Ivan Klima - My Golden Trades

The last old lady finally came out of the store and I went in.

'Your friend said you were all done,' the girl said.

'We are.'

'I haven't had a minute to sit down today,' she complained. 'There's been a constant stream of customers all morning.'

'I'm surprised you're still here,' I said. 'They're taking apart the roof over your head.'

'No one told me anything about it,' she said, shrugging.

'We're all packed,' I said. 'And I'd like to leave something for you.'

'Me?' She took the parcel from me. 'Can I look?'

I unwrapped the figure.

'No!' she shouted. 'No!'

'It's a souvenir.'

'No, it's impossible. I mean, why would you give this to me? You can't be serious — giving it to me just like that. Jesus, he's beautiful, he's real! It's him!'

Two young girls and a Vietnamese man with a suitcase came into the store, but she didn't even notice them. 'It must have been terribly expensive. And I — what could I give you for it?'

She began to rummage frantically in one of the drawers, and I. took the opportunity to wish her good health, then left the store.

Even in that brief time, the hole in the roof had grown. The surveyor was walking back from the National Committee building, looking extremely pleased. They'd given him permission to take away the stove, and all we had to do was put the old stove outside the door in its place. 'They also want us to put flags out for the twenty-

eighth of October,' he announced. 'But to hell with that, we're leaving anyway. Do you think the two of us can carry the stove down by ourselves?'

I doubted it. Fortunately, the roofers were in the building. They'd certainly help us. So while the surveyor went up to bargain with them, I unfurled both the flags, something I'd never done in the two months I'd shared my room with them. I was excited by the idea. They were almost brand new; only their edges were covered in cement dust. I rolled them up again and carried them down to the main entrance. Then I brought a ladder from the shed and put the flags in the rusty holders affixed, for that purpose, on either side of the door. Once again, I felt I had chosen the right place and the right time.

We still had to return the things we'd borrowed. The surveyor insisted that even the chair without a back belonged over the road. The last thing we did was take our borrowed beds back to the château.

I waited in the same corridor I'd waited in the first day, while the surveyor went to the office to get the formalities over with. Now, as then, I leaned against the parapet. The roses in the flowerbed had flowered, then faded, and only a few dried blooms remained on the bushes. The lawn was hidden under fallen leaves. The courtyard was full of shadows, but on a bench by the wall several old women were still trying to capture some of the sun's warmth, while in front of them a tall old man with thick, completely white hair was sketching something in the sand. I could make out circles and ellipses, and it suddenly occurred to me that the old man was telling the women's fortunes. Was he trying to tell them about the future that seems mysterious until the very last minute, or was he revealing the future that

stretches beyond that last minute?

One of the women seemed familiar and indeed when I looked around I saw, sitting on a low stone wall, the cage with a canary inside.

My first impulse was to go down and say goodbye to Mrs Pokorná and her memories, but then I thought she might not approve, might perhaps feel ashamed at having abandoned her ancient family seat after swearing to remain to the end. And anyway, all the old women suddenly got up and started walking away, the white-haired seer rubbed out his circles with a foot shod in a checkered slipper and, by the time another old man, whose angular head I already knew well, arrived, they had all vanished.

My acquaintance came right up to the vacated bench and, examining the ground intently, he tried to discern meaning among what was left of the diagram. Finding nothing that might offer understanding, he continued in his wandering. When he came within earshot of me, he called out, 'I've already found out who you are. It's all right.' Then he frowned and said bitterly, 'Did you see them, comrade? That's how they treat a person here. Is this what we've worked so hard to achieve?'

Yes, that's what we've worked so hard to achieve. And we, who with all our strength have worked to achieve it, should not be scandalized. My dear sir, you see that I'm not placing myself above you, but I agree with your prodigal son. We should complain less and repent more.

We carried the beds into the store-room and returned to our quarters. With the help of the two roofers, we carried out the new stove and put it in the back of the car. Then we gradually filled the rest of the car up with all the surveying gear: the theodolite and the broom, the tapes and

measuring chains and the buckets, the bags of unused coal and the brushes, the shovels, the briefcase full of forms, the axes, the machete and the half-empty cans of paint.

The surveyor and I said goodbye. I asked him to give my regards to his wife and wished them both a healthy daughter. Then, as I had done every day, I opened the iron gate, and the surveyor drove out. I followed in my car. Then I stopped and got out to close the gates for the last time. I looked up at the two flags snapping above the entrance in the autumn wind, and then a little higher to where the roof used to be, where I caught a glimpse of the roofers.

I got into my car again; the shop girl ran out of the stationery store with the doll in her arms to wave goodbye.

I drove off, but looked around a last time. The girl was still standing there, squeezing the ugly little rubber extraterrestrial in one arm, and in her other hand she waved a coloured handkerchief, as if I too were some extraterrestrial departing her desolate planet for ever.

THE TITLE OF this book, My Golden Trades, is meant somewhat ironically. There is a proverb in Czech that runs: 'A trade is a handful of gold,' suggesting that a skilled craftsman will never be poor. But there are other proverbs as well: 'For him with nine trades, the tenth is poverty,' meaning that if you never learn any trade properly, you'll never get rich.

The hero of my book, mostly involuntarily, tries his hand at a number of jobs, none of which he is really suited for. There is no gold in any of them, unless you count the unexpected gains experience brings. The book is autobiographical to the extent that I actually did most of the jobs mentioned in the stories. I took part in archaeological digs, I worked as a messenger and as a surveyor's assistant. I smuggled books and manuscripts. I even drove a train without derailing it (although, as readers who have driven a locomotive can attest, it's hard to have a head-on collision on the railway!).

Nevertheless, these experiences only provided the impulse or the occasion for me to say something I felt I had to say. Surveying, for example, is interesting work, but in and of itself, no job can ever be the subject for a story.

However, as an unskilled surveyor's assistant I got into places I would not normally have seen. I visited the Semtex factory where plastic explosives are manufactured. I saw the country from many church steeples, walked into the middle of vast fields and orchards, climbed at night to the top of lonely, terrifying hilltops and touched the earth countless times. I saw that the earth was suffering, and I decided to write something about it. And so 'The Surveyor's Story' came into being.

I am often asked these days what Czechoslovak writers will write now that the revolution is over. I usually reply that such questions are based on the false assumption that writers, especially banned writers, wrote mainly about repression, the secret police, prison and the cruel and bizarre practices of the communist regime. Not at all: they wrote mostly about the same things as writers everywhere, the only difference being, perhaps, that life sometimes put them in situations writers in a free country almost never experience. That can add colour to writing, nothing more. Something of this book is linked to a reality that (fortunately) belongs to the past. I believe, however, that most of what I have written does not rely on the existence of any particular regime; it is linked to our human existence, to our civilization and its problems. Whether I am right or wrong is something readers must judge for themselves.