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Fiction

From “The Year of Pearls”

By Zuzana Brabcová
Translated from Czech by Julia Sherwood & Peter Sherwood
Czech writer Zuzana Brabcová shows a woman leaving her husband to arrive at new understanding.

The Year of Pearls tells the story of Lucie, a married woman in her late thirties whose life is thrown into disarray when she embarks on a heady, yearlong love affair with a younger woman. In this extract the narrator, still living with her husband, finally confronts the long-suppressed nature of her sexuality. 

She made up her mind. There had to be some clues, signs, or leads somewhere around here. Some portents of things to come, some verifiable cracks appearing in the ground before an earthquake. That’s the only way of reconstructing the disaster. Because obviously, it’s a sign of disaster to wake up one morning and find that you’ve turned into someone else. Like an insect. Or a spider. A fly. A Gregor Samsa. That you’ve become someone else, that all your previous life has been amputated: you might still feel some phantom pain but you know that it’s gone forever. Your identity has been smashed to pulp, it’s lying scattered in the dust on an access road to a building site, crushed beyond recognition.

Well, let me tell you, it’s quite a shock—to rub your eyes one day and discover that you’ve become  . . . an animal, a previously unknown species. A monster. A stranger, a wrinkled old hag, long past the menopause. Or a homosexual, God forbid. A full-blown lesbo, forever and ever, beyond redemption, no going back. Even the idea of being a fly is less depressing. And nothing will ever wrench you out of this new shape, no earthly force, no Golem, not even ten Freuds, or a healthful regimen, or chewing Orbit gum regularly after each meal.

Not even your understanding husband or your smart grown-up daughter. Or your fabulous boss, who gave you a nice bonus for your exclusive interview (it’s all exclusives these days) with a leading Czech lesbian, which boosted the sales of his mag by a few thousand copies.

If you try and lean on your nearest and dearest, it will be like leaning on a rotten cellar door: you’ll just hurtle headlong down the stairs until you hit the concrete below. Mommy’s good girl, wife, mother, editor—all these acts you learned to put on as an amateur actor, for show. But what now? Pushing forty, can you still learn how to dance barefoot in the snow if all you’ve ever done was shuffle about in winter boots wrapped up in three pairs of woolen socks?

No, this can’t be happening, not like this, not out of the blue. There must be a clue somewhere, a lead. Something more convincing and conclusive than a painting of three fleeting female figures on a lakeshore. For example: in elementary school she enjoyed playing soccer with the boys. She was happy when they let her play goalie. No other girl had ever enjoyed that privilege.

When she was nine, Czechoslovakia was invaded by “friendly” Warsaw Pact armies. Shortly before that her parents made it to London on an organized trip. They brought back ten toy cars, genuine metal Matchboxes, the real thing, not some plastic trash Made in China. Complete with an opening trunk, four doors, roof and engine cover, even spring suspensions. They zoomed across the kitchen at lightning speed. 

The black Chevrolet with four tiny Beatles in the passenger seats was her favorite. With Lennon at the wheel in his signature wire-rims and Ringo in the back with tiny yet clearly visible rings on his fingers. For three whole years, she would play with them every day. So: do the Matchbox cars, and the fact that she’d hated wearing skirts (she wore one only for her final high school exam and then again, three years later, when she borrowed that awful pink dress from Renata for her wedding to Jakub), point to the definite predominance of male hormones? And does the predominance of male hormones definitely point to a lesbian predisposition? And does a lesbian predisposition . . .

I’ll have to check out academic studies on the subject. Scholars will have a better idea of who I am and why. Yes, there must be a clue to it all somewhere . . .

Hastily, as if on deadline, Lucie starts turning drawers upside down. The phone rings but she feels like she’s in someone else’s apartment, and you don’t pick up the phone in other people’s apartments. Female agents go through other people’s apartments with swift efficiency, ruthlessly homing in on documents that will confirm their suspicion.

With black-varnished fingernails, female-agent style, Lucie rummages through old papers, she jeers at her own adolescent poetry, examines signatures on faded postcards, flips through diaries. Nothing. Worthless scraps of paper.

She climbs onto a chair and roots around in wardrobes, hurling shoeboxes full of documents down to the floor, along with their contents. There’s a box of Christmas decorations. Her alcoholic neighbor Igor used to stash his rum in a box like this, right next to the nativity crib. It was his last, supremely inventive hiding place.

Behind the box with decorations her hand can feel another. It’s black and the label reads: RENATA. IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH DESTROY WITHOUT READING. She is so amused that she nearly falls off the chair. Could she really have been so melodramatic at eighteen, the age her daughter is now? So corny? IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH DESTROY WITHOUT READING. Please ensure your growing children don’t fall prey to cults, drugs, and the collected works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. That’s what you get if, as a fourteen-year-old, you sympathize with a brutal murderer glorified by Literature.

It takes her an hour, maybe two, to scramble out of the black box. She has to dig herself out from it as from an avalanche. Her teeth are chattering. She puts on a thick sweater, one of Jakub’s. And another one on top. She doesn’t keep rum in a crib, but the Fernet on the bookshelf will do fine. She used to keep it hidden behind The Possessed but recently, to avoid confusion, she has stashed the life-saving liquid behind John Barleycorn, Jack London’s alcoholic memoirs.

* * *

April 24, 1977

Dear Renata,

As you can see, unlike J. K. I write confessional letters on a typewriter because my confessions are spiky, and, anyhow, if Mayakovsky could have a cloud in trousers, why not a heart in a typewriter?

The stuff in my room, which you know so well, including this portable typewriter, is growing roots. Sometimes, right after I wake up, I catch sight of them. They are visible but only in a parallel world, which looks how I imagine eternity. And sometimes, when I wake up, I catch sight of this world butshock and horror!I can never see my own roots in there.

