The Dam Keeper

by Bianca Bellová

Translated from Czech by the author

The bitch is barking. There must be some deer grazing on the clearing above the dam. I put the kettle on and walk out to the yard to check it out.

It’s a fine evening; the sun is slowly leaving the valley which is rather picturesque, the cottages there are well kept, the doorsteps swept clean and dressed in little trinkets which are meant to make them look homely. The further into Germany you go, the lighter and warmer it feels. I’m not sure how to say it exactly, but the further you walk down the valley under the dam, especially after crossing the border, the easier it is to breathe.   

A roebuck is barking on the hill somewhere, that’s why the bitch is going crazy. It’s an interesting thing, you know: since the border’s been open, the deer still won’t cross over into Germany. They couldn’t when it was divided by the Iron Curtain, there used to be a live wire fence which would always shoot flares whenever anyone touched it. The deer learn territoriality from their mothers, right, they memorize where they lead them and so the Czech deer still walk on Czech paths and the German deer on the German paths. A German roebuck wouldn’t mount a Czech lady deer, funny that.

I tell the bitch to shut up and she does, she lowers her ears and you can tell how she’d love to bark the roebuck to the end of the world but she is afraid she might get a smack. Toni spoiled her rotten in the couple of months she stayed with me, she would stroke the bitch and feed her off the dinner table and go and chat to her and take her for long walks, a dog needs the walks and a nice word, that’s what she said. I let her, Toni always did as she pleased anyway. At first I was worried I might break Toni, she looked so fragile, never mind the belly – and soon she had me wrapped around her little finger. And now the bitch is spoilt, lies around all the time and I must teach her to obey again. But the bitch is smart; she will understand that it is pointless pissing against the wind.

The evenings here come fast; it’s a pleasant summer afternoon and suddenly you’re wondering what to wear to keep warm. But it is still warm now. There is smoke coming from just four houses under the dam – that’s how many people are still living here. Big houses, too – all left by the Germans. And now, so many years after the war, they’re empty again, most of them. Stumps of trees killed by the chemical factory and the power plant in the foothills still pierce the skyline, but when you take a walk through the forest, you will see that it is now full of young and healthy trees which will be standing solid when we are gone.

The roebuck keeps barking like crazy. You can’t blame him; it’s such a fine evening. Tomorrow I’ll pop into the forest to pick some blueberries and make myself pancakes with blueberry topping. As for the blueberry cake and blueberry dumplings Toni used to make last summer, I can only dream about them. She was a damn good cook I must admit. When I compare it to my own mother, say… Ah, what the hell. Or her rabbit with cream sauce, for fuck’s sake!

The first house under the dam is game wardens lodge. A proper solid house built by the Germans. The light is on on the first floor. The game warden lives alone; he’s already come to terms with it. He has realized that the even a long solitude is better than bad company. His wife ran off a long time ago; she was a sturdy little person, hairy as a werewolf in a mohair sweater on the night of a supermoon, but there was some sort of charm to her, a kind of inner strength that ugly women have. The game warden used to come around, or I went to see him, we’d have a chat and a couple of beers. Even hermits sometimes need company. I do kind of miss it, I won’t lie.   

Now I can just blow my trombone to keep myself entertained. True, I look like a dick with that trombone, but I never learnt to play a different instrument; the violins and pianos were allocated to the pretty, clean girls with good grades in the musical school in Litvinov and the dummies like me got the instruments that were left – trombone, accordion and sousaphone. So I sometimes sit outside my dam keeper’s house and play my trombone into the valley; it is a bit depressing, yes, but it really sounds like music and I need music from time to time. Here in the mountains, music is a scarce commodity, unless you put on some mind-numbing television show on. And I would rather shoot myself in the head than put on a mind-numbing television show.      

I pick up my binoculars and the bitch’s ears shoot up like antennas, she must be thinking we are going for a walk.  I look over the dam to the other side where the road leads. Now there is traffic of about five cars a day, more on the weekends when the city folks come. Three cyclists are riding on the road, a whole crowd in our terms. A mushroom hunter is walking on the hill opposite. As the sun goes down, the air turns colder and wavelets appear on the surface of the water. I like this time of the day. I should go for an inspection round, to check for poachers on the dam. But we haven’t seen one of those here for over two years now, so I might as well give it a miss. After that long drought, there’s not enough water in the reservoir and the fish are the size of goat droppings.

