God’s Rainbow

Jaroslav Durych

Translated by David Short

Published by Charles University in Prague,

Karolinum Press

www.karolinum.cz

ebooks@karolinum.cz

Cover by Zdeněk Ziegler

First English edition

© Charles University in Prague, 2016

Text © Jaroslav Durych – heirs c/o Dilia, 2016

Translation © David Short, 2016

Afterword © Rajendra A. Chitnis and Jan Linka, 2016

Translator’s Note © David Short, 2016

Illustrations © Jiří Grus, 2016

This book was kindly supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

ISBN 978-80-246-3291-9 (hb)

ISBN 978-80-246-3488-3 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-3322-0 (ePub)

ISBN 978-80-246-3489-0 (Kindle)

There used to be times when, having been seated on a train for several hours, it would begin to dawn on me what I’d forgotten to bring. Back then it wasn’t so serious. If I did leave something behind, I rarely regretted it much, because I usually managed perfectly well without it. But this time I was into the fifth day of my journey when I discovered that I had left behind the most important thing of all, namely my better judgement. That had never happened before. How had it happened now?

Well, happened it had. And to the extent that I was quite calm thinking about it, this was actually no odder than that I might ever have had any better judgement at all and that I might subsequently have left even that at home. Such things can and do happen. When all’s said and done, if I had acquired some, it was certainly no thanks to any effort on my part, but due more to my incaution, as may occasionally happen to a fish that snaps at something in murky water only for it to get stuck in its mouth and stay there. Thus I, too, had snapped at something in the stagnant sludge beds of my senses, having not the slightest inkling what it might be, and there it was. I’m sure I was no happier about it than the fish about the hook in its mouth, or a dancing bear about the ring in its nose, and I certainly have no recollection of how and from what I recognised that the disagreeable thing that caused me moments of anguish did have a value. Later, though, it brought me occasional gratification. I savoured it, licking and turning it in the wound, and then we grew so accustomed to each other that it stopped aching and pricking and pinching until finally, without my even noticing it, it worked itself loose from the wound and almost fell to the ground at my feet. So I learned how to fix it in and take it out like a gypsy girl’s earring, sometimes showing it off in all its lustre, sometimes hiding it as a philandering husband hides his wedding ring. After all, it’s not always best judged to exhibit one’s better judgement. And that’s exactly how I could have happened to leave it at home.

As noted, I only spotted this unfortunate oversight on the fifth day, and not because I’d started to hanker after it. It dawned on me that it was missing in the way I might miss something that isn’t particularly essential, but which I’m used to having on me more from habit; I hardly need say that it doesn’t weigh much. And yet I was perturbed. Should I have gone back for it?

Certainly not! From the very outset, that journey was evidence enough that the very idea of it had arisen in defiance of the principles of sound judgement. They wouldn’t have got along together. So?

There are journeys and journeys. And this was a special one. No one had forced me to undertake it. No one had imposed it on me as a penance. I had sought no one’s advice about it and I would not have been deflected from undertaking it by either warnings from friends, or by the dangers and discomforts without which it couldn’t have taken place. I had meant to decide on my actual destination only once I was on the way, having selected a region that was little known and even less accessible.

But what was I after?

Well, the choice was mine, wasn’t it? To seek seclusion, oblivion and much needed repose, to nurse body and soul and ponder on death and the life to come, as doubtless befits one of my years. But if that were all! Doubtless I might even have seen and admired myself in the mirror of perfection, for therein resides the culmination of all the most precious distractions, and who can resist the urge to have their impeccable charms revealed? Not I for one. Oh, I have seen myself already! Look, there I am! How refined I’m becoming! How I’m getting the better of temptation, of myself, of the world. I’m sure I might have drooled in anticipation. And rightly so. No one who hasn’t tried it can believe what it must be like to worship one’s own puerility.

However, all that would have been foolish and risible. After all, I could easily have done any of it at home, and it would have been more sensible and above all more genuine. If the point was to rectify my failings, why not go about it at the place where I had committed the offenses? Why escape to some secluded place? Surely that is only permitted when one is being tantalised by a woman, and I am pretty sure that by that age I was being tantalised by none.

But it was worse than that. During those hapless years when I’d looked penury in the face, all the lures of perfection were nothing short of repugnant, and what drove me to embark upon such a strange journey was an impious self-pity, which had grown toxic with my advancing years, and a blasphemous contumacy. And that had often left me feeling apprehensive, because I couldn’t trust the living, and I would have been ashamed of myself before the dead. Too late now though! I was on my way.

Oh, old age, you miserable thing! How happily do you descend from your heights to the pit where the carcasses of vain dreams and desires lie interred! How gladly you go back to places you should not! And why? Is it really so unbearable for the time spent awaiting death to be protracted, or is death unworthy of being awaited with greater patience than one’s wedding night? Why are you so sold on it? Where do you think you’re going, having donned a ridiculous mask of obduracy, as if, after a thousand days’ fasting and a thousand days’ praying, you meant to blaspheme mortally? That kind of defiance will gain you nothing. Or are you still impelled to have a good weep over the phantoms of your unaccomplished sins? Do you wish to stir them up like a swarm of rabid flies and wait to see yourself go mad?

The people whom I met and talked to doubtless thought that I was insane, being incapable of concealing how sorry they felt for me. But seeing that I was in earnest, and being quite well-meaning, they tried to smooth my troublesome passage, assisting me by word or deed, and thus I reached the furthermost little town to which I could travel, with all my luggage, by some means of transport or other, thence to trudge onwards on foot. The sight of me would certainly have made a cat laugh. Look, a man well into his sixties, unaccustomed to physical exertion and not in the best of health, heading out, stick in hand and a heavy rucksack on his back, for some place where even crows would croak themselves to death, but where he wishes to live alone, quite alone, although he is generally clueless and woefully lacking in experience.

But there I was, on the way. I’d left my larger items of luggage with some kindly folk in the town and kept with me just enough to see me through ten days or so, so at first the going was fairly good. Then it got harder. Not so much on the shoulders, or on the lower back. It was hardest on the eyes, then on the mouth and the ears.

I grew used to the sight of spellbound settlements that were more like the funerary assembly points of lost souls than places where living beings had dwelt, and to the sight of abandoned and weed-infested fields over which not even crows could be bothered to fly, and every step I took created an echo like an unremitting call to pray for the departed, or like one unending and painful litany. There weren’t many houses tumbling down or already in ruins, but that only made everything all the gloomier. Doors ajar, and behind them a silent, frightful darkness. Plant pots on window ledges, the plants in them withered brown. Instead of curtains cobwebs dangled. Oh, those cobwebs! Scary, and they knew it! I was certain that the spiders that had spun them had also dried up with fright. And there were uprooted fences, stakes with no goats attached to them, kennels without dogs, fruit trees that no one harvested, and the gloomily spectacular thickets of nettles and sundry weeds with which Nature had replaced human life, or rather wiped out all trace of it. And yet it was still not entirely forlorn. In the distance at least there was still smoke to be observed rising from a chimney. And here and there the imprints of wheels, and even of hooves and boots, had not yet been obliterated. There were still people here who had survived the devastation.

All around on the hilltops and steep scarps forests daydreamed, living their own lives, breathing their own breath and gloomy with their own, not in the least human, gloominess. There had been times when I’d found that alluring. Times! Times past! But this time things were quite different. Now I no longer needed to seek refuge in them, or solitude, a place to hide from anything that reminded me, however remotely, that there were people in the world. Their abodes had ceased to be offensively repellent and characteristically sordid and had taken on a conciliatory, cadaverous beauty and a sombre magnificence. A deathly hush reigned in majesty over all, death was everywhere, every house was like a tomb, everything was gaping into eternity. The forests that used to seem so pure and noble and beautiful, ah, how might they ever compare now to the purity, nobility and beauty of this ineffable silence of devastation and death! The most desperate cry of a bird strangulated in the direst spot was as nothing compared to the creaking of a gate hanging off its hinges. The beauty of scudding clouds seemed barely of note until reflected in the black, lifeless and sightless panes of the low-set windows.

The breath of the loveliest of Indian summers acquired its true sweetness only when mixed with the odour of advanced decomposition and decay, and the eye was lured less by the showy wings of belated butterflies than by the languid lumbering of carrion-seeking blowflies. And the best spot to take one’s ease was not on the untouched moss or amid the heather, but on the thresholds of the abandoned and bygone cottages and in the shade of the contorted lindens whose ageing away in the graveyards had passed unperceived.

I would have liked to walk by as slowly as possible. I would have liked to pause at every threshold. I would have liked to carry on walking until deep into the night, maybe until God’s break of the day. Oh, could there be anything more awesome than to gaze into the darkness behind the black and lifeless panes of the low-set windows against which I pressed my forehead and my mouth and nose?

Surely it was inconceivable that nothing would look out from behind them ever again. I kept expecting that those dead and motionless cobwebs would, after all, suddenly part and that through them at least the spectre of a tormented visage would show itself, whether human or ophidian, and that it, from its side, would also press against the glass, whether to frame a kiss, or a snakebite, or any other token that would not, either then or later, be made real unless our motionlessly appressed and benumbed lips broke through the glass that separated us like death or a curse. And the darkness behind those half-open doors! How it threw one off-balance! The drumming in one’s ears and the stabbing sensation in one’s brow! How terrifying it was, how stupefying, and how it coaxed one to one’s knees to await death!

My advancing years had begun to give notice of their demands. I hadn’t covered much ground, but had had nothing to eat or drink since the morning because the awe inspired by these afflicted places would not have permitted it. And then when the sun began to dip more alarmingly towards the earth and my mind, after a whole day spent meandering through these deserted places, started clouding with a peculiar, suffocating sorrowfulness, it began to dawn that I ought really to proceed with all haste to my destination and there, while it was still light, seek out somewhere fitting to spend the night.

I noticed that the road ahead twisted and turned before arching broadly towards a forest that could be reached in a much straighter line by a steep, but wide sunken track, and it struck me that it would be better if I took a short cut along this track.

If I were indeed to take this short cut, I would, unless I were to walk backwards, have to turn my back on all these spectral places. I felt rather awkward about that. It was as if I would be turning my back on an uncanny graveyard with ravaged and empty graves, in which lay neither coffin nor corpse, as if from some particular date no one had been permitted to die and as if the dying had had, by some incomprehensible device, to bear their bodies away straight to the Other Side. But fatigue was adding to the instability of my mind, whose attention was now engaged by the forest as a welcome change.

Its trees were quite young and at first it seemed quite an ordinary forest. But then it began to exude a balmy scent. And now I was faint and the balm was stupefying. At first only my hearing went berserk, as in the midst of an infinite, ponderous silence, then my sight started playing games and soon I was beset by various imaginings in the face of which I would, on any other occasion, have begun to tremble, but this time I desired that they would not leave me and perhaps take me with them all the way to perdition. They were akin to those visions of a felicity that has been devoured by time or veiled over by death. But common sense told me that I was acting like a dog who runs ahead and hasn’t noticed that he’s dragging a chain as well. But try arguing with someone who doesn’t know what he wants!

So I walked on and on until I entered a glade, where, on one side, stood some strangely illuminated and seemingly bewitched and spellbound spruces, across whose silent and dreamy rooftops the light danced like surges of pinkish and bluish waves hurrying off for a romp in the adjacent darkness. And I saw the sky and the clouds, more alone than I had ever been myself, and I felt sad and something whispered suggestively:

That’s her! There! Can’t you see?

But all I could see was a jay flying, or rather the fleeting shadow of it, more reminiscent of a distressed bat. Then the surges of pinkish and bluish waves seemed to want to laugh at something. And maybe they did laugh. Though my keyed-up hearing perceived no more than the mournful rasp of the old jay and the tweeting of its young. Only the treacherous sorrow in the dark recesses of my soul told me:

Just look! Don’t you recognise her? The sublime glitter on the spruce trees! The airiness! The stoop of the branches! Can you really not remember her dress, or her face, or how she stood as she looked down, clinging to the golden gate of God’s rainbow, down into your boyhood dreams.

The silent surges of pinkish and bluish waves rolled on. Overhead, the rooftops of the spruces turned grey, ahead of me the forest thinned and all around me stood tall trees that admitted a magical light in wide, slanting and iridescent stripes, waiting for beings invisible to my tired eyes to suspend a canopy from them and for that most beautiful one to appear beneath the canopy, she who had looked down, clinging to the golden gate of God’s rainbow, down into my boyhood dreams. And now I was approaching those strips of light that were like columns supporting the weight of both sun and rainbow, and something prompted me to leave the path and draw near, touch them and lean against them and wait. Maybe she will come. And I might have walked on, but the recollection of years bemourned and buried detained me. I told myself:

Do you even know if she’s alive? And if she isn’t dead, she has certainly so aged that nothing would trouble us so grievously as my having not come before this.

But the voice replied:

Are you not afraid to say it? And if she were, as you say, dead, should you now not be chasing after her and seeking and kissing that grave, or, more likely, digging with fingers, elbows and arms and head all the way down to her? Just hurry along and tarry not! It’s now, or never!

Well, it sounded encouraging. I was completely alone and I could have done even the most ridiculously silly things. And yet I said to myself:

And where am I supposed to be going?

The voice replied at once:

You are seeking a vision of beauty, you are seeking a vision of immortality, and you ask such a question? Just go on! Just keep looking down, up! Don’t go looking for excuses and be on your mettle! Ask the squirrels if they know anything about her hiding place! Or, perhaps better, the jays. They can fly around the forest and see everything –

I walked on. The path narrowed, passing between two rows of spruces. Their branches pressed fondly into the grass, trying my poor senses with the odd chimera of an image that refused to take shape, but so acted upon me that tears welled up in my eyes. I quickened my step, believing that it would pass. And the shadows slowly lengthened and erased the glitter and glint of the sunlight. But suddenly – What’s this?

To one side, above the spruce trees, a golden, piercing light gleamed. It was motionless, it did not fade and it quite dazzled me. I raised my eyes, desirous to know anyway what it was. I was disappointed, but also cheered, for I descried in the distance one tall spruce which held, in the embrace of its most winsome, its highest branches, a large cone. A radiance shot forth from it as from a golden onion dome adorning a church spire. My heart jumped, it was as if the cone knew everything and was itself pointing whither and which way I should go. And I was so confounded that I tripped, failing to watch the way beneath my feet, and if I had –

I almost jumped out of my skin. Yes, it was a viper. And a huge one at that! I pulled up short, at a distance of not quite two paces from it, but it didn’t even move. It was disgustingly brown and doubtless old and overbearing and self-assured, for it lay there peacefully and wound into a coil right there in the middle of the track. And I might well have been surprised at happening right then – at the autumn equinox, at a time with the days shortening and a fairly raw coldness rising from the earth – upon a viper of all things. But for now I was still dazzled by that shining cone and the memory of a girl, looking down, clinging to the gate of a heavenly rainbow, down into my boyhood dreams, and I stood there and stared and choked back my anger at that stupid cone, and if I could, I would have knocked it down. But now there was this viper preventing me. What now? Jump on it and trample it to death? That struck me as trickier than it is in reality. Beat it to death with my stick? If that failed, I would look silly. The ground was grassy, lumpy and damp and soft. But what would I do if I succeeded? Would there be any point to it? It would lie there and haunt me. That I couldn’t stand. I’d have to come back and bury it. Would there be any point in so doing? No, there wouldn’t. In the middle of sleepless nights it would scare me with its eyes overflowing with dark malevolence and ignobility and an infernal sorrowfulness. If I were to destroy it as I needed, I would surely have to pick it up, tear it in two and swallow it piecemeal, for it reminded me all too clearly of my own soul. So what then?

The oblique rays of the sun reflected spectrally off the beastly thing, which was exposing its monstrous body to their final glimmer. The shadows were almost upon it. Maybe that was all it had taken to make it coil up. It hadn’t wanted to go into hiding just yet. So I waited, impatient for the cold to set it shivering. But I did feel sad.

That, then, was how I was received by that enchanted place, that wistful and heavenly forest! The first to welcome me was a viper. And that was right now, just as the curse was lifted from the earth and the sky shone bright with God’s rainbow. But that probably didn’t apply to this spot. This spot had perhaps been left to the mercy of serpents. Yet it was to this spot that my spirit had led me!

But suddenly the truth dawned and my heart skipped. Wherein lay the connection between the insidious glitter of that shining cone and this hideous snake? What if the snake was showing me something, whatever that might be? If it was impeding my weary steps, surely it must be guarding paradise.

It had to be stirred, but calmly and pacifically and as sweetly as possible. It must not take offense. But what was I to say to it?

“You sod, you,” I addressed it, “are you alive? So what about it?”

Well, that was certainly no testimony to any shrewdness on my part. I understood as much only after the mistake was made and I felt in every joint that my punishment would be swift. So I stood and waited.

At first, nothing. My husky voice seemed merely to course through its body like a bluish shadow. Then its listless, wrinkled head rose, only to drop back to where it had been. Then the slits of its wicked eyes slowly opened half-way, then closed again. And that was all. It was sleepy. It didn’t know whether it might be dreaming or what was happening, and it didn’t look at me. I was standing behind it and it would have had to turn round slightly. For which it had neither the desire, nor the strength. And my unflattering and facetious way of addressing it must surely have had time to mature inside its flattened head, so it was perhaps right to assume that I was probably some creature more obtuse and vulgar than a dog, if not worse even than a hedgehog.

But suddenly, like some drowsy watchman, it came to and twitched as if slightly bothered. It raised its obscene neck with a head like an unopened water lily bud disgorged from a suddenly dried-up mud-bed and trodden down just for the hell of it, and, blinking obscenely with its evil eyes, it jerked its flattened head first to the right, then back, then to the left. And it was comical, because it didn’t turn to face me, though it must have felt my shadow on its body, but I was also taken by how those jerks of the head, while frankly evil, had a measured nobility and gentle grace to them. Such actions can only be those of a creature tenderly in love when, in the bosom of its sweetheart, it is woken by the call of death out of the sweetest of dreams. And suddenly I also recalled that hand, coaxing from the palely shining keys the jerky, boisterous and wistful sounds that subdued all heartache and laughed at tears. And I saw that arm, bared to the elbow, and the cheekily gushing and dying glitter of those jerky sounds as I had witnessed it at the last playing, before the roses faded and the hoarfrost descended –

Right now I would surely have loved to hear those sounds, at least with my eyes. But the viper seemed disinclined to play, and if it did play something, it was inadvertent and of short duration. It froze again in a convulsion of pride and venom, and if it hadn’t been lying there in the middle of the path like a snare for a suicide, I might have thought that it was all a dream.

I know not how I then realised that it had sunk deep in thought. Obviously, I would have liked to know whether it might not be watching, perhaps through some sliver of glass concealed inside its eye, at least a refracted image either of what I was or of what I wanted to be, or whether I wasn’t being mirrored in its scales in a way that made it feel ill, and without my suspecting a thing. But then it stretched out its neck and a strange tension passed visibly through the coils of its body, betraying its intention either to fight or play some dirty trick. I am sure I even trembled and held my breath, but I was already captivated. The first coil rose like a bow stretched taut, then it froze and waited with such dogged determination, as if reluctant to release from its embrace something of which the tongues of men, like vipers’ tongues, perhaps may hiss and little more. Then the raised neck slowly extended with its head away from me, not upwards, but completely horizontally, though not in my direction. It could have been a ploy or the prelude to unfurling the remaining coils. The next heavy coil followed rather more laboriously, changing the alignment of the sides and grumpily rebalancing after a sudden temporary hitch, and yet it did regain its balance and slip and slide downwards like faithless delight abandoning the exhausted. And suddenly, as I watched, I felt my whole body twisting, my ribs and vertebrae creeping and groaning, my lips getting longer and pointier and my nose flattening. And I could see that the whole outstretched, tense part of the snake was floating over something invisible that permeated the air, for though it extended and tensed itself so far out that it could no longer keep its monstrous weavings in balance, it still hadn’t touched the ground. And it was all so defiant and evil, as if the viper couldn’t bear to contemplate the moment when I would see the embarrassment of its slithering, but supercilious frame. And again it put me in mind of that lovely hand at the last playing –

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God's Rainbow