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HOLT MEYER 79

rade Hrabal’. After the voice of the father representative named the name Hrabal once 

already, now the representative of socialist statehood names the name again, but no 

longer with the bourgeois Mr., but rather with the communist ‘comrade’.

Transitions 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 I will treat together.

Transition 4 is to:

A já jsem stál se svou sestrou, políbil jsem ji tak, jako se líbají kočky, když se potkají. 

Moje sestra mi řekla [And I stood there with my sister, I gave her a kiss, a peck like cats 

give each other by way of greeting. And my sister told me] (ibid.).

Transition 5 is to:

Tatínek se sem bál přijít, zdali mu odpustíte, tak přijďte zítra k nám, podívat se na našeho 

tatínka, přijdete, prosím? [Father was afraid to come himself, he didn’t know if you could 

forgive him, would you consider coming to our place tomorrow, to say hello?] (ibid).

Transition 6 is to:

A já jsem řekl, že si to rozmyslím, [And I told her I’d think about it,] (ibid.).

Transition 7 is to:

a ze sálu…

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 [and then a voice came from the ballroom] (ibid.).

Moving from telling of the parting from the sister with a ‘cat kiss’ to the words of the 

sister, then to embedded narrator’s report of his own speech announcing his inten-

tion to reflect, then to the report of the place where words of officiality are calling 

him to order, these four transitions form the axis around which the section turns. On 

each side of the axis is a long speech, the first by the father representative, the second 

by the embedded first person narrator himself. The latter is flanked by the Barthes 

reference as a closing account of itself and its discursive location. This structure dem-

onstrates how precisely composed the passage and its voices are.

The axis surrounding the words of the biological sister center on a gender bor-

der analogous to that between the male embedded narrator and the hierarchically 

higher female narrator. But this relationship is one not of gender, but of sex, i.e. of 

pure body, with no discursive elements developing or being allowed to develop in the 

end — despite the call of the sister to create some kind of discursive connection to 

the biological father (the long inner speech of the embedded narrator declares and 

explains this refusal). It is just as bereft of actual talking as the relationship with the 

cats, and thus the bodily resemblance of the both of them to cats which the embedded 

narrator notes is apt and programmatic.

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  In the edition currently curculating one reads ‘a ze sálu zahřmělo’, literally ‘it thundered from 

the hall’. This is the only significant deviation between the version of Sebrané spisy Bohumila 

Hrabala and that edition placed in distribution by the publisher Mladá fronta. The ‘thunder’ 

adds to the authority of the calling voice and gives it perhaps an ironically infernal quality.

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80 SLOVO A SMYSL 24

The transition to the naming of the location of the official voice calling for a sec-

ond time and insisting on the entrance into the public sphere activates the tension 

already mentioned between the public and the private. It is insisting that the narra-

tor’s body, the body of the writer, move into contact with the social scene set up for it. 

This border is made spatial and thus literally visible — it is the border to the gathered 

public of his town of birth which marks its ruling state’s (temporarily, as it turns out) 

making the words of this embedded person politically sayable by making his words 

publically audible and his body publically perceptible.

The next transition is from the place of the official meeting to the voice of of-

ficiality itself with its own time considerations noting that the official colloquy has 

(always) already begun.

Transition 8 is to:

Prosím soudruh Hrabal, beseda začala! [Comrade Hrabal, if you please, we’re start-

ing] (Hrabal 1995a, p. 480, Hrabal 2011, p. 57).

Transition 9 is the one which immediately frames the long colloquy of the embedded 

narrator, the voice of ‘můj muž’:

A já jsem byl na besedě ve svém rodném městě, několik minut po tom, co jsem poprvé 

uviděl svou sestru, držel jsem se pořád těch letitých podobenek muže v uniformě 

starého Rakouska, a kdosi hovořil o mně, o mém díle, vytáhl jsem některé podobenky, 

ano, byl to hezký člověk, dokonce krásný člověk. ale čím déle jsem se díval na ty podo-

benky, tím víc a jasněji jsem věděl, že zítra nepůjdu navštívit tohoto tatínka, otce, že 

můj tatínek je ten, který sice není můj tělesný otec, ale který mě vychoval, který říkal, 

propadat můžeš na reálce každý rok, ale maturitu mít musíš, který mě nechal vystu-

dovat, který měl za moji maminku hrozný pocit viny, Francin, ten, který se promítal 

do Žemly z knížky U snědeného krámu. Taky jsem tam nešel, ani za sestrou, udělal 

dobře ten můj tatínek v rakouské uniformě, že za mnou nepřišel, teď už sám sebe 

chápu, proč mám pořád ten pocit viny, protože jsem žil vinou, kterou trpěl Francin 

a maminka. A tak bez viny jsem pořád šel do viny, pořád jsem prchal a prchal před 

tou vinou, která ve mně byla, ještě než jsem se narodil [And there I was, in the town 

I was born in, at an author’s appearance, just minutes after seeing my sister for the 

first time, and I held those worn photographs showing a man dressed in the uniform 

of old Austria, and as someone in the background went on about me and my work 

I looked at those photos, and he certainly was a handsome man, in fact remarkably 

so, but the more I looked the more convinced I was that tomorrow I would not go see 

my father. My real father, though not my biological one, was Francin, the man who 

raised me, the man who told me I could flunk high school every year but I’d have to 

get my diploma, who allowed me to go to university, and who had a terrible feeling of 

guilt on my mother’s behalf. And so I didn’t go, not even to see my sister that father of 

mine in the Austrian uniform did well not to come see me, now I finally understand 

myself, why I always carry that feeling of guilt. I assumed it from my mother and 

Francin and without actually being guilty of anything I bore that guilt, always and 

endlessly fleeing before that sense of wrongdoing, which was in me even before I was 

born] (ibid.).

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