'We were occupied then, too,' she winked at me conspiratorially, 'but it was a Prussian occupation. And the Prussians,' she added at once, 'put a notice on the wall here saying they hadn't come as conquerors, and would fully respect our national rights. Sir, this building has memories. During the last war, when they shot Heydrich, the Germans pasted on our wall a list of people they'd executed. Father ordered a special shipment of black-bordered envelopes, but then they locked him up, and six months later my mother was sending them out herself with letters of condolence.
'After that, by God's will, the blows came one after the other. Our building was confiscated by our own people and they were worse than the foreigners, and on top of that there was no one to drive them out. Last thing, right over there,' and she pointed to the corner of the attic
where there was a new mansard, 'Doctor Tereba had his observatory. He didn't have a family, and he'd spend all his nights up here. Venus was his wife, he'd say, and the moon and the planets were his children. You'll understand that, sir, because I know you measure by the stars, too; that young man who drives you around explained it to me. But you just figure out where things are on the earth. Doctor Tereba, he could figure out what would happen on the earth. Even before it happened, he told us about the disaster of the communist take-over in 'forty-eight. He had his telescope right here,' she walked over to the mansard and pointed to a pile of handbags on the floor, 'when the Americans flew to the moon; I invited everyone in the building up here so we could be a little closer to such a momentous event. And would you believe it? With my own eyes I saw how a cloud of dust was raised up there on the moon when that rocket landed. That's when I realized the moon wasn't what it used to be, if people can go walking about on it. Well, Doctor Tereba's gone too, and now they want to tear the place down. I tell you, that'll be the end of me. I don't think I could survive that.' She looked at me imploringly, as though it were within my power to save the building from destruction.
As I looked into her eyes, I could suddenly see, despite the vast distance in time, a line of Hussars in snow-white greatcoats, silvered by the light of the moon. The ominous sound of drumming reached the attic, and among the drummers a lone soldier was riding on a wagon, playing a harp. But no one could hear it over the drumming, not even when the soldier plucked the strings with all his might.
The Surveyor
WE DROVE OUR Romanian car to the top of a hill outside Chrudim and stopped a short distance from the new water tower. A road led up here, made of concrete slabs laid end to end. The point we had to re-survey should have been right beside the road, but someone had moved the marker stake, along with the cement base and the warning plate saying that anyone who moved the state's triangulation point was liable to prosecution.
The surveyor studied his map for a while. We then ran the tape-measure over the ground until we found, right by the edge of one of the concrete slabs, the spot where the triangulation point was supposed to be. I fetched the probe, a long iron bar with a point at one end, and for a few minutes we stabbed it into the earth without result. I expressed doubts that the mark-stone could have survived all the changes that had obviously taken place. The bulldozer, after all, would have hollowed out a roadbed wider than the concrete slabs. The stone must have been dug up.
'But then where is it?' the surveyor asked. 'They could have dug it up and then covered it with fill,' he admitted, 'but maybe they raised the level of the terrain when they
made the road. In that case, the stone would have remained in its proper spot, but buried even deeper.' He took the pick and began to dig. The earth I shovelled out of the hole — mainly gravel — was obviously fill. I couldn't imagine finding our stone underneath it, but the surveyor worked tirelessly and, as though aware of the folly of his effort, refused to let me dissuade him. When the trench he'd dug was deep enough to accommodate a kneeling sniper, he took the iron probe again and rammed it repeatedly into the ground right up to the grip. He struck nothing. 'It's always possible,' he said, 'that we've measured the distances imprecisely, or that some inaccuracies crept into the map we inherited. We ought to measure the position of the point again.'
The next day we brought a theodolite along. The surveyor levelled the instrument, tightened it on its pedestal, and began to focus in on the church tower while I, happy not to have either to dig or paint stakes, wrote down the angles he called out.
That evening the surveyor sat at his crippled table doing his calculations. The precision he worked to astonished me, especially since I know that slapdash work on our part would either never be discovered at all, or found out only after many years had gone by. Undoubtedly the knowledge that our measurements were as accurate as he could make them gave him satisfaction.
He was a rural man. He lived in a hamlet somewhere in the borderland between Bohemia and Moravia and he travelled about as far to Meštec as I did. His train arrived on Monday around ten; my bus from Prague got there an hour later. From that moment until Friday afternoon, we couldn't escape from each other; we even sat down to lunch
together. But both of us were silent types, and besides, there wasn't much time for conversation when we were working. I knew he was building an extension to his parents' house, in which he and his wife would live; that he was fattening up a bull he'd been given as a wedding present; that he ran for the fun of it, and played hockey and chess when he had the time.
He was my son's age; they both had finished their studies at the same time. And both had married only a few months before. He reminded me of my son, too, in his closed nature, and his kindly smile. These similarities inspired me to try to communicate with him on more than just a superficial level. But when people have no shared inheritance of work or songs or rituals or holy books or even heroes — when the bridges between us are fewer— what can bring them together?
Both of us were looking for a dining-room table.
Above the furniture store we occasionally drove past, a large red banner with yellow lettering on it declared that the aim of our ruling party was prosperity for all humanity. The surveyor would occasionally drop in to ask if they had a table. They never did. The bombastic claim over the doorway ridiculed us and we knew it, just as everyone who lived under this government of sloganeers knew it. Collectively humiliated, we shared contempt for those who humiliated us. But contempt and humiliation cannot uplift people and therefore cannot bring them closer together.
Sometimes I could see us as others saw us. Two figures of unequal age and position who moved through the countryside, across wet meadows and beet fields, carrying worn-out instruments and coloured stakes.
The older man would like to know what the younger
one thought about the world and whether he perhaps blamed his older companion for the state of the country. The older man has even prepared a defence should the question come up in conversation. He would explain what the war had done to him and his peers, how much anxiety and how many wrong-headed Utopian visions it had inspired in them. And he would explain the blindness that every vision produces.