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11 LELI
LELI WAS A GREAT GUY, with so many pals he never had time to get married, such a great pal he was. No festivity in the Kersko forest range, and there’s some celebration or other almost every Sunday, because anyone who’s young, that’s a cause for celebration in itself, none could happen without Leli being there. Especially if someone had got a keg in. That was a major kind of celebration, like when someone got married or had a baby, then the litre glasses came out to be drunk at whichever cottage or in whichever avenue the wedding or christening was being held. And so Leli would show up as MC and technical consultant. Leli could cope with anything, because he was one big technical encyclopaedia, he was so well read that there wasn’t really a book he hadn’t read, and he could give a lecture on anything whatsoever, wheresoever it took place. One time there was a barrel to broach, but the lads had brought it on a handcart, and when they set it down in front of the fire under the old oak trees, whose branches were bent low right over the barrel, no one dared tap the barrel. Then suddenly Leli turned up and at once: “What don’t you understand? Where’s the problem?” And when they said they were afraid to spile the barrel, Leli said: “Bring me an apron,” and he donned the apron then gave a lecture on what a spile is and the principle it works on, then he set the spile, loosened the screw and with a mighty blow drove the spile in, but the lads who’d brought the barrel along on the handcart were right, the spile shot upwards like a spear, the beer spurted and fizzed in a mighty geysir up into the oak branches, and Leli stood there in that fountain of beer, handsome and soaked, and after the beer had shot up and was dripping back from the leaves onto the benches and us, Leli pronounced with an appropriate gesture: “Technical defect… bring me a bowl of water and a towel,” and he untied the apron and blithely washed his hands of the technical fault, so we drank what was left in the barrel and then we went back and forth to the pub with jugs and ended up fetching crates of bottled Popovice lager, we sat on the benches and sang and played guitars till morning, beer never stopped dripping on us from the leaves, and we were all sticky and tacky with the beer and we smelled of beer, we were so fantastic because we were young. “Yep,” says I, “Leli’s a great guy.” And again Leli would go around Kersko and wherever someone didn’t understand something, he’d first give them a lecture, then his advice, or he’d get on and do what he’d advised himself. Mr Svoboda couldn’t paint his kitchen, so Leli said: “What don’t you understand? Where’s the snag?” And Mr Svoboda said he was afraid to spray the kitchen, which he wanted blue, and Leli said how lucky Mr Svoboda was that he, Leli, was passing, and at once he prepared him a pail of blue wash, improving it with a few drops of oil from a special bottle he’d been and got, and Mr Svoboda painted the kitchen, but after he went to bed he was woken at midnight by a strange sound coming out of the darkness of the kitchen, like someone giving sloppy kisses, and when he put the light on and looked up at the ceiling, it had bubbles all over that were cracking open, crow’s-feet cracks opening up everywhere and showering blue powder down to the floor. When Leli heard about it, he said “technical defect in the paint” and walked on unbowed, and he saw Mr Kuchař mending a windscreen-wiper on his car, so he went up, looked a while, then said: “Lucky I’m here, can I mend it?” And before Mr Kuchař knew it, Leli had given him a lecture on each of the components and on all the little screws, then asked Mr Kuchař to hand him a screwdriver, and with that and Leli having tightened the last screw, the wiper snapped and Leli pronounced knowledgeably: “There’s a technical defect in the material…,” and he handed Mr Kuchař the broken blade and departed, and the next day, Mr Kuchař was driving to Ústí on business and it was raining, and he steered with one hand and in lieu of the wiper wiped the rain away with the other through the open window, cursing all the way to Ústí: “Damn the man, that bastard Leli,” adding some other salty Moravisms… Yep, Leli was a great guy.
At home in his cottage Leli had a wonderful workshop, and in the workshop Leli had some tall coat stands, on which hung various outfits and overalls to go with whatever Leli happened to be doing or where he was going. So if he was cutting something with a hacksaw, he’d put on dungarees and a cap like American workmen wear, the kind with a big peak, he would be so intent on the job in hand that woe betide anyone who came in, not even his dad dared, and when I once did persuade his dad, his dad went in and said: “Leli, there’s a friend to see you,” but Leli carried on filing the edge of a piece of sheet metal he’d got in the vice and confined himself to a lofty: “How many times do I have to tell you that when I’m working I do not want to be disturbed?” And he was right, Leli was a picture of dignity as he worked in his boiler suit, he always had such style. And when he went out on his bike, he’d put on some jodhpur-like cycling trousers, take a canful of milk and one of mineral water and set out as if he were going on the Peace Race, Leli, so stylish, so magnificent. When he went out animal-watching in the woods or fields, Leli would change into hunting green and a deerstalker and have a pair of binoculars on his chest so everyone would know that Leli was going stalking, that in the evening we’d be told everything he’d seen, always linked to a lecture, so we, his friends, knew everyting we knew from Leli, Leli was like our university. If anyone invited Leli to take a boat-trip on the river, Leli would turn up in a marine-blue suit like the captain of a corvette, with a cap to match, borrowed from his friend who worked, and still works, on ocean-going ships, sailing the world, and he’s always at sea for sixth months and with us for six months, and we call him Sailor, so Leli in his First Engineer’s cap would sit in an ordinary dinghy and keep a keen and close eye on who was coming the other way and who they were passing, giving erudite lectures on every kind of seagoing and commercial vessel, and warship, and warships were Leli’s pet interest, he could go on for hours on end about them, drawing plans in the