Nearing the End
by Jiří Klobouk
"Three days ago, March 23, 2013, I set out writing Nearing the End. I pulled off one paragraph and deleted it. Time wasted, indeed. The book, a collage of my life’s circumstances, is meant for Amaya. After I die, my wife, sitting on the balcony of our 4H apartment, her legs resting on the empty chair opposite, where I used to recline, she’ll turn the pages wondering about this or that. For example, she’ll get to know how my mother Katka wanted more children but my father Franta opposed the idea. How at age nine I broke my right hand balancing on top of a chopped-down poplar tree and slipped. How in 1945 the Nazis were defeated, I discovered jazz, saw the movie Rhapsody in Blue six times and despaired to acquaint myself with Jean Simmons, the teenage goddess from the Dickensian silver screen feature Great Expectations. Last but not least, I want Amaya to know that when the war ended, the Commies replaced the Nazis in a good half of Europe. Stuff like that foretold that I would end up in New York and meet her (Amaya), and that she would become my wife and I her husband.”
Klobouk’s short stories have appeared in literary periodicals such as Partisan Review, Chicago Review, Artful Dodge and Skidrow Penthouse. For Winter Wolves, a story published in Mid-American Review, he was named outstanding writer in the 1985-86 Pushcart Prize edition.
His list of books includes: My Life with Blondie, Anti-Communist Manifesto (1975), Mostly Beethoven, Radio Plays I, Radio Plays II, Third Wife, JAZZ II:Parents, Music After Midnight and How High the Moon.
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