The Little Town Where Time Stood Still

by Bohumil Hrabal

  Then he disappeared off round the corner of the maltings, in order to be in time for his train to Hošt’ka Spa, to take a turn on the promenade, as he said, yes, on the promenade, but also to meet up with a friend and fellow butcher, for the two of them were members of a preaching society, while Mr Burýtek was busy slitting the throats of the squeaking piglets, in their dying rattles he heard the voice of God, smearing and anointing him with pig’s blood, and so Mr Burýtek got involved in peripatetic preaching, he preached the word of God according to “God’s Messenger”, a programme with booklets sent to him from America, and Mr Burýtek’s mission was to preach the word that the final battle of Armageddon was nigh, the butchers laughed at him, but when Mr Burýtek went home from the slaughter-house he used to preach about that last battle, and that’s why he’d been going every Saturday over to Hošt’ka, to the spa, so that he and his friend could test out each other’s preaching technique. But a week ago Mr Burýtek had received a gramophone with some records from America, and on those records the message of God was inscribed in Czech, all you had to do was wind up the gramophone and put on the record and out came the voice crying out about the preparations for the final battle of Armageddon, which was imminent . . . And Mr Burýtek, being a cyclist, had the rear carrier on his bicycle strengthened and on it he lashed that gramophone, and in the evenings he went round the villages and pubs on the edge of town to proclaim Armageddon with his gramophone and the trained voice which issued from it.

  So then Dad and Uncle Pepin halted outside the butcher’s shop on the edge of town, there in the lamplight shaded with pinned-together newspapers sat the butcher’s wife Mrs Burýtková, gnawing her lower lip and sticking out the point of her tongue and trying to touch the tip of her nose with it. When she failed, she got up and took a long wreath of sausages and set about counting them, as if she were praying the rosary. When she finished counting, she thought for a bit and started counting them over again, more concentratedly, but in the middle of the wreath she must have lost count, for she chucked the sausages aside, took a knife, and carefully started scraping splinters of bone and fat which had stuck from the chopping block. Then she sat down, slowly unwrapped a throat lozenge, and absent-mindedly put the paper in her mouth, threw the sweetie into the basket and felt for the doorhandle on the wall, eventually she found it and gripped it and went into the kitchen and brought the gramophone, she wound up the spring and put on the needle, but the gramophone didn’t work properly, it played, but off the groove. The butcher’s wife took the cleaver and first lightly, and then with a powerful sideways blow, she caused the needle to jump straight into the music, choral church music: “Love divine’s sweet angel flameth in the blue stars’ holy glow . . .” And Uncle Pepin, scrubbed and wearing his sailor’s cap, came into the butcher’s premises, saluted, the butcher’s wife laughed, clasped her hands and exclaimed, “Maestro, you’ve come at the right moment, shall we dance? What about a bit of theatricals?” But Uncle Pepin pointed to the gramophone and said, “Is it some sort of canonical hours or what? Let’s make it faster,” and he lifted the lid, shifted the speed lever forwards, and sure enough, love’s sweet angel revolved to the rhythm of the polka in the stars’ holy glow. And the lady butcher extended her arms round Uncle’s shoulders, Uncle kissed her greasy hand and danced with her, watching so as not to get grease on his sailor’s cap, for every other minute the butcher’s wife swept and brushed him up against some pig’s lights or tough old cow’s boot. And the butcher’s wife sighed and wiped the perspiration from her brow with her palm. Then she left Uncle standing and went into the kitchen, and when she returned, there she stood in the shop doorway naked. Only her hair was tied around with a large kerchief. A moment later Dad stepped in with a little case, carefully he closed the door behind him and bowed to Mrs Burýtková and said, “Dean Spurný’s sent me to see you,” and when he saw the nakedness of the butcher’s wife he grew all uneasy. Then he lifted the gramophone lid, slowed down the speed, and put the needle on again, and through the butcher’s shop fluttering off the floor tiles and wall tiles the choral church singing resounded again: “Love divine’s sweet angel flames . . .” “Come along in both of you,” invited the butcher’s wife, “come on, come on,” she nodded her head and sat herself down on a chair. “Wouldn’t you like to put on an apron?” Dad proposed. “No I wouldn’t, it’s too hot, take off your clothes too, make yourselves cosy, gentlemen,” she declared and laid her hand in her lap. “What’s that you’re bringing me?” she asked suspiciously. “Take a look, dear lady, the church is really not so much against gluttony as against drunkenness, the Dean . . .” “What about the Dean?” cried the butcher’s wife raising her arm. “He drinks seven pints of vermouth a day, and when he’s pissed, the mastiff takes him back to the parsonage or Trávníček the butcher.” “True enough,” observed Dad, “but one minute before the stroke of midnight he drinks up, and then he touches not a drop till it’s time for morning mass, whereas you, as we well know, sit up boozing spirits here, shame on you. Why do you drink so much?” asked Dad, opening the box he’d brought and sticking the plug of the fulgurational currents into the wall socket, then he rose and put out the light, closed up the shop, and when he returned to the kitchen, the purple violet air was sweet-smelling and sizzling, and Dad attached the anodes for epileptics and menstrual disorders, aimed at his forehead that purple, sizzling, glassy, hollow, blue-vapour-filled plate, then he raised it up high, touched Pepin’s forehead, then slid it round Uncle’s face, right round it, and then he placed the appliance close to Mrs Burýtková’s forehead, and a crackling issued forth from her kerchief and hair, and tiny sparks flew and sizzled, then Dad touched the woman’s shoulder and Uncle murmured blissfully, “Well, you’ll have to lend me this next time I go to see my little beauties, they’ll be wetting their knickers . . .” “You’ve got to see it,” said Dad, and like a magician and hypnotist he continued with this instrument, drawing a purple violet cloud and perfume round the chest and heart of the butcher’s wife, her breasts heaved not with indignation, but with delight, with astonishment. “So,” Dad remarked softly, “if you stop drinking, I’ll be along to give you an electric massage like this every Saturday . . .” and the lady butcher got up, tugged a string at the back of her head, and her kerchief dropped, and then her russet long hair fell tumbling down almost to the ground, and Francin, when he saw those tresses, the appliance began to tremble in his fingers . . . Then he gave the butcher’s wife the instrument to hold, took the butcher’s apron and covered the naked woman with it, he fastened it for her himself with a white tape, and the butcher’s wife was dressed as well in her long tresses, and Dad drew those tresses to him and twisted them round the butcher’s wife, her hair was like a bathrobe round her . . . And Dad sat the butcher’s wife down on a chair and fixed the neon comb and started combing through those tempestuous old-fashioned tresses, and the butcher’s wife lowered her head and closed her eyes, and you could hear the erotic cooing warble of the comb and the luxuriant cooing gurgle of the ultraviolet rays . . . “Where do you keep the alcohol?” enquired Dad tenderly in the ear of the lady. She took a key from her bosom and handed it to him, and Dad let her hold the appliance with its fragrance of thunderstorms and violets and pointed to the cupboard: “Here?” But the butcher’s wife shook her head. “Here? Not here. Here then?” Dad knelt down, inserted the key and undid the lock, and there on a little shelf stood jars of thyme and marjoram and pepper and paprika . . . “Here?” Dad shifted aside the jars and behind them were three bottles, one of Nuncius, one of Sagavir and a third with cherry brandy. Dad put the bottles out on the table and said, “It’s a sin to get drunk, mark you, but when you only taste it, it can’t do any harm,” and as he said it the butcher’s wife handed him the instrument and fetched some glasses. “But not you, you mustn’t ever again!” said Dad indignantly, but again he was charmed by the butcher’s wife’s tresses, hair like Mum used to have, hair she had cut off, without asking Dad’s by your leave. “Gie it
here,” said Uncle Pepin, “and I’ll pour out just a wee drop, old Holub, when I took him his rolls, he used to give me a dram of this as well.” And he poured some Nuncius into a glass, and he and Dad drank some and declared the drink fortifying for the stomach and medicinal for all liver and digestive troubles. “You say you’ll come and give me the treatment every Saturday?” the butcher’s wife inquired in tremulous tones. “Every Saturday, I’m your obedient lamb, bringing you a new life,” said Dad, “the treatment is absolutely simple, all I have to do is run through your hair with this comb,” said Dad and, unable to restrain himself, he took her hair and sniffed it, it had that same never-to-be-forgotten smell, the smell of his mother’s apron, where he used to run and hide when he was small . . . And now, in the drunk butcher’s wife, he found that from which he had been severed these eight years past, the long hair of his wife, which she had brought back from Bod’a Červinka the barber’s on the rear carrier of her bicycle, like an oblong Christmas cake, or four kilos of wine-flavoured sausages. Uncle Pepin remarked, “Well, Vlasta likes drinking this, she says, you have a drink of this too, lad, get something decent in your tummy . . .” And the butcher’s wife turned round and looked at Dad with eyes full of gratitude, and then, unable to restrain herself, she stroked the back of his hand, in which Dad was still gripping that effulgent comb. “But I reckon,” she said tenderly, “that some of that Sagavir, that bottle with the young swain on it, will be better for you, the Nuncius has an insidious flavour about it like its monk’s Franciscan habit, it seems medicinal, but like all medicines, the minute you take a little bit too much, that’s the end of you, and believe me, I know, but as for the Sagavir? It has a lovely lightish greenish yellowish-tinged colour, as if you were drinking the