What Pavel Was Looking For
~ Sunday, April 7, 2024 ~
Eight months since I published the notebook. I have not heard from Pavel Šimánek. I have been going back through the pages I did not include, and I have found a research trail that I think someone else should be able to follow.
Somewhere in the autumn of 2022 — the notebook entry is dated but I am not publishing the exact date — Pavel was contacted by a man who asked not to be identified. The man was, in Pavel’s phrasing, the grand-grand-nephew of a Prague university professor named Emil Kaufman. Kaufman was a late nineteenth century figure: academic, civic participant, politically active in the Staročeši movement during the years of the National Revival. The descendant had inherited papers and was looking for someone to look at them seriously. He found Pavel, which tells you something about how Pavel worked — he was the kind of researcher people found when they had something they did not know what to do with.
The diary
Among the papers was a diary. Pavel does not transcribe it extensively — the notebook pages I am describing are working notes, not a finished record — but he quotes one entry directly, and it is the entry that changed the direction of his research.
The entry is undated but placed by context in the early 1880s. Kaufman is writing about a man he knows from civic and political circles. The entry is brief. Pavel’s transcription:
Ferdinand si střeží nějaké staré tajemství. Nikdy se o něm nerozhovoří.
Ferdinand keeps some old secret. He will never speak of it.
Pavel does not record what Kaufman meant by old. He does not record whether Kaufman knew the nature of the secret or only its existence. He records only the line, and then — in his compressed working-notes hand — one word with a question mark: zachovatel? Keeper?
The search
Kaufman appears in a register of civic political participation from the period, accessible in digitised form through two archival sources: the Moravian digital library (Kramerius, MZK) and a Charles University repository document (DPPR 2012). Pavel used the list to find his Ferdinand. The name is not uncommon. He narrowed it by the criteria the diary implied: someone in Kaufman’s direct civic circle, someone whose presence in that circle was not purely political. Someone whose trade gave him reason to move through Bohemia.
He found Ferdinand Voitl. Fish merchant. Staročeši. Listed alongside Kaufman on the civic participation register. Pavel’s annotation: obchodníci s rybami — Praha — zachovatel?
The grave
Pavel searched the Prague cemetery records. He found the Voitl family tomb at Olšanské hřbitovy. He made a sketch of the carved ornament — a trefoil crown above two outward-curling symmetrical scrolls, carved above the entrance to the tomb — and wrote three lines beneath it that I have been looking at for eight months without knowing what to do with them.
He wrote: sv. Petr — ryby i klíče. Voitlovi věděli, co drží. Možná víc, než jen co.
St. Peter — fish and keys. The Voitls knew what they were holding. Perhaps more than just what.
What I am publishing and why
I sat on this because I thought it was too speculative. The research chain is real — Kaufman’s diary, the civic register, Ferdinand Voitl’s name, the grave — but the conclusion Pavel was moving toward is not the kind of conclusion I am comfortable endorsing without more. I have read Bishop Kapalini’s 2021 article on the keeper tradition (Those Who Held the Sign) alongside these pages more times than I want to count. The fit is exact. I do not know what to do with an exact fit.
I am publishing it because I was wrong to sit on the notebook as long as I did, and I am trying not to repeat that mistake with what it contained.
I have not yet been to the tomb. I am going to Prague this spring.