(7)

The whiteboard at Oskar’s back is still clean.

“Just now – well, just a few minutes ago – the reader started on this story,” he says. “They know nothing more about you than your names and the odd detail.”

The eyes of the students are on him, surprised. Oskar can see that he’s succeeded in engaging their attention.

“At this very moment they’re reading these sentences,” he goes on. “I would hope with a certain eagerness. If this is so, we do not wish to disappoint them. Alternatively their attitude might be one of mistrust, which we will need to break down. They might even have the preconceived idea that there will be nothing in our words to interest them. Writing is a battle for the reader’s attention. Out of the thousands of books they might pick up, why should they choose ours? The first page represents a battle which we have to win.”

“Win.”

He registers Kamil’s over-rapid, too self-evident expression of agreement.

“It might help if we try to imagine this reader. It could be anyone. Suggestions, anyone? How about you, Kamil?”

Kamil sniggers in his cluelessness.

“Think of any reader you like. Give them an age, a job, habits, a mood of the moment …”

“Mood?” Kamil repeats uncertainly.

“The mood he or she is in at the moment. Right now, as they start to read our story.”

“OK. Let’s say … a shop assistant in Diesel. She’s in a bad mood.”

Kamil laughs, as if he’s just pulled off a great joke. Presumption of innocence. Oscar remembers Uhde’s axiom – whether or not we are able to recognize talent in our student we should treat him as if we are.

“And do you think she’s enjoying our story so far?” His tone is as genial as he can make it.

“Enjoying?” Kamil looks around the class. “I don’t know, really.”

Oskar makes the discovery that he is not the only one who is irritated by Kamil’s chuckling. He appeals with his eyes to Simona, who blinks back at him in surprise.

“I don’t know. How about … a dental technician?”

She glances at Jakub and falls silent.

“Fine. Let’s say a dental technician who’s on maternity leave.” Oscar gives Anička the briefest of smiles. “She’s twenty-three. She’s only able to read when little Pavel is asleep – and before she gets round to it she has to clean up in the kitchen et cetera. For the first few minutes she finds herself incapable of concentrating on what she’s reading – her head’s buzzing with a range of practical concerns. She’s forgotten to rinse out the juicer. There’s a peanut under the sofa little Pavel could choke on. Things like that. Some of our paragraphs she has to re-read. And it has to be said that so far she’s not getting much fun out of them. The characters – a snooty writer and a few students – don’t have much to say to her. It’s already entered her mind that she might put the book down and pick up Mother and Baby instead. But something makes her persist with us. She doesn’t want to end up like certain other mothers on maternity leave, who are incapable of talking about anything except children.”

He has the impression that they are amused, more or less.

“Give me another reader.”

Eva draws breath. Her top is low-cut, her skirt short. Either her summer tan hasn’t yet faded or she goes to the solarium.

“His name’s Patrik. He’s twenty-five and single. He still hasn’t found the right girl – because he hasn’t met me yet!” she gushes.

Oskar gives a faint smile of politeness.

“He doesn’t go out much in the evenings. He sits at home listening to good music and reading. He has really lovely eyes. A beautiful mouth. Broad shoulders and gentle hands.”

“Gentle hands!” Kamil chuckles.

“Pretty good,” Oskar says with benevolence. “Give me another reader.”

“An X-ray technician on maternity leave,” Jakub offers. “But unlike the dental technician she’s really absorbed in our story. In particular she’s so taken with the character of talented student Jakub that she’s being rather neglectful in the care of her only child. Poor little Sonia is lying in her own waste. Her little bottom is red-raw.”

“Red Sonia,” Oskar observes.

They laugh.

“Red Sonia!” Kamil howls. “That’s a good one!”

Oskar has to control himself.

“Anyone else?”

There is no one.

“All right, then – I’ll go again. Fifty-year-old Karel. He’s managing director of a carpet factory.”

Simona and Jakub exchange glances.

“Right now he and his wife Alena are on holiday in Croatia,” he proceeds. “In Primosten. They always go there at the beginning of June, before the school holidays. For one thing it’s cheaper, and they don’t like it when it’s too hot and the beach is full of shrieking kids. Both their daughters are grown-up.”

Jasmína shakes her head.

“At the moment his wife – who is five years younger than he is – is reading our book. The shoulder straps of her swimsuit are pulled down, so she can get a better tan. A short while ago she laughed out loud. Her laughter makes her younger; Karel is transported back to the years when they first knew each other. He observes her with an air of indulgent superiority, which at the same time is almost jealous.”

