My Golden Trades

The Painter's Story

THIS MORNING, I decided to go to the country. A nice day was forecast, my wife would be at work till evening and, anyway, I didn't feel like writing. Recently, a realization that everything has already been written has made me despondent. All the stories have already been told or filmed or recorded and, even with a hundred heads, I would never discover most of what others have already recounted.

This winter my cousin, who is a painter, offered us the use of her cottage in the town of M. for the year, as she was moving to the other end of the country. My cousin is a beautiful, petite woman, and so is her house. Its one disadvantage is its location: it stands by a busy road where all day long cars and trucks and tractors chase each other up and down. However, the same train that blows its whistle under our window in the city takes us there. All we have to do is pack a book and a sandwich and walk down to the station in time for the next train. The journey takes an hour. The best thing about the cottage, my cousin assured me, were the neighbours. Right next door, for example, an interesting young gypsy couple had moved in.

My cousin's cottage is full of paintings, small paintings, as diminutive as their creator. Most of them depict strange

creatures — monsters, witches and vampires — riding around in fancy aerodynamic cars, crawling through the subway or peering through windows into rooms where terrified lovers cower in each other's arms. Her drawers and shelves are crammed with paints, pencils and charcoal sticks.

As a boy I was determined — that is if I didn't become a doctor or a writer — to learn how to paint. I longed to acquire the skill to represent the world in colour. But my life didn't unfold as I had imagined it would. During the war I wasn't allowed to go to school; the only branches of human activity I learned anything about were penal servitude and mass murder. And this happened to me at the most impressionable age, when one finds mystery wherever one looks. Nevertheless it was during the war, when I was interned by the Nazis, that quartos of paper and a set of watercolour paints first came into my possession. The watercolours were the cheapest kind— twelve different shades in a little tin tray — but I soon discovered that the colours could be mixed to make new ones. I painted what I saw: barrack walls and yards, food lines, trains transporting miserable wretches with suitcases and gunnysacks (stuffed, in vain hope, with feather pillows), wooden shacks where they produced mica, and brick fortifications. I had no idea how to handle perspective, but I noticed that the long barrack walls seemed to converge in the distance, so I drew them that way and they at once looked more realistic. I was so excited by my discovery that I drew only houses and walls until I ran out of paper.

After the war, I still believed I would become a painter. The barracks had vanished from my life, and it was more than buildings that attracted me now; it was the faces of

girls in my school. In social studies classes or during singing lessons — for which I had no talent — I tried, under my desk, to capture the appearance of those graceful creatures who shared the enclosed world of the classroom with me. Word of my talent got around. Soon the girls were even willing to pose for me — clothed, of course — as long as I gave them the finished painting. Portraiture thus brought me close to the beings for whom I longed; could I have dreamed a finer destiny than to be a painter?

It was eight-thirty in the morning, the train would leave in half an hour, but from the moment I made up my mind to go, I was restless. I locked the door and strolled down our long street to the station. About half-way there, I passed the house that Mr Vondrák had been building during the past five years. Mr Vondrák was a remarkable man, for he was a master of all the necessary trades. He performed the role of bricklayer and carpenter, roofer, electrician, plumber and painter. I had watched him from a distance all those years, waiting for the moment when I would see at least one contractor on the site, but he even stuccoed the walls himself. Sometimes his wife would be there, but she seldom worked, and then only as his assistant. Of course he noticed me; we always greeted each other and sometimes exchanged a few sentences. He would usually complain about something that wasn't available.

A short distance from the level crossing a dove was sitting hunched over in the middle of the pavement. There was something strange about where and how it was sitting, and when I got closer I saw that it was dead. I felt saddened by its dismal end on a filthy pavement. The loneliness of its dying — how will that be any different from

the loneliness of my own death? And the pavement — how does that differ from a hospital cell where a priest is not allowed to visit the dying, and relatives are unwelcome?

It is inappropriate to talk of death today. It's as though we're afraid it will threaten the majesty of life. Or is it because there have never been so many desecrated funerals, or so many corpses disposed of with no funeral whatever?

In earlier times, people mourned the animal they had to kill and they shrouded their dead and sent them off with a prayer or at least a ceremony of some kind, for they wished peace to the departing soul. In our century, they have often uncovered the dead and paraded them before the eyes of the mob.

For a decent burial, as for a decent life, you need at the very least some basic human compassion. Antigone gave up her life, but buried her brother with honour. Centuries later, her story still moves us, though we may also feel astonishment at her sacrifice. We no longer see that she died not for the sake of a proper funeral, but for the dignity of human life. How can we understand it, when we have stood by while the bodies of countless brothers and cousins, whom they have tortured, beaten, shot and gassed, have been thrown into common holes in the ground, like garbage? When we have looked on in silence while they scattered the bones and ashes of others over fields and tossed them into rivers? When we have pretended not to hear their voices crying for help?

A dignified funeral and a marked grave express our will to preserve the identity of a person. We erect a stone on which we carve a name and a few numbers, but in fact we are trying to maintain the shape of a former life, a single

unrepeatable story. When compassion and the commandment that life should be lived in dignity have been lost, where awareness of the past is lost, there are no stories, there are only cries of horror.

Apart from my cousin, I have several friends who paint. One of them, Karel, caused me to give up all thought of getting any work done today. Yesterday he showed up unexpectedly with a bottle of Rakije he'd brought back from Yugoslavia, poured himself a drink — I refused one — and at once began telling me the depressing story of his trip.

Karel is a thin, gloomy man with a thick artist's beard, the fanatical look of a visionary who has seen the coming apocalypse, and the pale complexion of those who sleep during the day. When he speaks, his voice has the quiet whine of the winter wind blowing through the garden at night, which accentuates his accusatory tone. 'I've been to a lot of galleries, but it never hit me the way it did down there. Do you know where Montenegro is?'

I said I knew roughly where it was.

It's a land of black mountains, he said, and desolate valleys populated by farmers, wine-growers and the occasional shepherd. Sometimes, in those valleys, you come across a town with mosques, minarets and souks. In one such place, in the former royal palace, they'd established a big art gallery. 'I went in just because I had some time to kill and it was terribly hot outside, and when I go through the halls I can't believe what I'm seeing. At a glance there is Braque, Rouait, Munch and Ernst, and over there — I can't believe it — Pollock, Hartung and Reinhardt. They've got Andy Warhol! I look again and I see some of our painters too. From a distance I can see Rada, Filla, a late Muzika. They've given over a whole wall to Medek at

the top of his form. Then I put my glasses on to look at the signatures. And you know who had signed them? Some guys called Cvetkovič and Stankovič and Toškovič, one Mrdjan, a Danice. And suddenly, the thing I was most afraid of happened: I found myself hanging there. I couldn't remember when I'd painted this picture, but it was me about five years ago. However, I'd signed my name Kavurič-Kurtovič. I've seen it before,' he complained, 'in Munich and Warsaw and Budapest, everyone hanging there, except they'd confused the signatures. But the tragedy didn't hit me until I was down there in Montenegro. I tell you, my friend, it's all over with painting. There's nothing new to invent. Everyone is ripping off somebody else. A hundred people line up for every idea, and even then they haven't a clue the idea's a hundred years old. A single Mondrian or a single Newman: fantastic — you fall to your knees in wonder; two are OK, and you can even take three, but when you see a hundred of those monochrome canvasses that look like a housepainter did them, each crossed with a white or maybe a black horizontal line, you feel like throwing up, or throwing yourself out of a thirteenth-storey window. It's the end of art. There's nothing behind it: no ideas, no experience, no invention — forget authenticity, that's a joke anyway. These guys are pure con artists, and the only people who call it art are the critics who are just as dishonest.'

That evening, when he'd left, I got out the book of Ecclesiastes which, as I've discovered many times, has everything in it. Sure enough, there it was:

All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it… Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new?

It has already been of old time, which was before us.

But so many had written in the same vein, both before and after Ecclesiastes. I admire them for it — Seneca and Suetonius, Chekhov, Wilder, Boll, Dürrenmatt, Greene and Demi — even though they've deprived me of my last crumb of hope that I might still find a story to tell that no one else has told. I admire them for not giving up, for searching the grey tide of words and constantly reiterated tales for undiscovered droplets in that sea in which they stood, as I do, on their toes from dawn to dusk, keeping their eyes and noses, at least, above the surface.

At first, though, I did not care for stories; I was convinced I would become a painter. I had oils, an easel, frames and a roll of canvas. I tried to draw everything that I saw, or even imagined. By now, I had seen the work of real masters, in reproductions and even in the original, but their achievements did not trouble me; the fact that the face I painted was at least a distant reminder of a real face, that my alley of birch trees might have been recognizable as such, filled me with so much satisfaction that I felt myself a companion of the greats.

The girl I was going with at the time loved poetry, white water, quiet corners in parks and Van Gogh, especially his sunflowers. A day before her eighteenth birthday I had a wonderful idea. I had a reproduction of 'The Sunflowers' at home: what if I made her a copy in real oils?

I stretched a canvas and set to work. There wasn't much time, so I decided not to bother with a sketch or an outline, but to start right in painting a flower. I worked my way down towards the vase. Before I started, I had felt there would be nothing simpler than to imitate the energetic, expansive strokes of Van Gogh's brush. Oddly enough,

however, my sunflower did not want to look like the one in the reproduction, and the vase refused to fit into the space I had left for it. Shortly before midnight, my brother peered into the kitchen, which I had turned into a studio. He was seven years younger than me and, as a future scholar of the exact sciences, he had a contempt for art. When he saw my desperate attempt to force the vase on to the canvas, he pushed me aside, drew a grid of squares over both the canvas and the reproduction, and then began, mechanically, to fill them in with the appropriate colours and shapes.

The next day, it was his copy of the sunflowers that I gave to my girl-friend. I reaped the praise that did not belong to me and was crushed by the experience. Suddenly, my paintings did not have enough space, enough movement. I wasn't able to say exactly what it was I lacked — perhaps it was narrative. I put the box of paints away in the cellar and, until this spring, I never painted another picture.

Although it was only Friday morning, the train was full of young men and women in army surplus overalls or dirty jeans, off for a weekend ramble in the country. Eventually, I found a seat. Across from me sat three young men who, together, were holding a girl on their laps. A fourth was cradling a guitar. On the overhead racks bottles of beer poked out of worn rucksacks. When they got to their shack, if they had one, the girl would make goulash, and they'd all start to drink the beer. They'd play the guitar and sing songs as they got drunk. Those who got tired of the beer would then make love to the girl. The girl had dishevelled, peroxided hair that half covered her expressionless face. That morning, or more probably the night before, she had outlined her lips with vulgar red

lipstick; the red varnish was chipping off her finger-nails. Her hands were dirty, and so was her denim dress. The boys were talking big, tough-guy talk, while she giggled. When one of them touched her breasts, she slapped his hand. But she did not get off their knees.

Twenty years ago, I would have wanted to get to know them. By then, I had stopped painting, but my longing to capture the world around me remained. I began to write. I was obsessed with a desire to know new people, and everywhere I sensed the presence of fresh and exciting stories. I trembled with eagerness to add to the sea that is threatening to engulf us all.

Ecclesiastes talks about this kind of obsession:

The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself. The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness: and the end of his talk is mischievous madness. A fool is also full of words. . Of making many books there is no end.

If only he had known. .

Of course there are people who probably don't even have time to observe the sea that is preparing to sweep our humanity away. This occurred to me when, on Saturdays or Sundays I would see Mr Vondrák moving about his house in blue overalls. The overalls had gradually faded as the house grew. Sometimes I heard him whistling somewhere inside the building. It seemed enormous, and I wanted to ask him how it felt to build something that large all by himself, but I was too shy. It wasn't until last month that, for no apparent reason, he suddenly invited me inside and showed me his work. The floor of the entrance hall was covered with smooth, carefully laid linoleum. The radiators

were impeccably installed, the windows closed with exemplary precision. The walls were straight and the corners right-angled. I wanted to know where he had learned all these skills. He replied that he worked as a graphic designer in advertising. I asked him about his work, but he avoided giving me an answer. I don't think he was trying to hide anything from me; it was more that he didn't seem to know what to say about it. He had poured his life into building this house. He talked to me about pipes of different dimensions and the difficulties of getting the right tiles. I noticed that not a single window looked out on to the street; they all opened out on the garden. As soon as we reached the attic, he asked me to wait at the top stair. Then he ran downstairs, I heard a door opening and suddenly the house was filled with cathedral-like tones. I looked in vain for its source. When Mr Vondrák didn't return, I went to look for him so I could compliment him on his fine sound system. As I walked down the stairs, I realized that the music was coming from somewhere in the basement. So I went down, and there, on the concrete floor, was a harmonium, and behind it, in his now faded overalls, sat Mr Vondrák the advertising designer, his head tossed back, playing Bach. 'I'm practising for the house-warming,' he said.

Several days later he finally broke down and used the services of professionals; these were equipped with a removal van. His furniture was ordinary, even a little scratched and worn. That evening, however, Roman candles flared merrily over the street.

The kids got off the train before I did. Novels and articles have already been written about them; they've been interviewed and made the subject of documentaries, and

not just in our country, of course. They've been studied by sociologists, psychologists and criminologists, and spoken about with understanding, pity and disgust; everyone has tried to capture or at least caricature their faces. I refer anyone interested in them to the relevant literature.

It occurs to me that we are approaching a frontier. We have used up not only most of our fuel, our non-ferrous metals, our drinking water, our clean air; we've used up our stories as well. There is nothing new to add.

So they won't have to admit that fact, authors invent things out of desperation; they describe how the child hero is buried in the earth up to his neck and how the crows circle around him, ready to peck out his eyes. Or they force him to watch as the father offers his under-age daughter to a goat as a sexual object. They have the hero experience an orgasm while raping a sixty-year-old woman connected to a life-support system. Or they try to excite the reader with a tale of a man deprived of his manhood by a bolt of lightning. These authors may think that they have, indeed, found a new story, or at least a new dimension of horror and ugliness, but they only think this because they've forgotten the ancient tales of Oedipus or Tantalus. They have not read their Suetonius and they haven't experienced a fraction of what Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Čosič or Kulka have gone through, and with them dozens or rather millions of others. Stories cannot be woven from horrors or ugliness, nor from perversion or debauchery. There are still people who long for solidarity and know that life without dignity is not real life, but I'm afraid their number is diminishing, just as real craftsmen and their apprentices, mendicant friars, sailors, merchants and travellers who walked or went on horseback are dying out. And I'm not

surprised at the diminishment: most people have long ago been swept away in the tide of the mundane, though they stood defiantly on their tiptoes.

As I approached my cousin's house, I saw her smiling gypsy neighbour hanging out the washing.

I had first come here to see my cousin back in the winter, and the neighbour was hanging out the washing then too. The moment she saw me — a complete stranger— she waved to me, and I waved back. And then she shrugged her shoulders, as if to say: It's too late. You should have come sooner. And she smiled a broad smile, as if to add: But we'll see if we can do something about it. She was scarcely eighteen.

I saw her husband soon afterwards. An enormous moustache sprouted under his nose and a beer belly hung over his belt. He had gigantic hands. I would not have wanted to be caught in their grip.

My cousin noticed that I enjoyed watching those two, and she told me his name was Sandor and that he worked on the collective farm. Her name was Marie. They had married very young — when she was fifteen — and now they had two daughters. A pity I'd missed the gypsy wedding, she said. Then she took a small painting out of a wooden chest. It depicted several svelte little witches stepping out of an automobile to join their companions in a dance. Among the witches I recognized our young neighbour.

'Why did you paint her that way?' I asked.

'She's in the right company,' my cousin declared, arousing my curiosity even further.

I spent the night in my cousin's cottage, and the next day I saw the husband, Sandor, dressed fit to kill, hurrying to catch the train.

No sooner had the train rattled off than a greying, elegant man appeared at the fence. The young mother ran out of the house, but I couldn't hear what they were talking about, though I could occasionally hear high, flirtatious female laughter.

'Sandor won't be back until late tonight,' my cousin remarked. 'By then everything will be back to normal.'

Soon after, the woman, bundled up in a big woollen scarf, left the house with her children and went off with the man.

But at noon, unexpectedly, the husband returned. I happened to see him hurrying home from the station. He was gripping two parcels in his enormous hands. He banged on the gate for a while, and when no one came to open it for him, he unlocked it himself. And then, though two walls separated us, I heard him calling her name. He repeated it several times, his voice rising, finally, to an inarticulate roar. At least it seemed that way to me, though perhaps he was only shouting from a more distant room.

I began to anticipate a possible story in which passions are carried far above the surface of things: free, destructive, enthralling — until I began to worry that it might all come to a head in mindless violence.

A while later Sandor appeared, no longer in his Sunday clothes. He had put on a red windbreaker, and was pulling a sleigh behind him. I didn't understand what the sleigh was for. God knows what, or whom and in what state, he was preparing to drag off.

I watched in astonishment as he walked towards a hillside, where children were playing in the snow. Then I could see his red windbreaker swooping down the hill.

In the early evening, I saw him in the pub. The landlord

brought him beer, and I heard him say out loud, to amuse the other tables, 'You look a little the worse for wear, Sandor.'

The gypsy took a drink. 'You should've seen the dream I had!' And he started telling them about it. An army officer had sent him up to Mars and ordered him to come back to earth on foot. 'And the cocksucker only gave me three days to do it. I had to run so fast I was dying of thirst.' He finished off his beer, then added bitterly, 'And I still have to write it down.'

My cousin explained that, because of their youth, her neighbours had been required to take marriage counselling before the wedding. There they'd been taught how to build their relationship, and had also been alerted to the meaning of dreams, in which the repressed subconscious speaks; if it remained mute, they were told, it could drive one to commit indiscretions. Sandor had been so startled by the notion of a subconscious that he agreed to write his dreams down, and then take them to the psychologist from time to time. But Sandor didn't usually dream, except about food and the army. 'So I sometimes lend him one of my dreams about monsters,' my cousin concluded, 'and he chops my wood in return.'

That's the way it goes. My story of the gypsies had been killed before it had a chance to be born. Not even Shakespeare, had he lived to see it, would have known what to do. The moment Desdemona insisted that Othello see a marriage counsellor, Shakespeare would have given up. Nevertheless, though I now expected no writing to come of it, I accepted my cousin's offer to use her cottage. The countryside was pretty, and the evening mist still smelled sweet.

I stepped into the cottage and was met with the usual smell of paint, primer and turpentine.

I didn't stay inside for long. I took a sketch-pad and pastels and set out into the countryside. It was a cloudless September day, and the wooded hilltops on the horizon shimmered in the haze; shades of yellow and brown were beginning to dominate the landscape. I walked through a colony of small weekend cottages where the diligent owners were working to keep their tiny plots and gardens in perfect order. The air here was full of the scent of autumn flowers, ripening fruit and fresh coats of paint. A little past the colony I could see some shacks inhabited by the kind of kids I'd seen on the train. The smell of wood-smoke emanated from them, and a girl not unlike the one in my compartment on the train was pumping water into a tub. I greeted her. She turned to look at me, and her eyes were red — from crying, or from the smoke. She looked at me for a moment, then nodded and turned back to her tub.

Beyond the shacks, meadows rose gently to woodland. There, the railway passed through a shallow valley. I walked up to the first trees and looked for a view I would enjoy drawing. I draw mostly landscapes now. Even my wife likes them. She claims that they express the more pleasant, comforting, less contradictory part of my personality.

The sun poured down on the land, a nearby hill rose steeply against the sky, a pond sparkled at the bottom of it. Several willows dipped their branches in its water, and a narrow, sandy pathway ran from the water towards me; it was lined with low shrubs, among which, closer to me, rose a mature mountain ash, its crown laden with reddish-orange fruit. I found a warm stone, sat down and began to

sketch the outline of the distant hill.

'And the only thing that really grabbed me,' my friend Karel had said yesterday, reminiscing about his visit to the gallery in Montenegro, 'apart from Hegedušič, who's dead now anyway, was old Generalič. You look at his cat sitting in the window, with a couple of apples and onions in front of it, and you say to yourself: This guy is incredibly inventive. He can't help it, he's a true primitive. He doesn't think about things, he doesn't make anything up, he just paints. There's one where he's got this plucked cockerel hanging on a hook. Can you think of a more eloquent image of the modern world? A greater disgrace to life than a bird stripped of its feathers? It's the image of man who has nothing left: no God, no hope. But Generalič doesn't know about any of this; he just thinks he's painted a plucked rooster in his village. Tell me, does it make any sense to go pn making an effort? Wouldn't it be better to admit honestly that we haven't got what it takes any more? And now tell me,' he said, stretching out his bony hand towards me, 'does anyone have what it takes any more?'

Ecclesiastes has an answer to that: 'He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.'

I expect that the landscape in front of me had been painted by several painters already. And the number of times photographers had immortalized it would be hard to guess at. I could, to distinguish myself somewhat, treat it as a cubist would, or a surrealist — paint a dead dove in the foreground instead of the mountain ash, perhaps. I could pretend that I saw the landscape in completely different colours from those a camera would see, but why? If I were a painter, I would probably feel the same kind of despair

that my friend Karel feels when he sees that he has barely been able to go beyond the limits others have reached before him. Fortunately, thanks to the spoiled sunflowers, I had been able to rid myself for ever of the responsibility of thinking up something new, at least in paint. I could, in all good conscience, delight in the fact that my mountain ash would at least faintly resemble the mountain ash I was looking at now, and that one day, when I looked at my picture again, the pleasure of this moment would perhaps come to mind.

A train gave a long whistle, and then I could hear the rattling of the carriages as though it were right behind me.

Sometimes I think that the furious hunt for novelty is diseased and self-destructive. We have declared progress to be our idol. Progress we understand to be something new, something that has never been here before and thus must be better than everything we have. It doesn't matter whether we move in the sphere of technology, science, the organization of society or the arts. The discovery of something new was always reserved for the genius; today all you need is a school-leaving certificate or at least a month-long training course and a good supply of arrogance. Perhaps we'd be better off if we worried less about whether we'd seen and expressed ourselves in a new way, and worried more about whether what we have seen and expressed is of use to anyone at all.

Something in the woods behind me snapped. I turned around. A girl in a denim skirt and blouse was approaching — at first sight a twin of the two girls I had seen today: the one in the train, and the one by the pump. She saw me. For a moment she stared at me, and it seemed that she too had red eyes, although most likely my own

vision was clouded by a red mist. She stopped abruptly, turned and hurried away down to the valley where the railway track was.

The girl would also have looked good in my picture; I could have painted her leaning against the trunk of the mountain ash, staring at me with her reddened eyes. But what kind of expression did she have, exactly? Lately, girls' faces have begun to seem less expressive, and more and more often I meet young girls who have no expression at all.

Recently in a doctor's waiting-room I picked up a magazine from the table and read that 'extensive cablization is an inseparable aspect of all electrification; the successful development of scientific and technological evolution requires tireless and qualified knowledge. . ' Language deprived of meaning — I dare not say beauty— and amplified by countless loudspeakers is pouring over the countryside, seeping into our homes, our spirits, our lungs, until we are stifled. I'm not sure that we could find even one brave girl who would bury us with dignity once our suffering is at an end.

How can we achieve real solidarity when we cannot even speak to each other?

Not long ago Karel brought me a poem by a friend of his who had hung himself a short while before. The poem went like this:

1. . this day

2. . this morning 3. . this forenoon

4. . this noon

5. . this afternoon

6. . this evening

7. . this dusk

8. . this night

9. . yes, just then

10. . it happened

It was his last poem. He believed that precisely by using such spare language he could stand up to the poisoned waves; he was constructing a raft on which to sail closer to others. Then he realized that he could not make himself heard even from this craft, and he gave up. They threw him into a mass grave, and that was the end of it.

A train whistled in the distance, but I paid no attention to it.

A handful of people despair at the barrier they see surrounding them. They believe they must get beyond it, or their lives on earth will have been in vain. But what of the rest? What of those who have never heard a kind word or a whisper of hope? The loudspeakers roar and the picture tubes cast their pallid glow.

The train's horn sounded close by, unexpectedly, insistently, and at the same time the brakes squealed; then I heard, or thought I heard, a brief, piercing scream. Then there was silence. I couldn't see it, but I knew that the train had come to a halt.

I stood up, as though that would better enable me to determine what had happened. The silence persisted; somewhere nearby a woodpecker started up. The scream had evidently sprung from my imagination, for it didn't seem possible that a human voice could reach me all the way from the valley, especially not over the sound of the train's horn.

I sat down again, gathered my pencils together, put the paper into a folder and set off towards the track.

The train was still standing there. It was a freight train.

I stood on a ledge of rock that overlooked the rails. From that height I could see three men leaning over a woman's body; the body did not have a head. The men were carefully avoiding a pool of blood which had soaked the girl's blue blouse and skirt. If I'd walked around the spur of rock, I could have gone down to the track, but it wouldn't have made any sense. There was no help I could offer.

One of the men climbed into the engine and came back with a piece of light-coloured rag. He shook it out, then he laid it over the body. It was a small rag, and it only covered the upper part of the corpse. The men talked for a while; the sound of their voices reached me, but I could not understand individual words. Then two of the men climbed up the ladder into the engine. The third man stood motionless by the body, as though unable to move, then he took a few uncertain steps to one side. The two men in the engine were shouting at him to get back in the train; then they climbed down, took him under the arms and pushed him with their combined strength up the ladder. A moment later, the train began to move.

What could I do? I turned my eyes to the heavens, hoping they were not empty, and whispered a prayer.

I went back to the cottage, put the paints away, and gazed for a while at my sketch. Then I crumpled it and threw it into the waste basket. In the distance, I could hear the siren of an ambulance, or perhaps a police car.

