Harlequin's Millions

  Copyright © 1981, Bohumil Hrabal Estate, Zürich, Switzerland

  English language translation © 2014 Stacey Knecht

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2014

  Originally published as Harlekýnovy Milióny by Mladá Fronta © 1981, Bohumil Hrabal Estate, Zürich, Switzerland

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hrabal, Bohumil, 1914-1997.

  [Harlekýnovy milióny. English]

  Harlequin’s millions : a novel / Bohumil Hrabal; [translated by] Stacey Knecht.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-9819557-3-5 (pbk.)

  eISBN 978-1-935744-44-3

  I. Knecht, Stacey, translator. II. Title.

  PG5039.18.R2H3713 2014

  891.8′6354 – dc23

  Cover art: Paul Klee, Die Sängerin L. als Fiordiligi, 1923–39

  The publication of Harlequin’s Millions, by Bohumil Hrabal was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Acknowledgments

  The absurdity of the game.

  A child sets up his toy figures

  only to knock them down again.

  GOMPERZ

  1

  JUST OUTSIDE THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE MY TIME stood still is a small castle, and in that castle is now a retirement home. There is only one road leading to the castle, which is at the top of a hill, the road is lined with old chestnuts, the branches of these old trees form a tunnel, so when you walk uphill it’s as if you’re striding through a long, Gothic vault, all the branches are intertwined, they don’t just support each other, they’re completely entangled, locked together by storm and wind. Somehow these trees, in their struggle for a bit of light, seem to have grown weary in the crown and are wasting away, so that the road is forever strewn with dried branches, black and charred, worn bare with constant friction. Sometimes when the wind is still, a whole branch will suddenly drop into the sand, you stand and stare as if a tile has just fallen from the roof, then you lift it up and toss it aside and feel the weight that might have injured you. Each time I set foot on that road, I’m putting my life at risk. I look up and see the five-hundred-meter-long tunnel, held up by black barriers that rise to the treetops like lances raised to honor some victory in a jousting match. If I chose to I could take the footpath that runs along the road, where the branches dip nearly to the ground, it’s lovely to walk up that path along the road from spring to autumn enjoying the leaves and flowers, in the autumn you see the burrs splitting open and firing their brown chestnuts, but I prefer to walk beneath the colonnade of black trunks, at the end of which is the entrance to the castle, like a great black curtain, the iron has been worked by a goldsmith’s hammers and tongs, while the gate itself is forged in the shape of the two black wings of a fallen angel, a gate, I should add, that opens only on visiting days. Even on a sunny day, when you climb up the hill to the gate, you’re walking in semi-darkness, all around you on either side of that double road sunlight and colors come trickling through the branches, as you walk slowly up through that shadowy crypt from which now and again, but always suddenly and unexpectedly, a black branch falls. And because on a sunny afternoon the white light in the castle courtyard is intensified by the gravel scattered there and on the road, against this bright background the black outline of Count Špork’s initials and arms stands out even more clearly, inscribed in the wings of the gate the way Francin used to write down the first and last names of the publicans in his brewery book, always embellishing the names with a calligraphic initial in red and blue ink, like the initials in a missal. Next to the gate, under the last gigantic chestnut tree, is a little house where the gatekeeper sits. Even on a sunny day the lights are on inside, because the shadows on the road are so deep, the treetops so dense, covered from spring to fall with an awning of leaves that keeps out the sun. We each take turns acting as gatekeeper, many of the pensioners here consider it an honor to perform this service at what was once the Count’s gate. Everyone who spends ten hours on duty here, keeping watch over that beautiful gate, feels like a changed person, it’s such a great honor to inspect each pensioner who enters the gate. There are some pensioners who live in the castle side by side, have their beds side by side and sit side by side at the table, but here at the gate they act as if they don’t know each other at all, as if they’re seeing each other for the very first time. They question each other about the purpose of their visit, even if they’re friends, during those ten hours the gatekeepers even seem to have forgotten the faces of their fellow pensioners and demand accordingly of everyone who passes through the gate that he not only state his name but also show the papers that prove he really does live in the castle. It’s lovely to walk up the hill along that lane, to be just an ordinary pensioner, an ordinary mortal, exhausted and nearly at the end of her strength and yet still climbing up the hill through that deep darkness, looking up at the elaborate black ironwork of the imposing gate, the lances and curves and points, the circles and great billowing waves all forged under a goldsmith’s hands, it’s lovely to walk through that gate and stroll through the castle park down the sand-strewn path past the stunted yews in the courtyard, meeting other pensioners no better off than you are, old men and women just wandering around, hobbling along and stealing glances at one another to see whether there might be someone worse off than they are, until they hear the bell for morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea, and finally, for dinner. I still always think it’s lovely to stop in front of the castle and look up