Read Online Harlequin's Millions by Bohumil Hrabal - Free Book Online

shecould look more deeply into her eyes, which were averted from the burning eyes of the youth, who was looking angrily at the bride, who was deep in conversation with the beautiful goddess, whose forehead was adorned with an acanthus leaf and whose flowing gown fell back to expose her naked breasts, belly and mound of Venus … I was captivated by this unusual wedding scene, with the near-divorce right at the very beginning, one by one I looked into the men’s rooms, where just as in the women’s section there were eight beds and a window on the north wall that beamed in the darkness with the trembling, sunlit leaves of aspen and oak trees as tall as the castle itself, the leaves illuminated by the glaring light like an overly bright television screen. And outside you could hear tires grinding to a halt in the sand of the courtyard, you could hear car doors slamming, a stretcher being taken out, when I walked past the old men leaning out the window, several of them instinctively turned around, sure enough, they didn’t want me to see their skinny legs in baggy trousers, they stood there facing me and smiled and hoped I’d leave, go somewhere else, where I wouldn’t be able to look at them, but I reassured them with a wave of my hand, like an orchestra conductor, I looked up, they didn’t trust me, they squinted out at the courtyard but kept their faces toward me, once again the soft melody of “Harlequin’s Millions” began to play, unravelingin a flurry of notes that twirled around a solo by one of the violins in the orchestra, until the concertmaster regained his hold on the compelling refrain, which was in harmony with this wedding somewhere in Greece, somewhere on a southern sea, and even the eyes of the beautiful youth, even the anxiety of the bride, and the kind but urgent words of the goddess, even the palm of her hand lifting the bride’s chin to look her more deeply in the eyes, and the other hand, cradling the back of the girl’s head in such a charming position, they were all in perfect harmony with “Harlequin’s Millions,” even the sounds from the courtyard, where you could hear, in the sun, the sliding of the collapsible bed along the rails in the ambulance, and the four tires churning the sand, even the shrieking of the motor and the gears shifting and Mr. Berka shouting … Hold on! I’ll open the main gate!, all of this was in complete harmony, and when I turned around to run quickly back down the corridor on the second floor of the men’s section, all the old men turned too, as if they had each been struck in the back, they rose up from where they had been leaning out the window, one by one they rose up behind the curtains, like people in old church paintings of the Last Judgment rising from their graves. They stood there, completely hidden behind the curtains, and bowed to me slightly, they touched the curtains with their foreheads and their skulls left an impression,one head after another made the nylon curtains bulge, and there in the late morning sun I was suddenly frightened, terrified, stricken with fear, as if I had just seen the Noonday Witch, whom I hadn’t believed in for years. Because not only are all the statues turned to the light of the human eye, not only is the whole castle built so that it points to the sun and the south, as if it were destined, in all its splendor and glory, for all those who enter the gate and cross the courtyard, not only that, even the trees present the best and smoothest side of their trunks to the sun, and people too are always presenting their faces and chests to each other, so they can show off their jewelry, and not only that, everything turns toward the south and the west, and toward the sun, even when the sun moves away from a bench in the park and a shadow falls on the pensioners sitting on that bench, they drag their bench over to where the sun is still shining, because none