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

I applied the same method at home with my family. The only person I was really close to was my brother-in-law, who stamped the passports of people traveling abroad. When we had time on our hands we’d go to restaurants where, just for fun, I’d invent seating plans. I’d tell my brother-in-law which customers belonged and which ones I’d toss out, who I’d seat where, and who I’d show the door when they’d had too much to drink or if they’d gotten tipsy somewhere else and just come in for a final round or to make trouble. My brother-in-law would sit there watching the customers arrive and he’d say quietly: “His passport I’d stamp, and his I would not.” My brother-in-law classified people according to whether or not he’d let them leave the country. And although after they’d left it wasn’t really his concern any more, he felt responsible for people’s trips abroad, and was always wondering, right down to the wire, whether he’d done the right thing in stamping someone’s passport or not. Twice, a plane took off while he was still on board, and he’d been taken into custody at the other end, once in Vienna and once in Paris. Then again, my brother-in-law had his own perverse little imp, and it befuddled him several times, to the point where he’d stamp the passport of someone he was sure was kosher only to find out later that the guy had defected, while someone he was certain was trying to emigrate would surprise everyone by coming back.

Anyway, the day before yesterday I was ushering at the Ledeburg Terraces where they were putting on a tragedy about a black guy by the name of Othello who ends up murdering his wife in her own bed. It wasn’t just paying customers who watched it; people living in the apartments overlooking the gardens could watch through their open windows, free of charge. I went to the apartments so I could at least sell them standing-room tickets, but they locked the gate on me. I fetched a ladder, but as I was climbing over the wall I fell and landed on my hands, practically wrenching my arms out of their sockets, and when I looked up the gate was open again, but while I was fetching the ladder someone slammed it back shut. I heard the key turning in the lock so I knocked to be let in, because I’d dropped my book of tickets on the other side. I couldn’t get it back, and to avoid being made fun of, I paid for all fifty standing-room tickets out of my own pocket, which earned me a pat on the back. At the end of the play, just when the noble Moor was strangling his wife, Desdemona, someone began strangling a woman on the second floor of the apartment building, and in the struggle the woman got shoved out the window just as the Moor was finishing off Desdemona, and people in the audience stood up because they thought they were seeing things, and I tried to calm them down but couldn’t. .. So I went back and, by the powers vested in me, I climbed the ladder, put my fingers to my lips and like a proper usher, I shushed the people standing around the woman in the courtyard. But she was lying on the ground with a broken leg, howling in pain, and I looked down into the courtyard and then back at the Ledeburg Terraces, and I realized that the wounded woman was none of my business, that my main concern was to make sure the play finished without interruption. When it was finally over, I climbed down, the audience applauded, the fellow who played the Moor, wet with his own tears, stood there receiving the applause like a dead man. Immediately afterward, we carried the woman from the small courtyard to an ambulance, and for the first time in my life I felt as if I’d taken cotton plugs out of my ears. I could hear the final applause rising from the Ledeburg Terraces and the tears and moans of the husband and that woman, and I heard all of it at the same time, yet each sound was separate too. I could hear it all clearly: the creaking of the seats being folded up, the squeal of hinges as the tenants opened their windows and leaned out, the conversations on either side of the wall, and everything suddenly seemed so bizarre I thought my ticket taker’s demon must have come back to play with my mind.

And the strange state continued into yesterday, when I worked a string-quartet concert, tearing tickets and ushering customers to their seats. A very select audience goes to hear a string quartet: preoccupied people with careworn, melancholy faces, including young girls you just know will go home in the end with a bun in the oven because a proper string quartet can make you defenseless. When the quartet began to play, I went to the top of the stairs at the back of the Ledeburg Terraces and sat beside the statues on the sandstone wall, and I put one leg across my knee and rested my chin in my hand, following the battle of the instruments — because I have always felt that a real string quartet is like a feud, or a bar brawl, or a fistfight in the town square, a life-and-death struggle, and over the years, I’ve learned to see stories and events in a string quartet to amuse myself, while I’m watching the audience sitting there in rows to make sure no one has passed out or is causing a disturbance. Yesterday, just as the quartet was coming to the climax and the cello seemed to be winning hands down, the second violin ripped into him and tore him to shreds. It looked like the first violin might come out on top because it was holding back on the sidelines, the way it is when three people are in a fight and the fourth one stands aside, laughing, and you could see it in the listeners, because most of them seemed diminished — cowed and bent, holding their heads in their hands, as though they were nursing a toothache. Just then, a little fellow in the front row stood up and edged his way backward among the chairs. I knew from experience that he was from out of town and worried about missing the last bus or the last train home, and I could see that he was backing straight toward a fish pond filled with water lilies, and if he continued, he’d trip on the low stone edging around the pond and fall backward into the water and cause a commotion. I knew I had to act quickly and come down from my sandstone perch and catch him by the shoulders at the last moment and then gently guide him to the exit. But my private demon whispered in my ear: don’t do anything, wait and see what happens. I looked up, and the drone of an airplane with colored lights on its wingtips joined in with the music of the quartet, and along with it I heard the clang of a trolley and it all merged into a kind of symphony, and I looked back down and saw that everything was happening as it should: the little man was only a few feet from the pool, the rest of the audience seemed dead, as though a line from yesterday’s play — “Behold what the scythe has laid low!” — applied to them. Then the man’s heels caught on the stones, and he tumbled backward, his little body mirrored in the pool, and for an instant, he curled up like a child in the womb, like the drawings in my Handbook of Home Medicine , and then a splash, and he went under and came up soaking wet and draped with lily pads, two buds resting on his shoulders like the pips on a general’s epaulets, and as he stood there up to his waist in water he unbuttoned his jacket and a tiny goldfish popped out of his vest, and the patrons in the rows nearest the pool backed away, some running up the stairs in my direction to distance themselves from the embarrassment, so no one would think it was them who’d brought the little man to the concert or that they might be related… and I heard the quartet drifting apart, and the cello, which was probably destined to lose the battle, deliberately contributing to the general cacophony; then the ushers pulled the man out of the pond, and someone laughed, but nothing upset me, not even when two of the musicians stopped playing altogether, and the first violinist, deprived of his triumph, ran down the narrow aisle between the rows of seats, arriving just as the ushers were dragging the little man out of the water by his trousers and, as they were pulling his trousers back up, the violinist whacked the little man with his bow, then again, then a third time, with a smack that sounded like a slab of meat slapping against a barn door, and I was on tenterhooks, trembling at the beauty, the utter beauty of it all, and several patrons were pounding their fists against the back wall until the stucco cracked loose, and others were scratching at it with their fingernails as though trying to climb out, but for me, everything meshed, everything blended with everything else, and my heart howled with pleasure. “I had no intention of disturbing you,” the little man said. “I have a train to catch.” Afterward, I went home dumbstruck by everything that had happened, and when I unlocked the door, the jingle of the key was like music, and I was even at peace with the fact that my daughter hadn’t come home yet.