The Ice Cream Man (6 page)

The hammer in the man’s hand bends a nail into a curve on the board, so the nail has to be pulled all the way out. The woman notices, to her satisfaction.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“That’s why I’m asking. We can’t talk about anything else, just trivial or general things.”

“The less we know about one another, the better.”

“How can you bear to come up with all those pat phrases?”

The woman gets up.

“Aren’t you exaggerating a bit? Are they going to shoot you if they find out your favorite color? Or if I tell them what it is?”

“What? An ice cream man?”

“Yes.”

“So you sell ice cream.”

The man goes to fetch some more nails from the shed. When he returns, the woman looks at him in amusement.

“Are you serious?”

“How so?”

“Do you have a little refrigerated cart on wheels that you drag along to parks and swimming beaches? Vanilla? And what else?”

“Cherry.”

“Anything else? Haven’t you any aspirations, any ambition? Selling ice cream day after day.”

“Do you mean that the only people who do it are those who are incapable of doing anything else?”

After a brief silence the woman says, “I studied English and French. At university.”

“I’m not interested.”

“No? Esther went to university as well. But Esther had to give up her studies when she married that Tomáš. Tomáš the accountant thinks a wife’s place is in the home.”

“If Esther is honest, the universities were already closed when she got married.”

“If you can recall that I’ve got a real life,” the woman snaps. “This life, this one here, is just a shadow life. Might as well be dead.”

“What’s brought that on? Real life or shadow life? It’s all the same life, whether you like it or not, from your first breath to your last.”

“If you don’t make it any further than being an ice cream man, I suppose you’ve got to think like that.”

The man struggles to his feet, drops the hammer to the ground, and picks up the board frame with the wire netting attached. He places it against the hutch.

“This will make a nice enclosure,” he declares. “The only thing missing is the rabbits.”

The next morning, the woman gets up even earlier than on other mornings, pulls a cardigan over her nightgown, takes a basket and a pair of scissors from the kitchen, and goes out barefoot into the garden. She strolls around the dewy grass without lifting up her hem and breathes in the mist; the dissipated, vaporized water permeates her skin. She picks some roses and places them in her basket, carefully selecting the flawless blooms at their peak, fully opened, with no signs of fading. Those are the roses she cuts as they are still asleep. In the kitchen, she tears off the petals, tips them into some hot, sugary water, hides everything under a lid, and simmers it over a low flame, so low that the pink remains pink. When the man wakes up, he wonders what the smell from the kitchen is. The landlady glances at Esther and says she cannot smell anything, but the man stops and sniffs the air now that he has found a sufficiently minor issue over which to disagree with the landlady, and he wonders again, both as a formality and out of sheer satisfaction.

In the evening, after the potatoes and dumplings, there is bread and jam. They are sitting in the same places as before. The landlady at the head of the table, the man and woman on either side of her, opposite one another.

“How does it taste?” the woman asks.

The man pokes his thumb into the pink jelly stuck to his lip, pushes it into his mouth, and licks his thumb clean.

“How do the roses taste?” she asks again.

“What roses?”

“The roses you’ve just poked into your mouth.”

“Hasn’t Tomáš ever eaten rose-petal jam before?” the landlady wonders.

“Well, is it good?”

“Difficult to describe . . . you try some,” he says, at the same time stretching over the table, putting his hand behind the woman’s head, and pulling her face close enough to kiss, but this happens so fast that the woman has no time to think, and Esther’s face turns away from Tomáš’s as if to avoid a slap or to flinch from a flying object, and Esther quickly gets up from her chair, picks up her plate and takes it to the sink, plunges it into the soapy water, hears the silence behind her, then the chair, the squeak of the floorboards, and the door as Tomáš leaves.

The landlady eats the rest of her bread and jam and brushes the breadcrumbs from the tablecloth onto the floor. The sound of the saw starts up in the yard again. The landlady gets up and clears the remaining dishes from the table.

“Just leave those; leave them to soak,” she says.

“I’ll have them finished in no time.”

“Stop clattering them together, or they’ll break.”

“I’m sorry.” Esther takes her hands out of the water, dries them on a cloth with her back to the landlady, and bursts into tears.

In the bedroom, the landlady pulls the curtain aside with one hand and places the other on Esther’s shoulder.

“Look at him now. What do you see?”

“He’s sawing some wood.”

“Yes, of course, but what else?”

“It’s going well. The saw’s been sharpened.”

“Silly girl, why are you crying?”

“I’m frightened.”

“What are you frightened of?”

“I don’t know. Everything.”

“Really, everything? You’re not frightened of Tomáš as well, are you? Look now. He’s doing everything for you. Getting up, sawing boards. He even breathes for you.”

Mrs. Němcová has a locked metal box in the chest of drawers in her boudoir that contains no money or brooches, only a substance of immeasurable value: a quick solution for every torment.

“It’s important to get the dose right,” she says, then explains, “One for a cough, two for nerves, three for insomnia, four for pain. The fifth pill puts an executioner out of work and turns a rapist into a necrophile. Do you understand? You can cheat Death himself by gobbling these up while he’s still knocking at the door.”

“What are they?” Esther asks.

“Cough pills. But it depends on the dosage. Remember: from one to five, just like the fingers of one hand. I can give you a few.”

“I don’t need any.”

“It will help you relax. With Tomáš as well.”

“I’m quite relaxed already.”

“He didn’t even get to give you a kiss.”

“It’s never just a kiss. His behavior is completely unreasonable, even when people are watching.”

“Is that so? He doesn’t seem that way at all. Well, if you change your mind, I’ve already given a few of these to Tomáš.”

