The Gentle Barbarian
“Whenever there was too little of something, he threw his talent into it to show that omnia ubique — everything is in all places,” Bohumil Hrabal writes of his late friend, the artist, writer, Prague Underground–member, and self-proclaimed Explosionist, Vladimír Boudník. Throughout The Gentle Barbarian, an extended eulogy in the form of a roving buddy comedy, Hrabal recalls his gently barbaric friend’s knack for locating the sense in the seemingly senseless. The lightheartedness of Hrabal’s signature storytelling style — pabeni or “palavering,” he calls it — and his slapstick sense of humor belie his subjects’ very sincere efforts to sift through the crude material world and extract the profound. While comedy is so often dismissed as mere diversion or means of escape, Hrabal and Boudník’s comic sensibility enables their more direct engagement with the world; their slapstick antics read as a mimetic response to the violence and chaos surrounding them.
Hrabal credits Boudník with reviving the myth of Dionysus, the archetypal creative drunkard. But Hrabal is himself the chief mythologizer, hyping his friend, elevating him to god status. Of course, one ought to take everything a hype man says with a grain of salt — who knows if any of these shenanigans actually happened. But Hrabal evokes his friends so adoringly and so vividly that the veracity doesn’t really matter. As the best storytellers do, Hrabal takes anecdotal recollections of Boudník, throws his talent into them, and elaborates upon them in such a way that Boudník’s life takes on the dimensions of an epic, extended piece of performance art. He has found a way to give his friend, whose oeuvre never achieved the renown of Hrabal’s, his due praise.
—Mia Ruf
Excerpt from The Gentle Barbarian
Once we were sitting in the pub U Brabců and talking about the expanding universe while drinking beer in a manner appropriate to the topic of conversation. Vladimír never went to the pissoir on his own initiative, and if he were on a visit in someone’s flat, he would never go to the bathroom, not even if his bladder were about to burst. And so when we’d had five beers and made our first trip to the toilets, two brothers sat down at our table and began talking animatedly among themselves. One of them, wearing dark glasses, was doing most of the talking. He had a booming voice and every syllable was so beautifully articulated we just listened to the melody of his speech. Vladimír was nibbling delicately at a bun, because all his teeth had come loose. But when our two table companions got up together to go to the pissoir, we saw that the one with the loud voice was blind. When they returned, our conversations merged and in the end we learned that when the two brothers were children, they were horsing around, jumping out of trees, and one of them let go of a branch and it snapped back into the other’s eyes, blinding him. When we were standing at the streetcar stop and Vladimír had pried sixty hellers out of me for the fare, he said: “One day, when I’m up to it, I’ll ask the blind fellow if, the moment he was blinded, his eyes turned inward and give him his one and only look at his own eye sockets.”
At this point, a man at the next table got up and began talking quietly, while casting side glances at the clock on the wall. “My name is Duže,” he said, “like ‘duše,’ soul. Just repeat as often as you can: ‘Be calm, be calm, be calm.’ If you have any need for hypnotherapy, I live in Horní Počernice, anyone can tell you how to find me. I live just past the garden.” The large hand on the clock advanced to one minute to nine, and Mr. Duže said: “Excuse me, but I’m going to miss my bus,” and he hurried off, but in the swinging doors he collided with the waiter who was just spinning round with a tray of foaming beer in his hand. Mr. Duže fell, drenched and blinded, and ended up on all fours in a pool of beer, yelling and cursing. Vladimír was amazed and rose to the occasion. He stood up, buttoned his overcoat, leaned over Mr. Duže and said quietly: “Just repeat after me: Be calm, be calm, be calm. If you need anything, my name is Vladimír and I work in ČKD. Anyone can tell you how to find me. I’m in the far building.”
Vladimír Boudník, Structural Graphic, 1965. Babylon Revue.
Another time we were sitting U Horkých in Libeň and we each bought ten bread rolls and chased each of them with a glass of Smichov beer. The pub was buzzing with conversation and laughter and some spruced-up female workers were sitting over by the window, drinking coffee with shots of rum, when a man came over to our table and said out of the blue: “Gentle-men, I’m a married man, which isn’t that interesting in and of itself, but my wife and I are living with my father-in-law in a single room that’s divided down the middle by a curtain, and I can tell you, gentlemen, the fact that my father-in-law eats my food isn’t that interesting in and of itself, but at night, when I have sex with my wife on one side of the curtain, I can see my father-in-law’s silhouette on the curtain right next to our heads and he’s jerking off so cleverly that when I start to come, so does he. I ask you, gentlemen, where else in the world could you find a father-in-law like that? My name isn’t important. I’m just a house painter.”
When Egon Bondy heard about the man blinded by a branch, he waved it off as though it were nothing, and when he heard about Mr. Duže and Vladimír, he rubbed his hands together, as if delighted that our phenomenal encounters were somehow fizzling out, no longer intensifying. Then, when he heard about the father-in-law who masturbated beside his own daughter as she was making love, he took me by the shoulder and looked at me askance, then took my head in his hands and peered intently into my eyes to see if I was telling the truth. Then he shouted: “Where is he?”
Vladimír Boudník, Ztichlá klika. Babylon Revue.
“Vladimír’s probably home by now,” I said.
“I mean the painter!” Bondy shouted. “Where is he?” And he shook his fist in my face. “Don’t play games with me. I know what you’re up to. You’re trying to put me off writing, but you are way off beam, Goddamn it! You’ve simply got to introduce me to this painter!”
“Right now he’s working on that big radio and TV transmission tower,” I said. “He’s hanging by a rope with a paintbrush in his hand, dipping it into the paint and singing to himself.”
“Bring him here!” Bondy yelled And he plugged his ears and wailed: “Vladimír has to write all this down, and if he doesn’t, then you have to do it, just like Božena Němcová did with her fairy tales and Jirásek with his old Czech legends. And tell Vladimír for me: the closer a mountain is to the sun, the colder it gets at the top. And only the sun has the right to its spots, as Goethe once said of Fredrich, the Prussian king, whom I happen to be studying at the moment. But you’ve got to introduce me to that painter! Don’t you see? He could be a martyr in disguise. That’s the whole point. The Pope can say, ‘The church has no need of martyrs!’ But we need them more than ever, so bring me that painter, Goddamn it!”
Vladimír Boudník, Stopy materiálu, 1959. MUO.
Vladimír liked to take long streetcar rides, waiting for the moment when the conductor up front would perforate several dozen tickets at once with her ticket-punch. He’d close his eyes, place his hand on his gall bladder and experience several different layers and phases of reality at the same time. First he’d have a tactile sensation of being that book of streetcar tickets as they were being punched, then he’d experience a gallbladder attack that felt as though his liver was being perforated by the conductor’s ticket punch, and finally he experienced the perforation of his duodenum. When he opened his eyes again, he’d go for a walk and think of how he would punch holes in his lithographs, to replicate the physical sensation he’d experienced on the tram.
That was the nature of his sensitivity. He liked to talk about how terrified he was of the moment the tailor who was fitting him for a new suit would kneel in front of him and gently, discreetly, insert his fingers between his legs, holding the tape to measure the length of his trousers . . . and how, in that ritual moment, Vladimír would faint. Whenever there was a plane crash, Vladimír wanted to know all the details. He would experience the catastrophe as a passenger catapulted into the air with the others, or burned up as the plane fell to earth, or struck by shards of metal as the engines exploded. It was as though he became the aircraft itself as it plunged into the ocean or plummeted to earth or was blown to bits in midair and then fell in fragments to the landscape below. When he learned that the insurance companies, to determine the cause of the crash, would gather up the debris and reassemble it into a replica of the original aircraft, Vladimír was thrilled. “That’s just like me! That’s exactly how I put myself back together again once a week.”
