My wife bent over me and kissed me goodbye. She whispered that I should sleep on, she’d get home early.
I couldn’t fall asleep again. When I closed my eyes Dad’s face returned to me in its final pain-distorted shape, and his chopped breath came to me from all corners.
A bell rang again, this time the front door.
Early morning visits fill me with foreboding. But standing at the door was only the fair-haired young man from Svata Hora, and in his features there was even more painful anxiety than usual. It was obvious that something serious had happened, or else he wouldn’t have called at this hour.
He asked me to come with him, he wanted to talk to me outside. In the street he informed me that he and his friends had been pulled in for questioning. In his case the interrogation had gone on for half a day and had touched on my reading two years before, my stories, my opinions, as well as the opinions of other authors who’d refused to write in jerkish language in the society that was accomplishing ‘the greatest freedom of man and the human race’. They also asked him why and how often he visited me, and several times in this context they mentioned the destroyed monument.
Life – and hence also death – went on.
I tried to calm him. Surely they wouldn’t accuse either him or me of blowing up a monument. They merely liked bracketing these two offences – the reading of short stories written in a language comprehensible only to humans, and the destruction of a statue of an officially-proclaimed giant. Even they must realise that the latter was more criminal than the former.
But the young man was in the depths of despair. This was the first time he’d been interrogated and had experienced the stubbornly uncompromising and suspicious jerkish spirit. I’ve been aware of it for years, recording how under its influence living voices were falling silent and language was being lost. It pervades everything, it gets into the water and into the air, it mingles with our blood. Mothers give birth to shrunken cripples and the landscape to dead trees, birds drop in mid-flight and children’s bodies are afflicted by malignant tumours.
He was walking beside me, afraid. He’d already handed in his notice at work, he’d found a job as projectionist in a cinema, and he was hoping to be accepted as a correspondence student of jerkish literature. True, he’d learn there that Charlie Chaplin left the United States, that bastion of unfreedom, but he’d have a little time left over to read books and reflect. But suppose they didn’t accept him now. He wanted to know where he’d find a safety net for himself when the one they’d assigned to him as well as the one offered to him at the department store were so large-meshed that a person fell through at once. Of course, everybody should weave his own net, he knew that. But if they burst in, if they stole into his home and tore it up for him? Fight them or begin to weave a finer mesh from scratch? How often could a person start from scratch?
Only nine o’clock. If I hurried I might be able to catch the youngster in the Bozena tavern, hand over the drug, and then go and find a funeral speaker.
The tavern was still half-empty at this early hour, and I didn’t have to search through a crowd: my former companions, apart from the youngster and the captain, were sitting at the table next to the bar. Enthroned at the head of the table, to my surprise, was our foreman, moreover in new overalls.
I entered unobserved and managed to overhear the foreman earnestly recounting how someone was a real show-off, always nose-dived right to the ground and pulled out only when all those who were merely standing and staring had plastered their trousers.
‘And what are you doing here?’ Mrs Venus had spotted me. ‘Come to help us?’
The foreman turned his head irritably, he didn’t like anyone spoiling his heroic episodes. I produced the medicine from my pocket and asked about the youngster; did anyone know where I might find him.
‘This is no kindergarten,’ the foreman informed me. ‘If he comes, he’s here, if he don’t, he ain’t. We haven’t seen him,’ he turned to Mrs Venus as his witness, ‘for at least a week.’
‘This isn’t the weather for him, you remember that sick turn he had. Maybe they’ll give you his address at the office,’ Mrs Venus said. ‘Bound to have it there. Why don’t you sit down?’
I ordered tea with rum.
‘Maybe you don’t know yet,’ Mrs Venus continued, ‘that they’ve locked our Mr Pinz up in the loony bin?’
Obviously I hadn’t heard about what had happened to the captain.
‘Wanted to set fire to the place he was living in. Scraped off the heads of matches, tried to make a bomb from them. Had it all ready, God knows what he’d intended it for. But then that Mary of his turned up, just looked in after all those years, and when he asked her if she’d stay with him she told him he was a nut and she’d sooner string herself up. So he decided to set that bomb off outside his own door.’
