Harlequin's Millions

which was heralded by the click-clack of marbles and beans in holes in the ground. The big beans were called Turks, and with one Turk you could pay for a whole throw, it was worth three ordinary beans. After the marbles came the spinning tops. Another game of chance we used to play was throwing a penny onto a chalk line, and at Easter, egg-tapping with a penny, the eggs lay on the ground, or in your hand … The soft voice explained, and down below, by the river, surrounded by a large wall, the tombstones came tumbling down, one after the other, on all sides, just like what happened in ancient times to a city that had surrendered, whose warriors on the ramparts were already dead, and then the jubilant, victorious army slaughtered everyone in the city who was still alive, men, women and children, old and young. The old witness Václav Kořínek put away his binoculars and said … The Ramparts were once called Rose Street, before that it was known as Below the Wall. It got the name Rose Street because of the reddish glow of the bricks in the town walls when the sun shone on them. Seventy years ago the street was called Skinner Street or simply the Skinnery. This street had its own policeman, Lukášek. He lived at number five-hundred-eight. Lukášek had a daughter, who died at the age of one. According to the customs of the day the tiny coffin had to be borne in a carriage driven by a boy and girl dressed as a groomsman and bridesmaid. Because the boy was one of those little rascals from the Skinnery, they had dressed him in a black suit borrowed from Mr. Trnka the varnisher, who was short but stout. The suit was three sizes too large. The big top hat rested precariously on his ears. A carriage was a strange sight on Skinner Street, and when it started moving with the girl and boy onboard holding the little coffin on their knees, a gang of youngsters began shouting and trying to jump onto the rear of the carriage. One of them knocked the groomsman’s top hat over his eyes and he was plunged into darkness, the girl screamed, the coachman cracked his whip at the boys and the horses … The pensioners had been listening attentively and they smiled, nodding their heads, once again “Harlequin’s Millions” wafted down and curled around the pensioners sitting together in little groups on the fourth-floor gallery of Count Špork’s castle, they looked down at the graveyard, at that distance they couldn’t really see what was happening, but Mr. Karel Výborný, who was peering through his binoculars, was so startled by something he saw that he quickly put them down, I grabbed the binoculars from him and focused, my eyes darted from one ravaged tombstone to the next and suddenly, to my delight, I saw that a tractor had fallen into one of the ruined graves, now two other tractors were trying to pull it out. Mr. Karel explained in a low voice … Among the dragoon officers were two illustrious figures. They were two lieutenants, Baron Dahlen and a Siamese prince who lived in a house in Zálabí just behind what is now Dr. Ruml’s villa, so he was also a bit of a Zálabían. The prince had a small, rather delicate build, a yellowish complexion, slanting black eyes and stiff black hair. We marveled at that hair during our games, when the prince would come and watch. He was an excellent dancer and never turned down an invitation to a ball, the local gardeners would deliver truckloads of flowers on his behalf, because he always gave each of his dance partners an extravagant bouquet. The prince was extremely interested in the games we played, jacks and marbles and ball games, we never needed the interpreter, he always sat a little farther away so as not to interfere, and we were perfectly able to communicate with the prince, we spoke Czech while the prince spoke a language unfamiliar to us, but together we used a kind of international language, with lots of pointing and gesturing, and that worked. We could tell the prince was seriously interested in our games by the fact that he wrote down the rules in some kind of chicken scratch in a little notebook, perhaps so he could make use of them later on in his own country … Said the witness to old times Karel Výborný, he spoke as he always did, as all three chroniclers did, for that matter, as if he were reading aloud from his memoirs, in which he had recorded everything he felt was memorable. I looked with delight at the tractor stuck in the open grave, as if a dead man had grabbed one of its wheels. Mr. Václav Kořínek began to speak … But best of all was our Rose Street when school was out for summer and the morning sun was shining, the guinea hens on Mr. Macháček the baker’s wall squawked loudly but you could still hear the rhythmical clatter of wooden mallets on tin from the workshop of Prachenský the whitesmith. Outside the house with the number four-hundred-thirty-three, veteran standard-bearer Havlíček sat and talked about the war. The next house, number four-hundred-seventy, belonged to the stove fitter Jan Maudr, who used to have a business on the corner of the Ramparts and Saint George Street with a sign that said: Huge Selection of Clay Ovens at Jan Maudr’s. When Jan Maudr died in nineteen-hundred-and-seven, the house was bought by Rudolf Kolář. The Kolář family had eleven children, the eldest daughter was married and by nineteen-hundred-and-ten she had two daughters of her own. So then there were sixteen people living in that house. Kindhearted Mrs. Kolář, who had been blessed with all those