The Ice Cream Man (15 page)

Maybe she thought I cared about her because I once waited in line for half an hour in the pouring rain to get movie tickets for us. She waited under a canopy, watching me as if I were a kitten dumped by the side of the road getting splashed with cold, dirty water from passing cars. After the film, she invited me to her place, draped my wet coat over the radiator, and made me a couple of sandwiches in the kitchen. Her roommate turned up drunk after a night in town and started berating me when I went to look for some matches in the girls’ room. She rocked on the chair behind the desk, smoking, propping her feet on the desktop, not ashamed of her legs or even her thighs, which were exposed under her skirt as far as the fasteners on her garter belt.

“So, you’re this Jan I’ve heard about. Looking for something?”

“Matches.”

She pulled out the desk drawer, took out a matchbox, and flicked it in my direction. It felt equally ridiculous to catch it as it would have to miss.

“So, tell me, are you enjoying it?”

“What?”

“Stringing Pavlina along.”

“It has nothing to do with me.”

She put her feet down and leaned forward with her elbows on the desk in order to see me better through the veil of smoke.

“Don’t give me that. You radiate a sense that you are somehow superior to everyone else. I can tell your type a mile off . . . you regard Czechoslovakia with those eyes, looking so sad and confused that any girl who happens to glance your way gets it into her head that you’re secretly in love with her. It’s a tragic misunderstanding. Isn’t that it, Jan? Look, if you had sex with her just once, she would realize she’s not missing anything. Is that too much to ask?”

When I went back into the kitchen, I started to take my leave. Pavlina didn’t understand at all. She accompanied me as far as the stairs, begging to know if I was angry about something, whether she had said or done something wrong.

“Not everything in this world is your fault.”

“Well, what then? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Everything, then.”

“Are you two good friends?”

“Who do you mean?”

“You and your roommate.”

“What about us?”

“Watch out. She might be a bad influence on you.”

Milan has taped a photo of a scantily clad woman above his bed. He thinks it lends a touch of individuality to his side of the room. But that’s what walls appropriated by men look like in a prison, in the army, in huts on building sites. Even the woman in the photo has had everything stripped away. Who could she harm? Other women? Real women whom the woman in the photo isn’t even trying to represent? The only thing she represents is temptation. Her hands conceal her breasts, which are more red than
flesh-colored,
thanks to the state of our nation’s color printing technology.

It makes no difference to this room whether it’s me here or someone else. If I left now, it would be impossible to tell from the room whether I were dead or alive; there would be no signs that I had ever been here at all. If I did die right here, it would be easy to clear me out, and the room would look like nothing had happened. I should have taken up smoking ages ago. Several packs a day. The tar would stick to my lungs and the surfaces in the room as if they belonged together. It’s easy to understand people who end it all in a way that leaves a mark. Or those who imagine that the end is a sign that cannot be exceeded, that only when something ends does something irreversible remain in force. The final solution comes only when there is nothing else to follow.

On the day Jan Palach was buried, everyone went into the city center; everyone had to be there. It was quite moving the way they stopped by, one after another (the ones who had barely said a word to me before) and asked if I was coming, wasn’t I coming, how could I not come, was it true I wasn’t coming. One girl brought the radio in from the kitchen. She must have thought I was lying in bed with pneumonia or for some other reason. I accepted it just to get rid of her. I could hear footsteps running upstairs, doors slamming, then, “Šarka, Šarka, we’re going to be late!” echoing from the stairwell, as if there were still something they might be late for.

Then there was silence. They had all fled from this silence, this emptiness that nothing shifts. I could sit here, the radio turned off. I could lie down and stare at the ceiling while the entire population was out and about. Years from now, I will not remember anything about this day besides this room; I don’t even know what the weather was like. Others remember how cold it was. That day was particularly raw. Was there any sleet or freezing rain?

When voices returned to the corridor, Pavlina came, too. I’d been lying in the same position the whole time. She had stood in the freezing cold, crying her eyes out. She would have liked to have gotten up close to me.

“Jan, where were you? I was waiting for you the whole time. Everybody was there.”

“So you were there, too?”

“How can you say a thing like that? Today of all days. Have you no heart? Why didn’t you go?”

“Why should I? It wasn’t my funeral.”

When Pavlina gave in and left, she should have understood at last. That was the day I finally broke away from everything, including her. She cried about it in secret, like slicing an onion. The dead Jan was her onion; the living Jan was the secret source of her tears. That was the moment, needlessly and loutishly exaggerated by our nation’s history, and not any of the other moments shared between only the two of us, self-conscious and pitiable.

“Slow down, Jan, slow down,” my mother suddenly prompts behind me. For some reason she did not want to sit next to me, choosing to sit in the backseat all the way from Olomouc and now ducking down to see through the windshield as a gentle, snow-covered hill comes into view after a grove of trees. Her hand grabs hold of my shoulder so suddenly and forcefully that I am startled and turn the wheel as if we’d encountered a sudden sharp bend in the road.

“Mom!”

“Don’t brake, keep going!”

“I’m trying to steer this car! You could have killed us!”

“Jenda, don’t stop—keep going! But slowly!
Slowly
. . . no, no, that’s not it. All these little valleys and woods look so alike . . . and it’s been over twenty years, the landscape has changed . . . the meadows are being overrun with trees.”

