Harlequin's Millions

by Bohumil Hrabal

  16

  FOR MORE THAN A QUARTER OF A CENTURY I WAS ONE of the leading ladies at the local drama society. After my six hundredth performance, they gave me a diploma and a large ring inscribed with words of gratitude. But I threw myself so completely into so many different roles, so many different types of women, that I couldn’t always distinguish between the roles I had played and the things I had really experienced. And I’d heard so many radio programs and seen so many television plays and series that in the end I stopped trying to tell the difference between what had really happened to me and what had happened to other people. In the quarter of a century that I did amateur theater with the drama society in the little town where time stood still, in those years, every two months, at the twenty rehearsals, the read-throughs, the three dress rehearsals, and then several performances, I was so immersed in my role that I could think of nothing else, could be nothing else, than the type of woman for whom that play had been written. As Faith Bly I lived the story of a girl who had murdered her own child, this was in the play Windows by John Galsworthy! It was hard for me, but even harder for Francin, what he had to put up with, even when I was just reading my part aloud! Me, murder my child? I was inconsolable when my favorite piglet had to die, now I was supposed to have murdered my own child. I cried my eyes out before finally becoming that murderess. But while Francin was still trying to avoid me, I was soon back in the theater rehearsing my next role, a fairly indecent young woman in The Garden of Eden, Miss Toni LeBrun, who leads her colorful life alternately as a cabaret singer in Palais de Paris in the city of Klausenburg, in Romania, and in the second act is living in the Eden Hotel on the Italian Riviera. Even after all these years I still have no trouble reciting my lines as little Scampolo, Emilia Bernini, or Enid Underwood, the daughter of John Anthony from the play Strife by John Galsworthy. Poor Francin, I was better at remembering other peoples’ lives than my own. And my favorite role, in The Tea Cosy, the poignant Fanynka, daughter of Matyáš Skřivánek the shoemaker … And Nanynka in Nanynka Kulichová’s Wedding? And Ginette in A Kiss in a Taxi? And the governess Lola in The Geyser? And Jane Campbell in Romance of the Roses? And Lady Chiltern in An Ideal Husband? Or Anais Beauperthuis in An Italian Straw Hat? To this very day I can recite from memory the part of Olga, the vaudeville dancer in The Ghosts, or Zdisa Donátová, the captain’s daughter in The Return of Youth, or Camilla, the niece of the Duchess de Capablanca in the play The Werewolf, or Nelly Goldsmith in The Monkey Talks! And what about my Kitty Verdun, Stephen Spettigue’s young ward in Charley’s Aunt, or Elizabeth, the wife of Jack Mackendrick in My Heart Lies in the Hebrides? For more than twenty-five years I was someone else, when I acted I became that naïve little girl, or young lady, or wife, or mother of a grown son, sometimes I had to play a prostitute or a murderess, so how hard could it be for me to invent a few details in a few of those stories they told, those witnesses to the old times of “Harlequin’s Millions”? My true story, though, is that I had to leave the brewery, those four rooms of mine, and that I moved to the little villa on the Elbe with Francin and Pepin, to a house I had designed myself, not realizing that in doing so I had designed my own cage, a cage for Francin and Pepin, for the people who came to visit us, because when the floor plans were ready, everyone was enthusiastic and envious, but once we’d moved in, along with all that flotsam and jetsam from the brewery, the house on the banks of the Elbe was filled to the rafters with clutter, the courtyard was strewn with car parts, planks, all kinds of junk that just lay there glaring at me, I’d never been able to figure out what all that junk was for. But the thing that made the least sense about that house was that all the doors to all the rooms opened out onto the same hallway, a hallway no bigger than a five-by-five-foot rug. The hallway door, the pantry door, the bathroom door, the kitchen door, the bedroom door and the dining room door. And so it happened that several times a day, in that little hallway, one of us or one of our guests would be trapped between the doors, several times a day whoever was sitting in the kitchen or dining room would be paralyzed with fright because they’d heard such a terrible shriek, then swearing, and then apologies. That was because whenever someone went to the bathroom, whenever I went into the pantry, someone always opened the door, then all the doors in that little hallway would swing open and then the doors would suddenly be stuck and there was always someone trapped behind one of them. Usually it was Uncle Pepin, who went to the bathroom more often than we did, he always tried to walk out of the kitchen as fast as he could, but at the same time I’d be trying to slip through as fast as I could with my bottle of beer, and then it was bang! crash! and screaming and shouting, but especially, our bodies touching in the half-darkness … And in the end Uncle Pepin would be turning around in the kitchen door, or the bathroom door, opening the door slightly and trying to slip in or out, but that was exactly what Francin was trying to do from the bedroom, where he had his desk … It went like this day after day and no one could guess just when it was going to happen, because we were all kind of bashful, no one ever announced he was going to the bathroom, so going to the bathroom was always a silent affair and it was as if no one ever went to the bathroom at all, anyone caught coming out of the bathroom turned crimson with embarrassment, and when he was sitting at the table again it was a long time before he regained his composure, because at the very moment when you were least expecting it, when a guest or one of us wanted to slip out as quickly as possible while pretending there was nothing the matter, at that moment, when everyone else thought he was in the hallway, another door opened and trapped the guest, or one of us, and then, when we had freed ourselves from behind the doors, we all sat down at the table, stunned and silently blaming each other, because we could never understand that we ourselves were to blame. And when Uncle couldn’t walk anymore and was starting to talk nonsense, he was brought to the retirement home, to Count Špork’s castle, to the ward for bedridden patients, when I visited him there I was amazed at the way the castle was designed and built, with the doors at the end of the long corridors, so you only ran the risk of someone opening the door from the other side, and the first time I came home from the castle, I suddenly saw the senselessness of our own house, that hallway of ours, where Francin and I were constantly bumping into each other and our guests, once a day I was frightened out of my wits by the banging and crashing of the doors and wished I could live in the castle, which was now a retirement home, where the corridors and doors were built so that no one could get trapped. That was why I dreamt of the home, I wanted more than anything to live there, in the Count’s old castle, to walk and stroll through the castle garden, admiring the statues of the beautiful young women, to always have enough space around me, even if it meant I had to share a room with four or eight others, because when I said that married couples had their own room, it was just a fairy tale I’d made up … And I was also tempted by the central heating, all the corridors, all the bathrooms, all the rooms and halls, from autumn to spring the whole castle was as warm as toast … while from autumn to spring in our little villa on the Elbe the wind and rain rattled the windowpanes, the house was drafty and cold, we had only one stove to keep us warm, Francin would throw in cut-up tires, which burned well and heated the stove until it was red-hot, but you could only feel the heat if you held your hands a few inches away. But I was the one who’d designed the room to look like the kind they have in England, with a glass wall shaped like a castle window, the wall was made almost entirely of glass, six large windowpanes that looked directly out onto the river, where gusts of wind and rain whistled across the water, there was such a draft here that all over the house it was like someone pressing their cold hands against your forehead, against your back. Even though we wore fur-lined coats around the house, we shivered with cold, even though we stoked up the tall stove with brown coal and pieces of tire, the house was lashed by snow and filled with the chill blowing in off the cold, filthy surface of the river. But that was also because all the doors opened onto that little
hallway, it was so drafty there that even when we were home alone, there would be such a strong wind blowing through the house that Francin’s pant legs would flap, a handkerchief that had fallen on the floor would be swept up by the draft and flung against the door, salt and pepper would swirl through the air of the dining room, flowerpots of cyclamen, my favorite plant, would topple over … But especially at night, or in the evening, and always when we were least expecting it, the draft would slowly blow open one of the doors, we’d get up to see who had come in, we shuddered in fear of who it might be, but suddenly a fierce wind would blow off the river and slam the door shut, so hard it was as if a guest had stormed out whom we’d offended in some way and who slammed the door with a bang, as if to let us know he’d never come see us again … this was all because I had drawn and designed the perfect little villa, which in reality was a disaster, for us it had seemed like some enchanted, mysterious castle somewhere on a high mountain in the Carpathians, the kind you see at a wax museum or an amusement park … We often thought of selling the house, of buying the kind of house our neighbors had, a house that looks like two railroad cars pushed together, where one stove is enough to heat the whole place, I often went over there just to warm up and was amazed at how quiet it was in that little house, even if there was a storm raging overhead, or it was snowing, or raining … Here they had such small windows, like the ones in railroad cars just behind the locomotive, little windows like the kind you see in mountain huts. Here it was toasty warm from autumn to spring and all it took was an ordinary, coal-burning kitchen stove, you just put in a scoop of coal and threw in some wood and crumpled paper, a stove that gave off as much heat as the central heating in Count Špork’s castle, the retirement home where Uncle Pepin was slowly wilting in the ward for bedridden patients, a castle that was the castle of my dreams, I often lay wrapped in blankets on the sofa, because there was such a draft, it opened doors and then slammed them so hard they nearly fell off their hinges, then