George
P.S. I hope you noticed how great my Czech is! Eh
(3)
Mr. Verner always carried thick black glasses with him, though he rarely put them on. Most of the time he shifted them back and forth from one hand to the other, sometimes opening one temple or the other, as if lost in thought and focusing on the moment when he would put them on; sometimes he would rest one of the temples on his upper lip, but Jiří, whom he never referred to as anything but Cousin, had never seen him wear them. Mr. Verner possessed a corpulent frame of medium height. His cousin, despite being only a few inches taller, at twenty-six was bound to have his slender figure viewed as much more elegant and graceful, bringing him the superficial sympathy that makes life so much easier for its recipients without their realizing it. Mr. Verner had white hair, cropped closely on the sides around his ears and temples. The rest of his head was bald and covered in dark-tanned skin. He had a habit of breathing deeply in and out, as if in the middle of some strenuous physical exercise. He wore his tie loose and was always in a rush. It wasn’t clear where to or why, but one day when the cousin asked, he bit down forcefully on one of the temples of his glasses and gave it some thought. Detecting no trace of irony in the cousin’s question and believing him to have asked out of genuine interest, he decided to give him an answer. “Every official, Cousin,” Mr. Verner said, “is like a limited train. More precisely, like something between a limited and an express. An express draws too much attention to itself, while a limited is more important than most other trains, but not so noticeable. Haste is the base speed for an official. You have to make everyone else think you have not more work than you can manage, since that could be used against you, but more than anticipated based on the administrative agenda, legislation, and client demand.” The cousin wracked his brain over the sentence for a while. He knew all the words, yet the meaning still eluded him. He shook his head from side to side. “If it looks like you can’t keep up with the work, you could be deemed incompetent, do you understand?” The cousin nodded. “Whereas if it’s evident from your behavior that your superiors are giving you perhaps not unreasonable but let’s say poorly thought-out instructions, which are unnecessarily complicating your life, then you’ve won.” The cousin nodded again, trying to grasp what implications this information could have for him. He had been employed at the bank for a week now, but had yet to understand what his job would entail. His supervisor, one Mr. Dostál, had given him direct instructions to make arrangements for the furnishing of three offices. Jiří had gone back to ask him several times what the offices would be used for, but from his answer it was clear even he didn’t know. All that Dostál told him was it was possible the offices might be for them, so he should make sure they were quality furnishings. That was roughly two days’ work, then Jiří had nothing to do again. For lunch every day they went to a restaurant that was just under ten minutes’ walk away, where Mr. Verner would meet him and Mr. Dostál. The pudgy Mr. Verner would always sweat during the soup. He consumed it quickly, with a certain doggedness, then, pulling a white or light blue handkerchief from his pocket, he would wipe the dewy sweat from his face, at which point he turned visibly calmer, becoming an affable companion. The cousin lived with Alice, who took him out to the cottage in Lhotka several times so he had a chance to meet her father, Josef, and her son, Kryštof. Alice had assumed the cousin and Kryštof would become friends, if for no other reason than that they were both roughly the same age, but Kryštof devoted most of his time to the fair-haired Libuše with a devotion she had never seen in him before, and spent most of the interim playing checkers with his grandfather. Josef was an old man. At first Jiří didn’t even realize he was in a relationship with Květa, since she looked a good ten years younger than she actually was. She looked about sixty, whereas her husband, despite being seventy-six, looked to be nearly eighty-five. When Jiří looked at Josef, he saw a tall, thin old man, who sometimes walked with a severe limp on his left leg. It was hard to answer when Josef asked him what was new in England, even though it was a question he got often. It seemed as if no matter what he said, the questioner was satisfied. When Josef asked how he liked it in the Czech lands, Jiří replied that he hadn’t been anywhere in the Czech lands yet except Prague, but Prague was probably even more beautiful than Venice or Jerusalem, which he knew intimately and which up until that point he had considered the most beautiful in the world. His answer seemed to give Josef a shot of energy, as he suddenly began trying to convince Jiří that he was wrong, despite having never seen either Venice or Jerusalem with his own eyes. He rubbed his palms together, making a sound like rustling leaves, and propped his right foot on a wooden swivel stool that had originally belonged to a piano.
“We love Prague very much, too much. It just isn’t right. All my life, apart from the ten years I spent locked up in the mines, that is, I was a structural engineer in Prague. I know the subsoil of all of Central Bohemia. I know the methods for laying foundations and the foundations of almost every building in Prague. I used to know the geological survey maps by heart, although now that I’m retired, I’m even forgetting some of the things I thought I’d never forget.” It wasn’t at all clear that either Josef or Jiří had any interest in what the other one thought, or that either one of them was even trying to communicate. But Josef had the idea stuck in his head, so he kept going.
“You know, every time I come to Prague I feel like I’m in a museum. The year before last, when I was in the hospital, I was lying in bed just steps away from the Faust House. We’re just peppered with history here.” Kryštof, who was outside in the garden, dismantling and cleaning the lawnmower, overheard a few words of the conversation through the open window. He came into the house, went to the kitchen, made two pint glasses of soda from the raspberries Libuše had picked, and carried them in to Josef and his mother’s cousin. The cousin was just about to leave the room, but when Kryštof set the glass in front of him, he picked it up, took a sip, and sat back down again. “Grandpa doesn’t talk much,” Kryštof said. “In fact it’s pretty rare, but every now and then he chats up a storm, don’t you, Grandpa?” Kryštof said, handing a glass to Josef. Josef just looked at the soda, nodded his thanks, and went back to his thoughts. He was thinking what a big city the capital was, a museum, disgustingly big and disgustingly ugly. As disgusting as a collection of stuffed animal carcasses. But he didn’t see any need to say so to their young relative from abroad. I wonder just how much he knows about Prague, Josef thought. Out loud he said, “Once you get to know Prague a little more, we can have a chat about it.” Then he turned himself to his drink, every so often picking up the glass and running it over his right cheek, then his left. He still couldn’t feel the left side of his face as well as the right. Like the way he felt after getting anesthesia at the dentist. He wondered why he no longer found the city enchanting. Maybe beauty was just a matter of a few recurring patterns. Maybe it was all just applied geometry. A few shapes over and over again. What was architecture other than applied geometry? Triangles. Spheres. Helixes. What else was the whole virus of Baroque? That wasn’t it, though. What was it? he thought. Maybe it was the fact that nothing had been developed in more than a hundred years. “Maybe that’s it,” he said, turning to the cousin. “It’s preserved, like canned food. The whole thing’s conserved to death!”