The Visible World Read Online Free PDF Page A

their lives, walking from room to blissfully empty room as though they could simply walk away from the gathering of things, as though they could still find a place—up this flight of stairs, maybe, behind this wall, in this room-sized garden—where time could not find them.
     
    It was on one of those days that my parents accidentally took the second set of stairs leading down from Špilberk Castle instead of the first, and so found themselves walking past the entrance to the crypt of the old Capuchin monastery. My mother had never been there. The crypt would be closing in fifteen minutes.
    A watery-eyed old woman with long white hairs on her chin was sitting in a chair at the top of the stairs, next to a rickety card table and a bowl with three coins. They were the last, apparently. The school groups, if there had been any that day, had left. The tourists who had once crowded the stairs to view the bodies of the monks, centuries dead, had dropped off with the war. The place felt oddly deserted. The old woman might have been waiting there for years.
    “Je tam dole zima, děti,”
she said, looking at them. It’s cold down there, children.
“Oblečte se teple.”
Dress warmly.
    And indeed they could feel the dank, subterranean chill breathing up out of the stairwell. My father put his arm around my mother’s shoulders. The woman handed them two yellow tickets.
    “To vám nepomůže,”
she said, smiling. That won’t help you.
    My father took the tickets, though there was no one to give them to, and together they started down the steep, turning stairs. They were halfway down, laughing about something or other, when they heard her call down the shaft after them:
“Musíte spšchat, děti.”
You have to hurry, children.
“Není moc času.”
There isn’t much time.
    Perhaps it was the change from the upper air, or the sudden silence of those dim, low-ceilinged rooms, or the clayey smell. Perhaps it was something about the short, unlit halls, where my father had to duck his head as he led my mother by the hand to the next candlelit room. Or something else altogether. It was nothing, after all. In the outside world the universities had been closed, the factories turned to the business of war. Up above, the newspapers listed the names of the dead in thin black rectangles, like advertisements for faucets or shoes.
     
    In the first, main room, where generations of schoolchildren had giggled over the poor mummified body of Franz Trenck, they stopped to look through the glass-topped coffin at the black, jerked flesh, the finger-thick cable of the neck, the nail emerging from the cuticle. In the second room a prison-like cell dug out of the wall and closed off by iron bars was filled with small brown skulls. They lay jumbled, one on top of the other, cheek to cheek, jaw to neck, some facing this way, some that. Some seemed to be laughing. The bars had been set into the stone.
    My father asked my mother if she was cold. She was fine, she said. They read the brief biographies framed on the walls—the dates, the names—and walked on.
    In the fourth and last room, apparently, there was a row of caskets arranged along the wall like basinets on a nursery floor. In each was a shape that had once been a human being but was now just a pelvis, a skull, a few fraying ropes of tendon. Here and there, hipbones tented bits of desiccated cloth. So much death, so neatly arranged. Walking from one to the other, my father told me years later, gave one the uneasy feeling of being asked to choose something.
    All the caskets were open. Next to each, at the end of a curved metal stem like a rectangular flower, was a sign that gave some information about the body next to it. It was a bit of a jolt, my father said, to learn that some of the dead had once been women, but once one knew, it was possible to imagine one could see it. And not just in obvious things—a wider pelvis, perhaps, or a thinner chest—but in other, frankly impossible things: