Catapult

by Paral, VladimIr

  Ta-ta-ta-dum, the express tore along through fields and woods, thundered at crossings, and rumbled through village stations overgrown with weeds, after the change of engines it quickly made up for the delay and at Kolin it was already two minutes ahead of schedule, I won’t be the one to push our train on to its destination, my love, you take charge of the string of cars, the changing of engines: you be the one to push me off on my way—

  “Just one more, this one will really be the last—” Jacek insisted on pouring Lenka another glass of Georgian cognac, “What’s gotten into you—” her tongue now tripped confusedly, “you put it into the desserts, into the stewed fruit, the tea, I even tasted it in my mouthwash…” “It only seemed that way, you’re acquiring the taste…” “But I don’t want to acquire any taste, I’m afraid I’ll get drunk…” “But how can you from just this little bit, come on, let’s clink glasses—,” they clinked glasses and Lenka emptied another goblet, she got up with difficulty and staggered off, under her thinning hair the sinking shoulders of a suddenly old woman and on the other side of the wall the revolting sound of splashing, then her sour breath, “Oh, Jacek, I feel so sick—” and she laid her head in his lap, “Mommy,” Lenicka called from her crib, “come and give me a kiss… Mommy—” “I can’t come now, darling, tomorrow—” “Mommy, pwease come now—” “I can’t—” Lenka moaned and collapsed on the floor, her head shook as if at her final gasp, “Mommy, I’m down on my knees, pwease come, pwitty pwease—” the neighbors’ brooms were beating on the floors and ceilings as on a tin barrel and like a rat inside it Jacek ran back and forth in the dark, he was afraid to turn on the lights, the Lenkas moaned on the other side of all the walls and, near madness, Jacek howled under his pillow.

  “… and greet him nicely and tell Comrade Dr. Mach that Mama and Papa send him their best,” Hanicka Kohoutkova repeated her instructions in front of the pale-blue entrance to Kolora, a firm in Pardubice, “in the event of a successful outcome, Mama will fatten up a goose for him, but better not say that, Comrade Doctor’s very strict. And don’t forget to greet him with `Honor to Work.’ I want so much for you to pass the exam—come around the corner and I’ll bless you on the forehead…”

  With a glass rod pull the skein out of the boiling dark-red bath, with another rod stretch it out and by twisting it in the opposite direction wring the specimen out to a pink color, untwist it, submerge it, and with both rods put it through the color bath evenly, as when you turn a hoop with a stick, that’s the way we learned to do it at school, to get the color even— “It takes a bit of practice, but it’ll come: a colorist has to be born,” Dr. Mach laughed, “so how about starting on the first of October?”

  In a small, cheerful lab with windows looking right out onto fields (“We tore down that terra-cotta smokestack across the way, so it wouldn’t throw a red reflection into the lab—”), bright skeins were hung everywhere and the dyed pieces looked like garlands and streamers, there are only four shades of black, no one knows how many whites there are, and no one has ever counted the browns, the keyboard of colored tones is over half a mile long, life as a colorist is a life of visual music, come here mornings, compose a Spanish moss or a bishop’s cyclamen in silk and we’ll put sixty crowns a day toward your account, on the wooden racks saturnine brown, bittersweet, Victorian blue, passion auburn, salmon pink, and cardinal red had dried, and on the pole below Jacek’s first harmonious chord after fifteen years, the color of flesh from that dark-red bath— “Starting on the first of October!”

  By the entrance Hanicka was fidgeting and biting her nails in agitation, “Jacek—” she cried out, and she ran toward him, “well—did they take you?” “They took me!” “Was it hard?” “I absolutely pulverized it.” “Oh Jacek, I suffered as much as when I took my high school exams. Mama will start right away fattening that goose for Comrade Dr. Mach, and for you too we have a reward—”

  A warm breeze blew over the solitary tract of beardless wheat from horizon to horizon under the hot clear sky and wave after wave rushed across that endless sea of grain, without an effort the path through the fields became a quiet street of well-swept clay and neat green fences with red knobs on top of the poles, behind each fence a little garden with a circle of flowers in the middle and a wooden bench and from each green gate, surrounded by roses, stairs up to a pretty little house, ours is that pink one with wild rose bushes along the stairs, on a concrete platform under the apple tree on a bench Mr. Kohoutek, my father, in a clean white shirt, his skin like a young woman’s, not even a single gray hair and a dry, firm palm, and out of the house comes my mother, Mrs. Kohoutkova, in a clean white apron, a thousand lively wrinkles from so much smiling and a hand soft and warm, in the parlor on a clean white tablecloth four deep dishes on four shallow ones and four settings of heavy, antique silver.

