Too loud a solitude

Bohumil Hrabal (1976)

• One
  • Only the sun has a right to its spots. - Goethe
  • For thirty-five years now I've been in wastepaper, and it's my love story.
  • I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me. My education has been so unwitting I can't tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.
  • Such wisdom as I have has come to me unwittingly, and I look on my brain as a mass of hydraulically compacted thoughts, a bale of ideas, and my head as a smooth, shiny Aladdin's lamp.
  • How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn't have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book had anything to say, it burns with a quiet laught, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.
  • And now it is all recurring in me.
  • If I knew how to write, I'd write a book about the greatest of man's joys and sorrows. It is by and from books that I've learned that the heavens are not humane, neither the heavens nor any man with a head on his shoulders - it's not that men don't wish to be humane, it just goes against common sense.
  • Rare books perish in my press, under my hands, yet I am unable to stop their flow: I am nothing but a refined butcher.
  • And I huddle in the lee of my paper mountain like Adam in the bushes and pick up a book, and my eyes open panic-stricken on a a world other than my own, because when I start reading I'm somewhere completely different, I'm in the text, it's amazing, I have to admit I've been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I've been in the very heart of truth.
  • Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a stranger to myself, I go home, walking the streets silently and in deep meditation, passing trams and cars and pedestrians in a cloud of books, the books I found that day and am carrying home in my briefcase. Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, never bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know. On I go through the noisy streets, never crossing at the red; I walk subconsciously unconscious, half-asleep, subliminally inspired, with every bale I've compacted that day fading softly and quietly inside me. I have a physical sense of myself as a bale of compacted books, the seat of a tiny pilot light of karma, like the flame in a gas refrigerator, an eternal flame I feed daily with the oil of my thoughts, which come from what I unwittingly read during work in the books I am now taking home in my briefcase. So I walk home like a burning house, like a burning stable, the light of life pouring out of the fire, fire pouring out of the dying wood, hostile sorrow lingering under the ashes.
  • I can be by myself because I'm never lonely, I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.
• Two
  • ..neither the heavens are humane nor is any man with a head on his shoulders.
  • ..the part of the Talmud that says: "For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us."
  • You wouldn't believe how many mice there are in a cellar like mine, two hundred, five hundred maybe, most of them friendly little creatures born half-blind, but there's one thing we have in common, namely, a vital need for literature with a marked preference for Goethe and Schiller in Morocco bindings.
• Three
  • Most of all I enjoy central-heating control rooms, where men with higher education, chained to their jobs like dogs to their kennels, write the history of their times as a sort of sociological survey and where I learned how the fourth estate was depopulated and the proletariat went from base to superstructure and how the university-trained elite now carries on its work. My best friends are two former members of our Academy of Sciences who have been set to work in the sewers, so they’ve decided to write a book about them, about their crissings and crossings under Prague, and they are the ones who taught me that the excrement entering the sewage plant at Podbaba on Sundays differsw substantially from the excrement entering it on Mondays, and that each day is so clearly differentiated from the rest that the rate of flux may be plotted on a graph, and according to the ebb and flow of prophylactics one may determine the relative frequency with which varying sections of Prague indulge in sexual intercourse.
  • Today, however, my friends made an even deeper impression on me with a report of a war, a total, humanlike war, between white rats and brown, which, though it ended in the absolute victory of the whites, had led to their immediate breakdown into two groups, two opposing clans, two tightly organized rodent factions engaged at this very moment in a life-and-death struggle for supremacy of the sewers a great rodent wax over the rights to all the refuse and fecal matter flowing through the sewers to Podbaba, and as soon as the present war was over, my friends the academic sewersweeps informed me, the winning side would again break down, like gases and metals and all organic matter, into two dialectically opposed camps, the struggle for supremacy bringing life back to life, the desire for conflict resolution promising imminent equilibrium, the world never stumbling for an instant. I could see how right Rimbaud was when he wrote that the battle of the spirit is as terrible as any armed conflict; I could grasp the true meaning of Christ’s cruel words, “I came not to send peace, but a sword”; and having received my education unwittingly, I was always amazed at Hegel and what he taught me, namely, that the only thing on earth worthy of fear is a situation that is petrified, congealed, or dying, and the only thing worthy of joy is a situation where not only the individual but also society as a whole wages a constant battle for self-justification.
  • And while the sewers of Prague provide the scene for a senseless war between two armies of rats, the cellars are headquarters for Prague’s fallen angels, university-educated men who have lost a battle they never fought, yet continue to work toward a clearer image of the world.
  • never having known glory, would never relinquish shame
• Four
• Five
  • Humbly and quietly I scraped up the remains of his remains, the toughest part being the red hair in the linoleum—it was like the spines of a porcupine run over by a truck; I had to use a chisel on it—and when I finished, I stuffed the leftovers under the clothes he had on in the coffin, covered his head with the cap I’d found hanging in the signal tower, and placed a volume of Immanuel Kant in his hands, opening it to a beautiful text that has never failed to move me: “Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder—the starry firmament above me and the moral law within me,” but, changing my mind, I leafed through the younger Kant and found an even more beautiful passage: “When the tremulous radiance of a summer night fills with twinkling stars and the moon itself is full, I am slowly drawn into a state of enhanced sensitivity made of friendship and disdain for the world and eternity.”
  • Meanwhile, the wall kept advancing and retreating, according to whether I pushed green or red, and in between I learned from the Theory of the Heavens how in the silence, the absolute silence of the night, when the senses lie dormant, an immortal spirit speaks in a nameless tongue of things that can be grasped but not described.
  • It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I’d seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence.
  • Twenty-one sunflowers lit up the dark cellar and the few mice left shivering for want of paper, and one mouse came up and attacked me, jumping on its hind legs and trying to bite me or knock me over, straining its tiny body, leaping at my leg and gnawing at my wet soles, and each time I brushed it away, gently, it would fling itself at my shoe until finally it ran out of breath and sat in a corner staring at me, staring me right in the eye, and all at once I started trembling, because in that mouse’s eyes I saw something more than the starry firmament above me or the moral law within me. Like a flash of lightning Arthur Schopenhauer appeared to me and said, “The highest law is love, the love that is compassion,” and I realized why Arthur hated strongman Hegel, and I was glad that Hegel and Schopenhauer weren’t leading opposing armies, because the two of them would wage the same war as those two rat armies in the sewers of Prague.
  • At first I thought she put so much wood on the fire just to win me over, but then I realized it was in her, the fire was in her, she couldn’t live without fire.
  • Anyway, there I lay, half asleep, overwhelmed by the gnawing going on above me, and, as usual when I drift off, I was joined by a tiny Gypsy girl in the form of the Milky Way, the quiet, innocent Gypsy girl who was the love of my youth and used to wait for me with one foot slightly forward and off to the side, like a ballet dancer in one of the positions, the beautiful, long-forgotten beauty of my youth. Her body was covered with sweat and a gamey musk-and-pomade-scented grease that coated my fingers when I stroked her, and she always wore the same dress covered with soup and gravy stains in the front and whitewash and woodworm stains—from carrying rotten boards she found among the rubble—in the back. I met her near the end of the war when, on my way home from Horký’s, where I’d had a few beers, she latched onto me, tagged along, so that I had to turn and talk to her over my shoulder, and she never tried to pass me, she just toddled noiselessly behind, and when we came to the first intersection I said, “Well, good-bye, I’ve got to be going,” but she said she was going in the same direction, and when we got to the end of Ludmila Street I said, “Well, good-bye, I’ve got to be going home,” and she said she was going in the same direction, so on we went, and I purposely walked all the way to Sacrifice and held out my hand to her and said, “I’ve got to be going home now,” but she said she was going in the same direction, and on we went until we came to the Dam of Eternity, and I said I was home now and we’d have to say good-bye, and when I stopped at the gas lamp in front of my door and said, “Well, good-bye now, this is where I live,” she said she lived there, too, so I unlocked the door and motioned for her to go in ahead of me, but she refused and told me to go in first, and since the hall was dark, I did, and then I went down the stairs and into the yard and up to the door of my room, and when I’d unlocked it, I turned and said, “Well, good-bye, this is my room,” and she said it was her room, too, and she came in and shared my bed with me, and when I woke up in a bed still warm with her, she was gone. But the next day, and every day thereafter, the moment I set foot in the yard I saw her sitting on the steps in front of my door and some white boards and sawed-off beams lying under the window, and when I unlocked the door, she would leap up like a cat and scamper into my room, neither of us saying a word. Then I went for beer with my big, five-liter pitcher, and the Gypsy girl would light the old cast-iron stove, which boomed even with the door open, because the room had once been a blacksmith’s shop and had a high ceiling and a huge fireplace, and she would make supper, which was always the same potato goulash with horse salami, then sit by the stove, feeding it with wood, and it was so hot that her lap glowed gold and gold sweat covered her hands, neck, and constantly changing profile, while I lay on the bed, getting up only to quench my thirst from the pitcher, after which I handed it to her, and she would hold the giant pitcher in both hands and drink in such a way that I heard her throat move, heard it moaning quietly like a pump in the distance. At first I thought she put so much wood on the fire just to win me over, but then I realized it was in her, the fire was in her, she couldn’t live without fire.So we went on living together even though I never really knew her name and she never knew or wanted or needed to know mine; we went on meeting every night, even though I never gave her the keys and sometimes stayed out late, until midnight, but the moment I un- locked the main door I would see a shadow slip past, and there she was, striking a match, setting fire to some paper, and a flame would sputter and flare in the stove, which she kept going with the month’s supply of wood she’d laid in under the window. And later in the evening, while we ate our silent supper, I would turn on the light bulb and watch her break her bread as if she were taking Communion and gather up all the crumbs from her dress and toss them reverently into the fire. Then we switched off the bulb and lay on our backs, looking up at the ceiling and the shimmer of shadow and light, and the trip to the pitcher on the table was like wading through an aquarium filled with algae and other marine flora or stalking through a thick wood on a moonlit night, and as I drank I always turned and looked at my naked Gypsy girl lying there looking back at me, the whites of her eyes glowing in the dark—we looked at each other more in the dark than by the light of day. I always loved twilight: it was the only time I had the feeling that something important could happen. All things were more beautiful bathed in twilight, all streets, all squares, and all the people walking through them; I even had the feeling that / was a handsome young man, and I liked looking at myself in the mirror, watching myself in the shop windows as I strode along, and even when I touched my face, I felt no wrinkles at my mouth or forehead. Yes, with twilight comes beauty. By the flames in the stove’s open door the Gypsy girl stood up, naked, and as she moved, I saw her body outlined in a yellow halo like the halo emanating from the Ignatius of Loyola ce mented to the façade of the church in Charles Square, and when she added some wood to the fire and came back and lay down on top of me, she turned her head to have a look at my profile and ran her finger around my nose and mouth. She hardly ever kissed me, nor I her; we said everything with our hands and then lay there looking at the sparks and flickers in the battered old cast-iron stove, curls of light from the death of wood. All we wanted was to go on living like that forever. It was as if we had said everything there was to say to each other, as if we had been born together and never parted. During the last autumn of the war I bought some blue wrapping paper, a ball of twine, and glue, and while the Gypsy girl kept my glass filled with beer, I spent a whole Sunday on the floor making a kite, balancing it carefully so it would rise, and I tacked on a long tail of tiny paper doves strung together by the Gypsy girl under my tutelage, and then we went up to Round Bluff, and after flinging the kite to the heavens and letting the cord run free for a while, I held it back and gave it a few tugs to make it straighten up and stand motionless in the sky so that only the tail rippled, S-like, and the Gypsy girl covered her face to her eyes, eyes wide with amazement. Then we sat down and I handed it to her, but she cried out that it would carry her up to heaven—she could feel herself ascending like the Virgin Mary—so I put my hands on her shoulders and said if that was the case we’d go together, but she gave me back the ball of twine and we just sat there, her head on my shoulder, and suddenly I got the idea to send a message, and handed the kite to the Gypsy girl again, but again she froze and said it would fly away with her and she’d never see me again, so I pushed the stick with the twine into the ground, tore a page out of my memo pad, and attached it to the tail, and as soon as the twine was back in my hands, she started screaming and reaching after the message as it jerked its way up to the sky, each burst of wind traveling through my fingers to my whole body, I even felt the message making contact with the tip of the kite, and suddenly I shuddered all over, because suddenly the kite was God and I was the Son of God, and the cord was the Holy Spirit which puts man in contact, in dialogue with God. And once we’d flown the kite a few more times, the Gypsy girl screwed up her courage and took over the twine—trembling as I had trembled, trembling to see the kite tremble in the gusty wind—and, winding the twine around her finger, she cried out in rapture. One evening I came home to find her gone. I switched on my light and went back and forth to the street until morning, but she didn’t come, not that day or the next or ever again, though I looked everywhere for her. My childlike little Gypsy, simple as unworked wood, as the breath of the Holy Spirit—all she ever wanted was to feed the stove with the big, heavy boards and beams she brought on her back, crosslike, from the rubble, all she ever wanted was to make potato goulash with horse salami, feed her fire with wood, and fly autumn kites. Later I learned that she had been picked up by the Gestapo and sent with a group of Gypsies to a concentration camp, and whether she was burned to death at Majdanek or asphyxiated in an Auschwitz gas chamber, she never returned. The heavens are not humane, but I still was at the time. When she failed to return at the end of the war, I burned the kite and twine and the long tail she had decorated, a tiny Gypsy girl whose name I’d never quite known.
• Six
  • But that wasn’t what scared me; what scared me was that suddenly I knew for certain that the gigantic press before me was sounding the knell of all smaller presses, I saw that all this meant a new era in my specialty, that these people were different and their habits different. Gone were the days of small joys, of finds, of books thrown away by mistake: these people represented a new way of thinking. Even if each of the workers took home one book from each printing as payment in kind, it wouldn’t be the same, it would still be the end of us, the old guard, because we were all educated unwittingly: each of us had a decent home library of books we’d happened to rescue, and each of us read those books in the blissful hope of making a change in his life. But the biggest shock came when I saw the young workers shamelessly guzzling milk and soft drinks—legs spread wide, hand on hip—straight from the bottle. Then I knew the good old days had come to an end, the days when a worker shoveled in his own wastepaper, went down on his knees in one-on-one combat, and ended each day filthy and exhausted from the effort. This was a new era with new men and new methods—think of drinking milk at work, when everyone knows that even a cow would rather die of thirst than touch a drop of the stuff!
  • That Greek holiday of theirs gave me a real jolt: I had dreamed myself to Greece by reading Herder and Hegel, I had developed a Dionysian concept of the world by reading Friedrich Nietzsche, but I had never been on a holiday; I had to spend nearly all my time off making up days missed—my boss deducted two days for every unexcused absence—and if I did have a day left over, I’d work for the extra pay, because I was always behind, there were always mounds of paper in the cellar and in the courtyard, more paper than I could get to. So for thirty-five years I’d lived with, lived through, a daily Sisyphus complex, the kind so beautifully described for me by Messrs. Sartre and Camus, especially the latter: the more bales driven out of my courtyard, the more wastepaper filled my cellar, whereas the Brigade of Socialist Labor at Bubny was always on schedule.
  • Meanwhile, twilight had given way to night, and while the old artist stood balanced on the ladder as if suspended from the sky, Manča gave me her hand and told me that the old man was her last lover, the last link in the chain of men she had known, and that since he could now love her only in spirit he had decided to compensate by building her a monument she could enjoy in the garden as long as she lived and place on her grave as a kind of coffinweight when she died. And while he worked on, perfecting the expression on the angel’s face by the light of the rising moon, Manča showed me around the cottage, from basement to attic, explaining in hushed tones how an angel had come to her and she had obeyed him and taken up with a ditchdigger and spent all her savings on a plot in the woods, and the ditchdigger dug the foundation and slept in a tent with her, but then she threw him over for a bricklayer, and the bricklayer made love to her in the tent and put up all the walls, and then Manča took up with a carpenter and he did all the carpentry work and shared her bed, but then she threw him over for a plumber, who slept in the same bed as the carpenter but did all the plumbing, only to be replaced by a roofer, who both made love to her and laid her roof with concrete tile but was eventually replaced by a mason, who roughcast all her walls and ceilings by day and slept in her bed by night, until she took up with a cabinetmaker, who made all new furniture in return for her bed, and so it was that Manča, with nothing but a bed and a clear-cut goal, built herself a house. And now she had taken up with an artist, whose love, though platonic, was such that he had undertaken a statue of her in the form of an angel, which brought us back to where we began and completed the circle of Manča’s life just in time to see the white bucks and ducks—the light-blue smock, having blended with the moonlight, was invisible—descend the ladder as if from heaven, and when his shoes touched ground, the hoary old man gave me his hand and said that Manča had told him all about me, that Manča was his muse, that Manča had rendered him so productive that he was now ready to continue the Almighty’s work and make her an angel. I returned to Prague on the last train, went home, and stretched out drunk and fully dressed under my two-ton canopy of books, and as I lay there thinking, I realized that Manča had unwittingly become what she never dreamed of becoming, that she had gone farther than anyone I’d ever known. I, who had constantly read books in search of a sign, never received a word from the heavens, while she, who had always hated books, became what she was meant to be, the kind of person people write about, and, more important, she had reached her full height. As I left, her wings shone in the night like two brightly lit windows in an Empire château; they had taken her far beyond our love story, beyond its ribbons and the turd she had brought back on her skis and promenaded in front of the Hotel Renner in the foothills of Golden Peak.
• Seven
  • For thirty-five years I’d compacted wastepaper in my hydraulic press, never dreaming it could be done any differently, but two days after I laid eyes on the gigantic press in Bubny, the dreams I never dreamed came true. That morning when I got to work, who should I find in the courtyard but two of the Socialist Labor youngsters in their orange gloves, nipple-high blue overalls, suspenders, green turtlenecks, and yellow baseball caps, as if on the way to a game. My boss took them triumphantly down to my cellar and showed them my press, and in no time flat they had covered my table with a sheet of clean paper for their milk and made themselves at home, while I just stood there humiliated, stressed and strained, knowing all at once, knowing body and soul, that I’d never be able to adapt; I was in the same position as the monks who, when they learned that Co- pernicus had discovered a new set of cosmic laws and that the earth was no longer the center of the universe, committed mass suicide, unable to imagine a universe different from the one they had lived in and by up to then. My boss told me to go and sweep the courtyard or help out in the cellar or just stand there and do nothing, because next week I’d be making bales of clean paper in the cellar of the Melantrich Printing Works, clean paper, nothing else. Suddenly everything went black: I, who had spent thirty-five years compacting rejects, wastepaper, I, who couldn’t live without the prospect of rescuing a beautiful book from the odious waste, I would be compacting immaculate, inhumanly clean paper! When I heard that, I was stunned, unstrung, I collapsed like a jumping jack on the first step of the cellar stairs, my arms dangling between my knees and a cracked smile on my face as I looked up at the two youngsters. They were not to blame, after all, they were only doing what they had been told; it was their daily bread, their job. I watched them pitching the wastepaper into the drum and pushing the red and green buttons, and I hoped against hope that my machine would go on strike or report sick or make believe its cogwheels or gearwheels were stuck, but no, on it churned at top speed, as if in the prime of youth, dinging and donging to beat the band, mocking me, showing me that only in the hands of Socialist Labor had it realized its true potential. And I had to admit that within an hour or two those youngsters might have been working in the cellar for years: they had divided up the labor between them, one of them scrambling to the top of the heap to provide a flow of paper and the other tending the drum below, so that in an hour they had made five bales. And every once in a while my boss would lean over the opening in the ceiling, give them a theatrical round of applause with his pudgy little hands, look over at me out of the corner of his eye, and shout down at them, “Bravo, bravissimo!” then add the Russian “ Molodtsy!” and I would lower my eyes, wanting to leave but unable to make my legs move, I was so numb from the shame of it all and from the repulsive ding-dong of my machine announcing that the compaction would soon reach maximum. Just then I saw a book flying from the sparkling pitchfork into the drum, and I stood up, pulled it out, and, wiping it on my smock, held it to my chest for a while—as a mother presses her child to her breast, as Jan Hus in the statue in Kolín presses his Bible to his breast until it is half crushed by his body—and, cold as it was, the book warmed me. Anyway, I looked over at the boys and they looked back at me as if nothing had happened, so I summoned all my strength and glanced at the title, and yes, it was a fine book, Charles Lindbergh’s account of the first transoceanic flight. And as usual I thought of Frantík Šturm, the sacristan of Holy Trinity, who collected books and magazines on the subject of aviation, because he was convinced that Icarus was Jesus’ forerunner, the only difference being that Icarus fell from the sky into the sea, whereas Jesus was launched by an Atlas rocket, which can lift five thousand and eight hundred pounds to a three-hundred-and-fifty-mile orbit, and is circling His earthly kingdom to this day. So I said to myself I’d make one last trip to Frantík Šturm’s microbiotic laboratory with the story of how Lindbergh had crossed the ocean, and after that, farewell to small joys!
  • "You mean you're the young man and the old man, too?"
  • There I stood, blinded by the sun, not knowing where to go, and not a single phrase from the books I swore by came to my aid in this hour of need.
  • Deep in thought, I walked to Charles Square, where I tore up the thank-you note, knowing it was the last, because the days of small joys, small pleasures had come to an end: my press had tolled their knell, it had betrayed me. And as I stood in Charles Square looking up at the glimmering statue of Ignatius of Loyola cemented to the façade of his own church and outlined in trumpet-triumphant gold by his own halo, what I saw was a large gilt upright bathtub with Seneca lying upright in it just after he had slashed the veins in his wrist, thereby proving to himself how right he was to have written that little book I so loved, On Tranquillity of Mind.
• Eight
  • Portrait of the artist as an old mushroom face.
  • Perhaps he was the one who, last year at the Holešovice slaughterhouse, put a knife to my neck, shoved me into a corner, took out a slip of paper, and read me a poem celebrating the beauties of the countryside at Říčany, then apologized, saying he hadn’t found any other way of getting people to listen to his verse.
  • Why does Lao-tze say that to be born is to exit and to die is to enter?
  • "Every beloved object is the center of a garden of a paradise."
  • Instead of compacting clean paper in the Melantrich cellar I will follow Seneca, I will follow Socrates, and here, in my press, in my cellar, choose my own fall, which is ascension, and even as the walls press my legs up to my chin and beyond, I refuse to be driven from my Paradise, I am in my cellar and no one can turn me out, no one can dismiss me. A corner of the book is lodged under a rib, I groan, fated to leave the ultimate truth on a rack of my own making, folded in upon myself like a child’s pocket knife, and at the moment of truth I see my tiny Gypsy girl, whose name I never knew, we are flying the kite through the autumn sky. She holds the cord, I look up, the kite has taken the shape of my sad face, and the Gypsy girl sends me a message from the ground, I see it making its way up the cord, I can almost reach it now, I stretch out my hand, I read the large, childlike letters: ILONKA. Yes, that was her name.

Page last revised on: 2024-05-05