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

“The best minds in the country are sacrificing themselves for the nation,” said Mr. Mit’ánek, blinking a grain of sand out of his eye. “So am I. I’m educating the nation not to jump off moving streetcars.”

“Well,” said the artist, and he waded into the pile of coal and vomited, then shook his arms and yelled, “can’t stop now! Must keep at it!… A clear goal…” and he vomited again, then added, through tears: “… is a cure for fatigue!”

An elderly lady wearing a beret with a little stem on top emerged from Lazarská Street carrying a parcel. She threaded her way through the maze of scaffolding, oblivious to a handcart standing there, and when she stepped through some rungs and onto the cart, it tipped, sending her to her knees. She got to her feet again and gazed into the face of St. Jude, while the stonemason, sitting on the statue’s lap, was trying to fit it with the new eye. The lady clasped her hands and prayed, her grey curls spilling from under her beret as she looked at the saint’s face. The stonemason moved the sandstone eye around until it lined up with the eyebrow but the old lady, in her prayers, was already at one with the superstructure of heaven.

A truck loaded with statues and busts and plaques pulled up in front of the church and turned into the collection depot. The man in charge hurried out through the gate and shouted, “Where d’you think you’re going with that? That stuff goes straight to the foundry.”

He vaulted into the back of the truck, took out a piece of chalk, and wrote a number on the head of each bust. When all the Generalissimo’s heads were thus inscribed, he turned, jumped off the truck, and laughed. “Don’t even think of trying to sell this stuff off as non-ferrous metal.”

The truck drove off.

Mr. Valerián filled a stonemason’s scoop with white liquid from the mixing trough and ladled it into a hole in the Lučan warrior’s head. His aunt anxiously ran her fingers through his hair. “D’you see?” she said. “He’s losing his hair, a lot of it!”

“Auntie, for the love of God, do not piss me off!” shouted the artist. “Can’t stop now! Must keep going!”

But the Lučan warrior had sprung a leak at the crotch, and white gobs of milky plaster of Paris were dripping onto the concrete floor.

“Auntie,” yelled Mr. Valerián, “quick, stick your paws between the warrior’s legs!”

“I’ve just been to church!” she said.

“Shut up! You gave me the last of your money for this plaster of Paris. Quick, or the warrior’s going to end up on the floor!”

The aunt wiped her hands on her skirt and then stuck her fingers into the hole in the warrior’s crotch.

Mr. Mit’ánek looked into the mirror and was astonished. There were two of everything in the cellar.

“Quick, the warrior’s butt has split!” Mr. Valerián shouted, and he went on ladling the plaster of Paris from the trough into the mold.

Mr. Mit’ánek placed his palm between the folds of the warrior’s buttocks and felt his hands sealing the leak.

“It’s not easy being a decent communist these days,” the stonemason said. He sat on the scaffolding beside the mortar trough, swinging his boots close to the old woman’s hat as she prayed. He brought his boot to a halt just above her head, and one of his laces grazed her blue beret, but the old lady was still utterly absorbed in the hierarchy of heaven.

The mirrors in the cellar studio stretched from the floor to the ceiling, and Mr. Mit’ánek now understood why the super’s wife had given him such a confused report — always two people in the basement, but only one ever left. In the corner, Mr. Mit’ánek saw what first looked like an industrial ironing machine, but on closer inspection it turned out to be an enormous silk-screen press, with rollers almost two yards wide and a frame constructed of solid oak beams and boards.

“Quite the contraption, isn’t it?” asked the aunt. “But worse luck, all the jobs we got to do on it were tiny. Valerián had a breakdown over the Christmas and New Year’s cards. He was hired to do a card with a photo of a seven-month-old baby boy and they wanted it to look like the baby was sitting on a horse, holding up a sign that said The Kocourek family wish you a Merry Christmas. He went through three cases of cheap wine before he was done. Every half hour he’d toss out everything he’d done so far, but when we worked it out that we’d be getting two thousand crowns for the job, I rescued the photo of the seven-month-old from the garbage, along with the picture of the horse, Valerián stuck his watchmaker’s loupe in his eye and copied the boy onto the horse, because it was supposed to look like the real thing.”

“And are those things on the wall postage stamps, or are they meant to be matchbox labels?” asked Mr. Mit’ánek.

“No, no,” said the aunt. “We’ve got a commission to do engravings of butterflies and tiny little beetles. This machine runs on an electric motor and makes an awful racket — it weighs eleven hundred kilos — and it’s cute to see those huge rollers spitting out a tiny little portrait of a beetle, no bigger than a matchbox label, as you said.”

“Shut up, Auntie,” shouted Valerián, and he went on ladling the plaster of Paris into the mold.

“The sausage is burning!” yelled the aunt.

“Auntie — don’t budge an inch!” he bellowed. At that very moment, the mold split open at the neck, and he quickly poured in the last ladleful and grabbed the warrior by the throat with both hands.

A flatbed truck pulled up in front of the church carrying a huge golden cross wrapped in silk pillowcases and blankets. A crane lowered a sling and tackle over the truck, and two workers carefully wrapped a duvet around the sling. Then the employees of Safina — the company that had gilded the cross — raised it carefully, lifting it by the arms like an invalid, then slipped the sling under it while another worker went to the opposite sidewalk to guide the crane operator with hand signals. The cross was soon suspended in air, about a meter from the stonemason, who sat up and inched backward until he was sitting in the statue’s lap with his arms around St. Thaddeus’s neck, looking up in alarm at the golden cross, then at the scrap depot with its thousands of unread books, their pages still uncut, then into the scrap-metal container filled with signs that had once indicated all those Prague squares and streets and parks named after the Generalissimo.

“It’s enough to make you puke,” he said quietly.

The boys kicked the ball down the cul de sac.

“Marty!” called Mr. Valerián. “Marty, come down here a minute.”

One of the boys knelt down and peered into the basement window. “What is it, Mr. Valerián?” he said, out of breath.

“Come down here, Marty. I’m dying for a smoke. My cigarettes are on the table. Take one and stick it in my mouth. As you can see, we’re all a bit immobilized,” he said, indicating the strange tableau with his chin.

The door opened and a breathless boy hurried into the cellar, his socks down around his ankles.

“Over there on the table. .. Not there? Then they’re probably in my pants pocket,” said Mr. Valerián, pointing with his chin.

The boy moved under the bright lightbulb and slipped his hand into the artist’s pocket.

“Marty!” shrieked a woman’s voice. Mrs. Karásková was squatting down at the window and peering in, her eyes crazed with worry at the sight of her beloved little boy groping about in Mr. Valerián’s pants.

“God knows I’d just as soon blow this church to smithereens,” said the sexton. He removed the first plaque, placed it in a laundry hamper, and shook his hands to get the circulation going again in his fingers. “I’m sick and tired of these cults.”