The Cowards (34 page)

‘Aw, no.’

‘Well, there were epidemics after the last war too, you know.’

‘I know, Spanish influenza. But there won’t be anything like that this time.’

‘Goodness only knows. You never can tell.’

‘No. They’ve got all sorts of drugs and vaccines and stuff like that now.’

‘I don’t know. All I can say is God spare us.’ She lifted the lid and took a look at the potatoes. ‘What did you do all afternoon?’

‘I went over to Benno’s for a while and then I just watched the crowds for a while and then I went over to Berty’s and then I saw Irena and we … talked for a while …’ I thought about showing Mom the snapshot but decided not to. That submachine gun might frighten her maybe and the war wasn’t over yet and why get her all worked up over nothing? Then I remembered I hadn’t showed my picture to Irena. How in hell could I have forgotten that! I felt so bad about that I almost felt sick to my stomach. But then I figured that I must have been saving it up for later, like an ace in the hole, and that made me feel better again.

‘Oh, you saw Irena? What’s she doing these days?’

‘Working at the post office.’

‘Did she say what she was going to do when … whether she’ll be going to Prague?’

‘No. But I guess she will.’

‘And what does she want to study?’

‘I’m not sure. Medicine, I guess.’

‘Medicine?’

‘I think that’s what she said once.’

Mother was interested in Irena because she knew how I felt about her. Quite a lot of people knew because, for one thing, I
hadn’t made much of a secret of it and for another thing, Mrs Moutelikova had told Mrs Frintova and Mrs Frintova had passed it on to Mrs Baumanova and Mrs Baumanova had told my mother that Danny had picked out a very nice girl and Mother acted like she didn’t know anything but was glad about it and Mrs Moutelikova told Irena’s mother in the shop that I came from a good family and that Irena better hang on to me because I was such a serious and reliable boy and since nobody took this Zdenek seriously because God only knew who he was and where he’d come from. He was just in Kostelec on a labour brigade whereas I was young Smiricky and all the mothers took me seriously, even Irena’s. Irena was the only one who didn’t.

‘What about you, Danny?’ Mother asked me. ‘Have you settled on anything yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You ought to be giving it some thought, Danny.’

‘Well, sure. But it’s not all that big a problem, is it?’

‘Remember, it’s for your whole life.’

‘I know. Well, I guess I’ll study English then,’ I said and smiled. For my whole life? I couldn’t believe it. For a couple of years maybe, but it seemed impossible that I’d always go on doing the same thing my whole life – like a job, I mean. Playing the saxophone, yes. I thought I’d probably do that for as long as I lived, and falling in love with girls and telling them how crazy I was about them, but then I figured I probably wasn’t going to live all that long anyway, and I couldn’t imagine I’d ever fall into one of those ruts older folks slipped into and never climbed out of. Maybe I’d die any one of these days. The idea didn’t worry me at all.

‘Well, it’s up to you,’ said Mother. ‘Your father and I won’t stand in your way.’

She set a plate of potatoes and a salt shaker down in front of me and sat down in a chair on the other side of the table. I started eating and the food tasted good.

‘Then you’d be a teacher after you graduated?’

‘Yes. Or I’d go on for my Master’s.’

‘Master of Arts?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well – what can you do with a Master’s degree?’

‘It depends. I could get a job in a library somewhere or maybe as an editor – that kind of thing.’

‘You mean you’d like to be a journalist?’

‘Sure, that too.’

‘I think you’d like that, don’t you?’

‘I guess so.’

‘You’ve always been good at talking, I mean, and always got the best grades on your essays.’

‘Well, we’ll see,’ I said. ‘The main thing is, the university will be open again.’

‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘God grant us good health – that’s all I ask. If only we can all stay well, we’ll manage the rest somehow.’

‘Sure,’ I said and pushed back my plate. ‘Well, time for me to be going.’

‘Now, Danny, promise me you’ll take good care of yourself,’ said Mother, and her eyes looked worried again.

‘I will. Don’t worry,’ I said and kissed her.

She stroked my hair and said, ‘And come home, as soon as you can.’

‘Sure,’ I said and went out into the hall. I looked at myself in the mirror and, in the shadow at least, I looked pretty sharp. I opened the door and stepped into the outside hallway. Mother stood in the doorway.

