My Golden Trades

The Engine Driver's Story

THE SEASON OF ballroom dancing was upon us, and crime was on the increase. I have little interest in ballroom dancing — I don't dance. A paedophile was at large in our neighbourhood, and the school had warned us to keep our children off the streets. My daughter told me that, coming back from aerobics with a younger friend, they had seen a stranger by the telephone booth on the corner who asked if they could give him two fifty-heller coins for a crown.

'So what did you do?'

'I only had one,' my daughter told me, 'but he gave me the whole crown for it anyway.'

The man asked them where they lived and where the Novaks lived. As fate would have it, the only Novák in our neighbourhood, Engineer Novák, happened to be walking by and when the girls called to him, the stranger took off. My daughter described him, but her description meant nothing to me.

Not long ago my wife's colleague, who works in a psychiatric institute, invited her to a club meeting for paedophiles. I went along. I was surprised to discover that most of the rehabilitated paedophiles looked not only utterly normal, but even rather sympathetic; they seemed

gentle and restrained. Of course, when they behave properly, my wife's colleague informed us, they are allowed to go home for the weekend.

'And they don't do anything wrong?' I asked.

'We tranquillize them before they leave,' she said, to allay my fears. 'But sometimes something goes wrong inside their heads and they don't come back on Monday. In such cases, the institute calls the police at once to avoid possible trouble. But the police have other things on their minds besides chasing after patients from the psychiatric institute, and so paedophiles, along with other escapees and as yet unexposed criminals, have the run of the city. As long as they don't actually assault anyone, no one but anxious parents gives them much thought.'

Since the conversation had turned to the organs of public security, the doctor reminisced about a schizophrenic wrestler who had once been a patient of hers. This wrestler had a theory about life, or rather about death, that interested me the moment I heard it. He thought that death was engaged in an unending struggle for control of the world, and to that end, She hired various assistants. Death and Her assistants moved among us, the living, in constantly changing disguises. On green days, which the wrestler alone was able to determine, they would dress up in police uniforms. That was when they were most dangerous.

The wrestler would never harm a soul, the doctor went on, but on the green days he had to be kept away from policemen in uniform. If he saw one, he would attack. He was a powerful man anyway, but when the fit came upon him his strength was amplified. Not only would he take the officer's pistol and night stick away from him, he would remove his cap, rip off his epaulettes and try to strip him of

his uniform. Then he'd throw everything down the sewer or stuff it into a garbage can and run. Most of the time the police caught him, took their private revenge, and then returned him to the institute with a warning.

I asked, not without a certain malicious satisfaction, how often he indulged in such delights. The doctor grew sad. They had scarcely let him out once every six months, and then only when they felt he had become completely quiescent. Last fall, however, he hadn't returned, and they found him a week later with a broken back in a field some distance from the institute.

So, in fact, he hadn't been wrong.

The doctor shrugged her shoulders.

The borderline between the madman and someone with brilliant insight into things that remain a mystery to others is usually infinitesimally narrow.

My daughter is afraid neither of perverts nor of those who should be trying to catch them. She seldom thinks about death, but when she sees through its disguises and glimpses it, she cries. As befits her fourteen years, however, she prefers to giggle even when there is no reason to. She loves driving fast, she's a secret smoker, and whenever she can find the excuse, she hangs out in the evening with fellow students of dubious reputation. When we take her to the theatre, she responds to the performance as though it were real life. Unlike me, she plays the piano, strums the guitar and the mandolin, and knows how to dance. She says that if I were willing, she'd teach me too.

My supply of willingness, however, has been exhausted in other areas.

'So how about it? Are you coming to the ball with us?'

I was trapped. So far, I had managed to avoid going to

balls, but now my friends were trying to persuade me to overcome, just this once, what they called my negative relationship to dancing. I could hardly refuse them. My friends were among those hounded and harassed by the police, in some cases even more than me. My attendance at this particular ball, though the thought annoyed me, had ceased to be a simple matter of my relationship to dancing.

Almost all of my friends had signed Charter 77, which meant that they had committed themselves (in the words of the Charter) 'both individually and as a community to work towards recognition and respect for civic and human rights in our country and in the world.' The authorities were firmly convinced that they and they alone were competent and entitled to protect the people and their rights, and they took the Charter as a declaration of war. The Charter signatories were picked up and interrogated; their flats were searched. When those carrying out orders discovered nothing more incriminating than ideas and books that they alone found offensive, the authorities had the Chartists thrown out of their jobs, put under surveillance, publicly vilified. Their passports and drivers' licences were confiscated, their telephones disconnected. This battle had gone on for a year, one side obstinately demonstrating the justice of their claims, the other side demonstrating their vast superiority in strength. One of my persecuted friends decided that the season of balls would be a good time to have some fun and relax.

The ball they were to attend was organized by the railway workers. Though my friends could not hold a ball on their own, they believed no one could object to their attending a function organized by a group as politically correct as the railway workers.

I suspected that the plan to join the railwaymen for an evening could not remain a secret. I believed my friends were foolish to think that those in disguise would not begrudge them an evening of dancing. My wife and daughter, on the other hand, had begun discussing what they would wear the moment our friends offered us tickets.

The day of the ball was overcast. A chilly wind spread a sheet of smoke, soot and ash over the city, and the streets were covered with a slick film of dirt. Anticipating disaster, I drove with extra care and parked the car as far as possible from the hall where the dance was to take place. My wife had had her high-school graduation dress repaired and altered for the occasion, and she still looked like a young girl. My daughter had made herself a gown of shiny scarlet taffeta. It was her first real evening dress; I could see that she was rehearsing in her mind the moment when she would take off her coat and enter the ballroom.

The women concentrated on negotiating the damp, treacherous pavement while I looked around. I noticed that on Peace Square, where we were headed, white and yellow squad cars bearing the two large, widely ridiculed letters indicating the Public Security forces — VB — were parked in places where it was forbidden to stop. Another white and yellow car, its siren wailing, wheeled into the square and sped up to the hall.

Even I could see that a green day was upon us..

Usually at this time of year, the small park in front of the St Ludmilla Church is empty, but now it was filled with men who, judging from their appearance, were obviously not regulars in the park. Corruption was in the air, and if you listened closely you could hear a quiet scraping sound — the noise of radio interference — like carborundum

sliding over a scythe blade or at least over hidden stilettoes. Soon we ran into the first group of friends, who announced that we would not get into the ball. When the people at the door realized we were not railway workers, they would give us our money back and turn us away.

As far as I was concerned, it made no sense to go any further, but my wife and daughter protested. They had finally managed to drag me out to a dance, so we should at least see for ourselves if it was impossible to get in.

My wife took me by one arm, my daughter by the other, and they would almost have persuaded me to pretend to be a railwayman (which, by the way, as a child I had always longed to be) had my friend Pavel not suddenly appeared in the park, supported by his wife.

My friend Pavel is one of those people who are plagued by the notion that they must tell others how to live in order to make the world a better place. That's why he's constantly getting mixed up in politics. He may well have been slightly more involved than others; that would explain why he was the only one who had suffered a blow to the head when, earlier, the mass expulsion of would-be ballroom dancers had taken place.

His driver's licence had long been confiscated, so he was looking for someone to take him to see a doctor.

I had always wanted to be an engine driver. When I was a child, there was nothing exceptional about this: there were almost no cars then, and truck drivers had not yet become an object of childhood dreams. I can no longer say exactly what it was about being an engine driver that attracted me: whether it was the desire to control the motion of an enormous hunk of metal, or the lure of faraway places. Whatever it was, I could stand by the kitchen

window for ages, staring down towards the tracks and waiting for a train to appear. Then, when I heard the puffing of the enormous machine in the distance and saw the approaching plume of smoke — and when it was dark outside the smoke was full of swirling sparks as tiny as stars in the sky that glowed and then died — I was gripped by a blissful sense of expectation, as though I were supposed to leave on that train, or as though I were expecting a visitor to arrive on it, perhaps from the heavens themselves, from where the train always seemed to emerge. At the time I did not know of those other freight trains that, on narrow, normal and wide-gauge tracks carried, and would continue to carry throughout most of my life, uncountable numbers of people whom She and her beaters and followers had singled out as victims.

The moment Pavel stepped into the car, he started telling us what had just happened to him, things that to him seemed incomprehensible. Then he stopped. It occurred to him that perhaps it might be better to remain silent about it all in front of my daughter. My daughter, in rather rough terms, reassured him that on the contrary, she found such experiences entertaining; at least they made up, in part, for the ruined evening. She unbuttoned her coat to reveal her ball gown.

I would like to have told my friend something of my wartime experiences, because they had helped me to understand many of the events that came later. I would like to have told him that I had learned how the persecution of a select sample of victims gave Her several advantages. Not only did it arouse fear among other innocent people, but it also gave those who were not included in the sample a sense of satisfaction that they were considered worthy of

trust. I would like to have mentioned how this even encouraged the most anxious of citizens to lend a hand, at least in the most inconspicuous of ways, to Her efforts so that with the passage of time remaining silent about Her work became second nature, an understandable and forgivable vice. I could have gone on to suggest that persecution of the innocent also satisfied a degenerate passion that circulates in the blood of many of Her assistants. However, the white and yellow car I could see behind us distracted me.

Before the war, the famous Helada company made soap. Into the long boxes containing their soap, they put pictures of steam and diesel locomotives. They issued an album with spaces into which you were supposed to stick the pictures. I owned the album and gradually filled the spaces in it. When I leafed through the book before going to sleep and saw locomotives in colours I'd never seen them in, locomotives with magnificent red wheels or with blue or green flanks, I was overwhelmed. And I imagined that I was the one who was allowed to move the rods and levers that controlled them.

I drove Pavel and his wife to the nearest health clinic. The yellow and white striped car that had followed us all the way like a faithful hyena parked by the curb behind me. Now that I was no longer distracted by driving, I could observe its crew. There were four of them. The man sitting next to the driver was saying something into his walkie-talkie. When he finished talking, he and the rest of them were obviously waiting for an answer. I imagined I could hear a hollow, loud-speaker voice coming from inside their car. Then one of the men got out, walked around my car and rapped on my window.

I opened it, and he asked to see my documents. My driver's licence was almost new, and the vehicle registration was in order, as was the car. He produced a breathalyser, and I blew into the tube, certain that not the tiniest drop of alcohol was circulating in my blood. He noted my innocence, even thanked me and said goodnight before returning to his car, from where he must have reported the results of his investigation by radio.

My collection was almost complete; I was only missing two cards, both of express-train locomotives. One was called The Mikado, the other was nicknamed Passepartout. Their stats were printed in my album, but I had no idea what noble shapes and outlines distinguished them from the rest. What good is an incomplete collection? Whenever I opened the album, I saw only those two empty spaces crying out to be filled. We had enough soap at home to last for at least three years. I couldn't get the missing pictures by trading for them at school, so I had already given up hope when our grocer invited me behind the counter and allowed me to open the soap boxes until I found the two missing engines.

The unusual pleasure of being behind a counter was even greater than the joy of at last finding the pictures I needed. I sensed, although I had no way of appreciating my discovery yet, that the man behind the counter, no matter how deeply he might bow to his customers, possessed the power to satisfy people's needs and desires. And anyone who has such power is like a king.

My first encounter with a real engine driver happened not long ago. He brought me a message from a friend of mine who lived outside Prague. The message vouched for its bearer, Martin B., and asked me to lend him something good to read.

Martin B. was not the kind of man I had imagined in my childhood commanding an enormous engine. He seemed too slight, too young, and moreover he was dressed in jeans.

We talked about folk singers. He was proud of his tape collection of protest songs by singers who were mostly silenced, and of his collection of books by banned authors. He or his friends copied out these books by themselves. I expressed surprise that someone so young would devote his time to copying out books by unknown authors.

'You have to do something!' This was the hope that encouraged him and told him his actions had meaning. I nodded and asked him how he liked his work.

My question surprised him. He had never wanted to be an engine driver.

I said that as a boy, I had, very much. What had he wanted to be, then?

He laughed. The only thing he could remember was wanting to go hunting in Alaska. At school, he had directed a play about Jack London. London could not have imagined how anyone could enjoy doing the same thing all his life. They should allow everyone to do one job for a while, and then to do something completely different, or nothing at all. He said he would happily spend half a year working double shifts on the trains if he could spend the same amount of time wandering about the world.

Would he go to Alaska?

He'd go to Denmark first.

Why Denmark?

Because they have a decent government there, he explained. And you can travel through the whole country by bicycle. After a long fast, you have to begin with small mouthfuls. Besides, Hamlet was prince of the Danes.

I could find no fault with his reasons.

He left with a parcel of extremely hard-to-get books. He said that if I really wanted, he would, as a favour, let me ride with him in the engine and allow me to drive it. Of course it would only be a freight train; someone like him could never get a better position; he was not sufficiently committed politically.

I didn't take his offer seriously, but that night I had a dream. I was walking through a desert landscape on a path between a railway line and a high wall. Suddenly, a gate opened in the wall ahead of me and a hissing steam engine emerged. It cut across my path and stopped in front of me.

I realized that this was the train I'd been waiting for and that I should quickly climb aboard one of its cars. Instead, I stared at the locomotive in fascination. It was a steely blue and it seemed to be very light, as if hollow. The front of it looked like any steam locomotive; smoke was even coming out of the smokestack. But the whole rear section looked like the exposed inside of a large clock. Cog-wheels, large and small, gleamed as though cast from pure gold. Through the small window I saw the engine driver's face, and his hands moving nimbly among the rods and levers. I wanted to call out to him, to ask him to let me climb aboard, but before I could bring myself to do it, the train started up and in an instant disappeared in the distance, leaving me alone by the track.

When I told my dream to my non-existent psychoanalyst, he persuaded me that the dream had nothing to do with how I had longed to drive a locomotive. I had merely seen an image of my desperation to overcome the isolation in which I have found myself for some time now. The train, especially this complicated steam engine, represented an

unattainable community — shiny and attractive, even though hopelessly outmoded. It symbolized friendship, a sense of belonging, love. I wanted to climb aboard, but the train started up and disappeared, leaving behind the rail of hope as a reminder of missed opportunities.

When did I miss my chance? I can't answer that. People miss opportunities every day. One can only try not to miss them through laziness or fear.

Pavel returned with a bandage around his head. There was an unexpected satisfaction in his expression. The doctor, Pavel claimed, had let it be known he sympathized. Pavel forgot about his pain as soon as he thought others shared it with him.

My wife leaned over to me and whispered an offer to drive if I was too upset.

Why should I have been more upset than her?

She imagines, like most people, that anyone who spends some time in prison or in concentration camps will spend the rest of his days, at least subconsciously, in fear of losing his freedom.

In fact it is usually the other way around. Often it is those who know about prison only from hearsay who fear it most. Fantasy can be more frightening than reality. Or perhaps it is even simpler: those who have made it through once hope they will be able to make it through again; the rest don't know. They have nothing to base their hope on.

My experience of life so far led me to two simple, if contradictory, conclusions. The first one was: everything evil a person can imagine can in fact happen. The second derived from the first: nothing that will happen to me in life can be worse than what has already happened to me.

The yellow and white car continued to follow us,

keeping as close as safety allowed. Perhaps they were afraid we would try to escape, or they wished to frighten me to the point where I would try to lose them. They'd be happy enough to stop me for speeding.

Yet why should we, who had done nothing wrong, try to escape?

I wondered how many such chases and harassments were taking place at that moment? I've heard it said that a crime is committed somewhere on earth every second. Yet there are no generally acceptable definitions of crime. In some places, crimes are kept a secret. Elsewhere it is a crime when a man goes to a railwaymen's ball with his wife and daughter. And who keeps count of crimes perpetrated by criminals artfully disguised as crimefighters?

But it is certain that at any moment, somewhere in the world, there are those who are on the run from robberies, from raped women, from murders and from molested and abused children. The harassment we suffered is worth paying attention to for one reason alone: it was probably the most nonsensical, and therefore the most wasteful crime of all.

'Europe is asking,' Pavel had written in one of his recent feuilletons, which the young engine driver and others like him were probably copying out, 'where is the liberty, equality and fraternity for which people bled under the Bastille? It is asking, how is "all power to the Soviets" working, for which people died beneath the Winter Palace? It is asking, when will this game of power end that is keeping us artificially divided, so that we cannot have today what the prophets of happier tomorrows promise for the future?'

Pavel asked these questions in the name of Europe. But

it was Pavel who received a blow to the head. It seems to

me that if they beat someone for asking questions, it should

at least be his most personal question — especially if he is a

writer. If a writer asks in the name of Europe or his country

or the people, in whose name should the politicians ask?

But then what should a writer do, when the politicians

have long ago stopped asking questions and take care only

that they may rule without interruption, regardless of how

harmful their rule may be?

I drove Pavel and his wife across the city to their home.

When we parted, it occurred to me that I should get out

with them and put my wife and daughter on a tram, or try

to find them a taxi. But I assumed that the men in the

yellow and white car were more interested in Pavel, my

fractious friend, and that as soon as he got out, they would

disappear. So I now looked hopefully into the rear-view

mirror.

They were following me. I turned into a narrow side-street. So did they. It seemed I had committed one of the crimes they do not like to leave unpunished: I had expressed my solidarity.

We could have stopped and got out of the car. But one feels a little safer in a car. Many people think of the car as their second home and some prefer it to their real home, which offers them no change, no mystery, not even the excitement of speeding. It depends on the people — and on the car.

I continued on my way home. When I next looked into the rear-view mirror, I saw that another yellow and white car had joined the procession.

Mr Novák, the civil engineer, lived only a few doors from us, but until recently we had never actually talked. He

was handsome, and so was his wife. They had three children. They played golf together — at least I would occasionally see them loading golf-clubs into their Škoda. I think he saw his wife as a princess, and had he been a prince he would certainly have wanted to provide her with more than golf; but he was just a civil engineer. Last New Year's Eve, we walked back from the bus-stop together. He'd had a little bit to drink and he was carrying a basket piled high with eggs. He told me that he'd recently been lent one of my books that was circulating in manuscript, and that he'd been waiting for a chance to express his sympathy. He could well imagine what a difficult time I must be having when I couldn't make a living at work I knew how to do.

Then he spoke about his own difficulties, and how often he had to demean himself before dull people he had no respect for, and how he suffered this humiliation only so that he would not lose his pay cheque, which was miserable enough anyway. Was it possible, he asked me, as though I were some clairvoyant, for life to go on in this hopeless way? What, then, was a person here for and why should he stay around?

I wasn't certain if he meant his sojourn in our country, or on this earth.

He slipped a couple of eggs in my pocket, we wished each other a happy new year, and parted.

Several days later I saw him on a bitterly cold morning attending to a shiny Mercedes. He couldn't contain himself and asked me what I thought of it. Seven years old, but in wonderful condition. He and his wife had always longed for such a car and then a once-in-a-lifetime offer to buy this one came up, but he'd had to go so deeply into debt that if

anything happened to him in the foreseeable future, his family wouldn't even be able to afford a wreath. And then, with a rag that he'd dipped in some foul-looking chemical substance, he resumed polishing the chrome.

We had already passed through the city centre and through the Vyšehrad Tunnel, beyond which was a straight stretch of road running alongside the Vltava river. We were scarcely five minutes from home. It was at this point that the second yellow and white car suddenly accelerated past the first car and past us. For a moment I dared to hope they were leaving us to do something more useful, but then a uniformed arm emerged from the window waving the regulation lollipop stick that meant stop. I braked, and so did the car behind us.

Two uniformed officers got out of the first car and walked towards me. I opened the door.

'Please get out, driver,' said one. 'Your documents.' He spoke to me in the tone he probably used with criminals he was arresting. He was the smaller and rounder of the two. The other one, who was more robustly built, remained a few steps behind him.

I objected that his colleague in the other car, which was still behind us, had already seen my documents.

He was unmoved. He held his palm out and waited until I handed the papers over. He leafed through them for a while, and then he said something that surprised me. 'Sir, the way you've been driving suggests to me you've been drinking. Are you willing to submit to a breathalyser test?'

I protested. After all, I had been tested an hour ago, and since then they'd been constantly on my tail. It was highly unlikely that I would have drunk something while I was driving.

'Do you refuse to take the test?'

I sensed a trap, and besides, they were behaving like clowns, not me. I agreed to the test.

When I'd blown into the tube, he took it from me, turned his back, and declared that the tube had turned green. Was I aware of the consequences that this could have for me?

Though I had become used to most things, I was astonished. For years I have tried to stay out of the game that in this country is a substitute for politics, a game which one side plays dishonourably, while the other side, though it plays honourably, plays without hope. I don't take sides. Not out of cowardice or calculation; it's just that I have neither the strength, nor the time, nor the capacity for the game.

I know that bad political policies influence everyone's life, mine included, but I would not dare to claim, not even to myself, that I am sure enough of what are good policies to be able to persuade others.

I am not convinced that one has a right to one's own car or plane, or the satisfaction of all one's needs at a time when most of mankind is hungry. I don't know whose side I should take in the struggles and wars I hear about and read about every day, though I suspect that most of those struggles will soon be forgotten, whereas the stories of Antigone or Hamlet will live as long as humanity itself.

But all my doubts have not stifled within me the awareness that injustice must be resisted.

The tube couldn't have turned green. Show it to me!

He replied that he was not required to show me the tube. So he was, after all, ashamed to confront his claim with reality. He then began, somewhat incoherently, to explain that there were cases of mild intoxication in which the liquid

in the tube changed colour only slightly. It made no sense to show the tube to me because to my untrained eye, the colouration would be imperceptible. He was not suggesting that I had drunk a lot, but the tone of the liquid had altered and that meant I had failed in my duty as a driver and become a hazard on the road. His voice cracked. I suddenly saw that he was ashamed. He had been ordered to detain me with a charge of drinking and driving, without regard for the self-respect that he would have to repress to do so. He was not trying to persuade me so much as himself.

He realized that he hadn't been firm enough with me. He was through talking, he said. I'd been drinking and driving and therefore he was confiscating my driver's licence. The persons in the car would have to get out. I was to lock the vehicle, turn the keys over to him, and leave the car parked here until they decided what action to take.

I looked towards my car and saw a golden head of hair in the window: my daughter was anxiously watching a scene that would certainly stick in her memory far more vividly than better plays performed by better actors. Unfortunately, I had a role in this play, and how I acquitted myself would also stick in her memory.

No one was getting out of the car, I said. 'I will not give you my keys, and furthermore I will lodge an official complaint about your behaviour.'

'If you don't hand over your keys, you'll have to come with us.' His voice cracked again.

I didn't care about the keys. I learned long ago that you cannot cling to objects if you don't want to become their slave. But is it the same with one's rights? If you don't cling to your rights, you will gradually be deprived of them, and become a slave all the same.