at the façade, which, when lit by the sun, is completely beige and radiates such light and warmth that it dazzles you. After a while, when you’ve gotten used to the beige glow of the walls, you focus your eyes on the huge wrought-iron clock, which fills the entire space between the second and third floors. The hands were made by a goldsmith and are as big as a grown man. When I first saw that clock it gave me a terrible fright, because even though it was just before noon, those hands were pointing to twenty-five past seven. At twenty-five past seven the clock had stopped, and no one had been able or even had a reason to repair it. The sad thing was that this clock, which always showed the exact same time up there on the castle wall, was like a memento mori, because everyone here and in this area knows that most old people die in the evening, at just about half past seven. And when I first stood here and saw how the poplars and oaks and dark spruce trees towered over the castle, how the park enclosed the castle on the south side in the shape of a horseshoe, when I turned my gaze back to the castle I saw that there were large, bare patches on the front wall where the plaster had crumbled. Here and there the original masonry showed through, as if the wall had been decorated with giant envelopes, engraved in the hardening plaster. And because the castle was on a hill outside the little town where time stood still, I coul
d hear the wind, a stiff breeze that whistled around the castle and surrounded it with the rustling of leaves, the century-old aspens trembled even when there was no wind, millions of leaves fluttering endlessly and trying to free themselves from millions of stems. I noticed at once, on that very first day, that you could walk from the great halls onto the balconies, which, like the gate, had been forged by goldsmiths, the balconies were all shaped like great transparent bathtubs, they looked like transparent sleighs, fit for a nobleman, or transparent coaches, or the flower beds around lavish tombstones. I noticed that the pensioners were sitting out there in the sun, silent and motionless, their heads resting on the railings of those balconies decorated with flower boxes, from which hung withered petunias and snapdragons and zinnias blackened by the sun like tobacco leaves. And below the clock I saw limp human arms hanging down, weary arms, some crossed for no particular reason, palms dangling like droopy flowers, wrists in dazzlingly white shirtsleeves. Through the ironwork I could see a chair and on that chair were a pair of outstretched legs, the rest of the body was blocked by a green flower box. And at that moment a gutter came loose from the side wing of the castle and swung down like a barrier at a crossing, as it fell it spun quickly around a fixed point like the big hand of an astronomical clock, but the rusty gutter stopped and remained there, it swayed back and forth, threateningly, spilling rust and old leaves and a bird’s nest. At that moment it struck me that the façade of the castle resembled the faces of each and every elderly pensioner, with that crumbling plaster and the hands of the clock stuck at twenty-five past seven, those hands that looked so much like arms resting on knees, I noticed that in places the plaster was so ravaged by time that the original masonry was exposed, great blocks of marl and sandstone cemented together with coarse mortar. Exactly like the faces of the older pensioners! Because in that castle there are also younger pensioners without a single wrinkle. But even the younger ones always seem to be looking elsewhere, they stand around as if they’re trying with all their might to remember something, but can’t, not for the life of them. And they’re probably not trying to remember anything at all, they look amazed, as if at any moment they’ll be able to remember something pleasant, something that will cure them, something that will do them good. Their faces give the impression of nobility and that they were once highly educated, but actually they’re still learning, only now is their education nearing completion, they’re perpetually on the verge of a realization that everyone else in the world is after too. But perhaps they only appear that way to me. For these people it’s a great achievement if they can even find their way back to the castle, their rooms, their beds. Then the glazed front door flew open, the reflection of the glass panes made a semicircle on the ground below and dazzled me, I lifted my head and on the second floor a bearded man stepped out onto the balcony, he leaned his hands on the railing and turned his profile to the right and then to the left, the old man looked like Count Špork himself. His raised chin shone with a trimmed white beard as he pretended to be observing the weather, the landscape. He remained in this exalted pose, unmoving, pensive, as if he were relishing this moment, in which he wanted to make clear that he had ended up in the retirement home by mistake. Then, just beside the row of columns that led to the castle vestibule, a face began to move, and I saw, to my dismay, that the face belonged to an old woman in a wheelchair, her hands were gripped firmly around the armrests, she tensed her arms and shoulders so tightly that her back formed a straight line against the back of the chair, so that I kept imagining she was a sphinx. And opposite her, next to another column, sat an almost identical woman, equally solemn, equally sphinxlike. Her wheelchair also had its back to the column, and there they sat, two feeble old ladies in their little black wheelchairs in the sun, both of them had their skirts rolled up so high you could see a white enamel chamber pot gleaming under the sliding seats of their chairs. And as a breeze blew from the north, softly singing and rustling the