“Down, stupid,” I command the bitch and she folds her ears and lies down.

I decide it’s time to write the daily records in the Dam Book. The water in the kettle has almost boiled away. I pour it over my coffee, put three sugar cubes in and take the Dam Book from the shelf.  I enter the record with today’s date: “No exceptional events. Water level: 235 centimetres below long-term average.  Cracks in dam wall: no optical changes observed, but seepage on northern side is growing. More spider-like cracks on the southern side, photo enclosed. Inspection by a structural engineer is urgently needed and requested.”

Then I close the book and light a fag. It makes no difference what I write there. Nobody reads the records. I did write a few times to the management in Prague; four of them arrived, their expressions gave an indication something wasn’t right with their anuses, and then, without uttering a word, they drove off back to Prague, never to be heard of again. They did see the extent of the mess, but decided to pretend nothing was happening. When the dam bursts open, they will claim they knew nothing and nobody reported it.  They will blame me, of that I’m certain, but I keep all the documents in perfect order and make copies. I’m not that daft.

But sooner or later, people will notice. Rumours will start spreading. People will come here even less. They fear the dam. It’s a big mass of water, no joke. Toni was the only one who wasn’t scared of the dam. She would run around it with the bitch like crazy, even when her belly was already quite big. That bloody dam lured her here all the way from town. I didn’t ask her about her past, I thought she might tell me herself one day.  To be honest, I thought she grew up in a children’s home, but then her mother arrived. I was kind of surprised Toni had a mother.  But if I had to imagine what she looked like it certainly wouldn’t be like that: a pudgy farmer’s wife, but instead of the big skirt with a pinafore, she was wearing terylene slacks and  a pendant with the Virgin Mary around her fat neck, sitting in my kitchen silent as a grave, her hands folded on her lap, a mug of coffee on the table before her, but she wasn’t drinking it. She said nothing. Toni was sitting opposite her, biting her fingernails, mute as a turnip. I got the dog and we went for the rounds. When I came back in an hour, the mother has gone.

“Where is she?” I asked Toni. She shrugged and points with her head towards the town. She was never into talking much. I guess that’s why I grew so fond of her. There are women that won’t shut up all day long; they never stop asking shit or making comments. I can’t handle that. But not Toni, Toni dropped half a word here and there and then went mute again.

“What did she want?”

“Ah,” Toni she waved her hand as if chasing a fly. “She wants me to come back home and stuff.”

“And you? Do you want to?” I uttered quietly and I swore even the bloody dog froze.

And Toni shook her head: No she didn’t, and I felt like grabbing her in my arms and squeezing her big time, but I lit a fag instead. Her belly was quite decent now, halfway there, I would say. Not that I had any ideas about our shared future on a bed of roses, walking the little one together by its little hands, none of that, but let me admit that I got hyped up and made a little cradle. Toni had whitewashed her little bedroom and put some net curtains up and some other knick-knacks, the game warden carved her a little wooden dove, the same as one he apparently had over his own cradle as a baby.

Then I found Toni playing with an old doll’s house. It’s the kind of thing that kids from wealthier families played with before the war, a whole two-storeyed house with wallpaper inside and curtains on the windows, the doll furniture is an exact copy of real furniture, it has chairs and tables and fireplace and old antique wardrobes and painted chests of drawers, there is even a tiny china potty and minute knives and forks.

“Where did you get it?” I asked her and her glance kind of panned to one side, she said she’d found it down in the village; someone left it outside a garbage can. Which was bullshit. Nobody here would throw such a precious thing away. This old crap left here by the Germans was easily cashed in, especially when it was in such good nick. Also, I recognized the doll’s house – I saw it in the game warden’s attic when I was helping him set up his aerial. I said nothing.

I went to see the game warden the very same evening. His kitchen was tidy, the first time since I’ve known him. He was even sitting there in his slippers! Clean-shaven. Fingernails clipped. When I came in, it startled him.

“You’re chasing my Toni, man,” I said and he started wriggling and saying I was off my head. When he saw I didn’t believe him, he changed his tactics and told me I had no right to Toni and she wasn’t mine and she wasn’t sleeping with me anyway, and the child wasn’t mine, so what. And that I was a cuckold.

So I slapped him. Nothing degrades a man like a slap. I just smacked him, it wasn’t much of a blow, it just made a proper smacking sound and his combover jerked a bit. He just sat there like a broken willow and I told him if I caught him chatting Toni up, he’d end up like the Germans at the bottom of the dam. I’d wait for him one night and no one would ever find out. I was shaking like a leaf myself, but you couldn’t tell. And the game warden almost burst into tears. Game warden my arse.   A man the size of a fairy-tale giant. His gun was propped against the wall by the door. I walked out. When I looked back in through the window, he’d laid his head on the table. That was the last time I spoke to him.  I see him from time to time from the dam, hanging around his yard or getting into his old Lada, revving the engine and driving off. Then he needlessly drives around the forest for half a day and he returns to his empty house, just like me. The pub in the village closed down years ago.   

The thing with the Germans was a kind of local folklore, nobody knows how much of it is true. Like whether those Germans who avoided the expulsion after the war – those who were irreplaceable in some job that nobody else knew how to do, like in a factory in town – ended up at the bottom of the dam, one by one, along with the houses. Before the valley got flooded, there used to be two villages, German ones, obviously. Pretty, not exactly wealthy but prosperous, clean villages with a church, a school, a pub and a voluntary fire brigade, judging by old photos.  Now they lie under all those tons of green water, inhabited only by undersize fish. That’s why swimming is banned here. The dam is no longer a source of drinking water; it went rotten years ago, like everything around here. The old women from the village used to scare little children by telling them that anyone who dived down to the flooded houses went insane and was taken to the madhouse in Hartmanice. The old women used to draw the little ones a coloured picture of the madhouse, a former vicarage, where all the inmates sway back and forth, give out lunatic shrieks and eat own excrement. Now there are no more children in the village to frighten with these tales.  The last child who was born here was the game warden’s son Hynek. From what I heard, Hynek now lives in town; he is divorced and gambles on fruit machines.

That’s why everybody was kind of happy when Toni turned up with the belly. Even though nobody knew her and she came from God knows where – which was quite usual here, nobody has lived here for more than two generations. Even the town folks who only come for weekends asked if the missus was okay whenever they met me, and gave me a knowing wink. Suddenly that community spirit was back that I remember from my early days here. When there were joint trips organized to a theatre in town or even all the way to Prague. When an outdoor dancefloor was built beside the pub, or when we roasted a pig together. We used to celebrate Easter and Pentecost together.  Kind of getting attached to a shared agenda. But now it’s obvious that it was only the pre-mortem flapping of a drowning man.   

The setting sun is nicely reflecting on the bits of mica on the façade of my house. The dam keeper’s house is the only building in the area built after the war. No wired skeletons in the cupboards, no military uniforms in the attic or rusty ammunition under the kitchen floor. No old photos or ghosts like there are in other houses here. People are used to them and live with them quite peacefully. They get accustomed to them being a part of their house, like a grandfather clock or a rabbit hutch.  The game warden has a ghost of an old hag in a white bonnet who sometimes sits down on the bench in the kitchen. She shakes her head and sometimes says a few words in German, but the game warden can’t speak German so he has no idea what she’s saying. I have never seen her but there is no reason not to believe him. The door of old Konopasek’s cottage has been known to lock itself; and people sometimes see two little barefoot children without standing by the roadside cross.  Fortunately, I don’t have this shit in my house. Toni almost regretted it; she used to listen to the tales of ghosts and bogeys with her mouth open and a dreamy gaze.  She was still a kid, even though she was almost twenty-five. She couldn’t stay still in that newly-built house of mine with its satellite dish and microwave; she got ants in her pants.

