Brian WILLEMS
Brian Willems is an American lecturing in British and Irish literature at the University of Split, Croatia. His fiction has recently appeared in 42opus, Pindeldyboz, Yankee Pot Roast, Über, Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), The Palaver Omnibus, The Edward Society and Retort Magazine.
THE SPIDERS OF PRAGUE
Two Turin retrospective curators had raised a question regarding the labeling of a minor ancillary drawing the late Mrs. Nadja Lovínová did for one of her illustrations to the British amateur arachnologist W.S. Bristowe's 1947 A Book of Spiders, the drawings hastily completed for monetary reasons back in Prague. I met the Lovíns in Rijeka, where I was to become a bit of an errand-boy for them, being the son of the only Czech family they knew before moving here in 1953, earning me a special place with Mr. Lovín, which was not hampered by our both being curly-haired and that we had coincidentally together worn yellow pin-striped shirts the first day we met. Mr. Lovín, trusting me to take care of the matter, put me in touch with a certain Mr. Králík, arachnid expert at the Prague Natural History Museum up on top of Václavské námìstí, where Mrs. Lovínová had researched her drawings.Mr. Králík took me down into the storage bowels of the museum and showed me what they had, having a hard time matching her illustration with a specimen.
"But this one looks like it, doesn't it?" I asked, pointing to a reddish spider with a black and white hump.
"Sorry, but no. That’s the Xysticus lanio," Mr. Králík said, underlining the display tag with a well-manicured index finger. "You're looking at a male Crab Spider, really quite different from what Nadja painted here," he said, resting the single water-color spider sleeping on a detached folio sheet on a display case.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sorry that you've had to travel all this way, but there doesn't seem to be a fit with any of these here. Have you ever read the book?"
"The Bristowe?"
"It’s more of a young person's introduction to arachnology, but I bet the illustrations would scare the living Jesus out of any kid reading it. I even remember one spider's description word for word: 'Liocranum rupicola, Domestic. Hunts on walls of rooms at night.' Can you imagine anyone getting a good night's sleep after that?" he asked, lining the folio sheet up with the edge of the display case. "I just wish she had labeled the damn thing," I said.
"She drew such wonderful lions too," he said. "Do you mind if I smoke?" He opened his silver cigarette case out towards me with a nod.
"No thanks."
Mr. Králík seemed to inhale without even lighting the cigarette. "Once, this was quite a few years ago, she actually had a lion running around the studio. Extraordinary! This was about a year after the war and one of her students had a job at the zoological gardens or something and arranged for the beast to stay over the weekend. The lion was brought by fire-engine and lead down the loading-stairs with his front and hind legs chained together. You should have seen the crowd. And her son, Honza, he died before you were born, I'd imagine, he hadn't really grasped the idea that a real lion was coming to visit. I guess he just thought it'd be another creature off his mother's pages. But when he saw that beast limping across the street, he was really so proud. It was heading to his mother's studio. He actually bit the top button off his coat and I had to stay and hunt around for it while he went crying to mother with a bloodied lip. That's why I missed the triumphant entrance to the apartment, Nadja demanding the chains be removed at once in her husky baritone, and that great photograph of her reclining behind the creature like a cub, resting on her right arm, looking like Picasso if Picasso had taken to wearing green taffeta," he said, looking slightly startled at my being there, and then ashing his whole cigarette at once into a white Gambrinus ashtray.
"What were you doing there?" I asked.
"Where?"
"At her apartment, when the lion arrived?"
Mr. Králík looked me in the eyes while blindly drawing out another cigarette. Uncontrollably, two coughs shook his body. Then we both just breathed together.
"Do you know how many spiders there are in an acre of land?" he asked, not waiting for an answer. "Two and a quarter million. In one acre. And calculation shows," he said, exchanging one display box for another on a high shelf, "that if there were just one specimen of each sex in that acre, that the male would have to wander around, back and forth, for no less than 82 miles before coming across the female, tending her web, or 194 miles if she didn't have a web keeping her to one spot," he wiped the dust off the box's glass with a grey rag and peered inside, "Impossible! No species could propagate under those conditions. No, the sexes have to be mustered together in quite considerable numbers," he said, his eyes bulging as he creaked the display box open, indicating a perfect match with the tip of his shaking index finger, "for the species to survive."