Reality is so . . .  mysterious. Magical. Ambiguous. Maybe Marx was right. It’s all to do with the dialectic. What does it want from me? I mean reality, not the dialectic. I don’t understand where it’s hurled me. Curves, a typewriter, my heart, roots, Marx. There was this girl who looked uncannily like me, at least that’s what you said, hey, look over there, can you believe it, you’ve got a doppelganger, I didn’t know you had a twin sister in Italythe chin, the nose, the long, angular Giacometti-like figure, the same walk . . .  But you had no idea, Renata, how at that moment nothing was farther from that girl’s mind than being upright as she sprawled on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the Venice Guggenheim Gallery, high on some shit, her face hidden by greasy hair, so you couldn’t really talk of a likeness . . .  But why am I going on about a junkie in Venice we barely glimpsed, even if she really had been the spitting image of me? Because I’m scared of the number of possibilities that can open up so easily . . .  Let’s say, if back in first grade I’d picked a desk next to Peter instead of next to Pavel, if instead of The Idiot I had opened L’Âme enchantée or some other piece of humanist junk, or if at a key moment, as I was walking to Old Town Square, I’d gone down Celetná rather than Dlouhá Street, then maybe our lives, my life would have taken a totally different course, that of a junkie or a young commie activist with top grades, a shit-scared rat . . .  All it would have taken was meeting a different set of people in Celetná than the ones I ran into in Dlouhá, people who might have lovingly carried me up to heaven or kicked me down to hell instead . . .  But maybe it’s all my mistake, assuming that everything would have turned out differently if you hadn’t approached me on the school staircase, if it hadn’t been you who wanted to borrow “Sergeant Pepper” but, say, Jiřina Kubištová, the mean fat nerd I had once stabbed to death with my compasses in a dream? In our next class Cell made us dissect flatworms but instead of the ladderlike nervous system all I could see in the microscope was Kubištová’s motionless fat white body, meticulously covered in red dots like some Pointillist painting by Signac. It made me feel sick, you may remember that I only just made it to the bathroom, the boys’ one. Because the girls’ was two doors farther down and also because the shape of the urinal seemed a perfect fit for my distressed guts. The other kids in my class were laughing their heads off, the morons, especially Kubištová. If only she knew, the cow! From then on everyone, at Cell’s ideological instruction, regarded me as an unstable, hypersensitive girl whose feeling for literature and spiritual values should not be unnecessarily upset by the dissection of flatworms. Nobody ever found out that this hypersensitive girl spent every night stabbing away until, over some six months, she managed to stab to death with her compasses half her class, the entire teaching staff, three stuck-up fourth-grade girls who managed to get into the Academy of Drama, probably by sleeping with someone, as well as a neighbor whose noises during sex made her feel like an engine was rushing through her nervous system, one much more complex than a flatworm’s ladder. And every now and then, in order not to waste her sadistic tendencies on private pursuits, she would extend the range of her compasses to the odd leading member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and once, God knows why, even to Che Guevara. It was the only expression of her political involvement in those days.

But this was meant to be a love letter, Renata, not an essay on the subject ofwhat exactlyMarx’s dialectic? Flatworms? The fatefulness or rather the randomness of paths people take? On young women growing up under capitalism, my unfortunate doppelgangers, running the risk of unemployment and narcotics, scratching out a squalid, miserable life next door to the entrance to pure Art?

Bullshit, Renata, all feeble and pathetic bullshit. Bullshit that just blocks off what is really inside my mind, my heart, my blood vessels, and my soul (if such a thing exists), my sentences, which I would so much like toto make you finally understand what’s going on between usinject directly into your veins. But in fact, there’s just one word I need to write, the only true synonym for truth: FEAR.

I’m scared, Renata. I’m scared of writing to you, of writing to you about fear, I’m scared of looking you in the eye, I’m scared of recalling the night we clung to each other inside a single sleeping bag a couple of yards from an Italian freeway. I was freezing in three sweaters, yet my guts were on fire, as if someone had used them to stoke a fiery furnace. I have yet to scramble out of that sleeping bag, I’m still inside it as in a cocoon, in my mother’s womb, before I was born, thank God. And I dread coming out of it and facing reality, especially if that reality is the third desk by the window, right behind Kubištová, who reeks of huntsman’s salami every day, God knows how she does that. You see, for us emotionally unstable individuals with an exquisite sense of smell, this kind of fetid dry sausage is the rack, it’s sheer torture and punishment, punishment forI guess for that sham identity of ours.

I’m scared of myself. Of being who I am. I’m horrified of the force for which I have left the door ajar. You have no idea and you will never learn what happened to me in that damp apartment of Angela’s. Luckily, Marilyn Monroe was the only witness.

I’m scared of my secret. I’ve always been a good girl, you know, never gotten into trouble, no ink blots in my exercise books, that kind of stuff, never wanted to give my mom extra problems, life was difficult enough for her after the divorce, I didn’t want people to make faces and turn their heads and mock me and shout “hey, you dyke,” because who knows, boys might not have let me into our block, and you might not have let me blow-dry your hair and girls in locker rooms might have squealed like idiots if they had to strip down to their panties before sports class in front of me, I just didn’t want to be different. I’ve made up my mind, and it’s final. My secret will remain a monster forever chained to the wall inside the thirteenth chamber, and that’s that. Under lock and key. I’m totally in charge of directing the farce of my own life: I shall get married as soon as I can, find a quiet, undemanding job, some sleepy hideaway where people shuffle along really slowly, slowly enough for dust to settle on their heads and on the stuff around them. Then I’ll have a baby. If it’s a boy I’ll name him after his dad, if it’s a girl I’ll call her Tereza.  I’ll iron diapers while watching Jaroslav Dietl’s soap operas. I will spend my rare moments of leisure listening to Hana Hegerová’s songs or going to see plays at the Vinohrady Theater or indulging in some other harmless cultural activity. The Velvet Underground, real dreams of compasses as well as less real dreams of mass extinction of commiesall that I shall leave to antisocial elements and daydreamers who have embarked on a march against the tide of history. You think I’m showing off? Blowing my own horn? Just wait and see, the future will vindicate my decision and my lie.

