It doesn’t scare him as much that they stole things — pictures, jewelry, dressers — but that in doing so they stole the souls of strangers. They’d violated what was most private, what had remained of that white-haired old man, of Roland and Rachel.
They had brutally raped the house in Zahražany.
When will that question be heard again?
“Will we make love or cry?”
When will my night visitors, the young man and the young woman, lose their inhibitions and fear?
When will they become naked and merge in embrace, to fill the empty house in Zahražany with spirit?
I don’t know.
I don’t believe anything.
AN APPEARANCE, WALKING
If I haven’t told you about Till yet, about my son from Mozartova Street, then I have to set it right immediately. Because there was always something with this Till.
He was going on twenty-three and had yet to serve in the army. He downright avoided his service.
Fact is he liked to take leave every day. Whenever he wanted.
He just walked the city without a care in the world, looking at whatever he wanted to and either whistled or not.
And once, at Rozkvět, at the shop where Mr. Pivo always has his street show and juggles bottles for a beer — and don’t think Mr. Pivo’s a small beer, they know him even in Prague, where he used to guest on Národní třída, opposite the Máj department store — Till met a man who walked in a way that seemed as if he almost wasn’t able to walk at alclass="underline" the man leaned against the glass of a shop window and seemed he wouldn’t get to wherever it was he was headed.
Till took charge and offered him his arm.
He learned a few facts about the walker that amazed him. The man himself began to mention them:
“You know, young man, I’m going to the tram. I live in Litvínov, but I was here to go to the cinema. They were showing a film about the Vietnam War. Are you interested in the Vietnam War?” the man asked.
“Hm,” Till replied, “Hair, hippies, Jane Fonda, Coming Home, Coppola, Apocalypse Now, Jim Morrison… you know, I have to say that I am.”
“They got it all wrong, they did, otherwise they couldn’t have lost, could they?!” the man reasoned.
“You know, I’m very interested in war. I reported for the first one, in 1914, but they didn’t take me.”
“What?” Till was shocked. “Mister, would you tell me how old you are?”
“Ninety-nine,” the man remarked, “I was nineteen then. I had weak lungs.”
“In the Second World War, I was again just a spectator of the newsreels,” the combative man complained.
“Well, maybe they’ll give you another chance come the Fourth World War,” Till thought, “when after the Third they’ll have to replenish their manpower.”
“But they went about it all wrong,” the man continued, “those Americans in the movie, they did…”
He could barely crawl, he was ninety-nine years old, but he still wanted to go to war.
Till was enraptured by him.
An immortal man, who would like nothing better than to fall.
AN APPEARANCE, DANCING
Would you like to hear a story about dancing lessons and first love? C’mon! I know you’ve heard plenty of them! But I’ll tell you something quite different, original, not so banal… though, when I think about it, it’s unavoidable — the heart of this story is really first love.
We begin with a joke, as the dancing-master Roubíček begins the evening lessons for the youth.
“Do you know the one about the lords?” Master Roubíček screams at the sweating young men in suits, who look like guests at a Sicilian wedding, their expressions as if a vendetta as they step the basics of the jive, polka, and waltz.
“I’ll kill him, guys,” the young Werther says.
“It’s sorry, having to stomp cabbage while listening to his wisecracks.”
But Master Roubíček, as if he hasn’t heard him, knows that his jokes are meant for the young ladies. He perks up and says: one — two — three and two — two — three, he claps, showing the slow, unsure and hunched boys what a true gentleman looks like: always with the most beautiful debutante, an excellent tie, a perfect body and, because every evening before going to sleep he doesn’t pick at his pimples as do the participants in his course, he has the time to invite such beautiful debutantes home.
There is one sorrow more to be experienced by our young Werther.
He dances with the master’s assistant, Bešta. Werther is, so to speak, unpaired, surplus.
Roubíček demonstrates dances with Werther’s female partner.
Petr Bešta is God’s elect. Only two years older than Werther, but already graduated from the beginners’ lessons, he has joined the advanced ballroom dancing group. And today? Today he dances body-to-body with the most beautiful girls left to him by Roubíček.
Because he’s eighteen, he’s growing into a master himself. His suit fits like a glove, the fuzz below his nose embarrassing no one, his posture perfect.
He lives in the same building as the young Werther, at the same entrance, and because in the evening after dancing lessons he goes home with his younger friend, on the way he tries to teach him moves of the subtlest finesse.
“Look man, you can’t turn with me on one spot all the time; dance is a sophisticated motion Jirka,” Petr Bešta explains to his partner.
“You have to sweep the corners with me!”
And so Jirka Werther sweeps corners with him, but so wildly that the next lesson the desperate Bešta screams: “Slow down, you’re throwing me around like Švanda the bagpiper, and I’m just a frail girl…” But young Werther sets his teeth, because he can’t imagine Bešta being a beautiful girl, and while dancing he whispers infuriated into his partner’s ear: “I’ll always be sadistic when dancing with you until you and Roubíček give me a girl!”
And Roubíček with his absolute musical pitch hears his name and immediately starts up: “Two English lords are in the restroom, silently urinating next to one another, and when they’re about to leave one says to the other: ‘Sir, they taught us at Oxford to wash our hands after using the pissoir!’ And the other replies: ‘At Cambridge, they taught us not to piss them…’ ”
“I’ll kill him, I’ll kill that guy,” young Werther hisses over Bešta’s shoulder in a caracole, and observes how Roubíček laughs at his own joke and coos with a beautiful debutante. “This is what they call dancing lessons’ first love? I swear by all that is sacred that no one will see me here ever again, dancing with a man like some prospector out in the Klondike!”
Once again, young Werther and Bešta Petr go home together in the evening. They stop in front of the house by the garbage cans.
“Man, Bešta, I have problems with the waltz — whenever I begin one I end up in a polka…”
“I know,” Bešta smiles and goes and stands with his chest thrust forth like a pigeon, then executes the Metamorphosis of Bešta into a female partner. And so the two dancers hold each other at the garbage cans and dance On the Beautiful Blue Danube all the way inside and up the stairs.
And one — two — three, two — two — three…
“Bešta, we look like idiots, don’t we?”
“Don’t worry, no one’s looking.”
But it’s not true. I, city, am watching.
Laughing, the whole city looks on.
AN APPEARANCE, FAST
Hours and hours I’m able to observe the children’s games and to admire how children manage, totally without ostentation, with only a wing-beat of imagination, to change the world.