'I'm actually looking forward to it,' I said. 'I've had nothing to do this week.'
'I wouldn't worry — not for the money you're getting.'
It seemed to me that they were giving me quite enough money for carrying a few extra bags along with the mail, but I said nothing.
'I heard you're going to be cooking something interesting at Chodov today. Is it true?' asked the manager.
'It's a farewell party.' I had let it slip that cooking used to be a hobby of mine.
'And what's on the menu, if I may ask?'
'Chicken à la Rawalpindi,' I said, off the top of my head, because if I like anything about cooking, its the possibility of inventing new and apparently nonsensical taste
combinations.
'Sounds exotic.'
'You're coming to try it out, aren't you?'
'I don't know,' she said. 'The end of the month, one deadline after another, and reports to fill out. And the deputy-director wants the plan for the next six months ready.'
I said I'd be delighted if she could come, and then, as usual, the telephone rang, and I had nothing else to do here anyway.
It was only seven-fifteen — I had a lot of time left before nine. When it's your last day as a courier, you should have something more important to deliver than a bundle of perforated labels. But my letters to the President of the Republic were still not ready to send.
The trolley-bus to Jinonice had long ago been taken out of service and replaced with a regular bus. I went to the last stop and looked around me, feeling perplexed. I hadn't been here in all that time. It was childish to expect nothing to have changed.
I wandered about the housing project for a while in the hope that somewhere at the end of it, I'd find the narrow street with the little country cottages.
This early in the morning, the empty spaces between the high-rises were deserted. The grass was covered with rubbish. Every time there was a gust of wind, large sheets of plastic would rise off the ground and flap in the air like the wings of great doleful birds.
I couldn't remember the name of the street — only the name of the man, which was of no use to me. I would probably only find it in the cemetery.
I had delivered many letters and many messages since
that first one. But I still think that message was the most important of all — at least for me.
In Vrsovice, the mainframe computer was on the second floor; it occupied a huge hall, while the programmers sat in their cubicles in front of their terminals. Miss Kosinová was watching rows of coloured numbers dancing across her screen. The figures stopped and the screen became still. Kosinová looked at it for a while longer, then she turned to me and said, 'You came at a bad time.'
'Is the system down?' I asked.
'No, just overloaded.' She explained that this type of American computer normally has ten times the memory, but the Americans aren't allowed to export computers with that kind of capacity to Czechoslovakia. They had warned our buyer not to attach more than ten terminals, but they'd gone ahead and connected three times that many anyway, hoping they could get the extra memory capacity from somewhere else. They hadn't. 'It's like everything else; we wait in line and hope we can scrounge a few extra minutes. And if we're lucky they let us stay here a couple of extra hours. When there's a greater demand, we always get bumped completely. But it doesn't really matter,' she added. 'We work ourselves to a frazzle and then the results just sit upstairs on somebody's desk. And even if someone does read them, no one does anything about it. Never mind about those labels,' she said, realizing why I had come. 'We'll manage to deliver them somehow.'
The boxes with the labels in them had piled up in the little entrance hall. I stuffed them into my bag, and into the rucksack I brought with me. Altogether, they must have weighed about thirty kilos.
As I finished, the numbers on Kosinová's screen began to
move again. 'Hurrah!' she cried, and ran to her little chair to continue working at a task whose outcome no one was waiting for.
In the porter's lodge, the violinist was on duty today. He stood, legs apart, behind his counter, his violin under his chin and played from memory the solo from the finale of Dvorak's Concerto in A Minor.
I would have loved to listen to him for a while, but I still wanted to get out to Komořan before I began cooking, so I didn't have much time left.
I put the box with the labels down in the hall. Mr Bauer emerged from his cubicle, and when he saw me, he remarked dryly: 'Well, I've worked it out for you.'
'What have you worked out?'
'Don't you remember? Wait, I'll bring it to you. You'll only be interested in the results anyway.'
I went into the kitchen once more to make sure nothing was missing.' The spices stood neatly on the shelf — I'd prepared the curry myself. There weren't many utensils here — two frying pans and two pots, one large and one small. Not a single lid.
'Here it is,' said Engineer Bauer, handing me a sheaf of paper.
I skimmed a column of figures and symbols. At the bottom, the computer had remarked:
LIFE IMPROBABLE IN 2069
LIFE COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE FROM 2084 ON
'That leaves us ninety-seven years,' said Mr Klíma, who was looking over his shoulder. 'I'll be exactly a hundred and thirty years old. I'd never have thought it — just think of all the things I won't live to see.'
Mr Vandas, who had come out as well, still had rings of sadness under his eyes. You'll be lucky to live to thirty,' he said darkly. 'If by any chance you should prove too disease-resistant, our health system will make good and sure you won't go on haunting us here for too much longer.'
Many people had come to the crematorium for the funeral ceremony last week. Both the little girls were dressed in coloured dresses and they stood out among the mourners like bright flowers on a black meadow. Vandas did not want a eulogy. It's too late to say what we haven't already said, he explained. So they just played music the whole time. When the curtain was drawn and the coffin began to move towards the fire, the elder of the girls jumped up, leaped over that long fence and ran into the dead area behind it to hold her mother back, since they had all told her she'd only gone out there for a while.
They pulled the girl back, — whispering something in her ear, most probably to be brave.
'I did what I could,' Bauer explained. 'I calculated that by 2025, more than half the budget would be spent on saving the environment. In actual fact, people will never be that determined. Also, I didn't factor in a single nuclear catastrophe, not to mention war, although when you take the number of nuclear generating plants in operation today, and their probable number in 2025, there should be at least three more Chernobyls.'
'Well, thank you very much,' I said.
'Don't mention it,' said Bauer. 'I was interested in this myself.'
'So, are you going to write something for us by way of farewell?' asked Klíma.
'I wanted to nip out to Komořan first. And I have to cook that lunch.'
'As you wish,' said Klíma, somewhat miffed. 'But it's not even half past ten.'
I sat down at the computer. I should have written a few words of farewell. But all I could think of was a quatrain:
All around the city's towers Fall the wildest little showers; But now we're in the mood We'll surely stop a flood!
Still moved by the fresh prognosis of Mr Bauer, I put another quatrain together. Klíma, though he normally did not do so, read the fruits of my labour. 'Did you just write this now?'
'I told you, I was in a hurry,' I said apologetically.