The Ice Cream Man (4 page)

She then leaves the man standing in the garden (“Why don’t you have a smoke, Tomáš?”) without giving him a chance to say that he doesn’t smoke—and takes the woman inside, leading her from the kitchen cupboards to the chest of drawers and from the chest to the pantry, showing her the dishes and table linen, the water supply, the laundry and trash facilities, and finally whispering about women’s things, how one deals with them. On the steps, the man pulls at some blades of grass with restless fingers and strains to hear the women’s conversation through the open door on the veranda. The man supposes he ought to go over and have a look at the collapsed eaves and the tools in the shed, but he stays within earshot, worrying all the time that the woman might let the cat out of the bag.

The sound of footsteps can be heard from the house; no more conversation is audible. Then the woman appears on the veranda.

“She wants to see our papers.”

They eat dumplings with brown gravy and are told that the late man of the house suffered a stroke just as he was going down the stairs and that he would probably have lived had the back of his head not struck the stone next to the steps; his skin remained intact, but a purplish lump the size of a fist swelled up on the nape of his neck; and at the hospital, the consultant, Dr. Nedved, one of the man’s old acquaintances, sliced it open and discovered a full 650 grams of congealed blood, and with that, the man’s head was placed in its normal position in the coffin. The landlady’s monologue would confuse anyone—it’s like sitting in a circus where all the performers are in the ring at once, walking on the tightrope, clowning around and riding on ponies, making it impossible to know where to look or listen, and into this jumble of exclamation points the landlady occasionally inserts an entirely unexpected question mark, and the woman is perplexed every time, expressing it in the same way: her mouth gapes open like a carp’s when it’s been swimming around and around in a tub and is snatched out without the slightest warning.

After the meal, the man and woman withdraw behind the closed door of their own room. The woman throws the pile of linen onto the bed and picks up her suitcase.

Unspoken disgust tastes like rancid fat in her mouth, and she can’t bring herself to touch the lock on her suitcase in the man’s presence. The man sits down on the sofa, knowing that is where he will sleep. There is a pillow on the sofa that will have to do. There are two pillows on the bed, bigger and softer, but they should stay where they belong. A suitable blanket is found in the wardrobe: he could hide it under the sofa in a hurry or take it along with him; a few bounds, and he could be lying next to the woman if the need arises. The woman has sat down on the edge of the big bed, propped on her tailbone as far toward the edge as she can. A quilt with red poppies floating on it covers the bed. The man looks from the sofa over to the window, to the left of the headboard. The window looks out directly onto the backyard with the vegetable plot and the berry bushes; to the left are the weather-beaten gray woodshed and the rain barrel at its gable end. The floor of the room is made of thick, creaky planks. It is impossible to walk on the floorboards without making them creak, though sounds will certainly come from the squeaky bed. When the woman turns over during the night by herself, it will sound as if a husband and wife are in bed. The bed is made of iron, the head and foot constructed from painted iron tubing. They usually have a simple iron mesh base with a sheet of plywood on top. Such a bed squeaks at the slightest movement because the iron loops distribute the weight, and they dig into each other under the strain.

But now everything is silent. They sit like two strangers on a train platform, both waiting for someone who’s supposed to come and meet them. It starts to get dark in the room. It’s not worth unpacking their suitcases for one night. They both look at the heavy wardrobe. It occurs to the man that he does not know what sort of wood it is made of. Suddenly it feels dangerous, as if it were unlikely or even impossible that Mrs. Němcová could have a wardrobe made of this type of wood in this era, in this country—and that would also be the man’s fault and would betray him, rather than the owner of the wardrobe.

It is now so dark in the room that it feels odd not to have lit the oil lamp. The man is sitting on the sofa, and the woman on the edge of the bed. From this point on, everything will have to be just like this: a maneuver that must be done in its own time, a grasp that cannot be loosened for even a moment. Esther finds some matches, lights the oil lamp, and starts to make up the bed.