leaves on the trees, I heard music in the distance, string players, the kind of music they always played as an accompaniment to Chaplin’s Limelight, or that film about the life of Toulouse-Lautrec, music that brought a wistful smile to your lips, a composition for strings that moved me as deeply as the elaborate castle gate. But although I myself was touched by the sound of those strings, I saw that the pensioners were just wandering around and paying no attention to the music, they sat on benches drawing silly pictures in the sand with their canes, or sucking quietly on lozenges and peppermints. On the right side of the courtyard was a separate building, also beige colored, and all along the front wall of that building was a large open corridor, a gallery, not nearly as pompous as the balconies on the front of the main building, and along this gallery were ten brown doors leading to various rooms, mounted on each of the ten doors was a small brown box. A few pensioners, all men, walked out onto the gallery, leaned over the railing and looked down, they looked at me, stiffly, rigidly, but I could tell they didn’t see me, their gaze was elsewhere, they were looking back, to the old times, when they were young, or perhaps they were still grieving bitterly and angrily about some incident they could do nothing more about, something beyond their control, even though the incident had only now reached maturity, while the reasons for whatever had happened were long since past … And I saw that same music drifting down from the long gallery, swirling like smoke around all those figures, I could even see the music pouring from the little brown boxes on the doors, which were open here and there. I shook myself out of my reverie and walked back toward the vestibule, where the two old ladies in their wheelchairs with their fingers clutching the leather armrests still looked like sphinxes, only now they were surrounded by the sounds of a string orchestra, and I saw that the music was coming from the rediffusion boxes, that this music was winding around the two old women like a wild rosebush around a statue, I looked up and saw that between every door on the balcony and the gallery, mounted on a bracket, was the same little box, like a cage for a blind bird, and I saw that from each little cage music was pouring, music for strings, the poignant sounds of the strings were intertwined, they played in unison, and then suddenly one of the players, with great urgency, would play a solo, the theme … yes! It was “Harlequin’s Millions,” those same millions that accompanied silent movies in the old days, an amorous scene, a declaration of love, kisses that made the viewers, who were moved to tears by the string players, reach for their handkerchiefs … Now I’m standing here in the courtyard of the retirement home, once the castle of Count Špork, Francin has rented a room here for the two of us, Francin’s older brother Uncle Pepin has been at the home for three months, in one of the wards of this poorhouse, as they called it in the old days. In the ward for bedridden patients. Whenever I visited Uncle here, then too I’d stroll through the vestibule, I’d walk up the slowly ascending corridor and peek into the side corridors, where old women came to life and pushed aside their curtains to peer into the courtyard … Then too I peeked into the corridor of the ward where the old women lay and where the sharp smell of babies’ diapers hung in the air, then too I peeked into the dining hall, years ago Count Špork held banquets here for hundreds of noble guests, then too I ended my walk in the ward for bedridden patients, where Uncle Pepin lay in his bed in the shadows and where nine other bedridden pensioners looked up at me, and here too I could hear “Harlequin’s Millions,” but only after I had sat down and looked at Uncle Pepin, who lay staring at the ceiling with unblinking eyes, not speaking, not agreeing, not disagreeing, just lying there, only then did I hear “Harlequin’s Millions” in the distance and I had the strong feeling that I was hallucinating, as a kind of defense against everything I had seen here. So strong was my revulsion, so heavy my suffering after all I had seen on my first visit to Uncle Pepin in this former castle! Yet something had happened to me, something that completely shocked me, I decided we should sell everything and Francin agreed, and now here I am standing in the courtyard, Francin has rented a room for us, it costs a whole mon
th’s pension and for a small additional fee we can live here like members of Count Špork’s own family, in one small room, that’s true, but for that extra fee we can have our breakfast, lunch and dinner in the same room where the Count and his family are said to have eaten their afternoon and evening meals, in the dining hall, every day I’ll stroll past the sandstone statues in the park and someday I’ll be able to say that I know what each of those statues represents, I’ll be able to look up at the ceilings, painted with scenes from Greek history, I’ll be able to touch the white Greek vases standing in the niches along the stairs, while Francin checks his watch, again and again, afraid he might miss the world news on all the radio stations where Czech is spoken. I had been in the castle at least ten times or more, but then I was a guest, scared of everything and easily panicked. Today I stood here as a person who is going to be living here for a long time, until something happens to me, suddenly someone will come to me, whisper sweet nothings and make me all kinds of promises and then set me free, in a landscape that knows no limits, no bounds. I’d been in the castle ten times or more, but today the things I noticed, the sounds I heard and the interactions I saw, were sharper, clearer, and in that sense different from all the times before.

