Artillerymen on the Moon

Henri Rousseau, an honoured naive painter, lives at a small god-forsaken French customs office in a company which has very little to do with honour. He has two servants, Ali, the Turkish smuggler and Sándor, the Hungarian strolling poet. He is also visited by Emily, the eternal muse and Francesca, the goat, lives in the same household. One day, the customs officer decides to close down the customs office and do away with the borderline and in honour of this rare event he invites the last of European travellers to a big farewell party to all the European customs offices and borderlines. Quite unexpectedly, the Italian opera singer Bonasera hurrying to make it to a singers' contest in Salzburg finds himself in the company of the English feminist Alice Cook who is awaited by her friend Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin; there are Hlavacek, the German baron who is on his way to baron Krupp to try out a new cannon; Monika, the French student, wanting to better the world of disorder with her revolutionary speeches; Anton Pavlovich, the Russian intellectual who has gone astray and wishes to make it for Paris to muse over democracy there; Eva Gunarsson, the Swedish inn-keeper and midwife hurrying to make it to the first labour in Sweden after years; and Ondrej Krška, the Slovak tinker who is not in a hurry since no one is waiting for him. During an evocative narration of the famous customs officer, quite unexpectedly, all the travellers change the small customs office for a lunar and poetic world of the famous customs officer in which everything works beautifully and easily. Men like one another, they marry, dream, find empathy for one another until there comes a time when trivial reasons bring them down to the earth, to a most real world of human intolerance. I suspect, however, the big customs officer is up to something again hoping to give humankind something which might protect it be for a short while.

Stanislav Štepka

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