  A nice little house, a nice new job, a nice little garden, Jacek looked and Hanicka was beautiful, she was full of joy and the eyes of all four were damp, touched, Jacek fought for the huge glass jug so that he could go for beer, but he wrested it from them only to find a ten-crown note on the bottom (“We’re entertaining you—”), a quiet, pretty tavern with a sparkling brass spigot, in front under a linden tree sat tanned, sturdy men in white shirts on red garden chairs on yellow sand under the green linden tree, all the tones unbroken and rejoicing together, from all the windows came the clean smell of roasting and frying, walnut cake and strawberries with cream.

  When dinner was over it was already six in the evening, Papa went out to drink beer and Mama disappeared into the kitchen, Hanicka had wiped her mouth thoroughly with a stiff napkin, but even so her conscientious kisses tasted of strawberries and cream. Today she had to sleep downstairs between Papa and Mama, but she could go out for a while on the bench in front of the house, on all the benches in front of the houses there were couples in the twilight, “I want to have three children,” she whispered, “two at least. The first one will be called Jastrun or Jadwiga. It’s practical too, they’ll have the same monogram as you do, that is, as we will. I’ve already started to embroider two red J’s.”

  “So go ahead and kiss each other, you’re as good as engaged now—” Mama smiled, one more warm silver goodnight spoonful of strawberries and cream and up the wooden stairs behind Mama, she showed him where the toilet was and also stuck a porcelain pot striped with flowers under his bed, the black traveling satchel rested like a purring cat on the little round armchair, a white basin and a white pitcher as in a summer cottage, the warm stars squeezed their way through the little window in the slanting wall, and out of the perfect silence rose the breathing of the dark earthenware oven of the endless Elbe plain.

  The morning was shining vigorously as Jacek ran down the stairs of the pink house, down the sleeping clay avenue to the train, he stayed out in the corridor by the window and again ta-ta-ta-dum, the express pulled out with an insignificant delay from the gray platform deserts of the new Pardubice station and it rumbled westward through meadows and fields, ta-ta-ta-dum, past green tablecloths and endless fields wave after wave to the stairs leading to the platform gardens with benches around the houses with their loving bright facades, it’s the hymn of freedom, this ta-ta-ta-dum, or is it only the theme song of parting—

  “Did you bring the white plush?”

  On the ridged mud in front of Cottex a scaffold was being raised and with latex paint an ancient mason was potemkinizing the facade of the electric plant, but the wall had nothing but contempt for this vain endeavor, the paint rotted, peeled, and fell off, and beneath it the inexorably naked bricks of the old barn which should have collapsed long ago, like the gaping teeth of a corpse overgrown with grass and still unburied—

  At the ring of the phone Jacek started, perhaps this was it— “Petrik?…” said Verka Hurtova, “Darling Verka…,” Jacek mumbled like Petrik Hurt. “I’m looking at the wall clock and the time doesn’t move, I wish I were at the square watching you jump off the streetcar. Petrik?…” “Darling Verka…”
“I thought that crazy Jacek was with you, Petrik, I can’t wait for the afternoon anymore, you’ll buy me ice cream first, won’t you darling, and we’ll lick it together, one lick for you and one for me, why must we leave each other in the morning and spend so much of the day apart…”

  Petrik Hurt rushed into the office and Jacek handed him the receiver in full stream, for another half hour they chirped and then Petrik was wiping the sweat from his brow, “Excuse me,” said Jacek, “but what are you doing this afternoon?” “We’re going to the swings!” “And then?” “Why home—” “I accidentally overheard and got the impression that you’re doing something special today…” “With us, you see, every day is special. Verka is… but you wouldn’t understand. Verka, you see…” “It sounded like a poem.” “Verka writes poems.” “About what, for heaven’s sake?” “Why, about the two of us—”

  Jacek dialed the director’s office, “It’s Jacek Jost; greetings, Jozef,” he spoke quickly into the speaker as Verka had done earlier, “I can’t wait any longer to break with this Cottex, I look at the wall-clock and the time doesn’t move, I wish I were at the square in front of our institute in Prague, I can’t wait to start working there, meanwhile you should supply me with a new typewriter for the lab, in ten years of service here all I’ve got is this old Urania from the time of Franz Josef—” Bang! and the director hung up.

