Harlequin's Millions by Bohumil Hrabal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Gulag for the Aged

An old peoples' home is to Hrabal what a cancer ward is to Solzhenitsyn and an Alpine sanatorium to Mann: an allegorical setting for a society in the process of disintegration. Czechoslovakia, however, was a far less malign society than the Soviet Union or even fin de siecle Europe - an amateur one might say, in the techniques of repression and self-delusion. Nonetheless, the old people's home is part of the Czechoslovakian Gulag, less overtly oppressive but no less dismal than that of the Soviets or pre-WWI Big Powers.

There are enough cultural relics in the castle-turned-retirement-home to remind the resident population that at some point in the not distant past things were different. A cultural life had thrived. The evidence is in the mouldy statues, and decaying frescoes that are the only distractions for the pensioners. Formerly elegant spaces have become communal wards; the library, a boiler room; the tied convent, a laundry.

A trio of pensioners are a source of orally transmitted memories and myths about events in the nearby village going back centuries. When alone with each other, they are silent, having heard everything each other has to say. But when approached sympathetically by someone else, they pour forth facts and rumours and tall tales in coordinated first-person detail, a sort of syncopated Greek chorus.

History, in Harlequin's Millions, does not take a wrong turn; it stops entirely. In 1945. The village is one that time by-passes. The enormous clock in the old people's home, a remnant of aristocratic life, has ceased to function long ago. The buildings are slowly crumbling; their sedated inmates barely existing in a state of permanent boredom. While free to roam, they rarely make it to the end of the drive before scuttling home.

The men shuffle aimlessly waiting for the next meal; the women knit unneeded baby clothes endlessly. The principle effect of the creation of the communist state had been to institutionalise the class animosities, national hatreds, and personal resentments of the past; not just in the workplace but also into old age. Correct procedure is valued above all else: even the laundry van is meticulously and tediously inspected on entry and exit for no apparent reason.

The eponymous Harlequin's Millions is a favourite popular tune of the Director. It plays constantly in the intervals between Czech-language news broadcasts on ubiquitous loud-speakers. A sort of institutional theme-song. Alternatively the title could refer to the country's duped population. Or perhaps to the local misperception that nationalisation of the local brewery had created instant millionaire-shareholders of the workers. In any case, Harlequin's Millions is the functional equivalent of Abide With Me played on the deck of the Titanic: a dirge in the face of impending death. At one point, a rotting gutter on the castle falls and crushes a tannoy-speaker mounted in the garden below, which continues to drone on. Only the expectation of lunch holds more interest for the pensioners.

A clutch of mad doctors look after the health of the inmates. One comforts by prescribing whatever quantity of cigarettes and alcohol is currently consumed by his charges. The other constantly plays classical pieces by Czech and German orchestras on the gramophone as balm for his patients. This latter unaccountably begins a sort of violent revolution among the retirees but regrets his imprudence and has them all sedated the following day. I am I insufficiently familiar with Czech history to understand the allusion but can guess that the reference is to political leaders and their vacillating nationalistic courage.

Visitors to the pensioners bring tales of woe from outside: disruption from construction, economic hardship, road accidents. Much better, they say with some irony, to be in the peace and quiet of the haven of the castle. All the inmates want to communicate to the visitors is how frightful old age is. They are agitated by these visits for days afterward. Retirement for them represents a defeat, a loss of not just material possessions but of a place in the world. They have nothing in common with those not similarly placed

"What is life," asks the narrating pensioner. "Everything that once was, everything an old person thinks back on and tells you stories about, everything that no longer matters and is gone for good," she replies to herself. Even the graveyard within the castle grounds is turned into a theme park, the tombstones, coffins and bodies treated as so much refuse. A Gulag even for the dead. "Such a wonderful beginning, and now such an end," she concludes. Written in 1981, there wasn't that long to wait.

I usually find allegorical tales somewhat tedious. Having to decode esoteric allusions, many obviously personal, does become arduous at times. However given the conditions under which Hrabal wrote in 1980, the allegorical form is probably the only one possible; and at least the outlines of his references can be comprehended by someone not similarly inhibited.

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