Bohumil Hrabal - Rambling On - An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab

LELI WAS A GREAT GUY, with so many pals he never had time to get married, such a great pal he was. No festivity in the Kersko forest range, and there’s some celebration or other almost every Sunday, because anyone who’s young, that’s a cause for celebration in itself, none could happen without Leli being there. Especially if someone had got a keg in. That was a major kind of celebration, like when someone got married or had a baby, then the litre glasses came out to be drunk at whichever cottage or in whichever avenue the wedding or christening was being held. And so Leli would show up as MC and technical consultant. Leli could cope with anything, because he was one big technical encyclopaedia, he was so well read that there wasn’t really a book he hadn’t read, and he could give a lecture on anything whatsoever, wheresoever it took place. One time there was a barrel to broach, but the lads had brought it on a handcart, and when they set it down in front of the fire under the old oak trees, whose branches were bent low right over the barrel, no one dared tap the barrel. Then suddenly Leli turned up and at once: “What don’t you understand? Where’s the problem?” And when they said they were afraid to spile the barrel, Leli said: “Bring me an apron,” and he donned the apron then gave a lecture on what a spile is and the principle it works on, then he set the spile, loosened the screw and with a mighty blow drove the spile in, but the lads who’d brought the barrel along on the handcart were right, the spile shot upwards like a spear, the beer spurted and fizzed in a mighty geysir up into the oak branches, and Leli stood there in that fountain of beer, handsome and soaked, and after the beer had shot up and was dripping back from the leaves onto the benches and us, Leli pronounced with an appropriate gesture: “Technical defect… bring me a bowl of water and a towel,” and he untied the apron and blithely washed his hands of the technical fault, so we drank what was left in the barrel and then we went back and forth to the pub with jugs and ended up fetching crates of bottled Popovice lager, we sat on the benches and sang and played guitars till morning, beer never stopped dripping on us from the leaves, and we were all sticky and tacky with the beer and we smelled of beer, we were so fantastic because we were young. “Yep,” says I, “Leli’s a great guy.” And again Leli would go around Kersko and wherever someone didn’t understand something, he’d first give them a lecture, then his advice, or he’d get on and do what he’d advised himself. Mr Svoboda couldn’t paint his kitchen, so Leli said: “What don’t you understand? Where’s the snag?” And Mr Svoboda said he was afraid to spray the kitchen, which he wanted blue, and Leli said how lucky Mr Svoboda was that he, Leli, was passing, and at once he prepared him a pail of blue wash, improving it with a few drops of oil from a special bottle he’d been and got, and Mr Svoboda painted the kitchen, but after he went to bed he was woken at midnight by a strange sound coming out of the darkness of the kitchen, like someone giving sloppy kisses, and when he put the light on and looked up at the ceiling, it had bubbles all over that were cracking open, crow’s-feet cracks opening up everywhere and showering blue powder down to the floor. When Leli heard about it, he said “technical defect in the paint” and walked on unbowed, and he saw Mr Kuchař mending a windscreen-wiper on his car, so he went up, looked a while, then said: “Lucky I’m here, can I mend it?” And before Mr Kuchař knew it, Leli had given him a lecture on each of the components and on all the little screws, then asked Mr Kuchař to hand him a screwdriver, and with that and Leli having tightened the last screw, the wiper snapped and Leli pronounced knowledgeably: “There’s a technical defect in the material…,” and he handed Mr Kuchař the broken blade and departed, and the next day, Mr Kuchař was driving to Ústí on business and it was raining, and he steered with one hand and in lieu of the wiper wiped the rain away with the other through the open window, cursing all the way to Ústí: “Damn the man, that bastard Leli,” adding some other salty Moravisms… Yep, Leli was a great guy.

At home in his cottage Leli had a wonderful workshop, and in the workshop Leli had some tall coat stands, on which hung various outfits and overalls to go with whatever Leli happened to be doing or where he was going. So if he was cutting something with a hacksaw, he’d put on dungarees and a cap like American workmen wear, the kind with a big peak, he would be so intent on the job in hand that woe betide anyone who came in, not even his dad dared, and when I once did persuade his dad, his dad went in and said: “Leli, there’s a friend to see you,” but Leli carried on filing the edge of a piece of sheet metal he’d got in the vice and confined himself to a lofty: “How many times do I have to tell you that when I’m working I do not want to be disturbed?” And he was right, Leli was a picture of dignity as he worked in his boiler suit, he always had such style. And when he went out on his bike, he’d put on some jodhpur-like cycling trousers, take a canful of milk and one of mineral water and set out as if he were going on the Peace Race, Leli, so stylish, so magnificent. When he went out animal-watching in the woods or fields, Leli would change into hunting green and a deerstalker and have a pair of binoculars on his chest so everyone would know that Leli was going stalking, that in the evening we’d be told everything he’d seen, always linked to a lecture, so we, his friends, knew everyting we knew from Leli, Leli was like our university. If anyone invited Leli to take a boat-trip on the river, Leli would turn up in a marine-blue suit like the captain of a corvette, with a cap to match, borrowed from his friend who worked, and still works, on ocean-going ships, sailing the world, and he’s always at sea for sixth months and with us for six months, and we call him Sailor, so Leli in his First Engineer’s cap would sit in an ordinary dinghy and keep a keen and close eye on who was coming the other way and who they were passing, giving erudite lectures on every kind of seagoing and commercial vessel, and warship, and warships were Leli’s pet interest, he could go on for hours on end about them, drawing plans in the sand not only of the various types, but also of all the great sea battles from Trafalgar to Narvik. When there was a forest fire over where the game park begins, everyone hurried to help put it out, and we were on tenterhooks: When would Leli turn up? And whereas fire brigades had arrived from various quarters and even a water canon came into its own, as we made our way back from the extinguished blaze, along came Leli in an asbestos suit with a rake over his shoulder, striding along, ramrod straight and head held high, relishing the wonderment he radiated from afar, and he promptly gathered us together and gave us a lecture to the effect that the best way to tackle a forest fire of burning moss isn’t a water canon, isn’t jets of water, but, at least for starters, rakes, with which you have to turn over the whole area that has burnt, because Leli’s known this for years — and this fire now, Leli had survived four such — and he turned and spread everything with his rake, and he showed us, “See, it’s still smouldering here, in three days’ time it’ll flare up again, ’cos smouldering moss and peat’s a right bastard…” And so it came to pass, the fire wardens chased Leli from the site of the fire as if he’d been taking the piss and acting like a provocative yob, so Leli had shouldered his rake and set off home like Winnie the Pooh in an asbestos suit and was giving us this lecture on the proper way to put a forest fire out, turning back and pointing to the swirling smoke, insisting that on Thursday it would flare up again… and it did, in four days, just as Leli had foretold, the forest caught fire again, at the selfsame spot, from the smouldering moss and peat… Yep, Leli, he was a great guy, who thought not only about us and for us, but also through us, and he lived with us and we respected him. His great passion was motor racing, and he didn’t just watch all the Formula 1 races, but he knew from foreign magazines every detail of the life of Fittipaldi and Emerson, he even knew their family lives, and one time when we were chatting casually about something we’d read about Formula 1 in the papers, Leli took the floor and in a quiet voice spelled out all the details, he knew all there was to know not only about what this or that driver looked like, but also what a racing driver thought about. Leli also had a car, but a Trabant, and when he was at the wheel, he wasn’t one to use a crash helmet and things, he invariably wore a sporty race suit, and having started the Trabant, he would slowly pull on his gloves, the very kind worn by Manfred von Brauchitsch, gloves with a strap at the wrist and huge almond- and tear-shaped cut-outs, and as he pulled away, it was only ever at full throttle, my, how he thrashed it, not that that mattered when all’s said and done, because if Fittipaldi went flat out, Leli went flat out as well, except that Leli, because he was thinking more about his friends, often came seriously unstuck. Leli would often attend pig-killings, invited with his father by the farmers in the villages around, because they were also glad to have him come, because he would start by treating them to such a wonderful lecture on pig-killing, that the pig in question, if it had heard it, would have thought it an honour to be about to be killed, and so it once came to pass that Leli was holding the rope, just to show the right way to tug it so as to fell the pig at the critical moment, but the butcher who was there to shoot the pig hit something soft, and suddenly Leli, pulling on the rope, flew backwards straight into the manure heap, his white apron — Leli always came in a white apron with his initials on the chest — slithering into the slurry, everyone was horrified that the butcher, instead of shooting the pig, had shot Leli, though the butcher had actually shot right through the rope Leli was pulling on, which Leli himself explained as the cause of his fall as, covered in slurry, he was alert enough to grab the rope and show that it had been shot through and that he was unharmed, and they shot the pig later in a corner of the yard. But by then Leli had had a bath and a change of clothes, after which he entertained them all, and how they all laughed, and how happy everybody was, but Leli didn’t laugh much, in fact he hardly ever laughed, his face generally wore an oddly amazed smirk…, and right above that grin were his infantile, shining eyes, amazed at the latest thing he’d discovered, or amazed at the amazement caused by the information he had just dispensed so selflessly. And when he came to a pig-killing, we always looked forward to it and waited in the pub, because Leli always brought a churn full of soup and white puddings, and always just for his friends, for us. And so one time we were waiting, but Leli didn’t make it, then someone came and said that Leli had driven into the ditch at the very edge of the forest, so we took the short cut past the spring and the tennis courts and past the pond in the woods, running to get to the spot as speedily as possible, and there we looked about us, but couldn’t see anyone, and suddenly we did, Leli had gone straight into the ditch and overturned, and we when ran up we could see Leli still in the car, so we turned the Trabant back over and soup and groats came streaming out of it, and when we opened the door some white puddings fell out, and we said: “Leli, what on earth?” And Leli started combing the groats out of his hair with a little comb, along with clotted blood and marjoram, and he said in all seriousness that it was that buggering conditioned reflex you get on the way to see friends, at the bend the churn had started to tilt and was about to topple over, but remembering that his friends were waiting, he’d tried to steady the churn, but just then his racer ran into the ditch and he’d overturned not only the churn, but the car as well. So we got round the Trabant and with a “Heave-ho!” lifted it like some toy car and deposited it back on the road, Leli and all. Leli got out and said: “You might have pretended that a Trabant’s heavier than it really is, you might!” and he started doling out the white puddings and black puddings, adding: “Sorry, but the soup’s inside the body of the car.” Then a week later Leli said: “Do you know, it was three days after and I still combed a groat out of my hair?” “Yep,” I said, Leli was a great guy and only ever thought of his pals, and in the end we all thought of him , but Leli thought more of us than we of him, we can see that today, we all have to admit that today. When spring came, we could bet on it that Leli would bring us each a basket of fresh eggs, as usual from the farmers where he bought them, he himself couldn’t stand the sight of eggs, but everything was for us, for his friends, especially for those with children. Then he’d bill us for the eggs and butter, but who else would be such a good pal as to turn his Trabant into a mobile shop? And another time we were waiting for Leli, he’d gone to get us two hundred and fifty eggs, fresh eggs for the children, but there was no sign of him, and suddenly a message came to go and extricate him from the same ditch as before, so we trotted off and it was exactly like with the churn of soup, that time round the pig-killing, Leli, before leaving the road, had braked slightly and rolled over several times before getting jammed in the ditch. We couldn’t see Leli inside the car at all, the entire Trabant being caked in egg, like the cement caked round the inside of a cement mixer truck, the kind that keeps turning to keep the liquid cement fit for purpose, and when we opened the car door, Leli was still sitting there, holding the steering-wheel and all coated in egg, the eggs having been smashed to smithereens, like when you dip a wiener schnitzel in beaten egg before breadcrumbing it…, but all Leli did was ask us to wipe his eyes, because he couldn’t see anything, which we did, and Leli said: “Remember, we learn by our mistakes, again, like that time at the pig-killing, the box with its neat stack of eggs started slipping off the other seat and instead of saying to hell with it, I meant to salvage ten or a dozen eggs for my friends, with the result that I smashed the lot…,” after which we spent all that day and the next cleaning the Trabant, finally poking stringy bits of drying yolk out of all the cracks with bits of wire, and the spring sun beat down on us, and there was such a stench from the eggs that we got out the paraffin and carbon tetrachloride and cleaned and polished everything once again, but two months later Leli said the Trabant still smelled of sulphur dioxide, like Poděbrady mineral water, so he couldn’t give anyone a lift except people in the know, ’cos strangers would automatically think he’d nearly shat himself… yep, a great guy was Leli, everything for his friends, we were always on his mind, while we were more attentive to our girlfriends, wives and children, his mind was on us. And another Leli thing: every time the fair came to Velenka or Hradišťko, he’d bring the children, from the fair, trumpets and pea-shooters and little drums, then he’d buy a whole slatted takeaway tray of cakes, and one time he was bringing them in his car and the tray threatened to shed a number of choux buns and creme rolls and make a mess of his carpet, but the main thing was that he wouldn’t be arriving with them the way we usually got them, by the trayful that he used to bring onto the patio outside the pub like a confectioner, holding it cleverly aloft and carrying it the way waiters carry a whole tray of meals, but yet again he drove into the ditch and again he got out unscathed, except that the whole tray of cakes, as the car rammed sideways into the ditch, Leli fell, just like in an American slapstick film, face and gloved hands right into the creme rolls and creme slices and choux buns, fifty fancy pastries, all cream and meringue, he fell into them face first though he never ate cakes himself, he didn’t even like them, if ever he was offered one he claimed it would make him throw up, even the sight of them made him puke… yep, a great guy Leli was, a great pal who only ever thought of his friends and their families, as if he were some kind of president…, and we never learned to appreciate it… Take this, on New Year’s Eve, Leli would always organise a New Year’s Party at the house of one or other of us, we’d have met a fortnight before at the Keeper’s Lodge, Leli in the chair, first he secretly told the waiter: “Hey, mate, six Bechers for our table, on my tab…,” and he broached every meeting in the same kind way: “Gentlemen, mates of mine, I declare this meeting of the Committee for a Dignified Farewell to the Old Year and Welcome to the New open…, right, I reckon the eats should be: pork, four kilos, for a special pork, potato, bacon and sausage bake, a large boiled ham…,” and he went on to list all the dishes, and we all agreed or suggested amendments, and finally, and this was Leli’s thing, eight litres of tripe soup, which he made himself, that was for the morning after… and in the pauses, Leli popped over to the waiter and in a whisper said: “Six double Bechers for our table, mate, on my tab…” Generous to a fault was Leli, and so once, as New Year’s Eve approached, Leli was in his long white apron with its blue and red embroidered initials on his chest, since the afternoon he’d been preparing the pork, potato, bacon and sausage bake and the lads were already drinking, and there was still a keg of beer and some bottles and suchlike, but Leli, ever the true butcher, was sipping white coffee and nibbling marble cake, as soon as everything was ready he’d also have a Becher, a ‘President in Exile’, his favourite, but only afterwards, because, as he told us in a lecture, pork, potato, bacon and sausage bake is not as simple as it might seem, he’d known a chef at the Grand Hotel in Tatranská Lomnica, the very man the President had had helicoptered all the way to Prague Castle when he needed this dish to be spot-on, “and you can be sure,” Leli concluded, “I kept a close watch on his hands, I’m very particular about making it like he did, most important’s the preparation stage…” And when the pork, potato, bacon and sausage bake started cooking on the barbecue — Leli, just like Mr Čány, couldn’t stand to have it roasted over hot coals, so we had to made a log fire outside and Leli, like Mr Čány, would take some tongs and bring hot pieces of charcoal in from the burning logs — as it was cooking, Leli undid his apron and said he was off to fetch his famous tripe soup, the one that would put anyone back on their feet the morning after and fortify them so as to be able to carry on drinking, so good was Leli’s version of tripe soup, and no one else’s was a patch on his, because Leli had his secret, just as the President had taken the secret of Becher liqueur with him into exile, and his secret was compounded by the fact that he got all his spices from the St Saviour pharmacy, hardly anyone else did, but Leli did because he was pals with the chemist and they’d talked a lot, and later Leli talked a lot to us, all about this spice we’d never even heard of. And Leli, having got in his car, suddenly remember the incidents with the churn of soup and the box of eggs and the tray of cakes, which he only ever brought specially for us, and got out again and took a moped, it would be safer by moped, and this we only learned later, he popped the short way home on the moped, donned his dinner jacket, put some bottles in his rucksack and the huge pot of tripe soup in a large bag, and to play safe he sat the bag in front of him, and so, all eager, he set off back to bring us the soup, which he would always stir, once it was ready, all the time until it went cold, because that’s how it should be, as he disclosed to us, because if it was left to its own devices, the fat and the grease would congeal on the surface and you might as well pour the whole thing away in the morning and feed it to the pigs… and as Leli, our great pal, was on the way back, driving slowly, a deer suddenly ran across the road and Leli, not so as not to hit it, but so as not to spill the soup, swerved and went into a skid on the snow, and Leli, a man who for fun could execute every conceivable fall and do tricks that had us worrying that he’d get up with a broken arm or perhaps never rise again out of the sand, he would always hop off and shake the sand off him, this time, so as not to spill the tripe soup, Leli was afraid to kick free of the moped as it grated along the ground the way he normally would because he was thinking not of himself but of the soup, and as he held on to it with both hands so it wouldn’t spill, he went spinning, and even as he caught the back of his head against a milestone he still managed to set the pot of soup down safely… With no sign of Leli, we set off to meet him halfway, and we found him, lying on his back and looking up at the stars as if he were dying, like when young Rosemayer crashed into that bridge near Darmstadt. When Bob lifted his head, his hand was all covered in blood, and Leli said: “Watch out, mind you don’t knock the soup over…,” and an hour later he died, for his pals, died rescuing his tripe soup for them, like I say, a great guy, a great pal was Leli, but who was going to entertain us now?