Harlequin's Millions (6 page)

irregular pulse and just like all the other pensioners they listened closely to their liver, spleen, kidneys, heart. One of the pensioners, who wore a jaunty cap, the kind the Prague dandies used to wear, who always seemed to me to be a very pleasant fellow because he knew how to knot a scarf like the kind the painters wore in the old days, a colorful scarf around his neck with an elegant bow at his throat, this man now no longer wanted to see anyone. He stood by the wall with his forehead against the plaster, sulking, he didn't want to see any more people, or trees, or sky, or Greek statues and tableaux, he only wanted to see what he saw: plaster, tabula rasa, nothing. And I noticed that all the old men were continually turning to look at each other, face-to-face, and when one of them left the group he always looked back once or twice to see whether the others were looking at him, suspiciously, scrutinizingly, because they could always tell from behind, by the way someone walked, how he was feeling, whether he was limping more than usual, whether stabs of pain in the kidneys and liver were distorting his shoulders, or even just to see his trousers flapping around his skinny legs, which were attached to his hip joints like wooden slats. But just then in the castle courtyard there was the shrill sound of a car horn, like when the police arrive wailing and spitting purple fire at the scene of a traffic accident, like an ambulance with a fatally injured passenger
racing through the streets or pulling up in front of a house where a man has been struck down by a heart attack. And all the old men crowded around the window, it took a while before the hands and fingernails that were caught in the curtains could be disentangled, the old man with the colorful scarf went on staring at the wall, because he didn't want to see any more accidents, either. And I walked into the corridor and looked up at the ceiling, at a sprawling fresco that showed a young man sitting on the ground, leaning back on one muscular arm with the other wrapped around his knee, he was draped in a thin veil, barefoot, and had his head turned in the direction in which I, too, was slowly walking, his eyes were filled with desire, the whites of his eyes gleamed and his pupils seemed sewn to the upper lids, he had full lips, and never in my life had I seen such a beautiful man, his hair was strewn with flowers and blossoms, they tumbled like ringlets over his forehead, the flowers were gold and blue, then just behind the youth I saw a blue gown slipping off the edge of an enormous bed with blue cushions tossed against the headboard and covered with a rumpled golden sheet, in the middle of that bed sat a woman in a long white gown, a young girl with the fierce expression of a bird, the bride's clenched lips were listening intently to some half-naked goddess, who had one arm around the girl's neck and with the other was tilting her chin upward, so she
could look more deeply into her eyes, which were averted from the burning eyes of the youth, who was looking angrily at the bride, who was deep in conversation with the beautiful goddess, whose forehead was adorned with an acanthus leaf and whose flowing gown fell back to expose her naked breasts, belly and mound of Venus … I was captivated by this unusual wedding scene, with the near-divorce right at the very beginning, one by one I looked into the men's rooms, where just as in the women's section there were eight beds and a window on the north wall that beamed in the darkness with the trembling, sunlit leaves of aspen and oak trees as tall as the castle itself, the leaves illuminated by the glaring light like an overly bright television screen. And outside you could hear tires grinding to a halt in the sand of the courtyard, you could hear car doors slamming, a stretcher being taken out, when I walked past the old men leaning out the window, several of them instinctively turned around, sure enough, they didn't want me to see their skinny legs in baggy trousers, they stood there facing me and smiled and hoped I'd leave, go somewhere else, where I wouldn't be able to look at them, but I reassured them with a wave of my hand, like an orchestra conductor, I looked up, they didn't trust me, they squinted out at the courtyard but kept their faces toward me, once again the soft melody of “Harlequin's Millions” began to play, unraveling
in a flurry of notes that twirled around a solo by one of the violins in the orchestra, until the concertmaster regained his hold on the compelling refrain, which was in harmony with this wedding somewhere in Greece, somewhere on a southern sea, and even the eyes of the beautiful youth, even the anxiety of the bride, and the kind but urgent words of the goddess, even the palm of her hand lifting the bride's chin to look her more deeply in the eyes, and the other hand, cradling the back of the girl's head in such a charming position, they were all in perfect harmony with “Harlequin's Millions,” even the sounds from the courtyard, where you could hear, in the sun, the sliding of the collapsible bed along the rails in the ambulance, and the four tires churning the sand, even the shrieking of the motor and the gears shifting and Mr. Berka shouting … Hold on! I'll open the main gate!, all of this was in complete harmony, and when I turned around to run quickly back down the corridor on the second floor of the men's section, all the old men turned too, as if they had each been struck in the back, they rose up from where they had been leaning out the window, one by one they rose up behind the curtains, like people in old church paintings of the Last Judgment rising from their graves. They stood there, completely hidden behind the curtains, and bowed to me slightly, they touched the curtains with their foreheads and their skulls left an impression,
one head after another made the nylon curtains bulge, and there in the late morning sun I was suddenly frightened, terrified, stricken with fear, as if I had just seen the Noonday Witch, whom I hadn't believed in for years. Because not only are all the statues turned to the light of the human eye, not only is the whole castle built so that it points to the sun and the south, as if it were destined, in all its splendor and glory, for all those who enter the gate and cross the courtyard, not only that, even the trees present the best and smoothest side of their trunks to the sun, and people too are always presenting their faces and chests to each other, so they can show off their jewelry, and not only that, everything turns toward the south and the west, and toward the sun, even when the sun moves away from a bench in the park and a shadow falls on the pensioners sitting on that bench, they drag their bench over to where the sun is still shining, because none of the statues looks very good from the back, they've been badly neglected, the sight of them from behind can even be somewhat painful for the pensioners, they have the feeling, and rightly so, that they've caught someone sitting on the toilet, or deep in thought with a finger up his nose and then wiping off the snot on a tree or a wall, the unexpected sight of the back of a statue is, for every pensioner, like a glance through a keyhole, a curious glance, which catches an old person taking out or putting in his false
teeth. There is also a castle chapel at the retirement home, from the outside you can clearly see that the head of the nave is pointing east, the chapel has gothic windows behind wrought-iron grillwork in which sparrows have built their nests, some of the windowpanes have been smashed in, so that now there are several hundred sparrows living inside the chapel, the organ pipes are dotted with their nests, they've taken over the gallery, in spring the swallows come and glue their nests to the gothic arches, to the consoles, the swallows raise hundreds of young birds, often the witnesses to old times sit on a bench by the chapel wall and watch the swallows feeding their young, watch how quickly they get in through the broken windowpanes, which are so small that only one swallow can fly through at a time. And day and night you can hear coming from the chapel the twittering of the sparrows, the chirping and chattering of the young swallows. When people come to the retirement home for the first time, they can never resist walking up to the door of the castle chapel and trying the handle in the semi-darkness, but the chapel is closed, and when your eyes have grown used to the light you see that there's even a bolt with a lock on it. So everyone who comes here for the first time kneels down in front of the chapel door and peers through the keyhole. Everyone is amazed to see that the floor is still covered with coal, because in the days when the
castle was heated with coal-burning stoves, the coal was stored here in the chapel. But now the chapel is closed and has become a home for birds. The swallows have even built a nest on the head of Christ on the high altar, and when their eggs hatch, the baby swallows twitter and chirp in Christ's ear, and when they've grown and have to leave the nest, they sit contentedly on the arms of the gold cross, sometimes seven little swallows in a row, as the voices of several hundred sparrows and swallows fill the chapel. Whenever a new pensioner arrives at the castle, the first few days he insists on seeing absolutely everything. On my first day I walked all the way to the castle greenhouse, but the windows had been painted blue, and there were no longer any flowers inside, the floor was whitewashed and in the middle stood a bier. When someone dies, he lies here until they come for him, the dead pensioner lies here on a board and waits until they come to take him away, I've been told that everyone else sits near him on three benches, the closest friends of the deceased, they hold a wake until the undertaker arrives and members of his family with clothes for him to wear in the coffin. Uncle Pepin will probably be the first of us to end up here, because he's been in the ward for bedridden patients for three months now, he's stopped eating, the nurse said I should write a letter to all his friends and relations, anyone who wants to come say their good-byes should
hurry, because it won't be long before Uncle Pepin has beat us to the greenhouse, where the floor is whitewashed and all the windows are painted blue. But pensioners who come to the castle for the first time, well, they want to see everything, even things that might not be so good for them. On the west side, under the mighty branches of the chestnut trees, from the second tier of branches, is the only place from which you can see into the castle, into the room that once belonged to Madame the Countess, that room now has four beds, they look like aviaries for birds of prey. Each one is equipped with a net, like children's beds covered with a net to keep the child from falling out when he has a fever or a restless dream. From time to time there are patients here, old men and women, who are so crazy that neither sedatives nor injections nor any other medicine can help them. It's so sad, at my own risk I once climbed into the crown of an old chestnut, the branches were as close together as the rungs of a ladder, it was like climbing up to a deer stand. And there, under a net, I saw an old woman in white holding the cords between her fingers, she was on her knees peering out the window into the darkness, she looked in my direction, her eyes bulged with terror, her hair hung loose and she had no teeth, and when I looked at her again I nearly fell out of the tree, she looked so much like me that I thought she
was
me. And I climbed down carefully, from
one branch to the next, concentrate, old girl, I told myself, don't slip and break your bones, stay calm, you had a bad scare, easy does it, and when I reached the ground I walked into the darkness, the only light on the second floor came from the windows where Count Å pork once had his chambers. I ran into the vestibule and up the stairs, I ignored the statues and the beautiful frescoes, in the corridor of the women's section I stopped short next to a little table, I raised my head, but there was no one else in the corridor, the night-lights shone dimly through the open doors and someone was snoring and from the corners of the room with the eight beds, from each corner you could hear a loud smacking noise, which went on until the snoring stopped. On the wall was a sign: How do our ladies pass the time? I didn't understand it, and read the message again. It was framed behind glass. How do our ladies pass the time? And on the little table and the next one and the one after that, I made my way down the corridor from one table to the next, amazed at first, then I reached out and touched the baby clothes, baby bibs, a baby bolero, even some swaddling bands, which you wrap crisscross around a baby's quilt like a braided Christmas bread, knitted booties embroidered with flowers, blouses and smocks, sunbonnets and caps with earflaps, tiny gloves that brought tears to your eyes, pairs of mittens joined together with colorful string, muffs. Yes, this was the
work of the old women who sat here in the sun crocheting and whose knitting needles cast reflections on the ceiling, on the multitude of cherubs and cupids, divine children who scattered down an ever-replenishing stream of flowers from their horns and cornucopias while treading the air with their feet to keep their balance under the weight of the Mediterranean flora. This was no handiwork exhibition, nor was it an answer to the question of how our ladies passed the time, here on these tables lay the things the old women couldn't give up, here lay the suppressed and for that reason constant and everlasting necessities no woman could live without, not even an old lady, a pensioner in Count Špork's former castle …

        T
HERE WAS A TIME
, I
WAS STILL YOUNG, WHEN
I thought there was a life waiting for me elsewhere, I even thought it was in Prague. When Francin drove to Prague once a month, to the Brewer's House, he always went in the Å koda 430, I'd put on my most fashionable dress, but each time Francin begged me to pretend I was just going out for a walk, I had to leave half an hour earlier than he did, so no one at the brewery would know he was taking me with him, people might resent that. And so I sometimes had to walk ten whole miles toward Prague, sulking, angry, I, who wanted to see for myself whether I could live in Prague, I, who assumed I could be just as much the center of attention in Prague as I was in our little town, I, who wore the latest high-heeled shoes, I marched down that dusty road, avoiding
the big whitewashed stones that the road workers put down to mark the broken spots, in those days the stones were called “bandits,” and usually Francin caught up with me just past the forest, I'd climb into the Å koda and climb out again, embarrassed and humiliated, in Prague, then Francin would rush off to the Brewer's House, we had agreed on a departure time, we'd meet back at the Å koda in front of Saint Stephen's Cathedral. And then I'd stroll across Wenceslas Square, strut down Národní třída and Na příkopě, trying to see if I could ever be unfaithful to my little town, if I could ever live in Prague, if I could spend my life here. And I believed I could, I never tired of the shops and window displays, in the ten years that Francin and I drove to Prague every month I got to know all the shops and in all the shops they got to know me, I stopped into all the furriers', all the silk merchants', I walked through all the arcades, visited all the cafés, even the waiters greeted me, I knew all the perfumeries and ladies' shoe shops, everywhere I went I pretended I'd buy only the most expensive goods, shop assistants ran out into the street with rolls of fabric and silk to show me what they looked like in daylight, and after a while I knew every price, every brand, every article in the stockroom, I even knew what they were expecting the following month. And because I liked to sit in the brewery reading
Elegante Welt
, all the shopkeepers assumed the
brewery was mine. And every month I bought myself a little something, once a year I bought fabric for a suit, every six months for a new dress, and in those days I also made Francin buy himself the most expensive shoes at Kabele's and Poldi Gutman's, once a year he bought material for a new set of clothes, but actually I was the one who bought all that, so I would become known in Prague as a woman of the world. But I could never get Francin to come along with me to the tea room at the Hotel Šroubek, or to have lunch at the Reprezentační dům. Francin had been there only once and had felt so wretched in those surroundings that he did one wrong thing after another, so I just gave up, and in the end, whenever we went out, we always went to the pub, to the Keys, where Francin, delighted that he could eat standing at the counter, polished off a huge pork schnitzel and potato salad for four crowns fifty, a schnitzel as big as the whole plate. But in all those years that I went to Prague, I was still just someone from the little town where time stood still. Whenever I walked into the tea room at the Hotel Šroubek, when I found myself among the dozens of mirrors and hundreds of lights, the glittering of the chandeliers, when the eyes of all the waiters and the maître d' and all those people lounging in their armchairs, wicker chairs in summer, which had been brought out onto the sidewalk, with only the waxy-leaved shrubs in green flower boxes
separating the guests from the passersby, when all those eyes were fixed on me, I nearly died of panic and blushed to the roots of my hair, I ordered coffee and tried to calm myself by lighting a cigarette, but cigarettes always make me nauseous, I went pale, tried to save myself by leafing through newspapers and fashion magazines, but my hands were shaking so hard that the pages trembled between my fingers … All those years, I tried to calm myself by going into the ladies' room, but all I wanted to do once I got there was lean over the sink and splash my face and forehead, again and again, to cool myself down, that's how upset I was, I talked nonsense to the toilet attendant, because I always had the feeling that everyone could tell I'd come straight from the brewery and what's more that I'd had to walk a long way, sometimes ten miles, before Francin had caught up with me and smuggled me into his Škoda, the same fate awaited me on the way back, when Francin made me get out of the car half an hour before we had reached the brewery and then drove on to the brewery by himself, while I arrived covered in dust, like a thief, and had to pretend I'd just been out for a walk, a nice, healthy walk. And the brewer's assistant was almost always there waiting for me, we never liked each other much, peering from behind the curtains of his house, he'd always come running out and say, grinning broadly … Great city, Prague, eh? But all the same, I was
unfaithful to the little town where I thought my time had stood still. The waiter from the tea room at the Hotel Šroubek introduced me to the owner of a real estate agency, who claimed I was a very capable young lady who had all it took to run my own little shop, a perfumery in the busy Revoluční třída, he drove me to see the perfumery and I was under no obligation of course, but the moment I saw the shop, it was called the Oreum, I could think of nothing else, my whole life consisted of nothing but the Oreum, I took out all my money, all our savings, Francin's and mine, and invested it in my new venture, and that's how I became the proprietress of a perfumery, a glowing little perfumery on the Revoluční třída, I'd sit up late every night memorizing the names of perfumes and powders, eyebrow pencils, French and German and English names, in the shopwindow on a clockwork turntable with mirrors was the triumph of French cosmetics, Elixir Lavalier, pills for a perfect bosom, jars and flasks and powder boxes shone in the permanently lit perfume case behind the counter, cut-glass bottles with roses, water lilies, sprigs of lilac and jasmine unfurling in aromatic oils, perennially fragrant fantasies, the gentlest hair lotions with a scent of violet that bore the secret of how to stay young and eternally beautiful. In those two months I had the time of my life, I felt myself becoming one with everything around me that could make a woman happy, fulfill her
mission on earth, and I never gave a thought to Francin, or the brewery, or the little town where my time stood still, I rented rooms from a milkman and his wife, I slept on the second floor, next to the window, trams rode past every ten minutes, all night long, the bed shook, but to me it felt like my bed was a lovely little boat that would carry me away to all the factories in Europe, where the most expensive perfumes were made, and cosmetic preparations and remedies and miraculous soaps that would remove all impurities, not just freckles, from a woman's skin, and creams from California to make the skin as smooth as velvet, and modern American nail polish, because varnished nails added to every woman's charm. And as my bed shook up and down, I smiled, and sailed in my little boat back to the Oreum, to my perfumery on the Revoluční třída, where Peruvian herbal soaps waited on cut-glass shelves and mirrored plateaus, soaps that removed wrinkles and postponed them until a later date, and transparent glycerin soaps with the scent of Highland heather, birch water from Hamburg, a lotion that worked wonders and defied old age, Pearls of Venus for pearly-white hands, cleansing milk that made a woman irresistible, Kaloderma jelly with no fats or oils, rose-colored powders and soaps with glycerin and honey for a peaches-and-cream complexion, Dralle's lily-of-the-valley perfume Illusion, a highly concentrated flower essence,
undiluted with alcohol, that all the ladies were mad about … And as the trams rumbled down the tracks every ten minutes along the broken cobblestones of Na poříčí, I dreamt that I'd have to hire a shop assistant, someone I could train, because such beautiful things as I had in my perfumery would attract all women who wanted to keep their good looks, with lily soap, for a youthful appearance and velvety skin,
poudre ravissante
, indispensable for actresses and indeed for all ladies with an unsightly birthmark or scar, for every woman, in fact, who longed to have a beautiful face. I was filled to the brim with the happiness that had come my way, I'd found a job that suited me, discreetly offering strips that were applied to the forehead and chin to get rid of wrinkles, mouthwashes and brushes for tooth and tongue, hair lotions for brunettes and others specially for blondes, because my Oreum was no ordinary shop, it was a temple, with a folding, twenty-piece altar, in whose open compartments, illuminated from above, was an assortment of powders and cosmetics that would mask all flaws, preserve a woman's assets and enhance her charms, so they'd never fade … And I went on dreaming night after night and into the daytime and I couldn't get enough of all those things, which I had bought at such a favorable price, which would bring me fortune and fame, because surely everyone would see what wonderful products I was selling and how
expertly I advised all the ladies, the shop would always be full, especially when people heard I sold bath salts, for fragrant baths in the scent of every flower and tree, spring greetings from Vesna for the boudoir, borax shampoo for toilet and tub, the latest perfumes in sturdy bottles, in nickel tubes, lily soaps by Hvĕzda Jihu, Graciella, a beauty lotion for the neck and hands, Konoor, to preserve the youthful color of one's hair and keep it from turning gray … And when I discovered the compartments of hairbrushes with splendid handles and sets of combs in every size and class, and fifty étuis of rings and brooches on velvet cushions, the rings were copies of all the famous rings, like Jablonec glass, but I couldn't believe my eyes when I'd polished those rings with Sidol, from then on I wore them myself, every day a different ring on every finger, they were so beautiful, and when I then found the beauty cases with a mirror under the lid and the insides lined with cut-glass perfume bottles and soaps and combs, I felt confident that my Oreum offered everything a woman could ever dream of … Yet in those two months, even though Francin came to see me almost every day, he never once came into the Oreum, he just stood on the opposite street corner and watched me, as I sold something now and again in the light of the permanently burning lamps, he watched me as I turned, as I stretched out my arm to reach a bottle of perfume that a customer had requested, he
stood there watching and waiting until evening, when I closed the shop and rolled down the shutter, only then did he detach himself from the wall and come up to meet me, guiltily, during those two months I glowed with happiness, but Francin was sad, he walked me back to my room and listened as I enthusiastically described my successes, future successes, to be sure, but I knew I could achieve them. And that made Francin sad, but he continued to wait for me by the wall and didn't care if people bumped into him, he never set foot in my perfumery, every night he walked me part of the way and every night he asked, wouldn't I rather go home? To the brewery? To the little town where my time stood still … But every night I declined his offer, laughing, and described to him how in five years' time we'd buy a little brewery of our own. But what I forgot was that just like all those famous trade routes where they transported goods from the cities along the Adriatic Coast to Nizhni Novgorod, even sea routes had a fixed, perfectly natural course, which no one deviated from, it was just like that in the cities themselves, in certain streets there are places people hurry through, run through, never stopping or slowing down until something gets in their way, and those are potential customers. But just as everyone always runs through Spálená Street and doesn't stop until they get to Lazarská or even farther up on Národní třída, my Oreum in the
Revoluční třída was in a house ten yards from the pedestrian stream, so the lights of the Oreum burned in vain, anyone who happened to pass by was driven into a kind of trap, and hurried on, so as not to bump into people coming from the other direction … No one ever came into my Oreum except perhaps someone who had stepped out of the stream into a quiet place to tie his shoe, or a woman seeking the shade of the street corner so she could fasten her garter, so I'd have about five or six customers a day, mostly women, the clockwork turntable, which bore the triumph of French cosmetics Elixir Lavalier on its glittering, mirrored plateaus, kept on turning, for two months I rested my fingertips against the counter and tried to conjure up my loveliest smile, two whole months, but no one came, while I stood here for two months bathed and combed and dressed to the nines, adorned with a smile, like a girl waiting for her beloved, who never came and never would. And so I began to get suspicious, I went around to all the other perfumeries and discovered that I was selling articles that were out of date, that had gone out of fashion ten, twenty years ago … And then my creditors began coming around with bills of exchange and threatening me, and after that came the bills for articles I had bought, but never sold, Francin still kept coming to visit and when he saw me there, and he knew a lot about doing business, because pubs are subject to the
same unwritten rules, there are some places in a town where people hurry and others where they feel safe, and that was where he opened the brewery pubs, the first time Francin saw me standing there, crushed, just after creditors and suppliers had threatened to lodge a complaint against me, Francin couldn't help smiling, he looked up at the rainy Prague sky above Revoluční třída … And then that bed of mine, where every night for two months I had drifted along on thoughts of my good fortune, all those splendid brands of perfume and powders and creams and pencils, in those days I still nodded off blissfully to sleep, but now I lay awake and waited for every passing tram, I broke out in a sweat, mopped my forehead and neck, and more and more trams went clanging past and made my bed shake up and down on the second floor on Na poříčí, the clanging bells sounded like the gong that announces the start of a public auction … And it was on those nights, when I couldn't fall asleep and the next morning, exhausted, walked reluctantly to the Oreum and raised the metal shutter, for no good reason, I stood there watching the stream of passersby, it was utterly pointless, none of them even glanced at me or my Oreum, not a single eye was drawn to that revolving turntable in all its mirrored splendor, at those moments I began to think back on the little town I had left behind, my bed standing peacefully in the quiet of the nighttime brewery, surrounded by