Tender Cruelties

PROLOGUE

If you're a good girl, you may go to school in September, promises father.

I try. I try very hard.

In the morning, I leap out of bed. I wash conscientiously, even behind the ears, where nobody can see. I clean my teeth from up-to-down, as I have been thought. I get dressed all by myself, like a grown-up person.

I brush my hair until every single one stands at attention: I become a model little girl.

Summer has never been as long: long and rainy.

It's the summer when wheat, under the balmy rain, grows bushy sprouts like weeds; the summer when earthworms parade around the porch of our kitchen. It's the summer, when young mice have to save their lives, swimming away from they inundated nests.

And it's also the summer when I am to become a school-girl.

I wake up in the morning.

Rain is swaying on the windows; it has fun day and night, and never has to go to bed.

With a harsh, metallic sound, it slides along the tiles on the roof and crushes vehemently down into the gutter, going glug-glug.

The little devils, dozing behind our chimney, are startled out of their sleep.

Rain is a plague. It rots the fruit on the trees, it blackens the wheat which dreamt of becoming golden.

The forest behind our house is steaming. Firs fling blue-green raindrops at my shivering neck.

Every day, before dawn, mother wakes me up. She chucks me out of my warm, cosy bed, makes me put on clumsy gumboots and a heavy raincoat. And off we go, to hunt slimy mushrooms.

Humidity attacks me: it blocks my nose, it makes me sneeze. I am soaking wet and sad.

It's pitch-dark. We stop at the edge of the forest awaiting dawn, when the trees will detach themselves from the menacing mass of the forest, when a hint of light will separate the branches stuck close together.

I'd rather stay at home and read, cuddled in a dry, smooth leather armchair; go down to the kitchen and watch grandmother, preparing our lunch; accompany the maid to do shopping in the village under her red and white checked umbrella. Yet I am with my mother in the woods.

She is not an unkind mother; just unable to conceive that her little daughter would hate what she loves most.

I loathe the forest - the mud, the sticky humidity of the spongy earth.

The gumboots scratch my feet, the raincoat crushes my shoulders. If that's all there is to Nature, thank you very much. I have seen enough! It disgusts me and I do not want to have anything to do with such a brutal and hostile world.

The mushrooms mock me. Their shady little eyes under hitch-up hats observe me with the spiteful grins of wicked teasers.

Mother is fiddling with the moss. Under her experienced fingers mushrooms turn up their polished heads and give her a welcoming smile.

Delicately, mother pulls them out and puts them tenderly into a wicker basket. Her face is beaming. Hunting mushrooms is part of her simple, rustic happiness.

I love my mother. For nothing in the world would I sadden her, spoil her fun, point out my absolute lack of interest for all the mushrooms in the world. Not to my mother, not to her, who never shows off with her adult's superiority!

I am kneeling down by her, trying to imitate her: not a single mushroom comes up to my aloof fingers.

To let me share her treasure, mother asks me to gather her mushrooms. This is an act of utmost generosity and I pay her back, accompanying her, without grumbling, on her forest expeditions.

Mother is a decent person.

Looked down on by my grandfather, for whom a woman has none other than a domestic avail, neglected by my grandmother who preferred her son, who, being a man, deserved her respect mother has got used to slip through the world, without asking for its attention, leading the existence of a tiny, timid creature, content to be allowed to live and be pleased with a sunbeam to warm her, with a drop of water to appease her thirst.

Without raising an objection, she married my father. My grandfather, who was financially ruined, chose him personally for his wealth and his promising future, among a long line of other suitors, - my mother being one striking beauty.

Mother put on patiently with my father's love, and discharged her obligations to him by giving him two children. She has never let anybody come close to her, or her private life to be disrupted more than was necessary.

She doesn't love us.

She doesn't hate us.

She tolerates us with a rare generosity.

Thus everyone lives a strictly-private life: grandfather with his culture; grandmother with her culinary art, her slushy love-stories, her dulcified music, and her romantic dreams; father with his stock-exchange and his adored wife; mother with her little pleasures; my sister with her starched nurse, and I with my books.

Father looks after our financial security, and the servants after our comfort..

BOOK ONE

USTI

If nothing is perfect, everything is acceptable, like my life with Rudolf. I don't disturb him any more, he doesn't hurt me any longer. We dwell on opposite sides of a lunar space, so far from each other that our bodies have been streamlined into Chinese silhouettes, raised against the vague horizon of a desert.

My days flow by to the suave sound of Mozart music, not minding a gritty, forlorn tune trickling down through a serene harmony, pouring out its obstinate despair into the intimate spheres of my life.

I know how and when to smile.

I am obliging.

I never contradict my husband.

My life with Rudolf has all the traits of an ideal marriage. We never quarrel and I try my best never to be a discredit to him. He has enough time to cultivate his ambitions and build up his career. And, during the World Football Championship, he can watch the matches on television to his heart's content. I do not complain about being neglected, like other wives, less indulgent than I am.

We have now a two-bedrooms flat in a concrete house built in Stalin's neo-classicism style.

