Niche writing competitions

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Battle of Britain, British Czech & Slovak Association, Czech, Czechoslovakia, Freedom, Liz Kohn, Niche, Rodean, Show trials, Slovakia, Space, Speedway, Tereza Pultarová, The Final Incarnation, Velvet Revolution, Writing competition

Maggie Davies and Sarah Dawson do such sterling work for us each month listing writing competitions for us to enter.  Some of them are quite niche – some nicher than others.   

You may wonder how these comps actually work out.  Well, here’s the inside story of one of them last year. It certainly categorises as niche – perhaps it’s the nichest – and it’s the one I’m most involved with, the annual comp of the British Czech & Slovak Association.  The subject matter for entries can be either (1) links between Britain and the Czech and/or Slovak Republics, at any time in their history or (2) society in those Republics since the Velvet Revolution of 1989.  Each year there’s a suggested (but not compulsory) theme.

Freedom was the suggested theme in this year’s BCSA writing competition – freedom in any of its forms.   The entrants showed their usual ingenuity in interpreting that. We took to the skies with a Czechoslovak pilot fighting for freedom in the Battle of Britain.  In another entry we mused on the excitement and the hopes in Czechoslovakia when freedom was restored in 1989, and on the reality and disappointments since that great time (but ending, I’m glad to say, on an optimistic note).  In a third entry we saw how the son of a well-off family in pre-war Czechoslovakia found his freedom working in a squalid farmhouse in southern Bohemia and then in a quarry in Derbyshire.  In a fourth we joined an alcoholic gambler pondering the meaning of freedom in a Czech bar.

Non-freedom entries included our very first venture into the world of speedway, and a comic playlet showing a Czechoslovak Jewish refugee talking her way into a job at Roedean School in 1939.

Deciding on the winners is always difficult.   But the judges managed it.  Thank you, judges!

Second prize, winning £150, went to Liz Kohn, with a piece called Two Worlds.  Liz has been researching her family history and in particular that of her father and his first wife, Alice Glasnerová.  Her current research is into Alice’s trial and its relationship to the Slánský show trials of 1952 in Communist Czechoslovakia.  Liz’s entry tells some of this story.  

This year’s winner – taking home £400 – was Tereza Pultarová. Tereza is a London-based science and technology journalist, originally from Prague.   She has degrees from Charles University and a Master’s in Science from the International Space University in Strasbourg. Her winning entry was The Final Incarnation – Chapter 1.  It is the first chapter of a novel Tereza has written, whichdeals with growing up in 1990s post-communist Czechoslovakia, and explores how traumas from the Communist years live on through family dysfunction and alcoholism.

It was so good to be back in a proper setting for the presentation of the prize this year.  In 2020 we presented the prize via Zoom, during one of the BCSA’s other events.  Last year we had to do it by post.  This year I had the privilege of marking Tereza’s success at our resumed Annual Dinner at the May Fair Hotel in London on November 23, as in the first photo above.  (Thanks to Erik Weisenpacher for the photos.)

The winning entries (and a selection of the others) are published in the Assocation’s magazine, the British Czech & Slovak Review.

We’ll run the competition again in 2023.  Watch our website, social media and the Review for details. 

Witches

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Bonfire, Czech, Hallowe'en, Historic injustice, James VI & I, Scotland, Slovak, Spring, Witches

There must be a story or two here.

On 30 April the Czechs have a custom called Burning the Witches.  It’s a custom that’s alive and well.  April 30 is six months after Hallowe’en, and comes right between between the spring equinox and summer solstice, so on this night Czechs say goodbye to winter and welcome spring by burning “the witch of winter” as an effigy on a bonfire.

In the best Czech fashion this has lost its magical appurtenances and is a good excuse for people to gather round the bonfire, listen to live music, cook sausages and – would you believe it? – drink beer.

The photos are of this year’s celebrations at Klánovice, on the easternmost edge of Prague.

Queues for the beer tent

Irish musicians got this gig

Their neighbours the Slovaks have their own tradition of marking the end of winter by burning the effigy of Morena, the goddess of death and winter, and then hurling her into a river.   (See the kafkadesk.org website for more info.)

It’s interesting to reflect on the comparison with the current campaign in Scotland to obtain pardons for the estimated 2,500 women who were executed under the Witchcraft Act between 1563 and 1736.  For some reason the Scots killed five times more ‘witches’ than other European countries.  King James VI & I was especially enthusiastic in this regard.  (For information on the petition to the Scottish Parliament see https://petitions.parliament.scot/petitions/PE1855.)

Witches don’t have to be just for Hallowe’en … Any story brewing?

Photos: Ed Peacock

Imagine things Czech or Slovak …

Tags

British Czech & Slovak Association, Czech, Freedom, Me-Too, Slivovice, Slovak

The closing date for the British Czech & Slovak Association’s 2022 writing competition has been extended.  It is now midnight on Sunday July 31.  So that gives you and your writerly friends and relatives another month to come up with 2,000 words that will interest, amuse, irritate, educate or otherwise entertain the eminent judges. £400 lies the other side of those eminent judges – plus publication in the British Czech & Slovak Review. The runner-up gets £150 (plus publication).

This year’s suggested (but not compulsory) theme is Freedom – in any aspect.  The interpretation is yours.  Personal freedom, freedom in relationships, the freedom of nations, democratic freedoms, or just the ending of lockdown?  You choose.

The 2021 competition brought in some impressive creative writing, including such gems as:

An entertaining account of a Scot’s postgraduate year in Czechoslovakia in 1972, which included a wedding missed because he was drinking slivovice to celebrate the release from prison of the father of a hitchhiker he had picked up en route.

A topical entry on the Me-Too theme that took us to a trial of a celebrity accused of sexual assault, with the simultaneous thoughts of the judge and the two victims.

A moving account of a young Englishwoman’s visit to Slovakia for her Slovak father’s funeral. (This won a runner-up prize.)

You can feature here!   Fiction or fact – either is welcome.  What is essential is that all entries must deal with either (1) the links between Britain and the lands now comprising the Slovak and Czech Republics, at any time in history, or (2) describing society in the Republics since 1989.  Topics can include, for example, history, politics, sport, the sciences, economics, the arts or literature. 

Entry is free.  Submissions are invited from individuals of any age, nationality or educational background.  Entrants do not need to be members of the BCSA.

Entries should be submitted by post to the BCSA Prize Administrator, 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England, or by e-mail to prize@bcsa.co.uk.  The closing date is now midnight on July 31 2022.

The submission guidelines can be seen on the BCSA website at https://www.bcsa.co.uk/2022-bcsa-writing-competition/ , or on application to the BCSA Prize Administrator at the addresses given above.

Writing comp with a Slovak or Czech dimension

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Anniversary, BCSA, Communism, Czech, Defenestration of Prague, Munich, Prague Spring, Slovak, Thirty Years War

A writing competition with a Central European twist! Exercise your imagination in a Slavic dimension in the British Czech and Slovak Association’s 2018 International Writing Competition, now open. If you win, £400 could be yours, presented at the Association’s annual dinner (so you and a companion would get a free meal as well), and your entry would be published in the British Czech & Slovak Review.

Anniversary – this year is the centenary of the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, but there are many other anniversaries to choose from in the history of the Slovak and Czech peoples: 1618 (the Defenestration of Prague and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War), 1848 (the Year of Revolutions), 1938 (Munich), 1948 (the Communist takeover) and 1968 (the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion). (1989 was a year out!) You may know of others. So ‘Anniversary’ is the suggested theme in the 2018 BCSA writing competition.

Fiction or fact – either is welcome. The first prize of £400 and the second prize of £150 will be awarded to the best 1,500 to 2,000-word pieces of original writing in English which must be on (1) the links between Britain and the lands now comprising the Slovak and Czech Republics, or (2) describing society in transition in the Republics since 1989. Topics can include, for example, history, politics, the sciences, economics, the arts or literature. ‘Anniversary’ is this year’s suggested theme, but is not compulsory.

Submissions are invited from individuals of any age, nationality or educational background. Entrants do not need to be members of the BCSA.  Entry is free. Entries must be received by 30 June 2018. An author may submit any number of entries. The competition will be judged by a panel of experts.

Entries should be submitted by post to the BCSA Prize Administrator, 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England, or by e-mail to prize@bcsa.co.uk.

For full Submission Guidelines and the Rules of the competition apply to the Prize Administrator at the addresses given above. Details are also shown at http://www.bcsa.co.uk/2018-bcsa-international-writing-competition/ .

Administrator’s tip:  If I could pass on one lesson from recent years, it is to read the instructions: in 2016 and 2017 several entries were disallowed (no matter how well written) because they did not deal with the prescribed subjects. Enjoy the writing!

Brexit can win you £300, plus a free dinner

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Brexit, Czech, Slovak, the EU, Vietnamese, Writing competition

Brexit – that’s the suggested (but not compulsory) theme in this year’s British Czech & Slovak Association’s writing competition.

Last year’s was the EU, and that resulted in a winning entry describing how a Referendum Night party turns sour for a Czech girl living in England. In 2015 it was migration, and the winning entry put you in the place of the Vietnamese minority in the Czech Republic today.

So let Brexit rip – at least in your imagination, for or against – and go for the £300 prize, the free dinner you get when it’s presented to you at the Association’s annual dinner at a hotel in London’s West End, and the publication of your piece in the December 2017 issue of the British Czech and Slovak Review.

The second prize is £100. Entry is free.

Fact or fiction – both are welcome.  The first second prizes will be awarded to the best 1,500 to 2,000-word pieces of original writing in English on the links between Britain and the Czech/Slovak Republics, or describing society in transition in the Republics since the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

There’s still time – the closing date is 30 June.

For further info go to http://www.bcsa.co.uk/the-bcsas-2017-writing-competition/, or approach the BCSA Prize Comp Administrator at prize@bcsa.co.uk, or at 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England.

Brexit? Try the 2017 British Czech & Slovak writing competition

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BCSA, Brexit, Czech, Slovak

Brexit? Its effects not only in Britain, but in Slovakia or the Czech Republic as well? Its causes (likely, unlikely, or just plain impossible)? Any aspect of Brexit could be the subject of your entry in the British Czech & Slovak Association’s 2017 writing competition. That could win you £300 (and a free meal at our glittering Annual Dinner!).

Fact or fiction – both are welcome. A first prize of £300 and a second prize of £100 will be awarded to the best 1,500 to 2,000-word pieces of original writing in English on the links between Britain and the Czech/Slovak Republics (at any stage in their history), or describing society in transition in the Republics since 1989. Topics can include history, politics, the sciences, economics, the arts or literature. Brexit is this year’s suggested theme, but is not compulsory.

The writer of this year’s winning entry will be presented with the prize at the BCSA’s annual dinner in London in November 2017. The winning entry will be published in the December 2016 issue of the British Czech and Slovak Review and the runner-up in a subsequent issue. Submissions are invited from individuals of any age, nationality or educational background. Entrants do not need to be members of the BCSA. Entry is free. Entries should be received by 30 June 2017. An author may submit any number of entries.

Entries should be submitted by post to the BCSA Prize Administrator, 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England, or by e-mail to prize@bcsa.co.uk.

All entries must be in English, prose, typed with double-spacing and no more than 2,000 words in length. (The recommended minimum is 1,500 words.) For full Submission Guidelines and the Rules of the competition apply to the Prize Administrator at the addresses given above. Details are also shown at http://www.bcsa.co.uk/the-bcsas-2017-writing-competition/.

The winning entry in the 2016 competition was Ms Bernhardt’s Brexit, by Jennifer Moore, and can be read by following the link at http://www.bcsa.co.uk/competitions/.   The runner-up was The Pig, the Cupboard and the Reichsprotektor, by Jack Mullin. See https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2016/12/22/brexit-night-and-a-hidden-pig-bring-czech-slovak-writing-prizes/ for more info.

Brexit Night and a Hidden Pig Bring Czech & Slovak Writing Prizes

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BCSA, Brexit, Czech, Pig, Reichsprotektor, Slovak

A Czech student’s evocative account of a party in London on the night of the EU referendum and what it might mean for her future has won the British Czech & Slovak Association’s most recent writing competition. The first prize of £300 was awarded for Ms Bernhardt’s Brexit, by Jennifer Moore.

Jennifer is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Guardian and Mslexia. She read English Literature at Cambridge University and is a previous winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition. She lives in Devon.

The second prize, worth £100, went to The Pig, the Cupboard and the Reichsprotektor, by Jack Mullin.  It’s a comic tale, based on a true incident that took place in Bohemia in 1942, in which an clever Czech householder goes to great lengths to prevent his pig being requisitioned by the occupying Germans.

Jack has lived most of his life in Ayrshire, working for the Butlin family and the Rank Organisation. In 1971-72 he moved to Prague, where he married a Czech, Libuse, and worked for a time in a local engineering factory and then at the British Embassy. He has now been retired for 18 years.

The BCSA aims to raise public awareness in Britain of Czech and Slovak life in all its aspects – including history, politics, science, economies, arts and literature. It puts on a series of cultural and social events throughout the year and publishes the quarterly British Czech & Slovak Review, a cultural and political magazine. The competition is for writing about the links between Britain and the lands now comprising the Slovak and Czech Republics, or about society in transition in the Republics since the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

The BCSA will be running the writing competition (its sixteenth) again in 2017. Entry is free. For more information e-mail prize@bcsa.co.uk.

Our picture shows Jennifer Moore and Jack Mullin (right) with the BCSA’s Competition Administrator, Edward Peacock, when they received their prizes at the Association’s Annual Dinner in London recently.

Good King Wenceslas

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Boleslav, Christmas carol, Czech, Drahomira, Good King Wenceslas, J M Neale, Prague, St Ludmila, Svatý Václav

If it’s great to see your work in print, and even to see other people reading it, think what it’s like to have people reciting or even singing what you’ve written 160 years later!  J M Neale would know ….

Good King Wenceslas has long been a part of the British Christmas – at least since J M Neale wrote the carol in 1853. An older man helping his page to carry the firewood and bring food to yonder peasant, leaving miraculously warm footprints in the snow. (Have you ever wondered why yonder peasant, who lives a good league hence, right against the forest fence, needs to come to Prague to look for fuel? Hmm …)

This story is not what comes first to the mind of the Czechs, whose patron saint he is. To them he is St Wenceslas, or Svatý Václav in their language. His statue stands proudly in Wenceslas Square in the centre of Prague.

A strong, handsome military leader, riding a great charger and dominating this huge square.

The reality was a little different. First, Wenceslas was not a king, but a Duke. More importantly, he was murdered at the age of 28 so was not the middle-aged uncle-like figure we might imagine.

Wenceslas was born in 907, or to put it in our terms 8 years after the death of Alfred the Great. He was the son of the Duke of Bohemia. Christianity had come to what is now the Czech Republic a generation or so before. His father was raised in a Christian setting, but his mother Drahomíra was the daughter of a pagan tribal chief and though she may have been baptized at the time of her marriage she was still pagan at heart.

In 921, when Wenceslas was thirteen, his father died and he was brought up by his grandmother, Ludmila, who raised him as a Christian. Wenceslas is usually described as very pious and humble, very educated and intelligent.  There was a struggle for control of young Wenceslas between his Christian grandmother Ludmila and his pagan mother Drahomíra. Drahomíra was furious about losing influence on her son and arranged to have her mother-in-law Ludmila strangled.

According to some legends, having regained control of her son, Drahomíra set out to convert him to the old pagan religion. She failed. In 925 Wenceslas assumed government for himself and had Drahomíra exiled.   He founded the first church on the site of the present-day St Vitus’ Cathedral that so beautifully dominates the skyline of Prague.

In England at this time, invasion by the Danes was the main problem. The rulers of Bohemia had to deal both with continuous raids by the Magyars or Hungarians and the forces of the Saxon king Henry the Fowler. To withstand the Saxons, Wenceslas’s father had forged an alliance with the Bavarian duke Arnulf the Bad. (They had glorious names in those days.) Unfortunately, in 929 the Bavarians and the Saxons joined forces, invaded Bohemia and forced Wenceslas to pay tribute. Tradition states that he saw this as preferable to the great bloodshed that would have followed resistance.

A 12^th century source states that “rising every night from his noble bed, with bare feet and only one chamberlain, he went around to God’s churches and gave alms generously to widows, orphans, those in prison and afflicted by every difficulty, so much so that he was considered, not a prince, but the father of all the wretched.” This presumably is the origin of J M Neale’s carol.

