Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  I’ve admired my grandfather since childhood. At the age of ninety he still used to sit behind his desk, quick-witted as ever. Behind him was a bookshelf graced, in jumbled profusion, by the masterpieces of the world of technical engineering and architecture, along with the travelogues of famous explorers. Only useful information. No fictional absurdities. When I’d grown old enough, Grandfather initiated me into the world of profit and loss. He had a notebook for every calendar year since 1938, containing a complete account of income accumulated and expenses incurred. We played a sort of game where I would name a year and month, and Grandfather would read from the notebook in question what had happened during that period. Down to the last cent. Sometimes information as to Grandfather’s height and weight during that year were also included. He would stare right at me with a triumphant look and I felt I was the grandchild of a genius.

  I remember that my grandfather once took me to church with him. I hadn’t been in that church before. At that time I hadn’t been in a church at all. When Grandfather invited me along with him, I was actually very surprised. Grandfather and the church? I did know that occasionally Grandfather liked to listen to soothing organ music, but as a rational person he usually relied on the classical-music station while sitting at his desk. Anyway, off we went. The church was odd, somehow. At first I didn’t understand what was different about it, but gradually I saw that the church lacked the flamboyant atmosphere and symbolism that I figured one might expect in a house of God. This church was simple. Simple pews, simple windows, a simple altar, simple paintings on the walls, a simple ceiling. Grandfather looked around for a long time, knocking on the walls, trying out the doors and the rows of seats, inspecting the beams. Then he nodded approvingly and we left. On the way home Grandfather talked to me about his work. He had designed many bridges, apartment blocks, and factories. And he had also designed one church. And that was the church we’d just seen.

  On the last curve of Grandfather’s life, when he was run over by a car, broke both tibiae, and got his feet crushed, it was clear to all of us, as he lay in bed, that he didn’t intend to continue living. And that’s what happened: before Christmas Grandfather announced to us all that he wasn’t expecting any gifts from Father Christmas that year. Luckily we all understood the situation, so we spared him the senseless piles of woolen socks, rulers, and accounting books. On “the Day” we all gathered around Grandfather’s deathbed and each of us said something by way of farewell. My turn came. I looked at the stumps of Grandfather’s legs, which because of the accident had shortened his height by nearly twenty centimeters, and I asked him how he would like it if we fitted him into a somewhat smaller coffin. Now that there was no longer any need for a full-sized coffin, we could manage with a considerably shorter and cheaper one. I remember how everyone looked at me in astonishment. In Grandfather’s eyes, however, there glowed a shimmer of economic pragmatism, and a squeeze of his cool hand gratefully approved my idea. And so it came to pass.

  You see, then, that a rational view of the world is in my genes. As with my grandfather, who built such a matter-of-fact church that a mystical godly aura had no place in it, and my father, who bought four pairs of ski boots at the same time, because they were ridiculously cheap, so it is with me, as I weigh myself before and after eating a kiwi, and then subtract the weight of the kiwi fruit to the nearest gram, and with my son, who always gives a two-second warning before he shits his pants. And so on. But I’m not proud of it. At least not so much anymore.

  During my not very long, but pretty eventful and successful career, I’ve transformed six companies into such perfectly functioning corporate entities that, if they were global businesses, every single one of the six billion inhabitants of the world would feel pure pleasure that they exist. Just think: only necessary things, and what’s more, absolutely no advertising or any other marketing bullshit. At my last job I took optimization so far that in the end I had to fire myself. Before that, I told the board that the managing director and the marketing manager would be redundant if we carried out one hundred percent of the reorganization I had suggested. Being greedy people, they agreed to my suggestion, after some hesitation. As an honest person I took their agreement to mean that I myself would be dismissed twenty-six days later. That was how long my planned reorganization took.

