'My little boy,' she whispered afterwards. She waited but he only breathed wearily. 'Do you like it here with me?' she asked.
'Yeah,' he whispered. He tried to hold onto the moment but didn't know how, and felt that even now it was beginning to slip away from him and he was beginning to fall into the night. The woman next to him moved slightly, whispered something, got up and pattered out to the passage. Water splashed noisily into the sink. She returned with a grey washbasin and a towel over her naked shoulder. She put the basin on the chair. 'Don't you want to wash yourself?'
So he had to get up and wash himself while she lay behind him. 'I don't know if I feel like sleeping any more,' she whispered. 'What if I switched on the radio?'
Then they lay side by side and the radio cast a dark rhomboid against the wall.
'Aren't you hungry?' she asked.
'No.'
'You usually. .' she started. 'My little boy,' she whispered, 'do you love me a little?'
He said nothing. A horribly sweet tune issued from the radio. Just as well he was able to ignore it. The motionless rhomboid. The cold strangeness of this room, of this night, this music, these words, this loving; he half closed his eyes and tried to conjure up his horse, quietly clicking his tongue at it, but couldn't even hear a response, it was sleeping somewhere — maybe his horse was worn out by that long day, wearily staring into a night full of stars while his warm nostrils quivered. The world was falling into a dark sack, the same old material. He lay there motionless: if only something, something were to come — a white horse at the corner of the street, Morning Star, something. .
'Bohouš!' she shook him. 'Bohouš, it's time you were gone.'
He leapt up. The grey washbasin was still standing on the chair. The low, cold sun shone into the room. .
'There's bread in the cupboard. . And some kind of almond pieces,' she said sleepily.
'I haven't got time,' he said testily. But he opened the cupboard and quickly cut a slice of bread.
'Will you come again this evening?' she asked when he was dressed.
'Don't know. . Maybe I'll go somewhere with Ladya.'
'Do come,' she said. 'I know you will anyway.'
The trams were stiflingly full and his legs were weak from lack of sleep. He hadn't even managed to wash. .
The time clock, the unsmiling watchdog of your days. Six-ten, there'd be words again. He dashed past the watchman and across the grey yard full of swirling ash. Workshop number one, past the rumbling presses, Anča cutting tin as usual, one more door and he could already see them in that never-ending never-changing row. . one big and three small cogs in the right hand, two small axles in the left, slide them on, let them click into place, test them, then take four screws and screw them into the holes, hang it up.
The foreman's gaze was fixed on the clock: six-fifteen. Jesus it's only six-fifteen. He grabbed one big and three small cogs in his right hand, two small axles in the left. He fitted them. Then he took four screws and put them in the holes. He passed the first box on to Marie. She turned to him and smiled slightly. The foreman's getting fed up; there'll be a bit of peace at last. The conveyor belt moved quietly. Take it off, hang it up. Marie s screwdriver squeaked. He could hear the clip-clop of hooves. He cantered along a totally white road through an alley of cherry trees with damp leaves. Steam rose from the meadows.
(1963)
LINGULA
1
The student canteen was a long, bleak hall in the basement and its walls, apart from the glass one at the back, had blind alcoves instead of windows. The canteen committee, it is true, had added some hand-painted commandments in an effort to conceal its drabness,
NO SPILLING OF FOOD! NO LEAVING OF DIRTY CROCKERY! NO SMOKING!
However they did little to cheer the place up and Tomáš and his friends used to carry their lunches to the glass wall. It was airier there and brighter and the table under the tenth commandment had one short leg and nobody sat there, so it was the perfect place for dumping coats, briefcases and empty soup dishes.
They got used to the spot — the last table in the second row — and cut a large scorpion out of cardboard, writing on it the words,
BIOLOGY — RESERVED!
Just beyond the glass wall lay a small garden: two lilac bushes, a low acacia bush, a white magnolia and a forsythia. Blackbirds and a pair of turtle-doves nested there. The students paid little attention to it, simply tossing their leftovers to the birds in the winter, and one day were almost surprised to find that the acacia was putting out its first leaves just as they were studying the viciaceae family.
When the lilac was starting to bloom they arrived to find an unknown girl sitting at the table with the short leg. Her hair was almost white and combed into a beehive. Her eyes were olive-green beneath dark brows and her neck was long. She sat as erect as a statue and held her knife and fork with such elegance that she could have been sitting in the Hotel International, or on a film set.
They did not take their eyes off her the entire time she was eating while she spared them not a single glance, as though unaware of anyone sitting nearby, or of the tenth commandment above her head that read,
BE CONSIDERATE TO YOUR COMRADES!
When she finished her meal she wiped her mouth on her handkerchief while gazing blankly into the distance. Then she got up and looked around briefly. She couldn't help noticing them now, but she made no sign and left, walking away from
them in her stiletto-heeled shoes, with the short, quick steps of the ideal secretary.
They stayed at lunch longer than usual, droning on about the girclass="underline" her legs, her hips, her breasts, her eyes. They couldn't just let her disappear like that. Tomáš was at the time the only one of them to have any free moments, so the task fell to him, even though the general opinion was that it was probably beyond him. The next day they caught sight of her from a distance. She was sitting at the same table. Opposite her was some guy at least fifteen years her senior — balding, stylish little spectacles perched on his snub nose, one corner of his shirt collar turned up.
She was eating like a duchess. He slurped his soup noisily, his face almost in the soup bowl.
'Do you like it?' they heard him ask.
'Yes.'
For a long time the two of them said nothing and then she asked, 'How about you?'
'Of course — I'm here with you!' He stopped eating and bared his brownish teeth.
'Stop it — I don't like that sort of talk.' They ate the rest of the meal in silence. Then he took away the dirty plates while everyone congratulated Tomáš because against someone like that he was in with a chance.
Over the next two days they found out that the fellow lectured in family law, was divorced and had a two-tone Skoda Spartak, but about her they discovered nothing. Nobody knew her or had seen her before. Apparently she wasn't a student but simply attached to the lawyer, and after that first day had only appeared in his company.
Soon they got used to her and stopped listening to what the
pair at the next table were saying. They were almost always silent anyway — he was still as unappealing and she as perfect as ever; when they finished eating he would clear away the dirty plates and she would remain seated a few moments gazing blankly after him. Then she would follow him and they would go upstairs, holding hands.
She was dubbed 'Tomas's girl' with friendly mockery: she had been assigned to him and he assigned her to himself too, even though he'd yet to say a word to her. The problem was that fellow didn't budge from her side and she never gave Tomáš a chance to speak to her. By now nobody even expected him to try. Only he thought about it, imagining the moment when he would do it. And since that was so easy to imagine he also imagined the moments that would follow: the two of them sitting together on the terrace of the Brussels Restaurant — music, the midnight dance floor, her olive green eyes, her full lips, kissing her as they danced, then beneath the bridge on the quay, and then in the entrance of the house where she lived, inside, kissing her as she sat on some unfamiliar fine-legged chair, and then making love on an unfamiliar couch — a long, lingering moment. Then he would start all over again.