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

Now I’m sitting in the White Lion, drinking pink Gambrinus, the whole pub is pink, pink curtains, even the table-cloths are turning pink, I’m sitting in pink solitude and lapsing into pink doldrums and nihilities, the two floating zeros on the lavatory door are my pink emblem, ‘Little pink life of mine,’ I muse, ‘your once prosperous business is going bust, you must settle with all your creditors, making sure you owe nothing to the elements from whom you’ve taken everything for the book, little pink life, I’m slipping into bankruptcy and it’s beginning to dawn that with true contrition and penitence a new account can be opened at the bank of infinity and eternity, those two zeros, those two cavernous gullets of yawning nullity, the two zeros incised heraldically in the doors of all gentlemen’s toilets…’ I’m in the White Lion and finishing off my last beer, on the wall the waiters have fixed a yellow board at which they’re throwing sharp-pointed darts trimmed with gaudy flights, darts of the sharpness and weight of a pair of compasses bent back straight, each player starts with three hundred points and the first to reach zero wins. I’ve also played and, playing, have won, I was the first to have nothing left.

I paid and went out into the fresh air. From now on, dear heart, I say, you only need to open the paper and every obituary is your own death notice, every fatal accident in the crime and casualties pages is yours, every ambulance hurtling along, siren screaming from its roof, is heading your way. So for you, my dear, I tell myself, everything is somewhere else, returning to the beginnings is your way forward, dreams of beautiful girls are the interior monologue of ageing flesh, my dear, I say, through conversation you have sought the hypertexts and subtexts of all conversations, but now, instead of humour, you find an awkward silence broken by an angel’s song. You may, my dear, consider it a mercy that this night’s end will be marked by the daystar, though you well know that lights-out and reveille are blown on the same trumpet. So, my dear, your sole inheritor is a certain grave from which the sight of the night sky hauls you by the hair, a sky in which from eternity to eternity invisible hands holding two invisible knitting needles knit a dark-blue sweater adorned with visible stars… Meditating thus, I reached Palmovka. The main road rolled its paving stones out into a chequered carpet, the mauve lights of traffic islands cooed amorously and the breeze blowing off the river gave the tramlines a good polishing and the tram wires glinted like saliva trailing from the mouth of a love-crazed swain. Then in the distance a pink figure flitted beneath the lights, I caught the smell of pale beer. And there below, above the railway line, a red light glowed and a bell jingled, and the lamp floated slowly down and I, full of bitterness, asked myself, ‘Am I really a granddad, an old boy, old man?’ And as with my youth restored I raced the descending level-crossing barriers, having to bend low to run under them, so, head down, I ran onto the tracks like a true athlete breasting the tape. And at that very instant a pink mist fell across my eyes and I fell, toppled by the shock of the impact, and fireflies came swarming from my head. When the pink mist dispersed, the pink maid of honour was sitting next to me on the tracks, like me she had hurt her head, against mine. The furious lady crossing keeper ran up and dragged us off the tracks. Just then a steam engine trundled past, splattering my face with a mixture of water and oil and scalding my trousers with hot steam. The crossing keeper raised the large and the small barriers and the red light rattled happily away on the erect pole.

“Pea-brain!” the railwaywoman hollered, “where were you going in such a hurry, come on!”

“To the other side,” says I.

“And where were you rushing to, you scarecrow, where?” “I was hurrying after him,” said the pink one, and she crawled across to me on all fours, pulled out a little round mirror and held it up for me to see the blood dripping from the gash on my forehead. As the level crossing lady left, she couldn’t resist calling back out of the darkness: “You’d be better off investing in a rosary, old man!”

I was infuriated and would have given her a tongue-lashing.

But the maid of honour calmed me down: “Leave her be, Venoušek, you don’t have much time. You must try and be nice to people, or they won’t come to your funeral.”

And she took her tiny round mirror and looked at her own forehead, which was trickling with blood, and by the light of the street lamps I read, on the back of the mirror: “Savour the flavour of EGO chocolate.” Then the pink maid of honour wiped my forehead, breathed into my face and I turned away and weighed up how it was that I, the only drunk I can put up with, how it was that only now I grasped why my wife would turn away whenever I breathed beer-sodden sentences at her at night, and that if I really loved her as much as my own EGO, I’d better drink wine instead, or stop drinking altogether. And I took the little promotional mirror and my own vile breath bounced back off it at me and I felt thoroughly disgusted. And at once I kissed the maid of honour’s pink cheeks in gratitude for the discovery, but she snuggled up close and a current of affection ran through her entire body, our foreheads were all tacky with drying blood and she mouthed hotly: “Jerry, my dearest love, let me taste your saliva, go on…”

And suddenly her breath was sweet and she whispered how nice I smelled, and I whispered back how nice she smelled, and so we became each other’s pink nosegay and we kissed and tasted each other’s saliva and breath and the more we kissed, the nicer our breaths smelled and the more we created the glorious sensation of swimming in a 3000-gallon barrel of export lager, bathing in a tank of beer with the balmy smell of hops and malt.

“Marylou,” says I, “you’re beautiful.”

“I know,” says she with all the authority of an expert.

“And what else do you know, Evie?” I babbled.

“Everything, Georgie-boy,” she exhaled.

We stopped outside a building about three streets from where I lived, a gaslamp guttered, spewing vitriol onto the pavement. The black, cast-iron, Art Nouveau balcony embellishing the entire tenement was like the paper trimming round a coffin. The maid of honour handed me a key.

“Open it quietly, Frank,” she said, “daddy’s such a light sleeper, see?”

“I do see, my Marylou,” says I, but my hands were shaking.

“Wait, Freddy,” she decided, taking the key from me, she braced her knee against the door, opening it and letting out a whiff of the hallway, which bulged out at us like a flag soggy with beer. The yellow light of the gaslamp alighted on the first step. I held up the little mirror and cast an unblinking eye of reflected light on the greenish wall.

“Jack,” she said tenderly, “you can keep this mirror to remember me by, it quite suits you, do you know that?”

“I do,” said I.

“You don’t know anything,” she whispered, “this mirror was the last thing my mum looked at before she died, see?”

“I do see,” I nodded.

She closed the door, but before she trapped the reflection from the little mirror on the wall in it, I had an apparition of Charles Baudelaire at the same spot: having missed his footing on a kerbstone, he was raising a hand to grab his halo, which, as he stumbled, was heading down into the mud. And the draught from the hallway was wafted by a pinion of imbecility.