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IT WAS THE EVE of St. Martin’s Day, November 10th. The first snow of the winter was close by. Dorni?ka abandoned reason for a few moments, just the amount of time required to switch on her laptop and order another red cape. Child-sized this time. Express delivery. When it arrived she left it in the back garden with the waterfowl feed and said prayerfully: “What will be will be.”
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SHE LEFT THE BACK door open that night, and when the St. Martin’s Day goose came up the stairs and into her bedroom, she wasn’t taken by surprise, not even when she saw that the goose was wearing the red cape and had Dorni?ka’s car keys in her beak.
“Thank you, goose,” she said. “I appreciate you.”
She drove the goose to the foot of Mount Radho?t’ and watched her waddle away up the mountain path, a bead of scarlet ascending into ash.
Thank you, goose. I appreciate you.
Al?běta the goose-meat lover didn’t even complain that much in the morning. She just glared at Klaudie and told her to forget about choosing the Christmas carp.
freddy barrandov checks . . . in?
As I was saying, I’m an inadequate son. I didn’t really notice this until I reached the age my father had been when he was imprisoned for repairing the broken faces of clock towers without authorization. He’d incurred the wrath of those who require certain things not to work at all. That’s what the broken clock towers had been designated as: remembrances of a civil war that stopped time at various locations scattered across my father’s country. Fixing the mechanisms seemed political, though it was impossible to agree on the exact meaning of the gesture. When my dad saw his first splintered clockface he just thought it was a proud and beautiful work that, if restored, would take the mortal sting out of being told how late you are, or how long you’ve been waiting, or how much longer you’ll have to wait.
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MY MOTHER affirms life in her own way: She did some of her most thorough affirmation on behalf of a government-sponsored literary award that posed as a prize sponsored by a company that made typewriters. One year the writer chosen to win the award declined without giving a reason and asked that her name not be mentioned in connection with the award at all. Unfazed, my mother congratulated the next best writer on his win, but was almost laughed off the phone line: “It’s sweet of you to try this, but everybody knows my book isn’t that good,” he said. He named another writer and suggested the prize go to her, but the recommended writer didn’t fancy it either. There had to be a winner, so my mother went through all the shortlisted writers but it was “Thanks but no thanks” and “Oh but I couldn’t possibly” all round, so she went back to the originally selected winner and made some threats that caused the woman to reconsider and humbly accept her prize.
Even though all went on as before, Mum’s developed a sort of prejudice against writers; there are behaviors she now calls “writerly,” but I think she actually means uncooperative. Anyway, my mother agreed with my father about the clockfaces they saw; she wanted to organize the ruin away. So the newlyweds had worked at this project together, though he never allowed anybody to even suggest that she’d been involved, taking all the blame (and speculation, and, in some quarters, esteem) onto his own shoulders. In court my father pleaded that he’d thought he was demonstrating good citizenship by providing a public service free of charge, but was asked why he’d provided this public service anonymously and at dead of night . . . why work under those conditions if you believe that what you’re doing is above reproach? And then all he could say was, Right, I see. When you put it like that it looks bad.
Another thing the law didn’t like: He’d broken into the clock towers, and left them open to people seeking shelter, attracting all sorts of new elements into moneyed neighborhoods and driving established elements out into shabbier neighborhoods so that it was no longer clear what kind of person you were going to find in any part of the city.
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MY FATHER got a three-year prison sentence and came out of it mostly in one piece due to his being a useful person; a sort of live-in handyman. He gained experience in tackling a variety of interesting technical mishaps that rarely occur in small households, and now works alongside my mother at a niche hotel in Cheshire . . . Hotel Glissando, it’s called, and it’s niche in a way that’ll take a while to describe. Dad’s Chief Maintenance Officer there. He more or less states his own salary, as the management team (headed by my mother) hasn’t yet found anyone else willing and able to handle all the things that suddenly need fixing at Hotel Glissando.
As Frederick Barrandov Junior, there was an expectation that I’d follow in Frederick Barrandov Senior’s footsteps, that at some point I’d leave my job as a nursery school teacher and join Hotel Glissando’s maintenance team.