Král Petr - In Search of the Essence of Place

D URING HIS CHILDHOOD , places were simply things that had always been there, unique and permanent facts. In a sense, the thing to do was just learn how to approach them; to win them over and make sure they were looked after. So, while outside the house dozed in the waves of summer sun that beat down on the roughcast plaster walls, he would explore indoors, hoping to find the vital fluids that coursed mysteriously inside the walls.

Upstairs, his curiosity was torn between the attractions of two particular rooms. Mothers boudoir, light and dreamy, brightened by sunlight pouring in through the large windows whose blinds were rarely closed, washing over the collection of white porcelain on a long chest of drawers, while in one corner a figure of Psyche scattered thoughts of loving ardour across the ceiling. The room next door was very masculine: darker and more sober, wood-panelled, at once protective and aloof. A French window led onto a balcony, through starched white curtains that seemed to be woven from spiders webs, the varied weft of their fabric making the night, the moonlight more opaque. To the right of this door a large dark-brown armchair, beside which stood a standard lamp, held sway over the smokers corner. After his father left, this empty throne took the place of the king.

On the endless afternoons when he was mostly left to his own devices, he simply had to nudge open the door and glide into the room, and all of a sudden it was adrift on an ocean of time whose tide of sunlit stillness left a taste of desecration on his lips. Before he could withstand its burning touch he would have to grow, embrace the waves of time that he felt welling up inside him. One day, sinking down between the ample armrests of the chair, he committed his first, furtive sin. Of course, it remained to be seen exactly whose authority he was flouting. In the evening the armchair-throne was occupied by his mother, who sat in it even after the absent fathers role was taken by another man, the doctor.

Yet it was odd how she ignored the armchair in her own boudoir, which was slimmer and more upright, covered in shiny white material that stuck to you like flypaper. There was always a cluster of multicoloured cushions on the seat, a soft barricade that was there to protect it, make it clear that the chair was out of bounds. Yet he would still come in and take the cushions occasionally , although he didnt stay long: he needed them for his dens, the mysterious houses within a house that he was forever building by piling cushions and mattresses in a corner, under the piano or a table. When he had finished he would settle down with the intention of simply being there, like an idle, do-nothing king.

Oddly enough this was just another way of committing sacrilege, overstepping the bounds of good behaviour. It was the same when he hid in the darkened cellar or up in the attic, a vast, pinkish-coloured icebox where ancient chests of drawers, unwanted bookshelves, a lamp without a bulb and a magazine rack made of rattan , faded with age and still full of periodicals with their pages stuck together, stood patiently gathering dust in the stony silence. Like railway carriages shunted into a siding where they gradually take root among the brambles, the discarded items of furniture ended up making the attic a sort of alternative residence: a shabby yet spacious apartment designed for a family of elusive ghosts. This was what made it so intriguing; just as when he was surrounded by cushions in the salon, being on his own among this old furniture pushed the rest of the house into the background and replaced it with this unconquered territory where he alone was lord, although it was too cold to stay there for long. It was a refuge from the familiarity of his home, and protected him from its protection.

He would also strip things of their normal functions. By treating the attic as somewhere to live, the piano or the drawing-room table as an awning, he pushed them to the limits of their use and showed them different ones, like making a walking stick, an umbrella or a sword gush forth water. And although he borrowed the cushions from his mother, as well as trying to turn the house of which she was mistress into a place of inconstancy, he still wanted his hiding places to remind him of the familiar womb.

In the same way he would stare at the next-door houses, especially the one on the left with the concrete path that led to it between two rows of box trees, and which stood behind metal railings and obscure shrubs. Square and flat-roofed, with its unassuming appearance this unfamiliar residence seemed to possess the ill-defined air of distinction that his own home inevitably lacked; its bulky shape rose from the bushes like a beached submarine, the bleary glass of the porthole that it directed towards his garden was an eye issuing a silent challenge. If you wanted to travel the world and have adventures, then the other side of these railings was definitely the place to have been born, wasnt it?