The Little Town Where Time Stood Still

by Bohumil Hrabal

  Today, when he returned drawn by the yoke of bullocks, he asked me to shut my eyes. And he carried something through into the living room. And then he put the light out in the living room and took me by the hand and led me through with closed eyes, he sat me down on the little armchair in front of the mirror, then he went and drew the curtains. I heard the lid snap open and thought he’d bought me a hat-box, but then I heard him stick the plug in the collar of the socket, I thought he’d bought me some sort of mixer, patent cooker or solar lamp, and then I heard a sizzling, slowly ascending rumble. Francin laid his hand gently on my shoulder and said “Now.” And I opened my eyes, and what I saw was marvellous to behold. Francin stood there like a magician, in his fingers he held a tube, in which there shone a pale blue light, a kind of thick purple violet light, which shone on Francin’s hands and face and clothes, a purple violet dampened fire in a glass tube, which Francin put close to my hand, and my arm went magnetic, I could feel purple sawdust sizzling out of that light, immaterial sparklets, which entered me and imbued me with fragrance, so that I had the scent of a summer thunderstorm, the air in the room had the scent too, like air after lightning strikes, and Francin slowly lifted the wonderful thing and put it close to his own face, I saw again that handsome profile of his, Francin stood solemnly here like Gunnar Tolnes, and then ran that tube over the open case, and there on the red plush, lining the lid as well, were set in a fan shape all kinds of brush heads, pipes and bells, all of it was made of glass and enclosed like bottles, dozens of instruments of glass, and Francin pulled off the tube and took out of the case and fixed into the bakelite holder one wonderful object after another, and each time that glass vessel glowed and filled with purple violet light, which fizzled and passed through into the human body just as required. Francin changed and experimented with all these electrodes with their neon gas content, saying quietly, “Maryška, now Uncle Pepin can bawl his head off, now they can make trouble at the brewery, now people can insult me as they please, but here . . . here are these sparks of healing which turn into health, high frequencies which give you a new joie de vivre, fresh courage in life . . . Maryška, this is for you too, for your nerves, for your health, this one here is a cathode which treats your ears, this cathode here massages the heart, imagine, a heart-enhancing sizzling phosphorescence! And this one is for hysteria and epilepsy, this violet ozone removes your desire to do in public things a decent person can only think of or do at home, and other electrodes are for styes and liver-spots, torn muscles, and migraine, the fifteenth one is for hyperaemia of the brain and hallucinations,” said Francin talking quietly, and in front of me spread those neon-filled forms, each one different, these electrodes were more like great pistils or stamens or orchid blooms than curative instruments. I listened to all this and for the first time ever I was speechless with surprise, even though those electrodes for hallucinations and high frequencies for hysteria and epilepsy concealed a direct reference to me, I had no reason to resist, so benumbed I was by that purple violet beauty. Francin put on an electrode in the form of an earpiece, he put it close to my forehead, I looked at myself in the mirror, and there was a stunning sight! I looked like a beautiful water maiden, like those young ladies in Art Nouveau pictures, purple violet, with ringlets singed by the evening star! Vacuum flasks with a purple violet storm of polar radiation! And again Francin leaned over the case and into the bakelite holder he stuck a neon comb, this neon comb glowed like an advertising sign over some ladies’ accessories shop in Vienna or Paris, and Francin came close to me, planted that sizzling comb in my hair, I looked at myself in the mirror and I knew that there was nothing more I could wish for but to comb through my tresses with that comb. And Francin slowly, as if he knew it, ran that shining comb through my tempestuous hair, reaching down to the ground, and again he reared up and again he ran through them with the high frequency fed comb. I began to quiver all over, I had to hug myself, Francin breathed out quietly, every time he couldn’t stop himself from plunging his whole face into those tresses of mine, which felt so good in that purple violet cold storm that when the comb returned the hair ends rose with it, and again that purple violet comb forging down through my hair, that bluish dinghy plunging through the rapids, that cascade of my hair, that purple violet marrowed hollow glass comb! “Maryška,” Francin whispered and sat down behind me and again slowly drew the comb through my electric charged hair, “Mary, this we’re going to do every day now, I brought this to assuage life’s hubbub with its blue shading, quieten your nerves, while for me the electrodes will rather be coloured red, to quicken the blood circulation and invigorate the living organism . . .” said Francin talking softly. And from the boxroom behind the kitchen hammer blows rang out, and an annoyed and ever crosser and crosser voice rose up, Uncle Pepin, who had come for a fortnight, and had been with us now for a whole month, and Francin, when I stroked him under the lamp and smoothed away his trepidation with the curve of my hand, he told me he was horrified by the idea of Pepin staying with us twenty years, and maybe the rest of his life. And Uncle Pepin mended us our boots and shoes, in the boxroom where he also slept, but they weren’t just shoes for him, they were something alive, which Uncle Pepin wrestled with, boxed to the floor, he cursed and swore for days on end, and I heard swear-words I’d never heard before, and also every half an hour Uncle took the shoe he was mending, and when he’d cursed and sworn at it, he’d slam it down, chuck it away, and then he’d sit on his stool and sulk. When he’d settled down, he would turn round slowly, take a look at the shoe, ask its forgiveness and lift it up again, stroke it, then go on pegging it and threading it tight, and having somehow clumsy fingers, he always yelped out, so that I came running, thinking he’d stuck the knife in his chest, but it was only the thread which wouldn’t pull through the sole, and the whole shoe threatened to rebel, indeed did, like a wound-up spring jumping out of a gramophone, so that shoe shot away like soap out of your palm, and it leapt right up on to the cupboard or the ceiling, as if there was a little motor in it, and when it flew out of Uncle’s hand, Uncle flung himself after the shoe, like a goalkeeper making a flying save of the ball. . .

  And now Uncle yelled out, “Damn! Blast!”

  Francin put away the neon comb, on top of the instruments in the case he laid the sheet of plush, took a look in the direction of Uncle’s cry and said:

  “Those fulgurating currents have given me added strength already.” And he put the case away in the cupboard, then I pulled on the button and the window blind flew up and the china button clicked lightly against my teeth. Across the orchard I could see the beige maltings, a maltster was walking with a squat lamp in his fingers up the steps to the first floor, then he disappeared, and the lamp appeared again one storey higher, again it disappeared, and reappeared, and all the time with each stair the lamp rose as if it was walking through the dusky brewery by itself, a lamp stepping all on its own up the staircase, then the lamp disappeared, but again reappeared and walked from window to little window over the covered bridge connecting the maltings with the brewhouse. But who was that stepping along at random like that, who was carrying that lamp about, just so that it might seem to rise up through the maltings and brewery all by itself? And I stood by the window and lurked like a hunter in wait for the buck about to come out on to the clearing . . . and my expectation made me quiver. Now the lamp appeared right up on the cooling-floor, where nobody ever goes at this hour, where there is a vat the size of an ice-hockey rink, a tank in which a whole brew of beer is put to cool, the young stuff . . . and now the lamp is walking there, a lamp that acts as if it knew I was watching it, a lamp carried just for me, the ten great big four-metre cooling-floor windows are fitted with louvres, open just a crack, like shutters in Italy and Spain, and that lamp walks steadily on, interrupted by those hundreds of louvres, the thin slivered motion of the kindled lamp, which now halts. I saw the window frame with its louvres open and someone with the lamp came out on to the roof of the ice chamber, where there is a moun
tain of ice piled four storeys high, twelve hundred cartloads of frozen river, of icy ceiling, which cart after cartload is heaped up in the chamber by a bucket-hoist, an ice chamber which is covered on top against the heat by half a metre of sand and river pebbles, on which from spring till autumn houseleeks grow, hundreds and thousands of houseleeks amidst cushions of green moss . . . and there stands now the squat lamp, which one of the brewery workers has brought up there, a maltster . . . I opened the window and heard from above a pleasing male voice, as if the kindled lamp were singing: “ . . . the love that was, it is gone, ’twas for but a short while, golden lassie, not for long, now she is no more . . . her life is o’er . . . to the deep linn by Nymburk town she’s gone . . .” And from the boxroom came Francin’s shouting: “For God’s sake, give over, please, Jožko!” And slowly I went out of the room, I didn’t even look today as the electric current slowly ebbed, like that love which drowned in the deep linn. Francin had lit the lamps, I went out into the passage and there sat Francin on a chair, both hands pressed to his chest and urging Uncle to leave it all be, and since he’s here, couldn’t he read or go to church or the pictures, just so long as there’s some peace and quiet in the house . . . Francin wanted to get up, but somehow he couldn’t, he tried once more, but he was intimately joined to the chair, I put my hand over my mouth, such was my alarm, because I knew that Francin had sat in the pot of cobbler’s glue. Pepin was mortified, he would have liked so much to mend all of his brother’s shoes, he talked about it such a lot because, of whatever he had ever felt affection for in this world, he felt affection for his brother the most, Francin tried to force his way up off the chair, but he couldn’t prise himself free and he bent forward and keeled over, he lay there on the floor and the chair with him. I knelt down and tried to prise Francin free, but the cobbler’s glue alias gum had stuck Francin down so firmly that he looked like an overturned statue of a seated Christ. Uncle Pepin pulled Francin’s shoulders, I tried lying down behind Francin and pulling the chair in the opposite direction, but it seemed more likely that my husband and Pepin’s brother would be torn in half than that we would liberate him from this situation. I rose up and something else rose with my hair, I took my hair in my fingers, drew it on to my lap and saw that my hair had got stuck in the other pot of cobbler’s glue or gum, I took the scissors and snipped off the pot of glue along with the end of hair, there the little container now lay like the Golden Bull of Sicily dipped in the strings of my hair. When Francin saw what had happened to my hair, he pranced up like a horse and a lovely sound of tearing fabric ripped through the boxroom. Francin rolled over free and stood there handsome once more, his eyes filled with healthy predatory sizzling wrath, he took the lasts and pots and boxes of pegs, and Uncle Pepin, I thought the look would be enough to break his heart, but Pepin handed his brother with alacrity everything combustible, and Francin with an ever greater and growing sense of relief chucked it all in the stove. The cobbler’s glue burned up so violently it lifted the stove plates, and the flame was sucked up through the flues into the chimney, a practically two-metre-long flame it was, long as my hair.

  6

  Uncle Pepin liked sitting best out beyond the malting floors, sheltered on one side by the orchard, on the other by the chimney stack, beside which oak staves of all sizes were stacked, staves out of which barrels were made in the cooperage, kegs, quarter hectolitres, halves and hectolitres and two hectolitres alias doubles, according to need, and then great big fifty-hectolitre and hundred-hectolitre casks, in which whole brewings of beer were stored in the fermenting rooms and cellars, casks in which the beer matured into either ordinary beer or lager. Here Uncle Pepin, when he couldn’t do his cobbling, found a stick and walked up and down by the malting floors practising parade ground marches, bayonet duels. So as he wouldn’t shout so much, Francin asked me to keep an eye on him.

  “Am I glad to see you, sister-in-law,” said Pepin, “your Francin’s a bit of a nerves twister, a right bundle of nerves, now in Mr Batista’s book he ought to give his privates a good soaking in lukewarm water or take more fresh air and exercise. But as you’re here the now, we’ll have a wee training session alias Schulbildung, seeing as I had nothing but top marks, certified commendations, no like one dunderhead, a lad from Haná, stepped out on parade and says to Colonel von Wucherer, ‘Mister, here’s yer bullets and buns, I’m gaun home, I’m quittin’ the service . . .’ and the Colonel yells at the officer in charge, ‘Have you got the cholera or what?’ ”

  “Peps,” I said.

  “Balls!” bellowed Uncle Pepin. “I was ever an example to all, and anyway d’ye think von Wucherer knew who I was at all? D’ye expect him to remember thousands of men like that? Once he was gaun off after the leddies, and two sodgers, dunderheads, hailed the carriage for to get a lift, then they see von Wucherer lolling back in the carriage there, and the sodgers saluted, and von Wucherer he says kindly like, ‘Where are you off to then, soldier lads?’ And they says, ‘We’re gaun on leave.’ And von Wucherer says, ‘Anybody gaun on leave has to have his Urlaubsschein, his pass, where is it?’ And the sodgers felt themselves over and von Wucherer says to one of them, ‘What’s your name, then?’ and the sodger said, ‘Šimsa!’ And von Wucherer asked the other sodger, ‘And what’s yours?’ And the other laddie said, ‘Řimsa!’ And the sodger that said his name was Šimsa started belting off into the field, and so von Wucherer commanded, ‘Řimsa, bring me back that Šimsa, pronto!’ Only Řimsa belted off along with Šimsa, and Colonel von Wucherer turned the carriage about and drove the stallions back to the barracks and right away he asked, ‘Which platoon are Šimsa and Řimsa with?’ And there was no Řimsa or Šimsa in the records, so Colonel von Wucherer, that said his memory was like a photographic camera, had the whole barracks called out on parade and he went from sodger to sodger, took him by the chin and stared him close in the eye, as if he would give him a kiss any moment, for about two days, but he never recognised the one who said he was Řimsa, nor the one that called himself Šimsa, so how d’ye expect a colonel like that to remember old Peps?”

  “Pssst,” said I, “there’s a meeting of the management board this afternoon.”

  “Right enough,” said Uncle softly, “but now I’m going to learn ye how many parts there are to a rifle,” and Uncle took the stick he was practising with, took it just as carefully and expertly as if it were a real army gun, pointed out on it and one by one listed off all the parts, finishing with, “and so this is the Kolbenschuh or butt-end shoe, and this is the so-called Mündung, muzzle or mouth . . .”

  “Of the Elbe,” I said.

  “Balls! What are you twittering on about like a young magpie? Elbow’s elbow, but this is the Mündung, muzzle or mouth, if you’d said the like of that to old sergeant Brčula, he’d have socked you one and you’d have flopped over flat as a rabbit!”

  From beyond the orchard you could hear the irate slamming of windows in the office and Francin ran out of the counting-house in a white shirt. I could see him dashing through the long grass, dodging the branches of the trees, it was a lovely sight to see the man running along, jumping over obstructions with leg outstretched to keep his footing in the grass, the other above the grass in an almost horizontal posture, his legs repeating alternately all of that wonderful top-of-the-grass-hopping motion. When he reached us I saw that in his fingers he was clutching a number three lettering pen.