Three Novels: Hordubal, Meteor, an Ordinary Life

by Karel Čapek

  The doctor was in his garden when Mr. Popel came to return the manuscript, again so carefully tied round as if it were a fascicle of completed deeds.

  “Have you read it?” the doctor asked.

  “I have,” murmured the old gentleman, unable to think of anything else to say. “Listen,” he blurted out after a while, “but it couldn’t have done him any good, to write things like that! It’s clear from his handwriting how unsteady he was towards the end, as if his hand was shaky.” He looked at his own hand; no, thank God, it’s not so shaky yet. “I think that it must have upset him, don’t you? In his state of health—”

  The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Of course it was bad for him. It was still lying on the table when they asked me to see him. He must have just finished it—if it really is finished at all—down to the last dot. Of course, it would have been better for him if he had played patience or something like that.”

  “Perhaps he might have been still alive, eh?” surmised Mr. Popel hopefully.

  “Oh, yes,” mumbled the doctor. “A couple of weeks, or a month or two—”

  “Poor man,” said Mr. Popel with emotion.

  The garden was silent, except that somewhere on the other side of the fence a child was shouting. The old gentleman thoughtfully stroked the turned-up corners of the manuscript. “Tell me,” he said suddenly, “what ought I to say of my own life! It wasn’t just simple and … ordinary like his, my friend. You are still young, you don’t know yet what kind of things a man can fall into…. Where should I get to if I tried to explain it all somehow? Well, it was, and what’s the use of talking. And you, you, of course, as well—”

  “I haven’t time for such-like things,” said the doctor. “To potter about inside oneself, or that sort of thing. Thanks very much, I find enough muck in other people.”

  “So you say,” Mr. Popel began hesitatingly, “better to play patience—”

  The doctor glanced at him quickly; don’t you worry, I shall not examine you here! “It depends,” he said curdy, “on what one does best.”

  The old gentleman blinked thoughtfully. “He was such a good, orderly man—” The doctor turned and made as if he were pinching off a withered flower. “Perhaps you’d like to know,” he murmured, “I’ve changed those aquilegais in his garden there. So that now he’s gone everything is left in order.”

  AFTERWORD by Karel Čapek

  The end of the trilogy. It’s as if the guests had gone—the house was full of them and now, suddenly, it’s silent; we’re a bit relieved and a bit forlorn. It is in this moment that we remember this or that we had wanted to say to those who have gone, and didn’t; something we had meant to ask them, and didn’t; or we remember what sort of person each of them was, and recall what he said and how he looked at us. Fold your arms and, for a few moments more, think about those who are no longer here.

  For instance, Hordubal the farmer. A cattle man who falls foul of a horse man, a conflict between a man who from solitude had turned completely inward, and the simple, that is to say brutal, facts surrounding him. But that isn’t it, that isn’t the real tragedy of Hordubal. His real and most bitter lot comes only with what happens to him after his death. With the way his story becomes coarse in the hands of men; the way the events, which he lived in his way and according to his inner law, become hazy and cumbrous when policemen reconstruct them by means of objective detection; the way it all becomes corrupted and entangled and contorted into another, hopelessly ugly picture of life. And how Hordubal himself appears twisted and grotesque when the public prosecutor, the mouthpiece of ethical judgment, calls his shadow as a witness against Polana Hordubal.

  What remains now of Juraj Hordubal? Only a helpless, feeble-minded old man. Yes, among those human proceedings Juraj’s heart was lost; that is the real, tragic story of Hordubal the farmer—and more or less of us all. Fortunately, we do not usually know how our motives and acts appear to other people; perhaps we would shrink in terror from the hazy, twisted picture that even those who think kindly of us have. We must become conscious of the hidden aspects of the true individual and his inner life so that we can try to know him more justly—or at least to respect more fully what we do not know of him. Hordubal’s story will have been written in vain if it is not clear what a dreadful and common injustice was done to a man.

  Our knowledge of people is generally restricted to allotting them a definite place in our life systems. How differently the same people and the same facts appear in Hordubal’s version, in the eyes of the policemen, and in the ethical preoccupations of the court! Is Polana beautiful and girlish, as Hordubal sees her, or is she old and bony, as the others say she is? This question seems simple and rather irrelevant; and yet it is on this point that the question turns: whether Stepan Manya (who in the real story was called Vasil Manak, just as Hordubal was called Juraj Hardubej) committed murder for love or for profit. The whole story will look different according to the answer given to that question.

  And there are heaps of such uncertainties. After all, what was Hordubal like, or Polana? Was Stepan a sullen brute or a charming uncle whom the child, Hafia, adored? And what about that question of the fields and the stallion? A story at first simple breaks up into a series of insoluble and debatable uncertainties as soon as it is fitted into various systems and subjected to various explanations.

  The same events are related three times: once as Hordubal lived them, then as the policemen ascertain them, and finally as the court decides them. The farther we go, the more the discrepancies and inconsistencies grate—it is in spite of this, or just for this reason, that truth has to be ascertained. This does not mean that there is no truth, but that it is deeper and weightier, and reality more spacious and more complicated, than we usually admit. The story of Hordubal ends with a wrong unreconciled and with a question that has no answer; it sinks into uncertainties just when the reader expects to be dismissed in peace. What, then, is the actual truth about Hordubal and Polana, what is the truth about Manya? What if that truth is something still broader, encompassing all the accounts, and even exceeding them? What if the real Hordubal were both weak and wise, if Polana were beautiful as a lady and worn as an old washerwoman, if Manya were a man who killed for love as well as a man who murdered for money? At first glance it is a chaos we can’t make out and which is not at all to our taste; and it is for the author to somehow put in order, as much as possible, what he has permitted.

  And then we have Meteor, the second phase of the trilogy. Here, too, the life of a man is portrayed in a triple, or quadruple way, but the situation is inverted: in every possible way people try to find the lost heart of a man; they have only his body, and they try to fit to it a corresponding life. But this time the point is not how far they diverge in their explanations, which, after all, they have to conjure out of their own wits (we may call it intuition, imagination, whatever). What is so striking is that here and there, in some things, they coincide with or hint at the probable reality—but even this isn’t so much the point. Each one places the given fact—the unconscious body of a man—into a different life story; the differences of each story come from who is telling it; each one includes himself, his experiences, his trade, his methods, and his inclinations. First is the doctor’s objective diagnosis; second, a story of love and guilt, the feminine sympathy of a nurse; third, the abstract, intellectual construction of a clairvoyant; and finally, the creative work of a poet. It would be possible to think up innumerable other stories, but the author had sense enough to stop in time.

  All these stories have this in common: that in them is mirrored more or less fancifully the one who is telling them. The man who fell from the sky gradually becomes a doctor’s case, a nun’s, a clairvoyant’s, and a poet’s; it is always him and, at the same time, the other one, the one who is preoccupied with him. Whatever we look at is that thing and, at the same time, something of us, something of ours, something personal; our knowledge of the world and of men is like a confession. We see
things differently according to who and what we are; things are good and evil, beautiful and dreadful—it depends upon the eyes with which we look at them. How terribly big and complex, how spacious is reality when there is room enough for so many different interpretations! But it is no longer a chaos, it is an abundance, a distinct plurality; it is no longer an uncertainty, but a polyphony. What threatened us like a blind conflict tells us that we are listening not only to different and inconsistent testimonies, but also to different people.

  However, if what we apprehend is always encompassed by our I, how can we apprehend this plurality, how can we approach it? Well, we must inquire into the I that we insert into our interpretation of reality; that is why An Ordinary Life had to come, with its probing around in the interior of a man. And here too we find this plurality: a man is a host of real and possible persons—and at first glance it looks like a worse confusion, like the disintegration of a man who has torn himself to bits and thrown his I to the winds. Only at this point did it become clear to the author: it’s all in order; the reason we can apprehend and understand plurality is that we ourselves are such a plurality! Similia similibus: we apprehend the world through what we are ourselves, and in apprehending the world we discover ourselves. Thank God, now we are home again; we are of the same stuff as that plurality of the world; we are at home in that spaciousness and infinity, and we can respond to those numerous voices. It is no longer only I, but we people; we can come to an understanding through the many tongues that are in us. We can respect a man because he is different from us and understand him because we are his equals. Fraternity and diversity! Even that most ordinary life is still infinite, immense is the value of every soul. Polana is beautiful, had she been ever so bony; the life of a man is too big to have only one face, to be sized up at a glance. No longer will Hordubal’s heart be lost, and the man who fell from the sky will live through more and more stories. Nothing ends, not even a trilogy; instead of ending, it opens wide, as wide as man is able.

  If you liked this book, you’ll probably like most of Catbird’s other Czech literature in translation. Here’s some information about these books. If you would like to order any of the books or receive notice of future Catbird books (i.e., our bi-annual catalogs), please call us at 800360-2391, e-mail us at catbird@pipeline.com, fax us at 203-230-8029, or send us a letter at 16 Windsor Road, North Haven, CT 06473. Shipping and handling is $3.00 total, no matter how many books you order.

  Other Books by Karel Čapek

  TOWARD THE RADICAL CENTER: A Karel Čapek Reader

  Edited by Peter Kussi, foreword by Arthur Miller

  Čapek’s best plays, stories, and columns take us from the social contributions of clumsy people to dramatic meditations on mortality and commitment. This volume includes the first complete English translation of R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the play that introduced the literary robot. paper, cloth, 416 pp., illustrated.

  WAR WITH THE NEWTS. Translated by Ewald Osers

  This new translation revitalizes one of the great anti-utopian satires of the twentieth century. Čapek satirizes science, runaway capitalism, fascism, journalism, militarism, even Hollywood. “A bracing parody of totalitarianism and technological overkill, one of the most amusing and provocative books in its genre.”—Philadelphia Inquirer. paper, 240 pp.

  TALES FROM TWO POCKETS. Translated by Norma Comrada.

  Čapek’s unique approaches to the mysteries of justice and truth are full of twists and turns, the ordinary and the extraordinary. “Čapek’s delightfully inventive tales … stretch the detective story to its limits and, in the process, tell us much about the mysteries of human existence.”—New York Times Book Review “One of the Best Books of the Year.”—Publishers Weekly. paper, 365 pp., illus.

  APOCRYPHAL TALES. Translated by Norma Comrada.

  In these stories, Čapek approaches great events and figures of history, literature, and myth in startling ways. “These little nuggets combine broad learning with sharp wit to make powerful moral statements.”—Publishers Weekly. paper, 192 pp.

  TALKS WITH T. G. MASARYK. Translated by Michael Henry Heim.

  Never have two such important world figures collaborated in a biography. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937) was the original Philosopher-President who founded Czechoslovakia in 1918, an important inspiration for Vaclav Havel. paper, 256 pp.

  Novels by Vladimír Párol

  THE FOUR SONYAS. Translated by William Harkins

  In Páral’s darkly comic world, people will do almost anything to attain their dreams, and freedom is nothing but another fairy tale. “The ways in which The Four Sonyas … conceals its larger meaning just beneath the surface of the narration is wonderful to behold.”—New York Newsday. cloth, 391 pp.

  CATAPULT. Translated by William Harkins

  This twist on the Don Juan story looks at the attractions and difficulties of freedom. “Páral masterfully switches from farce to drama and back again, so that in the end we feel Jost’s dilemma even as we’re laughing at him.”—New York Times Book Review. paper, 240 pp.

  Last But Not Least

  WHAT OWNERSHIP’S ALL ABOUT by Karel Poláček

  Translated by Peter Kussi

  The first novel translated into English by the most prominent Czech Jewish writer between the wars. “Poláček studies the effect of power on the values and dreams of ordinary people, revealing their weaknesses and skewering their pomposity with a deftness and dark wit reminiscent of Chekhov.”—Library Journal. cloth, 238 pp.