The Absolute at Large

by Karel Čapek

  General Hampl brought his troops to a halt before the city and sent forward a trumpeter and a herald with the demand that all non-combatants should leaves their houses. No one came out, however. The houses were empty.

  The Little Square was empty.

  The Great Square was empty.

  The whole city was empty.

  General Hampl twirled his moustache and made his way to City Hall. It was open. He entered the Council Chamber. He took his seat in the Burgomaster’s Chair. Sheets of paper were lying spread out in front of him on the green cloth, and on each of them these words had been written in a beautiful hand:

  “In the name of His Majesty the Emperor Bobinet.”

  General Hampl stepped to the window and cried: “Soldiers, the battle is ended. You have crushed with the mailed fist the clerical tyranny of the Council clique. An era of progress and freedom has dawned for our beloved city. Return now, all of you, to your homes. You have played your part nobly. Nazdar!” (“Good luck go with you!”)

  “Nazdar!” responded the army, and dispersed.

  One of Hampl’s warriors (they came to be called simply Hampelmen) went back home to the Burgomaster’s house; he had shouldered a rifle left behind by a Chinese soldier.

  And so it was that Hampl became Mayor. It has to be acknowledged that amid the prevailing anarchy his prudent administration also was blessed with comparative peace, thanks to the wise counsels of Bishop Linda and the Worshipful City Fathers.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  A CORAL ISLAND IN THE PACIFIC

  “ WELL, I’ll go to blazes,” said Captain Trouble, “if that lanky fellow over there isn’t their leader!”

  “That’s Jimmy,” remarked G. H. Bondy. “He used to work here at one time. I thought he was quite tame by now.”

  “The devil must have owed me something,” the Captain growled, “or I shouldn’t have had to land here on this wretched . . . Hereheretua!!! Eh?”

  “Listen,” said G. H. Bondy, laying his gun on the table on the veranda. “Is it the same as this in other places?”

  “I should say so,” boomed Captain Trouble. “Not far off, on Rawaiwai, Captain Barker and his whole crew were eaten. And on Mangai they had a banquet on three millionaires like yourself.”

  “Sutherland Bros.?” asked Bondy.

  “I think so. And on Starbuck Island they roasted a High Commissioner. Is was that fat MacDeon; you know him, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know him?” shouted the Captain. “How long have you been here, man?”

  “This is my ninth year,” said Mr. Bondy.

  “Then you might well have known him,” the Captain said. “So you’ve been here nine years? Business, eh? Or a little home of refuge, is it? On account of your nerves, I suppose?”

  “No,” said Mr. Bondy. “You see, I foresaw that they were all going to be at loggerheads over there, so I got out of the way. I thought that here I would find more peace.”

  “Aha, peace! You don’t know our big black fellows! There’s a bit of a war going on here all the time, my lad.”

  “Oh well,” G. H. Bondy demurred, “there really was peace here. They’re quite decent chaps, these Papuans or whatever you call them. It’s only just recently that they’ve begun to be . . . rather disagreeable. I don’t quite understand them. What are they really after?”

  “Nothing special,” said the Captain. “They only want to eat us.”

  “Are they as hungry as all that?” asked Bondy in amazement.

  “I don’t know. I think they do it more out of religion. It’s one of their religious rites, don’t you see? Something like communion, I take it. It takes them that way every now and then.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Bondy thoughtfully.

  “Everyone has his hobby,” growled the Captain. “The local hobby here is to eat up the stranger and dry his head in smoke.”

  “What, smoke it as well?” Mr. Bondy exclaimed with horror.

  “Oh, that’s not done till after you’re dead,” said the Captain consolingly. “They cherish the smoked head as a souvenir. Have you ever seen those dried heads they’ve got in the Ethnographical Museum at Auckland?”

  “No,” said Bondy. “I don’t think . . . that . . . that I’d look very attractive if I were smoked.”

  “You’re a bit too fat for it,” observed the Captain, inspecting him critically. “It doesn’t make so very much difference to a thin man.”

