house. Someone was playing a trumpet, or more likely had put on a record with Louis Armstrong or somebody, there was rubbish everywhere, bits of paper, advertising leaflets and Coca-Cola cans, and in the hot air hung a smell of onions, slops and human bodies.
I was seized by nostalgia for that country. Suddenly I was seeing myself in my orange vest pushing that miserable handcart. Of course I needn’t have worn that particular vest, but they made me wear some garishly coloured jacket to make sure everyone recognised me from afar and gave me a wide berth. This was now happening to me, even though, having been put into a colour-marked jacket in childhood, I longed for nothing more than to get rid of the mark of disinheritance.
‘We used to play him a lot,’ the youngster said. When he saw my surprise he explained: ‘We had a jazz band, you know, before I got my liver all buggered up.’
The captain rolled up the sleeves of his grubby pullover. ‘I may have something useful for your garden,’ he said to the foreman.
‘So long as it isn’t that greenfly spray of yours,’ the foreman was alarmed. ‘Made my greenflies scamper about like squirrels and screwed up my roses completely.’
‘We used to play Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, or Scott Joplin ragtime,’ the youngster said enthusiastically, ‘but we liked George Gershwin best, and he also came across best because people had heard his stuff before.’
‘And now you don’t play at all?’
‘Not a hope. Couldn’t blow now. Know what impressed me most? That he’d never had any special schooling, and look at the music he wrote!’
‘Did you write any yourself?’ I asked.
‘We all did. We just had jam sessions and something or other would come out of them.’
From one of his enormous pockets the captain produced a piece of collapsed rubber fitted to a small bellows. He squeezed the bellows a few times and the rubber swelled up into a small balloon.
Now balloons were something the foreman was interested in.
‘What kind of bird-brained contraption is this then?’ he asked, leaning his broad shovel against the wall of a house. He couldn’t know how appropriately he’d described the device, for it was actually intended, as we were informed, for scaring birds away. The balloon with the bellows also included, on one side, sails like a windmill’s and, on the other, a whistle. The windmill, by means of the bellows, would blow up the balloon, and once the air pressure in it exceeded a certain limit a valve would open and the whistle would emit a short but powerful blast, which would scare away any flying intruder.
Using his hook the captain pulled from a pocket an object reminiscent of a small organ pipe and with his sound fingers he screwed it into a thread at the end of the balloon.
We were all intently watching his antics, but the expected blast did not materialise: there was only the hiss of escaping air.
‘How is this superior to an ordinary rattle?’ the foreman asked doubtfully.
‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that a rattle goes all the time and the little bastards get used to it?’ The captain once more began to squeeze his bellows and we, now all leaning on our tools, were watching the balloon filling up.
‘And if there’s no wind?’ the foreman asked with interest.
At that moment there was a brief sound of bursting, rather like a distant shot, and what had just been a balloon was no more.
‘You know, they let us rehearse at the works club twice a week,’ the youngster reminisced, ‘but we could stay there as long as we needed to. Sometimes we’d fool around till the early hours of the morning, just stretching out on the tables for a moment if we felt like a rest.’
‘Weren’t they waiting for you at home?’ I asked in surprise.
‘At home? But I didn’t live at home!’
‘If there’s no wind,’ the captain replied to the foreman, ‘it works by electricity.’
‘If you felt like it and could spare the time,’ the youngster suddenly remembered, ‘the boys are playing in Radlice this Sunday.’ He fished about in his wallet and pulled out two tickets. ‘Maybe you’d like them.’
I objected that he’d got the tickets for himself, and while we were sweeping up the leaves and conkers which had dropped from a huge horse-chestnut tree he explained to me how to get there.
I sometimes feel nostalgic for America. Even in my dreams I wander among the skyscrapers or drive along highways through endless landscapes, always full of expectation. Yet nearly every one of these dreams ends sadly: I’d stayed on in that country, beyond the sea, I’d never return home again, to the place where I was born and where people, or at least some of them, speak my native language.
They’ve put me in a vest in which I feel restricted. I could take it off, or even with a fine gesture chuck it away and go somewhere where they won’t force one upon me, but I know that I won’t because by doing so I’d also be chucking away my home.
Franz Kafka was certainly one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived and worked in Bohemia. He used to curse Prague and his homeland, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave, he couldn’t make up his mind to tear himself away from them. His seemingly dreamlike plots unroll in an environment which appears to have little connection with any real place. In reality his native city provided him with more than just a backdrop for his plots. It pervaded him with its multiplicity of voices, its nostalgia, its twilight, its weakness. It was the place where the spirit could soar up to any heights, but it was also the place where there was in the atmosphere a barely perceptible smell of decay, which more particularly affected the spirit.
Kafka spoke perfect Czech, perhaps just a trifle stiffly, but he wrote in German. But he was not a German, he was a Jew.
Not a single Czech literary historian has ever found in himself enough generosity, courage or affability to range him among the Czech authors.
The sense of exclusion and loneliness which repeatedly emerges from his prose writings certainly stemmed from his disposition, from the circumstances of his life. In fact he shared it with many of his contemporaries. But Prague greatly intensified it. He longed to escape from it, just as he longed to escape from his old-bachelor loneliness. He failed to do so. He was unable to liberate himself except by his writing.
If he had succeeded in liberating himself in any other way he’d probably have lived longer, and somewhere else, but he wouldn’t have written anything.
Home had become a cage for me. I needed to break out, but whenever I went out while my wife was at home I could see fear in her eyes. She never voiced it, suspicion was not part of her nature, she was trying to trust me as she’d done before, as she trusted strangers, but her eyes would follow me wherever I moved. When I returned she’d run out to meet me, pleased that I was back home again and welcoming me tenderly. And she, who’d never been too concerned about how I spent my time, what I was thinking about, what I ate, would ask if I wasn’t hungry, and during supper she’d shyly reflect on where we might go together so we should enjoy ourselves, and she’d agree in advance with whatever I suggested. She’d never been like this before, she’d known how to pursue her own interests and have her own way, but now, humbled and humiliated, she was trying to live up to her idea of my idea of a good and loving wife, and her slight gaucherie both shamed and touched me.
She was not endowed with directness. I always felt that she moved more freely in the world of ideas and theorems than among people. In dealing with people she lacked naturalness. And yet she wished she had it, she needed it in her profession, which required her to gain her patients’ confidence. I noticed her trying desperately to achieve what others had received as a gift. I knew that she wanted people to be fond of her. She is happy whenever others appreciate her good qualities or her ability, and she hastens to repay them for it by deeds, or at least by words so eager that she embarrasses them. I’d wanted to help her not to feel isolated among people, and now I had brutally pushed heir back into the corner from which she’d tried to escape.
Of course she had a lot of acquaintances and colleagues who respected her, but she had few real friends. The children were growing up and the day when they’d be leaving us was approaching. If I were to leave her as well, who would look after her as she moved towards her advancing years, who would walk by her side?
But could I still do it?
We are lying next to each other, we embrace. She wants to knew if it was good for me; behind that question I suspect a multitude of suppressed and anxious questions and I ask her not to ask me anything. She says that she loves me, we’ll be happy together yet, and she falls asleep, exhausted, whereas I am sinking into a strange void between dream and wakefulness. I am fighting against sleep, against the state when I shan’t be able to drive away
