12
I glanced at my watch, it was time for Bod’a Červinka to have finished his little round. No doubt he got his vegetables today for a good price, and overjoyed by his bargain he’ll have stopped first on the square at Svoboda’s, where he’ll have had a couple of gills of vermouth and fifty grammes of Hungarian salami, then he’ll have stopped at the Grand, where he’s sure to have had one small goulash and three Pilsners, then, to start bringing his little round to its conclusion, he’ll have stopped at the Mikoláška drugstore, where, lingering in friendly conversation, he’ll have drunk three glasses of brandy. It’s also possible, however, that Bod’a was so overjoyed at saving two crowns on his bargain purchase of vegetables, that he went on to complete his so-called big round, that is to say, stopping at the Hotel Na Knížecí as well, for a black coffee with Original Jamaican rum, and finally dropping in for a quick one at the special bar of Louis Wantoch and Co., where he had a little noggin of kirsch as a final full stop to his celebration of such a cheap purchase of cauliflower and vegetables for his soup.
After Francin had gone off into his office totally unmollified, I hobbled out into the hall, pulled out my bike and rode off into town, I pedalled lightly with my white and painful foot, but then with each push of the pedals the ankle seemed to gain strength. I leant the bicycle against the wall, and when I peeped into the barber’s shop, there on the rotating armchair sat Bod’a in a snooze, I went in and sat down on a free chair. Bod’a must have done the big round today, because he was giving off a smell of cherry stones, he must have ended up at Griotte Inc.’s. “Bod’a,” said I. “What? Yes madam?” he said getting up with such a start that he snatched his scissors and started snipping them in the air. I said, “Bod’a, I’d like you to cut my hair.” Bod’a started in shock even more. “I beg your pardon?” he stammered. And I said, “Bod’a, I want my hair cut short like Josephine Baker’s.” Bod’a weighed my hair in his hands and rolled his eyes, “What, this surviving link with the old Austria? This hallmark, which says, ‘Here am I, Anna Czilágová, born Karlovice, in Moravia?’ Never!” And Bod’a tossed aside the scissors contemptuously and sat down and folded his arms and looked out the window and glowered. And I said to him, “Mister Bod’a, Doctor Gruntorád has trimmed his stallion’s mane and tail and he recommended me this modern cut against dandruff.” Bod’a was implacable, “Cutting it short would be like spitting on the host after holy communion!” I said to him, “Bod’a, I’ll sign you a solemn written undertaking . . .” “Only with that,” said Bod’a, bringing his writing things, and I wrote down on a quarter sheet of paper, like before an operation, that I of my own free will and being in full possession of all my faculties requested Mr Bod’a Červinka to cut my long hair short. And Bod’a, having dried this solemn undertaking by waving it in the air, put it carefully away in his wallet, flapped open the white surplice, pulled it under my chin, bent back my head, and took the scissors, he hesitated a moment, it was like that moment when a circus artiste in the big top is about to do a particularly dangerous feat and the drum rolls and rolls . . . and with two big snips Bod’a sheared off my flowing tresses. It took such a load off me, that my head sank forward on to my chest and I felt a draught on my neck. Bod’a laid the hair on the revolving armchair, then he took the trimmer and shaved off tendrils of hair and side locks, then his scissors snipped in the air, Bod’a stepped back and contemplated my hair like a working sculptor, and at once his scissors started working away concentratedly again. Whenever I tried to raise my head and glance stealthily at myself in the mirror, he pushed my chin down between my shoulder blades and carried on working. I saw him starting to perspire, his face gleamed and he smelt of Jamaican rum and kirsch and brandy with a whiff of not terribly pleasant beer about him, he lathered his brush, and every time I tried to look at myself, he pushed my head down, but I saw that a kind of joy was spreading over his face, a kind of delighted smile, indicating that something was going right. Then he soaped the back of my neck and shaved my neck with a razor, then he dampened my hair and trimmed it back with the razor, and suddenly I felt a bitterness in my mouth and my heart began to thump, now, when it was too late, the hair couldn’t be fixed back, I saw Francin, sitting in the evening in the office and penning initial letters with his number three lettering pen and round each initial he sets swirling tendrils and my russet hair coursing in the shape of a lyre, I saw Francin having his hands cut from my hair by Bod’a Červinka, having the purple violet glowing neon comb cut away by him, because now Francin will never be able to comb my tresses out there in the darkened room and luxuriate in my hair, which he fell in love with right back in the time of Austria and because of which he married me . . . I closed my eyes and pressed my chin to my chest and sobbed for a moment, Bod’a touched me twice, but I didn’t have the strength to lift my eyes up to the mirror, Bod’a took me tenderly by the mouth and lifted my chin, then he stepped back, and was so tactful that he turned away . . . There in the mirror on the revolving chair, up to the neck in a white sheet, sat a fetching young man, but with such an insolent expression on his face, that I raised my own hand against myself. Bod’a unfastened the surplice, I raised myself up, leaned on the marble table top and gazed at myself, astonished, for Bod’a had sculpted out of me my very soul, that Josephine Baker hairdo, that was me, that was my self-portrait, it was bound to stick out a mile at everyone, hit them in the face like a waggon shaft. By now Bod’a had long since dusted the chopped and fragmented hairs off the gown, mercifully allowing me a chance to get my bearings, to get used to myself. I sat down, still unable to take my eyes off myself. Bod’a took the round mirror and held it behind me. In the mirror in front of me I saw in the oval glass the nape of my neck, my boyish neck, which had returned me to my girlish youth, without making me cease to be a woman, still able to tempt herself with that neck of hers trimmed in the shape of a heart. And altogether that new hairdo gave the impression of a helmet, a kind of cap made of hair like Mephistopheles had when the Martin company played Faust in our local theatre, it looked as if it could be removed from my head, just as Doctor Gruntorád a short while back had taken off the plaster bandaging from my ankle, my hairdo fitted close to my scalp like that plaster did to my ankle . . . And I jumped up, but as I was accustomed to my hair pulling my head back, I nearly fell over and broke Bod’a’s mirror with my forehead. I paid, promising Bod’a I’d give him a case of lager for good measure, and Bod’a laughed and rubbed his hands, Bod’a too was invigorated by this barber’s feat of his. “Bod’a,” I said to him, “did you create it all by yourself?” And Bod’a flipped through the series of modern haircuts in his barber’s news, from the fringe of Lya de Putti to the bob cut of Josephine Baker . . . I went out, and a gust blew about my head, although there was a dead calm. I jumped on my bike and Bod’a ran out after me, bringing me those chopped-off tresses in a paper bag, he put them in my hand, those tresses weighed a good two kilos, as if I’d gone and bought me two kilos of eel. I said, “Bod’a, put them on the back for me, on the carrier, will you?” And Bod’a lifted up the spring of the carrier and laid the tresses down, and when he let the spring fall back on the tresses, I clutched my head . . . And then I rode off down the main street, looking at the passers-by, I saw de Giorgi the master chimney sweep, but he didn’t recognise me, I rode on to the railway station, looked at the departure times, but nobody paid me any attention, people thought I was someone else altogether, even though the bicycle and my body were just the same as they were before my hair was cut short. I pushed on the cycle pedals and returned up the main street, in front of Mr Svoboda the baker’s stood Doctor Gruntorád’s carriage, only this afternoon had the doctor finally made it to his tubby mug of white coffee and basket of rolls, which would be waiting for him there every morning, for when he got back from his rural deliveries and grumbling gall-bladders, and now the doctor came out, the coachman jumped down from the box where he had been dozing with his hands on the stallion’s reins, Doctor Gruntorád looked at me, I b
owed and smiled, but the doctor only hesitated a moment, then shook his head firmly to himself and mounted the box and drove off, while his coachman lolled behind on the plush seat. I rode through the square past the plague column, everyone looked at me as if they had never seen me in town before . . . on the parade walk in front of the firm of Katz’s, draper’s and haberdasher’s, a bulldog slept, and a group of ladies dressed in black were standing, with skirts down to the ground, the chairlady of the local civic amenity society was seemingly giving a guided tour to some notable composer, he had a big black hat on like a social democrat. Once I too went round with this amenity society with their skirts brushing up the dust of the paving, in the holy church of St Giles we stood by the closed side entrance and gazed at the floor where not a trace remained, only a memory of how hundreds of years ago there was a dried-up encrustation of blood from that massacre when the Swedes and the Saxons slaughtered all the burghers who had sheltered in there, and then we stood by the only really beautiful, historically valuable Fortna Gate, but we didn’t stare at the gate itself, we looked attentively under the arches of the stone bridge, where in the year 1913 the animal-tamer Kludský had bathed his circus elephants, still wallowing there to this day in the waters of the Elbe and squirting water over their backs with their trunks like fire-hoses, just like the photograph in the town museum — for Mrs Krásenská, the chairlady of the amenity society, thanks to her revivifying imagination, sees in this town only that which is no longer visible to the naked eye. Now the lady members of the amenity society took their special visitor across into the arcade in front of Havrda’s pub, and they gazed in a moved way at the cement pavement where Frederick the Great had once rested. And then, for the most precious thing in our whole little town, Mrs Krásenská led the famous composer off under her arm to the centre of the square, where on a bench two old-age pensioners were sitting resting their chins on their walking sticks, and the chairlady described and accurately delineated the Renaissance water fountain, which stood there up to the year 1840, when it was demolished, but you would be mistaken if you thought it was the two sitting old-age pensioners that the amenity society members were gazing at, by no means! The chairlady pointed and ran her finger around in front of the pensioners’ faces, but what she saw was what she was describing, those wonderful ornaments, sandstone festoons and the two small half-relief angels on that fountain, which used to be and therefore still are one of the adornments of our town. Ah, Mrs Krásenská, who loves everything which is no more, I was filled with affection for her when I discovered her romantic past, thirty years ago she fell in love with a tenor singer at the National Theatre, a Mr Šic, she used to stand after the performance outside the back entrance, and when the tenor singer came out and chucked away a cigarette end, she pierced that butt with a pin and laid it as a precious relic in a little silver casket, and as she was a sempstress, all day she had to sew, in order to make enough for one orchid, and all week she had to sew, in order to buy a seat in the box, where she always threw down that orchid from a day’s sewing at Mr Šic’s feet, and when she had thrown him that beautiful flower for the twentieth time, she waited for the tenor singer and accosted him and told him that she loved him. And Mr Šic told her that he didn’t love her, for the one reason that he didn’t like her great long nose. And Mrs Krásenská sewed away for a whole year and for the money she earned she went to Brno and had that great long nose cut off and muscle from her own arm sewn on to the nose cartilage in its stead, out of which in time the doctors shaped a marvellously beautiful small Grecian nose. And so it came about, that Mrs Krásenská stood once more at the rear entrance to the National Theatre, and as she was so beautiful, she could strike up a conversation with the distinguished tenor Mr Šic, but the tenor invited her for a nocturnal stroll and confessed to her that for almost a whole year he had been seeking out a beautiful girl with a tremulous long nose, a nose with which he had fallen in love and without which he was unable to live. And Mrs Krásenská confessed to him that she was the girl with the great long nose, but that she’d had it cut off for the sake of the famous tenor and replaced by the nose which he saw before him now. And Mr Šic raised his hands in the air and cried out, “What have you done with that beautiful nose! How could you!” And ran away from her . . . And Mrs Krásenská took a look at me alongside the Renaissance water fountain and raised her hands in the air and cried out, “What have you done with that beautiful hair! How could you!” And she pointed me out to our town’s precious visitor, and now I knew that my hair belonged to its historical monuments. And I pushed down on the pedals and three lady members of the amenity society borrowed bicycles from outside the Hotel Na Knížecí and pelted off after me, stamping so jealously on the pedals that they easily caught me up, and they pointed fingers at me, “She’s cut off her hair!”, and several cyclists who recognised me rode off indignantly after me, passed me as well and spat in front of me, and so I rode on through this moving gauntlet of cyclists, all lashing out at me with their angry looks, but that only gave me added strength, I folded my arms and rode on without holding on to the handlebars, and entered the brewery alone. The cyclists stood with their bikes between their legs in front of the office with its sign, Where They Brew Good Beer, There You Find Good Cheer, and now Francin ran out and behind him the three lady members of the amenity society, pointing at me with both hands.