Maybe We’re Leaving

Who is the third that walks always beside you?-2

Children play an important role in these stories. Most often, they facilitate the familiar theme of childhood as a period of innocence, or at least something better than the modern world: that golden age of mankind dimly remembered, to which there is no way back. In “Magda,” young Jaromír stumbles across a pristine oak-grove which provides him with an oasis in the midst of a brutal and cold life in the concrete pre-fabs of Ostrava: “Dubovina. Yes, Dubovina, Dubovina! This was for him alone — no one else knew anything about it — about that shade stretching up to the heavens, about those trunks as massive as the piers of a church.” The contact is so visceral, that he even names the spot — in a way not unlike the “Goldengrove” of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ weeping Margaret. The naming of a place is a taking possession of it, and this Goldengrove, this Dubovina, will be “unleaving” in the best sense of the word used by the punning British poet. Jaromír will grow up and leave it — to his detriment and regret — when he enters adulthood. Yet Dubovina itself, part of that natural world which Balabán describes so poetically and lovingly in the pages of his book, will remain, and retain its healing might. Twenty years, at least, pass between Jaromír’s story and that of Magda, the eponymous hero of the narrative. Ugly apartment blocks now stand where the acres of maize fields stretched before the boy’s eyes, and the mysterious airplane hangar, which made him shiver, has been gutted of all its numen via its conversion into a supermarket. But Dubovina remains as an oasis amidst it all:

She lights a cigarette and balls herself up into the intimate area bordered by her shoulders and knees, collarbones, small breasts, lap and arms. Here I’m home. Here I’ll make your crib, little boy. She smokes and sobs a little bit. We’ll go to the discount store in the old hangar together, shopping. You’ll like the arches. And on our walks we’ll make a little detour into that little wood of oaks, all shattered and bruised, left among the prefabs. There nobody’ll find us.

Impermanence, mutability, the stream of time, which carries everything — but especially the good things, the ones we regret — away from us, never to be found again, is the defining characteristic of these stories. It is tempting to see here an almost Ovidian sense of the worsening of times. Men, and the civilisations they created, were better “back then;” the modern world is soulless, empty. This idea can certainly be found in the reflections of Hans, upon his arrival at his grandfather’s old parish to collect some books, while the most recent pastor and his wife are moving out: “He noticed that the large Volvo was now almost full — such as contemporary churches never are. Soon the pastor and his wife would be off, and the vicarage would be orphaned. They call it an unstaffed parish.” The church is no longer needed, and where it is allowed to serve its dwindling congregations, even its architectural decoration has been pared back to the absolute minimum.

Similarly, Vladek, the hero of “Bottoms Up,” compares the capable, tough and fruitful generation of his grandparents with the grubby and devolved state of his own:

Granddad walked the seven kilometres into the village each Sunday to Mass, in a black suit with a hat on his head. That suit can still be found in the cabinet. Vladek wouldn’t be able to squeeze himself into it, even if he tried. Narrow arms, short pant legs — what a small fellow he had been. When he thought of it from time to time, Vladek just couldn’t understand how such small people (Grandma was a full head shorter than her husband) could bear so much work. And everything by hand — no chainsaw, no winch to pull the wood close. Those were solid people. Unbelievable people, their grandson thought, shaking his head. Everything in good order, washed and swept clean, not like it is with me.

Man has grown smaller, as have his ambitions and opportunities. The cynical number cruncher in “Bethesda” describes his own downward spiral:

Once he had studied music, then even theology — he had this twisted period in his life, when he wanted to “serve” — and in the end, he finished in this well-paying, but gruelling grind at the computer. At work, he had to forget completely about everything, switch off all unnecessary circuitry and concentrate only on what the computer wanted of him.

The urge to “serve” is encased in quotation marks here, because it seems to the person concerned that such dreams are not only out of step with real life, but the domain of such mousy, do-gooder souls as are themselves in need of charity. He’s wised up, so it seems. Yet how has he progressed since those unprofitable days of impractical pursuits? Turning from the vocations of musician and pastor of souls, he has become the slave of the computer, attentive only to what it “wants of him:”

Where are my numbers? They have disappeared into the underworld of forgetfulness like unplayed notes. I am paid to shuffle thousands of numbers through my poor brain, numbers of which I know nothing.. I’m like the musical scribes, who made copies of scores they never heard. No one wanted them to hear them. They might as well have been deaf. All that was required of them was clean penmanship, and thus in their ignorance they touched the summits of the musical art. They say that the entire Gospel can be found in the compositions of Johann Sebastian, and in their heads nothing more remained than there does in mine after the passage of these numbers.

But the characters who populate Jan Balabán’s stories are not victims. From this statement we except children, of course, and animals, of which Balabán was inordinately fond and which he describes with touching empathy. Examples of this abound; we shall focus on only two. In “His Master’s Voice,” the Catholic Anna Maria is irritated with her Protestant husband’s sermon to the dog in the foyer, which strikes her as overbearing and nastily triumphalist, exploitative:

Beyond confessional distinctions, though, what really bugged her was the way her husband, in his hangover, exalted himself above the dog, as if it were a mere worm. Who else would seek to assert his dignity above that of an unfortunate, stray animal, and in such a refined way, as if he expected a confession of solidarity and understanding?

Call him a tree-hugger if you must, but the sensitive appreciation shown to animals by Balabán in his stories — the understated sorrow for the “salami horses” leaps out at us — is no mere cuddliness. It serves a subtle, yet strong, philosophical purpose. Oldřich, the male protagonist of “And the Birds as Well,” is literally prostrate with an irrational fear of birds. The only manner in which he can rid himself of it, is by slaughtering a tom turkey at a farm. He pushes himself to do it, and it works. He returns to his job as a ship designer, and rejoins his wife and unborn child in normal life. However, in the end, although he seems to be healed of ornithophobia, he may well have replaced that hang-up with something worse:

The aft superstructure with rudder bracket and rudder post of the transatlantic ship was assuming clear contours on his computer, thanks to his precise calculations. Everything was in order, as much as anything can be. Only from time to time did his heart pain him on behalf of that heart, which had been beating so close to his own heart, and then ceased beating.

The economical image of that still-beating heart which he felt thumping against his own chest before he ended its pulsing, by hacking off the animal’s head on the chopping block, is so immediate and evocative that further commentary is unnecessary. But the point is, whatever Balabán’s convictions in regard to animal welfare may have been, the sympathy he reveals in these concluding lines are more on the side of the turkey than the man. Oldřich goes from being a victim to a killer. He even comes to the realisation that it was not birds he had a problem with, really, but killing. Cruelly persecuted throughout the entire story (by his own mind), he is freed of that persecution by becoming a persecutor himself. Killing, as therapy? Killing, as a constituent element of human nature, the lack of which leads to illness? This sort of Darwinistic, law-of-the-jungle world does not agree with Balabán’s ethos. And just as, stylistically, he progresses from concentration on individual details to metaphors open to and descriptive of us all, in these stories, Mankind’s bloody dominion over the animal world becomes a topic inciting us to consider Man as a bloody creature. From stories of animal cruelty, we are moved to questions of man’s inborn cruelty to others, and from that unsavoury thought, to a consideration of how we might better ourselves, and our world, by a realisation of the imperative to gentleness and understanding for all — including, and perhaps especially, other human beings.

Children and animals are innocent; children and animals can be, and sometimes are, victimised on the pages of Maybe We’re Leaving. It’s not that way with the adult characters, who are truly responsible for the fixes they find themselves in. However, if there were any one among them who might justly gripe against the way in which his life has been skewed and corrupted by his early environment, that would be the hero of “At the Communists.” A Freudian tale if there ever was one, “At the Communists” grounds the adult Leoš’s problems in his upbringing, at the hands of an overbearing mother, who “knowing what is best for everybody,” not only jammed him into the strictures of a Communist childhood from which most parents sought to shield their sons and daughters, but ostentatiously performed s*x acts in front of the child, despite her husband’s prudent objections. Why she did this — whether it was perverted exhibitionism, or a no-less unfitting didacticism, aimed at depriving s*x of its prurient mysteries in the child’s mind — is never quite explained. It is, however, a r**e. By imperiously forbidding the teenaged Leoš to leave the common bedroom for the kitchen once the moaning in the conjugal bed has begun, the wicked mother is using s*x as a tool of control, of power. But the fact remains that although Leoš is able, and more than willing, to castigate his mother’s actions, as an adult, he is no different:

To calmly buy yourself a bottle of good Hungarian wine, sure, Egri Bikavér, and drink it, alone if you must, or with a female, whom you lead to the door tomorrow, with a smile, and close it behind her. All right. With a smile and a little something else, I don’t have anything else for you, but what I gave you is quite enough. Three times a night, for sure. Four, no problem. That’s why he bought himself a nice wide bed. A real airport for long taxiing and sheer takeoffs. It depends on what you’re flying. I fly all sorts: from ultra-lights to B-52s. I’ve got something for them all. But mostly I prefer the F-16s, oh, those young rockets! — you can do whatever you like with them. They respond so well.

His attitude toward s*x is no better than his mother’s. He completely objectifies his partners, to the extent that he not only pays for services rendered, but spins out a metaphor of womanhood that deprives the girls of their humanity. The bed is an airport runway; the women are categorised as airplanes, and he is the pilot — completely in charge of the experience, which is entirely for his benefit, as he conducts his aerial acrobatics at the controls of the passive machines.

Love is a problematical thing in the stories that make up Maybe We’re Leaving. There is hardly a single instance of a truly happy pair of lovers in its pages. Divorce, infidelity, and unhappiness are the norm. Twice — in “Uršula” and “Edita” — violent marital spats are preludes to hateful s****l relations. In “And the Birds as Well,” where we find in Betyna one of the few examples of a truly caring spouse, she too must be hurt by her husband’s aberrant, psychosexual problem, which is not entirely resolved even at the “happy” conclusion of this, one of the darkest, of Balabán’s stories. And even the one pair of seemingly happy spouses, Timi’s parents, as described by Gabriela in the story to which she lends her name, are shown in the concluding tale, “Ray Bradbury,” to be far from marital bliss. They live separately, and a shocking divorce attempted through suicide has not yet been completely scarred over.