conclusion was that happiness was just a dream and life a chain of suffering, and directly over that philosophical testament he shot himself through the head, so that the blood pouring from his wound put several final stops under his writings.
Everyone on her father’s side of the family, she explained, had a touch of genius, an inflexible will, and clear- sightedness – her father most of all. She often spoke of him to me and, even though I had never seen him, I was reminded of my own father, not only because he was also a graduate engineer but because he too knew no greater happiness than his work, than the calculations in which no one was allowed to disturb him, and because he was strong, healthy and capable of cheerfulness once he decided to set aside that work.
I would have liked to tell her something similar about my ancestors, but I didn’t know their stories. I knew that some of them had come from far away, but I don’t know whether that was two hundred or a thousand years ago. I assume that even then they knew how to read, though it was a different script from the one I can read now, and that they prayed in a language of which I no longer understand a single word. I don’t know what they did for a living. Both my grandmothers had come to Prague and tried to trade there but failed. My grandfathers too came from the country. My father’s father had studied chemistry and worked as an engineer in a sugar refinery down in the Hungarian part of the monarchy. There, when my father was only eleven, he fell under a plough drawn by a rope and was fatally injured. My mother’s father, on the other hand, lived to a ripe old age: he’d been a clerk at the law courts and at the age of eighty he lived to experience the second great war as well as having a yellow star put on him and being forcibly deported to a ghetto. Even of this stocky old man with his grey, slightly tobacco-stained moustache I was unable to report anything remarkable, except possibly that, like his ancestors, he stubbornly believed in the coming of the Messiah, but for him that meant the mirage of the socialist revolution. That mirage helped him survive the blows of fate, the death of his wife, the loss of his home, his humiliation, hunger and the hardships of imprisonment. More and more often in that unhappy place he would preach to anyone who would listen to him, and more and more often I would be the only listener to remain. He too urged me not to believe in a god whom people had invented, whom the masters had fobbed off onto the poor so they should more readily bear their fate. As he grew older his litanies became an unchanging prayer which I knew by heart and to which I no longer had to listen. And then one night I awoke. Everyone else was sleeping, and from the corner of the room where grandfather slept I could hear a strange muttering. I recognised the old man’s voice and the plaintive intonation of a prayer spoken in the language he still knew but of which I no longer understood anything, a prayer addressed to God. I did not stir and listened with amazement to the voice which seemed to come from a great distance, from some long-past time. That was the first time I realised that the depth of the human soul is unfathomable.
Her father would desert his drawing board from time to time to wander about the mountains and climb rockfaces. He would take her with him, and taught her not to be afraid of heights. My father would only wander through the landscape of numbers into which the visions of his machines turned for him. He even took his calculations with him on holiday, and when he was seized by a new idea, which would happen almost continuously, he would forget about the rest of us. When he then found us at the dinner table or outside his window he’d wonder where we’d sprung from. But they forcibly expelled him from his landscape, put him into convict’s clothes and locked him up behind electric wires whose windings were all too easily calculable. He concentrated all his willpower and strength on surviving, on surviving with dignity, so that he might once more return to his beloved landscape. Apart from numbers and machines, father, as I understood later, also loved pretty women and socialist visions of a better world. Like every man in love he invested the object of his adoration with excessive and deceptive hopes.
Do you think every love indulges in false hopes? she asked.
I realised that she was asking about us, and I dared not say yes, even though I could see no reason why we should be exceptions.
