Ivan Klima - My Golden Trades

Her figure was boyish, and she had dark hair on her legs. She didn't seem like the type of woman men go crazy over, and even less did she seem the type to go crazy over men.

'I'm probably quitting my job here soon,' she announced when she came back.

'What then?'

'If I'm going to sell things, I want to get something out of it.' She frowned. 'The father sends four hundred a month for the kid, and the rest is down to me. You know how long I had to save up for this stupid skirt?' She took another piece of cake, remarking on how good it was. 'They'd take me on in the canteen at the cement plant, but I'm through with places where you have to punch a clock. They're also not going to get me working anywhere I have to be with guys. And I shouldn't be having to stand up a lot. My hip joints are a mess and sometimes they hurt so much at night I cry. But maybe I'll find something,' she said with sudden hopefulness. 'Or maybe something will happen.'

'What could happen?' I said, not understanding her remark.

'Oh, I don't know. Maybe some U.F.O.s will land, or something. Like E.T. Did you see that?'

'Yes, I did.' The film hadn't appealed to me much, but I had a faithful representation of the loveable little monster at home. Someone brought it into the country as a present for my children, not realizing that they were too old for dolls.

'I saw it nine times. When they showed it in Prague, I took time off work to go and see it even though it was always sold out. I slipped the woman taking tickets forty crowns and she let me sit on an extra chair for all the showings that day.'

'Would you like to have an E.T. at home?'

My question was so obviously foolish that she decided not to answer it. 'He was kind of — you know, like really from another world.'

'Would you like to go there?'

She sighed, frowned, and then said, 'Even if you could go somewhere like that, they wouldn't take me.'

The Attic

WE RETURNED FROM work earlier than usual today, while it was still light. The surveyor had to deal with damages incurred by the company when several of our stone markers were knocked over by tractors. Before I went into my room, I noticed that the door to the attic was ajar. I couldn't resist and went up the creaking, dusty stairs.

The attic was large and full of old junk. Everything was still except for some flies buzzing under the dormer. The beams were huge and ancient, though the tiles covering the roof seemed almost new. Old dresses were draped among the swallows' nests on the beams. In some doorless cupboards there were stacks of battered shoes, and between a mound of straw and a pile of old handbags I found some rusty stove pipes and several empty boxes and fruit crates.

Clearly nothing of value was left, but I wasn't looking for gold candlesticks. I was always more interested in printed paper — and sure enough, in one of the boxes I found a century-old book, a 'Reader for Schools of Farming and Winter Economies'. Just then I heard something creak behind me. I looked round and saw Mrs Pokorná's head emerging from the stairwell.

Aware that I had been caught trespassing, I greeted her with a guilty look. But she seemed glad to have found me. She started right in by telling me that many interesting things had once been stored up here, before people had carried them all away. The museum had even expressed an interest in the cavalry officer's uniform worn by her greatgrandfather, and her grandfather's drum had been here too, though the skin was broken. Her grandfather had served with Count Haugwitz's infantry regiment. It wasn't nearly as bad in those days: they only had tallow candles for light, of course, but on the other hand there was less lying and no stealing. When her grandfather was transferred to the cavalry, he played on a harp so big they had to transport it on a cart pulled by ponies. In 1866 he had fought in the battle near Hradec, and he had proud memories of it, even though he'd been on the losing end.

'We were occupied then, too,' she winked at me conspiratorially, 'but it was a Prussian occupation. And the Prussians,' she added at once, 'put a notice on the wall here saying they hadn't come as conquerors, and would fully respect our national rights. Sir, this building has memories. During the last war, when they shot Heydrich, the Germans pasted on our wall a list of people they'd executed. Father ordered a special shipment of black-bordered envelopes, but then they locked him up, and six months later my mother was sending them out herself with letters of condolence.

'After that, by God's will, the blows came one after the other. Our building was confiscated by our own people and they were worse than the foreigners, and on top of that there was no one to drive them out. Last thing, right over there,' and she pointed to the corner of the attic

where there was a new mansard, 'Doctor Tereba had his observatory. He didn't have a family, and he'd spend all his nights up here. Venus was his wife, he'd say, and the moon and the planets were his children. You'll understand that, sir, because I know you measure by the stars, too; that young man who drives you around explained it to me. But you just figure out where things are on the earth. Doctor Tereba, he could figure out what would happen on the earth. Even before it happened, he told us about the disaster of the communist take-over in 'forty-eight. He had his telescope right here,' she walked over to the mansard and pointed to a pile of handbags on the floor, 'when the Americans flew to the moon; I invited everyone in the building up here so we could be a little closer to such a momentous event. And would you believe it? With my own eyes I saw how a cloud of dust was raised up there on the moon when that rocket landed. That's when I realized the moon wasn't what it used to be, if people can go walking about on it. Well, Doctor Tereba's gone too, and now they want to tear the place down. I tell you, that'll be the end of me. I don't think I could survive that.' She looked at me imploringly, as though it were within my power to save the building from destruction.

As I looked into her eyes, I could suddenly see, despite the vast distance in time, a line of Hussars in snow-white greatcoats, silvered by the light of the moon. The ominous sound of drumming reached the attic, and among the drummers a lone soldier was riding on a wagon, playing a harp. But no one could hear it over the drumming, not even when the soldier plucked the strings with all his might.

The Surveyor

WE DROVE OUR Romanian car to the top of a hill outside Chrudim and stopped a short distance from the new water tower. A road led up here, made of concrete slabs laid end to end. The point we had to re-survey should have been right beside the road, but someone had moved the marker stake, along with the cement base and the warning plate saying that anyone who moved the state's triangulation point was liable to prosecution.

The surveyor studied his map for a while. We then ran the tape-measure over the ground until we found, right by the edge of one of the concrete slabs, the spot where the triangulation point was supposed to be. I fetched the probe, a long iron bar with a point at one end, and for a few minutes we stabbed it into the earth without result. I expressed doubts that the mark-stone could have survived all the changes that had obviously taken place. The bulldozer, after all, would have hollowed out a roadbed wider than the concrete slabs. The stone must have been dug up.

'But then where is it?' the surveyor asked. 'They could have dug it up and then covered it with fill,' he admitted, 'but maybe they raised the level of the terrain when they

made the road. In that case, the stone would have remained in its proper spot, but buried even deeper.' He took the pick and began to dig. The earth I shovelled out of the hole — mainly gravel — was obviously fill. I couldn't imagine finding our stone underneath it, but the surveyor worked tirelessly and, as though aware of the folly of his effort, refused to let me dissuade him. When the trench he'd dug was deep enough to accommodate a kneeling sniper, he took the iron probe again and rammed it repeatedly into the ground right up to the grip. He struck nothing. 'It's always possible,' he said, 'that we've measured the distances imprecisely, or that some inaccuracies crept into the map we inherited. We ought to measure the position of the point again.'