I had not done anything wrong, but I could not get rid of the idea of the utter futility of my painting. If only I had known that the girl had decided to give up. Yet what could I have done? One tries so often to speak, but is not heard. I would like to have found or merely repeated a word of hope: 'Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish;

why shoulds't thou die before thy time?'

The monsters my cousin had left grinned down at me from the walls, and I couldn't stay here any longer.

Outside, there were several women standing around the fence of my smiling neighbour. 'Have you heard?' they called to me.

Imprudently, from a childish desire to display my masculine superiority, I revealed that I had even seen the body lying on the tracks. Moreover, I said, I was probably the last person to see the poor girl alive.

They immediately wanted to know everything I'd seen and what she looked like, because so far, they said, no one had any idea who the dead girl was. I disappointed them. I knew nothing except that the girl had reminded me of lots of other girls; she looked so ordinary: nothing about her had struck me.

Did I think she was from the village or one of the cottage colonies nearby? Or was she a complete stranger?

I didn't know, I said, but I was sure I had never seen her before. Yet as soon as I said that out loud, I realized I wasn't sure even of that. Since I wasn't certain what she looked like, how could I be certain I'd never seen her?

They were disappointed, but even so they tried to persuade me that it was my duty to go to the police station and declare myself as a witness.

I thanked them for the advice, but I knew that, in any case, they would not allow me to bury her.

When I got home, my wife greeted me with a great sense of relief. She said that all afternoon she'd had ugly premonitions. When she had come home from work that afternoon and there was an ambulance in the street, she was terrified that something had happened to me. But it

had been for the man who had recently finished building the house in our street.

'What happened to him?'

A heart attack, she said. And the poor man had worked so hard. 'And what did you do?' she wanted to know. 'Did you go mushroom hunting?'

Suddenly, what I'd experienced seemed so improbable and unreal that I began to doubt it had actually happened. But I certainly did not want to talk about it. My wife would not have been able to sleep.

I said that the mushrooms weren't growing, and that I'd painted a picture but it hadn't worked out.

That evening, when my wife was already in bed, the doorbell rang.

It was an older woman in a headscarf — obviously a woman from the country. Embarrassed that she was disturbing me at such a late hour, she tried to persuade me that I knew her, that we'd met each other in the shop in M., and she'd seen me several times with a sketch-pad — once I'd even done a picture of her cottage.

I could recall none of this, but I nodded and invited her in.

She refused to sit down. She didn't want to take up any of my time, but they had told her that I was the one who had last seen the — she groped for the right expression — the one the train ran over, and so she had to talk to me. Every Friday her daughter came home from school for the weekend. Today she hadn't come back, and she wasn't at the school.

I tried to reassure her that her daughter would certainly turn up. And in any case, I couldn't help her. I had scarcely laid eyes on the girl in question.

That didn't matter; she'd show me a photograph. I'd certainly recognize her if I'd seen her. She began to rummage in her handbag, searching with increasing desperation among the things she kept there, but she couldn't find the photograph. Obviously she'd been so upset she'd left it at home.

I told her it was better that way, because the photograph would only reinforce an image I couldn't be sure of anyway.

But she had to know the truth. Sometimes the girl comes home, sometimes she stays with friends. Sometimes she even disappears for a whole week. She's a bit of a— nomad.

'There now, you see? That probably explains it,' I reassured her.

'What should I do, then?'

'Well, if you think it is your daughter, perhaps you should ask to see the body.'

She'd already been there and looked at the body; I couldn't imagine how hideous it was. No one could recognize her. No one! 'For a while I thought it was her— her poor little body, at least, but then I thought the legs were too long. If you could see how mangled she was.' The woman began to cry.

I said I thought the girl couldn't have fallen under the train by accident. Did she think her daughter had any reason to do something like that?

'Who knows?' she sobbed. 'You know what they're like! They don't take life seriously. They probably don't even know why they're alive!' She began searching in her handbag again. 'Do you think you could go back with me? I have a car.'

'It wouldn't make any sense. Even if you show me a photograph, I still won't be sure. But when they showed you the body, you must have seen how she was dressed. Did your daughter ever wear a denim skirt, for instance?'

'They all dress alike, don't they. And if you could have seen the dress, it was soaked in blood. The blouse didn't look like one of hers, but the girls are always wearing each others' clothes. You're a painter, aren't you?' she said, suddenly. 'Couldn't you draw what she looked like?'

I said I wasn't really a painter, and in any case I'd hardly be able to draw someone I'd only caught a glimpse of. 'Was she wearing a ring?'

'No. Besides, they'd steal it anyway.'

'Did she have any birthmarks?'

She shook her head. 'But you saw her. You were the only one who saw her.'

'I would like to help you, really,' I said. 'But I don't remember what she looked like.'

'You won't come with me?' She walked to the door. 'What am I supposed to do, just wait?' She stopped once more in the doorway. 'If it was her, I'll have to arrange the funeral.'

I'd forgotten about that.

She noticed me hesitate. 'Couldn't you just try. .?'

I led her into the dining-room, then went into my room and pulled out a piece of paper. The mountain ash danced red before my eyes. Then I saw the expressionless face of the girl in the train, and I couldn't shake it. The garden was bathed in moonlight. Several quick clouds scudded across the sky. The weather was changing. The wind whistled somewhere in the eaves like a squeaky pump. Now, when I half-closed my eyes, I could see the uncertain appearance of

the other girl with the bucket. The branches of the trees trembled slightly.

What was the point? They would have to identify her by something, the doctors, the police, the mother herself.

Somewhere far below me the familiar train sounded its horn. Then the branches cracked quietly. I turned around suddenly and she was standing there, several steps away. Her dishevelled hair tumbled over her low forehead and her left ear. She had a large ring in her left ear. Was it plastic, or perhaps ceramic? Her reddish eyes were set far apart, her eyebrows short and inexpressive, as though she'd two-thirds plucked them. Her nose was blunt, and her mouth was disproportionately small for her over-large chin. The chin, jutting forward, was the most expressive thing about her face, if anything was at all expressive about it. And then, of course, the eyes. Not their colour, but the look in them, a look of desperate anxiety. Eyes that had just caught sight of the sea. The sea that threatens to engulf us all; a sea the colour of blood.

I looked at the picture before me with astonishment and mistrust. Where had that face come from? From what depths had it emerged, and what did it have to do with any actual appearance? Had the visitor suggested it to me? Was I not merely depicting one of my own anxious, subconscious memories? I shoved the sheet with its portrait under a stack of scrap paper. I went back into the dining-room. 'Unfortunately,' I said, 'I really can't remember. Please go home. Perhaps your daughter is waiting for you already.'

'Do you think so?'

I walked her to the door.

'Who was that,' my wife wanted to know.

'Just a customer,' I said. 'She wanted me to draw her a picture.'

'At this time of night?'

'People are strange.'

'You see,' said my wife. 'I'm always telling you your pictures are good. They express. . '

'I know,' I interrupted. 'But that wasn't why. I'll explain tomorrow. '

'I keep thinking about the man down the road,' said my wife. 'He spent so many years building the house, and now, when he had finally finished. . ' And, she added, that kind of thing happens a lot. People who put an enormous amount of effort into achieving something often collapse when they finally reach their goal.

It's probably true. It must be awful to finish a work and then not have the strength to go on to the next thing. I imagined Mr Vondrák one evening climbing up to the highest stair in his new house, certain that he had spent the last five years wisely and well — the water wouldn't reach him here — and at that moment, he saw it: the sea he had tried to escape from, and for which he had had no time until now. It was here, its waves were rushing around his ears, and at that moment, his heart gave out.

A man should not build himself a house and, if he does, he should not complete that last step, because from that vantage point, he will see it.

Ecclesiastes writes about this:

I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards: I made me gardens and orchards. . Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on that labour that I had laboured to do: and behold, all was vanity and vexation of the spirit. .

In some cases, people don't even begin the work before they realize that their strength has gone. They glimpse the sea and understand that they cannot swim across. The waves roar round them. They call for help, knowing that no one hears them, and give up. So they run into the woods, see a railway track, lie down on it and wait. That is their story — their one, unrepeatable story. Several sentences long.

Who will bury her? This disturbed me.

I slowly fell asleep. If the dead girl remained unidentified, I will take a stone and place it in the ground near the tracks. And I saw myself transferring her face, or what I think was her face, into a piece of granite. That much, at least.

Then I remembered the dead dove, the one that gave up this morning. I had picked it up, so it wouldn't just lie there on the asphalt pavement, and as I picked it up, the grey feathers fell from its body like autumn leaves from a tree, and I didn't know what to do with it, because I didn't just want to toss it, naked, into the dustbin. So I carried it to a patch of long grass that was growing beside the path, and I set it down there and watched the leaves of grass rise trembling above it, as if to cover its nakedness.

Ecclesiastes also says:

And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour: and this was my portion of all my labour.