All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal

All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal

Author:Bohumil Hrabal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811228961
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2019-11-26T00:00:00+00:00


7.

At the time, I preferred to live in Prague. I bought a pass for streetcars and buses and began to live on the seats of the public transit system. I would ride through Prague all day long, and I became familiar with its suburbs and outskirts, and I even went out as far as a village called Velká Praha, all to avoid sitting at home, waiting for my cats to materialize. In those journeys around Prague, everything I happened upon, everything I observed through the window, I saw as an element in my salvation. Every pedestrian was a precious stone, every shop window, every shuttered storefront, every pile of rubbish, was the most beautiful work of art. I would ride through Prague and gaze at the scaffolding, and I saw myself climb to the highest level and then lean out, savoring the view of spires emerging from churches framed by scaffolding. As I rode through Prague, the sight of diminutive Vietnamese boys wearing denim distracted me from my cats, and wherever I looked through the windows of the streetcars or the buses, those tiny, slender Vietnamese, who had flown to Prague from great distances away, were entering or exiting shops in groups and hurrying off somewhere down the street, and I came to expect to see these Vietnamese every hundred meters. It was as if they were coming out to meet me, as if there were a convention in Prague of those almost childlike people, all dressed alike, all looking like army officers in disguise, in denim trousers and jackets covered in script, and they all had long black hair, like hippies, like actors in small revolutionary theaters. It was only with these journeys of mine back and forth through Prague that I realized that no matter where I went, whether I was traveling through Bohemia or Moravia, I’d see groups wearing those same denim outfits and long black hair, and almost all of them had childlike faces, like the faces of princes, and one Sunday afternoon, when I was driving to Kersko by way of Císařská Kuchyně, the only people I saw in the streets were three Vietnamese.

It was only to take my mind off my dead cats that I traveled around Prague on public transit, and my favorite streetcar was the Number 17 that went from D’áblice to Braník along the Vltava River, where each swan became a life preserver thrown to my wretched soul, thousands of life preservers, thousands of beautiful beings in the shape of swans who had flown to Prague from great distances away and were now swimming together in groups close to the embankment where they deigned to be fed by good people, all to take my mind off my dead cats.

Sometimes, during my journeys around Prague, a truck would stop beside my streetcar window and I could look directly into the desperate eyes of the poor cattle that were tightly chained by their necks to the floor of the truck bed, but they would raise their heads and look into our eyes, pleading for help.



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