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

Today, since the early morning, I stood on a street corner, amazed. The streetcars and human conversation, each thing responded to the other, like good footballers passing the ball. A flashy young man, whose passport my brother never would have stamped, was standing beside me holding under his arm a packet of newspapers or something tied with binder twine. Then a car ran over the curb onto the sidewalk and back down again, and two cops looking on just laughed, and the young man came up to them and said, “Didn’t you see that car?” And the cops replied, “Anything wrong with that?” The young man said, “Anything wrong with that? I’ll show you what’s wrong with that!” and he tore the cover off his packet and shook a sheaf of funeral notices in their faces, saying, “My mother was hit by a car that ran over the curb like that!” He held up the funeral notices with both hands, the way a priest holds up the monstrance during the holy sacrament, and it all fit together for me, even the sound of tearing paper, everything harmonized, even this morning when I stood by my daughter’s bedside, watching her sleep, and her nightdress had slipped up to reveal a nicely shaped calf, and any other time I’d have raised the roof and demanded to know where she’d been last night. But today, I could only gaze at her, moved by her beauty, and I walked out of her room without a sound, past my wife who was white with fear that I’d make a scene. I caressed the back of her hand, and she snatched it away as though I’d bitten her, and a boy was skipping down our street on one foot, shouting to anyone who’d listen: “My mum and dad are getting married!” I wasn’t scandalized in the least, I did the opposite of what I’d have done as a proper ticket taker and supervisor, I patted the young lad’s head and then looked at my hand and felt the pleasure the gesture had given me; and then I came across a hearse with a coffin inside, then another with two, and a bit further on, a third carrying three coffins, and I said to myself, you’d better take a side street, because God knows what kind of evil omen you’ll come across next, and as I was tying my shoelaces, someone rolled up a storefront shutter with a terrible clatter, and I jumped up and ran across the street and found myself standing in front of the Prague Municipal Funeral Service, and on each floor there were coffins in various stages of manufacture, and on the ground floor, on the other side of the shutter, the coffins were stacked neatly like in a warehouse full of black shoes. Any other time I’d have been knocked for a loop, but today I just smiled. A Russian Tupolev flew over the city, and everything came together in a grand symphony. I felt like I was becoming a rotten ticket taker, a rotten supervisor, and was turning into someone else, as though someone had taken the plugs not just out of my ears but out of my soul as well, or taken the blinders off my eyes, as though I’d been a cab driver’s nag until now, and on my way home for lunch, I bought a box of pastries and a panel truck nosed up alongside me, and a guy leaned out and asked where the pub called U Pudilů was. I said, “They used to call it that, my friend, but now it’s got a sign that says U Kroftů, but everyone calls it U Marků.” And the driver was thrilled and pounded his fist on the door like it was the kettle drum in a symphony, like in Beethoven’s Fifth, and he said, “Glad to know that, ‘cause I’ve been around this block four times, but you know what?” and he jumped out of his cab and said, “Let me show you something, a kid who’s been torn to shreds.” And he went around to the back of the truck, opened the doors, and there was an ordinary-looking coffin. So I said, “My friend, I’ve got a vivid imagination, and I can see him right here” — and I tapped my forehead with my finger — “not only worse than he actually is, but far worse than he could ever be. That’s the size of it!” And I went home and my wife and daughter were white with fear, they kept spilling their soup on the tablecloth, dropping pieces of meat on the floor, but in my mind, everything was as it should be, so I just smiled, which frightened them more than if I’d started shouting and threatening to beat them, and they got even more upset when I brought out the box of pastries and said, “Go ahead, open it up,” and my daughter wrung her hands and couldn’t bring herself to do it, because she must have thought I’d bought her baby clothes, and my wife broke her fingernails trying to undo the knots and then she cut the string and I had to open the lid myself. .. Inside were cakes and cream puffs, and I held the box out, but my wife and daughter backed up against the wall and if they could have, they’d have retreated right through the wall into the neighbors’ apartment, and I grew serious and began to sweat and took a cream puff out of the box and put it in my daughter’s hand, then I did the same for my wife, and they just stood there, holding the pastries I’d bought them, something I’d never done before, each holding a cream puff they couldn’t bring themselves to taste. .. “Go on, try them, I bought them for you,” I said, and I took one myself and ate it, and they lifted the pastries to their mouths and finally took a nibble, but they couldn’t even swallow that tiny morsel, and I could hear that what I’d seen this morning in the street and now here at home was part and parcel with the Symphonie Pathétique , which I’d be hearing for the thirty-seventh time that evening as a ticket taker, a symphony I’d have to set up for this afternoon, putting out folding chairs and making sure the cleaning ladies dusted the seats properly. My wife and daughter hung their heads, staring at the carpet, and I couldn’t see their eyes because their hair hid their faces and almost touched the cream puffs they held trembling in their fingers. That’s what you get for wanting to impose order on everything, I thought, or would have, if my old way of thinking hadn’t been blocked.