  Bondy still looked anything but tranquil. He sat droopingly on the veranda of his bungalow on the coral island of Hereheretua, which he had purchased just before the outbreak of the Greatest War. Captain Trouble was glowering suspiciously at the thicket of mangroves and bananas which surrounded the bungalow.

  “How many natives are there on the island?” he asked suddenly.

  “About a hundred and twenty,” said G. H. Bondy.

  “And how many of us are there in the bungalow?”

  “Seven, counting the Chinese cook.”

  The Captain sighed and looked out to sea. His ship, the Papeete, lay there at anchor; but to get to her he would have to go along a narrow path between the mangroves, and this did not precisely seem advisable.

  “Look, here, sir,” he said after a while, “what are they squabbling about over there, anyway? Some boundary or other?”

  “Less than that.”

  “Colonies?”

  “Even less than that.”

  “Commercial treaties?”

  “No. Only about the truth.”

  “What kind of truth?”

  “The absolute truth. You see, every nation insists that it has the absolute truth.”

  “Hm,” grunted the Captain. “What is it, anyway?”

  “Nothing. A sort of human passion. You’ve heard, haven’t you, that in Europe yonder, and everywhere in fact, a . . . a God, you know . . . came into the world.”

  “Yes, I did hear that.”

  “Well, that’s what it’s all about, don’t you understand?”

  “No, I don’t understand, old man. If you ask me, the true God would put things right in the world. The one they’ve got can’t be the true and proper God.”

  “On the contrary,” said G. H. Bondy (obviously pleased at being able to talk for once with an independent and experienced human being), “I assure you that it is the true God. But I’ll tell you something else. This true God is far too big.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I do indeed. He is infinite. That’s just where the trouble lies. You see, everyone measures off a certain amount of Him and then thinks it is the entire God. Each one appropriates a little fringe or fragment of Him and then thinks he possesses the whole of Him. See?”

  “Aha,” said the Captain. “And then gets angry with everyone else who has a different bit of Him.”

  “Exactly. In order to convince himself that God is wholly his, he has to go and kill all the others. Just for that very reason, because it means so much to him to have the whole of God and the whole of the truth. That’s why he can’t bear anyone else to have any other God or any other truth. If he once allowed that, he would have to admit that he himself has only a few wretched metres or gallons or sack-loads of divine truth. You see, suppose Dash were convinced that it was tremendously important that only Dash’s underwear should be the best on earth, he would have to burn his rival, Blank, and all Blank’s underwear. But Dash isn’t so silly as that in the matter of underwear; he is only as silly as that in the matter of religion or English politics. If he believed that God was something as substantial and essential as underwear, he would allow other people to provide themselves with Him just as they pleased. But he hasn’t sufficient commercial confidence in Him; and so he forces Dash’s God or Dash’s Truth on everybody with curses, wars and other unreliable forms of advertisement. I am a business man and I understand competition, but this sort of . . .”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted Captain Trouble, and aimed a shot into the mangrove
thicket. “There, I think that’s one less of them.”

  “He died for his faith,” whispered Bondy dreamily. “You have forcibly restrained him from devouring me. He fell for the national ideal of cannibalism. In Europe people have been devouring each other from time immemorial out of idealism. You are a decent man, Captain, but it’s quite possible that you’d devour me on behalf of any fundamental principle of navigation. I’ve lost confidence even in you.”

  “You’re quite right,” the Captain grumbled. “When I look at you, I feel that I’m . . .”

  “. . . . a violent anti-Semite. I know. That doesn’t matter, I had myself baptized. But do you know, Captain, what’s got hold of those black idiots? The night before last they fished out of the sea a Japanese atomic torpedo. They’ve set it up over there under the coco-nut palms, and now they are bowing down before it. Now they have a God of their own. That’s why they must devour us.”

  War-cries sounded from the mangrove thicket.

  “Do you hear them?” muttered the Captain. “On my soul, I’d rather . . . go through the geometry examination all over again. . . .”

  “Listen,” Bondy whispered. “Couldn’t we go over to their religion? As far as I am concerned . . .”

  At that moment a gun boomed out from the Papeete.

  The Captain uttered a low cry of joy.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  AT SEVEN COTTAGES

  AND while the world shook with the clash of armies, while the boundaries of States writhed to and fro like earth-worms, and the whole earth was crumbling into a field of ruins, old Mrs. Blahous was peeling her potatoes in Seven Cottages, Grandfather Blahous was sitting on the doorstep smoking beech-leaves, and their neighbour, Mrs. Prouzova, was leaning on the fence, repeating meditatively, “Yes, yes.”

  “Aye, yes,” returned Blahous after a while.

  “My word, yes,” observed Mrs. Blahous.

  “That’s how ’tis,” Mrs. Prouzova answered.

  “Oh, what’s the use?” said Grandfather Blahous.

  “Yes, that’s it,” added Mrs. Blahous, peeling another potato.

  “They say the Italians got a good hiding,” Blahous announced.

  “Who from?”

  “From the Turks, I expect.”

  “Then, I suppose that’ll be the end of the war?”

  “What d’you mean? The Prussians’ll start off now.”

  “What, against us?”

  “Against the French, they say.”

  “Good heavens above, everything will be dear again.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Aye, yes.”

  “What’s the use?”

  “They say that the Swiss wrote not long ago that the others might give it up soon.”

  “That’s what I say.”

  “Yes. Why, the day before yesterday I paid fifteen hundred crowns for a candle. I tell you, Blahous, it was one of those miserable things only fit for the stable.”

  “And you mean to say it cost you fifteen hundred?”

  “Not far off. There’s a rise for you, friends!”

  “Aye, yes.”

  “My word, yes.”

  “Who’s ever have thought it? Fifteen hundred!”

  “You could get a fine candle for two hundred at one time.”

  “Yes, auntie, but that’s years ago. Why, even an egg only cost five hundred in those days.”

  “And you could get a pound of butter for three thousand.”

  “And lovely butter, too!”

  “And boots for eight thousand.”

  “Yes, yes, Mrs. Blahous, things were cheap in those days.”

  “But now—”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “If only it was all over and done with!”

  There was silence. Old Blahous rose, straightened his back, and went into the yard for a wisp of straw.

  “Oh, what’s the use?” he said, unscrewing the head of his pipe in order to pull the straw through.

  “It wasn’t half smelling before,” remarked Mrs. Blahous, full of interest.

  “Smelling,” said Blahous, nodding. “How can it help smelling? There’s no tobacco left in the world now. The last packet I had was the one my son the Professor sent me—let me see, that was in ’49, wasn’t it?”

  “That was just four years ago come Easter.”

  “So ’twas,” said Granfather Blahous. “We’re getting an old man now. Very, very old.”

  “And what I want to know,” began Mrs. Prouzova, “is what’s all this awful to-do about nowadays?”

  “What to-do?”

  “Well, this war, I mean.”

  “Aye, yes, Heaven knows what it’s about,” said Blahous, blowing down his pipe until it gurgled. “That’s what nobody knows, aunt. They say it’s about religion—that’s what they tell me.”

  “What sort of religion?”

  “Oh, ours or the Swiss—nobody knows which. It’s so as there’ll be only one religion, they say.”

  “Well, we used to have only one religion before.”

  “But other places had a different one, aunt. They say there was orders from above that there must be only one.”

  “What sort of orders? Where from?”

  “Nobody knows. They say there were once machines that had religion inside of them. It was hidden in a sort of long boiler.”

  “And what were the boilers for?”

  “Nobody knows. Just a sort of boilers. And they say that God appeared to people to make them believe. There was a lot in those days, aunt, that didn’t believe. One has to believe in something; what’s the use? If people had only believed, God wouldn’t have appeared to them. So it was only their godlessness that made Him come into the world, see, aunt?”

  “Well, yes, but what did this awful war begin for?”

  “Nobody knows. People say that the Chinese or the Turks began it. They say that they brought their own God with them in those boilers. They’re supposed to be terrible religious, the Turks and the Chinese. And so they wanted us to believe the way they did.”

  “But why should we?”

  “That’s it, nobody knows. If you ask me, the Prussians started it. And the Swedes, too.”

  “Lord, Lord!” lamented Mrs. Prouzova. “And the prices things are now! Fifteen hundred for a candle!”

  “And what I say,” maintained old Blahous, “is the Jews started the war so as to make money out of it. That’s what I say.”

  “We could do with some rain,” observed Mrs. Blahous. “The potatoes are far too small. Like nuts.”

  “It’s my belief,” Blahous went on, “that people just invented that about the Lord God, so as to have someone to blame things on. That was all made up. They wanted a war and they wanted an excuse. It was all a put-up job.”

  “Who did it, then?”

  “Nobody knows. What I say is, it was all fixed up with the Pope and the Jews and the whole lot of them. Those . . . those . . . Kalburators!” shouted Grandfather Blahous, in great excitement. “I’d like to say it to their faces! Why, did anybody need a new Lord God? The old one was good enough for us country people. There was just enough of Him, and He was good, and honest and upright. He didn’t show himself to anybody, but we had peace instead. . . .”

  “What are you asking for your eggs, Prouzova?”

  “I’m getting two thousand each at present.”

  “They say they’re asking three in Trutnov.”

  “And I tell you,” declared old Blahous vehemently, “it was bound to come. People were cross with each other even then. Why, your husband that’s dead now, Prouzova, God rest his soul, was a spiritualist or medium or something in those days. And one time I said to him just in fun, ‘I say, Prouza, you might call back that evil spirit that’s just escaped from me.’ And he lost his temper, and from that day to the day of his death he never spoke a word to me again. Yet he was my neighbour, mind you, aunt. And look at Tony Vlcek. He always swore by those foxfates that you fertilize with, and if anyone didn’t belie
ve in them, he’d keep on going for him like mad. And my son, the Professor, tells me it’s the same wherever you go. If anyone sets his mind on anything, he must have everybody else believe in it. And he won’t let anyone alone. That’s how it’s all come about.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Aunt Prouzova, yawning. “What’s the use of it all?”

  “Ah, yes,” sighed Mrs. Blahous.

  “That’s the way things are in this world,” added Mrs. Prouzova.

  “And you women would like to go on cackling all day long,” Grandfather Blahous concluded peevishly, and tottered off into the house.

  . . . And the earth shook with the clash of armies, and thinkers in every camp confidently asserted that “a brighter day was dawning.”

  CHAPTER XXIX

  THE LAST BATTLE

  IN the autumn of 1953 the Greatest War was drawing to a close. There were no armies left. The armies of occupation, cut off for the most part from their homes, were dwindling away and gradually vanishing like water in the sand. Self-appointed generals marched from town to town, or rather from heap to heap of ruins, at the head of five men, one a drummer, one a thief, one a schoolboy, one a man with a gramophone, and one of whom nobody knew anything. They went about collecting contributions or arranging benefit performances “in aid of the wounded and their widows and orphans.” No one knew by now how many warring camps there were.

  Amid this universal and indescribable collapse the Greatest War drew to its close. The end came so unexpectedly that no one nowadays can tell just where the last so-called decisive battle was fought. Historians are still at variance as to which engagement marked the close and extinction of the world-conflagration. Certain of them (such as Dührich, Assbridge, and more particularly Moroni) are inclined to the view that it was the battle of Lintz. In these extensive operations sixty soldiers were engaged, representing eleven hostile camps. The conflict broke out in the large saloon of the Rose Inn, the immediate cause being the waitress Hilda (as a matter of fact it was Marena Ruzickova of Novy Bydzov). Giuseppe, the Italian, proved victorious and carried Hilda off; but since she ran away next day with a Czech called Vaclav Hruska, this too was not a decisive battle.