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

Ever after, I did my best to give the white felt hat a wide berth… But there was no preventing the remarkable encounters when, out of the blue, the white hat would come sailing by, out of the blue I saw Ionic Man ambling zigzag down the road, coming the other way a cyclist, a fat woman pounding the pedals so hard she risked snapping them off, just like, if she had a mind to, she might have lifted the handlebars with her mighty arms and sailed off up into the air, and coming towards her defenceless Ionic Man dodged to the right, then to the left, and finally the cyclist ran him down, leaving a gouge in his belly from her right brake lever, but she rode on as if nothing had happened, while Ionic Man lay in the road, his white felt hat lying there next to him, and he sat up and first tenderly dusted off his hat with his elbow, then he put it on and said: “It’s nothing, it’s nothing, though I were just thinkin’ o’ you an’ your funeral, I have to keep thinkin’ about your funeral ’cos I follow the crime an’ casualties pages every day, all stories about you, though under different names…” And I drove home in consternation, looking in the mirror and wondering where from my portrait Ionic Man had got the certain knowledge that I was a casualty in the making. Another time Ionic Man came to invite me to a pig-killing, and took me straight there with him, he put a rope round the pig’s bottom jaw and as he led it out to the place of execution, he jerked the rope and the pig moaned and squeaked with pain, but Ionic Man laughed and said: “Hear that? He’s also scared…,” then came the murder followed by the insipid smell of the disgusting innards and then soups and goulashes and alcohol, and by the middle of the proceedings Ionic Man was so drunk that he fell into a tub filled with diced lard, knocked the stove-pipe out of the wall and shunted the stove, and his wife screamed, at me as well, and grabbing a broom handle she laid about first him, then me, but I lacked the fibre to part company with the white hat, which terrified me, but drew me ever to it. Whenever I entered the inn, there in the corner behind the massive stove, there sat, in the smoke, the white felt hat, Ionic Man so tanned that he merged into the half-light of the nook, and when he rose, the white hat rose and the white newspaper, and Ionic Man read out to me the whole crime and calamities page, which he’d read himself ten times already. Once, I was returning late from the inn, where Ionic Man hadn’t been, and so I was pedalling happily past the cemetery wall, the white hat was floating above the wall, moving slowly the length of the wall with its dense mat of houseleek, the white hat shaded out now and again by black crosses. I hopped off my bike and heard Ionic Man’s voice, his solemn voice… “Dear friends, how sad it is when we must surrender to the earth that which sprang from the earth! Yeah, the days I have weighed in the palms of my hands!… No, better if I say ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity’, we’re here today to bury a man who has left his mark on Czech literature in letters of gold, but weep ye not, for this is a man who has gone before us, and if there is no resurrection, we weep in vain…” And I was visited with sadness and sorrow and I shivered, and that shiver proceeded from somewhere in the nails of my toes, a shivering and shaking that ended at the tips of the nails of my fingers, and I walked on as the white hat walked on the length of the wall, while Ionic Man’s voice declaimed again and anew his funeral oration over my open grave, and I walked along, still living, past the cemetery wall. And so I gained the cemetery gate which you could see through and one half of which now gusted open, leaving just the gateway with its spiked finials and cast-iron openwork. And before me stood Ionic Man and his white hat shone in the dark and as an extra his little dog was padding about next to his feet, and the little dog’s ear was bandaged with a white rag and Ionic Man’s nose was bandaged with a white rag, the white fabric, the white calico, enhancing the mournfulness of the graveyard, where the hazy lights of the lamps on the graves cast a sombre glow on the shiny ribbons of withered wreathes. “Glad to see you!” Ionic Man cried, “I’m glad you’re here,” his white hat tottered as did his nose, which seemed bound round with a white tie, “I were just rehearsin’ my funeral oration, which, even though I’ve broken my nose, I could deliver tomorrow, do you want to hear it?” I says: “No way, Mr Ionic, I don’t, I heard it across the wall, a minute back, but for God’s sake, what happened to your nose?” He brushed that aside and sat down on a gravestone, the little dog hopped onto his lap and he began to stroke it, and the white calico bound round the dog’s head, the white rag, merged with the calico of Ionic Man’s nose. “We were playing a game,” said Ionic Man, “an’ Muffy bit me on the nose without warning then dived under the bed, so what was I supposed to do? I dived after him an’ bit him on the ear in exchange, an’ now we’re both ailin’, eh, Muffy, aren’t we?” he said, caressing the little dog, but then he stood up and got carried away with what he said next: “You see, I haven’t been able to sleep for days, so I come to the cemetery instead, to get closer to everything, an’ so as to think everything through on the spot… what I’d like best for your funeral is to convene a county-wide trainin’ exercise for all seventy fire brigades at once. One brigade, that’s nowhere near enough for you, you deserve seventy brigades at your funeral. There are so many pipes and elbow joins for the water-distribution system in the fields of the cooperative farm — for waterin’ early vegetables — that if they were all joined together for the day, the procession could leave the New Inn with your coffin and come all the way through the village to the cemetery, an’ if the fire brigades set up their hoses within a formation of crossed fire ladders, the cortège could pass through an undiluted paradise of crossed water jets gushin’ from the extended ladders, at the top of each ladder there’d be a fireman with his own hose nozzle an’ down below there’d be six firemen with axes, which they would raise in a final salute, but the high point would be at the cemetery, but I haven’t quite got that worked out yet, but you’re a man with imagination, so how about this, what if, to round off your funeral, we had fire pumps in every corner, an’ what d’you think, might it work, suppose we held your coffin up over the grave an’ trained the hoses on it from underneath an’ had them lift you up as high as each hose could make it, what do you think, would the jets hold you up, I’m thinkin’ ping-pong ball, like when one’s cast up and held up high by that vertical jet of water in the château grounds at Lysá, what d’you reckon, would those jets, ten of ’em, hold your coffin up? And then, at a signal from the chief fire officer of all the chief fire officers of all the brigades, your coffin would float slowly down as the through-flow of the fire hoses slowed, what d’you think, wouldn’t it be wonderful, sort of bless the region with your coffin an’ at the same time carry out a region-wide exercise for seventy fire brigades?” Ionic Man stood there pointing, and I saw it all in the dark and half-light, I saw it all clearly and suddenly I knew that Ionic Man should have been a writer, that Ionic Man was a writer, except that Ionic Man didn’t write, though he did see things perfectly well, but that only now, here at the cemetery was I seeing that I should have thought the same thoughts as Ionic Man, I should have thought like that and from that moment on I would think in terms of the crime and casualties pages, like monks… oh dear, that doorstep Ionic Man had brought me, yes, it would have been none other than a step from the destroyed and defunct monastery in Sadská, any house of Augustinians would bring one step from Rome with them, and this will have been the step mounted by scribacious monks, who wrote and gilded beautiful codexes in response to the crime and calamities pages, those memento mori… Chirpily and gleefully I said: “Mr Ionic, give me your hand, you’ve opened my eyes, my inner eyes, that white hat of yours has taught me to see, only now can I see things I haven’t been seeing, but that you have seen…” And Ionic Man stood there and he had a radiant glow — how could I have missed it before? — his hat, it wasn’t the kind that cowboys wear, but a halo in the form of a hat, a circlet floating over a man whose powers were akin to those of the Holy Spirit… the very essence of being.