Miss Brolly

She appeared from nowhere. From the blue Washington sky or from the damp sticky air or from the very cupola of the Capitol. None of us could tell. And immediately, tiny as she was, in her Rayburn sunglasses and with an umbrella in her left hand, she commandeered our bus.
“This is my bus!” creaked her unoiled voice, as if she was a disembodied Sybil in her thousandth year wandering after the holy Babylonian speech, and then she added something, and threatened us with the index finger of her right hand, which was hanging onto the rail behind the driver’s seat, and something else which had to be her name.
“What’s she on about, what’s she on about?” Simon asked, leaning back in the seat next to me, although it seemed to me his thoughts were far away in Macedonia, as if at that precise moment – while we were passing the lofty obelisk with its two little windows that looked like the hood of some petrified Klu Klux Klansman – he was trying to clear up some questions concerning loneliness and death, about our Balkan solitude and death, or again he was preparing for a boar hunt in the forests of Lazaropole, above Radika.
“She didn’t say anything,” I refused to translate, and my gaze wandered over the satisified white, black and yellow faces of the passengers who, happy with the morning’s successful visit to the Washington Times, and more particularly with the rich lunch, were nestling back into their seats. I’ve always disliked tourists. I’ve seen them, garish and inappropriately dressed, with their cameras slung over their shoulders, gawping at the walls of our churches and monasteries, at the many deep seams of our secrets, or crowded into deliberately jolly buses, with their superior stare at our misery, with no understanding and with no comfort for us out there on the street. And now I simply couldn’t get rid of the thought that I and these learned people from all over the world were in precisely that situation, having drunk, eaten, to satiety – crowded into this bus that was to go past everything that was important in this city in three hours.
“National Gallery of Art.” I think that’s what our guide mumbled into the microphone, for her ruined voice swallowed whole syllables, as is she was eating something – or someone – so that each of us had to decide for himself what she was trying to say.
“What did she say, what did she say?” Simon asked me again, and in his rich voice one could sense that at this very moment while we were going past the green avenues, or they were going past us, cooling our lazy souls, he’d come back home from the hunt and was eating a tastily cooked hare or wild boar and was leaning back comfortably in front of the TV, gawping at some cheap American thriller.
“Yesterday we saw Picasso. His early works. She explained for those who hadn’t been there. Just enjoy yourself!”
“We’re lucky,” said Simon. “You could chase that exhibition all over Europe and not catch up with it. And here it was the first thing, and the best!” And for a moment he looked back towards the invisible building, already left behind, stood up for a moment, brushed his eyebrows, peered left and right round me and my seat as if he was trying to see the young Picasso on the roof of the gallery with a hat on his head and a brush in his hand, and beyond him his own children, the elder one in Brno, the younger in Bratislava.
“We lose everything,” said Simon, and after a moment he was back in his old position in his seat, he was hunting something in Macedonia, or that’s how it seemed, he was eating, or he was catching up easily enough from the middle of the cheap story in some movie he hadn’t managed to watch from the beginning.
“The White House!” she almost croaked, the skittish old woman in her blue linen jacket and navy skirt, and Hitler-style drove a hole in the floor of the bus as a sign to the driver to stop, just here by the sidewalk with the two benches where we had sat two days before, tired and sweating after a long, not very satisfactory walk, looking at the white building and drinking beer from cans. Then, when the door of the bus opened, she jumped out unexpectedly easily, opened her pink umbrella because the sun in front of the White House was grilling us insanely, and strictly, frowningly, like a hen *watching over and gathering her newly-hatched, inexperienced chicks, she lined us up on the sidewalk and immediately, without mercy, began to hurl oceans of information against our poor heads fuddled with food and sun. I saw how Simon was suffocating hopelessly in his unnecessary neck-tie; he wanted to roar in misery and pain, but he was a gentleman – he only flushed, and in a dignified fashion repeated, “What did she say, what did she say?” and I tried, from what little had reached me, to tell him that the president’s house hadn’t been built like this all at once, that generations of presidents had built onto it, adding to the artificial mound, that the building has no front and back, and that at the very top of the cupola itself – or the cupola of the Capitol? – there’s a statue of a woman. When she said this, Miss or Mrs Guide gestured as if she was waving wings, as if, miserble as she was, with all those spots on her face, she wanted to fly up over this disobedient, undisciplined mob, and alone, hovering peacefully over the full waters of the wide Potomac, to cool her unslaked pain. Maybe that’s just how some crazy Croat felt when, maddended by the heavy climate, he arrived in front of that great water and – probably sick with longing for his native Adriatic, or who knows what else that had stuck his mind – he gave this great river of Washington its name.
“Oh, Lord!” Simon said to me, as we filed back onto the bus and it continued along its customary route, “I feel as if she’s watching me all the time, as if it was important to her that I should listen to her. God, what have I done wrong?” he murmured, and crossed himself Orthodox fashion, and all the while his white beard was waving, partly from irritation and partly from the draught of the air-conditioning. “It’s true that our bodies deteriorate, our brains forget, our sight weakens, but the inner eye, until death and maybe after, it recognises what is beautiful,” he added, on a philosophical note; and leaning forward he unintentionally nuzzled into the unruly hair, untamed as the Nile delta and going beyond all reasonable territorial bounds, the full, long hair of the black girl sitting like a statue in the seat in front of him.
“Lincoln Memorial,” the guide shrieked aggressively, and the shriek rang on in our heads from the brakes of the bus, trying in vain to awaken the drowsy, suffocating afternoon that lay in our stomachs, on our legs, our stiffened ankles, itself lost in sleep in a long, unforgettable siesta.
“Come along!” she ordered. “Hurry up!” she shouted, as if the world and the universe might be lost while we got off, hitting our heads on the narrow sides of the front door of the bus.
“Stay here! Wait!” She hit us with syncopated syllables, gathering us up like the victims of some early mornig earthquake under the open pink umbrella, which seemed to have doused the heat from that griddle some unseen hand had hung from the maddened Washinton sky.
“This is our history!” she yelled voicelessly, pointing to the Athens-style construction springing from the middle of an immense greenness, certain that finally she would arouse us, would wake us up, would rivet our attention.
“Was she bumbling on about history?” grumbled Simon, a historian by profession, and a sour, patriotic smile played on his face. I could see his hatred when he said, “Does she know who she’s talking to about history? Back home, history grows in our gardens, it’s under every cabbage, every friut-tree, tomato plant, every house, every hovel, every stone. It’s under our vineyards, our poppy-fields. It lurks down below us like a heavy, unexcavated cistern, it’s waiting for the proper moment to rumble, to rise up and drown us – surviving blood-suckers living in comfort above its dragon heads. Does she know who she’s talking to? We fall in love on history and we die on history. And she has to land on us?” Raging red and out of his mind, offended and proud both at the same time, and the humidity was overpowering him, torturing him, and little rivers of sweat ran down his body, making patches of damp on his spotless white suit.
“We’ll see the Lincoln memorial a little later,” I explained. First there’s something else we have to see.”