the arsonist

Egon Hostovský

translated from the czech by

christopher morris

twisted spoon press

prague
2025
 Copyright © 1935, 2023 heirs Egon Hostovský
This translation © 1996, 2025 Twisted Spoon Press
Cover image and frontispiece © 1996 Tomáš Fafek
Afterword © 1996 Radojka Miljević

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced

in any form by an electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying,
recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission
in writing from the publisher.

isbn: 978-80-88628-10-1
isbn: 978-80-88628-36-1 (e-book)
the arsonist
He believed that all things were
one big Miracle, and when a man
knows that much he knows some-
thing to go upon.

Rudyard Kipling
 1

T he small mountain town that an unknown arsonist menaced

and terrified for two months is called Zbečnov. It lies right on
the Prussian border, among hills streaked with bluish gray and green
strips of unfathomable forest. It is a godforsaken place, rightfully
overlooked, since no famous man or woman has ever been born
there, nor does it boast a single Baroque chateau or a medieval castle
nearby, or even a notable set of ruins. And only once, in the Austro-
Prussian War of 1866, did infamous events rush through, leaving
stone and iron crosses in their wake on the plains and slopes, along
winding, dilapidated roads. Although some 1,500 people live in this
little town, it is so backward that to this day a watchman with a
drum and two sticks walks along the streets, children thronging
after him, to announce the decrees of the town council to the inhab-
itants. What kind of people live here? Clever folk and poor folk, the
unfortunate and the rich, just like everywhere in the world. Peasant
farmers, cottagers, craftsmen, tradesmen, functionaries from the
post office, the railroad, and the bank, teachers, day laborers, and
then the down-and-outers, whose professions are more mutable
than the weather here.
»How’s old Maršík making a living these days?«

• 11 •
 »He does all sorts of things, mostly business.«
»In what?«
»In whatever comes to hand! Shoelaces, creams, rabbit pelts,
sometimes he looks after the farmers’ cattle for them, and they say
he steals a bit, too.«
The wind is a frequent visitor to these parts. An eternal, wander-
ing wind, audible and restless, even when it sleeps off its malice,
lulling itself into a breeze. It ripples the treetops, tears the kites right
out of the boys’ hands, teases the fishpond, refuses to leave the clouds
in peace for a moment, is quarrelsome and spiteful, carries away
words of saving grace as soon as they have left the speaker’s lips and
mocks them. How can you help from mocking monologues to the
wind! Children have an understanding with it. Young conjurers look
dreamily at the horizon, jump up high, high above the ground, and,
waving their arms, try to fly.
»Ahhhhhhh!«
»What’re you shouting about, you idiots?«
»Are you blind? Can’t you see we’re flying? — ahhhhhhh!«
Blue, enticing, deceitful wind!
People from these parts have trouble finding favor in the eyes of
those from other parts of the country. They are said to be unsociable
and to speak an ugly dialect, which grates on the nerves with vulgar
expressions and a plebeian accent. I don’t know how much truth
there is to this. Yet in our age of a babel of languages in which villages
in the same country and people of the same kin understand each
other less and less, I worry more about comprehension than about
language. That’s why I think deaf ears and malicious tongues have
done more to damage the reputation of the citizens of Zbečnov than
any mutilated dialect spoken by the locals, or by their mountain
surliness.
Well, then, I cannot testify to having discovered any unusual or
extraordinary happenings in Zbečnov’s past. Nothing of the sort! In

• 12 •
the last forty years, only five incidences of violence against Jews in
the whole district, the regular barroom brawls after the mayoral elec-
tions, one murder out of jealousy, one attempted out of revenge, four
suicides, a few burglaries, plenty of petty thefts, and three hunger
riots against the farmers toward the end of the Great War. I only
took pause at the strange death of an Evangelical minister who was
finished off by his own flock, and while he was preaching in the
church at that. The whole business was perpetrated by a pig-headed
tailor whose shop was on the square. He had even more fixed ideas
than debts (which he was in over his head). And when he bent over
his accounts, ious, and orders for payment, he would clench his fists
and growl:
»Sure as anything, the pastor is preaching the word of God all
wrong!«
How could it be otherwise, when he, a God-fearing tailor, never
heard from the pastor’s lips the answer to the question of all ques-
tions: how does one get free of debt? God’s truth is only one, but lit-
tle human truths are many. The tailor soon found other faults in the
old pastor and a good number of people who shared his opinion. To
make a long story short, one Sunday a part of the congregation
rebelled. The malcontents kicked up a row during the sermon, came
out of their pews, and thrust under the astonished old man’s nose a
piece of paper on which was written: You’re too old! We don’t want
you! When the pastor had gotten the message, he raised a hand above
his head as if he were looking for someone to strike, gave a rattle from
his throat, and fell to the floor. He was dead on the spot, destroyed by
the little truth of the indebted tailor.
There was a good deal of fuss, remorse, belated repentance, and
bad blood about the whole affair. It found its way into the papers,
everyone heard about it, and the world’s attention was drawn to
Zbečnov for the first time.
Nevertheless, even with the best of intentions I cannot think of

• 13 •
any other event worth mentioning that would indicate that God
had exactly chosen the most sinful corner of the country to visit
calamity upon in the form of an invisible arsonist. No, we would be
hard put to find any tracks in Zbečnov’s past leading to the mysteri-
ous firebug. We should search instead in the great events of our time
and be satisfied for the present with the theory that the whole bizarre
case is one of their grotesque repercussions. The arsonist appeared
on the scene at a moment when ever-faithful Misery, which already
has as many names as it does insatiable jaws, had returned to us again.
And the great and lofty world is not one bit different from laughably
petty Zbečnov in its attempts to lay bare misery and evil in its true
form, in its reasons and consequences.

The occurrences I am going to speak of have their own central setting.

It is Josef Simon’s inn, the Silver Pigeon. It stands on the sharply slop-
ing Small Square opposite the school, in the middle of a long row of
young, well-tended lindens. An old, rambling two-storied structure
with cracked walls, small windows, narrow doors, cross-vaulted ceil-
ings, winding stairs, a deep cellar, and a well-settled state of decrepi-
tude wherever the eye falls. Only the gilded sign over the entrance is
not old. On the ground floor is the pub, the taproom, and the
kitchen, while seven rooms are found on the second floor, in three of
which live Josef Simon’s family, the other four being let out to guests.
The windows of the pub look out onto the square, the rooftops of low
houses, the steep meadowed descent, and the narrow valley, onto the
Prussian hills lined with a white tangle of paths.
Somewhere there, in the floating grayish vapors, our country
comes to an end. From there comes the howling wind, the rain and
the snowstorms. Several scattered, hunchbacked cottages, dark rib-
bons of smoke, and forests, forests. When evening comes, little lights
spring up from the bottomless darkness. So small, so unreal, that the
illusion of distance overcomes one with vertigo. All of the sullen

• 14 •
drinkers, all of the downcast souls who come to the Silver Pigeon at
night look in that direction. The little lights go out and then reap-
pear. Here is home, beyond them, the world.
»One day, when you’re grown up, you’ll go there, see? . . . There,
into the world!«
When people look toward the frontier by day, to the green twi-
light and the fog-shrouded horizon, they screen their eyes with their
hands and shake their heads in disbelief. Nothing good will ever
come from the frontier! A witch on a broomstick to scare the
naughty children, soldiers on maneuver to the irritation of the
farmers, frightening stories about an impending war the likes of
which has never been seen before. Who wouldn’t pay the frontier
heed? Perhaps only birds, clouds, and wind.
Josef Simon fears it as well. Even though he puts no faith in gossip
or in prophecies. Even though he would consider it a mortal sin ever
to feel the desire to understand politics and to imitate the comic ges-
tures of his customers, heatedly pounding on the tables with their
newspapers spread before them. He has not acquired much educa-
tion in his life, but a great deal of experience makes up for it — and
he knows that more wounds are inflicted for lines, fences, and stones
marking the boundaries between large and small strips of land than
for scorned love, and it results in more carnage than do threats to
honor and liberty.
Ah yes, he was only too experienced! He was born in this house,
into which the echo of the living history of the entire region filtered
without surcease. Here, people confessed, cursed, quarreled, slan-
dered, disputed, declared war, dethroned emperors, celebrated the
coming of peace; misery, hatred and ill luck came here and, again, the
celebration of love. He had the self-effacing wisdom of a host. And
always a smile on his lips. Stop the sun in its tracks and extinguish the
stars if you understand how the world goes round and if you’ve got
the truth by the forelock!

• 15 •
 »Whose side are you on, Simon?«
»I can’t make up my mind just yet. Give me a little time, like, say,
five or ten years!«
»Damn the fellow! He’s as cold as a dog’s snout, and so thick he
doesn’t know why he’s even in the world!«
»Are you telling me you know why you’re here?«
»Oh forget it, you’re dodging the question again! You don’t know
how to deal with anything, or maybe you’re just a hypocrite. We
won’t be electing you mayor!«
They admired him for some of his qualities. Every Thursday eve-
ning, beggars would come to his place from miles around. They were
given soup, potatoes, rice, sometimes even meat. They sat on the
doorstep, on the stairs, in the taproom, it was a wonder you didn’t
trip on them. »Nice ornaments!« the customers would complain.
Yet woe to the beggar who came to the Silver Pigeon on another
day or at a different hour! He would be tossed out by Simon before
he could open his mouth. Tossed out, and how! In a mad rage, with
threats and insults that would make your skin crawl. Witnesses to
these outbursts would go stiff with horror, since Simon was otherwise
cool and calm, even when using his fists to keep order in his place. It
seldom happened, but when there was a need for him to grab a chair
and brandish it, even the most presumptuous troublemaker would
calm down straight away. He had tremendous strength, which no one
ever would have expected in such a small fellow with a bit of a stoop,
and perhaps he was not too aware of it himself. The brawlers knew
Simon. He had stamped on the foot of one of them and broke the
bone and the toes like matchsticks — they took the poor wretch
straight to the hospital; he broke a second one’s arm when he had
gotten a little careless in showing him out of the pub; and in a bit of
a rash gesture he knocked three teeth out of a third, a handsome,
strapping, ruddy-faced fellow with wild dark eyes, as he was trying to
subdue the young man’s drunken temper.

• 16 •
 He never talked about this himself, and anyone who hadn’t
known him well for a long time might easily have taken him for a
coward.
Dance bands were not allowed to appear in his inn – he hated the
racket and didn’t care about extra revenue. He served the customers
himself, had never taken on a waiter to help out, and only on rare
occasions did his wife stand in for him in the pub.
He had never really been endowed with what one might call a
worldview. It was not for him — and he couldn’t have managed it
anyway — to reconcile the differences between all the points of view
that had been buzzing around his ears in that hotbed of thoughts,
convictions, and opinions ever since his childhood. He was the ideal
landlord: he believed no one and nodded approvingly to everyone.
He held to one law alone, the law of hospitality — he had it in his
blood. And he was ready to stand up for it against the whole town of
Zbečnov if need be.
On one occasion many years ago, the townsfolk had smashed all
of his windows because he had given refuge in the Silver Pigeon to a
Jew who, as the story in the surrounding countryside went, had killed
a virgin and used her Christian blood to make his cursed matzos. As
I said, Simon didn’t believe in gossip and rumors. Although he had
no reason to believe the Jew either, the man, frightened to death, was
his guest. And that settled it. He stationed himself in front of the
doorway, spread his legs wide, rolled up his sleeves, and hissed: »He’s
my guest! Come and get him, if you’re of a mind to!«
Given the situation, they no longer had a mind to, and they con-
tented themselves with just the broken windows and a month-long
boycott of the Silver Pigeon. Simon picked up the three largest stones
from the floor, put them in a trunk, and would secretly look at them
for years afterward.
He married late, when he was forty-three, shortly after the death
of his father, who had nearly brought the pub to ruin by pouring too

• 17 •
many beers on credit. He took for himself the eldest of the three
daughters of a well-off farmer from a nearby village, and contented
himself with a dowry of six thousand gulden. The marriage was
arranged by his relatives. The young woman came to him straight
from a convent. She had spent four years there, and had studied all
sorts of things, including foreign languages, for which Simon had
cool respect. She was a full twenty-two years younger, fragile, pale,
and she often cried. Her tears touched him, but he didn’t seek their
reason. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to prevent them anyway.
He was loving and attentive to her, gave her as much money as he
could, and sent her to the dressmaker himself.
After a year or so of marriage, he happened upon her diary. He
looked through it with interest, marveling at the foolishness with
which women occupy their time. All at once he stopped, read one
sentence twice, and then examined one page after another with
growing agitation.
Of his wife he learned that she was unhappy, and of himself that
he was an uncouth and simpleminded, if basically good-natured,
man whom she had been pressured into marrying by her parents.
He further read that in the foreign mountains on the other side of
the valley she had left her first and last love, some blond, blue-eyed
teacher who had managed to smuggle love letters even into the con-
vent, and who had turned his back on her for good after her
marriage.
For several weeks he walked around the house lost in thought,
avoiding eye contact with anyone. Impotent regret, which he had
long since lost the habit of feeling, was making him breathless. He
said not a word to her. He waited. And after three months, he picked
up her diary again and read what had been added to it. It was already
less interesting than before. The entries were concerned more with
the present than with the past, the despairing enthusiasm was gone
and was replaced by a dull sobriety. After another six months the

• 18 •
diary came to a definitive end, like most diaries, with everyday banali-
ties. The pain had subsided, the past had died away, time had healed
all the wounds. Simon breathed a sigh of relief. When after several
years it seemed his wife no longer thought of her notes, he dug up the
diary from the bottom of her chest and put it in his trunk with the
three keepsake stones.
He never cheated on her, they rarely argued, and he loved her just
as he would have loved any other even slightly bearable woman. She
got used to him, and later on, perhaps even a bit attached to him. The
whole town rubbed elbows beneath their roof. Simon learned all
about the goings-on in everyone’s lives, and he smiled. He was above
it all, whether it concerned him or not. He had a young wife — he
had won her, had won her for himself, because he had bet on his
winning card, on the card of time. And he had two children, Eliška
and Kamil. Eliška would get a decent dowry one day (although he
wouldn’t force her into any marriage the way her mother had been
forced), and Kamil would study (he envisioned him as a local doctor
or lawyer). He had his beggars’ Thursdays, he was compassionate and
indulgent, no one had anything bad to say about him. He even recon-
ciled himself to the fact that the Silver Pigeon would one day pass
into the hands of strangers. He blamed no one, he was not unhappy
about it, but neither was he happy. For that matter, what more can a
man expect from life when he neither trusts people nor believes in
them?

The stories surrounding the Zbečnov arsonist began when Eliška

was seventeen and Kamil fifteen. How many times the world and
Zbečnov and the Silver Pigeon had changed by then in the eyes of a
boy who was restlessly searching in life for the adventures ignored by
his father! Whenever he looked back over his shoulder after a length
of time, he saw a past that had changed so much as to be unrecogniz-
able. Not richer, not longer, just different than at the last look: it had

• 19 •
disintegrated as the months and years had gnawed away at it, dissolv-
ing into the rainbow-like colors of memory.
At first he saw only the light and shadow of fairy tales without
heroes. Anxiety, fear, joy, hunger, satiety, unearthly light, unreal twi-
light were their plot. Later on, the first change of scene magnified it:
surely you recognize this, or at least find it faintly familiar! His father
was an invulnerable knight, his mother a good witch, his sister an evil
fairy, the Thursday beggars a villainous band. He would sit with the
servant girls in the kitchen on a long bench by the stoves.
»See that, he sat right down at that table. It was the devil’s own
weather out, a wonder the wind didn’t take the roof right off — the
thunder was booming, one flash of lightning followed another, and
hailstones larger than a fist were falling. He had a red beard that
touched the ground and wild eyes. And what do you suppose he set
down in front of himself, dear lad? Cross yourself before I tell you!
A coffin! A black coffin — just as sure as I’m standing before you!«
A new change: he takes long walks with his mother in the forest,
along the hills beyond the herds of goats, around the fishpond with
its secluded corners overgrown with rushes, discovering windswept
paths and listening to odd stories of the sort that are not told to
children:
»At that time, my family was still paying us visits, my parents, my
sisters and my brother. Your grandfather, your grandmother, your
uncle — do you remember him? He brought you some candy —
don’t you remember? He came in a sleigh, a sleigh with a white horse
dashing like the wind, the sleigh bells jingled, the whip whistled,
crack, crack, he made a snowman in the yard . . . Grandpa was such a
little man, he smoked a short pipe, spat in all directions like a Gypsy,
you got a rocking horse from him . . .«
The setting sun shines differently than before, more brightly, the
wind hums something cheerful as it flies, today the frogs croak the
psalm of the fishpond more quietly, the moss is covered with golden

• 20 •
tones — ah, it’s a beautiful, new, strange fairy tale Mother is telling.
»One day, though, Papa told them: I don’t want you to come
here so often. I have very little money, you’re not my relatives, I don’t
like you! Well, they got cross with him, what would you expect?
They went away and they’ll never come back again. They have left
me here all alone . . . Come on now, you silly boy, why should you
cry? They’re not angry at you and me, one day we’ll take a trip
together to see them!«
And another change: School! Friends, battles, a bruised forehead,
ripped pants. The Silver Pigeon will be a fortress when troops sur-
round it. Ten machine guns rattle from the windows over the gilded
sign. Mother retreats to the background, why remember her? She
leaves the house for a week, returns dressed in black, ill for a long
time, a doctor regularly comes to the house. Around that time a fight
breaks out in the pub, the servant girls clasp their hands together in
fright, sobbing: »The landlord will kill them!« The windows shatter,
don’t you hear the tables being overturned next door? Then the
racket and the shouting subside. Finally all is quiet. Father comes in,
smiling as always. »It’s all over!« He wipes his hands on his clothes,
stretches. »A lot of them are in for a bad night! Go and clean up in
there! You’re not still afraid are you?«
Father’s glory is greater than that of all the kings in the world.
»Do you know, Vašek, how many of those robbers Papa crushed
like worms when they broke into our place last night?«
And what was his sister doing in those days? He hardly has any
memories of her at all. It seems . . . yes, yes, she ran away from home.
They searched for her all day. Later they brought her home half-
frozen in the sleigh. Such a commotion it caused, the dog barked and
barked in the yard, and someone said over the boy’s bed that it was
close to midnight. Good God, what had really happened to Eliška?
Change overtakes change. The world is full of heroes. Magnificent
heroes. In uniforms, with captains’ caps on their heads, rifles on their

• 21 •
shoulders, binoculars at their eyes, monstrous devices in hand, brig-
and feathers stuck in their hats. In those moments, Robinson would
freeze in amazement, seeing the bare footprint in the sand,
d’Artagnan find himself in a devil of a jam with his comrades, and
Alan Breck lop off more Whigamore heads with his sword than the
crew of the pirate ship had toes on their feet.
There is no life outside great deeds — you have to be a hero your-
self! A naval officer, an inventor, a builder of airships. And to be one
some day, you have to study. Every day Kamil gets up at six o’clock,
hurries to the train station, takes a local line to the district capital
where his school is, and does not return until evening. He already
knows much more than his parents, he reads sentences in Latin, dis-
cusses the intervals between the sun and the stars, knows what the
highest mountains on Earth are, and wears long pants. The Earth
seems ever wider, and the flow of the days more rapid . . .
But let us pause in our high, wild flight where moments and
their secrets burn out more quickly than sparks. Let us stop now,
because Kamil Simon is fifteen and he finds himself on the thresh-
old of events that truly deserve a listen.
»What do you hear?« they eagerly ask the curious little boy who
has excitedly put his ear to a telegraph pole to catch the echo of
unseen events and the chatter of the world.
»Nothing, just a buzzing! Wait . . . quiet . . . psst, psst! Something
is there now after all!«

For a long time he has wanted to be alone. He is absentminded, irri-

table, avoids his friends, wanders through the familiar places of his
native region, his head drooping. He stops from time to time, raises
his eyes from the ground and timidly scans the horizons, the wind
and the clouds. Horizons, wind, clouds! Only the forlorn, the disap-
pointed, the misunderstood fraternize with them. Kamil thinks all of
this unhappiness has caught up with him. He does not understand

• 22 •
 a bou t t h e au t hor

Egon Hostovský was one of the most distinctive voices in 20th-cen-

tury Czech letters as well as one of the most prolific. He was born the
youngest of eight children to a Jewish family on April 24, 1908, in the
northeastern Bohemian town of Hronov where his father was the co-
owner of a small textile factory. After finishing gymnasium in Náchod
in 1927, he studied at Charles University in Prague and then in
Vienna in 1929. Throughout the 1930s he served as editor in the
Prague publishing house Melantrich. During this period he pub-
lished a number of novels, among them Ztracený stín (Lost Shadow,
1931), Černá tlupa (The Black Gang, 1933), Žhář (The Arsonist, 1935),
for which he was awarded Czechoslovakia’s State Prize for Literature
in 1936, and Dům bez pána (House Without a Master, 1937). These
were translated at the time into other European languages, notably
Danish, French, Flemish and German, and established Hostovský as
one of the leading figures of his generation of Czech writers. In
February 1939, he traveled to Brussels on a lecture tour. As a result of
Nazi Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, he continued on to
Paris, and then to Lisbon, before arriving in New York in February
1940, which became his home during the war. His father, sisters and
their families all perished in the Holocaust. He returned for a brief

• 179 •
period to Czechoslovakia in 1946, working in the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and then in the embassy in Norway as a legal secretary, and
later as Charges d’Affaires. He resigned his post in 1949 and returned
to the United States, this time for good, in February 1950. While still
writing novels, he worked as a teacher of Czech at a language school,
wrote for American newspapers, and for five years served as an editor
for Radio Free Europe. Hostovský died in Montclair, New Jersey, in
1973. The novels written in emigration were immediately translated
into English (often preceding publication in Czech) and introduced
his work to an international readership.

• 180 •
 the arsonist
by Egon Hostovský

Translated from the original Czech

Žhář (Prague: Melantrich, 1935)
by Christopher Morris

Edited by David Chirico

Frontispiece : “Fear” by Tomáš Fafek
Wax drippings by Fedele Spadafora
Afterword by Radojka Miljević
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