Tales from Two Pockets

1 OTHER WORKS BY KAREL CAPEK FROM CATBIRD PRESS Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Capek Reader, edited by Peter Kussi, foreword by Arthur Miller Apocryphal Tales, trans. Norma Comrada Three Novels, trans. M. & R. Weatherall War with the Newts, trans. Ewald Osers Cross Roads, trans. Norma Comrada Talks with T. G. Masaryk, trans. Michael Henry Heim 2 TALES FROM TWO POCKETS by Karel Capek Translated from the Czech and with an introduction by Norma Comrada CATBIRD PRESS A Garrigue Book 3 English translation © 1994 Catbird Press Introduction © 1994 Norma Comrada CATBIRD PRESS 16 Windsor Road, North Haven, CT 06473 www.catbirdpress.com [email protected] 203-230-2391 Our books are distributed to the trade by Independent Publishers Group Sony ISBN 978-1-936053-03-2 Kindle ISBN 978-1-936053-04-9 Adobe ISBN 978-1-936053-05-6 See page 376 for the translator’s acknowledgments. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Capek, Karel, 1890-1938. [Povídky z druhé kapsy. English] Tales from two pockets / by Karel Capek ; translated from the Czech and with an introduction by Norma Comrada. -- 1st ed. “Originally collected in the vo\lumes Povídky z jedné kapsy and Povídky z druhé kapsy in 1929"--CIP verso t.p. “A Garrigue book.” ISBN 0-945774-25-7 : $14.95 1. Capek, Karel, 1890-1938--Translations into English. I. Capek, Karel, 1890-1938. Povídky z jedné kapsy. English. 1994. II. Comrada, Norma. III. Title. PG5038.C3A23 1994 891.8’635--dc20 93-42204 CIP 4 CONTENTS Introduction 6 Tales from One Pocket Dr. Mejzlik’s Case 13 The Blue Chrysanthemum 18 The Fortuneteller 25 The Clairvoyant 31 The Mystery of Handwriting 39 Proof Positive 47 The Experiment of Professor Rouss 53 The Missing Letter 62 Stolen Document 139/VII Sect. C 70 The Man Who Looked Just a Bit Suspicious 79 The Poet 85 Mr. Janik’s Cases 92 The Fall of the House of Voticky 103 The Record 114 The Selvin Case 123 Footprints 131 The Receipt 140 Oplatka’s End 150 The Last Judgment 159 The Crime on the Farm 165 The Disappearance of an Actor 171 An Attempt at Murder 185 Released on Parole 192 The Crime at the Post Office 199 5 Tales from the Other Pocket The Stolen Cactus 209 The Old Jailbird’s Tale 217 The Disappearance of Mr. Hirsch 223 Chintamani and Birds 230 A Safecracker and an Arsonist 241 The Stolen Murder 249 The Case Involving the Baby 258 The Little Countess 268 The Orchestra Conductor’s Story 274 The Death of Baron Gandara 281 The Breach-of-Promise Man 287 The Ballad of Juraj Cup 295 The Tale of the Missing Leg 301 Vertigo 307 The Confession 313 A Lyrical Thief 318 Mr. Havlena’s Verdict 325 The Needle 332 The Telegram 338 The Man Who Couldn’t Sleep 345 The Stamp Collection 351 An Ordinary Murder 358 The Juror 364 The Last Things of Man 371 Acknowledgments 376 6 Introduction The Czech writer Karel Capek (1890-1938) is best known in the English-speaking world for his plays and novels, espe- cially for his 1920 play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, which introduced the word “robot” to the world. He was also a master of the short story and a newspaper columnist, writing about literature, politics, and everything else that captured his interest. In 1928, Capek began publishing a new type of story in Lidové noviny, the widely-read newspaper for which he wrote a regular column. These tales about mysteries of all kinds surprised Capek’s friends: they knew him as a mystery reader, not as a mystery writer. He had read all the classics and contemporaries in their original languages: Chesterton, Christie, Conan Doyle, the French authors, and American authors, too — although he didn’t care for the “hardboiled, blood-and-gore” American style. On his 1924 trip to En- gland, he made a point of visiting not only Baker Street but also Dartmoor, haunt of the Baskerville hound. In 1929, Capek’s own “detective stories” were collected in two volumes: Tales from One Pocket and Tales from the Other Pocket, referred to together as “the Pocket Tales.” The late 1920s were a good time for experimenting with detective fiction. That era is now termed the Golden Age of Mystery Stories, and there was already a large body of fiction in the genre for Capek to respond to. It was also a period of relative stability in Capek’s personal and profes- sional life and in the life of his beloved country. Czechoslo- vakia had begun to move beyond the devastation wrought by World War I and the first-phase difficulties of establishing 7 a new nation, and neither the effects of the Depression nor the rise of fascism could be foreseen. A graphoholic under any