The Visible World Read Online Free Page A

had been. And she tented a napkin over her finger and touched it to the corners of her lips two or three times—a few yellow crumbs and a chalk line of powdered sugar had stuck to her rose-colored lipstick—and told me that as far as she knew the people who lived in the pond slept a kind of half-sleep, like bears, waking fully only when the ice had cracked apart and light came into their world again, and that she didn’t know but that perhaps the young man had cared for his music more than he did for himself, and that the men in the crypt had been heroes. Czech patriots. Those had been hard times, she said.
    Some weeks later I tried Mr. Hanuš, who walked with two canes because he had lost all his toes in a town I thought was named Mousehausen, but when I asked him one evening after he’d hobbled into my room to say good night to me (for he insisted on this), he didn’t seem to know anything about the pond people sleeping through the long winters. Sitting on the edge of my bed—I couldn’t have been more than six—he told me that the winters were the times of storytelling, when they imagined what they could not see and entertained themselves with long, complicated tales in which all the things they had glimpsed the year before played a role. I asked him about the young man who played the piano. Robert Nezval hadn’t wanted to live anymore, he said. Picking a big, gray picture book off the floor (it was a book of Greek myths; I have it still), he began to page through it absent-mindedly, past the picture of the herd of cows that Hermes stole from Apollo, with their bright yellow horns and blushing udders, past Athena being born from the head of Zeus, and Persephone being dragged into the earth by Hades. I wanted to show him the small wooden brooms that Hermes had tied to the cows’ tails to erase their tracks, and the four sleeping pigs, pink as newborn mice, falling into the dark with Persephone, but he was moving too quickly. Sometimes people just didn’t want to live anymore, he said. It happened.
    As for the men in the crypt, he said, it had been a bad time and they had done a brave thing, as true and just a thing as one could imagine, and thousands had died because of it. That happened too.
    “What did they do?” I asked him.
    “They killed a man named Reinhard Heydrich.”
    “How?”
    “How?”
    “How did they kill him?”
    Mr. Hanuš sighed. “They tried to shoot him but the gun didn’t work, so they threw a bomb which wounded him and later he died. This all happened long before you were born, in 1942.”
    “Did he wear a black helmet?”
    “Heydrich? No. A kind of cap. Some of his soldiers did, though.”
    “Why did they kill him?”
    “He was a cruel man. He deserved to die.”
    “Why?”
    “Why? Because he killed a great many people who did not deserve it, and sent many more to places that were very bad.”
    “Like prison?”
    “Worse.”
    “Did you...?”
    “So who is this?” he asked me, pointing to a picture of Selene gazing down from the moon at sleeping Endymion, who lay, vaguely smiling, surrounded by strangely wild-looking sheep. He looked at me over the tops of his half-glasses. “I get to ask some questions too, you know,” he said.
    So I told him how it was Selene, the moon, who had seen a shepherd named Endymion and fallen in love with him and had asked Zeus to grant him the gift of eternal sleep so that he might remain forever young and handsome, and that that was why she was looking at him from a hole in the moon. “I see,” said Mr. Hanuš. “And who does this huge hand with the grasshopper belong to?” That, I said, was the hand of Selene’s sister, Eos, who had also fallen in love with someone, maybe another shepherd, I wasn’t sure, but had made the mistake of asking the gods for eternal life instead of eternal sleep—a big mistake—and so had been left with just a grasshopper in her hand.
    Mr. Hanuš looked at the picture thoughtfully. “I like the sheep,”