'It's not bad,' he said, delighted. 'Do you want me to print it out?'
He printed both my poems, I stuck the page into my rucksack (I no longer needed my bag) and hurried out of the hall.
Dvořák was still emanating from the porter's lodge, and could be heard from outside the building. In the flower shop they had a single, wilting orchid. I looked around to see if I could see my blind man, but it was too early. Several days ago we'd come back on the same bus. I heard him explaining loudly to someone that in Arobidzhan— which lies on the ninety-first meridian and the fifty-sixth parallel — blind people don't go to school.
'What did you do, then?' a fat man sitting beside him had asked.
'I played the violin,' said the blind man. He lifted his
white cane, put it under his chin and pretended to coax a few plaintive tones out of it. 'I used to play in bars on winter evenings,' he said later. 'While I played, the guests talked, drank vodka and took bites of bread. Sometimes there'd be a blizzard, or the temperature would drop so low that no one could go outside. Then we drank a lot of vodka, and ate a lot of bread.'
'Did you have any bacon to go with the bread?'
'You think too much about bacon!' shouted the blind man. 'Are you a cook, by any chance?'
'What would be wrong with that?'
People around them burst into laughter.
'You haven't got an ear for music, or for people, only for something to fill your face. When there was bacon,' replied the blind man, 'people ate. When there was no bacon, there was salt, and when the salt ran out, there were tears.'
In the corridor of the wooden building I knocked on the familiar door and then entered without waiting for an answer. An unfamiliar woman sat behind one of the desks.
'Are you looking for someone?'
'For Natasha,' I said, someone thrown off balance.
'That's me.'
'Excuse me… I mean, I was thinking the woman who sits at the other desk,' I said, pointing.
'Unfortunately, Anička has the day off today. She had to go to Ostrava.'
'Ah.' I felt strangely put out. 'Can I leave something here for her?' I took out the flower. 'You'll probably have to put this in some water.'
'I'll look after it.'
I gave her the flower. I felt I should write her a message to go with it. Something like: I'm sending you a smile and I
wish you. . Or: Thanks for the trust. Or simply: Goodbye. And my signature. I took out the piece of paper with the print-out of my quatrain. The second one went this way:
In far-off Dubai you do or you die, In the Yukon you ken what you can, In Wooloomooloo there's no one but you— Oh, the end of the world is at hand!
There was no point in signing it; we'd talked but never introduced ourselves.
I folded the paper into a small square and handed it to the real Natasha. 'And would you be kind enough to give her this too, please?' My message was probably bad news, but it could also be understood as good news, if only because it existed at all.
She took the paper from me and promised to pass it on. I thanked her and hurried back to catch the bus so I could get back in time to prepare the Chicken à la Rawalpindi to celebrate my parting with the kind-hearted programmers, and my own career as a courier.
The Surveyor's Story
The House
I KNEW ONLY the name of the street and the number; that was all my friend the surveyor, who got me the job, could tell me, since he'd never been there. I'd have no trouble finding the house, he said, because it was right next to the town square. But I wasn't to expect any luxury. Surveyors tend to be frugal; much of their income comes in expenses — living allowances, remuneration for being separated from spouses and children and so on, and if they actually had to spend it on room and board, the work would quickly lose its appeal. So they try to find cheap accommodation.
In addition to bedding and a pillow, therefore, I took some dishes, a wash-basin, an immersion heater for coffee, and a lamp with a set of jaws that allowed me to attach it to anything solid.
I had taken a job as a surveyor's assistant after receiving a letter from the office dealing with my social insurance. The letter was only five lines long:
We are returning the documents you submitted to us in support of your application for artists' social insurance. It is impossible to ascertain from these documents with any degree of certainty whether your earnings did, in fact, derive from artistic activity.
When I asked the kindly woman at the office, whom I had known for years, for an explanation, she assured me I was not alone. A new director had taken charge and decided to cut insurance to people like me.
Was that legal? I asked. And who were these people like me anyway?
The woman told me that the new director's name was Mr Král and that I had best ask him.
I didn't feel like dealing with the director. This was hardly a disaster, after all. In two years and a few weeks I'd be eligible for a pension — if I survived with my health intact, that is. Surely forty years of insurance contributions would be enough to guarantee that.
A lawyer friend put me straight. If, he explained, I did not hold some documentable job for at least a single day during those two years, I would have the same right to a pension as someone who had never done a day's work— which is to say, none at all.
So those forty years would be simply wiped away?
Just work for a single day, he assured me, and I can save your pension.
Both of us knew that no one would ever put me on a payroll for a single day.
To put off, even briefly, the moment when I would officially start my new job, I had a look around the square. Its spaciousness was a credit to the generosity of the lords of Mrdice, who had founded the town 700 years ago. From where I stood, the square broadened to a point about two-thirds down its length where a baroque church emerged from a screen of century-old lime-trees. Even from a distance, I could see that the church was as shabby as all
the other buildings on the square. In front of it, in an area where they had probably held markets in the past — since the town, as I had read at home, had once been renowned for its grand horse markets — they had placed, with an aesthetic sensitivity typical of the present town fathers, an open-air bus station. Beyond a row of houses at the far end of the square rose a baroque roof with turrets, a small château, perhaps. I was delighted, because when I'd accepted this job, I had thought of Kafka's Castle and K. the surveyor.
I looked in through the glass door of a shop. Behind the counter stacked with stationery supplies a long-haired, bespectacled creature was staring back at me. I averted my eyes. Above the filthy windows, I could recognize the remains of a laurel-leaf festoon, betraying the building's origins in the Napoleonic era.
The girl in the stationery shop kept watching me, so I moved along to the main entrance to the building. Someone had fastened a piece of wrapping-paper to the door with three tacks. On it, written with a magic marker, was a sign indicating that the surveying office was on the third floor. I entered, walked down a dark corridor, then up an even darker staircase that led to a glassed-in balcony overlooking a courtyard. Various doors opened on to the balcony. Everything was big, dirty and decrepit. Outside one of the doors, an old kitchen stove was gathering rust, and beside it there was a bucket full of water.
I knocked on the door, opened it and went inside to find myself in a large, gloomily lit room. There was nothing in it but a new kitchen stove, a bag of cement and two flags twisted around poles leaning against a brightly coloured washbasin. The air had an acrid smell to it, like the air in a