  While I lived in a one-room apartment, everything was simple. I minimized my life logistically to such a degree of perfection that it could easily have won the Nobel Prize for Engineering Achievements in the Development of Domestic Conditions. My dear little fully automated paradise. Things started to change when I decided to take a wife. The family line has to be continued, after all. Especially if the blood of generations of absolute rationalists is flowing in your veins. And so a woman came into my life. And although I knew that women are anything but rational beings—I remembered my grandmother’s collections of poetry and my mother’s long telephone calls—my wife presented me with a real challenge. The order in which I laid down my clothes on my chair before going to bed, the precision with which I portioned out the toothpaste onto my brush each morning, likewise how precisely I could fold toilet paper into the right shape for wiping my bottom, in what order I placed groceries in my refrigerator, and the logical means by which I conjured the last drop out of the ketchup bottle—none of this earned me the faintest esteem in my wife’s eyes. But esteemed or not, devoid of emotion. I felt that my wife simply didn’t understand me: she who puts enough washing powder in the machine to scrub clean three football teams’ uniforms; she whose hairs are clogging up our sink and bathtub drains because she can’t be bothered to comb by the garbage; she who throws away potato peelings, enough to feed all four of our neighbors’ children; she who hauls back from the shops a whole ton of creams and gels, only to petulantly throw half of them away; she who flicks the remote control on the television so frequently that I can’t follow what the Teletubbies are doing on Urmas Ott’s talk show and which rally team Marje Aunaste will be driving in next week. She doesn’t understand me. Mamma mia!

  So be it. I could have lived with this silent misunderstanding, but one evening things went too far. I was sitting on the sofa watching a show on television that showed how stuntmen prepare their tricks. They work to a pretty high standard, but every now and then a screw or a bolt gets loose and then they have pretty memorable stunt funerals. I was sitting there, I had to piss and I was thirsty. I waited for a commercial, got up, grabbed a less than half-full beer glass from the table with my left hand, and went to the toilet. The kitchen was a meter or so from the bathroom. On the way to I opened my fly with my right hand and pulled my member out. Since the door was open, I saw that the seat had been lifted. This gave me a noticeable time advantage while I got my external urinary sphincter relaxed, a couple of steps before standing in front of the bowl. So it was. I should add that all this time I was drinking the beer glass empty along the way. Naturally my calculations were precisely correct. The cascade of urine that burst from my member during the final step reached its target at just the right time, without the least careless splash on the sides of the bowl. When I left the toilet contentedly, I met my wife standing at the kitchen door. Her mouth was agape and her eyes were bleary. I went past her to award myself a new beer from the refrigerator. My wife stood frozen, her back to me. I poured the beer skillfully into the glass, such that the depth of the head would be no more than two to two and a half centimeters. And then she started to speak. She said that she had seen me as if in a slow-motion replay. She had seen me coming, my nose in the mug, at the same time as my watchful eye had sized up the toilet; I had fished my member out of my trousers, and, Lord save us, a yellow cascade of wee-wee had spilled out of me, making her afraid that I would cover the floor, the wall, and even herself with it, but at the last moment the full arc of the cascade had plopped into the bowl. She was so shaken that she couldn’t get another word out all evening.

  I took her reaction as a compliment and
congratulated myself that at last my sufferings were bearing fruit. That night I climbed decisively onto my wife’s back and celebrated our little achievement with some rapid and attentive screwing. To my great surprise, the next morning, my wife packed her bags and left. Impregnated, fortunately. The next time I heard from her was about nine months later. A son had been born to us, and I’m allowed to see him every Sunday. I was very pleased with that, because to the prospect of embarking upon a new adventure with yet another representative of the irrational female sex for the purpose of spawning offspring didn’t seem very inspiring.

  Now, though, I’m sitting here. It’s an odd place. We’re sitting in a circle, there are five of us, four of us patients. At least that’s what the fifth person thinks—in her own estimation, she is healthy.

