The Ice Cream Man (10 page)

“I said that was something between us.”

“Is that so? Well, let’s hear it! You’ve had a whole week to think up something since the trains started running!”

“Don’t shout.”

“Not laughing now, are you? Look at yourself. Covered in chicken grease, rescuing butterflies! You look like a yokel. Have you stopped shaving?”

“Any other faults you’d like to name? Wonder if I’m circumcised? Want to check?”

“Makes no difference—we’re going to be shot and dumped into the same hole in the ground anyway.”

“Then you might as well know my final wish.”

“That I would indeed like to know.”

“They have to shoot you with a single bullet to the head, so you don’t suffer. But they should shoot me so as to make me linger for a while.”

“In a hole in the ground? Madness! Why would you wish for something like that?”

“The world seems to be heading toward that point,” Tomáš begins, then trails off.

“What point is that?”

“A certain point.”

“What point?”

“Just a point. Where there is no other way left for a man to lie with his wife.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, such pathos,” Esther says calmly.

“Couldn’t you just wash off that chicken grease? You don’t want to get it on the bedsheets.”

Tomáš throws a chicken bone into the fire and prods the embers with a birch stick. He is still sitting in the same spot, the stick in his hand, when Esther looks into the backyard from the bedroom window. Esther imagines the hole in the ground, imagines herself lying in it, and then Tomáš’s body, which would fall into her arms, Tomáš’s weight and his breathing, which would carry on for a while, the warmth and blood, which would ebb from them into the depths of the earth. Esther tries to feel all of this, because if it did happen, she would no longer know anything about it. The orange glow of the embers is fading slowly, and when Tomáš goes over to the water barrel and takes off his shirt, his skin is dimly visible in the warm-hued darkness. He scoops up some water from the barrel and rinses his face, his neck, his armpits. He takes his penis in his hand, urinates into the grass, washes it as if for a woman, carefully and thoroughly. But it is already quite dark. Perhaps Esther is just imagining it.

Tomáš left to go into the village and never came back. That evening at Mrs. Němcová’s house, dinner is eaten at the usual time, and the washing up is done after the meal. Mrs. Němcová comes to terms with the circumstances much sooner than Esther, as is usually the case for a person who does not have much to lose in a new situation. It is also immediately clear to Mrs. Němcová that she is on Esther’s side. She does not believe that he went off to perform heroic deeds; rather, she reckons he simply took to his heels. Esther would not be surprised if Mrs. Němcová had arranged matters so Tomáš went to buy a newspaper but ended up being sold down the river.

When Esther sets off along the dusty road, she gives the village a wide berth under cover of the edge of the wood, and not until the village is behind her does she return to the road. It starts to rain, not hard but still. Esther cannot help imagining how she might be listening to the rain in the bedroom now, and Tomáš would be so close that he would be able to hear it as well: the same raindrops against the window. She tries again and again to recall Tomáš’s expression, the way it was just before he left, when everything might have been written in it but sealed up, like a letter that doesn’t arrive until everything is over. But that expression was just as it had been all the other times when Tomáš had gone away for a short time, always to return. Esther didn’t know whether to take her suitcase along or not. Which would attract more attention: a lone woman walking along a country road carrying nothing or dragging a suitcase? Esther still knows nothing; she has not become any wiser than this.

She lugs her bag like a magnetic ingot being pulled toward the depths of the earth’s iron core: it bashes against her side and leg, stretching her tendons to the point of pain. How wretched and helpless she is in the rain, surrounded by dark fields; she thinks she will go and lie in the middle of the road to wait for tires that will continue their journey over the thing that has appeared in their path, but when she sees a car’s headlights approach from a distance, she dashes back into the field and darts back and forth searching for shelter like a hare, but the field has been harvested and is full of rough stubble. So she runs back and throws herself into the ditch. There is grass growing along its edges and water and mud in the bottom. She feels sick: there is something slimy and pulsating in there, like frogspawn that has been laid in water that is too shallow. She hears the sound of an engine spluttering from low-octane gas and thinks: if this is a nightmare, they will pull up right here. There are plenty of people who are having only nightmares these days, their own individual nightmares as well as immense, shared ones. The worst possible thing always happens, in defiance of the law of probabilities.

Here, too, instead of driving past, the car jams on the brakes. The car doors open a few meters away; the driver gets out, stretches his legs, unzips his trousers, and pees into the grass, someone walks about a bit, someone lights a cigarette, someone checks the map in the cone of the headlights. One walks into the darkness close to where Esther is lying and starts panting quietly, as if crawling around in a cramped cave where the oxygen supply is running low. The panting does not last long and ends in a sound reminiscent of a sudden asphyxiation; hands tear at the grass. When the car has gone on its way, Esther remains lying in the ditch full of urine and tadpoles. She searches her muddled memory for evidence of boots striding away in order to be certain that no one is still standing in the darkness. She lies there for so long that she starts to suspect she merely imagined the whole thing, but then is unable to explain why she was lying there at all. The dawn chorus starts to come from the edge of the wood; she twists onto her side, and the air feels cold. It is still dark above, but nearer to the land, the darkness has faded. She staggers to her feet and starts walking like a carved wooden doll that has been only half dipped in paint: her back half—the half Tomáš once lay alongside—is unchanged, but her front is dyed with mud. Depending on whether you approached her from the front or from behind, you would encounter two different women.

Esther has to hurry. Her legs realize this, and they are moving as fast as they can. She does not know what time it is when she ascends the slope toward the house. The sun is already quite high in the sky; perhaps the landlady has already returned. How is she going to explain the suitcase and her mud-soaked clothes? Her head cannot process that right now; her head has two holes from which she is looking out, but her arms and legs are doing everything in the right order, as if they have been rehearsing in secret for this very moment: suitcase under the bed first—she can unpack it later—then matches from the kitchen drawer. In the backyard, she pours some water from the barrel into a tub and puts her clothes in to soak. Then she washes herself. There is mud in her hair, on her thighs and between her breasts, all the way down between her legs. The water in the tub turns gray from the mud. She empties it on the ground and fetches more clean water. The wood is damp, but finally she manages to get a fire going under the laundry tub.

The landlady will not return until the afternoon. When she does arrive, she will tear a newspaper into strips and stuff the bits inside her damp shoes.

They have things to talk about. This means the landlady talks and Esther listens from her place at the table. Esther’s hair is freshly washed and combed, and she is wearing a clean dress from the wardrobe. Her hands are out, resting on the tablecloth, having been scrubbed with a nail brush, out and obedient like the hands of a prisoner who is required to sleep with her hands on top of the blanket. The landlady looks at Esther with satisfaction. Yes, the air does feel fresh after the rain. Nature will tell you what’s going on when events are in flux. Some times call for calm, others for vigilance.

The landlady’s voice is gentle. With her voice, the landlady isolates Esther inside her immediate sphere of interest, which is just as difficult to escape from as geography. Of course Esther can stay at the house through the winter, with no rent to pay. Then they will see how things are in the spring. Spring always means a new beginning. Was it Esther’s fault that Tomáš took all the money? The landlady keeps going on about the money as if it really existed, and it does need to exist because the world won’t go around without it, but then again, perhaps the landlady is going on about the money because it is easier to hate than to love, at least when you have to split up. But the landlady cannot grant Esther any special status, though it would be lovely to be there with Esther, just the two of them. Dr. Nedved has long been hinting that he would like Mrs. Němcová to take in convalescent patients who have nowhere to go until things sort themselves out. The doctor knows very well how large the house is—no pressure, of course, very tactfully—but the hospital is full to the rafters and even though many die, even though many are taken straight to the morgue, more keep arriving all the time! There is a shortage of medicine; the surgeons are operating day and night, but even they only have two hands . . . Dr. Nedved has now quite specifically requested this favor of Mrs. Němcová, the widow of his late business associate; the doctor will pay the odds out of his own pocket; there must be a point of honor behind it somehow. There would be a pilot who’s lost a leg. Just imagine how tragic: it’s been amputated above the knee, but now he’s already learning to walk with an artificial limb. Everything else is intact and in its place, so is it one shinbone that determines whether he’s a man? And if it’s up to the landlady and Esther, they’ll see to it that he’ll fly again!

Esther looks out the window into the valley. She can see the landlady’s brown coat and her skirt hem flapping in the strong wind as she rises up the slope to the house. The landlady is holding onto her hat; she constantly stops and looks behind her, and after a while Esther can make out a figure following the landlady. The figure moves slowly, with difficulty, somehow hauling itself and staggering through the rippling grass. One gust of wind sends the landlady’s hat flying quite some distance, but the stranger remains standing there while the landlady runs to catch her hat, like a frog that always waits until the last moment to hop off. The figure begins to acquire distinct male features, dark-colored trousers, a brown suit jacket, arms supported by sticks that the man pauses to lean on from time to time. Their ascent is slow; the man sits down in the grass to rest a few times. As they approach the house, Esther returns to the kitchen sink and plunges her hands into the soapy water. The landlady knocks on the door to her own house. Esther thinks: now everything is starting over again from the beginning. The man is fully prepared for what awaits him, and he smiles. Esther does not look surprised: once you’ve lost enough, you must be selective about what you’re missing. Then there is nothing to remove when they start expunging people from photographs. And the man will take anyone, just because of his missing leg.

III

THE WOMAN IN THE CINEMA STALLS

“Do you
know this woman?”

“No.”

“Look closely. We have reason to suspect she’s been looking for you.”

“Do you have any idea how many women come here?”

“Why do they come here?”

“There are three types. The first: women who want to become actresses. The second: women who are infatuated with the actors in my films. The third: women who come to proclaim that I have told their very own story. This third type can be divided into two subgroups. For one subgroup, the issue is so concrete that it becomes legal: I’ve stolen their story, or someone has stolen it from them and sold it to me. The second subgroup experiences the same thing much more lyrically, then things turn around: it’s their story I’ve told, but I’ve given them a voice and they are indebted to me and don’t know how to show their gratitude.”

“Well, which type did she fit?”

“Who?”

The man holds a photo in front of the director’s nose.

“I don’t know that woman.”

“Not many people have eyes in their head like yours. Don’t tell me you can’t see anything with them. Or is she so ordinary, you’re saying you’ve already seen hundreds like her here?”

“I can’t help it if you don’t believe me.”

“That’s different. It’s enough if you manage to convince me.”

The director is silent for a moment as he studies the photograph the man has placed on the table in front of him.

“You’re right. Nothing has such exacting requirements as a lie.”

The man leans back in his chair. The director stares at the table, but his gaze has turned inward.

“Perhaps there’s a third subgroup.”

“A third one?”

“Yes, or perhaps there’s some overlap between the two . . .”

“Which two? Spell it out.”

“The legal and the lyrical—they overlap to some extent, and that woman is right there in the middle, where both apply.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She expects me to be able to work out her story because I’ve got some information about it that she doesn’t. She unites the lyrical and the concrete. She comes here demanding answers about why she’s been left in the dark and asking what happens next. As if there were some sort of final solution. If someone’s died, she assumes I know how. If somebody’s gone missing, she assumes I know where. Her pain is so immense that she doesn’t believe in coincidence. She doesn’t demand evidence; in fact, she’s terrified of it. A lack of evidence is her only hope. But she demands answers.”

“How is she connected to me?” the director asks.

“Indeed, why did she sit through every screening of
The Ice Cream Man
in Olomouc? Why did she travel to the next town where they showed the film as well?”

“She can’t be the only one.”

“The film was shown as the one o’clock matinee in the other town. She went to the doctor and complained that she had such a bad back that she was given two days’ sick leave, just so she could go to those two screenings. She stayed in a boarding house and walked around the town before the film.”

“So you’ve been shadowing her.”

“The doctor prescribed pills for her back that were so strong, she was clearly in a fog.”

“Why did she take the pills? She didn’t have a bad back.”

The man does not bother to answer, and his face has such an inscrutable expression, like an inbred bulldog’s, that it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking.

“Of course, there are other women who follow your
Ice Cream Man
on its tour, the way camp followers trail along with an army. But they have one common denominator.”

“Martin Jelínek.”

“Precisely. But we’re not interested in Martin Jelínek. Jelínek is like a tail shed by a lizard.”

“Couldn’t there be an issue with Jelínek where she’s concerned as well?”

“Or else she’s wrestling with the same question as we are.”

“What question?”

“Who wrote the screenplay?”

“Why would that concern her?”

“Answer the question.”

“Nobody. Nobody wrote anything.”

“So it just materialized out of thin air?”

“Of course not.”

“Where did you get the idea?”

The director points to his head. “From in here.”

“How did it get in there?”

“I might well ask you the same question. Is it really a mystery? Everyone wishes it were. But the truth is that there just aren’t all that many stories. This one is so common, it’s no wonder that desperate, suffering people identify with it. That’s perfectly normal, and there are plenty of suffering people after the war years.”

“You were in Terezín.”

“That’s correct.”

“So you met there?”

“Who?”

The man says nothing. It occurs to the director that they don’t know whom he met there.

“If she were walking down the street, would you take any notice of her?”

“I’d have to see how she moved.”

“What about standing still? Would she do as an extra?”

“No . . .”

“Why not?”

“She’s just not right.”

“Explain what you mean.”

“I can’t explain it.”

“You wanted to see how she moved. Perhaps these will help you. After all, you just put one picture after another, at a fast enough rate . . .”

The man takes a large brown envelope out of his briefcase and hands it to the director. The director opens the envelope, takes out a big bundle of black and white photos, and bursts out laughing.

“What is this? Are you pitching this woman to me? Does she want a part? Have you been leading me along this whole time?”

The director walks into the café. It is a high-ceilinged space; there are people sitting at the tables. He spots the woman sitting at a table near the rear wall, engrossed in a newspaper, then goes up to the counter to order coffee.

“Excuse me, is this chair free?”

“Yes, it is.”

“May I sit here?”

“Go ahead.”

“Thank you.”

“Anything interesting?”

“No.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Here you are. Read it yourself.” The woman drinks the last of her coffee and gets up.

“Wait a moment.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t mean to disturb you. Please don’t leave on my account.”

