“What? Well, okay. Go.” Their father approves a bit absent-mindedly. Robert, Kryštof and Daniel sneak behind the scenes, and Kryštof meditates:
“I think Dad’s interested too. Imagine if we knew what this woman knows. Then everyone would obey us.”
And like the three Magi who, caps in hand, go caroling, Robert, Kryštof, and Daniel approach Nina Dimitrova and chirp: “Madam, please, we…”
“O God!” screams the world-famous artist from Bulgaria, threatening them with her polar-bear whip. “Get those damned brats out of here!”
“Surely it was a mistake,” Mr. Stankov comforts his sons and Daniel from the neighborhood. They sit in the arena like whipped curs. “You must’ve gotten confused,” he says, “she spoke Bulgarian and you misunderstood. Wait, I’ll go see her myself.”
“Dad, you know Bulgarian?” asks Robert.
“Sure,” he answers.
“Your dad’s great,” thinks Daniel, “he knows everything in the world.”
After an hour of waiting, Robert, Kryštof, and Daniel went to find him. The show had ended a long time ago and they wanted to go home.
“Go on, boys,” their father called out at them. He was engaged in convivial talk with Nina Dimitrova, “tell Mom, that… that… that I’ll come right away.”
“Your dad knows Bulgarian very well,” observed Daniel, when he was parting from both junior Stankovs.
“Well, of course he does,” Kryštof agreed. “I only hope that he’ll get out of that woman the secret of how she does all that stuff with the bears.”
The boys argued for a long time before falling asleep over what kind of a trick it could be, but because they didn’t come up with anything, they fell asleep and had dreams in which it all came to them easily.
They hadn’t a clue as to when their father returned home from the circus.
“She didn’t give it away,” Father whispered to the boys in the morning.
“That sucks,” the boys thought.
And neither did they notice that for the next two weeks their father was washing the dishes, dusting the whole house, shining the silver and taking out the trash.
He was doing chores he hated from the depths of his soul and that he, even in a modern marriage, couldn’t ever find justification for. What had happened? The boys of course wouldn’t know, but Mrs. Stankovová herself went to Nina Dimitrova for an answer.
And to her, she apparently revealed her secret.
From that moment on, her husband obeys no longer like a clock, but like a polar bear.
And he has been strictly forbidden from attending the circus for the next fifty years.
AN APPEARANCE, SILENT
Look, up there, as far up as the penultimate floor — the window. They lived together there. Dreamt. You see the window-box — there they nurtured it. You think they had a good crop? Here, amid the apartment blocks?
Don’t be crazy. Even their dreams wilted.
Toward the end they didn’t even sing, he sold the guitar and just lay below the poster of John Lennon, looking at her pacing the room, looking how she didn’t love him anymore, looking how she seemed to want to fly away, how she was suffocated. He looked, and examined the feeling. It was something in A minor that sounded in his soul, but who would’ve taken an interest in it.
Without dreams and without a guitar.
Then she left. She sent a postcard from London.
She took a trip. The second postcard came from Liverpool. John Lennon.
The young man was still picking up his mail then. Not anymore. Look, the mailbox is full.
Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison.
But there was no power able to raise him from his bed.
He lay whole days long, she left him a stereo system and he programmed only one song.
It played through his days and nights, over and over.
It was “Breathing” by Kate Bush. He liked the song very much. Yes, his girlfriend actually looked a lot like Kate Bush.
One day, though, the young man had to get up.
The electrician rang, coming to cut off the electricity. Then the song didn’t sound. The neighbors breathed a sigh of relief. But not for long. One day, the song was heard again from his studio apartment. The young man sang it. It sounded like a mantra:
“Breathing…
breathing… breathing…
breathing… breathing… breathing…
breathing… breathing.”
Understand?
Breathing… breathing… breathing… breathing… over and over again!
AN APPEARANCE, AUTHENTIC
It was in my new chapel, there at the old vocational school, now the city museum, where I first saw him. He was immersed in prayer, the material world ceased to exist for him, and I, city, asked myself, what makes him seem so peculiar to me? Yes, immediately afterward I understood. While the believers were shaking hands at the end of the mass, I realized that he was the only young man there.
All the others in God’s tabernacle were already old relics, on whose yellow, shriveled and tired faces life had inscribed a goodly number of wrinkles. When they kneeled on the hassock and wrung their hands over their prayers, their knees cracked like wood drying for a Stradivarius violin.
The Lord’s Prayer then streamed from their lips like dry leaves drifted away by the wind. They had one leg in the grave and another still at the altar, at least I imagined it that way, and it was a strangely horrific picture for me, like those of Hieronymus Bosch.
The gout, the disease of old legs, washed up on them from the inside, swishing whenever the worms bit into one leg, the other leg held firmly by angels at the altar.
But he was young. He stood with both of his feet on firm ground, or with his knees on the hassock, his face turned to the Lord. His prayers weren’t dead leaves; his prayers were will. Perhaps that’s why God always granted him whatever he asked.
His requests were not small. He wanted to become the richest man in the city. He slept five hours a day and the rest of the time he worked toward fulfilling his dream.
He had his start with the sale of antiques to rich collectors from Germany. Then he discovered that these connoisseurs hungered for old weapons inlaid with gold and silver, the muzzle-loading and breech-loading models from the 18th century, with gun-lock mechanisms, as if they were Prague’s astronomical clocks; so he started to produce them — exact replicas, impossible to differentiate from their older brethren. They knew how to kill, but they were beautiful.
So it is with women: they can kill, but they are beautiful, our young man thought. With the capital from the old icons and rifles, he opened a red-light house with young women. He chose the ladies himself. They can kill, but they’re beautiful.
At that time, the young man had employees. He signed over the salon to one of them and took all the profits for himself. He accepted art- and conservation-school graduates for his historical-weapons workshop, where they refined his wares according to period engravings and illustrations. He moved the antique shop to Prague, where he found a much greater market.
Still, every Sunday he came to my chapel, immersing himself in a world free of money and business, continuing to believe in his God. Whenever someone from the local congregation came to him and asked him for money, providing good reason, he gave it. He was no usurer and was not stingy. God, after all, doesn’t charge interest.
Don’t you believe?
Every Saturday morning you can see him in front of his house washing his Sierra with affectionate care. Stroking it and whispering to it like a lover. How beautiful these cars are. Beautiful, though they can kill. But he was always protected by God. He was protected from the insidiousness of money, too. Millions in the bank never harmed him.