'Was he a printer too?'
'No, he sold books — and mainly stationery. You should have seen our sign. "Antonín Pokorný," it said, and underneath that, in gold lettering: "Purveyor of Books, Lithographs and Stationery Supplies." Everyone knew my father, and he knew all his customers by name; he'd always give the children a free picture or a decal. You could buy whatever you wanted — even if it was paper with a special snake-grain finish. And if, by some miracle, it wasn't in stock, Dad would try to get it for you, would go all the way to Prague for it if he had to. Today? Just try going into the store now and asking for ordinary writing-paper. The girl will laugh in your face. Have you seen her?' she lowered her voice. 'The little tramp they've got looking after the stationery goods? Just try going in there to buy something and what do you see on the door? She's got a sign up saying: "Deliveries." "Gone to the post office." "Inventory Day." "I'm at the doctor's." And you know where she is all
the time? Back here in the stock-room,' she jerked a fat thumb behind her, where I could see only a barred window with opaque glass in it. 'She brings in soldiers and boys from the cement plant. She makes more on her back than she does standing behind the counter. So you haven't heard about the station?' she said, returning to her main preoccupation. 'Maybe they meant a bus station. The chaplain's been complaining that he can't say mass with the buses making all that noise just outside his door.'
To them, that would have been a reason for leaving the bus station where it was, but I didn't argue with her and, taking advantage of the pause in the flow of talk, I left the courtyard.
Even though he never said as much, I know my father was disappointed that I hadn't become an engineer. I had never known his father — he had died twelve years before I was born — but not long ago, I came across an article he had written. He'd learned that an American colleague of his had discovered a cheap way to produce acetylene. 'The ancient dreams of chemists of creating organic compounds from mineral substances have been resurrected. To get not only kerosene or alcohol, but to create, on the way, purely chemical substances necessary for the nourishment of man. Thus far, such dreams have been vain indeed, but recalling the enormous achievements of chemistry in our time, there is no reason to doubt that they might one day become true.' His article ended with a vision that seemed to him joyous and full of hope.
A few fluorescent lights flickered on the square, and a small group of people had gathered to wait for a late bus in front of the church. The shops were shuttered and dark, and the only light came from a pub called The Blackbird. The
din of many voices floated out through the open window.
I walked as far as the château. The gate was now shut and only a single window in a whole row was lit. An ambulance was parked in front of the gate.
Kafka had lived at the end of an era when a castle was still a good symbol of mystery and inaccessibility. People associated castles with nobility and sophistication. Today, our castle gates are open wide. Some have been turned into tourist attractions, but most have become warehouses for things or people. The fine furniture and valuable porcelain has been stolen or destroyed, rare books have been taken to waste-paper depots, and the princesses who didn't manage to make their escape were asked to work behind counters, on assembly lines or in offices. In our era, party secretariats have replaced the castles. They are the new symbols of inaccessibility, but they don't evoke notions of nobility; no one would associate them with ideas of gentle birth, bravery, wisdom or chivalry.
A hero who tries to pry open the gate of a secretariat will scarcely gain anyone's approval.
Back home I took off my clothes and threw them over the back of a chair. (Tomorrow I would have to hammer a few nails, at least, into the wall to hang them on.) It was only nine-thirty, but I fell asleep at once.
I was awakened by a rumbling clatter. The windows were shaking as though an air-raid was going on. I opened my eyes and looked around a room empty of people and things.
Where had everyone gone?
They'd been transported to Poland. Only I remained behind, forgotten, waiting for the man bearing my death sentence to enter.
The rumbling kept up, and I became fully awake. Through the open window I saw one of the enormous transport trucks disappearing around a corner. A bell in the tower struck twice. It might have been two in the morning, but when I looked at my watch, it was only half-past eleven.
With a sense of relief, I realized that the transportations had long since departed and it was unlikely that someone would come through the door to inform me that my presence was a burden to be removed from the world without delay. Those to whom I was a nuisance at present were certainly satisfied that I was now precisely where I was.
Another truck roared by outside. I got up and closed the window. One of the ancient panes of glass in it cracked with a high, rasping sound. Midnight struck.
I looked into the darkness in front of me. Now that I had closed the window, the air was filled with the room's own foul exhalations. My body felt broken and I was aware of a slight pain near my heart. I desperately wanted to fall asleep again, but instead, I kept hearing the sounds from the street and a silent rumbling in the bowels of the old building.
We all have our own castle whose gates we long to pass through. Most of the time, when we find them closed, we go off in another direction and enter doors that someone else has opened for us or through which we have no wish to pass.
Stone
WE WERE DIGGING a hole for a stone pillar in a clearing near the logging road. From the first blow of the pick, the ground had resisted. It was close to noon and a light breeze made the air tremble in the heat of the sun. After an hour's hard work we had only managed to make a shallow depression in the earth. We had hoped that once we'd made it through the tangle of tree roots in the top layer of soil the work would get easier. Instead, we had hit hardened clay full of chunks of solid rock.
My young boss, understandably, was stronger than I was, and more skillful, so he took the pick out of my hands and, with regular, rhythmic blows, tried to subdue the rock bit by bit. But a dull pick is no substitute for a pneumatic drill.
Do we have to put our stone pillar exactly here? I wondered. Perhaps the ground a little to one side would be softer.
'This is the best place for it.'
My knowledge of the work I was doing was so slight that I couldn't judge whether the location he chose was really the best of several possibilities, or whether he was simply revealing more of the stubbornness he had demonstrated several times over the past few days.
Our stone pillar was still lying on the floor of the station wagon. Perhaps anticipating the bedrock, the surveyor had selected the smallest of the stone makers we had, but even so it was just a little under three-quarters of a metre long. And we had to lay the mark-stone tablet underneath it. And between the mark-stone and the stone pillar there had to be a layer of soil at least twenty centimetres thick. Though it lay buried under a metre of earth, the mark-stone was the most important part of the trigonometrical station. While the stone pillar above it was often damaged, the mark-stone usually remained unmoved. There were crosses on both the mark-stone and the pillar, and they had to be aligned. Thus the position of the pillar could always be reset with reference to the mark-stone beneath it.
In the past, they used to build tall wooden constructions over the stone pillar. I remember towers so high it made me dizzy to look up at them. They don't build those towers any more; there aren't the carpenters to make them. Adjacent to the stone pillar, at a distance indicated by a notch on the handle of my pick, a concrete base had to be set in the ground to which a pole was fixed; at the trigonometrical point, the pole was red and white; at the intermediate points, black and white. Wherever there was a threat of damage, we put up two poles. There was always the threat of damage, even though it was an offence to tamper with the poles. In woods, seldom had surveyors bothered to erect markers; they would simply paint arrows on the nearest tree, one pointing left, the other right. And because over the years the stone pillar would become buried in earth or overgrown with grass or bushes, we would have to poke around in the undergrowth with a metal probe until we found it. When we had uncovered the