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

All spring and early summer I avoided Fascination avenue, but one day I suddenly missed Mr Methie, it had taken six months for all those bargain buys and super purchases to evaporate from my brain, so I turned into the avenue, not that I actually meant to, but like when a bucket is hauled by winch or chain from a well I was all wound round with the sweet threads of the violin playing into the whispering foliage that mercifully shrouded all the workshops and woodsheds and lean-tos, so I followed the melody that was neither Die Mühle im Schwarzwald , nor that typical intermezzo Silver Fern , but Fascination as it trickled through the leaves like water through one’s fingers or a drop net. And I stood at the gate and was struck once more by Mr Methie, who was standing, legs apart, in front of some instrument on three legs, and the instrument had its legs apart at exactly the same angle as Mr Methie and Mr Methie had one eye stuck in the instrument, watching a red-and-white stick, now, smiling, he took a few steps, moved the stick a bit further away and once more gazed with enormous delight through the theodolite, that instrument that he’d bought for a song along with a box of lenses, lenses to last to the end of time, and so to the end of the life, or the beginning of the death, of Mr Methie, who so desired to be called Mike. And again the strains of Fascination wafted from the gramophone and I heard a groan from the plot next door, the groan of a man injured not physically, but in his soul, an honest-to-goodness Slav cry of pain of one tormented by fate, though Mr Methie misinterpreted the lament of his neighbour, who was doubtless hearing Fascination for the thousandth time… Mr Methie pottered through the undergrowth to the overgrown fence and called into the leafage: “What is it? It’s Fascination ! Played by Helmuth Zacharias himself!” And as he made his way back, I quickly pretended to be tying my shoelace so that Mr Methie wouldn’t see me, but he came affably towards me, and a little dog trotted up as well, and Mr Methie handed me his red pole and I carried it hither and thither because Mr Methie had taken it into his head to survey his entire plot in the forest, and as he did so, he explained enthusiastically about the slaughterhouse gun he’d just invented for killing twenty-four pigs at once, and the endless fishpond as a perpetuum mobile that meant that all the families on nearby plots could keep carp in the same water that kept circulating round and round, and as he told me all this, Mr Methie started to sing as well, cleared his throat and started singing, and then he explained the one thing I was afraid of: “I’ve borrowed a tape recorder and so as not to be idle of an evening, I sing, anything that enters my head, you can hear me, the very things I’m saying now I’m singing, what do you reckon, isn’t it a glorious thing?” And he sang and walked about the wood, fingering some flimsy little stems… “See, I’ve got a total of a hundred service trees planted here, in five years they’ll give me a yield of five thousand crowns a year… And you’re wondering what service trees these are — they’re not, they’re black currant, and they’ll yield another five thousand in five years…” I said: “But they shouldn’t get dripped on from above, and you’ve got them all under a canopy of pine trees.” And Mr Methie sang: “You want to offer advice to me, me, a professional planner? It’s all going to be lit with ultraviolet light rays to replace the sun, the sun…” “All right,” I said, “but what are you hoping to achieve with this theodolite? Mr Methie gave a wave of the hand and put on the second half of Fascination , the violin section played by Helmuth Zacharias himself, and again it was as if he’d jabbed the needle into the brain of someone hidden behind the dense hedge, because as soon as the gramophone began to play, someone somewhere in the dense foliage groaned and squawked as if the gramophone needle were gouging a deep groove in his brain. Mr Methie took me by the shoulder and his eyes spouted a golden spray of rapture. He pointed to the area of five by five metres that he’d marked out with the theodolite and sang: “This is a dance-floor in the making… lanterns… subdued music… evening… can you hear it? Helmuth Zacharias!” I said: “Do you like dancing, Mr Mike?” And Mr Methie shook his head: “I’ve never danced, thing is, I’m creating this dance floor so as to prove to myself that I can do something, I’ve got this constant urge to create something of beauty, and can’t you just see it? And at the same time, watch, I send this ball through this pipe, teaching the dog to run this way and that