Radka Denemarková - I Wondered What Was That Hammering on the Door

Translated by Andrew Oakland

“I want to know what your father – a man by the name of Ralf – did in the war.”
Petr Buch struck out. And again. No mercy. Instinctively she covered her face to protect herself; her slight elbows pricked into his chest. One cup broke and the tea seeped away, dripped with indifference over the wooden edging. He forced her against the table. He felt strong. Powerful. It was intoxicating. He swept her onto the table, hitched up her pleated skirt, a white accordion against her chest, up to the chin. She lay as if under the guillotine, the head separated from the lower part of a body which did not belong to her. Whatever was happening between her legs had nothing to do with her; the pain was not hers. She wanted to shout out but was inhibited by her shock, her fear. The months they had shared seemed a momentary tenderness. Now Buch was pushing her hard against the raw wood. Splinters worked themselves into her thighs, buttocks and back as he continued to cut her down, pushing his head violently between her calves to break their vice-like grip. He entered her, kneading her mouth and cheeks from side to side, delighting in the disfiguring of that lovely little face, the smudging of its features. Torn skin continued to tear, as if in the undoing of an invisible zip; her symmetrical sweetness changed to a bloody grimace, a deep, oozing wound.
“You want to know what my father did in the war? You want to know what my father did in the war? You want to know what my father did in the war? Perhaps this, perhaps precisely this.”
A savage, almost blinding light cut treacherously into the dark. The spiteful scream of the closing part of a passage of music. Krásová – whom Klamová had conciliated and soothed with promises of further roles and assurances that working with extraordinary personalities always brought conflict and professional misunderstanding – and Oujezdský, too, were waiting with gratified eagerness to see how the arrangement would work out. An arrangement which Buch had thought through to its tiniest detail. An arrangement which Buch had not seen.
Buch was breathing heavily, clinging to an improvised table centrestage. He had long since switched off the green-shaded lamp.
“It’s very powerful. Remember how you reacted,” Klamová’s voice broke the silent tension. “But Jiří, please, no larking about. Everything carefully timed. We don’t want any injuries.”
“Yeah, and perhaps I should put my arm like this, you know, Jiří, so that I don’t knock you, because …”
Unexpectedly Buch moved, hoisted himself to this feet. A flailing octopus.
“I need some air.”
Surprised, Klamová cleared the way for him along the row of seats. She shrunk back from him, against the coldness of the wall. Buch’s blunt disregard for others. She was not giving up; she would do what she could to prise out of him the cause of his annoyance. Not least because of the astonished actors, who this time had been working with concentration, also thanks to her. She did not wish to play the diplomat with Krásová again.
“But that’s as you wanted it!”
“That’s right. Just as I wanted it.”

One little step, a second here,
Reaching the end of my first year.
By the time I get to five,
My world will be a heaving hive.

As a child, whenever Birgit addressed her mother, whenever she wanted a hug from her, the mother would be swept into a panic and shrink away from her. For a long time, Birgit did not understand why. She could not suspect that for her mother she was a biting splinter which could never be removed. A splinter which was working its way through her brain, her eye sockets, right down to her heart. A splinter which made it impossible for her to breathe freely, to draw breath for a normal life. A splinter of shame and indignity. Then her mother married and things began to improve; the life of a taken woman helped her sometimes to forget her degradation. But she could not forget it entirely because of the ten-year-old Birgit, whose figure was for ever dancing before her eyes.
Her stepfather was a civil engineer. They had got to know one another at meetings where her mother had acted as an interpreter for foreign – Russian – suppliers, technicians, architects, and parasites of various colours for the intended building and equipping of a megalomaniacal plan for the Prague Metro. He saw a quiet, rather timid woman, who performed her professional function competently and disappeared as soon as her duties were completed. Will-o’-the-wisp. He himself was shy – he assumed that she left for the same reasons as he. With hindsight he realised his fascination with her smile and her lips; her lips were of uncommonly fine shape and rippled tenderly when she spoke. He had no suspicion that one day – at home – he would find someone different. Someone strange to him. That the billowing lips would release, rather spew out, sewage, be transmogrified into a toilet seat. Impossible to flush, all still there. The billowing lips form the spewed-out sewage into words which are of no service to communication – words which defile, smear. Once, seventeen-year-old, powerless Birgit stood up to them, drove them away with her screaming. She remembers it well. She is sure she was seventeen. Everything was energized by the events of that spring – the office of the development scheme, the streets of Prague, every newspaper headline. The sensation of joyous excitement dissipated as she approached the flat. She mounted the steps one by one, each step heavier than the last, her legs weighed down by the bandages of dread. Nothing could be right here. The war was punishing and permanent.
“That’s not what I call speech. It’s not speech. It’s shit that’s coming out of your mouth. Do you want to make me stink? You sling this filth at me and then you forget all about it. But I’m drowning in it and I won’t be able to get out.”
“You think you’re any different? What the bloody hell are you trying to dig up? You useless fucking cow.”
That time, Birgit was silent before saying, in an unnaturally calm, even-toned voice: “You’re right. I’ll just leave it. Go and clean toilets, that’s the work for me. Mix the shit with the shit.”
But the mother needed no partner for conversation. These interminable extended monologues of hers, infecting the air around her and then just hanging there – they demanded an oppressed auditor. Their cessation would come as suddenly as their terrible outbreak. The next day, she would remember nothing of their content. So she would charge into them afresh. With renewed vigour.
The stepfather had married two women with little in common. How much did the one know of the other? The one he would meet in the light of day; in public he would bathe in the fake rays of stable co-habitation. The second awoke and assumed power as soon as the door of the flat slammed to. In the beginning he was fascinated by the remarkable contrast between the two manners of expression. The official voice was painstakingly correct and cultured; it was well-informed and subtly ironic. The other lived crudely in the gutter, was immune to self-reflection. But he believed, told himself, deceived himself that that she knew that the behaviour by which she tyrannized others was inflicting harm and devastation on herself. He ducked and dodged to convince himself he was a wise custodian of the peace whose job it was to fend off the worst, a role he would invoke on those rare occasions the mother was in a good mood. “Marie’s not so bad, you know. And she does love you, it’s just that she’s overwrought, she works too hard. Come on – we have good times, too, don’t we?”
But where the battle was at its fiercest he was wary to tread, and no doubt he would have been shocked had he known what the adolescent Birgit really thought of him. That he was a timorous coward. But perhaps he would have been more shocked still had he known what the ageing Birgit thought. That he was in fact a wise and – in his own way – brave man, who had stopped her from going under. But for him her boat would have capsized and she would have drowned.
Not that anyone would have noticed.
Two years into the marriage Johanka was born; for the stepfather, all escape routes were now blocked.
So the sisters grew up alongside each other: the one the product of an anxious, ungainly and illegible past, a past of which the mother wished to be rid, a past whose heterogeneity was wantonly characterized by name, evil and harshness; the other a mellow, cuddly, diminutive, cosy future, which the mother wished to embrace. All the mother’s best efforts – obvious or subtle – failed to prevent the daughters from nestling up to one another, becoming intertwined and joined for ever like climbing plants.

The doves flew from the rocks so steep,
broke the preying demons’ sleep,
broke the raging demons’ sleep.