by Pavel Mandys
“What happened to you?” I ask innocently.
Reluctantly, he turns away from Olda’s car. “I stuck my fingers where I shouldn’t have, miss,” he answers snidely.
I don’t know what to say, so I look quickly at Pete, who is poking a stick in a puddle on the sidewalk. I realize that the poodle has probably peed vengefully all over the apartment in my absence, and that I have no idea what to make for dinner. Olda is returning from his car and hands the documents to Olda No. 3.
“All in order,” he says curtly, and pretends not to notice the surprised look on the face of his adversary, who now brightens up; it almost looks like he’s going to fall on his knees before Olda.
“I . . . really? Well . . . you’re really nice! Thank you! Thanks!”
“What happened to your hand?” Policeman Olda asks nonchalantly, and Olda No. 3 looks at me as if to make sure we aren’t ganging up on him, and I act casual. Olda No. 3 exhales.
“A bit of a turmoil—I lost my finger, you know?”
“How?” Olda and I don’t even breathe. Pete watches us in confusion.
Olda No. 3 probably doesn’t really feel like explaining, but he relents in the face of a man of law: “Well, we had a small disagreement with my mom about a grave. She divorced my dad when I was a small boy, and it was very hard for her. Dad died last week, and she refuses to put him in our family tomb. We didn’t agree, we had a scuffle over the key and she is quite something. She’s an angry woman—she hacked me with a sickle she always takes with her to the cemetery. And the sickle cut off my finger. Unbelievable, right?”
I remembered my morning walk at the cemetery and the encounter with the old woman holding a water can and a sickle. “And when did it happen?” I asked.
“This morning. My wife doesn’t know yet, I have to come up with more believable bullshit, she won’t believe the real story. I wore my wedding ring on that finger, can you believe it? It was the pinkie; I have gained weight like a pig, I can’t put it on my ring finger anymore. Fucking food. Oh well, I should go—again, thank you.” Olda No. 3 looks back at Olda No. 2 and they exchange understanding smiles.
Then the door closes behind Olda No. 3. Well, almost—right before it closes, Olda No. 2 sticks his foot in the door. We wait awhile, then Olda, my Olda, enters the house and finds Madera’s mailbox and stuffs the dingy bag in it. He exits the house and smiles at me. I smile back a bit stiffly; I reminisce about the old lady from the cemetery and then a question occurs to me—would I let Olda No. 1 lie in our grave? It terrifies me when I come to the conclusion that I probably wouldn’t. I don’t even notice that Olda No. 2 has put his arm around my shoulders and is walking me through the square back home. Neither do I notice when Pete gives Olda his hand.
I recover when a ray of evening sun touches my face. Hopefully the rain is done. Hopefully spring is here. I squeeze Olda’s hand in mine, and start thinking about what to make for dinner. Perhaps I could also clean up and air out the apartment, wash the curtains, and check the status of my cemetery payments. Just for peace of mind. We never know what life has in store for us.
Epiphany, or Whatever You Wish
by Petr Šabach
Bubeneč
He was sitting in a train station that was no longer a station, since years ago somebody decided that trains would only pass through here on their way to the new and rather ugly stop on the left bank of the Vltava. He was sitting on a wooden bench; on one side was a hill, on the other a crumbling building named after one of the most famous poets of all time. “Ah, fate of man, how you resemble the wind . . .” He thought about Goethe’s verse, acknowledging the pathetic ah that he added to it himself. Purely to emphasize his utter despair.
This place had always drawn him in. It had the allure of the Wild West, and the fact that it was situated on the border of an English park with police on horses only added to this impression.
Beside him, casually resting against the wall, was his mountain bike. He was sitting and imagining what would come after he’d killed himself. If anything. He was hoping for nothing . . .
