My Golden Trades

The Archaeologist's Story

THE SUN HAD already warmed the caravan. I opened the metal locker where the workers usually put their clothes, and took out two paintbrushes, a scraper and a bundle of paper bags. I was thirsty. There was nothing to drink, but there were a few apples on the table that the foreman, Vítek, had brought from his garden. I slipped one into my pocket, took a bite of another and stepped out of the caravan with my small load. I hid the key behind one of the rear wheels — exactly the same place they hide the key from potential burglars in every caravan I've ever known— then I followed the path that wound among piles of excavated earth and puddles from the recent rains. From here you could see a spruce wood on the opposite hillside and practically all of the construction site, but you couldn't see the burial grounds. The metal shells of future buildings were radiating heat, and I was suddenly aware that the construction site, where at least a hundred people were supposed to be working, was silent, more silent than the burial grounds, where there are never more than five of us at any one time.

I had no particular feelings one way of the other about archaeology; it certainly wasn't one of my hobbies. In high

school, one of my classmates had longed to be an archaeologist. We were close friends for a while, and he would drag me around the old Celtic settlements near Prague. He even persuaded me to carry a small pick and trowel in my rucksack. Every so often we would dig a scrap of baked clay out of the ground, and my friend would lecture me excitedly on the people who had made it. Thanks to his enthusiasm, I knew something, at least, about the funnel-shaped-cup culture, the globular-amphorae culture and the scroll culture, the Řivna and Únětice cultures, and the people who made braided ceramics. But my friend was not allowed to study archaeology. His parents owned a small private laundry and at that time the authorities still took a dim view of such enterprises. Over the years, I had managed to forget almost everything he'd told me about ancient potters or Celtic settlements. All that remained in my memory were the poetic associations in the names of those ancient cultures.

History, on the other hand, has always interested me— and the mystery of where man first came from, where he made his first appearance on earth. I mean on the earth in general, and in particular in the place where I live.

The path led me alongside the portable units used by the construction workers. From here you could see the burial ground and the people who were working there: Lida, the archaeologist who was guiding our mole-like labours, her assistant from the museum, Petra, and the volunteer, Masenka, who at that moment was wheeling away a barrow-full of earth. She was the only person moving on the entire construction site.

In the portable changing-room there was running water. I squeezed between chaotic piles of scrap metal and lumber,

and past a table piled with yesterday's unwashed thermoses, filthy plates and utensils caked with old food. I found a half-empty glass of beer with a drowned wasp floating it in, poured the contents on the floor and stepped into the washroom. The water that emerged from the tap looked as though it were mixed with blood. Only one of the three sinks worked, and it did not seem that anyone had cleaned it in the two years the construction site had been there. It was covered with a layer of rust and slimy grease. I rinsed the glass out as thoroughly as I could and filled it with water.

We don't know a lot about the Celts who once lived in our country; that much I learned from my high-school classmate. They left no written records. Caesar, who fought the Celts for many years, tells us that Celtic priests — the Druids — considered it a sin to put down anything of what they knew in written form. What we know about them was passed on to us by others — by foreigners or enemies like Caesar, who also tells us what is so often repeated about the Celts, that they were an immensely religious people who believed in the transmigration of souls after death, and who worshipped their gods with human sacrifices. Natio est omnis Gallorum admodum dedita religionibus. . aut pro victimis homines immolant aut se immolaturos vovent. . But I certainly wouldn't want the main written evidence of our own lives to come from the notebooks of some marshal who happened to be commander-in-chief of an invading army.

Historians prefer the testimony of archaeologists. Unfortunately, archaeologists derive most of their knowledge of the Celts from graves. I am sceptical of the notion that we can know much of life from the grave,

though I admit that the way we bury our dead today reveals much about how relationships among the living have deteriorated.

Long before Caesar encountered religion in its Druidic form, the Celts worshipped both their heroes and the forces of nature: the goddess Mother Earth being foremost of those. Everything that surrounded them was an expression of spirits, whose voices they tried to hear and understand.

I'd love to know what those voices sounded like. Did they sound like the howling of the wind, like birdsong or the buzzing of bees? Or were they like the pounding of metal, as might have suited that age of metalworkers? Or did they perhaps come to man as invisible and inaudible vibrations, filling him with anxiety, love and portentous dreams — and do they sound essentially the same today?

'Did you find everything?' Lida, our boss, put down the scraper she was using to remove a thin layer of dirt from the grave. She was young, although her hair was prematurely grey, befitting her dignified bearing and her position.

I handed her the instruments, she gave me her customary smile and immediately divided the bundle of paper bags in half and handed one lot to Petra, who began putting lumps of clay into them. The lumps were lightly veined with tiny fragments of bone. 'Wonderful old fellows, aren't they?'

'That's all you've found?' I asked, mainly out of politeness.

'That's about it. A few bits of carbon. It's not going to be a good day. Just like all this week. I had a feeling it would be this way when I got up this morning.' Petra has a figure like the women on the fresco from Pyl: narrow waist and large breasts, black eyebrows that almost met over her

nose, and almond eyes — just like a Greek woman. 'Like last week, as soon as I saw Lida by the bus, I told her, "Today we're uncovering a treasure."'

Last Monday, at the edge of the uncovered part of the burial ground, they had unearthed a bronze needle, a buckle and part of a hollow tube that looked more than anything else like a bronze syringe. They couldn't say what it had been used for, and rather than trying to concoct a hypothesis that would have upset all our notions of ancient medicine — which I would have enjoyed — they wrapped everything in cotton wool, put it in a box, and we took it all the way to the next district where, in the middle of a wheat-field, a group of pensioners were digging under the guidance of a professor from the Academy.

Lida and Petra had talked all the way about their discoveries while I observed the countryside, which was still covered with trackless, uninhabited forests. It was here, mostly in the upland areas, that the Celts had built their settlements. They had lived here for centuries, and their spirits lived here with them. Then they suddenly vanished. But had they really left no more behind them than these few fragments and shards we were now discovering in their graves?

The professor knew her bronzes, and she received us warmly. She showed us the grave-site they'd uncovered in the field, swept clean of the last scrap of earth, and a large vessel still embedded in the ground. Then she offered us cakes. She couldn't be sure to what use the little tube had been put. 'You'll have to be satisfied with having uncovered something unique,' she had said to Lida. Lida had flushed with delight.

I went over to the next partially uncovered grave-site,

took a pick, and began to dig.

Masha came back with the empty barrow. With a shovel, she carefully removed the clay I'd loosened, then thoroughly examined each shovelful with her eyes and her fingers.

'Masha, are you hungry?' I asked, pulling the apple out of my pocket.

'Thanks, that's awfully kind of you. It's as hot as the Sahara out here,' she said, wiping the sweat from her forehead. 'If only we could find something. Petra says we won't uncover a single bone today.'

Masha is just seventeen. She has a wide, good-natured face, large, curious eyes and rather thick legs. Two days ago she rode through the back gate in the fence surrounding the building site on a bicycle that looked cobbled together from spare parts. She stopped at the edge of the grave-site, hesitating a while before daring to offer her services.

'If you work for us, you won't make enough to cover your petrol,' said Lida, pointing to the engineless machine.

Masha laughed. She said she was mainly concerned about getting the proper stamp in her I.D.

'But I found a bone a while ago,' she announced to me proudly. 'Just a tiny little fragment. Lida thinks it's from a skull.'

'Congratulations, Masha!'

'As a matter of fact, it made me feel kind of sad.'

'Why?'

'Because someone was once alive, and whether he was miserable or whether he was happy, it was all the same to them, wasn't it? And now all that's left of him is this tiny little bone — I almost missed it.'

'And what about his soul?'

'Do you think he had one?'

'The Celts believed that souls migrated into new bodies.'

'Do you believe that?'

'I don't suppose I do.'

When I was a boy I was bothered by the question of whether the unbelievers and pre-Christian souls would experience salvation and resurrection. The previous night I had been reading an ancient edition of Eusebius's History of the Christian Church. Sixteen hundred years ago, the author had written on that very theme, about how Jesus had descended into hell, having destroyed its gates, which for ages had been unmoveable, and how on the third day he arose from the dead, and resurrected with him the other dead, who had remained in the earth from ancient times. Today I no longer worry about such questions. I've realized that everything that has ever been preached over the centuries about the soul or about God, about the origins of the world or of life, is merely intimations, fragments or shards of something that goes far beyond our proud reason; our imagination can only seek in vain for words or images which might compose the fragments into a whole. And I am amazed by how readily that which we declare to be a sign of God's will or intervention is delineated by human time and human dimensions. Even those I consider wise cling desperately to fragments and persuade themselves, and others, that they have the whole vessel. I have been coming to terms with my own being and my future non-being all my life. The self-assurance of those who claim to know, even roughly, how it was and how it will be awakens my mistrust.

