Chapter 1.
“Mr Jelen? Hello. I’m Kratochvíl.”
“Hello.”
“You are Mr Jelen, aren’t you?”
“Mikuláš Jelen. Did Roman Rott send you? Or did Untermesser recommend me? What are you looking for?”
He laughed, shaking his head. “You don’t recognize me.”
“Should I recognize you?”
“Kratochvíl.”
“Sorry. I don’t know who you are, Mr Kratochvíl. Are you here for a book?”
“No, I’m not. We were at school together, remember? The elementary school in Schnirchova Street below Letná.”
“I don’t remember. Wait a minute… Boris? Your full name is Boris Kratochvíl, isn’t it?”
“We ought to call each other by our first names, Mikuláš, like we used to do. I can hardly believe that you wouldn’t recognize a classmate. Or are you just putting it on because you don’t want to recognize me?”
Thus spoke the man who walked into my shop at an exceptionally early hour: at seventeen minutes past nine, i.e. seventeen minutes after opening. Normal people don’t usually come in before midday.
What he had said was plain rude. Either you recognize me or you’re pretending. Nothing in between. How objectionable.
Yes, he did look familiar, now that I thought about it. The broad face of the ginger-haired, thickset boy who had gone around dressed like a petty official even when he was a child. It was still there in him. My classmate Boris.
“Sorry. It was a long time ago. I recognize you now.”
He looked at me, and I looked at him. It was awkward; I had always avoided encounters with former classmates, whom chance makes our fellow wayfarers in life for a short time; I kept myself to myself, independent of them. And so I made use of this rare opportunity and looked at myself through his eyes: inconspicuous even then (apart from the hand), a man of few means, a bachelor or a divorcé even then – that had already been written in his hand or his face at the age of ten. Now he’s about thirty-six. Zero to two children, maybe one child to support – with those nervous-looking eyes, he obviously didn’t intend to talk about that. He had opened a second-hand bookshop from a love of books, and before that he did this and that.
Career more or less non-existent.
Or did he know more about me?
“Hi, Boris.” I shook his hand. How long was it since I’d seen him? Twenty-five years? After a year of suffering in one class, fourth or fifth grade, he had moved away somewhere. I hated school. It was full of loud little people, all of them strangers. There were adult strangers there too, equally uncomprehending. Young or old, all of them looked at my hand when I went up to the blackboard.
“I imagine you’re looking for something,” I said. “I’d guess some erotica from the First Republic. Pictures or writing? Probably pictures, eh? I don’t have anything very interesting in stock, but I’ll make a note and ask around. Give me a month and I can get you anything you want. It also depends how much you’re willing to pay. Anything else?”
I found myself acting haughtily before I could stop myself.
“I’m not looking for a book, Mikuláš. I’m looking for you.”
“Really? Who told you about me?”
He made a face. “Nobody. You can find everything on the internet.”
“I don’t have a website,” I objected. Which was true. I refused to pay for that kind of publicity either in money or by accepting adverts. He smiled (a little too indulgently for my liking; he was putting on an act).
“Some people praised this little business of yours.”
“It isn’t a ‘little business’,” I protested, and Kratochvíl become more serious.
“Of course not, I’m sorry. Your second-hand bookshop has been in operation for quite a while, hasn’t it? A well-established business. It has excellent reviews. Don’t you read about it on the Net?”
“You guessed it.” (But the truth was that I enjoyed reading something positive about myself from time to time. I completely ignored negative reviews though, as soon as I came across a few critical words.) “But surely you didn’t look me up just to tell me that I run a good second-hand bookshop?”
“Maybe I did. You used to work in publishing.”
“That’s right,” I nodded.
“And you were also in the town library. For about three years?”
“Five years,” I admitted.
“Ordinary work, badly paid, lots of reading. Is anyone interested in this?”
“Always books,” he laughed, looking around at the shelves.
“That’s a good motto,” I said dryly. He stopped smiling.
“I came to tell you, Mikuláš, that I have a job for you. I’m offering you it.”
“I have a second-hand bookshop. That’s what I’m doing now. I don’t need a job. I’ve worked enough in my life.”
“It’s like you’re in retirement here,” he grimaced. “You’re thirty-five years old.”
“That’s nobody’s business but mine,” I snapped. I had been through enough. But I didn’t say that out loud. That was nobody’s business either. With his gaze fixed on the shelf marked CZECH FICTION, he mumbled that with the rent they wanted for this place I wouldn’t last long; a second-hand bookshop near the centre of Prague which didn’t focus on Pragensia, expensive fine-press publications and rare early printed books couldn’t stay in business for long. Then he named the amount which I pay the owner of the building each month.
The worst thing was that he was right. I could keep the shop going for another quarter of a year, but that was it. I was struggling to keep up with payments and a Russian had designs on the shop – he wanted to brew tea in a samovar and offer his compatriots the largest selection of second-hand books in Cyrillic script. From my selection of signs I chose one marked “taking delivery of books” and hung it on the glass door. People on the pavement passed by the shop window without even noticing. Above the shop I had a little room where I could rest, which was reached by a narrow spiral staircase. I invited Boris Kratochvíl upstairs and made coffee for him. I waited to see what he would say to me. And he launched into it and didn’t stop talking for a whole hour. This man, whom chance had once made my classmate and who had then disappeared from my life, had turned up here out of the blue and enthusiastically held forth about a phenomenal project which I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with but until then hadn’t had any reason to take an interest in. It concerned a stone quarry near Prague, which at one time had been much talked about on television and written about in the newspapers – it was a big political issue. “Quarry brings new hope,” said the enthusiasts. “Hopes killed stone dead,” said the sceptics. It was a long time since it had been a quarry. A hi-tech housing development had been built there – cityhouse, it was called, or something like that. A social/urbanistic/political centre away from the centre of Prague and the Czech Republic, paradoxically belonging to the somewhat rural Prague district of Zbraslav but living entirely, and incomprehensibly, on its own terms, or rather according to the rules that were postulated by its founder, Zikmund Kůn. The fact that he got away with it cost about ten local and national politicians their head. Whether it also cost Kůn a good deal of money, nobody was able to pin anything on him. They didn’t manage it in time.
(Translated by Graeme Dibble)