  2

  I’VE BEEN AT THE RETIREMENT HOME FOR A WEEK now and it never ceases to amaze me. Francin, to all intents and purposes, has cut himself off from his surroundings, he’s bought himself an ushanka, one of those Russian caps for winter, and pulled the flaps down over his ears and fastened them under his chin with a little hook and walks around the castle like that, all wrapped up, nothing on his mind but the news reports from every continent, news from the rest of the world. Including the commentary. I don’t really mind, in the forty years we’ve been together we’ve already said everything we have to say to each other, we have no more hopes, no expectations. We’re starting to see things a bit like Uncle Pepin, who will most likely be the first of us to go, but where? Our only wish was that we never be a burden to each other, until the day we died, we’d always help each other out. Every day I’ve discovered something new here, something that keeps me going. In front of the castle, a little farther downhill, is an old Augustinian monastery, which once had a large library. Now the library is a boiler room, the refectory, a laundry room, and the monks’ cubicles, repair shops. But just as in the castle, the ceilings are painted with biblical scenes, the plaster is peeling in the laundry room, but you can still discern the hand of a fresco painter. The central heating in the monastery runs on coke and coal, the stoker dumps the cinders in a pile out front. Every so often the cinders and ashes are carted off in a truck. The truck driver lives in the gardener’s house and is always happy to chat, sometimes a few of the pensioners will drop by to visit him, play with his children, have a beer with him in the evening. Twice a week this same driver collects the food scraps, which are stored in a special room. You can smell them from a mile away because they’re always a day late collecting them from that special room, so by the time the twenty buckets of swill are loaded onto the truck, they’re so full the scraps spill out onto the floor and ferment. But that’s not what I wanted to say. One of the pensioners, Mr. Berka, is at the truck driver’s house every single night playing with his children, drinking beer, they may even be distantly related, but whenever Mr. Berka is on duty at the gate and this driver pulls up in his truck, Mr. Berka comes running out and asks to see his permit to leave the premises, but that’s not enough for Mr. Berka. He asks the driver to show him his other papers, too. And the good-natured driver hands them over with a smile, but a stern-faced Mr. Berka checks to see whether the picture of the driver on the identity card corresponds to the driver himself, he compares them several times. Then he hands him back his papers but retains his meticulousness and sense of duty, he lifts the tarp slightly and scans the loading platform, square inch by square inch, if it’s cloudy or dark he searches the truck with a flashlight, but even that isn’t enough and he crawls right through the swill and shines his flashlight into the empty buckets, he lifts the damp tarp, and finally, his hands wet with old gravy and sour soup, he lets himself glide down along the side door and, just to be sure, and to ease his conscience, he lies down in front of the radiator and props himself up on his elbows, then lowers himself down until his cheek is pressed against the road so he can check under the truck to see if anything is being smuggled into the retirement home, or smuggled out. Then Mr. Berka greets the driver, curtly, coolly, but the very next day, early in the evening, he’s sitting with the driver on the stoop of the gardener’s house, playing with his children, running down the hill to get a jug of beer at the nearest pub … As I said, I’ve been at the retirement home for a week now and it’s one surprise after another. “Harlequin’s Millions” winds its way around the castle, the rediffusion boxes are hung not only in the corridors but also in the trees in the park, they’re covered with sheets of plastic to protect them from the rain, just like in the old times when beggars covered their barrel organs with oilcloth so they could keep on playing their harmonic waltzes. The string orchestra curls gently around the old tree trunks and “Harlequin’s Millions” climbs like old ivy into the crowns and trickles down along the leaves, the corridors of the home are filled with a pleasant phosphorescent gas, with the scent of cheap perfume, so no one is really aware of the music, only when there’s a power failure and “Harlequin’s Millions” is suddenly cut off, stops short, the way everything stops as if by magic in the tale of Sleeping Beauty, all the pensioners glance up, they look up at the speakers and the sudden loss of the music feels to them like when the lights go out and everyone longs to hear it again, because without it the air in the castle and along the paths in the park is unbreathable. When this happens in the evening, or at dusk, they all look up at the