How We Were Filmed

Vanities

A fragment by one of Czechoslovakia's leading poets

IT was agreed a movie would be made about the lab, how something was being done with a mouse. The mouse and the laboratory stood ready. Then the film crew arrived. When they saw the laboratory and the mouse, they grew sad and frowned.

"Haven't you got a flask here?'' they asked.

"Or at least some glass tubes, with fluid running through them?"

"Or maybe something on a burner that would boil and give off steam?"

"And this mouse, why is it so small and ugly?"

Embarrassed, we said we didn't have flasks, or steam, or beautiful mice, but we conduct experiments nonetheless, even without any lit burners.

"Yes," said the cameraman, "but without these things it just doesn't look at all like science! It looks like an average room. Couldn't you at least bring in a big microscope or maybe a telescope?"

We couldn't.

Sadly, the film crew took out their equipment and lit up the mouse and the hand which was to give it an injection.

"How will you give it an injection?" they asked.

We demonstrated.

"But we can't do a close-up of that; it would make people sick," said the director, who was evidently sick already.

Then they asked us to sit beside some moderate-size machines, and wanted us to simultaneously sort of look through microscopes, measure pH, turn on a centrifuge, weigh things, transfer liquid using pipettes, and make notes, all the while waving our arms in the air. In addition, the cameraman lit a burner.

Wondering how during scientific activity one waves one's arms, we took our places and the camera rolled. In the meantime, some assistant film personnel opened the cage holding the little mice, which quickly ran out all over the tables. In the ensuing confusion the cameraman overturned the burner, igniting the notes, and while he was extinguishing the fire the jar containing the pipettes fell with a cheerful crash and broke into tiny little pieces. The mice jumped around as if in a circus, the microscopes shimmered gently, and a delicate purple hematoxylin dripped onto the floor.

' 'That's it!" shouted the cameraman, and spilled a dish filled with a physiological solution of pH 7.4.

"You see, this way it has life," remarked the mildly contented director when it was all over. "Now let's do it again, please, and this time for real.''

Miroslav Holub

Translated by Steven Culberson and Vera Orac