circumstances, Capek could now indulge in writing for the pure pleasure of it. Always interested in presenting various points of view, he found the short story a perfect form for exploring, from many sides, such themes as the nature of truth and justice, the value and the mystery of ordinary life, and the potential within each of us for a multitude of widely different but nonetheless possible lives. And alone among Capek’s enor- mous output of books, the Pocket Tales reflect the wide range of his personal interests, experiences, and concerns. Crime and its causes and detection absorbed much of Capek’s attention while writing the Pocket Tales. And, as always when something captured his interest, be it crime, cacti, or Oriental carpets, he devoured all available resources on the topic. His response to an inquiry on the most inter- esting books he had read in 1928 was, “I don’t know; but the study that most interested me this year: criminology and criminal psychology.” He was also intrigued by the idea of writing mystery stories in Czech, there being no homegrown detective-story tradition at the time. Nor, despite Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, was there a tradition of using everyday, conversational Czech in literature. With the Pocket Tales, Capek broke the barrier both in his use of colloquialisms and in his style of punctuating speech. His earlier translations of modern French poets had opened doors for all subsequent generations of Czech poets; the Pocket Tales introduced a turnabout in Czech prose. Capek was equally intrigued by the idea of creating a different type of mystery story, one which depicted ordinary human beings caught up in highly un-ordinary, often extraor- dinary situations and circumstances. And, as in much of his 8 writing, the Pocket Tales were an attempt to identify the “various roads that lead to the knowledge of truth.” Each person has a certain truth, he wrote, but it is a partial truth. We can never know the truth in its entirety, because human knowledge is limited. Even a crime, when seen from another point of view, might not be perceived as a crime at all. And even if a criminal is caught, the whole truth may never be known. The Pocket Tales remind us that a poet’s truth can be quite different from a scholar’s truth; similarly, a detective’s truth differs from that of a doctor, lawyer, or fortuneteller. Only relative truth is accessible to us, Capek was saying, not absolute truth; it’s just that we often tend to confuse the one with the other. It was a horribly hot summer in Prague when Capek began to write the Pocket Tales. He had hoped to write at the rate of one tale per day, thinking up the plots as he walked to the newspaper office and writing them down that same evening. “But thinking is hard work when you’re gasping for breath like a carp,” he wrote to his future wife; he would “much rather lie somewhere in the shade and groan over — no, rather than groan over, actually write the tales.” In one of his letters, he remarks that he would write as long as the supply of ideas lasted; probably he would do a dozen and a half, two dozen, perhaps. Two dozen it was, at least for Tales from One Pocket. But something happened halfway through their writing. “As soon as I began to occupy myself with the world of crime,” Capek said in an interview, “I became captivated almost involuntarily by the problem of justice. You will probably find the turning point in the first half of these Tales. In place of the question of how to identify and portray reality, the question of how to punish prevails.” What is justice? How 9 just is it? Who should judge? How should we punish? In an imperfect world, we are not likely to have developed perfect ways of judging and punishing. The relativity of truth is matched by the relativity of human justice. Another switch occurs at exactly midpoint in the forty- eight tales: suddenly all the stories are being told by people other than the author. Furthermore, each storyteller’s offer- ing reminds someone else, someone apparently in the same room if not at the very same table, of yet another story. This is where Tales from the Other Pocket begins, and readers likely will wonder what brings such disparate types as a lawyer, a priest, a gardener, a doctor, an orchestra conductor, and an old jailbird together for a round of storytelling. Capek seems to have envisioned a truly pluralist mix of people who live in a pluralist, democratically-oriented society — the ideal that fueled the Czech and Slovak founders of the interwar republic.

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