suddenly darkened lightbulbs and fluorescent lamps and keep looking until the lights go back on and the music begins to play where it left off. At that moment all the pensioners sitting in the corridors, on the toilets, lying in bed, give a deep sigh and start listening to the music again the way they ought to be listening to it, with interest, life resumes and all those eyes, which have been gazing up with such eager, almost indignant anticipation, those eyes are lowered again, they look down at the floor, at the sand, because nearly all the pensioners have bowed heads, bowed with old age and illness, and continue studying the texture of the carpet, linoleum and sand, where they always tread carefully, because here in the retirement home you have to pay close attention to how you walk, because every fall can mean the loss of your mobility, one injury and the game is over, because here at the home anyone who can walk and get to the bathroom on his own is considered healthy. One day I walked around the castle until I reached the spot where they’ve put up a wire fence along the trees. The footpath ends there in grass. But I noticed that the wire under the old, low-hanging branches had been trampled to the ground, all you had to do was grab one of the branches and you could step right over the trampled wire and continue down a forbidden path nearly overgrown with grass, a footpath that led, barely visible, to the castle terrace. I was all excited, I shivered, imagined that a nurse might see me here or the caretaker or the head doctor himself, but my desire to see the forbidden park was so great that I walked along the stretch of fence that was still standing all the way to the terrace, from which you could see the little town where time stood still, but in front of which stone figures of naked young women and men stood out against the sky, statues of young men without clothing, of old men covering their loins with billowing robes, each statue stood on a high plinth, so that I had to look up to see their sandstone bodies, each statue was holding something, some object, or fruit … And even though I had lived in the little town for forty years, I’d never found the time to come see this row of statues, or the footpaths that ended in a burst of stars, paths lined with pruned beech trees and every hundred yards a statue, one for each month of the year, against a backdrop of branches and twigs, the leaves of red beeches touching their beautiful
human bodies. And when I stopped in front of the statue of a naked young woman, I didn’t even have to read the old, moss-covered inscription and the poem chiseled into the plinth to know that this statue glorified the month of May. This statue of a young beauty with her small breasts and provocative hips had an even greater effect on me than a mirror. I understood then and there why the retirement home was separated from the park by a wire fence, I understood what it was to be young, to be a young woman, I reached out my hand and touched the calves and thighs and hips and felt the grainy texture of that female flesh, with my fingers I felt the beauty of that female skin and suddenly I understood why some of the pensioners had dared to trample the fence to the ground and compare themselves, at their own risk, to those statues. So I stood there, I studied all the faces and bodies, and from the corner of my eye I discovered that what connected these statues had some deeper meaning, that in fact all the sculpted objects they were holding were there to emphasize that meaning, these statues represented the entire human race, in all its phases, and together they formed what we call nature: spring, summer, fall, winter … I was standing there in front of the statue of May when suddenly I knew that I had needed to arrive at this point, just as I am, so that while there was still time I could penetrate the secret of each statue, perhaps even the secrets of all these statues, which would probably tell me nothing more than the story of life, a cycle I’d nearly reached the end of. I could see that the sandstone statues formed a kind of novel, the tale of someone who had been waiting here for me, to explain to me, in stone handwriting, what Count Špork and his guests must surely have known as they strolled past the statues reading the story of man. There was no one else walking in the park, down below was the little town, encircled by the river and the red medieval walls, rising up across the river was the beige-colored brewery, with its smokestack, its tin roof gleaming, where I had lived for more than a quarter of a century, where I’d been happy, because in those days I was as young and beautiful as the statue of that young woman, below which the inscription May was just barely visible beneath the moss. I made a solemn promise to myself to walk down that forbidden footpath every day, to the statues, who had so much to tell me, because I had never, ever expected that life would go by so quickly. Before I’d even taken a good look around