from the vase, wrapped them in a damp tea-towel and handed them to me. I slipped them, along with the bundle of magazines, into my pushcart.
'Oh, and Engineer Kosinová wants to give this to someone.' She handed me a three-year-old mail-order catalogue from Neckermann's.
Outside, I was enveloped in a wave of hot air. I hurried across to the shady side of the street and walked towards the Old Town Square. I was wearing light cotton trousers, a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of deer-skin moccasins I'd purchased years ago in Chicago. I'd forgotten all about them until recently, when I started this job, which involves a lot of walking, and I loved them because they were so light and soft. I "was in no hurry: no one was expecting the magazines, the three-year-old Neckermann catalogue could certainly wait as well, though the flowers would soon need water.
Two days before I had brought Mr Vandas several boxes of tape from Letna. He was sitting in his cubicle, but instead of looking at the monitor, he was staring into the forlorn, bulldozed meadow outside the window. There was a half-empty glass of wine in front of him. He asked me if I'd sit and have a drink with him. He'd taken his wife to the hospital that morning. 'You know, I felt strange when we said goodbye,' he confided. 'It didn't feel right, leaving her to the mercy of a stranger who would put her on a table and slice her open. I know,' he added quickly, 'it's what's best, but I think you should have the right to lie down and be cut open for someone else. I was afraid for her, too,' he admitted. 'Still am. For her, for the children — and I'm afraid for myself too. Know what I mean? You hear of someone dying of cancer and the first thing you know you're
checking to see if you've got the same symptoms. I wish things were fairer. For instance, everyone should be allotted a minimum life-span. Forty years, at least. As it is. . My cousin's little girl died late last winter. She wasn't even five. From the time she was three her days were numbered, and in the end, they were feeding her through tubes. We tried to find a healer at the last minute, but it was too late. The poor little thing was buried the first day of spring. The parents weep and what can you say? In the past, you could at least comfort them with the idea that they'd all meet again, but today? I told my cousin to be brave and she said: Why? I didn't know what to tell her. In fact I didn't know what she was really asking me. Not long ago we were driving along the highway to Hradec — Julinka was with me — and on one side of the road there was this brand new fence, a long wire fence, and do you know what was on the other side? Nothing. Weeds, an overgrown, empty field. No construction site, no military training ground, nothing. With this beautiful new fence around it. The fence was five kilometres long — I clocked it — and then suddenly it came to an end. All that nothing was only fenced in from one side. It was like a vision of what we are living through. Do you understand what I'm saying?'
I looked into a bookstore window, though I knew there'd be nothing interesting on display. Even if, miraculously, something good were to be published, they wouldn't put it in the window; they'd keep it under the counter for their friends. Several men, probably construction workers, were standing outside a pub with half-litre glasses of beer in their hands, spending their working hours in pleasant conversation. The repairs to the façades on the Old Town Square were almost finished, and
the square gleamed with newness and colour like a grand Sacher cake; I liked it, and I got enormous pleasure out of just being able to wander about there. Before I found this job I came downtown twice a month at most, and then I was in a hurry to get back home and back to work. But now this job brought me here every day, and I could study the slow progress of repairs to the Týn Church, and peer into the exhibition room of the Town Hall. I could even have gone in, but felt reluctant to do so, for as long as I was moving through the streets with my pushcart in the general direction of my destination, I was working and no one could complain. But I had no business at an art show.
I stopped in front of the Town Hall tower. The first tourists of the morning were beginning to gather on the pavement below the astronomical clock. Tourists from the West were still asleep or perhaps having breakfast, whereas those standing beside me, already burdened with parcels and waiting for the Twelve Apostles to appear when the clock struck the hour, were a group from the empire of our eastern neighbours. I listened to their soft speech, a language that had seduced some of our reckless and gullible ancestors into dreaming dreams of a brotherhood of the strong and the weak. But the conversation didn't seem to be about anything that made sense.
The clock struck, the apostles paraded one by one past the tiny portals, but as always, they remained silent, telling us nothing and then vanishing into their darkness again.
I walked along Ironmonger's Street to Mustek where, in an antique store, I saw a Renaissance armoire costing 180,000 crowns. Doing the work I was doing now, this was the accumulated salary of ten years. I began to plan the story of a courier who decided not to eat, drink, live
anywhere or even read so he could save all his money to buy this antique armoire. Several endings suggested themselves. The courier, who all that time had slept in a cellar and lived on the leftovers he picked off plates in the stand-up buffets, could die of exhaustion. Or he survives but meanwhile — and this was the most plausible outcome — the armoire is sold to someone else. Or, and this was my favourite: he finally drags himself to the shop, where he finds the armoire still waiting for him, but in the meantime the price has doubled.
Just outside the entrance to the subway, a small poster announced in a brief, pointed verse: 'Hey, hey, hey, our pizza's okay kay kay!' I wasn't hungry, but the pizza was surprisingly cheap and there were only about twenty people in the queue, so I decided to indulge in a snack.
In fact, I have no great desire to own a Renaissance armoire, and I make my living as a courier only during the summer months. I have no complaints about the pay; I understand that in the age of long-distance electronic data transfer, interlocking information systems and telecommunications satellites, my job is as archaic, or as folkloric, as a bagpiper, a Buckingham Palace guardsman or a writer. But I have always had a weakness for archaic jobs, even in times when I could, on the whole, choose freely what I wanted to do. I refused to become an engineer or a physician, although my professors tried to persuade me to do so, and although I had inherited a capacity for mathematical thinking from my father. Some time later I committed my first political transgression (I had written an article in praise of Karel Čapek) and when they threw me out of the editorial department of an illustrated weekly, I was offered a job as editor in a factory that manufactured
aircraft engines. I turned it down, not because I feit it was demeaning to be editing an in-house magazine, but because I didn't trust aircraft engines. Had they offered me a similar position in a factory that made hats or mustard, I would have accepted.
As far as I can, I choose occupations that don't trap me within four walls. When I was an editor, I refused to sit in the office, but instead went out on assignments. Even as a hospital orderly, I spent most of my time rushing between the wards, the pharmacy, the morgue and the labs. Sitting behind a desk, there are no surprises. Outside, there is the possibility of a chance encounter.
I would have liked to work for the post office. People look forward to the postman, since most people, unreasonably, expect good news rather than bad. I used to long to bring people a message of great import. Now I'm more modest, and I'd be satisfied with bringing good news. But the post office didn't want me, so instead I took the job of courier in an institute that tests and evaluates air and water pollution across the country. The thing that interested me most about the institute was that a large number of computer programmers worked for it. I had heard a lot about computers but knew little about them and the people who serve them. I understood enough, however, that I could imagine the future belonging to them.