iridescence of the spheres, and its flavour is spicy, with an upper tone resembling the best dessert wine, and a lower tone suggesting the laundered skirt of a shepherdess who’s been sitting in the pasture on banks of thyme, and then peppermint and pimpernel.” And Dad and Uncle were about to pour some out, but the butcher’s wife expostulated, “You pair of barbarians!” and she got up, carefully winding herself in her hair, and she went and rinsed out the glasses in a pail, and when she brought them back, she poured the glasses, took the comb tenderly out of Dad’s hand and put its glow close up to the glasses and bottle, and the liquid glinted and glistened and seduced one to drink. They sipped, and drank up. Then there was silence, only flies buzzed round the shop and banged into the maddened windows. The gramophone stopped playing, and Dad went into the shop with his glass, instead of the handle of the gramophone he turned the handle of the old safe, which opened with a clinking sound. Then Dad felt for the gramophone, cranked it up, put on the needle, and when the church choir began again — “Love divine’s sweet angel flameth in the blue stars’ holy glow” — Dad shifted the speed lever, and the church music turned into a blaring galop . . . Dad came back and took another drink, the butcher’s wife was lying back in her chair, her hair swept back away from her shoulders, she was struck by something, her hair lay on the ground, as if flowing off the back of the chair. Then Dad had just one more glass, and when he’d drunk it, the butcher’s wife stroked him on the back of his hand and said to him with incredible tenderness, “Not like that.” And she was walking straight now, she went into the shop proud and august, as if the neon comb had imbued her with sanctity, she reached into the gramophone and slowed down the music, and now the church music was church-like, it floated with grandeur through the butcher’s premises as if in some old Romanesque chapel. When she sat down, she touched Dad again, and Dad plunged his face into her hair and couldn’t restrain himself, for so many years it had been denied him, for eight years he’d been deprived of sniffing at these long female tresses, he plunged and took that hair lightly in his lips, and it tasted identical, and the butcher’s wife felt the trembling male lips and pressed herself to him, pressed herself until she moaned out loud, for eight years or more she had never moaned like this to the touch of male lips, for so many years she had been apparently without feeling, never again, she had thought, never again will I be a saint to someone, embodying something more than myself . . . “Gentlemen,” said the butcher’s wife, when Dad stood up straight and said they really had to go, “all good things come in threes, now this cherry brandy, gentlemen, is quite a drink, every European house stocks this brand, every restaurant in the whole world marked with the sign of a cock, every world-class restaurant has this cherry brandy, six hundred cherry trees Mr Wantoch grows exclusively for its manufacture, and the recipe is a secret, it’s a drink as famous as Becher’s Becher Liqueur, Jelínek’s or Gargulák’s slivovitz, or Pilsner beer. When you take it in your mouth, one tone reminds you of the scent of bitter almonds,” but Dad sniffed at the butcher’s wife’s hair and repeated after her, “Yes, the scent of bitter almonds,” and the butcher’s wife continued: “Yes, bitter almonds, the second tone of cherry brandy is the high, July tone of ripening cherries, cherries swollen ready to burst, and the third tone is the scent left behind by summer lightning, when it splits a lime tree in half and all its leaves bristle . . . Gentlemen, excuse my manners, I went to a lycée, did you know, and from such a fine start in life here I have come to such an end . . .” The butcher’s wife bowed herself, and Dad took her by the shoulders and raised her up and said, “It’s unworthy of you, you are and you will be a good woman, only you must agree to be treated with these fulgurational currents, and,” he whispered to her in a voice fragrant with the blend of Sagavir and Nuncius, “only by me . . .” And the butcher’s wife nodded solemnly: “Yes, only by you,” and she opened her eyes, which had been permanently half-shut all the time, for years they had stayed half-shut, she used to look out at the world like a savage from a thicket, like an animal, like a fugitive . . . She opened her eyes and looked into Dad’s, then Dad lifted the brilliant comb and shone it into her eyes and saw that they were lovely and full of fiery sparks and that not even his wife had ever shown him such eyes, such eyes had only been shown to him many years ago by his own mother. And Francin poured a glass of cherry brandy, and the butcher’s wife jumped up, took him tenderly by the hand and said, “You’re barbarians . . .” and she put the glass into the cupboard and took out clean ones and filled them with cherry brandy, that heavy, syrupy, darkly passionate liqueur. Dad said, “You could just have a little one along with us, one glass won’t do you any harm . . .” But the butcher’s wife shook her head: “I’ve been tasting a stronger liqueur than all this.” And Dad inquired, “A lot stronger than this?” She sipped and nodded. “Much, much stronger, stronger than anything else.”