CAFÉ EUROPA
Literary Café
Monika Zgustova, The dead (a fragment)
I push the newspaper away. My attention is caught by three men with white hair, sitting
at the next table. Two of them are almost bald, the third has a great mane of hair. The
smart suits and ties look well on these men who must once have been handsome. In this
café the trio seems as if it were from another world, the old world, the past, perhaps the
Prague of betweeen the wars. I sip the white wine in my glass and let myself drift with
their voices: the voices of Antonin, Pavel and Dusan, as I am to learn in due course.
***
-In Holland they have found out how to maintain the consciousness of some one who
has just died.
Pavel took a sip of his cognac, stroked his bald forehead as if smoothing an unruly
fringe, and looked to left and right as if to assure himself that his words had had the
desired effect on his friends.
On Dusan they had evidently had no effect whatsoever. He was staring at the curtain —it
was of lace, and the smoke of the café had stained it grey— that the spring wind of
Prague ruffled in the open window.
-Maintain consciousness after death? Dusan said quietly, more to himself than to the
others. -Thatʼs all they need, the dead. Not to be able to forget. Thatʼs horrible!
A fit of coughing cut him short. When it had passed, Dusan shot his friends an apologetic
glance, but in that noisy café his two companions at the table seemed not to have noticed
the coughing, and probably hadnʼt even heard his words.
-Itʼs not exactly as you say, Antonin stopped reading the editorial in the newspaper and
energetically flicked the ash from his cigar. -In Holland they haven't found out how to
maintain consciousness in some one who's died. No. they have simply studied what
happens after the dead and have found that consciousness doesnʼt disappear at once. I
read it too.
Antonin rapped with his knuckles on the incontestable authority - the newspaper.
Perhaps to cover up for his slip of memory, Pavel waved his hand in the direction of the
waiter and signalled with a gesture that he wanted another cognac.
Meanwhile, Antonin filled his mouth with cigar smoke, blew it out, wiped his neck and
continued:
-I know the story of a live dead man. When President Wilson died, his wife pretended he
was still alive and made everyone believe that he was asking for advice on all the issues
he had to resolve. But it was she who was taking all the decisions.
-Iʼve heard that, too, said Pavel, swallowing the brandy the waiter had just poured him. But the story I like best is the one about Chekhov. When he died they took his coffin from
Germany to Russia. The coffin was sent in a goods train, in a wagon with the inscription
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ʻOystersʼ. When the train got to Moscow, they unloaded the coffin and sent it to the
cemetery. There were two burials that day: Chekhovʼs, and some generalʼs. The
undertakers got the two names mixed up, so the droves of readers who had come to
mourn Chekhov wept behind the coffin of a general while the few people following
Chekhovʼs coffin believed they were bidding farewell to the general. A military band
accompanied Chekhov to his grave.
-I have read that, too, but it wasnʼt exactly as you have told it, Pavel, said Antonin, folding
the newspaper. -Gorky wrote about it in his memoirs, and got very indignant.
-It was just like that, down to the last detail! What a nerve! Less cognac and more raw
carrot, thatʼs what you need for your memory, Antonin! – Pavel retorted angrily. And onion
too!
-The story doesnʼt upset me the way it did Gorky. On the contrary, I think itʼs funny,
Antonin said with a wry face. -We are nothing. If we could at least turn into dust! But not
even that: after we are dead, immediately afterwards, we are confused with the kind of
person we laughed at most when we were alive. Antonin picked up the newspaper again.
-Hey, Dusan, youʼre not saying anything. Have you come to see us just to have a snooze
in the café?
-Iʼm thinking about my dead man, Dusan said, his eyes following the curtain as it fluttered
and scattered around it tiny grains of dust that could only be seen in the shafts of sunlight.
He had the same name as me. Dusan, and his father was called Dusan, too. The
Russians have a word for this kind of double homonym: tioska.
The curtain in the window deflated lazily.
Through the smoke of his cigarette Pavel studied the picture on the wall of the café.
Antonin unfolded the newspaper. Dusan tasted his cognac and settled into his story:
-My homonym was married twice: to two of the ugliest women on Earth. The fact is that a
woman had only to ask him to marry her and my dear tioska would be marching off to the
altar. No, he didnʼt march, tioska was no soldier. He was more like... a horse. Yes, he
trotted up to the altar like a horse with blinkers on its eyes.
-What, didnʼt he like women? Did he only marry the ugly ones? - Pavel said, still studying
the picture, which showed a man sitting in a cafè, above whose table there had appeared,
like a mirage, a naked nymph, green and transparent.
-Do you know how much a tram ticket is going to cost ten years from now? Antonin
asked indignantly, reading the newspaper. The news surprised him so much that he put
on his glasses in order to see it better.
-I suppose he did like women, Dusan replied. -The only time I saw him show any interest
in an attractive woman was once in Berlin, at a symposium: he took a fancy to one of the
Polish delegates. That evening he waited for her in the hotel, in front of the lifts, but when
she appeared, she smiled vaguely at some one who was standing behind my tioska, and
zzzzzzum! She was off like an arrow. We had to go back to Prague the next morning, and
in the train I asked the tioska: "Did you notice with that Polish woman, every time she
kissed you, she bit you?" After that, the tioska wouldnʼt speak to me: for a week he didnʼt
say a single word. Phew! my tioska! The first wife left him just a few months after they
were married: my tioska had caught her with a man and she tore a strip off him for having
come home too early: "You can't do things like that," she said, and she stormed out of the
house with a face like thunder, beside herself. And the second wife, whom he married a
long time after that thing with the Polish woman, has outlived him.
-And why are you telling us all this ? Pavel said, and scratched his forehead. Antonin had
his eyes fixed on the newspaper. –Weʼre talking about life after death! Did your homonym
live on after he was dead?
-Well, in a way, yes. I went to his funeral. He died young, he was only seventy.
Another fit of coughing shook Dusanʼs body and he turned his face away from his
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friends. When he had stopped coughing, he sat very still for a moment until he had got his
breath back. He breathed deeply and studied the curtain that had filled with air and was
scattering grains of dust around it.
-Shall I close the window? Pavel asked.
-No need. The new air of spring, mmm! Dusan said. -Heʼs seventy, my tioska. I mean, he
was. At our institute there was a colleague called Koci. Before he was called Koci he had
a very long surname, German, but he changed it for a shorter Czech name. Our Koci was
not totally stupid, but he was none too brillant: pure mediocrity. Right from the start it was
obvious that in his academic work on literature —if his crudely cobbled together
hotchpotches can in any sense be described as academic work— our colleague Koci was
taking his inspiration from the texts my homonym had published. Not only stylistically; he
also stole the tioskaʼs ideas. Like everywhere else during the Communist years, our
institute often held meetings: whatever the subject of the discussion, it was approached
from the point of view of the single ideology. You know all about that, of course. One day,
at one of those meetings, friend Koci said about the tioska: "Comrades, in my opinion we
ought to demote comrade X —in other words, the tioska— to a position of less
responsibility. Among our directors we do not need people who are not only not Party
members, but do not even respect, in any active way, our political regime and our
ideology." No one protested; it was impossible, of course! We were afraid. We would
have been risking our jobs, our future as researchers and our childrenʼs future. And youʼre
right, Pavel, thatʼs no excuse. Of course it isnʼt. But the times forced us to do certain
things... Who wasnʼt guilty? The tioska. He wasnʼt. After that little intervention they kicked
him off the board and after ʻ68, after the Soviet invasion, they kicked him out of the
institute. But the tioska carried on doing research and writing his essays, and I really donʼt
know how but he managed to keep abreast of the latest tendencies in criticism in the
West. How did he earn his living? He dug ditches and laid pipes, in the mountains in
northern Bohemia, you know. And at night in his caravan he studied and wrote. He let me
read those essays that he couldnʼt publish anywhere, and he probably showed them to
other people, too, because before too long his reflections and his analyses started
appearing in the mediocre outpourings of our friend Koci, which he called academic
articles. And our director... You ask who our director was? Havenʼt you guessed? After
the ʻ68 invasion, friend Koci was appointed director of the institute, naturally! Well, to
continue: so before too long our friend Koci was inserting into his articles whole passages
from the studies written by my tioska, without acknowledging him, of course.
-With the coming of democracy, Dusan went on, friend Koci kept his place, of course, but
I have to admit that the tioska returned. Yes, the new democratic authorities made Koci
do it. And afterwards, Koci kept on reproaching the tioska, again and again, telling him
that during his absence from the institute, when he was working as a labourer, he had let
himself go to seed and his old methods were no use any more. But he still took the
tioskaʼs essays and kept them in his drawer for years. Without publishing them, of course.
So the tioska was writing for the drawer again, with the difference that before the Wall
came down he wrote for his own drawer, the contents of which somebody ransacked from
time to time, whereas under democracy he was writing exclusively for somebody elseʼs
drawer that no one ever looked in. The tioska knew this. The sense of impotence made
him ill. But why am I telling you all this? What were we talking about?
-You started to tell us about the funeral of your homonym, said Antonin, and with his
glasses on the end of his nose scanned a column in the newspaper.
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