Harlequin's Millions

2

I’VE BEEN AT THE RETIREMENT HOME FOR A WEEK now and it never ceases to amaze me. Francin, to all intents and purposes, has cut himself off from his surroundings, he’s bought himself an ushanka, one of those Russian caps for winter, and pulled the flaps down over his ears and fastened them under his chin with a little hook and walks around the castle like that, all wrapped up, nothing on his mind but the news reports from every continent, news from the rest of the world. Including the commentary. I don’t really mind, in the forty years we’ve been together we’ve already said everything we have to say to each other, we have no more hopes, no expectations. We’re starting to see things a bit like Uncle Pepin, who will most likely be the first of us to go, but where? Our only wish was that we never be a burden to each other, until the day we died, we’d always help each other out. Every day I’ve discovered something new here, something that keeps me going. In front of the castle, a little farther downhill, is an old Augustinian monastery, which once had a large library. Now the library is a boiler room, the refectory, a laundry room, and the monks’ cubicles, repair shops. But just as in the castle, the ceilings are painted with biblical scenes, the plaster is peeling in the laundry room, but you can still discern the hand of a fresco painter. The central heating in the monastery runs on coke and coal, the stoker dumps the cinders in a pile out front. Every so often the cinders and ashes are carted off in a truck. The truck driver lives in the gardener’s house and is always happy to chat, sometimes a few of the pensioners will drop by to visit him, play with his children, have a beer with him in the evening. Twice a week this same driver collects the food scraps, which are stored in a special room. You can smell them from a mile away because they’re always a day late collecting them from that special room, so by the time the twenty buckets of swill are loaded onto the truck, they’re so full the scraps spill out onto the floor and ferment. But that’s not what I wanted to say. One of the pensioners, Mr. Berka, is at the truck driver’s house every single night playing with his children, drinking beer, they may even be distantly related, but whenever Mr. Berka is on duty at the gate and this driver pulls up in his truck, Mr. Berka comes running out and asks to see his permit to leave the premises, but that’s not enough for Mr. Berka. He asks the driver to show him his other papers, too. And the good-natured driver hands them over with a smile, but a stern-faced Mr. Berka checks to see whether the picture of the driver on the identity card corresponds to the driver himself, he compares them several times. Then he hands him back his papers but retains his meticulousness and sense of duty, he lifts the tarp slightly and scans the loading platform, square inch by square inch, if it’s cloudy or dark he searches the truck with a flashlight, but even that isn’t enough and he crawls right through the swill and shines his flashlight into the empty buckets, he lifts the damp tarp, and finally, his hands wet with old gravy and sour soup, he lets himself glide down along the side door and, just to be sure, and to ease his conscience, he lies down in front of the radiator and props himself up on his elbows, then lowers himself down until his cheek is pressed against the road so he can check under the truck to see if anything is being smuggled into the retirement home, or smuggled out. Then Mr. Berka greets the driver, curtly, coolly, but the very next day, early in the evening, he’s sitting with the driver on the stoop of the gardener’s house, playing with his children, running down the hill to get a jug of beer at the nearest pub … As I said, I’ve been at the retirement home for a week now and it’s one surprise after another. “Harlequin’s Millions” winds its way around the castle, the rediffusion boxes are hung not only in the corridors but also in the trees in the park, they’re covered with sheets of plastic to protect them from the rain, just like in the old times when beggars covered their barrel organs with oilcloth so they could keep on playing their harmonic waltzes. The string orchestra curls gently around the old tree trunks and “Harlequin’s Millions” climbs like old ivy into the crowns and trickles down along the leaves, the corridors of the home are filled with a pleasant phosphorescent gas, with the scent of cheap perfume, so no one is really aware of the music, only when there’s a power failure and “Harlequin’s Millions” is suddenly cut off, stops short, the way everything stops as if by magic in the tale of Sleeping Beauty, all the pensioners glance up, they look up at the speakers and the sudden loss of the music feels to them like when the lights go out and everyone longs to hear it again, because without it the air in the castle and along the paths in the park is unbreathable. When this happens in the evening, or at dusk, they all look up at the suddenly darkened lightbulbs and fluorescent lamps and keep looking until the lights go back on and the music begins to play where it left off. At that moment all the pensioners sitting in the corridors, on the toilets, lying in bed, give a deep sigh and start listening to the music again the way they ought to be listening to it, with interest, life resumes and all those eyes, which have been gazing up with such eager, almost indignant anticipation, those eyes are lowered again, they look down at the floor, at the sand, because nearly all the pensioners have bowed heads, bowed with old age and illness, and continue studying the texture of the carpet, linoleum and sand, where they always tread carefully, because here in the retirement home you have to pay close attention to how you walk, because every fall can mean the loss of your mobility, one injury and the game is over, because here at the home anyone who can walk and get to the bathroom on his own is considered healthy. One day I walked around the castle until I reached the spot where they’ve put up a wire fence along the trees. The footpath ends there in grass. But I noticed that the wire under the old, low-hanging branches had been trampled to the ground, all you had to do was grab one of the branches and you could step right over the trampled wire and continue down a forbidden path nearly overgrown with grass, a footpath that led, barely visible, to the castle terrace. I was all excited, I shivered, imagined that a nurse might see me here or the caretaker or the head doctor himself, but my desire to see the forbidden park was so great that I walked along the stretch of fence that was still standing all the way to the terrace, from which you could see the little town where time stood still, but in front of which stone figures of naked young women and men stood out against the sky, statues of young men without clothing, of old men covering their loins with billowing robes, each statue stood on a high plinth, so that I had to look up to see their sandstone bodies, each statue was holding something, some object, or fruit … And even though I had lived in the little town for forty years, I’d never found the time to come see this row of statues, or the footpaths that ended in a burst of stars, paths lined with pruned beech trees and every hundred yards a statue, one for each month of the year, against a backdrop of branches and twigs, the leaves of red beeches touching their beautiful human bodies. And when I stopped in front of the statue of a naked young woman, I didn’t even have to read the old, moss-covered inscription and the poem chiseled into the plinth to know that this statue glorified the month of May. This statue of a young beauty with her small breasts and provocative hips had an even greater effect on me than a mirror. I understood then and there why the retirement home was separated from the park by a wire fence, I understood what it was to be young, to be a young woman, I reached out my hand and touched the calves and thighs and hips and felt the grainy texture of that female flesh, with my fingers I felt the beauty of that female skin and suddenly I understood why some of the pensioners had dared to trample the fence to the ground and compare themselves, at their own risk, to those statues. So I stood there, I studied all the faces and bodies, and from the corner of my eye I discovered that what connected these statues had some deeper meaning, that in fact all the sculpted objects they were holding were there to emphasize that meaning, these statues represented the entire human race, in all its phases, and together they formed what we call nature: spring, summer, fall, winter … I was standing there in front of the statue of May when suddenly I knew that I had needed to arrive at this point, just as I am, so that while there was still time I could penetrate the secret of each statue, perhaps even the secrets of all these statues, which would probably tell me nothing more than the story of life, a cycle I’d nearly reached the end of. I could see that the sandstone statues formed a kind of novel, the tale of someone who had been waiting here for me, to explain to me, in stone handwriting, what Count Špork and his guests must surely have known as they strolled past the statues reading the story of man. There was no one else walking in the park, down below was the little town, encircled by the river and the red medieval walls, rising up across the river was the beige-colored brewery, with its smokestack, its tin roof gleaming, where I had lived for more than a quarter of a century, where I’d been happy, because in those days I was as young and beautiful as the statue of that young woman, below which the inscription May was just barely visible beneath the moss. I made a solemn promise to myself to walk down that forbidden footpath every day, to the statues, who had so much to tell me, because I had never, ever expected that life would go by so quickly. Before I’d even taken a good look around me, I’d plucked out my first gray hair. But in those days I’d always been under the impression that I still had plenty of time, that I had time for everything, that old age was something that didn’t concern me. So I dyed my hair, smoothed my wrinkles with creams and massages, while Francin stayed the same, it even seemed to me that he was exactly the same as when he was thirty, but he had grown older too, because all of a sudden he was retired, all of a sudden we had moved to the little villa on the river that I’d designed myself … and all of a sudden it was my birthday and I turned sixty and all of a sudden sixty-five and all of a sudden I got paradentosis and Mr. Šlosar pulled out all my teeth and promised he would make me a set of dentures more beautiful than my own