blew them open again, sometimes the door stayed wide open and the most wonderful vision floated in, a vision of everything that had once been beautiful about the brewery and that I had seen in the castle, where I imagined not only myself living but also Francin, who loved heat even more than I did … But then a great windstorm arose from the other side of the river, it hurled itself against the wall of the former graveyard and split in two and then smashed into one of the six big windows in the glass room, shattering it to pieces, and that’s when I knew we were in trouble, the storm blasted open the doors in the hallway, Francin jumped out of bed but couldn’t get hold of the door handles, the wind was stronger than he was, all the doors were flung open at once, in the bathroom the towels swished back and forth like the tails of crazed and panic-stricken cows, in the pantry a gust of wind lifted the racks slightly and swept the pots of jam and compote to the ground with a playful clatter, the wind came charging into the bedroom and smashed through the windowpanes in a shower of tinkling glass and whipped out the curtains, which streamed in the wind and sounded like flags, wet flags on a flagpole, I pulled my quilt over my head, but the storm wind, which had died down, as if gathering its strength, now blew so hard against the bed that it leapt up and threw me out onto the carpet … And Francin stood there in that little hallway of mine, the hallway I had designed myself, all six doors kept flying open and slamming shut with a resounding crash, when Francin tried to stop one of the doors, the other doors, still opening and shutting, spun him around and threw him to the floor, he scrambled to his feet and then as if caught in the spin cycle of a washing machine was flung back down by the irregular, powerful blows of the hallway doors … And then came the moment we hadn’t expected, perhaps it was even for this very reason that the windstorm had forced its way into our home … The big cabinet in the bedroom, that whole cabinet was knocked over by a single blast of wind, it smashed open on the floor and the mingled scent of all kinds of powders wafted through the house, everywhere were broken pots and jars of old skin cream, streams of perfume and cologne ran across the floor, all the perfume I had left, everything we hadn’t been able to give away to the people who helped Francin work on his Škoda, and suddenly the cabinet full of unsold goods from the Oreum felt like a reproach, a sin, one we had long since forgotten … Yet all those smells and dusty powders suddenly revived me, I suddenly realized that I’d never actually had to be ashamed of abandoning my little town where time stood still, that when all was said and done, it had been been the most glorious time of my life, that because of it I’d been able to resist turning prematurely into a provincial housewife, and that if I ever had, it would only have been after I’d fought hard for the right to my own happiness, even though in the end Francin had been the one to suffer, but later, after I had gotten down on my knees and begged, he had blossomed, and become the master of the house … I stood up, leaned into the gale, I stood there as it lashed my face with a whirlwind of smells, the wind had opened all the boxes of powder, I stood there, fell to the floor, but quickly got to my feet again, I couldn’t help smiling at the knowledge that I had designed the hallway with the six doors for this very reason, so that a moment would come when I could leave behind everything that tormented me, sweep it all away, the moment when I’d realize that my place was here and nowhere else, the moment when I’d know and name all the fragrant aromas that the wind blew in my face and chased through the broken window and up into the sky, to heaven, somewhere far beyond the graveyard, beyond the river, the pills for a perfect bosom, Elixir Lavalier, the triumph of French cosmetics … perfumes rising and drifting and fading away, the scent of drowned roses, water lilies, sprigs of lilac and jasmine … eternally fragrant fantasies … the gentlest hair lotions with the scent of violets … Peruvian soaps for removing wrinkles slid across the floor like chunks of ice … glycerin soaps with the scent of Highland heather … birch water from Hamburg smashed against the wall, astringent rivulets that restored one’s youthful charm and defied old age … Pearls of Venus for pearly-white hands flew all around, clouds of rouge and talcum powder sailed past, and Dralle’s Illusion, the true fragrance of lilies of the valley that quickened every woman’s pulse, the scent of blue-orchid and water-lily soaps, the wind even blew anti-wrinkle strips out of their boxes and stuck them to my forehead, hair lotions, mouthwashes for teeth and tongue, I noticed a stream of liquid trickling across the bedroom floor, I stuck in my finger, sniffed, it was borax shampoo … lotions to beautify the neck and hands … And once more the wind burst into our home, it scooped up the empty, overturned cabinet, circled it twice and then brought it crashing down, into the devastation, the fragrant ruins … and at the sound of that crash I knew that the lid had banged shut, once and for all, on my past, it was all behind me now, we could take everything that was left of my Oreum to the dump, there was no longer any need for me to feel oppressed, everything had been swept away, just as when a child is finished playing with his toy figures and sweeps them off the table, to heighten the absurdity of the game …