The Little Town Where Time Stood Still

by Bohumil Hrabal

  And in the cake shop I ordered Mr Navrátil to wrap me four cream horns, and I took one right away and leant forward to stop the flaky pastry getting in my blouse. And again, as I crammed the cream horn voraciously into my mouth, at once I heard Francin’s voice saying that no decent woman would eat a cream puff like that, and Mr Navrátil smiled guardedly, because he had no teeth, and I paused in front of the window display, just let the women see my silhouetted profile from inside the dark shop, and Mr Navrátil handed me a small parcel done up with blue string. I paid, and Mr Navrátil opened the door for me, and before I rode off, he helped me with my hair, running alongside the bike for a bit, till the hair got into the airstream. I pedalled off with all my might, steering with one hand and holding that delicious parcel on one finger, and my hair welled up behind me, just like those beautiful brass balls in the regulator of a steam traction engine when it’s revving up. I went on making as if to look at the middle of the road in front of me, but on both pavements I could see all the various kinds of human eyes, those admiring eyes as well as those glances full of hatred for my bare knees, as they rose up alternately like camshaft joints. . .

  And when I reached the brewery I rode at once over to the stables, Mutzek ran to meet me, good little doggie, he wagged his long tail, and when I bent down to him he licked my palm and half-closed his eyes, and I went into the shed and brought an axe and unwrapped the parcel and offered Mutzek a cream puff, and he was distrusting at first, but when I laughed he started eating the cream puff and I considered in my mind how much I ought to take off to shorten Mutzek’s tail, and I placed the chopping block behind Mutzek and took his tail and laid it on the block, but Mutzek turned round, so I stroked him and offered him another cream puff, and Mutzek, his paw mucky with whipped cream, licked my hand and the axe-handle too and tucked into the second cream puff, and I laid out Mutzek’s tail on the block, and then with one blow I chopped off the greater part of it and Mutzek gasped, he had half of the cream puff inside him, but the pain in his tail was doubtless so great, that Mutzek started to moan and turn around, and with his mouth full of sugary foam he took hold of the stump of his tail, out of which blood was dripping, and Mutzek thought someone else had done it, not me, he licked my hand and the remains of his tail by turns, I stroked him and comforted him, “Mutzy dear, it’ll only last a short moment, think how handsome and beautiful you’ll be, it’s the fashion, it has to be like this, take a look and see!” I straightened up and showed him how my skirt was shortened too, but Mutzek began to lament dreadfully and I could see that I hadn’t chopped quite enough off, I ought to chop off just another little piece, but Mutzek wouldn’t hear of any continuation, I held his tail down on the block, I promised him all the cream puffs, and said I would buy him some more, but Mutzek broke free and took the chopped off piece of tail into his little mouth and ran off with it to the office, and just as the draymen were coming out, he ran into the counting house.

  A moment later Francin rushed out of the office, in one hand he held a number three lettering pen, in the other that piece of tail, and Mutzek stood on the last step and barked in the direction of the shed and stables, out of which I was just wheeling my bike, and when I rode up in front of the office, Doctor Gruntorád came bowling along into the brewery. The chairman’s stallion had had its tail cropped and its mane trimmed and the doctor jumped down from the driving seat, tossed the reins to the coachman, and taking a look at my skirt he proclaimed, “Everything is going to have to be shortened and there’s no end to what is needed. So, manager, now we’re going to shorten the working week, from the first of the month Saturdays will be cut by half, so we’ll knock off at twelve. The distances to landlords will be shortened by driving out to them. We’ll sell your Orion motorbike and get you a motor-car, which will shorten the time taken up and make scope for a greater turnover of beer. Ivan!” cried Doctor Gruntorád at the coachman. “Hand me my first-aid box, let’s put some plasters on the little doggie to stop that bleeding.”

  That afternoon Francin took the Orion off to Prague. I took the opportunity and after work I went off to the lodgings to see Uncle Pepin. Under a lit bulb Uncle Pepin was brandishing his fist at a great huge maltster, who was kneeling, but even on his knees he was still the same size as Uncle Pepin standing, but Uncle put on a threatening face and roared out, “Suppose I canna hold myself back! Suppose I just fetches you a mighty great Ostrava miner’s clout with my fist!”

  And the great enormous maltster clasped his hands and begged him, “Oh, Mr Josef, don’t make a widow of me wife and orphans of me children!”

  And the other maltsters standing round in a circle laughed quietly to themselves, those who couldn’t stand it any longer ran out into the corridor and stood there facing the wall and drumming their fists against the plaster and drowning in fits of laughter. And when they had finished choking they ran back into the lodgings.

  And Uncle Pepin stood legs astride beneath the light bulb and cried out, “So let’s have you the now!”