With a barely perceptible gesture, the second uniformed officer, who had so far stood silently observing all this, motioned the first man aside and stepped into his place. He could see that I was upset, he said. People who are excited behave rashly. I should understand that, at a time like this, it made no sense to argue over petty details. I had become involved in events over which neither I — nor he, for that matter — had any control. They had to take my driver's licence and keys. If I resisted, they would have to detain me, and they'd take my keys anyway and, given the mood that would prevail, I would certainly not be going anywhere for a while. What good would that do? If I surrendered the keys now, I could go home and go to bed, and when the dust had settled I'd get them back. He leaned over to me and said, almost in a whisper: 'Meanwhile. . you have another set at home, don't you?'

I know that during interrogations the roles are usually divided. One of the interrogators plays the tough guy and the other one tries to gain the confidence of the detainee by kindness. But this was not an interrogation, and it didn't seem to me that these two had been assigned complicated roles. They didn't have the basic props. They didn't have a breathalyser that normal breath would cause to change colour. They had not been taught how to switch a colourless tube for a coloured one. It seemed probable that the man who was talking to me now genuinely wanted to save himself some work, and me some unpleasantness.

But I still could not overcome my feelings of resistance and disgust. Should one submit to a false accusation only to avoid greater unpleasantness? If I acquiesced now, how could I later ask for justice?

It was my daughter who snapped me out of my

indecision. She had decided, despite her youth, to whisper words of advice: To hell with them! Let them eat the stupid keys if they want.'

My friend the engine driver and admirer of Hamlet might have put it more subtly:

. . Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument. .

We resist the One who, in various disguises, rules over us; we want to wrest from Her at least the right to the footprint we would leave behind, to an act we consider our own. Our struggle for the right to a life of dignity is with Her. Yet She and Her assistants attempt to reduce to nothing everything the struggle is about, to transform a conflict in which everything is at stake into a petty squabble in which resistance seems the act of a clown.

When I handed the keys over to the more polite of the two officers, I asked him if he could at least give me a receipt of some kind.

'Of course, that goes without saying!' He seemed relieved to put this embarrassing interlude behind him. He took his notepad from his case, then hesitated. He asked me to bear with him and walked over to his car. A few moments later he returned. 'I regret to say,' he announced, without even looking at me, 'that I cannot give you a receipt for your keys.' I could learn, he said, about the fate of my keys at my local police station.

We managed to flag down a taxi. The driver wondered how two women in evening gowns had managed to find themselves on an empty highway. We tried to explain it to him, but he didn't seem to understand, much less believe us. At the detention centre, where we went after we'd

changed our clothes, they looked at me suspiciously when I asked them to take a sample of my blood. The nurse looked at my ID for a long time as though she hoped to find something there that would explain what had driven me to make such an unusual request.

I sat on a bench in a room with filthy walls covered with anti-alcohol slogans and waited for them to call me into the office. I could hear incoherent shouts, and then two men in white lab coats dragged a struggling drunk past me, while a third orderly walked along behind them, ready to help if necessary. The drunk was yelling obscenities. He reeked of stale beer.

Ten years before we had been guests of the Presbyterian Church in Midland, Texas. Our hosts asked us what sights we'd like to see. We had no idea what we should look at, until it occurred to me that I would like to see the local prison.

What surprised us about the prison was its hospital-like cleanliness. Most of the prisoners were black, men and women, and they were kept in large cells. They were dressed in normal clothes; some of them lay asleep on benches, others stared at us with obvious hostility. Our guide, like all prison guides, praised the orderliness of the prison. He claimed the prisoners were prostitutes or people arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Most of them, he said, would be released the following day.

We were living near the Canadian border; the journey to this spot had taken us three days, and the return trip took a day and a night longer. We covered about five thousand miles, staying at various hotels; we took a small boat over to Mexico, where we spent a day. When we finally returned home to the peninsula between Lake Michigan

and Lake Huron, we realized something unbelievable: the whole time, no one had asked to see any identification. Not even when we visited the prison did anyone suspect that we might not be who we said we were.

They took a sample of my blood and told me that they would send me the bill, and the results of the test, by mail.

When we returned by the night tram, which was full of drunks, the streets were empty. Not a single yellow and white car was in sight, not a single uniform. The green day had ended.

Our car was where we had left it. My wife unlocked it with her keys, got in behind the wheel, and drove us home. No one followed us. Our street was dark — they'd turned off the electricity. Inside, we undressed for bed by candlelight. My first ball had surpassed all my expectations.

The following afternoon, when I left for the local police station, I was surprised to see a small crowd in front of the building where Mr Novák lived. They were gathered around the open hood of his shiny Mercedes.

'Come and look at this!' Novák called out as soon as he caught sight of me. 'I'll bet you've never seen anything like it.'

When he had got into his car that morning, the starter was dead. As soon as he lifted up the hood, he saw why: in the darkness of the night, someone had stolen his engine.

Why would thieves risk being seen or heard driving off with a stolen car? They would sell the engine for parts and no one could prove anything. 'They must have come here with a mobile workshop,' shouted Novák. 'And explain to me how they could have known that the lights would be off in our street all night?'

I asked if the police from the criminal investigation branch, or at least the local police, had been here to look for clues. I was naïve, he said. When he called them, they said they'd drop around during the day, if they had the time. After all, last night they were out on a big campaign. Wouldn't I grant them even a day off to rest?

Even when they do come, said people in the crowd, they'll only record the theft for their statistics. A single stolen engine was not worth starting a formal search over.

As a matter of principle we never confiscate the keys to anyone's car, I was told at the police station. Was I aware that I was committing a crime by falsely accusing an officer?

I returned home without my driver's licence.

My experience over the years had led me to two more contradictory conclusions. One said: what the strong take from the weak they will never voluntarily return. The second one comforted me: bureaucracy always has to take a case to its ultimate conclusion, so it can close the file.

My keys had to be lying around somewhere and soon they would be getting in someone's way. I decided not to think about them. I went out to prepare the garden for spring planting.

Not long ago I read that ten per cent of Americans believe that the car is the greatest invention of all time, and another twelve per cent chose the wheel as the greatest invention, presumably thinking of car wheels.

I don't think I'd be a good American; I could get along very well without a car. I prefer to walk. I realize, of course, that a car is not just a means of transportation. What we value about a car, sometimes even more than the fact that it goes, is the fact that it can be driven. In a world that is less and less driven by people, the car provides man

with an opportunity to express himself more personally than he can in the rest of his life. As a driver, he can escape his everyday roles and responsibilities — or at least he can tell himself that this is so. Sitting behind the wheel, he is no longer a clerk, a deluded husband, an unsuccessful and insignificant city dweller; he is a driver. By driving, he becomes what he imagines himself to be. Instead of running in dull and monotonous circles, he flies down roads to the unknown, in pursuit of ancient longings and phantoms. He flies down roads and becomes dangerous— through his dreams as much as his driving. That is why he must be stopped by the ever-watchful guardians of road safety.

When Martin, the engine driver, returned my books, he talked about crime on the railway. Trains would arrive at their destinations, he said, with only a part of their freight. It was understandable and even forgivable. When oranges disappear from a freight car, they may be the only oranges people in that part of the country will ever see. But of course oranges are only the beginning. Once, fifteen cars loaded with Wartburg automobiles were left on a siding, and several days later, just before they were dispatched, it was discovered that on the side facing away from the station, all the wheels had been stolen.

Martin had applied for a hard currency voucher for a trip to Denmark. As expected, he'd been turned down.

That evening Pavel stopped by to see me, his head still wrapped in bandages. He told me that several of our friends had been arrested on the way home from the ball, and no one knew what had happened to them. As usual, there was no mention of this in the media.

We tried to tune in to some foreign radio station, but

jammers drowned out the announcers' voices.

Jammers are the sound of a life that She — the one in disguise — directs according to Her notions. She knows that man has a different notion of his fate and good fortune, that he wants to win, through his defiance, his right to his own footprint, action, sentence, to a truthful thought that he could declare out loud or at least hear expressed. But She is convinced that She and She alone can decide our fate; say what is good and what is evil. She desires that the sentences she passes stay with us from morning till night, from the cradle to the grave, where one day She will lay us low. All voices other than Her own she brands false; they are banned and cannot be heard even from beyond the borders that She has ordered closely guarded. She has had recorded the creaking of Her joints and the howling of the wind in Her empty skull. She orders that they be broadcast, amplified a thousand times, to drown all sounds of life.

Three weeks later the authorities sent me a message. I went to the local police station where the same young officer who not long ago had explained to me that my request for my keys amounted to the false accusation of a public officer now asked me impatiently why I wasn't taking an interest in getting them back. Did I think that the police were some kind of baggage depository? I was to report at once to the commander of the special operations team.

The barracks of the special operations team was next to the street where I spent my childhood, so I found it with no difficulty. The commander of special operations was small and stocky, almost bald, and he wore glasses. His tunic was undone and underneath it I could see striped braces. He had a fatherly expression.

Yes indeed, he had seen my driver's licence, and yes, he even remembered that there were some keys with it. Three, wasn't it? Two? It was possible. One was bigger than the other. However, since I hadn't requested them for so long… it was now being dealt with at Vinohrady. On Peace Square. Did I know where the station was? Perhaps he'd better give me exact directions.

He backed up to a large map of Prague that hung on the wall behind him.

I said that I had driven around the square almost every day for fifteen years, and I was last there when the railway workers had held their ball.

Yes, that was right: the railway workers' ball, that would have been three weeks ago, wouldn't it? Well, the ballroom dancing season was just about over, and if I was going to go dancing — and he circumspectly let the word that again had forced its way on to his tongue, slip from his lips — I would have to hurry. He shook my hand. When I was already walking through the door, he asked again, with concern in his voice, whether I was sure I'd find the station on the square.

The station was where it was supposed to be, but of course they had neither my keys, nor my driver's licence.

Crime was on the increase, even though the ballroom-dancing season was coming to an end. The paedophile— whom no one, evidently, was looking for — was still at large in our area. A young medical student was raped and strangled on an international express train. And there were stories going round that the director of the automobile factory had given away to influential comrades or, at least, sold for the price of scrap a wagon-load of cars, which naturally did not belong to him.

I paid a visit to a friend of mine, a playwright who alone among my colleagues can publish what he writes and therefore has access to the comrades. He claimed that they had transferred the director to a less responsible position, and that things were beginning to get better. During my visit, a car stopped outside the house and a woman in gardening clothes jumped out.

As I understood it, the woman taught my friend's daughter. The clothes in which she arrived were 'emergency' clothes. She had been wearing them when she returned from her cottage the previous evening — and now they were all she had to wear. Over the weekend, thieves had burgled her flat. What they hadn't taken they had destroyed, systematically. They had pulled the drawers out of the cupboards and dressers and smashed them. They had torn up her fabrics or poured varnish over them; they had burned her passport and bank-books and the parquet flooring, broken her china, slashed her pictures. They had drunk her spirits, and what they didn't drink, they poured over her Persian rug.

It was as though they were taking revenge on her for something, as though they enjoyed the act of destruction more than theft. The police guessed that there was a whole gang of them at work. The noise of the destruction must have been heard in the building, and her neighbours immediately beneath her and on each side of her were home all weekend, and didn't even come out of their flats to see who was making such a racket. What kind of people were they? The things the thieves carried off must have half filled a large truck. The tears in her eyes as she told the story were not only for the vandalism, but for the indifference of her neighbours, who did nothing to protect

her property, and for the apathy of the investigators, who were unmoved by the wasteland her flat had become.

It occurred to me to ask what she taught.

She taught Marxism.

It didn't feel as though I missed being able to drive but oddly enough, at night, highways worked their way into my dreams with increasing frequency. I could read the names of exotic places on the road signs, or sometimes only the number of the roads that stretched through the prairies and clambered up mountainsides. The car was utterly unlike any I had ever driven; I was giving a lift to a girl utterly unlike any girl I had ever given a lift to, and I knew that we would make love as soon as I found an appropriate place. But could such a place be found on the highway? I turned on to a road that led into a wood, but that didn't seem deserted enough either; the trees were tall and widely spaced and offered no shelter, no real hiding place. I drdve out of the wood and on to an empty plateau of sand. There was not a living soul in sight, and even the road vanished. I was still driving, and as the sand crunched under the wheels I felt the girl's naked body pressing against me. She had taken off her clothes. I stopped the car, hastily reclined the seats and transformed the interior into a perfect bed.

As we were lying in an embrace I realized that the car, now driven by no one, had begun to move forwards. I raised myself up, and through the window I saw the edge of a precipice. We were moving towards it. I wanted to grab the wheel and slam on the brakes, but the seats were in my way. There was nothing I could do. The car moved right to the edge of the precipice and I could see the depths below me. I screamed in terror, but no one heard

me. I reached out for the girl, but felt only emptiness. She was no longer in the car, and I was alone as I plunged into the abyss.

When I told the dream to my non-existent psychoanalyst, he persuaded me that it was not about how I longed to drive a car again, nor about how I desired to make passionate love to a strange woman. My dream was about the state of disinheritance I found myself in. The girl symbolized the world beyond my family, my craving for the intimacy of other people. At the moment when real danger appeared and the abyss opened up before me, the girl, the symbol of that distant community, vanished — what remained was an overwhelming solitude.

Two weeks later, I was invited to the Traffic Inspectorate where a short, slightly built major was sitting behind his desk. 'Ah, it's you,' he said when he had studied my summons. He leaned over and pretended that he was looking for something before opening a file that he had on his desk. 'Now I wonder how these got here?' he said, taking out my keys. He held them between his thumb and forefinger, raised them up with a look of bemused curiosity, and jingled them. 'I believe these are the keys to your car.'

He handed them to me and then began to study the documents in the file. 'My goodness, the things I'm reading about you here,' he said. 'On the evening of 20 February, one of our squad cars followed you along the embankment for a while, and between the Charles Bridge and the Iron Bridge you committed five serious breaches of the Traffic Act. At the National Theatre you even ran a red light.' He looked at me disapprovingly; perhaps he actually believed what he was saying. 'Our comrades also administered a

breathalyser test,' and he pulled the familiar tube out of the file, held it between finger and thumb and observed, as I had, its colourless state. 'The results, as you know, were negative.' He put the tube back in the file. 'Even so, the comrades justifiably held your driver's licence. Five offences — that's too many. Was something upsetting you?'

He fell silent, as if awaiting a meaningful answer to his meaningless question. 'It happens,' he said. 'The driver may be sober, but because he's upset he can't concentrate, and instead of stopping and getting out of the car, he goes on driving and becomes a threat to other road users.' Once again he fell silent. When I still had nothing to say, he asked if I were willing to be re-tested.

I said I was, not to make his role too easy, and he gave me a form with questions printed on it.

'You've passed,' he said, when he'd scanned my answers. He took my almost brand-new driver's licence from the file, grasped it» and held it up as though it were something distasteful, then opened it up, closed it again, opened it, looked at the photograph and then at me, and put it back in the file.

He said he couldn't possibly give my licence back to me in that state. Why the photograph didn't even look like me. I would have to apply for another one.

I asked him if, considering that the only thing at issue now was a new photograph, he could issue me with a temporary licence. But he was obviously so upset that he couldn't concentrate, and he didn't even appear to register my question. He stood up to indicate that our conversation was over.

When I got home, I found Martin the engine driver waiting for me. He had heard about my difficulties, and it

occurred to him that the time had come for me to try driving a train. It couldn't be put off; at the end of the spring he was leaving the railway. They were offering him a place on a farm where he was to raise mink.

I told him that they were still hanging on to my driver's licence. He laughed. Wasn't that why he was here? I didn't need a licence to drive a train.

We left together, and got off the train in a small town in the foothills of the Ore Mountains.

We also long to drive so we can escape from Her. We step up to the driver's seat as though it were a royal (or presidential or secretarial) throne. It seems that we have dominion over the living and the dead. Dumbfounded by our own power, we succumb to the delusion that we have dominion over Her as well, since She could not possibly creep up to us and take us into Her embrace without our consent.

Once, far in the past, people believed those who ruled to be gods; later, it became clear that even they were controlled by a superior force; the same force that controlled everyone. It was also believed that the force, whatever it was called, had the power of judgement and the knowledge of good and evil. Those who ruled must have known that they could only do so imperfectly; that they were stand-ins and that everything they judged would be judged in a higher court. But of course this didn't stop many from giving themselves over to the self-delusion and the intoxication that goes with power. But this is nothing compared to the self-delusion and intoxication of those who rule oblivious of the power above them.

We talked for a long time, and it wasn't until midnight that I finally got to bed, in a bunk that was lined on three

sides with books. I knew that we would be getting up at four and that then I would be entrusted with driving an engine I had never seen. I couldn't sleep. I listened intently to see if I couldn't hear, from somewhere, the whistle of the trains of my childhood, but there was only the silence of a house in the country.

Next morning the darkness was so deep that it was still black when we got on to a commuter train that would take us to the station where our engine was waiting for us. The passenger car was crammed with sleepy men and women driven from their beds by duty. We had to stand in the aisle. Did I understand the signals, at least a little, my host asked.

The language of lights, semaphors, grade indicators, detectors, markers, fishtails, order boards, wig-wags and targets was something I had learned as a child. I trusted that an institution as conservative as the railways had not changed its language.

Very well) but he would test me all the same.

At the station we walked over to an engine that, now the possibility of actually driving it loomed, overwhelmed me with its size. My friend had to go to the office for his working orders. He said it would be best if I kept out of sight. He would let me in from the other side.

The station seemed deserted. The train we'd arrived on had gone, and the passengers had dispersed. A lone old man in a blue uniform with an oil can walked along, oiling the wheels of the freight train. The tracks gave off an oily sheen in the light of the station lamps. The diesel engine smelled of kerosene. I walked around the train. Beyond the last set of tracks there was a steep embankment overgrown with shrubs. I sat down on an overturned stone bollard and waited. I was neither excited nor impatient; I had, after all,

advanced well beyond the age when a man wishes to experience everything that excites him, just as he wants to make love to every woman he finds attractive.

Why, then, had I come here?

At that moment, the window of the engine lit up, then the headlights went on. A door high up opened. 'Come up, quick. We leave soon.'

I clambered up the steep steps and entered the cabin.

'Do you want to change your clothes?' he said, and opened up a small locker. On the inside of the door I caught sight of some pornographic pictures accompanied by the dry commentary: 'Stop! Warning signal! Then all clear, all clear!'

I said that I didn't think I would get changed; I'd rather he showed me what everything was for.

On the outside of the locker door, a blonde smiled on the shore of some lake, and next to her was a picture of Kronborg, Hamlet's castle:

The time is out of joint: o cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!

There isn't much to show you, he said. It's easier to drive than a bicycle. But he showed me how to start the engine, and warned me that the half-wheel in the middle of the control panel wasn't a steering wheel, but an accelerator. It had eight positions and I would be controlling the speed with it. This was the emergency brake. The button next to the accelerator was called an 'alert button' and it would be my responsibility to push it once every ten seconds. It would probably bother me until I got used to it. Here was the speedometer. I would have to keep an eye on it all the time because the speed was recorded on a tape and the

tape was handed in after the trip. If we had gone over the limit anywhere, we'd be fined.

He also told me that initially we'd only be hauling 320 tonnes, and would be picking up another eighty on the way. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough for those hills, especially if we had to get underway on a slope. Starting was the only thing that needed a little practice, so that the couplings wouldn't pull loose, or the wheels begin to spin. The first time, he would start himself. I would also have to realize that I was not sitting in a car, that 400 tonnes was a substantial weight and when I was going downhill I should be careful not to go too quickly and fly off the rails. And when going uphill I had to make sure I didn't lose speed. If I did, I would find myself standing still before I knew it.

At that moment, I noticed the signal ahead had turned from red to green. Despite myself I felt a twinge of excitement. 'Keep your head down for now,' Martin said, and leaning but of the side window he waved his hand to the dispatcher, turned the half-wheel slightly and, while I obediently crouched in a corner, we pulled out of the station.

The awakening countryside began to flow past us, but I paid little attention; I was looking at the speed signs: the speed limit here was low, and the whistle signals came one after another.

'You can take over now,' he said, turning to me and making room on the seat. 'Don't forget the alert button. If you want, I'll push it for you, for now.'

I said that I would try to press it myself. I sat down in front of the control panel, but the machine was not aware of this change. It was going by itself, as it was meant to do. The little light above the alert button came on at regular

intervals, but I always managed to deactivate it in time, so that the machine didn't honk at me. The track began to rise gently and, mindful of my mentor's advice, I turned the accelerator a little. Thus we went through several stations, at least twenty level crossings, some with gates, some without, the engine rumbling regularly and the needle on the speedometer steady. The speed limit varied from thirty to fifty kilometres an hour, and on the whole, I managed to accelerate or decelerate that enormous mass of metal smoothly. It was only after a while that I saw what an unusual view I had of the track unwinding in front of me, and heard the regular sound of the wheels clacking over the joints in the rails.

After an hour my instructor, who until now had kept a keen eye on the track, the engine, and my actions, took out his lunch, leaned up against the wall by the locker, and poured himself a cup of tea. More than any words could have done, his actions expressed his confidence in my capacities as an engine driver.

At one of the stations the guard came into the cabin and, paying no attention whatsoever to me, as though having a guest driver were absolutely normal, he began to talk about people I couldn't have known, one of whom was a colleague who got so drunk on duty that he couldn't even stand up, and was in that state when an inspector found him.

The story interested me, but at the same time I couldn't really listen, though I gathered that nothing happened to the drunken engine driver; he had faked an acute attack of lower back pain, and who would be so cruel as to compel a colleague suffering from excruciating pain to submit to a breathalyser test?

It seemed to me that the two of them were enjoying themselves and not paying any attention to the track, but suddenly my friend called out, 'D'you see them? Now you can blow your horn at them.'

It was then that I noticed, at the level crossing we were approaching, a yellow and white automobile with the widely ridiculed letters on it.

'If only they could see you like this,' he laughed, 'those brothers of theirs, the ones who hung all that nonsense on you.'

I gave a blast on the horn. Perhaps I actually caught a glimpse of Her at that moment. At least I thought I saw Her sitting there: all bone, her favourite disguise, grinning and showing her teeth at me, while I flashed past. Now I was aware of the massive weight I was controlling, and I saw the wagons behind me in a bend in the tracks and I surrendered to the illusion that I was pulling them along with my own enormous power. I had crossed Her path.

'Can you brake a little? Were going downhill anyway,' he reminded me.

I understood why he had invited me, offered me the opportunity, for a moment at least, to cross paths with Her, so that I would know I was not battling Her alone.

'You forgot the alert button,' he said immediately afterwards, reproachfully.

In an instant I returned to my place and pressed the button, as a sign that I was still alive.