I’m walking across burning hillsides. The heady scent of scorched grass, scorched flowers, the heady scent of ash and smoke. Whipping tongues of red flame to my left and right, shivering on the horizon and behind me. Up above the smoke the fluttering wings of a luňák (I don’t know what kind of kite it is; the Czechs on the hillsides of the Banat call every bird of prey a luňák; this beautiful word has kindled my fancy and I’ve started to use it; it’s a glimmer from a forgotten poem by Čelakovský blown up by the flames of the local language, as old as Čelakovský himself) . . . Above the smoke the fluttering wings of a luňák, in the gaps between the humps, the glimmer and flash of the Danube through the smoke . . .
The first time I came across a hillside on fire, I was surprised, even disgusted. The ocean of flames rolling up the ridged hillside seemed to me barbaric, brutal. Started deliberately by humans, but completely uncontrollable . . . Gradually I started to revel in lighted plains (I do indeed have a flask of distilled spirit in my pocket, but—although I take a sip from time to time—the intoxication originates in the dry, brutal, red fire); the barbarism, the taste of ash (not the scent—when you walk across burning hillsides, the smoke and ash get into your mouth, so it’s the taste of ash, the taste of smoke, not merely the scent; oh God, let me one day be capable of describing the subtle border where scent crosses over into taste!), the glow, the hopeless loss of grass, flowers, wretched insects . . . I’m possessed by a childlike intoxication: as a child I threw handfuls of dry grass into fires, I burned the flowers of bulrushes (when we pretended we were smoking cigars), I buried potatoes in the ash and liked best to eat the burned, really charred bits . . . Here, the obsession with fire had returned; not a compulsive, pyromaniacal obsession, but a childlike, human one . . . Without fire, survival is impossible here . . . In winter I made, maintained, and treasured a fire every single day. I learned the local ways of fire-making—at first these, too, struck me as barbaric, but now I get a fire going using either the scraped middle of a corncob soaked in diesel oil or a scrap of rubber inner tube . . . I’ve come to like other celebrations of fire, too, that town people would consider dreadful—on Walpurgis Night a great many tyres are thrown into pits and black smoke rises above the hills; overexcited old women in nineteenth-century folk costume beg kids to give them half-empty spray cans to throw into the flames—crack, crack, bang, bang. Joey, Looey, give me another spray can, pleads a laughing, toothless crone, flames in her eyes, a child’s flames . . .
I walk across hillsides on fire. I turn around again and again (the luňák is still hovering somewhere above the smoke, fluttering its wings, rapidly). Suddenly I’m terribly anxious; I turn and turn, the flames are everywhere. I’m standing in the middle of hillsides on fire, with no escape. I stop turning and just stand there; the taste of ash in my mouth turns bitter; now the smell of smoke is stifling, not pleasing; agitation twists within me like burnt straw . . . Do I taste burnt clothing, flesh, and hair? Do I taste the horror of boiling blood? Cough: now I’m coughing up what a few moments ago I was breathing in hungrily . . . I need to calm down, wipe the ashy tears from my eyes and try to find an escape route . . . That way, yes, that way; over there on that hump, in the direction of the Danube—a dusty path of white pebbles, which won’t burn; yes, that way, over there along the band of white in front of the undulating wall of flame, hopefully leading to that island of green the flames haven’t reached . . . The luňák has disappeared. I wipe the sweat and soot from my brow—the salt taste of tears mingles with the taste of ash. I hurry towards the white path, across still-green grass and black grass (crispy and thin, like the hair of a brunette). My heart is still restless, pounding, pounding, red hot with agitation and hope . . .
Memory and wind
I believed I could control the wind; as a little boy in kindergarten, I believed I could control the wind. Especially in that first autumn of my memory that hasn’t fallen into the void, has stayed with me, is here still . . . Children in kindergarten; in a town in North Bohemia, a tough housing estate aptly named “North”; and I move the wind, I command it to go in a certain direction, over the meadow to the volcanic heights, or from the volcanoes towards the housing blocks . . . We’re gathering leaves; it’s our task to collect leaves in the park. I run as far as the summerhouse, which is where it happens, where it comes to me: memory and wind . . . I’m standing in a summerhouse in a town in North Bohemia; not far away some other kids are racing around the flattened, ancient gravestones of a Jewish cemetery (some of them try to pick the Hebrew lettering from the sandstone; Hebrew letters behind the nails of children’s fingers). I’m standing in the summerhouse, my arms filled with red-coloured maple leaves. The air is fresh, although there is a scent of decomposition; the air is pure, the summerhouse enchanting (though actually marred by the urine and vomit of drunkards). From the dark of oblivion I run suddenly into the keen light of memory: I plunge into the summerhouse, which will not now disappear, which now will remain . . . Then we all go to the meadow, to the railway tracks. We run around the crab-apple tree and eat tiny, bitter apples. And I know that I can move the wind. And I have no idea that I’ve plunged into a memory that persists even after years of autumns in the Banat, and that I’ll be standing in that summerhouse even when I’m on a decomposing hillside somewhere very different . . . How about I try again to move the wind? How about I try to turn it around, so that suddenly it’ll be moving against the Danube’s flow, rushing towards the Serbian border, churning up fallen leaves on the hillside opposite, dancing in eddies from one Stations of the Cross chapel to the next? Autumn, wind, memory; a summerhouse that’s probably been gone for years; leaves that have decomposed to nothing yet never perish. My arms contract, my hands are ever smaller relative to the red maple leaf. And the wind obeys. The wind obeys me. On my hillside the leaves eddy—North Bohemian leaves from long ago, absorbed by the Banat wind of today . . .
Tell me about when you were little, granny
“Tell me about when you were little, Granny.” “But I’ve told you a hundred times.” “Go on.” It’s dark. The window is open and the little wooden hut is flooded with the fragrant air of the forest. The warm air of a July night. I’m lying under a blanket with no cover. I’m small and fair-haired: as sometimes happens with dark, brown-haired children, in summer my hair always goes lighter all over . . . I’m weary from a day spent walking in the forest. Granny is lying near me. Here, in this hut in a clearing in the middle of a forest, we are alone. A long time ago the head forester, a friend of Grandpa’s, allowed our family to build the hut . . . I’m lying under a heavenly blanket on a heavenly plank-bed in the middle of a heavenly forest, yet there’s something I need before I drift off into heavenly sleep: pictures from a past time, when the old lady lying near me was the kind of fair-haired child I am now . . . I know the pictures (they’re not really stories) by heart, and for that reason I want to hear them again and again, as I fall asleep, as sleep closes in on me . . . And Granny talks, in a tired, drowsy voice . . . of Libušin, of how she used to keep a cow and some ducks (or were they geese?), of fruit trees, of the Indian summer and potatoes baking with their tubers on . . .
No one tells me stories here. I’m shivering with fever (how many times have I been like this during this endless winter?), and I need to get up every hour to throw a few fresh, snow-white hornbeam logs, which hardly burn at all, into the gluttonous, rusty old stove. Once the bucket is empty, I’ll have to go to the yard (but it’ll be morning then, and light), where I’ll have to dig through to the woodpile with a shovel and use an old, blunt axe to chop up another bucketful. Then another and another, to build up a bit of a store. In the house I tip the logs into a chest painted green (maybe women used it in past times to store expensive clothes) . . . I shiver with a cold a thousand kilometres away from the hut; decades older and black-haired (here in the village I—a stranger from the northwest—am the only one who looks like a true man of the Balkans) . . . Yearning for the old stories, I close my eyes to darkness (just the glowing red slit of the stove): Tell me, Granny, tell me . . . But the images blur and come together with images from that summer; the cows and ducks come together with cows and ducks from local farms; the taste of potatoes is the taste of potatoes given to me this year in the fields above the Danube by the Kučera boys; the Libušin fruit of long ago is the fruit of local hillsides . . . My fever is suddenly more intense: on this frozen night I realize that this is exactly how my grandmother lived—a few years ago I had got into my car, driven a few hundred crazy kilometres along the Danube and found myself in her childhood, in a different, older, quieter, sweeter-smelling time. I have her within reach. I could go to Libušin (where I’ve never been) a thousand times in search of her stories, but I’d find nothing there. But here, in the hills of the Banat, I’ve fallen into these stories willy-nilly; I’m a part of their pastoral, rustic tableaux; I’ve fallen into the pictures I loved long ago, in childhood, in summer nights spent in the forest . . .
I will not fly
As a child I believed that I would learn to fly—even though I knew that it wasn’t normal and that no one in the world could actually do it. I had this great yearning to fly like a bird, and I believed that a yearning to fly would eventually result in my being able to do so. It was not a matter of will; I didn’t have the idea that I would somehow force a change in reality (even then I was able to make a clear distinction—not in words, but in thought). No, it wasn’t will, but it was faith that I would grow wings by sheer desire, that by sheer desire I would become weightless, that by sheer desire my bones would be filled with air and I would be borne upwards, upwards . . .
I’m sitting on my hillside, birds flitting about above me, three kites soaring over the hillside opposite . . . Although the yearning has not diminished, my faith has been lost. I’d like to fly just as I wanted to fly then, over the housing estate in north Bohemia, but I know that it’s not going to happen; here—on the blossoming hillsides of the Banat—I know that I’ll never fly . . . A bird flies through the air right above me with its wings almost laid against its body; it has pierced the air like an arrow, like a miracle—no outstretched wings, no flapping of any kind; as though it were still and someone down below had yanked the earth away . . . I often come here to watch miracles and ways of flying: magpies and ravens, kites and swallows, geese . . .
Whenever I stood over the Ploučnice River (since I was small I’ve been able to stare at water for hours) I would have the feeling that my yearning would force the green wave to carry my shadow—the shadow I had cast onto the surface—far away. I always had the feeling that the shadow only just managed to get away . . . I didn’t know any Chinese poetry, so I didn’t know about drowning reflections and drowning moons, yet I wanted the river to carry my shadow off into the distance. I imagined going without my shadow to the St Mary Magdalene Church on the opposite bank, to my piano lesson, to the gym, to school; I imagined running across the meadow and kicking a ball, without my shadow. And all the while my shadow was sailing into the distance; at night it disappeared, but with the morning it revived on the waves of rivers, on the waves of seas, on the waves of oceans. I was able to entertain myself with this fantasy for hours, days, weeks, years; later, too, as I stood over the Svratka and Svitava rivers, but that was more out of defiance. (I would drive the shadow away frantically, in the full knowledge that it would not get lost, that it would not float away . . . )
I’m not going to fly; but when on Sundays I’m sitting in church—that white church at the bottom of the hill; when I’m sitting in church (in my own place, by the Eighth Station of the Cross: Jesus admonishes the weeping women), I believe that perhaps I will fly after all—at a different time and in a different way, but still a little like I always wanted to . . . And sometimes in the early evening, when I’m standing down by the Danube, staring at my lengthening shadow in the waves, I realize what a miracle it is that the waves shake it about and tear it off just a little, although they never separate it from me entirely (sometimes even the shadow of a water bird crosses the shadow of my body); and the shivering waves and the shivering shadow (now this really is a miracle) flood my insides, and I’m floating in a state of weightlessness over the wide plain of water; I’m floating . . .
