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3 MR METHIE
IN SECLUDED SPOTS IN THE FOREST, in autumn or wintertime, when the sun doesn’t even peep out to show its face, not even as a sample with no commercial value, or to show that it still is, but is no more, when at seven-thirty in the morning it’s still dark and at quarter past four it’s already getting dark, spleen and melancholy descend and the damp soil is leafless and without hope. I sat at my window in the dark and looked out into the dark, not knowing what to do, whether to jump under the train which can be heard on such evenings from somewhere far away beyond the river, or to hang myself, as foretold for me by the fortune-teller Mařenka, who did me a tarot reading in the ladies toilet of the Kingsway hotel. And as the wick of my lamp lowered its tired eyelids, a motorbike turned off the main road towards my gate, stopped, and the dark figure of a man came in through the gate, and when I put some lights on, in the boxroom and outside in the yard, I saw, in his leathers, Mr Methie, and Mr Methie was radiant and laughing and two eyes blazed out from his thick eyebrows and long side whiskers, eyes that couldn’t restrain their joy and pride in themselves, their huge satisfaction that so contrasted with the landscape, rid of the leaves that were plastered down over every track and footpath, flower-bed and forest clearing, and all the ditches and glades and fences and oak nurseries. And Mr Methie signalled for me to follow him so that some of the happiness, the fascination out there beyond the gate, might rub off on me, and when, in the slanting light of the lantern dangling from the corner of the cottage, I saw the source of his elation, my first thought was that it was a rocking-horse lying upside down in his sidecar. It wasn’t a horse though, but a dead, stiff sheep, skinned, and with its lungs and liver poking out of a slit in its belly, like a handkerchief in a dandy’s top pocket. “What’s that?” I asked, recoiling. “Magnificent, eh?” Mr Methie jubilated, “a real bargain, only cost me a small electric motor and fifty crowns.” He was over the moon. “But what,” says I, “what am I supposed to do with it?” “Obvious,” says Mr Methie, “you’re going to help me butcher it, they tell me your spicey offal hash is the best, then we’ll marinate the meat and have escalopes and leg of mutton, and we can leave the rest in the marinade and turn it into sausages…,” Mr Methie enthused, and despite it being winter and his face being as purple as the sheep’s liver, this noble objective shone in triumph from his features and precluded any sense of cold, because the very image gave warmth, he having bought it for such a good price. “Right, Mr Methie,” I said, “let me get my fur coat and I’ll come with you, have you got a wooden washtub or a large bucket or vat at home?” So many options, but Mr Methie shook his head, he possessed none of the above. “So,” I said, “I’ve got a tub, we can take that and it’ll have to do, all right?” And Mr Methie grinned, baring all his teeth into the bargain, and the teeth enhanced the bargain-fired joy that flooded over him, joy in which he was literally basking, nay, wallowing. “Look,” he said after a moment, “Listen, don’t call me Mr Methie, call me Mike instead, would you?” I said: “But here in the forest everybody calls you Mr Methie,” I gibbered and ran back to the kitchen to get my fur coat and pick up a torch. When I came back into the cold of evening, Mr Methie said: “But that’s only a nickname, Methie, short for Methodius where I come from, so do call me Mike.” I said: “So Mr Mike, you’ve never been to my place before?” And Mr Methie said he hadn’t. And I set off through the pine trees, the lamp on the front of the house, now we were behind the house, it cast a sharp shadow outlining the edges of the cottage skywards and heightening the depth of the shadows through which we were walking towards the stream to fetch the tub, and as we walked I shone my torch on the ancient pines, which exuded the turquoise scent of their needles. “Mr Methie,” I said, “have you got any thyme? Allspice and pepper and bay leaves?” “No, I haven’t,” said Mr Methie, gazing thoughtfully upwards at the slender tree trunks, over ten metres tall, and their rhythmically outcast branches in the canopy. “Hell!” he vented his appreciation, “Great timber! Brilliant for planks and boards, nice healthy, mature wood, why don’t you cut them down?” I said: “You should know, Mr Mike, that each of these pines has its own name, this one’s Elegant Antonia, this one, as a tribute to her sister from the Chobot range, is Jaunty Josephine, this is Comely Caroline, the most beautiful one of all, see how exactly her crown is branched. This one’s fit for a window in Chartres cathedral, which is why she’s called Our Lady, Notre Dame, and this one, from her physiognomy, see? — she’s St Cecilia with both breasts knocked off… the thing is, Mr Methie, when I come out here to get away from Prague, it’s a habit I got from the lady teachers I bought the land from, they also had names for the pine trees, and whenever they came out here they would first bow to the trees, a deep Slav bow from the waist, passing from one pine to the next, and as they left, the same again…,” I said, and we came out onto the grass that sloped down to the brook, which you couldn’t see, but it was babbling away as if it had just cleaned its teeth and was gargling in different keys and agglomerations of sounds according to the inclination of its throat. “Hell,” said Mr Methie in amazement, “and what’s this here?” He took my torch and shone it on a tall, cloven-trunked willow… “Now that’s something,” he gushed and carefully shone the torch on the entire tree, already completely coated in new yellow bark over all its twigs and branches. “Mařenka told me my fortune…,” I said. And Mr Methie pointed the torch and made the shadows of all the branches dance, “What fortune might that have been?” Again he looked about him with the torch and then, having gone down close to the brook and taken a long look at the crystal clear water rolling the tiny pebbles and bits of flint over and over and clattering into the green waterweed and grasses hidden in the water, he gave his considered opinion: “Hell, you’re going to find it hard to die…,” and I understood that Mr Methie had said something really nice on my account and I understood that if you have a beautiful girlfriend or a beautiful pine forest and an even more beautiful stream with living water, you, or anyone, would be loath to die, and all for that very beauty. “Right,” said Mr Methie, “here’s the tub, shall we take it?” And we tried to yank the tub out of the earth, but the wood of the base was still frozen solid. Finally we put everything we’d got into it, our legs giving at the knees, and we yanked the tub out, complete with soil and dead leaves. We carried it to the sidecar and I asked: “Do you have a set of butcher’s knives?” Mr Methie said he didn’t. “So I’ll get my own knives and cutters, come from old army bayonets and combat knives, they do.” Then I turned the lights out and the motorbike started up, I sat at the head of the dead sheep and held on to the tub, the edge of which, with all its soil and frozen leaves, dug into the dead sheep, and I held the tub in such a way as to keep its hoops from touching the liver and lights. Mr Methie drove, and to judge by the motorbike’s sound it was a Jawa 250 Perak, he left the main drag down a side avenue, which was unsurfaced, skirting round puddles of ground water, because it’s low-lying here, the lowest spot in Bohemia, the lowest spot in the area, which is why water gathers here and at just one spade’s depth there’s a gush of mineral water, so every cottage and every building is standing on water, which seeps through walls and piling like when the wick drags the paraffin up in an oil lamp. “Do you know,” said Mr Methie, slowing down and putting one hand on his waist, “do you know what my tree is?” I said: “Pine.” “Noooo,” Mr Methie lowed. “Sallow or willow then,” I hazarded. “Nooo,” he said, adding quickly with a sense of satisfaction, “Aspen, because it’s flowering right now, now at the start of January, because it’s the first, and rather a nice harbinger of Spring. And he turned the handlebars sideways, put the foot-brake on and jumped off, went round into the light of the headlamp, took a key from his pocket, kissed it, then unlocked the gate, then he bent down, lifted the catch and proudly swung the gate open. Jumping back on the bike, he said proudly: “Made the gate myself, took me only a hundred and sixty-five standard working hours. Good, eh?” He turned to me and his white teeth and smile shone in the dark like the numbers on a phosphoresecnt alarm clock that has just started to jangle. I said: “Aspen, aspen, but that’s the tree Judas hanged himself on, after he’d betrayed Jesus, and so did Durynk, having murdered the prince’s page, thinking to please… But listen, Mr Methie, do you like mutton?” And Mr Methie spat and said: “Can’t stand the sight of it…” I said: “So why on earth did you buy it, barter for it?” And Mr Methie jumped off the bike, switched on the lights that had gone out and said with such rapture that his voice faltered: “You have to understand. Not buy a thing when it’s a real bargain? That’s me, buying beautiful things cheap, maybe flawed, but not to buy a thing, when it’s so cheap…” And he went and pressed the switch set into the wall of the house, which connected, downwards, to his workshop, which connected, downwards, to the outhouse, which connected, downwards, to the woodshed, the roof of which ended in the damp earth and which connected, downwards and last in line, to a lean-to, which had some pipes poking ominously out of it like the barrels of a katyusha rocket launcher or an array of little mountain artillery pieces. And over all this was the symphonic hum of the pinewood, which couldn’t grow tall because of the ground water, all their lives the trees had stood up to their ankles in the acidic solution, which trickled slowly down to this point from all the more elevated black soils and pools and rust-coloured waters of mineral springs. And that whole stretch about the house, which is hidden in summer beneath a merciful growth of rampant raspberry bushes and baby aspens and birches, the whole stretch, which bore no trace of any cottage, was now illuminated like a circus at night, like a merry-go-round with all the lights on, or a freak show half an hour before the evening performance. On an open space stood an awesome machine, a two-ton monstrosity, something like a lathe. And Mr Methie watched my amazement: “Quite something, eh? All it’s missing is the flywheel and engine, but not buy it when it was going for a song…?” and he took out a notebook and looked in it and raised his head jingling with joy: “If I put in a hundred and thirty standard working hours on this machine, I’ll be able to cut planks, but not just planks, whole rafters! And the outlay will come back not once, but ten times over…” And I hauled the tub down and began to regret ever getting involved in this adventure with a sheep, though remembering that otherwise I’d have been sitting indoors moping over time that had stood still, I commanded: “Mr Mike, get me a scrubbing brush!” And Mr Methie went into the house and triumphantly brought out to the pump a plastic wash-tub containing not ten, but fifty scrubbing brushes, I picked one and started scrubbing away at the tub in the stream of acidic water and saw the bristles of the scrubbing brush crumbling away, but when I took up another brush, Mr Methie jubilated: “Not buy ’em? One brush cost fifty hellers… Have you any idea what a bargain that was?” I said: “That’s all very well, but fetch a table out here, so we can get on with butchering the carcass, the sheep!” And Mr Methie went into the house, I carried on scrubbing by the light of some lamps and spotlights that shone up into the black of the pine trees, I scrubbed away and was already onto my fourth brush… And Mr Methie dragged a table outside, stood it right up against the wall, which was bare brick, not a hint of plaster, and that whole summer seat was starting to look like the ghastly, crummy yard of some poor plumber or mechanic who, dismayed at all that he saw about him, had gone and hanged himself. Then we took hold of the sheep, lay it on the table, I got a knife and, revolted, removed the dry leaves and commanded: “Mr Mike, bring me an axe, will you?” And Mr Methie went to look for an axe and his voice remained jubilant and kept calculating numbers of standard working hours, which he multiplied up then exulted at the gleefully dou