Tomáš Zmeškal - A Love Letter in Cuneiform

“Maximilian.”

“And the little fella’s Kryštof, right?”

“Yeah, that’s our son. But how did you know his name?”

“Everyone knows everything about everyone around here. But make sure you ask that father-in-law of yours, the engineer. You ask if he saw them. If he saw those monkeys.”

“All right,” said Maximilian. “I’ll ask.”

The woman meanwhile waved good-bye to the man with the cane and walked off with a jug of beer.

“You tell me,” said the man, striking his cane on the ground to emphasize each syllable. “You tell me how tropical animals like that could survive the cold. No, sir. They don’t have any winter down there in Africa and Australia. Am I right? And what would they eat, besides?”

“Leaves, Mr. Hořejší! Leaves!” shouted the woman with the jug, who had stopped at the gate to the garden restaurant, hearing the man’s remark.

Maximilian didn’t get a chance to ask his father-in-law that day, but that night he had a dream about being lost in a zoo, so the next day he made a point of inquiring into the matter.

“I saw them. I saw several animals,” said Maximilian’s father-in-law. “The Germans were retreating, the Americans were advancing, and one or the other of them blew the place to smithereens and the animals escaped. That’s war, you know? Until one winter after the war, I don’t remember which year anymore, but it was bitter cold, and all the animals were dying. The priest that was serving there, Růžička or something, I think he was called, but originally he had a German name, he gave a really nice sermon about how it was like living in the Garden of Eden. Paradise and all that. Like we were in paradise and we didn’t even realize it. He saw the animals, too. I think it was just before the coup, or was it after? I can’t remember now. But I’ll tell you more some other time.”

Maximilian and Alice’s marriage was not flourishing. Having a child did not cement their relationship and fill it with love and joy. Their genuine expectations were straight-out, absolutely, genuinely unfulfilled. After the birth, the last glimmers of Alice’s upbeat spirits faded as the sweet hormones of her snuggly pregnancy drained out of her bloodstream, leaving nothing but the futile gray of dusty streets stretching out before her.

She felt a little better when she took their son and went to visit her father at the cottage, but as good as she felt being there, she felt worse seeing her father deteriorate without the care of her mother. Sometimes he would forget to cut his nails. Sometimes he would go several days without shaving, and sometimes he just plain forgot to eat. When she reminded him, he would get angry at himself, so after a while Alice stopped reminding him, since when he felt bad, he would fire back at her viciously, turning his guilty feelings back on her. Her parents vied with each other in their offers to take care of Kryštof, but the oddness of their breakup didn’t add to Alice’s peace of mind. They both made a show of listing all the ways in which it was their fault. And meanwhile Maximilian changed jobs so he could earn more money, but the more he earned, the less he was at home. When he came home at the end of the day, sometimes he was so tired he would fall asleep at the dinner table before he finished eating. When Kryštof was a year old, the whole family got together. It was the first time in more than a year her father and mother had seen each other, and her mother treated it like a military operation, preparing for weeks in advance. New clothes, new haircut, manicure, pedicure, new pumps but properly broken in, so they wouldn’t pinch her feet and make her unpleasant or nasty toward Josef. It took her a whole week to choose a perfume, suitable both to her age and her objective. Friendly but not seductive. Friendly and therefore seductive, not like the rapid-acting scent of youth, but the relaxing scent of a late afternoon. Her mother devoted several months to her preparations, with the deliberate single-mindedness of an explorer setting out to conquer the North Pole. When her husband arrived in Prague from the cottage, however, she was completely disarmed. Dressed in an old sweater and with a two-day growth of stubble, his tall, thin frame was even more hunched than it had been the last time she saw him. He spent most of his time playing with Kryštof, and when he left he forgot to take the gift from his wife, tickets to a concert that she had been hoping to see with him. It had taken Květa several days of running around paying bribes to scrounge up two tickets for the young Canadian pianist whose performances of Bach’s Goldberg Variations had become the stuff of legend. She’d had to bring out the heavy guns, and didn’t have any more trumps left in her hand or in her heart. Alice was a proud mother, Maximilian was a proud father, and Kryštof was the center of their universe, but the difference between the way his grandparents looked was too great for anyone not to notice. When Josef went out to the balcony for a smoke, a handful of half-smoked butts fell out of his pocket. Alice quietly raged at him for wearing his old brown sweater when just the week before, on her last visit to the cottage, she had ironed his suit and two dress shirts and cleaned up his shoes. The cool, distant, secretly horrified look on her mother’s face at seeing her husband again after a year spoke volumes, and the dominant atmosphere of Kryštof’s birthday party was a direct reflection of the embarrassment everyone felt except for Josef and Kryštof. The grandfather crawled around the apartment after his grandson, neither one of them paying any attention to the rest of the guests. When the two of them got tired and little Kryštof began to drift off to sleep, his grandfather left to catch the train. His departure was rather abrupt. In fact, the only person he said good-bye to was Kryštof, but the boy was still too young to be able to tell anyone. When Květa left, a few minutes after him, she said to Alice: “You should’ve told me how he looks now, Ali. You should’ve told me! It wasn’t nice of you not to warn me.” And she walked out. Alice didn’t bother to try anything else after that. She had enough on her hands with her own marriage. Putting her parents’ relationship back together was beyond her. So she went on caring for her hastily aging father, and in the brief moments when her husband was at home she tried to enjoy him a little at least.

Increasingly, the sweetness of her first and only pregnancy was just a memory. Alice was now caught up in the murky flow of everyday life, submerged in the muck at the bottom, and the only thing that was clear was the aquarium window through which she observed her marriage. Maximilian was rarely at home. He fended off any questions with either silence or some implausible story. Once Kryštof turned three, Alice tried every now and then to broach the possibility of having another child, but whenever she did, she could be sure she wouldn’t see her husband at all for the next few days. Then as a rule he would turn up at dawn stone drunk with his buddies, turning every trip to the toilet or bathroom into a strange game, the goal of which was not to step on any of the arms, legs, or bellies belonging to the heaving bodies whose breath flooded the apartment with alcoholic fumes. When Maximilian sobered up and Alice tried to talk to him, it would end up in a quarrel that never failed to include a bitter exchange about how little money they had. More and more, their conversations turned into rows and their arguments into obstinate misunderstandings, leaving behind a grubby desperation that smelled of carbolic acid, chloroform, and tincture of iodine. The mutual wounding increased to the point that any means to alleviate the pain was good as far as Maximilian was concerned, even if it did kill half his soul along with it. It wasn’t a lack of caring on his part. Just the opposite, it was the growing realization of his own pathetic failure. His own failure flavored with sweat, pain, and a dash of blood. It was staggering to look into the void. He had all sorts of strange dreams. In one of them, the most absurd, he was an astronaut. Through most of the dream he was slowly and carefully putting on a spacesuit, before going out to repair the space station’s outer shell. Then the line that secured him snapped and he floated off into space, drifting farther and farther away from the mothership and farther and farther away from Earth. In one version the space station had portholes; in another it didn’t. But every time he had the dream, Maximilian knew his wife was inside, brewing him coffee or baking him an apple strudel just the way he liked it. She never made it to the window in time to see him float away. Obviously she couldn’t actually brew coffee in zero gravity, but in the dream that didn’t matter. Maximilian always woke from it with a lung-crushing anxiety. Another thing about it that bothered him was there was no weightlessness inside the station; it was just like on Earth. Contrary to the laws of nature, it was only outside that there was no gravity. Either way, Maximilian saw all his dreams as basically simple ones about his utter failure.