paper bag of cherries on the shelf by the windscreen.
I’d say you’re a doctor? says the driver.
No, I’m an engineer.
I’ll give you two minutes, engineer, not a second more.
He lays the palm of his hand flat on the klaxon and hoots. Not once but three times.
That should put him up if anything can! And again! Again. There he is!
Encyclopaedia editors rarely run. The man, who has appeared at the street corner, tries to sprint, doubled up, holding his case against his chest like somebody performing in an egg and spoon race. All those watching from the coach smile, Zdena included.
Once seated, it takes him a while to catch his breath.
I kept the coach back for you, they wanted to leave without you.
By way of reply, Tomas unfolds a paper napkin and shows her two rolls of golden milk bread decorated with sugar crystals and vermilion berries.