children, generously handed out homemade buns or pancakes to other folks’ children whenever they showed up at her front door. You could remember the names of the eleven Kolář children with a little rhyme: Sláva Vlasta Řina, I know a ballerina, Rudolf Otík Nina, she comes from Argentina, Lojzík Oldřich Elina, she plays the concertina, Jaroslav Bělina, and lives on semolina … There was also the occasional humorous incident in the privies, which were usually located in the courtyard of the houses and quite primitive. At number five-hundred-eight a two-year-old boy was once sitting on the toilet and tried to reach the rope so he could close the door, but his arms were too short, and then a very portly lady came running out of the house to answer the call of nature, at the door of the privy she turned around and began backing in bottom-first but gave the lad such a scare he was almost sick with fear … Mr. Václav Kořínek held forth, as if he were reading aloud these tales from the old days in a large auditorium, he stood there, leaning with both hands on the wooden railing, the wind blew through his white hair, he held his head forward like the bow of a ship and his memories cleaved the merciless waves of time, while down below, one shattered tombstone after another fell to the ground. The witness to old times Mr. Otokar Rykr broke the oppressive silence, in which all you could hear was the sound of “Harlequin’s Millions,” like a soft, sweet sonatina about a pair of lovers in a cheap color print … In the old days people went skating on the old Elbe, near where the footbridge now stands, on skates screwed to the bottom of their shoes, most unsuitable for figure skating. Ladies in long skirts, their hands in muffs, men in long winter coats. Here at least a young man had the opportunity to skate arm in arm with his sweetheart while gently squeezing her hand inside the muff. We impecunious lads made our own skates and called them gliders. We broke the iron sides off an old grater, snapped the curve of the handle in half, which gave us two fine blades, these we mounted on a piece of wood, then tied them under our shoes with a bit of rope and off we went. On Sundays a barrel organ used to play at the ice-skating rink and on rare occasions a little band … And lest I forget, of all the carousels in those days Šlemlajn’s from Kutná Hora was the most famous, and popular, because it had a platform. The carousel was hung with innumerable glass beads that glittered against the evening sky … Said Mr. Rykr and I put down the binoculars, it made me tired to watch something that caused me such pain, I felt like I was watching a bullfight, I, who love cows and bulls and calves, why should I watch something I found so painful? Because you should only dwell on the joyous things in life, in your memories, the things that give you the greatest pleasure, even something that may not be true but that you’ve believed in for so long that it actually does happen … When my tomcat didn’t come home for a week, then fourteen days, I was tortured by the thought that he’d been run over, that someone had shot him, that he was locked up somewhere and couldn’t get out and was slowly dying of hunger, it tortured me so that I couldn’t sleep at night, in my dreams one tomcat after another ran away and never returned, until I got to the last tomcat and finally said to myself, and believed it too, that my tomcat was probably much happier elsewhere than he had been with me and that he was now living with people who loved him even more than I had … In the graveyard three trucks were loaded down with tombstones, six men were loading the heavy stones with names and dates of people who had lived in the little town, six men loaded those tombstones onto the trucks, whose license plates were from completely different regions, they were taking them to places where no one knew those names, where the tombstone portraits in little glass ovals would mean nothing, sometimes one of the workers would smash the portraits with a sledgehammer before loading the tombstones onto the truck, he shattered the faces beyond recognition, he mutilated them, the way murderers do, but it wasn’t necessary, because wherever they were being taken, the stones would be sanded down, the first and last names that were carved into the surface would be removed and stonemasons would inscribe the names of the newly deceased, for the benefit of the grieving relatives who had ordered the tombstone … Mr. Václav Kořínek, witness to old times, seemed to have brightened up a bit, he sat down and said, this time not as a reproach, or for the sake of comparison, but simply for the fun of it … Oh yes, on the day before Christmas, everything was ready, in the Ramparts too, the street where we lived. Freshly baked Christmas cakes, mothers placed them proudly on their windowsills and people who met each other in the street were full of good cheer. They wished each other Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Mr. Rubek the mailman came to the door in full dress with a shiny new almanac for us tucked under his arm. Mr. Kulička the chimney sweep came by too, with a clean face and a white cap, and gave us a calendar that he said would bring us good luck all year long. We trimmed the Christmas tree, a fine young spruce that Papa, a boilerman, brought back on his return trip from Hanušovice, on the way there the train passed a little watch-house and Papa tossed a chunk of wood out of the locomotive with a note attached asking