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Authors: Ernst Weiss

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Jarmila

BOOK: Jarmila
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Ernst Weiss

JARMILA

A LOVE STORY FROM BOHEMIA

Translated from the German by
Rebecca Morrison and
Petra Howard-Wuerz

P
USHKIN
P
RESS
L
ONDON

A
YEAR AGO IN AUTUMN
when I was about to set off on a journey from Paris to Prague I realised in the car just before reaching the railway station that I’d left my watch at home, under my pillow. I asked the driver to stop and looked for a watchmaker’s in order to buy a cheap nickel watch. There was a shop in the vicinity with handsome-looking watches for a mere thirty-five francs. I bought one and, during the rather long journey, kept an eye on its timekeeping. For the first stretch of eleven hours, it lagged a quarter of an hour behind, but then raced through the subsequent thirteen hours half an hour in advance. When we arrived in Prague though, and I compared it with the large station clock, the watch was virtually at the correct time. I walked to my hotel. I had some time and strolled down to the quay of the Vltava. A small number of muddy-brown fishing boats sail on the still, slate-coloured river. The bridges stretching over it are equipped with damming defences and are indescribably beautiful, old and new ones alike.

 

I was sorely tempted to hurl my watch down from one of the bridges into the river. However, I decided to hold on to it and, gesticulating to make myself understood,
entrusted it to a small watchmaker’s on the left bank of the river; the repair cost only thirty-nine crowns and I got the watch back a few hours later in working order. Well, working order of a sort. It now capriciously charged forward or held back stubbornly rather like a disobedient child who lets itself be dragged along by excessively patient parents, tearing free from their grasp from time to time to chase after other children or a dog or hurtle up to the window-front of a toy shop. The watch amused me just as children of any age, dogs of any breed, enchant me, captivate me and make a fool of me. For only a few francs and thirty-nine Czech crowns this marvel of modern technology and
product
of efficient mass industry had already provided me with plenty of enjoyment.

 

Only I shouldn’t have relied on it. Naturally, it let me down and I missed an important appointment arranged from Paris with a business friend at a
coffee-house
on Wenceslas Square. I’d intended to purchase thirty tons of average grade Bohemian apples from the agent and was counting on the provision to pay off pressing debts in Paris.

 

It was now late afternoon. I was sitting over my third cup of coffee on the terrace of the café situated on the first floor of a grand building. In front of the
museum the statue of Saint Wenceslas and his
entourage
of knights and magnificent horses was still bathed in warm sunlight. The slanting shafts of evening sun rested on the well-rounded haunches of one of the horses, poised in motionless splendour, its gaze fixed on the gently sloping square bustling with people.

Along the heaving road (Wenceslas Square is in fact just a very wide and elongated avenue with no real equivalent in Europe) street vendors jostled, their wares spread out on the pavement or stacked up on small wooden boards in the entrances of buildings. Travelling merchants hawked a plethora of inexpensive goods: wonderful apples (no middling wares here), frameless mirrors, tin combs, orbs of Slovakian mountain cheeses, red on the outside, honeyed within, cheap neck-ties, oranges, bananas, hand-made lace and bright peasant embroidery. It was children mostly who stopped and tried to cajole their parents into buying; from my terrace I watched well-dressed children in white gloves, tugging at the hands of their mothers or governesses, and their poorer counterparts with small, pale faces.

In a doorway directly opposite, I noticed a street hawker. Still youthful, he was no longer the
youngest
and his handsomely chiselled face was locked in a rather grim expression. On the ground in front of him he had placed a stripped plank of wood and on it a multitude of little toy birds were weaving in and
out of one another, dancing, pecking, driven by an inner mechanism. Their staccato movements indeed reflected that of hens. Their wooden core was hidden beneath the soft, downy plumage of white, black and yellow feathers. Most of the time the trader stood there as if lost in thought but when a child came he would willingly hand over the toy to be examined, for
children
always want to know precisely what is going on inside their toy. When they then walked away,
embarrassed
at not buying, he just smiled at them. There was something odd about the fellow, almost bird-like, but far from the endearing restlessness of hens.

Every so often he righted one of the little birds that had fallen over, while never taking his eyes off the street. He was probably afraid of being arrested by the police for unlawful street trading. Frequently he pulled a little spring tucked away in the birds’
feathery
chest. Once again the creature struck up its spiky dance, pecking at the ground with its stuck-on beak as though there really were something to be found there. The rays of sun had long since wandered from the ample haunch of Saint Wenceslas’s horse on to the swanlike curve of its neck. It didn’t make any sense to wait for my business friend any longer. My new watch displayed a nonsensical hour.

When I looked up, I noticed that most of the little birds had been sold, only five or six were happily pecking
away. Suddenly the man snatched them up, stuffed them into a cloth-bag where they continued to twitch, clutched the plank under his arm and broke into a run. As far as I could see there were no policemen to run from and the other illicit street vendors worked on unperturbed.

Who was the bird trader fleeing from? It surely could not be the hunched, corpulent man in a
mouse-coloured
coat who was wearing a dignified black bowler hat on a head showing the first signs of grey hair? He was accompanied by a pretty boy of around ten and an ash-blond, rather bitter-looking woman whose hat was rather out-dated. They were walking silently up Wenceslas Square. It seemed to me that they were wholly unaware of the profound effect their appearance had caused. Entering the park behind the museum they vanished from sight.

The street-lamps flared into life lending a magical aspect to the square. I was tired, and left. My watch ticked on. The one thing it was capable of. And I’d relied on it! I was thoroughly irate.

S
HOULD I HAVE SUPPER
? According to my watch it was only just after six. I seemed to remember it having said half past the hour the last time I checked, but that was simply impossible. No watch in the world can move both forward and back at the same time. Indignantly I sank down on one of the benches in the park behind the museum and noticed not far from me the three familiar figures. Their demeanour was still the same, grave, silent and measured. The beautiful boy (the lamps were glimmering and I could see his striking fair hair tumbling forth from his slightly overlarge cloth cap), his father, the stout, squat man, and his mother, the sullen, withered creature. The boy was alert and restless. He probably would have liked to join the other children chasing each other through the bushes on this fine autumn evening, screeching like the seagulls on the Vltava. But his parents’ stern looks restrained him and forced him to pull his gloves back on and rest his hands in his lap.

I soon got up seeing as several people were waiting for me to leave my bench since it was the only one in the shadows. Two pairs of lovers raced at it, but a single man with a bundle under his arm beat them to
it, the collar of his coat turned up. He seemed
familiar.
He had a perplexing way of looking at me, with just one eye, the other surveying the scene. This way is typical for those people whose work forces them to use only one eye, watchmakers, for example,
marksmen,
or doctors peering into their microscopes. That brought me back to my vexing watch. It was only when I made my way down the steps to the square that I realised it was the toy-bird trader.

I turned back for I had nothing better to do. When I passed him I saw that his eyes—his right one to be
precise
—were fixed on the three people. Without being seen himself he watched their every move with an indefinable expression, half hatred, half love.

I left the park. It was sultry. Rain hung in the air. Or was it the mist that rises in the evening from rivers, here as in all steep valleys? I walked down to the river through countless streets, narrow for the most part. Its banks announced themselves from afar through a closely-beaded pearl necklace of splendid
candelabra
lights and arc lamps. My thoughts were blank, or, rather, occupied by the toy trader with his feathered mechanical toys and by—geese.

My cursed watch had made me miss the connection with the express train in Nuremberg on my journey from Paris. The slower passenger train I had to take instead gave me the chance to become better acquainted with
the Bohemian countryside. We stopped at small stations, larger villages, tiny hamlets, once even in the middle of a field.

The fields were already harvested. The woods, comprising deciduous trees (there are many birches and oaks in Bohemia, and majestic lime trees in the
villages
) had greatly thinned, and blackish twigs gleamed here and there through the bright foliage in the weak sun. In the bare fields, still covered in stubble, I saw gaggle upon gaggle of geese. Bohemia, surely, boasts the most beautiful geese of any country. Here they are not fed, as in France, on fish waste. In the summer they are set free on the grassy meadows, later on the fields of stubble, and come autumn they’re fattened indoors in a manner both refined and cruel. Alongside the beautiful, powerful, snow-white creatures I noticed others apparently ailing, stripped of all but their large wing feathers. Their breasts, their underbellies, were naked, unkempt, reddish-grey, and they didn’t march with the same cockiness and confidence as their healthy comrades; they waddled slowly, timid and fearful, and steered clear of humans, flapping their wings and starting up a furious cackling whenever they glimpsed one. I asked a fellow passenger what lay behind their strange behaviour. He didn’t understand me at first, but then he smiled and replied: “You try being flayed alive, having every single hair pulled out one by one,
being throttled and squeezed all the while between a pair of knees! I’d like to see you then! And the same procedure every year!” I then learned in detail how in most parts of Bohemia geese are plucked alive each year thereby producing the heavenly, light, downy feathers which made sleeping amongst the plump, snowy-white pillows of my Prague hotel such a
pleasurable
experience. Yet the goose not only provides feathers, but also skin, fat, meat, stomach, heart, liver and blood! Virtually every part of it is eaten. There is no escaping geese here in Bohemia.

I opted to dine somewhere else that evening,
perhaps
in that small, old-fashioned tavern which had caught my eye when I was following the toy trader. It was situated on Wenceslas Square beyond the statue and was bound to have simple but good fare that didn’t feature geese. Most importantly, I’d noticed large glasses of almost black beer on the tables, and
charmingly
svelte or reassuringly sturdy blonde and brunette waitresses whose bare and firm beautifully white arms were heaving around enormous amounts of food and drink. People of modest means sat together amiably on the long wooden benches, smoking, and happily gorging on food and beer.

I stared blankly at my watch. Now it had
outperformed
itself. It had ground to a complete halt although the spring was tightly wound. Still furiously
shaking my watch which was swishly chromed in nickel I entered the stuffy room beneath the gothic vaulted walls, suffused with tobacco smoke and odours of beer, frying and onions. I looked around. In a corner, sandwiched between two waitresses, was my friend the bird trader, his right eye winking at me and my accursed watch.

I
SAT DOWN
in an empty corner and ordered beer and Prague ham. I planned to leave the following day—but not before having sampled the ham. I couldn’t make myself understood to the waitress. The toy trader, who’d been watching me the whole time with his uneven, steely-grey eyes, came to my aid; his German was not without flaws, but fluent. There was a choice of ham dishes on the menu served raw or smoked, warm or cold, with horseradish or gherkins, cooked in wine or with noodles baked in the oven, or even as an omelette filling, with macaroni, or garnished with pickles, and so on. I wasn’t really hungry and ordered without paying attention. In fact I rather would have liked to invite the toy trader to join me for a glass of beer. There were three kinds, the first a light, wheat colour, then a brown one, the last thick, heavy, and almost black. When I was young wet-nurses were given black beer like this to increase their milk flow. Was it sweet, or rather bitter like English stout? Who could I ask?

The toy trader was back in his corner, taunting the two waitresses, or groping them with his strange hands. (I couldn’t say what was strange about them, and yet I’ve never seen anything like them.)

He took particular pleasure in grabbing their
armpits
from behind to which they took great exception. However the more they fended him off, the more he would pursue them, incense them, only to turn away with a contemptuous smile on his gaunt, manly face which was not unattractive. One of them, a tall blonde, very young and charming, trembled as soon as he approached. At the last moment he turned away from her and with a smile pulled a kind of double bird from a small case behind him—two mechanical little birds with feathery puffed up chests, one white, one red, that could not and would not lay off each other. As soon as they were placed on the polished table of ancient black oak they started to fight as long as their springs would let them. He gave me a furtive look, as an actor would a critic seated in the front row, then orchestrated the battle of his mechanical creatures, now toppling one, now spurring the other onwards. I deliberately looked away. I ate the thick, juicy slices of ham,
Prager Schinken natur,
and washed it down with beer. Both were indescribably delicious. Now all I was left to wish for (apart from a good cigar), was to drum some sense into my damned watch.

I pulled it from my trouser pocket where I had buried it contemptuously and picked up a table knife which was appropriately notched and rusty. I prised open the watch’s glass cover as well as the two metal
lids. Then I took a toothpick and prodded at the
balance
spring, the heart of any watch as everyone knows. Everything depends on this small spring. My jab was well placed. The spring trembled, but could not be coerced into swinging once more rendering my efforts useless. Suddenly I was aware of someone looking over my shoulder.

“Not a toothpick! A steel fork, if you please,” the toy trader advised, provoking my derisive response: “I’m going to clean this watch carefully, then I’ll oil it a little.” A bulbous oil dispenser was placed on the bare wooden table in front of me. “Then I’ll shut the inner cover, then the outer one, and secure the glass lid once more. I’ll turn the hands to the correct time—what time is it exactly? Then I’ll go out, look for a dry spot on Wenceslas Square, place the beloved watch on the ground with the utmost of care, and—with all my one hundred and eighty pounds—will launch myself upon it.”

“You and your watch will have come to the end of the road then,” the toy trader remarked easily, without looking at me. The watch seemed to fascinate him. “But do allow me to take a look first, I’m from the trade.”

“Ah, you, too? Just yesterday I wasted thirty-nine crowns at one of your colleague’s.”

“Every repair has its price, but you needn’t pay me if I can’t get it to work.” As I shook my head and
continued to jab at the innards of the watch, which to my mind deserved such punishment, he went on, as though he couldn’t bear to see the clockwork suffer: “Where’s the reason in this? Monsieur needn’t pay me at all even if I do get it running. Agreed? Now if
monsieur
will just have a little patience!”

He took the watch from me with his slender,
powerful
hand, fetched his small case and placed it for safety’s sake between his knees, as though it could go astray. A few miniature tools appeared from the depths of his shirt pocket and he secured a watchmaker’s
magnifying
glass in one eye. The other one was transfixed in an empty stare. He set to work. He was silent, and so was I. The lovely young waitress came over every so often. The pair of us drank, peacefully and plentifully.

BOOK: Jarmila
9.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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