me, I’d plucked out my first gray hair. But in those days I’d always been under the impression that I still had plenty of time, that I had time for everything, that old age was something that didn’t concern me. So I dyed my hair, smoothed my wrinkles with creams and massages, while Francin stayed the same, it even seemed to me that he was exactly the same as when he was thirty, but he had grown older too, because all of a sudden he was retired, all of a sudden we had moved to the little villa on the river that I’d designed myself … and all of a sudden it was my birthday and I turned sixty and all of a sudden sixty-five and all of a sudden I got paradentosis and Mr. Šlosar pulled out all my teeth and promised he would make me a set of dentures more beautiful than my own teeth, that’s what Mr. Šlosar told me, and I had believed his eyes and his voice that assured me that false teeth gleamed brighter than the teeth he had pulled, why, in America it was even the custom that when you reach a certain age, you have all your healthy teeth extracted and instead of those you wore teeth you could rinse under running water, because teeth with fillings just kept decaying and caused rheumatic diseases and heart problems. This had happened to me in the fall, Mr. Šlosar was in excellent spirits, I’d heard that the fall was paradise for dental technicians, because it’s hunting season, and the huntsmen in our little town celebrate the end of every hunt by drinking themselves silly, and early the next morning when one of them throws up in the ditch or the toilet bowl, he accidentally spits out his expensive dentures, so from September to New Year’s Mr. Šlosar has his hands full with all those teeth, he even has to work nights repairing and making new false teeth for his hunting clientele, while they have to pay three times more than what they’d paid for their dentures the first time around. And when my gums were healed, I had him make a plaster cast and a month later I went back to him, full of hope, I smiled, because I knew that by the end of the day I’d be wearing those porcelain teeth, that work of art, as Mr. Šlosar called them, those lilies of the valley that he would plant in my rosy gums. And Mr. Šlosar disappeared into his workshop and when he returned he was carrying something wrapped in cotton on a tin tray, he asked me to sit down in the chair, close my eyes and open my mouth, and he slid something cold and hard over my lower gums, my chin dropped under the weight of it, then he slid in something even more disgusting, some object that made me want to vomit, I started gagging, but the voice of Mr. Šlosar urged me to suck the silver plate to the roof of my mouth and wait until the dentures had warmed up a bit. And so I lay there, the woman who moments before had clapped her hands when she saw Mr. Šlosar walk in carrying his artificial remedy on a silver tray, now I had the feeling he had clamped my whole head in a vice, I felt myself turning deathly pale, my whole body and soul struggled against the humiliation and disgrace that had been shoved into my mouth, a hostile object in a cold, harsh cave, with cones of dripping stone above and below. I paid, Mr. Šlosar assured me it was only a matter of time before I was used to the new teeth, under no circumstances was I to remove that artifact of his, which he had labored over with such care, I even had to sleep with it in, something aging saleswomen and office girls did best, since they couldn’t possibly go to work without any teeth. He walked me all the way to the square, actually he had to hold me up, because when I left his dental studio it was like leading a widow away from a grave, he held me up and whispered in my ear that I shouldn’t run my curious tongue along the teeth, a curious and restless tongue could give you cavities, even cancer, one of his clients had contracted such a serious illness with her curious tongue that she’d had to be admitted to the psychiatric unit, the psychoanalyst had given her orders never, never, under any circumstances, to yield to her curious tongue, otherwise the cavities could turn into cancer, Mr. Šlosar said in parting that there were plenty of men, boorish types, who had a set of dentures made but only wore them once and then threw them in a drawer and trained their toothless gums on crusts of bread until they were beautifully callused, which was a perfect substitute for teeth, but still! I had always been an attractive woman, he told me, I’d never make a fool out of him and I’d wear my teeth at all costs. He said this in a confidential tone and then slipped his own dentures out of his mouth and held them up before my eyes and said, I wanted to throw these away, too, but that was out of the question! How could I ever recommend false teeth to a patient if I wasn’t wearing them myself? That would be like Kolář the pharmacist having no hair and constantly trying to fob off his hair tonic on everyone else, his tried and tested hair tonic. The best thing for men with a new set