In the morning, the man is still on the sofa and wakes to the sounds of the woman moving around. He is lying with his back toward the bed and, while they have come to a tacit agreement about privacy, he can still hear how awkward everything is. The woman has a long white nightgown, heavy and stiff from fresh laundering. The neckline is high, the sleeves long and puffy, the cuffs tight, and its hem reaches down to her ankles. The nightgown is like a white field-hospital tent in which difficult operations are performed without sufficient equipment, a place that even enemy forces leave in peace until a certain point. Under the shelter of the tent, the woman pulls on her stockings; her wrists wriggle loose from the sleeves, and now all her limbs are free beneath the fabric. The man knows what will happen next but is unable to shut his ears. Nothing was agreed upon about sounds; they forgot about sounds. Fiddling with clasps; the brief, jittery snap of an elastic waistband; the sound of rough lace brushing against the skin of a midriff; cups curving around breasts and shoulder straps being put into place. Of course, all this would be heard, and particularly the silence afterward, when the images created by the sounds are still vivid in the mind: the weight of the breasts, the nipples pressed against the lace. A blouse over them, buttoned up the front. The sleekness of the petticoat, the concealed embroidery. The skirt in woolen fabric, no color at all. Finally, the shoes, which Esther chose to bring when she heard about the mountains.

The man leaves for the village train station right after breakfast. The woman remains seated at the table to keep Mrs. Němcová company until the landlady has finished washing the dishes. Mrs. Němcová enjoys talking about herself and the house, but when she starts asking questions about her guests’ lives, the woman announces that she is going for a walk. Only as she walks down the slope to the road does it occur to her that she has provided the landlady with an excellent opportunity to snoop through their belongings. She has no idea why the man’s suitcases are so heavy. She knows what her own case holds: a few items of clothing, a comb, a toothbrush, a bar of soap.

The woman decides to walk up the opposite hillside, from which she can see the house, the landlady’s movements in the garden, and the road along which the man will return. She climbs up close to the edge of the forest and lies on her back in the grass.

“How long have you been lying there?” The man is a black silhouette against the sun.

“I must have dozed off.”

“You’re burned to a crisp.”

“Did you manage to find anything out?”

“We won’t be getting out of here on a train for a couple of weeks.”

“What about a car? Perhaps we can arrange to get a lift.”

“It was quite some assassination attempt. There are Germans everywhere. Maybe we ought to let the dust settle. This could be a good place to watch where it settles.”

“What do you mean, dust? Can’t you say what you mean? We should at least explain to her where we’ve come from and where we’re going.”

“We’ve been to a funeral, and we’re on our way back home.”

“Well, yes. Who died?”

“Haven’t we gone over this?”

“Who was it who died?”

“Your sister’s child.”

“Why did a child have to die? Wouldn’t a biddy or some old codger have done?”

Mrs. Němcová shows the man the coal cellar and the boiler room. The steps are narrow and dark, winding downward like a snake with a drooping head. It is cramped down there, with an almost imperceptible light source on the ceiling and two metal doors that look thick yet hollow and lumpy, as if someone had pounded on them with a sledgehammer. Behind the door on the left is the coal store: the threshold is high, with a sharp metal edge embedded in concrete. Behind the door on the right are the firebox and coal scuttle. The landlady assigns the man the task of shifting coal from the store to the coal scuttle in the boiler room.

The man thrusts a shovel into the coal scuttle, which is black through and through; it reflects nothing, sucking in all light. There is just sound and resistance, a clump dug up in needlessly separate pieces from the depths.

From behind the curtains, the woman looks out into the backyard, where the man stands with a saw in one hand and an ax in the other, between a sawhorse and the half-collapsed rabbit hutch. The sun is blazing in the sky, but the man does not remove his sweat-drenched shirt. The woman goes down into the yard, touches the aphid-ravaged roses, and the man tries to saw something on the sawhorse, as if carefully sawing a woman in two while ensuring she stays in one piece. Even though sawing is not quite the same thing as playing the violin, it does reveal the performer’s skill at every moment, and the woman is unable to stop herself from laughing at how the saw blade jerks from side to side and gets jammed in the wood.

