the Sokol gym hall, where our equipment was already waiting for us: brooms, shovels, scrapers and a handcart whose body was half a dustbin. To show my goodwill I took the biggest shovel.
As a child I had lived on the outskirts of Prague, not far from the Kbely airfield, in a villa which stood next door to a tavern patronised by hauliers. Every day, just before noon, the municipal sweeper would arrive. He’d draw up his cart in the open space where the hauliers had pulled up with their horses, take out his shovel and almost ceremonially sweep up the horse droppings, or any other rubbish, and drop it all into his cart. He would then push his cart up against the wall and make for the bar. I liked him: he wore a peaked cap, though not a sailor’s cap, and an upturned moustache in memory of our last emperor. I also liked his occupation, which I thought must surely be one of the most important jobs a man could have, and I believed that street-sweepers therefore enjoyed everyone’s respect. In reality this was not so. Those who cleansed the world of garbage or of rats were never shown any respect. A few days ago I read about a jilted stucco worker who, exactly two hundred years ago, in St George’s church, had slashed the face, mouth and shoulders of his lover, for which he was gaoled, and taken to the place of execution, but was then reprieved and instead sentenced to clean the streets of Prague for three years. Respect as a rule was shown only to those who cleansed the world of human refuse, to bailiffs, judges and inquisitors.
When I wrote a short story twenty years ago about the slaughtering of horses I invented an apocalyptic scene about the incineration of their remains. I tried to get into the Prague incinerator, which as a boy I used to see burning in the distance, reducing everything to one gigantic pile of clinker, but the manager refused to let me inside. He was probably afraid I might wish to uncover some shortcomings in the operation of his crematorium.
Many years later, when I was working as a cleaner at the Kr c hospital, I had to cart all the refuse to the big furnace every morning: blood-soaked bandages, gauze full of pus and hair, dirty rags smelling of human excrement, and of course masses of paper, empty tins, broken glass and plastic. I’d shovel everything into the furnace and watch with relief as the rubbish writhed as if in agony, as it melted in the fierce flames, and listen to the cracking and exploding sounds of the glass and to the victorious roar of the fire. On one occasion, I never discovered why, whether the fire was too fierce or, on the contrary, not hot enough, or whether it was the wind, the rubbish did not burn but the draught in the furnace sucked it up and spewed it out from the high chimney-stack, up towards the sky, and I watched with horror and amazement as all my refuse – rags, paper and tatters of bloody bandages – slowly descended to the ground, as it was caught in the branches of the trees, or sailed towards the open windows of the wards. And at that moment the idiots and imbeciles from the Social Welfare Institute, who were responsible for the upkeep of the hospital grounds, came rushing out howling with delight and pointing to a tall silver birch which was draped like a Christmas tree.
It occurred to me that what had just happened was no more than an instructive demonstration of an everyday occurrence. No matter ever vanishes. It can, at most, change its form. Rubbish is immortal, it pervades the air, swells up in water, dissolves, rots, disintegrates, changes into gas, into smoke, into soot, it travels across the world and gradually engulfs it.
We started in Lomnickeho Street, Our Venus, whose name was evidently Zoulova, was wielding a broom; she was helped, with a second broom, by the man with the captain’s cap who most of the time chewed silently, now and again spitting out some frothy phlegm. They were sweeping the stuff onto my shovel and I would fling all the filthy mess into the dustbin on our handcart. When the dustbin was full we turned it upside down and tipped everything onto the pavement, all the rubbish in one heap; this would later be picked up and removed by the garbage truck. In this way we marked out our progress with those heaps and slowly advanced to Vysehrad. I looked at the tinted foliage of the trees, they were waving to me from the distance even though no one was waiting for me under them, even though she was no longer waiting for me. I think of her only as ‘she’. In my mind I mostly do not give her a name. Names get fingered and worn just like tender words. Sometimes in my mind I called her a soothsayer, because she used to foretell people’s futures and she seemed knowing to me. Also she was surrounded by mystery, and made more beautiful by it. When she was christened she was named Daria.
I could not remember if we’d ever been here with each other. Our meetings over the years had blended together, and the years had piled up as in the folksong about the farm labourer. I’d met her as a result of visiting a friend who lived in a caravan; he was training to be a geologist’s assistant. My attention was caught by a little sculpture whose fantastic character set it aside from the spartan interior of the caravan. My friend, who until a little while before had been writing art reviews, told me about the woman artist whose world was bounded by dreams, phantoms, passion and tenderness. He assured me that a visit to her studio was a profound experience, and I made a note of her address. One day when I was out looking for a birthday present for my wife I remembered that address.
Her workshop was in a modest-sized vaulted basement in Prague’s Little City district. A third of the room was taken up by wooden shelves holding her work.
She received me courteously and we chatted for a while; she even told me about her little girl and asked me what I and my wife did. But I thought her interest was due to the fact that I had come to her as a customer.
She moved adroitly among her shelves. As she walked there was a movement of eyes and lips on her long skirt, a pattern of brown eyes and bright red lips. Her own eyes were blue and her lips rather pale. What would happen if I embraced her among her shelves? But I knew that I wouldn’t.
I bought a bird with a slender neck on which sat a sharp-edged little head with small, impish, human eyes. She wrapped my purchase in tissue paper and saw me to the door. After that we didn’t see one another for many months. But on the eve of my forty-seventh birthday she unexpectedly appeared at my front door: she wished to borrow her little sculpture for an exhibition that was to be held in Budapest. I asked her in and introduced her to my wife, who was delighted to make her acquaintance. The three of us sat in my study. Lida, who likes making people happy, said how much she liked her little figurine.
We were drinking wine, myself and my wife just to be polite. Daria spoke of her forthcoming exhibition and then about her travels. She told us about Kampuchea, which she had once visited. She talked of that country as like an Eden of happy and innocent people – this fascinated my wife, who is keen on liberating people of their sense of guilt – and we got on to our own culture, which is based on the knowledge of sin and therefore of metaphysical guilt. Daria maintained that the doctrine of sin was our curse, because it deprived us of freedom and interposed itself between one person and another, and between people and God. My wife made some objection. She believed that freedom should be limited by some kind of inner law, but then the conversation moved on to children and their upbringing. But I was concentrating less and less on what was being said and instead became aware of something different: the unspoken voice of the other woman. It seemed to me that it was addressing me in the expectation that I would hear it and understand it.
The evening shadows were creeping into the room and it seemed to me that the remaining light was focused on her high forehead, which, oddly enough, resembled my wife’s. The strange thing was that the light did not die with the day. It seemed to be emanating from her, from a flame which undoubtedly was burning within her, and I thought that this flame was reaching over towards me and engulfing me with its hot breath.
After she had left I seemed to remain in its field of force. Lida said the sculptress was an interesting woman and suggested we might ask her to come again, perhaps with her husband, but I, either from fear or from a presentiment of a possible conspiracy, did not rise to the idea and turned the conversation to some other subject. My wife went to her room and I tried in vain to do some work. So I turned on the radio, which was broadcasting baroque organ music, but the music did not calm me, I was unable to take it in. Instead I could hear disjointed snippets of sentences: a litany in a strange voice pervaded me like the warmth of a hot bath. What had that voice really been like? I searched for an appropriate word to describe it. It was neither sonorous nor sweet and melodious, neither colourful nor obtrusive – I was unable to say what enthralled me about it.
When I embraced my wife that night, who was gentle and calm in lovemaking, slow as a lowland river in summer, I heard that voice again and suddenly realised the right word for it: it was passionate. I tried to dispel it – at such an inappropriate moment – but I failed.
We had turned a corner and were now moving away from Vysehrad. I was still using my coalman’s shovel to load scraps of paper, plastic cups and squashed matchboxes onto the cart, also the head of a doll, a torn tennis shoe, an empty tube, a smudged letter, as well as – the most numerous items all over the ground – cigarette butts. All that rubbish I shovelled into the dustbin on the cart, and when that was filled to the brim the captain and I got hold of it and together we tipped it out onto the pavement, where the wind, which was stiffening all the time, scattered the rubbish about again, but it didn’t really matter: rubbish is indestructible anyway.
Rubbish is like death. What else is there that is so indestructible?
Our innkeeper neighbours had five children, the youngest boy had the same name as me and was about my
