Maybe We’re Leaving

Who is the third that walks always beside you? The Everyday Apocalypse in Jan Balabán’s Maybe We’re Leaving. Two great Christian authors come to mind when one considers the stories that make up the present volume: Fyodor Dostoevsky and T.S. Eliot. The first is directly apparent: Pavla, the young girl renting a cottage from the hulking tippler Vladek in the story “Bottoms Up,” fears that one night he’ll come into the apartment she shares with Ivan and kill them both with his hatchet “like that Karamazov fellow.” “Raskolnikov,” Ivan corrects her calmly — she’d mistaken Crime and Punishment for The Brothers Karamazov. Then, in “Edita,” when Vladimír gets out of bed to rush cross town and pick up his unfaithful wife, he wonders bitterly, “Who am I, Prince Myshkin?” referencing the pure Christian hero of The i***t. Eliot, on the other hand, is present only indirectly, yet for all that, in a much deeper way. Whether or not Balabán was influenced by the great Anglo-Catholic poet, their work springs from the same conviction: this world, and the stream of time inseparable from it, are things lent us. We need to be aware of the necessity of right action, while we can act, in order to live a fully human life and — hopefully, attain an even fuller life on the other side of the grave that awaits us. Even the slightest act here below is freighted with an eternal significance for good, or evil, as Eliot says. A life worth living — or, rather, worthily lived — is one that is lived in conscious awareness of this fact, one in which the human agent strives to do good for others, and, ultimately, for himself. The time-centred words of John 9:4 are not among the sparse Biblical citations that we find in Balabán’s stories: “I must work the works of Him that sent me, whilst it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.” However, they perfectly sum up the entirety of Eliot’s corpus, and the book in hand, as well. They are at the heart, I submit, of the book’s title: Možná, že odcházíme — Maybe We’re Leaving; a curious phrase, but one which carries an implicit weight of consequence that is apparent at first contact, and even more suggestive after one reads through the entire collection. The title might also be translated It’s Possible, that We’re Passing Away, and this, with the subtle lyricism that is characteristic of Balabán’s prose, strikes one as an introductory clause that demands its completion in the reader’s mind: “and therefore…” Balabán has a poetic gift which Eliot would certainly have appreciated. In the original Czech his prose is lucid, suggestive, and evocative with an immediacy, a conciseness, usually reserved for verse. Petr Hruška speaks of his “ability for precise, pregnant definitions [which is] well complemented by a talent for the creation of completely fresh poetic images.” (In his note on the author accompanying Balabán. Povídky (Brno: Host, 2010), p. 517. In another short essay, he writes: “His text develops from an incisive feeling for details, for small events, actually rather a mere episode, but always bound to a concrete person in a concrete time and space, in a concrete life-situation, from which it is possible to emerge only by progressing in the direction of some sort of attempt at generalisation.” “Vážně,” also in Balabán. Povídky, p. 512.) Unsure as to whether this comes across adequately in my English translation, I will yet be bold enough to submit at least a short example from “Salami Horses”: The road narrowed to a pathway leading into the midst of the riverside forest. Huge trees: lindens, alders, maples, oaks and innumerable hornbeams enclosed them in a balmy twilight. The path twisted and turned in the thick undergrowth of bear garlic, the white flowers of which twinkled like sparks. It is a striking synaesthesia — one can almost hear and smell that bear garlic, as well as see it. It is an expression not unlike what we find in the verse of Marianne Moore, whom Eliot greatly appreciated (and who also had a penchant for the building up of crescendos of images). But again, it is the message of imminent responsibility that most links Balabán with Eliot. Stylistically, besides the obvious generic differences, he is closer in literary approach to the great realists and psychological novelists of the European nineteenth century, chief among whom is Fyodor Dostoevsky. (Hruška notes this as well, referring to “his extraordinary degree of seriousness, degree of gravity found in his words. It reminds one of that evangelical vigour in which narratives of time past are written, in the age of the Russian realist novels.” p. 514.) The quote here to offer is the fevered reflection of Oldřich from “And the Birds as Well,” (The title, “A ptáci taky,” is borrowed from the text of a song by The Plastic People of the Universe (author’s note).) who tries to shield his mind from the terrors of his ornithophobia by an abstract consideration of the child in his wife’s womb, the gender of whom they do not yet know: And so thus must you address twice over one incomprehensible child. They are two approaches to one summit, to the abstract child, of whom all concrete newborns are just imperfect variants, just like all people are merely unsuccessful derivatives of man, of the son of man, the pattern elevated above the poverty of all concrete names, above all vain human destinies. This is an odd, yet torturously logical, meditation (which began with a philological consideration of the morphology of the names Andrea/Ondřej) that would not be out of place in the mouth of one of the great Russian’s hyper-intellectual heroes, like Ivan Karamazov, during his disquisition on the Grand Inquisitor. Yet Balabán is nowhere near as drastic as Dostoevsky. Violence, up to and including brutal murders, occurs in all three of the novels referenced in the pages of this book, but the Czech author does not need to resort to overwhelming shock tactics to discuss the pathologies of everyday life. (Physical violence in the context of marriages breaking down, or, rather, its allure and repulsiveness to the characters concerned, can be found in stories such as “Uršula” and “Edita.” But that is about as far as it goes.) For these are quotidian situations we are presented with in Maybe We’re Leaving. They range from the nervy half-bitten anxieties of a couple in a second marriage, played out in front of a foundling dog (“His Master’s Voice”) to the heartrendingly tragic, yet no less common, situation