sand not only of the various types, but also of all the great sea battles from Trafalgar to Narvik. When there was a forest fire over where the game park begins, everyone hurried to help put it out, and we were on tenterhooks: When would Leli turn up? And whereas fire brigades had arrived from various quarters and even a water canon came into its own, as we made our way back from the extinguished blaze, along came Leli in an asbestos suit with a rake over his shoulder, striding along, ramrod straight and head held high, relishing the wonderment he radiated from afar, and he promptly gathered us together and gave us a lecture to the effect that the best way to tackle a forest fire of burning moss isn’t a water canon, isn’t jets of water, but, at least for starters, rakes, with which you have to turn over the whole area that has burnt, because Leli’s known this for years — and this fire now, Leli had survived four such — and he turned and spread everything with his rake, and he showed us, “See, it’s still smouldering here, in three days’ time it’ll flare up again, ’cos smouldering moss and peat’s a right bastard…” And so it came to pass, the fire wardens chased Leli from the site of the fire as if he’d been taking the piss and acting like a provocative yob, so Leli had shouldered his rake and set off home like Winnie the Pooh in an asbestos suit and was giving us this lecture on the proper way to put a forest fire out, turning back and pointing to the swirling smoke, insisting that on Thursday it would flare up again… and it did, in four days, just as Leli had foretold, the forest caught fire again, at the selfsame spot, from the smouldering moss and peat… Yep, Leli, he was a great guy, who thought not only about us and for us, but also through us, and he lived with us and we respected him. His great passion was motor racing, and he didn’t just watch all the Formula 1 races, but he knew from foreign magazines every detail of the life of Fittipaldi and Emerson, he even knew their family lives, and one time when we were chatting casually about something we’d read about Formula 1 in the papers, Leli took the floor and in a quiet voice spelled out all the details, he knew all there was to know not only about what this or that driver looked like, but also what a racing driver thought about. Leli also had a car, but a Trabant, and when he was at the wheel, he wasn’t one to use a crash helmet and things, he invariably wore a sporty race suit, and having started the Trabant, he would slowly pull on his gloves, the very kind worn by Manfred von Brauchitsch, gloves with a strap at the wrist and huge almond- and tear-shaped cut-outs, and as he pulled away, it was only ever at full throttle, my, how he thrashed it, not that that mattered when all’s said and done, because if Fittipaldi went flat out, Leli went flat out as well, except that Leli, because he was thinking more about his friends, often came seriously unstuck. Leli would often attend pig-killings, invited with his father by the farmers in the villages around, because they were also glad to have him come, because he would start by treating them to such a wonderful lecture on pig-killing, that the pig in question, if it had heard it, would have thought it an honour to be about to be killed, and so it once came to pass that Leli was holding the rope, just to show the right way to tug it so as to fell the pig at the critical moment, but the butcher who was there to shoot the pig hit something soft, and suddenly Leli, pulling on the rope, flew backwards straight into the manure heap, his white apron — Leli always came in a white apron with his initials on the chest — slithering into the slurry, everyone was horrified that the butcher, instead of shooting the pig, had shot Leli, though the butcher had actually shot right through the rope Leli was pulling on, which Leli himself explained as the cause of his fall as, covered in slurry, he was alert enough to grab the rope and show that it had been shot through and that he was unharmed, and they shot the pig later in a corner of the yard. But by then Leli had had a bath and a change of clothes, after which he entertained them all, and how they all laughed, and how happy everybody was, but Leli didn’t laugh much, in fact he hardly ever laughed, his face generally wore an oddly amazed smirk…, and right above that grin were his infantile, shining eyes, amazed at the latest thing he’d discovered, or amazed at the amazement caused by the information he had just dispensed so selflessly. And when he came to a pig-killing, we always looked forward to it and waited in the pub, because Leli always brought a churn full of soup and white puddings, and always just for his friends, for us. And so one time we were waiting, but Leli didn’t make it, then someone came and said that Leli had driven into the ditch at the very edge of the forest, so we took the short cut past the spring and the tennis courts and past the pond in the woods, running to get to the spot as speedily as possible, and there we looked about us, but couldn’t see anyone, and suddenly we did, Leli had gone straight into the ditch and overturned, and we when ran up we could see Leli still in the car, so we turned the Trabant back over and soup and groats came streaming out of it, and when we opened the door some white puddings fell out, and we said: “Leli, what on earth?” And Leli started combing the groats out of his hair with a little comb, along with clotted blood and marjoram, and he said in all seriousness that it was that buggering conditioned reflex you get on the way to see friends, at the bend the churn had started to tilt and was about to topple over, but remembering that his friends were waiting, he’d tried to steady the churn, but just then his racer ran into the ditch and he’d overturned not only the churn, but the car as well. So we got round the Trabant and with a “Heave-ho!” lifted it like some toy car and deposited it back on the road, Leli and all. Leli got out and said: “You might have pretended that a Trabant’s heavier than it really is, you might!” and he started doling out the white puddings and black puddings, adding: “Sorry, but the soup’s inside the body of the car.” Then a week later Leli said: “Do you know, it was three days after and I still combed a groat out of my hair?” “Yep,” I said, Leli was a great guy and only ever thought of his pals, and in the end