'Sometimes I think nothing has any meaning,' Masha

said, waving towards the stones that outlined our grave-site. 'Actually, I wrote a story about it.' She blushed. 'You write stories?'

'Sometimes, only when I get certain ideas.' 'What was the story about?'

'Someone poisoned my cat a little while ago. He was a beautiful torn, really adorable. Everyone said he was the most adorable creature they'd ever seen. I decided that it must have been done by someone really hungry for revenge

Vítek, the foreman, who was walking by the next grave, stopped and interrupted our literary discussion with a down-to-earth question: 'What colour was the cat?'

'He was a strange kind of yellowish-brown. He looked like a miniature lion.'

'Do you know who did him in?'

'That's just it; I don't know who could have done such a thing. It's like the Vietnamese. Those poor people are so far from home, and no one likes them. In our town, whenever you go into a store and ask for something they don't have, the shopkeepers tell you that the Vietnamese have bought it all.'

'Don't talk to me about those little gooks!' snapped the foreman angrily. 'I'd like to see you when one of them goes crazy. One of them here went after the section chief with a pick-axe. It took three men to hold the bastard back.'

As though they had sensed we were talking about them, two Vietnamese in overalls approached us with a swinging gait they had adopted from their Czech co-workers. They were gaunt and slightly built, one was half a head shorter than the other. They stopped at the edge of our grave-site

and observed us for a while with polite interest. Then finally one of them asked: 'So, did anything you find today, madame?'

'Nothing!' said Lida, looking up from the grave.

'Not yet a Celtic jewel, even?' asked the shorter one. His intonation was a remarkable blend of the orient and Pilsen.

'Not a single thing,' said Lida.

'It is regretful,' replied the Vietnamese. 'Truthfully. We were forward looking.'

'Curious little buggers, aren't they?' said the foreman as soon as the Vietnamese had wandered off. 'They get hammered every morning. They drink a bottle of beer for breakfast and can't hold it — I'm afraid to send them up on the scaffolding.' He took his pick and with delicate, almost gentle blows, broke the hard, compacted clay. He was the one who had accidentally discovered the burial ground. Last spring, when a bulldozer was digging a trench for the foundations, Vítek noticed something glittering in the piles of earth. He picked it up, rinsed it in water — and found himself holding a golden ear-ring. Not the kind they make today; a solid, heavy thing. The foreman had not been surprised at his discovery: a gypsy woman had predicted he'd find treasure three times in his lifetime. Of course, she hadn't necessarily meant a treasure of precious metal. As soon as he made his discovery, Vítek took the golden ring to a museum, where it caused a great commotion. The trinket came from the young Halstat period, or even from the early Laten period. It was a magnificent example of its kind. He may have chanced upon a whole Celtic burial ground, they said, and warned him to take a good look at everything the bulldozer turned up. Vítek started looking carefully, but then the archaeologist

had arrived in the corner of the site, along with her assistants and some amateur enthusiasts, and they began to dig. Foreman Vítek became an enthusiastic amateur. He lived nearby, and he continued to draw wages even when he was digging here. Deep down, he was hoping to find the other ear-ring; on top of that, he was rather fond of Mrs Petra.

So far, no one had found the other ear-ring, nor any other trace of gold. The most likely explanation was that the Celtic goddess Nerthus, Mother Earth, had planted the ear-ring there to prevent the last remains of a people who had worshipped her and made sacrifices to her from being scattered by a bulldozer.

'All the same, I'm telling you,' the foreman went on, 'these little gooks — it's the start of a whole new wave of immigration. '

'Whatever do you mean by that?' asked Lida.

'They've come here from the east, haven't they? There's more of them around than dog-shit on the pavement. A week ago in our housing estate, the building inspector just okayed two new dormitories; they've already filled them. '

'You mustn't look at it like that,' Lida objected. 'They work here, after all, and they've got to live somewhere.'

And our people are all moving west,' Vítek continued, pursuing his theory. 'Can you imagine what the place would be like if the borders weren't wired up?'

