Czech writing

by Bohumil Hrabal

translated from the Czech by James Naughton

Dear Dubenka,

Ever since I got back from the "Delighted States", from that journey you planned for me so preposterously and so fondly, maybe just so that we could see each other again, ever since that time I've been off the rails ... It's like what happened to my mother, who, according to her death certificate, died of softening of the brain — but I've attained such an absolute peak of emptiness and I'm so, so alone, effectively in solitary confinement, tied up in a straitjacket, no longer living in time, but only and exclusively in space, which shocks and horrifies me ...

One day an Italian who came to Prague by marriage, a young man who restores chapels, invited me to come out and see this thing he'd seen in Budec "to where Saint Wenceslas would ride out to visit his grandmother Ludmila, later strangled with a scarf" and there in Budec in the dome of the rotunda, rest the mouldered, mouldering bones of hundreds of generations of doves, who, whenever they sense their time has come, fly into the dome to die, several whole centuries of them there are, down beneath nothing but humus, guano, layer upon layer of generations of doves in that rounded dome, rising up from the pluperfect tense via the imperfect to the dove feathers and bones of the year that's just past ...

So that's me, I who have aged so much now that I live and feed off childhood memories, these layers of mine are there somehow in the receding strata of that dove sepulchre in Budec — all I have to do is close my eyes and I'm back there, back in Zidenice, where I was born in the bed in which my grandfather later died, in a room which meant everything to me, because from the moment I opened my eyes there was always sunshine in that room, or if not sunshine, light at least ... Our street, Balbinova, sloped up a hill, the pavement passed our pair of windows, and as people went up and down the street their heads either rose up or descended, severed by the two window-frames ... That is my light, the little house on Balbinova, in Zidenice, where my unmarried mother gave birth to me, where my granny and granddad brought me up, that street of mine with its little low houses and that sunlight ... I've always thought of the room where I was born as a little church or a room in a chateau, with its holy pictures and the Virgin Mary under a glass cover, and huge asparagus ferns, and a plush-covered table and on it a huge plush-covered book with a gold fastening, it looked like a bible, that family album, which I was afraid to open ... Outside the windows were fields of maize and fruit trees and the rising hillside, where a vineyard ran and grandma had a field ... When the time came, she took me with her, she hoed the tomatoes and beans, picked the gooseberries and currants, and again when it was time, she clambered about the trees picking the various damsons, plums and apricots, while I sat staring ... What did I stare at? Nothing, I was simply there with granny, always bathed in sunlight, even if it started to drizzle ...

Dubenka, just like I remember those first three years of my life, living with my grandmother, so I remember you now, I see you in light, you're dressed in light, you even have a halo, because you're so far away, because, Dubenka, then it came to pass, when I was four years old, they took me away to Polnà, to the brewery, where the sun never entered, I lived there with my new dad and my mother, a stranger to me, and in that brewery apartment you had to have the lamp on even during the day, for sunlight you had to go into the yard or off into town… So I became a runaway, who always stayed out of doors till bedtime ... I'm no different now, Dubenka, I'm just the same — the sun only comes out when I remember you, and even if it's a rainy day ... I can still see you that first time you came to the pub the Golden Tiger, with your rucksack on your back. I was sitting under the little antlers, at the back of the pub where they have to leave the light on, you were searching for a face to match the name, and then you came up and you introduced yourself as April Gifford, studying Czech, you expected I'd be cross at you barging in like that ... but I knew right away, my future was in your eyes, I melted, and so did my friends, you sat down with us and had some beer, and Mr Marysko said ... April ...? Aprilka ...? No, we'll call you Dubenka ... And from then on you were Dubenka ... for April in Czech is "duben", the "oak month" ... And when you took off your jacket, spattered with rain, somebody inquired: Is it raining out there? And you said ... Yes folks, Mr Hrabal, it's raining, or as you Czechs say, it's pissing down ... Hearing that, all the customers burst out laughing and they gave you a special look, as if you'd stroked them or something ... And when we asked you where you were from, you told us, repeating the answer several times: Ze "Spokojenych" stàtu ... From the "Delighted" States ... But you pleased the customers most of all when, in reply to a question from our former Consul: So what do they teach you on that Slavic course, what good things have you learnt? you said guilelessly: Well, stuff like, for example — what a smart-ass Party we have ... Hearing this, our Consul was tickled pink, and he said ... This girl must come again! she's a sweet child ... So now you'd introduced yourself, Dubenka, to the Golden Tiger ... and I think once again of that young archaeologist, who showed me the excavated dome of that Romanesque church, all those layers of dead doves and pigeons ... through the deep probe in its side I saw several centuries back, back to where the bones and feathers had turned to nothing but guano and humus, while there up above lay the dead doves, who, before they died, decorously spread out their wings like fans and tucked up their tiny heads, just as Lady Death, the dovely reaper has contrived it ... O Colomba, Colomba, my little dove ... as it is written in the Ursuline Church, where tiny, lace-wrapped Colomba rests, her bones that were brought to Prague by the Father of our Nation, the Emperor Charles IV ... the Saint who preferred to die, rather than marry the one she did not love, she sleeps her sleep along with the Ursulines, like the doves in their layers do in the dome of the Romanesque rotunda of Budec near Prague ...

