smile. “But I don’t mean to keep you. No, don’t say a word. I enjoy talking. Truly I do.” The girl from next door stood on the staircase, with her mouth still full. I made my way home along the murky brook, the desolate landscape, furrowed with excavation, silhouetted by flares of waste gas. Several times I was tempted to dial the number of Mrs. Hermína S., to arouse hope in her for one brief instant, to provide her a moment of great anticipation and delicious, heart-pounding excitement. Out of respect for the inexorableness of destiny, I never followed through. Several times, late on one of those rainy evenings filled with hostile and unfathomable women, as I searched the felled trees for your fingerprints in vain, with everything catching me off guard and leaving me at a loss — several times now I had stepped into a phone booth, lifted the receiver, inserted a coin, and, after dialing the first two digits of the four-digit number that to my mind will forever represent the sum total of all the chasms of silence, hesitated while outside the trolleybuses and trams hurtled across the trampled plain and the watchtower lights blinked with dull regularity, until finally I was chased out in disgrace by the impatient pounding of someone with a matter that brooked no delay. 98
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STILL, I THINK ABOUT THEM every day, the old lawyer and Mrs. S., at that hour of the morning when the alarm clocks ring and my child slides toward me under the covers and, two fingers in his mouth, closes his eyes in bliss. He was born the year the first hydrogen bomb was tested, the year of the XIXth Congress of the CPSU, which is to say the year when shortly after we brought him home from the hospital, Grandfather Frost set out from the Chukotka Peninsula in Siberia in order to make it to Prague in time for Christmas Eve. Then he drove screeching through the city’s muddy streets in a shabby sleigh from the National Theater’s property storage room, while Snegurochka the snow maiden, with the bosom of a boyar, tossed flyers to the bewildered crowd. On one side they said, “Visit Grandfather Frost’s Christmas market at the White Swan department store!” and on the other, under Picasso’s dove, “Forward, people of goodwill, with Stalin and Klement Gottwald, for peace and socialism!” When the day comes for my boy to write the canonical biographical prose of his political questionnaires, he will state that both his parents were intellectual workers and that his education exposed him to every layer of society, from nursery school on. He will probably learn a lot about atomic accelerators, but he isn’t likely to learn
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