An Anthology of Czechoslovak Literature/xⁿ+yⁿ=zⁿ

MAX HLOUBA, a teacher of special subjects, stepped out on to the threshold of his villa,—it was really a bungalow for one family, which, when he had first built it, had aroused the scornful surprise, later the envious admiration of all those living on the outskirts of the town, and was filled with enjoyment by the magnificent summer weather. It was the morning of one of those days which exist in the grace of God, and on account of which nature could almost be accused of ostentation if this display did not betoken such a kindly desire to induce man at least to sigh with bliss at the thought of how lovely the world sometimes can be.

And in good sooth Hlouba needed only this blithe morning, goldenly sunlit, to put the finishing touch to his happy mood. That day it had happened that when he had woke up before sunrise, an idea had flashed across his mind and fairly dragged him from his bed, the sudden arrival of a solution which would assuredly ​result in the triumphant close of his mathematical labours, hitherto consisting only of vain endeavours. He had seized his pencil and immediately recorded the formula which had dawned upon him, after which he had begun to bestrew the paper with line after line, while feeling more and more delighted by the certainty that this time there was no mistake whatever. Suddenly, as if at the blow of a magic wand, in the granite rock, against which the mathematicians of the whole world. had hitherto rasped their finger-nails till the blood flowed, there had been revealed to him an aperture which, though narrow as yet, though only a mere cranny, was already widening, and from it he would certainly be able to shape a victorious entrance where he would lay a mine which would hurl the whole rock into the air and thus rid the world of Fermat’s problem, that bugbear of all mathematicians, whatever their nation or habitat.

He, Max Hlouba, a mere Czech teacher in Neznašov!^[1] Beyond any doubt, this time beyond any doubt. Of course, it was perhaps not yet possible at one swoop to strip such a delicate veil as this from the truth, of course not. On the contrary, there was still quite a number of these veils, and what made it particularly difficult was the fact that they were all so fragile, that two could not be removed together, and unremittingly patient labour would be necessary before the last one was reached.

But the mere certainty that he was on the right track; the happy, victorious certainty, and its realisation made it worth while to have been born and to experience such a morning as the present one when a man’s only regret was that his embrace was not wide enough to begird the whole world. Was it really possible that the ​world could be so beautiful? Assuredly, the same intuition which to-day had removed the mathematical purblindness from the eyes of his soul, had brushed against his bodily senses also, the result being that on this, of all days, he unexpectedly perceived the whole picturesque charm of his native Neznašov, the soft comeliness of the mountain azure. And, amazing to tell, not even the trill of the nightingale had ever stirred his heart as much as now the plain ditty of the little grasshopper, the “common locust,” Tettix subulatus—Hlouba’s special subject was natural science—jerkily strummed as if upon silver wires in a warm blade of grass within three yards of Hlouba. And it was all Hlouba could do not to utter a shout of exultation at the mere fact that the small window, from which a luminously flickering spark reached him as a flash reflected by the sun, was a fixture in a cottage on the lonely mountains, at least ten miles away from him in a direct line.

But his real and vitally justified enthusiasm was aroused by the prosaic slap of washing in the tub into which two active hands were suddenly thrust. They belonged to his adorable wife Štefka. She slipped out of the bedroom even earlier than he did, if, as to-day, she wanted to cope with all the work which the washing entailed—she had two children and no servant. If he wanted to say good morning to her, all he had to do was to dart round the corner to where Štefka had placed the washtub in a shady spot. Hlouba did so, and tumbled into his wife’s arms so as to make her burst out into full-throated laughter, which sent the strawberry fragrance of her breath full into his face. Štefka, it must be said, was not beautiful, or rather, her whole beauty was contained in her fragrant freshness, the healthy tan of her ​skin. Her face was without any rosy pigment, all of which had concentrated itself upon her lips which were ruddier than the cherry, while uprightness and a sparkling humour beamed from her dark eyes.

“Štefka, the game’s won, I’ve managed it at last! Fermat’s^[2] theorem that x to the nth plus y to the nth equals z to the nth can’t be solved in whole numbers if n is greater than 2, is nonsense. There are co-efficients which. . . .

“Oh, darling, I am so glad, but I am still more glad that you are well, that I am well, and especially that Štěpánek and Maxínek are well.”

She pointed to the perambulator in which the two twins were asleep in the health-giving air. They were alike as two peas and they might have been taken for a copy of one of those child-studies at which Mánes excelled.

“And what about those hundred thousand marks? Couldn’t we do with them?

Štefka knew about them, but she sighed:

We shouldn’t want as much as that to pay off the mortgage on the house. I should be quite satisfied if we had enough for that, and we should have it soon if you were to get that job in the bank.”

“When I do get it, I’ll fetch you a slice of the blue from the sky,” exulted Hlouba.

​“I only wish it could be this very morning,” retorted Štefka. “I could make very good use of a slice of blue sky. I want some blue for the washing just after lunch.”

And she gave one of her crystalline laughs.

“You’ll see,” he assured her as he gave her a hasty kiss. The castle clock in the town had just struck a quarter to eight; it was high time for him to start for school:

When he got beyond the palings he laughed aloud; he had only just seen the point of his wife’s joke.

“Not at all bad, that about washing blue from the sky.” He did not realise that there was a touch of bitterness about the joke.

From the perambulator a sound in the key of A was heard, and before the tempo could be indicated, Maxínek and Štěpánek launched themselves upon a duet which could not be listened to for long. It became necessary to stop up simultaneously the mouths of the two food-seeking artists, and assuredly the wherewithal was not lacking.

At this moment of enforced leisure she gazed dreamily at the mountains and the flickering reflection of the far-away window caught her eye; a grasshopper faintly chirped in a flower-bed; in the sultry hush could be heard the rising of the blade of grass which Hlouba had trampled under foot.

She felt perfectly happy, and she nearly fell into a doze, but she started up; above the cornfield by the last corner cottage of the town, a man moved to and fro flourishing a large sheet of paper which he pasted up on a wall and then another one, whereupon he departed.

He was a janitor from the town hall, who at other times was phlegmatic to the point of eccentricity and ​notorious for his slowness. At this moment the utterly tranquil township which had hitherto presented the appearance of being uninhabited, began to be animated with shapes rapidly running past the back-yards; men shouted at each other across the fences in their gardens and fled along the verandas hastily slipping on their coats as they went. But why this long delay with the fire-alarm trumpet and gong?

But it was not a fire; the scared men did not escape into the town, but swarmed in front of the placard at the corner. The place was soon black with them and the din of their voices penetrated to where she was.

Urged by a fearful curiosity, Mrs. Hlouba ran along as soon as she had managed to lull the twins in the perambulator to sleep again, and she discovered what was the matter.

War. Mobilisation. ****** It was eight o’clock to the minute on the same day,—but a year later, Mrs. Hlouba was again sitting on the veranda and was nursing, not the twins, who were toddling in the grass before her, but their little brother who was only a few weeks old. Otherwise there had been no change; the wash-tub stood round the corner in the shade, even the reflection from the mountains had reached its eight o’clock gleam and Štefka in a dreamy mood was mournfully peering at it. There had been no change, and it was as if Max Hlouba, teacher of special subjects, had just gone off to school, although it was over six months since he had gone much farther away, when a placard, calling up his class, had duly made its appearance at the corner.

​It had not affected him greatly, for he had long previously lost all feeling for everyday life. This had left him on the day when war had been declared. At noon he would come home from school and without taking his hat off he would sit down at his desk to his figures. Štefka’s anguished reference to the events of the day was noticed only when it was emphatically repeated in the form of a question and disposed of with the brief remark:

“Then I can’t afford to lose time. Every minute is infinitely precious and might even cost me a hundred thousand marks.”

He took his lunch with pencil and paper and, in fact, he sacrificed every spare moment to his demon of a Fermat, for whose sake he, who till then had been a model teacher, began even to neglect his school work; he would even get up at night and after he had lit the gas would go on scribbling until morning, when his wife would find him asleep, his forehead resting on his hands. But the most serious part of it was that his love for the twins, which hitherto had been unbounded altogether, suddenly dwindled away as if it had never existed.

