palm, and once, on a blustery day when it was unpleasant in the forests, and the wind was howling in the crowns of the swaying trees, I ventured down into the outspread landscape.
It took three-quarters of an hour to get to the nearest village on foot, though it had seemed within easy reach. It lay in broad meadows behind a pheasantry, a mill, and a fishpond. I persuaded Žana to be my guide, a strapping, twenty-year-old country girl who knew every corner of the region.
We went into the valley at one o’clock on a cloudy afternoon. It rained off and on. The clouds banked up in the west and rolled forward strongly. Women in colourful costume were working in a field of rapeseed, half mown, which rippled in the soft pink, verging on orange, of the land, and which lay in regular rows on the other side, binding it up. Out of the dark background of the forests, somewhere through a narrow slit in the clouds, a narrow ray of light broke through and illumined everything. The golden, slanting rapeseed, as well as the blue, red and yellow dresses of the women, saturated with the rain, were irradiated and suffused with the glow.
On the outskirts of the village, between barns with thatched roofs, we encountered an old man. He was walking slowly, and carefully clutching the fences. He was bareheaded. His jaw seemed shrunken, and the sockets of his eyes were black and empty below his half-closed eyelids. Where the fences ended and he had nothing on which to hold, he extended his hands in front of him, with palms outstretched, into the void, and walked slowly in his coarse blue canvas clothes, barefoot, scarcely moving forward. When we passed him he muttered something incomprehensible and fell silent.
Žana took me to the large farm of the village mayor. A large, stout peasant woman with a rectangular face, lazy,
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dark-haired and dishevelled, led us into her sitting-room. Four of her children and a dog rushed in after her.
She sat down heavily opposite us on a wooden bench behind the table, and breathed out.
‘I was asleep,’ she said, ‘and the children came to wake me! And what is life like in a village? You have to slave away from morning to night, go through hell with these children, with no thought of amusement. I’d run away in a minute. It’s no sort of life. You haven’t even got anything nice to look at. Listen here, Eva,’ she said to her ten-year-old daughter, who was standing in a corner biting her lip, ‘go and fetch the teacher lady, and you, Karel, go and look for your Dad!’
The children went out, and the peasant woman went on complaining. She led us into the parlour, which smelt of mould, and showed us pictures of young officers with their signatures and dedications. She told us about her youth. She was from Prague, an innkeeper’s daughter, and had been married out without a dowry to the owner of a big farm. She considered it a sacrifice, and had been blaming her husband for years. He came in out of the fields; he was a big man, gaunt, covered with dust, and physically worn out. He had kind blue eyes, fair hair and a face that was sunburnt up to his hairline. He caressed the head of one of his daughters, about four years old, and kissed her. His wife did not stop grumbling.
‘When the soldiers came to this place, all the officers told me I was wasted in a village,’ she said, placing her youngest daughter, about a year old, on her lap.
He shifted in impatience, looked out of the window, and drummed his fingers on the table, in order to avoid looking at his discontented, overweight, dishevelled wife with her big, lazy eyes, in her untidy, shabby clothes.
‘People labour away like cattle till they almost drop! And when they come home they hear nothing but all this.’ His
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eyes darted over the window frame, but his bony, tanned face did not change its expression.
‘What are you looking for, ma’am,’ said Žana, ‘what sort of different life would you want? You have food to eat, praise God, and also someone to look after. And there is happiness in all that already!’
‘That’s what I say!’ interjected the mayor cheerfully. ‘Look, you must be content with what the Lord God has bestowed!’
She smiled contemptuously and pursed her thick lips.
Eva entered the room, and after her a young woman, slender and gentle, with a face pale as if from cold or want. She had a high forehead, and features and grey eyes filled with the expression of a sensitive soul, and full of suffering.
She was the village schoolteacher.
‘Look, it’s Auntie,’ said the mayor’s wife to her youngest daughter, who was holding out her little hands to the young lady.
The mayor frowned and turned away.
I could not understand why.
The young lady was the daughter of a village schoolmaster, the eldest of twelve children. She was serving as village schoolteacher for an annual salary of 120 gulden. In the mayor’s household she was given a little soup at noon, from what they cooked for themselves and for their domestic servants. In return she taught and cared for their children, helped with the domestic chores and sewed for them. She was in poor health and overworked, but modest and quiet, sensitive and proud. The bread she received was repaid a hundredfold. The mayor’s wife, strong and coarse as she was, exploited her. She loathed work herself, and placed everything that needed to be done in the frail white hands of the schoolteacher. The latter worked far into the night, to the point of fatigue and illness.