pub urinal. A grimy film covered the window, making the light that came through it seem grey. The ancient floorboards were covered in cement dust. Two halves of a French-window were leaning against the wall to my left. And suspended from the ceiling in the dead centre of the room hung a single strand of electrical wire with part of the insulation burnt away. It brought to mind another room where I had been compelled to spend a part of my childhood during the war. The similarity horrified me.
I stepped into the next room through an opening in the side wall. There, seated at a table that was missing one leg, was a young man with short cropped hair. Behind him, I could see a camp-bed, some chairs, several crates of various sizes, a green metal container shaped like a bomb, a pair of rubber boots, a suitcase, and an electrical cable nailed to the wall.
The young man got up to greet me. He was about as tall as me, but thinner. I introduced myself.
He offered me his hand and said that his name was Kos. He hoped we'd get along. Had I done this kind of work before? he asked.
I told him the truth, that I hadn't, but that I came from a family of engineers, and that perhaps surveying wouldn't be completely alien to me. I had experience working in the garden, I said, adding quickly that I realized the work he was expecting me to do was different.
We returned to the first room together, and I opened a window that had not been washed, and possibly not even opened, for many years.
Was the room all right? he asked.
I replied, evasively, that it was certainly what you'd expect in a building like this, but that I didn't know what
I'd be sleeping on; I hadn't brought a mattress with me.
He assured me he'd look after everything. He'd already arranged for a bed from the old-people's home, and across the street, in an empty building earmarked for demolition, he had seen several pieces of fairly decent furniture.
I hadn't exaggerated about the engineers in my family. My father, my grandfather, my uncles and my aunts were all engineers. According to family lore, one of my aunts had been the first woman in the country to get a degree in chemical engineering. My brother is a physicist. And my son has already decided to continue the tradition — and in a completely new field, which made my father happy. I was the only defector. Not because I was afraid of theory — my mathematics professor found it incredible that I decided to study the humanities — but I couldn't relate to technology, and most of its creations scared me.
We went down to the square and, pushing our way past dustbins and empty orange crates, entered one of the buildings that, from the outside at least, looked no worse for wear than those around it. Its former inhabitants had obviously moved out some time ago. The floor was strewn with old magazines and letters, shards of glass, odd socks and torn underwear. There was a pair of ragged slippers lying beside a small cupboard with its door ripped off to reveal shelves with a few small cups and cheap plates covered in dust. My eye was immediately caught by two kitchen chairs. One had a broken back rest, but the other seemed in good repair. We set both of them aside, then emptied the useless dishes out of the cupboard — and thus I acquired the furniture I needed.
'We'll be out every day anyway,' said the surveyor. We packed our booty into the four-wheel drive, a station
wagon manufactured in Romania with the name of my new employer in fresh paint on its grey-green doors. It looked as though it could self-destruct at any moment. We got in and drove off to fetch my bed.
The old people's home was located in the old chateau; its long corridors swarmed not with courtiers, lackeys, princes and princesses, but old men and women wearing the same kind of slippers I had just seen in the abandoned flat.
My new boss asked me to wait while he went to the office and signed for the bed. I leaned against a parapet and looked out into the courtyard, where red and butter-coloured roses were blooming beside a pathway of yellow sand. Several old women were sunning themselves on a bench against the wall.
Kafka had certainly never tried to be a surveyor; and his novel, of course, was neither about surveying nor about a castle. It was a story about his own vain longing to go behind closed doors. We all have different doors through which we may not pass. The greatness of an artist consists in constructing his door so that in it, we can also see the door that blocks our own way.
An old man with a large, angular head was approaching me along the hallway. A pair of prominent ears poked out from under his curly grey hair. He stopped. I could feel him measuring me with his eyes. 'Looking for someone, comrade?'
The word 'comrade' grated on me and I replied, reluctantly, that I wasn't. Then, afraid that I had been too brusque with the old man, I added, 'I'm here to arrange something.'
'Ah,' he said. 'If you want to get your parents in here,
you haven't got a chance.'
'No, that's not what I'm here for.'
'Unless you can fork out over ten thousand — like that.' He struck his thigh with a big, ruddy fist. 'Everyone here goes around with their hand out. If you don't shell out, they won't even sweep under your bed. And you'll get a piece of rotten meat for lunch. Complain and you'll never see a decent piece of meat again. That's what we've come to.'
Fortunately, the surveyor arrived and took me into a store-room where a congenial-looking housekeeper gave us a metal hospital bed and a mattress.
When we returned with it to the square, the surveyor remarked that our faded Napoleonic palace was soon to be demolished. That was why we were getting it rent free, he said. There was a flush toilet on the balcony, and although they'd cut the water off, it didn't matter because I had running water in my room. They'd disconnected the electricity as well, but fortunately Mr Wolf, who moved out last week, still kept a garage in the courtyard, which meant he had his own meter. For a fee, said the surveyor, he's allowed us to tap into his circuit. The stationer's store was all that was left, and Mrs Pokorná, the former owner, who lived in a flat on the ground floor.
When I'd swept the worst of the mess off the floor and brought my things in from the car, the surveyor looked at his watch as if to say it was time to go. But before we set off to work he pulled a well-thumbed book out from his desk and asked me if I'd like to read the safety regulations. I replied that I didn't think it would be necessary, and he agreed that they were mostly hot air. He did recommend, however, that I always wear the gloves he would issue me
with now. He handed me a pair of yellow work gloves made of rough pig-skin, and I signed a paper saying I'd been informed about safety on the job.
In the courtyard there were several sheds in varying states of collapse. One had a waterproof roof and a door with a lock. This housed the instruments and items worth stealing: tripods, an axe, a machete, a hoe, shovels, a pickaxe, paintbrushes, stakes, paint, solvents and a sack of coal. A shed that leaked contained poles and stone plates, while cement markers were piled untidily in a shed missing its entire front wall. Between the sheds and the entrance to the courtyard was a pile of rubbish so old that it no longer smelled.
We loaded the tools and equipment we needed into the car — I rather carefully, anxious not to spill or break or misplace anything. We took three colours of paint with us: red, white and black. Had we felt like painting national flags on walls, we couldn't have done much — the colours of Bohemia, the Polish, the Danish, the Swiss and the Canadian flags — these were the only ones I could think of. The paintbrushes, Kos told me, should always be kept in plastic bags, securely tied so they wouldn't dry out. Japan and Laos also had red and white flags, I remembered. But we wouldn't have been able to do Laos unless we could paint elephants.