English / Sample translations /

/translated by Elsa Morrison/

The widow...er

          "When I'm gone," grandmother always began the same way and detailed instructions would follow about how to iron shirts and fry cheese or perhaps how to fry shirts and iron cheese, grandfather had stopped listening because he had long had quite different ideas about life without grandmother. When grandmother was gone, he was looking forward to doing everything she stopped him doing, enjoying to the full everything she would not allow him to do, and having everything she would not let him have. Immediately after returning from the funeral he would make himself very strong coffee with six lumps of sugar. For supper he would open a packet of soup and eat it off the spoon straight from the packet as he used to do before he knew grandmother. At night he would not open the window. In the morning he would not have any breakfast, instead he would have a stiff brandy. Yes, that would be the life! He would want for nothing, nothing except grandmother.
          Grandfather sincerely loved grandmother. As the years went on, there was nothing he desired more than to die at the same time as she did like Philemon and Baucis. But grandmother had told him so often how to look after himself without her that he already regarded himself as a widower. After all grandmother was always right.

          But this time it was different. One hot stuffy day grandfather found himself standing in front of the hospital, in his hand a bag with grandmother's skirt, blouse, a pair of stockings, nightdress, toothbrush, spectacles and the book she had not opened for the last few days. He was single again after fifty-one years.
          The sad duty of arranging the funeral awaited him. While he was in the nearest telephone box looking up the address of a funeral parlour, he noticed a purple cloud rolling down from Petřín Hill. The wind was beginning to stir up the dust from the street, pedestrians were walking faster holding on to their hats. Somewhere a gust of wind slammed a window shut. "You've forgotten your umbrella again," grandfather chided himself. "You're sweating, if you get soaked you'll get pneumonia." He was surprised to find he was talking to himself in the second person, but it was even stranger that he was talking exactly like grandmother. From the day she had bought him an umbrella he had regularly left it at home, mostly intentionally, so that he would not have to cart it about with him or leave it behind somewhere. Until now he had never reproached himself, not even in the heaviest rain. What on earth was wrong with him? Perhaps he was still just remembering her voice. It would pass in time. He calmed down and took the first tram home.
          He was just about to leave the bag in the hall when he remembered this was something grandmother did not like. (Why do I always have to tidy up after you?) He put grandmother's things in their proper places in the flat. The clothes he put in the linen basket in the bathroom, the toothbrush he put in the bin, then promptly took it out again, washed it carefully and with a bad conscience tossed it back in the bin. He put her glasses on the bedside table and first he put the book in the bookcase but finally he put it beside her glasses. Meanwhile it had stopped raining but before grandfather went off to the funeral office, for the first time in his life, he took an empty shopping-bag with him to buy something to eat on the way home.
          "Don't keep looking at the pretty girls or you'll get run over," said an inner voice when he was crossing the street. "You won't be the first to come to a sticky end that way." Grandmother's voice was getting no fainter. On the contrary, it was becoming even clearer like the voice of a living person. But one thing had changed. It was no longer trying his patience, making him want to disobey. Quite the reverse. Whenever grandfather acted according to her instructions he was aware of a hitherto unknown joy: grandmother would be pleased with him.
          He arranged the funeral for two days later. He did not need to send out any funeral announcements, there was no one to send them to. Then he went to the grocer's and made straight for the jams and the mustard. "Grandfather," a voice held him back, "have you forgotten you've no gallbladder?" He put the jam back on the shelf and looked round helplessly. "Where are the carrots?" he asked a stout lady wearing an overall. "Past the cakes," she nodded to the left. Grandfather set off in the right direction.
          When he put the contents of the shopping bag on the kitchen table he was amazed at what he had brought home: carrots, cabbage, peas, cauliflower, kail, ham, bacon, cheese, rolls and butter. "What will I do with all this?" he sighed. He couldn't possibly eat it as it was. Grandmother had a book with recipes he remembered as he opened a drawer. For a while he leafed through cuttings from newspapers and pages of hand-written recipes that grandmother had begun to collect soon after they were married. He read them for the first time. It took the whole evening. It was almost midnight when he realised that in fact he had bought a vegetable dumpling, that is the makings of one. He was just about to start cooking when a voice that could not be ignored said, "If you have indigestion during the night, don't expect me to get the bicarbonate of soda for you." Grandfather was aware that indeed he could not expect anything of the kind from grandmother and decided to have a proper breakfast in the morning.
          He was in bed when the voice told him he should open the window at night. He got up and obeyed. He had a good sleep and was wakened by the sun.
          When he dressed he did not stop at shirt and trousers but also put on grandmother's apron. "Fat does not wash out," the voice in his head was saying as he did so.
          The vegetable dumpling was not a success. The voice had forgotten to tell grandfather to cook the vegetables in salted water but grandfather did not hold this against grandmother. In any case he did not expect to enjoy this kind of food, he used to eat it only when forced to. Today for the first time he ate it voluntarily. He was almost pleasantly surprised.
          He did the washing up immediately after eating so that grandmother could not say he had left it for her to do. Then he sat down in an armchair and thought about himself. "What's wrong with me?" He did not understand himself. "Why am I not doing what I've so often promised myself? Now that this misfortune has come upon me and I am alone, why is it not the same as when I was single? What will become of me? A henpecked widower? Brrr," he shuddered. "I'll go to the pub tonight, grannie. You can say what you like!"
          "Just go then, grandpa, you need it," said the voice understandingly. "But don't eat any white pudding and see that you're home by eleven."
          Grandfather got up, reached for his black jacket and when he was in the hall he turned back for his umbrella. The pub was certainly just round the corner but there were some flashes of lightning and you never knew.
          The gravediggers lowered the coffin into the ground and grandfather threw in a bunch of dahlias grandmother's favourite flowers. Then the gravediggers filled in the hole and grandfather stood as if he were watching but he saw nothing. When he focused again he was alone in the cemetery. He read the letters in gold on the granite headstone several times before he took in what was written. On the monument was his own name - Milan Možný. Not believing his eyes, he went right up to the headstone and traced the letters with his fingers. Milan Možný indeed it was.
          How could it be anything else, grandfather said to himself. On the door behind which grandmother and he had lived, his name alone appeared. It was the same in the telephone book. Even letters for grandmother bore his name - why not grandmother's death? That was why he kept hearing grandmother's commands within himself, that was why he could not live his own way, grandmother was still alive within his baggy clothes. There in the grave lay he, his instructions, his fatherly advice and the little irritable commands he had treated her to for half a century. It serves me right, the widow...er said to himself. Enjoy yourself, grandmother.
          It was late in the evening when he got home and as grandmother used to do he broke up a roll in milk. He had always scoffed at this old wife's supper while he opened a bottle of beer. Then he went off to bed. Before he settled to sleep he put on grandmother's glasses and reached for the book she had not read. He did not share her weakness for fiction, preferring factual literature, but today he was in no mood for facts. He licked his finger (a habit of grandmother's he had always hated), turned the page and began to read, "Father did not even have to open his eyes to see that Mother was awake - "