HRABAL, Bohumil

Too loud a Solitude

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Once a month I go and visit my uncle and look around in his garden for the place to put my press when we retire. The idea of saving up and buying the hydraulic press when I retire was his, not mine. He spent forty years as a railroad man, raising and lowering gates at crossings, forty ears as a signalman, forty years, like me, enjoying nothing but work, and when he retired he found he couldn't live without a signal tower, so he picked one up secondhand at a border station no longer in use and had it brought back to his garden, and then some of his friends who were retired engineers chipped in on a small locomotive—an Ohrenstein & Koppel that had once pulled skips and flatcars through a steelworks—and some tracks and three flatcars, all of which they found at a scrap heap somewhere, and once they'd laid the tracks in and around the trees of the old garden, they would stoke up the Ohrenstein & Koppel every Saturday and Sunday, and off they'd go, giving rides to children in the afternoon and—when evening came on and they began drinking beer and singing—rides to one another, or else they would all crowd together on the locomotive, and it would look like a statue of the river god Nile, the figure of a naked reclining Adonis dotted with figurines.

One day I went to see my uncle to find a place for my press, and as night fell, and the train, its lights aglow, rounded the apple- and pear-tree bends at top speed, I watched him sitting in his signal tower, busy at the switches and, to judge by the intermittently flashing aluminum tankard, every bit as well lubricated as the Ohrenstein & Koppel. Since I walked through the children's whoops and the old men's hoots without being invited

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I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.

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Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

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