I
The cobblestones were damp and slippery but, all things
considered, he decided it was better to risk twisting his
ankle than to lose sight of the woman walking quickly a hundred
feet ahead of him; this woman who, according to Slaný,
was in communication with Frédéric Chopin a century and a
half after his death. A strange case… If anyone had told him,
ten years before, that ten years later – on this gloomy Monday,
an All Saints’ Day in the twilight of the century – he would no
longer be a member of the secret police but would be reduced
to playing private detective in a country that had been sliced in
half and converted to capitalism, he would have cursed the future.
Then again, if that same someone had added that he would be
spying on a former school dinner lady who transcribed dozens
of posthumous scores dictated to her by the Polish composer,
the fanciful part of his personality would have been awakened
and he would have thought that, on further consideration, the
future merited a closer look. And if, moreover, that mysterious
someone had told him that the woman in question was
the widow of a recalcitrant individual whom he had followed
years before, he would have seen in his future occupation of
detective the suggestive glow of destiny, of a torch handed on
from past to present.
Yes, this woman and her ghost made a change from those
dissidents who haunted bars into the small hours under the
previous regime, those damned dissidents who had given him so
many nagging chest infections over the years, from sitting and
waiting in unheated cars, because this StB agent had suffered
from weak lungs ever since he was a little boy.
The woman he was following, whose fame was starting to spread
far beyond the mountains of Bohemia, had been called Věra
Foltýnova since her marriage, twenty-six years earlier. She was
born Věra Kowalski one June day in 1938 – nobody remembered
the exact date – which made her fifty-seven on that particular
All Saints’ Day in 1995.
When she reappeared in his field of vision, the former StB
agent breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t the first time she’d
briefly vanished from sight that day, since leaving her apartment;
each time he lost her like that, he started sweating, despite all
his experience of shadowing people from a distance. And then
her chubby figure would materialise again, a mischievous smile
on her face. If that was the game, he was happy to play along.
She had been constantly on the move since mid-morning.
And the detective hadn’t had a chance to rest in the past week.
Now that the street had straightened out, he thought things
might get easier. He would follow her more closely to make sure
he didn’t lose her again. Where could she be headed? One thing
was sure: she wasn’t going home, because her home was in the
opposite direction. It was almost noon… When she went into
a food shop, he exhaled and celebrated this brief respite by
lighting a cigarette. Just then, he remembered that the journalist
had asked him to get in touch as soon as he had some news. He
spotted a telephone booth a dozen feet from where he stood. It
rang twice before the journalist answered.
‘Ludvík Slaný, Česká televize.’
‘It’s Pavel Černý. You asked me to keep you in the loop,
and I’ve got a moment now because she’s nipped into a shop.
She left home just before ten and went to Olšany to put flowers
on her husband’s grave. Right now, I’m close to Vyšehrad.’
He went on like this for a few more sentences, then suddenly
said: ‘Hang on, she’s coming out. She bought another pot of
chrysanthemums. And now… yes, it’s just as I thought: she’s
going up the street. I’ll call you again when I get a chance. I
don’t want to lose her…’