I noticed that the snow which had fallen that morning had none of the usual deathly whiteness about it, but was dirty grey. My guide didn’t even look about him but hurried to a shed behind the house, opened its wide double door, and wheeled out his machinery. Unlike the house itself this was an object of impressive appearance. It reminded me of an ancient fire engine: all brass and gleaming metal parts. It might equally well have been a perfect artefact for some exhibition of op art. The long hose was fitted with a nozzle.
He wheeled the assembly into the garden, uncoiled the hose and began to pump some handles. A smelly mist issued from the nozzle. I watched the mist settling on the snow, but that dirty snow, instead of getting blacker, seemed to be getting lighter. No doubt there was some chemical reaction between the artificial mist and that chemical mess that had dropped from the sky. Thus we found ourselves in the middle of a near-white island while all around lay black clods of snow. I didn’t say anything, and he too was silent. In his eyes I saw neither disappointment nor the joy of a perfectly played practical joke. After a while he stopped pumping, coiled up the hose, and wheeled his shining equipment back into the shed. I seized oh the moment when he was inside and quickly walked along the railway line to the station. As I walked through the black snow I thought to myself that even if that man was crazy, he was no crazier than the rest of humanity which, in its eagerness for comfort, was spraying the world with a black mist in the belief that this was the direct road to the Garden of Eden.
It would have been embarrassing if he’d recognised me too, but he didn’t seem to remember me. He had been too obsessed with his own mission at the time to take note of the face of someone who served him, at best, as an intermediary.
I promised him I’d come and look at his inventions as soon as I had some time, and he did not press me any further.
‘For all you know your Harry may have been with me,’ Mrs Venus said. Her face seemed even more swollen than in the morning and she was gazing at us with her right eye like an owl. ‘He’s not like you, he doesn’t only go in for machines!’
‘He can do better than you, you old hag!’ The captain took a swig of grog, pulled out his pipe and filled it with his good hand.
Last Monday it rained even harder than today. We had to stop work before time was up, and as we were only a short distance from where the captain lived this seemed a suitable moment for a visit.
He led me to a house which looked even more dilapidated than the one where, years ago, he had demonstrated his equipment to me. He unlocked the door and hung up his captain’s cap on a rusty nail behind it. The walls of the hall were damp and hadn’t been painted for a long time; everywhere lay heaps of dusty objects and scattered pieces of clothing. The room’s appearance and dimensions suggested a ship’s cabin. Over his bunk hung various drawings, mostly of windmills. Nowhere did I see anything that suggested our first encounter. Perhaps I was the victim of some fixed idea and the captain had nothing in common with that young man years ago. No doubt the number of unsuccessful inventors in the world was increasing like that of unsuccessful poets.
He opened the bottom drawer and took out some folders of plans. He’d lately concerned himself with the most effective way of using wind power. He unrolled the first sheet and I saw a dreamlike ship whose deck was taken up by turrets carrying windmill sails, five turrets in all. He showed me further drawings, among them a windmill bus and a flying windmill, all these craft driven by wind. The drawings were meticulously done, the individual parts all bearing letters and numbers: I recognised the drive assembly, the transmission gears and the blades of the propellers as I knew them from childhood from my father’s drawings. Other drawings had landscapes dotted with wooden turrets towering picturesquely above the tops of the trees.
It struck me that the captain was not so much a madman, not so much a joker, as a poet at heart. What else could a real poet do when he realised that crowds of jerkish wordmongers and image-mongers had already flooded the world with their rubbish? What else could he do in the face of the monstrous palatial blocks choking the earth but build his windmills which rise up silently and leave behind neither noise nor smell?
