Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal

Author:Bohumil Hrabal [Hrabal, Bohumil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature, Fiction, Translated
ISBN: 9780241290224
Publisher: Penguin Classics; Penguin Random House
Published: 1965-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Word came from the castle that the station-master was invited to Count Kinský’s to dinner, and at seven o’clock a groom would come for him. I drew down the blind and switched on the lights in the traffic office. In the station-master’s office, although there was electricity there, I lit the oil lamp with the round wick and the green shade. And I went out with Dispatcher Hubička to the trains, and gave them the green light with my lantern as they passed through our station. Mr Lánský came down into his office and brought his baronial gear with him, the grey trousers and huntsman’s jacket, and his Schwarzenberg hat with the capercailzie’s feather. He left the door open into the traffic office as he dressed in there, and was pleased to be seen at it.

Along the field track from the castle rode a groom on a white horse, and he had another white horse beside him. The stars were palpitating in the sky, and the night was radiant. The frozen snow began to crackle and crunch underfoot. The green lamp gave forth a gentle hissing sound in the station-master’s office, where Mr Lánský was studying himself fixedly in the mirror. He was already in his gala clothes, even the doeskin gloves and the Schwarzenberg hat. And the lamp threw upon the ceiling a small white ring, with larger rings radiating outwards from it like the ribs of a skeleton. When I used to stay with my grandmother on holiday, she had just such a lamp shining on her table, and I liked to lie in bed in the evening and look up at the ceiling, at those shadows round the white ring the oil lamp cast there, and, look at it how I chose, I could always see on the ceiling a kind of skeleton, even when I covered my eyes with the counterpane I could still see that ceiling, and the skeleton on it. Once, when I was staring at the ceiling like this, Granny came in with an apron full of fire-wood, and shot the logs with a rattle into the stove. I shrieked: The skeleton’s shinbones have fallen off!

The groom rode on to the station on his white horse, and beside him stepped the saddled white horse he led. Those horses were so white that they gave off light like a flowering bush of jasmine on a summer night. Mr Lánský came out of the office, and the groom jumped down and helped him into the stirrup. The station-master drew on the reins and trotted over to the pigeon-loft, and called up:

‘Go to sleep! I’ll come back to you again. Your station-master’s coming back! Go to sleep, my children!’

The Polish silver-points cooed, and beat their wings against the lattice of the lowered flight-hatch, and the station-master rode away on his horse, accompanied by the groom. He crossed the tracks, and the two white horses trotted along the hard field path; you could hear the ring of

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