I Served the King of England

  I drove on through the countryside, and no one could hear me, and all I could see from the hilltops was forest, because what was left of man and his works was slowly and surely being swallowed up again by the trees. The small fields were disappearing beneath rocks and grass, and bushy undergrowth had moved into the buildings, and black elder branches were prying up cement floors and tiles, rolling them over, spreading leaves and tangled branches above them, because a black elder has more power in it than a lever, than a hydraulic lift or press. Following piles of gravel and ballast, I arrived at a large building. I walked around it and realized that I would feel good here, beside this road. Although I’d been told that my job was to mend the road and maintain it, so far no one was using it, and no one was likely to, because the road was maintained only in case of emergency and for carrying out logs in the summer. Suddenly I heard something that sounded like a human lament, the music of a violin and then a lilting cry, so I walked along the road toward the voice without noticing that my little horse, whom I’d unhitched, attaching the reins to his harness collar, and the goat and the German shepherd were all following me, and I came upon a group of three people. They were gypsies, the people I was supposed to replace, and what I saw was miraculous, the unbelievable come true. An old gypsy woman was squatting by a small fire like all nomads, stirring a pot that rested by its handles on two stones, and as she stirred it with one hand, she leaned her other elbow on her knee and held her forehead in her hand. An old gypsy sat in the road, his legs apart, pounding neatly piled stones into the roadbed with powerful blows of his mallet. A young man in boots and black trousers that fitted tightly around the hips and with cuffs that flared out in a bell was leaning over him, playing a passionate and elegiac melody on the violin, a gypsy song. The music must have made something in the old man’s life seem more intense, because he wailed and complained in a long melancholy cry and, moved by the music, tore fistfuls of his hair out and threw them into the fire. Then he went back to pounding the stones while his son, or maybe it was his nephew, played the violin, and the old woman went on cooking her food. And I saw before me what I could expect, that I would be here alone, with no one to cook or play the violin for me, with no one but the little horse, the goat, the dog, and the cat, who was still keeping a respectful distance behind us. I coughed, and the old woman turned around and looked at me as though she were staring straight at the sun, and the old man stopped his pounding, and the young man put his violin down and bowed to me. I said I was here to start work, but the old man and woman stood up, bowed, shook hands with me, and said they were all ready, and I could see now that they had in the bushes a light gypsy cart with large rear wheels. They said I was the first person they’d seen in a month, and I said, Is that so? But I didn’t believe them. The young man took an instrument case from the cart, opened it up, and like putting a baby in its cradle he very carefully laid the violin inside, then covered it even more carefully with a small piece of velvet cloth embroidered with initials and notes and the words to a song. Then he looked at the violin and stroked the velvet cloth lovingly, closed the case, jumped up onto the cart, and took hold of the reins while the old road mender sat down. They put the old woman between them and drove off the partly mended road to the house from which they carried out blankets and eiderdowns and several pots and a kettle. I tried to persuade them to stay for another night, but they were in a hurry and could hardly wait, they said, to see another human being, to see other people. I asked them what the winter was like here. Ai ai ai ai, wailed the old gypsy, very bad. We ate our goat, our dog, and our cat. He raised his hand and held up three fingers in the sign of an oath and said, Three months there hasn’t been a soul here, and snowed in we were, sir. The old woman cried and repeated, And snowed in we were. Then they both began to cry, while the young man took out his violin again and played a melancholy song and the old gypsy shook the reins and the little horse leaned into his traces while the young man played standing up, his legs wide apart, with powerful motions, the languid expression of gypsy romance in his face. The old woman and the old man wept and quietly said, Ai ai ai, nodding to me, their faces full of suffering and wrinkles, letting me know with a gesture that they felt sorry for me and rejected me at the same time, because they shooed me away with both hands, not from themselves, but from life, as if they were digging my grave with those hands and laying me in it. When they reached the top of the hill the old man stood up and pulled out another clump of hair, then the wagon disappeared over the brow of the hill, and all I could see was a hand tossing the hair away, perhaps as a sign of the great despair and pity he felt for me. I went into the large hall of the abandoned inn to look at where I’d be living, and as I walked through the building and around the stables, the woodshed, and the hayloft to the pump for water to wash myself, the horse, the goat, the German shepherd, and the cat walked gravely behind me. I turned and looked at them, and they looked at me, and I saw that they were afraid I might abandon them, and I laughed and patted each one of them on the head in turn, except the cat, who wanted me to pat her too but the power of her own shyness made her scoot away.

