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8 THE SNOWDROP FESTIVAL
KERSKO FOREST IS SO DEEP that, as the legendary Czech wrestler Gustav Frištenský tells us, a black member of his professional Graeco-Roman group got lost in it and Frištenský never saw him again, as he says in his Memoirs. I was looking for Mr Liman, and I was so long looking for him that I nearly got lost in the forest, because I was facing a tumbledown cottage, a number of byres and an outhouse, in front of which, on a chair, sat an old man in dungarees, his white hair sticking out like horns, such strange strands his hair was in, like long coils of steel swarf, like wood shavings all intertwined and interlocking. He sat there and chickens were pecking all round him and he was scattering grain for them. I said: “Nice spot this, isn’t it?” And he nodded and said: “It is too, but you’re not from these parts, are you?” As I explained I’d only recently bought a second home, a cottage really, on Avenue Twenty-four the old boy interrupted and said in a sonorous voice that he knew the spot, that that part was called Nouzov, that the plots were bordered by a babbling brook called the Velenka, and that the meadow had belonged to the Králs from Hradišťko, the meadow known as Alder Lea. I said how pleased I was that, if nothing else, the air here was wonderful. “True,” he said, “the air hereabouts is raw, but wholesome, and then Kersko, a forest-city, is divided up and numbered on the model of New York, the metalled concrete road is like Fifth Avenue, and the avenues off to the side, they’re like streets, if you leave the main thoroughfare, then on the right-hand side they’re even-numbered, and on the left odd, so if you were to look down on this forest-city from above, the layout’s like a fern frond,” he said and stood up, and his hair stuck out awesomely, and it struck me that the tips of the curls could poke an eye out if they were made of bronze. He stood legs apart and asked: “Can I be of service? Are you looking for someone?” I said: “I am, but I’ll not find him now, but tell me, how long is the metalled road, the concrete one?” Pleased at the chance to show off his knowledge, he said: “From the bus-stop to the Semice — Hradišťko road, it’s two thousand three hundred and forty-eight metres, as measured by Mr Procházka the roadmender,” he said, and he fetched a red folding chair, wiped the chicken poo off it and invited me to sit down. I thanked him, getting a whiff of the byre and an indeterminate, rank stench, but the old man was so behorned with that hair, and such was the power emanating from the tips of his curls that my impression was, as I gazed in amazement at his chrome-coloured hair, that in the event of a storm it must start discharging St Elmo’s fire. I said: “I’ve heard there’s an ancient pine tree somewhere round here and I’d like to see it.” He glanced at the little pendulum clock hanging from a pine branch, and its striker struck the hour in a frenzy and with great gusto and a noise like a woodpecker… “I’m still all right for time… so, you mean Showy Toni? You’re dead right, she’s a beauty, magnificent, if you look up into her canopy and the sun’s shining, the canopy’s like that window in St Vitus’ Cathedral, the spokes and fellies of her branches are absolutely precise, and she swings steadily in a circle with such precision… She was planted in 1620, and not far off there’s her little sister, the rangers call her Slinky Tonietta, I think she’s even more beautiful, with a little topknot, and her branches close kempt, like a pixie cut… and she’s also a giant, except that her trunk got so gouged by lightning that her growth rate slowed…,” said the old gentleman and a gentle breeze blew back the silken branches of a little birch grove, and the old boy extended a hand as if to caress them, and he did caress them, fingering the little leaves and restoring emotion to them. I could tell he was a sensitive old man and that he lived at the expense of the elements, and in harmony with nature, as befitted his age. He carried on, constantly putting out his hand, now as if he were warming himself at the flickering flames of the leaves wafting on the birch twigs: “We’ve got another classy number here as well if you go along Avenue Six, known as Nymburk Way, you go as far as the tract we call The Crest, right, and there by the brook you’ll see a spruce, half its height jutting over the other spruces around it, it must be two hundred years old and more, and its nine lower branches are twisted upwards in such a way that their ends are like roots with more spruces shooting up from them, nine spruces, ten metres tall, and the tree holds them aloft like a juggler juggling plates on nine sticks, though plates spin round, it actually resembles a massive candlestick, that giant spruce…” He had spoken, and he lit a cigarette and sat on a chair next to me and his overalls, dribbled with gravy and something that smelled pretty awful, gave off such a terrible stink that I turned to leeward… For something to say, I suggested there might be a lot of woodcock in the area and pointed towards the birch grove that began beyond his plot and was twinkling over his fence. He took a long drag on his cigarette and it was almost like a light coming on next to his mouth, as if he’d bitten the cigarette off, so short it had become, and then the smoke came scudding out of his mouth, resembling the long, solid curls jutting out like little sabres jammed into his head. “This isn’t their time, and there aren’t many anyway, the days are long gone when assistant foresters would bet a bottle of wine that they could bag twenty or thirty in an evening. Woodcock do their celebratory mating dance around the end of March or beginning of April, after the sun’s gone down and the first star’s come out… the males fly about making a glorious love call and the females sit around in the cold grass listening…” He had spoken, he cleared his throat, a prolonged rasping cough rasped forth from him and the cuckoo flew out of the clock and rasped in exactly the same way, marking five o’clock. “I know,” the old man told the clock, and he took another colossal drag and again it was as if he’d bitten off part of the cigarette, so far down had it burned, lighting up the stub… As he spoke, he pointed with his cigarette: “No more woodcock, a pair here and a pair there, but, come July, you do get nightingales warbling away in the night, magnificent, if you keep a lookout, nightingales also warble in your avenue, in the oaks at the forest edge… it’s a violin performance, it’s like when an artist starts cutting a beautiful image in a plate of pure crystal with a diamond stylus. I can’t sleep a-nights, I prowl around, following the voices of the nightingales, and here…,” he patted his chest, “…here I have this sensation of sweetness and I’m happy that there’s still something beautiful so close by… but there’s most nightingales by the ruins of Mydlovary Castle, across the river, like if you were to go from Přívlaky towards Kámen, or — you’re a young fellow — if you go dancing at Kocáneks’ in Hradišťko during the parish fête… after midnight, if you take a stroll with a pretty girl past the King of Clubs into the fields, across the football pitch at Ruždiny… then with the stream of cold air coming up off the water along the track the song gets louder and louder, and not one, but three, a quartet, sometimes I’ve heard as many as six nightingales, for an hour, an hour and a half, giving out a thin silvery thread and embroidering with their voices a violin concerto with no recapitulations, and when it falls silent you can spot one sitting, exhausted, on a branch, you can see the little chap must have lost at least twenty grams… and even if he were to shed half a kilo, tell me, why do they sing like that, and who for?” He’d spoken and was grave and so deeply affected that he bent a little and wiped away a tear with the back of his hand… and the spikes of his hair stood there right before my eyes and nose and I caught the dreadful smell emanating from that cornucopia of odours and it made me see stars and I leaned away so far that I lost my balance and fell flat on my back and as my legs flew up I caught him on the forehead with one knee. I rolled quickly over into the fallen leaves and as I dusted myself down, I saw I was covered in chicken poo, and I blushed, but as the old man stood over me I realised he was taller than me by a head and his gigantic arms were raised to form like a little shrine above me and he tried to be reassuring: “Don’t do that now, you’d just rub it in, once it dries it’ll flake off… but let me draw you a map, since you’re new round here, you don’t have to mind about the people, but do mind about nature, to start with, avenues six and four, between them there’s a clearing, and there you’ll see hundreds of Siberian irises in bloom, and if ever you go to Mydlovary, across the river, I’m off there myself in a moment, you’ll find some centuries-old oak trees, and one of them is so hollow that twenty or thirty people have sheltered from a storm inside it! But I’ve always liked going there and dancing in the spring, and sometimes even now: did you know, there was this lovely old custom last century when the young folk would meet under those old oaks and the girls would deck themselves with snowdrops and dance to the music of the band, right there beneath those ancient giants of the forest? Incidentally, why did you stop at my gate, why? Were you looking for someone, not me, surely?” He pointed at the top of his dungarees, from which chicken droppings were hanging adrift, like ancient medals… “No,” I lied, “I was just passing, but I’m glad you told me all about the forest.” He gestured with his hand and, to the cuckoo, which had just popped out of the Black Forest clock, cuckooed and clattered back inside its coop, he said: “I know, give me half an hour and I’m off, but do you know what else is worth seeing hereabouts? Come the autumn, that little knoll over there, it’s called Semická, is covered in hundreds, thousands of blue fringed gentians and yellow hawkweeds! They get scrunched by tractor tyres day after day, yet there’s always more and more of them… and if you go a bit further west to the hill called Bílá, above Přerov, there you’ll find, you won’t believe this, wild asparagus, I mean, asparagus!” And he placed his hands on my shoulders and only then did I notice that his entire arms were dappled with chicken poo, and that his hair was full of bits of straw and chaff and scraps of hay and several flaky chicken droppings, all like bits of leaves fallen from birches that were old before their time, but now the old boy seemed in a bit of a hurry, he looked straight at me, beating time with one hand as he quickened his delivery: “Do you know that planks cut from the pines in this forest are a lovely copper colour and that they turn red with age? And do you know that in olden times pines from Kersko were floated all the way to Hamburg? And do you know that in olden times the drive shafts in Dutch windmills were made from Kersko oaks? That the fortress at Theresienstadt used up five hundred Kersko oaks in beams and planking? And do you know that you enter the council offices and three different cottages in Hradišťko through Gothic windows, which peasants made into doorways having taken them from the ruins of the little church at Kersko that got destroyed during the Hussite wars? And do you know that they used to make ships’ masts out of Kersko larches? And do you know that what we call Lablets are oxbow lakes detached from the Labe, as the great River Elbe is known hereabou