  And he threw himself at the huge maltster, who gave ground, and Uncle Pepin gave him a half-nelson, and tried to put him to the floor, but the maltster reared up and knocked Uncle over and pinned him down and everyone around shouted and clapped, but Uncle Pepin grabbed him round the neck and the maltster allowed himself to be turned just about almost on to his back, but at the last minute he knelt and Uncle gave him a full nelson and the maltster stood up and walked round the room with Uncle, carrying Uncle like a little child, but Uncle Pepin yelled out in his delight, “And it’s a stunning victory, just like our own Gustav Frištenský!”

  Then the maltster knelt again and did a somersault with Uncle, only now did I notice that the two wrestlers were wearing white long-johns, right down to their ankles and tied at the ankle with laces. And as the huge maltster did the somersault, he pinned Uncle Pepin down, lay on his head, but Uncle shouted out, “Give up, it’s no use, I’ve got ye held fast!”

  But the great huge maltster reared up, nabbed Uncle Pepin by the ankles and neck and set him spinning and then fell over with him, but Uncle Pepin roared out, “That’s set ye flying, like Frištenský that time with the negro!”

  And then the maltster weakened and Uncle Pepin took him by the shoulders and the maltster subsided into laughter and laughed till the tears ran, and Uncle put him on the floor and the chief maltster knelt down and announced, “Mr Josef, you’re the winner again!”

  And the wrestlers stood up, Uncle bowed and smiled, bowing at the throngs which only he could see around him.

  “And tomorrow it’s the return bout,” said the chief maltster and dipped his face in his can.

  “Uncle Jožin,” I said, “could you come over to us for a minute and lend us your saw, please?”

  And Uncle Pepin recovered his breath, nodded his head, then he went over and threw the blanket off his bunk, all his underwear and other clothes were at the foot of it, he rolled aside the bolster, which was all grimy at the head, and under the bolster he had all sorts of little boxes and reels of thread and so many funny useless tiny bits and bobs, here Uncle found a key, opened his cupboard and pulled out of it a paper bag, upon which was written: Alois Šisler, Hatter and Furrier, and out of that bag he took a beautiful white sailor’s cap with golden cords and the gold-embroidered emblem Viribus Unitis.

  “Old Šisler sewed me this, he wouldn’t have done it for anyone else but me!” So saying he planted that beautiful white sailor’s cap on his head, and there he stood in his long-johns, behind him the tumbled bed with its kicked underwear and clothing at the foot and its load of useless funny old things at the head.

  “Uncle Jožin,” I said, “that’s a lovely bed you’ve got there, I’ll sew you some covers for it, alright?”

  “If ye want,” said Uncle, quickly getting dressed.

  And the maltsters stood round and watched, they gazed at the floor and couldn’t manage to say me a single word, they even seemed sorry that I’d turned up in the middle of all that fun with U
ncle Pepin, because it was their fun and I didn’t belong in it, between me and them lay a difference like the one between this lodging room, where eight of them sleep together, and my three rooms and kitchen, where I sleep and Francin, the brewery manager, who may even make it one day to brewery director, while they will still only be maltsters, till the day they retire, the day they die. Uncle Pepin closed the cupboard and glowed with joy over that cap, the kind only sea captains wear, or first officers.

  “Good night to you, sirs,” I said and went out of the lodgings.

  Before we had pushed through the gust of wind at the corner of the maltings, the light bulbs began to quaver at the corners of the brewery and stables, as if the draught was draining the electricity out of them. Uncle’s cap glowed like the milky shade of a paraffin lamp and Uncle had to hold on to that cap tight with both hands to stop the buffets of wind whipping it away from him. It even seemed to me as if Uncle Pepin was just about to float up in the air like once my bouclé bathtowel did . . . and I knew for a cert that Uncle Pepin wouldn’t give up his cap, that he’d rather fly zig-zag up into the darkness towards the brewery chimneys and gyrating weather-vanes. And when I lit the lamps and Uncle brought the saw over from the master cooper, I knocked over a chair and Uncle and I shortened the legs of the chair, not much, by ten centimetres, which each time I measured with a tailor’s tape-measure. When we laid the table on its side, Uncle Pepin said, “Sister-in-law, do ye know what? What’s the point of measuring it all with that tape-measure? Let’s just saw off one leg and then lay the sawn-off block against the next leg, and then we can just saw them off straight without measuring.”

  I gave a laugh, “Uncle Pepin, you ought to have joined the police force, with such brains!”