  I don’t remember how I ended up here, but I do remember the first time I attended. The group was supposed to meet “at about six in the evening,” it said in the flyer. That specification drove us all mad. At 18:00 precisely there were four mutually unacquainted men in the room, and our faces betrayed the fact that the one who had summoned us was not present. The room was repulsive: cheerily colored curtains, chairs of different designs laid out chaotically on the floor, in one corner a pile of different-hued mattresses, and then a shelf with all sorts of bric-a-brac and stacks of stupid magazines. The ceiling was lit ridiculously bright, with electricity being consumed by the most uneconomic bulbs I’ve seen in my life. We all felt uncomfortable. We shifted from one foot to another, not daring to sit down or touch anything. Finally a fifth person entered the room. A woman. She smiled guilelessly at us and told us she was Katrin. By way of response we looked at our watches. The time was 18:18.

  In the course of time we’ve gotten to know each other. I’ve come into contact with some very exciting personalities here, and I feel good around them. Arved, for example. Arved always sits to my left. Every morning and evening he measures and weighs his wife, his two adolescent children, and himself. He has compiled a collection of statistical data on his family going back eighteen years, on the basis of which he does dynamic future projections of his family members’ body measurements. At three-year intervals. Calculating trends based on world markets, consumer-price indices, and prognoses of central bank rates, he has constructed a mathematical model for his family budget, which makes it possible for him to estimate, for example, how much will be spent on clothes and food in 2014. With 98.5 percent accuracy. We all appreciate Arved’s work a great deal. Except one of us: Katrin.

  Or Martin, for example. Martin is a wonderful guy. As a result of thorough calculations, he’s discovered some very interesting things. Martin actually found that eighty percent of the movements of his family in their home occur over twenty percent of the floor surface area. Adding the area covered by furniture to that needed for movement, he designed a new house for his family. With a surface area nearly four times smaller, the family was able to maintain more or less that same standard of living. But what a saving on building costs! What economy of execution! To say nothing of the fact that Martin’s house stands on a thirty-eight square-meter plot that he bought from a man for the price of a sandwich when his guard dog died of old age and he couldn’t do anything else with the kennel. We think Martin is a genius. But again, Katrin doesn’t think so.

  And then of course there’s Ott. Ott was already a smart operator when he took a new name for himself: Ott Kott. His parents had provided him with the name Otto Gottlieb. Well, listen. Ott Kott, with the initials O.K., is the dream name of any logical person. Ott was a taxi driver. He honed his skills so as to construct a minimal taxi and yet offer maximum service. He removed two of the car’s four cylinders, since, having estimated the average speed of travel in the city as twenty-seven kilometers an hour, he simply had no need for so many cylinders. Ott sold the cylinders at Kadaka car market, put the money he got for them in an envelope and posted it to the management of the taxi company. Ott used very little petrol. In addition to the savings from the reduced cubic volume of the engine, in his own garage Ott mixed petrol with cheap kerosene in a barrel reserved for the purpose, reducing the cost of fuel by a third. In choosing his routes, Ott always proceeded from a calculation of optimal mileage, without disdaining side roads, always overlooking some of the less-important traffic signs, and cutting right through any green spaces. Always with the aim of getting the passenger to their destination by the most direct route. On his dashboard, Ott replaced all the unnecessary gauges with cardboard fakes, and paid the proceeds from the sale of the original items, to the last cent, into the company’s bank account. That’s the kind of inventive man Ott was.

  So here we are: Arved, Martin, Ott, and myself. Four great men. And we pretend that we’re listening to Katrin, who thinks she’s curing us of a terrible disease. She calls our group Logisticians Anonymous. Actually we feel surreptitiously proud of that. Logisticians—a word to be proud of. Logistics—that is the greatest thing. It is what makes people human. Separates us from the animals. We’re able to compile all rational knowledge, calculate, measure, and then draw the right conclusions. We don’t tolerate waste. We recycle life—we who are each the result of a single, efficient pregnancy. Though, if you start to think about it, even that’s a bit of a waste. Wait a minute. How many spermatozoa are there in a single ejaculation? I’ll do a study of that at home. I’m sure that it’s possible to economize on that and solve our country’s overpopulation problem at the same time. You see—we’re full of good ideas! So it can’t be an illness.