Of course I did frighten her, but only because she enjoyed it. Here in this weird part of the world, you don’t even have to scare anyone. If you don’t know the place you might get scared shitless: you could be walking in a meadow and suddenly sink into the cellar of a house there was no sign of above ground. In some places, the remains of walls stick out between the trees and sometimes you can still find something amongst the rubble – a shoe, a bit of tinted glass, an old postcard or a spoon. On the other side of the hill there’s an underground ammunition factory where prisoners of war were supposedly deployed in those days.

I’m coughing. I’ve been coughing a lot recently. All my life, I was fit as a butchers dog, spent my life out in the fresh air and now this, constantly. I can’t even blow the trombone properly. The old wound in my shoulder also started hurting recently. The bitch always hides her tail when I start coughing. When I stop, she nuzzles up against me, stupid cow. I throw her a stick and she runs for it like a retard, trying to please me.

Toni was always asking about the flooded villages, what they looked like. Nobody knew what they looked like, first of all we are not bloody scuba divers and, second, we are not daft. Also, swimming in the dam is prohibited, as I said already. But I did tell her what I knew. Two villages, one of them with a church (did it have coloured glass in the windows, she wanted to know), benches on the village square, fully grown trees, a paved road around it, it was probably boring there in winter and full of flies in summer, like everywhere. While I was telling her this, Toni fell asleep with her head on the table; it was the baby making her so tired. I carried her to her bed and covered her up. Then I sat beside her, watching the moon shine on her face. A trickle of saliva run down from her mouth, it was a kind of cute.

The following morning, she wasn’t in, but I wasn’t worried, she used to do this frequently; she would take the bitch and go for a walk. It was the end of summer, like now, a pretty hot day. The rowanberries were turning red and that is always pretty here. Purple lupines were blooming in the roadside ditches; everything here is a bit later than elsewhere. They came back at lunchtime, both soaking wet.

Toni was pale, terribly pale, absolutely white, she looked almost as if she was no longer alive. I felt like crossing myself.

“You’ve been swimming in the dam,” I said and she looked at me so very tiredly and started to faint. She just kind of very slowly started sliding to the floor. I normally tend to avoid that women’s stuff – crying, hysteria and excessive emotions – but I could tell this was real. My reflexes were always very fast, that’s why I used to play forward in the Litvinov ice-hockey team before finally destroying my shoulder. I managed to catch her. When I carried her to her bed, she felt like a block of ice, like a large cut of beef from the cold storage room.

She said she was in the flooded village. She said she was walking on its square. She could see the sun shining there from above and reflect on the tip of the church spire, she saw fish swimming through the windows and water weed growing on washing lines like festoons, she saw pensioners sitting on benches on the square wriggling their feet and a dozen children sitting in the schoolroom with their backs dead straight, silent as graves. She saw a teacher standing by the blackboard, wearily looking out of the window and nodding subtly in Toni’s direction.   

I gave her some linden tree with a drop of brandy in it and she fell asleep. When I came to see her half an hour later, her blanket was on the floor and there was a big bloody lump between her legs. Toni stared into the wall apathetically. She never said a word again. I looked after her for two days and she was gone on the third. She took nothing with her; she even left her shoes behind. I don’t know where she went but I have various theories. She was mental right from the start and I was daft enough to close my eyes to it.   

I buried the child under the larch tree in the garden. The bitch often rests beside the grave. I have a kind of seat there, sometimes I sit there and play the Concerto for Alto Trombone by good old Mozart and sometimes I just sit there and smoke and watch the doodlebugs swarm.

I still go to measure the cracks in the dam and write it all down. Then I climb one of the hills, smell the juniper trees and try to find a place from which to best watch the spectacle. For now, we still have time because there isn’t enough water in it.  But one winter with decent snow or two weeks of rain will do the job. I imagine the water spouting from the cracks like a fountain, followed by gobs of concrete and after that, water will take everything. It will rush through the valley, washing away all the old houses and all the silly trinkets, telegraph poles, dog kennels, post boxes, frying pans, walking sticks, torn bridal veils, legless and eyeless dolls, old letters and photos from the walls. Water will wash it all away and leave the valley pure. I don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know it’s going to happen sooner or later.

The air is still pleasantly warm. I’ll get a few beers and go to check on the game warden. I’m not worried, he’ll be happy to see me. We can just stay silent, sit outside his house and look into the valley. The roebuck keeps barking.