'I didn't,come home at night and I'm more sober after a bottle of wine than you are after two glasses of lemonade.'
'Who's the dark-haired guy? Surely you can say a couple of normal sentences to me?'
'He's a fellow student from Kolín. We bumped into each other at the bottom of Wenceslas Square. I had an hour free and we went and sat somewhere. What interests you is if we made a date. No, we didn't. But he gave me his telephone number. Do you want it?'
'No, but I'm getting tired of your evasions.'
'I'm the one doing the evading? I toil for hours at school and then rush home here in a sweat in order to look after you lot. Then, out of the kindness of your heart, you offer me a week off and after five days you interrogate me as if I was your slave.'
'You're far from being a slave, very far. But you still haven't answered me.'
'And I don't intend to, because I find both your tone and this whole interrogation insulting.'
'Okay. Well, I find the situation you're placing me in degrading.'
'I'm placing you in some kind of situation?'
'Yes. Even my assistant has already. .'
'God in heaven, why do I have to keep hearing about that fool?'
'It's me who's the fool, not him, for putting up with this.'
'So don't put up with it then. Just leave me alone.'
'What's that supposed to mean, "don't put up with it"?'
'Seeing as I don't know what you actually object to, I can't tell what it implies. What I do know is that you've spoiled my mood, and that I don't want to listen to you any more.'
'Now or ever again?'
'Now and preferably never again.'
'Fine. We can get a divorce.'
'Okay, then.'
'You can say it just like that?'
'It was you who said it, not me.'
'I said it because I know that's all you're waiting for.'
'Maybe it is, but it's you who said it. And besides, you'll never divorce me because you know full well you'd never find anyone else to put up with you, not even if you sent all your assistants out scouting.'
(1994)
ABOUT LOVE AND DEATH
URANUS IN THE HOUSE OF DEATH
Only very rarely is someone from Prague invited to Australia with their fare and expenses paid. Director Michal Vrba received an invitation to a theatre festival due to take place in the city of Adelaide during March. The festival was linked to all sorts of exhibitions, conferences and debates. To judge from the programme enclosed with the invitation, the distant seaport with the sweet maidenly name would be sagging under the weight of cultural events during the festival.
Michal tended to be a doer who regarded talk about theatre as a waste of time, since everything that could be said about theatre had already been written long ago. None the less the invitation pleased him — thrilled him in fact. He replied immediately, saying that he accepted the invitation to speak about Czech theatre and was looking forward to visiting the antipodes.
Regarding himself as a free agent (he had been divorced several years earlier) he could see nothing to prevent him taking the trip.
When he arrived that evening at Leona's (Leona s real name
was Alena, but from the moment she became his lover he had called her Leona; it sounded more arty) he told her about his trip with almost excessive enthusiasm. He exaggerated because he was unsure how she would react to the news and he wanted to make it clear that he was going whether she liked it or not.
'And they didn't invite me?' she wanted to know.
'I don't think they even invited wives.'
Leona acted in the small theatre where he was the sole director, as well as administrator, manager, and, most of the time, author of the plays (or rather poetical compilations.) He had trained as an economist, however, and defected to the theatre because economics bored him. But his knowledge came in handy as he had some inkling at least about market forces. He found Leona attractive — she was tall and slender with small breasts and a soft voice — and she was alluringly eccentric. Whenever she got drunk, which was quite often, she wanted to make love to him, no matter where they happened to be. Then she would demand, 'What have you done to me?' And she would expect him to reply in the most direct terms. Apart from that she was interested in all sorts of magic. She made regular visits to an astrologer and consulted fortune-tellers and homoeopaths. Michal didn't believe in any of that stuff, but so long as she brought him indisputable predictions about the good prospects of their relationship, or possible dangers for their theatre, or potential economic opportunities, he accepted it as part of their amatory conversations. He had therefore already provided her with the precise details about the moment when he left his mother's womb, and from time to time even allowed her to tell his fortune from the cards, which almost always foretold love and stressed with surprising frequency his artistic proclivities.
'Last time my tarot-reader talked about a long journey,' she now recalled. 'I thought she was talking about me, but now I see she meant both of us.'
She obviously regarded the fact that the journey was foretold as a good omen, or, more accurately, it meant that she could not receive the news other than as confirmation of what was intended to happen. That eased his mind and he started to wonder whether, since he had the rare chance of travelling such a long way, he shouldn't stay there for at least a month. That idea didn't appeal to Leona. What was she supposed to do here while he was off globe-trotting?
'When I come back we'll take a lovely holiday together,' he promised.
'Yes, we'll take a bus ride into the country. That'll be a great holiday. But go where you like, I'm sure I'll find something to do here while you're away.' It sounded like a threat, but he pretended not to have heard, as he disliked quarrels.
Then he returned to his usual routine: rehearsals, performances and scrounging for money, but in addition he had to spend the evenings writing his paper for the conference. He decided to write about small theatres, not simply because they were the ones he was most familiar with, but also because he was convinced that they were the only thing it was possible to say anything interesting about, since only they, if the theatre was going to survive, had any future. The theatre, he maintained, was one of the last places where the spectator could still personally witness the act of creation. However, the big theatres so alienated the audience from the actor, that instead of witnessing the act of creation they could only witness its effect. For a public brought up on television, the theatrical stage was no more than a big TV screen, the only thing special about it
being its three-dimensionality, and technical advances were bound to rob it of that remaining uniqueness before long. By contrast, small theatres facilitated mutual contact. The act of creation had far-reaching implications in today's hypertech world. It had become the only way for the human spirit to escape both the stultifying stereotype of the mundane and the depths towards which it is drawn by the dark forces of that banality that encourages and accumulates within it.
He visited Leona almost every day. During supper about a week before his departure, when he was in the grip of pre-travel nerves, Leona suddenly said to him:
'You mustn't fly there.'
'Fly where?' he gasped.
'You mustn't fly anywhere. You should be extremely cautious about what you do because you have Uranus in your eighth house.'
'So?'
'It's the house of death!'
'How did you figure that out?'
'I went to see my astrologer. After all, I have to consult him when you're planning a journey like that!'