A Sojourn in Bohemia Read online

  Varanus took another drink and considered how best to explain her relationship with Iosef in terms that would make sense to a mortal. In the meantime, Julius did not withdraw his hand, and Varanus found no reason to object.

  “Iosef is a man of intellect rather than passion,” she explained. “I find that his mind is moved far more often than his heart.”

  “But surely…” Julius countered. “A young man in the full bloom of youth.…” His eyes twinkled. “And with so beautiful a wife.… I doubt even the Pope could restrain himself were he privileged to be your husband.”

  “At his age, I think health more than restraint would be the cause of inactivity,” Varanus replied sardonically. She and Julius shared a grin at this, which she enjoyed. “No, truly, Iosef and I share a marriage of scholarship more than anything else. We have affection for one another, but it is hardly the fiery passion of youth.” She took another drink and said, “You must have wondered why a man so young chose to marry a woman old enough to be his mother. A woman already married once before.”

  “I did not think it polite to ask,” Julius answered. “And besides, were it not for the fact that I trust your word implicitly, I would insist you were exaggerating. You look older than the Prince by a matter of years, not decades.”

  “Milk bathing,” Varanus replied without missing a beat.

  “Not blood?” Julius asked. “I understand that one Hungarian countess found it very efficacious.”

  Varanus almost laughed aloud at the suggestion and at Julius’s complete ignorance as to its deeper significance.

  “Nonsense,” Varanus said. “I can barely stand the sight of blood. I certainly wouldn’t do anything like bathe in it.”

  But as she spoke of bathing in blood, she found her mind turning quite unexpectedly to the events that had transpired in the Shashavani valley five years earlier. She had bathed in blood then: her own and her enemies’. And for a moment she found herself quite unable to breathe as flickers of memory danced before her eyes.

  The touch of Julius’s fingertips against her cheek brought Varanus back with a start. Her hands clenched into fists, and it took all of her self-control to keep from shattering the glass she held.

  “Babette?” Julius asked, his voice soft and pleasant like honey. “Are you alright? You seemed to have vanished for a moment.”

  The moment of panic gone, Varanus quickly took a deep breath and laughed.

  “Oh, you must forgive me,” she said. “I fear the brandy has gone right to my head.”

  Julius smiled at her and said, “That’s not true.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Varanus agreed. “But I assure you that I am well. Just a momentary thought.”

  “Of course.” Julius withdrew his hand, allowing his fingertips to stroke Varanus’s cheek. He placed his hand atop Varanus’s again and gave it a gentle squeeze. “But if you are troubled by something, I do hope you will tell me.”

  “I am troubled by one thing,” Varanus said. “Not your fault at all, Julius, but kindly do not refer to me as ‘Babette’.” She let a moment pass before she explained, “I much prefer ‘Varanus’, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course, Fräulein,” Julius replied. “Varanus it shall be. It is a very good name. I enjoy saying it.”

  Varanus gave Julius a pleasant smile. “And Julius.…”

  “Ja?”

  “You are still holding my hand.”

  “So I am,” Julius answered. He looked into Varanus’s eyes and slowly raised her hand to his lips. “Shall I stop?”

  “Not on my account,” Varanus said softly.

  CHAPTER NINE

  That same night Friedrich was in his laboratory at the top of his crumbling house, feeling the weight of hopelessness pressing down upon him. After months of experimentation and a decade of work, he found himself faced with yet another failure. Again the rats were dead, riddled with tumors and physically distorted by the solution he had given them. Indeed, these latest results were among the most hideous; their bodies seemed to have gone mad, devouring themselves through rapid over-growth and cellular collapse. And it was all the more frustrating that these had been his most promising subjects. These rats had shown real signs of improvement. For weeks their aging had slowed, they had become more active and revitalized, and the oldest ones had even shown signs of returning youth.

  Until the tumors and the decay set in.

  Friedrich sat hunched over his desk with his face in his hands, struggling not to weep or to scream with despair. He had been so close! He had seen the results that he had been struggling to find for the past eleven years! But again it was for nothing! It always seemed that the closer to success he came, the more horrible the ultimate fate of his subjects. He was at his wits’ end; and worse, he simply could not bring himself to try again. It was not just the repeated failure that left him exhausted, but also the sheer cruelty of it all. His test subjects were only rats, but still he had murdered them. And for what? A few days of youthful vigor? Even an animal had the right for its death to carry some meaning, and without a success, all of their deaths were meaningless. Could he really continue killing them in some vain, arrogant hope that one day something might come of it? What if these poor beasts had been men? Could his conscience have borne the weight of that? Surely not!

  Friedrich rubbed his face and sighed. He had almost forgotten how it felt to not be exhausted. Perhaps that was the trouble: he was too tired to think clearly. He was making mistakes.

  “Friedrich?”

  Friedrich turned at the sound of his name. He saw Erzsebet leaning in from the hallway, one hand raised to catch his attention. She was always very polite about respecting his privacy, unlike the others. But she was the youngest, so perhaps that was to be expected. She had not yet learned to take his generosity for granted.

  “Erzsebet, what is it?” Friedrich asked, slowly rising from his chair.

  “Oh…” Erzsebet replied, suddenly at a loss for words. “I just wondered if you meant to join us tonight. Stanislav asked about you, so I thought I’d check on you.”

  Friedrich smiled and quickly brushed off his waistcoat. Like much of the room, his clothes were covered in chemicals and soot. Accepting the opportunity for a distraction from his recent melancholy, he joined Erzsebet at the door.

  “Yes, I suppose I have been a bit reclusive tonight,” he said.

  “Tonight?” Erzsebet asked, incredulous despite her polite tone.

  “All month,” Friedrich admitted. He sighed. “The work has been very demanding.”

  Erzsebet smiled at Friedrich and took his hand. “Come,” she said. “Zoya wants to paint my portrait tonight. Why don’t you sit with me while she does?”

  Friedrich glanced back at his desk, then at the cages of the rats, whose numbers had diminished considerably since last year. There was a twinge of guilt and shame at his repeated failures. And he suddenly realized how badly he needed to get away. Why shouldn’t he spend an evening with his friends instead of laboring on with an experiment he knew was doomed to failure?

  “I think I shall,” he said.

  * * * *

  There was a party in full bloom in the parlor when Friedrich and Erzsebet arrived. The whole house was in attendance, along with several others Friedrich did not recognize—his guests invited so many people to visit he could scarcely keep track of who was who. Karel was reading delightfully bad poetry to a pair of shop girls in the corner. Stanislav was arguing with Ilya and Wilhelm in the center of the room, along with three other men and a woman Friedrich recognized as fellow revolutionaries. A few hangers-on were drunkenly reenacting Parsifal by the fireplace, their loud tones competing with the arguments of the socialists and with Karel’s poetry.

  Zoya had sought some sort of refuge near the one gas lamp that worked properly, and she was setting up a backdrop for Erzsebet’s portrait complete with ostr
ich feathers and the cat Jadwiga—or “Tinatin” as Aunt Ekaterine had taken to calling her. Zoya was clearly the only member of the party close to sobriety, and Friedrich could also tell that she was more or less infuriated by the intrusion of the drunken troubadours into the region of the fireplace, which she so often claimed as her personal workspace.

  “There you are!” Zoya exclaimed at Erzsebet. “Where have you…?” She paused. “Oh, good, you’ve brought Friedrich. Perhaps he can talk some sense into that boyfriend of yours.” She called across the room to Friedrich: “Those actors are ruining my light, Stanislav’s revolutionaries are ruining my peace, and Karel is ruining.… Well, he’s ruining everything, as usual!”

  Karel pointed a finger at Zoya and replied, “Sic transit gloria mundi, my dear Zoya!” before returning to some sentimental ode to beauty that seemed to have engrossed the shop girls.

  Friedrich gave Zoya a nod. She might pretend that all the noise was a mere inconvenience, but Friedrich understood the artistic temperament, so similar is it to the scientific. The clamor of intoxication was worse than a distraction: it was practically a wall against which the artistic mind had no hope of prevailing.

  He quickly dropped onto the sofa next to Stanislav and was struck by the full force of the drunken argument.

  “Wilhelm,” Stanislav said, waving his hand to articulate his point, “we are all revolutionaries here, aren’t we?” He put an arm around Friedrich’s shoulders and grinned. “Even Freddie here.”

  “Of course we are, of course we are,” Wilhelm replied, a little too drunk to be fully coherent. “But you are talking about nationalism, Stanislav! And nationalism is the enemy of revolution!”

  “That is nonsense,” Stanislav answered. “All I am saying is that the Czech people have a right to be free from the Austrian yoke. How is that nationalism?”

  “Because you put your country before your cause,” answered one of the other socialists—a Frenchman named Nicolas. “A bourgeois Czech is the same as a bourgeois Austrian. A worker in Bohemia is the same as a worker in France.”

  “I know many Austrians who would claim differently,” Stanislav answered. His tone was playful, but there was an edge behind it.

  “Your true comrades are the working class, not anyone else of any nation,” insisted Veronica, a visiting Englishwoman of Stanislav’s acquaintance. She had apparently joined them for a few weeks while on her way to agitate for social reform elsewhere in the British Empire. “Socialism will free the world, Stanislav, not nationalism. In nationalism there are only chains.”

  “I do not question socialism!” Stanislav insisted. He paused a moment to fill a glass of something from an almost empty bottle. He pressed the glass into Friedrich’s hand. “I am glad you joined us, Freddie. You had better drink fast!” Then he turned back to the others and said, “But consider this, my friends: I want to live in a socialist republic as much as any of you do. But I want to live in a Socialist Republic of the Czechs, not of the Austrians, or the Russians, or the English, or the French!” He pointed at each of his fellows as he named their nationalities. “For too long we have been ruled by foreigners; and when the revolution comes, I intend to see our Austrian overlords overthrown just as surely as our class enemies are overthrown. If that is nationalism, then I am a nationalist!”

  Friedrich gave Stanislav an encouraging slap on the shoulder, but he knew better than to get involved in the argument. However generous his purse, he was an aristocrat. He took a quick sip of the drink he had been given and found it to be some bitter concoction that went down hard and felt delightfully warm afterward. Friedrich quickly finished his glass and poured himself another.

  “But don’t you see, Stanislav?” Ilya protested. “When the revolution comes, there will be no need for nations. There will be no Republic of Czechy any more than there will be a Republic of Austria or a Republic of Russia. That is bourgeois thinking. There will be only a single socialist state. A republic, perhaps, but perhaps not! For democracies are so easily swayed by the wealth and deception of the bourgeoisie!”

  “But there will only be one socialist state,” Wilhelm insisted. “And we will all live there in harmony, whether German, or Russian, or French, or Czech.

  “Or English,” reminded Veronica, lest the Continentals forget the rest of the world.

  “Ja, ja, Miss Wilson: also the English,” Wilhelm agreed with intoxicated enthusiasm. “Even the Poles!”

  Friedrich cleared his throat and said, “Wilhelm, I know you mean well, but the way you say ‘even the Poles’ doesn’t really inspire confidence.”

  The Poles had every right to be part of the revolution, even if their county had been carved up a hundred years ago. Indeed, being without a state, it seemed logical that they had even more of a stake in the revolution than the Germans or the Russians!

  “And what language will we speak in this universal socialist utopia of yours?” Stanislav asked.

  “What?” Wilhelm asked in confusion.

  “What language?” Stanislav repeated. He grinned at Friedrich like the two were conspiring in some secret plot against the others. He tapped his glass against Friedrich’s and took a drink. “Come on, tell me.”

  “Well, I…” Ilya stammered.

  “We needn’t have just one,” Nicolas said.

  “Of course we must,” Stanislav insisted. “One state, one language. The bourgeoisie use our many languages to cause division and confusion. A universal state must have only one, unless every nation will have its own socialist county and therefore its own language.…”

  Stanislav grinned at Friedrich as he spoke.

  “Sneaky devil,” Friedrich said, raising his glass in a toast, which Stanislav mimicked with his own glass. They both quickly drank and refilled.

  “German!” Wilhelm announced suddenly. “Marx and Engels wrote in German. It is logical that our new state should use the same language.”

  “Here, here,” agreed one of the other revolutionaries.

  “Nonsense,” Veronica protested. “The language of our new state should be the language of the country where the revolution first begins. And that country must be—”

  “La France!” Nicolas announced proudly.

  “Russia!” Ilya answered. “For what country is so oppressed as Russia? It is there that the revolution will surely begin, so it is Russian that all true revolutionaries must speak!”

  “You see?” Stanislav asked. “Russian? English? German? French? But not Polish, or Irish, or Croatian, or Czech. This is why I must be both a nationalist and a revolutionary. Because it is so easy for you whose nations rule other nations to say that we will all be equal under your banner. But it is much harder for us who are under the thumb not only of the bourgeoisie but of your bourgeoisie. Tell me Wilhelm, if the revolution began in Warsaw would you throw off your German-ness and become part of a Polish socialism? Or you, Nicolas? If the revolution began in Indochina, would you so gladly renounce France and embrace your Asian brothers?”

  The others were silent, looking annoyed at Stanislav’s line of questioning.

  “No?” Stanislav mused. “So I ask again, comrades, what language will we speak in this post-national utopia?”

  “Latin,” said Erzsebet.

  Friedrich looked up, surprised at hearing her voice. The revolutionaries looked surprised as well. Young Erzsebet stood a few feet away, addressing them timidly but with conviction.

  “What?” Ilya demanded. “Latin?”

  Erzsebet paused for a moment and glanced back at Zoya, who gave her a reassuring wink.

  “Latin,” she repeated. “It is a dead language. It is simple enough to learn and so many intellectuals know it, but still no nation uses it. So it wouldn’t give preference to anyone.”

  “Of all the…” Wilhelm began.

  But Stanislav laughed aloud. He bounded to his feet and rushed to Erzsebet,
pulling her into his arms and kissing her.

  “My darling girl, putting us all to shame! Here we are arguing, and she is the one to give us an answer.” He sighed sadly. “If only it were so simple.”

  “Isn’t it?” Friedrich asked, rising from the sofa and joining them. He put a hand on Stanislav’s shoulder. “It seems to me she’s rather answered your question.” He threw a glance at the other revolutionaries. “And provided the answer none of you could. I think that’s cause for praise, really.”

  Stanislav coughed a little, looking frustrated at having been upstaged, both in front of Erzsebet and in front of his revolutionary friends. But he gave Friedrich a sincere smile and slapped him on the ribs.

  “How right you are, Freddie. After all, we are men, not beasts. Compromise is our gift from nature, as savagery is theirs. It does not matter who provides the answer, so long as an answer is given, yes?”

  This last question was directed toward Ilya and the others. There was a moment of hesitation before camaraderie and inebriation won out, and they all raised their glasses with a resounding “Yes!”

  “…et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” Karel intoned from across the room. He glanced up at the loud shouting. “What?”

  This brought laughter from the others, even Zoya, who still looked irritated at everyone and everything for disturbing her work.

  “Oh, never mind, Karel,” she said. “Erzsebet, come here will you? There will be plenty of time to give these fools sensible answers they won’t remember in the morning. But I have a portrait to paint, and I think the actors have finally passed out. Now come along before they sober up and start reciting again!”

  The command was half serious and half in jest, and it made Erzsebet laugh. She took a step toward Zoya and then turned back.

  “Oh, Freddie, will you sit with me for my painting?” she asked.

  But a thought had taken Friedrich. It was what Stanislav had said. Men, not beasts. What if that were all the difference?

  “Um…” he said, stammering as his thoughts and his speech collided. “Just…um.… Five minutes, Erzsebet…Zoya. I only need five minutes.…”