Signals in the Fog

My father had four brothers. They lived with their parents in a small town in which all the sons with the exception of my father remained. Their father, my grandfather, had a workshop where – home again from his job at the factory – he would repair the motorcycles of everyone in town. All the sons with the exception of my father would help him do this.

Dad was the eldest child and one day the workshop would be his to inherit. But all he was interested in was football. So while my uncles were learning how to clean spark plugs and carburettors, my father was teaching himself to dribble and take corner kicks. When my uncles came back from the military, they got jobs straight away at the local mechanic’s workshop; my father played for Dukla Písek when he was in the military, and after his service was over he simply moved to another club.

Before I was born my father moved to a better club and when I was three he moved again to become the Kostelec team captain. Then my grandad died and Dad renounced his right to the workshop in favour of his brothers.

Most Sundays Dad had a match and the whole family would go there with him, even when it was all the way across the republic. That’s what our Sundays were like. Sometimes we had to get up when it was still dark because we needed to be there at least two hours before the match started. Dad didn’t eat anything, or maybe just a drop of beef broth, then he found a seat for Mum somewhere in the stands and one for me right there on the “subs’ bench”. After that he disappeared off into the changing rooms.

If there was no match we went to visit my uncles. We would set off later and arrive there in time for lunch. My uncles would open the big metal gate, ease out their battered old Skodas (parking them on the roadside), and we would enter the drive in the beautiful, shiny car I was so proud of. Everyone got his hand pumped, we had our meal, and then my uncles would lift up the bonnet of our car, stick their heads inside and shout to my father that he should step on the gas or the brake. Or else they jacked the car up and looked at it from underneath. Then Grandma came out and said it was dinner-time, after which my uncles poured out the wine. It was always the same; after a while, Dad was the only one who was doing any talking. He gave a retelling of all the matches he’d played in since our last visit, describing all the passes and corners, pulling from his wallet or bag newspaper cuttings bearing his picture and articles in which he was mentioned. He handed these to Grandma and she received them in the same hands she had once used to turn on the radio for news of what was happening at the front.

Then the cuttings were handed on and round, first among the uncles and then among their wives and all my cousins, even though we knew that next day they’d be calling Dad a show-off.

But then all of a sudden Dad stopped being the captain, and on those evenings with my uncles his tales were supported by fewer and fewer cuttings. I was still sitting on the subs’ bench but no longer was Dad playing to the gallery for me. Then came the match when Dad got injured. They were in mid-jump when the opponent drove his elbow into Dad’s throat. It hurt Dad for ages and then after a few months it started to hurt him even more, but he didn’t want to go to the doctor’s with it because he needed to train. He was hoping that by working hard he’d get his form back so he only went to the doctor’s when he started to have problems with his breathing. The doctor immediately sent him to another doctor, and then he didn’t come home. Some people who used to watch him play arranged for Dad to go to the best clinic around, where they operated in an attempt to remove a tumour from his throat. They screwed something into his mouth to keep it as wide open as possible, but still it wasn’t enough and in the end they cut his throat out from the outside and the operation took so long that the whole clinic ran out of the right blood to give him and the ambulance drivers drove round all the other hospitals to get more supplies to save him with.

When at last he was in a position to receive visitors, my uncles were waiting outside his door. They looked very happy and told Dad he was lucky; but as soon as they got outside they turned serious and said it was good luck, too, that Dad couldn’t talk or ask any questions, otherwise he’d be asking where Grandma was. The best thing for him now was rest, and surely it would have caused him excitement to find out that Grandma was lying in another hospital after a heart attack.

But eventually Grandma got better; Dad made a complete recovery, too. From that time on he wore a polo-neck whenever he could. And he didn’t laugh as much as he had done before. Apparently because when he’d had the operation to open up his jaw they’d torn the corners of his mouth with the tool. And it was true that in those places he had these long and stiff-looking scars, but he just didn’t laugh so much because he never got back into the team.

And now when we went to my uncles’ Dad still talked about football, still went over his famous penalties and corner kicks, but he was telling us things we’d heard before. There were no new cuttings he could bring with him; now he worked in a factory, where he was responsible for the siding. The people still filled the stadium, but no longer did they scream and drive their fists into boards at the front of the stands for Dad.

One day Dad took out from the cupboard his box of newspaper cuttings and spent ages going through them. Then he went back to the cupboard and fished about in it again, this time bringing out his football boots. Then for ages he rubbed polish into them and Mum didn’t say anything even though he was cleaning them at the freshly-laid kitchen table. The next day we got into the car and drove towards my uncles’. But instead of going straight up the drive we went to the stadium. The stadium was full of people and my uncles were waiting for us there.

The local club was celebrating its seventieth anniversary and a match had been arranged between the current team and a team of veterans. When he came back from the changing rooms Dad was smiling as much as the corners of his mouth allowed. He was wearing the Number Seven shirt and the captain’s armband. Dad was superstitious. With all the clubs he’d played for in his glory years he’d worn only the Number Seven, and he was really pleased that this hadn’t been forgotten. My uncles, my aunts, Grandma and all my cousins made for the stands and I – even though I was big now – took my place on the “subs’ bench” just like I used to. I sat there and watched Dad warming up.

A man at the front of the crowd pointed at Dad and said to his neighbour, “See that Number Seven. He started off with us. When he was still a teenager. When he was still good he could score a goal straight from a corner, and he could take the ball from the keeper in his own penalty area and dribble with it the length of the pitch, get their keeper to commit himself, stop the ball on the goal-line and then calmly get to his knees and, before anyone could run back, nudge it over with his head.”

And Dad heard it. He finished with his warm-up, sat down next to me, watched the stands filling up, and held me by the elbow. Then the referee blew his whistle and the players went forward for the toss.

The match soon got going. My father was all over the field: no sooner had the ball landed in the possession of the veterans’ keeper than Dad was at his side. He took the ball onto his foot, tossed it to his head, then ducked so that it fell to his chest, which he then thrust outwards to propel the ball ahead of him. And Dad was off in pursuit.

First he dribbled around his veteran team-mates, who, from the way they were watching him, didn’t seem to understand what he was doing. Then he set about his opponents, who tried to take the ball from him, and as soon as he was through he headed for goal.

He ran as he’d run in his younger days, when he was still on the top of his form. But suddenly, out of the blue, when he was at maximum speed, you might say, he stopped. The ball, which he had been urging ahead of him, took a few rolls more, then it, too, came to a stop. The keeper ran out and booted the ball up the opposite end of the field, where the play resumed. But Dad stood where he was.

Probably nobody except us was even watching him – the veterans were in a mighty struggle to defend their goal – when Dad suddenly yelled out the names of my uncles. Then he yelled out again because his voice was coming out all funny and weak, or maybe so that my uncles had time to realize the problem. For me, though, it long remained a puzzle how they had known what was wrong.

My fat-bellied uncles suddenly jumped out of the stands and even hurdled over the boards before running onto the pitch. And they didn’t ask Dad a single question. Two of them grabbed hold of him under the arms – one at either side – and they dragged him off, away from the people to the wooden bench; one of them buried Dad’s face in his shoulder so the people wouldn’t see that Dad was crying, and another massaged his legs, while the other two bribed the ambulance driver so he’d take Dad home in the ambulance, so that it would look like Dad had failed to reach the goal because he’d got injured, because he’d strained a ligament or dislocated a knee or something. They did whatever they could to spare him the public humiliation of pulling up not because he was injured but because he was old, of pulling up within clear sight of goal because his strength had deserted him: the little that remained to him he had used to get back to his shaking feet and spare himself the shame of falling over again.

It seems they really didn’t speak at all until the big metal gate to their yard was closed behind them, at which point Dad embraced each of my uncles in turn.

For a long time after this we didn’t go to my uncles’, even though our rusting, once so beautiful car could have done with the run. Then one day Dad came back from work on foot; he’d sold the car. With the money from it he later bought a nearly-new Skoda. And it was in this that at last we drove out to my uncles’. They opened the big gate for us to drive in, but Dad parked out on the street in front.

My uncles came out and took a look at our new car. Dad got out and said, “You’re going to have to give me a few lessons, lads, so I don’t make a nuisance of myself as soon as this one starts to fall to bits as well.” My uncles laughed and the oldest one said, “You know how much we like to play about with these things, kiddo.”

They were all quite old by now, but it was the first time I’d heard them call Dad ‘kiddo’. They sat down at the table and one of my uncles poured the wine out. Instead of starting to talk about football Dad asked my uncles if they remembered playing soldiers in the tall wheat by the Elbe. My uncles’ eyes brightened at once; they nodded their heads and proceeded to remember all kinds of other stories that we got to hear for the first time as well. So we just sat there and listened. My aunts didn’t go running off to make open sandwiches and my cousins forgot that they’d wanted to go to the dance. My uncles were smiling a lot and so was Dad, at least as much as the corners of his mouth allowed him to. He kept smiling late into the night, though by this time the others had long been sitting there in silence.

Suddenly he looked off somewhere into the distance and said, “Do you remember that time Dad bought a ship’s horn off someone, which they’d had in the mountains and was sounded if someone got lost in the fog. You know what I mean – it was on the roof behind the chimney. If Dad sounded the thing five times I had to run into the yard as quickly as I could; three times and it was Karel who had to run, once and it was Jarda. We had to leave whatever we were doing and run straight home; it didn’t matter where we were. We were always disappearing off somewhere, and this way Dad knew he could get hold of us.”

My middle uncle laughed and said, “And if the horn sounded six times, we all had to come back.”

My second uncle got up without saying anything and a moment later the blaring noise started. Dad and my uncle counted together: “Two … three … four … five … six.” Six signals sounding in the darkness.

(Translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland)