The Little Town Where Time Stood Still

by Bohumil Hrabal

  And when he returned tired from the office, he stood in the doorway in the shadow, the white shirt cuffs showed how he was exhausted by the whole day, these shirt cuffs almost touched his knees, the whole day had placed so many worries and tribulations on Francin’s back that he was always ten centimetres shorter, maybe even more. And I knew that the greatest worry was me, that ever since the time he had first seen me, ever since then he had been carrying me in an invisible, and yet all too palpable rucksack on his back, which was growing ever heavier by the day. And then every evening we stood under the burning rise-and-fall lamp, the green shade was so big that there was room for both of us under it, it was a chandelier like an umbrella, under which we stood in the downpour of hissing light from the paraffin lamp, I hugged Francin with one hand and with the other I stroked the back of his head, his eyes were closed and he breathed deeply, when he had settled down he hugged me at the waist, and so it looked as if we were about to begin some kind of ballroom dance, but in fact it was something more, it was a cleansing bath, in which Francin whispered in my ear everything that had happened to him that day, and I stroked him, and every movement of my hand smoothed away the wrinkles, then he stroked my loose flowing hair, each time I drew the porcelain chandelier down lower, around the circumference of the chandelier there were thickly hung coloured glass tubes connected by beads, those trinkets tinkled round our ears like spangles and ornaments round the loins of a Turkish dancing girl, sometimes I had the impression that the great adjustable lamp was a glass hat jammed right down over both our ears, a hat hung about with a downpour of trimmed icicles . . . And I expelled the last wrinkle from Francin’s face somewhere into his hair or behind his ears, and he opened his eyes, straightened himself up, his cuffs were again at the level of his hips, he looked at me distrustfully, and when I smiled and nodded, he plucked up courage and looked right at me and I at him, and I saw what a great power I had over him, how my eyes entrapped him like the eyes of a striped python when they stare at a frightened finch.

