The Little Town Where Time Stood Still

  So Dad assigned the workmen their jobs on the ice carting, and the foreman noted them all down in his book, he who had once been an ordinary brewery worker and had worked his way up to be the gaffer to all of them, who jotted down all the shifts in his notebook and made notes on every worker’s clocking-on and behaviour during working hours, the foreman, who was always so pleased with himself that he couldn’t believe the luck that had given him this power over the workers, who surely looked forward every morning to looking at himself in the mirror, and dressing and putting on his jacket with the four button-down pockets, sticking into it his notebook with all the names and details of all the brewery workers, and he was always so pleased with himself, that half an hour before the hooter was due to sound he was already standing there in front of the brewery office, legs astride in his topboots and breeches, and staring with prickly eyes to see who was coming to work not only on time, but with what sort of a will, whether still yawning, and so on. The foreman disliked Uncle Pepin for shouting and bawling so much at work, he always used to put him in the boilerhouse, where he had to descale the boiler, chip off the saltpetre, nobody fancied doing this job, because it was dusty in the boiler and the light bulbs glared and two workmen with their hammers like woodpeckers tapped away square centimetre by centimetre, bit by bit, and the saltpetre fragmented into dust, and the workmen had to have scarves and kerchiefs wrapped about their mouths. But Uncle Pepin used to sing and shout away on the job, anyone working alongside Uncle would have despaired otherwise, their only defence against the dust and stifling air of the boiler was being able to have a good laugh at the expense of raucous Uncle, every other moment somebody would come into the boiler-room and shout into the pink dust of the boiler, “Old Řepa says you used to graze goats up at the battle front.” And with great hammerblows Uncle would bang away at the boiler, roaring back in rhythm, “What would yer goats be doin’ up at the front line, ye great oaf? Goats is sensitive, minute they hears gunfire, off they scarpers. Ach! When there’s a battle on, who’s goin’ tae be messin’ about at the front wi’ goats an’ all?” And the mechanics opened up the ventilation flaps and Uncle’s voice thundered through the brewery as though amplified through a megaphone, and the foreman sped up, opened his notebook, and yelled into the boiler, “What do you think you’re up to, shouting on the job? Don’t you imagine, just because your brother’s the manager here, that you can get up to whatever you like, I’m taking a note of this!” And he jotted something down in his book and looked about him triumphantly, smiling brimful of self-contentment and jubilation, that only he, out of all the workers, had worked his way up to be the gaffer, with all this power over the others. And when the business of descaling the boiler was over, the foreman lined up the cleaning of the sewers, and Uncle Pepin vanished again, lowered himself into the ground like entering the turret of a submarine, and one worker stood outside with a sheet-metal wheelbarrow, while Uncle down in the bowels and guts of the brewery shovelled up slime and loaded shovelful after shovelful into a pail, and his companion pulled up the pail, tipped the contents into the barrow, and when he got bored, or when some other worker was coming along past the open sewer, he’d kneel down and yell into the sewer, “Jeannine’s been round and she says she’s just sewing up her wedding pyjamas.” And he’d go on his way, and Uncle’s bellow would come gushing out of the sewer like a huge geyser, coruscating and battering against the walls and rearing up to the heavens: “What, that auld cow? She walks like there’s an udder between her legs, and I’m supposed to be weddin’ that? Me, that’s the darlin’ o’ the finest beauties aroun’?” And Uncle’s voice was so penetrating, it flew across the brewery orchard and over to us, in the open window of Dad’s office, and the foreman dashed out, opening his notebook as he ran, and he knelt down over the stink of the sewer and yelled down at him, “Mister Josef, don’t you go imagining your brother’s got some clout over this . . . I’m the one in charge of the workers here! Get down to work at once and stop dawdling!”

