The Drowning Of A Goldfish Read online

  “The movement of a ball is only the ball changing places,” scans my thumping heart in unison with the rattling of wheels, the carriage trembling to our polyphonic rhythm.

  The train stops with exasperating regularity. At each stop the disembarking passengers reluctantly step off. Newcomers board with hesitation and the station-master signals the departure with the halting gesture of an actor in a silent movie.

  I would like to get off, and run the remaining distance, so consumed with impatience am I. Returning home out of breath, I would tear the door ajar, assuring myself that Iris would still be there, safe, sitting at the windowsill, swept away in her Siamese dreams.

  With a heavy heart, I climb the stairs and open the door; Rudolf is slumped, face down, on the table. On hearing me enter, he raises his head and looks at me with forsaken eyes. On the floor lies a black bag, convulsively shaking.

  “Since you left, Iris has been continually howling: everyone will know now that we keep a cat! She has to go, as quickly as possible. For the moment, she is in the bag because it muffles her mewing.”

  Frantically, I open the bag. Iris throws herself on my neck, presses her little triangular face against mine; her claws dig into my flesh.

  Punishing me, she accepts me. Giving herself to me, she reclaims me as her possession.

  The love of a Siamese cat is an all-consuming engagement between two characters, those of slave and master. Both parts are interchangeable, autonomous and sovereign. They unfold between life and death.

  Renouncement and destruction are synonymous terms.

  The love of a Siamese cat is a relationship characterized by the biblical term of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” cruel and intolerant.

  The ethics of a Siamese cat is the linear righteousness of the Jewish God, exterminating his own people since they did not worship him enough, and perishing with them himself.

  The love of Iris is hard and merciless, suspicious and spiteful, in constant need of assurance that our engagements match, ready to reject me if I do not live up to her expectations.

  When I go out, she falls asleep; I return and she is, once again, at my disposal. She puts her paws around my neck, she presses her little nose against mine to breathe in my breath, she licks me to give me her smell and take mine.

  Rudolf does not bother her. He is part of the inventory like the other objects in the room. She passes by without being aware of him. Her relation to him is neutral coexistence.

  As for Rudolf, he tries not to take Iris into consideration; his heavenly ignorance furnishes him an acceptable alibi.

  It is me who will be subjected to the law. The challenge is mine; he is not part of it.

  One day, out of the blue, Rudolf is struck by a bolt of lightning: he is summoned to the director’s office and presented with an ultimatum: within a week either he or the cat has to go.

  When I return home that evening, I sense the disaster. Rudolf is pale and unhappy. He feels betrayed. He is scared of the director and scared of me.

  It is useless to talk: I know what will happen. Velenský, the cop, has taught his son how to obey.

  I look at Rudolf and feel pity. He is a little boy, too soft and too tender, who bows his back under the whip of the ogre towering above him.

  I put my hand on Rudolf’s shoulder.

  He lifts his head. Large tears spell out from his ravishingly green, uncertain eyes. His long silky eyelashes flutter as he looks at me; smiling timidly, enchantingly, he asks my protection.

  “Don’t be upset, Rudolf. Don’t be scared. I’ll fix it. I’ll find a place to live.”

  He takes my hand, kisses it, opens his arms to hold me against his heart.

  Choked with repulsion, my body trembles like a wild horse, and I shrink back.

  Rudolf lowers his eyes. With a pathetic smile he gets up, opens the cupboard, takes out a bottle of wine, uncorks it, and fills a glass to the brim.

  Like the blood of a bull penetrating the pale sand of the feverish arena, the red liquid overflows onto the tablecloth.

  Each cell of my body quakes with compassion.

  If I pity Rudolf, I am lost.

  It is either him or me. His dead weight would break my back.

  The night drags on, glueing my limbs to sticky bedsheets. Like chewing gum, it rolls me about in its salivating gums.

  Heavy as an avalanche under a warm spring wind, I loll on the slope of my insomnia. My task will start in the morning. I shall have to find a place to stay: for us quickly, for Iris immediately.