  TRANSLATED FROM ESTONIAN BY CHRISTOPHER MOSELEY

  art

  [SLOVAKIA]

  RÓBERT GÁL

  Agnomia

  “It seems undignified,” says Jan, “to accept congratulations for the past, as if the context of that past, not worth remembering, is totally irrelevant. This isn’t a criticism of heroism, but a criticism of the need to hang your heroism out for adulation, as if every heroic act is equal. You can’t just equate an act of socially defined heroism with an act of highly individual—and therefore socially indefinable—heroism. Where is the boundary between the social need for heroes and the accidental hero, a partaker in a heroic deed, who doesn’t feel the need for a social proclamation of his heroism?” Jan is the hero of an invisible terror. Every opportunity for rebellion is punished. And because each rebellion is already punished while still in a state of potentiality, it’s never able to reach actuality in any other way but wounded. This is true for all Jan’s relationships, which never have happy endings. We’re talking about the hidden side of Jan, something one-sided, which is by definition already invisible, because it’s in the shadow of our hero. What occurs in the shadow can be only seen from inside the shadow—which means that we only learn about it when the shadow begins to speak. And then it’s necessary to differentiate what the shadow says from the fact that it’s being said by a shadow. Character isn’t built on the soft horizon of a sob, says Father, based on his beliefs, which he forces into my head by simply rejecting all of my objections. And this forces me to start up my defense mechanisms, so that inward screams, piled one on top of the other, gradually prevent my exterior from having its own face, a face that might reveal the character of my interior. This is how the need arises to compare one’s inner state with the exterior world of this or that environment. Errors posed as truth command the truth. Is a proof of belief confirmed by intransigence? And then there are all those unexplored areas of an incorrectly posed question. Standardized obsessions that fit the scheme of some ism, or others gulping down their breath in attacks of clairvoyance. The stirring of tensions between the two brings up a third type of obsession, the search for and discovery of order in chaos, which it shatters by following a single line of thought toward one final outcome. To reveal one’s color to others means to multiply the contrast, to bestow sweaty T-shirts to the backs of generations that will silently tag us as our own perpetrators. A circle is always one-sided
and that side always depends on the direction of its spin. Spinning it faster means, in practice, that a glimpse of its end naturally blends with the vision of its beginning. To push oneself off from any point on a circle is possible, though it never happens entirely at random. Transformation of form through content is not a linguistic game. It has to do with the inevitability of sustaining form and thus displaying its content. As in music, here it’s not about thoughts, but about the permanent tension caused by the need to think, about belonging to this or that content to the point of accepting it in the form of parasitism. Because the scalpel of intellect isn’t able to adequately discern between operation and autopsy, the object of its incision is abstract at first and only during the act itself does it emerge from the fog of unconsciousness into the sphere of understanding to gradually acquire the face of a conscious reality. A reality whose essence is deadened by autopsy, but is not actually dead, because it still exists. When Blevin showed up in Jerusalem with a huge suitcase, I was there by accident. I recall the burning heat in his eyes. It grabbed me at once because it contrasted whatever fragility marked his personality—just as Blevin’s smallish figure was in such stark opposition to the size of his luggage. Felix and I sit in a small pizzeria, waiting for him, and as soon as he shows up we order some pizza for everyone. Felix is very happy to see his friend after so many years and, right away, he starts explaining something to him. It has to do with the fact that the two of them actually have no place to stay, but “that doesn’t matter, the important thing is that you’re here.” I also remember my second meeting with Blevin rather well. It was in a small house in the leafy and lush Jerusalem district called Ein Karem. I went there invited by Felix one spring day shortly after noon, and after a series of forceful knocks on the door (and some silent communication with the dog tied to its doghouse next door), a wooden gate opened and Blevin, with a sleepy look, invited me in, as if he didn’t recognize me at all. His heavy eyes looked bleary from sleeping, but I was soon told how tired he was from hours and hours of meditating in the dark of his windowless room—specially built for just this purpose—in the attic of his house. On a wooden secretary near a wall, dozens of labels were glued with various maxims, imperatives, and simple advice for living. Carefully spaced, yet somewhat limiting the use of the desk, they were arranged in compartments—a regular structure of neurotic order. The labels were supposed to repeatedly remind Blevin of the strict differences between the desirable and the undesirable, as if some authority before him had engraved them into words and thus made them eternal in these very formulations. In a monastery park in the middle of Prague, a family of peacocks walks about freely. The majesty of the much-admired father peacock is suddenly disturbed when one of the park visitors opens a bag of birdseed, just like the old lady last time, who first frightened the peacock, then ostentatiously fed him her crumbs, and then finally, as if all that wasn’t enough, exclaimed in surprise: “Geez, he shat on me!” But let’s get back to Jan. Jan is a terrorist without a cause. He’s a hundred times brighter than most mortals, yet still missing that something which would make him wise. He’s like a lion with caged eyes, beaming his stare into eyes that are equally caged. This system of cages upon cages is a manifold product of his own caged brain. It is the language he opens with every word, so he can repeatedly lock it down into one and the same thought. Jan shaped his little missy in his own image, “to have her gain value,” but then she wanted to breed and so she married a tractor driver. Yes, anyone seeing Czechs and Slovaks abroad in the world has the tendency to think: What did these people come here to represent? And then a second question immediately follows: Can a Slovak comfortably experience democracy anywhere but in Slovakia? And soon other sequential questions stem from these, in which one can ask himself and immediately answer; understanding now why most citizens of small, meaningless countries remain stuck in those countries as though there were no other options. It’s precisely in small and meaningless countries that one finds writers who naturally think of themselves as “reproducers of reality,” but why this reality needs to be amplified in their writing, they don’t say. If we claim—and we do claim precisely this—that such reality must be produced in an artistic way, not simply re-produced, then we need to separate the work of art from art. Someone like Eli Roth shows up, a controversial Jewish film director, and simply shoots his chainsaw massacres in tiny Slovakia, to which Slovaks react first with rage, before realizing that this is a perfect way to get Slovakia some publicity. Roth, a young Tarantino, accomplishes in a single moment what dozens of elite intellectuals have attempted. Yes, people sense what other people are feeling and act toward them accordingly. They can be malicious that way. And in this sense, those of us whose destinies are to struggle in the waters of our own restlessness will always find ourselves at a disadvantage. Jan introduced me, one by one, to all his hostages. He drew me into his cunning conversational maneuvers, the results of which were more and more frightened looks from his girl, one of six current girlfriends. He liked to situate me between him and whichever of his girls as part actor and part observer, thus indirectly imitating my own situation of being unable to reach one because of the other, which may have something to do with the famous complex named for old King Oedipus. In this sense Jan functioned as my psychologist, yet more subconsciously than consciously, because that’s not how sadists think. Jan always has six girls, with one of the six receiving special attention, and who’s then rotated out. That is, so to speak, one is always manifest and the other five latent. They’re all so devoted to him that none of them dares to have another boyfriend. Jan would only find out about it anyway, they tell themselves, and spend their evenings masturbating, thinking of Jan. Meanwhile, my father, who simply thinks that Czechoslovakia should never have been divided, tells some anonymous person in a political discussion on the Internet what a wonderful person I am. My father, the most wonderful of all people, who for years has based his beliefs exclusively on his exertions within the need for their own implementation. This is the definition of a man of action, though how could such a term ever be defined when the result of an action is precisely a change of definition? Unless it’s the other way around, actions taken precisely to prevent some other action and thus sustaining the original definition (such as the political unit called Czechoslovakia). But if ideals are abstract, the actions corresponding to such ideals must be equally abstract. Thus, any previously defined words, around which the aforementioned process of recycling an action revolves, must gradually turn into memes, and thus lose their definitional substance. What’s left are dead-end streets, those snakes of well-meant, calculated reality, which always, for whatever reason, unseen by the scientist’s eye, manage to defy calculation. Yes, we all want to be oh-so understood! And yet we know very well that some of the things we try to understand are simply incomprehensible, and this precisely because of their essence. Why do we so stubbornly look for locks in every door—even the ones that are already open? This is also one of the questions regarding Buñuel and The Exterminating Angel. Mightn’t the existence of a lock on an opened door change the status of its openness? And so on. To create a culture necessarily means in most cases to be acultural. For why should a creator need to know what others create, for the purposes of his own creation? A widespread and blind groping about is sufficient for a creator, since as he knows very well that no groping can be without limits or else it would spill into something else. The role of the creator is to sustain the spill within one’s own character, preventing it from ever spilling into something else. As such, we’re dealing with the permanent maintenance of the desired flow, which for this reason becomes a flow of thought in the sense of a tautology—that is indisputable. A flow of thought in the sense of a realization of the act of thought, the flow of what’s being thought continually melting into the flow of thinking. This isn’t philosophy, just the gradual process of a creative undertaking—with jackhammer in hand. A creator is always more of a worker than an intellectual. A man forced to observe
is learning to observe; a circle inside a circle, repeatedly burst like a bubble. The lure of traps—traps that even traps fall into. I say: only people who are perverse in their body and soul can perform great deeds! claims Frantisek Drtikol in one of his letters, adding: But it must be a pure, beautiful, original, free-spirited perversion, bubbling up from the man’s own depth! It may not be a plagiarism, an imitated thing . . . One thing has a name, another is looking for a name. And it’s discovered that the name doesn’t belong to the named, but to the designation. The leap into the identity of that name, which is legitimate, because it’s already legitimized. The leap into the illusion of a break—for it is an illusory break—it never ceases appearing as a fault-line. Like a thought that isn’t thinking about itself, but about what it doesn’t want to think about, and from which it tries to separate itself. The mental process of the unfinished intention of desire. Shouts of an unknown nature. The claustrophobia of concerning oneself with them as a certain type of limit. Is this a sense of humor about the humorless? But jokes must come with humor, no? I’m sitting on a bench, a little before midnight, thinking; I settle down. And suddenly a girl sits next to me. I think intensely of lighting a cigarette and in the end I actually do it. The tension between us didn’t last long. I wanted to give her a chance, but she was impatient. She leaped up in a rage (I only then noticed her delicate nose and glasses with elegantly thin rims), just so that she could turn on her heel in front of my eyes and stamp out the cigarette butt of her desire with a disdainful gesture. But I survived it. And a day later she appeared again in the form of a different woman. An equally intemperate intellectual with tortoise-shell glasses and good skin. After a few days of getting to know each other, she informs me by cell phone that I need someone more refined. Laughter, like a dog barking, is a reply, an outburst, a response to my feeling for her; let’s call that feeling “resignation.” Response as a designation, a marking. Response—Narcissus’s echo to the silent companion of his doubled desire. My relationship to women is monomagical. To enter every situation unprepared, as though in the remnants of a dream. Building up the vibrations of what’s already been lived through, the tension generated by the possibility of survival. To find a window of a moment. To fail a test, an indicative sentence of contradiction. A human gets a taste for another human—cannibal. Images of fertility, geysers exorcizing ghosts. The sun winding through empty deposits of anxiety. A cohort of useless resolutions meeting behind enemy lines. The order-loving movement of a tumor of the spirit toward healing, away from one’s own body. And from every pain a question mark jumps out: Is this pain the right one? Defocusing the invisible toward greater and greater visibility. An escape manipulation, the coordinates of a spiderweb thrown