To the Wedding

3

On the train going back to Athens the same night, I heard piano music being played in another city.

A wide staircase which has neither carpet nor wallpaper but a polished wooden handrail. The music comes from an apartment on the fifth floor. The lift seldom works here. It can’t be either a record or a compact disc, it’s an ordinary cassette. There is a slight dust on all the sounds. A nocturne for piano.

Inside the apartment a woman is seated on an upright chair in front of a tall window which gives on to a balcony. She has just opened the curtains and is gazing over the night roofs of a city. Her hair is drawn back in a bun and her eyes are tired. All day she has worked on detailed engineering drawings for an underground parking lot. She sighs and rubs the fingers of her left hand which ache. Her name is Zdena.

Twenty-five years ago she was a student in Prague. She tried to reason with the Russian soldiers who entered the city in their Red Army tanks on the night of August 20, 1968. The following year, on the anniversary of the night of the tanks, she joined a crowd in Wenceslaus Square. A thousand of them were carted off by the police and five were killed. A few months later several close friends were arrested, and on Christmas Day, 1969, Zdena managed to get across the frontier to Vienna and from there she travelled to Paris.

She met Jean Ferrero at an evening organised for Czech refugees in Grenoble. She noticed him as soon as he came into the room, for he was like an actor she had once seen in a Czech film about railway workers. Later, when she found out he really worked on the railways, she felt sure he was destined to become her friend. He asked her how to say in Czech: Bohemia is my country. And this made her laugh. They became lovers.

Whenever the railwayman had two days off work in Modane, he drove to see Zdena in Grenoble. The two of them made trips together on his bike. He took her to the Mediterranean, which she had never seen. When Salvador Allende won the elections in Chile, they talked of going to live in Santiago.

Then in November Zdena announced she was pregnant. Jean persuaded Zdena to keep their child. I will look after you both, he said. Come and live in my house in Modane, it has three rooms, a kitchen, a bedroom for us, and a bedroom for him or her. I think our baby is a girl, she said, suddenly enchanted.

On the platform at Athens somebody offered to escort me. I pretended to be deaf, as well as blind.

When Ninon, their daughter, was seven years old, Zdena heard on the radio one evening that a hundred Czech citizens in Prague had signed a petition demanding human and civil rights. Was this, she asked herself, a turning point? Eight years she’d been away. She needed to know more.

You go, Jean said, sitting on the kitchen table, we’ll be fine, Ninon and I. Take your time, maybe you can even get your visa prolonged. Come back for Christmas, and we’ll all go on a luge right down to Maurienne! No, don’t be sad, Zdena. It’s your duty, Comrade, and you’ll come back happy. We’ll be all right.

Still listening to the nocturne in the room on the fifth floor, Zdena closes the curtains and goes over to a wall mirror by a blue and white tiled stove. She gazes into the mirror.

What really happened that evening ten years ago when she asked Jean about the visa? Had they agreed, like people possessed, like the mad, that the three of them would never again know the same place as home?

How do we decide things?

Stuck into the bottom corner of the mirror is a bus ticket: Bratislava-Venice. She fingers the ticket with her left hand, the one whose fingers ache.