I love you, Renata. I love you madly. I can’t help it. This love is something I have laid during your endless baths in your black-tiled bathroom, laid it on your bidet like an unwanted egg, and now I don’t know what to do with it. That’s why I go to bed with any bastard I bump into. I know that you don’t understand this and find it morally reprehensible. Well, you should know it’s all the egg’s fault. And I shall crack that egg, I swear I will. I want to be normal at any price! And I’ve been making some progress: I used to blush every time someone mentioned faggots. But yesterday, I didn’t bat an eye, I even managed an off-color joke when that bitch Marcela asked, smiling the most innocent of smiles, if by any chance we were lesbians.

And yet it is so painful sometimes, this voluntary amputation of my wings. You can’t imagine what you do to me with your smile, your touch, your voice, the tiniest gesture everyone else is blind to, whereas for me its significance overshadows life and death. Your blondeness, your flowingness, your tenderness, some typical gesture of yours, say, a raised eyebrowwhat do men, both yours and mine, know about that? It’s all mine, mine alone, my own sweet, forbidden abyss. Oh, the temptation to fling myself into it, wings or no wings!

Renata, you are my well. I love you so much. My bottomless well, filled with inexhaustible water. Please forgive me. I had to write this to you.

                                                                                                            Your Lucie

P.S.

Please don’t schlep this letter around like you usually do. It might fall out of your handbag somewhere in a heterosexual setting, which is almost everywhere, if you take out a comb, your make-up, or your beloved pocket edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Of course, she had never mailed the letter. Instead of Renata’s handbag, it ended up in the black box that Lucie had labeled with a threatening message for future generations: RENATA. IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH DESTROY WITHOUT READING.  And once she dropped the letter into the box, she hadn’t stopped at amputating her wings. In one fell swoop, she had pulled out the splinter along with the pus. She had cut out Renata, she had chopped off her heart like the end of a loaf of bread, without a hiss of pain.

She went for a walk down to the Moldau. She sat down on a rock by the riverbank. On the other side of the river there stretched rows of apartment buildings and tired trams suspended from strings of cables like a giant harp. Plink, plonk, plink, plonk . . .  My country, the sound of a broken harp.

She got engrossed in a magazine article: “Most people are not aware that we become sexual beings the minute our sexual glands form inside the uterus. It is at this moment that the male and female brains begin to differentiate. Females have a pair of X chromosomes, males have an X and a Y chromosome. Metaphorically speaking, we are all female. The creation of males is determined by a switch that flips inside the fetus in the thirty-sixth day of its life.”

Interesting. She lit a cigarette. So there’s some kind of a chemical switch. She emptied the contents of a plastic bag out on the ground. With a metallic sound, a pile of beautiful, genuine, though by now quite battered, Matchbox cars landed at her feet. All of a sudden, the opposite bank was bathed in an intense glow. She tossed the cars into the Moldau, one by one, as far away from the shore as she could. The tiny Beatles were the last to go.

From Rok Perel. © Zuzana Brabcová. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood. All rights reserved.
English Czech (Original)

The Year of Pearls tells the story of Lucie, a married woman in her late thirties whose life is thrown into disarray when she embarks on a heady, yearlong love affair with a younger woman. In this extract the narrator, still living with her husband, finally confronts the long-suppressed nature of her sexuality. 

She made up her mind. There had to be some clues, signs, or leads somewhere around here. Some portents of things to come, some verifiable cracks appearing in the ground before an earthquake. That’s the only way of reconstructing the disaster. Because obviously, it’s a sign of disaster to wake up one morning and find that you’ve turned into someone else. Like an insect. Or a spider. A fly. A Gregor Samsa. That you’ve become someone else, that all your previous life has been amputated: you might still feel some phantom pain but you know that it’s gone forever. Your identity has been smashed to pulp, it’s lying scattered in the dust on an access road to a building site, crushed beyond recognition.

Well, let me tell you, it’s quite a shock—to rub your eyes one day and discover that you’ve become  . . . an animal, a previously unknown species. A monster. A stranger, a wrinkled old hag, long past the menopause. Or a homosexual, God forbid. A full-blown lesbo, forever and ever, beyond redemption, no going back. Even the idea of being a fly is less depressing. And nothing will ever wrench you out of this new shape, no earthly force, no Golem, not even ten Freuds, or a healthful regimen, or chewing Orbit gum regularly after each meal.

Not even your understanding husband or your smart grown-up daughter. Or your fabulous boss, who gave you a nice bonus for your exclusive interview (it’s all exclusives these days) with a leading Czech lesbian, which boosted the sales of his mag by a few thousand copies.

If you try and lean on your nearest and dearest, it will be like leaning on a rotten cellar door: you’ll just hurtle headlong down the stairs until you hit the concrete below. Mommy’s good girl, wife, mother, editor—all these acts you learned to put on as an amateur actor, for show. But what now? Pushing forty, can you still learn how to dance barefoot in the snow if all you’ve ever done was shuffle about in winter boots wrapped up in three pairs of woolen socks?

No, this can’t be happening, not like this, not out of the blue. There must be a clue somewhere, a lead. Something more convincing and conclusive than a painting of three fleeting female figures on a lakeshore. For example: in elementary school she enjoyed playing soccer with the boys. She was happy when they let her play goalie. No other girl had ever enjoyed that privilege.

When she was nine, Czechoslovakia was invaded by “friendly” Warsaw Pact armies. Shortly before that her parents made it to London on an organized trip. They brought back ten toy cars, genuine metal Matchboxes, the real thing, not some plastic trash Made in China. Complete with an opening trunk, four doors, roof and engine cover, even spring suspensions. They zoomed across the kitchen at lightning speed. 