“Jealous?” Jasmína voices her doubts. “Why jealous, for God’s sake?”

Though he doesn’t much like her, Oskar is grateful for this first expression of disagreement.

“I said almost jealous. He’s nearly jealous of this unknown author because he has succeeded in making his wife laugh. And what if Alena tells Karel that he should read the book himself?”

“Himself.”

This is getting unbearable. Oskar is going to have to come up with a way of pointing this out to Kamil. Leaves are falling beyond the windows of the classroom.

“Some time later Alena goes for a swim and Karel picks the book up. With suspicion, I reckon. He checks the author’s name, reads the blurb on the jacket, makes a start. His expression says, Show us what you can do, you hack! Perhaps if he were introduced to the author in person, his behaviour would be different. But out here on the beach he holds a clear advantage. It’s his – Karel’s – book, bought with his money, so he can do with it as he chooses. If he wants to, he can rip it up or throw it into the sea. This is why he reads the opening sentences with the attitude he used to take when checking the girls’ homework. The author has to be ready for him; he needs to ‘get’ Karel. But how does he do this?”

“Should he try to arouse his curiosity?” says Anička.

Oscar nods.

“And do you think he’ll manage?” Jakub asks.

Oscar gives the faintest of smiles.

“I hear doubt in your voice, politely expressed though it is.”

“Why should the managing director of a carpet factory be interested in some book about a creative writing class? What if he has absolutely no interest in the subject?”

Simona fixes her brother with a searching look.

“That’s highly probable,” Oskar concurs. “And that’s precisely why the author has to write well. He has to wake Karel’s curiosity in a given situation which at first sight holds little interest for him. And this he has to do before Karel’s very eyes, so to speak.”

“This author’s pretty sure of himself.”

“Yes, he is. But what’s left to him? Without self-belief he wouldn’t be able to write. It’s rather like sex – you can’t make love if you don’t believe in yourself.”

“That’s what I keep telling my boyfriends!” Eva shouts out.

Oskar waits for Kamil to quieten down.

“Right from the first page the author has to show the reader that he’s – if you’ll forgive me – good.”

“And modest,” Jakub remarks with irony.

“And healthily immodest,” Oskar specifies. “He’s trying for something which is the hardest aspect of the writer’s craft – to tell a story about simple, seemingly trivial events while saying something important about life. Gleb Zekulin.”

“And well-read,” says Jakub, smiling.

(23)

Lucie says: “Old women on the slow descent to the basement shouldn’t go ten-pin bowling or whatever it’s called.”

Oskar sits down on the bar stool next to hers. Lucie is drinking mineral water.

“For God’s sake! I felt like a real old maid!”

“It’s only a game.”

“Yeah, and I was playing for my dignity. For the last scraps of my self-belief …”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“I’d been thinking that after all these years, I was finally at peace with myself. So why should something like this get me so hot and bothered?”

“How about a Campari and orange?”

“I’m driving, in case you’d forgotten!” Lucie’s objection is comical.

“Once the young ones stop playing we’re all going for a Chinese. If you joined us, that’d mean you wouldn’t be driving again for at least two hours.”

Lucie gives her hesitant agreement.

“You know, sometimes I really do worry that I’m starting to behave like one. An old maid, I mean,” she says, as soon as the barman is out of earshot. “I’m getting certain hypochondriac tendencies. Every morning I go to the bakery, the newsagent’s and the chemist’s.”

Oskar smiles.

“That’s why I haven’t got myself a dog, even though actually I’d rather like one. I wouldn’t want to turn into one of those typical retirees …”

“In the park in front of our building I often see a woman who speaks to her dachshund for minutes at a time. You know what I mean? Not just commands and stuff like that, but whole, complex sentences. She explains to him why they have to go home, what they’re going to cook together; she even talks to him about what mood she’s in.”

“A widow?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never spoken to her myself. The dog never lets me get a word in.”

They drink each other’s health, agree to use the familiar ‘you’ form.

“Just look at this – I don’t even know how to drink through a straw. I’m a hopeless case. Where we’ve got our allotment –”

Lucie pauses for a moment.

“Have you read it yet?”

“Yes.”

“Even at the allotments I’m something of a black sheep. Everything dies on me. I’ve even stopped mowing the grass. Those ecologists would be full of admiration for me. I just sit in front of the hut and read. The neighbours shout to me over the fence; I pretend I don’t hear them. They’re over fifty, for heaven’s sake!”

