Please, one moment more. You can make up the time on the autoroute.
There’s a speed limit.
Who cares? You just said it. Who cares?
She opens her handbag and slips a couple of hundred-koruna notes under the paper bag of cherries on the shelf by the windscreen.
I’d say you’re a doctor? says the driver.
No, I’m an engineer.
I’ll give you two minutes, engineer, not a second more.
He lays the palm of his hand flat on the klaxon and hoots. Not once but three times.
That should put him up if anything can! And again! Again. There he is!
Encyclopaedia editors rarely run. The man, who has appeared at the street corner, tries to sprint, doubled up, holding his case against his chest like somebody performing in an egg and spoon race. All those watching from the coach smile, Zdena included.
Once seated, it takes him a while to catch his breath.
I kept the coach back for you, they wanted to leave without you.
By way of reply, Tomas unfolds a paper napkin and shows her two rolls of golden milk bread decorated with sugar crystals and vermilion berries.
Ambrosia, food for the gods, and the thermos I had filled with cappuccino.
The two of them drink from blue paper cups with white Madonna-like figures printed on them, and the froth of the coffee lines his upper lip. Then they bite into the rolls. Zdena has pearly, very regular teeth.
It’s hard, he says. We’re living on the brink, and it’s hard because we’ve lost the habit. Once everybody, old and young, rich and poor, took it for granted. Life was painful and precarious. Chance was cruel. On feast days there were brioches. You like them?
They are filled with almond paste.
And these are morello cherries.
For two centuries we’ve believed in history as a highway which was taking us to a future such as nobody had ever known before. We thought we were exempt. When we walked through the galleries of the old palaces and saw all those massacres and last rites and decapitated heads on platters, all painted and framed on the walls, we told ourselves we had come a long way — not so far that we couldn’t still feel for them, of course, but far enough to know that we’d been spared. Now people live to be much older. There are anaesthetics. We’ve landed on the moon. There are no more slaves. We apply reason to everything. Even to Salome dancing. We forgave the past its terrors because they occurred in the Dark Ages. Now, suddenly we find ourselves far from any highway, perched like puffins on a cliff ledge in the dark.
I can’t fly.
You’ve never flown, even in a dream?
Perhaps.
It’s a question of belief.
In that case there’s no harm in being on your ledge, is there?
It has never occurred to Zdena before that a stranger might make advances to her grief, and that therefore she might flirt with him. She wants to weep at the absurdity of it and smile with the relief.
You have to be frightened, he says.
Frightened I am.
Then you’ll fly.
Look! She points through the window, where the snowflakes made their curtain. Look — there’s the sea.
We’ve lost the habit.
Of flying?
No, of living on a ledge.
The sea’s very calm.
It’ll come back.
You mean one day I’ll get used to it.
Things become familiar without your getting used to them.
Despair is familiar, Tomas, don’t you think?
Of course one can’t help imagining less pain, less injustice.
Dear God, why?
They asked the same question, Zdena, in Nineveh and Egypt. They asked it during the Black Death, when, in Europe, one person in three died of The Plague … Fourteenth century.
You had to write the entry about the Black Death in your encyclopaedia?
There wasn’t one. It came under Feudalism, Reasons for Its Decline. Try one of these, they’re made from walnuts. Walnuts were once thought to cure many illnesses of the brain.
Lightly roasted, they eliminate despair! she shrieks.
The thing about Italians is they understand pleasure, he says, all their ingenuity goes into pleasure. They’re the opposite of Slavs.
Are they? If you say so I expect you’re right, Tomas. We only live once, don’t we? And today we have to — no, I have to — I have to live without hope.
Tears fill her eyes.
Last summer, says the bald man, I visited a ruined temple. No inscriptions. No time. Only the grass growing and wilting and growing. And the sea below.
Outside Zdena’s window the morning colours roll by: greens, poppy reds, mustard yellows. Hill gives way to hill, and the far ones are lavender-coloured. They pass lorries from Sofia and Istanbul. Up by the windowscreen the light dazzles as from a hundred keyrings.
I could see a broken arch, says Tomas. It framed the sky and a little triangle of the sea. Everything so far away, my dear, and very slowly, so slowly it perhaps took an hour or more, I noticed that the sky framed by the ruin was brighter, had more light in it than the sky around, and that the little triangle of sea was of a deeper blue than the rest of the sea. Optical illusion, you’ll say! And you’re the scientist, and I’m your political enemy with a Party card. On a ledge … but not without hope, Zdena.
Zdena begins to shake with laughter, uncontrollable. And the bald man repeats: On a ledge in the dark, and he picks up her nearest hand to stroke it, whilst the bus hurtles on. At last she is calm. The two of them sit there. Zdena doesn’t pull her hand away and, as a coach from Budapest overtakes them, he reaches for her left hand, the one whose fingers often hurt her, and although he doesn’t know this and will never know it, he gently clasps the fingers that hurt, and comforts them, and she looks down at the man’s hand with its hairs curling like Qs, and she sighs.
Zdena and Tomas separate in the Piazza San Marco, the square in Venice where most people rendezvous and meet.
28
I hear a glass object being polished. Standa, the large department store in Ferrara, has just opened.
The signalman in his black leathers and motorbike boots is making his way down an aisle and, silhouetted against the barrage of pearly and frosted lights, he looks like a black frog, straight out of Aristophanes. The floors are marble, the counters are black and the objects are gold. All the flasks — some of them giant ones — contain golden liquids.
The perfume fabricant’s counters are arranged like dolls’ houses in toy streets. In each house sits a woman with every hair on her head in place, and fingernails lacquered with the shades of perfect seashells. Some of these women wear glasses, some are young, some are mothers, one has come from Cairo and another from a village in the Trentino. Each day they have to spend an hour before they start work, preparing their faces. They must all show that they have taken a potion which will spare them from ever ageing. And the strange consequence of this is that the young seem old.
The signalman is looking at a chart with fifty different skin colours on it. Each colour is round like a small coin. He peers and then, his head thrust forward, he approaches closer and closer, searching among the fifty for his daughter’s coin: the colour, as he remembers it, of Ninon’s body when he scrubbed her back under the shower when she was a child.
Are you looking, Signore, for a makeup kit? Perhaps I can help?
Behind her ageless mask the ragazza dei cosmetici has protruding eyes and the thick lips of somebody wild.
I was thinking about a perfume, says the signalman.
For a man or a woman? she asks.
A young woman … my daughter.
Would it be for the day or night?
For a wedding.