The Little Town Where Time Stood Still Read online

  BOHUMIL HRABAL (1914–1997) was born in Brno, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. More interested in poetry and the life of the brewery managed by his stepfather than in his studies, Hrabal eventually enrolled in the law faculty at Charles University in Prague. The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 led to the closing of the universities and Hrabal did not complete his degree until 1946. Not inclined to practice law and unable to find a publisher for his poetry once the Communist Party came to power in 1948, Hrabal held a long series of odd jobs, including notary clerk, warehouseman, railroad worker, insurance agent, traveling salesman, foreman in a foundry, wastepaper recycling center worker, and stagehand. In 1962 he became a full-time writer, but due to government restrictions was obliged to publish much of his work in underground editions or abroad. The motion-picture adaptation of his novella Closely Watched Trains brought Hrabal international recognition, including the 1967 Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, but only in 1976 was he “rehabilitated” by the government and permitted to publish select works. By the time of his death—he fell from a fifth-floor window in a Prague hospital, apparently trying to feed the birds—Hrabal was one of the world’s most famous Czech writers and the author of nearly fifty books. Among his other works available in English translation are I Served the King of England, Too Loud a Solitude, Harlequin’s Millions, and Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (published as an NYRB Classic).

  JAMES NAUGHTON (1950–2014) was a translator of Czech literature and poetry and a professor of Czech and Slovak language and literature at Oxford University. In addition to Cutting It Short and The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, he translated Hrabal’s Total Fears: Letters to Dubenka.

  JOSHUA COHEN is the author of eight books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, Witz, and, most recently, Book of Numbers. He is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, and lives in New York City.

  CUTTING IT SHORT

  and

  THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL

  BOHUMIL HRABAL

  Translated from the Czech by

  JAMES NAUGHTON

  Introduction by

  JOSHUA COHEN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Cutting it Short copyright © 1976 by Bohumil Hrabal; translation copyright © 1993 by James Naughton

  The Little Town Where Time Stood Still copyright © 1973 by Bohumil Hrabal; translation copyright

  © 1993 by James Naughton

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Joshua Cohen

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in Czech as Postřižiny and Městečko, kde se zastavil čas First published in the United Kingdom by Abacus, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group

  Cover image: Károly Escher, Bank Manager at the Baths, Budapest, 1938, Hungarian Museum of Photography; © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / HUNGART, Budapest Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hrabal, Bohumil, 1914–1997.

  [Mestecko, kde se zastavil cas. English]

  The little town where time stood still / Bohumil Hrabal; introduction by Joshua Cohen; translated by James Naughton.

  1 online resource. — (New York Review Books Classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-841-6 —ISBN 978-1-59017-840-9 (softcover)

  I. Naughton, J.

  D. (James D.), 1950—translator. II. Title.

  PG5039.18.R2M3513 2015

  891.8'635—dc23

  2015016469

  ISBN 978-1-59017-841-6

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Translator’s Note

  CUTTING IT SHORT

  THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL

  INTRODUCTION

  Having to read (let alone having to write) an introduction to the fiction of Bohumil Hrabal is like being forced to listen to beer-tasting notes before drinking your draft. Which I was forced to do, recently . . . Stopping in Prague on a day’s layover from Odessa I settled myself down in what I’d remembered as a hospitable hospoda, a cut-rate, run-of-the-mill pub, which, however, had become—in the span between my visit and when I’d lived in Prague in the early 2000s—an “artisanal microbrewery,” with the new track lighting and frosted-glass walls reframing the plank floors and tin ceilings not as Habsburgian or even Czechoslovakian relics but as postcapitalist, postindustrial chic. A waiter in tight jeans and a tuxedo T-shirt brought me a trilingual menu, though before I even had the chance to inform myself about the “sustainable” pork goulash and the “organic” flour dumplings, he began to patter on, in gourmet Esperanto, about “Žatec-sourced heirloom hops,” “creamy malts in the nose,” “pithy citrus in the finish,” “6 percent ABV,” until I wasn’t thirsty anymore—I was asleep.

  So, I’ll try to be brief.

  When I first came to Prague, in the summer of 2001, all I heard in the bars was: I was too late; I’d missed out on the Good Old Days, immediately after the Fall, when the bars never closed, day or night, and the absurdist playwright who was also the president would, every Sunday or so, sneak away from the castle for a pint. Now beer was too expensive, whores of every gender were too expensive, and smokers were being compelled to take their butts outside. Soon, with EU membership looming, even the yeast levels would be regulated, and the city would become Vienna Lite. By the time of my arrival, Hrabal—the greatest Czech novelist since Jaroslav Hašek (which is to say, since World War I)—had been dead for four years, after falling out of a hospital window while feeding the pigeons (though many who told me their Hrabal stories—and everyone told Hrabal stories—claimed that the writer had been depressed and jumped). “If only you’d been here for ’89,” witnesses to the Velvet Revolution would say to me, born in 1980. They had a point—but what would I have done with beer or whores at nine years old?

  Of course, the few Americans who’d been in the country under communism (mostly journalists, like Alan Levy, but also the animator Gene Deitch, who produced Tom and Jerry from Prague) directed the same Good Old Days rhetoric at the 1990s crowd of expats who were lecturing me, as did Czech novelists as diverse as Michal Ajvaz, Jáchym Topol, and Václav Kahuda, who though they never glorified the precarities of communism always spoke to ausländers about the ’80s, ’70s, and ’60s—their own childhoods—with a bittersweet boozy hint of nostalgia.

  Ja, ja, nostalgia: that state or faculty we’ve been instructed to mistrust because all the latest research tells us that the world of yesteryear—the gaping yearning hesternal—was never as sepia-beautiful, as black-and-white easy, as it seems, or seemed. It doesn’t take a Freud to relate the sentiment to childhood: If the past appears simpler, it was because in the past we were simpler too, or just nonexistent. To feel born too late for a true life (whatever that is), and to feel that as a failure and that failure as ennobling, are very Czech emotions. Or perhaps they became very Czech emotions because they were the themes of Hrabal’s best books, two of which have been bundled here: Cutting It Short and The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, published in 1976 and 1973 respectively—illegally—in samizdat.

  Cutting It Short, like Hrabal’s three volumes of memoirs, is narrated by a woman, though while the memoirs are narrated by the author’s wife, Cuttin
g It Short issues from the mouth of his mother, called here by her nickname, Maryška. She tells the tale of her romance with Francin, the shy, dignified manager of a brewery, and of the introduction of “the modern”—the characterization is Hrabal’s—to the little town of Nymburk, Nimburg in German, the author’s home in Bohemia, about a train’s hour east of Prague, perched on the banks of the Laba, or Elbe.

  The mythical innocence of Nymburk is abruptly severed—the Czech title is Postřižiny, a word referring to the Slavic and also Jewish tradition of ritualizing a child’s first haircut—by the debut of wireless telegraphy, aka the radio, which brings in voices from without to drown out all the familiar and familial voices within: the chatter and idle babble of the churchyard and market square. Once this innovation is publicized—it publicizes itself—everything else has to be interrupted (or, as the Silicon Valleyists now say, “disrupted”), cut short: The mischievous Maryška snips her hemlines to expose her knees; she saws the legs off tables and chairs; she takes a knife to truncate her dog’s tail; and eventually even has her celebrated locks of flowing blond trimmed off—that hair her barber describes as the “last surviving link with the old Austria,” meaning with the Austro-Hungarian Empire—so that she can ride her bicycle à la mode, with an aerodynamic crop like Josephine Baker’s. What Hrabal has set in motion are two cyclical plots that race each other to embody the metaphysics of history in a manner infinitely more enjoyable, and more joyous, than anything in the pages of Hegel or Spengler: Maryška’s loss of youth, symbolized by her haircut as much as by her marriage, speeds alongside the town’s loss of youth, the cause of which is mechanization, where horses are replaced by trucks, human labor is replaced by the dynamo, and local oral lore becomes transmitted globally. All the olden stories must be written down—or formalized through recording and broadcast—because the technology demands it, and all the olden storytellers are dying.

  Preeminent among whom is Uncle Pepin—a character based on Hrabal’s own uncle, an itinerant cobbler and inveterate tippler who, in Cutting It Short and The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, is said to have come to the brewery for a fortnight’s visit, but stuck around for decades. The Little Town Where Time Stood Still—the English title is an exact translation, though Czech, a language that specializes in diminutives, can compress “Little Town” to “Městečko” without risking the preciousness of “village”—is in every way his book, despite it being narrated by his nephew, the son of Maryška and Francin, who’s anonymous but quite winkingly Hrabal. The Little Town Where Time Stood Still proceeds in much the same way Cutting It Short does, anecdotally, as Uncle Pepin’s swagger, blather, and tendency to repeat himself provide his nephew with both subject and style. Everything is outsize, aggrandized—violence is casual and caustically funny, even when the Nazis invade and occupy the brewery (no mention is made of the invasion and occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia). The day Reichsprotektor Heydrich is assassinated all carousal is banned (the announcement is delivered by radio). But Uncle Pepin—a Good Soldier Švejk—like veteran of the Austrian army, which he describes, in Hrabal’s novel Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, as “the most elegant army in the world”—keeps antagonizing Friedrich, the Nazi engineer who’s usurped Francin’s job: “If only we had a hundred Austrian divisions, my God, we’d soon have you lot beat! Old Freiherr von Wucherer would give the order: ‘Vorwärts! Nach Berlin!’ and we’d beat the lot of you.” Everything was better under the emperor—the drinking, the dancing, even the fighting —at least according to Hrabal, who was born in 1914.

  World War II, and the subsequent reorganization of the brewery along socialist lines, spells the end for Uncle Pepin, who fades away like a photograph in the nursing home that Hrabal immortalized in another novel, Harlequin’s Millions. That is, he stops speaking—he cannot, or will not, gloat, joke, or even flirt with a nurse, and it’s this deprivation or surrendering of his “palaver” (Josef Škvorecký’s translation of Hrabal’s term pábení) that paves the way—like asphalt over the cobblestones—to death.

  So time stands still, or can be made to stand still, just as long as a tongue transfixes it . . . That’s all the insight I have, my lovelies, or all that I can bear to give you before turning you loose on this foamy, heady volume, which also makes an excellent coaster. You’re supposed to laugh, you’re supposed to read fast—like this is all just a cartoon or a fast-forwarded slapstick sequence, like life.

  —JOSHUA COHEN

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Cutting It Short follows the text of the first edition of Postřižiny as published by Československý spisovatel, Prague, 1976. Its sequel, The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, follows the text of the author’s original 1973 typescript Městečko, kde se zastavil čas, as used for the editions by Odeon, Prague, 1991, Sixty-Eight Publishers, Toronto, 1989, and Comenius, Innsbruck, 1978.

  CUTTING IT SHORT

  La Bovary, c’est moi

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  1

  I like those few minutes before seven o’clock at night, when, as a young wife, with rags and a crumpled copy of the newspaper National Politics, I clean the glass cylinders of the lamps, with a match I rub off the blackened ends of the burnt wicks, I put the brass caps back, and at seven o’clock precisely that wonderful moment comes when the brewery machinery ceases to function, and the dynamo pumping the electric current around to all the places where the light bulbs shine, the dynamo starts to turn more slowly, and as the electricity weakens, so does the light from the bulbs, slowly the white light grows pink and the pink light grey, filtered through crape and organdie, till the tungsten filaments project red rachitic fingers at the ceiling, a red violin key. Then I light the wick, put on the cylinder, draw out the little yellow tongue of flame, put on the milky shade decorated with porcelain roses. I like those few minutes before seven o’clock in the evening, I like looking upward for those few minutes when the light drains from the bulb like blood from the cut throat of a cock, I like looking at that fading signature of the electric current, and I dread the day the mains will be brought to the brewery and all the brewery lamps, all the airy lamps in the stables, the lamps with round mirrors, all those portly lamps with round wicks one day will cease to be lit, no one will prize their light, for all this ceremonial will be replaced by the light-switch resembling the water tap which replaced the wonderful pumps. I like my burning lamps, in whose light I carry plates and cutlery to the table, open newspapers or books, I like the lamp-lit illumined hands resting just so on the tablecloth, human severed hands, in whose manuscript of wrinkles one may read the character of the one to whom these hands belong, I like the portable paraffin lamps with which I go out of an evening to meet visitors, to shine them in their faces and show them the way, I like the lamps in whose light I crochet curtains and dream deeply, lamps which if extinguished with an abrupt breath emit an acrid smell whose reproach inundates the darkened room. Would that I might find the strength, when the electricity comes to the brewery, to light the lamps at least once a week for one evening and listen to the melodic hissing of the yellow light, which casts deep shadows and compels one into careful locomotion and dreaming.

  Francin lit in the office the two portly lamps with their round wicks, two lamps continuously bubbling on like two housekeepers, lamps standing on the edges of a great table, lamps emitting warmth like a stove, lamps sipping paraffin with huge appetite. The green shades of these portly lamps cut off almost with a ruler’s edge the areas of light and shadow, so that when I looked in the office window Francin was always split in two, into one Francin soaked in vitriol and another Francin swallowed up in gloom. These tubby brass contraptions, in which the wick was adjusted up or down by a horizontal screw, these brass skeps had a huge draught, so much oxygen did these lamps of Francin’s need that they vacuumed up the air around them, so that when Francin placed his cigarette in the vicinity of the lamps the brass hive mouth sucked in ribbons of blue smoke, and the cigarette smoke, as it reached
the magic circle of those portly lamps, was mercilessly sucked in and up the draught of the glass cylinder, consumed by the flame, which shone greenishly about the cap like the light given off by a rotted stump of wood, a light like a will-o’-the-wisp, like St Elmo’s fire, like the Holy Spirit, which came down in the form of a purple flame hovering over the fat yellow light of the round wick. And Francin entered by the light of these lamps in the outspread brewery books the output of beer, receipts and outgoings, he compiled the weekly and monthly reports, and at the end of every year established the balance for the whole calendar year, and the pages of these books glistened like starched shirt-fronts. When Francin turned the page, these two portly lamps fussed over every motion, threatening to blow out, they squawked, those lamps, as if they were two great birds disturbed out of their sleep, those two lamps positively twitched crossly with their long necks, casting on the ceiling those constantly palpitating shadow-plays of antediluvian beasts, on the ceiling in those half shadows I always saw flapping elephant ears, palpitating rib-cages of skeletons, two great moths impaled on the stake of light ascending from the glass cylinder right up to the ceiling, where over each lamp there shone a round dazzling mirror, a sharply illumined silver coin, which constantly, scarcely perceptibly, but nevertheless shifted about, and expressed the mood of each lamp. Francin, when he turned the page, wrote again the headings with the names and surnames of the public-house landlords. He took a number three lettering pen, and as in the old missals and solemn charters, Francin gave each initial letter in the headings ornaments full of decorative curlicues and billowing lines of force, for, when I sat in the office and gazed out of the gloom at his hands, which anointed those office lamps with bleaching-powder, I always had the impression that Francin made those ornamental initials along the lines of my hair, that it gave him the inspiration, he always gave a look at my hair, out of which the light sparkled, I saw in the mirror that wherever I was in the evening, there in my coiffure and the quality of my hair there was always one lamp more. With the lettering pen Francin wrote the basic initial letters, then he took fine pens and as the mood took him dipped them alternately in green and blue and red inks and round the initials began to trace my billowing hair, and like the rose bush growing over and about the arbour, so with the thick netting and branching of the lines of force in my hair Francin ornamented the initial letters of the names and surnames of the public house landlords.