New Year's Evey
Synopsis: A man grappling with the
death of his wife spends New Year's Eve at a hidden place in Brno near the
birthplace of Bohumil Hrabal where he searches for solace and where the
unbelievable comes true.
It's a half hour till midnight and the
sky above and below me is repeatedly punctured by the premature blasts of
fireworks impatiently awaiting the promise and hope of the new year. On the
table beside me sits a bottle of Evey's favorite champagne – our tradition had
always been to pop the cork at midnight and sip directly from the bottle, and
Evey loved her traditions.
If you ever want to get to where I
am spending this New Year's Eve, and I do very much recommend it, take the
number two tram east from Brno's main station, get off at the last stop, cross
the main road and walk up a nondescript street behind the school. At the top,
homes give way to a further climb up a wild, unkempt hill while a vast cemetery
unfolds to your left.
At the corner of the cemetery you'll
also find a modest monument marking where the writer Bohumil Hrabal was born.
Years ago, while on a train from
Toulouse to Paris as part of one of Evey's signature overly-ambitious vacations
where reality could never quite equal her romanticism, Evey found a copy of
Hrabal's I Served the King of England under her seat. Despite
never having heard of it, she eagerly flipped through the book and as we pulled
into the Gare Montparnasse she snapped the book shut on the final page. Over
the next few days, as we meandered among the bistros and bohemian shops of the
Latin Quarter or strolled along the Seine she would constantly repeat the last
line of the book, saying how our time in Paris really was the unbelievable come
true.
For you to also experience Hrabal's
unbelievable come true, continue on past the marker up the hill. With the
cemetery on your left pavement soon gives way to dirt and urban life falls away
below you. Keep right and you'll find yourself among garden plots dotted with
sheds and shacks in various states of repair, some well tended with new coats
of varnish, others slowly surrendering to time, nature, and memory.
Soon you'll find a metal gate
listing drunkenly to the side, tarnished with years of neglect. Push past that
gate and walk no more than a few dozen paces and prepare to be astonished. The
city of Brno will suddenly explode into view below and you can see everything –
Brno's short, stubby castle on a short, stubby hill – the spires of Brno's
cathedral – every park, house, building, shopping center, pub, gas station,
factory, and statue which make the city what it is.
It was a bright-blue Easter Sunday
earlier this year when, during an aimless walk of escaping and forgetting, I
stumbled across the Hrabal monument and the cemetery and made the trek up the
hill beyond the collision of birth and death. While the faces of the dead
enameled on their headstones stared blankly at me from the left, trees and
bushes blooming with pinks, purples, yellows and whites ripped right from the
pages of a greeting card dotted the hillside to my right as I slowly meandered
up the hill, up away from the frivolity of Easter of which I had no desire to
take part.
Lack of purpose, more than
curiosity, made me slip past the gate and brought me to the precipice over Brno
– a city where I had never loved and never been loved and which failed to stir
my aching emptiness. Where most people would react with awe at the first sight
of this stunning vista, I registered only disappointment.
At the beginning of this year my boss
offered me a work assignment in Brno. I had always previously said no to such
assignments – San Francisco was Evey's city with her job, her friends, her
family, her Edison-bulb hipster cafes, her tucked-away little diners which
still served unlimited coffee for a dollar, her little hideaways where she
found the magic in the otherwise mundane, and as long as Evey was there, San
Francisco was where I belonged. But her side of the bed had been cold and empty
for six crushingly long months and San Francisco was just as alien to me as
Brno, a city on the other side of the world which seemed to lack character as
much as it lacked vowels.
Evey would have found the magic in
this place, up the hill from the intersection of Hrabal's birthplace and the
resting place of thousands, where lost and wild Brno gazes down on the
modernity and progress and where the unbelievable comes true. She would have
loved the rickety shack just a few paces from the edge, no larger than a
side-of-the-road fruit stand, with its creaky old chair and dusty table. I, on
the other hand, was simply disgusted by the years of filth of passers-though
using the shack for their own needs who had left a layer of beer cans, chip
bags, condoms, syringes, and plastic of a thousand shapes and colors strewn
over the floor.
Later that night, as I sat
listlessly in my apartment in the nearby communist-era behemoth painted green
and orange in a futile effort to mask the stagnation inside, local plum brandy
stung my throat and my thoughts turned back to the shack, the edge, the view.
A nagging feeling came over me –
Evey would have sat down in that aging chair and stayed awhile; she could
always see the romance and magic in the routine and unspectacular. Even at the
end, when her head was bare and she coughed too much, she still tried to grasp
every moment and hope for the unbelievable to come true. Even if for nothing
more than the sake of her memory, I vowed to return to the shack.
Despite the April weather making an
abrupt about face back towards winter, the following Sunday I gathered some
cleaning supplies and a bottle of plum brandy and trudged through the rain and
snow and howling wind past the Hrabal monument, the rows of sodden dead, the
deserted sheds, up to the shack on the edge of the hill. While the rain whipped
across the mouth of the shack, I cleared out the years of detritus so that all
that remained was the chair, the table, and the shack. Then, as Evey would have
done, I settled into the chair to see what would happen.
When you do come here, it is
important to sit and wait awhile – only after hours of sitting, watching,
contemplating, does the unbelievable come true. For me, on that damp and
windswept day, I sat for hours sipping plum brandy and staring into the
bleakness of the city shrouded in fog and clouds and sorrow and disappointment
and regret, desperate for something to happen.
Then, as the light faded and the
last of the plum brandy settled acidly in my stomach I felt a feeling rise in
my chest – a spark, a shiver, a thrill that coursed through my body. Then I
heard it – a sound, a formless whisper above the wind, tickling my ear and
triggering a flood of memories of love and warmth and loss and despair.
“It's really rather beautiful, isn't
it?”
Evey's voice, low and roughened by
years of smoking trendy clove cigarettes, was unmistakable. The shock I felt
sprang not so much from the unbelievable coming true but from resentment for
her relentless optimism, as if she was mocking me. I snapped back, “Don't talk
to me about beauty. How can you look at the beautiful when you left me alone
here in this ugly place? Besides, you know how much I hate the rain.”
“Oh, I know. But you always seem to
look at the negative. You focus on the bleakness of a city in winter, on the
boredom of your life, on the loss of a loved one. Where's the bright side? You
have to learn to see the beauty in the rain and the love you still have in your
heart.”
This time there was no need to
answer. Evey was right. She was always right. And that was all she said to me
that first day in the shack on the hill where the unbelievable comes true – no
declarations of love or advice for the future or apologies for deserting me –
but I also somehow knew that she had so much more that she wanted to tell me.
So every weekend since I've made the climb past the birthplace of Hrabal and
the resting place of thousands who survive only in names, stones, burnt-out
candles and withered flowers and sat, waited, drank plum brandy and spoken with
Evey.
She wanted to talk about me – she
asked about my work and colleagues, made sure that I was cleaning my apartment
regularly, admonished me for drinking too much alcohol and not eating enough
fruit, inquired about her family and friends back in San Francisco. Mostly,
though, we talked about the past. We rehashed candle-lit dinners at the marina,
commiserated about a vacation to Mexico spent primarily in the bathroom,
laughed at stale inside jokes that suddenly became funny again years later. We
lived and relived our life together every weekend.
As the blossoms of spring fell away
and gave way to the steamy warmth of summer, Evey's sense of adventure urged me
to get out and explore Brno like she would have. By then, her influence had
already started to take hold and from the vantage point of the shack on the hill
above the birthplace of Hrabal and the cemetery, Brno had become more
beautiful, more alive, with a character and soul that in the depths of my
winter had gone ignored.
I began taking a walk every Saturday
to somewhere in the city. I strolled around the reservoir where any warm day
seemed like an excuse for the entire city to come and eat ice cream and drink
beer and take a naked dip in the still-chilly water. I sat on the grass in
Luzanky park, watching romantic picnics and children frolicking. I walked the
old city center among the throngs of people working and shopping, discovering
the hidden nooks and crannies of the city that Evey would have adored.
Those Saturdays were always slightly
tainted by an anxious impatience, however – a clawing need to summit the hill
on Sunday and speak with Evey as if, without her voice, the newfound beauty of
Brno would slip away back to crumbling grayness.
Soon, autumn blustered in with its
stunning menagerie of colors and I was spending every waking minute of every
Sunday at the shack. I even started to find that on Saturdays, no matter where
I started my city walk, it always seemed to lead me here, to this shack, this
hill, this view. Evey disapproved of me spending so much time at the shack, as
well as the two bottles of plum brandy I drank every weekend, but continued to
visit with me nonetheless.
A ritual set in – Evey made me wait
hours while I plumbed my memory of her and us until finally she became voice
and we would spend our time playing out the remembrances of our relationship
and our life together and reveling in each other's company and love until long
after the sun dipped behind the hills and night settled over us.
As the days grew short and the
leaves fell and the chill of winter crept into the air I delighted in the
twilight when the lights of Brno gloriously appeared below, even more vibrant
with the addition of twinkling Christmas decorations. The city took on a life I
could never have imagined in January – locals drank mulled wine and ate sausage
and laughed with friends and lovers among the quaint booths of the Christmas
markets – a scene straight from a story-book which no one in San Francisco
would believe actually exists. But Brno is a place where the unbelievable comes
true.
The day before Christmas, when
Czechs come together with their families to feast on the incongruous meal of
fried carp and potato salad and see what baby Jesus leaves under the tree, I
too was with my loved one, in the shack on the hill above the birthplace of
Hrabal and the cemetery. After the now-routine hours of waiting and a bottle of
plum brandy, a familiar voice caught the wind, “Merry Christmas”.
“Merry Christmas,” I replied. “You
know, today is also the feast of Adam and Eve here, so anyone with the name Eve
gets extra gifts beyond their normal Christmas presents.” After hesitating a
moment, I continued, “I didn't really know what to get you though, I'm sorry.”
“Don't be sorry. In fact, I have
something that I want to give you. Come here on New Year's Eve and I'll give
you your present. And don't forget the champagne.”
So here I am. Five minutes till
midnight. Suddenly, reassuringly, I hear Evey's voice, just a whisper caressing
my ear, and her first and few and final words to me are a truth that I've known
for so long yet ignored. Her words fill me with clarity and love and regret and
joy and sadness and unlock something inside me that I thought would remain
locked forever.
“You're right, Evey. I love you
too.”
And so now I realize that this will
be my last visit to the shack on the hill above the birthplace of Bohumil Hrabal
and the cemetery where the unbelievable comes true. The shack will always be
here, though, and you can come and visit any time. I'll leave it nice and
clean, with just the chair, the table and the unbelievable. And maybe you too
will find what you are looking for – a loved one, a truth, an end, or a
beginning.
The fireworks over Brno are building
to a crescendo as midnight hurtles closer and when it comes I will pop the
champagne and let the golden elixir bubble over my hands to the hard ground
without bringing it to my lips. To tell the truth, I had never really liked
champagne in the first place.
One minute to go. Thousands of
exploding stars fill the night below me, above me, illuminating the city in all
its glory and this is the last moment that the unbelievable will come true for
me here at the shack and it fills me with a warmth I can hardly bear to stand.
Evey would have been delighted by
the fact that there is a word in Czech, ahoj, which means both hello and
goodbye.
Midnight.
Ahoj.
Pop.
Happy New Year.
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