Why I Write?

And Other Early Prose Pieces

Bohumil Hrabal

Translated from the Czech by David Short

Published by Charles University,

Karolinum Press

Ovocný trh 5/560, Prague 1, Czech Republic

Cover and graphic design by Zdeněk Ziegler

Typesetting by Karolinum Press

First English edition

© Karolinum Press, 2019

Text © Bohumil Hrabal – heirs c/o Dilia, 2019

Translation © David Short, 2019

This edition and notes © Jiří Pelán and David Short, 2019

Illustrations © Jiří Grus, 2019

ISBN 978-80-246-4268-0 (hb)

ISBN 978-80-246-4323-6 (ebk)

CONTENTS

1. Why I write?

2. Those Rapturous Riflemen

3. Cain

4. Trapezium Number Two

5. The House that Refreshed Itself in a Flash

6. The Feast of Sts Philip and James

7. Scribes and Pharisees

8. No Escape

9. The Glorious Legend of Wantoch

10. The Sufferings of Old Werther

11. Protocol

12. A Schizophrenic Gospel

13. A January Story

14. A February Story

15. One Great Guy

16. Atom Prince

17. The Gabriel Explosion

18. Made in Czechoslovakia

19. Blitzkrieg

20. Meetings by Chance and by Design

21. Line No. 23a

22. One Pretty Nondescript Station

23. A Christening

24. Be Expecting Me

25. Toy Shop

26. Everyday Chit-Chat

27. A Woman in Love

28. One Ordinary Day

29. Notes

30. Editorial Note

31. About the Author

32. About the Translator

WHY I WRITE?

