Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles Read Free Book Online

newspapers or staring at me. Their gaze was stern rather than welcoming, but I was grateful for their presence – but for them, I would have been alone in the building. Not one other visitor could be seen.
    From the exhibits, I learned which parts of the country were oolitic and which were pre-Cambrian. Stuffed fauna lurked in unexpected corners, all malevolent glass eyes and dusty fur. A wall chart explained the intricacies of lignite mining; another, the workings of a bauxite plant. Examples of local industrial production included most ofthe marvels of the modern world: washing machines the size of small cars, small cars the size of washing machines, telex machines, AM radios, aluminium frying pans, lead-based toothpaste, acetate pyjamas, asbestos quilts...Few of the explanatory timelines mustered the strength to get past 1975. In a nod to the interactive, touch-screen age, many of the glass cases needed the dust wiped off them to reveal the treasures within.
    One hall was devoted to depictions of traditional peasant life through the ages in different parts of the country. This led to an enfilade explaining the national story through serfdom, monarchy, industrial revolution, republic, fascist republic, people’s republic and democratic republic. All these phases were packed into the twentieth century. The preceding epochs were simply a grim routine of invaders, pogroms and home-grown rulers with soubriquets such as ‘the gouger’.
    The particularly potent version of hell that the Nazis and Soviets inflicted on Eastern Europe was handled in a curiously modest fashion, with little bombast or horror. And the final three panels of the exhibition were visibly recent insertions, pale patches on the wall betraying the outlines of their predecessors. Presumably the originals had extolled the glorious strides made by the people’s republic towards the socialist nirvana envisaged by its leader, the father of the nation. Instead, they extolled the collapse of the Soviet east. Walls fell. Assemblies were stormed. Street names changed. The advertisers arrived.
    The history was the newest thing in the building.

    As I was crossing the polished floor of the museum’s atrium to the heavy wooden doors and the street beyond, the old woman who had sold me my ticket jumped up from her chair. I froze, suddenly nervous, as she rushed towards me, apparently eager to prevent my leaving. The brass of the front door’s fingerplate was cold under my fingers – I desperately wanted to brace my shoulder and push out, escape, but held back. Perhaps one paid on the way out, I thought, except that I had bought a ticket on the way in; perhaps you had to pay to enter and leave, or perhaps she expected a tip of some sort. Or perhaps she suspected that I had hidden a stuffed owl under my coat. It seemed certain that she thought I had done something wrong.
    She was ushering me towards the door in gestures that seemed half shooing and half encouraging, as though she wanted me to leave. All the while she was speaking to me, an incomprehensible torrent. Was this a simple send-off? Was she throwing me out?
    We were through the door, and she still spoke, and gestured, now with a sense of eagerness or purpose. She took me by the sleeve of my coat and led me with a strange, quick, waddling gait around to the side of the building, where a narrow alleyway separated the museum from the neighbouring cube of stone. Decades of fumes from brown coal, retarded industrial adventures and pitiful automobiles had unevenly stained the museum’s side wall, and it was etched with graffiti, mostly domestic and cryptic, some international (a swastika, and USA #1). Pockmarks like acne scars were sprinkled over this filthy surface, deep holes like missing divots.
    The sentinel of the museum looked at me expectantly. This, this wall, was what I had been brought to see, but I did not know why. Her face, regarding me with a sort of anticipatory glee, carried no clues. In the 1990s