  When the time came for the ice carting, the foreman gave Uncle Pepin the hardest job of all. Even before light, in the dark, the ice-workers chopped planks out of the ice sheet, long strips of ice, which a workman near the bank cut up into sections, and into each section he chopped an eyehole, and the workmen on the bank hooked them up by the eyeholes, and then two by two they hauled these sections with the hooks on to the bank, and there again two by two the workmen picked those chunks up in their purple gloves and threw them into the carts, and since the ice was weighed, every smallholder wanted to have a heavy waggon, so they made supports of ice at the side-flaps and flanks, and the loads of glistening ice glowed with iridescent colours in the red and icy dawn sunlight, and the horses strained forward, the hide on their rear haunches creased, the horses always seemed to buckle and squat back, their sharp hooves bit into the icy bank, shattered ice showered from under their hooves and the iron axles stuck, and every waggon grated and groaned beneath the weight, every wheel like a badly greased pump, and then one after another the waggons, like hours on a clock face, rolled along to the brewery weighbridge and onward, sometimes three or four waggons stood together in front of the ice-crushers, the breakers of the ice, which the hoist buckets carried away up the shaft, right up to the roof of the six-storey-high ice store, where the buckets turned out the contents of their pockets, and returned back along the conveyor belt. In the afternoons gramophone music could be heard from the river, punch steamed away on a table, and children and students skated, only I felt this dread, only I saw that toil on the frozen river, only I saw the exhausted horses, their tails and manes grizzled with twining icy hoarfrost, only I saw and felt that weight of lifted ice, I saw the whole crust of the river taken and hurled into waggons, the chain-gang of dreadful labour, where there was nowhere to get yourself warm, or if there was, only in a bothy stuck on to the wall of the boatyard, where several pairs of frost-numbed hands were constantly stretched out over the scorching stove . . . And Uncle’s singing and shouting rang out from the crusher, his radiant, irate shouting, only the angry fuming of Uncle Pepin could warm the workers, and especially give them zest for work . . . Uncle stood by the crusher with a hook, and as soon as a waggon drew up, he shouted, “Sodgers of Austria ever victorious, victors everywhere and for aye!” And he took his hoe, and with two blows he knocked out the catch on the side flap, which opened, and the ice tumbled out into the crusher, and the keen crusher hungrily masticated that translucent, milkily opalescent ice, Uncle Pepin took his hook and squatted down, and, like Don Quixote tackling his windmills in mortal combat, Uncle Pepin took up the bayonet pose, roared, and the workman on the other side adopted the same comic posture, and Uncle commanded, “Einfacher Stoss! Vorwärts!’ And he attacked the icy log-jam, shouting and yelling and dealing out blows, and the ice hurtled into the crusher, often enough they had to clasp Uncle with two arms, ask him not to fag himself out, toil away so much, they clasped him affectionately, giants a head taller than Uncle . . . but Uncle Pepin wouldn’t give in, shouting, “Sodgers of Austria have tae be ever and ever victorious!” And he grappled with the giant of a carter, the other carters rallied round and laughed till the tears ran, for Uncle Pepin knocked down the laughing carter, put him flat on his back and yelled at the others, “Just like Frištenský’s win over the black . . . I give ’em all the same medicine!” And he brandished his purple fist over the ruddy nose of this bear of a man, but the noise of the empty crusher alerted Uncle and the workmen to the need to extract the last remnants from the load, and when the bucket hoist had raised and turned out the last remnants of ice into the ice store, Uncle sort of breathed out, happily and emptily, relaxed by the regular pulses, and rested too . . . But sometimes the ice was so hard packed the crusher couldn’t get a purchase on it, the ice-workers had to thrash it with clubs, and with hooks and crowbars, but you had to watch that the machine didn’t get hold of these tools, which were not only crushed, their blades were ripped off and thrown up and stabbed into the ro
