Harlequin's Millions

9

“HARLEQUIN’S MILLIONS” SWEETLY FILLS THE GAPS like cotton candy between the news from around the world and the news from home, and especially between the musical interludes, the brass bands, which so captivate some of the old men and women that they prick up their ears, sit up straight, their eyes sparkling, and start tapping out the rhythm in the air, but hardly anyone here ever listens to the news, or, thanks to a special internal alarm, they only hear what they want to hear. I can’t help thinking that if war broke out, no one in the retirement home would notice, especially if it was time to prepare for lunch. Here at the home, lunch is practically a holiday, it’s a moment everyone looks forward to, except perhaps those with a damaged stomach or liver, but even they look forward with that same enthusiasm to their unsalted, unpeppered soup and tasteless porridge. The pensioners start getting ready almost an hour beforehand, they glance impatiently at the clock and rather than wait around they stroll up and down the corridor, or outside, if the weather’s good, and five minutes before the nearly fourteen-foot doors swing open, they’re standing in line and staring vacantly ahead, swallowing spittle and saying nothing. And when the doors open, those who are able quickly push their way to the front, those who walk with a limp push hardest, and then they all sink down into their seats at the table, and some of them, to avoid thinking about food and tormenting themselves with the thought, begin carefully polishing their napkin-wrapped silverware and their soup bowls, they hold the bowls up to the light to make sure they’re completely clean, instantly hundreds of faint specks of light appear on the ceiling and walls, reflections of polished spoons, hundreds of tiny mirrors wander over the enormous fresco, filling the entire ceiling of the Count’s former banquet hall, which is as big as a train station, the fresco bulges and billows across the ceiling like a gigantic awning, at its center is a cavalry battle, Greek soldiers with plumes hacking mercilessly at heavily armored Persians, swords gleaming, every phase of the cavalry battle is shown, falling, dying men and horses, everyone and everything is locked in bloody combat, in the middle Alexander the Great, his eyes blazing, swings his sword left and right and his phalanx advances and drags the enemies from their horses, hundreds of faces contorted with the lust for battle, hundreds of men, who have suffered a fatal sword blow to the chest or throat, tumble from their horses, but at that very moment they meet the eyes of their commander, who swings his sword and sows death and destruction while at the same time giving all his warriors the confidence that the battle will ultimately be won, there’s even an old warrior who shields his commander with his own body and after receiving the sword’s blow meant for his master, falls headless to the ground, without the commander even realizing it, swords flash, hundreds of arms inflict blow after blow, hundreds of lances, hundreds of clanging shields ward off hundreds of swords, the whole dining hall ceiling is filled with groaning, screaming, clattering, crashing and neighing, because even the horses are fighting each other, fighting and biting … but below this, in hundreds of chairs, are four hundred pensioners, and because the soup still hasn’t been served, they once again start polishing their bowls, and four hundred bowls flicker across the ceiling, with their shallow porcelain bottoms they scan the battlefield like searchlights, no one looks up, not even Francin, only I look and I’m amazed at what I see there, what I’m witness to, this is better than a movie theater, a movie theater is for anyone and everyone, you just pay for whatever you want to see, here no one bothers to look, I alone have the honor of seeing this … This morning Francin has already listened to all the European radio stations, he has no interest in what happens at the retirement home, his body is here, but his mind is always elsewhere, checking in with each of the radio stations that broadcast the news in Czech, scouring the pages of the atlas to locate all the places in the world where something newsworthy has happened, he’s just like a Mariáš player, always checking his watch and afraid he might miss some important detail, afraid to miss even a single minute … sometimes he forces a smile in my direction, from a distance, he looks down on me, and it’s true, I live and breathe this castle, I can stand for hours on the balcony looking out at the little town where we once lived together … and then the soup arrives, the girls from the kitchen bring tureens of steaming soup, four hundred pairs of eyes look up and all those eyes are filled with enthusiasm, everyone serves themselves with the soup ladle, those who have Parkinson’s are served by others, the hall is filled with the steam from dozens of soup tureens, the shuffling of shoes, boots and slippers, the tinkling of impatient spoons, I perceive all these sounds together with that fresco billowing over the dining hall like a tarp over a gigantic hayrick, and then there’s the impatient tinkling of spoons against porcelain, slurping, chomping, belching, the tapping of saltshakers against the sides of bowls, eyeglasses bent over those bowls and casting long reflections through the hall, which is filled with silver fish and eyeglass frames, faces that nearly touch the bowls with their chins … four hundred skulls nod up and down to the rhythm of the soup dribbling down along the spoons, through the throat and into the stomach, all those stomachs, even the sick ones, consume the vermicelli and vegetable-laced liquid with great relish, their greed in this first phase is unbelievable, not even children eat as greedily as pensioners, especially those who have digestive trouble, no one eats as greedily as a person with a duodenal ulcer or a nervous stomach, they can hardly even wait for the main course, they torture themselves with the thought, will they get the best piece of meat today? Will they manage to ladle up a few extra dumplings? Extra sauce? And while on the ceiling the young men are slaughtering each other with such ferocity, such envy and hatred, while at the edge of the fresco battlefield the lightly armed Greek soldiers, with their short swords and enormous studded shields, prepare for the decisive attack, for the moment when they can finish off the heavily armed Persians, in the hall below, the main course is brought in on plates, dumplings with meat and sauce, four hundred plates descending from above, and upturned eyes, lit with enthusiasm until the moment the plate is on the table, and if the portion meets their expectations, their enthusiasm grows, but if the meat is all gristle, that enthusiasm fades, slowly turning to amazement, then to indignation and rage and looking around at other people’s pieces of meat, and then knives tinkle, forks raise bits of noodle and meat in the air, and the chewing and swallowing begin … Some of the men, a few dozen of them, have the habit of removing their teeth at the last moment, they do this so inconspicuously, they try so hard to be inconspicuous that almost all of them drop the dentures, which hit the parquet floor with a loud crash, the men lean over to one side, feel around guiltily for their teeth and wrap them in a handkerchief, and then the embarrassed and blushing pensioner tucks his false teeth, handkerchief and all, into his pants’ pocket, while dozens of others are taking their teeth out of their pants’ pockets and putting them back in their mouths, so that lunch-time is filled with the tinkling of spoons, knives, forks and the clattering of bowls and false teeth … And once again everyone gobbles down their food, as if it’s a contest, or as if the battle between the Greeks and the Persians has spread to the hall below, only instead of swords and lances and shields the diners use spoons and knives, forks and napkins … And when everyone has finished their meal, that is to say those who have finished first and polished off what they’ve been offered by those who couldn’t eat more than half, a kind of lethargy descends, but then suddenly the eaters wake up, only now do they emerge from their food cloud, only now do they begin to feel an inkling of shame when they realize how greedily they’ve been eating, they look at each other and wonder if their greedy eating has offended anyone, even though everyone has been eating greedily, everyone, even those with health problems, they were the greediest of all, which is why they’re now listening to their intestines, their stomach, to hear whether they might have eaten too much, whether any digestive troubles might surface, they listen carefully and swallow powders and take bicarbonate of soda. Those who were in the middle of a Mariáš game are already wrapping their dessert in a napkin and enthusiastically getting up from the table, perhaps they didn’t even realize they were eating, they haven’t been concentrating, every player has his mind on the card game again, those who lost that morning hope to at least win back what they lost, while those who won are smiling and firmly resolved to win even more, Francin looks at his watch, yes, at one-thirty he’ll go off and listen to more news from around the world … and once again “Harlequin’s Millions” begins to fill and infuse the hall and the corridor and the footpaths along the castle walls with the cotton candy of violins, with tender, wistful music, as pleasant and inoffensive as a squirt of cologne. And the pensioners rise, one by one, sometimes a few dozen will get up at the same time, their enthusiasm is gone, they’ve satisfied their hunger, once again a few dozen pensioners drop their dentures on the oak parquet with its inlaid star, everyone who wears false teeth and removes them before lunch is under the impression that no one else can see him do so, even though every pensioner, since nearly all of them have false teeth, knows exactly what those gestures mean, everyone is ashamed of those teeth, tries to remove them while bending forward, some even pretend they have to tie their shoe, but in almost every case their hand shakes so hard, they’re unable to perform the motion of sliding their hand in and out of their mouth and hiding the teeth in a handkerchief, so that the hand, trembling with shame, drops the teeth, which go crashing to the floor and glide across the slippery parquet to the legs of the other pensioners, who watch their comrade with contempt as he leans forward, kneels, and tries to catch the set of teeth as if it were a frightened mouse … And even though every pensioner knows perfectly well that nearly everyone here wears dentures, and even though everyone knows that hockey players, even the most famous, the Canadians, keep their teeth in a glass labeled with their name on a rack above the bench where the celebrated pros put on their skates, and none of them are ashamed of those false teeth, it’s just part of their job, even though they know all that, old people are still ashamed of their teeth, of other people seeing them putting them into their mouth, they all pretend to be doing something else, turning away to do it in secret, as if they’re relieving themselves behind a bush or a bathroom door … and so “Harlequin’s Millions” accompanies the pensioners back to their rooms, through the corridors, or when the weather is good, to a bench, or on a stroll through the courtyard, where every pensioner inspects himself carefully to see whether the moment has come when sour juices begin gurgling up from the stomach and flooding the mouth, when an indignant gallbladder refuses to process the mass of overheated cooking oil and sour cream and bacon fat, when the duodenum suddenly propels the contents of the stomach into the throat and the unfortunate pensioner throws up everything he has eaten with such relish … “Harlequin’s Millions,” that indifferent tape, plays on and on, carelessly dispersing its scent, its melody, so gently and delicately that the only ones who hear it are those who prick up their ears, those who want to hear it, while those who don’t want to hear “Harlequin’s Millions” get far enough away from the rediffusion boxes that they can no longer hear it, or they do hear, but that’s only because they think they hear, they’d have to turn their heads before they could really hear … I usually walk right past those dead spots, ignoring them, or stand and sit in those places in the corridors and rooms where the notes of “Harlequin’s Millions” have slipped to the floor, or are so weakened that they’re warped. But sometimes I yearn to hear and be drowned out by the violins, to lose myself in that forest of stringed instruments, in “Harlequin’s Millions,” and I’ll go stand under one of the speakers, turn my face upward and let myself be sprinkled and showered by the persistent, sentimental music raining down from above, a melody so moving that I dissolve into tears … And only here and only now and only at this very moment under the shower of “Harlequin’s Millions” did I hear, coming from the bathroom, the sound of someone retching, and when I moved away from the music and listened more closely, I heard the groaning and puking coming from other toilet stalls, I heard the toilets flushing, the fierce rumbling of the water, the churning and vanishing, the raging through the bowels of the drainpipes of all those scraps of half-digested meals, food that everyone would look forward to all over again, day after day, until one day someone discovers after the first bite that he’s not hungry anymore, that he’s lost his appetite, that he’s slowly but surely headed for starvation, because a triumphant invalid, like the triumphant Greek armies, like the Persian soldiers in whose eyes one can see the oncoming defeat, a triumphant invalid knows all too well what lies ahead, just as I feel that I’m the only one who really knows what’s going on around here. But no, that’s not the case at all! I see how the others scrutinize me, I’m constantly surprised at how everyone is always keeping an eye on each other in this place. Everyone is always watching closely to see whether the others aren’t looking rather yellowish, or losing weight, every pensioner watches every other pensioner, with no malicious intentions, but only because sooner or later, but inevitably, he sees himself, and only himself, and runs his fingers along his own collapsing face to confirm his suspicions. I see the eyes of the old people who suffer from diabetes, they have to carry around a watch and a scale, and when the barometric pressure drives a nail into their heads, so deeply they can feel it in their mouths, they stagger, have to sit down, quickly swallow a pill, all the invalids, each in their own category, can tell from a distance, when they walk through town, when they see each other for the first time, one invalid can immediately tell by the eyes of the other and the other can immediately tell by the eyes of the first that they’re united by a mutual illness … But I see now that each has his own fate, a fate no less difficult than mine, if anything more so, but the people here are more humble than I am, they’re modest, they don’t flaunt what they know, they may very well know more about this retirement home than I do, but they don’t do anything with that knowledge, they have no reason to boast about it, not with words, let alone with their eyes. In that sense these people are further than I am, all I do is disturb them in their quiet and gradual dying. At that moment the drainpipe broke loose again and, still hanging from a single hook, slid down crosswise along the façade of the castle, hit the ground with a mighty clang and lay against the wall like a mourning band, the pensioners who were walking in the courtyard stopped, turned, then stood motionlessly, because in falling the drainpipe had dragged down one of the rediffusion boxes, console and all, it lay there under the drainpipe and went on playing “Harlequin’s Millions,” softly and sweetly … And the sound of that music made me melancholy, took me back to the womb of time, to the day we moved from the renowned brewery to the villa on the river. Francin sat in his chair, next to him lay the dog Bora and next to her the old tomcat Celestýn, all of them too scared to go anywhere, the dog and cat were impossible, it didn’t take much to upset them, all I had to do was start my spring cleaning, all I had to do was turn the chairs upside down on the table and those two creatures would start getting restless, so when I hinted that we were going to be moving, that cat and dog instantly got hay fever, they sneezed and coughed and looked at me as if we were going to leave them behind, Francin too, once every four years when I began painting the house, he wouldn’t come home, nor would the cat, the dog lay in her doghouse, trembling so hard the whole doghouse shook … And when we had really begun moving, the workers came with their girths and slings and carted off sideboards and cabinets, big tables, then boxes and crates, which they carried in their warm hands, filled with all sorts of household knickknacks, everyone found this very unnerving, I’d made up my mind to dispose of all those knickknacks during the move, but now it was as if I were getting rid of everything in case I died, just as I’d done and had to do when my mother died. And Francin sat there, staring out the window at the malt house, at his beloved brewery, at the tall chimney oozing smoke, like saliva oozing from the mouth of a person in an epileptic fit, the old dog and cat sat next to him and they huddled together, gave each other support, because the two animals had never experienced anything like this before, now they really knew that their days at the brewery were over, each time I walked past Francin, Bora and Celestýn, I stroked them and tried to reassure them … Don’t be afraid! And so we transported piece after piece, room after room, Francin and the animals sat there for two days straight and watched the objects marching past, furniture they were fond of, cabinets and armchairs and salon tables that evoked the golden times, which would never return, we felt like the farmers whose horses and cows were taken from their stables during the collectivization, until there was nothing left but empty space where your footsteps, amplified by the emptiness, rang out like church bells, I saw the brewery workers coming to gape at me, their wives and children too, they came from far and wide to witness our humiliation, people came from the little town, people who used to visit us now came to witness the end of what had always seemed like it would last until we retired, now one piece of furniture after another was loaded onto the trucks, I saw all those people who had wished this fate on us now roaring with laughter, pushing their way through the empty corridor, sitting down on the gently sloping tin roof, there they sat, the whole roof was full of them, jeering, if they couldn’t find a place to sit they went and sat on the edge of the roof, their legs dangling over the gutter, laughing their heads off, those who couldn’t see climbed up the cramps of the brewery chimney to get a better view, and there were so many people standing around one of the empty trucks, it was like a tidal wave. And then came the moment when I led Francin outside, I seated him in an armchair in the truck, then I brought out old Bora, she tried to jump into the truck by herself, but her hind legs were too weak, I had to help her, and then I went back and there in the empty house lay the old tomcat Celestýn, I lifted him up like a wet towel, he was lathered in sweat, he snuggled up against me, his heart pounded so hard it was like holding a steam engine, and so, with the tomcat in my arms, my head held high, legs astride, I stood there in the back of the truck and off we drove through the crowd of people, past hundreds of laughing and inquisitive eyes, I saw that everyone had wished this on me, for years to come this would be the most wonderful sight they’d ever seen. And as we rounded the bend I fell down on one knee, I took one last look back and saw our whole life at the brewery so clearly before me, in a few minutes I plunged through a quarter of a century, as if I were drowning, or the way people have visions when they’re about to die. And the rediffusion system went on quietly crocheting that same lace doily, “Harlequin’s Millions,” the witness to old times Mr. Kořínek looked at me and when he saw that these images were running through my mind, he gently touched the back of my hand and painted with words exactly what he saw deep in the womb of time, in the distant past … It was Christmas Eve and there was a frost … The errand boy from the roundhouse had come by several times to say that Fiala, a stoker, hadn’t shown up at work … Fiala’s wife, an Italian beauty with a six-year-old daughter, said he wasn’t home, she didn’t know where he was … Meanwhile that afternoon a resident of Stratov was walking past a grove of pines … when he thought he noticed someone … lying under a tree … He saw an older man lying in a pool of blood … He ran to get help … When others arrived on the scene, they determined that the man’s wrists and throat had been slit. His blood had stopped flowing and was clotted around the wounds … and his body was stiff … Beside him lay a razor and a sheet of paper … I leave this life of my own free will, I can’t bear it any longer … He wrote about the poor condition of the locomotives … the lousy coal … he rode along as a stoker, was always exhausted … In those days on a sixty-mile haul you had to bank the fire at least four times … and he didn’t have a moment’s peace at home either … His wife couldn’t get used to her surroundings, and blamed him for things he could do nothing about … The mayor and a gendarme had the suicide victim loaded onto a cart and taken to the mortuary in Kostomlaty … They sent a telegram to the roundhouse saying that Fiala the stoker was dead … At about four o’clock that afternoon Dr. Gruntorád arrived in Kostomlaty in his horse-drawn carriage to see a patient … he received a message to come have a look at a body in the mortuary … After a thorough examination Dr. Gruntorád determined … that the suicide victim was still alive … He treated his wounds and had him transferred to the hospital … It was Christmas Eve … You must realize, Madame, that in the old days a stoker had to be familiar with all sorts of coal. Locomotives for passenger trains, Siegl locomotives, had slanted grates, which gave a good draft in the stokehold. Besides lignite they also burned bituminous coal. Some passenger trains used only bituminous coal, but from different mines, for instance you had Silesian coal from Waldenburg, which couldn’t stand up to a poker, it sintered, especially when the fire was blazing. Then you had coal from Neurode, which formed little heaps that could be stoked up while the train was moving. And then there was coal from Gottesberg and Bohemian coal from Kladno and Moravian coal from Rosice, and in rare cases, as in Děčín, you even had Cardiff coal from Wales …