Читать онлайн «I, City»

Pavel Brycz

I, City

AN APPEARANCE, HEROIC

If you stop at the corner of two streets — there among the small houses you might know as Na Špačkárně, in the quarter of the city irreversibly called Stalingradská (at least that’s what people still call it, for there is no greater paradox of history than calling the small by great names) — you will encounter two memorials to the victims of the miners’ strikes of Most.

The strikes numbered two, during them eight people were shot. One strike was in 1920, the second and more famous one in the Year of Our Lord 1932. I am not a poet, I am a city, ill equipped to write about the affairs of people. I am a city, a new city. I cannot bear witness to the past, I can describe only what I see.

And here, among the full-grown, needle-leaved shrubs, I see a stone.

And on the stone:

THIS & THAT, FROM HERE & THERE, AGE, MINER

THIS & THAT, FROM HERE & THERE, AGE,

MASTER SHOEMAKER

One sunny day in June, a twenty-six-year-old poet born in Old Most brought his friend Pedro from Lisbon to the memorial.

The poet thought he’d introduce his friend, the Portuguese poet, to the utter absurdity he experienced in his every encounter with the memorial to the miners’ strikes. He laughed at the mere memory of the Youth League shirts worn by he and his Gymnasium classmates, released from afternoon lessons and obliged to stand astride the officers of the army and the people’s militia. Comrades laid wreaths, another comrade delivered a speech, and after the address the Internationale was sung. The Gymnasium boys, like our poet, were born in the year 1968. They couldn’t stand memorials, comrades, Youth League shirts or wreaths.

And they couldn’t stand the Internationale.

But they liked playing pranks.

“So we also sang the Internationale, to the grumbling of those fat old farts, who were in uniform, with their rifles slung over their shoulders, but we sang it in the original, in French,” Most’s poet explained to his Portuguese friend. “They were totally confused, as were our teachers, and the army officers as well, none of those comrades knew what to do, even given their excellent cadre profiles, the lessons they’d learned about crisis development engraved deep in their faces. They didn’t know whether they were supposed to forbid our singing as an impertinent provocation, or to appreciate that for the first time we were singing along with them, in unison.

“We sang, and in so doing we laughed at their parades, at their memorials, at their eternal fear of a freedom that for them was only the recognition of necessity. ”

Most’s poet finished his story, and approached the memorials. The Portuguese poet read to himself the names of the long dead as well.

And, suddenly, they became completely serious, and forgot the laugh for which they had come. No longer was there the absurdity of the Internationale and the Youth League shirts. Only the two of them and the shot dead remained, and the young men felt a profound sadness for the fact that people sometimes don’t know how to be people.