Winter: Each time you step outdoors your toes curl – well, they try to – and you hiss into your scarf. The temperature’s like a shock and awe manoeuvre; it stupefies. Morning after morning either I or the lady at the newspaper kiosk make the announcement, “This is it, it’s the coldest day of the year, it can’t get any colder than this”, before bursting out into bitter laughter at the naivety of having had exactly the same thought the day before…
I found myself at a tram stop very late one wintry night. I’d just attended one of those “unofficial” gatherings that generate bad feeling if missed too frequently. The others were enjoying themselves, as far as I could tell, but I kept wondering why such gatherings seem to be the only way to bond, or earn trust, or whatever it is these gatherings are about. Can’t we change that? Off the clock chit-chat is too much… work. I’d rather just make blood pacts and sort things out in court if the pacts are broken.
At three in the morning I scurried to the tram station all agog at the length of time it had taken to escape. I’d arrived at the party at 8pm with my heart set on leaving an hour and a half later. But my colleagues wouldn’t hear of it: they started saying things that made me realise I should’ve steered clear of the whole thing in the first place. I was hearing stuff like: “Bohunka, there are certain laws… well, all we can say is: you can leave if you want to, but if you do, I’m afraid we might have to call the police. So it’s up to you…”(?!) This was said so sorrowfully that it took some time for the threat to sink in. I sat in silence after that, thinking hard. They’d told me that the choice between staying in their ossuary of mouth noises and leaving and risking arrest was “up to me” and I had no difficulty deciding, but I’d also made up my mind not to leave without threatening them back. All I had to do was come up with words that would fill them with the same amount of baffled dread as theirs had inspired in me. This proved much more difficult than expected. Everything about my colleagues – from their remarks to the refreshments served to the music that they’d selected – was so lawful in essence that there could be no prodding at it. Eventually I jumped up, mumbling that police or no police, I was leaving, and 45 minutes later I was caught in a state of suspended animation at the nearest tram stop. The tram was either15 minutes late or it would never arrive.
The only other person waiting alongside me was a very tall ectomorph who whispered that he was an undergraduate. I asked him why he was whispering, he said he wasn’t whispering, and we argued about that for a bit (I haven’t yet reached retirement age and my hearing is one of the few faculties I have confidence in). The tram stop showed some signs of having been made defunct years ago and other signs of being exactly the right place to make a transport connection in the early hours of the morning. We couldn’t make up our minds to change location. And then, in addition to the ice busily unpicking our sinews, a brutal blanket of wind began flapping around us. The sensation was as dire as any beating; we looked at each other, the student and I – his lips were grey, there was such a large hole in his knitted hat he might as well have gone bareheaded… at his age I stayed out as late as I possibly could to save on dormitory room heating, and assumed that he was practising similar thrift. His gaze was desperate, and grew more so once we gave up on the tram. The tram was not coming to us, but we could not go to it, there was no way to find it in that valley of busted street lights with its metres of pavement crumbling away in either direction. We continued chatting, the student and I. This was very different from the talk at the work gathering… the student and I were engaging ourselves in a bid to make some things understood. You know: these are the things that used to hurt me before I came here to the edge of oblivion, these are the things that used to make me happy, and so on. A last-ditch attempt to be known by another: aloof as we are, even Praguers aren’t immune to this desire. Our teeth were chattering so loudly that I only heard very little of that boy’s life story. I only know what I said… and only he knows what he said. We’ve since agreed that the symmetry of that is pleasing.
I told the student that this is my least favourite time of year. Nothing to do with the weather… we would’ve been all right if we’d wrapped up warmer. My not thinking to and his not being able to afford to were matters the weather had no jurisdiction over.
It’s gift-giving that’s a hassle.
Gift-giving season is like wading into a murky pond; your values slide into slime, you have to switch off certain processing centres so as to be able to accept the gesture and ignore the gift itself… my complaints about it all are strident, yet my surrender to the ritual is total. I’ve never been able to intuit what people want, and when I ask I’m lied to, I reckon, since delivery of the requested items is somehow less than rapturously received. So I just guess and guess, and dream of hitting the gifting jackpot one day: the feeling of having given something that was craved.
“But you haven’t always been subject to this angst, have you, Ms Sklenářová,” the whispering undergraduate seemed to ask.
“You’re a perceptive one… what was it you said you study again? History, eh? Funny that – I studied the same thing. To answer your question: gift-giving season used to be fine, even enjoyable, until, hmmm, someone must have done something… ah yes… it was Vincentka. This is all Vincentka’s fault.”
If speedy finger-pointing was an Olympic sport, I’d be bringing the gold medal to its rightful home in the Czech lands – I said what I wanted to say about Vincentka before the student could utter another word of encouragement.
Vincentka was… is… Vincentka was almost my sister. She told me that naming her after a cure-all had been her father’s idea. Vincentka’s birth had caused the most brutal hangover of her father’s life to vanish into thin air. Absolution, redemption and divine mercy: that’s what baby Vincentka embodied. For her father, at any rate.
For me, it was more…
Well. She and her mother, Evženie moved in with me and my father – I don’t remember what year, exactly, and we don’t have photos – but I do remember that it was the morning of Christmas Eve, and that this expansion of our family felt… unplanned. The first clue to that was my father’s look of extreme surprise; his smile had every appearance of having been freeze-dried on to his face, though he claimed that he’d been planning to tell me about the new love in his life before ultimately deciding that showing was better than telling. Maybe that actually had been on the cards, but I have a lot of doubts that he’d meant for it to happen that particular morning. I don’t think Evženie had either. When she and Vincentka unpacked, it was obvious that theirs had been a haphazard packing session. Single socks, single shoes, handfuls of magnets and batteries. Vincentka and Evženie had either been turned out on to the street by someone too evil to wait for a day less sacred, or… perhaps they were on the run…
Evženie played the guitar as if it were a tambourine and she played the tambourine as if it were a guitar. My almost-mother sang at weddings, taught girls self-defence at the local Sokol gymnasium, and choreographed routines for two mass gymnastic events in a row: (theme: “all for one and one for all”).
