"I'll read this at home," says Tamina, putting the review in her bag. Then she says: "Bibi isn't going to Prague."
"Just as I thought," says Hugo, and then he adds: "Don't worry, Tamina. I've promised. I'll go there for you."
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"May all your wishes come true!" said Hugo, and emptied his glass.
Tamina too downed her whisky in one gulp, and put her glass on the coffee table. She was about to sit down again, when Hugo suddenly embraced her.
She did not defend herself, merely averted her head. Her mouth was twisted and her brow furrowed.
He had taken her in his arms without knowing how it happened. He was frightened initially by his own gesture, and if Tamina had pushed him away, he would have retreated timidly and virtually apologized. But Tamina did not push him away, and her grimace and averted head aroused him enormously. None of (he few women he had known up to now had ever responded so eloquently to his caresses. If they decided to make love with him, they would undress very placidly, with a kind of indifference, and then wait to see what he was going to do with their bodies. Tamina's grimacing gave their embrace a depth he had never dreamed of. He gripped her with frenzy and tried to tear off her clothes.
But why did Tamina not defend herself?
For three years now she had fearfully been imagining such a moment. For three years now she had been living under the hypnotic stare of such a moment. And now it had arrived, just as she had imagined it. That is why she did not defend herself. She accepted it as one accepts the inescapable.
All she could do was avert her head. But that was no use. Her husband's image was before her, and as she
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"I've got good news for you. I talked to your brother. He's going to see your mother-in-law on Saturday."
"Really? And did you explain everything to him? Did you tell him that if she doesn't find the key he should force open the drawer?"
When Tamina hung up, she had the impression she was drunk.
"Good news?" asked Hugo.
"Yes."
With her father's cheerful, energetic voice still in her ear, she reflected that she had been unjust to him.
Hugo got up and went over to his liquor cabinet. He took out two glasses and poured whisky into them.
"Tamina," he said, "you can phone from here whenever you want and as often as you want. I'm going to say it again. I feel good with you, even though I know you'll never sleep with me."
He forced himself to utter "I know you'll never sleep with me" just to prove to himself he could say certain words to this inaccessible woman's face (though in a cautiously negative form), and he felt almost daring.
Tamina got up and went over to Hugo for her glass. She was thinking about her brother: they no longer spoke to each other, yet they really loved and were ready to help each other.
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swiveled her face about the room his image followed accordingly. It was a large portrait of a grotesquely large husband, larger than life, yes, just what she had imagined for three years.
And then she was entirely naked, and Hugo, aroused by what he took to be her arousal, was amazed to discover that Tamina was dry.
Lost Letters
bring them back to her notebooks. She forced herself to review the sequence of vacations, as she had managed, if only incompletely, to reconstruct it: the first vacations on the shore of a small lake in Bohemia, then Yugoslavia, then the small lake in Bohemia again, and a spa, also in Bohemia; but the sequence of these vacations was uncertain. In 1964 they had gone to the Tatras and the next year to Bulgaria, but after that the trail vanished. In 1968 they had spent their entire vacation in Prague, the following year they had gone to a spa, and then they emigrated and had their last vacations in Italy.
Hugo withdrew from her and tried to turn her body over. She realized he wanted her on all fours. At that instant she recalled that Hugo was younger than she, and she was ashamed. But she made an effort to stifle all her feelings and obey him with total indifference. Then she felt the hard blows of his body on her rump. She realized he was trying to dazzle her with his strength and endurance, he was joined in a decisive battle, he was taking a test to prove he could conquer and be worthy of her.
She did not know that Hugo could not see her. The fleeting sight of Tamina's rump (of the open eye of that mature and beautiful rump, of the eye that stared at him pitilessly) had so aroused him that he closed his eyes, slowed his tempo, and breathed deeply. Now he too tried hard to think of something else (it was the only thing they had in common), so as to be able to go on making love to her.
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She had once undergone minor surgery without anesthesia, forcing herself during the operation to review English irregular verbs. Now she tried to do the same by concentrating entirely on her notebooks. She thought about how they would soon be safe with her father, and this nice Hugo would go and get them for her.
Nice Hugo had already been moving fiercely on her for some time when she became aware that he was oddly raised on his forearms and thrashing his hips around in all directions. She realized he was dissatisfied with her responses, finding her insufficiently aroused, and therefore trying to penetrate her from various angles and find somewhere in her depths the mysterious sensitivity that was hiding itself from him.
Not wanting to see his labored efforts, she moved her head away. She tried to control her thoughts and
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Lost Letters
Over the telephone, Tamina asked her father to wrap everything carefully, to seal the parcel with gummed tape, and, above all, stressed that neither he nor her brother was to read any of it.