‘Well, good-bye,’ I said and started down the stairs.

‘Good-bye,’ she said. At the landing, I saw her still standing there and blew her a kiss. Like I’d done at noon. Like I’d done every day for as long as I can remember. I decided to go over to Heiser’s place through the castle grounds to make better time. I turned left and headed towards the square. By now the sun was shining only on the tops of the houses on the left side of the street; down below it was already twilight. Refugees were still camping in the square and flags dangled down at them from every side. The windows of the City Hall and the post office and the buildings on the left side of the square glinted in the setting sun, which bathed everything on the
square in a lovely yellowish light – the refugee families crouching on the sacks and bundles together with all their children and sometimes dogs, all chewing away on something, and the French soldiers, too, in their dusty blue uniforms. An organ sounded from the church and behind one of the narrow windows in the Gothic bay you could see the glimmer of candles. I went around the church. In front of the door stood a cluster of stock-still people, bareheaded and respectfully silent. The church was packed. They couldn’t get in. As I passed the door, I could feel a wave of heat coming out from inside and caught a few words of some song to the Virgin Mary and the weak bleat of the organ. I could just see the choirmaster sitting up there in the loft going off into a trance over that sloppy music which he’d had to put up with for years, and even worse since he gave violin lessons, and now there he sat probably glad to drown out his fear in that music, scared of what could happen before the Russians arrived and scared of what would happen once they did. I’d taken a few music lessons from him once and always had to wait outside until the kids ahead of me were done with theirs. I only played the piano then, so I didn’t have it bad, but the kids ahead of me scratched away on their violins and the choirmaster would prance around clapping his hands to his head and sighing or shrieking while those kids calmly sawed away, flatting the sharping like so many tone-deaf mummies. That was our choirmaster. And up at the altar, the rector was working his way through his
trinitate personae et unitate substanciae
without believing a word of it, whispering it, mumbling it, whining it while the choirmaster went after those flat or deflated tones with his index finger on his organ, and everything about the priest was cheap and shabby – his cassock frayed, the monstrance battered – everything around him down at the heels, including himself in his medieval parish house with its weather-beaten image of St Anthony out in front, and still there was really something beautiful about it all and somewhere in the world, in Rome or New York or maybe even in Prague, there were brand new churches whose priests believed in all this and sang about it every day as though each day they were singing it for the very first time,
with reverent voices, wonderful, rich voices:
vere dignum et justum est aequum et salutare, nos tibi semper, et ubique gratias agere
It sounded beautiful all that
Domine Sancte, Pater omnipotens, Deus: Qui cum ungenito Filio tuo, et Spiritu sancto, unus es Deus, unus es Dominus
. I stopped to listen and I could actually hear the priest’s rusty old voice croaking,
Oremus – praeceptis salutaribus moniti, et divina institutione formati, audemus dicere: Pater Noster, qui es in coelis
– and, oh, how I wished that our Father Who art in Heaven was really sitting up there, looking down at me and taking care of me as if I really mattered, but I knew the earth rotated around the sun and that the sun was only an immense disc belonging to the Milky Way and that it was spinning away in space in an orbit all its own and that, according to Eddington, there were about a hundred thousand million stars in any given galaxy and around a hundred thousand million galaxies in the universe and what good did it do me if the priest said
omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est
if I simply couldn’t believe it? I looked away from the church and up at the castle, at its three rows of glittering windows, and I started past the parish house up the steep hill. Quickly and without looking back, I climbed the lilac-scented path up past the crumbling castle outer wall, and I didn’t stop till I got all the way up to the circular drive in front of the castle. From there the square below looked flat and crawling with tiny figures headed every which way under the copper disc of the setting sun. There was something about that seductively blossoming May evening that made me feel so strange that I rushed over to the courtyard to leave that view behind. It was dark and damp in the first courtyard. As I passed the well, the door of the steward’s apartment opened and out came Ema, the steward’s daughter.

‘Hello,’ I said and waited for her. Her big, potato-nosed face broke into a grin as she came towards me in her pink dress.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘How’re you doing?’

‘Fine, thanks. And you?’

‘Not bad. Listen, what’re all your noble folks up to these days?’

‘They’re just getting ready to leave. You want to take a look?’

‘Sure. You mean they haven’t been jailed yet?’

‘No. Why should they be put in jail?’

‘Well, von Schaumburg-Lippe, for instance.’ Actually I didn’t really know either why they ought to be put in jail. ‘What’s the Queen of Württemberg doing?’

‘She’s here, too. Come on, I’ll show you.’

‘Oh, I know what she looks like. You showed her to me before remember?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Still – so what? Another look can’t do me any harm.’

Ema grinned. ‘It’ll be some day when Danny Smiricky doesn’t have time for a look at things.’

‘Well, you know me,’ I said.

‘Come on then,’ said Ema. You could see her corset or girdle or whatever it was under that pink dress of hers. She had mammoth hips topped by an unusually short torso – a real steward’s daughter type from the outside, anyway, she looked custom-made for living in a castle tower. We passed through the second courtyard and stopped in front of the stables. Three open carriages stood there, the horses harnessed and ready to go. A cluster of castle kids had gathered to stare. The count was already seated in the first carriage – an old guy, over ninety, with a neck like a giraffe and a head that wouldn’t stop shaking. Next to him, her knees covered by a thick green blanket, sat the countess. They stared dully in front of them. Across from them sat two young girls as ugly as they come.

‘Who’s up in the first carriage with the count?’ I asked.

‘Countess Hilda and Countess Elis,’ Ema said.

I looked at them, both redheads, and then over at the second carriage where a butler in ordinary clothes was just helping a fat, grey-haired old lady wearing a black shawl up and in.

‘The one that’s getting in now is the Marquise von Stroheim, one of the count’s cousins,’ Ema said.

The old lady sat down and as she did the carriage rocked slightly. Kozak, the castle gamekeeper, leaned out of a window over the stables and in his vest and with his sleeves rolled up settled down to watch the proceedings. His wife was at the next window and the two of them looked down without a trace of regret or respect. A young man with a little beard sprang up into the carriage, spread out and tucked in a blanket around the marquise.

‘That’s Count Hohenstein, her nephew. He’s engaged to the queen.’

‘Oh?’ I said. He looked pale and ordinary and completely insignificant.

‘I wonder what she sees in him, anyway,’ I said.

‘He’s a nobleman. A blue blood.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said. Well, that kind of thing probably meant a lot to those people. And maybe there really was something appealing about locking yourself up in your own private world like that and gradually becoming extinct. Which reminded me that I had blue blood in my veins, too, and why my ancestors couldn’t have taken better care of it was beyond me. It made me mad. So here I was now, just another ordinary mortal on my way to meet Mitzi down below this castle.

‘The one sitting across from her is the marquis, her husband, and next to him is the Princess von Blumenfeld. She’s an old maid,’ Ema said.

The marquis was fat and redfaced and the princess looked pale and drawn. They were all bundled up under blankets and steamer rugs. Mr Kozak spat from his window and lit his pipe. The marquis called out in German to somebody in the house. Princess Renata came out of the door followed by her two little kids in loden coats. She looked German and bony and wore a transparent raincoat over her dirndl. The old butler lifted the kids into the carriage and then helped the princess up.

‘What’s keeping the queen?’ I wondered.

‘She’s probably still busy giving instructions to the housekeeper. She’s got more energy than all the rest of them put together.’

‘Isn’t the housekeeper going with them?’

‘Yes. But the staff won’t be leaving till tomorrow morning.’

Everybody was already seated in the carriages. They were all just waiting for the queen. The coachman of the third carriage was letting a harness strap out a notch. The ramparts cast their jagged shadow across the courtyard and the last sliver of the crimson sun shone from the edge of the horizon straight up to the door. I kept my eye on the door and just as the shadow reached the threshold, the Queen of Württemberg appeared, all made up and wearing a light brown suit, as beautiful as Greta Garbo, her hair shining in the copper glow, and said something in German to the housekeeper bowing behind her and then, with a few elegant womanly strides, went over to the carriage, jumped in, and called out in a firm, deep voice, ‘
Los!
’ The coachman cracked his whip, the first carriage rolled off, the second right behind it, and then the third. There was a creak of wheels and out they went through the gate and down the drive and in the last carriage I could see the copper-coloured hair of the queen who didn’t turn to look back, and then there was only her glow as she passed through the gate and she was gone. She impressed me, that Queen of Württemberg, and I felt sorry for her. But Ema was standing beside me.