“Thank you, goose,” she said. “I appreciate you.”
She drove the goose to the foot of Mount Radhošt’ and watched her waddle away up the mountain path, a bead of scarlet ascending into ash.
Thank you, goose. I appreciate you.
Alžběta the goose-meat lover didn’t even complain that much in the morning. She just glared at Klaudie and told her to forget about choosing the Christmas carp.
freddy barrandov checks… in?
As I was saying, I’m an inadequate son. I didn’t really notice this until I reached the age my father had been when he was imprisoned for repairing the broken faces of clock towers without authorization. He’d incurred the wrath of those who require certain things not to work at all. That’s what the broken clock towers had been designated as: remembrances of a civil war that stopped time at various locations scattered across my father’s country. Fixing the mechanisms seemed political, though it was impossible to agree on the exact meaning of the gesture. When my dad saw his first splintered clockface he just thought it was a proud and beautiful work that, if restored, would take the mortal sting out of being told how late you are, or how long you’ve been waiting, or how much longer you’ll have to wait.
—
MY MOTHER affirms life in her own way: She did some of her most thorough affirmation on behalf of a government-sponsored literary award that posed as a prize sponsored by a company that made typewriters. One year the writer chosen to win the award declined without giving a reason and asked that her name not be mentioned in connection with the award at all. Unfazed, my mother congratulated the next best writer on his win, but was almost laughed off the phone line: “It’s sweet of you to try this, but everybody knows my book isn’t that good,” he said. He named another writer and suggested the prize go to her, but the recommended writer didn’t fancy it either. There had to be a winner, so my mother went through all the shortlisted writers but it was “Thanks but no thanks” and “Oh but I couldn’t possibly” all round, so she went back to the originally selected winner and made some threats that caused the woman to reconsider and humbly accept her prize.
Even though all went on as before, Mum’s developed a sort of prejudice against writers; there are behaviors she now calls “writerly,” but I think she actually means uncooperative. Anyway, my mother agreed with my father about the clockfaces they saw; she wanted to organize the ruin away. So the newlyweds had worked at this project together, though he never allowed anybody to even suggest that she’d been involved, taking all the blame (and speculation, and, in some quarters, esteem) onto his own shoulders. In court my father pleaded that he’d thought he was demonstrating good citizenship by providing a public service free of charge, but was asked why he’d provided this public service anonymously and at dead of night… why work under those conditions if you believe that what you’re doing is above reproach? And then all he could say was, Right, I see. When you put it like that it looks bad.
Another thing the law didn’t like: He’d broken into the clock towers, and left them open to people seeking shelter, attracting all sorts of new elements into moneyed neighborhoods and driving established elements out into shabbier neighborhoods so that it was no longer clear what kind of person you were going to find in any part of the city.
—
MY FATHER got a three-year prison sentence and came out of it mostly in one piece due to his being a useful person; a sort of live-in handyman. He gained experience in tackling a variety of interesting technical mishaps that rarely occur in small households, and now works alongside my mother at a niche hotel in Cheshire… Hotel Glissando, it’s called, and it’s niche in a way that’ll take a while to describe. Dad’s Chief Maintenance Officer there. He more or less states his own salary, as the management team (headed by my mother) hasn’t yet found anyone else willing and able to handle all the things that suddenly need fixing at Hotel Glissando.
As Frederick Barrandov Junior, there was an expectation that I’d follow in Frederick Barrandov Senior’s footsteps, that at some point I’d leave my job as a nursery school teacher and join Hotel Glissando’s maintenance team.
—
A MONTH or so after I’d turned thirty-three I learned that Mum had assured the hotel’s reclusive millionaire owner that I’d join the team before the year was out.
She broke this news to me over lunch.
“Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” she asked.
My answer: “Not sure, but maybe on a beach reading a really good mystery. Not a murder mystery, but the kind where the narrator has to find out what year it is and why he was even born…”
Would I have answered differently if I’d known that Mum intended this to be a proper talk about my future? Probably not.
Mum was livid.
“Sitting on a beach reading a good mystery novel? Sitting on a beach reading a good mystery novel?? If that’s the height of your ambition you and I are finished, Freddy.”
“Come come, Mother… How can we ever be finished? I’m your son.”
“I’m going to give you one more chance,” she said. “What are your plans for the next few years? What motivates you?”
I spoke of the past instead of the future; a past, it turned out, I had neither lived for myself nor been told about. I remembered a sign that read REBEL TOWN, but not in English. I remembered people striding around with cutlasses, and a nursemaid who was a tiger — her lullabies were purred softly, and the melodies clicked when they caught against her teeth: Sleep for a little while now, little one, or sleep forever…
“That was my childhood, not yours,” my mother snapped. “Yours is a pitiful existence. I had you followed for six months and all you did apart from turn up to play in a sandpit with infants was go to galleries, bars, the cinema, and a couple of friends’ houses. What kind of person are you? I spoke to your weed dealer and he said you don’t even buy that much. You are without virtue and without serious vice. Do you really think you can go on like this?”
“What shall I do then?”
“You’ll start working at Hotel Glissando next week.”
“Will I? Can’t somebody else do it?”
“No, Freddy. It’s got to be you.”
—
THIS WAS SEXISM; my younger sister Odette is much handier than me. I pointed this out, but my mother seemed not to hear and proposed that I shadow Dad at the hotel for a few months in order to acquire the skills I lacked. I told Mum that I wouldn’t and couldn’t leave Pumpkin Seed Class at this crucial moment in the development of their psyches. Mum told me her career was at stake. A bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and unscrupulous woman who was just below Mum in the chain of command was gunning for her job, subtly and disastrously leaving my mother out of the loop so that she missed crucial directives and was left unaware of changes to the numerous hourly schedules and procedures that it was her task to oversee and complete. I could see my mother’s stress as she spoke: It was there in her hair, which usually looks thoroughly done to a state-regulated standard. But now there were knots in my mother’s hair. I’d never seen that before.
—
HAVING SAID I’d sleep on my decision I went over to my sister’s flat and we talked all night. We both like the Glissando well enough. Discretion is its main feature: You go there to hide. The furnishings are a mixture of dark reds and deep purples. Moving through the lobby is like crushing grapes and plums and being bathed in the resultant wine. There are three telephone booths in the lobby. Their numbers are automatically withheld and they’re mainly used for lies. Once as I was leaving the hotel after running an errand for my dad I saw a man in a trench coat stagger into one of those phone booths. He had what looked like a steak knife sticking out of his chest and must’ve trailed some blood into the booth and lost a lot more at quite a rapid rate thereafter, though I didn’t see much of this. Blood’s a near-perfect match for the color scheme — each drop is smoothly stirred in.