Prague Noir by Sylvie Germain

Author:Sylvie Germain
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907650406
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2011-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

Tenth appearance

‘Have I really ever loved anyone at all,

or was it just a lightning flash

which made me the shadow of my former self?’

Vladimir Holan

Now the city was just black and white. The soil, in the parks and squares, had hardened into sooty sods sprinkled with fine snow, where great rooks hopped, cawing harshly. The trunks of limes and beech trees were anthracite grey and the house fronts looked blackened and scaly. But the roofs were white, the bare branches of the trees and the twigs sparkled with hoar frost and the birch trees glittered. A wan sun hung dimly in the distance, in a sky veiled by the smoke which rose in gloomy twirls from the chimneys. It was achingly cold.

People tottered by cautiously, their eyes moist with cold, their faces shrouded by the mist of their own breath. But they did not look at each other, they saw nothing; all attention was focussed upon the pavement, lacquered with layers of ice. They moved like tightrope-walkers, arms akimbo, hands poised to deaden a fall.

In a street around Karlov dustbins were steaming, full to overflowing with red ashes. A bitter smell hung on the icy air. One window on a second floor caught my attention. It alone had a bit of colour. Behind the window pane, beside a fruit-dish filled with oranges, there was an earthenware vase patterned in yellow and blue. The vase held a bunch of chrysanthemums, purple, coppery and pale ochre. Small mounds of coal formed little pyramids along the pavement, opposite the air-holes of the cellars. A dead pigeon lay at the foot on one of these half-subsiding pyramids, its coal lumps scattered around it.

That bitter day, the pile of lignite put me in mind of Kafka’s short story The Bucket Rider, where the protagonist sets off in search of something to fill his empty stove.

‘The coal is finished, the bucket is empty, the shovel is meaningless; the stove breathes out icy blasts, the room is swollen with cold; through the window the trees are stiff with frost; the sky is just a silver breast-plate deaf to all entreaty. But I need coal, I do not yet have the right to freeze to death. Behind me is the pitiless stove, before me the no less pitiless sky; I must slip between the two and go and ask for succour from the coalman.’ The speaker is so poor and stiff with cold, his need is so extreme, it makes him comical. Now we see him flying through the biting air astride his lamentably empty bucket. ‘Magnificent, magnificent; seated camels do not rise more splendidly from the ground, shaking themselves under the driver’s stick. We proceed down the frozen street, at a regular trot; sometimes I rise to the level of the first floor, I never go down to street level.’

The wretched fellow bedecks himself in all manner of farcical finery, capering upon his nimble bucket-steed. The numb rider is confident that with such a mount he cannot fail to attract the attention of the coalman, snug in his cosy cellar .

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