Tomáš Zmeškal - A Love Letter in Cuneiform

“Verner,” said the man. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Now stop that, Květa, and get dinner ready. Jiří here must be hungry after such a long journey. Aren’t I right?”

“I could eat a little something,” Jiří said.

“Do you hear that, Karel? You hear how beautifully he speaks Czech?”

“Oh, yes, very nice, very nice,” said Mr. Verner.

“You know, I was thinking, Karel. You’re in insurance still,” Aunt Anna said.

“I haven’t been at the insurance company for a long time now. I stopped working there before the revolution.”

“So where are you now?”

“I’m at that bank. I told you that. We talked about it.”

“Ah, the bank, well, that wouldn’t be too bad either. Maybe you could find something there for our boy here, Jiří. Some kind of employment.”

“Oh, thank you but that won’t be necessary,” Jiří said.

“You be quiet. You don’t know how things work here,” Aunt Anna said. She looked at Mr. Verner. “Just like his mother, isn’t he? Just like Eva, especially the mouth, don’t you think, Karel?”

“I’m really sorry. Here we are talking about you … as if you weren’t even here,” Mr. Verner apologized.

“Never mind,” Jiří said.

“At my age,” Aunt Anna said, “and I’m going to be ninety-five, Karel. At my age I don’t have time for courtesies anymore. You know.”

She gave Jiří a sharp stare and lifted her arm, indicating that he should leap from his seat and support her as she rose from the chair. And so he did. Aunt Anna rewarded him with a fleeting smile and patted him on the arm that she was using to prop herself up. “Karel, please, could you hand me that cane over there … that one, that’s right.”

Mr. Verner handed her the cane, and leaning one arm on it and the other on Jiří, she made her way into the next room for dinner. Jiří struggled to adjust his strides to Aunt Anna’s tiny footsteps as Verner walked behind them, watching attentively lest the slightest shudder of need ripple through her fragile body. In that way, step by step, the three of them proceeded to the table where dinner would soon be served.

At dinner Jiří was pleased to discover that his intellectual labors to decipher the complicated scheme of his family, which in its intricacies surpassed even the filigree fabrics of the ancient Venetian masters, had paid off, and he was beginning to understand who he was actually related to. However, just as he thought he was starting to grasp where one thread ended and the next one began, he found himself once again hopelessly perplexed by the tangled logic of family relationships. Aunt Anna, Květa, Mr. Verner, it made no difference who said what, it all sounded the same — for instance, Aunt Anna sketching out one of the clan’s adjacent lines: “But then after the putsch in forty-eight he got remarried in Germany. Then her sister moved from Canada to Vienna and had another child there with her second husband, and her sister, she lives here in Vysočina, so she wasn’t allowed to go to college. Then her daughter, who can’t be much older than your Kryštof, Alice, she went and married a distant cousin of hers from Opava, and that’s about it.”

Jiří was beginning to realize that historical dates weren’t enough for him to gain a full understanding of the Czech world. He didn’t let it discourage him, but he did conclude that it was going to require a substantially greater degree of energy and ingenuity than he had initially estimated.

(2)

Date: whenever, second day in Prague

Hi sis,

I’m writing like I promised. I hope I have the right address so it reaches you without going halfway around the world before finding its way back to London where it sits for three months, like last time, when I was in Rome. Just for the record, I talked to Mum and Dad. There was a bit of confusion, since they called the hotel but I had canceled the reservation and the staff there didn’t give them the number I left. Then Dad got the bright idea of calling Aunt Anna, but either she couldn’t hear or she forgot. She’s practically a hundred years old and she looks like a sharp-eyed little turtle. Anyway, they tracked me down eventually; she probably gave them the number for Alice, who’s Aunt Květa’s daughter. It isn’t easy working out who’s who, and I still have no idea which ones are actually our relatives. The airport was the usual thoughtless affair. All the flowers are dry and the streets are untidy. Rubbish spilling out of the bins and fag ends all over the place. On the other hand they’ve got this funny apparatus they call a tramvaj . That’s tramway to you, sis. I don’t think they realize it’s an Americanism and that they’re actually little electric trains. They run precisely on time. An odd contrast with the filthy streets. Then they also have the metro here. It’s excellent, truly excellent. I’m sure you’d love it — it’s the answer to all your crazy sci-fi dreams. It runs perfectly and inside it’s spotless, unlike the streets, almost like Germany, but the design is the thing. If you can imagine, the stations look like the inside of a spaceship from one of those old sci-fi TV series, the ones you and Mum and Geoffrey love so much — Buck Rogers and Star Trek and all that. Just picture aluminum foil in all different colors with geometric patterns stamped into it, hemispheres and dimples and such. I don’t know how they came up with it. Brilliant. As Dad would say in Czech: k sežrání . And as if that weren’t enough, the rest of it’s covered in marble. I kid you not. Either artificial stone or marble, like some kind of outer space mausoleum. I just love it!! But you’re better off not telling people here what you think. They’re a bit on the sensitive side. You’d just love it. So those are my first travel notes. Say hi to Geoffrey, and give Mum a call or she’ll start cursing you again. And don’t even think about mentioning what happened in Paris.

George

P.S. I hope you noticed how great my Czech is! Eh

(3)

Mr. Verner always carried thick black glasses with him, though he rarely put them on. Most of the time he shifted them back and forth from one hand to the other, sometimes opening one temple or the other, as if lost in thought and focusing on the moment when he would put them on; sometimes he would rest one of the temples on his upper lip, but Jiří, whom he never referred to as anything but Cousin , had never seen him wear them. Mr. Verner possessed a corpulent frame of medium height. His cousin, despite being only a few inches taller, at twenty-six was bound to have his slender figure viewed as much more elegant and graceful, bringing him the superficial sympathy that makes life so much easier for its recipients without their realizing it. Mr. Verner had white hair, cropped closely on the sides around his ears and temples. The rest of his head was bald and covered in dark-tanned skin. He had a habit of breathing deeply in and out, as if in the middle of some strenuous physical exercise. He wore his tie loose and was always in a rush. It wasn’t clear where to or why, but one day when the cousin asked, he bit down forcefully on one of the temples of his glasses and gave it some thought. Detecting no trace of irony in the cousin’s question and believing him to have asked out of genuine interest, he decided to give him an answer. “Every official, Cousin,” Mr. Verner said, “is like a limited train. More precisely, like something between a limited and an express. An express draws too much attention to itself, while a limited is more important than most other trains, but not so noticeable. Haste is the base speed for an official. You have to make everyone else think you have not more work than you can manage, since that could be used against you, but more than anticipated based on the administrative agenda, legislation, and client demand.” The cousin wracked his brain over the sentence for a while. He knew all the words, yet the meaning still eluded him. He shook his head from side to side. “If it looks like you can’t keep up with the work, you could be deemed incompetent, do you understand?” The cousin nodded. “Whereas if it’s evident from your behavior that your superiors are giving you perhaps not unreasonable but let’s say poorly thought-out instructions, which are unnecessarily complicating your life, then you’ve won.” The cousin nodded again, trying to grasp what implications this information could have for him. He had been employed at the bank for a week now, but had yet to understand what his job would entail. His supervisor, one Mr. Dostál, had given him direct instructions to make arrangements for the furnishing of three offices. Jiří had gone back to ask him several times what the offices would be used for, but from his answer it was clear even he didn’t know. All that Dostál told him was it was possible the offices might be for them, so he should make sure they were quality furnishings. That was roughly two days’ work, then Jiří had nothing to do again. For lunch every day they went to a restaurant that was just under ten minutes’ walk away, where Mr. Verner would meet him and Mr. Dostál. The pudgy Mr. Verner would always sweat during the soup. He consumed it quickly, with a certain doggedness, then, pulling a white or light blue handkerchief from his pocket, he would wipe the dewy sweat from his face, at which point he turned visibly calmer, becoming an affable companion. The cousin lived with Alice, who took him out to the cottage in Lhotka several times so he had a chance to meet her father, Josef, and her son, Kryštof. Alice had assumed the cousin and Kryštof would become friends, if for no other reason than that they were both roughly the same age, but Kryštof devoted most of his time to the fair-haired Libuše with a devotion she had never seen in him before, and spent most of the interim playing checkers with his grandfather. Josef was an old man. At first Jiří didn’t even realize he was in a relationship with Květa, since she looked a good ten years younger than she actually was. She looked about sixty, whereas her husband, despite being seventy-six, looked to be nearly eighty-five. When Jiří looked at Josef, he saw a tall, thin old man, who sometimes walked with a severe limp on his left leg. It was hard to answer when Josef asked him what was new in England, even though it was a question he got often. It seemed as if no matter what he said, the questioner was satisfied. When Josef asked how he liked it in the Czech lands, Jiří replied that he hadn’t been anywhere in the Czech lands yet except Prague, but Prague was probably even more beautiful than Venice or Jerusalem, which he knew intimately and which up until that point he had considered the most beautiful in the world. His answer seemed to give Josef a shot of energy, as he suddenly began trying to convince Jiří that he was wrong, despite having never seen either Venice or Jerusalem with his own eyes. He rubbed his palms together, making a sound like rustling leaves, and propped his right foot on a wooden swivel stool that had originally belonged to a piano.