Dear Dubenka, I'm writing to you from our metropolis, where once it was the custom for flocks of doves and pigeons to toddle about and coo in the city squares, and people took photographs of themselves with them, and gave them titbits to eat ... Those city squares were even a kind of witness to our legendary dove-like nature ... But it's no longer so, a while ago I started coming across men in a kind of official garb, like a zookeeper's uniform, they looked like gnomes or inmates of some institution, they even wore goggles, maybe so as not to be identified, great preternaturally huge goggles with lenses like two yoghurts. There they were, walking about in the early hours of the morning, going through the streets and squares, scattering poisoned grain or catching pigeons in nets, like the little butterfly nets we had as children. Often I would meet these monsters already bearing their prey, holding a kind of fishing net, each one full of topsy-turvy wings, helpless red feet rammed through the netting, in every net you saw one or two pairs of horrified dove's eyes, those beautiful eyes ... And nobody stopped them, everyone was dismayed at those human monsters carting off their prey ... hundreds of innocent dove's eyes ... Yet every May the First, at every festival, every children's fun and games in city squares and Parks of Leisure and Culture, everywhere the blue banners fluttered and the blue flags waved in children's fingers bearing that white dove, painted for the Peace Movement by Pablo Picasso ...

I live in a city where for at least the last two years a campaign has been waged against doves and pigeons, they're just vanishing more and more ... here and there one struts out or a little group of them, pecking whatever people throw at them ... but watch it, because according to the newspapers and magazines it's forbidden now, doves and pigeons are a danger to human health ... and feeding them is undesirable, almost a punishable offence ... I've even seen people kicking over-confiding ones out of the way, they just kick them out of the way, and there are people who shout and threaten to make an official complaint, when they see somebody feeding those beautiful, innocent pigeons — that dove-like nature of ours ...

Everything is changing here, Dubenka, and there's no end to it, already the voices have been heard saying that swans are dangerous too, that a swan is liable to kill ducklings with its lovely black bill ... Thousands of swans have flown into Prague to find a quiet safe haven, where they live by begging, and they in turn reward people with their elegance, they are our fashion models, our white mannequins, Prague is a fluvial Swan Lake several miles long ... and this is also starting to bother, not just the hunting and shooting fraternity, but also people like me, because I too can see how the ducklings disappear and only the ducks remain on the Vltava ... What's to be done about it? In England at least the swans belong to the Queen, and anybody who maims or kills a swan, is prosecuted — in England maiming or killing a swan is a crime of lese majeste ...

But, I reckon, Dubenka, happiness is always cheek by jowl with lurking misfortune. Once when I was in Moscow, as a guest of UNESCO, for celebrations of the millenium of the Russian Orthodox Church, we went to open a monastery in deep snow — it looked in that snow as if it hung in heaven itself — its walls were blue and its pillars white ... and that heavenly chanting! Ruslan and Ludmila, a thousand years ago, after wandering all over the Mediterranean, finally witnessed Orthodox mass in Constantinople, and they were so moved by it, that they asked each other: Are we still on earth or already in heaven? And all at once they knew that for the Russians Orthodoxy would be number one ... I was invited along with the rest to meet Patriarch Pimen, and when my turn came, I told the Patriarch that once I'd given a lecture in a crystal palace on Zum ewigen Frieden, the subject of a little book which Immanuel Kant wrote in nearby Kaliningrad, formerly Koenigsberg, founded by the Bohemian ruler Premysl Otakar II ... After I'd summarized its contents, I enquired of the Patriarch ... Would you be so kind as to tell me — you know how in Hebrew Emanuel means "Child of God" — so are the bad ones also the Children of God, or only the good ones? The Patriarch fixed his spellbinding eyes upon me, he weighed me up lovingly in those coal-black pupils of his, and after some weighty deliberation he said ... The bad ones are ... also the Children of God ... I bowed to him and I went out into the yard, all aglitter with snow, and the monks were standing now in the turrets and they began to set the bells rocking with great blows of their paw-like gloves, mittens like goalkeepers wear for ice-hockey, and the bells pealed out in harmony over several miles of snow-covered landscape, over Moscow and surely further still, the bells hung in the open Romanesque windows of the tower, and the figures of the monks moved in rhythm, contrapuntally, to the bidding of the blows of those ice-hockey mitts ... The Deacon came across the yard, and women knelt, and he blessed them, and he gave them the cross to kiss ... I knelt down too, and he blessed me, and when he gave me the cold silver cross to kiss, he saw the label on my coat lapel, saying where I was from, and he said quietly ... You can talk Czech with me, I was at the seminary in Presov ...

So the bad ones are God's children too, Dubenka, they and all of us are Emanuels, it was for us that Kant wrote that little book ... Zum ewigen Frieden ... "To Eternal Peace ..." Dubenka, that was the wonderful time in Moscow when during the summer a seventeen-year-old German student landed his plane in Red Square, it was the Day of the Defenders of the Soviet Sky ... The tiny plane crept in close to the ground like a wolf ... He flew in past the streets of Moscow ... steering himself neatly over a bridge above the river, he slipped his craft in under the trolley-bus wires, and the policeman directing the traffic in front of the Kremlin managed things so well that the plane made a safe landing, it only bobbed up ever so gently against the red Kremlin wall ... And as the young man leapt out, two women carrying bouquets to place on Lenin's tomb, seeing that child dressed as an airman, gave him their flowers, because they thought it was all part of the display for the Day of the Defenders of the Soviet Sky ... Dubenka — those women, the traffic cop, that boy pilot, all of them are God's children ...


© Twisted Spoon Press
© Estate of Bohumil Hrabal
Translation © James Naughton

ISBN 978 80 902171 9 5
204 pp.
145 x 205mm
softcover with flaps
literature / essays
€13.50

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