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

Someone else slaps his face and says, “So what?”

A woman with blood streaming from her nose looks out from under a colonnade as though she, too, had just told the same mean-spirited citizen that she was a proud Czechoslovak. And in the middle of the square, a man in black drags a woman wearing a floral dress through a puddle, cursing the heavens. “A right slut I married!”

The woman clings to his legs but the man in black kicks her away. Curling up, she collapses in the pool of water, a photograph in an oval frame, her hair floating like seaweed in the filthy water. Finally the man is satisfied. He kneels in the water, twists her hair into a wet knot, turns her weeping face upward, and runs a loving finger over her features. Then he helps her to her feet, they cling to each other, kiss, and together they walk slowly away, like the holy family. When they reach the Small Square, just outside the Prince Regent, the man in black flings his arms wide as if unsheathing a sword from its scabbard and declares to the empty square: “The spirit has triumphed over the flesh!”

A streetcar rumbles by with a few dead men inside hanging by their hands. A pedestrian stumbles to his knees and tries to ignite a cobblestone. A giant bull bestrides the city, invisible except for a set of pink testicles.

Sometime before noon, I’m walking to the open-air market U Kotců. On the corner, I buy a horoscope for every month of the year and watch colored ribbons streaming from the salesgirls’ noses as they measure the material with their arms. Each day, sun umbrellas sprout from the heads of the crones selling medicinal herbs. I often see old ladies tottering out of the dark recesses of the market, their faces scarred with signs of the zodiac, two patches of leopard spots for eyes, dragging their outlandish knickknacks into the light of day. One of them is selling green roses made from tiny feathers, an admiral’s sword, and accordion buttons, another is offering war-surplus boxer shorts, canvas waterbuckets, and a stuffed monkey. In the Coal Market, the salesgirls carry tulips of every color around in their kangaroo pouches. Doves bill and coo in the shop windows on Rytířská Street, and parakeets flit about in their cages like poetic metaphors. Several Canadian hamsters are working their way to freedom in the tall chimneys of their glass cages. Once, for three hundred crowns, I became a saint for an instant: I bought up all the goldfinches, then released them from my hand. Oh, what a feeling when a terrified little bird flies from your palm to freedom!

I enter the covered market where old ladies sell blood pudding by the plateful. The air in here smells of newborn babies, damp garlic clusters, vinegar, and hemp. Men are unloading slaughtered lambs from the backs of trucks. Strange how the high holidays demand animal sacrifice: fish at Christmas; goats and lambs at Easter. I think of the time we slaughtered a pig back home and bungled slitting its throat and it burrowed into the manure pile, preferring to drown in piss and shit rather than face once more the butcher with a knife in his hands.

I get a move on, but it’s too late. The bucket of beer I’d gone out to fetch has gone flat. In the office of the Zinner Brothers, with its five floors of toys, the warehouse manager is shaking with rage. “Look, waterboy,” he says, “we sent you for beer, not the bloody elixir of life. You certainly took your time, you really did!”

And the goods handler adds his two cents worth: “Hey, Kafka! When’s your Uncle Adolf going to die again? Seems he’s been passing away in installments.”

“Any day now,” I say, and I take the invoices and spend the rest of the day double checking and ticking off two consignments of children’s toys: one foot soldier with rifle; one soldier in rowboat; one soldier with helmet; one officer, marching; one general in overcoat; one drummer; one trumpeter; one French horn; one large drum; one soldier, prone, with rifle; one artillery gunner with ramrod; one officer, erect, with map…

I check off the figurines and think about how they’re always mistaking me for someone else. I’ve been living on my own for years now, but the moment there’s a pool of vomit anywhere, or someone makes a racket at night, the neighbors come rushing over and give mother an earful. That young upstart of yours was raising a ruckus last night. Does he really get such a kick out of it?

Gunner with rangefinder; one man with telephone, taking notes; one motorcyclist; one wounded soldier, supine; two medics; one doctor in white lab coat; one ambulance dog; one prone soldier with cigarette; one dragoon on horseback…

My aunt died at the Maryseks, and the next morning Mrs. Marysková hurried over to mother’s and complained that I had pounded on the window that night and my aunt was so startled she probably had a fit before she died. It was definitely my fault, because Mrs. Marysková ran out and heard my awful cackling laughter, even though it’s been years since I’ve lived at home.

One cow, grazing; one cow, mooing; one calf, standing; one colt, grazing; various piglets; one cat with ribbon, standing; one chicken pecking; one tiger cub; one spotted hyena, one bear on hind legs; one American buffalo; one polar bear cub; one monkey, scratching…

Once, I watched a vet bending over a sick calf and telling the owner he’d prescribe an infusion, but then the vet yelled at me to come over at once and take this brush and scrub between the cloves of the animal’s hoof, like that, then he insisted I take the brush handle and swab out the creature’s mouth, like that. I could only stare at him, unable to bring myself to say I was a bystander, not a stable hand.

One mountain goat; one wild boar; one shepherd boy; one farmer; one chimney sweep; one cowboy standing; one Indian throwing a lasso; one large rabbit sitting; one boy scout in a hat; one sheepdog…

I entered the synagogue, and a mud-spattered Jew leaned over to me and whispered: “Might you also be from the East?” I nodded. Later, when I stopped off for a beer, two fellows were sitting there and one of them said to me, “You’re a baker!” and I nodded, and the fellow rubbed his hands together and said, “See? I could tell right off!” He called for a deck of cards and said, “We need a third for a game of mariáš. Betl for a crown, Durch for two. .. Low card deals.”

One Mary; one baby Jesus; one Joseph; one wise man standing; one black wise man; one shepherd with lamb; one angel; one Bedouin; grazing sheep; one sheep dog…

I check off two consignments of toys at the Zinner Brothers on Maislová Street, wholesalers in toys and fine leather goods, which is why I love to go walking after work, though I’m always tripping over the toys that have passed through my hands that day. I like walking through Kampa Park where children on all fours scrawl chalk drawings on the asphalt pavement, and they continue their drawings up the walls of buildings, as high as they can reach. I’m struck by a picture of a man whose hat has been drawn simultaneously front and back. His hidden ear is sketched above his head like a question mark, like a coat of arms.

“Did you draw that?” I ask the little girl who has just finished drawing it. Her elbows are blue, the color of shotgun-shell casings.

“Yes, but it’s nothing,” she says. She uses her foot to erase a portrait that wouldn’t be out of place in an art gallery. “Would you comb my hair for me?”

“If you’d like,” I say.

The girl straddles the bench, then tucks one leg under herself, while I sit behind her. She hands me a comb over her shoulder and I comb her hair, and she half closes her eyes. Then she looks at a falling leaf and says, “That leaf’s hands are sore, so it had to let go.”