Larcenists and Lambs

Prague, Czech Republic - February 28-3

Martin was the only child of older parents who both died within a short time of each other a few months after he’d moved in with Helena. Both of their bonds with the past were thus definitely broken. Still, it took another twelve years for Martin and Helena to get married, even though they’d lived together from day one, albeit in a different apartment – not the original tiny hole-in-the-wall. Martin had analyzed his and Helena’s incomes, taxes, factored in the future development of the GNP, likely changes in tax rates, national birth rates, and a few other indicators, and the resulting graph had indicated that there wasn’t the slightest reason to throw away money on something as silly as a wedding. Helena, too, couldn’t care less about marriage.

Or so he’d thought. Until that fateful morning, when she’d awoken unusually grumpy (Martin had had a vague suspicion that it might have been due to his amorous advances at 5:45 a.m., while she was still asleep). Shortly thereafter, she informed him that he had two options: either to finally marry her or to finally get out. He’d tried to convince her, graph in hand, that such a step was entirely unnecessary, but she assured him that she was serious and he married her the very next weekend.

Martin was a good investigative journalist. He was so good that people were constantly telling him so, in order to get him to write more stories. And because Martin liked having his ego stroked, he had a strong tendency toward workaholism. This was why he had to stick to a firm work schedule: not to make himself work enough, but to keep himself from working too much. But today was an exception. He’d finished his story and just didn’t feel like starting a new one. His thoughts kept coming back to that ill-fated weekend three weeks ago.

Something was wrong.

I have to think of a way to cheer Helena up, he thought for the twentieth time that day. Got it! I’ll make a fantastic dinner. Something she really loves. Along with some of those little extra things chicks like – or are supposed to like. Martin wasn’t sure what they were exactly; he vaguely remembered seeing a candlelit dinner for two with flowers and a piano on TV, but he had a feeling Helena would prefer a really loud Clash CD. And she’d send him and the flowers packing, asking if he thought she was a goat, since he was bringing her weeds. Oh well, lots of time left till evening. He’d think of something.

____________

Helena stared out the window. From three floors up she watched the other side of the street. She had a vague feeling that someone was talking to her, but she really, really didn’t want to come back to Earth.

“Frau Stone! Ich spreche with you!”

Slowly Helena turned her head. Manfred Hermann’s face was horribly contorted and he was shaking with rage. His tiny eyes and wrinkled pink nose reminded Helena of a pig’s snout. The other ten people were very busy. The guy on the left, who was sweating so much his bald head glistened like a mirror, was very diligently digging through the papers in front of him. The guy on the right felt a sudden need to write a very important text message. The half-woman from Controlling looked like she was going to slip right out of her chair and under the table. It reminded Helena of grade school, of the moment when the teacher, at the start of an oral exam, was deciding whom to call up to the blackboard and none of the students dared make eye contact with her.

Helena took a deep breath and opened her mouth. And then she stopped again. Maybe it was those rapidly blinking pig’s eyes. Suddenly she didn’t want to explain anything.

“Na?” Manfred was shaking, sweating and positively reeked of perspiration. The bald guy was frenetically leafing through his papers.

And then it all became very clear. And because Helena generally didn’t think through what came into her head, but was all the more swift to act upon it – after all, she had a husband to do the thinking, but as luck would have it, he wasn’t there at the moment – she started talking almost as fast as the thoughts came into her head.

“You know what? I just at this very moment got tired of playing the i***t here. I quit. What I’m trying to say, Manfred, is that you’re a fat pig and a moron. And that you don’t know what deodorant is and that you understand your job about as well as a goat understands parsley. It is Czechism for you don’t know what you’re talking about. A goat is one of those animals that has horns and goes ‘maaaa.’ And you’re an i***t. You do understand the word i***t, don’t you?” she added hopefully.

Yes, Manfred Hermann knew the word i***t, as well as a few of the other words that had been mentioned. And he was convinced that, in order to maintain control, he had only one option: “You’re fired as of right now!”

Helena glowed: “That’s great. I knew we’d agree on something. I always end up seeing eye to eye with everyone.” Then she slowly got up and headed for the door. The oval conference room suddenly rustled with the sound of papers that had to be read at that very moment, clicked with urgent text messages, and clacked with the nervous taps of shoe heels that were supposed to relieve the owner’s unbearable tension.

“See ya!”

Oddly, no one answered.

