Burying the Season sample

burying the season

ANTONÍN BAJAJA

BURYING THE SEASON b l u e d rˇ e v n i c e wa lt z

t r a n s l at e d f r o m t h e c z e c h b y

d av i d s h o r t

jantar publishing lo ndo n 201 6

First published in London, Great Britain, in 2016 by Jantar Publishing Ltd www.jantarpublishing.com Czech edition first published in Brno in 2009 as Na krásné modré Dřevnici Antonín Bajaja Burying the Season All rights reserved Original text © 2009 Antonín Bajaja © 2009 Host – vydavatelství, s.r.o.

Translation copyright © 2016 David Short Jacket & book design by Jack Coling The right of David Short to be identified as translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission.

A cip catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. isbn 978-0-9933773-7-2 Printed and bound in the Czech Republic by EUROPR INT a.s.

This translation was made possible by a grant from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

CONTENTS

Foreword iii Translator’s Preface ix

Burying the Season 1

Appendix 418 Publisher’s Note 425

Fluff!

1 JEANNE Z lín, Spr ing 20 0 6

Dear Jeanne, Once again I’ve had the bright idea of tidying up all my old stuff – this time for real. The stuff in those countless boxes and drawers. Or in my brain, where the past is getting ever nearer. I’ve remembered this story. I wasn’t even twenty. Studying in Brno. I nipped home to collect some clean clothes, empty Mum’s larder and have a quick chat with everybody – chiefly Grandma, who was nearly blind by then; after she returned from exile, the Commies let her live with us. Mostly she’d just sit on her bed, making the odd comment from time to time. In Czech, or English. Every time I visited, she’d take a small-denomination banknote or a sweet from her fancy pinafore then grope for my pocket to slip it in as a present; it would have made her very sad if I’d said no.

And I also used to pop home to get a decent bath and a good night’s sleep before leaving again.

On this occasion I hadn’t left yet and was still finishing breakfast when Mum came and sat next to me. She looked embarrassed. I asked her what was wrong. “Nothing,” she said, staring at the tablecloth, “I just need to ask you a favour,” and she went on about how she’d chanced 1

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to flick through the notebook on my bedside table. How she’d read bits and how it upset her – all those things I’d written about the family and neighbours. My fantasising.

“Don’t write about our private lives. Or about the private lives of our friends. Or at least don’t let it get into the wrong hands. Or… at least promise me you won’t use any rude words. Or say hurtful things about anyone. Promise!”

That nearly made me choke. And I nearly choked on the cake that was halfway down my throat. I had to wash it down with some milky ersatz coffee. I told her that sometimes joy got the better of me, or anger. Or sorrow as well. And that then I sit down and write about my childhood, but that I only wrote about it to you, dear Jeanne, because you and I spent our childhood together. I got quite garrulous. She looked at me, her eyes sad and tired. Perhaps slightly surprised as well.

They were saying it was better if I forgot those times. I understood. She knew I understood, but right then I could hardly have explained to her why our childhood had been happy and full of promise. Why it was such fun, even though in the adult world there was all that thievery, people being eliminated, locked up, murdered. Why it was such a frolic, even though the labouring masses had won the “final battle” of their militant hymn, which hadn’t left my relations and their bourgeois friends unscathed either.

Instead of trying to defend and explain myself I promised Mum that in my “letters for Jeanne” I would eschew rude words, provocations and anything hurtful. I wouldn’t let my imagination go wild.

Yesterday I searched very hard. I kept worrying I mightn’t find that rude little file, however (such a grand version of but would make Mum happy) fortunately I did. So I needn’t write the whole thing up again.

It ended with a date and dedication: To dear, younger-by-the day Jeanne on your twentieth birthday, belatedly, with love from your older-by-the-day

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brother – April 1961. It was, as indicated, belated by two months. That had enabled me to add in a postscript that the world had its first cosmonaut (HURRAH!) – Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin. But right now that’s not important. So, so as not to hold things up, I am extracting from its yellowed pages just this much: … and we two scallywags are running up the hill called Navrátilka after the family on whose land it was, and then down into the dip below the Pivoda place, where the Svitáks’ nanny-goat is grazing. Barbie’s waiting for us. We listen with some interest as she tells us how, just before we got there, she’d done a completely green poo. That surprises us quite a bit, because Comrade Sviták is a Communist. But Barbie loves her father, and so do we, because he keeps coypus so there’ll be enough furs for all working-class women, and he makes salamis, which are delicious. She calls him Daddikins. She calls her mum Mummikins, but she isn’t a Communist. She’s very ill, sits around at the kitchen table and sleeps a lot. One time we caught her just as she’d woken up and she told us she’d had a dream. She said the streets were full of jolly people, girls dancing in flimsy American skirts and everybody was chewing gum. We were very surprised, but no matter, let’s get on.

“Go on, show us then!” we shout in unison, and Barbie leads us into the bushes. She takes a stick to lift the dry grass away and we see something the like of which we’ve never seen: her green poo. An emerald green blowfly takes off from it and disappears with a loud buzz into the low alders. Barbie says: “It’s green because we had spinach for lunch yesterday.” How dearly we wish we could have spinach for lunch as well. Green poo is becoming something daring, if not mysterious, and we look forward to having our own. Our anticipations are broken by a bleating sound and we creep over to where the poor goat is tied to a stake by a long rope. First I look meaningfully at you, then at Barbie: “Let’s milk her!” Barbie grabs the goat by the horns,

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you hold her round the neck, and I start pulling at her teats. The goat threshes about, the rope’s strangling her, but we don’t let go. It’s fun for about five minutes. Then you tell Barbie that I’ve got a willy like the goat’s things, except I’ve only one and it’s smaller. Barbie wants to see it and I blush all over and run away from her up the dell; she’d never catch up with me, and anyway I spot a slug, it’s disgusting. I grab it. “I’ll throw it at you,” I bleat, bleat and offer a truce, as victor. “You show me your crack and I’ll let you have a look.” She won’t, she refuses. So the gully is a decent place to be again, except the goat’s upset and bleating. We head for home.

For lunch it’s carrots and peas – a meal that we loathe. Mum stands over us with a wooden spoon and we force the stuff down, spoonful by spoonful. At unguarded moments we toss the muck under the table until finally there’s more on the floor than in our bellies. The housemaid, Annie Cigánek, caught us at it. She tells on us and we get a belting, and she’ll end up in hell, because we prayed God, the Virgin Mary and our guardian angels that she should… (and so on).

A month from now it will be thirteen years since Mum died. I hope she’ll forgive me now for trying to piece together those records of childhood. For allowing them to get into “the wrong hands”. I’ll trim them here and there to make her happy. They cover nearly fifty years and came about under all sorts of circumstances. I need to get shot of them; as the years pile up, anxiety resurfaces – the mercifully forgotten evil. The fear.

Right now, Jeanne, I’m wondering: how did I hit on that French name for you? Why don’t I call you Jana? I expect it started over afternoon

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tea one day in the mid ’fifties (at the Foersters’, or the Linharts’?) when you played Jeanne d’Arc for us. Saint Joan after Shaw. You’d studied the scene when you were sixteen and applying to drama school. You were standing in the middle of the hall, and most of your audience were ladies. A moment before they’d been sipping their coffee or tea and helping it down with strudel. Suddenly they were rigid, because a few seconds back you’d shouted: “Light your fire. Do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole?”

And they were staring, because meanwhile you had walked across to the teak staircase, trotted up to the landing, your eyes brimming with tears, and no one could tell if you were weeping in sorrow, defiance or hope. Passion sprang from your lips: “You promised me my life; but you lied. You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread: when have I asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times.” You stopped. Heated seven times died away down the hall.

I was afraid you’d forgotten what comes next, but you hadn’t. You raised your arms towards the ceiling, where a large brass chandelier hung. It seemed to me to be trembling in the reflection of the flames, the whole hall seemed to tremble. Next to me, Mrs Koblížek the R .I. teacher whispered: “Bless my soul,” and the half-deaf Mrs Leopold-Baťa asked the pharmacist’s wife, Mrs Graubner, “What’s going on?” And on you went. It took me a while to latch on to the words’ meaning as well as their sound: “… if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy

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frost, and the blessed, blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.” Then came the applause, of course, and it was almost frenetic. Dr Linhart’s wife, speaking to Mrs Tolar, the wife of an assistant professor at the university, said: “I’m afraid that isn’t going to get young Jana into drama school.” “I’m afraid not,” Mrs Tolar agreed with a nod, and our language teacher, Mme Zwinger, chipped in with her own fascinating comment: “J’adore Jeanne d’Arc! I adore! Becoze she battled against the Eenglish and one Eenglish promised me grand amour and then ’e rang off with another.” “Ran off,” Mrs Dvořák from the mill corrected her.

Above all else, dear Jeanne, you were a fighter for right. We were both fighters for right. For the right right. Ah well, and what then? Your brother.