Vyhľadávanie
Assistant Professor Firkner goes to the faculty regularly, of his own accord, without being forced to. He sits around, walks about, stretches his limbs, reads the newspaper and the post, talks to his heart’s content, telephones anyone and everyone, expresses surprise over some trifle, has his elevenses in the snack bar and looks forward to lunchtime. He eats two helpings of soup, followed by the main course, helps himself to and drinks three lots of tea or chicory coffee, available from the same vending machine as the tea. He puts four slices of bread into his pocket; three he takes home, one he eats at work – bit by bit, just to pass the time, as if he were chewing gum. He dozes for a while in his room, once more expresses surprise at something and begins to gather together the documents necessary for the administrative reports. He usually takes the materials home. Some of them he has already procured before lunch, after receiving three orders from Frič. He looks through the material, contemplating how to go about it. His preoccupation, the way he scratches his head, as well as the competent self-confidence reflected in his face reminds one of a maintenance man who is considering the best way to install electric wiring or where to start mending a refrigerator. Pondering whether he is likely to come up against some difficulty or whether he has everything he needs, he resembles a repairman working out how to proceed and checking to make sure he has all the necessary tools. At such moments, as a sign of satisfaction, he always whistles quietly, almost inaudibly, to himself. When he has put everything in his briefcase, he can visit the administrative offices in the afternoon as well, or – if he finds anyone there – even the staff rooms. He usually pays a visit to the staff rooms in the morning. Especially in one of those periods when the Dean has sent an emphatic directive in writing to remind the teaching staff of their duty to be present at the faculty on weekdays between eight and twelve. He enters a room for three people. If no one is missing – after all, someone could be teaching at that time, or they could be in the toilet, the library, the snack bar or somewhere else – he sits down on a fourth chair. He begins to talk. He talks with ease and slowly, regardless of whether there are three or just two people present. He speaks with ease and slowly even if it is to no more than one person.
The ease of his mode of expression arises from the fact that he burdens it minimally with a topic; that without apparently doing so on purpose, he manages to keep the topic secret. This is a strange tendency and a gift. It is hard to concentrate on such speech, but no one tells Firkner that. Neither does anyone draw his attention to the fact that he is disturbing them. After all, those who sit in the room disturb each other anyway, even though they have promised themselves a thousand times that they will work in silence. When they do manage to achieve this, more or less, the telephone rings or someone knocks. A student, or perhaps a colleague from another room, and if there is no one else, Firkner steps in with his art of concealing his topic. With his talent for producing words lacking the features of and connection with concrete meaning, it is easy for him to draft administrative reports. It is harder to read these reports or get to the bottom of what Firkner is talking about. The people in the staff rooms pretend out of politeness. They nod from time to time, grunt or wrinkle up their faces in simulated surprise. They are loath to disturb the semblance of communication. They can only relax at those moments when, under the influence of some practical, concrete issue, Firkner speaks comprehensibly.
His conduct, diligence and ambiguous wording when writing official documents raises questions about the readership and use of the administrative materials. These written documents circulate through the customary channels in the bowels of the faculty and the most important thing about them seems to be the act of handing them in and receiving them. If necessary, they should serve as evidence that something has taken place, that work is being done in various fields at the departments, initiative is being shown and the required tasks carried out. The sphere of initiative, which Firkner stylises equally well as the sphere of taking stock, appears mainly in the genre of programmes and plans.
If someone read Firkner’s administrative texts carefully, they would discover that they are above reproach from the orthographic, lexical, morphological and even syntactic points of view. However, even a thorough reading will not make it possible to reveal more clearly the nature of the hushed-up topic. In any case, the reader to whom Firkner’s texts are addressed does not approach them with any such design. Their layout is good, they are exemplary, free of typing errors. That in itself inspires confidence. Anyone who fails to discover the topic in this linguist’s precisely written text, gives priority to the belief that all is in order, rather than embarking on a tedious search.
* * *
By keeping secret the nature of his topic, he has made a good name for himself among the leading officials at the faculty. The fact that they did not understand the dissertations he submitted on time to achieve his qualifications won their respect and made them feel the fault lay with them. They suppressed this unpleasant feeling by ascribing the breakdown in communication to the dissimilarity of the specialization in which their close, hard-working, modest colleague had achieved a high degree of erudition.
From this point of view, too, Firkner could hold his own as Head of Department – and in many other ways better than Frič. However, some representatives of the faculty felt sorry for Frič, as they couldn’t easily forget – and here we can see the strength of their awareness of what is right and proper – that he had done his best to help them achieve higher qualifications.
There is also a problem so far as Firkner is concerned. A weak spot, which in spite of the positive results of all the assessments cannot be eliminated. It is his bachelor status. It would be odd if the faculty were to be represented at any level by someone who was still single at such an age. An assistant professor! A doctor! A PhD! For heaven’s sake, why hasn’t he got married? This provokes suggestions of homosexuality, a feeling of abnormality or – worst of all – the terrible impression that as a clandestine clergyman he is held in check by vows of chastity. His firm, unambiguously declared world view is against this. But every time it is possible to combine the celebration of Teachers’ Day with that of Good Friday, he will be one of those who must be watched, to see how they behave when confronted with meat at the official dinner, with what facial expression they approach whipped ham paste or liver dumplings in the soup and how their eyes react to pork cutlets fried in breadcrumbs. Such Teachers’ Day celebrations allow for a greater degree of insouciance than International Women’s Day. In contrast to the women’s special day, for certain teachers grotesque inebriation would be more convincing as a spontaneous expression of the fact that this university teacher has rid himself of the silt of his past, his family background and conservative upbringing than the singular confirmation in words of his manifested world view. The difficulty lay in the fact that none of those under suspicion, including Assistant Professor Firkner, got as drunk as some reliable individuals whose world view was beyond question.
There were problems in particular with Vice Dean Barnáš, who, when drunk, regularly went through stages of melancholy and aggressiveness. At one Teachers’ Day party he forced them to let him sing the folk ballad “They cut down the birch tree” with the band from the army garrison that sponsored them. The musically capable band put him off for as long as they could, but in the end they had to resign themselves to it. They began to play the ballad and let Barnáš sing it solo. In the middle of the second verse the Vice Dean burst into tears. About an hour later he was banging his fist on the table and beginning to rant and rave. It was rumoured that after one business trip he had a fight with his chauffeur that drew blood. Having made a night of it, he first asked the chauffeur to let him make himself presentable in his studio flat before being driven home and then, when he had drunk two or three vodkas, he responded to his chauffeur’s hospitality and a badly phrased comment by hitting him in the face with his fist. The chauffeur gave as good as he got, they fought for a while and then he threw the Vice Dean out onto the street. Barnáš had to go home on foot.
* * *
Within the closed walls of the university building they didn’t usually bring up serious or dangerous issues, but played it safe with frivolous gossip. The favourite and most frequent subject of these discussions was provided by those not present and especially things about them which, under other circumstances, would not have drawn much attention or made people want to talk about them.
For example, Assistant Professor Bót had noticed much earlier that whenever his colleague, Associate Professor Ján Augustín, who shared a room with him, ate something, he then devoted time to his teeth, but it was only during one of the periods of compulsory attendance that he began to talk about it. Augustín would eat a little fruit or some biscuits and then immediately go to the washbasin. He would take out a section of his teeth and when he had first given the teeth that remained in his mouth a thorough rinse, he would turn his attention to the teeth he held in his hand. The whole of this process was not accomplished in silence, but was accompanied by loud noises. When rinsing his mouth, Augustín used the water to produce an effect reminiscent of gargling when you have a sore throat. It was a good thing the basin was next to the door. He kept it closed with the front part of his foot, in order to avoid being caught in the act by some female student while he had half his teeth in his hand and half in his mouth.
Bót, however, was not the only one to disclose what went on behind the closed door to their office. He himself became the target of Augustín’s revelations. Apparently, his colleague Bót had once asked him out of the blue whether he wouldn’t mind if he took off his trousers. Well, thanks very much, thought Augustín, so shocked that for a moment he couldn’t utter a word. When he’d recovered his wits, he said: “By all means take your trousers off. As you like! But in the meantime I’m going to the snack bar!” Sure enough, on days when it rained, Bót would come to the faculty in his “rain trousers” and when he was alone in his office, he would change into a clean pair. This even happened two or three times in Augustín’s presence, while hidden behind the open door of the cupboard. Such gossip spread like wildfire and now and then those concerned came to hear about it. That’s how it was in Bót’s case, too. He couldn’t deny the trousers, but he defended himself by saying that he had never mentioned taking his trousers off to Augustín, only changing his trousers. In fact these two colleagues made each other look ridiculous on account of their unusual concern for cleanliness. While Ján Augustín was especially finicky about oral hygiene, Rudolf Bót was very particular about the cleanliness of his trousers and shoes. Of course, only during periods when he was abstaining from alcohol. The moment he returned to drinking, his trousers and shoes gave him away.
Firkner would never talk about Augustín’s teeth or Bót’s trousers. He gives the impression that he cannot concentrate on gossip like that. When whoever is speaking has finished, instead of responding in some way, he immediately begins to talk in his obscure manner on some serious topic. In his clear, comprehensible moments, he turns people’s attention to things no one else has noticed. He is taken aback by the fact that Mária Bubínová, senior lecturer at the Department of Pedagogy and Psychology, has a diacritical mark over the letter “i” missing from her name in this year’s faculty bulletin. He has already brought this to her attention. She herself had not noticed the mistake in her surname. Maybe Doctor Bubínová, a thirty-eight-year-old single mother, thought that Firkner’s attention to her surname was an idiosyncratic form of courtship on his part, or even a sign of what might possibly be serious interest. That was not the case. Firkner was interested in nothing more than the diacritical mark.
Adam Zachariáš was interested in such things as Augustín’s teeth and Bót’s trousers. His interest was also aroused by Firkner’s meticulous reading of the faculty’s bulletins.
They used to come out every year in September and most of the text was literally identical to that in the previous one. Usually, the only changes were in the list of teachers and employees. Titles were added to some names, others announced marriages and yet others the arrival of a new member of a department. The names of those who had changed their jobs, died prematurely, retired or who had had to leave the faculty against their will were dropped from the list. Apart from Lipník, in the new academic year one such name was that of Zachariáš, because in the course of time it had come to light that in the critical years he had appeared in a radio programme which Assistant Professor Bartoš, a member of the assessment commission, labelled as subversive and hostile. Zachariáš immediately realized he could no longer stay at the faculty. He had to look for a new job. His former neighbour, Imrich Dúdor, helped him to get into the theatre.
Translated by Heather Trebatická
