by Egon Hostovsky

translated from the Czech by Christopher Morris

Chapter 1

The small mountain town which an unknown arsonist menaced and terrified for two months is called Zbecnov. It lies just on the Prussian border, among hills streaked with bluish gray and green strips of unfathomable forest. It is an out-of-the-way place, rightfully overlooked, since no famous man or woman has ever been born there; there is neither a single baroque chateau nor a medieval castle nearby, nor even a notable set of ruins. And only once, in the war of 1866, did infamous events rush headlong through, leaving stone and iron crosses in their wake on the plains and slopes, along winding, dilapidated roads. Although some 1,500 people live in this little town, it is so backward that to this day a watchman with a drum and two sticks walks along the streets, children thronging after him, to announce the decrees of the town council to the inhabitants. What kind of people live here? Clever folk and poor folk, the unfortunate and the rich, just like everywhere in the world. Peasant farmers, cottagers, craftsmen, businessmen, functionaries from the post office, the railroad and the bank, teachers, day laborers, and then the down-and-outers whose professions are more changeable than the weather in this region.

   "How's old Marsik making a living these days?"
   "He's doing all sorts of things, but mostly he does business."
   "In what?"
   "In whatever comes to hand! Shoelaces, creams, rabbit pelts, sometimes he looks after the farmers' cattle for them, and they say that he steals a bit too."
   The wind is a frequent visitor to these parts. An eternal, wandering wind, audible and restless, even when it sleeps off its malice, lulling itself into a breeze. It ripples the treetops, tears boys' kites right out of their hands, teases the fishpond, refuses to leave the clouds in peace for a moment, is quarrelsome and spiteful, carries away words of saving grace as soon as they have left the speaker's lips, scoffing at them. How can you help scoffing at speeches to the wind! Children have an understanding with it. Young conjurers look dreamily at the horizon, jump up high, high above the ground, and, waving their arms, try to fly.
   "Ahhhhhhh!"
   "What're you shouting about, you idiots?"
   "Are you blind? Can't you see we're flying? - ahhhhhhh!"
   Blue, enticing, deceitful wind!
   People from that part of our land have trouble finding favor in the eyes of those from other parts of the country. They are said to be unsociable and to speak an ugly dialect which grates on the nerves with vulgar expressions and a plebeian accent. I don't know how much truth there is to this. However, in our age of a babel of languages in which villages in the same country and people of the same kin understand each other less and less, I worry more about comprehension than about language. That's why I think that deaf ears and malicious tongues have done more to damage the reputation of the citizens of Zbecnov than any mutilated dialect spoken by the locals, or by their mountain surliness.
   Well, then, I cannot testify to having discovered any unusual or extraordinary happenings in Zbecnov's past. Nothing of the sort! In the last forty years, only five incidences of violence against Jews in the whole district, the regular barroom brawls after the mayoral elections, one successful murder for jealousy, a failed one for revenge, four suicides, a few lootings, plenty of petty thefts, and three hunger riots against the farmers toward the end of the war. I only took pause at the strange death of an Evangelical minister who was finished off by his own flock, and while he was preaching in the church at that. The whole business was perpetrated by a pig-headed tailor whose shop was on the square. He had even more fixed ideas than debts (which he was in over his head). And when he bent over his accounts, IOUs and orders for payment, he would clench his fists and growl:
   "Sure as anything, the pastor is preaching the word of God all wrong!"
   How could it be otherwise, when he, a God-fearing tailor, never heard from the pastor's lips the answer to the question of all questions: how does one get out of debt? God's truth is only one, but little human truths are many. The tailor soon found other faults in the old pastor and a good number of people who shared his opinion. To make a long story short, one Sunday a part of the congregation rebelled. The dissatisfied kicked up a row during the sermon, came out of their pews and thrust under the astonished old man's nose a piece of paper on which was written: You're too old! We don't want you! When the pastor had gotten the message, he raised a hand above his head as if he were looking for someone to strike, gave a rattle from his throat, and fell to the floor. He was dead on the spot, destroyed by the little truth of the indebted tailor.