Nearly offended, he assured her it had never occurred to them to imitate Tamina's mother-in-law by reading something that was no concern of theirs. But I know (and Tamina knows it too) that there are sights whose temptation no one can resist: auto accidents, for instance, or other people's love letters.
So the intimate writings were finally with her father. But did Tamina still value them? Hadn't she said a hundred times over that the gaze of outsiders was like rain obliterating inscriptions?
No, she had been wrong. She wanted them more than ever, they were more than ever dear to her. Those notebooks had been ravaged and violated as she had been ravaged and violated, so that she and her memories had a kindred fate. She loved them all the more.
But she felt sullied.
A very long time ago, when she was seven years old, her uncle had come upon her when she was naked in her bedroom. She had been terribly ashamed, and her shame had turned into rebellion. She made a solemn, childish vow never to look at him again in her whole; life. They could scold her, yell at her, make fun of her, but she never looked at her uncle, who came often to visit.
Now she was in a similar situation. Although she was grateful to them, she no longer wanted to see her
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And during all this, Tamina saw her husband's gigantic face in front of her on the white surface of Hugo's wardrobe. She swiftly closed her eyes and again reviewed the sequence of their vacations, as if they were irregular verbs: first the vacations at the lake; then Yugoslavia, the lake, and the spa—or rather the spa, Yugoslavia, the lake; then the Tatras and Bulgaria, and then the trail vanished; later on, Prague, the spa, and finally Italy.
Hugo's heavy breathing tore her away from her memories. She opened her eyes and saw her husbands face on the white wardrobe.
Suddenly Hugo too opened his eyes. He caught sight of the eye of Tamina's rump, and pleasure ran through him like lightning.
22
When Tamina's brother went to get the notebooks, he did not have to force open the drawer. It was not locked, and the eleven notebooks were all there. They were not wrapped but thrown in every which way. T
he letters were also jumbled; they were a shapeless pile of papers. Along with the notebooks, Tamina's brother stuffed them into a briefcase that he brought to his father.
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father or her brother. More clearly than ever before, she realized she would never go back to them.
Lost Letters
he is saying. He wants to imprison her in the universe of his blood and thoughts, but she is utterly enclosed in her own world. Remaining unshared with her, the words he is saying become heavier and heavier in his mouth, and his delivery becomes slower and slower:
"... a book of love about politics, you know, because the world has to be re-created on a human scale, our scale, the scale of our bodies, of your body, Tamina, of my body, you know, so that someday there will be a new way of kissing and a new way of loving ..."
The words are heavier and heavier, like big mouth-fuls of meat too tough to chew. Hugo falls silent. Tamina is beautiful, and he hates her. He thinks she is exploiting her fate. She is perched on her emigre and widow past as on a skyscraper of false pride from which she is looking down on everyone. Filled with envy, Hugo is pondering the tower of his own that he has been trying to put up facing her skyscraper and she has been refusing to see: a tower made out of one published article and a projected book about their love.
Then Tamina asks him: "When are you going to Prague?"
And Hugo realizes she has never loved him. She is with him only because she needs him to go to Prague. He is seized by an irresistible desire to take revenge on her:
"Tamina," he says, "I thought you would have figured it out by yourself. You've read my article, after all!"
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Hugo's unexpected sexual success brought him an equally unexpected disappointment. He could now make love to her whenever he wanted (she could hardly deny him what she had once granted), but he felt he had succeeded neither in captivating nor in dazzling her. How, oh how, could a naked body under his own body be so indifferent, so out of reach, so distant and foreign? Had he not wanted her to be part of his inner world, that imposing universe shaped by his blood and thoughts?
Sitting across from her in a restaurant, he says: "I want to write a book, Tamina, a book about love, you know, about you and me, about the two of us, our most intimate diary, the diary of our two bodies, you know, I want to sweep away all the taboos and tell everything, tell everything about me, about what I am and what I think, and it'll be a political book too, a political book about love and a book of love about politics . . ."
Tamina stares at Hugo, and suddenly he can no longer endure that stare and loses the thread of what
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"Yes," she says.
He does not believe her. And if she read it, she took no interest in it. She had never referred to it. And Hugo is aware that the only deep feeling he is capable of is fidelity to the unrecognized, abandoned tower (the tower of the published article and the projected book about his love for Tamina), that he is capable of going to war for the tower and forcing Tamina to open her eyes to it and marvel at its height.
"After all, you know that in my article I talk about the problem of power. I analyze how power works. And I criticize what's going on in your country. I talk about it without pulling any punches."
"Look! Do you really think they know your article in Prague?"
Hugo is wounded by her irony: "You've been away from your country a long time, you've forgotten what your police can do. That article has caused a great stir. I've gotten lots of letters. Your police know who I am. I know they do."