It’s not easy to be a good ticket taker in the Waldstein Gardens. There’s a lot of dispute over whose bailiwick it is, because a high wall separates the Waldstein Gardens from the St. Thomas brewery next door, and although it’s difficult to climb over, the wall doesn’t block the sounds of music or conversation. It’s a real test of a good supervisor’s nerves when the Prague Municipal Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Doctor Smetáček, plays the same evening as Mr. Polata’s Šumava Regional Brass Band on the other side of the wall. It always leads to conflict, because each side thinks the other is interfering with its music. And since I’d torn tickets and ushered exclusively for these elite performances in the Waldstein Gardens, I couldn’t stand the beer gardens at St. Thomas’s, and the very sound of a brass band would turn my stomach. My brother-in-law was different and although he stamped passports for a living, he was a simple man who loved his beer and other worldly pleasures. So Waldstein was right to have had such a high wall built, as though he’d known all along that the Czech nation would be divided. I was not divided, however: I stood firmly on the side of symphonic music, and often, during a concert, I found myself daydreaming about how I’d put a ladder against the wall, climb over it, and pound all the patrons and their brass band into unconsciousness. I harbored such high-minded notions until now, when I felt in my bones that I’d reversed the course of my thinking and that today something was bound to happen. When the conductor came out and tapped his baton on his music stand and the audience fell silent, you could hear Mr. Polata’s brass band playing a clamorous polka. The musicians stared painfully into the whispering crowns of the ancient trees. After that, there was nothing to do but take Mr. Polata’s music on, so now it was the Prague Municipal Symphony Orchestra’s turn to start poking its nose into the flowering garden of the St. Thomas brewery. The Symphonie Pathétique began, and the conductor directed it like a high priest, but as for me, I heard Mr. Polata’s brass band not as an enemy but an ally, and the brass band’s music blended with the Symphonie Pathétique as though they’d been written by the same composer… and for the first time, I imagined that there were people on the other side of the wall, not just a bunch of barbarians, but people living by their own lights, with beer and brass-band music, and they were probably just as fond of that as I was of the Prague Municipal Symphony Orchestra, so it wasn’t just them getting in our way, the interference was mutual, and I heard that old chestnut, Waldteufel’s Skater’s Waltz , floating over the wall and blowing a kiss to the Pathétique and no one could stop it from happening, or if so, it would mean stopping one to the detriment of the other, or, like me, you could learn to listen to everything at once, though to do that, you needed patience. Usually I stood leaning against the broad trunk of a tree, but today I gradually moved into the shadows under a large branch, until I reached the wall, where I bumped into a small man pounding the wall with his fist. Then he put his ear to it, and I put my ear to it too, and I could hear the scraping of brogues and oxfords on the brewery’s sandy dance floor and the dancers’ heavy breathing and their conversations, and over it all a great tree of brass-band music opened out. I felt a powerful urge now, as never before, to see what was happening on the other side of the wall. So overwhelming was the urge that it led me to remember that there were ladders in the Waldstein’s aviary, so I opened the screen door to the place where they had once raised vultures and eagles. The mesh ceiling wasn’t there anymore, but I saw three ladders leaning against the wall and climbed quietly up one with the Adagio splashing at my back, and up where I was heading, one rung at a time, there was more light and more music as well. .. The trees were resting their branches on the top of the wall, but I pushed them out of the way and looked down on the other side, and though I could easily have just walked into the brewery, today was different, today I saw it through the Symphonie Pathétique and I was going to look down at the other half of my new self, whence like a breeze, the tones of the brass instruments were wafting upward along with the aroma of beer and the fragrance of women… one more rung and there it was, just, it seemed to me, as it had been with the string quartet. Through the branches and between the leaves, I saw, in the yellow glow, an array of square tablecloths with glasses of beer on them, I saw the square dance floor and the people dressed in black and white and busty women swirling in circles, one hand hanging free, the other resting lightly on the napes of their partners’ necks as they spun around, their faces flushed, while the men held them round the waist or placed their faces against their cheeks as if the dancers were drinking in one another’s breath… and then I saw a beautiful woman standing in the middle of the garden surrounded by four men who might have been tailors, using a tape measure to measure her waist and her bust, then each breast separately, as if they were judges in a contest to choose the queen of the bounteous bosom, and one of the men drew white lines on her body with tailor’s chalk, lines of classic beauty, covering her black evening dress and tracing the shape of what lay beneath, those classic arcs and intersections and who knows what else, and I heard everything that was going on here dissolved in the music that came from behind, from across the wall. I glanced back for a moment to see the audience in the Waldstein Gardens holding their cheeks and their chins, for the music had so undone them they had to support their heads in their hands, whereas on this side the dancers, men and women, were moved to cheer ecstatically in response to the joy that flowed from Mr. Polata’s music… and waitresses walked among them, their backs arched, carrying a bouquet of five brimming beer glasses in each hand, moving from table to table, marking the beer mats with pencil strokes. Then the Skater’s Waltz ended; the musicians blew the spittle out of their instruments, while the women let their partners hold on to them and lead them back to their tables, their hands still curled gently around the mens’ necks, and now they were playing the finale of the Symphonie Pathétique , the Adagio lamentoso, and some of the men in the beer garden walked over to the wall and shouted over into the Waldstein Gardens: “To hell with your Beethoven! Goddamned Mozart! Killjoys!” The little man had climbed up through the aviary and appeared on the wall beside me, tugging my sleeve and saying, “Aren’t you in charge here? Why don’t you do something?” But I had just seen my brother-in-law sitting in the beer garden at a table with two plates on it, next to the entrance where they were taking admission, and my brother-in-law was no doubt amusing himself by picking the dancers he’d let travel abroad and those he wouldn’t. But then I saw it! Surrounding the beer garden on three sides was a monastery that was now an old folks’ home for women, and in every window on the second and third floor I could see the bright eyes of these old women staring down in the same direction, at the queen of the bounteous bosom, staring feverishly at those male hands as they took her measure and made their notes, and as I looked down it hit me! This was where the real music was. This was why all the women down there danced the way they did, why they let themselves be held around the waist and promenaded beneath the trees and why they placed their hands on their partners’ necks. They did it for the old women to see, these women who no longer had anyone to touch, who would never again be embraced that way, which was why the old women’s eyes sparkled as they did, why they glowed with longing and envy and resentment; and I saw that there were walls not just dividing symphonic music from brass-band music, but people from people as well, walls far more real than the one I was sitting on, gazing down and seeing everything at once, so mesmerized it’s a wonder I didn’t go plunging off. And the little man tugged at me again and urged me to intervene, because the dancers below were shaking their fists and shouting at the orchestra, “To hell with your A major!”