  And Uncle Pepin shouted, “You leave the police out of this! Uncle Adolf had only been with the force just a month, straight off they took him with them in hot pursuit of one particular character, surrounded the building he was in, and when they entered the kitchen there was his other half sitting all by herself and the chief detective says, ‘Where’s your old man?’ And she says, ‘Gone to cut tree stumps,’ and the chief kicks in the door to the living-room and there through the open window he sees this character darting up the hillside, so he orders them, ‘After him!’ And Adolf is first out the window, lands up to his neck in manure, but he scrambles up out of it and off they all scamper into the woods waving a revolver and there they had the character surrounded, and he had a revolver too, so they were persuading him to chuck it away, and the character said if they took one step further he was going to shoot, and so the commander spent an hour persuading the character, saying he’d get mitigating circumstances and guaranteeing him personally only six months, and so the character chucked away his revolver, and triumphantly the commander put the handcuffs on him and they led him off to the bus, and Adolf wanted to get into the police vehicle too, but they said that with all that manure on him he couldn’t, so he had to go on foot all the way to the very outskirts of Ostrava, and there they threw him off the tram, so he had to walk all the way home on foot, and at home the landlady wouldn’t take his clothes for the wash, so he carted them off to the cleaners and took his ticket, and when he came back a fortnight later to get his clothes, there was heaps of folk around and lots of lassies he knew too, and when Adolf’s turn in the queue came the manageress took his ticket, and when she came back, she was all red in the face and she threw the parcel back at Adolf and yelled at him, ‘Ye’ve shat yersel’, haven’t ye, so ye can just go and wash it yersel’!’ And he went home all shamefaced . . .”

  And so Uncle went on and I smiled and we sawed the legs off the table according to Pepin’s recipe, we shortened the table height by ten centimetres, and Uncle Pepin said, “And so Adolf had no luck in life, once he was passing this pub, and some drunken dentists were there, and they invited Adolf for a drink, and when he’d had some and was glad folks were being nice to him again, all of a sudden one dentist in a drunken stupor pulled out another dentist’s front teeth, and seeing as Adolf was drunk too, the one that pulled out the front teeth took Adolf and pulled out all his back teeth, mind you Adolf was dead lucky there was no drunken gelders around that night . . .”

  “That would’ve been pretty mighty sore,” I said, laying a sawn-off piece to the last leg and we went on sawing merrily away and Uncle Pepin expatiated, “But then they took Adolf off on military exercises and he was right over in Turčanský Svätý Martin and again, seeing as Uncle Adolf was a qualified engine-driver, they gave him a Sentinel to drive, and one day this bloke, sergeant-major, was reading the army paper and he finds in the circulars, steam-roller needed for road surfacing outside barracks, Cheb, so he gives Adolf his orders and ration allowances, and Uncle Adolf sets off for Cheb in his Sentinel following his map, this was in the spring, and Adolf spent the whole summer just going westwards across Slovakia, and in the autumn he crossed the Moravian border and went on his way, but slower and slower, because each Sunday he went off home, and when he’d spent all autumn getting through Moravia, he went back to make discreet enquiries at the barracks in Turčanský Svätý Martin, but there they told him the sergeant-major had hanged himself, because a gun had been found on the square and nobody knew who put it there, so they had stuck it in the stores and that was one gun too many, and so Adolf went on his way in the Sentinel right across the length of Czechoslovakia, and by spring he’d got as far west as Pilsen, but as he hadn’t any coal he had to stoke the boiler up with firewood, begging and borrowing on the road, but he burned up an awful lot of folk’s fences too, specially when he was a long way off from the woods, and he was terribly delayed, as in fact he was only driving the Sentinel one day at a time in the end, because it took him three days to get home to Ostrava for the Sunday, and three days travelling back to the Sentinel again, and so finally in the summer Uncle Adolf made it to the garrison in Cheb, and there they locked the pair of them up, Adolf and the Sentinel, and when it was all sorted out and explained, they sent Uncle Adolf as military watch to Košumberk Castle, and as he had nowhere to go now, there out of boredom at Košumberk he fell in love with the daughter of the visitors’ guide, and he married her, and all that time he stood there on guard, toting his weapon, but after three years of this he reckoned they’d likely forgotten him, so he just stripped off his uniform, stashed his weapon away in a corner, and there he is to this day, working as a visitors’ guide . . .” and Uncle Pepin straightened himself as the last block of wood dropped off.

  I took the lamp and carried it across to the sideboard, to see how this table was going to look shortened by ten centimetres. And when Uncle and I put the overturned table on its side I stared wide-eyed with astonishment and my eyes just popped. I went through to the kitchen, stood for a while on the doorstep and gazed out over the orchard treetops at the brewery chimney stack, then after a bit I went back in.

  Uncle Pepin was knitting his fingers.

  “What’s to be done? Nothing’s to be done, Uncle Jožin,” I told him, “bring me over those historical novels of Beneš Třebízský from the bookcase, would you?”

  And I righted the table, that table off whose legs in half-darkness Uncle Pepin and I had sawn four times ten centimetres, but each time we’d gone and placed the ten-centimetre block against one and the same leg, hadn’t we, so that we’d shortened this one leg by forty centimetres . . . and Uncle Pepin brought along those old historical novels and I piled them under the missing leg, but it wasn’t enough, so I had to finish it off with Šmilovský’s Parnassia.