  When they met, the director pretended that nothing had happened, he only upped his affability, the old man has refused to collaborate so we’ll force it out of him, Jacek rushed to Cottex with Tina’s camera, at 12:00 sharp he conspicuously stepped straight from the courtyard onto the fire ladder and up onto the roof of the electric plant and in full view of the director’s windows he whipped off two rolls of industrial espionage, twenty-four shots so perfect they could go directly to the desk of the director of the CIA—“What f-stop are you using, Mr. Jost?” the hulking guard with the heavy revolver in his belt took an interest, “You haven’t seen anything—” in a theatrically threatening half-voice Jacek tried to provoke some action against himself and out of despair he even hinted he might take flight, “Today I’d step down as far as f22,” the warrior yawned instead of shooting and climbed into his glassed-in cage, it was maddening—

  “Oooooo—” went Jacek to Lenka in the doorway when she came to open the door for him, and right after that he kissed her, as usual, “But I said hi to you—” Lenka said in surprise, “But I gave you a kiss—” “But why did you bellow so?” “I bellowed?—” “You did, right when I opened the door—” “I didn’t bellow, are you mad?—” “But I heard you with my own ears, you went ooooo—” “I’m really scared, Lenka, what’s wrong with you?”

  Lenka was doing laundry in the bathroom, Jacek snuck into the kitchen, turned on the mixer, and snuck out to the bedroom, Lenka went to the kitchen and the mixer was silent again, she went back to her laundry, Jacek snuck into the kitchen, turned on the mixer, and disappeared, Lenka went to turn off the mixer and went back to the laundry, Jacek turned on the mixer and hid behind the bathroom door, Lenka went to the kitchen, in the bathroom like lightning Jacek turned on the wringer and the washer and rushed into the kitchen, “Have you been turning this on?” she asked in confusion over the screeching machine, “Why would I do a thing like that?” “Well, for no reason at all—,” the mixer was silent but in the bathroom the roar of the two motors and Lenka stiffened, “What’s that—” “You’ve left on the washer, dear.” “But I’m done with the laundry—,” together we ran to the bathroom and were horrified at the two motors running, “What’s wrong with you, dear?”

  And at night lay all the knives out on the sideboard with the handles together and the points facing outwards, a fan of blades pointed toward anyone who comes near them, in the morning when Lenka gets up not a word from her, only Lenicka’s voice from behind the wall, “Mommy, why don’t you talk to me today, even when I make you angry—”

  Tanicka’s room was noodle-shaped, about 140 sq. ft., only an iron bed, a wardrobe, a stove which would never warm anyone, outside the window facing the Svitavy station plain little parcels wrapped in oiled paper and on the wall a prewar tin poster advertising the Papez Company with the legspread of the Eiffel Tower against a yellow Parisian sky, “I’m dying here—” in a theatrical posture Tanicka stretched out her skinny arms clad in a none too clean blouse, “Of impatience,” said Jacek, “Absolutely!” she cried, collapsing on the bed to show just how absolutely, but she couldn’t endure lying quietly more than two seconds at a time, so already she was churning her legs in the air like a cyclist and bursting into laughter, magnificently unaware what dying was.

  “Would you like some bread spread with lard?” she said from the bed. “I’ve started to write a novel.”

  “I’ll take a slice. Of course it’s about the two of us.”

  “The knife’s on the wardrobe. You come in in Chapter Two.”

  “How many chapters do I last? Do you have any salt?”

  “No. I’d like to have lots of lovers…”

  “I’m not enough for you? So advertise.”

  “What woman wouldn’t want to have lots of lovers? The novel will have a hundred chapters.”

  “Seriously, at our place there’s a couple by the name of Hurt and the wife writes poems… about the two of them. Really, I wouldn’t believe that in the world…”

  “There really isn’t any novel, I made that up, maybe I will write one, but I’ve already got more than thirty poems about us. For instance:

  I don’t care

  for crumbs

  fallen from the table

  I want to be a feast

  for you the unsated

  I am virgin soil

  “What do you say to that? Would it do for a blues song by Vasicek Neckar?”

