Hana Andronikova: The Sound of the Sundial (part 2)

When winter fell, our first winter in that city, there was a bitter freeze. Even the river froze over. Father gave me a pair of skates and after a few days I cut across the ice better than him. I wheedled a hockey stick out of him as well, so I could join my friends. Unlike Venda and Mira Zajíc and Kubík Novotný, I had to be home by dark, which annoyed me. The others had to show up for supper as well, but afterwards they could return to the river. I envied them. Only once did I have a bit of luck. Mother wanted to go to the cinema. They were showing a Czech comedy, fittingly titled Life is a Dog. My parents dressed up, gave me some unnecessary advice about what I should do if the house caught fire, and not to open the door to anyone. Then they promised me they’d be home as soon as the film was over. At half past seven they closed the door behind them, I rushed to put on my anorak and threw my skates over my shoulder. On the threshold I remembered that the boys carried paraffin lamps with them, so I went down to the cellar and added an extremely dusty one to my sporting equipment.

When I reached the river the boys cheered. There were only three of them so now we could at least play a game. Two against two. I put the paraffin lamp down on the frozen water and Venda got his matches out. The smooth surface of the ice reflected the yellow flickering of the lamp like a mirror, the snow fell into the silence and into our numb souls. A snowflake landed on the window of the lamp and turned into a drop of water which ran along the surface and disappeared. The beams of the paraffin lamps were a kaleidoscope. They were different from the reflections of candles on the river in Varanasi. The surface of water reflects exactly what it sees, ice is different. Ice multiplies light, splits it, plays with it. It enchanted me. Furrows from our skates cut through the light. A world dispersed in the ice, chaotic and at the same time transparent. I took my glove off to touch. It was cold. As though it wanted to capture me, draw me in, it breathed out chill and pledged itself through my fingertips. I skated right, left, in a trance, but I didn’t play well. At that moment the flicker of lights fascinated me more than anything.

“Daniel?! Daniel!”

Mother’s voice shook with the cold. Or rage. “What are you doing there? Why aren’t you at home?”

Why aren’t you at the cinema, was my first thought, but I choked the question back. She wouldn’t have. Father stood on the shore next to her, watching the scene as if from a distance.

The performance had started at quarter past eight with a newsreel. Reichsprotektor Neurath’s speech had the effect of a flu virus on the audience. Just a couple of people started coughing at first, but then the infection spread with the speed of Czech burlesque, jumped from row to row, surged like a breaker and flooded the whole cinema till everyone was coughing so much that not a letter could be heard of the muscular oratory of the Reichsprotektor. The terrified constable on duty asked for quiet. When the afflicted failed to obey he turned up the lights and stopped the projection. The flu-stricken audience received a warning. Please, there has to be complete silence! Otherwise I’ll have to clear the cinema.

Silence reigned. The invalids calmed down and after a short interval the projection restarted. The first scenes of Life is a Dog appeared on screen and the coughing fits were not repeated. Ten minutes into it, three Gestapo and one SA man invaded the cinema. They stopped the projection, called up reinforcements from the ranks of the police and kicked the paying audience out of the hall.

So my parents slouched home. On arrival they found with surprise that their only child was not seated at his desk nor lying in bed. They ventured into the dark in a search of their lost son. And now they were standing on the bank and mother was wringing her hands and I stood there not knowing how to escape I wanted to sink into the ground, to disappear under the ice. Tail down, I crawled off the skating rink. A delicate situation. I was embarrased in front of my friends, and at the same time I knew I had violated the trust of my trusting mother. Not that my father wouldn’t have trusted me, but I somehow knew that he had no illusions about me. He never had any illusions about anyone or anything. It was different with mother. First of all she got angry and then she started working on me. She made it a thing of principle and honour and then she played on my feelings, that I had disappointed her and how unhappy it made her. I took these psychological debates badly, when I felt as though I was being interrogated. I shrivelled to the size of a small beetle, melted under her all-knowing gaze and turned into a pathetic traitor who blurts out everything he knows and much that he doesn’t on top. I was a rotten liar and an even worse man of honour. In the end she repeated that every time I broke the rules I would be punished. And then the verdict was pronounced.

“No more skating till the ice melts.”

For a moment there was silence. After a few seconds father spoke up for the first time that evening. He announced that never in his life had he heard anything more fiendish. He laughed. Your mother’s a cunning woman, you know.

It was the only time he’d ever intervened in mother’s disciplinary methods. He’d always refrained from comment and silently made it understood that he and mother played the same tune. They were as one, impenetrable and unrelenting. This time he didn’t hold back, and facetiously translated mother’s statement: You’re not allowed to go on the river while it’s covered with ice, Dan. Once the ice melts, then you can go and skate there again.

She protested that it wasn’t what she’d meant at all. The ice had to melt, then freeze again, and then I could skate. Was that clear?

Father stuck out his lower lip and the corners of his mouth turned down.

“In other words, till it rains and dries again.”

I was hysterical. “But that could mean I won’t get to skate at all!”

“Exactly,” she snapped and walked into the kitchen. I locked my eyes on father; I didn’t want to cry. He winked at me.

“I’ll try to persuade her tomorrow, but no promises.”

I flung my arms round his neck and poured out my thanks.

He persuaded her. The punishment was mitigated to one week. Seven days, seven nights and indescribable torture. Every day I went to look at the ice on the river and beseeched it to hold out. By the time the punishment expired great ice floes were floating in the river. It was a shame, but the ice floes weren’t completely useless. The other boys and I had a good time with them. We got hold of some big sticks and pushed the pieces of ice around; soaked through and numb with cold, we dared each other to cross the river without getting our feet wet.  We jumped from one ice floe to another across to the opposite bank. I was balancing on a piece of ice when she appeared. Mother. It was inconceivable how she always managed to catch me out in any mischief I got up to. I knew I was in for another thunderbolt. I could expect nothing less than a total ban on all outings and some sort of unpleasant task on top. And that’s the end of it, she always said on such occasions.

I jumped on an ice floe not far from shore, stuck the stick into the water and waved at mother in a bold kind of way so that the others wouldn’t think that she had me completely under her thumb. Seconds later events gathered momentum. My stick broke. The ice floe, swinging about and slippery, mother’s terrified gaze, mouth stretched wide open, the inexorable weight of my own body. A short flight or rather, a free fall. A great splash. I roared under the surface. Pins and needles, pain like knives, shards of glass. I don’t even know how I got out of the water or how she hauled me home. My lost memory seeped back with the warm water. The bath and mother’s hands, her soothing voice. Then darkness again. I could see father as though in a haze, his strong hands carried me away. He was saying something to mother, firmly and directly. In my fever I returned to the stifling streets of Calcutta.

Everything was dark and black like Savitree’s eyes. I fell in love in the middle of the burning Indian summer.

I no longer remember why, but I had got out of bed earlier than usual. In the corridor I ran into Kavita. She was standing by the window looking onto the street, hands planted on her sides as if she wanted to stem the avalanche of fat which flowed down her sides. When she noticed me she shouted: Come and look. Just come and look at that Shivora witch. Scum!

Kavita and Zam openly turned up their noses at anyone from a lower caste, and at any of the rabble of beggars which swarmed through the Calcutta streets.

Through my sleepy eyes I blinked at the sight below. A tousled little girl, mounted on a shrunken mule, ragged tresses of hair like trash, a smudged little face and wild, bitter eyes. Wrapped in a piece of worn sackcloth, she was struggling with a malnourished pile of bones. Stick in hand, brandished like a sword, she flogged with all her strength; behind the one-eyed mule bounced a two-wheeled cart loaded with brushwood, thrown on so randomly it was a wonder it didn’t fall to the ground. Kavita stretched out her hand, index finger extended. Do you see her? The little witch. The old man used to ride, but before long he was on his last legs, wasting away in that hovel of theirs, can’t even sit up in bed any longer, so he sends that she-devil. What a fate! Bad karma.

I stood on tiptoe and spoke in a strangled whisper.

“What – what’s her name?”

“Savitree.”

Savitree. Fate. Bare feet, rough, blackened skin on her heels; she jabbed it into the weak spots of a skeleton barely able to move. Savitree, I repeated to myself in silence. Savitree. The dull clatter of wooden wheels on the cobblestones. Ah, Savitree, my wretched Savitree. The sound of her name and the thudding of the stick on the moulting coat of the mule, these blows cut into my young soul like the bridle into the mouth of the exhausted animal. Her face contorted with strain and anger, childish, innocent and wonderful, wild and inhuman. I looked into her. Savitree. She might have been the same age as me, maybe a little older, but it seemed as though she had lived long already, long before me. She was older by several lives, by the suffering fate had etched into her face. And I stared at her and felt giddy. A flood of revulsion and love. I couldn’t bear even to look at her and at the same time I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wanted to run away and hide. I wanted to run out to her and take the reins and the stick and drive fate away. But I stood there, feet rooted to the tiles, hands glued to the window-sill, and couldn’t breathe. She was like Kali. Red eyes and dark skin, angular and strained features. Bloody Kali. I had seen her in an illustration, hair flying freely, unbound, teeth like fangs; she rode on a lion into battle, to stop the demon Raktabija. Decorated with the chopped-off heads, limbs and entrails of everyone who crossed her path. The enraged Kali didn’t stop until Shiva himself, her mate, fell on his knees before her. At that moment the goddess embraced her husband, shed her terrifying shape and was transformed into Gauri, the beautiful all-caring mother.

Savitree was cursed. I wanted to fall on my knees in front of her.  I wanted her to be transformed. I wanted to shriek at her, to call out, to stop her, I wanted so much to do something. She was wild and unbound. I didn’t dare to let out a sound. I would never have dared to address her. A mixture of empathy and horror, of tenderness and repulsion stuck in my mouth, bitter and everlasting. I never forgot her. I tried to drive her out of my dreams, out of my life, but every morning, heaviest of sleepers, I got up at cockcrow, crawled out of bed and looked for Savitree, the witch. I loved her. She was cursed. Condemned. I wanted to free her, but  invisible bars divided us, a glass barrier, through which I could not reach her. After two weeks of early rising I left for school.

I didn’t mind boarding school in itself, only I missed mother. I used to think about father as well, but I didn’t miss him half as badly as I missed mother. Maybe because he mostly wasn’t home anyway. After the first three months I fell ill. An attack of malaria. My parents came for me and took me back to Calcutta. Mother cried and the doctors stuffed me with quinine. A protozoan of the haemosporidia family blasted my corpuscles and liver. The very first morning after arriving in Calcutta I was back on my feet, waiting at the window, full of fever. Savitree didn’t come. She never came again. But she followed me my whole life through my fits of malaria. She kept coming back on that mangy mule harnessed to the creaky cart, her eyes bloodshot like Kali’s. I saw her again and again in my fevers. My ague took the shape of Savitree. My delusions had her name, I repeated it like a prayer, and my helpless mother had no idea who I was calling for. Savitree. She still runs in my blood.