English / Sample translations /

Translated by Jonathan Bolton

Conception [chapter 1]

          I was conceived to the hacking coughs of Russian rocket launchers, under a sky lit up by signal flares, and I was born shortly before Christmas in the last year of the war, which was also the first year of the peace. You usually don’t find out the precise day of your conception, and the mother herself, as is known, tends to be rather at a loss in this respect. But not in my case. For reasons that I’ll explain in a moment, this date (April 25, 1945) engraved itself ineradicably in my mother’s memory. And on the very day when she was first impregnated with this most rare of burdens, I weighed (shortly after conception) about as much as a small gold ring. And then — my mother had hardly discovered what had happened — the stage known as “the expulsion of the fetus” began. But I stuck my two nimble suction cups to her moist mucous membrane, and try as she like, she didn’t have a chance. Later she changed her mind, and burned with an insatiable love for me. Well, I forgave her for both. But nevertheless I considered it useful to punish her a bit. And so I decided to be born a little early. Prematurely.
          But now I should say something about my father, whom I have probably never seen but nevertheless venture to know more about than most of you do about your procreators.
          On April 25, in the late evening, a band of soldiers broke into a house in the suburbs of Brno, and the next-door neighbor, who observed everything while hiding behind the curtain of her bathroom window, estimated there were sixteen young men. First they looted the house for a while, and then they found my mother locked in her bedroom. They dragged her out to the front walk, and one soldier stood guard, the safety on his weapon released, while the others took turns. She was sixteen: one soldier for each year. And when the guard’s turn came, he put his weapon on the ground and quickly unbuttoned his pants. But my father was faster. The guard, you see, hurriedly unbuttoned his pants right where he had laid aside his weapon, so that they fell below his knees and tangled up his legs, whereas my father jumped out of the darkness, ran past him, knelt between my mother’s legs, and only then unbuttoned his pants in a flash. And because he was wearing a uniform (actually just a shirt, taken a moment before from a soldier he had dragged out of a nearby pile of corpses), he looked (especially from behind) like any other soldier, and so the guard just cursed obscenely and waited there, in the light of the signal flares and beneath the coughing of the Russian rocket launchers, for my father to wrap it up, because in war there’s an unwritten law: he who hesitates goes hungry. I don’t want to suggest that the guard wouldn’t also take his turn; he just had to yield to someone more alert than he was. When it comes to winning women’s hearts, a soldier is completely defenseless, with his rear uncovered, and this defenselessness, put out on display, is something like an animal signal to any rivals: a soldier can kill a soldier before or after coitus, but he must always respect the coital truce, that hundred and eighty seconds of separate peace. And my father knew all this quite well, and managed to take advantage of it.
          So when he stood up from my mother, he quickly jumped back into the darkness.
          That’s how I imagine it all.
          But when I go over it in detail, I confess, I also try to figure out what nationality my father was. Spaniard, Portuguese, Indian, Arab, Albanian, Malaysian, or Mexican? Was he a mage who happened to be passing by, a powerful Basque sorceror, who criss-crossed the map of Europe in those morgueish years, looking for somewhere to slip in his leaven? I can’t tell anything from, for example, my appearance, in which my mother’s bearing predominates. And so, if my father’s seed burnt up without a trace the sperm of those soldiers of misfortune, my mother’s angelic appearance perfectly concealed whatever my face might have inherited from my father. And the evil omen I always carry is as invisible as a word from an ancient book, a word that floats, transparent, above cities, forests, and waters.
          Every year at the end of April, on the anniversary of my conception, Brno wraps itself up in the cloth of scarlet banners, and a military brass band plays on Freedom Square, near what used to be BAŤA’s palatial shoe store. I was born at the end of the war, and every year brings me a festive reminder of this fact.