The black Chevrolet with four tiny Beatles in the passenger seats was her favorite. With Lennon at the wheel in his signature wire-rims and Ringo in the back with tiny yet clearly visible rings on his fingers. For three whole years, she would play with them every day. So: do the Matchbox cars, and the fact that she’d hated wearing skirts (she wore one only for her final high school exam and then again, three years later, when she borrowed that awful pink dress from Renata for her wedding to Jakub), point to the definite predominance of male hormones? And does the predominance of male hormones definitely point to a lesbian predisposition? And does a lesbian predisposition . . .

I’ll have to check out academic studies on the subject. Scholars will have a better idea of who I am and why. Yes, there must be a clue to it all somewhere . . .

Hastily, as if on deadline, Lucie starts turning drawers upside down. The phone rings but she feels like she’s in someone else’s apartment, and you don’t pick up the phone in other people’s apartments. Female agents go through other people’s apartments with swift efficiency, ruthlessly homing in on documents that will confirm their suspicion.

With black-varnished fingernails, female-agent style, Lucie rummages through old papers, she jeers at her own adolescent poetry, examines signatures on faded postcards, flips through diaries. Nothing. Worthless scraps of paper.

She climbs onto a chair and roots around in wardrobes, hurling shoeboxes full of documents down to the floor, along with their contents. There’s a box of Christmas decorations. Her alcoholic neighbor Igor used to stash his rum in a box like this, right next to the nativity crib. It was his last, supremely inventive hiding place.

Behind the box with decorations her hand can feel another. It’s black and the label reads: RENATA. IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH DESTROY WITHOUT READING. She is so amused that she nearly falls off the chair. Could she really have been so melodramatic at eighteen, the age her daughter is now? So corny? IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH DESTROY WITHOUT READING. Please ensure your growing children don’t fall prey to cults, drugs, and the collected works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. That’s what you get if, as a fourteen-year-old, you sympathize with a brutal murderer glorified by Literature.

It takes her an hour, maybe two, to scramble out of the black box. She has to dig herself out from it as from an avalanche. Her teeth are chattering. She puts on a thick sweater, one of Jakub’s. And another one on top. She doesn’t keep rum in a crib, but the Fernet on the bookshelf will do fine. She used to keep it hidden behind The Possessed but recently, to avoid confusion, she has stashed the life-saving liquid behind John Barleycorn, Jack London’s alcoholic memoirs.

* * *

April 24, 1977

Dear Renata,

As you can see, unlike J. K. I write confessional letters on a typewriter because my confessions are spiky, and, anyhow, if Mayakovsky could have a cloud in trousers, why not a heart in a typewriter?

The stuff in my room, which you know so well, including this portable typewriter, is growing roots. Sometimes, right after I wake up, I catch sight of them. They are visible but only in a parallel world, which looks how I imagine eternity. And sometimes, when I wake up, I catch sight of this world butshock and horror!I can never see my own roots in there.

Reality is so . . .  mysterious. Magical. Ambiguous. Maybe Marx was right. It’s all to do with the dialectic. What does it want from me? I mean reality, not the dialectic. I don’t understand where it’s hurled me. Curves, a typewriter, my heart, roots, Marx. There was this girl who looked uncannily like me, at least that’s what you said, hey, look over there, can you believe it, you’ve got a doppelganger, I didn’t know you had a twin sister in Italythe chin, the nose, the long, angular Giacometti-like figure, the same walk . . .  But you had no idea, Renata, how at that moment nothing was farther from that girl’s mind than being upright as she sprawled on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the Venice Guggenheim Gallery, high on some shit, her face hidden by greasy hair, so you couldn’t really talk of a likeness . . .  But why am I going on about a junkie in Venice we barely glimpsed, even if she really had been the spitting image of me? Because I’m scared of the number of possibilities that can open up so easily . . .  Let’s say, if back in first grade I’d picked a desk next to Peter instead of next to Pavel, if instead of The Idiot I had opened L’Âme enchantée or some other piece of humanist junk, or if at a key moment, as I was walking to Old Town Square, I’d gone down Celetná rather than Dlouhá Street, then maybe our lives, my life would have taken a totally different course, that of a junkie or a young commie activist with top grades, a shit-scared rat . . .  All it would have taken was meeting a different set of people in Celetná than the ones I ran into in Dlouhá, people who might have lovingly carried me up to heaven or kicked me down to hell instead . . .  But maybe it’s all my mistake, assuming that everything would have turned out differently if you hadn’t approached me on the school staircase, if it hadn’t been you who wanted to borrow “Sergeant Pepper” but, say, Jiřina Kubištová, the mean fat nerd I had once stabbed to death with my compasses in a dream? In our next class Cell made us dissect flatworms but instead of the ladderlike nervous system all I could see in the microscope was Kubištová’s motionless fat white body, meticulously covered in red dots like some Pointillist painting by Signac. It made me feel sick, you may remember that I only just made it to the bathroom, the boys’ one. Because the girls’ was two doors farther down and also because the shape of the urinal seemed a perfect fit for my distressed guts. The other kids in my class were laughing their heads off, the morons, especially Kubištová. If only she knew, the cow! From then on everyone, at Cell’s ideological instruction, regarded me as an unstable, hypersensitive girl whose feeling for literature and spiritual values should not be unnecessarily upset by the dissection of flatworms. Nobody ever found out that this hypersensitive girl spent every night stabbing away until, over some six months, she managed to stab to death with her compasses half her class, the entire teaching staff, three stuck-up fourth-grade girls who managed to get into the Academy of Drama, probably by sleeping with someone, as well as a neighbor whose noises during sex made her feel like an engine was rushing through her nervous system, one much more complex than a flatworm’s ladder. And every now and then, in order not to waste her sadistic tendencies on private pursuits, she would extend the range of her compasses to the odd leading member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and once, God knows why, even to Che Guevara. It was the only expression of her political involvement in those days.

