Translation Tuesday: Breaking Through the Drum by Bohumil Hrabal

In the first of a series featuring translated works, Czech author Bohumil Hrabal explores life as a theatre usher in war-time Prague in this short story from his new collection Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, translated by Paul Wilson

By Bohumil Hrabal and Paul Wilson for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

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I never felt better than when I was tearing the stubs off people’s tickets and showing them to their seats. In primary school, I loved to make seating plans for the teacher. Then during the war, a weird thing happened to me. A kind of ticket-taker’s demon lit on my back and right in the middle of the newsreel, when the voice announced that eighty-eight enemy aircrafts had been shot down over Dortmund and only one German plane had gone missing, the perverse little imp whispered something in my ear, and I said in a loud voice: “Aw shucks, it’s bound to turn up again.” My voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else, so I turned up the house lights and ordered the person who’d said it to come forward. The other ushers and I walked through the audience, but no one confessed and so, invoking our official powers—we actually had such powers—I declared that the entire program, including the feature film, was hereby cancelled, the tickets were null and void and, as punishment, everyone had to go home without a refund.

I’d stand down by the front row and scan their faces to see if they were really watching the screen or not

Everything suddenly seemed so bizarre I thought my ticket-taker’s demon must have come back to play with my mind

The streetcars and human conversation, each thing responded to the other, like good footballers passing the ball

And forever after I was a rotten ticket-taker and a rotten organizer

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