Tamina is silent and more and more beautiful. My God, he would agree to go to and from Prague a hundred times if only she would open her eyes a bit to the universe he wanted to take her to, the universe of his blood and thoughts! And he abruptly alters his tone:
"Tamina," he says sadly, "I know you're annoyed with me because I can't go to Prague. At first I thought I could hold off publishing the article, but then I realized I didn't have the right to keep silent for such a long time. Do you understand?"
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"No," says Tamina.
Hugo knows he is saying ridiculous things that are taking him where he does not at all want to let himself be dragged, but he can no longer retreat, and this makes him despair. Red blotches mottle his face and his voice quavers: "You don't understand? I don't want things to end up with us here the way they did with you there! If we all keep silent, we'll end up slaves."
Just then a terrible disgust took hold of Tamina, and she got up from her chair and ran to the toilet; stomach rising to her throat, she knelt in front of the toilet bowl to vomit, her body doubled up as if she were sobbing, and before her eyes was the image of that boy's balls, cock, and pubic hair, and she smelled his sour breath, felt the contact of his thighs with her buttocks, and it crossed her mind that she could no longer visualize her husband's genitals and pubic thatch, that the memory of revulsion is therefore stronger than the memory of tenderness (oh yes, my God, the memory of revulsion is stronger than the memory of tenderness!), and that nothing is going to remain in her poor head but this boy with bad breath, and she vomited, doubled up and vomited.
She left the toilet, and her mouth (still filled with that acid smell) was firmly shut.
He was embarrassed. He wanted to escort her home, but she did not say a word, keeping her mouth firmly shut (as in the dream where she had a golden ring in her mouth).
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When he spoke, her only response was to quicken her pace. Soon he had nothing more to say, and he walked a few more meters alongside her in silence, then stopped and stood motionless. She went on walking straight ahead, without even a backward glance.
She continued to serve coffee and never again telephoned Prague.
PART FIVE
Litost
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Who Is Kristyna?
Kristyna is a woman of about thirty, who has a child, a butcher husband she gets along with quite well, and a very intermittent affair with a local mechanic, who now and then makes love to her after hours amid the discomforts of the auto-repair shop. The small town hardly lends itself to extramarital love, or rather it requires a wealth of ingenuity and audacity, qualities Kristyna is not abundantly endowed with.
Meeting the student turned her head powerfully. He had come to the town to spend his summer vacation with his mother, had twice stared at the butcher's wife as she stood behind the shop counter, and the third time, when he spoke to her at the local swimming place, he was so charmingly timid that the young woman, accustomed to the butcher and the mechanic, could not resist. Ever since her marriage (a good ten years now), she had not dared touch another man except in the safety of the locked repair shop, among dismantled cars and old tires, and suddenly she had found the audacity for amorous meetings out in the open, exposed to prying eyes. Though the spots they chose for their walks were the most isolated and the likelihood of anyone intruding on them negligible,
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Kristyna's heart would pound and she would be filled with stimulating fear. But the more bravely she faced the danger, the more reserved she was with the student. They did not go very far. He got only some brief hugs and tender kisses, she would often slip out of his arms entirely, and when he was fondling her body she kept her legs tightly together.
It was not that she did not want the student. It was that she had fallen in love with his tender timidity and wanted to preserve it for herself. Hearing a man expound ideas about life and mention the names of poets and philosophers was something that never before had happened to Kristyna. The student, poor boy, could talk about nothing else; the range of his seducer's eloquence was very limited, and he could not adapt it to women of varying social levels. Anyway, he felt no need to blame h
imself in this regard, because the quotations from the philosophers produced much more of an effect on that simple butcher's wife than on any fellow student. One thing nonetheless escaped him: an effective quotation from a philosopher might charm the butcher's wife's soul, but it stood as an obstacle between the butcher's wife's body and his own. For Kristyna vaguely imagined that by giving her body to the student she would lower their affair to the butcher's or the mechanic's level and she would never again hear a word about Schopenhauer.
With the student she suffered from an embarrassment she had never known before. With the butcher and the mechanic she always arrived quickly and
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cheerfully at an understanding about things. For instance, both men agreed to be very careful, because the doctor had told her after her child was born that she could risk her health if not her life by having another. This story happened a very long time ago, when abortion was strictly forbidden and women themselves had no means of limiting their fertility. The butcher and the mechanic well understood Kristyna's apprehensions, and before she allowed them to enter her, she would make sure with good-humored naturalness that they had taken the required precautions. But the thought that she would have to behave like that with her angel, who had come down to her from the cloud where he conversed with Schopenhauer, made her feel she would be unable to find the words she needed. I therefore conclude that her erotic reserve had two motives: to keep the student as long as possible in the enchanted territory of tender timidity and to avoid as long as possible the disgust sure to be inspired in him, as she saw it, by the crude instructions and precautions without which physical love could not take place.