The Sweet Weekend

 

 

Lenka Procházková

 

 

(Translated by James Naughton)

 

 

 

            Sharp sunshine beat down on the bed.

 

She felt all sweaty and dirty, the air in the room was stifling grey from those solitary night-time cigarettes.

 

Next to the alarm-clock, which indicated half past nine, there lay a small rectangle of milk chocolate.  The wrapper was already printed with the price increase, but he’d bought it in the pub.  So this little bit of fun had cost him even more, she realised.  Disgustedly she brought the chocolate over, unstuck the paper, and unwrapped the foil.  The bar inside was light brown, each row had four pieces and she counted six rows.  Twenty-four pieces altogether.

 

She felt with her feet for the slippers.  When she stepped forward, everything went black in front of her.  She groped for the corner of the bookcase, regained her balance, then went shakily over to the window and opened it.

 

The old narrow roofs jutted reflectively beneath a blue sky, children shrieked in the park opposite, mothers on benches smoked wearily, and maybe they would have liked some milk chocolate.

 

She decided to have a shower.

 

But either gas water-heater did not work, or she didn’t know how to use it, something she only discovered in the bath.  She shook with cold and annoyance, then she rubbed herself in a towel which smelt of baby powder.  She found a floral dressing-gown on a hanger and put it over her naked body, even though it was made of synthetic fibre.  She didn’t want to be too charitable to herself.

 

So she went back to the chocolate in the living-room.

 

Carefully she broke it up into squares, took off her hair pin, and used the sharp end to carve a number on each piece.  The chocolate warmed to her fingers’ touch, papillary arcs of contours stuck to its smooth surface.

 

The clock on the church struck ten.

 

She picked out the piece with number one, pressed it against her tongue, and while she waited for it to dissolve, she flicked the rest of the pieces and sorted them into an endless table on the table.

 

The telephone rang.

 

She swallowed the sweet saliva, lifted the receiver, explained that the owner of the flat wouldn’t be back till tomorrow evening, wrote down a note on the pad, and hung up.

 

She sat down on the unmade bed, laying a packet of Dutch Drum tobacco and cigarette papers on her lap.  The tobacco was pleasantly moist, despite the severe shaking of her fingers she managed three quite decent rolls.  She poked the protruding wisps in with a match.  Then she struck a light and inhaled the smoke.

 

It tasted better than she’d expected.  I’m evidently going to manage okay, she thought to herself defiantly.

 

She walked across the room, and moved the table to the wall to stop the chocolate melting in the sun.

 

At eleven o’clock she ate piece number two, washing it down with rum.  The spirits seemed much stronger, and more burning than yesterday, but that was most likely due to not having eaten all night.

 

She filled up her glass and repressed a strong desire to lie down.  She reached for the pillow, it was still, but she tidied it away with the blanket to make quite sure.

 

She decided to walk about.

 

From the window to the door she counted ten medium-sized paces.  On the way back only nine.  The way back is always shorter, it struck her.

 

After a few short turns this idiotic manoeuvre ceased to amuse.  Left at a loss, she turned to the shelf with the record player.  She put a record of gypsy music on the turntable, lowered the needle, and adjusted the sound to a modest volume.  Then she sat down on the carpet, bent her legs into the awkward lotus flower position, and shut the painful crevices of her eyes.

 

Halfway through the first song she already knew this was crazy.  But she couldn’t make up her mind to turn it off.  So she just stood up and went over to the window instead.

 

Again she assured herself that it was a lovely pure, fragrant spring day out there, she saw the morning river, in the distance the theatre swathed in the scaffolding, and nice window boxes of flowers close by.

 

She switched off the record-player, these gypsy tunes are songs for joy, not a suitable backcloth for sorrow, she lit another cigarette.

 

Before midday the telephone rang again, she took another message, and bit into the third piece of chocolate.  Again she washed it down thoroughly with rum, realising that at this rate her supply of liquor wouldn’t last her till morning.

 

So at one o’clock she varied it with strong coffee, for which she had no wish or appetite.

 

At two she moved the softened chocolate into the stuffed fridge.  Sadly, she resolved that a good deal of the salami, spreads and cheese would have to be thrown out on Sunday when she left, but she could leave some of it, the woman who owned the flat would be glad they hadn’t eaten everything up.

 

At three she moved on to the second (and last) bottle of rum.

 

Two pieces of chocolate later the tobacco ran out, but she soon found a packet of cigarettes in a drawer, opened it, and while she was at it, left six crowns in an obvious place in the bookcase.

 

At half-past six she watched children’s bedtime TV with the sound turned off.  When it was over, she switched off the set, waited for the clock to strike from the tower, and ceremoniously swallowed the tenth piece of milk chocolate.

 

At nine o’clock it occurred to her that she could dilute the remaining quantity of rum.  It seemed a pretty tiresome, ant-like procedure, but she made herself up a jug of grog, sweetening it a great deal to make up for lost calories, and putting it away to cool in the fridge.

 

At a quarter to eleven, hunched over the lavatory bowl, she was violently sick.  Then she went to the bathroom, let steams of water pour over her puffy face, and after recovering somewhat, cleaned her teeth.

 

The fourteenth piece stuck clenchingly in her throat, but she washed it down in time with the cold grog.  Then she collapsed in a stupor on the bed, set the alarm with a final effort, and fell asleep.

 

One hour later she stopped the alarm’s ringing, stumbled to her feet, fumbled her way in the dark to the kitchen, felt with difficulty for the fridge, and finding it, took out the rest of the chocolate.  She took it back to bed, struck three matches before identifying the piece with the lowest number, re-set the alarm clock and fell asleep again.

 

In this way she spanned the intervals between the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth squares.

 

By the time of the nineteenth it was dawn, birds began to squawk in the nearby gardens.

 

At five o’clock in the morning she suddenly started tingling all over with cold.  She lifted the top of the quilt box, dragged out the blanket with a single tug, covered herself, bit into the twentieth piece, and finished off the over-sweetened grog.

 

She lay there and waited for the clock on the church to strike six.

 

At seven she got up, swallowed the twenty-second piece down in two goes, tidied away the quilt, and opened the window on to a sunlit Sunday.

 

The last two pieces she crushed with a knife into fragments, which, when the time came, she licked off the paper with her tongue.

 

She tore up the pale blue wrapper and the foil, and scattered the litter from the window for the pigeons.

 

 

 

“I’ve been thinking about infidelity,” she said at the time.

 

“Don’t you like me any more?” he said, taken aback.

 

“It’s not that, I meant your potential infidelity.”

 

“It won’t happen, you can rest assured,” he laughed.

 

“But if it did, I’d probably like you to tell me by some kind of mutually agreed symbol.  You could buy me something, for instance.”

 

“Some flowers?”

 

“No, that’s so banal.  What if it happened in winter?  It’d cost you far too much.”

 

“Every little bit of fun has its cost.”

 

“Buy me some chocolate instead.  Milk chocolate, okay?  So I can obliterate the shock with something sweet.”

 

 

 

At half past nine she got dressed, took most of the food she’d bought for their weekend together out of the fridge, stuffed the greasy wrappings into a polythene bag, and going out into the Sunday street, threw the stuff into the dustbin.

 

She avoided the pub, which she had fled on Friday evening with her sweet present in her handbag.

 

“She was only a whore, d’you hear?  It didn’t mean a thing!  What am I supposed to do now, hang myself?!” he bellowed, running after her and then kicking at the door of the borrowed flat, which she locked in his face, because now it really didn’t mean a thing.

 

She avoided the pub, went to the cinema one street further on, and after the morning show was over she carried on home on foot, in order to stretch her legs a little, and avoid getting back from this sun-drenched, spring-filled, last weekend so early.