The Little Town Where Time Stood Still

by Bohumil Hrabal

  9

  The foreman stood inside the gate as usual holding a notebook in his hand, the workmen went on coming to work just as before, but that was only a superficial semblance. They avoided greeting the foreman, all deliberately turned up a quarter of an hour late, and the foreman was transparent, non-existent, a non-person. He jotted things down, noted down late arrivals in his book with sarcastic comments, but when he was sorting out the work for the day the assistant cooper said, “We don’t need you as a bailiff over us any more, and we don’t need Mr Frantz acting as king of the castle either, we’re going to sort out things for ourselves from now on.” And the foreman said, “As long as I’m your appointed superior and the brewery management board which appointed me remains in charge, you’re going to have to go on taking your orders from me.” But the assistant cooper declared, “Only from now on, this brewery is a national enterprise, and there’s no more bosses any more, we’re the masters now, and from now on a factory council is in operation, and I’m the chairman . . .” And off he went and the foreman stood there in a sudden state of shock, and when he came back from the office, he suddenly looked quite small. He went to find the assistant cooper and he said tearfully, “But I’m one of you, I was employed for years in the fermenting cellar as an ordinary workman.” But the assistant cooper retorted, “You were against us all along the line, you always wanted whatever the boss wanted, a boss’s love is a pain in the back, moreover you used to play the boss and lord it over us, and we can’t forgive you that, it was unforgiveable . . .” The foreman remonstrated further, “But you didn’t accept me . . .” But the assistant cooper said, “No we didn’t, but now we’re telling you to quit, we’ve decided to do without you . . . Anyway, your letter of notice is in the post, and the best thing for you is just to get along home now . . .” And the foreman went away, then he came back again, and just as before it had always seemed like a dream, to have reached the position of foreman, and he couldn’t believe it all those years ago, now he had to return to the brewery yard once more, because he just couldn’t believe what had happened, he thought he was dreaming, it was impossible for him to get the sack like this, but nobody noticed him, nobody paid him any more attention, he was see-through, transparent, because he’d lost his authority, he could no longer sack a worker and take on somebody else in his stead, workmen no longer crumpled their caps in their hands in front of him, asking humbly for a job, for they were the masters now. And so it happened, that when Mum started picking the apples that autumn, and when the foreman came too to pick the apples from his own perquisite trees, bringing his own containers and ladders, standing there on the ladder and handing down basketfuls of apples for his tearful wife to pour into big laundry baskets, while Mum and two other women were picking apples for their own baskets, suddenly his wife burst into tears, saying that Mum was picking apples from her tree, picking those Tubby Rattlers that had always belonged to her . . . But Mum said the foreman had no say in the matter any more, these trees were hers now, Dad was still employed and, according to long-standing agreements, as brewery manager he had the right to one half, and the halfway mark ran through the orchard, taking in the row that the foreman had taken wrongly in the first place, so the foreman’s wife climbed up the ladder behind Mum and started picking those Tubby Rattlers, and Mum deliberately started scraping the mud off her boots, and the dried mud spattered the wife’s face and hair, but she carried on all the same, so Mum came back down the ladder, treading on the wife’s knuckles gripping the ladder rungs, and forcing her to come down too, so the foreman’s wife took Mum’s basket of apples and poured it into her own, and then the two women turned face to face, it looked as if they would go for each other, they started their run-up, all ready to grab the other’s hair and rip the other’s blouse and give vent to their long-standing hatred, roused by this autumn apple-picking, when at that moment three workmen came over from the maltings led by the assistant cooper, and when they arrived the cooper said, “The perks are finished, over and done with, the fruit garden is ours. The whole of it — take your ladders away, from now on we’re the ones who are going to pick the fruit, we’ve got children and grandchildren, and even if we didn’t, the orchard belongs to all of us now, it doesn’t belong to the bosses any more . . .” And Dad came through the garden, dodging the branches, and when he overheard the end of the conversation, he observed in a quiet voice, “But I never acted the boss.” The assistant cooper replied affably, “No, sir, you didn’t, you were kind and decent to us, but the fact you were decent just makes it worse now, because you were serving the bosses then, but now we are the bosses, and since you’re here, you might as well know that you’re not going to stay on as manager, we’re going to appoint a new manager from the ranks of the workers, the unions are going to give us a workers’ manager, because from tomorrow all the nationalised shares are to be sold only to the workers, and we are the shareholders of the brewery, so it’s our right to appoint the people in charge, just as the bourgeois limited-liability company had the right to appoint its own people to run the firm in the past . . . You, missus, take the apples you’ve already picked, and you too, lady, take the apples you’ve picked as well, and go home now, manager, sir, you’ve got three months’ notice, you needn’t come in to the office on Monday, because we’ve already got our own director. You were decent to us, and that has to count against you, because it meant that you blunted the edge of the class struggle, do you see?” Dad shook his head and said, “Not entirely, but I get the message, I’ll go and fix my things . . .” And as he went off with the three members of the factory council the cooper turned again and then, with an effort, but all the same, he said, “We’re also going to start clearing out the garage today, right away, take away your car, and all the canisters and spare parts too, we’ll put all the stuff beside the wall for you . . .’ And Mum went red to the roots of her hair, taking the baskets full of apples she turned them out on to the trampled grass, she piled the smaller baskets inside the bigger ones, laughed, and said to Dad, “Now we’ll begin a new life,” she stroked him and gave him a laughing smile and he stared her right in the eye, he hadn’t expected this from Mum, then he took the handles of the baskets and off they went, looking round as if for the last, or the first time at this beautiful brewery orchard, where together they had lived for a quarter of a century, and the garden they saw was beautiful as it had never been before, the apples on the boughs offered colours and scents made for a final journey through this garden where they used to hang out the washing on lines, where Mum used to pick daisies and other meadow flowers, but all they had to do was close their eyes and in their minds they were back in this garden once more, when Mum closed her eyes not only could she count all the trees from beneath her closed eyelids, but she could tell each tree apart just like remembering people, their faces and movements, and their tiny flaws . . . And when Dad had carted off the spare parts to the new shed beside their own house which they had bought a few years back, when he had hauled the Škoda over, he returned to the office for the last time, emptied his drawers, and took his pens, while the new director opened his mail, drinking beer first thing in the morning as he was accustomed, he opened the post and distributed it and waited for Dad to go, and Dad waited, lingered, went out to the brewery again, he’d left some empty canisters deliberately by the wall, he lingered there too, but none of the workmen came up to him, nobody said goodbye to him, nobody said he was sorry, not a single word, they walked straight past as if he wasn’t there, as if never in his life had he given their wives a lift in his Škoda and on his motorbike when they were about to give birth, or taken their children off to holiday camp, as if he’d never only recently lent them the lorries and cars for transporting new furniture or material for buildings and houses they were putting up, and so Dad went off, as if guilty of something, he departed like the foreman. When Dad had carted off the last box of pens and tiny calendars and notebooks, he opened the cupboard and took out the two portly lamps, the light of
which he had used to write by all those years ago, and which were ready and waiting, in case the electricity failed, the portly lamps with green shades, and as he was carrying them off, the workers’ director remarked, “But those lamps are listed in the brewery inventory . . .” and he took them out of Dad’s hands. “I’ll buy them,” said Dad quietly. But the workers’ director shook his head and said in an alien voice, “You’ve bagged enough already, and you’ve built yourself a villa . . .” And when Dad left the office, this was what the workers’ director had been waiting for, he took both lamps with their green shades and he threw them out of the window on to a heap of lumber and scrap, and the green shades and cylinders smashed to pieces and Dad clutched his head and there was a crumpling sound inside, as if his brain had been smashed. “The new era’s beginning here too,” said the workers’ director, and he went into his office. And on that same day, when Dad and Mum moved house, after they had hung up the last curtains, when Dad had fixed his name on the little wall with a screwdriver, just when he had screwed the green letter-box carefully on to four blocks of wood, Uncle Pepin came over from the brewery with two suitcases, a swallow-tailed butterfly was fluttering round his head, and wherever he went, after him this brown butterfly with peacock-feather eyes on its wings came fluttering, hovering over him. When Uncle Pepin put the suitcases down to get his breath back, the swallow-tail rose up above him like a dove announcing the Immaculate Conception, Dad looked at Uncle, and Mum came out, and when she saw the butterfly she said, “Uncle Jožin, where are you off to, and what’s that butterfly doing over your head?” And Uncle Pepin gave a wave of the hand and said, “Silly thing’s been following me a’ the way from the brewery, the moment I left the lodgings, it started off after me . . . I keep drivin’ it off, but it willna go.” And Mum asked, “And where are you going, Uncle? On your holidays, is it? On a trip, to visit your lovely ladies? Which one’s invited you?” And Uncle Pepin said, “No, no, I’m a pensioner ye see, I’m just coming to ye for a wee visit. All I’ve got is here in my hands.” And Mum took fright, she made a motion with both hands as if she was warding off a black storm and her hair bristled in horror. But Dad smiled and said, “Come on in then, brother.” And Mum whispered to Dad, “He’ll stay till the day he dies now, you’ll see . . .” But Dad just smiled again and said, “So what?”

