Three Novels: Hordubal, Meteor, an Ordinary Life

by Karel Čapek

  She was bigger and older than I was, with black hair, and as dark asablack cat; I don’t know what her name was or her nationality. I showed her my enclosure of chips, but she didn’t even look at it, perhaps she didn’t recognize that the beans were hens; it hurt me frightfully, and from that day on my enclosure gave me no more pleasure. Instead she snatched up the neighbour’s kitten and pressed it, all terror-struck and with staring eyes, to herself; and she knew with her fingers how to make a piece of string into such a star that it was like a charm. A boy can’t keep on adoring continually, love is a feeling too heavy and tormenting; at times one must temper it down to comradeship. The boys jeered at me for being pally with girls, it was beneath their dignity; I bore it bravely, but the chasm widened between them and me. Once she scratched the saddler’s son, it was a regular fight, but the painter’s boy intervened and hissed contemptuously through his teeth: “Let her be, it’s a girl!” And he spat like an apprentice. If after that he had beckoned to me I should have followed him instead of that black little minx; but he turned his back on me and led his gang to other triumphs. I was beyond myself with pique and jealousy. “Don’t you worry,” I threatened, “if they came for us, I’d let them have it!” But in any case she didn’t understand what I said; she stuck her tongue out after them and altogether behaved as if I were under her protection.

  Then it was the holidays and sometimes we were together all the day long, until towards evening Mr. Martinek used to lead her by the hand back to the wooden huts on the other side of the river. Sometimes she didn’t come, and then in desperation I didn’t know what to do; I crawled with a book into my hiding-place between the boards and pretended that I was reading. From the distance I could hear the war-cries of boys to whom I no longer belonged, and the firing of shots in the rocks. Mr. Martinek bent down, as if to count the boards, and he murmured compassionately: “Why is it that she hasn’t come to-day?” I made as if I hadn’t heard, I only read on furiously; but I could feel almost with bliss how my heart was bleeding and that Mr. Martinek knew it. Once I couldn’t bear it any longer and I set out after her; it was a terrible adventure; I had to cross the footbridge to the other side of the river, which on that day seemed to me more terrifying and wild than ever before. My heart thumped and I went, as in a dream, to the hut which seemed destitute; only the voice of the fat canteen woman could be heard somewhere, and a woman in a shirt and skirt was hanging out washing and yawning loudly like the butcher’s big dog. The dark girl was sitting on a box in front of a hut and she was sewing some rags together; she blinked with her long eyelashes and in her concentration she kept sticking out the end of her tongue.

  Without any fuss she made a place for me beside her, and she began to talk quickly and pleasantly in her foreign tongue. I never had the feeling before that I was so immensely far from home; as if I were in another world, as if I never should go home again; it was a desperate and heroic feeling. She put her thin, bare arm round my neck, and for a long time she whispered, damply, ticklishly into my ear; perhaps she was telling me in her strange tongue that she liked me, and I was so happy that I could have died. She showed me the hut in which apparently she lived; the sun had warmed it up to suffocation and it smelt like a dog-kennel; a mans coat hung on a nail, rags on the floor, and some boxes instead of furniture. It was dark in there and her eyes were fixed on me so near and beautifully that I could have cried without knowing what for: love, helplessness, or terror. She sat down on a box with her knees under her chin, she whispered something like a little song, and she looked at me with those fixed wide eyes; it was as if she were performing magic. The wind banged the door to and suddenly it was quite dark; it was terrible, my heart jumped into my throat, I didn’t know what would happen next; there was a light rustling in the dark and the door opened, she stood against the light and looked out, quite still. Then again there was the rumble of a shot in the cutting, and she repeated: “Bang,” Suddenly she was cheerful again and showed me what she could make with string; God knows why she began to behave towards me like a mother, a little nurse; she even took my hand and wanted to take me home, as if I were a baby. I tore myself away and began to whistle as loud as I could so that she could see what I was like; I even stopped on the foot-bridge and spat into the water, just to show her that I was big and that I was not frightened of anything. At home they asked me where I had been to; I told a lie, but although I lied easily and often like every child, I felt that this time my lie was somehow greater and heavier; therefore I lied with overmuch zeal and haste—I wonder that they didn’t find me out.