The road is winding, following the contours of the gently rolling hills. I sit in my fake leather seat with my winter coat on; only rarely do we encounter an oncoming car, and if any cars come up behind us, they overtake us meekly when I pull over to the shoulder. I relax enough to steer with one hand. I roll down my window and rest my left arm on the window frame, but the air is too cold. We drive through another wood. So far I have gone by my mother’s sighs, jolts, and cries to identify features of the landscape she is looking for. With every passing mile, she has grown more restless and is complaining of motion sickness, but on no condition does she want me to stop; and every time the trees thin out or stop abruptly and the landscape opens up, she grows silent, almost vanishing from the backseat, and I have to check in the rearview mirror to see if she is still there.

“Well? Does this look familiar?”

“Slow down.”

I downshift smoothly, but my mother takes no notice of such niceties now. I creep forward through the snowy valley. The edge of the forest has receded far above us on both sides. Much later, a house comes into view over on the left, pale against the dark forest backdrop.

We leave the valley and its house behind as the road gently curves to the left. A cluster of light-colored houses is visible a few miles away. A train line has appeared along the country road, and my mother orders me to drive to the train station. It is not difficult to find. A blue flatbed truck is parked in the cobbled square in front of the station, and we pull up next to it. I roll up my window and get out of the car, adjust my trousers, and button up my coat. My mother bought it and insisted that I put on a white nylon shirt underneath, though it sticks to my skin like cold plastic in this freezing weather.

“Shall I put on a tie as well?” I had asked in an
unnecessarily
peevish voice, but she just looked at me wide-eyed and with a strange earnestness.

“No tie.”

I look at the row of houses behind the tree trunks and bare branches. The station building looks completely dead, but when I step inside, I find a kiosk selling soft drinks and bread. The woman at the counter is so ancient, she must know something.

“There’s one house a couple of miles south of here.”

“That’s right.”

“The first house you come to on the right. Up on the hill.”

“Is that where you’re going?”

“Do you know which house I mean?”

“These days it’s some bigwig’s summer house.”

“It looks like a farmhouse; it’s old.”

“Yes, that’s what it looks like. Anything else?”

“No, that’s all. Do you have any bottle openers?”

My mother is sitting under the lindens. The paint on the bench flakes off at the slightest touch. She does not want any of the drink I offer her, nor the bread, though it is good, baked that morning, spongy and tough at the same time.

“Let’s walk around a bit,” she says.

“If we go for a walk, you’re going to get cold.”

She gets up, not even bothering to brush the paint flakes from her skirt.

“I’ll get your gloves from the car.”

“Don’t make a fuss, Jan.”

I don’t feel like taking the bottles of soda with me, so I put them in the car. In the meantime, my mother has managed to disappear from the square: I can see her black skirt on the linden-lined road she walks down, going back the same way we came into the village.

“Mom! Wait.”

She stops and turns around, watching as I catch up. She wants me to walk in front of her, and every time I glance back over my shoulder, she has slowed her pace and gotten farther behind. I ask her if she is tired, but she waves at me to continue, and I carry on until I can no longer hear her footsteps at all. She has stopped and is standing in the middle of the road, staring in my direction. Though her face is obscured by the shadow of her rabbit-fur hat, something in her stiffness and her dangling arms makes me feel that old, familiar uneasiness.

“Well, shall we keep going?”

She responds by starting off again. Her gait is so slow and stylized that in her skirt, her too short coat and her gray rabbit-fur hat, she looks like an actress who has arrived at a photo shoot with a hangover and is trying to preserve her dignity. I do not know if she is performing for me, herself, or this scenery she has compunction to appear before one more time. All images relating to my mother are somehow linked to performing: squeezing into gaudy apparel, contours maintained with syrup of ipecac. Now she is negotiating her way in tortuous high heels through the small depressions and bumps in the asphalt, as if she might step on a landmine at any moment, and maybe she will. Maybe she has come here in order to vanish with the winds.

“Jan, darling, could you go and fetch my gloves? My hands are freezing.”

She wants to get rid of me. Of course, I go back to the car to fetch her gloves. As I walk past her, she touches my cheek briefly and clumsily, her face turned away as if she were afraid her breath might smell. It does not smell, but her eyes look puffy. I keep glancing behind me as long as it takes her to disappear behind the bend where the hill rises up.

I walk swiftly, and despite the freezing cold, sweat starts to drip between my skin and the nylon. I sit in the car for a little while, take a gulp from my mother’s bottle. Something sticks to my tongue. When I go back, the sweat has frozen and my skin is cold; my steps quicken, and I soon break into a half run. When I reach the bend in the road, I cannot see my mother anywhere. I look up at the hill. There I can see her shape on the veranda of the house on the hillside. She appears to be sitting. When I have climbed halfway up the slope, she gets up and disappears around the back of the house.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be snooping around here, Mom.”

“I know. It’s a pity there’s no one around. It would have been nice to have a look inside the house as well.”

“Everything might have changed.”

“Not everything. The bedroom window still looks out into the backyard, just like before . . . it’s lovely here, isn’t it?”

We talk about the house as if it were something self-evident and true that she has always shared with me. She walks around, her high heels sinking into the ground and pulling up frozen clods of soil from beneath the thin layer of snow. She comments on the state of the outside walls, looks for signs of some old water barrel. She has never talked to me about this house, though I have heard about it through walls, late at night, at the end of nasty arguments. This house has implacably brought such scenes to a close in great silence. My mother and father have always been in agreement about that fact, or else the house has won, crushing them both.