Tomáš Zmeškal - A Love Letter in Cuneiform

(4)

Josef was at home alone when the doorbell rang. His wife and daughter had gone out shopping. “Again?” he said, with the infinite naïveté of a man who thinks that everything necessary for the wedding has been purchased. As if once all the things for the wedding had been bought, the preparations for it could be brought to a close once and for all, and they could devote themselves to something else. This time they said they were going to a department store on Wenceslas Square to buy some sort of ribbons. “Ribbons,” Josef repeated. They already had some ribbons somewhere. What did they need any other ones for? As if they didn’t know that colors were just electromagnetic waves anyway.

“Measurable. That’s right, mea-sur-a-ble!” he repeated, raising his voice. Of course, it was no use trying to explain. He knew they would only laugh at him. In a good-natured way. “Spare us the technical details, Dad. Just tell us which color you like best,” his daughter said, and then she and Květa would both conclude that his taste in color was questionable. As if he didn’t know. Of course!

“Alice is more and more like Květa every day,” he said. No doubt a lot of it was the wedding … but so many other things, too. Yes, and of course they had blossomed. Both of them. Undisputedly. There was no denying it. Both his wife and his daughter had blossomed. And entirely unexpectedly they had bought him a box of expensive, very expensive and very good, Cuban cigars. They told him he just had to save one, to light at the wedding dinner when he gave his speech as father of the bride. The cigars came in a wooden box of twelve. Well, now there were just ten, but the wedding was only two weeks away, so no need to worry they wouldn’t last. He never had smoked that much. Just occasionally and by himself, so he could really savor the experience. The best was smoking while listening to something nice. Something he could savor. The best was with Antonín. Listening with him, even if they didn’t say anything, that was the best. He knew how to appreciate it.

Studying the box of cigars, Josef decided to invite Antonín over. He could bring some brandy. They could enjoy a couple of cigars and to go with them, what else, Dvořák’s String Quartet in F Major. The Czech composer who wrote on the other side of the pond. Especially that third movement. Full of sunshine. Obviously American.

Before Josef could accept the letter from the mailman, he had to sign again, one line above, since the first time he signed by accident for the wrong delivery. His mind was still occupied with the third movement of Dvořák’s quartet. For some reason he couldn’t remember what the tempo was.

The melody, a melody like that of course is easy to remember, but the tempo, that’s a different story. The tempo comes from God, as one conductor said. Josef held the letter up closer to his eyes and suddenly stopped humming. The sender was listed as Květa. It took him aback, and for a moment he was afraid something had happened to her. Yes, it was his wife’s name on the back side of the envelope, but the handwriting wasn’t hers, that was obvious at first glance. He took a long, dull, narrow knife from his desk that he used to open letters and slit open the envelope. He read standing up, just taking little half steps to the side every now and then. He would clear his throat, lift his foot, but then not follow through. When he finished reading, he realized his throat was dry, parched as sand.

Instantly two things were clear. First: Something had snapped like a spring on a clock tower. Something had ended. Second: His whole life he hadn’t understood his wife a bit, not one single drop. After reading the letter he folded it back into the envelope and put it in his pocket. Was it true? If so, what else did he not know about? A railyard in his head with no switches. Once the dull, hazy feelings had passed, a single clear thought emerged: However hazy your thinking, don’t panic! Whether or not it made much sense, Josef kept repeating it to himself over and over.

After a rapid succession of alternating various types of despair with feelings of rage and utter ruin, he suddenly became aware of the taste of salty cheese in his mouth. Don’t panic , he shouted at himself several times, but it didn’t help keep his head clear. What do you do in this situation, he wondered, when you find out you’re a cuckold and your wife is a whore? It wasn’t even that so much as who it was with. Of all people! Whoring herself to him! He swallowed the salty taste and found he had bitten through his lip. I’m starting to — yes. However hazy your thinking, don’t panic! Maybe it was just the usual false accusation, the kind this country has such a tradition of, it’s practically in our blood. Of course, first he had to carry out a survey of the terrain, determine the type of bedrock and the freezing depth, in order to know how deep to build the foundations, and then, assuming it was even possible, determine whether there was any evidence for the allegations in this slanderous denunciation. These thoughts circled in Josef’s head, as well as a number of others, no matter how strenuously he tried to suppress them, along with anything that even remotely resembled a feeling. Emotions meant the death of his marriage, while thoughts gave it life — that much, unfortunately, was plain as day to him. Any feeling was like a dead fish trapped in a net of thoughts, pitifully and clumsily struggling to keep from tearing open. Suddenly his favorite room was tinged with blood. Looking out from under his eyelids, even his good, solid desk, abounding in stability, suddenly seemed to take the shape of an altar, on which sooner or later some anonymous goat would have its throat cut. Yes, his mind raced, yes, if the harsh reality is that all of it is true, then I am that goat, or some other animal sacrifice, and the blood covers the walls that are closing in on us. Unable to bear the thought of waiting, Josef’s mind — not him, his mind — peevishly rushed to engage its technical capacity, trying to calculate how far the goat’s/his blood might spray if he slit open his carotid artery at this very moment. Lacking a basic knowledge of physiology or medicine, his mind had to perform several fairly complex arithmetic operations, and several decisions had to be made regarding which formulas to use for the calculation. His lack of focus considerably complicated the process. The heart is a pump. Quarts of blood, reportedly four to six. Viscosity, internal friction of veins, arteries, capillaries. Fluid density. Pump force. Diameter of the opening. Yes, it wasn’t actually that hard, and as his mind, not he, arrived at the final conclusion, he took a few steps back from his good, stable desk, feeling as if his throat had already been slit, the blood even now dousing the freshly painted walls. The bright idea of killing him or her also occurred to him, which calmed him down a little. But even before the thought subsided, he was certifiably sure he was incapable of murder; his own experience with it was irrefutable — unfortunately. I’m going out of my skull, he realized. My thoughts aren’t even listening to me. All at once it was obvious he couldn’t wait for Květa at home. He had to get out! He pulled the envelope from his pocket again. He opened the denunciation and read through it one more time, laid it on his desk, took the extra set of keys to the cottage in Lhotka from one of the drawers, and walked out the door.

(5)

Alice never did find out why the day they were finalizing the last details of her wedding dress and tracking down those irresistible honey-colored ribbons, her mother suddenly shut herself up in her father’s study and started to cry. From the shape of her wrinkles Alice concluded it wasn’t over the wedding. Josef had left the letter on his desk, and at first Květa ignored it. For tidiness’ sake she preferred to just put it away and do a quick dusting. That was what she always did when she was anxious, and with Alice’s wedding coming up she was anxious constantly. The fact that the letter had been sent by registered mail was obvious from the way the color stood out against the pleasing brown of the desk. To pick it up and read it wouldn’t be that unusual, Květa decided in those few fractions of a second that divided her happy life from the feelings of devastation and frustration that awaited her in that moment. When she grasped what the letter said and the fact that Josef had already read it, she let out a sob. She didn’t read it all the way to the end, there was no need, everything written in it was true. She took the letter, put it back in the envelope, went into the bathroom, tore it into little pieces, threw it in the toilet bowl, and flushed it down. She went back into the study, sat in the chair at her husband’s desk, and looked through all the drawers, but except for a few slide rules and some books of engineering, math, and physics tables, she didn’t find anything. She had always felt a certain pride at the fact that he understood those things. Even now the feeling was still there. She wasn’t sobbing anymore, and she knew there was nothing left for her to do but wait for her husband. She had to just sit and wait.