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

I gaze at your lovely figure and and there is no need to call upon the imagination in order to trace a return to the beginnings, your morning attire is of a fine, oyster-coloured linen and you are a voucher for a peat spa, your blue eye stares at me with a lacteal tinkle, with a stiff forefinger you part the yellow branches of a weeping willow and you are fully aware that you can expect from me all the very worst.

At the finish emotive flashes of lightning and a golden one-0-eight open the way to a sewer, a sorry weekend in the life I’m now starting to live.

The clothes I dream of are woven from the laughter of Siberian cellulose, eight hundred girls’ green hands are the foundation of a sweet confession, contours of laughter solidify in a mask of politeness and the mini-crisps of your tiny porcelain ears are perfectly concealed in the eavesdropping thickets of your fine peroxide-infused hair.

The hands of timed things and events wind counter to the flow of clock hands back to zero hour, though a single day spent with a girl you love on a Norwegian glacier is the stock exchange of love of all good people. The friendship of a woman is pain for two, yesterday the foxes moved away and rewarded a brass band by clapping.

How I’d like to summon up the strength to rip off your face, with a single yank, how I’d like to lay bear all your thoughts with a single thwack, with a single brutal yank, like whipping off a bra, like whipping off undies!

Along a belt of pathways I return to the beginning of going, the revealing magnificence of animal experience wants thirsty cities to have lidos filled with children. Your forget-me-not eye, damaged by a fragment of Modra majolica, now understands my cool gaze, it is right that you watch the knife of my imagination carving its way back to the sources of things.

The last brook is sucked into a stream down to its last drop, the last river into the sea and the ocean evaporates up into the azure sky down to its last little bright cloud.

I can see you watching with me that rising fall, I can see that not one stage in this striptease has escaped you. I’m apparently pursuing the memory of your white silk, gold-embroidered dress, the sleeve furnished at the wrist with little slits for my desire, two hollow folds of cream-yellow cashmire, but I watch all the more closely as a pure spring and divine Ago go forward to meet the Spring, and you smile at me seeing me scoop up whole handfuls of creative clay, and I, sniffing the earth, am also sniffing you.

Thus enriched with a bowl of curly cuttings, I sip the hope of an hourglass and for a healthy diet I prefer sorrow, a bit of copper wire found near a petrol station links me to eternity, the cage-rearing of lake trout is my disrupted honeymoon.

Now I’m sitting on the bottom of a little inn at Krč, the window panes are the walls of a great aquarium, you are floating in slow motion up by the ceiling, like a bee that has fallen into the honeycomb of my brain, fluttering curtains are an incessant process of hope and my destiny’s dues are stored in a freezer.

The last flame of evening in the colour of orange tulips licks at the last beams and rafters, but I prefer to read in the papers about lions gnawing an upright piano for twelve minutes and how the lion cubs captivated some sports journalists, how via the swing-doors of coffin lids people are sucked through static architraves of clay into the earth, but the aura of humanity is best honoured by a striking picture and the future of mankind is a bookshop.

Meanwhile inside my brain I can hear the rustling of your sweet limbs, your skin is embellished with delicate crevices, you are buoyed up by contours of cigarette smoke, you rise upwards like bubbles in soda water, trees and flowers describe circles, an apple falls from an apple tree with an apple already in its core, the last ruins of evening slide silently into the soft dust, though for now I enjoy the extremes and eccentricities of the textual songs of newspaper poetry. And for now this is your youthful bodice and this is your skirt drawn into delicate bulges at the waist and this is your ivory-coloured silk robe and it is in Empire style and this is a girls confirmation outfit kept as a memento and this is your back dappled with beer mats and this is your unloosed hair and musical staves stream from your head. I see you floating naked now beneath the dark-brown beams, I see your arms moving in rhythm lit fiercely by the spatter from a yellow chandelier, I see hot springs spurt from your beating feet, droplets rise from all the pores of your body, you’re immersed in a phosphorescent bath and streams of seltzer gush from your flickering ankles, fizzing fins, carbonated pinions, the little wings of flying fish, the flights attached to the ankles of the handsome young god Mercury.

The full moon glints in the first print of Armstrong’s sole, but I’m more deeply affected by the item in the evening paper about the sixty-eight-year-old picker of medicinal herbs who dozed off in a flower-filled meadow and was sucked in by a harvester and whose corpse tumbled out with her herbs and the hay beyond recognition. The stellar minibus stands in the same place all the time, but this is your little dress for cycling in and this costume of dark cheviot has a velvet rosette in the middle, but for now I envy the air for the way you slip through it as toilet soap slips through the hand, I’m envious that your face is anointed with fresh tears of royal jelly, I envy your glass-paper coating and how men’s gazes are easily struck on you like mercurial matchsticks, I’m envious of the squadrons of sperm and little angels who are your constant retinue, I envy myself for envying, because human desire can surmount all, desire explosive as a child’s unhappiness. Your trunk is atilt and from your mouth a broken necklace of breath-freshening pastilles comes fizzing, you sparkle about the saloon like a huge lime-wood spill.

Life is a process of removing impurity, mercy and fortuity and necessity are the chubby triplets of a miracle, but girls’ football boots are words of Maytime, little boots but one size smaller than a spaceship. Shards of shattered dolls have wounded my soul, a caterpillar crawling in close proximity to my eye is bigger than an express train in the far distance.

A peasant in the mountains of Moravia, having failed to get a job some years back, took it out on a statue of Jesus with his belt.

I see my life being sucked into my mother’s womb, I see how, by an umbilical cord, I am being wound right back into the belly of our progenitrix Eve. I see that soiled underpants are an imprint of the infinite and intestines churned up by noble dread lead to a higher vision. I see my seed being sucked upstream like a mountain trout back to my first wet dream, I see me injaculated into the sperm duct of our progenitor Adam through the reproductive system of all my ancestors. By my sense of touch I experience resection of the rib that I’ve been missing right down to the present.

My every pore is in a state of high alert and the visible world is stored in a fine sheet, beyond the table-cloth of this landscape lies a life-giving void and I can never reach the cusps of the crossed swords of contradictions, I can never untie the tips of the four corners of the earth.

It’s lovely to hear that jangling of panes of glass and see you thrusting through to the far side of things. Now you’re flying quite low over a meadow like a swallow before a storm, Siberian irises in bloom scrawl purple flashes across your breast, you’ve just paused and hang transfixed in the air like a mermaid over the counter of old chemists’ shops, now you’ve sailed into the scent of an olive tree in bloom, knowing how much we like to pick flowering sprigs of olive and interline our shirts and bodices with them in our chests of drawers, all the smells of an alluvial forest are postcards from you, a sand dune beyond the translucent heat is the colour of your grainy thighs and hips, a meadow of flowering ox-eye daisies emits the inaudible sound of your unblinking eyelashes.