teeth, that’s what Mr. Šlosar told me, and I had believed his eyes and his voice that assured me that false teeth gleamed brighter than the teeth he had pulled, why, in America it was even the custom that when you reach a certain age, you have all your healthy teeth extracted and instead of those you wore teeth you could rinse under running water, because teeth with fillings just kept decaying and caused rheumatic diseases and heart problems. This had happened to me in the fall, Mr. Šlosar was in excellent spirits, I’d heard that the fall was paradise for dental technicians, because it’s hunting season, and the huntsmen in our little town celebrate the end of every hunt by drinking themselves silly, and early the next morning when one of them throws up in the ditch or the toilet bowl, he accidentally spits out his expensive dentures, so from September to New Year’s Mr. Šlosar has his hands full with all those teeth, he even has to work nights repairing and making new false teeth for his hunting clientele, while they have to pay three times more than what they’d paid for their dentures the first time around. And when my gums were healed, I had him make a plaster cast and a month later I went back to him, full of hope, I smiled, because I knew that by the end of the day I’d be wearing those porcelain teeth, that work of art, as Mr. Šlosar called them, those lilies of the valley that he would plant in my rosy gums. And Mr. Šlosar disappeared into his workshop and when he returned he was carrying something wrapped in cotton on a tin tray, he asked me to sit down in the chair, close my eyes and open my mouth, and he slid something cold and hard over my lower gums, my chin dropped under the weight of it, then he slid in something even more disgusting, some object that made me want to vomit, I started gagging, but the voice of Mr. Šlosar urged me to suck the silver plate to the roof of my mouth and wait until the dentures had warmed up a bit. And so I lay there, the woman who moments before had clapped her hands when she saw Mr. Šlosar walk in carrying his artificial remedy on a silver tray, now I had the feeling he had clamped my whole head in a vice, I felt myself turning deathly pale, my whole body and soul struggled against the humiliation and disgrace that had been shoved into my mouth, a hostile object in a cold, harsh cave, with cones of dripping stone above and below. I paid, Mr. Šlosar assured me it was only a matter of time before I was used to the new teeth, under no circumstances was I to remove that artifact of his, which he had labored over with such care, I even had to sleep with it in, something aging saleswomen and office girls did best, since they couldn’t possibly go to work without any teeth. He walked me all the way to the square, actually he had to hold me up, because when I left his dental studio it was like leading a widow away from a grave, he held me up and whispered in my ear that I shouldn’t run my curious tongue along the teeth, a curious and restless tongue could give you cavities, even cancer, one of his clients had contracted such a serious illness with her curious tongue that she’d had to be admitted to the psychiatric unit, the psychoanalyst had given her orders never, never, under any circumstances, to yield to her curious tongue, otherwise the cavities could turn into cancer, Mr. Šlosar said in parting that there were plenty of men, boorish types, who had a set of dentures made but only wore them once and then threw them in a drawer and trained their toothless gums on crusts of bread until they were beautifully callused, which was a perfect substitute for teeth, but still! I had always been an attractive woman, he told me, I’d never make a fool out of him and I’d wear my teeth at all costs. He said this in a confidential tone and then slipped his own dentures out of his mouth and held them up before my eyes and said, I wanted to throw these away, too, but that was out of the question! How could I ever recommend false teeth to a patient if I wasn’t wearing them myself? That would be like Kolář the pharmacist having no hair and constantly trying to fob off his hair tonic on everyone else, his tried and tested hair tonic. The best thing for men with a new set of dentures, their first, was to take money out of the savings bank, or borrow it, or cajole their wives into giving them a thousand crowns so they could take a week off work and then sit in the pub surrounded by other people and drink beer or restorative beverages from morning till night, only then could they forget about those false teeth, that was certain, said Mr. Šlosar, the teeth must stay in your mouth throughout the course of treatment … And I walked across the square with my head held high, I had to walk that way, because if I leaned forward even slightly, my head would drop and my teeth would fall out. I felt this, and burst into tears, because I realized I was doomed to be an old woman, from this moment on I’d be an old hag, a toothless old crone, because I couldn’t bear having a thing like this in my mouth, even if I were to take all my savings out of the bank and spend six months drinking champagne and beer, even then, and that’s how well I knew myself, I wouldn’t be able to endure those teeth, my whole body, my soul, everything was telling me those dentures were unwelcome, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d been tricked, that th