As Helena passed the kitchen off of the hallway, she heard the wheezing voice of Karel Václav or Václav Karel, who stood turned with his back to the hallway, phone in hand. “I’m gonna kill that f*****g slut. She did that to me. I’m gonna kill her.” She paused long enough to assure Karel, or Václav, that it would surely not be as bad as all that because from now on they wouldn’t be seeing each other so often. And you know what they say: out of sight, out of mind.

Karel or Václav swung around with sincere terror in his eyes, gave his boss who he wasn’t aware wasn’t his boss anymore a glowing smile, and said something about “people these days.” He said he’d just had a very unpleasant telephone call with his ex-girlfriend, although of course he’d told her not to call during work hours.

Helena asked the young man whether he’d ever wondered if honesty wouldn’t simplify his life, and without waiting for an answer, headed for the reception, where she deposited the keys from the company Superb on the desk. She had no one to say goodbye to, no friends at the bank. And she never kept any personal items at the office.

Out of habit, she didn’t head out of the building through the main door, but, completely illogically, through the underground garage. Too late she realized that this time she’d have to walk through the entire garage on foot, which was rather a pain. What music would she choose for this moment if she was sitting behind the wheel? Chris Rea’s The Road to Hell popped into her mind.

Helena’s last gesture on bank property as she walked past the doorman was an upturned finger.

____________

Martin wasn’t expecting the key in the lock at 2:15. His startled left hand dropped the pot it was holding onto his left toe. “Goddamn it!” he yelped and his right hand released the knife which landed softly in the toe of his right flip-flop, thus pinning it to the wooden floor roughly two millimetres from his pinkie. “Bloody hell!” he said, trying to take a step. However, the flip-flop pinned to the floor betrayed him, and, while the top half of Martin’s body started to move forward, the leg didn’t. When Martin’s forehead met the kitchen counter, he gently moaned, “Oh s**t,” freed his right foot from the offending flip-flop and rushed to the door to find out what could be bringing his wife (no one other than his wife had a key to the flat) home shortly after two o’clock. And because he’d never seen his wife at home at this time of day, on a workday, it must be a very serious reason indeed.

“What the devil are you doing here?” he met her at the door where, in Martin’s opinion very sexily, she was in the process of peeling her high heels off of her feet.

“I quit.”

“Oh s**t,” Martin said. “Are you fu-- flipping kidding me?” Helena couldn’t stand when he used vulgar words. And he didn’t, unless he was very upset. And for the last three weeks he’d been constantly upset.

“I’m not. I quit.”

Martin analyzed the news for an instant.

“OK. But when people quit, they don’t just show up at home at 2:16. Actually, they generally continue to go to work for the entire severance period. If not, it’s a violation of work discipline and they don’t get severance pay, which they are entitled to according to the Labor Code. For example, when I left the newspaper, I …”

“I don’t give a hoot about severance pay,” Helena interrupted him. “But, to be honest, it really never entered my mind. Is there anything to eat? I haven’t had lunch.”

“Well, I was just making dinner. I thought something romantic and such… but I don’t think it’s quite done yet.”

Helena stopped in mid-step and gave her husband a probing look. “You’re making dinner in the middle of the afternoon? You’re cooking? A romantic dinner? Is everything OK? Have you taken your temperature? And why do you only have one shoe on?”

“Well I thought… if… well that after that happened… when you came home… we could find something more pleasant to think about…”

She looked away quickly and headed for the bathroom. Martin followed her and leaned against the doorjamb. She was jerking her clothes off and carelessly tossing them on the floor, while filling the tub. Neither said a word. Then Martin broke the silence: “What happened?”

It took Helena a while to answer. When she spoke, her voice was very quiet and held an uncharacteristic tremor.

“I am sick to death of all the disgusting hypocrisy. I don’t want to waste my life on useless, superficial things anymore – it’s trickling through my fingers. I don’t want to just exist anymore, I want to live! I am so sad, I…” her voice broke, “I feel so bad.”

He was by her side in an instant. Suddenly, Helena was like a rag doll, in his arms. “Kitten, it was just the ninth week, the very beginning. And you even said that this was a bad time, that you didn’t know how we’d manage. So it just solved itself. It just happens. And to women over thirty it happens roughly a third of the time. We’ll have another baby.”

The force of her reaction shocked him: “I don’t want another one! Or, yes I do. But I wanted this one! I liked this one! I talked to him! I felt him! Nobody can understand what we shared! And he’s gone!” Then she broke down in his arms.

As he rubbed her back, Martin realized that this time he really, really had no idea how to assess the situation or what to say.