February 8, 1985

You my dear beloved boy, Honza Vee, Do you know why I’m writing you? because I want to skip out on work. Don’t take it personally, you’d be insulting me, that I overestimated you, but really, now I’d most like to walk with you through the forest and we’d both be smoking pigarettes and we’d both be enjoying going to the pub and we’d both be telling racy jokes, you about yesterday’s heather – what you called yesterday’s heather. It’s so nice that there was sand there and that hot water and that little bit of autumn and that girl with you – you had a big effect on me, boy. To the point that I became more beautiful. I don’t mean spiritually, with you no woman can become more spiritually beautiful. I mean physically. But, to tell the truth, I’m more beautiful each and every day, I wouldn’t want to see myself in my coffin. The young ones will go mad with grief like women did when Elvis died. That paleness and seriousness – except for that slight jeer, malicious, but forever present in the corners of his mouth. I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll surely be perfect, pity I won’t live to see it.The other day I wheedled my way into a recipe for bread that a certain Jana gave me to taste (I’ve had Jans and Janas all around me my whole life like flies, can’t you at least have slightly different names??) and baked it at once because some acquaintances where coming by (so-called not-Jans). The bread tasted like dirty laundry that someone had forgotten in the middle of a burned-out factory for enameling furniture – it’s no wonder, either, when the enamelworks are burning, who’d worry about the laundry – and it was about two and a half centimeters tall and that half a centimeter was the bread’s bottom crust. You know, I’d said beforehand that I was going to bake bread and then it would have been awkward to make some sort of stupid apology, so I cut off the end – well, sliced off isn’t really the right term, an electric saw would have been the right tool – basically, I managed to use knives with the camouflage method and it broke off, I spread butter on it and they watched me and shouted, my god, you’ll break your teeth and hollered indecently like that, meanwhile I altogether attractively swallowed a piece. Do you know what it was like? Like one of my friends says, with criminal tendencies. Now I have to give the rest – well, not the rest, but the bread without that piece that I broke off – to the rooks, I feed them just so that they don’t peck at me, those peckers, maybe even they won’t want it and then, please, trust nature.How’s it going in court? Do you have some new Schiler or whatever that poor guy’s name was? You have to free people, only wish good things to criminals, don’t be a snob, do you know how much people steal all around the world and how happy they must be when they finally get into government because they’d stolen enough?Have you seen the last film Chytilová and I made, the Faun? Has it reached you yet? In Praga caput regni, or Prague caput rainy, it’s been going for a few weeks already. I hope I’ll earn enough for at least two diamond pajamas – forgive me, I’m tired, Johnny, so I have a tendency towards making jokes like this.What do you think about the Uffo over Minsk? Aha – that’s a well-placed question, no? Have you ever seen an Uffo? Don’t make that face, I see you, as I say to my cats when they want to sneak away in another direction for the purpose of improper urination. Our Honza is still claiming that it was garbage from some satellite, but I have a witness for it, and he was a chemical engineer – since he was, evidently he still is – so he’s a man of science and not an idiot and he saw it with me, pay attention: I talk sometimes, I don’t know when, with Květa Fialová (do you remember Omice and that fantastic bender, that was really a work of God, no? and how Blanka came and said that she had absent-mindedly forgotten to get dressed – we were pretty well roasted, right?) – so anyway, back to the Uffo, so I understand why I can’t be married, you know, I’d torture myself with a husband if I knew how much he was suffering from me! A woman’s gentle heart knows itself at the point when the woman altogether stops pushing her way into marriage, but rather lingers shyly between some flirtation and deep contemplation about the nature of birth. But the first option is much more natural to me. Yeah – when I stopped – you’re lucky, you’re happily married and not happily divorced like I am, because you have a pot of goulash waiting at home and I don’t unless I cook it myself, but I like cooking, there’s a bit of eroticism in it, what are you going to do, gentlemen, you don’t understand it in the slightest and now back to those Uffos.Right, so I’m calling Květa Fialová and looking up at the sky here at my writing desk at the same time I’m looking out the window and suddenly it seems, if I haven’t gone mad, because in the late afternoon sky of let’s say August, early September, I see in the totally clear sky something like a crescent moon, but it looked like it was made of gold. You know, sometimes the moon comes out like that in summer, when it’s New, it’s a skinny little thing and it’s almost see-through, if the sun’s still shining. And this was during the swiftest sunset, all orange and those opalescent colors of late summer sunsets, and this thing like a crescent shining like gold and so I tell Květa to go look out the window if she sees it too, and she comes back to the phone saying she doesn’t see anything. So I said goodbye and then, abracadabra, the crescent moved and lay horizontally with the round part on the bottom. And at one end it had – like a small black or like smoke or a dark cloud – some spot. And my boyfriend, who’s educated, came and in front of both of our eyes it started moving, not very quickly, and it disappeared in that horizontal position in the sunset, we stood on the terrace until it went away. – What do you say to that? Our Honza, the Airplanist, grimaces drily and chatters and claims that it was garbage from some satellite. But how on earth can some garbage stop, make some basic moves every which way, and then set into motion? Or can it? Have you read anything about it? Isn’t it navigated from some spaceship or something? I think so, like it can be manipulated. I would like it if one day small creatures in silver clothes crawled around the terrace, it would be them, the golden boys, and that’d put a stop to any boredom. I’ve read so many reports about it from Brazil and Argentina, I just don’t understand what’s so special about these lands that the Aliens see in it?? Why don’t they fly to Zelená Liška, Prague 4? Really, I’d give them some liquor so they wouldn’t dissolve into stink and odorous smoke like when I baked that bread. What then, they’d melt away maybe under the doorframe and to the neighbors, they’d call the police – you see how necessary it is in today’s world to consider everything beforehand: do you want it or are you just kidding yourself without consulting your superiors, meeting with Aliens? After all, there aren’t any, and if there are, who knows what they’re like. You’d have to read Technical Horizons and Flammarion, going back and forth, but even that wouldn’t be enough, like who in this century, if you will, has been cleared for some great train robbery. The robbery of the century. You know how that romance goes, it’s a pity if you had to try a criminal like that, I’d come, but I don’t know. We’d probably go to some pub instead, or not, really we’d go to church. You know, I’m already feeling so guilty that I’m going to work again. I have to. I have no desire to, but a girl has got to. And at this age she’s an exploited maid. So you see. I have to finishing writing something. Ah well, so I’ve goofed off with you and now you write me some goofoff too, okay? See you EsterWrite, but be content-heavy and factual. Don’t spout nonsense. You’re a man, and as such you have duties. Write just as seriously as I do. Has your cat pissed on your work files on your work desk yet? If not, then don’t give her my regards. Every decent cat must have a firm and energetic approach to life.

Well – you see how incapable, even stupid, I am: instead of these scribbled pages I could have sent you the same number of pages with a copy of “Capital”, it’s a hit now, you should read it. Okay bye.