Mrs. Němcová knows very well that there is a shortage of convalescent beds in the hospital, and the senior consultant is extremely concerned about Mrs. Němcová’s lungs. They don’t exchange a word; the doctor can tell right away from her coughing. It is a dry, hacking, nagging cough that produces no phlegm. It is worse at night and disturbs Mrs. Němcová’s sleep. She steadfastly forbids them to x-ray her chest, claiming to be superstitious. “What if you see my heart, with all its secret agony, its forbidden passions?” Even when the doctor explains that he would see only a shadow of her heart, she doesn’t permit any diagnostic procedures beyond a stethoscope. The relationship of pleasure and profit between them is so complicated that not even the doctor has sufficient capacity to work it out on a moral level. At the bottom of it are the business dealings between Mrs. Němcová’s deceased husband and the doctor, and they can be felt like a pea through any number of mattresses: the doctor’s Hippocratic oath, his duty of confidentiality, the widow’s cough, and all the poor patients’ complaints for which there is no relief. Because of the old lady’s inflamed larynx, many patients will be left not just coughing but writhing in pain. Of those with hope and connections, though, a few might get a free convalescent bed in Mrs. Němcová’s large house, assuming the metal box in her chest of drawers receives a regular supply of the final solution, the one whose benefits depend on the dosage.

The woman looks at the man.

“I told the landlady how we met today.”

A line of irritation appears on the man’s forehead.

“We should have discussed that first.”

“You never want to speak to me. And I had to say something when she asked.”

“Say something, yes, but you don’t always have to answer.”

“Well, it’s too late now.”

A gust of wind reaches the hill; they hear and feel it at the same time, smell the grass and the spruce trees. It comes as if to document that they are standing side by side, breathing the same air.

“Well, how did we meet?”

“On the tram.”

“Where?”

“In Olomouc.”

“What was I doing in Olomouc?”

“Have you never been there?”

“Did you tell her what I was doing there?”

“No! Just that you were on the tram. Now listen: you have to remember this. The tram was absolutely packed, the way it usually is in the afternoons, especially when a lot of people get on at the stop by the brewery after the end of their shift.”

“How do you know? Have you seen it with your own eyes?”

“Seen what?”

“That there’s a brewery there? And a stop in front of it?”

“You take me for an idiot, constantly doubting me . . .”

“Carry on, then.”

“I was standing in the center of the carriage, in the part where there are no seats—of course there were no seats free at that point. Then the doors opened, and a huge mass of people swarmed in. I ended up with my back against a window, and suddenly you were standing next to me. At first, you were standing bashfully to the side; but at the next stop, the overcrowding got worse and the mass of bodies pressed you toward me. You tried everything to avoid touching me and started to apologize, sweat dripping down into your collar; you had nothing to hold on to, and you were forced to put your hands up against the window so you wouldn’t crush me. I was trapped between the window and your arms; for a while you even managed to keep a few centimeters’ distance between our bodies—it must have required tremendous strength, and adrenaline was pulsing through your muscles in the struggle against the mass of people and every jolt from the tram . . . as if you might catch a deadly disease from simply brushing against me . . .”

“That’s how you told the story to the landlady, using those words?”

“How do you mean?”

“That vividly.”

“Oh, the landlady makes me nervous. I got a bit off track.”

“Tell me the way you told the landlady. The main points, briefly.”

“I’ll tell it the way I want to! It’s my memory. And memories are feelings. What else can they be?”

“Our memories are details. Maybe you realize that now.”

“Guess what came into my mind then?”

“I guess that it really happened to you.”

“But it wasn’t my husband.”

“What difference does it make? You’ve mixed everything up, so now that man is me.”

“I looked you straight in the eye to see if you were trying to keep your distance out of bashfulness or desire . . .”

“Any other possibilities? Perhaps disgust or indifference?”

“I couldn’t tell! Your strength just started to wane, and finally you slumped against me and stammered into my ear,
‘I can’t help it, I’m very sorry . . .’”

“You’ve never seen him again.”

“Of course I have! I married you.”

“Was that everything?”

“You ought to come up with a reason for being in Olomouc.”

“Why were you there?”

“I lived there.”

“But I was only visiting.”

“Yes, that sounds better, you were only visiting. If you’d lived there, too, that wouldn’t have been such a huge coincidence, a fateful coincidence whereby we bump into each other.”

“No more coincidences, remember that.”

The woman doesn’t seem to have heard, so the man repeats, “Remember that.”

“If lying has become so easy, could it ever become difficult again?” she asks.

But Esther is not terribly sure of herself in the presence of Mrs. Němcová. How piercing Mrs. Němcová’s eyes are—they can see through everything, including Esther and Tomáš. They can clearly see what Esther can only surmise due to her youth: that there is something strange about them. There has been right from the start. They simply do not appear to be at any stage of marriage. They are of an age where, if they were at any stage of a marriage, they would probably be right at the start, but they show no hint of initial ardor, midstage companionship, or final emptiness, and none of the enmity of any stage. They have the sort of strained indifference that shows they are simply not a couple at all: something has forced them together, and in these accursed times, the landlady has sensed this compulsion. Its stench hangs in the nostrils like mold growing under the floorboards. The landlady is fed up with furtive glances and back doors that lead from wardrobes to hidden attics. She built her house so high up that historical events flow past her, like a river flooding the bottom of a valley. Entire villages are washed away with them, but there she stands on her veranda, near the edge of the forest, in her very own little Switzerland. She reckons the madness will last another two or three years, and when it is all over, she will pose the following questions: