Too Loud a Solitude

A Novel

Bohumil Hrabal

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780547545882
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

A fable about the power of books and knowledge, "finely balanced between pathos and comedy," from one of Czechoslovakia's most popular authors ( Los Angeles Times).
 
A New York Times Notable Book
 
Ha?tá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Ha?tá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—the ability to quote the Talmud, Hegel, and Lao-Tzu. In this "irresistibly eccentric romp," the author Milan Kundera has called "our very best writer today" celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word ( The New York Times Book Review).

Four

One afternoon the slaughterhouse people brought me a truckload of bloodstained paper and blood-drenched boxes, crate after crate of the stuff, which I couldn’t stand, because it had that sickly sweet smell to it and left me as gory as a butcher’s apron. By way of revenge I piously placed an open Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam into the first bale, a Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller into the second, and, that the word might be made bloody flesh, an Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche into the third. And as I worked, a host, a swarm of those dreadful flesh flies the butchers had brought with them from the slaughterhouse buzzed around my head, attacking my face like a hailstorm.

While I was on my fourth mug of beer, I noticed a pleasant-looking young man next to the press, and I knew then and there it was Jesus Himself. And soon he was joined by an old man with a face full of wrinkles, and I knew on the spot it could only be Lao-tze. So there they stood, side by side, the better for me to compare them, an elderly gentleman and a young man, as thousands of cobalt-colored flies swooped in thousands of wild nosedives, their metallic wings and bodies embroidering an immense tableau vivant made up of constantly shifting curves and splashes like the flow of paint in those gigantic Jackson Pollocks.

Not that I was surprised to find the two of them there: my grandfathers and great-grandfathers had visions too when they drank, but they saw fairy-tale characters. My grandfather met all kinds of mermaids and water nymphs in his wanderings, and my great-grandfather believed in the imps, sprites, and fairies he saw in the Litovel Brewery malthouse. As for me, with my unwitting education, when I lie falling asleep under my two-ton canopy of books, I see visions of Schelling and Hegel, who were born in the same year, and once Erasmus of Rotterdam rode up on his horse and asked me how to get to the sea. So I wasn’t surprised when another two of my favorites showed up. Seeing them side by side, I realized for the first time how important their age was for an understanding of their teachings, and leaning through the flies’ fandango in my wet, blood-soaked smock, I pushed first the green button, then the red button, and watched Jesus, an ardent young man intent on changing the world, rise up and take over Lao-tze’s place at the summit, while the old man looked on submissively, using the return to the sources to line his eternity; I watched Jesus cast a spell of prayer on reality and lead it in the direction of miracle, while Lao-tze followed the laws of nature along the Tao, the only Way to learned ignorance. And all the while I was loading armfuls of wet, red paper and my face was smeared with blood. Then I pushed the green button, and the press started compacting the flies along with the disgusting paper, the flesh flies that couldn’t tear themselves away from what was left of the meat and were mad for its odor and started rutting and mating, and as their passion drove them into wilder and wilder pirouettes, they formed thick orbits of dementia around the drum full of paper, like neutrons and protons swirling around their atoms.

Drinking from my mug, I kept my eyes glued to the young Jesus, all ardor amidst a group of youths and pretty girls, and the lonely Lao-tze, looking only for a worthy grave. Even as the compacting process reached its final stage and the paper started squirting and dripping blood and flesh-fly juice, I watched the young Jesus still suffused with mellow ecstasy and Lao-tze leaning sad and pensive against the edge of the drum and looking on with scornful indifference; I watched Jesus giving confident orders and making a mountain move, and Lao-tze spreading a net of ineffable intellect over the cellar; I watched Jesus the optimistic spiral and Lao-tze the closed circle, Jesus bristling with dramatic situations and Lao-tze lost in thought over the insolubility of moral conflicts.

When the red signal lit up and the bloodstained wall started retreating, I went back to pitching boxes and cartons and blood-soaked wrappings into the drum, but I also found the strength to skim a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, or at least the pages about his cosmic friendship with Richard Wagner, before plunging it into the drum like a child into a bath, and just in time to swat away a swarm of blue and green flies lashing at my eyes like weeping-willow branches in a whirlpool. And the moment I pushed the green button, what should come tripping daintily down the cellar stairs but two skirts, one turquoise blue, the other velvet violet, the skirts of two Gypsy girls who always came as a revelation, visiting me when I least expected them, when I thought they’d died, their throats slit by a lover’s knife. These two Gypsy girls, who collected wastepaper and lugged it around on their backs in huge bundles the way women carried grass from the woods in the old days, would waddle their loads along crowded streets, and people had to step aside for them and retreat into doorways, and their packs were so big that whenever they tried to come into our courtyard they clogged the entrance, but they’d squeeze through, make straight for the scale, bend over, turn, and fall into the pile of paper smack on their backs, only then undoing the straps and freeing themselves from their enormous yoke, after which they’d drag the bundle onto the scale and, wiping their sweaty foreheads, look up at the dial, which always showed at least seventy-five, and sometimes a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five pounds of boxes and cartons and refuse paper from various shops and distribution centers. And whenever they began to miss me or whenever their loads became too great—they were so strong and had so much energy that from a distance those bundles on their backs looked more like a small train or tram—they would come down and pay me a visit, throw off their canvas-covered burdens, fall back on their piles of dry paper, roll their skirts up to their belly buttons, pull out cigarettes and matches, and light up, flat on their backs, inhaling the smoke as if chomping on chocolate. I shouted a greeting, and, though surrounded by a cloud of flies, I could see the turquoise Gypsy lying on her back with her skirt up to her waist—fine legs and a fine naked stomach and a bush of hair surging up from below like a flame, one hand under the kerchief that held the dark, greasy hair together behind her neck, the other raising the cigarette to her mouth, oh, how innocent she looked—and the velvet-violet Gypsy lying like a tossed-off towel, exhausted, spent from her tyrannical labors. I pointed an elbow at my briefcase—I usually bought salami and bread on the way to work, then took it home with me, because I couldn’t eat a thing when I drank, and I almost always drink at work, because I’m so excited, overwhelmed, overwrought—and the Gypsy girls rolled themselves out of the paper like two rocking chairs and, sticking their cigarettes in their mouths, lunged into the briefcase, four hands pulling out the salami, dividing it equally; and then, snuffing out the cigarettes with great theatricality, grinding them into the floor with their heels as if they were snake heads, they sat back down and set to. Only after they had polished off the salami did they start in on the bread—and how I loved to watch them eat it: suddenly very serious, they would crumble it with their fingers and raise each morsel separately to their mouths, nodding and touching shoulders like a team of horses pulling the dray to the knacker’s, and in fact, if I came across the two of them in the street dragging their packs from shop to warehouse, they always had their arms around each other’s waists and cigarettes in their mouths and they always walked in a kind of polka step. They had a hard time of it, those Gypsy girls: they had not only themselves and two children to support, they also had to support their man, a Gypsy who took his cut every afternoon according to the size of their bundles. He was a strange type, that Gypsy: he wore gold-rimmed glasses, had a mustache, and parted his hair down the middle, and I never saw him without camera slung over his shoulder. He took their picture every day, posing them carefully and stepping back to frame the picture, while they flashed him the brightest of smiles, but he never had film in the camera and the Gypsy girls never saw a single shot of themselves, and still they had their picture taken every day and looked forward to the results like Christians to heaven.

One day I ran into my Gypsy girls on the other side of the Vltava where the Libeň Bridge swings over from Holešovice. As I was walking along, I noticed a Gypsy policeman with white sleeves and a striped stick directing traffic at the bend near Scholer’s, and the way he polka-stepped to change the flow of traffic was so striking and dignified that I stopped to watch him finish his half-hour shift, and suddenly a flash of turquoise blue and a blaze of velvet violet caught my eye, and who did I see across the street but my two Gypsy girls—attracted like me by the sight of a Gypsy directing traffic at a busy intersection—in a crowd of Gypsy children and a few older Gypsies, all of them beaming with pride at the heights to which a Gypsy had risen. And when his time was up and he had passed the intersection on to his replacement, he went over to bask in the praise and congratulations of his fellow Gypsies, and all at once I saw the turquoise-blue and velvet-violet skirts fall to their knees and start shining the policeman’s dusty shoes. At first the Gypsy merely smiled, but soon his joy got the better of him and he laughed and kissed all the Gypsy girls ceremoniously, while the turquoise-blue and velvet-violet skirts went on shining his shoes.

