'When you tell it, it's a fantastic joke,' said Petra, returning to her nuclear war story. 'A mask and a coat! I saw on German television what would happen if the rockets started flying. It was such fun I didn't have the heart to send the kids to bed. What if the whole thing just blew up that night? I'm not kidding, I had this stupid idea: let them live a little. I let them eat a whole ice-cream cake for a snack.'
'Do you think it could start suddenly, just like that?' said Masha. She was clearly alarmed.
'Why not?' said the foreman. 'It could start by accident.'
'I've already talked things over with Joe,' Petra continued. 'We're going to apply to emigrate to New Zealand.'
'Oh, sure, the whole country's just waiting for you to show up down there,' said Vítek. He sounded as though he'd taken the idea as a personal insult, as though she'd decided to move away from him.
'If not New Zealand, somewhere else. It could scarcely be worse than it is here.'
'It wouldn't be any more use than a fart in a hurricane,
Petra,' said Vítek vengefully. 'When those bombs start exploding, where'll you hide? Radiation will be everywhere, it'll be winter all over the world, because the sun will never make it through that cloud of ash.'
'Well, what of it?' insisted Petra. 'So I'll freeze somewhere. Is it better to stay here like a calf waiting to be slaughtered? Look at those fools, always putting on such a show.' She pointed at the squadron of jets flying straight towards us. So far, they were completely silent.
Masha was furiously sweeping the grave-site with a straw whisk. 'What will you do if you don't get to study archaeology?' I asked.
'I don't know. Maybe I could still study literature.'
'Do you think there's a connection?' I said, surprised. 'Or is it because you think that writers are good people too?'
'Don't you think they're good?'
'I prefer not to make judgements about people in advance,' I said.
Not long ago, my friend the priest told me what one of our own chieftains — who had refused to sign the latest solemn treaty of vassalage and protection — had told him just before his death: 'You Christians are making one big mistake. You look on all people as your neighbours and you don't understand that once in a while, you have to deal with the devil.'
I respect that chieftain, because he rejected that ill-fated tendency to which the spirits of our homeland seduce us. At the same time, I would not want the human world to be reduced to angels and devils, to those who have seen truth and those who are in error, to those who are with me and those who go for my throat. Though when I think of all the things I've witnessed in my life, I really don't know why
man thinks he is endowed with qualities that rank him above all other living things.
'I know a few wonderful people,' I said cautiously, 'and they are neither archaeologists nor writers.'
'As a matter of fact there is a connection,' said Masha, returning to my previous question. 'A friend of mine and I went for an outing a little way past Konstantinky. Do you know that area?'
'A little.'
'And we found a fragment of something on a hilltop. They were widening the road. The piece was traced with old-fashioned decoration. It must have been in the ground for a length of time that I could scarcely imagine, and yet, once, someone must have made it. Someone living. Before, in school or in museums, I was never interested in archaeological finds. And now suddenly I felt it was important to find something out about that person, especially since I lived right where he did. So I wrote a story about it.' She blushed.
'What did you call the story?'
'For a long time I couldn't think of a title, and then it came to me: Silence! I tried to imagine what it must have been like back then, and all I could come up with was how awfully silent it must have been everywhere. I got scared just thinking about it. I sent it in to a competition in Cheb magazine. They wrote back and said it was sensitively written, but I didn't know how to work with themes properly. They also said it wasn't contemporary enough.'
'I wouldn't take it too much to heart. Maybe they were afraid of silence too.'
'I don't understand what they meant, working with themes.'
I would like to have told her that I can only imagine with great difficulty something more hopeless than submitting short stories to a competition, or studying in one of our subjugated universities, but I didn't feel like letting on that I had some connections with that massive literary grave-site. Besides, Masha had thrown down her scraper and was plugging her ears because the squadron of fighters was screaming over our heads again. Whether they belonged to the Celts or to the other side, they certainly drowned out all the voices, the secret ones and the obvious ones.
Years ago I travelled through Scotland. Not because I was interested in the progeny of the Celts; I was drawn, rather, by the barren mountains and lakes celebrated in old songs, and modern myths about primeval monsters. At Inverness I checked in at a small hotel and then set off for a walk in the hills that rose over the town. I only got as far as the outskirts where, through the window of a small house, I heard a woman's voice singing a Scottish song. I'd heard Scottish songs and ballads sung in English, but the woman was singing in Gaelic, and I heard the old melodies as they had sounded originally.
I know that music cannot be expressed in words, just as words cannot express eternity, God, infinity or the soul. So I leaned against the stone fence post, listening to the woman singing, and looked at the rocky, barren mountains. Suddenly, the sun emerged from behind a cloud and illuminated a distant hillside. In the sharp light that defined a strip of rocky ground, I saw a white stone structure. It stood alone in a large field of heather. Even at that distance, I could see that the cracks between the stones were overgrown with moss, there was no glass in the windows, and the walls were strangely distorted. Outside a
low doorway, on a bench, sat an old man in a white coat. He was looking towards me. I was overcome with inexpressible excitement: I knew that this house was the place I had been gravitating towards all my life. It was the home I had been looking for. I was expected. I knew that when I stepped over the threshold, the embrace into which I would sink would surround me and fill me with joy once and for ever.
Then the woman came to the end of her song, and everything vanished.
I could have continued my walk into the hills, but I understood that my real reason for coming here had been fulfilled. I could expect nothing more blissful. So I walked back into town, packed my suitcase and went to the station.
Only later did I realize how through the voice, in a land so apparently distant, I had heard the spirit of my true homeland speaking to me. It was a voice that could not reach me at home, for it was drowned out by the shouts and arguments and laughter that fill every homeland. Like Masha, I tried to write about it — several times, in fact — but of course I never found the right words.
'I've just been thinking,' said Vítek, 'that the whole ice age must have been caused by a huge cloud of ashes. What if those people a long time ago were as stupid as we are, and invented everything we have?'
'And you think that they wouldn't have left a trace of themselves behind?' said Lida.