  This evening a horse neighed from the darkened yard, then there came another whinny, and then there resounded a thundering of hooves, rattling of chains and jingle of buckles, Francin jerked up and listened, I took a lamp and went out into the passage and opened the door, outside the drayman was calling out in the dark, “Hey, Ede, Kare, hey whoa!”, but no, the two Belgian geldings were pelting away from the stable with a lamp on their breastplate, just as they had returned weary, unharnessed from the dray, in their collars and with the traces hung on the embroidery of those collars and in all their harness after a whole day delivering the beer, just when everyone thought, these gelded stallions can be thinking of nothing else but hay and a pail of draff and a can of oats, so, all of a sudden, four times a year these two geldings recollected their coltish days, their genius of youth, full of as yet undeveloped but nevertheless present glands, and they rose up, they made a little revolt, they gave themselves signals in the gloom of dusks, returning to the stables, and they shied and bolted, but it wasn’t shying, they never forgot that still and ever up to the last moment even an animal can take the path of freedom . . . and now they flew past the tied houses, on the concrete pavement, under their hooves sparks were kindled like flints, and the lamp on the chest of the offside gelding furiously bucketed about and bobbed and lit up the flitting buckles and broken reins, I leaned forward, and in the tender light of the paraffin lamp that Belgian pair flew past, stout, gigantic geldings, Ede and Kare, who together weighed twenty-five metric quintals, all of which they now put in motion, and that motion constantly threatened to turn into a fall, and the fall of one horse entailed the fall of the other, for they were harnessed together with ties and leather buckles and straps, yet constantly in that gallop they seemed to have a mutual understanding, they bolted simultaneously and alternated in leadership by no more than a couple of centimetres . . . and behind them ran the unfortunate drayman with the whip, the drayman dreading that one of the horses might break its legs, the brewery management would dock it from his pay for years to come . . . and the loss of both horses would mean paying it off till the end of his life . . . “Hey, Ede and Kare! Hey whoa!”, but the team was already dashing into the draught of wind by the maltings, now their hooves softened in the muddy roadway past the chimney and malting floor, the geldings slowed down also, and again by the stables, on the cobble-stones, they speeded up, and on the concrete pavement, illuminated by sharp-edged shafts of light from passages lit by paraffin lamps, on that pavement, drawing hissing sparks from every buckle dragging on the ground, every chain, every hoof, those two Belgians gathered speed, it was no longer a running pace, but a retarded fall, puffs of breath rolled from their nostrils, their eyes were crazed and filled with horror, at the turning by the office both of them skidded on that concrete paving, like a grotesque comedy, but both rode along on their rear hooves, with sparks flying, the drayman stiffened with horror. And Francin rushed to the door, but I stood leaning on the doorpost, praying that nothing would happen to those horses, I knew very well that their incident was also my story too, and Ede and Kare once more in synchrony trotted alongside one another into the draught from the maltings, their hooves grew quiet in the soft mud on the road past the malting floor, and again they gave themselves a signal, and for the third time they flew off, the drayman leapt and the lamp, as one of the horses tugged the bridle, flew in an arc and smashed against the laundry, and the crash of it gave the Belgians new strength, first they neighed one after the other, then both together, and they pelted off along the concrete pavement . . . I looked at Francin, as if it were me who had changed into a pair of Belgian horses, that was my obstinate character, once a month to go crazy, I too suffered a quarterly longing for freedom, I, who was certainly not neutered, but hale and healthy, sometimes a bit too hale and healthy . . . and Francin looked at me, and saw that the bolting Belgian team, those fair blowing manes and powerful air-drawn tails streaming behind their brown bodies, they were me, not me, but my character, my bolting golden coiffure flying through the darkened night, that freely blowing unbound hair of mine . . . and he pushed me aside, and now Francin stood with upraised arms in the tunnel of light flooding from the passage, with uplifted arms he stepped towards the horses and called out, “Eh-doodoo-doodoo! Whoa!”, and the gelded Belgian stallions braked, from beneath their hooves the sparks showered, Francin jumped aside and took the offside horse by the bridle, snatched it and dug it into the foaming maw of the animal, and the motion of the horses ceased, the buckles and reins and straps of the harnessing fell on the ground, the drayman ran up and took the nearside one by the bridle . . . “Sir, sir . . .” stammered the drayman. “Wipe them down with straw, and take them through the yard . . . forty thousand crowns that pair cost, do you follow me, Martin?” said Francin, and when he came in the front door like a lancer, and he served with the lancers in the time of Austria, if I hadn’t jumped aside he would have knocked me down, he would have stepped right over me . . . and out of the dark came the sound of the whip and the painful whinny of the Belgian horses, swearing and blows with the wrong end of the whip, then the leaping of horses in the dark and cracking of the long whip, wrapping itself round the Belgians’ legs and slashing into the skin.

  2

  But my portrait is also four pigs, brewery pigs, fed on draff and potatoes, and in the summer, when the beet ripened, I went for the beet leaves and chopped up those leaves and poured yeasty liquid and old beer over them, and the pigs slept twenty hours and put on as much as one kilogram a day, those piggies of mine used to hear me going off to milk the goats, and straightaway they bellowed with joy, because they didn’t know that I was going to sell two of them for ham and have two of them slaughtered at home for sausages. As I was milking the goats my porkers would cry out in delight, because they knew that all the milk I got would be poured out right away for them. Mr Cicvárek only glanced at the pigs and said immediately how much those pigs weighed, and always he was right, then he took those two piggies in
his arms and threw them into a kind of basketwork gig, a butcher’s buggy, drew a net over them and said, “Those little beggars fight you back just like the old woman the first time I kissed her as a lass.”

  Bidding them farewell I said to my piggies, “Tatty bye, little old piggie-wiggies, you’re going to make ever such lovely hams!”

  The piggies had no particular desire for such glory, I knew, but all of us have the one death coming to us, and nature is merciful, when there’s nothing for it, then everything alive that has to die in a moment, everything is gripped by horror, as if the fuses go, for both man and beast, and then you feel nothing and nothing hurts, that timorousness lowers the wicks in the lamps, till life just dimly flickers and is unaware of anything in its dread. I didn’t have much luck with butchers, the first one I had put so much ginger in the sausages that he turned them into confectionery, whereas the second drank so much from first thing in the day that when he lifted the mallet to stun a pig he smashed his own leg, there I was standing with the knife ready, I practically slit that butcher’s throat in my fury, then I had to cart him off to the hospital, what’s more, and get hold of a replacement. Whereas the third butcher brought his own invention, instead of scalding he had taken to scorching the bristles off with a blow-lamp. I should’ve junked that butcher in the WC instead of the soup, because for one thing the bristles stayed in the skin, and more important, the pig stank of petrol, so that we had to pour the soup down the drain, because not even the pig that was left would eat it.

  Mr Myclík, he was a butcher now, a butcher to my taste. He asked for some marble sponge cake and a white coffee, and had himself a rum, but only once the sausages were in the cauldron, a butcher who brought all his tools wrapped up in napkins, brought with him three aprons, one for slaughtering and scalding and gutting, the other he donned when putting out the offal on the chopping board, and the third apron when everything was almost finished. It was Mr Myclík too who taught me to get one extra spare cauldron and keep that cauldron only for boiling sausages and blood puddings and brawn and offal and heating fat, because whatever cooks in the pan leaves something of itself behind, and a pig-slaughtering, lady, it’s the same as a priest serving mass, because, after all, both are a matter of flesh and blood.

  And while we baked the bun dough for the sausages and blood puddings, and while we brought the tub, and into the night I boiled the barley and prepared on plates a sufficient quantity of salt and pepper and ginger and marjoram and thyme, the pig had got nothing to eat at midday and began to sense the smell of the butcher’s apron, the rest of the livestock too were subdued and quiet, trembling already in advance like aspen leaves, all the other trees are calm and still, the storm is somewhere off in the Carpathians or the Alps, but the aspen leaves tremble and vibrate, like my pig, who is to be slaughtered on the morrow.

  I was always the one to go and bring the pig out of the sty. I didn’t like them to bind up the piggie’s mouth with a rope, why this pain, when I brought the pig treacherously out for the butcher I scratched it on the dewlap, then on the brow, then on its back, and Mr Myclík came from behind with his axe, raised it and knocked down the pig with a mighty blow. For safety’s sake he aimed two or three more wet knocks at the pig’s splintered skull, I handed Mr Myclík the knife and he knelt down and stuck the blade in its throat, searching a moment for the artery with the point of the blade, and then a gush of blood poured out and I placed the pan beneath, and then another big cauldron. Mr Myclík always, obligingly, while I was changing the containers, stopped up the gushing blood with his hand, then let it go again. Now I had to mix the blood with a wooden whisk to stop it from clotting, then with the other hand too, with both hands simultaneously, I beat at the wonderful smoking blood, Mr Myclík with his helper Mr Martin, the drayman, rolled the pig into the tub and poured boiling water on to it from jugs, and I had to roll up my sleeves and with splayed fingers feel through the cooling blood, take the clotted lumps of blood and throw the stuff to the hens, with both arms up to my elbows in the cooling blood — my arms failed, I waggled them about as if I was on my last legs with the pig, now the last clots of coagulated blood, and the blood settled down, grew cool, I pulled my arms out of the pans and cauldron, while the scalded, shaven pig rose slowly on a crook to the beam of the open shed.

  The pig’s head lay severed with the dewlap on the board, just then I brought across two shoulders. And now I ran through the yard, my hair tucked under a scarf, so as not to miss a moment, because by now Mr Myclík had rolled out the guts and told his helper to go and turn and wash them, while he himself rummaged in the pig’s innards, from memory, like blind Hanuš in the clock, slicing into something else every time, and the spleen and liver and stomach came loose, finally also the lungs and heart. I held the jug ready and all those wonderful lights tumbled out, that symphony of wet colours and shapes, nothing gave me such ecstasy as those pale red pig’s lights, wonderfully swollen like crêpe rubber, nothing is so passionate in colouring as the dark brown colour of liver, adorned with the emerald of gall, like clouds before the storm, just like tender cloud fleeces, there running alongside the guts is the knobbly leaf fat, yellow as a guttered candle, as beeswax. And the windpipe too is composed of blue and pale red cartilaginous rings like the suction hose of a coloured vacuum-cleaner. And when we tumbled out that wonderful stuff on to the board, Mr Myclík took a knife, whetted it against a steel, and then sliced off, here a piece of still warm lean meat, here some pieces of liver, here a whole kidney and half a spleen, and I held up a large pan with browned onion and put those pieces of pig straight in the oven, after carefully salting and peppering it all, so that the goulash from the slaughtering would be ready by midday.

  Taking a sieve, I strained out the boiled pig’s offal, the shoulder, the halved head, turned it on to the board, one piece of meat after another, Mr Myclík removed the bones, and when the meat had cooled a little, I took in my fingers a piece of dewlap and a piece of cheek, instead of bread I chewed some pig’s ear, Francin came into the kitchen, he never ate any, he couldn’t stomach a thing, so he stood by the stove and had some dry bread and drank some coffee with it, and looked at me and was embarrassed on my behalf, and I ate with relish and drank beer straight from the litre bottle. Mr Myclík smiled, and just for politeness’ sake took a bit of meat, but changed his mind and sipped his white coffee and tasted his marble cake, then he took his mincing knife, rolled up his sleeves, and with powerful motions of the knife the lumps of meat began to lose their shape and function, and with the half-moon slicings of the rocker blades the meat gradually became sausage-meat. And Mr Myclík proffered his palm, and I poured scalded spices into it, Mr Myclík was the one butcher whose spices I had to drench first in boiling water, because, he said, and I understood him quite palpably, it makes for a greater dispersion and delicacy of aroma. And then he added the soaked bread-roll crumb and again mixed it all thoroughly and ran through it with his powerful hands and fingers and mixed it through and through, then he tugged the sausage-meat off both his hands, dug into it, tried it for taste, gazed at the ceiling, and at that moment was as handsome as a poet, he stared at the ceiling in delight, repeating over to himself: pepper, salt, ginger, thyme, bread-roll, garlic, and as he pattered over that quick-fire butcher’s tiny prayer, he dug into the sausage-meat and offered me some. I took it on my finger and put it in my mouth and tasted it, staring likewise at the ceiling, and with eyes brimful with piggy delight I unfurled and relished on my tongue the peacock fantail of all those aromas, and then I nodded my assent, that as the mother of the household I approved of this gamut of flavours, and nothing now stood in the way of getting down to making the sausages themselves. And so Mr Myclík took the trimmed skins, spaled with a splint at one end, with two fingers of the right hand he parted the aperture and with the other hand just stuffed, and out of his fist there grew a wonderful sausage, which I took and fastened with a spale, and so we worked, and all the while as the sausage-meat declined, so in their jointed vessel
s of skins the heap of sausages rose.

  “Mr Martin, where have you got to again?” Mr Myclík called out every other while, and every time this Mr Martin, the drayman, maybe all the days of his life, whenever he had a moment, he had loitered, in the shed, in the stable, behind the cart, in the passageways, he drew out a little round mirror and looked at himself, he was so enamoured of himself, he was always overpowered by whatever it was he saw in that little round mirror, for hours on end he could linger in the stable, forgetting to go home, all because he was plucking bristles from his nose with the tweezers, plucking hairs from his eyebrows, he even dyed not only his hair, but even coloured his eye-lashes and powdered his face. I’d tell myself, next time Francin would have to get me another helper from the brewery. “Mr Martin, for Christ’s sake where have you got to again? Slice up this gut fat, we’re going to make barley and breadcrumb puddings, where have you been?”

  Mr Myclík loaded the barley puddings, by now he’d drunk his second pouring of rum, then, quite out of the blue, he just dug into the blood-soaked sausage-meat and smeared a bloody smudge on my face with his finger. And quietly he started to laugh, his eye glinting like a ring, I dipped into the bloody pan myself, and when I tried to smear the butcher one on the face he ducked aside and I planted my palm on the white wall, but before I’d wiped it off Mr Myclík had given me another smudge, then he carried on skewering the pudding. I dipped into the blood again and made a dash at him, Mr Myclík ducked me several times like a Savoy medley, then I smeared his face with blood, and went on skewering the barley puddings, and laughed when I saw the butcher laughing with his great hearty laughter, it wasn’t just any old laughter, it was a laughter from somewhere way back out of pagan times, when people believed in the force of blood and spittle. I couldn’t resist scooping up some barley blood and smearing it again in Mr Myclík’s face, and he ducked me again, I missed him, and with a great big chuckle he planted me another smudge, and carried on skewering the puddings. Mr Martin brought a crate of beer over from the bottling room, and as he bent down carefully I smeared him in the face with a full palm of bloody sausage-meat, and Mr Martin the drayman drew his little round mirror out of his pocket, looked at himself, and probably he was even more enamoured of himself than usual, he gave a hearty laugh and scooped up three fingerfuls of red sausage-meat. I dashed into the living room, Mr Martin ran after me, I shouted out, not even realising that behind the wall the brewery management board was in session, you could distinctly hear the scraping of chairs and calling of voices, but Mr Martin besmirched me with blood and laughed, the blood brought us closer together somehow, I laughed and sat myself down on the sofa, holding my hands out in front of me like a puppet, so as not to mess up the covers, Mr Martin likewise held his messy hand up in the same gesture, while the rest of his whole body gradually dissolved with laughter, shook, and his throat burst into a choking, jubilant, coughing chuckle. And Mr Myclík dashed up and scooped with a full palm at Mr Martin’s face, the barley grains glistened in it like pearls, and Mr Martin stopped laughing, he went solemn, it seemed as if he wanted to hit someone, but he only drew out his little round pocket mirror, looked at himself in it, and seemingly found himself even better looking than he had ever seen himself before, and he guffawed with laughter, opening wide the sluice gates of his throat and bellowing with laughter, and Mr Myclík, an interval of a third lower, chuckled away with a small-scale laughter which matched the little teeth under his black moustache, and so we roared together with laughter and didn’t know why, one look was enough and off we went, bursting into stitches of mirth which hurt in the side. And now the door opened and in rushed Francin in his frock coat, pressing his cabbage-leaf-shaped tie against his chest, and when he saw the blood-smeared faces and the terrible laughter, he clasped his hands, but I couldn’t restrain myself, I took three fingers of bloody sausage-meat and smeared Francin in the face, to make him laugh in spite of himself, but he took such fright that he ran, just as he was, into the boardroom, two members of the board of management collapsed on the spot, because they thought a crime had been committed in the brewery. Doctor Gruntorád himself, the chairman, ran by the back entrance into the kitchen, looked about him, and when he saw that broad laughter on the blood-smeared faces he sighed a sigh of relief, sat himself down, and I, with my hands messy with sausage-meat, made a red stripe on the doctor’s face, and for just a moment we all went quiet, gazing through tearful eyes at our chairman Doctor Gruntorád, who rose to his feet and clenched his fists and thrust out his bulldog jaw . . . but all of a sudden he bayed with laughter, it was that force of blood, that sacral something which, in order to be averted, was discharged from time immemorial by this smearing with pig’s blood, the doctor dug into the sausage-meat and rushed at me, I ran laughing into the living room, the doctor missed me and landed his hand on the ready made-up bed, he went into the kitchen and scooped up a fistful and returned, I ran round the table, the white cloth was full of my palm prints, every other moment Dr Gruntorád dotted the tablecloth with blood, he headed me off and I ran squealing into the passage connecting our flat with the boardroom, the lights were on in the room and I ran into the meeting, golden chandeliers and beneath them a long table covered with green baize, upon which files and reports lay outspread. And Gruntorád, chairman of the board, rushed in after me, all the members of the management board thought their chairman was after my blood, that he’d tried to kill me already. Francin sat on a chair and mopped his brow with a bloodstained hand, and the chairman chased me several times round the table, I shrieked and the sweat poured from both of us, when suddenly my foot slipped and I fell, and Doctor Gruntorád, chairman of the municipal brewery, and limited-liability company, splodged a full hand in my face and sat down, his cuffs drooped and he started to laugh, he laughed just like me, we laughed together, but that laughter only enhanced the consternation of the members of the management board, because they all thought we had gone quite dotty.