  And so Uncle Pepin moved into the basement flat, and some kind of other time began, Dad got started on the garden, and as he worked he started to change, he that had always drunk coffee and a piece of dry bread with it now began to eat meat, and liked a good beer, he that had once loathed onion now just loved it. And as he ate, his voice grew stronger too, he liked to rail and shout, and the more he shouted, the stronger his voice grew, and the shouting began to give him a real appetite, and when they slaughtered a pig, Dad not only ate up all the soup from it, but he even ate the cold boiled pig’s head and neck, and he ate the sausages without any bread and drank beer with it. But Uncle Pepin, who’d been so fond of his food, and wherever he was invited would eat six dinners and drink up whatever he was offered, Uncle Pepin began to go back to his beginings, becoming what Francin had used to be like in terms of food, and he would leave his meat and ask for just a mug of milk or coffee and a piece of bread. “There’s no helping it, sister-in-law,” he said, “if ye’re no working ye dinna want to eat.” But as he reduced his intake and ate only staples, potatoes and soup, so he stopped shouting too, stopped railing and carrying on, he no longer had any reason to roar away with his tirades at the whole town, he just waved his hand, and when Francin railed and shouted and carried on, Uncle Pepin pacified him, clasped his hands, stuffed up his ears and begged Francin to be quieter. And so the brothers worked together during the day in the garden, but Uncle claimed his eyesight was starting to get poor, so Francin gave him the hoe, fixed up strings, and Pepin hoed the vegetables, but when he hoed up the cabbages along with the weeds Francin shouted, and Pepin could only dig the paths. He dug out those paths so much, however, that he made them into ditches, but Francin was just glad that Uncle was getting a bit of exercise, so Uncle went on digging, but gradually less and less, he sat around, and learnt to walk with the careful step of the blind or poor-sighted, fumbling in front of himself with outstretched hands, as if some obstacle were constantly about to cross his path, “Like walking in water,” he used to say, and then he couldn’t even find the path, and when Dad led him on to it, again he couldn’t feel to find the hoe, and when Dad put it in his hand, he dug helplessly and couldn’t keep his direction and dug the path out into the beds, and Francin yelled and roared. And so the neighbours, knowing Uncle Pepin of old, started to proffer advice at the fence: “Mr Josef, what about just getting two steam engines in and ploughing up the whole garden?” But Uncle Pepin just felt for the edge of the path, sat down, and Francin shouted back, “What d’you mean, you great idiot, d’you think we can just haul some great threshing-machine in here between these trees? A monster like that, how’d we ever get it in here? It’d knock down the fence! Who did you get that from?” And the neighbours held on to the wire fence with their fingers and said, “Mr Josef, Captain Meldík suggested it, the fellow that’s chairman of the gardeners’ organisation.” And Uncle Pepin gaped into the distance, and was far away, while Francin shouted, “What’s a chap like Meldík doing being chairman of the gardeners’ organisation? He was never a captain in the army anyway.” And the neighbour insisted, “He was, sir, and he’s been saying, ‘Know those two lads at the villa, I need to show them a bit of gardening. Pipsy now . . .” And Dad shouted, “How can a cretin like that teach anyone gardening? Pipsy, eh? I’ll give him Pipsy! He’s got about as much grey matter in his noddle as my brother and me have up our arses!” Dad exclaimed pungently. And the neighbour said, “Meldík reckoned he’d teach you how to cultivate clover, you see, and then you could have a few goats, but you’d have to dig up the garden really deep with a coulter . . .” “What d’you mean cultivate goats, it’s not that simple,” shouted Dad brandishing the hoe. “Goats are bloody guzzlers, once one swallowed three gulden from Mum’s purse, and another time we put out a bucket of pork fat to cool and the goat drank the lot, leave goats out of this, you cretin!” And Mum opened the window and said: “We could put the goat-shed next to the garage, we’d make something from it.” And Dad cleared his throat and shouted back at Mum, “You’re all cretins, you always lose money on goats!” But Mum stuck to her guns: “Not at all, I’d like to have a nice quiet pair of goats, it’d wake you up in the morning, and it’d be nice to take them out to pasture, in the fresh air . . .” But Francin shouted that they could keep their fresh air, and he started shouting at his brother, who wasn’t fighting back any more, he was somewhere else now, he didn’t feel the need to shout, nothing he heard riled him now, nothing gave him cause to get angry, he just sat there on the edge of the path, sat on a board and felt the sunlight, as if he were in a warm bath, and he needed nothing more to complete his happiness, just what was around him, that warm silence. “I can’t see any more,” said Pepin, and Francin started shouting, “What d’ye mean, ‘can’t see’? You don’t want to see, that’s what it is!” And Uncle Pepin said quietly, “I wouldn’t be able to feel my way to find the goats, except in the shed.” And Mum said from the window, “Then I’d take you out to the pasture, I’d tether the goats to your arm, Uncle Jožin, out in the pasture,” she went on happily, glad to have inveigled Uncle into the game, but Uncle Pepin looked in through the window, where the pale curtains were glistening, and waved his hand and said, “Oh never mind . . .” “But there’d be the milk, and goat’s milk goes to the blood!” the neighbour said with hope in his voice, but instead of Uncle Pepin, who had drifted off into definitive silence with that wave of the hand, Francin shouted back, “What’s that you say? My brother Pepin, what got cognac and champagne from his lieutenants and entertained the young ladies and conducted sociable conversation till the police rolled him up and brought him home like linoleum, my Pepin’s supposed
to start drinking goat’s milk, is that it?” The neighbour spread his two palms in a fan and said, “But this brilliant man, who enjoyed so much to sing and dance, if he was to sing to these goats they’d produce lots more milk, Michurin writes that when you sing and play music to the cows it improves their milk yield . . .” But instead of Pepin it was Dad who angrily remonstrated in reply: “What’s all this? Michurin tells us you can grow apples on willow trees, by grafting them on, but what can he know about raising goats? How dare you?” Dad shouted and adopted a bayonet pose and called out, “Come on, Pepin, let’s give him your einfacher Stoss, give him one right in the nose, like good Austrian soldiers, come on, hit him!” And Dad lunged out straightaway with the blade, with the end of the hoe through the wires, adding joyfully, “And your Austrian soldier wins again . . .” and he looked across at his brother, but Uncle Pepin was quiet and silent, looking another way, he just waved his hand as though what had been said was no longer worth a single exclamation, a single motion, all was vanity of vanities. Yet still there was one more occasion on which Uncle allowed himself to be swept along by Francin, they started going out picking mushrooms and other edible fungi. But there again Francin had to employ cunning, the first time they went out to the woods near Dymokury, Francin bought three boletuses beforehand to take with him, and as they rode off in the train that morning they could see there were another hundred mushroom-pickers travelling with them, when they got to Rožd’alovice, they all poured out, a whole herd of mushroom-pickers all livid with one another, and all the woods re-echoed to their cries and calls and summonings. But Francin knew how to dispose of the pickers who constantly got in their way and crossed their path, he let them pass and right at the edge of the wood he took out one of the boletuses he’d bought and lifted it up to show one of the pickers hurrying by and said, “So you’re just going to leave these ones behind are you?” And he lifted up this bought boletus, and the mushroom picker stood there lightning-struck, and Dad cleaned up this nice boletus and put it in Uncle’s basket, and Uncle handled it and sniffed it and was blissfully ecstatic, and so in this way Dad made use of all three of the bought boletuses to remove the other pickers from their path, each time he lifted the second, and then the third boletus to a passing picker, and any picker behind whom Dad had found a mushroom was so devastated with jealousy, that it put him off his hunting. And so the two brothers walked on through the woods, Francin led the way for Uncle across ditches, and then they sat, Uncle took the boletuses, sniffed them, and Dad shouted with happiness. But then so many pickers started taking the train out from their little town where time had stood still, that Dad said they’d better start going in the afternoon, but the rest of the mushroom-pickers must have started saying the same, and so they all met again at the railway station in the afternoon, then they decided to go by bus, but again all the mushroom-pickers who used to go by train turned up for the bus, so Dad said the best thing would be if they started taking the car, but in the morning at crack of dawn, out of this little town where time had stood still, a whole great long column of cars and motorbikes and cycles set off, all again in the same direction, so that there they all were again in the woods with everyone within eyeshot and at arm’s reach. So Dad made up his mind, and following the legacy of Professor Smotlach, they started collecting both inedible and suspect fungi and toadstools. Dad took with him a saucepan and a pat of butter and he and Uncle Pepin began to practise some experimental mycology. This way they always had fungi almost from late spring up to the end of autumn. They started by picking grey tall amanita and bunches of sulphur tuft, they kindled a fire, softened onion in butter, and added a pinch of common earthball and panther cap. Dad handed the fried concoction of fungi to Uncle Pepin first, waited half an hour and asked Uncle, “Jožka, you don’t fancy you hear any ringing sounds, do you?” And then, since Uncle wasn’t hearing any ringing sounds, or rather he was, but it was only the clanging of the bell from the church or the tinkling of a bicycle bell, Dad ate some of the mixture too and pronounced it quite excellent. Once however they stayed in the woods for a whole five hours, Dad had added a bit more earthball or truffle, and when they’d eaten some there they stayed stuck in the woods for hours, because their legs had gone numb. Uncle Pepin rejoiced that he wouldn’t ever have to walk again, he’d be an invalid, they’d have to push him about in a wheelchair. But a couple of hours later Uncle Pepin was to be disappointed. The strength returned to their limbs and they got to the station and returned safely home. By that time Francin was starting to feel enormously fit after all those suspect toadstools and fungi, and they took Mum along with them as well, but by now they were both so far gone that they fried up a mixture of bitter boletus, and lurid boletus, and sulphur tricholoma or gas tar fungus, as well as a few common white helvella, which according to Professor Smotlach contains helvellic acid . . . And first of all they gave this tasty concoction to Mum to try, and when after half an hour Mum still couldn’t hear any ringing sounds in her ears, they had some too, and subsequently Mum pickled the helvella they had collected in vinegar and pronounced it really excellent, far better than ordinary edible boletuses. Then Francin got the idea that if you took this pickled helvella, put it in tarragon vinegar with chanterelle, hydnum, known as urchin of the woods, and a tree fungus called chicken of the woods, then it could be served in a cocktail, sprinkled with lemon juice and a spot of Worcester and Tabasco sauce, for such a combination tasted just like the finest shellfish and lobsters. And one day it happened that they got off the train at Třebestovice, and after Francin had led Pepin by the hand across the football ground near a little wood, Francin said, “What’s that red patch over there?” And they went back, and were amazed, they knelt down and filled a basket piled high with beautiful orange birch boletuses. And then they sat in the sandy ground by the woods and warmed themselves, and later back at the station the other mushroom-pickers, who’d been out looking all day and had only a couple of edible mushrooms to show for it at the bottom of their baskets, shouted at them and said they must have bought them somewhere, that Francin and Pepin were just out to provoke them. And so it happened that same evening, when Mum for the first time in ages cooked up those classic edible mushrooms, all three of them were horribly sick and Uncle Pepin had fainting fits and diarrhoea, then he got a dreadful thirst and vomited again, and this was followed by a dull headache, cramps in the calves and intermittent double vision as well as continuous ringing sounds in the ears. When they took them all off to hospital, because their legs had been numb for six hours, the consultant said they’d all been poisoned by edible fungi, the last person that had happened to was Professor Smotlach himself, found in a deep coma after partaking of edible mushrooms.