Until the age of twenty I had no idea what writing was, what literature was. At high school I consistently fell at every hurdle in Czech language and had to repeat years one and four, so extending my adolescence by two years… After twenty, that first solid plank of my ignorance snapped and I then fell headlong for literature and art, so much so that reading and looking and studying became my hobby. And to this day I am kept in a state of permanent euphoria by the writers I came to cherish in my youth, and I know by heart François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel,[1] and even Louis Céline’s Death on Credit[2] and the verse of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I’m still reading Schopenhauer and my latest teacher, Roland Barthes… But at the age of twenty my real inspiration was Giuseppe Ungaretti, who so impressed me that I started writing poetry… Thus did I set foot on the thin ice of writing and the force that drove my writing was the sheer delight at the sentences that dripped from my soul onto the pages in my Underwood typewriter, and I was bowled over by the chain being strung together from that first sentence on, so I began keeping an intimate diary, my self-addressed billets doux, my self-addressed monologue combined with interior monologue… And I had a constant sense that what I was writing was mine and mine alone and that I’d succeeded in setting down on those blank sheets something that was quite an honour, but simultaneously startling. Back then, whenever my mother’s friends and neighbours asked how I was getting on with my legal studies, she would just brush it aside saying that “his mind’s forever on other things”… And that’s how it was, back then I was obsessed with writing, a young man in gestation: the only thing I looked forward to was the weekend, when I would return from Prague to Nymburk,[3] and the main thing was that, back then, it was so quiet in the office of the brewery and I could spend a whole two days at my Underwood, and having written the first sentence I’d brought with me from Prague, I could sit at the typewriter and wait, fingers held aloft, until that first sentence gave birth to the next… Sometimes I might wait an hour or more, but at other times I wrote so fast that the typewriter jammed and stuttered, so mighty was the stream of sentences… and that flow, that rate of flow of the sentences kept assuring me that “this is it”… And so I wrote for the sheer pleasure of writing, for that kind of euphoria in which, though sober, I showed signs of intoxication… And so I wrote according to the law of reflection, the reflection of my crazy existence… I was actually still only learning to write and my writing amounted to exercises, variations on Apollinaire and Baudelaire, later on I had a go, under the guidance of Céline, at the stream of city talk and then it was the turn of Izaak Babel and in time Chekhov and they all taught me to reflect in my writing not only my own self, but the world about me, to approach myself from inside others… and to know what destiny is. And then came the war and the universities were closed[4] and I ended up spending the war as a train dispatcher and new encroachers on my writing were Breton’s Nadja and the Surrealist Manifestos… and every Saturday and Sunday, in the deserted office of the Nymburk brewery, I carried on writing my marginal notes on things I’d seen and things that had befallen others, I was frightened, but also honoured to have become, by writing, an eye witness, a poetic chronicler of the hardships of wartime, and at the same time, having spent so many years writing on that Underwood of the bleakness and brutality of reality, to have been forced gradually to let go of my adolescent versifying and replace it with a woeful game played with sentences that tended towards the transcendent… and so I went on setting down my self-addressed, interior monologue, but without commentary, and so, being my own first reader, I could have a sense, gazing at those pages of text, that they’d been written by someone else… and I have continued to feel it an honour that I was able to write at all, that I could testify to that huge event in my life, that I was at last able to start thinking thanks to my typewriter… And so I carried on writing as if I were hearing the confession not only of me myself, but of the entire world… And I continued to see the driving force of my writing in that fact of being an eye witness and in the duty to note and set down all the things that excited me, pleasant and disturbing, and the duty to offer, by way of my typewriter, testimony not on every single event, but on certain nodes of reality, as if I were squirting cold water on an aching tooth… But I saw that, too, as a divine game, as taught to me by Ladislav Klíma…[5] And then the war came to an end and I completed my studies to become a Doctor of Laws, but I yielded so far to the law of reflection in writing that I took on a string of crazy jobs with the sole object of getting smeared not just by the environments themselves, but by my eavesdropping on the things people say… And I never ceased to be amazed at how, every weekend, in the deserted office of the brewery where on weekdays my father and his accountant would work, I could carry on jotting down the things that had befallen me in the course of a defamiliarising week and that I had dreamed up in the arcing of my mind… And I went on playing like this, with a sense of having my chest rubbed with goose fat by a beautiful girl, so strongly did I feel honoured and anointed by the act of writing… And then it dawned that my years of apprenticeship were over and that I must snip myself off from the brewery and abandon those four rooms and the little town where my time had begun standing still… and I moved to Libeň,[6] to a single room in what had once been a smithy, and so embarked not only on a new life, but also on a different way of writing… And then I spent four years commuting to Kladno and the open-hearth furnaces of the Poldi iron and steel works and that gradually made a difference to the way I played with sentences… Lyricism became slowly regurgitated as total realism, which I barely even noticed because, working as I was next to fires and the milieu of the steelworks and the rugged steelworkers and the way they spoke, it all struck me as super-beautiful, as if I were working and living at the very heart of pictures by Hieronymus Bosch… And so, having snipped myself off from my past, the scissors actually stayed in my fingers after all and, back then, I began taking the scissors to what I’d written, applying the ‘cutter’ technique to the text as to a film. Eman Frynta referred to my style as ‘Leica style’, saying that I captured reality at peak moments of people talking and then composed a text out of it all… And I recognised this as an expression of respect because, back then, I already had my readers and listeners because I, as they put it, I had the knack of reading without pathos… And so, back then, I went on writing with my scissors close at hand, and I would even write solely with a mind to reaching the moment when I could slice up the written text and piece it together into something that left me stunned, as a film might… And then I went to work as a packer of recycled paper and then as a stagehand and I invariably looked forward to my free time and the chance to write for myself and for my friends, and I would make samizdats of them so as actually to be a writer, a top sheet and four carbon copies. Then I became a proper writer; from the age of forty-eight on I published book after book, almost falling sick with each successive book, because I’d tell myself: now they’re publishing things that I’ve thought were only for me and my friends… But my readers ran into the hundreds of thousands and they read my things as they would the sports pages… And I wrote on and on, even training myself to think only through the typewriter, and my game now proceeded with a hint of melancholy; for weeks I would wait for the images to accumulate and then for the command to sit down at the typewriter and rattle off onto the pages all the things that by now were just scrambling to get out… and I wrote and kept receiving honours for my writing, although after each ceremony I felt like a nanny goat that’s just given birth to a litter of kids… Now I can afford the luxury of writing alla prima, resorting to the scissors as little as possible, with my long text actually becoming an image of my inner self, rattled wholesale into the typewriter by my fingertips… Now that I’m old, I find I can genuinely afford the luxury of writing only what I feel like writing, and I observe ex post that I write and have been writing my long premier mouvement texts in time with my breathing, as if the moment I wave my green flag I start inhaling the images that are impelling me to write and then, through the typewriter, I exhale them at great length… and again I inhale my pop-up picture book and again exhale it by writing… So it’s almost to the rhythm of my lungs and a blacksmith’s bellows that I galvanise myself and calm myself rhythmically so the act of my writing works with the motion of a grand drama, like the workings of the four seasons… Only now am I becoming aware that writing has brought me to the realisation that only now have I pinpointed the essence of ludibrionism, which is the essence of the philosophy of Ladislav Klíma… I believe that it’s been only through the act of writing that, several times in my life to date, I have reached the point where I and a melancholy transcendence constitute a single entity, much as the two halves of Koh-i-Noor Waldes press studs click together, and I rejoice that, as there is less of me the more I write, so there is more of me, that I am then a permanent amateur whose prop is the one little word: Amo… and so love… I blithely consider even the suffering and those particular strokes of fate to be just a game, because the most beautiful thing about literature is that actually no one has to write. So what suffering? It’s all just one great masculine game, that eternal flaw in the diamond that Gabriel Marcel writes about… When I began to write it was just to teach myself how to write… But only now do I know, body and soul, what Lao Tse taught me: that the greatest thing is To Know How Not to Know.[7] And what Nicholas of Cusa whispered to me about docta ignorantia…[8] Now that through the act of writing I have achieved the acme of emptiness, I hope I shall be treated to some means by which finally to learn in my mother tongue, through the act of writing, things about myself, and about the world, that I don’t yet know.

THOSE RAPTUROUS RIFLEMEN

A short story

Searching some old wardrobes for something,

I came across my first attempt at prose,

possibly a novel that I’ve since given up

for lost. So just for interest’s sake, here

it is for my friends…

I/

Jan came out. The glazed door opened, the handle having been depressed. Twice did the laws of reflection and refraction meet the Stargazer half-way. Once at the opening, once at the closing of the glass surface. “What a gorgeous morning. Good day to ye, Morning! Küss die Hand, Sunshine! Küss die bare arse, more like!” As Jan strode along the pavement he tipped his hat back to the very top of his head, his hand dribbling the ticking of his watch into his right ear as it passed. He was also careful not to tread on the cracks between the kerb stones and repeated to himself: “What a gorgeous morning! Have you had breakfast? You haven’t. Is the city breakfasting? It is. On what?… Wagons, cars, motorcycles and wicker baskets laden with fruit and veg…” And Jan Stargazer lost touch with himself. He walked past the wagons, cars and motorcycles and time and again waved his gaudy handkerchief, convinced that he was sailing through a lake-town paved in swirling H_2O, where the cars and wagons were boats bound hither and yon, their bellies filled with wares and sightseers. But Jan wanted more than this; he wanted everyone who met him to recognise at once that Jan wasn’t Jan, but a craft that had broken its moorings. He asked the first passer-by to moor him next to a sodium vapour lamp in the harbour. He leaned against a railing and asked an old man to wait by his clothes while he took a dip. And he dabbled his foot in imaginary water. The old man wiped his spectacles, then a second time, and still he could see neither clothes, nor waterway. When the waters of insanity had risen almost to his mouth, he bowed, withdrew out of range and, from desperation, bought himself a hat. This is why Jan Stargazer enjoyed transferring the coordinates of smile and confusion onto passers-by, knowing they would ask: ‘Is the man mad, or what?’ They’d smile, then forget. But one time they’d come along entirely alone, with only their footsteps for company. Along a paved road or a footpath. And suddenly, Where am I? In the third projection plane of dreaming. Lips move, a hand addresses the blue and is accountable not only for third persons, but for entire assemblies. And then, beneath the waters, a foldaway field altar opens out, and who’s this leaning out of its gold frame? Jan Stargazer. And what’s he doing? Waving to the car-boats and testing the temperature of non-existent water. Now the former fun-poker doffs his hat and bows: “Yet it’s wonderful to dream aloud!”… But that’s not what Jan wants. He’s unhappy with dreaming. That’s precisely why he’s kissed imagination’s hand farewell, so as to be rid of it. That’s why he’s bouncing up and down on an enormously long plank and can’t touch the ground because what about the tens, hundreds, thousands at whose floors the lift of intellect only pauses and why not let the regions we pass by come gushing out? But snap a gear lever at full speed, bounce on a plank without being able to touch the ground! It’s wonderful, daredevil, but how such things can end… These were Jan Stargazer’s thoughts as he passed from one shopfront to the next. He stopped, stepped up close to the glass and breathed on himself, sniffed at himself. He screwed up his eyes and checked to see how fetching it was. Then at once he started thinking up metaphors for eyes. A pair of minus signs; twin knife slashes in a fur coat. In line, not one above the other. But how about some accessories? A white stick and a metal sign with the legend: Blind from birth. Touch, hearing and nothing else. This was the very moment when Jan became like the young man who stands outside the fairground booth within whose depths lies a naked mermaid, and wonders whether he should or shouldn’t. Though he knows in advance that he should enter. All it needs is to think quickly how to go blind. First, close the eyes. And in we go. The peelings that are his eyelids admit a pink light, and touch is also a useful device and the walls are warm. The voices to be heard, how different the sound they make, and the sense! And the images to be seen! Six hummingbirds, no two the same, embroidering an inscription on a curtain: Just what do the blind see in heaven? That would be a good heading for a cook book too, look you. Nothing better than to contrive a new world for oneself out of nothing but noise. But then along came something that had nothing to do with the game. “Permit me, sir, let me lead you…” “It’s all right, thanks, I only live round the corner, I’ll make it…” “Sure it’s all right, so I’ll take you round the corner…” So what now? Jan was the old passive Jan again, weighing ninety-five kilos. Somewhere from a desk at the back of his conscience a little voice piped up: “What did I say, sir?” There was nothing for it but to hold out an arm and go. Ah, another’s arm, and warm. I wonder who it is. He half-opened one eye and out of the corner saw a skull with thick, black hair. Not wearing a tie. The stargazer opened his eyes wide, turned and said: “Fritz!” But he immediately lowered his gaze before Fritz’s, he wanted to say something, apologise, but those eyes. The earth, apples, elderberry, granite. He was embarrassed, and with his little eyes half-closed he watched the receding Fritz Milkin, his schoolmate, who was reciting as he went: “At the age of twenty-six…,” shook his head, “who’d have thought, at twenty-six..,” and putting a forefinger to his temple, Fritz Milkin repeated to himself: “Twenty-six and a constant repeater of stupidity…”

II/

Every day, the Milkins get up, have a quick wash and prepare all the day’s meals. They pee out in the garden. Oh, how wonderful it is to empty one’s bladder in the morning, that rapturous whistling sound. Then they kick-start their tandem and off they’d go. On a bicycle for two, Ferdinand by the bell, Josef at the back. They lean into bends, step on it on the level, brake going downhill, and ring the bell at pedestrian crossings. A twice-a-day journey. Once there, once back. Josef sits there and pedals, seeing neither wires nor handlebars, seeing nothing at all. He just pedals, using the smells from shops, bends in the road and the stones on the roadway in town to determine his location here, in Europe, in the world. At the third turn of the pedals after the first bend you have to duck. It’s the first low branches of some linden trees. Then comes the war memorial. An alphabetically arranged seating plan of the fallen and missing soldiers of the First World War. And whenever, meaning twice a day, the brothers ride past on their bicycle, they always get a whiff of simple graves. They ride into a cloud of reminiscences and their hearts join hands and dance off hippity-hop deep into the past only to pop back into the bodies of pedalling automata a moment later. They invariably catch the unkind salutation of passing shrapnel and tell themselves: ‘Back then it would have taken just one little step and the plaque, the black marble plaque with space for just two more names, would have been filled.’ But they don’t complain. And they don’t even say it to each other. They just think it. And not even that. They’re like the bell that they ring as per the highway code, they laugh and are glad that the war memorial’s safely behind them, that they’re breathing blue air, that they’re selling mineral water. That they are Ferdinand and Josef Milkin, deserters from the war memorial… By the booth with a cottage attached, where Ferdinand’s son Fritz lives, they hop off by command like in the circus. They’d trot on a few metres and stop. Then Josef sits next to the nickel-plated pipe and takes maids’, ladies’ and pensioners’ bottles from them and listens to the liquid steadily rising until the fizzing at the neck shrieks done! And then other flasks, company casks, flagons, whatever people bring with them. First come, first served. Josef loves listening to the pensioners who so relish every burp as they jubilate in their infantile way: “My, that’s some water! So good for the health!” And Josef nods, understanding why they cling to every litre of air that could prolong their life by one tenth of a second. Ferdinand, he tears off the receipts, and as the one in charge of the money box, alternates between ‘Good bye’, ‘Cheerio’, ‘See you again’, ‘’By-ee’ and savours the women’s backsides, slurping on his saliva, because he’s still only sixty and a widower. Whenever there’s a pause, Ferdinand leaves his booth, takes a look round and says: “Yes, it’s going to be a lovely day.” And behind him the trickle of mineral water tinkles away and Josef cools his hand in it. “D’you remember, Ferdi, that time we were taking the post up on the funicular and had to chuck that St Bernard off ’cos it freaked out?…” Ferdinand is staring out over the hills somewhere in the direction of Tyrol… “And how I had to bop its owner one? I thought he were done for. What a crack it was! Thought I’d killed him. But then I still had both thumbs….” And he looks sadly at the fin that used to be his right hand, where there’d once been a thumb. Josef, his chin raised, says: “I should have knocked the fathead out at the bottom. But what’s done is done. Like with that kitten…” And now comes the moment that Ferdinand’s been anticipating for the entire last quarter of a century… when Josef will start cursing the kitten that cost him his sight and Ferdinand his thumb. For a long time he’s had his speech ready, ready to say that if they hadn’t gone to get the kitten, the shrapnel would have made the same mincemeat of them as of their comrades, while they were only hit by fragments. He’s had his speech ready to say that if they’d smoked even one extra cigarette, or even if they’d denied themselves that pleasure, everything would have been different. He’d tell him that that scrap of fur, or rather his love of all living creatures, had prevented the black plaque that they rode past twice a day from being engraved in its entirety in letters of gold and with a photo of Josef and Ferdinand Milkin… Now he’s looking into the blind, cross-slashed face of his brother and sees that any exercise in oratory is pointless. Josef is stroking the flow of water with his fingers and smiling. “You know what, Ferdi? Let’s go and buy ourselves a kitten, just like the one back then, you know, a tabby with a white bib, white socks and a little pink muzzle…” Ferdinand doesn’t reply, blowing his nose instead. He can see a bunch of navvies coming from the railway. He glances at the calendar and thinks: “Aha, Friday! Hello!…” But no. Workers. On a Friday. Nothing to smoke. Proletarians from Thursday to Saturday. ‘To hell with it!’ ‘Life’s a pig!’ ‘Bugger it all!’ ‘We’ll be beggars till the day we die, the bosses do what they like with us.’ They’ll have been raining abuse on the New European Order since first thing, banging their tools viciously. Now some sit on the table, others astride the bench in revolt, while from Monday to Thursday, when they still have something or other to smoke, they sit properly. Ferdinand taps his forehead: two missing, ah yes, they’ll have gone into town to pick up dog-ends… and he sets glasses of mineral water down in front of the navvies. Suddenly the whole gang jumps up and stares hard towards the corner of the square. “Got some?”… “Got some!” the two tatterdemalions exult, raising their cupped palms high. And the rest dash towards them. They share out the dog-ends and in silent concentration re-roll them. And they start puffing away. They inhale the smoke and something nice shines out of their eyes, and they aren’t even listening to their comrade as he sketches, in the sand, on his knees, a map of his little field on which he’s marking an avenue of cherry trees as a line of dots. Through the billowing smoke the navvies draw inspiration from any woman who passed by. “What a roly-poly!…” “Hell, they must be feeling the heat… sweating…” “Between their legs!” And one old boy with a face full of jolly wrinkles exhales through the smoke: “The Tartar women used to shave it. We’d spy on them through a chink in the bathroom, single or married, wow…” And he half-closes his eyes and the others, Ferdinand as well, follow suit. “They give ’em a good soaping then shave ’em with a sharp knife.” And they can all envisage, at arm’s length, the Tartar women bathing, stropping their knife, propping their legs up on a bench and shaving themselves between the legs, or one another… “When we was in Algiers we ’ad a hell of a time with ’em, filthy bitches…,” a gaunt fellow takes over, “…filthy, I tell you, we always ’ad to give ’em a bath first, an’ if you’d seen the diseases, scary…” And again they all grimace at the image and reach for their flies. “Best know where you’re putting it…” “Let it loose on some Turkish bint…” “You could end up wi’ it drippin’ slivovitz, a whole Danube…” “Christ, we ’ave to go, or the supervisor’ll do his nut…” And one by one they pay their twenty hellers, for Ferdinand lets them have it cheap, he really appreciates this bunch, who’ve taught him so much about Africa and Asia, whither two of them once wandered. Every day he asks them things, or they start of their own accord. And that’s why they get a discount, likewise the retired pastry-cook Marvánek. Every time he turns up, he unbuttons his waistcoat and takes out a silver tube that looks like a chalice taken from a shrine. Then out comes a little funnel that he fits into the tube and then dribbles the mineral water into it. Kids and grown-ups alike come to sit and stare at Marvánek’s silver tube. But now Ferdinand is staring after the departing navvies, mentally filling in the details of the tale he’s been told and plucking hairs from his nose. Hell no! That man’s back on his knees and drawing his little field again, this time in the gutter, marking with a cross the line of cherry trees planted for his daughter, and Ferdinand guesses that at that moment he’s adding his neighbour’s field to the diagram, and wingeing about the neighbour’s unwillingness to sell him the strip that will make his cherry orchard whole and enable him to plant another row of trees. Ferdinand has heard it all a hundred times before and knows the sorry tale of woe by heart, and he understands. He sees the dreamer rub the pretty geometry out with his foot and his mates thumping the poor guy in the back. When Ferdinand turns round, he sees that his brother, his head on his chest, has fallen asleep.

III/

At that moment Jan Stargazer turns up, as is his wont. Head held high and hatless. Now and again he runs a comb through his hair and watches, against the morning sunlight, his dead hair being borne away on the wind. “Good morning, Mr Milkin,” he says, saluting with one finger, “Is Fritz in?” “Not sure, he could be still in bed…,” says Ferdinand, offering Jan his hand. “What’s up?” “Nothing in particular, I want to see Fritz,” says Jan and he opens the little gate. He crosses the yard and knocks on the cottage door. Not a sign. Just some wasps hissing about under the overhang. He takes the door handle and stares gormlessly at his wrist watch. Quarter past ten. And in he goes. Once he gets used to the change of light, he looks about him. The pictures they’d been talking about were lying on the floor. Jan treads on the work, the face of a portrait of a girl, as it happens. He quickly steps back and finds himself standing in a bowl of apples. And under the flowers on the window ledge there’s a little mat cut out of sunflowers. Jan Stargazer mutters to himself: “What is the man up to, turning himself into carpets and mats to go under plant pots?” Instead of a cloth, the table has a moonscape covering it, held in place with shingle nails. The moon itself is covered by a promotional ash-tray from the Olla company. Jan is most sorry for the girl nailed to the floor through her eyes and ankles. And for having trodden on her face. He wishes he could strip off and lie down next to her. Warm her with his own body and bring her to life. Instead, his eyes are drawn to the wall, where some pictures are hanging of which it is impossible to say that they are pictures. He looks at one face made up of bits of newspaper and fabric and finished off by hand to wear the expression of doleful workmen, sentimental whores or kids waiting for a bit of coal to fall from a passing truck. There are workmen stepping out of a frame made of welded pipes, whores surfacing out of cleverly wired-up corks. And suddenly they’re all gazing out at what Jan is wearing, the tie with which he expresses his own taste… And a beggar sitting at the foot of a wall under a bridge looks at Jan as if Jan is wearing nothing at all. A fist with galvanised veins leaps from one picture to bop Jan Stargazer on the nose. Goodness knows what might have happened if the door hadn’t opened to admit the egg-shaped, curl-coated cranium of Fritz. He places a little packet on the table and unwraps a rectangular glass sign of the League Against Tuberculosis bearing the legend Thank you for not smoking. “Fritz!” Jan cries. But Fritz starts hammering a nail in above the mirror, whistling as he checks he’s got it dead centre. And he hangs up the sign with its Thank you for not smoking inscription. Then he gleefully dances a few steps back, rolls a cigarette and strikes a match on the sandpaper belly of a worn-out old biddy. “So, what do you think?” Jan Stargazer claps a hand to his forehead: “Wow, Fritz!… That’s brilliant! Something I’ve been dreaming of for ages. Nicking that sign from the patisserie. To give us a conscience. We know what we’re supposed to do and we don’t do it. But I do know…” And Fritz breaks into a dance. “So do I. We crap on all values from a great height. Thank you for not smoking. Thank you for not smoking. D’you fancy a roll-up? Thank you for not fornicating. For not stealing. Thank you for understanding man’s basic needs. Eh?” And Fritz grins a toothy grin with all his gleaming-white teeth and strolls across the girl from her fingers to her head. Suddenly he holds his gaze. “Well I never. Her lord and master has washed her face. Was he trying to bring her round?” And Jan has no idea what to say; he drops his own gaze. “Am I trampling on beauty? Eh? There was a time when I wanted to stir people’s emotions with Beauty, but people still live like beasts and still work till they drop and get bludgeoned for their trouble. And those places I’ve supplied pictures to? Where did my soul in inverted commas go? Big houses, the cars of subtropical beauties and gorgeous idle whores in bed. Yes, thank you for not smoking. The League Against Tuberculosis. The whole world can go blundering into war, but something as simple as a sitting room, kitchen and bathroom, no way. I’m done with it! Causing a stir, raising the alarm with a bop on the nose…” Fritz is shouting now and pointing to his latest pictures, while in desperation Jan Stargazer reaches under his armpit and sniffs his fingers. Then he mumbles: “But Fritz, I want to be rid of my self, too, I want to turn myself into a carpet, just like you, but there’s so much beauty that just escapes, escapes.” And Jan Stargazer kneels down and wipes the face of the portrait. Fritz hops across to him and yanks him away by the shoulder: “Life and art is reality, not a daydream, not going about the street like a blind man, but with the eyes open, idiot! And now beat it! And give me a whistle tonight.” Jan Stargazer struggles to his feet, calm restored, and offers Fritz his hand. “Thanks, Fritz, I needed that, I’ve been born…”

Excerpt from the e-book