In the meantime Oskar has started to think of something else.

“That ecologist, Jakub Patočka. His wife,” he says carefully. “Did you read about that?”

Lucie shakes her head.

“I don’t read the papers any more. I need to save time.”

“Thirty years old, three children. Just committed suicide.”

He is unsure how she’ll respond to this; to his surprise she shrugs with indifference.

“Another story of misfortune,” she says. “Another one whose life was too much for her. Could anyone really blame her?”

Oskar gives this some thought. In the lanes behind them the bowling balls continue in their noisy revolutions. The speakers above their heads are playing Eighties’ Czech pop.

“For a year or two I really hated my sister. But I forgave her a long time ago. Sometimes life really is too much for us.” Lucie takes hold of her glass and raises it towards the ceiling of the bowling alley.

“Rest in peace, Hana.”

It is the first time Oskar has heard her name. They return to their drinks.

“It was my choice to lumber myself with two kids. That’s how they referred to it. I sacrificed myself. But it’s always rather more complicated than that. It’s impossible not to see the voluntary aspect of the thing. It’s tempting to see yourself as a sacrifice – it rids you of the responsibility for your own decisions. Something like an alibi for a lifetime.”

Oskar listens.

“Hana was thirty, too,” Lucie continues, after a few moments’ silence. “Of course, I was completely unprepared for anything of this order. Nobody could be. In your naivety you wait for this great, noble, tragic sorrow – and what you get instead is lethargy. And exasperation, obviously. Everything gets on your nerves: films, what people say, how people smile, adverts. All those little banalities. That’s why Simona is as she is: she can’t stand chitchat, half-truths, quips. That’s why she’s sometimes hard to put up with.”

“She seems a pretty good type to me.”

“Let’s not go into that. If it’d been me who married Karel, I’d have killed myself. It’s going to my head. Does it really happen this quickly?”

“I suppose so.”

“Two suicides in one family – can you imagine that? That really would be in pretty poor taste. My parents would have to start to thinking where they’d gone wrong …”

Oskar feels a wave of sympathy roll over him. Maybe he is being over-sentimental, but he is the type. His hand brushes against hers – the hand of a woman no longer young, he realizes.

“So I don’t read newspapers, but I read a lot of books,” Lucie says. “Biographies, for the most part. My alternative lives. I’d like to talk about literature – if you’re not too tired of it.”

Oskar shakes his head.

“Do you think we’re still looking for what exactly we should call it?”

“Of course.”

“All right, then, here’s what I think: I didn’t really care for some of your books, of course – the stories about sex and the novel about infidelity, for example.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“Wait a second: that’s not what I really wanted to say. I might not care for some of your books, but I buy them all. Every year. And I look forward to them. I have the feeling that I know you.”

Oskar says nothing.

“In places they … Let me put it another way. You’re one of the few people whose words I’ve given some thought to in the last few years. The others are mostly writers, too. Usually women writers. You’re pretty much the only man.”

Literature is something intimate, Oskar realizes. An intimacy which we lack in our lives.

“You know what struck me today in the car? What if I wasn’t going for the kids’ sake but for yours?”

She falls silent.

“I had the feeling you’d understand my screwed-up life, that you wouldn’t laugh at me.”

“And what’s so funny about your life, for heaven’s sake?” Oskar says seriously. “Apart from the way you bowl, of course.”

Lucie smiles enigmatically. Her glass is empty.

“I was never going to like the stories about sex,” she says.

“I realize that such a theme might irritate you in particular. And I admit that infidelity and jealousy are to a degree artificial, in that they are problems that spoiled brats such as I – who have known none of life’s real problems – can indulge ourselves in.”

By trying to oblige – as so many times before – he has encroached on the borders of his true thoughts.

“Oh, just put it out of your mind!” Lucie exclaims. “Don’t take my ramblings so seriously! Let’s face it, I’m like a vegetarian in a meat market!”

Oskar is surprised by the grandness of her diction. Had he not known she’d drunk no more than a single Campari, he’d have said she was drunk.

“I wanted to say that the way we live, that’s the way we write.”

“And read.”

Oskar is in agreement with this. Lucie looks around, her expression conspiratorial.

“I’m going to tell you a secret, OK?”

She puts a finger to her lips and leans in towards Oskar.

“I’m a virgin,” she whispers to him. “Can you believe it?”

Translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland