Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim
Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997). Born in Brno, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hrabal studied law at Charles University in Prague, but never practiced the profession, working variously as a travelling salesman, in a theatre, and at a factory. Regarded by many Czechs as one of the finest writers of the twentieth century, Hrabal’s best-known novels are Closely Observed Trains and I Served the King of England, both filmed by acclaimed Czech director Jiří Menzel, who won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968. After his death, and according to his wishes, he is buried in an oak coffin branded Pivovar Polná (Polná Brewery), the brewery where his mother and stepfather met.
Just after noon a young man—no, he was more of a kid—walked into our neighborhood bar. Nobody knew who he was or where he’d come from. Anyway, he sat down at the table under the compressor and ordered three packs of cigarettes and a beer. Then he opened up this book he had with him, and from then on all he did was read, drink, and smoke. His fingers were all yellow, probably from smoking each cigarette down to where it burned him. Now and then he’d feel around on the tablecloth for a cigarette, light it off the old butt, and puff away. But never for a second did he lift his eyes from his book.
For a while nobody paid any attention to him, because it was just before a soccer game, and the place was packed with the pregame regulars, all dressed up and raring to go—full of spirit for whatever team they were rooting for. They kept straightening their backs as if their coats didn’t fit, puffing out their chests, and striking poses with their hands in their pockets. And standing there at the counter downing their last beers, they argued over whether their team would win four-one or five-one.
Then out they streamed, laughing and strutting so that you could tell from three blocks off that they were on their way to the game. When they got to the movie theater at the corner they all turned and waved back at the glass doors, where two heads nodded back. One head belonged to old Jupa, whose doctor had made him cut out soccer after he had two heart attacks in the stands, and the other one—it belonged to the bartender, and he couldn’t go because he ran the place. The soccer fans held up their hands, gesticulating. By this time they had reached a sign reading No Burials on Sunday, the current attraction at our local movie house. But if you looked out the glass doors of our beer place, what you saw was Burials on Sunday, because the corner of the building jutted out a little in the direction of the street and covered up the No. They were a happy bunch; anyone could tell they had the game all sewed up. Soon they were just tiny specks at the end of our long street.
They missed their streetcar; it rolled past them, its three cars transformed into three red stripes. So they turned around one more time, waved again … and then crossed over onto the island in the middle of the street….
At three o’clock the bartender pushed a button, and the compressor motor on the wall above that kid—he was still reading away—the motor started up and a red light came on. The bartender purposely dropped a cracked stein from as high as he could reach, and even though it hit the floor like a cannon ball, that guy just kept on reading. There was even a smile on his face. The bartender waved his hands in front of the kid’s eyes but they never left the book. All he did was grin. “He can’t hear, he can’t see, he’s halfway through his second pack of cigarettes, and I’m about to bring him beer number five. I wonder when he’s going to take his little trip over to the john? What is this generation coming to?”
Old man Jupa, who was sitting over by the other wall, facing the kid, made a gesture of despair and shook his head as if to say, “What’s the use of talking?”
Then in came someone else no one had ever seen before. A slightly humpbacked, gray-haired little guy carrying a pot of sauerkraut. A pot of sauerkraut on a Sunday afternoon! He ordered a beer and put the pot down in front of him—so he wouldn’t forget it, I guess. He rubbed his hands together and looked out the door into the street.
Old man Jupa couldn’t take it any longer. “What is this generation coming to anyway? I just wonder what that pipsqueak is reading. I bet it’s pornography or some kind of thriller. That’s what it is—a sleazy detective story. What a deadhead! Everyone else goes to the game, but His Excellency just sits and reads. Disgusting!”
All in all, he wasn’t at all bad-looking. He was wearing the kind of sweater only a mother or a girl friend could knit, the kind that weighs a good twenty-five pounds. He had a red bandana around his neck with a well-made knot; it was like those bandanas bricklayers and village musicians used to wear, tied with a knot as small as a jelly bean. And his head, bent over the book, played up a shock of shiny black hair that looked as if it’d just been doused in motor oil.
The bartender squatted on his heels and looked the boy in the face from below. When he’d had his fill, he stood up and said, “I’ll be damned if that guy isn’t actually crying!” And he pointed to the tears that had begun to fall all over the page—drip, drop, drip—like beer from the tap.
Well, that made old man Jupa furious. “What a bastard! No wonder we don’t have any soccer players! Strong as an ox, and he blubbers like a baby! Disgusting!” And he spit on the floor with great gusto.
The little man who’d brought in the pot of sauerkraut opened his hands and said, “It’s all on account of the young people having no ideals. When I was his age I was out on the field. Merz, the famous center forward, had taken a bad spill, and the best center forward of all time, Karel Koželuh, had to go in for him. Johnny Dick, our coach, said to me, ‘You take over inside left.’ So even though I had trained to play outside right, I started my career playing inside left. One time, though, Johnny Dick waved a telegram at me across the field and yelled, “You’re in luck. Our outside right is out.’ So I finally did get a chance to play outside right.”
The little man looked up at old man Jupa, who had the reputation of being an expert, and Jupa said, “Then you must have known Jimmy too, the back who played with Kuchynka.”
“Sure I knew him. But Jimmy was his first name. Do you happen to remember his last name?”
All of a sudden you could’ve heard a pin drop. Jupa had frozen. Then with a grin the little man started up again. “How could you know, anyway? His name was Jimmy Ottaway, and he was English and a crackerjack player.”
“What about Kanhäuser?” snapped Jupa.
But the little guy came back with a gesture that showed in no uncertain terms what he thought of our Jupa. “What are you bringing Kanhäuser into the picture for? He didn’t start playing with us until ’24!”
By this time the kid was feeling around for another cigarette. He lit it off the old butt and shook his yellow fingers for a few seconds—he must have burned himself—but he never let up reading. And now he was laughing, laughing like a hyena, laughing until he was weak.
Old man Jupa jumped up, banged his fist down hard on the table right next to the book, yelled, “Why, you dirty brat, you! Nobody’s going to laugh at me!” and went back to his seat.
The boy was so caught up in what he was reading he had broken out into a sweat, so he wiped off his forehead, loosened the bandana, and rolled up the sleeves of his sweater. He was enjoying the book so much that in a burst of high spirits he banged his fist on the table—and so hard that everything took a leap. The bartender was just bringing him another beer.
“You’re not the only one here, pipsqueak,” the bartender screamed into his ear. “Keep your little tricks to yourself.”
So anyway, the young guy—he was still reading and still chuckling away—felt his way up to the glass of beer, took it out of the bartender’s hand, and managed to take a deep drink without moving his eyes off the page.
“Beer number six, cigarette number twenty-one,” said the bartender in disgust. “What a generation they’re going to make, let me tell you. Christ, if he was my son I’d tear that cigarette out of his mouth, even if his whole chin came with it,” he yelled, demonstrating on himself how he’d rip off half the kid’s face. “But if I want to teach him a lesson, the smart aleck would have the police on my back in two seconds flat!”
Then, to punctuate his statement, he punched the compressor button. The red light went out.
By now Jupa had regained his composure, and he turned to the little man and said, “People who know something about soccer say that only Bican at the height of his career was up to playing with the Real Club.”
The little man pushed his pot of sauerkraut to the middle of the table and said, “Oh no! Bican never had the creativity a center forward needs. The only player who would have been up to the Real Club was Karel Koželuh. Koželuh had a feeling for team play. And why? Because he played outside left to my outside right. That’s why.” Then he pulled the pot back to the edge of the table, fished out some sauerkraut with the tips of his fingers, raised the limp little sheaf above his head, opened his mouth, and dropped it in. As he munched, he offered some to Jupa. “Help yourself. It’s good for you.” But all he got for his pains was a face that clearly said, “Anything but sauerkraut. I can never keep it down.” Old man Jupa had begun to look awfully small and awfully miserable.
