John Berger - To the Wedding

I’m so sorry, he murmurs.

I think you should be!

The driver turns down the volume on the music and announces over the loudspeaker that in five minutes the coach will be stopping at a Gasthaus for toilets and refreshments.

It takes a long time, the bald man says, and meanwhile it’s possible …

Are you a doctor?

No, I drive a taxi.

You expect me to believe that! What are you doing riding in a coach if you drive a taxi?

I’m tired of driving, he explains.

You don’t have the face of a taxi-driver! she retorts.

I can’t help it … I drive a taxi … and anyway cars are useless in Venice … in Venice you walk.

Zdena pauses, perhaps to wonder what she’s doing.

A taxi-driver. It’s hard to believe, she says.

We’re all living things which are hard to believe, the man says, things we never imagined.

Forty minutes’ respite, announces the driver over the loudspeaker, not a minute more please.

Let the cat stay on my chest. I like her there, Gino. She’s purring. They say cats, when they lie on you, take away static electricity. Fear makes lots of static. She’s not frightened. She doesn’t know. Her warmth is going right into my bones. I can feel her purring between my ribs. Yes, put out the light. I think I’ll sleep.

When Zdena and the bald man, whose name is Tomas, come back into the coach, they are deep in conversation.

What shall I tell her when I see her? I can’t bear lies. All my life I’ve fought against lies — to my cost. But it’s stronger than me. I can’t bear lies.

You have a voice that couldn’t lie. There are voices that can’t lie.

So?

There’s no need to lie. What’s needed is calm.

I haven’t seen her for six years. As you might guess, I blame myself: if I’d been with her, it wouldn’t have happened. I shouldn’t have come back, I should have stayed with her in France. She needed me. Of course I blame myself.

There’s no blame.

She’s so young, so young.

Whom the gods love …

There’s no love in SIDA. I’m a scientist, Zdena says, I know what I’m talking about. No love. Not a scrap.

You mustn’t panic, Citizen.

Citizen! You’re the second person this week to call me Citizen. I thought our ancient form of address was junked.

You like to hear it?

Now it’s no longer used, I suppose I do. When it was used I hated the hypocrisy of it. Today it reminds me of my teens, when I dreamt of going to the Conservatoire.

There’s a silence. Both of them remembering.

So, she’s getting married, the man says.

An Italian has fallen in love with her, and insists upon marrying her. Crazy.

He knows?

Of course.

Why is he crazy?

Be reasonable, he’s crazy.

She doesn’t want to get married?

She wants everything and she wants nothing. They can’t have children. I’ll never know what she feels. Nobody else can know. But I feel it here! She used the Slav word douchá and the way she pronounced it as she put her hand to the base of her neck, indicated that, although she was small, and light as a bird, her longing and her despair were immense.

Outside, the trees are blacker than the sky and the driver has put on an old cassette of a Verdi opera. The honeymoon couple are cuddling and the shopkeepers are opening cans of beer.

Is he unemployed, your future son-in-law?

He sells clothes, men’s clothes.

So he works in a big store.

No, in street markets. He’s called Gino.

That’s short for Luigi.

Yes, taxi-driver!

If I understand, you’ve never met him?

Here’s a photo of the two of them in Verona, my daughter sent it.

She’s very beautiful, your daughter, and she already looks Italian! As for Gino with his big nose, his big teeth and his long wrists, he’s exactly like a young man drawn by Lucas van Leyden. A long time ago, nearly five centuries. I have a postcard of the drawing at home. Lucas probably drew it a few months after meeting Albrecht Dürer — the two of them swapped drawings in Antwerp.

How come you know so much?

Gino and the man in van Leyden’s drawing have the same kind of independence. It goes with their faces — with those teeth and that nose. It has nothing to do with rank. Men like them never have power. They’re riders. Much later the Americans turned the rider into a cowboy, but he’s much older than America. He’s the man in folktales who comes to take you away on his horse. Not to his palace; he doesn’t have one. He lives in a tent in the forest. He’s never learnt to count—

If he sells clothes in a street market, I’d have thought he could count!

Prices, yes, consequences, no.

That’s why I say crazy, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

He knows exactly what he’s doing. More than you or I know what we’re doing. When we do a thing, when we decide to do something, we’re already thinking about what it’ll be like when it’s done, when it’s over. Not him. He only thinks about what he’s doing at the moment.

His passion, apparently, is fishing on the river Po.

His passion is your daughter.

Zdena lowers her head, as if ashamed. The coach passes a castle with lights in every window and hundreds of cars parked outside.

Lucas van Leyden, the bald man says after a silence of several minutes — a silence underlined by the snoring of the passengers already asleep — Lucas van Leyden died before he was forty.

I don’t think Dutch painters of the sixteenth century take taxis in Bratislava — so how do you know?

Every day I bring with me a hundred postcards to look at whilst I’m waiting for a fare.

Zdena raises her head and, for the first time in weeks, she laughs.

The bald man shakes his head and smiles.

Then she says: When I listen to you, I feel you deploy your encyclopaedic knowledge — for that’s what it is — so as not to have to face the pain of it, the cruelty of life.

Under the ancien régime, he says, I used to work for an encyclopaedia.

That explains everything!

Not everything.

Everything about you! She laughs again.

The Encyklopédia Slovenska , he announces.

I have it at home. You were an editor?

I tried to keep the painters for myself. I was a general editor.

And now?

What do you expect? L’ancienne encyclopédie! There’s no money. We were turned out into the street, and each of us was given fifty sets of the encyclopaedia to sell. If we succeeded we could keep the money for ourselves.

I bet they were hard to sell.

I didn’t sell one set. I kept my car and I became a taxi-driver.

You lose your job working for an encyclopaedia, Tomas, and I begin composing a dictionary of political terms. We’re political enemies.

My wife makes dresses … No, don’t … yes, do … cry …

I haven’t cried once.

Then cry, my dear, cry.

Her sobs come faster, and so as not to be heard, she buries her mouth in her companion’s jacket. Later she tries to speak but she can’t find her voice. Then she says:

… and what a black mountain

Has blocked the world from the light.

It’s time — It’s time — It’s time

To give back to God his ticket .

The coach hurtles down the motorway. The shopkeepers drink their last beer. The bride lays her head on the crotch of her sleeping husband. And Tomas puts his arm round the woman from Bratislava who quoted Tsvetayeva.

Soon all the passengers will be asleep and the driver will switch off the music. It’s easier for him to stay awake with the music off.