Radka Denemarková: Prologue of Money from Hitler
18. March 2010 11:17
In his hand, Denis grips a pointed green spade, which he plunges into the soft, reddish soil, waterlogged after the night's torrential rain.
As he toils, Denis's outstretched tongue lolls against the white fence of his teeth, two of whose pickets are missing. He drives the small spade deeper and deeper, first turning the soil, then dumping some of it onto a growing pile next to his right knee. He smacks the excavated matter into shape as he builds his mound. This greasy stuff is the kind he likes. Having put the spade down, he bores a hole into his creation with a forefinger. The finger is embraced by a pleasant chill, but the soil also gets between the nail and flesh. To force it further into the soil would turn the pleasure into pain, and Denis is quick to pull it out. With great curiosity, he examines a clothes peg which has been disfigured from the time it has spent packed in the earth. He examines it from all sides, and then rests it against his cheek. He uses it to smear a line down his left cheek, then down his right, then down the middle of his forehead; he works a further smudge over his Adam's apple.
He's a Red Indian, lying in wait, on the warpath.
His grubby hand again grips the flaking green handle of the tool. He begins to slice away at the earth, to strip the clumps formed by grasses and weeds grown together. After several minutes of this, the spade makes contact with something hard, which proves such an obstacle to further progress that Denis is forced to change tack, his long gashes giving way to a gentle but feverish chopping at the loamy gyros. When he has finished, he is out of breath; on the ground in front of him lies some sort of bowl, which is strikingly long and narrow and has strange bits sticking out of it and rough cracks and holes. A white bowl. He picks it up and cleans it, removes all remnants of dirt. Then he rinses the object with a child's watering can, also green, with a red sprinkler spout. Only twice and briefly does he walk away to fill the can with dirty rainwater from a rusty old tub, set down years ago by the strawberry plot so that Denis could paddle in it in summer. Now that the hole-ridden bowl has been emptied out and cleaned, he turns it round and round, before lifting it up.
He is surprised to see two hollows: eye sockets.
It is a skull.
A human skull.
With care, five-year-old Denis carries it from the orchard to the sandpit.
A broad-beamed Woman wipes her hands absentmindedly on a red and white checked dishcloth. The hands are now dry, but she continues to rub them for an unusually long time. She is lost in her thoughts, fragments of memory that she is trying to capture, piece together, classify. She throws the dish¬cloth over a chipped, oft-painted kitchen chair by the stove. She picks up a plate, dazzling white porcelain with a blue pattern—a stark contrast to her weather-beaten, country face—and arranges a symmetrical fan of bread dumplings on it. Then, using a metal ladle, she pours a dark brown sauce containing strips of meat into the dry pool in the centre of the plate. She does this with care, so as not to soil the perfect white of the dumplings.
In the dining room, she puts the plate down in front of her husband, who has washed his tired face and rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt. The man eats greedily, without speaking. The Woman sits alongside him, looking at the soft black hair on the back of the strong, broken-nailed, much-loved hand that awkwardly grips the silver spoon. It is a tireless digger, stripping the plate of all dirt.
The Woman gets up just once, to fetch the dishcloth she has left in the kitchen. Now she has it in her lap, and from time to time she wipes her red chapped hands on it. With the last of the dumplings, the man mops up what remains of the sauce, circling the plate twice to perform the task to his liking. As the last morsel disappears into his gluttonous chops, the Woman gathers her courage. As he groans with satisfaction, she begins to tell him she found Denis at the sandpit, making sandcastles. Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man, bake me a cake as fast as you can.
The man gives a great belch, then takes a swig of chilled beer from the foaming bottle, although a glass produced for this very purpose sits in front of him, a glass that bears an unusual engraving.
"Well? What of it?"
she found Denis making sandcastles. He was squatting,
grounded by great hills of sand warped into strange shapes.
ark yellow hills with hollows and prolapses, like pastry in oven spilled from the tray before baking. With great concentration, Denis was filling with wet sand an odd-shaped vessel foil of holes.
"If he's pinched something of yours from the kitchen, give him a smack so he won't do it again."
The Woman takes a deep breath and tries to think calmly about what she is going to say. She stepped up to the sand¬pit. Denis kept quiet in anticipation; perhaps he sensed that he had found something precious. Something sacred. Some kind of treasure. It was just that he didn't yet know what kind of treasure it was. The Woman wrested the strange object out of his mucky little fingers and made off towards the shed with it. Denis scurried after her in silence and defi¬ance; he pulled at her skirt, tried to fight her. She gave him a slap.
"What the hell's going on? Out with it, woman!"
"It's not... what you think it is. It's ... it's a ..."
It was as if someone had stuffed that fan of bread dumplings down the Woman's throat, along with a tangible fear that caused her voice to shake.
"I want you to take a look at it yourself," she said.
"Well, bring it here, then!"
"I can't. You'll have to follow me. Come on, move yourself."
"Where?"
"The shed."
The man reluctantly gets to his feet; he pulls in his belt, constricting the fatty flesh around his waist.
"What a bloody fuss about some stupid toy."
Night.
Cut into by a light, into which two figures step. They pause in the porch. The first dog—the neighbours' dog— starts barking. And then the whole pack sets up; their staccato alert encompasses the village. The dog learns of his mistake and sends out a message of calm; the village lapses back into silence. Only now does the pair make a move.
As there is no bulb in the shed, the man uses the eye of a flashlight. The place is filled with piles of all kinds of rubbish. Old things that might come in handy sometime, most of which no one will ever give a thought to again. Broken rakes and old pitchforks. A grain grinder. A spade in two parts. A straw press and some hand tools. There is a low shelf, with cracked boards. A highchair for a child, painted. An enormous radio, dumb, with its insides ripped out. A winnower, a broken mill for cleaning grain. A battered cupboard, whose front doors do not open properly, whose right side droops towards the ground.
There is a light green dresser with, sliding glass doors, the paintwork on its handleless drawers badly cracked.
The dresser is crowned with a dark brown cardboard box, which bears the legend "Electrolux"; this is anchored by an old leather-bound book. The Woman tears the flashlight from the man's hands. She seems so captivated by the brown of the cardboard, so lost in her thoughts, that the man has to swal¬low his distaste. She goes closer to the box. The man stum-bles against a chair lying on its side, its woven seat torn.
"Bloody hell! If we're just wasting our time out here for some stupid reason ..."
The Woman is standing in front of the box. Without speaking, she hands the flashlight back to the man; without speaking, she lifts off the leather-bound book and tosses it to the ground. The man turns the light on the book's title, unin¬telligible, worked into the binding in Gothic script. As if per¬forming a ceremony, the Woman lifts up the wings of the cardboard covering and takes a step back. Without speaking, she indicates that the man should take a look for himself. He holds back.
"Come on, now. Have a look!"
The man spits.
'S'pose I can'tjust stand here like an idiot."
He reaches into the box and pulls out an object that is hard and white. The light is shining on an asymmetrical orb, fused together. As he turns it around in his hands, the man stiffens: The flashlight reveals the contours of its reinforced places where the pieces have grown together and seeks out the emptiness of its hollows. Eye sockets. The skeleton of a face. The man throws the thing back where it came from.
"Shit! Shit, shit! Where the hell did he get that?"
"He says he dug it up in the garden."
"Which garden?"
"Which garden do you think? Ours! Where the orchard starts. Where the Golden Reinettes are."
The man gives a wheezing cough and then spits.
"He found that . . . when he was playing . . . That's the only thing he grubbed up?"
"The only thing."
"What are you gawking at me like that for? It might be ... what do they call it... ? Neanderthal man. You know, him that they're digging up, that they're writing about in all the papers. It doesn't have to be ..."
"What are we going to do?"
The man understands that this is no time for wild fan¬tasies. There is no need for them to lie to each other; the Woman makes this clear by her harsh bearing, also by the tremor in her voice and the moistness of her eyes. Suddenly constructive, the man sets out what they need to do.
"We'll find the rest. He'll have to tell us where he found it. And you get a story ready for him."
"But he's asleep."
"Then wake him up!"
Half an hour later, Denis is standing at the window of his room—a large room on the first floor—partially veiled by the
rtain. There is no need for him to hide: Those two down here are absorbed in their work, determined to put this night hift behind them. But Denis sees them. He sees the eagerness with which the man and the Woman shovel away at the earth around the place where he found his treasure, plough up the soil where his skull belongs, thrust their hands into the bed of an unknown being. From above them comes a whispering of the leaves of the apple trees, leaves that will fall next month, just as they fall every year, and then become mixed together to form a blanket for the sleeper and give him relief. They always did this, until Denis found the bed. The discovery was meant to be Denis's; it was waiting there for him to make. The man and the Woman pull out a kind of twisted bar, some white rods, and a basket with an odd shape. At this point, the Woman staggers over to an apple tree, leans on its trunk, and throws up.
The more he watches them, the more defiant Denis feels. These toys belong to him; he was the one who was supposed to find them. One after another. And they stole them from him. The toys are his. Tomorrow he is going to take them back. Denis is tired; he can barely keep his eyes open, and he is struggling to stand. His little feet patter back to the bed. He picks up his teddy bear and lays it next to him, pulls up the covers. Before he gives in to sleep, he imagines the white toy lying next to him, its hollows lit up by the many-coloured fireworks of fairy tale worlds.
Denis holds on to this childish image for a long time. Not until two years later is it overlaid and then pushed out by the birth of his sister, Natasa. Then he develops a fascination for the fragility and the beauty of a living human body.
Translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland