Too Loud a Solitude

by Bohumil Hrabal

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 his baby seems to renew his strength, though not so much the strength in his arms as the strength in his soul. They’re terribly sensitive people, the Gypsies, and like a beautiful Czech madonna playing with the infant Jesus they have big, human eyes that make your blood run cold, eyes that reflect the wisdom of a culture long forgotten. While we were running around with clubs in our hands and hides on our loins, the Gypsies had their own state and a social system that had been through two declines; and today’s Gypsies, who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads’ fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of rough-hewn wood like a child’s laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Pr...