  “Certainly, you can have a flat. I’ll put you on the head of the priority list. But you know, it won’t be tomorrow,” cautions Vladimír, my guardian angel.

  “It can take a couple of months. Don’t forget that others have been waiting for several years. All that I can promise is that you will get the first available accommodation in the new building across from the hospital, which is almost finished.

  “You have an advantage over the others: you and your husband both have socially important jobs and you will, in addition, receive the recommendations of all the institutions where you teach Russian.

  “As you see,” counsels Vladimír heartily, “there are no unsolvable problems; there are only problems to be solved.”

  Vladimír is a born optimist, the very image of the positive hero of this new era, the incarnation of the ideal of writers of socialist realism.

  Vladimír is truly good. He is a friend to me and kind to everyone, even to those who make me want to spit in their dirty faces. Vladimír is contemptuous of no one:

  “Everyone is entitled to a weakness. If a person is rotten, it is because he or she was mistreated by capitalists. Anyway, the problem will be solved by communism, where each human being develops in all his splendor.

  “Man is born good, he aspires to light and strives for the ideal.”

  Although there are concentration camps in the Soviet Union who is put there, and why, are subjects that I do not discuss with Vladimír any more. I do not have the right. If I challenge his dogma, what can I offer him instead? If my guardian angel falls, who will lift me “from the mud to the stars”?

  Our relationship is well-balanced. I keep my skepticism—was I not mistreated by the treacherous bourgeois?—and he keeps his confidence in the progress of universal goodness. His dreams are, without any doubt, more congenial than my tormenting reality.

  The only problem of placing Iris for the time being is that of choosing: none of my friends in the Russian courses will refuse me their help.

  I ponder and weigh. I need somebody without children, pets, or commitments, someone who can make Iris feel that she is the center of the universe.

  Finally I decide on Eva, the director’s secretary at the chemical factory.

  Eva is intelligent, sensible, honest, and absolutely trustworthy. Our friendship was formed on first sight. We share a love of books, we go together to the theater, movies, and concerts. I see her every day in class or in her office on my way to tutor her director. She appears like a sunbeam, delicately places the cups of black coffee in front of her boss and me, serving us my favorite cookies. At noon, we eat together at the factory canteen, enjoying each other’s company. I like to talk to her, to look at her: her beauty, shaped to perfection, is the result of the subtle labors of her mind. Eva is a flawless image of a free woman. I know no one else to whom I could entrust Iris as gladly.

  I put the key into the lock and turn it. The door resists me. Iris, her nose to the ground, presses with all her force against the door, anticipating my arrival.

  She jumps up into my arms, clasps my head within her paws. Her warm, raspish tongue begins to lick me possessively. She allows me to take off my coat and prepare us something to eat. Then, sitting in my lap, she chooses from our common plate the morsels worthy of her delicate taste.

  Suddenly, she stops eating and looks at me, startled and confused.

  I do not eat, I do not talk to her …

  She is uneasy. Her
tail swishes nervously about, her ears pivot, angling back across her triangular skull. She gives a shrill sound of discontent and seizes my arm with her claws. Using her hind legs against my elbow as support, she hangs like an overripe grape upon my arm, shaking me ferociously. Her teeth plunge into my wrist, my skin rips apart and blood tickles out of Iris’s mouth.

  I try to free myself from her grip and the agonizing pain. Iris has strict ideas about love: considering my lack of attention a felony, she feels within her rights.

  Slowly, she lets me go. Without a backward glance she jumps off my lap, and positions herself at the window.

  I remain seated at the table, wondering how I can make her accept what I have to do. Intelligent as she is, her paranoia will not allow her to understand.

  Between sky and earth a queer void exists. Iris roams, withdrawn.

  I take my travel bag and shove my cashmere sweater inside. It has long been the exclusive possession of Iris.

  I pick her up in my arms kissing and petting her. Her eyes stare at me relentlessly. She doesn’t purr. Her body has hardened, as closed as an oyster.

  Holding her with my right hand, I open the bag, and quickly slip Iris inside, closing the zipper.

