The Little Town Where Time Stood Still

by Bohumil Hrabal

  3

  Just like me and Dad, just like Dad and Mum too, and just like the whole of our family, Uncle Pepin disliked staying at home. We got too much on each other’s nerves, we caused each other too much suffering and humiliation, we loved each other too much, and so we preferred to shoot ourselves off with this love of ours in different directions, and we preferred being amongst people and things in other surroundings. Dad, as long as we still had the Orion, that dreadful motorbike, which had to go in for general repairs after every ride, used to spend every Saturday stripping it down, but never alone, he even tried to initiate me into this operation, but I only ever did this routine with Dad once, because it wasn’t a matter, as Dad had promised, of working on it just for an hour, it took all afternoon and then all evening, and Dad kept enthusiastically explaining to me what all the drawbacks of this Orion model were, and how he was only delving into its innards in order like a skilful surgeon to remove its various faults. But I moaned over the Orion like a dog tied to its kennel, every minute seemed to me like an hour, and every further hour like the whole of eternity, and whenever I later saw so much as a single motorcycle part I felt just like Mr Douša, who couldn’t bear seeing innards, the minute he saw any he had to be sick, and me too, at nine o’clock at night, on a Saturday, when Dad with enormous care had reassembled the distributor, carefully wiped it with a cambric cloth, describing to me with enormous affection all those little plates and screws and the function of the distributor, which corresponded to the functions of the glands, the pancreas, and the adrenal gland in the human body, and my brow was tense, with stave lines of creases, and Dad’s brow was glowing with pleasure, and when I saw that we still had the engine open before us, its black cylinders and crank shaft protruding, and the carburettor dismantled over the workbench, my stomach churned, and before Dad had time to spring back with the distributor, I sicked up into it, with a generous helping of salami, “tourist” salami, and Dad yelled at me and threatened me with a hammer, saying it was the same for him as if when serving mass I had taken the body of the Lord, the sacred host, and spat it out on the floor, I was horrified by that distributor, piled high like a mess tin at a children’s camp, a mess tin with its dollop of food, it always makes me . . . Suddenly it flashed through my head, and it did, I collapsed in horror the very next instant, only to smile at it a moment later, knowing all the more certainly, with every passing while, that what I did was the right thing to have done . . . And Dad ran about with the hammer, and being unable to kill me, he took out his watch, put it on the little anvil and with one blow shattered it to smithereens, the only way to save himself from smashing my head in instead of the watch . . . And he opened the gates and drove me with his finger out of my Garden of Eden, and I was out in the starry night, the raised-up stars like tremulous silver daggers menaced me with their blades in the chill heavens, and I went off into the brewery orchard, and I lay down under an ancient avenue of nut trees and nuzzled the earth and osculated the grass with my face and clasped it with my lips and spread-eagled myself out, even writhed, even sweetly whined at intervals. We had a cat at home, his name was Matsik, and one day Mummy decided the cat wasn’t going out that night, it was staying at home, it was muddy out and it would jump on the bed in the morning. But at midnight Matsik first of all knocked over a cup with his paw, and when that didn’t do the trick, with all his might and main he overturned a heavy old Austrian alarm clock from the dresser, and Dad got cross, he took Matsik and plonked him down on the front doorstep, and since he’d just been woken out of his sleep, first he kicked a chair with his bare toe, and only with a second kick did he managed to kick Matsik out into the night, and so the cat ended up as if for a punishment exactly where it had wanted and longed to be all night long.

  And so in the course of two years’ tinkering with the motorbike Dad had got through all the brewery workers, then all the neighbours round about the brewery and finally practically half of all our little town. To anyone not in the know Dad, on a Saturday afternoon, would pop the question, “What are we doing then this afternoon?” And anyone unawares would reply honestly that they were doing nothing special, and Dad would take that person tenderly by the elbow and say eagerly with a lovely smile full of mysteriousness, “Well, I tell you what, come up to the brewery and hold a lock-nut for me, just for an hour.” And anyone not in the know came along, little suspecting that Dad was dismantling the big end, and the neighbour would hand him the spanners and Dad would delve further and further down towards the rattle in the engine, which was a congenital feature of that engine, a kind of permanent ailment it was, like someone with a hobble on one foot or a stammer. And Dad could describe his descent into the entrails of the Orion with such fervency, that while the wife of Dad’s helper raved furiously at home, while his girlfriend swore that if she didn’t kill her sweetheart she’d give him the shove or get off with his friend, young men and old neighbours alike took the bike apart with Dad, and time marched on towards midnight, and dawn began to rise, and Dad decided that now was the time to put the engine together again, what joy awaits us when at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, when the bells begin to ring, let’s have a bet on it, Dad proffers his hand, I kick the starter just the once to try it out and the engine peals into life like the Sunday bells. And so it was that everyone repaired the bike with Dad just the once, everyone in the vicinity of the brewery and from our little town took his turn, and anyone who had already repaired the bike with Dad once, holding the lock-nut for him just for an hour on a Saturday, on hearing Dad’s sneaky question, anyone who had experienced that horror, shouted back at Dad from afar, “No no! I have to go to the hospital in the afternoon. I have to go to the cemetery. I have to be at home, my sister-in-law’s visiting. I have to do the accounts. I promised to help my brother build his family house . . .” And in spite of this Dad would respond sweetly, “But you must admit that engine on the Orion’s a terrific thing . . .” And the neighbours agreed, a terrific thing it was, but they didn’t have time today and probably never would, because if they’d spent all night in the pub till morning, or if they had gone off on that occasion with other women, it would have amounted to the same thing, because no spouse, no sweetheart ever believed them, even when Dad delivered written confirmation of what had occurred on that Saturday afternoon, evening and Sunday morning, Mr Jarmilka even insisted on having it confirmed by the notary public, but his wife still didn’t believe him, so there was nothing for it but to get divorced. So when Dad walked off to town these days, people when they spotted him coming quickly left off their work, sweeping the pavement, or digging their garden, as if in some fairy tale or other, as soon as they saw Dad they were sucked into the doors of their homes and cellars and woodsheds, emerging cautiously only after Dad had passed, looking about them for a long time cautiously and only then continuing in their work, but their peace of mind and mood of contentment were gone. It had got to the point where, even when Dad walked on to the town square, people, seeing him, rushed hurriedly into side streets, ran into the Church of Our Lord and sat down there, and feigning contemplation hid their faces in their hands as they sat in the pews, so that Dad wouldn’t recognise them. Some of the locals, having seen Dad on Saturday morning and now even the whole of Friday casting his eyes over people’s faces, thought it better to run into someone else’s house, where they hung about for a good long while by the door to the cellar or out in the yard, later slinking along the passage and, like sleuths trailing criminals, with the merest twitch of their profile peeping into the street to see if the way was all clear. Burýtek the butcher, who had gone to hold Dad’s lock-nut just for a quarter of an hour as Dad had promised, when he’d returned on the Sunday he’d found a whole laundry copper or cauldron of tripe soup totally spoilt, because tripe soup when it’s cooling has to be stirred just like soup from a slaughtered pig, until it’s absolutely cool, so Mr Burýtek the butcher, when he saw Dad in Palacký Road, he got such a fright that he ran into Mr Šisler the hatter’s, and beca
use like all butchers he was terribly shy and timid, Mr Šisler was able to sell him a beautiful hat, and Mr Burýtek spent ages trying it on, and then he bought it, and it worked out cheaper than if he had gone to fix lock-nuts with Dad for half an hour. Uncle Pepin only helped Dad the once. Towards midnight, when Uncle Pepin could see all the beauties in the public houses with ladies’ service glancing in vain at their watches and then at the door, expecting to see his white cap enter, there Uncle Pepin was, thumping away with an oak mallet, while Dad held the shaft, on to which, not with a hammer, no sir, with a wooden mallet they were hammering a new bearing, because Dad thought it was this bearing and nothing else that was causing the engine to overheat while going up hills and emit a sort of dry clink, as if you were dropping one little coffee spoon after another into a tin bucket. And so there was Dad gripping the shaft against his midriff and gripping that bearing too, and Uncle thumping away with the mallet, and suddenly Dad could see that one more blow would shift the bearing a bit too far, further than was needed, it was just right as it was, so Dad yelled out, “Hey whoa, enough!” And he should have said no more than just enough, for that “hey whoa” induced Uncle Pepin to fetch it another blow with the mallet, but Dad had pulled away the shaft with the absolutely perfectly positioned bearing, so Uncle with the mallet gave Dad a great clout in the belly, and Dad just keeled over, and just as Uncle Pepin was getting him back on his feet he managed to stand up by himself, and again Dad took the hammer and struck out at Uncle, Dad never hit him, but he had to do something equal to hitting him, so he took Uncle’s watch, his Patent Rozkop, that bulbous watch from Austrian times, put it on the anvil, and then, as he struck that watch with the hammer, and its hands and springs and screws splattered over the wall, Dad ceased to feel the pain of that mallet blow to the midriff, and he drove Uncle out, he just had enough time to wash and stick on his mariner’s cap, and jump over the fence, because the night-watchman Mr Vanřátko was always so fast asleep after midnight that nobody dared to wake him, he slept with his doggie Trik at his feet, and neither little owls, nor screech owls, nor great barn owls with their tu-whit tu-whooing woke him, our night-watchman wasn’t even woken up by those women who tied him up once with a washing line, Mr Vanřátko always slept soundly on.