The woman pushes in her chair and leaves the café. The man notices the woman’s gloves have fallen to the floor. He manages to pick them up and put them on the table before the woman returns for them.

“Do these belong to you?”

The woman takes the gloves and walks toward the door for a second time. The man gets up and hurries after her. He catches up with her outside and tries to walk next to her, but she looks away at once and crosses to the opposite side of the street. They both walk at a brisk pace, the man choosing to remain a few meters behind. He observes the woman’s calves and ankles and the heels of her shoes, which have been worn down to nothing. When they reach the park beneath the massive linden trees, the woman suddenly stops and turns around.

“Are you still there? Do you think I don’t know who you are?”

“Who am I?”

“Don’t try that. You’re that film director.”

“Do you like my films?”

“I’ve only seen one. Have you made others?”

“Before the war, I made a few.”

“I’m not interested in those, the ones you made before the war. And if you think you’re going to harass me, then I dare say I can harass you.”

“What am I supposed to be guilty of? Why would you want to harass me?”

“I am Esther Vorszda.”

“If your name is Esther Vorszda, that’s nothing to do with me.”

“No, it’s not my name—but it wasn’t her real name either.”

“Whose?”

“The woman in the film. Esther Vorszda was her assumed name; she was really someone else.”

“Who then? Do you mean you?”

“You must take me for a basket case.”

“No, not at all.”

“Do you have any idea how intolerable it is to be in a public place and have a complete stranger start to insinuate himself into your company so everyone can see and hear? And it’s even more intolerable when everyone recognizes that man.”

“I don’t think I’m that famous.”

“Oh, yes, you are, especially here in Olomouc. In Prague, you might be able to stand around and lean on railings, but here everyone notices you right away.”

“Then Esther Vorszda did her utmost to avoid noticing me, even by accident. Isn’t that a bit suspicious?”

“You ought to know. The way she must constantly be on her guard.”

The telephone rings. The director picks up the receiver.

“You went up to her.”

“You were convinced there was some connection between us. Even I started to believe it. I had to see that woman.”

“Well, did you see how she moved?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Do you intend to meet her again?”

“I don’t know. She’s in Olomouc. And I’m here in Prague.”

“That journey is nothing if you want to meet her once or twice a month.”

“She’s married.”

“That hasn’t stopped her before.”

“Has she had anyone?”

“She’s had several. A gym teacher, a waiter, a lawyer.”

“What about her husband?”

“A locomotive driver, a master builder, and a couple of men so young they haven’t had time to get a profession yet.”

“She said you were on the hunt for her husband.”

“Is that what she said?”

“She didn’t mean you personally. She talked about ‘them.’ I concluded that ‘they’ were people like you. But if you really are after her husband, I don’t understand what you want from me.”

“We don’t hunt for people. We hunt for coincidences. And when there are too many of those in one place at the same time, we start to suspect they are not coincidences at all. Only then do we become interested in people.”

“She talked about coincidences a lot. She seems to have as little belief in coincidence as you do.”

The man returns to the director’s office the next day.

“Have you read the reviews?”

“I have.”

“Then you will surely have encountered the complaint from some critics that the choice of Martin Jelínek for the part of Tomáš was not entirely a good one. What do you think about that?”

“You’re referring to a couple of women who write plot summaries for the culture pages of provincial newspapers.”

“Which bit should I discount? The women or the provinces? Anyway,
The Ice Cream Man
is an exception—they deal with its plot in a single sentence. But they have drawn up a whole list of things Jelínek has too much of or too little of or not at all. It’s nonsense, of course; they just can’t admit they have fallen under Jelínek’s spell, like all other women. But why did you choose him?”

The director presses the tip of his tongue against the sharp edges of his teeth. “I’m not aware of any obstacles that might have prevented Jelínek from playing the part of Tomáš.”

“And that’s enough for you? No obstacles?”

The man stands up, turns his back to the director, and looks at the posters on the office walls. “It’s enough for us. But we thought you were an artist.”

The man goes over to the wall and stops to look at the photos. “Guess when I started to become disgusted by photographs? Portrait pictures, frozen in an instant of time. They’re smiling at the camera like idiots. Why? They’ve still got hair.”

“We’re particularly interested in the material you shot but that for one reason or another didn’t see fit to put in the final film. What do you usually do with that sort of material?”

“I destroy it.”

“Really? I’m sure there must be some really valuable things among that stuff that should be saved—preserved at all costs.”

“If we’re talking about
The Ice Cream Man
, everything was thrown away.”

“In the future, if you ever want something to be annihilated once and for all, I advise you to destroy it with your own hands. If you have your errand boy throw the reels into the trash can, anything might happen. Don’t think you can blame everything on the errand boy if something goes wrong. Why did you have Tomáš Vorszda dig a pit in the ground?”