'And what about those two hijackers? Wasn't that like shooting fish in a barrel too? I'm sorry, I know you were just doing your duty.'
'It's too bad the driver bought it and not the other bastard. That's what really bothers me.'
'But did it have to happen at all?'
'What do you mean?'
'I'm just asking, before we start. I don't have my camera here and no one will hear us.'
'You think we should have let them go?'
'That's what I'm asking.'
'They had rifles and a busload of kids.'
'But they let the kids go!'
'Once we promised them they could cross the line.'
'That's what I'm getting at — you made a promise.'
'Are you saying we should have kept our word?'
'I'm just asking.'
'If we'd let them go, we'd have had two more attempts within a week, and four more after that. And then one day they wouldn't let the kids go, or someone inside the bus would lose it and let them all have it.'
'I was just asking.' He began to regret coming here, regret letting himself be drawn to this place, and by such an occasion. He was ashamed of himself for not asking tougher questions, for not raising obvious objections. If the borders had been open in the first place, he wouldn't have had to go to jail back then, and no one would have felt compelled to hijack a bus full of children just to get to the other side.
The man in uniform suddenly froze, then abruptly yanked his rod back. In the clear water of the brook Pavel could see a trout, solidly hooked, attempting to wriggle to safety under a nearby boulder. What hope of escape is there when we swallow the hook? And are we even aware that we have?
'They were the ones who started shooting. They blew out the windows in the guardhouse. And the children were screaming: Let them cross the border or they'll kill us! So what else could we do? Don't think I enjoy shooting at people. It's the first time this kind of thing has happened in all the time I've been here. Anyway, it wasn't my decision. First the general came down, then the prosecutor and some other guys from the district and the regional headquarters. They were the ones who did the negotiating and made the promises. Then I get the order: don't let them through! Everything was decided somewhere else.' His classmate pointed toward the zenith, to where people have believed from time immemorial that the power deciding our fates resides.
Pavel turned off the main road, drove through a small wood and a sleeping village, then turned again on to a narrow road lined on both sides with ancient apple trees. A few minutes later he pulled up in front of the cottage. It stood alone, forlorn and dark. The meadow surrounding it was bathed in moonlight.
When he stepped inside he inhaled the familiar mixture of musty air, wood smoke and dried herbs. He turned on the light, opened the shutters, let down the flap of the writing-desk, poured himself a glass of vodka, turned on the television that stood on a small baroque table, sat down in an armchair and watched music videos for a while. He watched them to satisfy himself that videos, or at least those made according to the latest trends, were designed simply to bombard the viewer with disjointed bits of information and bizarre and deformed shapes until he finally comes to believe that the world is indeed an incomprehensible, perverted madhouse.
Recently, whenever he visited his mother and turned on her television, she would watch it for a while and then say: I've already seen that. It didn't matter what was on — the première of a film, the news or a sporting event: she'd already seen it. Yet she was almost wise in her dottiness. He turned the television off again. Two-thirty in the morning. He could go to bed now, but he still wouldn't sleep. He could sit down with his computer at the table and go on working on his screenplay, but he was too tired for that. He gazed for a while with pleasure at the intarsia on the cover of the writing-desk. The inlay formed the image of a man with a parrot sitting above his head. Not long ago his colleague and tennis partner, Sokol, had tried to sell him a commode with a similar motif, but he'd wanted too much for it.
How much was too much money? Nothing will ever be any cheaper. If he'd owned a real house and not just this isolated country cottage, which could be broken into and robbed at any time, he would have bought the commode. But he didn't have a house, and if he had, who would he bring to visit? His mother, perhaps. But his mother wouldn't know it was his house. She would only notice a change, and a change would be distressing. When he had been to see her the week before, he had found a photograph of his father. She had looked at him suspiciously. 'Who have you got there?'
'Don't tell me you don't know who it is.'
She hesitated for a moment, then said, 'Quite a handsome fellow your father was. You can take him away again now.'
So he'd taken the photo with him and put it in one of the drawers of the writing-desk. Now he got up and took it out. It was one of the first pictures he'd ever taken. It wasn't bad for a beginner. The contrast was very sharp, and his father's face looked as though it had been carved from wood, so in fact Pavel had succeeded in suggesting the man's profession.
His father had been a trained carpenter who did wood carving in his spare time. He had also liked to read biographies of famous people. His small library had introduced Pavel to Chaplin, Eisenstein, Hus, Balzac, Henry VIII, the unfortunate Maximilian Habsburg and the even less fortunate Anne Boleyn. Except for the last two, he had aspired to be somehow like each of them.
When he had had to move away from his father's house he abandoned reading and started going to the cinema. Unfortunately, the choice of films was limited, and most of them were very dull. They urged people to work harder and emulate the lives of revolutionaries, or they exposed the misery of the poor — in the present abroad and in the past at home. But he was moved by the story about Ditta's daughter. He saw it over and over again, as he did The Ballad of a Soldier. At the time he thought there could be nothing more magnificent than directing films, although that ambition seemed far beyond his reach. Eventually he grew tired of going to the cinema, but he didn't enjoy sitting at home either. He would wander through the woods on the edge of the city, sometimes with friends, more often with Lassie, his collie. The dog would hunt real or imaginary rabbits, while he would invent stories of which he himself was the hero, powerful and indomitable.
Then he decided to ake pictures of things he saw on his rambles. He made the camera himself, partly because his mother couldn't afford a new one, and partly because he enjoyed making things and he wanted to have something unique. He used a cigar box, with the glass from an old pair of spectacles rigged as a lens. At first he took snapshots of everything he saw. When he showed his favourite ones to his mother, she gave them no more than a cursory glance: 'Well, so what? The camera did that, not you.'
He was stung and almost gave up altogether, but then he decided to prove to her that it was actually he who had made the pictures, and not the camera. He began to photograph clouds, animals and the hands of old people. To get pictures of hands, he went to an old people's home. He could have photographed their faces too, but he was more interested in hands. Everyone was doing faces. The worst films were full of them.
For animals, he went to the zoo. That was where he met Peter, and where they plotted their escape. He had actually had to persuade Peter to go through with it. Peter lacked the courage to do something like that on his own. He couldn't have brought himself to hurt his family. Parents, Peter believed, were to be honoured and obeyed. But Pavel had no family, only his mother, who believed that life had done her wrong and would do her more wrong; she constantly complained about her loneliness, her insomnia and her poor health.