* * *
At first he didn’t pay attention to any of it. As a working title, he called them “flashes,” and he had no intention of sharing them with anybody. After all, it was nobody else’s business. It used to happen, for example, when he was cleaning knives. In particular the largest of the set—the handles, aligned by size, stuck out of the heavy wooden block right beside the old toaster. This knife always unsettled him. He couldn’t define it. He couldn’t describe it. It was, simply, just a very short “flash.” He started to be afraid of those knives, but at the same time, they irresistibly attracted him. To avoid thinking about this, he got used to covering them with a dishtowel. He didn’t realize that these “flashes” could have been premonitions of murderous thoughts, until the time when he and Helena were waiting for a subway train to arrive, and in one of his flashes he envisioned his wife falling onto the tracks in front of the first engine. Silently, without a scream . . .
Now he was sure. Almost all of his thoughts slowly changed into lines converging toward one point. To murder Helena. Until now, he had thought he loved his wife. At least that’s what he had claimed to everybody. At the same time, he understood that the only way to prevent it all was to act faster—to kill himself before he could do something foolish; if murder can be described as foolishness. This could not be suicide; this was supposed to be only a preventive murder of self. Rational suicide. Of course he was afraid, but because he was unduly polite, he could not act any other way. He decided to proceed carefully. He waited until his wife went to bed. He sat down at his writing desk, and in the light of a replica green-shaded bank lamp, he wrote a sentence on a clean sheet of paper, with very neat, almost calligraphic handwriting: ADVANTAGES and DISADVANTAGES of life after death. For a short time he sat stiffly, and it was only when he became somewhat more alert that he added under ADVANTAGES: I won’t weigh anything. And with this statement—because nothing else occurred to him at that moment—he took a sleeping pill and read until the letters in front of his eyes started undulating like wheat fields in the summer breeze.
He knew he would do it, but he didn’t have any idea yet as to how. Because later, everything was supposed to look like an accident. That meant he needed to eliminate anything that could give rise to any possible questions and jeopardize the reputation of his family. That was a priority.
He pondered, purely theoretically, what form of suicide he would choose under different circumstances. Probably pills. He liked those the most. If just one could put him to sleep for an entire night, what would an entire package do to him? Twenty floors, twenty levels under his sleep, there must really be that large nothing—the majestic, dark nothing. A hundred times, a thousand times more nugatory than sleep without dreams.
It must look like ordinary absentmindedness. Later, they could all blame it on—and they probably would—his being overworked, his fatigue, perhaps burnout . . . who knows? The safest method would be to step out in front of some large truck or train, somewhere it would cause only minimal problems. He eliminated the subway right away because that was obvious—whoever decided to jump there, they certainly knew exactly what they were doing. And then there would be all the complications . . . After all, he didn’t want anybody to become embroiled in his problems, and just the idea that it would block traffic for a few hours and thus complicate life for many innocent people as they were trying to get to work was so horrifying to him that he broke into a sweat. For the same reason, he rejected suicide by gas.
When he was small, in Dejvice—the Prague neighborhood that is so quiet that even a car accident becomes an event—there was a gas explosion in a large apartment house, right across from the Hotel International. The havoc this caused is hard to imagine. Fifty meters from the site of this catastrophe, the building’s custodian ended up there on the tracks after she apparently ventured out holding a candle to find out what the smell was that had been bothering her at nig
ht. Even though he never saw this, he always imagined the poor woman, with gray hair up in a chignon fastened with a small comb, and with genuine astonishment in her wide-open eyes.
Therefore, an accident. Nobody who wants to commit suicide rides in front of a train with a bicycle, he realized with relief, and so he went to the cellar where for years his slightly beat-up mountain bike had been leaning against the wall. An older model which today would have no market value, and probably wasn’t even worth stealing. He checked the brakes and the tires, of course, and the rest of the evening he spent looking for the air pump, which he later discovered in one of the ski covers.
“I’ll go for a bike ride tomorrow,” he later said to Helena. She didn’t respond. She had no opinion on the matter at all. “Tomorrow . . .” he repeated.
He walked toward his work desk, opened the first drawer, and took out the list with ADVANTAGES and DISADVANTAGES, and under ADVANTAGES—with I won’t weigh anything already there—he scribbled, Definitely Helena!!!
Well, I can’t change what God has in store for me, he thought bitterly, when he learned that on the following Sunday his daughter was bringing her new—and by his count, third—boyfriend to meet him.
“Oh well,” he sighed when his wife informed him about it.
“Why Oh well? Why do you say Oh well when you haven’t seen him yet?” his wife said angrily.
He kept quiet. Could he tell her at that moment that he planned to commit suicide the following week? And specifically because of her? One thing was clear—he did not wish at all to spoil for his daughter her so very important day. He would never forgive himself. More precisely, he would not forgive himself in the little time he still had.
The young man who on Sunday really did come to visit looked to him a bit tipsy, addressed him as Pops, and what was worst of all—when Helena asked him whether he wanted a roll or a piece of bread with his soup, he asked for bread but no crunchy crust. His name was Pavel, and that same evening there appeared under I won’t weigh anything and Definitely Helena!!!—I won’t see Pavel anymore!
They say bicycle rides are unforgettable, but when he came out on the highway and started riding down the hill, it was not any grand experience. He rode slowly around the park, and after about half an hour he became brave enough to enter a busy street to ride among all the cars and trams. Once he made his way to the outskirts of Prague, he decided to ride along the riverbank. When he was returning in the evening and hit the lights that announced civilization, it took a lot out of him to navigate that chaos. He kept himself in the bike lane, which seemed to him impossibly narrow, and when he got close enough to see his apartment house it started to rain on top of everything, and the asphalt before him glistened like a river. No wonder his head was spinning; he was winding through a bunch of almost stationary cars, in a panic, trying not to scratch any of them. Riding on the sidewalk, as many others would, he considered to be highly inconsiderate.
He now coasted in a low gear, pretty much standing on the bike, when suddenly he tried to turn right. But as he maneuvered, he started wobbling until he couldn’t hold on anymore and fell sideways. Directly behind him brakes squealed. He didn’t even perceive much of the physical pain. His only thought was to get to safety with his bike as fast as possible, in a way which would not bother anybody.
The car that had almost hit him rolled up and one of the windows slid down. The driver—who had to lean over the passenger—asked him if he was okay. He nodded his head and gestured with his hand that they should continue driving, and to prove that there was nothing wrong with him, he laboriously picked up the bike and offered a friendly smile.
“You have no reflectors on the back!” the driver yelled at him, shook his head and drove away.
“That was close,” he muttered, and for the rest of the way he walked, pushing his bike.
Before he put it away in the basement, he found out from the tachometer that he had ridden over twenty kilometers that day. It surprised him and also cheered him so much that he wanted to announce it to Helena and their daughter. But the wife was already asleep, and the daughter was who knows where. He took a shower, then settled down to read his book. Before he killed himself, he wanted to finish it. It took him awhile to remember the thread of the narrative where he’d left off and, lying on his back, he thumbed through the detective story. Later, after he turned off the lamp, he was thinking in the dark about what was going on with him. How many of us are there? At this moment, on this night? he said to himself, and in his somnolent thoughts, there scurried a memory of a news report about a desperate suicidal man who had hammered a nail into his head. And am I doing anything different?
He dreamed about Helena and himself drowning. He, not far from her, smiled while whisking his right hand against the waves and the flat pebbles beneath them. And then came the flash with the knife. That was, naturally, worst of all . . .
The following day Helena announced that in a week, he had to take her to visit her parents.
“We’re not discussing it!” she preemptively declared, even though he—except for an exhausted look he inadvertently gave her—hadn’t uttered a word.
So again, a postponement, he thought, and it occurred to him that if he kept being so considerate to everyone and everything, he could just end up dying of old age.
He suffered through the wedding anniversary. His father-in-law got completely drunk and laughed at him the entire evening for how little money he was making.
