Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka
204
Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka
204Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9788090217195 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Twisted Spoon Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/1998 |
| Pages: | 204 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
James Naughton was Professor of Czech Language and Literature at Oxford University until his death in 2014. His translations of Czech literature included Bohumil Hrabal's The Little Town Where Time Stood Still and The Jingle Bell Principle by Miroslav Holub.
Read an Excerpt
From PUBLIC SUICIDE
(Dear Dubenka,
Ever since I got back from the "Delighted States", from that journey you planned for me so preposterously and so fondly, maybe just so that we could see each other again, ever since that time I've been off the rails . . . It's like what happened to my mother, who, according to her death certificate, died of softening of the brain - but I've attained such an absolute peak of emptiness and I'm so, so alone, effectively in solitary confinement, tied up in a straitjacket, no longer living in time, but only and exclusively in space, which shocks and horrifies me . . .
One day an Italian who came to Prague by marriage, a young man who restores chapels, invited me to come out and see this thing he'd seen in Budec - to where Saint Wenceslas would ride out to visit his grandmother Ludmila, later strangled with a scarf - and there in Budec in the dome of the rotunda, rest the mouldered, mouldering bones of hundreds of generations of doves, who, whenever they sense their time has come, fly into the dome to die, several whole centuries of them there are, down beneath nothing but humus, guano, layer upon layer of generations of doves in that rounded dome, rising up from the pluperfect tense via the imperfect to the dove feathers and bones of the year that's just past . . .
So that's me, I who have aged so much now that I live and feed off childhood memories, these layers of mine are there somehow in the receding strata of that dove sepulchre in Budec - all I have to do is close my eyes and I'm back there, back in Zidenice, where I was born in the bed in which my grandfather later died, in a room which meant everything to me, because from the moment I opened my eyes there was always sunshine in that room, or if not sunshine, light at least . . . Our street, Balbínova, sloped up a hill, the pavement passed our pair of windows, and as people went up and down the street their heads either rose up or descended, severed by the two window-frames . . . That is my light, the little house on Balbínova, in Zidenice, where my unmarried mother gave birth to me, where my granny and granddad brought me up, that street of mine with its little low houses and that sunlight . . . I've always thought of the room where I was born as a little church or a room in a chateau, with its holy pictures and the Virgin Mary under a glass cover, and huge asparagus ferns, and a plush-covered table and on it a huge plush-covered book with a gold fastening, it looked like a bible, that family album, which I was afraid to open . . . Outside the windows were fields of maize and fruit trees and the rising hillside, where a vineyard ran and grandma had a field . . . When the time came, she took me with her, she hoed the tomatoes and beans, picked the gooseberries and currants, and again when it was time, she clambered about the trees picking the various damsons, plums and apricots, while I sat staring . . . What did I stare at? Nothing, I was simply there with granny, always bathed in sunlight, even if it started to drizzle . . .
Dubenka, just like I remember those first three years of my life, living with my grandmother, so I remember you now, I see you in light, you're dressed in light, you even have a halo, because you're so far away, because, Dubenka, then it came to pass, when I was four years old, they took me away to Polná, to the brewery, where the sun never entered, I lived there with my new dad and my mother, a stranger to me, and in that brewery apartment you had to have the lamp on even during the day, for sunlight you had to go into the yard or off into town . . . So I became a runaway, who always stayed out of doors till bedtime . . . I'm no different now, Dubenka, I'm just the same - the sun only comes out when I remember you, and even if it's a rainy day . . . I can still see you that first time you came to the pub the Golden Tiger, with your rucksack on your back. I was sitting under the little antlers, at the back of the pub where they have to leave the light on, you were searching for a face to match the name, and then you came up and you introduced yourself as April Gifford, studying Czech, you expected I'd be cross at you barging in like that . . . but I knew right away, my future was in your eyes, I melted, and so did my friends, you sat down with us and had some beer, and Mr Marysko said . . . April . . .? Aprilka . . .? No, we'll call you Dubenka . . . And from then on you were Dubenka . . . for April in Czech is "duben", the "oak month" . . . And when you took off your jacket, spattered with rain, somebody inquired: Is it raining out there? And you said . . . Yes folks, Mr Hrabal, it's raining, or as you Czechs say, it's pissing down . . . Hearing that, all the customers burst out laughing and they gave you a special look, as if you'd stroked them or something . . . And when we asked you where you were from, you told us, repeating the answer several times: Ze "Spokojenych" státu . . . From the "Delighted" States . . . But you pleased the customers most of all when, in reply to a question from our former Consul: So what do they teach you on that Slavic course, what good things have you learnt? you said guilelessly: Well, stuff like, for example - what a smart-ass Party we have . . . Hearing this, our Consul was tickled pink, and he said . . . This girl must come again! she's a sweet child . . . So now you'd introduced yourself, Dubenka, to the Golden Tiger - and I think once again of that young archaeologist, who showed me the excavated dome of that Romanesque church, all those layers of dead doves and pigeons - through the deep probe in its side I saw several centuries back, back to where the bones and feathers had turned to nothing but guano and humus, while there up above lay the dead doves, who, before they died, decorously spread out their wings like fans and tucked up their tiny heads, just as Lady Death, the dovely reaper has contrived it . . . O Colomba, Colomba, my little dove . . . as it is written in the Ursuline Church, where tiny, lace-wrapped Colomba rests, her bones that were brought to Prague by the Father of our Nation, the Emperor Charles IV . . . the Saint who preferred to die, rather than marry the one she did not love, she sleeps her sleep along with the Ursulines, like the doves in their layers do in the dome of the Romanesque rotunda of Budec near Prague . . .