In the meanwhile the kid—his eyes still glued to the book—had stood up. Nobody’d ever have guessed how tall he was. They don’t make them much taller. And the way he held that book of his, you’d think he’d never done anything in his life but hold books like that. He pushed back his chair like a count and then stood stock still in the middle of the room. There must have been some magic in what he was reading. Then he made his way over to the door at the other end of the room with Rest Rooms This Way painted on it, opened the door as if he’d done it a thousand times before, and disappeared into our old clubroom. (The clubroom used to have a showcase with our pennants and cups, from the time when you could still get a good game of soccer going in our part of Prague, but now it was being used to store crates of beer and soft drinks.)
Anyway, the bartender had just enough time to say, “What a nut,” and point to the closing door, when suddenly we heard a loud crash of bottles followed by a soft tinkling of glass. He threw open the door for all to see, and what they saw was that young punk stumbling his way through an ocean of empty bottles, and—get this—his book still planted firmly in front of his face. Finally he got to the next door. He felt around for the doorknob, turned it, and went into the men’s room.
The bartender tiptoed up to the door, opened it a crack, and peeked in. Then he closed it again, crossed through the clubroom, came back into the main room, and said mournfully, ‘What an awful sight. Picture him—standing there pissing away, and with the other hand he’s holding the book—and reading! And that cigarette dangling from his lower lip. No, I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve been serving beer for thirty years now, and never have I seen the likes of it. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know,” and he shook his head, “but this generation will be the death of us.”
Jupa asked the little man suspiciously whether he had ever played international ball. “Of course,” he answered. “Man, did I have a stroke of hard luck in Stockholm once. I get this beautiful pass, see! So I close my eyes and sidekick it. But the Swedish center half stuck his foot out, and that was the last thing I remembered. Later, in the hospital, Kuchynka told me he heard the bone crack three times and could almost see the stars. I didn’t break the leg, though, just tore off the kneecap. You should have seen how it swelled up. It’s a good thing we had a real specialist in Prague—our own Johny Madden.”
At this point the young guy came back, reading and smoking and making what looked like treble clefs in the air with his cigarette. He leaned against the doorjamb with the toes of one foot resting on the floor and the heel straight up and down. After a while he started back to his seat, but when he got to the center of the room he stopped and wrinkled up his forehead, as if something he’d read had given him a terrible shock. Then he shook his head, and tears as big as hailstones began to fall. Some of them fell on the back of old man Jupa’s hand, and Jupa jumped up and shouted, “Nobody’s going to cry over me!” Anyway, when the kid finally got back to his place, he practically collapsed into the chair.
Old man Jupa was furious. “Who ever heard of such a thing! Johny Madden a knee specialist. Johny Madden was a coach!” He looked up at the bartender, and the bartender began to laugh.
The guest, who was just about to drop another sheaf of sauerkraut into his mouth, jerked his head forward, threw the sauerkraut back into the pot, and said, “You can’t be very up on things if you don’t know about the miracles Johny Madden used to perform on sprained ankles. Why, all the ballerinas used to go to him. He had a ballerina in there with him the time they brought me in. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll have you fixed up in no time,’ he said to me while he massaged the dancer. Johny Madden … he was a great coach too of course….” And he picked up the sauerkraut again, threw his head back, and dropped it into his mouth.
Now old man Jupa had a reputation for being an expert, and he was fit to be tied. He stroked his bald head in self-pity and kept saying, “Impossible, impossible,” to himself. He seemed to have begun to shrink as soon as he started talking to the little guy. His neck was gone; his head sat right on his shoulders.
The bartender tried to save the day by pushing the button on the master board. It lit up the red light and started the compressor motor growling. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said, “where those punks get their money. When I was a kid, you were a millionaire if you had enough for a few beers!”
“Forget about him,” old man Jupa chimed in. “He’ll end up in reform school anyway. Just look at him. Four o’clock in the afternoon, this game could knock our team out of first place, and all our noble friend here can do is sit and chain-smoke and get sloshed. Where else is he going to end up but jail? He’ll probably go and murder a cigar store lady.”
“Hey, waiter!” the kid shouted. And don’t think he looked up from his book, either. No, all he did was motion toward himself and rub his thumb and forefinger together to show he was ready to pay.
“Did you see that? Did you hear that? I’m afraid to say anything to him. If only Comenius could see this….” He shook his head and added up the beers. “That’ll be seventeen crowns.”
The young guy took out a fistful of bills from his pocket the way the little guy picked up the sauerkraut from his pot. Then he separated out two ten-crown bills and put them at the far end of the table, like a pianist reaching for those real low notes. Then he made a “Do what you see fit with the change” gesture with his hand, crumpled up the rest of the money, and stuck it in his pocket like a handkerchief. But the bartender laid down a three-crown note next to the book and said to him, “You can keep your change. I’ll have no dealings with a jailbird.”
They watched the boy put out his cigarette in the ashtray. He was as careful as if he was ringing a doorbell. Then he felt around on the tablecloth for another cigarette, put it in his mouth, took out his matches, struck one, set fire to the three-crown note, and lit the cigarette with it—all without lifting his eyes from the book. As he inhaled, he waved the flaming bank note in the air, and when it finally began to burn him, he dropped it into the ashtray all twisted and black. It sat there like a piece of carbon paper. Then he leaned his forehead up against his thumb and index finger, looking as much like a monument as a person can.
The bartender spat, bent down, and whispered, “Nothing is holy any more. There was a time when people would climb a fence to catch a feather the wind had blown away, and what does this juvenile delinquent do? He uses money to light his cigarettes! And you can be sure he didn’t earn it for himself. How old do you think he is, anyway? Twenty-one? What will he be like when he’s thirty? Why, he’ll set the whole place on fire.”
Then old man Jupa started in again. “What about František Svoboda?”
The little gray-haired guy couldn’t have looked more patronizing. “You mean Franci? A great passer and a real tank. But he can’t compare with Koželuh. The way Franci passed to Zámora—why, to this very day Zámora jumps out of bed when he dreams of that bomb coming at him. The trouble was, Franci loved picking fights. If you’d ever gone to soccer matches, you’d have remembered his battles with the Hungarians … Ferencvárosi Toma Egysilét. Turay, who was known for his brutality, and Toldi, that two-hundred-twenty-five-pound giant, both running wild, and right there in the thick of it—our tank Svoboda. But when it comes to teamwork, Koželuh was impossible to beat. And why? Because he played outside left to my outside right. You follow me?”
Old man Jupa, who couldn’t have been more than a few years younger than the little guy, had shrunk so much during the last few minutes that his head was on a level with his stein; all he had to do was tip it a little and he was in business.
The sun beat down. The right-hand side of the street was steeped in bluish shadows, while the roofs on the left-hand side were just barely holding up under the weight of the light. And the Burials on Sunday sign—the come-on, in today’s lingo—was ablaze with iridescent paint. It was like the light reflecting off hundreds of pocket mirrors. At the end of the street, where you could see right through the trams—there were so few people riding them—paraded a steady stream of walkers in all shapes and sizes, with a baby carriage thrown in here and there for good measure. The kid stood up from under the compressor motor. His face was striped from the light coming in off the street. His eyes were still glued to the book. And taking his coat off the hook, he put one arm through a sleeve and then stood there in that ridiculous-looking pose—one arm in, one arm out—like a scarecrow in a cabbage patch, and kept right on reading.
The little guy added up his own bill, put down the money next to his glass, and picked up the pot of sauerkraut. Old man Jupa stood up, grabbed that pot like it was a life preserver, and shouted, “Are you trying to tell me we play lousy soccer?” And as he shouted, he shook the pot.
But the little guy, who stood opposite him, had held onto it and was shaking it along with Jupa—so hard he almost tore Jupa’s arm out of its socket. “Cut the crap now, will you? One day I pivoted twice in a row, and before you knew it the whole team was shouting, ‘Play that ball, or you’re out of the game on Sunday!’ Take Borovička, for example. He’s got all the technical know-how but no sense of team play. Or Kučera—a great player, but he hogs the whole show. No, to the best of my knowledge—and I’d swear it on a stack of Bibles—the best soccer ever was played by … the best soccer player of all times was Karel Koželuh. And you know why? Because he played outside left to my outside right.” And he pulled the pot right out of the hands of a very disgruntled Jupa.
Then he looked out into the street. Over by the coming attractions pictures in front of the movie theater stood this real stacked broad sucking on a hard candy and looking at the pictures. “What a woman!” exclaimed the little man, in a trance. “God, what a woman! Now that’s what I call a woman! And you know what she needs. Of course there aren’t any real men around nowadays to give it to her. No man today can even begin to understand a woman like that. What a woman!” And shaking his head, he read into that woman just what he had been talking about. Suddenly there she was—twirling her bag and sucking her candy and heading straight for us. When she was all but at the glass door—it even got a little darker inside—she turned again and showed us all her beautiful curves in profile and walked past. “That woman is my ideal,” said the little man, and he tucked the pot under his arm and set out after her like a sleepwalker or something.
Anyway, the kid finally pulled on the other sleeve, and—still holding the book in both hands—he spit out the last butt and ground it into the floor with his shoe. Then he put one hand on the glass door, shoved it open, and disappeared. Left the door open and disappeared.
“And not a word the whole time he was here,” said the bartender. He just couldn’t keep himself from going outside and yelling, “You good-for-nothing pipsqueak!” after the kid, and slamming the door real hard.
The glass gave out a suspicious rattle, and the bartender froze. “Jupa, I’m scared to turn around. Did I break it?” But Jupa shook his head no.
So there they sat, looking out the glass door. A crowd of people buying tickets began to form in front of the movie house. Old man Jupa looked up at the iridescent No Burials on Sunday sign and spit. “What an idiotic sign. Let’s hope it’s not a bad omen for our team.” The bartender was nervous by nature, and the kid with the book hadn’t exactly helped, so he started brush-cleaning glasses and holding them up to the light to make sure they were clean, just so he wouldn’t be the first one to see the soccer crowd turn the corner.
Suddenly old man Jupa cried out, “Here they come!”
The first one to round the corner was Mr. Hurych, followed almost immediately by the others. They were all bedraggled and hunched over; they all looked withered and small, as if they’d gotten drenched and their clothes had shrunk. Right under the No Burials on Sunday sign Mr. Hurych tore off his hat, threw it down on the sidewalk, and started jumping on it. The others tried to console him. Then, just to make it absolutely clear how much he was suffering, Mr. Hurych took off his overcoat, threw it down, and started jumping on it too.
“There’s something funny going on here,” said old man Jupa. “Must have been a tie.” And when he saw Mr. Hurych reaching for the doorknob, he opened the door for him himself. Well, Hurych fell in a heap on the first seat he came to and just sat there, looking out into space. The rest of the crowd came in and waited to see what he would do. Finally he picked himself up, took off his jacket, threw it down on the floor, collapsed back onto the bench, and said, “All eleven. No exceptions. Send all eleven to the mines!” And he pointed off in the direction where he figured the nearest mines to be.
Old man Jupa went over to the glass door and looked out. He didn’t even notice that the beautiful woman, the one with the twirling handbag, had turned back onto our street, and that the outside right with the pot of sauerkraut was still sleepwalking ten feet behind her. She went into the movie theater, and there he was, right behind her.
So anyway, here was old man Jupa standing in the glass door with his arms stretched out like Christ on the cross. And if anyone had happened to look at him from the side, they would have seen tiny tears making their way down his cheeks. But by then the bartender had begun passing around a tray of fortifying brandy.