To the Wedding

27

When Zdena wakes up there is no more snow and the coach is in the bus station of Trieste. The sun is up and the seat beside her is empty. She glances at the luggage rack: he has taken both his hat and his battered dispatch case.

Have I time to go and wash? she asks the driver, who is eating cherries from a paper bag and spitting the stones out of the window.

The driver looks at his watch. We leave in four minutes, he says.

The coach-load of passengers from Bratislava is more alert than yesterday. Today they are in a foreign country which, until recently, was a forbidden one. They are in Italy — land of fruit and wine, of elegant shoes, jewellery, corruption and sunshine. The newlyweds are impatient to go to bed in their Venetian hotel. The shopkeepers are impatient to get down, to take note of every difference and to buy whatever they can.

The driver starts the engine. Zdena climbs up into the coach, panting.

You can’t leave yet, there’s a passenger missing!

If somebody misses the bus, says the driver, it’s not the bus’s fault.

Please, wait two minutes more, I’m asking you.

You know how long we have in Venice to turn around, lady, before I drive back? Eight hours, no more, and I need some sleep.

That’s wrong, says Zdena, you are entitled to twenty-four hours.

Entitled! You want more than eight hours, they scream, then drive for another coach line, not ours!

It’s against the security regulations, argues Zdena.

Who cares?

I know he was going to Venice, he told me so.

He’s not the first man, sweetheart, to vanish in Trieste.

He had a ticket for Venice!

He was the first passenger to get down. You were still asleep!

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.