To the Wedding

5

During the first year of my blindness, the worst recurring moment was waking up in the morning. The lack of light on the frontier between sleep and being awake often made me want to scream. Slowly I became accustomed to it. Now when I wake up, the first thing I do is to touch something. My own body, the sheet, the leaves carved in wood on the headboard of my bed.

When I woke up in my room the next day I touched the chair with my clothes on it, and again I heard Ninon’s voice as sharply as if she had climbed up a ladder from the street and was sitting on the windowsill. No longer a child, not quite a woman.

Today — the first flight of my life. I loved it above the clouds. Where there’s nothing to stand on, I could feel God everywhere. Papa took me on the bike to the airport at Lyon. First hop over the Alps to Vienna. Second hop to Bratislava. And here I am in the city whose name I only knew as a postmark or as part of her address. The river Danube is beautiful and the buildings along it too. Maman was at the airport. She looked prettier than I thought. And I’d forgotten how beautiful her voice is. I’m sure men fall in love with her voice. She was wearing her wedding ring. The flat on the fifth floor has high ceilings, tall windows and furniture with thin legs. A flat made for long talks. All the drawers are full of papers. I looked! To get to my room I go out on to the landing by the staircase and open another front door with a key. I think this room belonged once to another flat. Maman says something about “a shameful story of informers” and I’m not sure what she means. I like my room. There’s a big tree outside the window. What kind of tree? You should know that, she says in her beautiful voice, it’s an acacia. Best of all, there’s a pick-up so I can play my cassettes.

Three days without a note. I must be enjoying myself.

Went for a long walk in the forest looking for mushrooms. I found some éperviers. Maman didn’t know about éperviers — she thought they were only birds! — so I said I’d cook them for us. If you don’t know how, they can taste very bitter. We ate them in an omelette.

She asks questions all the while. What am I going to do after my Bac? Have I many friends? What do I want to study? What do they want to study? What about foreign languages? What would I say to learning Russian? In the end I tell her I’d like to learn to be an acrobat! Straightaway she answers: There’s a very good school for circus artists in Prague, I’ll make enquiries. I kiss her because she doesn’t see I was joking.

Sunday lunch in a restaurant on the Danube. Before we went swimming. She bought me a costume yesterday. Black. Quite sexy. She told me that a few years ago she swam across the Danube at night — it’s forbidden — to prove she was still young! By herself? No, she replied but she didn’t say anything more. Her costume is black and yellow like a bee.

The Pope is visiting Poland, and all during lunch Maman talks about what’s happening there. Lech Walesa is in hiding and his trade union has been outlawed. Solidarność, as Papa calls it. The old General, according to Maman, the one whose name begins with a J, has fewer and fewer choices, he’ll have to negotiate with Walesa even if he doesn’t want to. The old guard are finished, she whispers. We both have a second ice cream. The Brezhnevs and Husáks can’t last, they’ll go, swept aside. Do you know what the people in the street call our President? — she bends very close to my ear — they call him the President of Oblivion!

Maman has two daughters! That’s what I’ve learnt. I have a sister. Maman loves us both. My sister’s called Social Justice. Justie, for short. She’s writing a book, Maman. It’s called “A Dictionary of Political Terms and Their Usage, 1947 Till Today.” The first entries are Abstention, Activist, Agent Provocateur … When she says these words, they sound like love words. She has a lover, I think. A man called Anton telephones and she talks to him — I can’t understand anything except when she says my name — she talks to him with a voice like a cat’s tongue, tiny and warm and raspy. I asked her and she said Anton wants to take us into the country. We’ll see. Her book is all about my sister. She’s plainer than I am. But worthier. They’ve got as far as the letter I. Idealism, Ideology. Soon she’ll be on to the Ks. In the restaurant we’re drinking coffee when an orchestra files in, tunes up and starts to play. Tchaikovsky! Maman hisses. A disgrace! For Czechs it’s a disgrace! We have our own composers. I ask her if she knows the Doors? She shakes her head. Jim Morrison then? No, tell me about him, you must tell me. I recite in my poor English:

Strange days have found us,

Strange days have tracked us down.

They’re going to destroy

Our casual joys.

We shall go on playing

Or find a new town …

Say it to me again, slowly, Maman asks. So I do. And she sits there gazing at me. After a silence she says something I immediately wanted to write in my diary. You’ll never have, she says, all of you, the future for which we sacrificed everything! I felt so close to her at that moment, closer than my sister ever is. Afterwards, in the tram, we cried a little on each other’s shoulders and she touched my ear, fingering it — like the boys at school try to do.