  The day after she came as if nothing had happened, and she tried to whistle with pouting lips; I taught her, generously letting her have a bit of my superiority; friendship is big. On the other hand, it was easier for me to set out on a pilgrimage to the huts; we whistled to each other from a distance and that greatly strengthened our friendship. We scrambled up the slopes from where one could see the navvies at work; she basked on the stones in the sun like a viper, while I looked at the roofs of the little town, and at the onion dome of the church. How far it was. That one there with the tarred roof is the joiner’s shop; daddy puffs and measures something out on the boards, Mr. Martinek coughs, and mammy is on the doorstep and shakes her head: What is that rascal up to again? Here, nowhere, you can’t see me; here on a sunny slope where mullein and viper’s bugloss are in flower; here on the other side of the river where pickaxes ring and dynamite goes bang and where everything is quite different. This is such a secret place: from here you can see everything and nobody sees you. And below they have already laid the little rails and they carry away stone and soil in trucks; someone jumps up on the wagon and it goes by itself on the rails; I should like that, too, and to have on my head a kind of turban made out of a red handkerchief. And to live in a wooden hut, Mr. Martinek would make it for me. The little dark girl looks at me steadily, it is silly that I can’t tell her anything. I tried to talk to her in a secret language: “Javra tivri nevrecovro povrovivrim,” but she couldn’t even understand that. All we can do is to stick our tongues out at each other and one after the other make the most dreadful grimaces to express the harmony in our minds. Or to throw stones together. Just now it’s the time to stick out our tongues; hers is active and thin, like a little red snake; altogether a tongue is a queer thing, from near it is as if it were made out of lots of little pink lumps. Down below we can hear people shouting, but someone is always shouting there. And who can look longest into the other’s eyes ? That’s strange, her eyes look black, but from near they’ve got green and gold things; and that little head in the middle, that’s me. And suddenly her eyes opened wide with terror, she jumped up, screamed something, and ran down the hill.

  Below on the track a confused little group of people moved towards the canteen. Only their scattered pickaxes were left behind.

  In the evening there was animated talk that one of “those people” had stabbed a foreman in a row; the gendarmes had taken him away, they said, he had chains on his hands and his child ran after him.

  Mr. Martinek turned and looked at me with his big, beautiful eyes, and he shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well, who knows which of them it was,” he murmured. “People like this may be anywhere.”

  I never saw her again. In sadness and solitude I read anything that fell into my hands, hidden between the planks. “You have got a good boy!” the neighbours used to say, while dad, with a paternal modesty, replied: “Let’s hope that he’s some good!”

  CHAPTER VI

  I LIKED my father because he was strong and simple. To touch him gave me a feeling like leaning against a wall or a strong pillar. I thought that he was stronger than anyone else; he smelt of cheap tobacco, beer, and sweat, and his powerful build filled me with a pleasant sense of safety, reliability, and strength. At times he was cross and then he was terrible, he thundered like a storm; but sweeter was the touch of terror with which I climbed up on to his knee. He didn’t talk much, and when he did it was neve
r about himself; I never got rid of the feeling that if he liked he could talk about great and heroic deeds that he had done, and I would put my hands on his powerful, hairy chest to feel it resound. He was deeply and thoroughly immersed in his work; and he was very economical, for he measured money by the work which he had done for it. I remember how sometimes on Sundays he took the bank book out of his drawer and looked into it; it was as if he were looking with satisfaction at properly made piles of good, sound planks; there it is, my boy, heaps of labour and sweat. To squander money is like ruining a finished job, it’s a sin. And what is it for, dad, this money you save ? For my old age, perhaps father would say; but that isn’t it, people only say so; money is to show work, life’s virtue of industry and self-denial. Here you can see for yourself, this is the result of a life’s work; here it is written that I have worked and saved, as is seemly and proper. And as economically as is seemly. The time came when father was already very old; for a long time mother had been asleep in the churchyard below a little marble monument (but it had cost lots of money, daddy used to say with piety) and I had a good position; but dad still shuffled on his heavy, swollen legs to the joiner’s yard in which there was almost nothing more to do, saved, counted, and on Sundays, quite alone in the late family nest, he took out his savings book and looked at the numerical total of his honest life.

