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15 IONIC MAN
I WAS SITTING by an open window, deeply engrossed and without not a single reason to be doing anything, thinking of anything, I just sat there looking out of the window, totally stunned and numbed by non-being. And two black horses turned off the main road and then a dray and on the box stood, legs astride, a man in a huge felt hat, holding the reins theatrically, and when he eased up, the horses got the bit between their teeth and charged off down the forest avenue and I was fearful that the black team wasn’t just off for the ride, but was heading for me, and how right I was, they flew through my open gate and rammed the shaft through my window with such fury that I had to step back, but one mighty yank reined the horses in and they stopped where they were, though with their heads and shaft in my front room. And the driver hopped off sideways, patted the horses’ rumps, which the black geldings took as an invitation to start munching on my begonias, and then in through the door came Ionic Man, as he was called, I knew him by sight from the pub, where he’d once been with one of his horses, gave him a drink from a pint glass and left. I’d sometimes see his white cowboy hat as he staggered through the village by twilight, I’d seen his hat in the vegetable fields, where he went to screw together the sections of the long pipe for watering the vegetables, he was always sunburnt and in summertime he’d only ever be in the bottom half of his boiler suit as his white hat sailed like a little dinghy through the cauliflowers and ripening cabbages and fields of kohl-rabi. So I said: “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” He sat down and took his white hat off and his curls fell out across his sun-tanned brow, and he told me he’d found a beautiful doorstep at the tip and he’d brought it for me as a gift. “Me,” he said, “I like writers because, whenever I write a letter, I can never get it finished, I get so freaked out writing it that I keep drinking shots of peppermint liqueur, one after another, till having failed to finish it I chuck it away.” I offered him a glass and placed a bottle in front of him, and Ionic Man drank, not the way you drink alcohol, but the way you drink mineral water, to quench a thirst, and he said: “I’ve got this felt hat, see, so I get so hot that I drink non-stop — beer, peppermint liqueur, anything liquid — because I get all hot and sticky and being hot and sticky makes me thirsty.” I says: “That’s all very well, Mr Ionic, do help yourself, but what am I supposed to do with that doorstep?” Having stroked the nostrils of his horses, which had set about my two caps and were munching away at them with the same zest as Ionic Man drinking spirits, he said: “What to do with the doorstep? For a writer, mountin’ a doorstep is a bit like a steppin’ into another place, an’ I reckon, when I read the crime an’ casualties pages of the paper, I always imagine the dead person’s you, so you’ll have this doorstep here as a sign, a sign of foreboding…” He got up to go, put his hat back on, and as he left he was staggering so much that he almost had the door off its hinges. Then he appeared on his dray and with a few mighty heaves on a crowbar he dropped the doorstep onto the ground, it was a step from some church, the like of which I hadn’t seen in ages, and if I had, then only in cathedrals and minsters. He jumped back down and again with his silvery crowbar he rolled the step away into the greenery underneath the birch trees, and I turned back to look at myself in the mirror and try to see what Ionic Man had come to tell me about the crime and calamities pages, and yes, there it was, I could see the shadow of death mirrored in my eyes. Ionic Man came back inside and he was sweating, and so as not to waste precious time, he picked up the bottle and drank straight from it, his Adam’s apple leaping up and down with every gulp as he sucked in the hard liquor with great gusto and a great thirst. Then he looked at me, patted the back of my hand and said: “If anything happens to you, d’you want to be buried in our village, at Semice, or in Hradišťko?” I told him I was nowhere near dying just yet. Ionic Man said: “Dyin’ natural-like, I know that, but from what I read in the papers, it’s all unnatural deaths, an’ I reckon that if anything does happen to you, you’d be better off wi’ us, in the cemetery at Semice, what I mean is, I think a writer should know what’s to become of him if he’s suddenly not there one day.” “That’s true,” I rose and went to