I Served the King of England (24 page)

The road I maintained and patched with rock I had to crush
myself—that road resembled my own life. It was filling up with weeds and grass in
front of me. Only the section I happened to be working on at the moment showed traces of
my own hand. Cloudbursts and steady rainfall often flooded the work I did and covered it
with deposits of earth, sand, and pebbles, but I didn’t curse my fate, I went
about my work patiently in the long summer days, carrying away the sand and the rubbish,
not to improve the road but simply to make it passable for my cart and horse. Once after
a rainfall a whole section of the roadbed was washed away and it took me almost a week
to build it back up to where I’d finished the week before, but I started work
early in the morning with even greater concentration, and the goal I set myself, to
reach the other side of the gap, made me feel less tired. A week later, when I was able
to drive my cart over this section, I looked proudly at my work, though it seemed as if
I’d done nothing
but restore the road to its former state. No
one would have believed I’d done it or praised me or given me credit for sixty
hours of work, except the dog, the goat, the horse, and the cat, and they couldn’t
have testified to it. But I didn’t want to be seen by human eyes anymore, or
praised for what I’d done—all of that had left me. For almost a month I did
practically nothing but labor from sunup to sundown, just to maintain the road in the
state it had been in when I’d taken over, and the more I worked, the more I saw
that the maintenance of this road was the maintenance of my own life, which now, when I
looked back on it, seemed to have happened to someone else. My life to this point seemed
like a novel, a book written by a stranger even though I alone had the key to it, I
alone was a witness to it, even though my life too was constantly being overgrown by
grass and weeds at either end. But as I used a grub hoe and a shovel on the road, I used
memory to keep the road of my life open into the past, so I could take my thoughts
backward to where I wanted to begin remembering. When I finished work on the road, I
would tap the blade of my scythe into shape, cut the grass on the hillsides and dry it,
and on afternoons when the weather was good I would carry the hay into the hayloft and
get ready for winter, which they told me lasted almost six months here. Once a week I
hitched up the little horse and set off to buy food, going back along my mended road,
then turning off and slowly going down an untraveled path. When I looked behind me I
could see the tracks left by the cart wheels and, after a rain, the hoofprints of the
little horse. Then, after passing two abandoned villages, I would finally arrive at a
decent road where I could see ruts left by transport
trucks and, in
the dust of the shoulders, tracks left by bicycle and motorcycle tires, the vehicles
used by the forest administration workers and soldiers on their way to and from work or
guard duty. After I bought cans of food, salami, and a huge round loaf of bread in the
store, I would stop off at the pub, and the pubkeeper and villagers would come and sit
down at my table and ask how I liked it here in the mountains, in all this solitude. I
was enthusiastic and told them stories of things that no one had ever seen before but
were actually there, and I told the stories as if I were only passing through by car, or
had come for two or three days, I talked as though I were on vacation, like a nature
lover, like a city person who babbles romantic drivel whenever he comes to the country
about how beautiful the woods are and the mountain peaks in the mist, and how it is all
so perfect that he would like to settle here for good. And I talked in a jumbled way
about how beauty had another side to it, about how this beautiful countryside, like a
round loaf of bread, was all related to whether you could love even what was unpleasant
and abandoned, whether you could love the landscape during all those hours and days and
weeks when it rained, when it got dark early, when you sat by the stove and thought it
was ten at night while it was really only half past six, when you started talking to
yourself, speaking to the horse, the dog, the cat, and the goat, but best of all to
yourself, silently at first—as though showing a movie, letting images from the
past flicker through your memory—and then out loud, as I had done, asking yourself
questions, inquiring of yourself, interrogating yourself, wanting to know the most
secret things about yourself, accusing yourself as if you were a
public prosecutor and then defending yourself, and so arriving, in this
back-and-forth way, at the meaning of your life. Not the meaning of what used to be or
what happened a long time ago, but discovering the kind of road you’d opened up
and and had yet to open up, and whether there was still time to attain the serenity that
would secure you against the desire to escape from your own solitude, from the most
important questions that you should ask yourself.

And so I, a road mender, sat in the pub every Saturday till evening, and
the longer I sat there, the more I opened myself up to people. I thought of my little
horse standing outside the pub, of the wonderful solitude of my new home, and I saw how
the people here were eclipsing what I wanted to see and know, how they were all simply
enjoying themselves the way I used to enjoy myself, putting off the questions they would
have to ask themselves one day, if they were lucky enough to have the time to do that
before they died. As a matter of fact whenever I was in the pub I realized that the
basic thing in life is questioning death, wanting to know how we’ll act when our
time comes, and that death, or rather this questioning of death, is a conversation that
takes place between infinity and eternity, and how we deal with our own death is the
beginning of what is beautiful, because the absurd things in our lives, which always end
before we want them to anyway, fill us, when we contemplate death, with bitterness and
therefore with beauty. I became a laughingstock in the pub by asking each one of the
people where he wanted to be buried. At first they were shocked, but then they laughed
till they cried at the idea, and then they would ask me where I wanted to be
buried—that is, if I was lucky enough to be found in time, because
they hadn’t found the last road mender but one until spring,
by which time he’d been eaten by shrews and mice and foxes, so all they had to
bury was a small bundle of bones, like a bunch of asparagus or beef trimmings and soup
bones. But I was delighted to tell them about my own grave, and I said that if I was to
die here, even if they buried only a single ungnawed bone of me or a skull, I wanted to
be buried in that graveyard on top of the little hill, at the highest point, with my
coffin right on the divide, so that when what was left of me decomposed, it would be
carried away by the rain in two different directions: part of me would wash down the
streams that flow into Bohemia, and the other part of me down the other side, under the
barbed wire of the border, through the brooks and streams that feed the Danube. I wanted
to be a world citizen after death, with one half of me going down the Vltava into the
Labe and on into the North Sea, and the other half via the Danube into the Black Sea and
eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. The regulars in the pub would fall silent and stare
at me, and I would always rise to my feet, because this was the question the whole
village looked forward to. Whenever I came, they would ask me this question in the end,
and I always answered the same way. Then they’d say, What if you died in Prague?
Or in Brno? And what if you died in Pelhfimov, and what if the wolves ate you? And I
would always tell them precisely what it would be like, just as the professor of French
literature taught, that man’s body and spirit are indestructible and he is merely
changed or metamorphized. Once the professor and Marcela analyzed a poem by a poet
called Sandburg about what man was made of, and it said man contained enough
phosphorus to make ten boxes of matches, enough iron to make a
nail to hang himself on, and enough water to make ten liters of tripe soup. When I told
the villagers this, they were frightened—frightened of the idea and of me as
well—and they made faces at the thought of what awaited them, which was why they
preferred being told what would become of them when they died here. One night we went to
the graveyard at the top of the hill and I showed them the empty spot from which, if I
were laid in the ground there, half of me would reach the North Sea and the other half
the Black Sea. The main thing was to make sure the coffin was lying crosswise in the
grave, as if balanced on the peak of a roof. Then I went back home with my shopping. On
the way I’d think things over, talk to myself, go over everything I’d said
and done that day, and ask myself whether I’d said or done the right things. The
only right things were the things I enjoyed—not the way children or drinkers
enjoyed things, but the way the professor of French literature taught me, enjoyment that
was metaphysical. When you enjoy something, then you’ve got it, you idiots, you
evil, stupid, criminal sons of men, he would say, and he’d browbeat us until he
got us where he wanted us, open to poetry, to objects, to wonder, and able to see that
beauty always points to infinity and eternity.

Just before winter set in, when I couldn’t take it anymore and began
to long for someone to be with, I bought some big old mirrors in the village, and some
of them I got for nothing. People were glad to be rid of them, because when they looked
into them, they said, Germans would appear. So I packed the mirrors in blankets and
newspapers and
took them home. All day long I pounded pegs into the
walls of the taproom that doubled as a dance hall and then screwed the mirrors into the
pegs, and I covered a whole wall with mirrors—and I wasn’t alone anymore. On
my way back from work I would look forward to seeing myself coming out to meet myself,
and I started bowing to myself in the mirror and wishing myself a good evening. Now I
wouldn’t be alone until I went to bed, because there would always be two of me
here, and it didn’t matter that our movements were the same. When I left, the one
in the mirror would turn his back too and we’d go our separate ways, though I
would be the only one really leaving and walking out of the room. I had trouble
understanding this, and couldn’t think through why it was that when I left I
couldn’t see myself leaving, and that when I turned my head I could see my face
again but never my back. The unbelievable came true whenever I returned from Saturday
shopping with my pay and stopped below the graveyard on the hill and walked down to the
little brook that was fed by the springs and rivulets on the hill. In this countryside
even the rocks shed water, and each time I washed my face in the brook, the water was
cold and clear and I could see the juices from the people buried in the graveyard above
flowing down into this little brook all the time, distilled and filtered by the
beautiful earth that can turn corpses into nails to hang myself on and pure water to
wash my face in, just as many years from now somebody somewhere will wash his face in me
and someone will strike a match made from the phosphorus of my body. I drank the water
from the spring below the graveyard, savoring
it like a connoisseur
of wine, and just as a connoisseur of Bernkasteller Riesling can detect the smell of the
hundreds of locomotives that pass by the vineyards each day, or of the little fires that
the vintners make in the fields each day to heat their lunches, I too could taste the
dead buried long ago in the graveyard up there. And I tasted them for the same reason
that I had got the mirrors, because the mirrors held the imprints of the Germans who had
looked into them, who had departed years ago, leaving their smell behind in them, in the
place I gazed into for a long time each day and where my double walked. As with the
departed in the drinking water, I rubbed shoulders with people who were invisible, but
not invisible to someone for whom the unbelievable had come true, and I kept bumping
into young girls in dirndls, into German furniture, into the ghosts of German families.
Just before All Souls’, my countryfolk, who made me a gift of these mirrors in
exchange for letting them see into the mirror that was waiting for them in the
graveyard, shot my German shepherd. I had taught him to do my shopping—or, rather,
he had taught himself, because one day he took the basket in his mouth to show me that
he wanted to go shopping with me, but I knew he could find his way to the village on his
own, so as an experiment I gave him a list of what I needed and off he ran, and two
hours later he returned and set the basket with the shopping in it down in front of me.
So instead of taking the little horse I would send the German shepherd every other day
with the basket to fetch supplies, and once, when the villagers were waiting for me in
vain and saw the dog carrying the basket, they shot him, to get me to
start coming to the pub again. I cried a week, mourning for my German shepherd, and
then I hitched up the little horse. The first snow was falling, and I set out for my pay
and a large amount of supplies for the winter, and I forgave the villagers, because they
had really missed me. They didn’t make fun of me now, and if they did, it was a
different, higher kind of fun, because they couldn’t live any longer without
having me come to the pub. They told me they had nothing else to look forward to, and
they certainly weren’t looking forward to my death. They wanted me to come once a
week to see them, because it was a long way to the church and I was a better talker than
the pastor. My German shepherd managed to make it home. They shot him in the lung, but
he ran back with the basket of supplies, and I patted him and brought him a lump of
sugar as a reward, but he wouldn’t take it this time, he laid his head in my lap
instead and slowly slipped away. Behind me the little horse leaned over us and sniffed
at the dog, and the goat came as well, and the cat, who slept with the dog but had never
let me pat her except at a distance. I would talk to her, and she would lie on her back
and wriggle and twist and show me her claws and send looks at me as though I’d
actually been scratching her under her chin or stroking her fur, but whenever I reached
out my hand, the savage force of her shyness would make her scramble out of reach. Now
the cat came up and cuddled against the German shepherd’s fur the way she used to,
and I held my hand out, but she was looking into the dying eyes of the German shepherd.
I stroked her, and then she looked at me, and it was so awful for her to have me
stroking her, to have overcome her shyness while her companion was
dying, that she closed her eyes and pushed her head into the dog’s fur so she
wouldn’t see what terrified her and filled her with longing at the same time.