  Mother was not so simple; she was far more sensitive, emotional, and overflowing with love for me; there were moments when she pressed me convulsively to herself and sighed: My only one, I would the for you! Later on, when I was a lad, these bursts of love somehow embarrassed me; I was ashamed that my pals might see when my mother kissed me so passionately; but when I was quite small her fervent love placed me in a state of subjection, or subjugation, I loved her enormously. When I whimpered and she took me in her arms I had a feeling as if I were dissolving; I liked tremendously to sob on her soft neck, wet with tears and a dribbling child’s mouth; I pressed gulps out of myself as much as I could until everything melted in a blessed, sleepy mumbling: Mummy! Mummy! Altogether mother was for me combined with an over-sensitive urge to enjoy my pain. Not until I became a little five-year-old man did aversion to such feminine manifestations of feeling grow in me; I turned my head away when she pressed me to her breast and I wondered what she got from it; daddy was better, he smelt of tobacco and strength.

  Because she was supremely emotional she somehow dramatized everything; small family disputes ended with swollen eyes and tragic silence; daddy banged the doors and set to work with fierce tenacity, while from the kitchen an awful repining silence rose to the heavens. She cherished the idea that I was a weak child, that some misfortune might happen to me, or that I might die. (Her first baby had died, my unknown little brother.) Therefore she was always rushing out to see where I was and what I was doing; later on I frowned manfully when she watched me like that and I gave her sullen and obstinate answers. And all the time she kept asking: Are you all right ? haven’t you got tummy ache ? At first I felt flattered by it; you feel so important when you are ill and are put to bed; and mammy convulsively presses you to her breast. You darling, you mustn’t die! Or she used to take me by hand to a miraculous place of pilgrimage to pray for my health; she sacrificed to the Virgin Mary a little wax bust because she said my lungs.were weak. I was deeply ashamed that she had sacrificed a woman’s bust for my sake, it humiliated my manly pride; altogether it was a strange pilgrimage, mammy prayed silently or sighed with her eyes fixed and full of tears; I felt dimly and painfully that it was not all for me. Then she bought me a bun which, of course, was much better and finer than those at home; but in spite of that I didn’t care for going on those pilgrimages. That feeling has remained with me all my life: my mother was something that had to do with illness and pain. Even now I think I would rather rely on father with his smell of tobacco and manliness. Father was like a pillar.

  There is no one for whom I might wish to make the home of my childhood more beautiful than it was. It was commonplace and good, like thousands of other homes; I honoured my father and loved my mother, and my days were long upon the land. They made a decent man out of me to their image; I was not so strong as father, not as great in loving as mother, but at least I was industrious and honest, sensitive, and, to a certain extent, ambitious—that ambition is certainly an heritage of my mother’s liveliness; altogether what used to be wounded in me most is very likely from my mother. And see here, even that was in order and to some good; as well as one who was prepared to take pains, there was in me a man of dreams. For instance, it is certainly not from my father that I am looking into my past as into a mirror; father was so absolutely objective; he had no time for anything but for the present because he was absorbed in his work. Remembrance and the future belong to those who have an inclination to dream and who are more absorbed in themselves. That was mammy’s share in my life. And as I look back now on what in me came from my father and what from my mother, I find that both have accompanied me all my life, that my home never came to an end, that even to-day I am a child who has his own mysterious world while daddy works and counts, and mammy follows me with a look of fear and love.

  CHAPTER VII

  BECAUSE I learned quickly, and because out of solitude and aloofness I soaked myself in books, father let me study; besides, it was somehow understood from the very beginning because he had a great respect for gendemen and because material and social advancement was for him the holiest and most obvious task of a righteous man and of his progeny. I have noticed that the most able children (in the sense of life’s career) come as a rule from those industrious middle strata which have only just begun by modesty and self-denial to lay the foundations of something like a claim to a better life; our advancement is pushed onwards by the labours of our fathers. In those days I had no idea of what I should like to be; except something grand like the tight-rope walker who swung one evening over our little square, or the mounted dragoon who once stopped at our fence and asked something in German; mammy gave him a glass of water, the dragoon saluted, the horse pranced, and my mother blushed like a rose. I should have liked to be a dragoon, or perhaps a guard who slams carriage doors and then, with infinite elegance, swings up on to his step when the train has begun to move. But you don’t know how people manage to become conductors or dragoons. One day my father announced in an awed voice that he would let me study after the holidays; mother cried, the teacher told me to appreciate what it would mean if I became an educated man, and the parson began to say to me: “Servus, student.” I turned crimson with pride, it was all so glorious; it was already beneath my dignity to play, and with a book in hand I painfully and in solitude ripened into adolescent seriousness.

  It is strange how the following eight years at the gymnasium seem to me so irrelevant—at least in comparison with my childhood at home. A child lives a full life, it doesn’t take its own childhood, the present moment as something temporal and transitive; and it is at home that it is an important person with a place to fill that belongs to it by the laws of property. And one day they take a country lad and put him in a school in the town. Eight years among strange people, it might be called, for there he won’t be at home any longer, he will be a little outsider and never will he have the reassuring feeling that he belongs there. He will feel terribly unimportant among those strange people, he will always be reminded that he STILL is nothing; the school and the unusual surroundings will create a feeling in him of humiliated smallness, paralysis, and inferiority, a feeling which he will try to overcome with cramming, or—in some cases and not till later—with a mad revolt against the authorities and school discipline. And at school it is continually being rubbed into him that it is all merely a PREPARATION for what is to come; the first year is nothing more than a preparation for the second, while in his fourth year a boy is only getting ready for his fifth if, of course, he is sufficiently attentive and studious. And all those long eight years are again only a preparation for the leaving certificate, and only then,
my boys, does real learning begin for you. We prepare you for life, the masters lecture, as if what was wriggling on the forms in front of them was no life worth the name. Life is what will not come until after the certificate: that is roughly the most powerful notion that the secondary school cultivates in us; and therefore we leave it as if we are set free instead of feeling rather upset because we are saying good-bye to our boyhood.

  Perhaps because of that our reminiscences of school consist only of fragments, disjointed; and yet how keen is our perception in those years! How well and clearly do I remember the masters, the ridiculous, half-mad pedants, the good fellows who in vain tried to tame the wild swarm of rascals, and the few noble scholars at whose feet even a boy had a vague feeling, almost with tremors, that it is not a matter of preparation but of knowledge and that at that very moment he is in a process of becoming something and somebody. I can also see my colleagues, the battered forms, the corridors of the old building scholarum piarum, a thousand reminiscences as clear as a vivid dream; but all that time at school, those eight years, taken together, are strangely without a face and almost without a sense; they were fleeting years of youth lived impatiently to get them over.

  And again: in those years how ardendy and keenly does a boy appreciate the things that do not belong to school; anything that is not a “preparation for life,” but is life itself: whether it be friendship or the so-called first love, troubles, reading, religious crises, or romping about. This is something to which he may give himself heart and soul, and what is his now and not till after the certificate, or until, as one says at school, “when he has finished.” Most of the inner conflicts and follies of youth, lived with tragic seriousness, are, I think, the result of that period of suspense in which our adolescence takes place. It is something like a revenge that we are not taken seriously. In revolt against that chronic feeling of unreality we long at least in some way to experience something positive. And that’s why it is like this; that’s why in adolescence a silly rascality and a tragic, surprising seriousness so confusedly and sometimes so painfully are mixed together. The progress of life is not such that out of a child a man develops gradually and almost imperceptibly; suddenly there appears in a child terribly complete and devilishly mature lumps of manhood; the parts will not fit together, they are disorganized, they clash in him so incongruously and illogically that it almost seems like madness. Fortunately, we older ones have learned to take this state leniendy, and we soothe and make these boys understand who begin to take life with deadly seriousness that they will grow out of it.