along the pipe, I keep on training him because, if I keep myself in training, why shouldn’t I train a little stray dog? But that Zacharias fellow, he breaks my heart…,” he said with a little more gravity, then he crossed the few paces to the theodolite and looked into it theatrically, I could see the instrument had no lenses, but Mr Methie tightened the screws as if the lenses were in place, and I, as requested, went pointlessly through the trees with a beautiful red pole, which I placed wherever Mr Methie indicated with the palm of his hand, several times over I had to move it there and back, one step this way, one step that, before he was satisfied and jotted something down in his notebook with such enormous pride and beaming yet again like the sun appearing from behind some surprised clouds… And on his feet he had two left boots, the same kind he’d given me in the winter, but I couldn’t wear them, not because I didn’t want to, I did try, but because I look at the ground as I walk along and the boots made not only my left leg veer left but my right leg as well, and I began to find walking hard and I started falling over and crashing my legs into each other and tripping myself up. But Mr Methie wore them magnificently, as he did that bee-covered gold waistcoat with no buttons or button-holes, and for a belt he had a kind of gold cord, like the rope they pull in church before the start of mass. I went on holding the red pole, the ranging rod, and suddenly I realised that Mr Mike Methie was in reality a poor wretch who wished not to have to contemplate the pointlessness of not only his own life but of all life, and so like the summer leaves that mercifully conceal the little houses and sheds and confusion on the plot in the wood, Mr Methie used each and every bargain to conceal any view of himself, any glimpse of his own self, a sight that scares and horrifies each and every one of us. But that’s probably as it should be… Mr Methie! Mr Mike, do you think I’m any better off?

THERE’S NO SHORTAGE of stray dogs hereabouts, dogs that have been chucked out of cars and now sit around by the filling station or at the lay-by in the forest, inspecting every driver who stops to see if it isn’t the master of one of them. But the belovèd masters of belovèd doggies don’t stop in the hope of being reunited with their loyal little mutts; more likely it’s to chuck out another little dog and make a quick getaway, which is why there is no shortage of dogs in our forest. You can see it on the main road as well, because dogs know they must wait for their masters at the point where they were left, much like when one goes to buy milk or bread or the paper, hitches him loosely to the door-handle and is back out in no time. Doggies who wait like that are calm at first, but then they start trying to spy if their master is coming, looking into the shop through the window. And so even in town it can happen that there’s an Alsatian tied to a railing, all morning and all afternoon he’s there, watching the door of the grocer’s shop for his master to come out. And any dog like that pads up and down and waits for his master to appear and for them to be both back home, where in quieter hours they can celebrate the latest instalment of the mystical fusion of master and dog. The main road runs live with dogs, and when lights are ablaze and headlights dazzle as the cars slow down, the dogs come running, each thinking they are the eyes of his master, but the tyres of lorries are merciless and can steamroller a dog out flat as a rug, a bed-side mat, so by the time you’ve travelled from here to Prague you’ll have met, say, ten, sometimes twenty dogs squished into two-dimensional figures from which any driver can tell what breeds the faithful unfortunates had been. One such dog, probably he was used to sleeping on straw at home, bedded down in our cowshed, and whenever the dairymaids came in to feed the cows, he thought it was his master, his lord and master, but seeing that it was strangers, he would growl and stand guard over the straw he probably slept on. And so I, being the officer on duty, was informed that there was a suspicious dog on the straw in the cowshed, so I went along and I shot it with my service pistol. When I took aim, he got up on his hind legs and begged me with his front paws not to shoot him, to let him live, because he had to go and find his master, his lord and master. Two shots and he fell and then they took him away to be skinned, because in our village roast dog is a delicacy, and, when all’s said and done, it’s right: if a dog has no master, it’s more humane to turn him into a roast dinner, just like a gang of men working on the motorway who’ll adopt any stray dog, take a whole gaggle of them along to the shops or the pub, treating them nicely, giving them their lunchtime leftovers, or buying a whole crate of milk for them — not that they’re particularly fond of dogs, but a dog that’s well-nourished tastes better, and with plenty of lovely milk in its diet the meat is more tender. So every week, they kill one dog, painlessly, by pushing a piece of pipe up its muzzle, skin it and roast it. Sometimes it could be two a week, but no one can hold that against them, for who other should be despatched with a pipe up the muzzle and stripped of his skin but the dog’s master who chucked him out of the car. But anyway. As I shot that dog in the straw, one of the cows, a heifer, took fright, she was a real beauty from as far away as Mecklenburg or somewhere, and she broke loose and flew right at me, because I was stood in the doorway with my pistol. I barely dodged her as she flew past me like a bull past a toreador, and I felt her hairs brush against my uniform and the medals I wear on my chest, and with her tail held high and terror in her eyes, the Mecklenburg cow jumped the fence round the cowshed and disappeared into the forest. I gave orders for the animal’s keepers to go in search of her, but you’d never find a cow in Kersko forest, never in a month of Sundays! Like looking for a needle in a haystack! A month later she was spotted by some mushroom-pickers, but the minute she saw a human, such was the fear I’d put in her with my smoking service pistol, that she high-tailed it into a covert and kept running like crazy. So in our woods, besides all the stray dogs, we also had a roaming cow, a feral Mecklenburg heifer, a beast weighing in at half a ton. So I thinks to myself, we go on a hunt every autumn, so… I’ll call the hunters together, because I’m one too, a fully paid-up member of the hunt, and we’ll shoot the cow, having tracked it down first, because a feral cow might start attacking people and man is the measure of all things, not only notionally, but also for real, and doubly so in our own time, when all other comrades and I, we guard the substance of socialism against the foe, even if that foe turns out to be a feral cow. So that Saturday, we turned up on a collectivised tractor, from the collective farm the cow had escaped from, spread out in a long line and proceeded forward until we ran the feral Mecklenburg heifer to earth. This suited us very nicely, just the thing for true huntsmen, hunting a huge beast as heavy as two stags, a heavy heifer weighing as much as ten roebucks or seven moufflons, no meek barn cow, but an honest-to-goodness feral cow, like when on an earlier occasion we’d shot just as heavy an elk that had wandered across from Poland somewhere, it had attacked three different cars on the main road, lifting them up with those massive antlers like the hopper of the kind of digger they use for making roadside ditches, levering up three cars and lifting them off the ground, he was only slightly injured and he tossed the three cars, while they were moving, into the ditch like they were just toys. So, the feral cow made to turn and was going to attack us likewise, but then she thought better of it and ran out of the trees into a grassy clearing, but striding out to face her went Kurel with his hunting rifle, an outstanding marksman, with a limp, but I could rely on him — if the heifer came within range, even if the cow went on the attack, he’d fell it. We were followed along by a tractor as our war wagon, so if anything happened we could leap onto it like Hussites in the Middle Ages, whose latter-day heirs and very embodiment we were, so we formed a circle round the cow, she snorted and stamped her hoof, almost kneeled down to select who to attack, then went for old Kurel, who must have hit her with a single shot, but she charged off, only stopping on the ploughland, where she stood, legs apart and head down ready to attack, and old Kurel hobbled after her while me and the other huntsmen thought it wiser to hop onto the flatbed trailer behind the tractor and rush to Kurel’s aid with our war wagon, he took a shot at the feral cow from fifty metres, but she remained standing, and we of the tractor crew circled the cow at a distance, each of us firing off a death-dealing bullet at her bovine heart, but she remained standing, staring wide-eyed ahead of her, we were seized with terror as our ammunition almost ran out, and I even took a pot-shot with my service pistol, but the cow remained standing and staring ahead, and we didn’t know who she was going to attack. Then I got out my walkie-talkie to summon the fire brigade and their beautiful red truck so they could despatch the feral cow with their water cannon, when out of the trees came this pretty girl, walking along so prettily on her beautiful legs, and she came towards us, heading right for the cow, and we shouted at her and I ordered her as police commandant to stop and turn back because the cow was feral and could trample anyone to death, yet the ingenuous girl kept getting ever closer and we roared ourselves hoarse and rode round on the tractor and trailer with our hunting rifles raised ready to fire if the cow did attack the girl so we could bring it finally to its knees with a concerted burst of fire. But the girl went right up to the cow, raised her hands and pushed it in the side and the cow rolled over like a statue, her legs stiff, she fell on her side but with her eyes still wide open, so we hopped off the tractor and the girl turned our way, and as we got closer she took the cow by its wrist, lay against its flank and said: “This cow’s been dead for half an hour, terrified to death, this, gentlemen, is what they call rigor mortis, a muscular spasm after death, you needn’t be afraid of her.” I said: “What do you mean, who’s afraid? We knew that, didn’t we, comrades…” Then we had ourselves photographed, each with one hunting boot on the feral cow, a group photo because I was minded to see news of the event in Svoboda or the Nymburk Gazette , with a photo. Then I said: “And what are you doing here, young lady? Where’s your ID?” And she handed me her citizen’s ID card, I read how young she was, then moved straight on to ‘employment’ to check she wasn’t a social parasite, living as a vagrant or prostitute, but she was a teacher. She said: “It’s so beautiful here, who’d have thought how lovely it is in such a flat area?” And I said: “Officially speaking, that’s a different matter. But what are you, a teacher from Prague, doing here?” She said: “Do you mean to say you gentlemen don’t know that Mozart played the organ in that little church over at Sadská?” I said: “We know that, and that he played the organ, but we prefer brass bands…” And she said: “And do you know that in that village over there, Hradišťko, two head teachers used to live who were friends of Mozart’s? And that, at Mozart’s request, one of those headmasters gave him several songs that he then used in Don Giovanni ?” I said: “And did the teacher have an export license?” And the girl said: “You didn’t need a license in those days, the export of art objects wasn’t against the law back then, they didn’t see it as ideological sabotage. Gentlemen, I’m glad you saved my life from this feral cow. I’m glad to have met you, gentlemen, and now I must head for the ferry, otherwise for one thing I might miss my train and for another, the ferryman told me he stopped ferrying at five, he was off to play cards, something I like too, not just canasta, but poker even, and it was poker, the game, that led me to believe that this feral cow, even from a distance, as I approached, had been dead for half an hour…,” she said and set off, and we looked at her beautiful legs and her undulating walk, she walked the way young girls walk, and it delighted us no less than having felled that feral Mecklenburg cow and thus saved our forest and village from devastation just as, the year before, risking our own lives, we had overcome a sorry, massive elk that had wandered across from Poland, all the way to our forest. “Dammit, that’s no human, she’s not a living being, I reckon she’s got no body, I bet she’s a fairy,” old Kurel, my good old marksman friend, started yelling. I said: “She couldn’t have been a fairy, Kurel,” I said, because fairies don’t carry, and are not entitled to carry, a citizen’s ID card. See!” And old Kurel hobbled off with his rifle after the girl as she receded into the distance, shouting as he ran: “If she’s not a fairy, she must be a wood nymph!” And he took aim and fired, then again, the rifle making his shoulder jerk, we could see a target on the girl’s receding back and old Kurel, not that he missed her, he hit her, because old Kurel was never off target, but I was afraid to write a report on it because that beautiful girl walked on and looked back and waved to us with her hankie… so, as you can see, in our neck of the woods all manner of things can cause people, driving along the tree-lined stretch of the main road, to dump dogs on it, all manner of things can happen when I, in a good cause, shoot a dog in a cowshed and a priceless Mecklenburg cow breaks loose and goes mad, like the one lying here with its legs in the air, with the result that the return on thirty thousand crowns is animal flesh for the rendering plant or the zoo. So: do not cast dogs from your cars!