of a child suffering from an incurable illness (“The Burning Child”), but they are all of them stories to which we can all relate. They are so common in their conception that each reader, I reckon, has heard of something similar happening in the “real life” that surrounds her or him, and even possibly — though one hopes it is not so — has experienced it on his own skin. The limpid descriptions of these everyday situations create a sense of reality that drives deeper than what we find in the great novels of nineteenth century Realism. Objects so common that they are within our reach at this moment, as we hold this book in our hands, and people so common as to be our neighbours, coupled with Balabán’s poetic mixing of narrators from third-person omniscient to stream-of-consciousness first person, (The latter is indicated in our translation by italics.) foster in us a sense of lived immediacy which forbids us to hold the situations at arm’s length. We can almost taste the stories. As Hruška so accurately describes it in the above note, Balabán progresses from minute detail to generalisation, and thus effects a very human expansion of the experience from what happened to this particular individual, to something that touches upon us all, as humans. The intimacy of the narrative is also helped on by the interwoven structure of Balabán’s collection. Many, but not all, of the stories are linked. They do not run into one another consecutively, as they might in a traditional frame narrative; they are linked, rather, by the author’s use of the same characters in different stories. Dr. Roman Hradílek is little more than an introductory prop for the story of his wife in “Uršula,” while he is front and centre in “Salami Horses,” and appears as a much more sympathetic character than we would have expected, based on the first tale. Likewise, his wife is only tangentially mentioned in his story — providing another look at the character of that protagonist, with whom we sympathised in “Uršula,” and their son Robert, barely mentioned in the earlier work, is fleshed out and made real in the latter. The despairing drunk of “Emil” makes a phantom appearance in “Bottoms Up,” while the dysfunctional Červenka clan to whom we are introduced at second-hand in “The Cedar and the Hammer” make a guest appearance, drunk at the counter of the liquor store, near the conclusion of “Emil.” The positive young lovers Gabriela and Timi thread through both “Gabriela” and “Ray Bradbury.” The effect we experience when coming across these familiar characters at unsuspected moments is not unlike that achieved by Krzysztof Kieślowski in his own interplaiting cinematic series Dekalog. Since all of his stories take place in Ostrava and its general environs, Balabán heightens the reality of his narratives by immersing the reader in a situation that approximates life in a common area. We become the neighbours of these people, and they bob and weave into and out of our purview just as do the familiar faces of our apartment block, our workplace, our parks and the hospitals we visit. Unlike the writer he surely admired, Balabán does not introduce any feverish Raskolnikov into his stories, who butchers a defenceless old woman in order to test out a philosophical thesis. The anguish of a single mother about to introduce her child to an apartment in a housing estate that, with its defensively barred windows, seems more like a prison cell than a real home (“Magda”), is enough to arouse our sympathies and engage our minds on questions concerning the world about us, and the social conditions in which some of us are forced to live. By focusing our eyes on the everyday concerns and mundane trials of common, ordinary individuals — whose stories we are sometimes led to consider from more than one angle, as in the case of Roman and Uršula — Balabán slyly engages our sympathy on behalf of quite unremarkable people. And in so doing, he displays a great, deep, Christian humanism, which leads us to acknowledge the worth and dignity of every single human being. Jan Balabán (1961—2010) was only eight years old when Aleksander Dubček sought to introduce “Socialism with a human face,” a less repressive, open rule in the then-Communist controlled Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. He was still eight years old when the Soviet Union, the Communist hegemon of Eastern Europe, led the armies of five “fraternal” Communist nations into Czechoslovakia, in order to repress the Prague Spring and reintroduce totalitarian order. It is worth considering whether this wrenching event — the excitement of a Western nation beginning to breathe with both lungs again, suddenly stifled under the Soviet boot — had a seminal influence on the young boy’s developing consciousness. Certainly, the characters in all of the short stories that make up Maybe We’re Leaving seem to be in search of something that was taken away from them, to return to a better world that existed just around the corner they turned a moment before. Whether it be Edita’s husband, heading for a messy divorce, yet desperately nostalgic for the happy times of their marriage, little, terminally-ill Katka longing for that time before she learned how to count, which conflates in her mind with the time before she grew sick, or the nerdy Jaromír, sighing after the pristine Pre-Cambrian era, unspoilt as yet by the hand of man, each and every actor on the stage of Balabán’s collection is in search of a return path to a paradise lost. “She didn’t understand what she was supposed to understand,” the narrator of “The Burning Child” tells us, in reference to Katka, sick in hospital, and preternaturally talented with a mathematical sharpness that holds her in an obsessive grip, she merely nodded so that she could get up from her crouch at last and continue on the path between the pines leading to the ruins on that hot summer day, which she still remembered chiefly as back then, when she still didn’t know how to count. Somewhere in the back of her head she still preserved the image of her incomprehension, when she saw those lines or pebbles checked or crossed in front of her eyes as nothing more than lines or pebbles. In the same way, she remembered the incomprehensible shapes of the letters in their rows on the signs. They were not yet words and letters, but a mystery. Now, at ten years old, she guarded these memories of her illiteracy and innumeracy like a treasure chest, containing her real childhood.