of of the box surrounding. And Uncle undaunted fought for every haft and handle, while the rest fell to the ground and fled to get behind beams, Uncle laughed and yelled and roared with exultation: “Sodgers of Austria win on every front, even in peacetime!” And one ancillary worker shouted out, “If only Jeannine could see you now!” And Uncle roared, “See? What’re ye blabbering on about, ye dimwit! The hussy canna even dance the tango.” And not far off the foreman stood unobtrusively, he stepped up with a smile and said, “Jeannine certainly can dance the tango, and how! Right folks?” He said, and turned to the ice-carters and workmen, and then to Uncle, but old Uncle Pepin went all quiet and said softly, “Never ye mind that,” and he started sweeping up round the crusher, he knelt down and picked up pieces of shattered ice in his purple glove, and after a minute the workers seemed to take their cue, they knelt down beside Uncle and threw fragments of ice into the hoist, and the carters went off to their waggons, and the foreman was left standing alone, his smile frozen on his face, and he just had to make out he hadn’t grasped what had just happened, he pulled out his notebook, jotted down something, and the workmen were even quieter and stared into the empty revolving crusher, as they’d stare into a fire, until the foreman grasped the point, and went off through the brewery gate, for it was a long time since he’d been considered one of the workers. Ah, how differently my grandfather used to vent his anger! During the holidays I would be sitting there with Grandpa in the garden, and my grandfather would be trying to light a cigar, and because there was a wind about, Grandad began to get cross and bawl at the wind for blowing out his matches one after another, until it went and blew out his very last one. And Grandpa called, “Nanny, fetch me some matches, will you?” But no one fetched him any, and Grandpa called out, “Nan, matches!” And he listened, but nobody brought him any matches, so Grandpa shouted, “Nana, for Christ heaven’s sake, what are you doing with those matches?” And by now he was gripping the cane chair and sweeping his eyes behind him to scan the open windows, with their billowing curtains. And I said, “Grandad, I’ll go and get them!” And Grandad bellowed, “For blithering Christ’s sake and all my sainted aunts, why don’t you get me my matches, you stupid cows?” So I dashed into the building, where Granny and the maid were scuttling from window to window, constantly unable to disentangle themselves from the curtains, while Grandad yelled in the open window, “You bitches, where’s me matches then?” And I took the matches from Grandma and made as if to run, but in the passage I stopped and listened to Grandpa bellowing and smashing now not only the chair but the table too, and roaring, “You bitches, I’ll slay the lot of you, where’s them matches?” And by this time Gran and Annie had hauled the old closet out of the shed and handed Grandad an axe, and in a couple of minutes Grandpa had smashed the whole cupboard to smithereens, at which point he sank into an armchair, and I handed him the matches, but Grandpa didn’t want them any more, he just rested for a moment, as if after a tremendous struggle, like in the films, when the husband finds out his wife has been unfaithful, and whilst Granny and the maid between them gathered up the splinters of the closet into a chaff basket, and took off the solid pieces to the wood-shed, Grandpa glared furiously in front of him and rolled his eyes, but after a quarter of an hour he seemed to come to, he gave a laugh, shook himself, and was his happy and frisky self once more. This was what my mum used to tell me about how her dad used to like letting off steam, he being my grandfather, and I used to think, that was how it once was, but he still liked venting his anger like that even now, in his retirement. Before we set off home after the holidays, he took me on the roundabouts, bought me whatever I wanted, till I felt sick, but, as we were on the way back, Gran was drying her curtains on long laths, curtains showing the four seasons of the year, and on these big curtains the twelve months were embroidered, curtains crocheted by Granny herself, and when I woke up in the morning I used to look in the window and read those curtains like a children’s folding picture-book, and Grandpa, as we were returning, got his trousers caught on a nail on those long laths, upon which those curtains were stretched out drying in the sun, and he tore his trousers a little . . . and all at once the laughter was wiped from his face, like the pictures in the “Children’s Corner” of Our Little Reader, where, if you turn the smiling face upside down, you find on the same head a face that is weeping, likewise it seemed as if Grandpa had torn a hole, not in his trousers, but in his very soul, and the laughter in which we had been living all afternoon had all run out, and Grandpa tugged his finger in that hole and made it even bigger, maybe just so as he could shout and get angry. “Who fixed up those nails there, eh? Who?” he bellowed into the open windows of the house. “Where’s Annie? Nan, where are you all?” he bawled, but the curtains just billowed, and the building was quiet. “You lot there, what stupid bitch did that? Will you own up or won’t you?” Says I, “Grandad, I’m just going to go and look for Grandma . . .” And I went into the building and looked through the curtains into the garden, there stood Grandpa looking into the windows, staring full of anger, as if the windows were eyes, and he roared and stamped: “Come on, you lot! So you won’t answer? Those are my new trousers, you stupid bitches! Come and get them sewn up, right away!” But nobody moved inside the house, all was silent, the curtains drifted, and Grandad glinted amongst the flowers beside the green lawn, where the gleaming, starch-impregnated, drying curtains hung, with their four seasons of the year and twelve months, all the figures on them were figures of little angels, even for winter the wee angels had wings just as Granny had sewed them in her youth for her trousseau. “So, you lot there,” Grandad bellowed, and he jumped into the curtains and stamped on them, and the curtains were torn from their frames of laths and nails, and Grandpa wound the little angels up on to his shoes and twisted his feet in them, and, being half a century old, the curtains tore, as Grandpa parted his legs, I heard the ripping sound, but that still wasn’t enough to satisfy Grandpa, once he’d torn his way out of the curtains, he issued a final challenge, shouting out, “Annie, fetch the thread, Nanny, get the thread, you pair of silly bitches, and fix up this ruddy snag!” But the house was quiet, and Grandad stuck his finger and then his whole hand into the tear, and ripped the trousers right down, and then, bending over, he took the untouched leg and in trying to rip it he tripped and fell, the fabric was so strong, but once on the ground he undressed down to his long-johns and tore up the discarded trousers, then jumped and stamped on them, but that was still too little, he ran into the laundry with them, and stuck them under the boiler, but even that was too little, he took the matches from the boiler, struck one and set the trousers alight . . . At that moment the maid came in with Grandma, they wrung their hands and put down the baskets of washing from the mangle, and first Grandma and the maid hauled out the cupboard, then Grandpa knocked the cupboard over and bashed it in with his hands and the weight of his body, then with his axe he chopped up the doors, while Granny pulled the burning trousers out from under the boiler and ran outside with them, removing his wallet and identity card from the pockets, for Grandpa, when something got on his wick, was dreadfully sensitive and touchy, but when he sobered up again, he was the nicest and kindest grandfather in the world, and he himself used to blame it all on race, declaring, “The Slavs are a terribly sensitive race.”

  So there I stood with my skates over my shoulder, the light bulbs were already lit, far away you could hear the trains, and the ice men said a thaw was in the offing, in the next two days, and I watched the carts of ice arriving out of the darkness, those great lumps of ice loaded slantwise on the waggons made mountains like the Tatras, the drivers and ice-men were swathed in blankets, with drenched sacking wrapped about with ropes on their feet, some waved their arms in the air and their purple gloves were like the heavy wings of birds which can never fly up in the air, so they waved their arms about at least, to get warm, and Uncle Pepin shouted and sang, “A nightingale on the lake shore warbles,” attacking with his hook the bergs of ice billowing fr
om the side flaps of the waggons, like St George with his lance doing battle with the ice dragon, gramophone music sounded from the river, and in the glow of the coloured light bulbs student couples danced, and beneath the light bulbs you could see the vapour rise from the pan out of which ladles of steaming hot water were taken to make hot punch, and I watched Uncle, who wasn’t coming to see us any more, because he was having one of his rebellions again, and I was unhappy, I used to spread slices of bread and take them to him on the pretext that I was spreading them for myself, I couldn’t bear to see how Uncle Pepin, after spending his entire pay packet in two days with his little pretties, by Wednesday was taking stale bread from the hens and eating their potatoes. When I remembered I was supposed to go home, I didn’t feel like going, I preferred to go on standing there in the corner in semi-darkness, just like the picture of the Orphan Child we had in our school reader, there I stood and didn’t feel like going home, even though I had everything I could want at home and warmth and the gramophone, there’s bound to be another smart gathering of people there again tonight, people from town who come visiting in the evening and talk about the theatre and culture and drink beer, three times the next morning Mum would curse, because one of the guests had mistaken the larder for the lavatory, and instead of peeing into the bowl of the WC had gone and done it into a pot of lard . . . And Mum poured it off the next morning, and in the evening, when the company gathered, I saw her bring that pot and hand the guests a knife and some fresh bread and ask each of them to spread some lard on his bread as they fancied . . . and the guests spread the lard on their bread and tasted it and proclaimed, “Well now, that’s some lard, you can really tell the brewery feed in it . . .” And I stood and watched them just like Mum, and Mum was only returning to them what they had done to her, but I was glad for the sake of our guests, because I hated the lot of them, they were just too perfect, they gave me a complex and I didn’t know what to say to them, I blushed and said nothing, and nobody got a word out of me. I found those guests of ours a bit of a joke now as I watched those dozen or more heavy wet boots come past me, wrapped in sacking and ropes, and I saw all our guests quite close by, just over there across the orchard, how all their shoes meanwhile fitted so closely, it was even fashionable then for men to have small feet, often I saw our guests after walking this great distance from town past the river and across the fields, how they would lean against the brewery wall, lift one foot and bend down and rub and massage the toe of their shoe to get the blood flowing, their toes hurting simply because they were wearing shoes one size too small, in order to look elegant . . . And I said to Uncle, “Uncle, please come back to us . . .” But Uncle waved his hand: “Work takes precedence, and what of it!” And he showed how neatly he could knock out the catches, and how his arm with undiminished energy, as if he were drunk, tore away with the hook and dragged the platelets of ice into the crusher. And I walked through the open gate, the lanterns shone on the corners, a sweet-smelling breeze blew from the river bringing the thaw, trains clattered in the distance, as if they were just the other side of the brewery wall . . . And a gust sprang up by the maltings as always, whooshing against my back, so that I had to lie back into it, if I’d been leaning forward even a tiny bit more I’d have gone flying and stumbled till I fell, so strong was this wind, now it whooshed round my ears, and the ice-skates hanging over my shoulders were seized by this gust and swung away from me . . . But after a few metres the wind ebbed abruptly, and the skates jingled beside each other, and I saw the lit-up windows of the tied lodgings, I glanced into the kitchen, but Dad was standing there by the kitchen stove, lost in thought, slowly and absent-mindedly sipping coffee, I saw how the range was full of various pots and pans, then the primary school head came in, laughing, and Mum was standing in the doorway leading through to the living rooms, laughing too, and then I saw these rags lying on the table cut up into squares, Mum and the head teacher were picking up these rags by the middle and flapping them and then fastening them together with thread, and soaking them in the saucepans on the stove, next the counsellor-at-law and the pharmacist came out of the other room too, and all of them in a happy mood, even Dad was smiling, then they gave him those rags and Dad bound them up together, they were all relishing this work enormously, and I couldn’t work out for the life of me, what was this all about? What was it going to be? And then I saw it . . . Mum untied those strings and threads, and when she unfurled those rags, they were beautiful as the wings of a butterfly, as a peacock eye, for every rag shimmered with blue and green and red metallic colours . . . And our guests carried those cambric hankies off into the other room, where I couldn’t see them . . . So I went round the tied lodgings and quietly through the garden, I heard the ice hoists crushing a new load of ice, the glow of the light bulbs running up by the ice store delineated sharply the angles of the roof, as if there were a fire over there at the back of the brewery, as if it were some kind of holy picture of the Last Judgment, such an ominous sign burning with sulphur and mercury did those light bulbs send out there into the night, that the outlines of the brewery and the shadows seemed to me green . . . But through the window I could see into our flat, where hundreds of cambric kerchiefs were drying on long clothes-lines, and Mum and the guests kept bringing more and more of them in from the kitchen, this was such a marvellous sight to see in our house that I felt like going in to help too, but when I remembered my Uncle Pepin muffled up in scarves and with his boots wrapped up in sackcloth and string, and remembered the other participants in the ice hauling, I began to smile unpleasantly, as if I had started to understand something quite different from what I saw over here and over there, I practically shook with that sense of another different world, a world which is cut in two like St Martin’s cloak with his sword, but continues nonetheless, adjacent to itself, just like the cambric handkerchiefs, which the teacher started ironing, after putting on Mum’s apron, and the soaked boots and clothes out there behind the brewery and the ice store, where the bucket hoist constantly hauled away upward the noise of crushed ice and the light of the light bulbs running up into the livid dark sky. And Mum pushed in the sewing-machine and measured Dad’s trousers, when she took his measure at the crotch the company roared with delight and choked itself laughing, only Dad looked solemn and embarrassed . . . And Mum assembled those dry ironed cambric kerchiefs, and the sewing-machine hummed as the company watched and conversed, laughing and sipping their beer, and in a trice Mum had plugged away at the pedals and produced a beautiful pair of trousers, and then she took Dad’s measurements, chest and arms, and she sewed and sewed, while the head teacher sat on a chair and fastened the sleeve to the body with a swift needle and sewed on bobbles instead of buttons, like black viburnum berries, and after an hour Dad went off to change, and when he returned, he was a harlequin, a black close-fitting beret was added with a tall ostrich plume, Mum put new black patent leather shoes on him with the same kind of bobble instead of a buckle, and then she also cut out a tiny square from a black band and stuck it on Dad’s face and powdered it with white talcum, till Dad choked . . . And everyone marvelled, so did I, at how handsome Dad was, not just handsome, but the most handsome of all men, in spite of being convinced that he was ugly, a puny slave to infinity. And the head teacher with the counsellor-at-law brought the oval mirror in from the bedroom, and Dad, when he looked at himself, I could see it, it was just like me all over, Dad was equally mistrustful, I too was afraid to look at myself in the mirror, and now Dad had to see it, and he did, he looked at himself for a long time, then he stretched out a hand, probably he didn’t believe his eyes, that it was really him, I was rooting for him there outside the window, just take a proper look at yourself, Daddy! And take a look at the rest of our guests! And Dad struck a pose like a true harlequin, laughed a hearty laugh, for the first time in his life, in spite of being dressed up like a clown in the circus, he recognised himself, he found his own self. And he lifted his foot with its ribbon and laid it on a stool, leant his elbow on his
bent knee, cupped his face in his palm and so created the melancholy figure of the harlequin, the melody of “Harlequin’s Millions” . . . And Mum brought in a pail from the passage and put it down on the carpet under Dad’s mouth, it looked like at the ball, when Harlequin feels so ill, like being sick . . . I saw it all and understood . . . And I saw the company go on ironing and sewing, and the sewing-machine went on humming away, while out there behind the ice store the bucket hoist hummed away relaxed and free, not a single fragment of ice was being carried up any more, and now the sewing-machine, too, joyfully produced its rattle of belts and jolting parts . . . And I too relaxed and felt free, my tension vanished, I empathised so much with the machine that today I had embodied it for the whole afternoon, but then the lights went out . . . And the driving belts cooled down, and Mr Vanřátko, the night-watchman, pulled off his Mexican gun and loosened the catch on his revolver, both weapons were incapable of firing, and slowly, flitting between the trees, with his little doggie in tow, he went off to guard all night in fear and dread those genuine driving belts, because they cost fifty thousand crowns, and Mr Vanřátko had given Dad his signature, that he’d have to pay for any loss. Then, at the corner of the maltings, Uncle’s white cap appeared, the kind worn by Mr Hans Albers, Uncle held on to it with both hands and struggled with the wind, but finally he managed to bring his cap safely through into calm waters, I saw Uncle leap the gate and rush off, to be in time for the lovely Žofín bar girls, to dance with them and make them a gift of the last two ten-crown notes he had, which he’d stuffed into his shoe on the Saturday, so that the ladies wouldn’t take them on the Sunday. And then I slipped back home, I waited till the coast was clear, undressed and lay down in bed, nobody had been looking for me, and then as if to fulfil my wish the door opened by itself and I gazed out from under the quilt, out of the darkness into the lit-up series of rooms, and saw how hour after hour more and more pairs of cambric trousers and sleeves and long jackets flowed off the sewing-machine beneath Mum’s fingers, I saw the men’s nimble hands indefatigably sewing on black bobbles, and more and more crates of beer and undiminished fatigue . . . and towards midnight I saw how there was no end to the cumulative enthusiasm of the company . . . And I felt old, I suddenly had the feeling I was terribly old, much older than my mother’s companions, they were like little children, sewing dresses for their dolls . . . But, when the company dressed up in the harlequins’ costumes and they all put on their tight-fitting black berets and their plumes and had a good look at themselves in the mirror and in the mirrors of their companions’ eyes, and when they had finished praising each other, saying how well each costume went with the next and all with each other, and really they all did, then the head teacher clapped his hands and gave the signal, and the company put their black masks on over their noses, and when they had powdered themselves, the head teacher announced they would start rehearsing the midnight scene of harlequins for the Sokol association’s masked ball.