Jiri Klobouk
THE MUSIC TEACHER
At the end of March I had my forty-sixth birthday . Even–
ing was approaching. I sat at the window with my hands between
my knees. I couldn't even remember when my last student left . That
morning I had gotten up right away, put on a clean shirt and match–
ing socks, sewed a few more buttons on my vest, paid special at–
tention to my hair, and even thought about wearing a tie. But I
guess everybody regarded this as a passing eccentricity. The whole
day through no one even once asked me whether I was going to a
wedding or something. I was certainly not going to tell anybody it
was my birthday if they couldn't figure it out from the sudden
changes in my appearance . The only people who remembered were
my father and mother. They wrote me a letter, each half a page , tell–
ing me to watch my health and wishing me continued success in my
creative life and work . Who would have thought that in a few days I
would receive such sad news? At that time my father was still
energetically planning his forthcoming activities, and my most re–
cent piece of information was that he and my mother were going to
take a bus to Brno to see Dvorak's
operaJakobin.
I couldn't complain
about my life then either, and every evening before going to sleep I
was thankful that bad luck hadn't dogged my footsteps and that I
didn't know what it was like to have to wrestle with fate. That birth–
day evening I noticed that the window needed a new coat of paint,
but I just didn't feel like getting involved with such trivialities. The
surrounding musical instruments, for example, or the street below,
were indisputably of much more importance to me.
Besides the violin I teach piano, and during the lessons I usual–
ly look out the window at the same street I have been looking at for
years, as if these two things, the street and music, are linked in–
separably. The street is called Uphill Street, and on it, in addition to
a dairy store, a meat store, and a tavern named
The
Austrian's,
you
can see among the vaulted arches resting on rickety chairs, in almost
all kinds of weather, the "wrinklies" and the "shrivellies," as I call the
old people who compete with each other all day long in silence.
Quite a few of them already have one foot in the grave. Most of them
die in the middle of a word they never manage to get out, or when
they have just decided to finish knitting the sleeve of a sweater begun
