he might be both. A crazy inventor pulling his own leg. But I found his exposition so entertaining that I continued to listen to his vision of the world of the future, when oranges and rice would be cultivated beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles, while in our country there would be two harvests, and breadfruit trees and date palms would thrive.
I heard him out to the end but I told him I didn’t have the time to go along with him then to see how his machine for the spraying of the mixture worked. He shrugged and left, and as a farewell gift handed me a few colour photographs which showed an array of strangely shaped objects arranged on the grass. I have no technical memory, so I’m unable after all these years to recall their shapes, and the photographs were lost when I was forced to leave the paper.
A few days later he turned up again. Had I noticed that there’d been a fresh fall of snow? He’d borrowed his neighbour’s car solely for the purpose of convincingly demonstrating his equipment to me. Once I’d seen it I’d realise its revolutionary significance and would maybe write an article about it after all.
The elderly Tatra car took us all the way to Kralupy. There, on the outskirts, immediately behind the railway crossing, we stopped. It was a small house, and evidently a bachelor establishment. On the wall facing the front door hung a framed photograph of a white-haired man: unless I was mistaken it was a picture of Edison, and below it in large letters the inventor’s statement: ‘My work is the work of peace!’ A desk below the window was covered with cartridge paper with drawings on it and with some rolled-up plans; on the shelves stood several skilfully-made model ships. I hurriedly drank a cup of coffee and then we went out by the back door into his yard.
I noticed that the snow which had fallen that morning had none of the usual deathly whiteness about it, but was dirty grey. My guide didn’t even look about him but hurried to a shed behind the house, opened its wide double door, and wheeled out his machinery. Unlike the house itself this was an object of impressive appearance. It reminded me of an ancient fire engine: all brass and gleaming metal parts. It might equally well have been a perfect artefact for some exhibition of op art. The long hose was fitted with a nozzle.
He wheeled the assembly into the garden, uncoiled the hose and began to pump some handles. A smelly mist issued from the nozzle. I watched the mist settling on the snow, but that dirty snow, instead of getting blacker, seemed to be getting lighter. No doubt there was some chemical reaction between the artificial mist and that chemical mess that had dropped from the sky. Thus we found ourselves in the middle of a near-white island while all around lay black clods of snow. I didn’t say anything, and he too was silent. In his eyes I saw neither disappointment nor the joy of a perfectly played practical joke. After a while he stopped pumping, coiled up the hose, and wheeled his shining equipment back into the shed. I seized oh the moment when he was inside and quickly walked along the railway line to the station. As I walked through the black snow I thought to myself that even if that man was crazy, he was no crazier than the rest of humanity which, in its eagerness for comfort, was spraying the world with a black mist in the belief that this was the direct road to the Garden of Eden.
It would have been embarrassing if he’d recognised me too, but he didn’t seem to remember me. He had been too obsessed with his own mission at the time to take note of the face of someone who served him, at best, as an intermediary.
I promised him I’d come and look at his inventions as soon as I had some time, and he did not press me any further.
‘For all you know your Harry may have been with me,’ Mrs Venus said. Her face seemed even more swollen than in the morning and she was gazing at us with her right eye like an owl. ‘He’s not like you, he doesn’t only go in for machines!’
‘He can do better than you, you old hag!’ The captain took a swig of grog, pulled out his pipe and filled it with his good hand.
Last Monday it rained even harder than today. We had to stop work before time was up, and as we were only a short distance from where the captain lived this seemed a suitable moment for a visit.
He led me to a house which looked even more dilapidated than the one where, years ago, he had demonstrated his equipment to me. He unlocked the door and hung up his captain’s cap on a rusty nail behind it. The walls of the hall were damp and hadn’t been painted for a long time; everywhere lay heaps of dusty objects and scattered pieces of clothing. The room’s appearance and dimensions suggested a ship’s cabin. Over his bunk hung various drawings, mostly of windmills. Nowhere did I see anything that suggested our first encounter. Perhaps I was the victim of some fixed idea and the captain had nothing in common with that young man years ago. No doubt the number of unsuccessful inventors in the world was increasing like that of unsuccessful poets.
He opened the bottom drawer and took out some folders of plans. He’d lately concerned himself with the most effective way of using wind power. He unrolled the first sheet and I saw a dreamlike ship whose deck was taken up by turrets carrying windmill sails, five turrets in all. He showed me further drawings, among them a windmill bus and a flying windmill, all these craft driven by wind. The drawings were meticulously done, the individual parts all bearing letters and numbers: I recognised the drive assembly, the transmission gears and the blades of the propellers as I knew them from childhood from my father’s drawings. Other drawings had landscapes dotted with wooden turrets towering picturesquely above the tops of the trees.
It struck me that the captain was not so much a madman, not so much a joker, as a poet at heart. What else could a real poet do when he realised that crowds of jerkish wordmongers and image-mongers had already flooded the world with their rubbish? What else could he do in the face of the monstrous palatial blocks choking the earth but build his windmills which rise up silently and leave behind neither noise nor smell?
I asked him how much time he spent on his inventing. He said not so much now. He was usually too tired. At one time his head used to buzz with so many ideas that there weren’t enough days and nights to put them down. Then he’d got married. He’d thought his wife would support him in his endeavours, but what woman could work up an enthusiasm for something that brought her no practical advantage? She’d begun to nag him, she even threw out his drawings and models. Finally, when their son was three, she’d run off. The captain spat towards the corner of his cabin and opened a cupboard which was full of strange objects. He’d wanted to go back to his old drawings but he’d suddenly discovered that there were stones rattling in his head. He was going downhill. One day, when he was cutting a sheet of metal with a welding torch, he’d handled it so awkwardly that the cut strip fell and crushed his hand. They had to amputate it at the wrist. So he’d been transferred to storekeeping. There, now and again, some idea would come to him. He hadn’t heard from his ex-wife for many years, but she’d not had a good time either. The fellow she’d run off with beat her, he knew that from his son. Maybe she’d come back some day. He wouldn’t drive her out, she’d find her bed all ready. He pointed to the upper part of the bunk, and it was only then that I noticed that the check bedcover had a thick layer of dust on it.
‘How old is your son now?’ it occurred to me to ask.
He looked at me in astonishment, and Mrs Venus answered for him: ‘Why, Harry’s off doing his military service now.’
In the dim saloon bar it was getting darker still and the raindrops were beating noisily against the windowpanes. But this was nothing compared to the drops which would beat a tattoo on the roof of the attic studio, where on days like this it got so dark we became invisible to one another, so we could find each other only with our hands and our lips and our bodies. Then, all of a sudden, she’d be overcome by tears, and as we were saying goodbye, as she was kissing me with moist lips in the doorway of the building, she begged me not to be angry with her, that it was only those clouds which had so depressed her, and she promised she’d write me a letter.
I’ve always wanted to get a letter from which I could see that I was being loved, and indeed she sent me one written on a rainy evening, or maybe late at night when the wind had dispersed the clouds.
My darling, my dearest, at this moment I’d leave everything, I wouldn’t take anything with me, and if you said: Come! I’d go wherever you commanded. I realise that one pays for this, but this is right because one should pay for it. But even if I were to die, even if I were to go out of my mind, which to me seems worse still, I’d go…
I was alarmed by these promises and resolutions, but at the same time I was flooded with a happiness, like the warmth of sunbathing.
She also wrote to me that she loved me to the point of feeling anguish and pain, that she experienced a terrible pain because I was not with her at this moment, just now when everything that was good in her was crying out to me.
That’s how she called me to her, and I knew that I had always longed for just such a woman. It gave me so much happiness that the reality of her pain and despair did not impinge on me. Or else I was too old to share her hopes without fear. Was I afraid we would end up like all those whose longing dies away and who can then scarcely bear to lie down by the side of each other night after night? Or was I not so much afraid as simply unable to brush
