Bohumil Hrabal - Mr. Kafka - And Other Tales From the Time of the Cult

“Did Zátopek lose? We were all rooting for him!” Lenka said. She pulled out her hankie and ran the corner of it around the inside of his lid.

“Zátopek’s a cunning devil,” the Prince said wearily. “He shot ahead at the last minute and set an Olympic record.”

“Oh, that’s beautiful,” Lenka whispered, her body shaking as though she were working the treadle of a sewing machine. “That’s so good.”

“You know, the Americans tested a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific that’s a thousand times stronger than the one they dropped on Hiroshima,” the Prince said.

“Enough about the Americans,” she said. “I’ve had it with them. All their talk about how we had to stand up to the communists got me into prison, and last week they brought in a trainload of Swedish ore that we had to shovel out of wagons marked ‘American Zone of Occupation’…” She sighed and shuddered. She didn’t even notice that Mr. Hulikán had flicked his fourth spent matchstick past her head. He’d lit another cigarette and was still sitting on the edge of the dolly looking at the ground, as though he were butting heads with destiny. Then he tossed away his cigarette and jumped down.

“My guardian angel’s abandoned me,” Mr. Hulikán said. He walked out of the storeroom, repeating to the guard: “My guardian angel’s abandoned me! Used to be I either got paid in kind, or I stole what I needed. But here? I was better off doing piece work in the Šumava forests. At least we had enough to drink. The Rusíns taught me how to pour a few gallons of denatured alcohol into a shallow well and light it on fire, and then, at just the right moment, smother the flames with blankets. .. It turned the well into a source of drinkable hooch. But the final straw that got me into all this shemozzle was when I killed the dray horse that I used to deliver the ice with my fist. They fired me. And that’s when my guardian angel left me high and dry,” Mr. Hulikán said, speaking directly to the guard.

“It’s out,” cried Lenka, and she exited the storeroom bearing the nonexistent mote from the Prince’s eye in the corner of her hankie; she gave a deep sigh that rose from her very toenails, while the other female prisoners went on sweeping out the wagons. But the guard heard nothing; he was leaning against the warm boards that covered the outside of the storeroom, pondering his sins of omission. As he stared at the colored illustration on the child’s bed, he imagined himself on bitterly cold days, a white angel, leading the female prisoners at the end of their shift downstairs to the men’s shower room; there he would let them warm themselves by the radiators while they stared at the walls, casting sidelong glances into the corridor as the naked steel workers emerged from the changing room carrying soap and towels, and the women stared at the naked male bodies, following them round the corner with their eyes, and those eyes became showerheads showering the bodies perfumed by dust with their desires. As the guard wrote his daily report he felt the prisoners’ blushes become his own and he knew that what he allowed to happen was against regulations, but he felt it was more important to show the people in his care, at least once a day, something like a Christmas tree…

“Keep moving!” shouted the guard. “Rinse out those soup buckets, and then wait for me!” But the prisoners knew from his tone of voice that he regretted having to say it.

When the prisoners were leaving and the workers began pushing the dolly loaded with fire-clay conduits out of the storeroom, the guard climbed up the pile of typewriters, pulled down the cot, and with a pair of metal snippers he’d borrowed from the welder, he cut the colored illustration from the headboard. He took the picture with him into the storage room, looked around, and behind a pile of fire-clay piping, he unbuckled his Sam Browne belt, took off his tunic, and slipped the guardian angel under the back of his shirt, its wings against his shoulder blades. Then he put his tunic back on and pulled the belt tightly over it so he could smuggle the picture out through the factory gate. When he emerged into the sun and ran to catch up to the women, walking behind them as their guardian, he felt the wings in the tinplate picture merging with his body, and he knew that neither his Sam Browne belt nor anything else in the world could prevent him from having wings of his own as big as twin brides, that nothing could prevent him from continuing — inadequately and against regulations — to protect the women in his care. And that, in his own mind, was his salvation.

At the very edge of town the door of the public house flew open and the publican dragged out a girl with long fair hair and tried to shove her down the steps, but she grabbed the banister with both hands and yelled into the night: “Let me live! Let me live!”

The publican wrapped an arm around the girl’s waist and, with his free hand, took out a bunch of keys and struck her over the knuckles, and when she released her grip he kneed her in the back and she stumbled down the steps, her arms flailing. She collapsed in a heap on the empty roadway, her hair splayed like a peacock’s tail or an ostrich-feather fan.

“Hey, there,” shouted the Prince, “how do you know that’s not my girlfriend?”

“Some girlfriend, you piece of shit!” said the pub keeper, turning in the doorway to face him. “She put away nine rums and five beers, and she can’t pay the tab.” And he slammed the door behind him, locking it angrily.

“Let me live!” cried the girl.

A fire truck in full cry roared past the railway tracks that ran through the scrap-metal division of the steel works. Some firemen were sitting on jump seats, others stood on the running boards, their helmets glistening in the morning sun. One of them had a gleaming white set of teeth and stood with a boot propped on the front mudguard. He was hanging on with one hand and saluting with the other, gazing around him with a celebratory air, acknowledging the accolades he imagined coming his way and announcing to no one in particular: “The cooling pipes in the blast furnaces are clogged. We’ve got to douse them with water.”

“Things are getting much better, doctor,” said Bárta, the loader. “Christian Europe is consolidating.”

“Which Europe?” asked the doctor of philosophy derisively. “And what d’you mean ‘Christian’? It’s more Jewish than ever before.”

They were pulling scrap out of the railway wagons and loading it into hoppers: cylinders and pistons, a glass disc, the crushed remains of Leyden jars, twisted compasses, metal hoists with weights and counterweights, a bundle of iron rods and electromagnetic coils, an upright galvanoscope, a spectroscope, and a sextant with mirrors. Bárta, a former merchant, removed brass components from the scrap and put then into a box so when the shift was over, he could take the brass away and sell it for cash.

“It is Christian,” the merchant said.

“That’s crap,” said the doctor of philosophy, raising his hand. “At one end of the spectrum you’ve got one brilliant Jew, Christ, and at the other end you’ve got another genius, Marx. Two specialists in macrocosms, in big pictures. All the rest of it is Mother Goose territory.”

He took a jimmy and pried loose the latch on the next wagon; then he and Bárta lifted the door off its hinges and gently let it slide down to the tracks. They climbed inside and started rummaging around. They brought out a sump pump, an old blower, pieces of a threshing machine, a farm gate that had been dismantled with a cutting torch, a paper cutter, a seed drill, a field mower, an old weigh scale, and parts of a plough. They tossed it all into the hopper.