When Štefka brought them along to wish him good night, all he used to say to them was: “That’s right, that’s right,” and before he would raise his eyes from his figures and kiss the babies he had to be urged by the violent importunacy of their mother. It actually happened on one of these occasions that he confused Maxík with Štěpánek, entirely forgetting the insignificant but unmistakable mark which distinguished his first-born. To all her reproaches and remonstrances, however gentle, he replied only by clenching his fists till the joints ​creaked, and by gnashing his teeth, he had no time for words. She then had recourse only to tears, but in the end even they failed her, when one day he shouted at her in an abusive tone such as she had never heard from him before and never heard again. For if such was his way, he should not see her shed tears, though her heart were to burst. She turned to stone by his side, when she saw how stubbornly unfeeling he had become. And so now she took no notice when one day he rubbed his hands victoriously and at another time tore his hair,—it was all due to his cursed obliquity of vision.

It was an obsession, it was a fever which became more and more intense, the nearer the day upon which Max also was to enter upon his military duties. He carried out the preparations for this at the last moment with the greatest rapidity, violently wrenching himself from his mathematical paroxysm. Only at the time of parting did it seem that the solemnity of the moment had withdrawn the film of hypnosis from his eyes. Suddenly, with eyes starting out of his head, he stared at his babies in their swaddling clothes just as when he had first been shown them, long had he fixed his glance upon them and at last it was good-bye, and he went. It had seemed to Štefka also that for a moment his eyes had gazed at her as devotedly as they had done long before, but what was more important to him than anything else was a fresh insistence upon the instructions he had given about his scientific work and the continuation of it which he would be sending from the army. She parted from him without tears and without any danger that her heart would burst. It was only when she was left in solitude that she was assailed by an uncontrollable sorrow.

​Not even while on military service did he reveal any awakening of his heart. It is true that not a day passed without the arrival of a field service post-card from him, but every single one of them was covered with mathematical formulæ, written with copying-ink pencil, and sometimes algebra was replaced by huge columns of figures, so that there was hardly enough time left for the writer to add any good wishes or the news that “everything is as usual,” but what the “usual” was, Štefka never discovered.

The letters arrived without a hitch, for he himself was acting as censor.

Only when she informed her husband that if God grants, you will find at least one more of us, dear daddy, when you come back; I only wish you could come back earlier” did she receive about five heartfelt lines, and as a proof of how undisguisedly heartfelt they were, there was a sort of large blot in which the conclusion of the letter dissolved into a bluish smear just at the point where he referred to the 100,000 marks, and about the journey which, thank God, was now unmistakably close to its successful termination.

Then more and more cards with more and more figures, some of which were underlined several times, instructions as to their safe disposal, till at last the cards had stopped coming, twelve weeks previously, shortly before the third heir to the name of Hlouba uttered his first cry, and she still did not know whether she was nursing a posthumous child or not.

Startled, Mrs. Hlouba stared in front of her. There, as if he had sprung from the earth, a messenger from the town hall, and the expression on his face recalled Štefka’s mind from distant dreams to the immediate present, ​suddenly rousing her from her bemused and listless condition. He broke the distressing news to her considerately, and when he had gone there could be no further doubt, she held the confirmation of the truth in black and white. Nor did this confirmation lack the seal of strictest authenticity, with which the last six field post-cards were fastened together; they were handed to the widow with a few trifles which had been left behind by the dead man. The post-cards had been in his breast-pocket when an enemy bullet entered his heart.

On the post-card it was not possible to decipher a word or a figure except the heading which was common to them all. “Conclusion of the proof of the untenability of Fermat’s problem.”

But the conclusion itself was utterly and hopelessly effaced in a smear of blue and red. Stefka Hlouba sat long over this last message from her husband, before her eyes released the scalding torrent which forms the outlet for all such tears as have been kept back for months at a time. She did not rid herself of them at once, nor even in a day, or a weck, but nevertheless a point was reached when they grew less and were no longer so scalding, yet she felt no relief. One day, during the same winter, while clearing out her late husband’s desk, she came across all his post-cards containing the unfinished proof of Fermat’s theorem in a drawer where she had put them to await, now vainly, his return.

Suddenly her fingers clutched feverishly at the batch of papers, and when she had separated them from the cards bearing the traces of Max’s tears and blood, she laid them aside. The rest she grasped resolutely and threw into the fire. Just as they were flaring up, she ​stretched out her hand, as if she wanted to save them. But it was too late.

“And even if . . . no, not for a hundred thousand,” she whispered to herself.

Not until the last of them had shrivelled up in the flames, did Štefka sink on to her knees and press her lips for the first time upon the last red trace which Max Hlouba had left behind him in this world.