  The road I maintained and patched with rock I had to crush myself—that road resembled my own life. It was filling up with weeds and grass in front of me. Only the section I happened to be working on at the moment showed traces of my own hand. Cloudbursts and steady rainfall often flooded the work I did and covered it with deposits of earth, sand, and pebbles, but I didn’t curse my fate, I went about my work patiently in the long summer days, carrying away the sand and the rubbish, not to improve the road but simply to make it passable for my cart and horse. Once after a rainfall a whole section of the roadbed was washed away and it took me almost a week to build it back up to where I’d finished the week before, but I started work early in the morning with even greater concentration, and the goal I set myself, to reach the other side of the gap, made me feel less tired. A week later, when I was able to drive my cart over this section, I looked proudly at my work, though it seemed as if I’d done nothing but restore the road to its former state. No one would have believed I’d done it or praised me or given me credit for sixty hours of work, except the dog, the goat, the horse, and the cat, and they couldn’t have testified to it. But I didn’t want to be seen by human eyes anymore, or praised for what I’d done—all of that had left me. For almost a month I did practically nothing but labor from sunup to sundown, just to maintain the road in the state it had been in when I’d taken over, and the more I worked, the more I saw that the maintenance of this road was the maintenance of my own life, which now, when I looked back on it, seemed to have happened to someone else. My life to this point seemed like a novel, a book written by a stranger even though I alone had the key to it, I alone was a witness to it, even though my life too was constantly being overgrown by grass and weeds at either end. But as I used a grub hoe and a shovel on the road, I used memory to keep the road of my life open into the past, so I could take my thoughts backward to where I wanted to begin remembering. When I finished work on the road, I would tap the blade of my scythe into shape, cut the grass on the hillsides and dry it, and on afternoons when the weather was good I would carry the hay into the hayloft and get ready for winter, which they told me lasted almost six months here. Once a week I hitched up the little horse and set off to buy food, going back along my mended road, then turning off and slowly going down an untraveled path. When I looked behind me I could see the tracks left by the cart wheels and, after a rain, the hoofprints of the little horse. Then, after passing two abandoned villages, I would finally arrive at a decent road where I could see ruts left by transport trucks and, in the dust of the shoulders, tracks left by bicycle and motorcycle tires, the vehicles used by the forest administration workers and soldiers on their way to and from work or guard duty. After I bought cans of food, salami, and a huge round loaf of bread in the store, I would stop off at the pub, and the pubkeeper and villagers would come and sit down at my table and ask how I liked it
here in the mountains, in all this solitude. I was enthusiastic and told them stories of things that no one had ever seen before but were actually there, and I told the stories as if I were only passing through by car, or had come for two or three days, I talked as though I were on vacation, like a nature lover, like a city person who babbles romantic drivel whenever he comes to the country about how beautiful the woods are and the mountain peaks in the mist, and how it is all so perfect that he would like to settle here for good. And I talked in a jumbled way about how beauty had another side to it, about how this beautiful countryside, like a round loaf of bread, was all related to whether you could love even what was unpleasant and abandoned, whether you could love the landscape during all those hours and days and weeks when it rained, when it got dark early, when you sat by the stove and thought it was ten at night while it was really only half past six, when you started talking to yourself, speaking to the horse, the dog, the cat, and the goat, but best of all to yourself, silently at first—as though showing a movie, letting images from the past flicker through your memory—and then out loud, as I had done, asking yourself questions, inquiring of yourself, interrogating yourself, wanting to know the most secret things about yourself, accusing yourself as if you were a public prosecutor and then defending yourself, and so arriving, in this back-and-forth way, at the meaning of your life. Not the meaning of what used to be or what happened a long time ago, but discovering the kind of road you’d opened up and and had yet to open up, and whether there was still time to attain the serenity that would secure you against the desire to escape from your own solitude, from the most important questions that you should ask yourself.

  And so I, a road mender, sat in the pub every Saturday till evening, and the longer I sat there, the more I opened myself up to people. I thought of my little horse standing outside the pub, of the wonderful solitude of my new home, and I saw how the people here were eclipsing what I wanted to see and know, how they were all simply enjoying themselves the way I used to enjoy myself, putting off the questions they would have to ask themselves one day, if they were lucky enough to have the time to do that before they died. As a matter of fact whenever I was in the pub I realized that the basic thing in life is questioning death, wanting to know how we’ll act when our time comes, and that death, or rather this questioning of death, is a conversation that takes place between infinity and eternity, and how we deal with our own death is the beginning of what is beautiful, because the absurd things in our lives, which always end before we want them to anyway, fill us, when we contemplate death, with bitterness and therefore with beauty. I became a laughingstock in the pub by asking each one of the people where he wanted to be buried. At first they were shocked, but then they laughed till they cried at the idea, and then they would ask me where I wanted to be buried—that is, if I was lucky enough to be found in time, because they hadn’t found the last road mender but one until spring, by which time he’d been eaten by shrews and mice and foxes, so all they had to bury was a small bundle of bones, like a bunch of asparagus or beef trimmings and soup bones. But I was delighted to tell them about my own grave, and I said that if I was to die here, even if they buried only a single ungnawed bone of me or a skull, I wanted to be buried in that graveyard on top of the little hill, at the highest point, with my coffin right on the divide, so that when what was left of me decomposed, it would be carried away by the rain in two different directions: part of me would wash down the streams that flow into Bohemia, and the other part of me down the other side, under the barbed wire of the border, through the brooks and streams that feed the Danube. I wanted to be a world citizen after death, with one half of me going down the Vltava into the Labe and on into the North Sea, and the other half via the Danube into the Black Sea and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. The regulars in the pub would fall silent and stare at me, and I would always rise to my feet, because this was the question the whole village looked forward to. Whenever I came, they would ask me this question in the end, and I always answered the same way. Then they’d say, What if you died in Prague? Or in Brno? And what if you died in Pelhfimov, and what if the wolves ate you? And I would always tell them precisely what it would be like, just as the professor of French literature taught, that man’s body and spirit are indestructible and he is merely changed or metamorphized. Once the professor and Marcela analyzed a poem by a poet called Sandburg about what man was made of, and it said man contained enough phosphorus to make ten boxes of matches, enough iron to make a nail to hang himself on, and enough water to make ten liters of tripe soup. When I told the villagers this, they were frightened—frightened of the idea and of me as well—and they made faces at the thought of what awaited them, which was why they preferred being told what would become of them when they died here. One night we went to the graveyard at the top of the hill and I showed them the empty spot from which, if I were laid in the ground there, half of me would reach the North Sea and the other half the Black Sea. The main thing was to make sure the coffin was lying crosswise in the grave, as if balanced on the peak of a roof. Then I went back home with my shopping. On the way I’d think things over, talk to myself, go over everything I’d said and done that day, and ask myself whether I’d said or done the right things. The only right things were the things I enjoyed—not the way children or drinkers enjoyed things, but the way the professor of French literature taught me, enjoyment that was metaphysical. When you enjoy something, then you’ve got it, you idiots, you evil, stupid, criminal sons of men, he would say, and he’d browbeat us until he got us where he wanted us, open to poetry, to objects, to wonder, and able to see that beauty always points to infinity and eternity.

  Just before winter set in, when I couldn’t take it anymore and began to long for someone to be with, I bought some big old mirrors in the village, and some of them I got for nothing. People were glad to be rid of them, because when they looked into them, they said, Germans would appear. So I packed the mirrors in blankets and newspapers and took them home. All day long I pounded pegs into the walls of the taproom that doubled as a dance hall and then screwed the mirrors into the pegs, and I covered a whole wall with mirrors—and I wasn’t alone anymore. On my way back from work I would look forward to seeing myself coming out to meet myself, and I started bowing to myself in the mirror and wishing myself a good evening. Now I wouldn’t be alone until I went to bed, because there would always be two of me here, and it didn’t matter that our movements were the same. When I left, the one in the mirror would turn his back too and we’d go our separate ways, though I would be the only one really leaving and walking out of the room. I had trouble understanding this, and couldn’t think through why it was that when I left I couldn’t see myself leaving, and that when I turned my head I could see my face again but never my back. The unbelievable came true whenever I returned from Saturday shopping with my pay and stopped below the graveyard on the hill and walked down to the little brook that was fed by the springs and rivulets on the hill. In this countryside even the rocks shed water, and each time I washed my face in the brook, the water was cold and clear and I could see the juices from the people buried in the graveyard above flowing down into this little brook all the time, distilled and filtered by the beautiful earth that can turn corpses into nails to hang myself on and pure water to wash my face in, just as many years from now somebody somewhere will wash his face in me and someone will strike a match made from the phosphorus of my body. I drank the water from the spring below the graveyard, savoring it like a connoisseur of wine, and just as a connoisseur of Bernkasteller Riesling can detect the smell of the hundreds of locomotives that pass by the vineyards each day, or of the little fires that the vintners make in the fields each day to heat their lunches, I too could taste the dead buried long ago in the graveyard up there. And I tasted them for the same reason that I had got the mirrors, because the mirrors held the imprints of the Germans who had looked into them, who had departed years ago, leaving their smell behind in them, in the place I
gazed into for a long time each day and where my double walked. As with the departed in the drinking water, I rubbed shoulders with people who were invisible, but not invisible to someone for whom the unbelievable had come true, and I kept bumping into young girls in dirndls, into German furniture, into the ghosts of German families. Just before All Souls’, my countryfolk, who made me a gift of these mirrors in exchange for letting them see into the mirror that was waiting for them in the graveyard, shot my German shepherd. I had taught him to do my shopping—or, rather, he had taught himself, because one day he took the basket in his mouth to show me that he wanted to go shopping with me, but I knew he could find his way to the village on his own, so as an experiment I gave him a list of what I needed and off he ran, and two hours later he returned and set the basket with the shopping in it down in front of me. So instead of taking the little horse I would send the German shepherd every other day with the basket to fetch supplies, and once, when the villagers were waiting for me in vain and saw the dog carrying the basket, they shot him, to get me to start coming to the pub again. I cried a week, mourning for my German shepherd, and then I hitched up the little horse. The first snow was falling, and I set out for my pay and a large amount of supplies for the winter, and I forgave the villagers, because they had really missed me. They didn’t make fun of me now, and if they did, it was a different, higher kind of fun, because they couldn’t live any longer without having me come to the pub. They told me they had nothing else to look forward to, and they certainly weren’t looking forward to my death. They wanted me to come once a week to see them, because it was a long way to the church and I was a better talker than the pastor. My German shepherd managed to make it home. They shot him in the lung, but he ran back with the basket of supplies, and I patted him and brought him a lump of sugar as a reward, but he wouldn’t take it this time, he laid his head in my lap instead and slowly slipped away. Behind me the little horse leaned over us and sniffed at the dog, and the goat came as well, and the cat, who slept with the dog but had never let me pat her except at a distance. I would talk to her, and she would lie on her back and wriggle and twist and show me her claws and send looks at me as though I’d actually been scratching her under her chin or stroking her fur, but whenever I reached out my hand, the savage force of her shyness would make her scramble out of reach. Now the cat came up and cuddled against the German shepherd’s fur the way she used to, and I held my hand out, but she was looking into the dying eyes of the German shepherd. I stroked her, and then she looked at me, and it was so awful for her to have me stroking her, to have overcome her shyness while her companion was dying, that she closed her eyes and pushed her head into the dog’s fur so she wouldn’t see what terrified her and filled her with longing at the same time.