'Dear God, where do you dredge up ideas like that?' said Petra at last. Vitek's remonstrances had been directed chiefly at her.

'You're the one always telling me how nations migrate,' said Vítek in his own defence, 'how these Celts suddenly disappeared.'

'But that was under completely different circumstances,' said Petra, and sighed, perhaps regretting the passing of those circumstances.

The Celts really had vanished. For centuries, they had worked on their fortified settlements, clearing the woods, grazing their herds. Some of the graves testified to the wealth of their princes, but as the beginning of the millennium from which we date our era approached, the earth seemed to have swallowed them up.

Were they wiped out by a plague? Or did they think the soil would no longer support them and so moved west with their herds, their tools and their clay vessels filled with grain? Or were they slaughtered or driven out by the wild warriors who lived to the north and east?

It occurred to me that if we admit the influence of what is called the genius loci, we may retrospectively conjecture about the events that took place. Perhaps one of the neighbouring rulers — more powerful, or maybe just more determined than the rest — brought his army to the very borders of our basin. Perhaps he would not even have had to enter the territory in arms because the local inhabitants respected the commands of their chieftains and Druids not to provoke the enemy, but rather to overwhelm him with their discipline, and with unexpected kindness. The conqueror would perhaps have summoned the chieftains and arrogantly demanded their submission in exchange for which he — the invader — would promise to protect their territory against invasion.

The chieftains would have weighed their options carefully before accepting subjection and protection. A treaty of vassalage was perhaps written — emphasizing that the signatories were entering into vassalage voluntarily—

and signed in a big ceremony. It wouldn't matter whether the signatories knew how to read and write. The treaty— like all such treaties — would be binding only on the subject peoples regardless of whether they even knew the treaty existed, let alone whether they had accepted and signed it.

We might surmise that the people were not happy about this state of affairs. Some of them rebelled and were killed, others packed up their meagre belongings and struck out for the west or the south through the nearly impenetrable forests. In those idyllic times, when free movement was hindered only by lack of roads and the only impediments were bears or wolf packs, whole tribes could simply leave. But because we are considering what we have called the influence of a genius loci, we ought also to assume that not all of the subjected people withdrew, or were slaughtered; some must have simply adapted so completely to their conquerors that no one could have told master from slave when living, let alone in the grave.

And thus the Celts vanished from the places where we live today, and all that remained were burial grounds containing the ashes of their ancestors; and perhaps the gods and goddesses and spirits who had become too attached to the rivers and mountains and trees and rocks.

With a deafening roar of jet engines, a squadron of fighter planes chased each other across the sky. It was impossible to tell at that speed whether they belonged to the Celts or their conquerors. In any case, it made no difference. Masha dropped her knife and brush, looked up in alarm and put her hands over her ears.

The beautiful Petra also stopped digging. 'Yesterday we had Civil Defence exercises,' she said. 'An officer with a lot of brass on his shoulders came and gave us a pep-talk

about what to do if the bomb went off. He was pretty optimistic about our prospects, because — he kept assuring us — in the event of a nuclear war, we'd be issued with plastic coats and masks that you could put on in twenty seconds. He brought a set with him all wrapped up to show us how it worked. So he gazes out of the window and suddenly shouts: Fire-flash, south-south-west, approximately twenty kilometres away! He grabs the parcel, but he can't get the knot undone. He tries to break the string, but he can't do that either. He ends up having to borrow a knife from someone just so he can show us the protective gear. The fool has gone into a nuclear war without even taking a penknife! And you know what he says? He says, "Strictly speaking, comrades, I'm already dead. You see, a mere length of hempen twine can cost a man his life!'"

'He didn't really say, "strictly speaking" and "hempen twine"?' asked Vítek.

'"Strictly speaking, hempen twine",' Petra repeated. 'You don't think I'd make something like that up, do you? I couldn't if I tried.'

Lida stood up in her grave and wiped the sweat and dust from her forehead. 'I guess it's time to photograph this now,' she said, pointing to the grave that she and Petra had carefully swept clean. She pulled a camera out of a bucket and looked around for the best spot from which to immortalize the grave-site. 'You know who called me at five o'clock this morning?' she said, suddenly remembering. 'The professor. She said our discovery wouldn't let her sleep. And then, when she finally dropped off, she dreamt about the thing.' Lida turned the wheelbarrow over and stood on it. The grave in front of her was as clean as a

table ready to be set, but at the same time it was bare, empty, and as hot as a patch of earth after a fire.

'So, what was it?' asked Petra.

'She claims it was a handle.'

'A handle? Who's she kidding!' said Vítek. 'What did they need a handle for?'

'Maybe for a chisel,' explained Lida. 'Or for some special kind of knife.'

'Do you think it could have been a sacrificial knife?' Masha set down the brush she was using to clean the cracks between the rocks.

'A sacrificial knife would probably have been bigger.' Lida jumped down, turned the wheelbarrow upright, pushed it over to the other side, and then got up on it again. 'Anyway, it's difficult for anyone to say with any certainty now.'

'That's awful,' Masha whispered to me. 'I touched that handle yesterday, too. And they might have used it to kill people with.'

'The blood would have dried up long ago,' I reassured her.

'But what if there was a curse on the thing?'

'Do you believe in curses?'

She shrugged her shoulders. 'Don't you?'

'Not really.'

'Do you think they. . aren't they watching what we're doing here?'

'Who, the dead?'

'The ones buried here.'

'Are you afraid they might take revenge on us?'

'When they dug that Tollund man out of the peat bog, one of the excavators suddenly dropped dead on the spot.

I read about it. It couldn't just have been a coincidence. The man who had written the story was there — he said that the old gods demanded a life in exchange for that ancient man.'

'That sounds like a pretty human notion of what the gods expect.'

'So you think there's nothing, then?'

I didn't understand her.

'I mean, you die and then — nothing?' she explained.

'There's no answer to that.'

'Why not?'

'There's no answer that you can put into words.'

'I know — I ask a lot of dumb questions. It drives my parents mad.'

'Words come from experience, that's what I meant to say. When we talk about something that no one has ever experienced, words can only be misleading.'

'That's interesting, what you say. Does that mean you can't even write about it?' Masha filled the wheelbarrow right to the brim with earth. 'I'd still like to see him — the Tollund man, I mean. They say he has a beautiful head.'

I trundled the wheelbarrow off to a nearby pile.

We are all waiting for some message of hope, hope for our life here, and perhaps even more, for eternity. We want assurances that we will be saved from the laws of nature, where everything is subject to extinction; assurances that the life in us has strived for something new, and thus that death has no dominion over us. From ancient times, people have offered bloody sacrifices, even human sacrifices, to the gods, expecting hope in return. Finally they, or some of them anyway, found consolation in a God who accepted the sacrifice of his own Son, and in return gave them hope

once and for all. At the same time other people, who had never heard of this God worshipped by the Israelites — nor of his Son who said: 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall never pass away'—sacrificed one of their own people and threw his body into the Tollund bog.

The man on the cross looks down upon us in countless forms. The man from the Tollund Fen, the noose removed from around his beautiful head, with that magnificent high-bridged nose, was put on display in a provincial museum. The meaning of sacrifice has been lost today; we continue to wait for some more persuasive, more logical and more understandable prophesy. We await this news from priests, from astrologers, from political leaders, from philosophers and from writers. And many, longing to win the favour of those who wait, say: 'May you be saved!' And others cry, 'There is no heaven except on this earth, except in this life.' Still others skilfully divert attention and seek a substitute hope. Very few have the courage to stand up and say, 'Beloved, there is no answer. Insofar as death can be conquered, insofar as man is truly endowed with something denied to other forms of life, it can only exist in a dimension for which we lack words.' But such answers, no matter how true, would interest or satisfy no one.

'What do you want to be, anyway, Masha?' I asked when I came back.

'I wanted to study archaeology. But they're probably not going to open the faculty this year, or next year either.'

'Of course they won't,' said Lida from the next grave-site. 'They say archaeology has no practical use. It is uneconomic.'

'And what draws you to archaeology, if it makes you think such thoughts?' I asked Masha.

'I like the idea of finding gifts in graves. Each of those things must have been rare and special for those people, and yet they put them into the grave along with their dead. I like the idea that people used to be so fond of each other.' She continued piling the earth into the wheelbarrow. 'When Mum and Dad got divorced,' she said quietly, 'they sued each other for possession of the TV and the cutlery. They couldn't have done that if they'd known how people used to… Archaeologists have to be kinder than that; at least I can't imagine a bad archaeologist.' Masha dropped her shovel and quickly covered her ears as the squadron of unidentifiable jet fighters screamed over our heads again.

'When you tell it, it's a fantastic joke,' said Petra, returning to her nuclear war story. 'A mask and a coat! I saw on German television what would happen if the rockets started flying. It was such fun I didn't have the heart to send the kids to bed. What if the whole thing just blew up that night? I'm not kidding, I had this stupid idea: let them live a little. I let them eat a whole ice-cream cake for a snack.'

'Do you think it could start suddenly, just like that?' said Masha. She was clearly alarmed.

'Why not?' said the foreman. 'It could start by accident.'

'I've already talked things over with Joe,' Petra continued. 'We're going to apply to emigrate to New Zealand.'

'Oh, sure, the whole country's just waiting for you to show up down there,' said Vítek. He sounded as though he'd taken the idea as a personal insult, as though she'd decided to move away from him.

'If not New Zealand, somewhere else. It could scarcely be worse than it is here.'

'It wouldn't be any more use than a fart in a hurricane,

Petra,' said Vítek vengefully. 'When those bombs start exploding, where'll you hide? Radiation will be everywhere, it'll be winter all over the world, because the sun will never make it through that cloud of ash.'

'Well, what of it?' insisted Petra. 'So I'll freeze somewhere. Is it better to stay here like a calf waiting to be slaughtered? Look at those fools, always putting on such a show.' She pointed at the squadron of jets flying straight towards us. So far, they were completely silent.

Masha was furiously sweeping the grave-site with a straw whisk. 'What will you do if you don't get to study archaeology?' I asked.

'I don't know. Maybe I could still study literature.'

'Do you think there's a connection?' I said, surprised. 'Or is it because you think that writers are good people too?'

'Don't you think they're good?'

'I prefer not to make judgements about people in advance,' I said.

Not long ago, my friend the priest told me what one of our own chieftains — who had refused to sign the latest solemn treaty of vassalage and protection — had told him just before his death: 'You Christians are making one big mistake. You look on all people as your neighbours and you don't understand that once in a while, you have to deal with the devil.'

I respect that chieftain, because he rejected that ill-fated tendency to which the spirits of our homeland seduce us. At the same time, I would not want the human world to be reduced to angels and devils, to those who have seen truth and those who are in error, to those who are with me and those who go for my throat. Though when I think of all the things I've witnessed in my life, I really don't know why

man thinks he is endowed with qualities that rank him above all other living things.

'I know a few wonderful people,' I said cautiously, 'and they are neither archaeologists nor writers.'

'As a matter of fact there is a connection,' said Masha, returning to my previous question. 'A friend of mine and I went for an outing a little way past Konstantinky. Do you know that area?'

'A little.'

'And we found a fragment of something on a hilltop. They were widening the road. The piece was traced with old-fashioned decoration. It must have been in the ground for a length of time that I could scarcely imagine, and yet, once, someone must have made it. Someone living. Before, in school or in museums, I was never interested in archaeological finds. And now suddenly I felt it was important to find something out about that person, especially since I lived right where he did. So I wrote a story about it.' She blushed.

'What did you call the story?'

'For a long time I couldn't think of a title, and then it came to me: Silence! I tried to imagine what it must have been like back then, and all I could come up with was how awfully silent it must have been everywhere. I got scared just thinking about it. I sent it in to a competition in Cheb magazine. They wrote back and said it was sensitively written, but I didn't know how to work with themes properly. They also said it wasn't contemporary enough.'

'I wouldn't take it too much to heart. Maybe they were afraid of silence too.'

'I don't understand what they meant, working with themes.'

I would like to have told her that I can only imagine with great difficulty something more hopeless than submitting short stories to a competition, or studying in one of our subjugated universities, but I didn't feel like letting on that I had some connections with that massive literary grave-site. Besides, Masha had thrown down her scraper and was plugging her ears because the squadron of fighters was screaming over our heads again. Whether they belonged to the Celts or to the other side, they certainly drowned out all the voices, the secret ones and the obvious ones.

