When Eve Was Naked by Josef Skvorecký

Author:Josef Skvorecký
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466893993
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Filthy Cruel World

… the present time is not pastoral,

but founded on violence, pointed

for more massive violence: perhaps

it is not perversity but need …

—Robinson Jeffers

The whole evening was a screaming bore. It grew harder and harder to force my cheek muscles into a smile, and the expression on my face felt stiffly unnatural. By half past eleven or so, I could tell that Jesenin was concentrating desperately on stifling a yawn. As I watched his mouth contort grotesquely, I felt myself crumble under the weight of the emotional deficiency of my ridiculously lonely life, and suddenly I couldn’t stand it any more. The whole time we were in the pub, sitting under a plaque proclaiming that two nineteenth-century writers had sat there, all I was interested in was whether Jesenin, Ferdinand, and Jana were as cheesed off as I was at having to be there, nattering about stuff we’d nattered to death a thousand times over. And if they were, why in the world were we all sitting there, who was forcing us? And for that matter, why do people insist on getting together at all—when all they can come up with to talk about is the absurdity of socialist realism and the socialist regime, scuttlebutt about the relationships of other people or high-handed judgments about their character, competence, inclinations, and appearance; political reflections on where the world is going; and other such inanities.

True, it is remotely possible that they actually enjoyed it, the idiots. Me, I was furious with myself for being so spineless that I’d agreed to come with Jana, because I knew how much it meant to her. Now that we were there, over an empty bottle of wine—we couldn’t afford a second one—and now that we’d covered all the absurdities of socialist realist productions old and new, and everyone we knew, and now that even Ferdinand had quit trying to be clever and his appearance, normally deliberate, meticulous, and showy, had wilted into banal mediocrity, and now that even Jesenin’s eyes were turning glassy with boredom, I couldn’t figure out why it was so important to Jana.

I found out later, though, standing with her on the bridge, with the immaculate sparkle of the Vltava River under us like a black dissolved mirror, and above us nature’s finest display of costume jewellery, the starry autumn sky. There, tremulously, she informed me that ever since she’d met me, things between her and Marty had been unravelling, and, long story short, that she loved me. True to the old rule about never telling a girl you love her, even when it’s true, and especially when it isn’t, I answered evasively, in a convoluted sentence, and then in long run-on sentences interspersed with pauses and unfinished phrases, covering my behind by implying some great and tragic love that kept me from loving anyone else. The costume jewellery overhead seemed to call for me to kiss her, and she apparently expected it, so I did, but the intensity of her response made it less than pleasant.

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