‘The stupidity of it,’ the foreman said in disgust; ‘scraping off two hundred thousand match-heads, stuffing them into a metal soda siphon, and then using it on a building like that! But if I was you I wouldn’t put my nose in that office, there’s another idiot sitting there!’ And he returned to his airfield, where his friend didn’t manage to pull out of a spin that time and rammed himself with his MIG so deep into the ground that when they’d put out the fire and cut the wreckage up with a blow-torch they were left with a hole big enough for twenty blokes to hide in.
When the rescue teams arrived in the area of the volcanic disaster they found, in addition to the thousands of dead, a few who’d survived on the roofs of houses or in tree-tops, and also some who were stuck in the mud and couldn’t get out by themselves. Of one little girl only the head was showing. Below the surface her legs were firmly clutched by her drowned aunt. The rescuers spent many hours trying to free the girl, and themselves got stuck in the mud in the attempt. All that time a reporter with a television camera was filming them, so he could bring the fate of the little girl closer to those who were contentedly or perhaps sympathetically bored in their own nets and wanted to be witnesses. After sixty hours the little girl’s sufferings were over and the tired reporter was able to return to his television net. By the time they’d cut the clip they needed from the recorded shots, the little girl’s soul had already risen and was lamenting above the dark waters and the mud, above the red-hot crater of the volcano, and also above a million TV screens which were flickering all over the world in order to show the vain struggle of the rescuers and the touching death of the little girl, who’d never rise from the ashes but who became famous for those few exciting seconds. And who heard the calling of her soul, who was shaken by her sobs? Who at least pictured her features at the moment when her lungs were vainly trying to catch that last breath of air?
‘In case you don’t get his address there,’ Mrs Venus returned to the youngster, ‘you could try that Dana of his. He might be there.’ And she described for me the house where the woman Dana lived. I’ve no idea how she knew. The house was in the Little Quarter.
The tea with rum had warmed me through nicely and I was now able to set out for the office. My way led me through the familiar little street of family homes, and when I got to the artist’s window I gazed in amazement on a vest which, suspended from a cord, shone brilliantly with its orange colour. Set out behind it into the depths of the room were the stems and stalks of exotic plants. They had been arranged by the artist’s hand to suggest human figures. As I stared into the window I could make out individual likenesses, familiar facial features. A woman with a jockey cap on her head undoubtedly represented Mrs Venus, still without her Red-Indian wrinkles, but already with a sorrowful expression around her mouth. At the same time, however, there was something joyous in her attitude, in the gestures of her hands. Perhaps the artist had caught her just at the moment when she was about to mount the filly she’d nursed back to health. A moment later I identified a sculptural likeness of the foreman, carrying a wounded airman out of an imaginary aircraft and, in doing so, very nearly soaring up himself on the wings of his bravery. I also recognised the captain, his stocky, as yet unbowed figure looked good in a naval uniform. Perhaps, after all, there was in him both the eccentric inventor and a great prankster. But at the beginning of his actions probably stood a childlike dream, a mirage of distant voyages. Mr Rada, on the other hand, stood there in ugly brown convict’s garb and was pouring water from a billy-can onto the head of another convict. His face was frozen at the instant of sudden inner illumination, at the touch of bliss. At that moment I heard the notes of Gershwin’s rhapsody. In the youngster’s expression there was so much concentration in his own playing and so much happiness that he seemed transformed. His clarinet was intended to suggest not so much a musical instrument as a conjurer’s wand which caused rocks to part and transported humans into the realm of their own dreams.
I realised then that all these faces were, in their likeness, both real and unreal. They seemed younger and more attractive, as though nothing of the working of time or life had marked them. At the same time I understood that this exhibition had been prepared by a different artist, by a woman artist. The sculptor here had only let her use his exhibition window and she, surmising the direction of my walking, had set out for me her park, a garden where a person might see his own likeness as he himself wished it to appear at moments of grace. Maybe she had done this to remind me of her, or to demonstrate to me her loving and generous vision of what art should represent of
