Harlequin's Millions

by Bohumil Hrabal

  7

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS AND SUNDAYS, FRANCIN, who hated sitting around the house, liked to tinker. That was the only reason he tinkered, so he wouldn’t have to sit around the house, every Saturday he called in someone to help him, preferably a worker from the brewery but sometimes just an ordinary fellow he happened to meet in the little town. First he disassembled his motorcycle engine, then his car engine, and after midnight he put everything back together again, he tried to convince his helpers of the beauty and charm of an engine, enthusiastically explaining each and every part, the workers would listen respectfully, but their minds were elsewhere, at home, in the pub, each of them resolved firmly that this would be the last time he ever helped Francin with his tinkering, and in this way Francin, one by one and with great enthusiasm, got all the maltsters and all the coopers, all the simple and trustworthy people of the little town, to work for him, he couldn’t stand people who read books, who meant something in the little town. He liked the simple man, who listened respectfully or at least pretended to be as passionate about car parts as he was. But only here, in the retirement home, did I realize that Francin, with all his tinkering, had just been trying to run away from me, he loved me too much, whenever I’d look at him and smile, he’d blush to the roots of his beautiful hair, I turned him to jelly, he became submissive, pathetic, and was terrified that if I were to smile like that at other young men, they’d undoubtedly fall as much in love with me as he was. And he wished the impossible for himself, that I would belong to him alone, that he would never have to share my smiles, my eyes, my hair, my words with anyone else. So it’s only now, now that I’ve had my teeth pulled, that I understand that I was once a goddess to him, that he was powerless against me, he could never be rude to me, he could never, ever look at me, he could never stand my gaze for too long, he’d lower his eyes and knit his fingers and then, on the pretense that he was going out to get coal, he’d go out to the brewery courtyard, where he could recover his composure in the fresh air, he spent a long time shoveling coal into buckets from the big piles next to the malt house, and when he came back inside, he stoked the fire and pretended to be busy with something, anything, as long as he didn’t have to look me in the eye, and if he did look at me, it was to watch me as I sat reading or did the ironing. Most of all he liked to help me stretch the eiderdowns and sheets, which had been sprinkled with water that had dribbled from my fingers as if from a holy water font, we’d each grab two corners of the sheet, crumple them up in our hands, and then, standing face-to-face, we’d pull so hard it was as if we wanted to tear the sheet down the middle, and then came the best part, after we had stretched the damp sheets with our fingers we moved toward each other with ludicrous little steps, the corners of the sheet and our fingers touched and I took the corners from Francin’s hands, he was always so happy, he came mincing toward me and then stood still with one leg raised, as if he were doing a dance step, and laughed, and was sorry when I put one sheet after another, one eiderdown after another, one pillowcase after another into the big laundry basket, the same basket we used to gather fruit in summer, dozens of such baskets of apples and pears from the brewery orchard … When we were finished, that was the only time he ever looked at me, he looked at me for a long while, somehow that laundry bound us together, somehow in those happy moments we understood each other … And on those Saturday and Sunday mornings when he was tinkering, he always perked up, on those nights and mornings and afternoons he suddenly seemed more handsome, while his helper looked pale and had circles under his eyes and was unsteady on his feet, Francin straightened up and sighed happily, sometimes when he was tightening his nuts and bolts he got his fingers dirty, sometimes he even tore a little piece of skin, it hung from his finger, but he just shrugged, pulled off the piece of skin and went on working. It wasn’t until he came back, I could always tell from a distance that Francin was coming home to me with a sore finger, it wasn’t until he sat down and looked at his finger that he turned pale, he bandaged the finger and showed it to everyone, that sore finger, he even had to lie down, he lay in bed and held the bandaged finger straight up in the semi-darkness, and moaned, groaned, bid me farewell, begged me, if he were to die, to bury him in the graveyard in Konice, the village where he was born. Sometimes I even had to send for Dr. Gruntorád, Francin’s finger had become inflamed, there was danger of blood poisoning and Dr. Gruntorád took out his scissors to cut open the finger and the swelling … And Francin moaned, cried out … For the love of God, Doctor, do something about my finger, I’m at death’s door, do something, for God’s sake … and then the doctor had to wrestle with him, Francin couldn’t stand the feel of the scissors, the doctor had to push him down on the bed and sit on top of him, and because the doctor had been a medical officer in the Austrian army, he shouted at Francin … Is this an Austrian soldier? Is this a man who served with the Uhlans? But Francin kept on fighting him, he hit him back, very disrespectfully, if you ask me, and howled … No one in this universe had ever been in such agony as he was in, not only did his whole body hurt but his soul too and in a moment he’d be dead, we might as well get down on our knees so he could bless us … but the doctor summoned our maid Anka from Budečko, who, everywhere she went, even to the movies, always carried an ax, she came in, laid down her ax and grabbed Francin by the scruff of the neck, and when she grinned at him and he saw her only remaining tooth, he started shivering and went limp and the doctor cut open the infection and Francin fainted. And when Anka had quit working for us and Francin needed medical assistance, Dr. Gruntorád brought along his own maid, in his barouche, and she was even more imposing than our Anka, and when Francin saw her, well, he took one look at her and was flat on his back and the doctor treated him in that position … And afterward, when Francin was recuperating, he drove all over the little town where time stood still, stopping for everyone he met, he showed them his bandaged finger, grinning, and told them what had happened and in doing so relived the greatest pain and agony in all of Central Europe, which he, Francin, manager of the beer brewery, had suffered … Even people who had cancer or were missing a leg, or an arm, even they had to listen to the gory details, Francin, weeping with self-pity, told them that people with no arms and people with no legs and people who had cancer weren’t suffering from any real disease, but that the pain in this finger, and he shoved the bandage under their noses, this was the worst pain north of the Alps that a former Uhlan, who feared nothing and was allowed to fear nothing, had ever had to endure … Whenever Francin got the flu, or angina, he’d fire up the tall stove until it was red hot and I had to bustle around him all day long and wrap him in damp sheets, and he just lay there, every day we had to kneel down next to his feverish bed, and he blessed us, he wrote and dictated his last will and testament, sometimes he’d climb out of bed and stand behind the red-hot stove and sweat until he nearly collapsed, then all of a sudden he’d have a change of heart, the fever would magically disappear, he’d get dressed with the look on his face of someone who has forgotten something important and walk out into the courtyard, then into the garage, lift the hood and was suddenly fit as a fiddle and began tinkering on the carburetor or some other part, it was very drafty in the brewery, but Francin went on tinkering, with a droplet on the end of his nose, and when he returned five hours later, he announced that he was better again … I strolled thoughtfully from one statue to the next, the sand in the castle park crunched beneath my shoes like fresh snow, I walked past all the months, which the sculptors had carved from sandstone with their bare hands, I didn’t even realize I was walking, I was so absorbed in the naked men carrying a wild boar, one of whom was a young hunter whose three-cornered hat was outlined against the blue sky dappled with white clouds, I identified with the lives of all the naked young women, May, June, July, August, statues that made such a deep impression on me that they evoked memories of Francin, the beer brewery, our maids. Anka from Budečko was truly my favorite, she was honest and courageous, and she’d spent so man
y years with us. But once a year she would get completely drunk, she’d come staggering out of the brewery, where she’d been drinking lager with the fellows from the fermentation room, her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm, and when they sat down she’d start talking about how someday everything would be different, someday there would be no more maids and no more mistresses, and there would be no more beggars and no more slaves, everyone would be equal, then she stood up, combed back her hair with her fingers, Anka liked to have her hair cut like a man’s, then sat down again and picked up where she had left off, her eyes still sparkling, and I had to laugh, but in the end Anka was right, because there are no more maids now. I strolled down the footpath, then up the sandstone steps, above me on the castle terrace I heard cards being slapped down on the table and the cries of cardplayers, victorious cheers, two old women in flowered dresses came waddling by, they leaned on canes and moved their enormous bodies slowly down the path, raking up the sand behind them with their rigid shoes. It’s a good thing that there are no more maids, I’d pretty much forgotten them by now. Each of them arrived with a wicker basket, in which they carried an umbrella, and they always came from somewhere in the mountains, from Slovakia. They were always very young, barely twenty, and rather shy, those girls, but they still had to sleep in the kitchen, even though we had to walk through there every evening and every night to get to the hallway, and if we came in from outside, we had to go through the kitchen to get to our rooms, whenever we had guests the girls sat at the kitchen table and didn’t dare go to sleep, they sat there pretending to read, because they could easily have laid down on the trundle bed, but the girls were so young that they were easily embarassed, imagine if someone saw them lying there, asleep, arms and legs flung wide, as they let themselves be carried away to a more pleasant world than the one they lived in. It’s a good thing the maids are gone, along with the rest of those golden days, but it is only here in the retirement home that I’ve thought of them again and I feel a little ashamed. Those girls worked all month for room and board and a hundred and fifty crowns, they lived in the kitchen and if anyone, no matter who, came in at nine, ten o’clock at night, the girls always stood up respectfully and it was only after we had gone to bed that they pulled out their own strange little bed, which served as a table during the day, it was the kind of bed you could slide out like a matchbox and so narrow you could only sleep in it if you lay on your back with your legs stretched … The girls were always firing up the stoves, cleaning the rooms, feeding the pigs and goats, I fed the pigs and goats too, but only occasionally, only when I wanted to show that I knew how … And all those maids of ours in those twenty years or more, after they’d received their Christmas gifts, a telegram would arrive in January from the village where they were born, a telegram from their father, mother or brother telling them they had to come home immediately because someone in the family was dying … And so once again they packed up their wicker baskets, stuck in their umbrellas and, with a guilty smile and a dejected little curtsy, offered me their hand, blushed and went back home, so that in February I had to start looking for a new maid … The only one who stayed with us for longer than a few months, three years in fact, was Anka from Budečko, she was really a man dressed up as a woman, our Anka, and at night, if anything seemed amiss in the brewery, Anka was there in a flash, she grabbed her ax, raked her fingers through her short-cropped hair and cried … Let’s get ’em, Ma’am! But she always went alone, because I was too scared, she single-handedly drove away the thief, struck a rat dead with her ax when she found it gnawing at the belly of a fatted goose, and once when she came out of the cinema with her ax hanging from the garter under her skirt, right there along the Elbe she single-handedly beat a man senseless who had attacked her and had said, foolishly, your money or your life. Anka only had one tooth, she told me once roaring with laughter how she’d lost the others, back home in Budečko she had worked as a coachwoman and one day when she was saddling a horse, she punched him in the flank so the horse would exhale and she could tighten the strap a notch, but the horse inhaled and while she was holding the end of the strap between her teeth so she could adjust it at the right moment, the horse exhaled so powerfully he yanked out all her teeth, all except that one tooth, which jutted from her gums, glittering ominously, whenever she laughed. It’s a good thing the girls have all disappeared, it’s a good thing people don’t have to make a living the same way they did in the old days, it’s a good thing maids no longer sleep in the kitchen, I myself would have probably died of fright or jumped in front of a train if I’d had to be a maid … But Francin was crazy about those girls, and from what I could see and hear, they were crazy about him too. He loved to sit with them, loved when they confided in him, all those maids were just like him when he was a boy, and a young man, as a child Francin had been unbelievably poor, he and Uncle Pepin would decorate the Christmas tree with nothing but apples and cookies, on Christmas Day all they ever got was a cup of milky coffee and a small slice of cake. Francin always looked forward to the evenings when I had to go to rehearsal, he’d sit down at the kitchen table across from whichever maid we had at the time and the two of them would launch into an animated conversation, laughing and finishing each other’s sentences, Francin agreed with everything the maids said, and when he told them about the time he’d trained as a salesclerk, somewhere in Humpolec, the girls would crow with delight, they’d jump up and hug him, and he hugged them back … Sometimes, when I deliberately came home early, before Francin could come meet me at the bridge, I’d stand in the courtyard looking in through the kitchen window, I’d listen to what he and the maid were talking about, and I found that it was the very same thing Anka from Budečko had always talked about, after the fellows from the fermentation room had plied her with lager and she stood in the doorway and heaped reproaches on Francin and me, she shouted at us that the golden days of the rich were numbered and that soon everything would be the way it eventually turned out to be. As I sat crouched and listening under the kitchen window, I heard that Francin actually shared the maids’ opinion, but was afraid of violence, he always thought that if everyone were to become just like him, the people and the situation would change automatically, if only because the rich would start sharing their wealth more fairly with others … And when I walked into the kitchen, it was over. Francin broke off the conversation, stammered something and then went upstairs, the maid blushed deeply and began making up the trundle bed. Francin certainly had his secrets! Every month I found a bar of chocolate in his briefcase, with chocolat au lait on the wrapper, and each time the chocolate bar would disappear and I never knew who Francin had given it to, as a friendly gesture perhaps, a small gift … Any time I saw one of the maids chewing something, I’d squeeze her cheeks together and force her to open her mouth, but each time she was only chewing a bit of dried apple or a crust of bread, and each time those maids would laugh at me, sometimes they tried to make me pry open their mouths, they even wrestled with me, those girls, they fought me tooth and nail until I was forced to open their mouths myself, completely convinced I’d find chocolat au lait inside, but once again it would only be a bit of dried apple … And so I never got a single bar of the chocolate, which disappeared every month, year in year out, and to this day, here in the retirement home, I still don’t know who Francin was giving away the milk chocolate to all those years. One night I came home from my rehearsal earlier than usual, Anka from Budečko was sitting in the cellar cutting up apples for the goats, the light in the cellar was going on and off, the maid shrieked with laughter, I quietly unlocked the front door, and in the hallway Francin was standing next to the cellar door switching the light on and off and he was laughing with his mouth full of chocolat au lait, Anka from Budečko was in the cellar howling with laughter, Francin kept flipping the light on and off and nearly choked on the chocolate, he was as happy as a child … Quietly, I went outside again, to the front of the brewery, I walked back and forth for a while, so as not to intrude on Francin’s
happiness, because if I had walked in and surprised him, Francin would’ve immediately begun making up his bed for the night, his body would’ve started hurting all over, he would’ve fired up the tall stove and crawled into bed and swallowed a few aspirins and begged me to kneel down so he could say his last good-byes, because he’d be dead by morning … Whatever happened to Anka from Budečko, that maid of ours with her one tooth? Now I think it was probably Anka who got all that chocolate, that chocolat au lait … I’m walking down the footpath in the castle park, it’s a good thing there are no more maids, the two old lady pensioners in flowered dresses are sitting on a bench, I can’t see them anymore, but I can hear them through the shrubbery … Yes, yes, says the voice of one old lady, so that night he came around with his daughter’s urn in my shopping net. The ample bosom of the other woman rises and she exclaims … Good heavens! I walk on, past the statues, which I hardly notice anymore, it’s a good thing that there are no more maids, that they disappeared along with the golden days, it’s a good thing that there are no maids, it’s a good thing that they’re not … Now I’m standing in front of the statue of Winter, a fur cloak billows around the gaunt, naked old man, the cloak floats three inches above his chilled body, his fur cap looms against the sky like a bishop’s miter, but the old man is warming his hands over small flames that rise up through a bucket full of holes, which is being held up to him by a chubby cupid. The two old lady pensioners drag themselves along on their stiff legs, now they’ve turned the corner and are walking through the tunnel of pruned red beeches, leaving only a trail of sand behind them, as if someone has been walking along dragging two sacks of grain, two dead deer … What a shock! cries a voice from the red foliage … But why would anyone go swimming in the Adriatic? And the other voice cries, in a heartrending tone … Heaven help us …