Otavin


by Vera Stiborova
translated by Jirina Fuchs, July 11, 2000


Throughout the years, I have dreams of trains:
trains that lead to the PISEK station; in the shade
of the trees cut into global shapes my aunt Marie
is waiting for me, she has on a flower-printed
dress,because it is summer, or at least in all my
dreams it is summer: it is a hot vacation day,
but even in this breeze-less conditions, in the
flower baskets hanging under the station roof,
the goblets of colorful petunias are are shivering...
  The train comes to a stop, and from the clouds
of steam my aunt Marie, wide in the shoulders as
some ancient Czech farmer's wife, red in the face,
is rushing to meet me with her arms wide open....
  All of my life I am having dream of trains, of
trains taking me to my native place:in these
dreams each street, each park, each town square
or a piece of a field surounded by houses appear
in my mind as a palimpsest: under the firs picture
there is another one, and another, and, miracle
or miracles!, the older the picture is, the sharper
and brighter are its contours.....
 I am travelling to the place of my birth every
year and already from afar I am straining to see
the church tower. Now! I see it! And as the train
moves forward, the streets, the parks and the river
are stringing on my memory as a silk thread upon
a skein... And I am not fighting back the tears:
here it is, that my dad met my mom, here it is,
where they went to have me baptized... Here it is,
where the students of famous violin virtuoso
Sevcik took me to classes... Here the lovely
little houses of Rybarska Street stood, with their
small tunnels leading to the Otava river; when
you were nearing it from afar, here and there
your face was hit by the reflection of the sun
on the Otava's  surface, and further on you could
hear the sounds of the boats anchored there..

And here! This is the park with the green pavillion
full of musicians, they are now playing an aria
from Martha, next to the basin with gold fish
'my aunt Marie is standing, all red in the face,
she would give her life for music!, and on the
island in the middle of the basin a plaster stork
is standing and he is spouting out cascades of water
intermingeld with a rainbow...

 The house of my aunt Marie  has never changed throughout
the years I have known it, that is at least since
1910, when my grandparents moved here, and it, surely,
did not change since its inception. It was merely
hanging there. It was grand: with its facade of
Czech village baroque, with its windows as eyes
full of flowering fuchsias; there was a high
wall with double gates painted rusty yellow, courtyard,
garden, and another wall, then fields, and river Otava
with mills along the river, with its mills emanating
that ancient life-exuding frangrance of crushed
wheat... In the house: a warm, darkened living
room and the magical bedroom with old armoires and
a round table: on the table a vase full of summer
bouquet of roses, chinese carnations and lillies...
At that time, in the end of June, beginning of
July, my aunt's room smelled exactly the same
as all PISEK's churches and cemeteries smelled...

In the room: a deep recess in the wall, and in it
the treasures, possibly from all the village
fairs: glasses, bowls, pitchers and goblets. When
the early summer morning was beginning, noticible
by ever so slightly paler blue of the sky, the
recess in the wall shone with unearthly blue,
as if each of the glasses grabed a piece of sky
into itself; but then the sun climbed higher
above the wall, and it filled the room with orange 
glow blinding to the eyes. And only in this glow
a piece of a broken stone, placed in between all
the glass, began to shine.... The element in the
stone that shone, said my aunt Marie, was gold...
Gold from the river Otava... It was "otavin"....
Having no reason to disbelieve Marie, so it was:
otavin.......

  This year, in the middle of February, I received 
another letter from aunt Marie, written, like all
the others, with those large, non-imitable letters,
clear and honest as all of her life has been:
laboring in the town, working in the garden,
baking her famous goodies on the old-fashioned
stove. Come soon, she wrote.  

                          I came. I walked
through a rainy tree-lined, partially tree-less
road, from the railroad station through the town.
Much, much has changed. Everything has changed...

And the Rybarska Street now existed only in my
palimpsest. With a great joy I found the only
thing that did not change: Maria's house. We sat
down, as in the old times, to the table scrubbed
white with river sand. Maria's hands were laying
on top of the table, the year-lines of the wood
were raised above the desk. They looked much like
Maria's hands... That must be the loyalty, I
thought, only through loyalty we begin to resemble
one another... We sit until evening, and we do
not turn on the light. Marie, bent down with the
weight of her ninety years, put more wood into
the stove. Scarlet shadows danced over the white-washed
walls, the alarm clock was loudly ticking and
my aunt Marie was breaking the silence with her
soft voice. 

 But! All of a sudden, very suddenly, she got up
from the bench and was all attention. Somebody
is in my garden, she said. Who would come into
this garden, I thought, as far as I can remember,
nobody has ever made it here except through the
gate. Aunt must be getting old... The alarm-clock
seemed louder. Somebody is in the garden, said aunt
Marie again and she positioned herself to a square
window in a thick stone wall, through which a
disturbing light of a shivering moon was shining.
The face of the moon looked very unhappy, it
seemed scarred by the branches of leafless trees...

Aunt's voice was excited, but something in it
suggested that this was not happening for the first
time. It disturbed me even more than usual. Could
it be possible that someone uninvited would dare
to come all the way here? Here, unto a fortress-like
teritorry? For ninety years a rusty key to the gate
and the walls sufficed... No, nobody dared to enter
here....but now even I was watching the shadows
dancing on the remainder of snow undeneath the
limestone wall and around the basin with rain
water into which the sparkling winter stars
were sliding....                                  
      It is only wind, aunt Marie,
the wind is moving the branches, the wind...


My aunt laughed, it was a short sinister laughter,
laughter I have never heard from her before.
I was not familiar with this laughter...
It was not her usual comforting laughter, this
was a laughter of a victim given to an unconquerable
evil force, to such evil force, about which we
do not know what it will do the next second...

 This, as far as I know, said aunt Marie, is for
the fourth time. They climbed the wall from the back,
on the side, where it is lower than the street.
Also, there is a pile of compost there.
            
   She had
no time to finish. We have spotted two man's figures,
slouching slowly, carefully, with some burden
in their hands, bags maybe, or some shopping
bags. The third shadow behind them was a child.

The child called out to those two, few sound made
it all through our window. Aunt went to the stove
and took the coal spade.A week ago, she said,
they stole my wagon and two geese, God knows
how they do it, the geese did not even squeek,
and only God knows, how they carried the wagon
over the wall... In summer they raided my garden:
they took all the vegetables and also my lillies,
those planted by the wire fence, you know, those,
that usually stand there like soldiers on guard,
for the whole summer... Aunt was in the hall, her
hand was on the door handle.

  Please, do not go there, I said, as I shook with
an unfamiliar horror. Has the earth itself turned
upside down? What has happened here? What is
gpoing on here?
  There are no flowers left, continued Marie with her
hand on the door, not even for the cemetery.

  Do not go, I repeated, do not go there.. The
key was still in the lock, she did not turn it yet.
Through the opening above the door, the opening
by which the swallows came in and out in the summer,
a pale 
light was coming in, moon was climbing higher over 
the roof and soon it will light up the whole courtyard.
Every stone will be plainly visible. I was holding
Maria by her shoulder: who are you talking about?
Who is it?

  They moved into an abandoned house, there are about
thirty od them. But how they live, how can they
sleep behind those glassless windows, empty
rooms, I really cannot imagine. They stole everything
from the neighbor's chickencoop, and then
took apart his chickencoop for wood. They began
to take down the roof, but not to repair their
own, no, they sold the tiles. The neighbor went
at them with a stick, they took the knife at him,
all of them. And those lillies of mine.....
those...those... next day a little boy was
selling them in the market. You stole them, I shouted
at him. He began to yell. And a group of fat,
angry faces closed in over me, and said: take
it easy, lady,or we shall wait for you over there......

  Aunt quickly unlocked the door and almost fell
out of them. In spite of her age she ran over
the courtyard, bent to one side, with a cool
shovel in her hand. Next to the wire fence, apart
from open chickencoop, two hens were standing  and
were emitting short cries. Aunt headed for the garden,
I followed her. We ran on wet frozen grass, but for a
second I have seen it full of violets and I even
smelled their fragrance... It was now February,
but my imagination, my palimpsest, magically painted
Easter, profusion of violets, and I was tempted
to lie down and hid my face in that fragrance...

One, two seconds, enough! Now we have heard two
voices behind the wall: one angry, one soft,
submissive... Then somebody said a bad word.
A light from a flashlight pierced the dark. The
child appeared. It ran under aunt Maria's shovel
and in a second it was up on the wall, somebody
was pulling it from the top. Aunt Marie was
banging her shovel on the wall and swearing...
I have never heard her say so many bad words...
In that moment I realized, that peaceful,
God-fearing person cornered by evil may, and
sometimes must, even kill...

  I took the shovel from her hand, and I was
shaking too. When we returned into the house,
my aunt began to cry. I have never seen her cry
before. I have never heard her to swear. Until
now. We remained speechless until we went to bed.
Aunt slept in the kitchen, I went to sleep
in the bedroom, I took a warm feather blanket
with me. From the recess in the wall, blue goblets
and pitchers were emanating light. Somewhere
in between the glass, the invisible broken stone
was waiting. It will start shining only with the
sunrise. But, who knows, will the sun come up,
tomorrow?

  In April I received the news that aunt is in a
hospital for long-term care. The caregivers from
that good institution were writing: she is running
away from here, because she says the violets are in
bloom, that she has to feed the hens and geese,
to plant the bulbs of white lillies. She is
escaping and escaping. We had to transfer her
into a locked pavillion. And my aunt added, in'her
own handwriting: I shall return home!

 Shortly afterwards aunt Marie died. Perhaps of
homesickness. 

 I was going to PISEK again: everyone of us has
his or her own Rome... 

 This time I went with no tears, with no emotion.
The church steeple with its proud green top was
still there, it seems no vandals have gotten that
far yet... I stopped swearing only when the priest
recited the prayers for the dead. 

 The final curtain was going down, aunt Marie
was going to better pastures... I was waving
to her, as she used to wave to me while standing
at the railroad under the trees with rounded
crowns, when my train was beginning to move
towards Prague. 

  After I opened her house with the key given to
me by an "empowered legal" person, I entered
into the room. Feather blankets, sheets, all
have disappeared. Some dirty rags were strewn
around the floor. The bed mattress was half-burned,
the chairs disappeared. All that remained was
the table and empty armoires. Also the recessed
opening in the wall was empty, except the broken
stone with the traces of gold... Nothing was left,
except the stone. Otavin...

  In the kitchen the same scene: green tiles
from the stove were torn off, the floor ruined.
I opened the window: a stench so thick came in,
that I wanted to tun away. From the pile full of
last years rotten stalks and remains of flowers,
new, juicy shoots and shiny leaves were growing,
and behind a stand of killer weeds, in the
limestone wall, a hole large as an empty window,
was yawning, large enough for a group of bent-down
thieves...

  A quiet, peaceful blue day, high sky, was
standing above the wall... Through the hole in the
wall one could see nearby forest and a see-through
haze over the river. In fact, you could hear
the river: it bubbled at the weir, sizzled against
the banks, and was clinking as the stones of quartz
and silica were travelling down the river, towards
that huge dam, on the bottom of which today
sleep the submerged mills...


(Author of this story VERA STIBOROVA was born
in 1926. Source: Lidove Noviny, July 11, 2000.
This English Translation by Jirina Fuchs is
unauthorized)