I asked him how much time he spent on his inventing. He said not so much now. He was usually too tired. At one time his head used to buzz with so many ideas that there weren’t enough days and nights to put them down. Then he’d got married. He’d thought his wife would support him in his endeavours, but what woman could work up an enthusiasm for something that brought her no practical advantage? She’d begun to nag him, she even threw out his drawings and models. Finally, when their son was three, she’d run off. The captain spat towards the corner of his cabin and opened a cupboard which was full of strange objects. He’d wanted to go back to his old drawings but he’d suddenly discovered that there were stones rattling in his head. He was going downhill. One day, when he was cutting a sheet of metal with a welding torch, he’d handled it so awkwardly that the cut strip fell and crushed his hand. They had to amputate it at the wrist. So he’d been transferred to storekeeping. There, now and again, some idea would come to him. He hadn’t heard from his ex-wife for many years, but she’d not had a good time either. The fellow she’d run off with beat her, he knew that from his son. Maybe she’d come back some day. He wouldn’t drive her out, she’d find her bed all ready. He pointed to the upper part of the bunk, and it was only then that I noticed that the check bedcover had a thick layer of dust on it.
‘How old is your son now?’ it occurred to me to ask.
He looked at me in astonishment, and Mrs Venus answered for him: ‘Why, Harry’s off doing his military service now.’
In the dim saloon bar it was getting darker still and the raindrops were beating noisily against the windowpanes. But this was nothing compared to the drops which would beat a tattoo on the roof of the attic studio, where on days like this it got so dark we became invisible to one another, so we could find each other only with our hands and our lips and our bodies. Then, all of a sudden, she’d be overcome by tears, and as we were saying goodbye, as she was kissing me with moist lips in the doorway of the building, she begged me not to be angry with her, that it was only those clouds which had so depressed her, and she promised she’d write me a letter.
I’ve always wanted to get a letter from which I could see that I was being loved, and indeed she sent me one written on a rainy evening, or maybe late at night when the wind had dispersed the clouds.
My darling, my dearest, at this moment I’d leave everything, I wouldn’t take anything with me, and if you said: Come! I’d go wherever you commanded. I realise that one pays for this, but this is right because one should pay for it. But even if I were to die, even if I were to go out of my mind, which to me seems worse still, I’d go . . .
I was alarmed by these promises and resolutions, but at the same time I was flooded with a happiness, like the warmth of sunbathing.
She also wrote to me that she loved me to the point of feeling anguish and pain, that she experienced a terrible pain because I was not with her at this moment, just now when everything that was good in her was crying out to me.
That’s how she called me to her, and I knew that I had always longed for just such a woman. It gave me so much happiness that the reality of her pain and despair did not impinge on me. Or else I was too old to share her hopes without fear. Was I afraid we would end up like all those whose longing dies away and who can then scarcely bear to lie down by the side of each other night after night? Or was I not so much afraid as simply unable to brush my wife out of my life, my wife of whom I was still fond and who, after all, was supposed to belong to me to the end of my or her days?
If there were a devil, she chose a suitable quotation for me, it wouldn’t be he who decided against God, but he who didn’t find eternity long enough to come to a decision.
How can a person win love if he can’t come to a decision?
My wife suspects nothing, she trusts me. But she has tormented dreams. She is walking with her class across a snow-covered mountain plain, suddenly all of them increase their pace and she can’t keep up with them. She remains alone in the wind and frost, looking in vain for the way. Fog descends. She realises she won’t ever find her way out again. At other times she climbs a rock with her friends, and when she is at the steepest point they all disappear. Rigid with vertigo she presses herself to the rockface. She can’t move up or down, she calls for help, but no one responds.
She tells me her dreams and searches for an interpretation. She goes all the way back to her childhood, when she used to be on her own, unable to be close to anybody.
I know that she is wrong in the interpretation of her dreams, but I keep silent, I leave her at the mercy of her anguished visions.
But how can a man still believe in love if he has no compassion?
The foreman finished his second beer and unbuttoned himself. I realised that he was not so much worried by the change in atmospheric pressure as by the fact that he might lose his bonus. He ordered a third beer and announced that he’d made up his mind: he’d finally teach that Franta a lesson!
Franta is that young idiot with the tic in his face, the one I don’t understand a word of when he speaks. To my amazement he is also a foreman, he even drives a car and it looks as if he is checking on our work, not by official authority but so he can grass on us. Everyone hates him. Whether because he’s a cripple or because he’s a grass I can’t judge.