   There was a good deal of fuss, remorse, belated repentance and bad blood about the whole thing. The affair found its way into the papers, everyone heard about it, and the world's attention was drawn to Zbecnov for the first time.
   Even with the best of intentions, however, I cannot think of any other event worth mentioning that would indicate that God had chosen the most sinful corner of the country for calamity to visit in the form of an unseen arsonist. No, we would be hard put to find any tracks in Zbecnov's past leading up to the mysterious firebug. We should search instead in the great events of our time and be satisfied for the present with the theory that the whole bizarre case is one of their grotesque repercussions. The arsonist appeared on the scene at a moment when ever-faithful Misery, which already has as many names as it has insatiable jaws, had returned to us again. And the great and lofty world is not a bit different from laughably petty Zbecnov in its attempts to lay bare misery and evil in its proper form, in its reasons and consequences.

   The incidents that I am going to speak of have their own center of action. It is Josef Simon's inn, the Silver Pigeon. It stands on the sharply sloping square opposite the school, in the middle of a long row of young, well-tended linden trees. An old, rambling two-storied structure with cracked walls, small windows, narrow doors, cross-vaulted ceilings, winding stairs, a deep cellar and a well-settled state of decrepitude wherever the eye falls. Only the gilded sign over the entrance is not old. On the ground floor is the pub, the taproom and the kitchen, while on the second floor are seven rooms, in three of which Josef Simon's family live, the other four being let out to guests. From the windows of the pub, you look out across the square, the rooftops of low houses, the steep meadowed descent and the narrow valley, onto the Prussian hills lined with a white tangle of paths.
   There, somewhere in the floating grayish vapors, our country comes to an end. From there comes the howling wind, the rain and the snowstorms. Several scattered, hunchbacked cottages, dark ribbons of smoke, and forests, forests. When evening comes, little lights jump forth from the bottomless darkness. So small, so unreal, that a man is seized by giddiness at the illusion of distance. All of the sullen drinkers, all of the downcast souls who come to the Silver Pigeon at night look in that direction. The little lights go out and then reappear. Here is home, beyond them, the world.
   "One day, when you're grown up, you'll go there, see? . . . There, into the world!"
   If people look towards the frontiers by day, to the green twilight and the fog-shrouded horizon, they screen their eyes with their hands and shake their heads in disbelief. Nothing good will ever come from the frontiers! A witch on a broomstick to scare the naughty children, soldiers on maneuver to the irritation of the farmers, frightening stories about an impending war the likes of which has never yet been seen. Who wouldn't be afraid of the frontiers? Perhaps only birds, clouds and the wind.
   Josef Simon is afraid of them as well. Although he does not put any faith in gossip or in prophecies. Although he would considerit a mortal sin ever to feel the desire to understand politics and to imitate the comic gestures of his customers, heatedly pounding on the tables with their newspapers spread before them. He has not acquired much education in his life, but a great deal of experience makes up for it - and he knows that more wounds are inflicted for lines, fences and stones marking the boundaries between large and small strips of land than for scorned love, and that more carnage comes about as a result than from threats to honor and liberty.
   Ah yes, he was only too experienced! He was born in this house, into which filtered uninterruptedly the echo of the living history of the entire region. Here, people confessed, cursed, quarrelled, slandered, disputed, declared war, dethroned emperors, celebrated the coming of peace; misery, hatred and ill luck came here and, again, the celebration of love. He had the self-effacing wisdom of a host. And always a smile on his lips. Stop the sun in its tracks and extinguish the stars if you understand how the world goes round and if you've got the truth by the forelock!
   "Whose side are you on, Simon?"
   "I can't make up my mind just yet. Give me a little time, like, say, five or ten years!"
   "Damn the fellow! He's as cold as a dog's snout, and so thick he doesn't even know why he's in the world!"
   "Are you telling me you know why you're here yourself?"
   "Oh forget it, you're dodging the question again! You don't know how to deal with anything, or perhaps you're just a hypocrite. We won't be electing you mayor!"
   They admired him for some of his qualities. Every Thursday evening, beggars would come to his place from miles around. They were given soup, potatoes, rice, sometimes even meat. They sat on the doorstep, on the stairs, in the taproom, it was a wonder you didn't trip on them. "Nice ornaments!" the customers would complain.
   Woe, however, to the beggar who came to the Silver Pigeon on another day or at a different hour! He would be driven out by Simon before he could open his mouth. Driven out, and how! In a mad rage, with threats and insults that would give you goosebumps. Witnesses to these outbursts went stiff with horror, since Simon was otherwise cool and calm, even when he was keeping order in his place with his fists. It seldom happened, but when there was a need for him to grab a chair and brandish it, even the most presumptuous troublemaker would calm down straight away. He had tremendous strength, which no one ever would have expected in such a small fellow with a bit of a stoop, and perhaps he was not well aware of it himself. The brawlers knew Simon. He had stamped on the foot of one of them and broke the bone and the toes like matchsticks - they took the poor wretch straight to the hospital; he broke a second one's arm when he had gotten a little careless in showing him out of the pub; and in a bit of a rash gesture he knocked three teeth out of a third, a handsome, strapping, ruddy-faced type with wild dark eyes, as he was trying to subdue the young man's drunken temper.
   He never talked about this himself, and anyone who hadn't known him well for a long time might easily have taken him for a coward.
   Dance bands were not allowed to appear in his place, he hated the racket, and wasn't concerned about exceptional profit. He served the customers himself, had never taken on a waiter to help out, and only on rare occasions did his wife stand in for him in the pub.
   He had never really been granted what one might call a world view. It was not for him - and he couldn't have managed it anyway - to reconcile the differences between all the points of view that had been buzzing around his ears in that hotbed of thoughts, convictions and opinions ever since his childhood. He was the ideal landlord: he believed no one and nodded approvingly to everyone. He held to one law alone, the law of hospitality - he had it in his blood. And he was ready to stand up for it against the whole town of Zbecnov if need be.
   On one occasion many years ago, they had smashed all of his windows because he had given refuge in the Silver Pigeon to a Jew, who, as the story in the surrounding countryside went, had killed a virgin and used her Christian blood to make his cursed matzohs. As I have said, Simon didn't believe gossip and rumors. Although he had no reason to believe the Jew either, the man, frightened to death, was his guest. And that settled it. He set himself in front of the doorway, spread his legs wide apart, rolled up his sleeves and hissed: "He's my guest! Come and get him, if you're of a mind to!"
   Given the situation, they no longer had a mind to, and they contented themselves with just the broken windows and a month-long boycott of the Silver Pigeon. Simon picked up the three largest stones from the floor, put them in a trunk, and would go to look at them secretly for years afterwards.
   He married late, when he was forty-three, shortly after the death of his father, who had nearly brought the pub to ruin by pouring too many beers on credit. He took for himself the eldest of the three daughters of a well-off farmer from a nearby village, and contented himself with a dowry of six thousand in gold. The marriage was arranged by his relatives. The young woman came to him straight from a convent. She had spent four years there, and had studied all sorts of things, including foreign languages, for which Simon had cool respect. She was a full twenty-two years younger, fragile, pale, and she often cried. Her tears touched him, but he didn't seek their reason. He was afraid that he wouldn't be able to prevent them anyway. He was loving and attentive to her, gave her as much money as he could, and sent her to the dressmaker himself.
   After a year or so of marriage, he happened upon her diary. He looked through it with interest, marvelling at the foolishness with which women occupy their time. All at once he stopped, read one sentence twice, and then examined one page after another with growing agitation.
   Of his wife he learned that she was unhappy, and of himself that he was an uncouth and simple-minded, if basically good-natured, man whom she had been pressured into marrying by her parents. He further read that in the foreign mountains on the other side of the valley she had left her first and last love, some blond, blue-eyed teacher who had managed to smuggle love letters even into the convent, and who had turned his back on her for good after her marriage.
   For several weeks he walked around the house pensively, avoiding eye contact with anyone. Impotent regret, which he had long since lost the habit of feeling, was making him breathless. He said not a word to her. He waited. And after three months, he picked up her diary again and read what had been added to it. It was already less interesting than before. The entries were concerned more with the present than with the past, the despairing enthusiasm was gone and was replaced by a dull sobriety. After another six months the diary came to a definitive end, like most diaries, with everyday banalities. The pain had subsided, the past had died away, time had healed all wounds. Simon breathed a sigh of relief. When after several years it seemed that his wife no longer thought of her notes, he dug up the diary from the bottom of her chest and put it in his trunk with the three keepsake stones.
   He never cheated on her, they rarely argued, he loved her just as he would have loved any other even slightly bearable woman. She got used to him, and later on, perhaps even a bit attached to him. The whole town rubbed elbows beneath their roof. Simon learned all about the happenings in their lives and he smiled. He was above it all, whether it concerned him or not. He had a young wife - he had won her, had won her for himself, because he had bet on his winning card, on the card of time. And he had two children, Eliska and Kamil. Eliska would get a decent dowry one day ( although he wouldn't force her into any marriage the way they forced her mother), and Kamil would study (he envisioned him as a local doctor or lawyer). He had his beggars' Thursdays, he was compassionate and indulgent, no one had anything bad to say about him. He even reconciled himself to the knowledge that the Silver Pigeon would one day pass into the hands of strangers; he blamed no one, he was not unhappy about it, but neither was he happy. For that matter, what more can a man expect from life when he neither trusts people nor believes them?

   The stories surrounding the Zbecnov arsonist began when Eliska was seventeen and Kamil fifteen. How many times the world and Zbecnov and the Silver Pigeon had changed by then in the eyes of a boy who has been restlessly searching in life for the adventures overlooked by his father! Whenever, after a length of time, he looked back over his shoulder he saw a past that had changed so much as to be unrecognizable. Not richer, not longer, just different than at the last look: it had disintegrated as the months and years had gnawed away at it, disintegrated into the rainbow-like colors of memory.
   At first he saw only the light and shadow of fairy tales without heroes. Anxiety, fear, joy, hunger, satiety, unearthly light, unreal twilight were their plot. Later on, the first change of scene magnified it: surely you recognize this, or at least find it faintly familiar! His father was an invulnerable knight, his mother a good witch, his sister an evil fairy, the Thursday beggars a villainous band. He would sit with the servant girls in the kitchen on a long bench by the stoves.
   "There, see, he sat right down at that table. It was the devil's own weather out, a wonder the wind didn't take the roof right off - the thunder was booming, one flash of lightning followed another, and hailstones larger than your fists were falling. He had a red beard that touched the ground and wild eyes. And what do you suppose he set down in front of himself, dear lad? Cross yourself before I tell you! A coffin! A black coffin - just as sure as I'm standing before you!"
   A new change: he takes long walks with his mother in the forest, along the hills beyond the herds of goats, around the fishpond with its secluded corners overgrown with rushes, discovering windswept paths and listening to odd stories of the sort that are not told to children:
   "At that time, my family was still paying us visits, my parents, my sisters and my brother. Your grandfather, your grandmother, your uncle - do you remember him? He brought you some candy - don't you remember? He came in a sleigh, a sleigh with a white horse dashing like the wind, the sleigh bells jingled, the whip whistled, crack, crack, he made a snowman in the yard . . . Grandpa was such a little man, he smoked a short pipe, spat in all directions like a Gypsy, you got a rocking horse from him . . . "
   The setting sun shines differently from before, more brightly, the wind hums something cheerful as it flies, today the frogs croak the psalm of the fishpond more quietly, the moss is covered with golden tones - ah, it's a beautiful, new, strange fairy tale that Mother is telling.
   "One day, though, Papa told them: I don't want you to come here so often. I have very little money, you're not my relatives, I don't like you! Well, they got cross with him, what would you expect? They went away and they'll never come back again. They have left me here all alone . . . Come on now, you silly boy, why should you cry? They're not angry at you and me, one day we'll go off after them together!"
   And again a change: School! Friends, battles, a bruised forehead, ripped pants. The Silver Pigeon will be a fortress when troops march around it. Ten machine guns rattle from the windows over the gilded sign. Mother will be in the background, what will there be to remember her for? She leaves the house for a week, returns dressed in black, ill for a long time, a doctor regularly comes to the house. At that time a skirmish breaks out in the pub, the servant girls clasp their hands together in fright, sobbing: "The landlord will kill them!" The windows will shatter, don't you hear the tables being overturned next door? Then the racket and the shouting subside. Finally all is quiet. Father comes in, smiling as always. "It's all over!" He wipes his hands on his clothes, stretches. "A lot of them are in for a bad night! Go and clean up in there! You're not still afraid are you?"
   Father's glory is greater than that of all the kings in the world.
   "Do you know, Vasek, how many of those robbers Papa crushed like worms when they broke into our place last night?"
   And what was his sister doing in those days? He hardly has any memories of her at all. It seems . . . yes, yes, she ran away from home. They searched for her all day. Later they brought her home half-frozen in the sleigh. A great cry was raised, the dog barked and barked in the yard, and someone said over the boy's bed that it was close to midnight. Good God, what had really happened to Eliska?
   Change overtakes change. The world is full of heroes. Magnificent heroes. In uniforms, with captains' caps on their heads, rifles on their shoulders, binoculars at their eyes, monstrous devices in hand, brigand feathers stuck in their hats. In those moments, Robinson would freeze in amazement, seeing the bare footprint in the sand, d'Artagnan find himself in a devil of a jam with his comrades and Alan Breck lop off more Whigamore heads with his sword than the crew of the pirate ship had toes on their feet.
   There is no life outside great deeds - you have to be a hero yourself! A naval officer, an inventor, a builder of airships. And to be one some day, you have to study. Every day he gets up at six o'clock, hurries to the train station, takes a local line to the district town where his school is, and does not return until evening. He already knows much more than his parents, he reads Latin sentences, discusses the intervals between the sun and the stars, knows what the highest mountains on earth are, and wears long pants. The earth seems ever wider, and the flow of the days more rapid . . .
   But let us pause in our high, wild flight in which moments and their secrets burn out more quickly than sparks. Let us stop now, because Kamil Simon is fifteen and he finds himself on the threshold of events that are really worth paying attention to.
   "What do you hear?" they eagerly ask the curious little boy who has excitedly put his ear to a telegraph pole to catch the echo of unseen events and the chatter of the world.
   "Nothing, just a buzzing! Wait . . . quiet . . . pst, pst! Now there is something after all!"

   For a long time now he has wanted to be alone. He is absent-minded, irritable, avoids his friends, wanders through the familiar places of his native region, his head drooping; he stops from time to time, raises his eyes from the ground and looks around timidly at the horizons, the wind and the clouds. Horizons, wind, clouds! Only the abandoned, the disappointed, the misunderstood fraternize with them. It seems to Kamil that all of this unhappiness has caught up with him. He does not understand his own sadness very well, the only thing that he knows for certain is that he has chosen the wrong way in the quest for bold ideas. What does the cold, gray and oppressive school, more unpleasant by the day, have to do with them? After all, he hasn't been a good student for some time, it's a wonder he doesn't drop out now, and the teachers constantly wave the prospect of failure in his future life under his nose. Over time he has cast off nearly all of his former plans. All he wants is peace and quiet, all he wants is to be free of the fear of exams and to acquire at least a pinch of his former faith in his qualities as a future hero. At home he envies the servant girls and the beggars - he tells himself that he would change places with them in an instant, and their world suddenly seems beautiful to him even without any breakneck adventures.
   No one else has any idea of what is going through his head, and not even he himself knows what to make of his muddled thoughts. He talks about school, laughs at his teachers, sometimes brings his friends to the Silver Pigeon, where with twisted grins they whisper to each other about girls. That is not what is really on his mind, however. Only once, in spite of himself, did he say to Rudolf Hamza, one of his schoolmates, the son of a Zbecnov doctor, the brightest boy in the whole class, that a time would come when there will be much talk about Kamil Simon, because it was his destiny to stand against the majority. That time, Rudolf looked long and seriously into Kamil's eyes, smiled ironically and said that most of the boys his age had similar opinions of themselves. Kamil felt ashamed, and never spoke to anyone again about his hidden dreams. He loved Rudolf for his contempt for their teachers and for the stately way in which he kept to himself. He unconsciously imitated him in speech and gesture, and marvelled at his peculiar ideas and prophecies, which were as seductive and chilling as ballads.
   Humanity, he says, faces great upheavals. There exists, he says, a secret organization of young people under such and such a name, pledged to friendship in life or death, and they are drawing lots to see who will blow up the cathedral and who will shoot the king. Whoever the lot falls to will carry out his task with blind obedience. It is only these sorts of people, he says, who will shift the world from its foundations; one day there will be no borders or wars or poverty.
   "Do you want to join their organization one day, Rudolf?"
   "I don't know - perhaps."
   "And what if they caught you?"
   "Oh, to hell with you and your infantile questions!"
   Kamil is deep in thought. Very strange things indeed are happening in the world and in its people. And in the immediate surroundings, even under the roof of the Silver Pigeon. He had realized that when Eliska came home for good from the convent, the same one in which her mother once lived. For three years she had been shut away there; she used to come home only on school holidays and on important occasions. Kamil barely recognizes her now. She is so similar to those girls who, with their every movement, fill him with a sadness he cannot comprehend. He is shy around her, it is unpleasant for him to look into her eyes. Everyone laughs when he balks at kissing his sister when they are reunited. Eliska doesn't speak much, it seems as though she is constantly listening to a voice that only she can hear. She has already been home for two months and so far they have exchanged only a few words. For that matter, they did not show much concern for each other before either. God knows why he calls to her one evening: "Come on, let's go for a walk together."
   A significant moment! Eliska walks slowly in front. She is wearing a long, light-colored dress, the wind lifts a scent of lavender from it. - If I weren't her brother, and if I were older, would I think her pretty? - Kamil muses to himself. They have been walking for a half hour without saying a word.
   "Is it true that you lost grandmother's ring in the convent?"
   "Yes, but we found it in the end."
   Silence. Why was he asking her about that? Mother has talked about it several times, and after all, he knows they found it. As the story goes, they had prayed to Saint Anthony - how ridiculous!
   Eliska suddenly stops and turns to Kamil. She looks over his shoulder somewhere far beyond the valley, at the dark blue Prussian hills with their first twinkles of light. And she speaks. He would never have thought that it was her voice.
   "There was such a beautiful child there, a ward of the convent, her name was Dora."
   She gave a brief, mirthless laugh.
   "That girl, it was as though she were possessed by the devil. We were a little afraid of her. She would always creep up to my bed at night, sit at the head, and her eyes shone in the darkness like those of a cat. She would whisper to me: 'Don't even think that I believe in God - I believe in nothing at all, absolutely nothing!' Imagine a total darkness where you can only see Dora's eyes and the eternal light on the crucifix . . . We still write to each other even now. But - oh, listen to me! I don't even know why I'm telling you this!"
   Kamil doesn't utter a word. He has the impression that he has just heard that secret voice which until now only Eliska has perceived. He steals a glance at her; he sees a flaxen-haired girl whom he barely recognizes, eyes fixed onto the blackened distances. By pure chance she is there walking next to him, her thin lips compressed in thought, her stiff arms crossed awkwardly behind her. It's clear that she really is beautiful. Who was it that had told him that Bilek the confectioner had fallen desperately in love with her? A nice name - Severin Bilek! But of all things, what difference does that make? What does he care about her convent? He would rather think about the fact that in three days they'll be handing out the marks at school, and then he has two months of vacation to look forward to. No, not for anything in the world would he encourage her to go on, he's not interested in her . . . My God, what on earth had happened that time for the dog in the yard to howl so long? Yes, it was just before midnight!
   "You ran away from home once, didn't you?"
She stopped in mid-stride, as if to weigh him with her eyes. He went on ahead of her and felt her gaze fixed on his back. She answered indifferently and elusively: "That was many years ago now!"
   "But I remember it. Why did you run away?"
   She was still walking behind him, obviously not wanting to catch up. What's that? He swiftly turned around when, with studied carelessness, she delivered the few abominable words: "It was because of her. She's always been bad!"
   Now they are standing face to face. He can no longer see her eyes, the darkness is too thick, but nonetheless, his glance bores into something just as alive and yet just as silent, just as insistent and yet just as timorous as her gaze.
   "Who are you talking about?"
   She answers quickly, almost irritably, as though the answer were self-evident:
   "About our mother, who else?"
   Even before she had spoken, he had sensed in a sudden burst of acute anxiety whom she had in mind. Spots swam before his eyes and he felt as though his tongue had turned to wood. An automatic protest (Lord in heaven, you just don't talk that way about Mother!) was quickly stifled by a boundless, sinful and rapacious curiosity. As if by command, they sat down at the same time on an unplowed strip of earth. The lavender scent of her dress was more penetrating than it had been before.
   "Why do you think she's bad?"
   Wasn't that just another one of those infantile questions that makes Rudolf push him away? He asked it quietly and shyly, and Eliska answered in a voice that was equally uncertain and hesitant. They were feeling each other out in their minds, each trying to decide if the other was worth attempting to understand.
   "I'm not in the mood right now to go into detail. Look around you a bit and you'll see a few things for yourself. Though of course, you're her darling!"
   There was no doubt that what followed was in the same foreign, mysterious voice as before. She said it slowly, one word after another, as though making an ironic allusion to something:
   "Why does she shut up all the rooms before she takes so much as a step out of the house? You don't know? Why is it that in her whole life she's never found a single friend? Well? Have you ever seen a single living soul come to visit us? You haven't, have you? It's obvious that people are afraid of one of us, don't you think? Afraid of someone who must have too much on her conscience, if she double-locks the doors in the daytime and doesn't trust her own husband or her daughter, not even her little favorite - never mind the servant girls. It would be enough to make you laugh if it wasn't enough to make you cry! And even the sparrows on the roof twitter that Papa's blind. She knows (the terrible obstinacy with which Eliska avoids the word mother!) how well I know her game, but fortunately she's always been afraid of me. She only dared lay a hand on me once - that's when I ran away from home . . . That's how it is! I hope you'll have enough sense not to go straight away from here and blab what I've told you!"
   Kamil is in the habit of taking in even the most remarkable revelations without protest, and trying to make it fit into some known category or rule. Now, however, his thoughts remain mute.



© Estate of Egon Hostovsky
Translation © Christopher Morris, Twisted Spoon Press

ISBN 80 902171 0 9
176 pp.
13.5 x 19 cm
hardcover
1 b/w drawing
fiction : novel

Copyright © 2009 Twisted Spoon Press