Fascists of any kind have the same taste: overblown, misshapen, monumental. Dwarfs long inevitably for magnitude.

Our flat is situated on the ground floor to the right of the entrance, flanked by a pair of plaster columns, supporting the statues of a worker and a doctor, tending their stiff arms to each other.

Hail to the fraternity of the working classes , once treacherously divided by perfidious capitalists, proclaim their crooked mouths.

The building is a ten-storey high bunker, pierced by tiny, glum windows. On the opposite side is a school, built by the Nazis, in a similar style.

The street in-between is barren, without a single tree. The pavement is tarmacked.

Greyness prevails.

In October, I begin my studies by correspondence at the Institute of Russian Language and Literature, an extension of the Charles University, and the prospects of the studies shelter me from the barbs of my everyday life.

Once a month, I finish my Thursday courses at noon, - I teach Russian in the factories and institutions of Usti nad Labem, a dreary industrial town not far from the German border,- and travel to Prague.

The lectures at the Institute take place on Fridays and Saturdays from seven in the morning until nine in the evening, with an hour break for lunch; from seven until lunch on Sundays.

The local train, that I board, moves like a bone-idle snail through the one hundred and twenty kilometres, separating Usti from the capital, arriving to Prague at five in the evening. I could take the express train at seven PM and be in Prague at nine, but this little local train is my only self-indulging leisure.

The evening express is crowded with tired, waspish people who never stop jostling and arguing. The local train is nearly empty. A handful of elderly people and squealing school children, travelling between the little towns and villages, usually stay in the corridor. I watch them passing by, trying to figure out their lives.

That restless, ginger-head, is hardly a model schoolboy. He is too involved in real life and he has too much to do! Returning home, he runs off to inspect the fields, the woods and the farm yard.

The ginger-head is a solitary hunter. Nobody has time to watch over him. His mother is in charge of the cows in the agricultural cooperative where his father drives a tractor. He probably has several siblings. He must be the youngest one: his worn-thin clothes are too big for him, though spick-and-span. At least they were so in the morning. The stains and smears are recent, the mud on his shoes has not yet dried completely.

His mother takes good care of him. The sandwich, he is eating, is stuffed with juicy ham. They keep a pig, slaughtered in January. They smoke the larger part of the meat, so they would have some in stock all year round. This redheaded boy needs nourishing food. He is in continuous motion. To stay still, with a book in his hands, must be sheer agony for him. The earthly world interests him too much to fish for its reflections in textbooks.

Suddenly, the redhead becomes aware of me. He pulls a clown's face, opens the door of my compartment and hands me his sandwich.

Why don't you take a bite? Where are you going?

To school. Yes, please, I'll gladly try your sandwich, if you can spare it.

He breaks off a generous lump and gives it to me, scrutinising me intensely.

No kidding! You're a bit too old, you know. What the hell have you done so that they keep you in so long?

Suspicion lurks. He would like to clear off, but not before he would understand, as not to get himself trapped .

You must be some dunce, to repeat your grades to your age! Did you play hooky, or chatter all the time?

Nothing like that. Don't worry. I'm working, you know, and so I go to school just once a month for two and a half days.

'Fancy that, she is nobody's fool, this big one! She does all right for herself. To get bored just once a month! She must know how to pull strings!'

Do you think I could do it too? He asks me avidly. How come they let you?

I don't think it will work for you. Sorry. You have to finish your schooling first, then you can do like me.

He looks at me amazed:

' Did you ever see such a moron? Going to school if you don't have to! When there are so many fantastic things to do!'

He has made up his mind: I am a fool and better keep away from me. He tries to be polite, as he was taught to, with the grown-ups.

Excuse me, Miss. I have to go back to my friends. I've something important to tell them. I'm getting off at the next stop, anyway. Good-bye, Miss.

He hands me his hand, wishing to leave me as quickly as he can.

Wait a moment. Thanks for the sandwich. No need to be scared. You don't need to go to school for as long as I, if you don't wish so.

But he is gone. His angst of being condemned to a life-long schooling , shall soon dissolve under the high blue sky.

To walk to my parents' from the Central Station, - known before the Communist Party Putsch of 1948, as Wilson Station, and commonly known as Wilsonak, - takes me half an hour. I have to climb up a large street, - called the Foch Avenue during the First Republic in 1918-1939, and the Schwerin Avenue during the Nazi occupation. In 1945 its name changed into the Stalin Avenue, then into the Vinohradska Avenue after Nikita Khrushchev had condemned Stalin at the Soviet Communist Party Congress. It's known as the Avenue of Political Errors by the inhabitants of Prague.

My luggage is light. Since I consider Usti as a passage in my life, I keep nearly all my belongings at my place, - the former children's room. It may happen that I shall not find anybody at home. Mother, working shifts at the factory, doesn't usually return either until after ten, or until five in the morning. Father, too anguished to stay alone in the empty flat, could be gone to see his friends. My sister, taking advantage of their absence, tends to roam