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

But beautiful Poldi is also the moment when a grinder suddenly tears off his safety glasses, flees his work, and goes outside as far away as he can; he looks into the sky, then at the mountain of rusting scrap metal, at the birds who come to drink from the boiling pools by mistake; he watches as a tiny scalded body hops into the rusty pipes and thinks how everything has its own torture chamber, but also its own paradise. And the grinder goes back to his post, dons his safety goggles, presses the button, and starts working again, feeding the yard engine shuttling back and forth to the furnaces. Everyone is possessed, at times, with the desire to rebel. Man has refused to live in a primitive state of nature, which is why angels drive ambulances and gather up other angels who have been broken in half.

I love going to the works canteen beside the sleeping warehouse, where the slabs and billets and blooms are stacked in neat layers like oaken logs. Outside, I look at the sky, where a woman’s head suddenly appears, as large as the night sky itself, a head of curly hair singed by stars, her countenance filled with never-before-perceived detail. Steel with an admixture of wolfram and cobalt will, when sliced into, show colors like those of an Asiatic butterfly’s wings. Someone pumps sentences into my brain, long-forgotten images from childhood; meaningless objects and conversations peel layers from my heart. I am again a river faun, paralyzed by longing for a river nymph. I walk through wolframic space, my mouth and nose threaded with wire, and whenever I deviate from my course, I feel a sharp pain in my jaws.

I approach the electrolytic furnace, a tablet of blue glass before my eyes, and the molten metal gurgles violently. This is the magnificent work of magnificent people. The roar of the blast furnaces echoes through the hall like a symphony orchestra, and a single glance carries me through the furnace’s hearth, back to that staircase where you and I carried a lamp to the pawn shop, when my hand first touched yours; melodic rollers milled my heart, dusty mannequins suddenly froze, sharp-eyed and conventional; your rocking-chair walk galvanized my brain and the lightning bolt of my feeling electrified your hair. After that, for the sake of love, one could plunge into the molten metal: make steel with an admixture of myself and your image within me, an image that calls to mind a small, childlike face flushed with gentle, silly laughter, because a Jewish girl spat out razor blades and I slashed my wrists. Beautiful blueberry nights fill my liver with morning and the nozzle of my heart spews forth an amalgam of blood. The sun rides the elevator up from the darkness, and the silken, waving wheat sways like a woman’s raw cotton skirt. The wheels of the pit-head elevator turn backward, and columns of cherry-tree trunks girdled with white lime reveal the hidden location of military burial grounds. Watchmen guard the female convicts in their wire enclosure, and swallows deliver the message of violins in their beaks. The women prisoners form lines, and I look for my beauty, but she’s not there yet. Some of the girls comb their hair like high-toned ladies. They roll up the sleeves and legs of their cotton blouses and trousers like millionaire heiresses sunning themselves on the beaches of Miami. The world is sustained by these girlish shapes, by lipstick, toothbrushes, face cream, and by male eyes. They are bandages and sticky plaster that will stay in place for ten, fifteen, twenty years at a stretch. Even a lifetime. A siskin sings in a cage at the entrance to the women’s camp, its eyes put out to make it sing more melodically. Sweetness fills my chest: I smell nail polish, vats of chocolate, and slaughterhouse stun guns. I think of empty cigarette cases, miniature lightbulbs, graveyard candle chimneys, a gold-leaf press, crowns of thorns, and organtine. Lilies of the Valley flow from my eyes. Beautiful Poldi, an impression in copper, tiny head on a fragrant medallion, the aroma of hair singed by stars, I will garland you with the most beautiful things I have ever seen, I will speak with you through dead objects, I will address you when enamel jugs fall from the sky, when the mad moon mirrors the reflections of your reflection. The air itself is anointed with you. I need only dial the number, and an amethyst telephone will be answered at the other end, and from your mouth, air will flow transmitted by tiny electromagnetic waves, frozen words, constellations, human tissue, laboratory ovens, bridges going nowhere, and a vibrator. Oh, if only I could lend you my eyes! It is so marvelous to be in love, to carry one’s own tiny electric motor around with one. Why, even the touch of a razor can last for twenty years and more. There is always more of me when I think of you, Poldi. As if through you, I’ve conquered a diamond universe.

I recline on my bunk, but first I use a match to immolate the bedbugs in the cracks. The sun knits a gem-studded stocking. I write your name in chalk on the boards of the bunk above me, where Jarda Jezule twists and turns angrily in his sheets and bits of straw from his mattress float into my eyes. Someone has driven a knife into the broken cupboard. Jarda Jezule sits up and lets his small red foot dangle down; the toes like a set of teeth.

“Hey, Jezule,” I say, “where do you keep your reading matter — those Collected Works?”

“What Collected Works?”

“The ones you brought with you,” I say, and I draw Poldi’s head on the board, her hair singed by a star.

“Would you lay off!” Jarda replies, poking his head down. “I’ve lost five kilos. What about these bed bugs? What about that shithouse right next door?”

“There were poets in concentration camps, too,” I say, and carry on with my drawing. “Jezule, a little romanticism never…”

“But this isn’t a concentration camp!” Jarda shouts, the blood rushing to his face.

“That’s right,” I say. “It’s not, but nothing lasts forever. There’s not an ounce of the romantic in you, Jezule, not a single ounce.”

Jarda, volunteer laborer and former furrier, grasps the side of the bunk, leaning down, his face spouting hostility, a cathedral gargoyle. He jumps down, his red feet slapping the floor hard, then he hobbles over and brandishes his finger in my face like a knife, holding my eyes in check for a whole minute, as though he wanted to tell me something terribly important. Then he waves his hand, dismissing the terribly important thing and me along with it. He spits, then begins stuffing newspaper into the toes of his boots.

“Hey, Kafka,” he says calmly, “Does that lice ointment help? Does it help?”

“It helps,” I say. “It helps.”

“So Kafka, my buddy, go to bed. You’re just off the nightshift, get some sleep,” Jarda Jezule says, picking up his boot and peering into it with scientific curiosity. As I’m drifting off I can hear him rummaging under the bed and dusting some books off on his knee.

And again, morning after morning, I arise and have no time to think about myself or to wonder: Am I happy? Am I unhappy? I am aware, before it happens, of that first mechanical motion of my hand, reaching for the alarm clock, I grope sleepily between its legs to stop the clanging of its nickel-plated testicles. Then, with the same groping motion, I fumble for the light switch on the wall and undertake the first shy self-examination of a man prematurely woken up, his hair in disarray, smelly, someone sitting up on his bed one more time, holding an alarm clock. Each morning I turn on the radio, tune in to Berlin and listen. .. There’s dead air at first but then, a few minutes before four a.m., “The Internationale” comes on, sung by a choir with an orchestra, then a sweet, familiar voice says: “Good morning, comrades! Moscow calling,” then thirty seconds of silence, followed by the sudden morning sounds of a busy Moscow street near the Kremlin, whistles, honking horns, sirens, and the bells of the Kremlin begin to peal… one, two, three, four, five, six times, then the pleasant voice comes on again: “Comrades, this is Moscow calling! Good morning, it’s six o’clock,” then “The Internationale” again, rendered by the choir and orchestra, which means it’s four a.m. here, which means I have three more minutes, making it worthwhile to slip back into bed and watch the second hand tick slowly forward, around once, twice, and again. Sometimes I even doze off for those three minutes, but then I must arise and surrender to the automatism, terrible, yet precise, especially in the morning, when there’s no choice but to come to life, get dressed quickly, brush the teeth of the doppelgänger in the mirror, and wonder why I shave every other day and wash and eat several times a day, and go around with a seating plan in my brain. Why worry constantly about missing out on something? You must be brave, I console myself, you must, you must, you must! I repeat the mantra every hour, but in the morning, I say it every minute, the better to brush aside nagging thoughts. I leave the house and it starts to rain, a thin drizzle shrouding the countryside and my garden, and I feel how much I need the rain. I feel the dark water pushing through to the roots, washing away the limestone dust. I feel my pores smacking their lips, I become a Golden Russet, a Winesap, a Topaz, a Melba Red and I begin to wonder what else I might need to be any happier. I crave potash, phosphorus, nitrogen. I open my eyes, and my automatic pilot has long since planted me in a seat on the bus, and I become aware of how I’m being sucked out by perspective, out into the streets that converge at a point in the distance, becoming so narrow a bicycle could scarcely squeeze through; and yet, when we reach that point, two buses can pass abreast and a new perspective mendaciously offers the prospect of miniature objects on the horizon. Vehicles approaching from a distance are as alike as two points of a colon, then growing until the headlights sweep by, and I see it’s another bus just like ours. For an instant, we mirror each other, and moments later I see a pair of red taillights grow smaller, until they vanish prematurely. I look around and I’m not alone. Some of the workers are asleep, still dreaming, or lost in thought. The small emerald light on the driver’s dashboard is beautiful and as large as any visible star. The driver keeps his eyes simultaneously on the road ahead, on both sides, and in the side and rearview mirrors, while monitoring the engine, accelerating or decelerating, working the clutch and the brake with his feet, controlling the steering wheel with his hands. In Vokovice, as he does every morning, he leans out and looks up at the same window and says, “She’s up!” If the window is dark, he honks the horn, stops the bus, and honks again, until a light goes on, then the bus continues contentedly on its way. I imagine that inside that window there’s a bed belonging to a post-office clerk, who has an arrangement with the bus driver, and I see her, sitting on the edge of her straw mattress, ready to put on her stockings, wondering if it’s worth getting up, and then, when she sees the tousle-haired girl in the mirror, she asks: why go on living? But the bus is already driving on down the road, past Ruzyně airport, its runway illuminated in anticipation of an arrival, lined with ruby lights that converge at the far end of the landing strip where anyone standing would see our bus passing by that point. .. The aircraft casts a cone of light on the runway, approaches the earth, grows smaller as it touches down, as tiny now as a child’s elastic-powered model plane, the wings swinging around, the navigation lights reversing, and once again it grows larger as it approaches the terminal, though it is still the same size. .. I close my eyes and see that everything is quite different from how it appears, from what it is. .. Everything exists in the elasticity of perspective, and life itself is illusion, deformation, perspective. .. I open my eyes, and we’ve arrived at the steelworks. The volunteer laborers rouse each other: Get up, they’ve brought you a load of coke. And like the others, I shuffle listlessly through the factory gate, show my I.D., and walk to the showers and the changing room. I see the yard engine chugging around the bend pulling a 4500-kilo load of red-hot steel slabs still glowing pink. Like young girls off to their first dance, the ingots seem able to conceal their true essence and appear instead to be made of crepe paper pumped full of warm air, prevented by a mere string from soaring into the air like balloons, airy and graceful and unreal. The locomotive spews clouds of steam, and almost, it seems, with its last ounce of strength, it drags its payload in pink past me, so close it singes my hair and clothes, and I am left in no doubt that these are tons and tons of steel, obelisks so long and so wide, and for a moment I see them more or less as they are, but then they immediately diminish and as I move away I accelerate their diminishment, while altering nothing in the reality of the yard engine and its slabs of steel. .. I quickly doff my streetclothes, and following my daily routine, I pull on a tank-top, then a shirt, then boxer shorts, then sweat pants, then trousers, then I put on my boots, then a cat-skin vest, then my overall pants and top, then an apron and gloves, and finish it off with a helmet, and finally, like the other workers, I walk quickly out into the night. The morning star — huge, but no bigger than the emerald light on the bus driver’s dashboard — glitters in the firmament, marking the beginning of all morning shifts and at the same time, the end of every night shift. I turn around and on the distant hillside, I can see the yard engine laboring up the slope with its 4500 kilos of pink ingots; the train is small and different now and yet the same one that not long ago singed my clothes and hair. Now it’s climbing Koněv and up there on the hillside it is tiny, no bigger than a child’s toy train on a string. .. Everything exists in the elasticity of perspective.