complained; ‘the time you mess around waiting for your pay.’
I nodded. He told me his name was Rada. He’d taken note of my name first thing in the morning. He’d shared a room at the Litom ě ř ice seminary with a man of that name forty years ago.
I said that all my relatives had lost their lives during the war, that the only surviving one was my brother who was a good deal younger than me.
He had two younger brothers. The middle one lived in Toronto and the youngest one was a doctor, a radiologist, apparently a good one, but he would have liked to be a traveller, he really came to life only when he saw some foreign scenery. As a matter of fact he was nearly always somewhere abroad, most recently in Kampuchea. ‘Would you believe it, he actually learned to speak Khmer. To him it’s just a bit of fun, he can learn a language in a few weeks!’
We passed through a brick gateway and approached the areas we’d cleaned that morning. I was glad that my shift was behind me and that I could now walk through the quiet little street onto which, by then, more yellowing leaves had dropped from the adjoining gardens, past the dark eyes of the houses which gazed on me wearily but also contentedly.
Suddenly I froze. In one of the windows I caught sight of a hanged man, his face pressed to the window-pane and his long tongue hanging from his open mouth. From below he was flooded by a blood-red glow.
Mr Rada noticed what I was staring at and said: ‘Let’s see what our artist has put on show for us today.’
I realised that the figure in the window was only a skilfully got-up dummy. As I looked more closely I saw another head, half female and half dog, its teeth dug into the hanged man’s thigh.
‘Oh dear,’ my companion was not happy. ‘He must have got out of bed the wrong side. He usually puts something more entertaining in his window. A little while ago he had some colourful acrobats turning somersaults. I sometimes come here specially to see what he’s thought up. My brother, who came along with me once, declared that they’re the work of a lunatic.’ Mr Rada again returned to the subject of his brother, who seemed to play an important part in his life. ‘To him everybody he can’t fit into a pattern is a lunatic. He actually believes that the whole world is crazy, he says the world needs some terrible shaking-up, some great revolution to equalise the differences between the sated and the hungry. We argue a lot. At least until quite recently, when he came back home and told me about such a revolution that even I wouldn’t credit it. Right next to a hospital a well full to the rim of murdered people. Corpses everywhere, he just couldn’t have imagined it. Maybe he simply saw what any revolution always brings to the people.’ Mr Rada stopped and looked about him, but we were alone in the swept street. ‘The Apocalypse! That was the word he used, even though he never decided to believe in the Last Judgement and regarded Revelations as, at most, a poetic vision.’
My wife’s consulting room was not far from where we were.
Luckily her waiting room was empty. I knocked. After a moment a young nurse put her head round the door, choked back the reproof on the tip of her tongue and asked me to come in.
I saw Lída sitting behind a desk half taken up by a bunch of gerberas. She was examining some sheets of Rorschach blotches.
‘You’ve stopped by to see me? That’s nice of you.’
‘I was walking past.’
‘Are you going straight home?’
‘I thought I might look in on Dad first.’
‘It’s nice of you to have dropped in. Would you like some coffee?’
‘No, thank you.’ My wife had been offering me coffee for the past twenty-five years; I would have been interested to know if she’d noticed that I don’t drink coffee.
The young nurse had disappeared somewhere, I could hear a door shutting quietly. I sat down in the armchair in which normally people would sit with depressions, anxieties,
I nodded. He told me his name was Rada. He’d taken note of my name first thing in the morning. He’d shared a room at the Litom ě ř ice seminary with a man of that name forty years ago.
I said that all my relatives had lost their lives during the war, that the only surviving one was my brother who was a good deal younger than me.
He had two younger brothers. The middle one lived in Toronto and the youngest one was a doctor, a radiologist, apparently a good one, but he would have liked to be a traveller, he really came to life only when he saw some foreign scenery. As a matter of fact he was nearly always somewhere abroad, most recently in Kampuchea. ‘Would you believe it, he actually learned to speak Khmer. To him it’s just a bit of fun, he can learn a language in a few weeks!’
We passed through a brick gateway and approached the areas we’d cleaned that morning. I was glad that my shift was behind me and that I could now walk through the quiet little street onto which, by then, more yellowing leaves had dropped from the adjoining gardens, past the dark eyes of the houses which gazed on me wearily but also contentedly.
Suddenly I froze. In one of the windows I caught sight of a hanged man, his face pressed to the window-pane and his long tongue hanging from his open mouth. From below he was flooded by a blood-red glow.
Mr Rada noticed what I was staring at and said: ‘Let’s see what our artist has put on show for us today.’
I realised that the figure in the window was only a skilfully got-up dummy. As I looked more closely I saw another head, half female and half dog, its teeth dug into the hanged man’s thigh.
‘Oh dear,’ my companion was not happy. ‘He must have got out of bed the wrong side. He usually puts something more entertaining in his window. A little while ago he had some colourful acrobats turning somersaults. I sometimes come here specially to see what he’s thought up. My brother, who came along with me once, declared that they’re the work of a lunatic.’ Mr Rada again returned to the subject of his brother, who seemed to play an important part in his life. ‘To him everybody he can’t fit into a pattern is a lunatic. He actually believes that the whole world is crazy, he says the world needs some terrible shaking-up, some great revolution to equalise the differences between the sated and the hungry. We argue a lot. At least until quite recently, when he came back home and told me about such a revolution that even I wouldn’t credit it. Right next to a hospital a well full to the rim of murdered people. Corpses everywhere, he just couldn’t have imagined it. Maybe he simply saw what any revolution always brings to the people.’ Mr Rada stopped and looked about him, but we were alone in the swept street. ‘The Apocalypse! That was the word he used, even though he never decided to believe in the Last Judgement and regarded Revelations as, at most, a poetic vision.’
My wife’s consulting room was not far from where we were.
Luckily her waiting room was empty. I knocked. After a moment a young nurse put her head round the door, choked back the reproof on the tip of her tongue and asked me to come in.
I saw Lída sitting behind a desk half taken up by a bunch of gerberas. She was examining some sheets of Rorschach blotches.
‘You’ve stopped by to see me? That’s nice of you.’
‘I was walking past.’
‘Are you going straight home?’
‘I thought I might look in on Dad first.’
‘It’s nice of you to have dropped in. Would you like some coffee?’
‘No, thank you.’ My wife had been offering me coffee for the past twenty-five years; I would have been interested to know if she’d noticed that I don’t drink coffee.
The young nurse had disappeared somewhere, I could hear a door shutting quietly. I sat down in the armchair in which normally people would sit with depressions, anxieties,
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