The following day, in the early morning when everybody else was still asleep, they set off on their drive back. At home, he succinctly added the word Father-in-law—surely it’s not difficult to guess into which column.
* * *
It’s not just that he was a polite person—he had been born out of politeness. Unlike many of us who were born out of love or boredom, he was born out of pure politeness. To explain—his father, many years ago, had met his mother through an advertisement. They had a date in a bar, and at the moment when this young woman—who would later become his mother—took cigarettes out of her purse, his father jumped up to her and in a flash, leaning gallantly toward her, struck a match. Unfortunately, a small part of the head from this cheap Czechoslovakian match fired directly into her eye, where the little piece of hot sulfur burned her cornea and iris with a hiss.
A fast transfer to the nearest hospital and surgery followed. The doctors took a long time to announce that they were able to save the mother’s eye. And since the father was just as polite as later his son would later be, he asked this woman to marry him, because even if the eye turned out to be okay in terms of its function, after all the suffering, her visage had become a bit twisted, which bestowed upon her the look of a slightly cross-eyed young woman. More like fetchingly cross-eyed. There was a wedding and later a pregnancy, and even if the father already felt a bit old for children, he took it all in stride, and without any protest he began to prepare for his new role in life. And so Boris was born.
* * *
The last event he had to suffer through was Christmas. That would really be inappropriate—to kill oneself in the midst of the holiday hullabaloo. After all, it’s the time of the birth of the most important—even though, technically, only half the most important—of us. He bought presents as he had done every year, which basically were just small trinkets for Helena and Klára. Some cosmetics, which, as always, the store clerks helped him choose. After that, he didn’t sweat it. From Helena he got some underwear and handkerchiefs, and Klára told him that her present was still on the way. Naturally, he later added under I won’t weigh anything, Definitely Helena!!! I won’t see Pavel anymore, and Father-in-law, the word Christmas.
And then the new year came. Finally, he decided on Epiphany—that magical twelfth night after the birth of our Savior. He put all his things in order. In a few folders tied with bows in the bottom of the drawers in his writing desk, there were all of his grade school report cards—from kindergarten up to his university diploma, rolled up in
a scuffed blue tube, along with his birth certificate, marriage certificate, and even his old vaccination card. He didn’t write a will (as he barely owned anything) but in the envelope with the word vacation cleverly scrawled on it, he left twenty thousand korunas, which represented his life savings. According to the information he had, that should suffice for a very modest funeral, and perhaps Helena would even get some money from his insurance, though he didn’t know much about that; it was more like wishful thinking. Truthfully, he wasn’t even sure he had signed up for any insurance. That had always been Helena’s thing.
Once he had assured himself that he had taken care of everything in this regard, he started looking after miscellaneous stuff. He returned all three books to the library that he had borrowed some time ago, and then he attached his library card with a rubber band to his credit card and ID. This small, tidy package he then placed with all the other documents.
Every afternoon now he spent riding his mountain bike to the Bubeneč station. There, sitting on a bench, he watched trains passing by without stopping. Not only watching, he was actually monitoring trains with a notebook and a watch that he held like a stopwatch—he was checking their punctuality. In the end, he decided on the train going north to Děčín which passed by every day at nine in the evening, reliable almost to the minute.
On the D-Day—like every morning—he shaved and showered, put on clean clothes, and read until lunchtime to learn how that utterly gripping book would end. But soon he lost the ability to concentrate enough on the book and so, with a sad sigh, he returned it to the library. In the afternoon he went out for a walk; he stopped in a half-empty coffee shop on the main street, then lazily returned home where he prepared a simple dinner for Helena and Klára. He himself didn’t eat. He was not hungry. Around eight in the evening, he changed into his sports clothes and put his helmet on. By half past eight, he was already at the station. He stood there leaning against his bike, looking around, and it seemed that except for him there was no other living soul. In a moment he wouldn’t be a living soul either, it occurred to him.
