The Drowning Of A Goldfish (2 page)

He had every right to do so: He had let him marry his daughter, a ravishing beauty, quite untouched by culture, both qualities his doing. Grandfather was a handsome man, disdainful of women.

I do not understand how I merited the distinction of Grandfather's attention. Did he wish to spite my father? Or did he feel I could take him out of his solitude? Yet, his isolation was voluntary. One day he just decided to break with his friends, to abandon his table at the café, to move out of Prague, and remain with no company other than his own.

Grandmother suffered tremendously from this situation. Raised in Vienna, which she had to leave after the death of her mother for Prague, to her a bleak and uninspiring town, she must have been appalled by the muddy countryside of Senokosy. Thus, she lost the last of her friends and the remains of her world, whose elegant survivors took refuge in the refined paintings of Gustav Klimt.

Grandmother did not rebel. Grandmother never complained. The duty of a wife is to follow her husband. As she tried to teach me: A real lady never displays her emotions and knows how to adapt to every situation.

Becoming a companion to my grandfather, I acquired the right to read all of his books and to possess some of his time and his knowledge. He never treated me like a child. If I did not understand what he was explaining that was my business.

I felt neither deprived nor frustrated. To intuit things fascinated me more than to grasp them. Intuiting became my way of thinking.

Together, we made a funny couple; a very chic gentleman, impeccably dressed in his dark gray suit, with a magnificent bow-tie of a matching color, a flower, preferably mauve, in the buttonhole, his elegant feet in size eight dress shoes, wandering through the fields and meadows in the company of a well-mannered little girl, her pink ribbon tied around her curls, tilting her head toward every interesting plant, trying to classify it with a Latin name, forcing herself to prove that her mind was capable of assimilating all that was being offered.

Grandfather and I started a little botanical garden, all private, all secret, belonging exclusively to the two of us.

Grandfather had a fence built in a sunny corner of the garden, the soil tilled, the sections landscaped into terraced plots. We did the rest.

We carried from an abandoned quarry rocks of exquisite beauty; we grabbed cushions of a lush, green moss in the forest, we embellished our garden with grottoes, rockeries, and opalescent ponds. When the garden was ready to receive the most beautiful plants in the world, we undertook many adventurous expeditions.

Provisioned with just a chocolate bar, sacrificing all comfort, we became keen hunters. Lovely plants trembled at our approach. Nothing but an imperfection, unnoticed at first glance, could save them from our spade. We lifted them out of their native soil with all the delicacy of an attentive admirer. Wrapped in a moist cloth, gently placed in a fine wicker basket, they were carefully carried to the botanical garden. We discussed at length their placement, considering their beauty, but also their wellbeing. Perpetrators of flower-napping, we had become responsible for their very survival.

For that, we were in full agreement.

Small conflicts, menacing our celestial harmony, sneaked in, deceitfully, later on. I, for instance, would have desired to populate our empire with ladybugs, snails, and frogs. Even a hedgehog would have been welcome.

Grandfather, to whom all animality was suspect, found this fancy of mine inadmissible.

“The creatures will gnaw at the plants. And what is more, they are filthy!”

I had to give in. He was right.

The botanical garden was only one of our secret worlds.

There was the Sunday mass in the neighboring village, a real one, with whitewashed Baroque farms, vegetable gardens in front of the sheds, stables full of cows and horses, farmyards swarming with cackling chickens, strutting geese, and ducks tottering on orange feet, like little boats on a sea. Sometimes, I even saw some squealing piglets, very gay and very dirty.

The church, perched on a green slope, dominated the calm and rustic landscape.

Everything breathed the gentleness of life: the streams, teeming with fish, the lavish groves, concealing mushrooms with velvety heads and the trees, offering—according to season—red, yellow, and blue gleaming fruit.

Prim little girl, I would scurry beside my grandfather who would show me all these beautiful things, and we would be happy. We felt part of this sunny serenity and feared nothing.

The steeple of the church, whose shape became clearer and clearer as we approached, reinforced our impression of everlastingness.

The foundation of the church itself dates back to the sixth century when Byzantian monks built a monastery in the forest above the Sázava river. On the twelfth century portal there are majestic birds, bizarre animals, and profiled letters that Grandfather could read. He explained everything to me. We thus possessed the secret of eternity and, as a particle of it, would exist forever.

Educated by Jesuits, Grandfather manipulated the absolute with virtuosity. He tamed reality, suppressed the facts that he could not control, and turned the truth to suit himself. His truth was pure and calm.

He made me feel good. I learned to assimilate my suspicions as I pushed back Father's world, too brutal to be rendered tame.

I could feast on gold-brown, roasted squab, savor the tender crust of broiled lamb, relish the veal melting on my tongue, muffle up in the fur of wild cats, my intimate friends.

I would kneel beside Grandfather at the base of a pillar in the last row of the church. How hard the prie-Dieu would be without our embroidered cushions!

I would mimic diligently Grandfather's gestures, while keeping an eye on the priest who moved about with dignity. Anticipating his slow movements, his robe would shimmer under the sunbeams, which lost their intensity as they passed through the stained glass windows.

The sound of the organ, deep and majestic, would collide with the dissonance of human voices, lamentable in their imperfection.

The people in front of me would offer, to my wandering eyes, thick, wrinkled necks and flowered scarves.

I sensed that we occupied a privileged position although we would be sitting, by pure chance, with the crowd. We could have been celebrating mass in the sole company of the priest. Grandfather was fluent in Latin, and I knew what was being said as he had elucidated the mystery for me.

But to what avail was all this wisdom, all this complicity, if it did not help me to find Myšák?

One day he disappeared without leaving a trace. I spent days searching after him, calling him, asking all the neighbors if they had not seen a black and white kitten. My nights were filled with ghosts, plaintively mewing to be rescued.

Later I learned that Grandfather, who had seen enough of this “dirty beast,” asked my father either to take “it” to Prague with us or dispose of “it” in another manner.

Father gave Myšák away to a man who ate cats.

This person received Myšák from the hands of my grandmother.

That did not pose any problem.

The kitten trusted her blindly.

CHAPTER II

IRIS

When Iris entered my life, I was playing the part of a lady-spouse.

It was not that I had given in to the world of my grandmother; I had adapted myself to circumstances.

My first year of high school coincided with the last years of the German occupation.

How could I, so delicate and fragile, have passed the entrance exams, consisting mainly of physical exercises?

I still carry within me those three days of humiliations, calculated to erase all self-esteem, when I was subjected to the howling of thick-boned Valkyries, outfitted in the loathsome brown uniforms of “Bund Deutscher Mädel” (the Nazi organization for young girls), especially brought in to present to us, the “slawischen Unterrasse” (Slavic degenerates), the Aryan ideal in its absolute form.

I still hear the stridence of cloth ripped apart, and I still shiver at the memory of the touch of their sharpened claws tearing up my gymnastic shirt as they reached out to crush me.

Yet, I could have avoided this affront to my dignity, this trauma, this wound forever opened, if I had been able to overcome my repulsion and the panic which engulfed me at each contact with the world of my grandmother. I could have accepted my father's proposal to enroll me in the Vyšší dívčí, a private school for Daddy's little girls, a breeding ground for distinguished and elegant spouses, if I had had more confidence in him, if I had been able to understand that it was a way out, not a trap.

Vyšší dívčí was established in the second half of the 19th century as the first secondary school for girls by Eliška Krásnohorská, writer and librettist of the composer Bedřich Smetana.

Krásnohorská knew only too well what it means to be an intelligent woman in a society which excluded her from any serious education. To make her project happen, she needed all her energy and all her courage. Labelled as a blue-stocking by these gentlemen and ladies of years gone by (the ladies and gentlemen of our time would call her “this high-flown bitch in dire need to be laid”) she was vilified as a suffragette. Grandmother, who had a very vague idea of the significance of this frightening word, explained to me that it referred to a woman who had degraded herself to such an extent that she no longer wished to care for her husband and children and having nothing better to do, would roam at night, sometimes even with men of questionable reputation. Poor as a church mouse, suffering from rheumatism which inhibited her from holding a pen in her deformed hands, EliÅ¡ka Krásnohorská nevertheless succeeded in gathering around her the best minds of the nation.

The “crème de la crème” of the Czech intelligentsia made it a point of honor to teach at her school. She knew how to win over musicians, poets, and scientists. The students were worthy of these teachers, proving as knowledgeable as men. This led to demands for equal access to education for women.

In 1918, when equality of education had been passed as a law, Vyšší dívčí lost its raison d'être. It only offered education up to the 6th grade and thus their students were excluded from entering universities, which required eight grades.

With time, Vyšší dívčí became a sort of finishing school, where young ladies of the well-to-do bourgeoisie received a wordly education that taught them how to entertain the distinguished and successful in their salons. I suspect that Father wanted to enroll me there because he harbored the ambition of eventually finding a son-in-law who could later become a partner in his banking business for which his daughter showed so little inclination. I am certain that my will was as strong as his though, and I would be the one to decide on a spouse.

Vyšší dívčí, as a private school, was not directly controlled by the state, and the state, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, meant the Nazis.

The entrance requirements were, as far as I was concerned, acceptable: I needed to have completed five grades of primary school and to pass an examination, proving that I was capable of logical thinking.

Father needed to pay the annual fee. After my ordeal and rejection at the high school, I found this arrangement acceptable.

In spite of myself, I became one of “them”—a student! To prefer a little to nothing is a trait of Czechs, subdued by the historical reality of being a small nation in the heart of Europe.

I remember very little of the fifty-nine ladies with whom I had to spend my mornings. I would escape into an imaginary world; the bourgeois mentality is more contagious than the flu.

Not to feel completely isolated, I sided with my teachers. Arms crossed behind my back, always attentive, I would diligently transfer every word from their lips into my memory. I had decided to appropriate all that was being offered, to squeeze each drop of their knowledge, and to store it as economically as possible, in my mind.

Mathematics stifles me. Blue with asphyxia, I struggle with it. The ground gives away beneath my feet and I drown in the sweat of my bottomless despair.

I take full revenge by closing myself in. The problem is no longer that I do not understand. At this point, I DO NOT WANT TO UNDERSTAND.

I am watching the clouds, slipping by outside the window; I am contemplating the leaves, engaged in a rhythmic dance, teased by fondling touches of wind. My life is elsewhere.

I transform the numbers into familiar images: Eights grow pointed ears and greet me, waving their tails above their mischievous heads; sixes, idle snails, creep across the blackboard, salivating to their hearts' content; twos, majestically swinging their long flexible necks, float in the ocean of threes; fives—capricious monkeys—hang on the branches of fours; sevens, undulating giraffes, play basketball with the nines—Indian cobras, who with sharp, hissing cries, toss zeroes around, while the ones watch this circus, whipping the dried, cracking air.

Tamer of ferocious numbers, I smile, savoring my victory. I have discovered the secret of my life: My inward evasions render me untouchable.

I do not find one single friend among my classmates. I scorn them and they hate me. I could not care less. I do not want to become a part of their world. I am biding my time in a first class waiting room.

The voice of my father yells somewhere far off in space: “Idiot, idiot, idiot” … and crashes against the ramparts of my private silence. Armed with calmness, I discern the mystery that father would like to keep to himself:

HE NEEDS ME TO BE A WINNER.

He had defined, once and for all, the basis of our relationship with a concise statement.

“Either you are the best or I am not interested,” a condition easy to meet at a school for Daddy's little girls.

I could not give a damn.

My great-grandfather was a gambler. His passion for cards devoured all that he had: his farm, his forests, his fields, his ponds, his family.