          For years, I waited for my father to cast a signal to the winds, or at least for some ugly, slippery sound sent in my direction. But it seemed he had forgotten me. Or else he sent dozens of those messages, but I — even though I jumped up and down in the dark and stretched out my hands in all directions — didn’t catch any of them. Only twice did I have the feeling that I had almost established contact with him, but to this day I’m not sure what was actually going on.
          The first time it happened was at the lake formed by the Brno dam, near the Sokol swimming pool. It was at the end of the season, in the late afternoon, after a storm. That’s the time of day I like best: the reservoir is deserted, the lake covered with a fresh, smooth skin, space for my own lazy thoughts to resonate.
          I rented a boat and was rowing from Obora in the direction of the swimming pool when I heard a muffled scream and then saw someone drowning. Some guy was floundering and splashing about so much it was disgraceful, and he was shouting something too, and I would have passed him by without a second thought, but I suddenly grew attentive, because I had heard something quite strange. I turned the boat around and rowed quickly toward him. I had the feeling he was speaking directly to me, trying to gain my attention by repeating the same sentence over and over: “Hey there, boy, I’ve got a message from your old man!” And this didn’t surprise me at all. It is known that states of mortal anxiety can function as means of communication between dark forces and our world. It occurred to me that my father had decided to use the drowning man as a convenient loudspeaker. I sailed up to the guy and fished him out with some difficulty, and at the risk of capsizing the boat, I held his head above water and waited to hear what he would say. He had a drooping mustache, an evasive gaze, and a gold crown in his upper row of teeth. I held him for a long time, ready to listen, but he was as quiet as a fish, and I finally realized with regret that the contact — if there had been any — was broken, and I wouldn’t hear anything.
          So I dropped him back in the water, took up the oars, and continued on my way, lost in thought. But now I was sure of one thing: it was good to be near people in mortal anxiety, because through them it was possible to establish contact with my father. And this determined my life in the future. I left my profitable occupation (as a waiter at the Avion Hotel) and embarked on my long, Samaritan path as a hospital assistant (always willing to snoop around the beds of the dying).
          The second time it happened was early on a Thursday evening, just the time when people in the center of town push their garbage cans out the front doors of their buildings. I was walking between these rows of garbage cans, lining Jakubská Street to see me, when I saw a man who had just finished reading a letter fold it twice, tear it up carefully, and throw it into one of the garbage cans. But despite his inconspicuousness, there was something so strange about all his movements that I stopped walking, turned to the window of a butcher’s shop, and watched him in the glass. When he departed, I went to the garbage can and patiently hunted down every scrap of the letter. Then I opened my briefcase, took out the nylon bag in which I carried snacks to work, and turned it inside out so any grease wouldn’t hurt the letter. At home I poured out the scraps on a piece of Bristol board and diligently pieced them together, only to discover it was one of those “chain letters,” so popular at the time. And the following sentence immediately captured my attention:
          “Father M. S. Prudencio, a priest of Rio de Janeiro, who copied this letter 12x and carried it to a mailbox, was attacked on the way back by 6 terrorists seeking to dispatch him to the next world with doses from their submachine guns, but suddenly all their guns jammed, and the priest smiled apologetically.”
          And I read this sentence again 3x, so as to confirm what I had known from the start: Father M. S. Prudencio was my father, and I recognized him by that apologetic little smile.
          That’s how I had always imagined him, and it was with the same apologetic smile glued to his lips (and wearing the shirt of a soldier who had been shot) that he once knelt down to my mother.
          The next day I bought some yellow blue-lined stationery at the hospital canteen, crept into the nearest hospital room, and set up a screen, the kind used to hide dying patients, so that no one would disturb me. I rolled up the sleeves of my assistant’s smock and wrote an address on an envelope:

          The Reverend M. S. Prudencio
          Rio de Janeiro
          Brazil

          In the afternoon I took the letter to the post office. But the young woman at the counter who postmarked it informed me the address was incomplete and in such a case the post office could not guarantee the letter would be delivered into the hands of the addressee. As she was giving me my change, I lightly touched an artery in her wrist with my index finger and, in that seemingly ordinary touch, let my animal magnetism go to work. In the following days she followed me around like a little dog, quivering gently all over. And so I began to go out with Kamila, in order to establish some connections that would ensure the delivery of my letter to Brazil. And this determined my fate in the future, because Kamila was the modest daughter of a powerful apparatchik, a Kamila-Cinderella fated for a quite different prince.
          So my father, it seems, intervened in my life two times: he chose a vocation for me as hospital assistant, and he chose a wife for me, Kamila. As if he were directing me from somewhere extremely far away. And I want to believe that’s what was happening.
          But will he make himself known a third time? And will I remain watchful enough, quick enough, to recognize it in time?
          I stand by the window and look out onto the street. It’s late at night and Kamila has awakened and propped herself up on her elbow. She is silent for a long time, observing me, and then she begins to laugh: “Are you praying or what?”


Labyrinth [chapter 4]

          after we returned from the Beskydy Mountains, Dad had the feeling that more and more powerful bastards were latching onto his life, and he attributed this to his conflict with the functionaries from the Hunters Association, on someone’s orders, for example, they relocated him from his school in Brno to somewhere in the Realm of the Asshole, he commuted there daily in the early morning hours and didn’t return to Brno until evening, and when he compensated for this injustice by finding ways in the surrounding forests to satisfy his interest in natural history (he discovered a nesting ground of the eagle-owl Bubo bubo by the rocky crest known locally as Hejkalice, and nearby, in a stagnant bend of the Dyje River, the nest of a penduline titmouse, Anthoslopus pendulinus), and he was beginning to feel that even there and thus he could be happy, on someone’s orders the principal began breathing down his neck and putting spokes in his wheel, and Dad wrapped up the biggest one and brought it home to show us
          Petr, he said to me, we’re heading into such cursed times that we’d be better off in a nicely bloated cowpat, and he said to Mom, Don’t punish me, God, but I’m starting to get the feeling that there’s no pleasure in life, and with great disgust he lit a cigar conspicuously similar to a miniature model of the dirigible Italia, which left on a desperate expedition to the North Pole in 1928 A.D.
one Sunday afternoon Dad returned from making the rounds of his ornithological traps, scattered throughout the surroundings of Brno (he caught birds, ringed them with rings bearing the date and place they were caught, and then released them in the firm belief that he would see them again), he made his rounds by bicycle, and this was also an opportunity to stop at the gamekeeper’s lodge or the parish house, because he had plenty of friends all over, he was exceedingly sociable, he liked to sit awhile and talk awhile and forget the time, and then he had to pedal all the more swiftly, so: one Sunday afternoon Dad returned, leaned his bicycle against the fence, and, forgetting to take off his shoes, walked right into the dining room, calling from the doorway:
          Haničko, things look bad, they’ve arrested Father Samek
          No! cried Mom
          They came for him in the middle of the night, Dad continued, but when they took him away, all the windows in the village lit up and they had to drive through that hive of lights
          Why’d they arrest him? said Mom quietly, and Dad began to hunt for his box of ugly cigars, a box similar to a hangar for tragic dirigibles, and when he finally found it, he fished out one with disgust and told us everything:
          Fourteen days ago, on someone’s orders, they wound a chain around the cross on the road to Bělice, and they pulled it out of the ground with a tractor and took it the devil knows where, and the next day Father Samek hammered out a gigantic, heavy cross from some large beams, threw it on his shoulders, and took it from the parish through the whole village to the pit where the other cross had been, and as he walked, the sweat poured off him, and people stopped to watch, and some of them joined him at a safe distance until they formed a kind of procession, and when Father Samek reached the place, he took the cross from his shoulders, wiped off his forehead and rested, only to seize the cross again and drag it up to the pit and try to place it there and set it upright, and he went at it like a madman, and people stood around and watched and at first no one thought to come closer and help out, and when he placed the cross and set it upright and threw the clay back into the pit, a car from the city drove by, slowed down, stopped a good long way from the cross, stood there motionless for a while, and then turned around and drove away, but in the night someone knocked down the cross and carried it away and not a splinter remained
