Martin Reiner: Lucka, the Poet and I

Scenery room

The day I flew to England to visit the poet Maceška came far sooner than I could have imagined. But I want to speak of what came before. Because I was living in a country ruled by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, shortly before everything changed.

In May 1988 I met a writer called Paukner at a seminar in someone’s apartment. Until then Paukner had been a stranger to me. After the seminar he told me about a Brno poet called Jiří Maceška, of whom I’d never heard. I can still remember the mix of shame and defiance I felt as I listened to Paukner. I was a big reader, but I knew only the authors school hadn’t kept a secret from me, read only the books on sale in socialist bookshops or available for loan in the local library. And in these places you never came across Paukners or Maceškas.

Paukner introduced himself as “a writer who hasn’t published anything”. But it was obvious that he was known to everyone in that spacious city-centre apartment, whose occupier was a certain dramaturge. Among the visitors to the seminar the type predominated that was as dilapidated as the host’s furniture, real ages not- withstanding. This impression was intensified by the incorrigible beardedness of most of those present. It was as though they had emerged from right at the back of the scenery room. I shared with them an unhealthy pallor, a typical symptom of a life spent in the shadows.

The professor who gave the lecture that evening was an Englishman with greying hair and lips that were fleshy and finely shaped like a woman’s. His interpreter was a young woman who looked like a Red Indian squaw, with a long plait that flailed against her slender back whenever she turned from professor to auditorium and back; the look was underscored by a knitted headband adorned with exotic symbols in many colours.

Dan, my only Brno friend, was there too; it was he who had brought me, in fact. He stuck out like a sore thumb – not only by his great height, but also by his clean-shaven cheeks and the deep orange of his jacket. Dan didn’t have much in common with literature – he considered himself a visual artist – but Brno is a small place; sooner or later, people who ought to meet, do.

When the discussion was over, someone opened all three of the high, double-casement windows; fresh air from the street streamed into the room, along with snatches of sound from a world oddly distant and strange. A small, more intimate group gathered around the professor from England in search of further exciting details of how liberal economies worked, this time without the intercession of the interpreter. Other guests headed for the toilet or ventured deeper into the large apartment, where homemade sandwiches, canapés and several un- corked bottles of wine were waiting for them.

I got myself a beer and sat down in the living room, in a deep armchair whose upholstery bore an irregular design. I assumed a thoughtful attitude: I was wary of looking like a hopeless outsider in a company whose members were long acquainted with one another. I wanted Dan to appear. A shadow fell across my lap and I looked up. But it was not Dan; this man had an unkempt black moustache that failed to conceal the puffiness of his lower lip.

“Vladimír Paukner,” he said as he offered me his hand.

I’m not from Brno

I was quick to recover from the fright that such encounters always inspire in me. Paukner added something ironic about his unfulfilled writer status, and I wanted to respond in kind by introducing myself jokingly as a ‘diligent reader’. But in the end I just said quietly, “I deliver newspapers in Královo Pole. My name’s Tomáš Mráz.”

From the conversation that followed it turned out that Paukner lived in Královo Pole, too, up on Fuchs Street, and had done for almost eight years. This information might have allowed us to indulge in an exchange of shared experience had it not been for the fact I had moved to my ground-floor bedsit on Berkova Street only a few months earlier. I’m not from Brno. I was born in Velké Bílovice, to a family of winegrowers; it is wine-growing country. I went to grammar school in

Kyjov. I had come to Brno to study law three years earlier.

I hadn’t even really wanted to – my father insisted. He saw me coming back to Velké Bílovice and the vine- yard with an academic title. He’d spent his whole life in the place and couldn’t imagine anything different. He was suspicious of the town, and also of anyone who went to live there voluntarily. In any case, I dropped out of university when I was in the second year. For six months my mum was the only one who knew about this, but when I came home for the vacation it was plain that I’d have to come clean. For better or for worse, I’ll get over it, I told myself. As it turned out, the very next day I repacked the bag in which I’d brought home my dirty laundry and left. My father didn’t try to stop me: he thought it was best that way.

It was a Saturday. The wind was soft as a net and the sun bobbed about in time with my footsteps; it was a textbook happy-childhood day. To get to the bus stop I walked the length of the long street where I used to play football with my mates. Already I knew that I’d never be back. Although my exit had nothing in common with the defiant departure of a proud hero of the silver screen, I was walking the most important four hundred metres of my life.

No one spoke much in our house. But it didn’t take many words for my father and me to fail to understand each other. We just didn’t get on.

For a while the person closest to me was Sam, a black Newfoundland whose coat was forever covered in mud and who stank to high heaven. (Dad wouldn’t have him in the house.) He ruled over our yard with the composure and firmness of purpose of an Old Testament prophet. When I was four years old he was the same size as me; if he wanted to lick my face, all he had to do was stick out his long, dark-red tongue. While I was having my face licked I must have looked like a windfall apple. But it seemed to me that this was the rite by which a big beast and little boy became secret brothers.

On a hot spring day when I was five, Sam attacked me and sank his teeth into my face. At the time every- one else was out. That afternoon is lost to my memory as a small meteorite is lost in tundra.

I know from reports that the first to hear Sam’s pitiful whimpering was my sister Jana. They say it was a bloodbath. When I was first admitted to the hospital in Kyjov, I imagine Mum thought I’d be disfigured for life. She was the one who announced that the dog would have to be shot. The task fell to my father. But Jana remembers how he was unwilling to shed any more blood. He liked the dog: over the years he’d got used to the calm presence watching over the yard. What’s more, as far as he was concerned Sam had his uses.

“What would be the use of doing away with him?” he asked, raising his voice. He’d always asked questions in this manner and he always would. His arguments in support of Sam may have been informed by the natural limitations of a grocer, but in consequence they didn’t sound entirely nonsensical.

“The lad’s in hospital. That’s bad enough. And on top of that you’re telling me I’ve got to kill the dog?”

“Listen to me, Dad.” His wife was a woman of moderate opinions who tended to give in easily, but now her voice was firm. “As long as the dog stays, I won’t have a moment’s peace. I’ll never be sure it won’t do the samething again. And I won’t just sit here without lifting a finger, waiting for it to happen.”

By now my father realized he wasn’t going to get his way, but still he grumbled. “But the lad loves that dog!”

“Since when have you been interested in who or what the lad loves? Anyway, after what happened he won’t want to go anywhere near it. He’ll be scared of it. And if he isn’t, I will be.”

So Sam vanished from my life ... and I never even asked where he went. One look in the mirror was enough to convince me that the unhappy dog had done something that placed his continued presence in the household out of the question.

Lešany nativity

Of course, I didn’t tell Paukner any of this. I mention it here only because it was a year after Sam’s death that I started to read. Soon I was an avid reader, and the heroes of storybooks became my nearest and dearest. I read whatever I could lay my hands on. There was no one around who could guide me in my passionate consumption of books. In the local library – which was managed by Mrs Andruszyszynová, a retired teacher of Czech – only a couple of inches separated the classic works of world literature from popular works for the youngest readers. Mrs Andruszyszynová was a great patriot who passed me Čapek’s Talks with T.G. Masaryk – Masaryk was a native of nearby Hodonín – under the counter. As I was a particular favourite of hers I got to read this in the third year of primary school. But naturally enough the heroes of the books I loved most were dogs. The very best of these was Lassie, and I had a soft spot, too, for Curwood’s Kazan (who is part-wolf, part- dog) and his son Baree. The fictional death of White Bim Black Ear had a more profound effect on me than the death of a real dog. It was not until I read Troyepolsky that I first caught a glimpse of myself in the pages of a story, but after that I was merciless in my self-reproach for Sam’s death. This exasperated my father and he tried to get my mum to put a stop to my reading. He even claimed that my forever sitting about with a book in my lap was creating a distance between us; he quite failed to see that it was the distance between us that had caused me to embrace books. Anyway, my mum took my side: my bedroom on the upper floor continued as the departure point for my journeys – on Captain Bontekoe’s ship, in hot-air balloons that landed on desert islands, in search of the animals I knew from Brehm’s great atlas.

I fell in love with Gulliver’s Travels, in particular with the part where the wise Houyhnhnm horses decide to replace all their humanoid servants with asses, which are more reliable. Then I discovered Verne, and while still at primary school I read all twenty-three of his books then available in Czech. I made myself so much at home in Verne’s world of adventure that I barely thought of seeking out any other source of amusement. But when Mrs Andruszyszynová, who was quite strict, came to the conclusion that her favourite reader was failing to develop, she decided to take action. She took to adding to the books I’d chosen for myself a Nezval here and a Závada there; I had to read these books because I knew she would be testing me on them.
I don’t claim that at the age of thirteen I particularly enjoyed Hrubín’s Lešany Nativity, nor did I exactly wolf down Mathesius’s Songs of Old China. There was little in most of the lines I truly understood, but still the world of poetry somehow spoke to me: it was its very aloof- ness that resonated. I might make something out in the fog of words and at night imagine myself all alone, standing on a bridge, the horn of a tugboat sounding in the distance. Although I couldn’t tell where the boat was headed, I would gaze into the darkness and wait.

My discussion with Paukner having moved on from Královo Pole to literature, I raised the subject of Čapek’s translations of French poetry, talk of which in those days I imagined to be more impressive than talk of A Captain at Fifteen. This was a mistake – Paukner loved Verne as much as I did. And if I’d stuck with Verne he’d never have asked me what I thought of Jiří Maceška’s new book.

Translated by Andrew Oakland.