of dentures, their first, was to take money out of the savings bank, or borrow it, or cajole their wives into giving them a thousand crowns so they could take a week off work and then sit in the pub surrounded by other people and drink beer or restorative beverages from morning till night, only then could they forget about those false teeth, that was certain, said Mr. Šlosar, the teeth must stay in your mouth throughout the course of treatment … And I walked across the square with my head held high, I had to walk that way, because if I leaned forward even slightly, my head would drop and my teeth would fall out. I felt this, and burst into tears, because I realized I was doomed to be an old woman, from this moment on I’d be an old hag, a toothless old crone, because I couldn’t bear having a thing like this in my mouth, even if I were to take all my savings out of the bank and spend six months drinking champagne and beer, even then, and that’s how well I knew myself, I wouldn’t be able to endure those teeth, my whole body, my soul, everything was telling me those dentures were unwelcome, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d been tricked, that they had stuck a blacksmith’s anvil in my mouth, a big glass ashtray full of cigarette butts and burnt matches, two sharp river shells, on which I’d alread
y cut my tongue, which was completely terrified and wriggling all around that strange thing in my mouth, I couldn’t keep that tongue still, it wasn’t curious, it was deranged, that finicky tongue of mine had gone crazy, it bled and could very easily have destroyed itself, just as hunters claim that if a weasel gets caught in a trap, it’ll be dead before sunset, even if it hasn’t been wounded. And when I arrived home I got the old tool kit out of the Škoda 430, grabbed the metal lever for prying tires off the rim of the wheel, spit the teeth out onto the table, looked aghast at those choppers, which were laughing at me, the gums had fallen open in a wide grin, and with a few blows of the tire iron I smashed those very expensive teeth, the porcelain shattered like a beer bottle, I hammered away at those teeth as if I were the one who’d gone crazy and I kept on hammering until the pink gums had turned to dust and teeth were flying around the kitchen. I swept together the remains and threw them in the stove … At Easter, when I was doing my spring cleaning and moved the table with the washbasin away from the wall, I’d found a few more teeth still lying there … Now I stood in front of the sandstone statue of a naked young woman, every half hour military planes took off from somewhere behind the hill, they rose straight up above the castle with a great roaring and whistling, sometimes a whole squadron, one plane after another, the sound of the engines and wings was like the groaning and wailing at the scene of a natural disaster. I stood and gazed at the calm, radiant face of that woman, wrapped in a mist of love and longing and hope and the assumption of love, her profile was silhouetted against the sky, the sun glided behind an enormous oak, in the blue sky above the statue’s ringleted head a stripe gleamed, somewhere high in the sky, ten kilometers up, an airplane drew its shining trail, it left behind a neon stripe, like the hand of a glazier drawing a diamond across glass, leaving a fragile stripe that, with a light tap, was enough to break the glass in two, the ascending plane disappeared briefly behind the sandstone head, then reemerged near the eye of the stone beauty, it went through her head like a pin through a Jugendstil hat … I walked back, I looked down at my rhythmically moving shoes, shuffling along the sandy path, I walked with my head bent, past the statues of the next few months, but I didn’t look up, I knew that they would wait for me here and that I still had many days ahead, days in which I would find the strength to look at everything the Baroque sculptors had carved out of sandstone for Count Špork, and for me … When I stepped over the trampled wire fence, like a thief in the night, on my way back to the retirement home, I heard a deafening explosion in the skies above the little town. As always, I couldn’t help thinking that the brewery had collapsed, that Saint Giles Cathedral had come tumbling down, but then I thought that perhaps it was the castle, I waited a moment, perhaps two jet planes had collided above the retirement home, after a while pieces of metal would fall one by one out of the sky and bury the castle and the park with the sandstone statues … But all was still, it had been nothing more than the air imploding behind the plane, which had flown at great speed through the sound barrier … And I quickly took three steps back and became aware of a higher warning system, the gutter, which had been dangling from the side of the castle, was now torn off and landed horizontally on the ground, where it bounced once or twice and then grew quiet and peaceful, stretched out on the ground like a snake that had died long ago.