sluggish and sad and suffocating us, I feel melancholy and desolate; I get the shivers and would like to have a pair of wings so as to fly to countries in which a warmer, freer air blows.”
I think she is talking not only of these sad winter days, but of the grayness of our country after a failed revolution, the grayness that, like mud at the bottom of a lake, has seeped into our lives.
Once more, with a column of light coming through the door, I go into the kitchen. Božena is sitting there, waiting for the water to boil to make tea. She wears a black dress and a white apron, and is sitting with her head bowed and her elegant coiffure combed upward. The nape of her neck suggests frailty, but also strength, exhaustion, and sadness. The water has boiled; she heads off with the cup and the teapot. Now she’s seen me, she moves her lips in a way that is barely visible, and gets another cup. In her room she puts my cup on the bedside table and without another word goes to her desk. I have the feeling she is so sad that she cannot speak. And that she is escaping into her writing so as not to have to think. She stands in front of the desk, the tray in her hands. I observe her from behind and see that she is not reading what she has just written, that she is staring into space. One day she had told me: “Vítězka, you and I have to be strong because we are fragile.” The gray light falls from the window onto her shoulder, her arm, and a curl of hair that has freed itself from her coiffure. She sits down and adds words to her letter. Then she gets her coat and before going out, whispers to me: “Today I can’t give you any of my time, Vítězka. Finish your tea and go. Don’t ever come back.”
Her voice, always so smooth, has dealt me a hard blow. I cannot move. The sound of the door closing behind her is like a sigh.
What has she added to the letter?
“If I could choose, I would like to be reborn two hundred years from now or perhaps even later, when the world will be, if such a thing is possible, just as I would like it to be so as to able to live in it with pleasure.”
So yes, it was she who saw us embracing.
How can she write in such an elegant way after having made a discovery of this kind? She wishes only to be reborn when the world will be a better place. A place in which there will not be people as mean as I am, I who have joined the police in their games designed to ruin other people’s lives. But what could you expect, Božena? I need the money, just as I need love, even if only for a moment, even if it is handed to me on a platter by the police.
“I am at your command, Herr von Päumann.”
“Fräulein Zaleski, how fares that campaign to isolate Božena Němcová from her friends and potential benefactors?”
“Mrs. Eliška Lambl, a friend of Božena’s, the sister of one of her doctors, told me yes, I have it here in writing: ‘There are many days when there is no food in her house. Nothing whatsoever. One day Božena complained to my brother that she had but one coin left and didn’t know what to buy with it; whether a little tea to keep her awake, a candle to write by all night, or a little ink, which was also nearly finished.’”
“Has she spoken to other people of interest?”
“Yes, to the poet Jan Neruda, who went to see her with his companion Hálek. Jan told me: ‘We visited her to ask for a contribution to the first issue of May magazine. We stared incredulously at the flaking walls and the shabby furniture; the tablecloth especially fascinated us, being half ripped and patched up, yet there on the table. I don’t mean to say that it was the first time we’d seen such poverty, but to find it in the home of a person who had become a celebrity thanks to a lifetime of work left us speechless and open mouthed.’”
“Does our writer continue to get help from her friends?”
“When she fell on hard times she was ashamed and didn’t want her friends to know anything about