To the Wedding (14 page)

A
vehicle swaying, a sizzling of wheels that are not running on rails but asphalt, an engine purr, a sensation of being cushioned like a child dozing on a sofa, voices in Slovak telling long stories, on the backseat a honeymoon couple, the bride still wearing her roses, near the front a group of shopkeepers who specialise in glassware and are on their way to look at Venetian glassblowers, a Bohemian dance coming over the loudspeaker, a faint smell of beer, and Zdena is in the coach she caught outside the railway station in Bratislava.

She is seated next to a bald man, wearing a dark suit with a pinstripe which is twenty years out of fashion. They have been sitting beside one another for two hours and have not said a word. Not even arriving in Vienna
made them talk. He removed his hat and she kicked off her shoes. After that each of them settled back into their personal limbo. She looked out of the window and he read a newspaper.

Now he opens his dispatch case and takes out a brown-paper package. Unwrapping it he finds some meat sandwiches. Lifting up the whole package, he offers one to her. She shakes her head. He shrugs and bites into his own sandwich.

Have you noticed, he says with his mouth full, how gherkins, the
kysléuhorky
, are getting more and more sour?

She says nothing.

Is it your first visit to Venice?

Yes, it is.

She has a voice which doesn’t fit her reticent appearance. The voice of a born singer which doesn’t have to search for expression, since expression is the gift of that voice. The three words—yes, it is—sounded as though they were an entire life story. He must be at least fifteen years older than her.

She turns again to the window. Soon it will be dark. The last sunshine lights the distant mountains, a church hidden between hills, leaves, countless millions of them, the nearest along the edge of the road made to flutter by the draught of the passing coach, village houses of three storeys, apple trees, many wooden fences, a solitary horse.

I’m sure you’ll like Venice, he says.

I just change there, she says.

It is the moment in the farmsteads out there when the chickens are locked up for the night, and old women crumple newspapers and push them, with kindling wood, into the stove and look for their box of matches.

Why not take an orange? In Venice we’ll already find cherries. Where do you go afterwards?

To my daughter’s wedding.

A happy occasion, then.

Scarcely. My daughter is HIV-positive.

Without an instant’s reflection Zdena has told the man who is a stranger what she has hesitated to tell to her intimate friends. She stares at him as though he, not she, has said something shocking. The skin of his bald scalp is as smooth as a silk scarf, moistened with a spray for ironing.

I’m so sorry, he murmurs.

I think you should be!

The driver turns down the volume on the music and announces over the loudspeaker that in five minutes the coach will be stopping at a Gasthaus for toilets and refreshments.

It takes a long time, the bald man says, and meanwhile it’s possible …

Are you a doctor?

No, I drive a taxi.

You expect me to believe that! What are you doing riding in a coach if you drive a taxi?

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:

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.