for a Christmas tree. On the way back the railroad watchman was waiting for him with the spruce and simply handed it to him … Said Mr. Kořínek and suddenly he grew solemn, three trucks had started off down the road, from up on the castle gallery you could see the black tombstones lying side by side in the back of the truck, the way they transported the dead during the war, the trucks disappeared, then reappeared a moment later, closer than before … Mr. Kořínek took out his notebook, removed a folded letter from between its pages, he unfolded it and read it aloud, so loudly that the pensioners sitting on the benches in the courtyard turned their faces to him, and those who were strolling froze, slowly turned and looked up toward the voice shouting out across the fields … My dear little town, although I have spent so many years abroad and am now such an old man, I still think of you, my native town. I salute you, Ostrov, avenue of birches, restaurant by the weir, where one could sit back and listen to the roaring of the water, I salute you, avenue of limes, the road to Šumava, great, beautiful meadow, flat as a tabletop and fringed with tall trees, I salute you, mighty dam, and Dubina, and you three tall poplars in Rohov, and you, Mr. Kofroň. Do you still monitor the water level and sound the alarm when the ice breaks up? And the bridge? Does it still tremble when a heavy floe hits one of its piers? And how are Mr. Poláček and Boháček and all their friends? Such fine fellows! In summer they mined sand from the Elbe and in spring, when the ice began breaking up, they pushed apart the ice floes with long forked sticks. And how is the Old Fishery? And that lovely spot at the foot of the Ramparts, where we used to stand and watch the foaming water tumbling from the weir into the millrace? I often think back on the quiet Church Square with the imposing structure of the cathedral, whose towers can be seen from miles around. And the fountains, into which people nowadays probably throw things that don’t belong. And I think of the promenade from the Bártl home to the Měšťans, where even now the girls probably still smile and wink at the students, oh how we envied them. And do the great windows of the dance hall at Hotel Na Knížecí still glow in the distance when there’s a soiree or a ball? And Mr. Preclík, does he still play those beautiful waltzes? And whatever became of Stázička, our lovely dancer, who was said to be the prettiest girl in our little town and would show up for a date wearing her brother’s shoes? They were too big for her, but she obviously wanted to shock us, because they were bright yellow, and that was a rarity back then. I salute you all, as you live on in my memory, even if Mr. Hanuš has made your bed for all eternity, and no doubt someone else has done the same for him. May a summer breeze blow the petals from a rosebush and scatter them on your graves, together with a handful of memories … Cried and shouted the witness to old times Mr. Kořínek, reading what it said in the letter, and there, within sight of the retirement home, the three trucks disappeared with the black tombstones of citizens, people, who years ago had lived in the little town where time hasn’t stood still for anything, not even for the old graveyard. In the afternoon the wrought-iron playpens from the children’s section were carted off to the scrap-metal yard … but in the old graveyard, among the few remaining graves, among the uprooted acacias and thujas, there, with even more zest and enthusiasm than before, almost a kind of malice, and now with plenty of space to drive around in, the three tractors engaged in battle with the remaining tombstones, which no longer had as much strength as when they had been standing side by side, in close ranks, and for a moment it had seemed, but that had been only an illusion, that the tractors didn’t stand a chance … Now their victory was assured, the phalanx of tombstones had been almost entirely mowed down and carted off, a few still lay on their backs, yet it seemed to me that the tractors were now much fiercer, almost deranged, like an angry swarm of bees, they charged furiously at the stones that were still standing, the machines seemed to cheer each time they knocked down another tombstone, their engines roared with determination, as if they wanted to resolve this unequal struggle as quickly as possible. When dusk had fallen, and then evening, all you could see were the moving headlights bringing down the last tombstones … It was alarming to watch a bulldozer, which you couldn’t see, light up a tombstone, headlights coming closer and closer, until it crashed into that stone with its enormous shovel, the headlights seemed to sniff at the first and last names of the deceased and for a moment neither tombstone nor tractor moved, from a distance all you could see was that terrible tension, like when the dentist clamps your teeth one by one in his pliers and pulls with all his might, then there was a dead minute, and then something in the foundation gave way and the tombstone fell, and then the next one and finally at midnight the last one … and the tractors kept driving around and around the former graveyard, their headlights sniffing, scouring the battlefield, everything that had been standing now lay flat, but that wasn’t enough for the tractors and their headlights … they drove around in circles to make sure they hadn’t missed any tombstones, perhaps one of the smaller stones in the children’s section … The witn