Father – Thanatos – Theta. Chi cambia, muore. Whosoever changes the sequence of words or distorts their meaning will perish, so one cabbalistic treatise tells us, though I can’t recall its title nor the name of its author. My memory is in shreds, just like my father’s pyjamas. Out of piles of words, lumps of sentence, scraps of story it is my intention to braid, or should I say cobble together, a novel. How foolish! How pretentious! How vain! But she who hovers at my shoulder, she too, it seems, sees promise in my conduct: I feel the tremor of her impatience, a longing for the moment when she will see the light of day. What’s more, she no longer toys with the poet’s bones – the Russian diminutive kostički imposes itself, a word used by a Russian anatomist in a dream I once had – I took these kostički in my mouth and crunched them until their strange taste reached me. Had she been toying with the poet’s bones – transferring them from one container to another – in an attempt to fend off boredom, or because she wished to alert me to her presence? Without doubt I had forgotten about her. If that time I hadn’t plunged into Mácha’s poems – to check the dedication poem Máj [May] for words which rhymed, like “syn, vin” [son, wines], “máj, ráj” [May, paradise], a poem in which a whole story of love and death unfurls as if from the cocoon of a silkworm – and so hadn’t brushed up against their froufrou habit, perhaps she would have remained forgotten for several months more. “Hynek! Alexander! Daniela!” How many word-cocoons will be needed, how much slubbing and pupation, how much sloughing; how many transformations must I undergo before …?

And she who hovers about the bookcase – what if she slubs, pupates and sloughs her skin, what if she, too, transforms herself? Once I hung up for her a little bell I got from Alexander. Not because I wanted to make fun of her – I wouldn’t dare do that – but because I wanted to get closer to her. Perhaps I was hoping that this small but really fundamental change of clothes would change her in other ways, too, so that I would find her easier to mollify and she would at last take pity on Aunt Emily. Aunt Emily has not moved or spoken for four years; the last word she tried to write after coming round from her stroke began with “Smr”, then she raised her hand because the initial letter had loops which put me in mind of the Greek theta or zeta. The only result of my attempt to soften the being up, is this: ever since I hung the little bell I have been pretty much aware of her every movement. Of course, sometimes I can’t be sure that the bell was not stirred by the wind blowing from the Church of the Sacred Heart, which insinuates its way in under the buckled window frames, or whether it was touched by the princeling’s hand. At first he was startled when it set up its gentle peal, but then he smiled and said it was not as scary as it looked, it wasn’t as if it cast a shadow over your head like the one he had seen a month ago when he was working on the square in Lyons. Dr Schneider had taken him along. Parents had set their offspring on their shoulders so they might see the head of the murderer Legros as it thudded into the basket. It must be awful to know that in thirty seconds, one second, right now, your soul will be leaving your body and you will stop being a person: this you know for sure, and the certainty is the worst thing of all. Or perhaps the uncertainty is worse still – because you don’t know whether this really is the end of everything. He looked at me in astonishment.

Because I was moving the books around, had taken out the Rose of the World and the Fabled Menagerie, turned the other cheek (if we can speak of a cheek). At this moment my gaze rests on the picture in the gold frame. This was painted years ago by Jaroslav Koch in memory of my father, for whom, on 15th November 1984, death had come to Kubelíková Street. (At last I remember the words of the gypsy.) Above the stage is the arch of a triangular typanum, like those on Greek temples. The golden curtain is open and strapped back. At the sides of the stage the set is made up of panels – white at the front, light-grey immediately behind, then dark-grey. Right at the back we see empty plains and the horizon at dawn. Somewhere out there a flower sets off – a stem bends in the wind, its white blossom a flame. In the bowing of the blossom there is something wistful. There? Is it there I am supposed to go? Now that at last I have the picture in my hands and am looking at it up close, two rods become recognizable to the sides of the open, strapped-back curtain. Perhaps they are meant to be stage sentries, or theatre gates which will hold the curtain for the flower once it makes up its mind to go on stage. But for now the flower is frontstage, tossed about by the wind but held by invisible roots.

Or perhaps she’s not looking at the picture (which by now I’ve put back on the wall). Perhaps her gaze has worked its way through to the room of Mrs Šedivá, our next-door neighbour. All is quiet in there; we haven’t heard a single sound for three days. One might even think that Death has called in at Mrs Šedivá’s, too, nane man. Just a few days ago you could hear a swishing and a clattering, and the occasional bang. But the day before yesterday the room was cleared – how many times has it happened by now? Two workers in orange overalls brought out bags full of books and papers and took them away in the lift. I keep thinking of Mrs Šedivá, sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, paralysed with desperation. I seem to remember that this time Mrs Šedivá’s (or the Old Woman of Paper’s) flat wasn’t even full up, that at other times, too, she would leave little narrow paths between the heaps of old paper and books which rose to the ceiling. I don’t think the clear-out was ordered by Mrs Šedivá’s daughters, nor does it seem that the bags went straight to the dump as they usually do. They went to the police station, for careful examination. What if they find traces of blood, or even one of the limbs of the man who was quartered, the man whose arm was found in the one of the dustbins in the yard?

(from Daniela Hodrová, Komedie [A Comedy], Torst, 2003)

Translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland