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“Haňťa! Where are you? For Christ’s sake, will you stop ogling those books and get to work?
A few more years of the same, though, and I got used to it: I would load entire libraries from country castles and city mansions, fine, rare, leather- and Morocco-bound books, load whole trains full, and as soon as a train had thirty cars off it would go to Switzerland or Austria, one kilogram of rare books for the equivalent of one crown in convertible currency,
by then I had begun to understand the beauty of destruction, and I loaded more and more freight cars, and more and more trains left the station heading west
that day on they called her Shithead Manča.
He took their picture every day, posing them carefully and stepping back to frame the picture, while they flashed him the brightest of smiles, but he never had film in the camera and the Gypsy girls never saw a single shot of themselves, and still they had their picture taken every day and looked forward to the results like Christians to heaven.
I picked myself up from the floor as the terrified soldiers must have done when the stone covering the tomb where Christ lay buried sprang into the air and set Him free,
I looked up and realized that Jesus and Lao-tze had disappeared up the whitewashed stairs like the turquoise and velvet-violet skirts of my Gypsy girls before them,
my head spinning from too loud a solitude, and not until I’d made it to the back alley and breathed some fresh air in my lungs could I pick myself up and get a firm grip on the pitcher.
Lots of Gypsies work in road construction; they’re paid by the job and they put their heart and soul into it, because having a goal keeps their energy up. I always like to watch them naked to the waist doing pickax battle with hard earth and cobblestones, I like to watch them underground to the waist seeming to dig their own graves, I like them because they keep their wives and children near the construction sites, and whenever one of them feels a yen for his baby, a Gypsy woman tucks up her skirt and takes over his pickax and he dandles the baby on his knee, and, oddly enough, playing with
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For thirty-five years now I’ve compacted wastepaper in a hydraulic press, for thirty-five
I would read slowly down the lineup of the first team, slowly down the lineup of the second team, and slowly down the lineup of the juniors, and not until I found my name among the substitutes was I happy again.
Only now did I see the workers at the foot of the conveyor belt tearing open the boxes, taking the virgin books out of them, pulling the covers off, and tossing the naked insides on the belt, and it didn’t matter what page they fell open to: nobody ever looked into them, nobody even dreamed of looking into them, because whereas I stopped my press all the time, they had to keep the belt full and moving.
Like not having anyone at your funeral.
This was a new era with new men and new methods—think of drinking milk at work, when everyone knows that even a cow would rather die of thirst than touch a drop of the stuff!
So for thirty-five years I’d lived with, lived through, a daily Sisyphus complex, the kind so beautifully described for me by Messrs. Sartre and Camus, especially the latter:
He is his own ecosystem
It reminded me of the time
Oh God! What now?
coffinweight
Manča, with nothing but a bed and a clear-cut goal, built herself a house.
“Molodtsy!”
Gypsy girl,
Ilonka
