Prague Tales (CEU Press Classics) by Jan Neruda

Author:Jan Neruda [Neruda, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Central European University Press
Published: 2011-09-12T20:00:00+00:00

The Water Sprite

* * *

He always walked hat in hand, in cold snap or heat wave, his only concession being to hold the low, rounded, wide-brimmed topper above his head like a parasol. His grey hair was smoothed down over his skull and drawn together behind in a pigtail pressed and bound so tightly that it never so much as jiggled. (It was one of the last of its kind in Prague – there could have been no more than two or three left.) His green, gold-buttoned frock coat made up for its short front with long tails, which flapped all the way to his emaciated calves. A white waistcoat covered his hollow chest; then came black trousers, reaching only to his knees, and a pair of gleaming silver buckles, then snow-white stockings reaching to another two silver buckles, and finally a pair of large shuffly shoes. Whether he ever changed the shoes I cannot tell, but the leather of which they were made always looked as though it had come from the roof of a tumbledown cab.

The withered, pointed face of Mr Rybář – for that was his name – shone with an eternal smile. He was a strange sight, walking through the streets. He would pause every twenty paces and look to the right and to the left, as though his thoughts, instead of travelling inside him, maintained a respectful distance, keeping him amused and forcing him to turn and smile at them, the pranksters. To greet people he would simply raise the forefinger of his right hand and give a soft whistle. The same soft whistle also preceded everything he said, and he usually began with a ‘djah’, which implied acquiescence.

Mr Rybář lived on the lower left-hand side of Deep Lane and had a fine view of Petřín Hill. Whenever he spied strangers turning right in the direction of the Castle District, he would follow them, and when they stopped at the observation point and admired the beauties of our city, he would stand beside them, raise his finger, and whistle. ‘Djah, but the sea! Why don’t we live by the sea?’ Then he would follow them into the Castle, and when they admired the gem-studded walls of St Wenceslas’s Chapel he would whistle a second time and say, ‘What do you expect? Here in Bohemia when a shepherd throws a stone after his herd, the stone is likely to be worth more than the sheep!’ And more he did not say.

On account of his name, his green coat, and ‘But the sea!’ we called him the ‘water sprite’,[2] but everyone, young and old, held him in great esteem. Mr Rybář was a retired court official from the Turnov region now living in Prague with a relative of his, a young woman married to a low-ranking civil servant by whom she had two or three children. People said he was fabulously wealthy, not in banknotes but in gems; they said his room contained a tall black cabinet

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