  “You write poems about the two of us…,” Jacek whispered with enchantment.

  “Did you bring the money?” Lenka said, and she went to the bathroom to do the laundry, Jacek snuck into the kitchen and turned on the mixer.

  And before the pale Lenka could go downstairs to hang out the wash, Jacek had gone for cigarettes then slipped back into the empty apartment, turned on the washer, the wringer, the mixer, the radio, and the TV, a fan made of knives on the sideboard and away quick, with his cigarettes he went down to the drying room and helped Lenka hang out Lenicka’s shirts and tights, who will do your wash, little one, when they take Mommy away—

  One step behind Lenka up to our place, in the hallway the roar from our apartment, “Someone must be in there—” she whispered, “But who could—” “Don’t go in there, wait—” she leaped to the door opposite hers, bearing the nameplate JAROMIR MESTEK, and leaned with all her weight against the bell.

  In his green windbreaker with a hood and carrying his carved cane, Mestek came right out, although evidently prepared for an excursion he quite willingly let himself be led into our apartment, “It’s happened again,” Lenka whispered to him, “just like last time…”

  Mr. Mestek seems to know his way around our apartment well enough, he looked it over expertly and turned off all the roaring electric appliances, then went back to the hallway to check the fuse and returned right away, “It’s nothing,” he smiled, “just the current acting up.” “But look here—” Lenka whispered with horror, pointing to the knife fan on the sideboard, “just like last time…”

  “But it’s nothing,” Mestek smiled comfortingly, “it’s just Lenicka playing, or Grandma being absentminded…”

  “But they’re both at the movies and when they left it wasn’t happening—” Lenka whispered in a terrified voice. “Exactly like last time—”

  “You’ve been terribly overwrought lately,” Jacek interrupted her, “and evidently so preoccupied you…”

  “But then it wouldn’t be—” and Lenka tried to swallow, “quite normal…”

  “But what are you thinking of,” Mestek interrupted her, “why should you imagine such negative things…”

  �
��Someone must have been in the apartment…” Lenka whispered.

  “Well, since it disturbs you so,” said Mestek, “it’s nothing, of course, but for the sake of your peace of mind—” and he took a clean dishcloth out of a drawer—he really knows his way around here—and he deftly wrapped all the knives in it without touching a single one, “—I’ll take this to the police, the fingerprints will explain every-thing—”

  “Give that here!” Jacek exclaimed, and in a cold sweat he grabbed the bundle out of Mestek’s hand, “I’ll take it there myself.”

  “And so the movie’s over,” Mestek smiled good-heartedly, “or did the ghost do something else? Who put that balloon up there on the sideboard?”

  “But you put it there…,” Lenka was smiling now and blushing, “so Lenicka could see it from all directions…”

  “Maybe I did that thing with the knives too,” said Mestek, “you know, I do occasionally have blanks…”

  “But what are you thinking of,” Lenka interrupted him, “why should you imagine such negative things…” and she was laughing now, in a little while Lenicka and her grandmother came back from the movies and straight up to Mestek, “Uncle gwab me—” Lenicka insisted, and Mestek held her a while and then seated her up on the cupboard, Lenicka was afraid and ecstastic, “Uncle don’t go way,” he wouldn’t go yet, Mommy has to pour him some cognac to thank him for his help and Grandma brings him a plate of brittle cookies, Lenka and Mestek clink glasses and right away she’s poured another one, for herself as well, conversation and laughter from the room, the two of them sitting on the sofa and the husband outside the door, great, what woman wouldn’t want to have lots of lovers, great, but not like this, so pointlessly guiltless — In the middle of the table a pink rum cake for Lenka’s birthday with a twenty-eight made of Dutch cocoa icing, around it are neighbor Mestek (the timid suitor), Vitenka Balvin (the experienced seducer), Mija Balvinova (as a bad example), and we two Josts (fissionable material), Jacek (the procurer), who has unpacked from his black traveling satchel onto the white tablecloth one bottle of Georgian cognac after another, until there were ten of them in all (66 crowns a bottle—, his last special bonus was 900, so 240 left over for the secret hoard, the special bonuses from Cottex had become a sure thing now), “But they’re only pints—” Jacek called as he poured out the second, Lenka was chatting with Mestek about baby powder and Mija was doing her best to no avail, “It’s kind of dead here…,” Jacek whispered to Vitenka, the expert on relaxed parties.