But this was meant to be a love letter, Renata, not an essay on the subject ofwhat exactlyMarx’s dialectic? Flatworms? The fatefulness or rather the randomness of paths people take? On young women growing up under capitalism, my unfortunate doppelgangers, running the risk of unemployment and narcotics, scratching out a squalid, miserable life next door to the entrance to pure Art?

Bullshit, Renata, all feeble and pathetic bullshit. Bullshit that just blocks off what is really inside my mind, my heart, my blood vessels, and my soul (if such a thing exists), my sentences, which I would so much like toto make you finally understand what’s going on between usinject directly into your veins. But in fact, there’s just one word I need to write, the only true synonym for truth: FEAR.

I’m scared, Renata. I’m scared of writing to you, of writing to you about fear, I’m scared of looking you in the eye, I’m scared of recalling the night we clung to each other inside a single sleeping bag a couple of yards from an Italian freeway. I was freezing in three sweaters, yet my guts were on fire, as if someone had used them to stoke a fiery furnace. I have yet to scramble out of that sleeping bag, I’m still inside it as in a cocoon, in my mother’s womb, before I was born, thank God. And I dread coming out of it and facing reality, especially if that reality is the third desk by the window, right behind Kubištová, who reeks of huntsman’s salami every day, God knows how she does that. You see, for us emotionally unstable individuals with an exquisite sense of smell, this kind of fetid dry sausage is the rack, it’s sheer torture and punishment, punishment forI guess for that sham identity of ours.

I’m scared of myself. Of being who I am. I’m horrified of the force for which I have left the door ajar. You have no idea and you will never learn what happened to me in that damp apartment of Angela’s. Luckily, Marilyn Monroe was the only witness.

I’m scared of my secret. I’ve always been a good girl, you know, never gotten into trouble, no ink blots in my exercise books, that kind of stuff, never wanted to give my mom extra problems, life was difficult enough for her after the divorce, I didn’t want people to make faces and turn their heads and mock me and shout “hey, you dyke,” because who knows, boys might not have let me into our block, and you might not have let me blow-dry your hair and girls in locker rooms might have squealed like idiots if they had to strip down to their panties before sports class in front of me, I just didn’t want to be different. I’ve made up my mind, and it’s final. My secret will remain a monster forever chained to the wall inside the thirteenth chamber, and that’s that. Under lock and key. I’m totally in charge of directing the farce of my own life: I shall get married as soon as I can, find a quiet, undemanding job, some sleepy hideaway where people shuffle along really slowly, slowly enough for dust to settle on their heads and on the stuff around them. Then I’ll have a baby. If it’s a boy I’ll name him after his dad, if it’s a girl I’ll call her Tereza.  I’ll iron diapers while watching Jaroslav Dietl’s soap operas. I will spend my rare moments of leisure listening to Hana Hegerová’s songs or going to see plays at the Vinohrady Theater or indulging in some other harmless cultural activity. The Velvet Underground, real dreams of compasses as well as less real dreams of mass extinction of commiesall that I shall leave to antisocial elements and daydreamers who have embarked on a march against the tide of history. You think I’m showing off? Blowing my own horn? Just wait and see, the future will vindicate my decision and my lie.

I love you, Renata. I love you madly. I can’t help it. This love is something I have laid during your endless baths in your black-tiled bathroom, laid it on your bidet like an unwanted egg, and now I don’t know what to do with it. That’s why I go to bed with any bastard I bump into. I know that you don’t understand this and find it morally reprehensible. Well, you should know it’s all the egg’s fault. And I shall crack that egg, I swear I will. I want to be normal at any price! And I’ve been making some progress: I used to blush every time someone mentioned faggots. But yesterday, I didn’t bat an eye, I even managed an off-color joke when that bitch Marcela asked, smiling the most innocent of smiles, if by any chance we were lesbians.

And yet it is so painful sometimes, this voluntary amputation of my wings. You can’t imagine what you do to me with your smile, your touch, your voice, the tiniest gesture everyone else is blind to, whereas for me its significance overshadows life and death. Your blondeness, your flowingness, your tenderness, some typical gesture of yours, say, a raised eyebrowwhat do men, both yours and mine, know about that? It’s all mine, mine alone, my own sweet, forbidden abyss. Oh, the temptation to fling myself into it, wings or no wings!

Renata, you are my well. I love you so much. My bottomless well, filled with inexhaustible water. Please forgive me. I had to write this to you.

                                                                                                            Your Lucie

P.S.

Please don’t schlep this letter around like you usually do. It might fall out of your handbag somewhere in a heterosexual setting, which is almost everywhere, if you take out a comb, your make-up, or your beloved pocket edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Of course, she had never mailed the letter. Instead of Renata’s handbag, it ended up in the black box that Lucie had labeled with a threatening message for future generations: RENATA. IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH DESTROY WITHOUT READING.  And once she dropped the letter into the box, she hadn’t stopped at amputating her wings. In one fell swoop, she had pulled out the splinter along with the pus. She had cut out Renata, she had chopped off her heart like the end of a loaf of bread, without a hiss of pain.

She went for a walk down to the Moldau. She sat down on a rock by the riverbank. On the other side of the river there stretched rows of apartment buildings and tired trams suspended from strings of cables like a giant harp. Plink, plonk, plink, plonk . . .  My country, the sound of a broken harp.

She got engrossed in a magazine article: “Most people are not aware that we become sexual beings the minute our sexual glands form inside the uterus. It is at this moment that the male and female brains begin to differentiate. Females have a pair of X chromosomes, males have an X and a Y chromosome. Metaphorically speaking, we are all female. The creation of males is determined by a switch that flips inside the fetus in the thirty-sixth day of its life.”

Interesting. She lit a cigarette. So there’s some kind of a chemical switch. She emptied the contents of a plastic bag out on the ground. With a metallic sound, a pile of beautiful, genuine, though by now quite battered, Matchbox cars landed at her feet. All of a sudden, the opposite bank was bathed in an intense glow. She tossed the cars into the Moldau, one by one, as far away from the shore as she could. The tiny Beatles were the last to go.

From Rok Perel. © Zuzana Brabcová. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood. All rights reserved.

Rok Perel

Rozhodla se. Musely tu přece být, musely existovat nějaké stopy, znaky, signály, indicie. Předzvěsti toho, co následovalo, nějaké ověřitelné pukliny v zemi před zemětřesením. Jedině na jejich základě bylo možné rekonstruovat katastrofu. Protože co je to jiného než katastrofa, když se jednoho dne probudíte a zjistíte, že jste někdo jiný. Třeba brouk. Nebo pavouk. Moucha. Řehoř Samsa. Že jste někdo jiný, že vám byl amputován celý dosavadní život: možná vás ještě trochu pobolívá, ale vy dobře víte, že už neexistuje. Vaše identita je napadrť, válí se v prachu příjezdové cesty na staveniště, rozdrcená k nepoznání.

Buďte si jisti, že je to fakt bomba – promnout si oči a zjistit, že je z vás… zvíře, možná dosud neobjevený druh. Obluda. Nějaká docela cizí stará ženská, vrásky kam se podívaš, dávno po přechodu. Nebo, chraň vás bůh, homosexuál. Lesba jako Brno, definitivně, neodvolatelně a napořád. To už je vážně snad míň depresivní ta moucha. A z toho nového tvaru vás nevyrve nic, ničí síla, ani Golem, ani deset freudů, ani zdravá životospráva, ani pravidelné žvýkání žvýkaček Orbit po každém jídle.

Ani váš chápavý manžel a dospělá, inteligentní dcera. Ani váš báječnej šéf, kterej vám dal pěkný prémie za váš exkluzivní rozhovor (jiný než exkluzivní se dnes nedělají) s přední českou buzerantkou, co mu zvýšil prodej časáku o pěknejch pár tisícovek.

Pokusíte-li se opřít o své blízké, bude to, jako kdybyste se opřeli o zteřelé dveře do sklepa: sletíte rázem po schodech, hlavou dolů na beton. Dcerunka, manželka, matka, paní redaktorka – dosud to všechno byly role, které se daly ochotnicky oddrmolit, aby se neřeklo. Ale co teď? Je možné se na prahu čtyřicítky naučit tančit bosá na sněhu, když jste zvyklí šourat se v teplé obuvi s třemi vlněnými podkolenkami?

Stejně to není možné, takhle ze dne na den. Někde musí být stopy, indicie. Pádnější a poněkud průkaznější než obraz s třemi efemérními ženami na břehu jezera. Třeba: velmi ráda hrávala s klukama na základce fotbal. Byla celá blažená, když ji pustili do brány. Žádné jiné se toho privilegia nedostalo.

Když jí bylo devět, vpadla do Čech sprátelená okupační vojska. Těsně  předtím se její rodiče vrátili z zájezdu do Londýna. Přivezli jí deset angličáků, pravejch kovovejch poctivejch autíček Matchbox, žádnej plastikovej šmejd Made in China. Kufr, čtvery dvířka, střecha, motor, všechno otvírací, a to pérování. Přejely kuchyň jak blesk.

Jedno z nich měla nejradši: černou chevroletku, v níž seděli čtyři malí bítlsáčci. Za volantem Lennon s brejličkama a na zadním sedadle Ringo s prstíčkama plnejma miniaturních, a přesto viditelných prstýnků. Hrála si s nimi tři roky každý den. Lze z těch angličáků a z faktu, že k smrti nerada nosila sukně (v sukni pouze odmaturovala a tři roky později si vypůjčila na svatbu s Jakubem takové příšerné růžové šaty od Renaty), vyvodit jednoznačnou převahu mužských hormonů? A lze z jednoznačné převahy mužských hormonů vyvodit jednoznačně lesbickou preferenci? A lze z lesbické preference…

Budu si muset přečíst nějaké odborné studie. Vzdělanci vědí určitě líp než já, kdo a proč jsem. A přece tu někde musí být klíč…

A Lucie začne, překotně, jako by hořel termín uzávěrky, obracet šuplíky dnem vzhůru. Zvoní telefon, ale ona si připadá jako v cizím bytě, a v cizím bytě se telefony nezvedají. V cizím bytě provádějí agentky rychlou a tichou domovní prohlídku. Jdou tvrdě po dokumentech, potvrzujících podezření.

Černě nalakovanými nehty agentek přehrabuje se Lucie ve starých papírech, posměšně si pročítá pubertální básně, studuje podpisy na zašlých pohlednicích… a listuje deníky. Nic. Bezcenná makulatura.

Stoupne si na židli a leze do skříní. Krabice od bot plné písemností hází i s obsahem na hromadu.V jiné krabici jsou vánoční ozdoby. v právě takové, u jesliček v betlému, měl Igor schovaný rum. Byla to jeho poslední, vrcholně geniální skrýš.

Za krabicí s ozdobami nahmatala ještě jednu, černou, se štítkem: RENATA. PO MÉ SMRTI NEČTĚTE A SPALTE. To ji pobaví, div nesletí ze židle. Je možné, že byla v osmnácti, ve věku své dcery, tak – patetická? Literárně odvozená? PO MÉ SMRTI NEČTĚTE A SPALTE. Dohlédněte prosím, aby vaše dospívající děti nepodlehly sektám, drogám a sebraným spisům F.M. Dostojevského. Takhle to dopadá, když se někdo ve čtrnácti dojímá nad brutálním vrahem, glorifikovaným LITERATUROU.

Z černé krabice se dokáže vysoukat až za hodinu. Možná za dvě. Vyhrabe se z ní jak zpod laviny. Drkotá zubama. Navlíkne na sebe tlustý Jakubův svetr. Ještě jeden. Sice nemá rum v jesličkách, ale fernet v knihovně úplně stačí. Nejdřív ho schovávala za Běsama, ale nedávno si přesunula záchranou placku, aby se to nepletlo, za dva Londony: Démon alkohol a Paměti pijákovy.

* * *

24.8.1977

Milá Renato,

jak vidíš, na rozdíl od J.K. píšu citové dopisy na stroji, protože mé city jsou hranaté, a proč by nemohlo být srdce ve stroji, může-li být oblak v kalhotách.

Věci v mém pokoji, který tak dobře znáš, i ten kufříkový consul, zapouštějí kořínky. Někdy, těsně po probuzení, se mi je daří zřít. Jsou viditelné, ty kořínky, jen v paralelním světě, jenž je patrně věčností. Někdy po probuzení tedy doň nahlédnu, ale svoje kořeny – ó hrůzo – jsem tam ještě nikdy nespatřila.

Skutečnost je tak… mysteriózní. Magická. Dvojsmyslná. Třeba měl Marx pravdu. Dialektická. Co chce ode mě? Tedy ne Marx, ale ta skutečnost. Nechápu, kam mnou smýkla. Křivky, stroj, srdce, kořeny, Marx. Ta holka, co mi byla děsně podobná, říkalas to aspoň, hele, to snad neni možný, tvoje dvojnice, nemáš dvojče v Itálii? ta brada, nos, a ta dlouhá hranatá figura jak od Giacomettiho, táž chůze… Ale tos nemohla vědět, Renato, ta holka v tu chvíli neměla na vertikální polohu ani pomyšlení, válela se na zemi před vchodem do Guggenheimovy galerie v Benátkách, sjetá ňákým svinstvem, přes mastné vlasy nebylo jí vidět do tváře, tak jakápak podoba… Ale proč se tady rozepisuju o sotva zahlédnutý benátský feťačce, byť by mi z oka vypadla? Protože mě děsí množství možností, od jejichž uskutečnění nás někdy dělí tak málo… Třeba by stačilo sednout si tehdy v první třídě do lavice s Petrem a ne s Pavlem, otevřít si místo Idiota Okouzlenou duši nebo jinou humanistickou sračku, vzít to v určitý rozhodujúcí okamžik na Staromák Celetnou a ne Dlouhou, a náš život, můj život by se rozeběhl docela jiným řečištěm, běžel by korytem feťačky nebo mládežnické funkcionářky s červeným indexem, podělané udavačky… Stačilo srazit sa v Celetný s docela jinejma lidma, než jsem potkala v Dlouhý, s lidma, který by mě láskyplně vynesli do nebes, nebo naopak skopli do podsvětí… Anebo je to můj omyl, domnívat se, že by všechno bylo jinak, kdybys mě neoslovila tehdy na školním schodišti, kdyby tu desku chtěla půjčit dejme tomu Jiřina Kubištová, ta tlustá podlá šprtka, kterou jsem jednou ve snu ubodala kružítkem? První hodinu jsme pak s Buňkou pitvali žížalu, ale já pořád, místo žebříčkovaný nervový soustavy, viděla v tom mikroskopu nehybný bílý tlustý tělo Kubištový, precizně červeně vytečkovaný jak ňákej pointilistickej obraz od Signaca. Udělalo se mi jak víš nevolno a sotva jsem doběhla na záchodky, klučičí. Holčičí byly jednak o dvoje dveře dál, a jednak jsem zjistila, že mušle jsou tou nejideálnější formou pro můj neklidný obsah. Spolužáci se mohli uchechtat, debílci, nejvíc Kubištová. Kdyby tak věděla, kráva! Od té doby mě všichni pod názorovým vedením Buňky považovali za labilní, přecitlivělou dívku, jejíž cit pro literaturu a duchovní hodnoty není nutné rozrušovat pitvami žížal. Nikdo se nikdy nedozvěděl, že ta přecitlivělá dívka noc co noc bodala a bodala, až se jí podařilo zhruba za půl roku ubodat kružítkem polovinu třídy, kompletní profesorský sbor, tři nafoukaný čtvrťačky, co se, jistě přes postel, dostaly na DAMU, souseda, kterej při šukání supěl jak mašina ženoucí se její nikoli žebříčkovanou, ale o to složitější nervovou soustavou. Čas od času, to aby své sadistické sklony nezneužívala výhradně k soukromým účelům, připletl se do dosahu jejího kružítka nějaký významný člen ÚV KSČ a jednou dokonce, bůhví proč, i Che Guevarra. Byl to jediný projev její politické angažovanosti v té době.

Ale tohle má být milostný dopis, Renato, a nikoli slohová práce na téma – Marxovy dialektické skutečnosti? žížal? osudovosti, či naopak nahodilosti lidských cest? Dívek vyrůstajících v kapitalismu, mých nešťastných dvojnic, ohrožovaných nezaměstnaností a omamnými jedy, živořících v špíně těsně před vchodem do čistého Umění?

Kecy, Retano, ubohý a trapný. Oddalující jen skutečný obsah mé mysli, mého srdce, mých cév a duše (je-li ta věc), mých vět, které bych ti tolik, tolik chtěla – abys konečně pochopila, o co mezi námi jde – vstříknout rovnou do žíly. A přitom stačí napsat jedno jediné slovo, to jediné pravé synonymum pravdy: STRACH.

Renato, já se bojím. Bojím sa psát Ti, psát Ti o strachu, bojím se Ti podívat do očí, bojím sa vzpomínat na to, jak jsme se k sobě tiskly v jednom spacáku pár metrů od italský dálnice. Klepala jsem kosu ve třech svetrech, a přece mi vnitřnosti hořely žárem, jako by jimi někdo přiložil do pece ohnivé. Ještě jsem se nestačila vyhrabat z toho spacáku, jsem v něm jak v kukle, jak v mámině břiše, zaplaťbámbu dosud nenarozená. Nechce se mi z něj k smrti do reality, obzvlášť je-li jí, tou realitou, třetí lavice u okna přímo za Kubištovou, která každej den, nevím, jak je to možný, příšerně smrdí lovečákem. Pro nás totiž, labily s vytříbeným čichem, je takovej smrdutej trvanlivej salám skřipcem a mukou a trestem, trestem za – za – asi za to ochotnický markýrování identity.

Mám strach ze sebe samé. Že jsem ta, která jsem. Hrůzu z té síly, které jsem pootevřela dveře. Ty ani netušíš a nedozvíš se nikdy, co se se mnou stalo v tom vlhkym bytě u Angely. Viděla to naštěstí jenom Marilyn Monroe.

Strach z tajemství. Jsem hodná holčička, víš, nikdy se mnou nebyly problémy, sešity bez kaněk a tak, nechtěla jsem mamince přidělávat starosti, neměla to jednoduchý po rozvodu, nechtěla jsem, aby se mi pošklebovali a otáčeli se za mnou a vysmívali se mi a křičeli za mnou „čau buzno“, třeba by mě pak kluci nepustili do brány a Ty bys mi nedovolila fénovat Ti vlasy a holky v šatně by debilně pištěly, až by se před tělákem přede mnou svlíkaly do kalhotek, nechtěla jsem být jiná. Už jsem se rozhodla, definitivně. Tajemství zůstane netvorem, navždycky přikovaným řetězy v třínácté komnatě, a basta. Pod zámkem. Režii té své frašky mám pevně v rukou: co nejdřív se vdám, najdu si nějakou nenápadnu a tichou práci, nějakou ospalou zašívárnu, kde se lidi sunou pomalu, tak pomalu, že se na ně i na věci stačí usazovat prach. Pak se mi narodí miminko. Když to bude kluk, bude se jmenovat po tatínkovi, a když holk.a, tak bude Tereza. Při žehlení plen budu sledovat seriály Jaroslava Dietla Nemnohé chvíle volna využiji k poslechu Hany Hegerové či návštěvě Vinohradského divadla či k jinému neškodnému kulturnímu vyžití. Poslech skupiny Velvet Underground, reálné sny o kružítku i ty nereálné o hromadném vychcípání komoušů přenechám asociálům a snílkům, kteří vyrazili na pochod dějinami v protisměru. Myslíš, že se vytahuju? Že si honím triko? Však ty uvidíš: budoucnost dá mně i mé lži za pravdu.

Miluju Tě, Renato. Miluju Tě láskou k zešílení. Je to prostě tak. Vyseděla jsem si tu lásku během Tvých nekonečných koupelí v Tvé černé koupelně, vyseděla jsem si ji na vašem bidetu jako nechtěné vejce, s nímž si teď neví rady. To proto spím s každým blbečkem, co mi přijde do cesty. Nechápeš to a mravně Tě to pohoršuje, že? Tak tedy věz, že na vině je ono vejce. Rozbiju ho, na to vem jed. Chci být normální, za každou cenu! A dělám pokroky: dřív jsem zrudla při každé zmínce o buzerantech. A včera, včera to se mnou ani nehnulo, a dokonce jsem se zmohla na přisprostlej kameňák, když se nás ta mrcha Marcela s neviňoučkým úsměvem zeptala, jestli náhodou nejsme lesby.

A přece to někdy tolik bolí, má dobrovolná amputace křídel. Nedovedeš si představit, co ve mně vyvolávají Tvoje úsměvy, doteky, vlasy, hlas, nepatrné gesto, k němuž jsou všichni ostatní slepí, zatímco mně zastíní svým významem život i smrt. Plavost, splývavost, něha, nějaký archetyp v podobě třeba zvednutého obočí – co o tom chlapi vědí, ti mí i ti Tví? Je to moje, jenom moje sladká, zakázaná propast. To pokušení vrhnout se do ní, i bez křídel.

Renato, studničko. Mám Tě tak ráda. Studničko moje beze dna, s vodou nedopitelnou. Odpusť mi, ale musela jsem Ti to napsat.

Tvoje Lucie.

 

P.S.  Tenhle dopis promím nevláčej měsíce po kabelkách, jak je Tvým zvykem. Mohla bys ho vytrousit, až si budeš někde v hetereosexuálním prostředí, a to je téměř všude, vyndavat hřeben, řasenku nebo své milované Shakespearovy sonety v kolibřím vydání.

Dopis pochopitelně nedoručen. Neskončil v Renatině kabelce, nýbrž v černé krabici, na niž Lucie nalepila štítek s výhružným vzkazem budoucím generacím: RENATA. PO MÉ SMRTI NEČTĚTE A SPALTE. Jakmile tam ten dopis vhodila, nezůstalo jen u amputace křídel. Na jeden ráz vytlačila si třísku i s hnisem. Vyřízla si Renatu, ufikla srdce jak patku chleba, ani nesykla.

Šla se projít k Vltavě. Sedla si na kameny. Po druhém břehu se táhly hřbety činžáků, unavené tramvaje pod strunami elektrického vedení jako pod obří harfou. Blem blem, blem blem… Má vlast, zborcené harfy tón.

Začetla se do časopisu: „Lidé nevědí, že jsme pohlavními tvory od okamžiku, kdy se v průběhu nitroděložního vývoje objeví pohlavní žlázy. V tu chvíli se začne diferencovat mužský a ženský mozek. Ženy mají dva pohlavní chromozómy X, muži chromozómy XY… Metaforicky řečeno, svým způsobem jsme všichni založeni jako děvčata. Vznik chlapců zažizuje chemický vypínač, ktorý se sepne v šestatřicátém dni plodu.“

Zajímavé. Zapálila si cigaretu. Takže ňákej chemickej vypínač. K nohám si vysypala obsah igelitky: kovový zvuk, a u jejích nohou hromádka krásnejch, pravejch, i když už trochu dost otlučenejch angličáků. Protější břeh zalila náhle vlna prudké záře. Jedno po druhém naházela autíčka do Vltavy, co nejdál od břehu dohodila. Jako poslední letěli bítlsáčci.

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