fetch a loaf of bread and, catching myself in the mirror, I saw I’d gone pale and grey. Then I started slicing the bread, feeding it to the horses turn and turn about, because they’d eaten three books off the table by the window and a towel. Ionic Man sadly bewailed the absence of beer and I went out and fetched a bagful of bottles, cool beer from the cellar, and Ionic Man picked up one bottle and dashed the cap off against the edge of the table, took a swig of foaming beer and began to make his case with considerable enthusiasm: “Listen,” he said, “have yourself buried at Semice, for one thing the cemetery is the other side of the forest, so you’d have pine needles an’ the smell of pine right on top of your grave, but the main thing is there’s a football pitch in the forest, an’ knowin’ how fond you are of football…!” I said quietly: “So I am.” “See then, I knew it, there’s no other cemetery like it, the ref’s whistle will easily carry all the way to your grave, an’ every kick of the ball an’ the players’ shoutin’ an’ the crowd mouthin’ off…,” and he looked me guilelessly in the eye and took off his hat and raked his hair with his hard fingers, and his locks rattled as that living comb ran through them. I said: “It was very kind of you to bring me the doorstep, but I think we’d better hold back on the funeral, okay?” He put his hat back on and at that same instant got thirsty and dashed the cap off another beer against the edge of the table. “No,” he said, having drunk his fill, “the step will remain here to tweak your conscience, “because I also do orations at funerals an’ I’d like it a lot, if you died, or got killed somewhere, or murdered, if I could do yours… but I can tell you all that later, for now there’s our cemetery by the football pitch… Have you ever been inside a charnel house?” I remarked that the horses had eaten all the bread, so I gave each one a handkerchief and they polished them off slowly and with relish. “No, I haven’t been inside a charnel house,” I said. “So when there’s a match on,” said Ionic man, “we can meet up there, ’cos the ref uses the charnel house as his changing room, the pitch is only the other side of the wall, an’ again, if anything happened, there’s often fightin’ at our pitch, we love beatin’ the ref up, specially if he doesn’t award a penalty that wasn’t there, but we’ve got such sensitive fans that they’re capable of chasin’ the ref out into the fields just for not givin’ a ball as over the line, or a corner, or givin’ one when there wasn’t one… So do you know now where you’ll be buried one day? Wouldn’t it be just great for you? Though one time we nearly killed the ref for mistakenly failin’ to give a hand-ball that wasn’t. An’ we chased him off the pitch an’ up a pine tree that leans over the cemetery, an’ we shouted at him to come down, an’ he shouted: ‘I’m scared you’re gonna hit me,’ so we spent three minutes shoutin’ at him to come down an’ him sayin’ he wouldn’t, so I popped an’ got a two-handed saw an’ we chopped the tree down, includin’ the canopy where the ref was hangin’ on like a woodpecker… but he fell into the cemetery an’ before we could run round the wall he’d made off into the fields, an’ there he got worked over among the cauliflowers, nice story, eh? I bet you’re lookin’ forward to summat happenin’ to you and gettin’ buried in our village now, aren’t you?” Completely perplexed, I picked up a basket and offered the horses by the window some socks, and the geldings, as if they hadn’t eaten since the night before, gorged on the socks and I glimmered with hope that Ionic Man would finally go home, I said: “Okay, in the event of my lot being to get into the crime and casualties pages, in that case I do wish to be buried in the cemetery behind the football pitch…,” and I tipped back on my chair to check on myself in the mirror and said with a quaver in my voice: “But I don’t look like someone about to die!” Ionic Man opened another bottle and said: “The crime an’ casualties pages are not only full of people who had no thought of dyin’, but people who didn’t even look like it, and suddenly bang and they’re gone! A tile flying off a roof, a broken axle on their car, explosion, murder, and they’ve had it, but I’ll tell you this: you’re bloody lucky I’ve brought you that doorstep, ’cos I, if you did make it onto those pages, I mean we firemen, we’d bury you like you was one of us! I mean, the hearse would set off from the New Inn, past the fire station, which will be open, a big red fire engine will be parked halfway out, nose first, there’ll be two firemen standin’ on it in