into space. The insatiable cameras of untalented people, who float wherever they walk. Only to open their beaklike mouths, from which seeds of hatred are propelled by pressure. A guy with three mobile phones like three cocks and across from him a big-breasted babe who’s trying with all her might to look serious, as if it were possible in her case. Two toughs behind her back react to a remark by the aforementioned macho man who gets up for a moment to enact the screen-test of a gunslinger without a gun, because now he’s having a good time. His chick has been in the restroom for the last ten minutes. A fat boy from the next table sits in her place. The mirror of a window, through which I’m observing all this, is slowly fogged by the unexpected course of the evening. Spurred by nothing I can see—one, two, three—they all wink at me in succession. I’m in the groove. I’m tapping this nonsense into my head and don’t pay attention to the people I’m talking about. In one of the illustrations—self-portrait photos of naked L., depicting herself searching and in some places even in spasms, finding the right form of her corporeality—there are two spots on her neck, photographed from behind her back, which seems in this photo even more androgenic than it does in reality. The spots were of course painted on for effect, the photo wasn’t meant to be a document and yet for me they are always a memento, a visual meme, triggering an entire sequence of chain reactions: accusations and self-accusations. (To what degree must we provoke change in a human being while they are already being changed?) To bring out feelings as if internally hiding something. Controlled denial of wanting, which isn’t based on anything, nor is it justified by anything. The emptiness, which frightens us immediately, is barred by the structure of the net and breathing in it. Empty cans of what’s been drunk rattle through a street of static sculptures of the just restored. The looks of tourist children, their chirping cameras capture what was, angels included, and transform it into other materials. Time shifts between expectations and disappointments—unsteady, almost invisible. This is an annihilation of the sun and other such hermits. This is a tautology of every moment, as if every moment was necessarily a tautology. “If I knew she was so mentally unstable, I definitely wouldn’t have married her,” Ben says. And the vision of Ben’s interest in my work surpasses the consequences of my expectation. I need to reintroduce myself, years later, for he no longer walks around my place with a funnel in his ear to eavesdrop on me. What do Jan and Ben have in common? Nothing and much. Jan thinks of himself as a gourmet of life, to the point of having the need to lecture others about how to live. Jan still hasn’t lost his belief in reproduction, although preferring to constantly produce new things himself. Ben doesn’t talk about reproduction yet, but he’s also as an author, almost unproductive. Despite that, one can feel in him the need to change this state of affairs. Ben is insured against obvious loneliness through his paper marriage, though this evidently never much suited him. The illusory security of this status, which he imposed on himself and his wife, is primarily intended to hide something. But even Ben doesn’t believe in the irreversibility of his fate—and yet his actions, which all seem to haunt him, don’t support this confidence. We might point to the fact that he’s the younger of the two by a bit, because even Jan, when he was Ben’s age, perceived things similarly. Jan ran away from a childless marriage, stating that he was good enough to deserve other women. Ben probably thinks the same. At a certain stage of their lives, both could be seen walking around Prague in long black coats, cloaking the solidity of their pose even when walking. One flirted with artistic inclinations, the other only theorized over them. They both liked cats, but neither knew why. Both carefully maintained their daily bachelor rituals during relationships. One is convinced that women are supposed to tyrannize him; the other believes the opposite, a belief he practices fearlessly in private. They each have rock-hard reasoning behind their convictions, as demonstrated when push comes to shove. At that moment, they pay attention, focus their senses and, giving out the refined screams of intellectuals, recklessly disown themselves as well as anyone close. For every secret is generated by the revelation of something similar. Is there an urge to create the similar? But the similar thing is always equidistant to its original. It is the movement of illusion that displays the patterns to images, by which they are perceived. This is overstepping the boundary of necessity to return to the form, which the noise of contrast shed of its color.