The Ice Cream Man Read Free Page A

everyday lives always requires, and the truth had chosen him as its defender—a terrifying, dizzying, unexpected honor.
    The male actor walked behind a screen, but the director could still see him: in the shadows, the man opened a bottle of mineral water and gulped from it, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He leaned against the wall and ran his fingers through his hair, clasping the base of his nose as if holding back tears; while on the other side of the screen, the woman staggered atop her long legs like a giraffe in net stockings until the man lunged back and stood beside her, having finally managed to grasp the image at hand, and began explaining things to her, his cheeks burning. It’s like a magician sawing a woman in half: the audience must see the woman whole and the saw that will cleave the body in two all at once, in the same picture. If the woman is already in pieces, there’s no magic at all.
    The woman rolled her eyes for a moment, turned her back to the man (whose shoulders then slumped), and began harassing the cameraman: isn’t the man’s contract identical to the woman’s in regard to the penetration scene? Which of them had been cheated, and why? Which of them was being paid more? And what were they in fact being paid for: acting or doing things for real? The male actor then raised his hand, and he, too, demanded a body double. Eventually the pair hovered on the brink of penetration without ever crossing the threshold, and for that reason they acted very well. The body doubles propped themselves up by the billiard table for about ten minutes, and the man entered the woman from far enough away to make sure the camera didn’t miss a thing. Just to be sure, the betrayed husband stood next to both couples. Perhaps they would decide later which set of reactions to use in the final cut. It was hard to believe that the actor playing the husband might see anything new or thrilling in the body doubles, and, true enough, he seemed to be listening more than looking. From behind the screen came the sounds of something that seemed to touch him on a far more personal level: a woman, convinced of the need for artistic truth, was surrendering completely to a man who, it turned out, had not wept in vain.
    The director fell silent. We were sitting on the veranda. Insects with long legs and short wings flew back and forth on the glass cover of the oil lamp. Who had designed them? The director couldn’t bear any analysis. We were all simply to stare into the darkness. It stared back at us many times. Tausend und tausendmal. A thousand and a thousand times.

    An entirely unrelated scene. I was taken into the village and led into a cellar with a concrete floor dug deep into the ground. Junk from floor to ceiling, shelves balanced against each other, heavy boxes lying around, broken dishes, steel girders piercing the space from wall to wall. The director said that Esther was to crawl across the room through all the junk. In some places, it was so cluttered that she’d get stuck, and the floor was covered with cold, stinking puddles. I looked at the set, the props, and didn’t know what to think. Just crawl for your life, he advised. But where is Esther? When and why? Is this a memory or a nightmare? Trust me, he insisted. But he didn’t trust me, not at all! He assured me that he trusts me, and above all claimed to know how to trust me ( or in which way I can be trusted).
    The camera was in place, but it was all a ruse. He was interested only in the sounds. That evening, back at Mrs. Němcová’s house, I can hear my own voice coming from the director’s room: a combination of quiet hissing and groaning, short moans as if I’m dragging spikes across my own skin. There’s something difficult, embarrassing, angry, compelling about it. The tape is played over and over. Then, in the middle of it, I hear the director’s voice, and I know exactly where his hand is.
     
    Martin Jelínek. An ungodly fusion of