          and so Father Samek hammered out a new cross and once again heaved it on his shoulders and once again walked through the whole village with it, to make it clear to everyone that he would do it ten times, a hundred times, as many times as necessary, and he wasn’t even discouraged that this time the people who dragged away the cross in the night carefully filled up the pit and brought along boulders to fortify it, he wasn’t discouraged because this time everyone went to work, someone brought a hoe, someone else a shovel, and then more hoes and more shovels, the wayside cross turned into a busy construction site, they dragged away the boulders, deepened the pit, and then strengthened the upright cross with the dug-up boulders, but in the evening everyone already knew that this time, they wouldn’t just come for the cross in the night, they would come for the priest too, and so they guarded him all night, but when it happened toward morning, they couldn’t do more than show their solidarity, and so they turned on their lights and stood by their windows, nearly the whole village stood that night at their lit-up windows, but the next night they were there again with their V3S trucks escorted by GAZ cars full of cops, and they picked up five people: the one who brought the first hoe to Father Samek, the one who brought the first shovel, the one who most deftly pulled the boulders away, the one who helped the priest raise the cross, and finally the one who said “The more frightened we are, the stronger they’ll be” — and they gathered up these chosen five, along with their families (they drove through the village with harsh spotlights, and someone hidden behind those lights showed them whom to take and who lived where), and they loaded them into the V3S’s with their blankets and the occasional piece of furniture and immediately drove off with them, no one knows where, most likely to eastern Slovakia, where they were scattered among a number of gypsy villages
          Mom didn’t say anything, she sat there paralyzed, current ran only through her hand, twitching
          I remembered Father Samek very well because he used to visit us often, a colossal priest who had to bend his head when he walked through the doorframe, a Gulliver among the little Catholic gentlemen, as he used to say himself, and when we visited him in Bulice, we found him either somewhere in the church on a scaffold with a pail of whitewash, or in the parish garden, digging a compost pit
          If he had to break a path through to heaven for his parishioners, Mom used to claim, he would pick up a jackhammer and get right down to it
          He’s a true embodiment of Christian virtues, Dad used to say, and I’m convinced that a saintly crown is already prepared for him up above
          I wouldn’t exactly wish that on him, Mom objected, because most of the time that’s a martyr’s crown
          Well, Dad pointed out, this country needs martyrs like a blooming flower bed needs bees to pollinate it
          But at this point Mom, who was otherwise a picture of quiet humility, practically went crazy
          What did I say? said Dad, startled, but no one answered him, no one explained anything to him, and Mom left him sitting there in his own confusion like some old numbskull
          and while we’re at it, I also remember how Father Samek once came to visit us with a gigantic basket of strawberries from the garden, Mom fixed them with cream and we sat in our garden in Žabovřesky, in exactly the same place where Dad had dug up that box of ammunition and a Wehrmacht mortar a year and a half earlier, and right below the balcony where, almost three years earlier, I had spoken for the last time with Frau Herrmann and Frau Macek, we sat on folding chairs and it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and the wasps flew down on us furiously and Dad, looking into his plate with its squashed strawberries and cream and inspired by the red spots in the thickened milk, turned again to his favorite theme and made a speech about the cleansing blood of martyrs, their crimson bridge that from heaven to earth does span, and Mom and I immediately felt lousy and hurried off, each running to a different corner of the garden, and even Father Samek grew a bit pale and put down his spoon
          You have the gift of a suggestive imagination, he said to Dad, but don’t waste it unnecessarily, try writing books, about nature, say, and he pointed to the sky, write about that eagle there, for example, whence, why, and where it’s flying, but Dad shook his head
          That’s not an eagle, Father, that’s a swift, since the war ended swifts are, surprisingly, moving to the cities, and in general I’ve been observing other unusual movements of birds, Father, the argonauts once guessed their future from the movement of birds, and I would venture to claim that even today ornithology has something to say about the future of humanity, why, when we follow the movements of birds, it’s as if we were looking far beyond the horizons of our days, and let us lift our heads to the sky and read what is written about us in the calligraphic script of the birds

          in the fall of 1949 we received notice from the national committee that a decision had been made to use the corner building on Eliška Machová Street, left behind by its German owners Herrmann and Macek, as a special-education school, and we, loyal tenants, were hereby offered a replacement apartment in the center of town, of the same category, to be moved into immediately
          I hope I’m wrong, said Dad, but I smell a rat, and he put on his military uniform, which he still had from the mobilization and which he reached for whenever he wanted to look masculine, tough, resolute
          Do you think it’s a good idea, asked Mom, to put on your uniform these days
          A uniform always works, said Dad, straightening the knot of his soldier’s tie in front of the mirror
          I’d like to know, Karel, continued Mom, what kind of special-education school they’re actually going to establish here, you know, I’d like to know what will remain here after us
          A special-education school, my dear Hana, is a school for mentally deficient children, in other words retards, and he adjusted his peaked cap with a light touch and was already hurrying to the tram stop, I saw him from the window as he strode down Šmejkal Street, shoving people aside as a butcher does sides of meat, and how could it have occurred to me then that, the same time a year later, everything would be terribly different

          altogether we lived in Žabovřesky for just a little more than four years after the war, but suddenly it seemed terrible to me to have to leave, all my friends were in Žabiny, Jandek from the blacksmith’s on Burian Square, Prášil from the upholsterer’s on Montgomery Ave. and Krejčí from Šmejkal Street, and in the end I would even miss Zetka, whom everyone in the class scorned, Dad tried to convince me that I would visit them, because it was within spitting distance of the center of town, but I knew what was what and several times a day I felt a choking in my throat and I went up to the attic to see Grandpa, who was spending a lot of time there lately, and I stopped right outside the door and heard him hammering lath nails somewhere in the middle of the labyrinth, at that time it was finally supposed to be ready, Grandpa was in a hurry, and so he hardly ever descended from the attic, even though he knew, of course, what all of us knew — he would finish it and we would move out, and he had already had a decorative plaque made, which he would then hang there:

          In the Year of Our Lord 1949
          May this maze receive God’s blessing
          For whom I built it I don’t know
          Where I’m going I’m only guessing
          Remember where I’m wandering now

I stood outside the attic door and I didn’t dare go inside, although I had seen detailed plans countless times, and even a three-dimensional model
          I called Grandpa! and heard him put aside his hammer somewhere deep in the labyrinth and set out on the tortuous path to me
          (the labyrinth was a long-standing dream of Grandfather’s: he saw one even before World War I, as a wandering apprentice somewhere in the Netherlands, and it enchanted him, but he didn’t begin to build it until after the Allies’ invasion at Normandy, originally as a hideout for parachutists, and he was lucky, because Frau Herrmann and Frau Macek, to whom the building belonged and who certainly wouldn’t have agreed with the construction, had never been to the attic in their lives, they lived shut up in their sinful shell and while they certainly heard the noise above their heads, they decided not to take it into consideration, for them it was more and more just a symbol of the intrusive world
          Grandpa kept improving the labyrinth, thinking it through and refining it, adding more walls and barriers, trying out new tricks and ever condensing and concentrating it, achieving such a level of perfection that today I stand before him in my mind and doff my cap with a deep bow)
          the door opened and there was a smell of sawdust and Grandpa appeared in a long smock with handfuls of lath nails in his pockets, looking at me questioningly
          I figured out how to arrange it so we don’t have to move, if we invite the people from the national committee who want to move us out, you see, if we invite them to the attic, they’ll get lost and leave us in peace
          I’m afraid, Grandpa lapsed into thought, that others would come after them
          How many people can get lost in that labyrinth of yours, altogether?
          You mean how many would it take to satiate it? and he shrugged, I wouldn’t venture to guess, not even approximately, and I’ve never thought about it that way before
          Let’s try it out, then, I decided, and it occurred to me that not only the people from the national committee who want to move us out could get lost in there, but also the people who would come to look for them, and then the people who would come to look for the ones who came to look for them, and the functionaries from the Hunters’ Association who were persecuting Dad could also get lost in there, and the functionaries of the other association who locked up Father Samek, and basically everyone who threatened and persecuted us, everyone Dad was talking about more and more often, more and more quietly
          but Grandpa, who had listened to me carefully, only smiled sadly and shook his head: Once we began, Pete, we wouldn’t know when to stop, that’s no solution, I’m sorry
          That’s okay, I said, and then I remembered I was supposed to tell him that Mom was waiting downstairs with lunch