  The bag begins to shake desperately, the strident mewings unnerving me. I am tempted to open the bag and let Iris go. I want to reject all responsibility: Iris will never forgive my lack of consideration but, at that moment, I don’t care. I am fed up, I want Iris out of my life, I long to look after nobody but myself.

  Since Iris has entered my life it is only she who matters. She is too possessive, too intolerant, too demanding. She devours me, she vampirizes me.

  Her love is nothing but constant, impudent blackmail.

  She did not choose me, I did not choose her, but I am the one paying for our forced union.

  My teeth are chattering like the castanets of a frenzied Spanish dancer, and my heart throbs like a fleeing horse. I need air. I feel myself growing sick with this consuming, obsessional anguish.

  I clutch the bag in my rigid hands. The temptation passes; bitterly, I bite into its gray ashes.

  “A scandalous sin is committed by he who lets fall his brother …”

  Taking the bag I open the door. Leaving the cancer pavilion, I go to share my ordeal with Eva.

  Eva’s parents came to Ústí in 1946 when the Czechoslovak state, wishing to repopulate the border regions from which the Germans had been expelled after the defeat of Nazism, offered expropriated furnished homes to the “pioneers.” They came rolling in from all the parts of Czechoslovakia, driven either by the urge to get ahead at the expense of others or by the housing problem in their own area.

  Eva’s home is a modest one, built during the twenties by the diligent lower middle class under the guise of “small but ours.”

  The tiny dwelling is crammed with solid furniture, meant to survive generations of little people; it takes over the space with the savage brutality of those without culture.

  The wallpaper is flowered, the rooms spotless, the air unbreathable.

  I go up to Eva’s room, situated in the loft beside the attic where multicolored laundry is hanging on a tight cord.

  Eva’s place, clear and pure, clashes discordantly with the rest of the house. The room is whitewashed, the floor is a mellow oak, and it possesses a harmonious symmetry.

  The bed, table, one armchair, and shelves on the walls are all a luminous white. Numerous books are wrapped in colorful paper. On the windowsill, the shiny leaves of green plants gleam with health.

  Eva is waiting for me. She knows how I feel and we embrace without saying a word.

  I unzip the bag. Iris does not stir. The silence is deadly. As a drop of water, splashed against the window, slowly seeks its path, I turn and go away.

  Like the bang of a firing squad, the door shuts behind me as I emerge into the empty street. And my heart, a Judas, hangs like a rope around my neck.

  For three days Iris refuses to get out of the bag.

  She does not eat nor drink.

  I take her back.

  Her behavior does not change.

  I try to force-feed her.

  She vomits all that she has not succeeded in spitting out.

  The visits to the veterinarian’s are of no help.

  After two weeks, Iris dies.

  At the end of the month, the flat promised by Vladimír is ready.

  At the same time, I learn that I have been accepted at the Institute of Russian Language and Literature.

  To exist means to subsist.

  Exemption from this is the sublime.

  EPILOQUE

  Vladimír hands me the key to the apartment.

  As I open the door, a mass of thick dust falls on my head, making me cough. Vladimír comes in behind me, looking at me with a triumphant smile. He is offering me the impossible! His generosity overjoys him and warms his heart.

  The apartment looks as if the workers, at the call of an alarm, have hurriedly evacuated the building site; half-empty sacks of plaster lie about on a soiled floor, crooked shovels and other tools are rusting in the grimy bathtub.

  The toilet, heaped with excrement, gives off a foul smell. Vladimír rushes to the bathroom to flush it; the cord of the water tank breaks off in his hand and water rushes down like the streams of Niagara Falls. The toilet, blocked by accumulated refuse, overflows, water runs along the tiles, bringing out their pleasant design; it seeps along the corridor and into the living room.

  Hoping to stop the flood, Vladimír pummels the water tank with his powerful fists. Seeing his new suede shoes, sinking ankle-deep into the dirty water, I begin to shake with suppressed laughter. Amazed, Vladimír looks at me. Suddenly, he too begins to roar. He picks me up in his arms, saving me from the deluge.