“Damned blunt,” the man says, then throws the saw to the ground and begins cutting the metal mesh.

“You don’t seem to be much of a carpenter.”

“I’m not anything. Just bear that in mind.”

“So why did you decide to do that?”

“I can’t stand being idle.”

“What if it goes wrong? You’re ruining good boards. The landlady will ask for her money back.”

“Even a moron can get a rabbit hutch nailed together.”

“Well, then, I’m sure it will turn out fine.”

“Just remember, I can get you to shut up if I feel like it.”

“You don’t seem like the violent sort.”

“I have other ways as well.”

“Is that so?”

“This is a sign.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If the landlady is in sight, there can be no signs of resistance.”

“Why not? So a wife can’t put up any resistance? What if the wife is furious? Or if the wife just isn’t in the mood?”

The man looks indecisive, then the woman adds with a sneer, “This isn’t going to be easy if your sense of drama is this poor.”

Once a week, Mrs. Němcová walks to the local district hospital. She sets off at seven in the morning in order to arrive by nine; her small contribution under the extraordinary circumstances. Dr. Nedved, the senior consultant physician, is an old acquaintance of her deceased husband’s. Mrs. Němcová knows about looking after medical equipment and is squeamish neither about blood nor about needles in particular (“You can’t imagine what it’s like there; they need all the help they can get”). The landlady is a voluble but undefined figure who certainly belongs in this rural landscape, but she dresses in foundation garments that are too complicated for a plausible landlady of a rural boarding house. The garden belongs to the house, but whether the fields of corn or the wood belong to it as well is impossible to ascertain. The landlady visits the hospital once a week, and on other days she clomps in her stout-heeled shoes from room to room, then out into the yard, where she puts her hands on her hips that are covered by a girdle, surveys the rolling landscape beyond the fence, and thinks that everything takes on a soft, womanly shape as it grows older and wiser, even the surface of the earth as it is worn away by water and wind. Mrs. Němcová’s attention-seeking melancholy and narrow outlook, which she conceals with a slightly elevated manner of speaking, are to the couple’s benefit. Be that as it may, the landlady enjoys superior status in the eyes of the man and woman; she can safely kick at mines as much as she likes, and they will not explode. The mines will explode only upon contact with her guests.

Once the landlady has left, the man sets off for the village with the saw under his arm. The woman is on her own. She begins to pace between their room and the kitchen, peeps out from every window, opens cupboard doors, inspects the furniture and utensils as if she had just regained the power of sight. She feels ashamed of herself and the landlady’s property, as if it had been carried out into the yard under foreclosure and the creditors were noting down every scratch and annual growth ring in their accounts. She lies down on the bed, tucks her arms under her back, and raises her pelvis and legs into the air, riding an invisible bicycle. When she grows tired of that, she goes over to check the door to the landlady’s quarters. It is securely locked.

She returns to the bed, presses her face into the quilt, and tries to think her own thoughts. But the first thing that pops into her head is the external force that suffused her as a child, an image of God painted on the church ceiling, with colossal, pork-red, fearsomely taut thigh muscles, surrounded by lengths of winding shop-pleated holy fabric. The woman utters the name of God in vain. Then she utters her own name. And the man’s name. She whispers the man’s name three times through the crocheted lace into the poppy quilt, but she feels only coarse cotton threads against her lips. She listens to the house and the wind blowing outside the house and touches herself. Her ears monitor the stairs, the doors, and the floorboards; her eyes close and try to look inward. Finally, her reward comes: a brief moment that she would insist on bringing to an end even if they burst into the room with dogs and guns; she would bring it to an end in front of all of them, and only then would she show them her papers.