          the moving van that came to carry our furniture from Žabovřesky to the center of town, to Běhounská Street, resembled a gigantic Noah’s Ark
          I sat in front with Grandpa, next to the driver, while Mom and Dad went ahead, to wait for us there
          the ark, filled with prewar furniture, boxes of Dad’s books and natural-history collections, rocked wearily, and it kept getting stuck somewhere, and horns honked from all sides and brakes squealed, once we even had to maneuver backwards and Grandpa got out and coaxed the driver somewhere slowly and patiently, and then the driver got out too, it was right across from the Tivoli, an art nouveau colossus raising a gigantic bowl of hardened, dusty cream to the heavens My sick grandmother lives here on Botanická, I’ll be right back, the driver notified us, and he took an empty bag and came back in an hour, the bag under his arm was so full he couldn’t close it all the way, full of cigarette packs and chocolate bars, and then we set off again and after some complex maneuvering downtown (four years after the war there were still burned-out houses and potholes surrounded by barriers, the streets resembled an old man’s gums, with the teeth eaten and gnawed away) we finally drew near to Běhounská Street, Mom was watching from one end (on Freedom Square), and at the other end (on Red Army Square) Dad was on the lookout, now without his uniform
          (he lost the uniform almost as soon as he showed up in it at the national committee
          You’re a teacher by profession, why are you wearing a uniform?
          I’m a Czechoslovak reserve officer, said Dad, and I was mobilized in this uniform on September 23, 1938
          You should have turned it in long ago, take it off, at your request and against your signature we’ll lend you civilian clothing, which you’ll return to us washed and ironed in a well-packaged bundle in a week
          Dad refused, protested, haggled, got angry, even shouted, but in the end he changed into the pants of some collaborator who had been shot, because he had no other choice if he wanted them to negotiate with him
          the negotiation dragged on for fourteen days, Dad went around to apartments that didn’t suit us, haggled again, refused, protested, got angry, and shouted again, but it all would have been for nothing if he hadn’t happened to run into an old classmate, Vojta, who landed the apartment on Běhounská for him, one of those roomy Jewish apartments whose owners were missing after the war, and the waiting period had already expired)
          now, when I remember years later how we wandered around the ravaged city in the moving van, how we kept pulling up and backing out, going back to try other narrow streets, the whole thing seems to me an unimaginably long trip, as if we had traveled several days, and then I’m sure why that is: it wasn’t a trip to some place from somewhere, from the periphery to the center, but above all a trip from something into something quite different, understand, across an imaginary boundary, with that trip, something ended for me once and for all, and at the same time began something evil that lasts to this day, so that of course it wasn’t Noah’s Ark at all, but something absolutely different, and I’d rather not ask at all, and I’d rather not know
          and only just recently has another explanation occurred to me, and I imagine that it could also have happened, for example, in this way:
          when I went up to the attic for Grandpa, and when Grandpa stepped out of the labyrinth to see what I wanted, and when I told him and then gave him the message that Mom was waiting with lunch, and he went downstairs, I lingered there a moment longer, I don’t know what got into me, but suddenly I opened the door and crept into the labyrinth
          and, you ask, why didn’t anyone look for me? I don’t know, but maybe they did look for me, and maybe Grandpa managed to do what all labyrinth builders dream of: he built a labyrinth so perfect that not only do all who enter get lost in it, but it’s also a labyrinth that, like a big, lame animal, gets up and limps off, erasing its own tracks with its tail, and so everything I’ll go on to describe, everything you’ll hear, takes place in the bowels of that animal, now invisible, who walks, limps, and always erases its own tracks