Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

Author:Bohumil Hrabal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Six

For thirty-five years now I’ve compacted wastepaper in a hydraulic press, for thirty-five years I thought there was no other way, but then I began hearing about a new press over in Bubny, a gigantic press that did the work of twenty, and when eyewitnesses reported it made bales of seven and eight hundred pounds, bales delivered directly to the train by forklift, I said to myself, ‘This is something you’ve got to see, Haňťa, with your own eyes. It’s time for a courtesy call.” And when I got to Bubny and saw the enormous glass structure and heard the press booming away, I was so shaken I couldn’t look at the machine, I just stood there and turned my head away, fumbled with my shoelaces—anything to keep from looking that machine in the face.

To peer into the mass of wastepaper and find the spine and boards of a rare book has always been a special treat for me. Instead of going after it on the spot, I’ll take a piece of steel wool and give the shaft a good rub, then have another look at the paper and check whether I have the strength to pull out the book and open it, and not until I decide I do have the strength will I pick it up, and even then it shakes in my hands like a bride’s bouquet at the altar. That’s the way it was in the old days, too, when I played soccer for the village club: I knew the lineup wasn’t posted in the Lower Tavern until Thursday, but I would ride down on Wednesdays, my heart thumping, and stand there astride my bike scrutinizing the notice board itself—the lock, the glass case—unable to look directly at the notice, then I’d read out the name of our club, letter by letter, and only then glance at the lineup, but since it was Wednesday the lineup was still the previous week’s, so off I rode, to return the next day, when again I would stand there astride my bike scrutinizing everything but the lineup, and once I took hold of myself, 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.

Standing in front of the gigantic press at Bubny, I had the same feeling, and once I was over the initial shock, I took hold of myself and glanced at the machine, which rose up to the glass roof like the gigantic altar at St. Nicholas in Prague. It was even bigger than I had expected, with a conveyor belt as long and wide as the one that slowly dumps coal under the grates at the Ho lešovice Power Station, but what was slowly moving along this belt was books, books put there by young workers in getups quite different from what I or others

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