Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street
Page 16
There was a moment of silence. The fat man took off his glasses, yawned, and slumped down in the chair, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Well, the main thing is, Marie’s in the clear now, for good,” he said with a thin smile.
“So if there really is somebody up there weighing our deeds, he’s going to have one hell of a time with Mrs. Kouřimská,” he sighed again, closing his eyes. “I just hope it isn’t like here. Because if we got what we deserved for everything we did in our lives, they’d have to just cancel heaven, straight up.”
“Amen,” said the fatter man, packing tobacco into his pipe. He tucked it between his teeth and looked around for matches. As his eyes passed over the black rectangle of the window, he noticed some fleecy streaks of white stuck to it from outside.
“Look at that,” said the fatter man almost humanly and struck a match. “The first snow!”
But the fat man was fast asleep.
NOTES
A few of the characters in Innocence have surnames with meanings relevant to their personalities or their role in the plot. They are listed here (in alphabetical order) along with explanations of references in the novel that are common knowledge to Czech readers but most non-Czechs are likely to miss.
Dolejš: lower
Hrůza: horror, terror, dread
Nedoma: not at home
Navrátil: Josef Matěj Navrátil, Czech painter (1798–1865). Famous for his landscapes, although most of his work consisted of still lifes and figurative paintings. He is also known for having inspired the work of photographer Josef Sudek.
State Security: in Czech, Státní bezpečnost, Communist Czechoslovakia’s secret police (commonly referred to by its abbreviation, StB).
“good princess Libuše”: Legend has it that Libuše was the wise and beautiful wife of the Czech ruler Přemysl. One day, as she stood overlooking the Vltava river from the fortress of Vyšehrad where she and Přemysl lived, she prophesied the creation of Prague with the words, “I see a great city whose glory will touch the stars.” Seeing a man building the threshold of a house (in Czech, práh), she ordered a castle erected on the site and suggested the city be named Praha. In another legend, made famous by Alois Jirásek’s Staré pověsti české (1894; Old Czech Legends), Šemík was the name of the crafty white horse that saved the farmer Horymír’s life by leaping over the ramparts of Vyšehrad with him just before he was to be executed.
“what a nice statue they’d made of her”: Božena Němcová (1820–62), author of the classic Babička (1855; The Grandmother), one of the first novels written in Czech. An idealized retelling of the author’s childhood, it is known and revered as a repository of folk wisdom. Born Barbara Pankel in Vienna, Němcová wed at age 17, in an arranged and ultimately unhappy marriage. She died, alone and in poverty, in Prague. She is currently pictured on the Czech 500-crown banknote.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Heda Margolius Kovály was born Heda Bloch in 1919 to Jewish parents in Prague. In 1941, her family was deported to the Łódź ghetto in Poland. Heda, her parents, and her husband, Rudolf Margolius, survived horrific conditions there, only to be taken to Auschwitz in 1944. On arrival Heda’s parents perished in the gas chambers. She and Rudolf were separated, but Heda survived by being selected for work detail, and eventually escaped a death march in time to participate in the Prague Uprising. In Prague, she was reunited with Rudolf, who rose to deputy minister of foreign trade after the 1948 Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. In 1952, Rudolf was arrested on false charges of conspiring against the state and convicted in the Slánský Trial, one of the most notorious Stalinist show trials of the era. In the wake of her husband’s execution, Heda, who had been working as a graphic designer, and her five-year-old son, Ivan, found themselves societal outcasts. Denied employment and thrown out of her apartment, Heda eked out a living by designing book dust jackets and weaving carpets. In 1955, she married Pavel Kovály, a philosophy lecturer. Heda turned to translation, and eventually earned a reputation as one of the country’s leading literary translators. Following the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Heda and Pavel sought a new home in the United States, where Pavel worked as a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and Heda was a librarian at Harvard Law School. They returned to Prague in 1996. Heda died in 2010 at the age of 91. Under a Cruel Star, her memoir of her time in concentration camps and the early years of Czechoslovak communism, was first published in 1973 and has since been translated into many languages.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Alex Zucker has translated novels by Czech authors Jáchym Topol, Miloslava Holubová, Petra Hůlová, and Patrik Ouředník. Honors he has received include an English PEN Award for Writing in Translation, an NEA Literary Fellowship, and the ALTA National Translation Award. In 2014 he created new subtitles for the digitally restored version of Closely Watched Trains, the 1966 Czechoslovak New Wave classic based on the Bohumil Hrabal novella. Alex lives in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Visit him online at alexjzucker.com.