What drew her to Mr Anti-Personality? What drew her to a man who awaited directives with the patience and calm of one who will put his very life on the line in order to avoid relying on an idea of his own? She was like a trapeze artist who swooped down to link arms with the fellow trundling around the tent on a penny-farthing bicycle. The grace of this couple’s oscillation entranced their children, Vincentka and me. Our harmony sometimes seems to be an extension of theirs. All the more so since the two of us still spend time together, decades after the two of them parted ways.
The undergraduate sat beside me – not listening (he was narrating his own story) and yet he looked so profoundly trustworthy, he looked so very like a rock of sympathy that I went on telling him.
She introduced herself with a joke, you see. It was that, and not her spur of the moment arrival that distorted gift-giving season for me. This pigtailed possibly-not-so-innocent had fashioned herself a cloak of sparkly wrapping paper and festooned her head with tinsel, ribbons and a gift tag that she wiggled until I read aloud: Say hello to your New Little Sister!
I identify this as the moment I became aware of bone marrow as a physical substance. I mean, I didn’t know what to call it at the time. But when I learned about it later, I realised “bone marrow” was the name doctors and butchers call the jelly in my skeleton that lurches – it does, I swear it – during uncomfortable moments like receiving “a new little sister” for Christmas.
That was only one of many occasions on which I’d see Vincentka presenting herself as a gift. Not offering herself – presenting herself. As in: I am the gift, you are the recipient, you must respect the role you have been positioned in, I’m not what you asked for, not what you would have chosen for yourself, but being a gift, I’m exempt from valuation on those terms… being a gift, I’m someone you have no choice but to receive.
I can’t and won’t tell V how it grieves me to see her get the ribbons and wrapping paper out every time she wants to win over someone new. I already know what she’d say: “Why not relax a bit, Bohunka, instead of taking my silly jokes so seriously…”
And they work – her wrapping paper introductions actually work. Vincentka is embraced, validated, flirted with (when appropriate): Just what I wanted! How did you know?
I have an almost-sister, and that almost-sister intuits what people want and very deliberately withholds it. Seeing that, knowing that it’s not only conceivable but actionable, is in many ways just as good as being able to do it. This is how Vincentka wins me over every time. This is what makes her the only person I know whose “thank you’s” I find believable. She thanks me in advance for the favours I’ll grant her.
The undergraduate appeared to have concluded his own whispering. He’d set his hands on his knees, he’d bowed his head and he’d closed his eyes. I put a hand on his shoulder and shook him. And he clinked… or more accurately, something in his rucksack clinked against the back of his neck. A glass bottle.
“Young man!”
I tapped his cheek; he groaned a little bit, but that was all.
There was no time to waste. I unzipped the student’s rucksack, willing the bottle to hold something stronger than mineral water. It did. Half a litre of tuzemák! I’ll never look down on fake rum again.
Being a well brought-up person, I dosed the student with a capful of the stuff before tossing back a capful myself and then repeating the procedure another four or five times for both of us. In very short order we could speak intelligibly, our quavering lethargy left us and we had enough energy to walk home. Not really a brief expedition, the walk from Strahov to Holešovice, but we had more of Radim’s tuzemák to help us along the way, and I assured him he’d have a sofa to sleep on at the end of it all.
Radim hiccupped. “Look here, Ms. Sklenářová… I think you should know I’m no Lolito.”
I looked him up and down and laughed. Cackled, really. “Fakt?”
“Ah… I… but why would you offer me shelter all of a sudden?”
“It’s not all of a sudden. You already gave me tuzemák… saved us both, really. And now I want to give you a warm place to lay your head for the night. Before you start hiccupping at me again, that’s not meant in a dirty way.”
Radim thought it over as he took another swig. “Gave you tuzemák… saved us both. Hmmm… that’s… not untrue? And yet if someone had asked me earlier this evening if I had anything to give anybody, I would’ve said: “Listen here, Humberta, I haven’t even got what it takes to sustain myself. Someone – well, haha – this garbage water is actually a present from someone. Not a close friend, of course… anybody who knows me knows I have high standards. So my only plan for this bottle was to sell it on, if I could. I didn’t think of this stuff as something that could temporarily warm us; I completely overlooked it. It’s interesting…”
He handed me the bottle, and I raised it high above our heads, celebrating with the moon.
“So you’re not only getting an heirloom sofa to sleep on, you’re getting the idea that you’re a benefactor. You’re welcome.”
“The idea I’m getting is that there probably isn’t anyone who can’t be a benefactor,” Radim corrected me, as primly as you please.
“Same difference.”
“How are your hands?” He grabbed my left hand and stuck it into his pocket for warmth as we walked. And then he asked what it was I’d been saying to him at the tram stop. He was awfully sweet about it, said he really wanted to hear it.
“Oh – never mind,” I said. “What about you? What were you saying?”
“I can’t stand repeating myself. Nothing enrages me more than that,” said Radim. He was smiling, though.
Helen Oyeyemi will be representing Corpus Christi, Cambridge in the University Challenge Christmas special on 24 December on BBC Two