I bowed my head. “With extreme mournfulness and grand regretification, I no farewell ticket. I no want to so long ticket. I am leaving now. Good-purchase!”
At once the little gleam exited the blonde’s eyes. She turned abruptly and walked into the crowd. I too turned to see if I could find her boss. Maybe he would know where the girl in the blue beret had gone. But in the crush of people I couldn’t tell overling from tourist. Then it dawned on me: there was no boss. It was just a standard tactic used by the ticket sellers to make a sale.
I stood before another placard-holder, a bearded fellow with long hair. Maybe he would remember a pretty coworker. But he didn’t know her either.
“Don’t you all work for the same company?”
“Are you kidding?” He laughed. “We are all competitors. Sellers of tickets to the great Mozart Hall, the Dvořák Hall, the Rudolf-inium, the small churches.”
“But she’s been here, in this part of the square. I’ve seen her a few times.”
“People come and go often in this job. The pay isn’t so good, you know. A salesgirl might even quit in the middle of a conversation with you. Like this.”
And he walked away.
What kind of absurd joke was this? I wondered. Had he somehow rehearsed this scenario and waited, God knows how long, for it to be realized? I watched him move to another spot. I shook my head, still incredulous.
Not far from the K Museum stood a young man just where the girl in the blue beret had been days before. I wanted to imagine it was she but I couldn’t bend reality. I didn’t have the magic to turn a balding twenty-five-year-old into the lovely girl in the blue beret.
“Excuse me, but do you know a girl who used to work here carrying a placard? A girl from Georgia who wore a blue beret?”
“Georgia? No. But there did used to be a girl here… You know her name?”
“No. Was she pretty?”
“Yes. Very.” And he smiled as if remembering the girl in the blue beret. “Blue beret, you say? Well, maybe she did.”
“Ah, good. Finally getting somewhere. Do you know how I can reach her?”
“No. She left.”
“Left?”
“Yes. Left.”
“You mean she’s gone?”
“Gone. Left. Same meaning. Is English your native tongue?”
I disregarded his question, which may have had sarcastic undertones.
“Gone? Like altogether gone?”
“Yes,” he said testily. “Like they say in America, gone gone.”
“Gone gone where?”
“How should I know? Maybe back home. Lots of students work here from different countries, then they get homesick and go home for a while.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“No. And I didn’t know her that well. And who says that — with-out a name — that we talk about the same person.”
“Is she coming back?”
“If the she is the same she in your half of the conversation as is the she in mine, I don’t know. She just said she was leaving. Maybe she didn’t even say she was leaving and just left.”
“She worked for your company, right?”
“Right, and why are you so interested in her?”
“Will your boss tell me?”
“Why should my boss tell you more than me? Why should he give you personal information about employees? We have new privacy laws. You want ticket to tonight’s concert?”
“Why? Is your overling coming toward you and you will be flamed for chatting too muchly with me?”
The chap looked at me as if I were loco. Maybe that line I had twice heard before wasn’t a ploy after all. Just a coincidence I was misreading.
Frustration needled me. I felt I had walked into a bramble bush. Why didn’t I ask her name, the girl in the blue beret? What an idiot! A golem! I had a half date with a girl whose name I didn’t know. I wanted to ask her but thought it would be intrusive. If she felt I was becoming too personal, she might turn and walk away, just like that golem I had addressed a few minutes ago. I should have gotten her name and phone number like a normal person and made a date. Well, I did have sort of a half-baked date, didn’t I? I wondered if prizes are given by social science foundations for creating new social forms.
Why did I dilly-dally, knowing in the depths of my skin that precisely this would happen — that she would slip away from me, that my lethargy — just call me Oblomov — would do me in? When it came to making my films, I was pretty forthright, even aggressive. Why not with girls? Could it be that the interest she had shown in chatting with me, in saying I looked like Danny K, was just politesse? That she wasn’t interested in me at all? I got so used to looking like thirty, I forgot that someone might see me as a man of forty, and what would a twenty-year-old girl want with a much older guy? On the other hand, the few conversations I had with her seemed to be personal, not routine, salesgirl’s talk. But who can enter another human being’s heart? We try and try but never succeed. I wished I could pull a magical dictionary out of my pocket and with several key words enter another’s heart.
Plan A didn’t work. Since I couldn’t find her on the square, I couldn’t buy another ticket from her for the concert. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t go. And so, that night, at the Dvořák Hall, although I had told her I couldn’t attend, I bought a first-row balcony seat. I didn’t consider what to say if I met her in the lobby while buying a ticket. No doubt I’d see her during intermission and make up some story about my canceled appointment. But, besides seeing her, there was another, subliminal, reason for my going. I wanted to see if she really would attend and had not sold the ticket again (as I probably would have done) and pocketed the profit.
Te hall — where Mozart had premiered his “Prague” symphony, the 38th—was stunning: red-velvet paneling and gold lamé on the walls. From my perch I looked down into the orchestra where the girl in the blue beret should be sitting. But I couldn’t find her. I looked left and right. So she did take the money and run. Good for her. Maybe she needed it. Then a wave of applause. Soon the music would begin — Bach’s Brandenburg No. 1 and then Dvořák’s Piano Quintet — and I still am scanning the seats row by row. I still hadn’t found her. And no wonder. I kept looking for a blue beret. But why should she wear her hat indoors? Then I looked once more, and there, there, there she was, in the left front of the orchestra.
From my balcony seat, I saw her almost in profile. She had short, cropped hair and she moved her head to the rhythm of the music. After the first figure she just stared ahead, mesmerized by Bach, a lovely smile on her face. She was absorbing the music like a sunbather sunlight and it made her happy. How could one not be happy in Bach’s Garden of Eden?
Up in the balcony, I deluded myself, amused myself, that I had a date with her. After all, I had asked if she wanted to go to the concert and she said Yes, and I treated her to a ticket and here we were— both of us — in the hall. It was a bona fide half date. Of course, I slyly edit out that first she told me sotto voce to quickly buy a ticket, which I offered her, creating that looney half date — credit me for that invention — to the enrichment of society (a boon to shy or other socially maladept people) and to the detriment of me.
The only trouble was that even though we were both here, I wouldn’t talk to her. I decided not to seek her out during intermission, for I didn’t want her to assume I was a liar. Telling her my appointment was canceled and that I decided to come at the last minute would look strange. That would look like a ploy, an attempt to upgrade a half date by fifty percent (to seventy-five percent, for those of you weak in math, who think upgrading a half date by fifty percent makes it equal one full date).