Years ago I travelled through Scotland. Not because I was interested in the progeny of the Celts; I was drawn, rather, by the barren mountains and lakes celebrated in old songs, and modern myths about primeval monsters. At Inverness I checked in at a small hotel and then set off for a walk in the hills that rose over the town. I only got as far as the outskirts where, through the window of a small house, I heard a woman's voice singing a Scottish song. I'd heard Scottish songs and ballads sung in English, but the woman was singing in Gaelic, and I heard the old melodies as they had sounded originally.

I know that music cannot be expressed in words, just as words cannot express eternity, God, infinity or the soul. So I leaned against the stone fence post, listening to the woman singing, and looked at the rocky, barren mountains. Suddenly, the sun emerged from behind a cloud and illuminated a distant hillside. In the sharp light that defined a strip of rocky ground, I saw a white stone structure. It stood alone in a large field of heather. Even at that distance, I could see that the cracks between the stones were overgrown with moss, there was no glass in the windows, and the walls were strangely distorted. Outside a

low doorway, on a bench, sat an old man in a white coat. He was looking towards me. I was overcome with inexpressible excitement: I knew that this house was the place I had been gravitating towards all my life. It was the home I had been looking for. I was expected. I knew that when I stepped over the threshold, the embrace into which I would sink would surround me and fill me with joy once and for ever.

Then the woman came to the end of her song, and everything vanished.

I could have continued my walk into the hills, but I understood that my real reason for coming here had been fulfilled. I could expect nothing more blissful. So I walked back into town, packed my suitcase and went to the station.

Only later did I realize how through the voice, in a land so apparently distant, I had heard the spirit of my true homeland speaking to me. It was a voice that could not reach me at home, for it was drowned out by the shouts and arguments and laughter that fill every homeland. Like Masha, I tried to write about it — several times, in fact — but of course I never found the right words.

'I've just been thinking,' said Vítek, 'that the whole ice age must have been caused by a huge cloud of ashes. What if those people a long time ago were as stupid as we are, and invented everything we have?'

'And you think that they wouldn't have left a trace of themselves behind?' said Lida.

'Why should they? What do you think will be left of all this?' he said, pointing contemptuously at the unfinished structures of iron and steel around him, his own work. 'The rust will eat all this up in a couple of years.'

'Rubbish, Vítek,' said Petra. 'You'll never convince me. How would it be if you just uncover another layer over here for me?' And the foreman obediently took his pick and carefully began to loosen the clay.

The voice through which the spirit of place speaks to those who listen is common to us all; to me and to those people who moved from the backwaters of my homeland more than two millennia ago. By calling it a voice I don't mean anything mystical, a voice of blood and soil. I'm surprised that most people don't hear it, don't feel the natural reasons for affinity with one another. I'm surprised that they invent other reasons, more artificial ones, for sticking together: race, faith or ideas. They are more eager to believe their lives are influenced by the positions of planets than by the shape of the mountains that surround their birthplace, or the height of the heavens above them, or the direction of the winds that bring the clouds.

Is it possible not to feel some affinity for people who have followed every day the meanderings of the same river, climbed the same hills, seen the same flock of birds with each spring, and to whom darkness and light, the cold season and fruitful season, arrived at the same time?

It is probable that very soon we will have altered the courses of all our rivers, cut down all our forests, killed off the migrating birds, and obscured the boundary between day and night; in other words, that we will have broken the ties that bind us to our ancestors, those of our blood and those not of our blood, the tie that binds us to our homeland and therefore to the earth. And then we will have hurled ourselves into the emptiness of the universe.

'Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Look! Come and look!' cried Petra suddenly. And we all rushed out of our graves to see

what she'd found.

'Bronze!' she cried. 'I've got something bronze!' She was gripping a kitchen knife and carefully peeling away thin layers of clay.

'My word, there it is,' said Lida, kneeling beside Petra, her gaze fixed on a single place in the grave.

All I could see were several poisonous-looking greenish spots.

Petra got up, sat on one of the stones that edged the grave-site, took a cigarette out of a packet and lit it. Her fingers were trembling. 'This would happen now,' she complained, 'just as I was getting ready to call it a day.'

Lida brought over a box, then she and Petra knelt in the grave and began peeling back thin layers of clay bit by bit. 'It was Mother Earth,' sighed Petra. 'She could feel our strength and enthusiasm running out.' She cut a rectangle of clay out of the earth; a thin, greenish line was visible in it.

'What do you think it is?' whispered Masha.

The knife was very slowly scraping back the clay. The time allotted for our work was gone; the construction workers had suddenly emerged from their hiding places and were trudging along the pathway that led to the back gate.

I gathered up the tools and put them in the wheelbarrow.

The Vietnamese were now all shiny and clean; they had changed out of their overalls and into jeans. They stopped a little way off and spoke together in their impenetrable language. The larger of the two came up and looked curiously into the grave. 'Did you find something for your pleasure, madame?

Petra looked up. She hesitated for a moment, as though

wondering whether they were worthy of hearing such important news. 'A bronze,' she announced dryly.

'After all!' said the man happily. 'Congratulation.' He nodded to his mate, who approached quietly. Then, as if on command, both of them leaned over the grave in unison. Petra leaned slightly to one side and pointed to the thin, green line in the soil. The smaller Vietnamese extended his index finger and declared, in his exotic Pilsen accent: 'I have seen already. When I dig a trench, I find such thing.'

'What did you do with it?' asked Vítek.

'Had no time,' sighed the Vietnamese. 'It was too much shooting.' And then he caught himself, as though he'd revealed too much, nodded his head and hurried away to the gate, followed by his companion.

The bronze needle was almost entirely exposed now. Masha, standing beside me, was scarcely breathing. 'It's beautiful!' Then she stopped. 'I hope it's not another one of those sacrificial knives.'

The notion that not long ago people still offered human sacrifices to the gods appals us, and we feel ennobled at how distant we, as humans, are from that primitive cruelty. But when I think of the endless masses of people sacrificed in my own lifetime, not to the gods, but to the insane visions of those who put themselves in the place of those gods, it doesn't seem to me that we have any reason to feel ennobled at all.

At last Petra carefully liberated that rare object from its grave, laid it in the box and said: 'Tune in tomorrow!' Masha swept the grave-site again, and then the women went to the caravan to change. Vítek the foreman also disappeared so that he could take a quick tour of

inspection around the emptying construction site and still be able to walk Petra to the bus. Masha came up with her makeshift bicycle. 'Too bad we didn't find anything,' she said to me.

'Maybe tomorrow.' I watched as she skillfully manoeuvred her bicycle around the piles of earth. Perhaps back then, when she found her first ancient fragment, she too had heard the voice of the local spirits.

I have suggested that the voices urged us only to submit or to escape. But I know that's not how it was at all. Most probably, the voices counselled caution or moderation. The cowardly took them as an appeal to submit; the restless or impatient as an invitation to flee. But there must have been others still who understood that they were to remain, to hold out and to survive, because without them the land would remain empty and dumb. Perhaps the graves of these people will yet be found, or perhaps they were so poor that there is nothing in their graves at all. But I am certain that they lived here and remained.

I consider them my true kinsmen: by fate, by place and by choice.

It was suffocatingly hot in the caravan. I opened the window as wide as I could and then went to wash in the bathroom that had never been cleaned.

The construction site was silent. The wretched metal structures pointlessly rose out of the earth. The piles of dirt cast long shadows and blushed red in the setting sun. A short distance beyond the caravan, a huge digger reached out its long arm towards me. Girders, painted planks and sheets of plastic lay scattered everywhere on the ground.

I walked back to the caravan, sat down on the steps and watched evening descend over the piles of earth. A strange

world, where the cleanest, tidiest, most stimulating place is a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old burial ground. From somewhere in the distance I could hear a dog barking and the faint rumbling of a truck's engine.

Suddenly, from somewhere around the burial ground, I heard a sound — as though someone were pounding metal dustbin lids together. The clatter echoed with improbable force through the silent construction site. I got up from the step and cautiously walked along the empty path to the graves.

The banging continued at the same strength, and fell silent only when I reached the spot from which the graves could be seen. I climbed up on a pile of earth and scrutinized the area in front of me. There was no sign of movement anywhere. No sooner had I started back than the lids began to bang again.

Who knows what the voices of our home spirits sound like; who Would be brave enough to claim that he is capable of hearing them?

I sat down on the steps again. A mist was rising off the woods on the opposite hillside. You try to listen all your life, and all that time, you try to distinguish which of the voices you hear are essential, which resonate with your inner self and which are merely empty chatter tempting you into the universal abyss.

The metallic voice sounded for a while longer, and then gradually faded, as though it were disappearing into the depths of the earth. But I could still hear it long after it had fallen quite silent.