all their finery, there’ll be a fire pump outside the council office, where the cortège will pause, with two more firemen kneelin’ next to it, axes raised in homage… then the cortège will make another stop outside the Old Inn, the one where you an’ I both go, an’ there’ll be black flags flyin’ from the dormer window an’ the spare fire pump, an’ two firemen will be kneelin’ beside that one too, an’ then, slowly, we firemen will take you to the cemetery behind the football pitch, I’ll give the oration, please God I’ll be fit, an’ in my uniform I’ll bid you goodbye…” The horses had eaten the last sock, one with holes in, holes like all the other socks waiting to be darned. I said: “Will they eat towels?” Ionic Man said: “They like towels best of all, last year, over by the common, before I popped off an’ got back with some beer, they’d polished off a whole line of washing, pegs an’ all, then there was the time we were doin’ downhill racin’ on our bikes, down the steps of the sports hall, an’ I won, but I fell head first on the stones during the second heat, cuts everywhere, they plastered my head with about thirty sheets of loo paper, but I was supposed to be doin’ an oration the next day, a lovely oration I’d got, but I couldn’t get up on my feet, I spoke anyway, I trimmed the loo paper away so I could see my notes — I have to have my orations written down — but the oration was done! Though there was a wind blowin’ and it kept rustlin’ the sheets of loo paper stuck to my cuts and sores…” said Ionic Man, and having looked at me, he suddenly started to cry, crying so much that the stream of tears dripped down in a steady trickle, he wiped his eyes and having looked at me again, again he started sobbing uncontrollably, and the tears cascaded into his hat like a fountain and they got pumped back into his lacrimal sacs and so the tears he had shed a moment before started over again. I was taken aback and tilted my chair back and, having had a good look in the mirror, eye to eye with myself, I let out a howl and brought the chair’s front legs back on the floor with a bang… “My God,” I says, “why on earth are you crying like that,” I says, “what’s come over you to make you cry like that…?” He nodded his head and his curly hair bounced and he said: “Yes, yes, I’m cryin’ over you, ’cos I’ve brought you that doorstep as a present…” He rose, set his white hat on his head, a felt Stetson, pulled it down over his forehead with his fingers, knocked back the rest of the spirits, when the sun came out from behind the clouds, glaring bright, and its blazing light glittered on the terrets and chains and filigree of their harnesses and the sun’s rays passed through the corners of the horses’ eyes and cast blue-green shards, and the horses were standing to attention and I could just see them hauling a hearse with each steed having the tiny gejzir of a black funeral plume spouting from its head. Ionic Man staggered out, his white hat went out into the sunlight, and he placed his arms on the window frame, so he was standing there between his horses and their shaft, on which he lay his black hands, and he smiled at me through his tears and I got a fright, because only then did I notice that Ionic Man had no teeth, just a few sparse, hollow black bits of bony material, just one sneeze and the sorry remnants of his dentition would come flying into my room like so many dry petals of jasmine shaken with every gust from the bushes alongside the road like a snowstorm in summer. Then Ionic Man hopped up onto the box, disentangled the reins from the handbrake, stood astride and started jerking the reins and with the reins the bridle, and the horses, with frenzied eyes, fell back on their hind legs, beating the gravel path with their shoes, the chains jangled against the shaft and the team reversed through the gate, as tight a fit as a piston in a cylinder, then the dray turned and Ionic Man slackened the reins, the horses got the bit between their teeth and galloped off, flying down the main road, they slipped off into the trees and I watched as the white felt hat sailed through the branches and between the tree trunks, watched that white hat sailing away, and my eyes lit long on the stone step, a step that once led up to some church, some basilica, a step so well worn that I sat by the window deeply engrossed, staring at the step, and I could see little shoes and boots lifting off it and people’s feet marching up it and down it, people’s ankles and insteps and shins, cut off by the edge of the step, with which several past centuries had entered my garden…