  At last, the water tank fills and shuts off by itself.

  “At least I won’t have to wash the floor, now. Don’t worry, Vladimír, it’s quite all right,” I chuckle, as I catch my breath.

  With that we leave, hand in hand, and walk straight into the crisp, clean sunshine.

  The same evening, I show the apartment to Rudolf.

  “I suppose that it is going to take longer than a week to get into shape, especially if you only have time to work on it between your courses and during the weekend. We’ll have to stay where we are until the end of the month.”

  The next day, I start to clean.

  The work, when one is not skilled, is hard. My muscles refuse to obey, become tense, and the back of my neck twitches in pain.

  I am kneeling on the filthy floor. I scrub with all my force, but the dirt mocks me. I start crying with frustration.

  At last, I escape from my drudgery: my Russian courses start in half an hour. I have just enough time to wash my hands and change before I take refuge at the Chemička.

  Yet, this squalid chore is all in vain, this torture is of no avail to anybody: Iris will never sit at the window between these awful Stalinist-style columns, Iris will never wait for me, her nose pressed against this door.

  The apartment is a trap that I entered of my own will. Now, there will be no more “camping” at the cancer pavilion. Together with Rudolf, I have a “marital home,” we are even more a “couple,” and it was I who tripped the snare!

  I rush into the street, escaping my life-time prison, and run towards the Chemička, my shelter against the unforeseeable.

  Sweating, my heart beating like a hammer, I stop in front of the factory, inhale its acid odor and, gradually, begin to calm down.

  As long as I have my work, I am secure. Nothing and nobody can really hurt me.

  As long as these strong, friendly faces surround me, nothing and nobody can make me the “spouse Velenský.”

  As long as I stay among people, the cage for two will remain open.

  My freedom depends on me and the desire of people to accept what I have to offer. I need them: I must be sufficiently useful so that they will need me.

  I repeat my truth
as a magic formula. It reassures me but, deep down I wonder: what if they no longer needed me? What if my skills are insufficient to earn a living?! What if I were chased out of this world of anonymous little ants?! What if I became “Mrs. Doctor Rudolf Velenský” of whom no one has any need?!

  This fear is the essential horror of my life. I wake up in the dead of the night when it is buried, but it swells like a cancer, and creeps along my body; omnipresent and horrid.

  What if I were nothing but a parasite, living off the alms of the generous worker-ants?

  What if all my degrees, acquired so diligently and painfully, were nothing but scraps of paper which will not enable me to earn a living?

  I would like to tame my fear like a docile dog who sits down at my command; but my fear is an obstinate and untrainable cat. It bites me at will, it sneaks into my bed, pressing its sleek body against mine and, stretching out, it digs its claws into my defenseless flesh.

  This fear is in me forever, the only certainty I possess, the only companion on whom I can depend. My unique hope is to appease it by talking about it.

  “What have you been doing?” wonder my students, noticing my swollen and reddened hands, as I open the book to start the lesson.

  “Nothing much,” I say evasively, trying to hide my hands under the textbook. “We have received an apartment and I am trying to put things in order, not an easy job for a novice like me.”

  “You must be crazy! Why didn’t you tell us?! After work, we’ll come and help you. Just give us the key and all will be clean and shiny in an instant. You should be ashamed of being too proud to ask your friends to help you!”

  I am blushing. Not out of shame, but from happiness.

  “And what about your husband, Comrade, how come he lets you slave for him?!”

  “I am just a simple worker, not an educated man like him,” says Vašek Holý, whose face and hands are rugged and hard. Inside he is as good and soft as a freshly baked loaf of bread. “In all our life together and we have been living as a couple for nearly forty years now, I have never let my Manka slave for me.”

  I say nothing. I smile. There is nothing to say. But, at that moment, I would give everything in exchange for the life of Manka, a worker at a food plant who, when meeting me downtown, always gives me a handful of peanuts, pinched at the plant and asks me if her “old man” is misbehaving.