Jarmila Read Free Page A

looking at me, didn’t take his eyes off me. “Let him speak!” I thought. “If only you hold back for another five minutes he will start to talk and pour out his watchmaker’s heart to you.” And that’s indeed what happened. All through the evening (and for how long before?) he had felt an urge to open up. He had simply been holding out for the best moment to begin without burdening anybody. He could see I was waiting and so he began as though picking up an earlier conversation: “Yes, I flinched like that when, as a young man, I first saw my beloved Jarmila. There she was in front of her house, her white hand plucking feathers from the breast of a goose. Jarmila, the most beautiful in a large village full of splendid girls. Her little white feet rested on the cloth where the feathers fell, and she was stretching her toes amongst the feathers. They warmed her rosy soles, her tiny heels,and her sculpted ankles. See how it floats, how it flies! Breathe out, and it is gone, breathe in, and it is there again, and all the while nothing but the stupid feathers of a silly goose.”

V
    “… AND WITH BREASTS like Bohemian apples, so full of scent, and skin like down, and everything so delicate. The other women plucked geese in their musty rooms, but Jarmila’s lungs were so sensitive that the tiny down feathers didn’t agree with her: breathing them in caused irrepressible coughing fits until she thought she would suffocate. She clenched the thrashing goose between her firm young thighs with her skirts stretched tight and tore at it.
    What can I say? We used to meet at night in a small barn to the right of the house where her husband, the old feather merchant, stored his feathers. There were no children, but she wished for them. Was that wrong? It was perfectly natural! After the crops had been harvested and as soon as the second batch of hay from his few meadows was piled high in the hay-loft her husband set off to travel the country on his cart. He was a penny-pincher. According to the villagers who laughed behind his back he even refrained from touching his young blond wife out of sheer thriftiness, not wanting to wear her out. Why should an old fool have a wife? And to think he not only had the wife for ages but, eventually, the child too. Still does, up to thisvery day. Will this never change? Shall he have him forever? I often sneered at him as I lay with his wife on the heavy, rustling, soft sacks in the feather-store’s gallery. She could feel the fine down feathers tickling her throat, she wanted to cough, but didn’t dare to! The schoolmaster, brother of the Oom-Pah, (I call him the Oom-Pah you know, that unwieldy brass instrument, a strident, immense kind of French horn with valves and tubes of brass, him, the old grey man for my young blond Jarmila) … yes, that poor old scrawny schoolmaster with steel-rimmed spectacles on his bony nose and his ears a-quiver, slinking around guarding his fat, rich brother’s wife. He probably would have fancied a nibble himself, but she did not want him. Only me. That oddball, so scholarly, with all his erudite books, his hunched back, and the shiny seat of his trousers, worn-out from sitting at his desk in front of stupid kids, he did not hold any appeal. However, I was soon going to learn all about ‘sitting’, doing time, myself! But I am not in the least ashamed of it since I was in the right.
    He hated me and maybe he was the one who betrayed us. Don’t tell me, dear sir, that I was guilty of seducing poor Jarmila, stealing her from her rich husband, defying all law and order. It was him after all who would sit for evenings on end drinking beer in front of the local fire station with his associates, or playingfor the Sunday dance with the rest of the fire brigade band, slobbering into his instrument with his fat lips, pawing its valves with his plump digits …” He bent over the cogs, screws and pins again. “The mechanism is crudely constructed,” he repeated