Mrs Venus told me that he’d recently had an operation. They’d taken his manhood from him. Franta did indeed have big breasts and his incomprehensible talk was in a falsetto. Last week, the foreman was now telling us angrily, that cripple had grassed on him, that he’d gone to have a beer when he’d claimed he was seeing the doctor. ‘I saw that shit at the final stop of the number 19 yesterday, in that bloody refuse truck of his, so I grabbed him by his collar and dragged him out on the pavement and said to him: “You’ll kneel down right here and ask my pardon, you swine, or else bring a pot along to collect up the bits of your bloody face!” He had to get down into the mud and repeat after me: “Mister Marek, I apologise to you, I’ll never say a word about you again.” “Mister,” I made him say to me, because to him, and to him alone, I’m no Comrade!’
The foreman is an ex-NCO who served some time at the airfield; that time he obviously regards as a heroic and happy one, and he is fond of reminiscing about it – which helps me to recollect my own childhood days. I envy him his memory. Not only does he remember a mass of stories and sayings, but he also knows the names of all the streets in our district, and that’s several hundred. He is as expert about the names and closing times of all the taverns as he is about street-cleaning technology. And they put him on an equal footing with that cripple.
‘You should have made him stand a round of beer,’ the captain remarked. ‘He’d remember that all right, having to dip into his own pocket.’
‘I wouldn’t accept one from him,’ Mrs Venus said. ‘I’d sooner stick to water.’
‘He’s a poor wretch,’ Mr Rada cut in from the next table. ‘What do you want from him?’
‘That one?’ the foreman became heated. ‘He’s a cunning little bastard, he knows very well that if they cut my bonus his will go up. Who d’you suppose grassed on us last month, the day we had that downpour, when we left out Lomnického?’
‘He’s a poor wretch all the same,’ I joined in.
‘You didn’t know him,’ Mrs Venus said, her swollen eye flickering between Mr Rada and me, ‘before they did that operation on him. By the time he got down to work it would be midday, and out: in the street the moment he’d catch sight of a skirt he’d whip out that thing of his!’
‘Creatures like him should be done in at birth.’ The foreman knew no pity.
‘How could they do that?’ I objected.
‘And why not? You only bugger about with them all your life, and there’s no time left for normal people. Aren’t I right?’ the foreman turned to the others. ‘And a decent bloke’s got to work till he croaks.’
‘And who’d decide who is normal?’
‘Leave it to the doctors; they can tell pretty well nowadays. Let me tell you,’ the foreman decided to cut short the discussion on euthanasia, ‘that if that damned pervert grasses once more on any one of us, I’ll catch hold of the bastard and kick him all the way down to the Boti
č
stream and there I’ll hold his bloody head under the water till he sees reason.’
Two and a half thousand years ago it is believed that the Greeks in Asia Minor, whenever their community was threatened by the plague or some other disaster, picked a cripple or otherwise deformed person, led him to the place of sacrifice, gave him a handful of dried figs, a loaf of wheat-flour bread and cheese, then struck him seven times on his genitals with a scourge, and to the accompaniment of a flute burnt him to death.
It was another rainy day, but at the beginning of spring. On the window-sill of the noble town house opposite two drenched pigeons were huddling together, and we were also huddling together, exhausted from love-making. I was beginning to get up because I wanted to get home, where my wife and children were expecting me, my unsuspecting and deceived family and my neglected, abandoned work. By now she knew that cautious movement which was the beginning of my moving away from her, but she didn’t, as usual, say: Don’t go yet! She just started to cry.
I asked what was wrong, but she only sobbed and pushed me away from her. It had been getting too much for her, she no longer had the strength for those perpetual goodbyes, for that coming together and breaking apart, she wasn’t cut out to be a two-man woman, she couldn’t bear the deception, the pretence sickened her, she wanted to live according to her conscience, she wanted to be with the one she loved.