Vladimír was capable of working himself up into a state of rabid morbidity, only to explode it, to blow it up, in his graphic art. There was a rhythm to it. He was either too sick or too healthy, and the state he happened to be in was exactly how he appeared to anyone who met him. But nature proceeds just like Vladimír, because nature got there before he did. You might even say that Vladimír was nature’s student, her product, her admirer. . . .
Vladimír Boudník, Explosionalismus, 1956. Babylon Revue.
Once Vladimír and I set off for the Brdy forest to hunt for wild mushrooms. But mushrooms were not the real point of our journey. We wanted to travel along the railway track where Egon Bondy had lain down one night, drowsy with opiates, to get himself painlessly run over. But the track where he lay down was taken out of service that night, and he woke up next morning, not in the kingdom of ontology, but still lying on the track, while the trains roared by on the other line.
We got to the Smichov train station with time to spare so we walked along the platform, admiring the locomotives. An engineer was wiping down the condenser and I went up to him and said: “Mr. Kopič, if they were to shoot you a low pass right up the middle, could you still dribble through your opponents and score a goal?”
Mr. Kopič, a former centre-forward for the Polabana Nymburk soccer club, replied proudly. “You bet I could! And you know, I still like kicking the ball around. Do I know you?”
“I’m a fan of yours from Nymburk, from the brewery,” I said.
And while Vladimír looked on in amazement, Mr. Kopič said: “Gentlemen, it’s just about departure time. May I have the pleasure?” And he made a sweeping, aristocratic gesture, inviting us aboard the locomotive. We climbed into the cabin and Mr. Kopič waited for the signal from the dispatcher, then he pulled the throttle and eased the train out of the station. Once we were under way, Mr. Kopič told us how, just outside of Smíchov, a man had dragged his son onto the tracks and got them both run over. He’d seen the son struggling to escape, but the father was stronger, like Abraham when he was about to sacrifice his son Jacob, except that God reprieved Abraham at the last minute, whereas the easygoing Mr. Kopic, though he applied the brakes, ran over the father and son, and all he saw was their legs flopping about. . . .
The tale moved Vladimír to tears. When the dark cloud of tragedy had lifted, Vladimír asked if he could hold the throttle lever. Mr. Kopič said he could. Vladimír gripped the lever and looked out the window for a while, then he handed it back and declared: “Just by touching that lever, you can feel the whole locomotive, the whole train, the whole track!”
“This is the spot where Egon Bondy lay down on the tracks,” I said, pointing it out, and Vladimír declared: “What we experienced in those few minutes is Apollinaire’s Zone!” And he stood there ecstatically, his legs apart. And I, who have often travelled by train and tasted the vibrations of the entire locomotive, the click-clack each time the wheels passed over a joint in the tracks, I registered all of it with my whole body, because I was a dispatcher during the war. I also worked with the track maintenance crew, and my job was to ride along in the cab and determine, by sensing the movement of the machine, whether there were any problems with the switches and report on any repairs to the road bed that needed doing.
I knew that Vladimír was experiencing the train in motion as a direct, tactile sensation. Once again, his eyes opened wide and I knew that, in that precise moment, Vladimír had become the train, the locomotive, and the entire rail line. And as the coupling between the engine and the tender jerked back and forth, gently, brutally, suggesting a kind of sexual communion between them, Vladimír leaned toward me and whispered: “I’ve got the most amazing erection!” The train stopped in Zadní Třebaň. Mr. Kopič wiped his hands with detergent oil and as he was saying goodbye to us, he apologized for the grime and said: “You know, Vojta Hulík’s engine was so clean he’d wear white gloves to operate it.”
Vladimír Boudník, Stopy materiálů, 1960. Galerie Moderna.
Gentle Barbarian by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson,
is published by New Directions and available March 3, 2021.
Mia Ruf is a writer and illustrator who lives in LA. She wrote her thesis on postmodern war literature, but has since chilled out a little.
Paul Wilson has translated books by Václav Havel, Bohumil Hrabal, Ivan Klima and Josef Škvorecký. He lives in Canada.
