To the Wedding (15 page)

T
he 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.

H
old 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.

T
he 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.

W
hen 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 get 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.

Ambrosia, food for the gods, and the thermos I had filled with cappuccino.

The two of them drink from blue paper cups with white Madonna-like figures printed on them, and the froth of the coffee lines his upper lip. Then they bite into the rolls. Zdena has pearly, very regular teeth.

It’s hard, he says. We’re living on the brink, and it’s hard because we’ve lost the habit. Once everybody, old and young, rich and poor, took it for granted. Life was painful
and precarious. Chance was cruel. On feast days there were brioches. You like them?

They are filled with almond paste.

And these are morello cherries.

For two centuries we’ve believed in history as a highway which was taking us to a future such as nobody had ever known before. We thought we were exempt. When we walked through the galleries of the old palaces and saw all those massacres and last rites and decapitated heads on platters, all painted and framed on the walls, we told ourselves we had come a long way—not so far that we couldn’t still feel for them, of course, but far enough to know that we’d been spared. Now people live to be much older. There are anaesthetics. We’ve landed on the moon. There are no more slaves. We apply reason to everything. Even to Salome dancing. We forgave the past its terrors because they occurred in the Dark Ages. Now, suddenly we find ourselves far from any highway, perched like puffins on a cliff ledge in the dark.