‘Like it was with them cemeteries on the motorway,’ said Mrs Venus. ‘When they destroyed them they had to dig up the corpses and they offered a hundred an hour, plus a bottle of rum a day, and even so everybody told them where they could stick it. They had to send in convicts to do the job and of course they paid them bugger-all!’ She stopped, stretched, leaned her shovel against a wall and lit a cigarette. ‘Corpses ain’t no joke, there’s poison in them that goes right through your rubber gloves, and once it gets in your blood you’ve had it.’ She was smoking and seemed to be gazing into the distance, somewhere only she could see. If I had met her years ago I would certainly have repeated her words to myself, I would have been in a hurry to write them down in order to preserve her speech as faithfully as possible. At that time I believed that anything I saw or heard would come in useful for some story. But I have known for a long time now that I am most unlikely ever to find any events other than those I experience myself. A man cannot gain control over someone else’s life, and even if he could he would not invent a new story. There are nearly five thousand million people living in the world and every one of them believes that his life is good for at least one story. This thought is enough to make your head spin. If a writer emerged, or better still, was produced, who was obsessed enough to record five thousand million stories, and to then cross out all they had in common, how much do you suppose would be left? Scarcely a sentence from each story, from each human fate, a moment like a drop in the ocean, an unrepeatable experience of apprehension or of a meeting, an instant of insight or pain – but who could identify that drop, who could separate it from the flood of the ocean? And why should new stories have to be invented?
Daria, in tears, once accused me of regarding her as some beetle I had impaled on a pin in order to describe it better. But she was mistaken: in her presence I usually forgot that I sometimes tried to invent stories, and I would watch her so closely only because I wished to understand the language in which she spoke to me when she was with me in silence.
‘But I had a great time with those corpses. Got myself a job down there,’ Mrs Venus gestured towards the Vy s ehrad ramparts, ‘on the path lab. That’s where they carted all the stiffs that had had their throats cut or been knifed. Got it through a girlfriend, a dicey job, she said, but with bonus payments, and in the end they gave me bugger-all. Anyway I only did it because of the old boy that gutted the bodies, he was a mad one and crazy about stiffs. “Zoulova,” he’d say to me, “you’ve got some arms. I’d love to have a good look at your humerus one day.”’ And Mrs Venus spread her arms – they really were long and slim.
The sickly smell of decay seemed to engulf me. When I took on the job of a hospital cleaner my colleague could not deny himself the pleasure of taking me to the morgue the very first day in order to show me the corpses on the tables, on the floor and in the refrigerator, and while doing so he was watching me out of the corner of his eye to see if I was turning pale or making for the door. But I was used to dead bodies from childhood, to such quantities of dead bodies that the few solemnly-dressed recent deceased neither frightened me nor turned my insides.
Now I recalled not only that tiled room but principally the wide table, which I saw as clearly as in a dream, and on it lay my father.
My father was gravely ill, the disease was gradually destroying him from within, so that he, who had always been so strong and irrepressibly healthy, was now scarcely able to hold a pen in his hand. When I looked at his notes, which were still swarming with numbers and formulae I didn’t understand, the figures were so shaky I could hardly read them. Whenever I regarded these figures and formulae, I was gripped by sadness. I knew that he had not published his calculations for years, although he was being asked to do so, and I also knew that these numbers were a road to some new knowledge and that knowledge to him meant his life, but from them I could see that father’s life was by now shaky, that these figures were getting ready to accompany him on the road to where there are no numbers.
I would have liked to dispel that unhappy vision, but no matter how intently I fixed my eyes on my cart, my father’s motionless features remained before me. What is the purpose of a life of suffering? It may teach a man to humbly bow to the inevitable, but he will still be crushed by the approaching death of someone dear to him.
But I still tried to reassure myself that my father, who had come through so many trials in his life, would not succumb this time either.
On that day long ago my father had to carry me out of the aircraft when it landed. I was shaking and sobbing and refusing to look up at the sky, where bold aerial acrobats were turning somersaults in their machines, winding their way up into the clouds and diving steeply towards the roofs of the hangars. My father lifted me up on his shoulders. He didn’t even say: Poor little boy, he didn’t reprimand me, he just carried me and on the way showed me the trains which flashed by below us, giving them their names, just as if they were relations or children. He carried me as far as the wooden footbridge over the railway line and said I could spit down into the funnel of a locomotive if one came along. When at last one came, spewing sparks and smoke, he himself leant over the railing to set an example for me, and the powerful rush of smoke and steam emitted by the funnel lifted his hat off his head and all we could do was to watch it sail down to settle on a pile of coal on one of the wagons and disappear