We have seen from the antics of Drahomíra and Ludmilla that family life in the ducal household was, er, dysfunctional, as the saying now is. In 935 his younger brother Boleslav plotted to kill Wenceslas. After Boleslav invited Wenceslas to celebrate a religious feast, three of Boleslav’s companions murdered Wenceslas on his way to church. The tradition is that he knocked on the church door for sanctuary but a frightened priest inside denied him entry. I’ve been to the church myself to pay my respects.

Boleslav succeeded him as the Duke of Bohemia. If you look him up on Wikipedia you’ll see he was known as Boleslav the Cruel.

Boleslav expressed much remorse at his brother’s death – as did our Henry II after the murder of Thomas Becket – but that didn’t stop him staying on the throne for the next 37 years. Wenceslas was considered a martyr and a saint immediately after his death, when a cult of Wenceslas grew up in Bohemia (and in England). His chapel in St Vitus’ cathedral in Prague is magnificent. Since 2000, his feast day (September 28) is a public holiday in the Czech Republic. Another reason for the Czechs to like him.

Thanks and well done, JM!

(If there are historical errors in what I’ve written, do point them out!)

Rambling on

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Bohumil Hrabal, censorship, Communists, Czech, David Short, Jiři Grus, Kersko, pigs, SSEES, Václav Kadlec

Our creative writing tutor impressed on us the need for short stories to be taut, carefully structured affairs. All repetition was to be cut out, they should start right in the middle of the action, there was to be no unnecessary detail, we should set the scene by showing rather than telling wherever possible. Now I expect short stories to be around 2000 words long, quick and to the point, unrepetitive, with only key details, and a clever twist at the end, and I try to write them like that myself.

So I was wholly unprepared for the book of 19 short stories I’ve just read by Bohumil Hrabal (translated from the Czech).   I’d not read any Hrabal before. The title should have given me a clue: Rambling on: An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab. Sometimes little happens, the narrators ramble, on and on, in sentences that often go on for pages, with multiple bizarre images and adjectives tumbling over each other. They add up to a glorious depiction of life in the 1970s in the village of Kersko, in a forest in what is now the Czech Republic. Basically they often seem to be about men going to the pub! An array of eccentrics are lovingly described, along with country rituals such as those surrounding the killing of a pig.

Hrabal wrote these stories around 1975 but they weren’t published in that form until after 1989, because some of the stories were suppressed or altered on the instructions of the Communist censors. Why they found some of these tales offensive is often hard to understand today: the portrait of a policeman might be off limits (he is inordinately proud of his medals, and so punctilious in his job that he loiters off-duty in the woods at night to nab drivers leaving the pub, including his own son), but why forbid a story of a man’s pursuit by bike of a woman who is very much taken with his coiffure, which he has carefully nurtured to resemble that of a famous Slovak footballer of the day?

We read of a hoarder of useless ‘bargains’, who gets the narrator’s help in cutting up a sheep. Another story is a hymn to the beauty of apple blossom, and a surreal account of a farmer’s unsuccessful attempts to stop his ram impregnating his ewes. A third tells of a grossly fat man who lies down to weed his garden and who talks endlessly about ‘fining’ (or ageing) salami, but he is so greedy that he always eats the salami before it has hung for the requisite time. A fourth is about a self-appointed expert and organiser who appears at every village festivity and he insists on helping villagers in whatever they do but, unfortunately, his advice is usually wrong.

My favourite is a wonderful story of a feast shared by rival hunting clubs. They have quarrelled over who should have a celebratory feast, to eat a boar that fled from the territory of one group to be shot on the other’s (in a school, in front of the children), and so have a joint banquet. The details of the chase and of the feast are gleefully related, along with arguments over the menu and practical jokes played during the meal, which at one time has a dangerous stand-off with both sides pointing guns at each other.

The last two stories become increasingly surreal, stream of consciousness monologues in which I admired the vividness of the writing even though I didn’t know what was going on …

My translation was published in 2014, by Charles University in Prague. It has several colour illustrations by Jiři Grus. There is an Afterword by the editor, Václav Kadlec, which gives helpful background. There’s also a Translator’s Note by David Short, formerly of the School for Slavonic & East European Studies, in which he speaks of the peculiar difficulties that abound in translating the rambling style of these stories, and how he set about overcoming them. Successfully, in my book!

ISBN 978-80-246-2316-0

‘The Glass Room’

Tags

Architecture, Czech, Mies van der Rohe, onyx, Simon Mawer

To tell the story of a house over 60 years enables you to write a number of stories, as connected or disconnected as you wish. And to create that satisfying feeling the reader has of knowing some connection, or some recognition as the various strands cross each other, or don’t …

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer does just that. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and I can see why. It is a remarkable novel, and I’m most grateful to my American friends who recommended it to me. It contains some beautiful writing. Set mostly in Czechoslovakia, the story takes us through the optimistic days of that country’s First Republic between the wars, the German occupation in WW2, the Communist era around the time of the Russian invasion of 1968, and briefly out again into freedom after the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

The house is the Landauer House, inspired during a chance meeting in Venice of a wealthy honeymooning couple (Viktor and Liesel Landauer) and a brilliant cutting-edge architect (Rainer von Abt). He designs and builds for them the latest in 1930 living – a house utterly devoid of ornament, with no curves anywhere, a flat roof, using expensive and daring materials, the main living area largely encased in glass, affording a stunning view of the nearby city. And in this Glass Room is an onyx wall, which produces breathtaking lighting and colour effects as the light changes.

The Landauer House is in fact based on the actual Villa Tugendhat, designed by no less than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built in 1929–1930. It is near Brno (Město in the novel) in what is today the Czech Republic, and is on the list of UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites. It too has a Glass Room and an onyx wall. You can visit it but you must book at least two months in advance (see http://www.tugendhat.eu/en/).

  The Villa Tugendhat

We read of the inspiration, design and building of the Villa, alongside the lives of the Landauers. Viktor is Jewish, and the proprietor of a car-making company. Leisel brings up their family, and has a close friend Hana, who leads a less conventional life. On business trips to Vienna Viktor comes to regularly visit Kata, who prostitutes herself to raise money to feed her child Marika.

Due to an extraordinary coincidence (which I forgive, because it enables the story to intensify and progress dramatically) these families are thrown together by the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 and the subsequent absorption by Germany of part and then all of the Czech lands.

I won’t spoil things by saying any more about what happens to the Landauers. Suffice it to say that their being wealthy and Viktor’s being Jewish tell against them and the house is confiscated and is used by the Nazi occupiers and subsequently the Communist state. This enables us to get the other stories.  For a time during the German occupation it is a eugenics laboratory, where people are measured en masse, in a bid to find physiological identifiers that would enable someone to be immediately racially classified (especially if you were Jewish). This section is largely seen from the point of view of Hauptsturmführer Stahl, who’s in charge of this operation. He has an unexpected sexual awakening in the Glass Room.

We read too of the Villa’s liberation by the Red Army (a liberated occasion, one might say), and then its use in the Communist period as a gym for children at a physiotherapy clinic. Here we read of another love story, of Zdenka (who runs the gym) and the doctor Tomáš.

Ever-present in all these stories are the elegant and unconventional Hana, and the dodgy Laník, the Landauers’ chauffeur who becomes the Villa’s caretaker when they leave. (How he is paid all this time is not explained.) There is a moving coda to the book.

Examples of the writing:

“In the Glass Room they mounted the onyx wall. The slabs had veins of amber and honey, like the contours of some distant, prehistoric landscape. They were polished to a mirror-like gloss, and once in place, the stone seemed to take hold of the light, blocking it, reflecting it, warming it with a soft, feminine hand and then, when the sun set over the Špilas fortress and shone straight at the stone, glowing fiery red.

 The onyx wall

‘Who would have imagined,’ Hana said when she first saw the phenomenon, ‘that such passion could lie inside inert rock?’

Finally they laid the linoleum, linoleum the colour of ivory, as lucid as spilled milk. During the day the light from the windows flooded over it and rendered it almost translucent, as though a shallow pool lay between the entrance and the glass; during the evening the ceiling lights – petalled blooms of frosted glass – threw reflections down into the depths. On the upper floor there were rooms, zimmer, boxes with walls and doors; but down here there was room, raum, space.”

“Something remarkable is happening to the onyx wall: slanting through the great windows, the light from the setting sun is gathering in the depths of the stone, seething inside it like a fire, filling it with red and gold. This concurrence of sun and stone seems elemental, like an eclipse or the appearance of a comet, some kind of portent. Or hell. The fires of hell.”

Published by Abacus.