Ivan Klima - My Golden Trades

'Bronze!' she cried. 'I've got something bronze!' She was gripping a kitchen knife and carefully peeling away thin layers of clay.

'My word, there it is,' said Lida, kneeling beside Petra, her gaze fixed on a single place in the grave.

All I could see were several poisonous-looking greenish spots.

Petra got up, sat on one of the stones that edged the grave-site, took a cigarette out of a packet and lit it. Her fingers were trembling. 'This would happen now,' she complained, 'just as I was getting ready to call it a day.'

Lida brought over a box, then she and Petra knelt in the grave and began peeling back thin layers of clay bit by bit. 'It was Mother Earth,' sighed Petra. 'She could feel our strength and enthusiasm running out.' She cut a rectangle of clay out of the earth; a thin, greenish line was visible in it.

'What do you think it is?' whispered Masha.

The knife was very slowly scraping back the clay. The time allotted for our work was gone; the construction workers had suddenly emerged from their hiding places and were trudging along the pathway that led to the back gate.

I gathered up the tools and put them in the wheelbarrow.

The Vietnamese were now all shiny and clean; they had changed out of their overalls and into jeans. They stopped a little way off and spoke together in their impenetrable language. The larger of the two came up and looked curiously into the grave. 'Did you find something for your pleasure, madame?

Petra looked up. She hesitated for a moment, as though

wondering whether they were worthy of hearing such important news. 'A bronze,' she announced dryly.

'After all!' said the man happily. 'Congratulation.' He nodded to his mate, who approached quietly. Then, as if on command, both of them leaned over the grave in unison. Petra leaned slightly to one side and pointed to the thin, green line in the soil. The smaller Vietnamese extended his index finger and declared, in his exotic Pilsen accent: 'I have seen already. When I dig a trench, I find such thing.'

'What did you do with it?' asked Vítek.

'Had no time,' sighed the Vietnamese. 'It was too much shooting.' And then he caught himself, as though he'd revealed too much, nodded his head and hurried away to the gate, followed by his companion.

The bronze needle was almost entirely exposed now. Masha, standing beside me, was scarcely breathing. 'It's beautiful!' Then she stopped. 'I hope it's not another one of those sacrificial knives.'

The notion that not long ago people still offered human sacrifices to the gods appals us, and we feel ennobled at how distant we, as humans, are from that primitive cruelty. But when I think of the endless masses of people sacrificed in my own lifetime, not to the gods, but to the insane visions of those who put themselves in the place of those gods, it doesn't seem to me that we have any reason to feel ennobled at all.

At last Petra carefully liberated that rare object from its grave, laid it in the box and said: 'Tune in tomorrow!' Masha swept the grave-site again, and then the women went to the caravan to change. Vítek the foreman also disappeared so that he could take a quick tour of

inspection around the emptying construction site and still be able to walk Petra to the bus. Masha came up with her makeshift bicycle. 'Too bad we didn't find anything,' she said to me.

'Maybe tomorrow.' I watched as she skillfully manoeuvred her bicycle around the piles of earth. Perhaps back then, when she found her first ancient fragment, she too had heard the voice of the local spirits.

I have suggested that the voices urged us only to submit or to escape. But I know that's not how it was at all. Most probably, the voices counselled caution or moderation. The cowardly took them as an appeal to submit; the restless or impatient as an invitation to flee. But there must have been others still who understood that they were to remain, to hold out and to survive, because without them the land would remain empty and dumb. Perhaps the graves of these people will yet be found, or perhaps they were so poor that there is nothing in their graves at all. But I am certain that they lived here and remained.

I consider them my true kinsmen: by fate, by place and by choice.

It was suffocatingly hot in the caravan. I opened the window as wide as I could and then went to wash in the bathroom that had never been cleaned.

The construction site was silent. The wretched metal structures pointlessly rose out of the earth. The piles of dirt cast long shadows and blushed red in the setting sun. A short distance beyond the caravan, a huge digger reached out its long arm towards me. Girders, painted planks and sheets of plastic lay scattered everywhere on the ground.

I walked back to the caravan, sat down on the steps and watched evening descend over the piles of earth. A strange

world, where the cleanest, tidiest, most stimulating place is a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old burial ground. From somewhere in the distance I could hear a dog barking and the faint rumbling of a truck's engine.

Suddenly, from somewhere around the burial ground, I heard a sound — as though someone were pounding metal dustbin lids together. The clatter echoed with improbable force through the silent construction site. I got up from the step and cautiously walked along the empty path to the graves.

The banging continued at the same strength, and fell silent only when I reached the spot from which the graves could be seen. I climbed up on a pile of earth and scrutinized the area in front of me. There was no sign of movement anywhere. No sooner had I started back than the lids began to bang again.

Who knows what the voices of our home spirits sound like; who Would be brave enough to claim that he is capable of hearing them?

I sat down on the steps again. A mist was rising off the woods on the opposite hillside. You try to listen all your life, and all that time, you try to distinguish which of the voices you hear are essential, which resonate with your inner self and which are merely empty chatter tempting you into the universal abyss.

The metallic voice sounded for a while longer, and then gradually faded, as though it were disappearing into the depths of the earth. But I could still hear it long after it had fallen quite silent.

THE SEASON OF ballroom dancing was upon us, and crime was on the increase. I have little interest in ballroom dancing — I don't dance. A paedophile was at large in our neighbourhood, and the school had warned us to keep our children off the streets. My daughter told me that, coming back from aerobics with a younger friend, they had seen a stranger by the telephone booth on the corner who asked if they could give him two fifty-heller coins for a crown.

'So what did you do?'

'I only had one,' my daughter told me, 'but he gave me the whole crown for it anyway.'

The man asked them where they lived and where the Novaks lived. As fate would have it, the only Novák in our neighbourhood, Engineer Novák, happened to be walking by and when the girls called to him, the stranger took off. My daughter described him, but her description meant nothing to me.

Not long ago my wife's colleague, who works in a psychiatric institute, invited her to a club meeting for paedophiles. I went along. I was surprised to discover that most of the rehabilitated paedophiles looked not only utterly normal, but even rather sympathetic; they seemed

gentle and restrained. Of course, when they behave properly, my wife's colleague informed us, they are allowed to go home for the weekend.

'And they don't do anything wrong?' I asked.

'We tranquillize them before they leave,' she said, to allay my fears. 'But sometimes something goes wrong inside their heads and they don't come back on Monday. In such cases, the institute calls the police at once to avoid possible trouble. But the police have other things on their minds besides chasing after patients from the psychiatric institute, and so paedophiles, along with other escapees and as yet unexposed criminals, have the run of the city. As long as they don't actually assault anyone, no one but anxious parents gives them much thought.'