When they had finished the salami and bread, they picked the crumbs off their skirts and ate them too, and then the turquoise Gypsy stretched out in the paper and hitched up her skirt to the waist. “How about it, chief?” she said seriously. “You game?” I showed her my hands full of blood. “Not today,” I said. “Got a bad knee.” She shrugged and rolled down her turquoise skirt, staring at me the whole time with unblinking eyes, as the velvet-violet Gypsy had been doing from her perch on the bottom step. Then they both stood up, refreshed and invigorated, gathered the edges of their canvas sails, and, just before disappearing, dropped their heads between their legs like folding rulers, shouted their alto good-byes, and ran out into the corridor, and soon I could hear their feet pattering across the courtyard in their inimitable polka gait, moving on to new piles of wastepaper as per the orders of the finely combed and neatly parted Gypsy photographer with the gold-rimmed glasses.

So I went back to work, hacking away at the blood-soaked boxes, cartons, and wrapping paper, until they started cascading from ceiling to drum, and once the hole in the ceiling was free, I could hear everything going on in the courtyard, everything being said there, as if through a megaphone. Some of my regulars came up to the opening, and I peered up at them from below, and if they looked to me like statues on a church portal, my press looked to them like the catafalque of Charles IV, father of our country. Then suddenly they were replaced by my boss, wringing his hands and booming down at me in a voice full of malice, “Haňťa, what were those fortune-tellers, those witches, doing here again?” Trembling as usual, I dropped to one knee and, holding on to the drum with one hand, looked up, wondering what he, my boss, had against me, what made him pull such terrifying faces, faces so indignant, so full of suffering that they always made me believe that I was a repulsive person and a hopeless worker who inflicted the most ignoble blows on his noble superior.

I picked myself up from the floor as the terrified soldiers must have done when the stone covering the tomb where Christ lay buried sprang into the air and set Him free, I picked myself up, dusted off my knees, and went back to work. By then the flesh flies were out in full force, maybe because I’d stirred up a draft by clearing the hole in the ceiling; in any case, they formed a thick shrub around me and my hands—a raspberry bush, a bramble patch—and brushing them away was like forging a path through filings of iron wire, but soaked in blood and sweat though I was, I never stopped working.

While the Gypsy girls were with me, Jesus and Lao-tze had been standing together in the drum of my hydraulic press; now that I was alone again, wound in wires of flesh flies but left to my own devices and the routine of my work, I saw Jesus as a tennis champion who has just won his first Wimbledon and Lao-tze as a destitute merchant, I saw Jesus in the sanguine corporality of his ciphers and symbols and Lao-tze in a shroud, pointing at an unhewn plank; I saw Jesus as a playboy and Lao-tze as an old gland-abandoned bachelor; I saw Jesus raising an imperious arm to damn his enemies and Lao-tze lowering his arms like broken wings; I saw Jesus as a romantic, Lao-tze as a classicist, Jesus as the flow, Lao-tze as the ebb, Jesus as spring, Lao-tze as autumn, Jesus as the embodiment of love for one’s neighbor, Lao-tze as the height of emptiness, Jesus as progressus ad futurum, Lao-tze as regressus ad originem.

Anyway, I went on pushing the green button and the red button until at last I’d thrown the final armful of repulsive bloodstained paper into the drum, cursing the butchers for cramming my cellar full of the stuff yet blessing them for bringing me Jesus and Lao-tze, so in the last bale I put a Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant, and the flesh flies went berserk, attacking the last bits of dried and drying blood with such gluttony that they failed to notice the drum wall crushing and compacting them, separating them into membranes and cells. I fastened the compacted cube with wire and wheeled it out, surrounded by what was left of the still-crazed flies, to join the fourteen other bales, all of which were also strewn with flies, green or metallic-blue flies shining on every black-red drop of blood, each bale like a gigantic side of beef hanging from a hook in a provincial butcher’s shop at hot high noon. I looked up and realized that Jesus and Lao-tze had disappeared up the whitewashed stairs like the turquoise and velvet-violet skirts of my Gypsy girls before them, and looked down and realized that my pitcher was empty, so I stumbled up the stairs on all threes, my head spinning from too loud a solitude, and not until I’d made it to the back alley and breathed some fresh air in my lungs cou...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight