Although I hadn’t done anything, my experience as an innocent person with members of the police, whether in uniform or not, had not been happy. It didn’t occur to me that thanks to my orange vest I was now myself on the borderline of being in uniform.
‘Well then, you sweepers,’ the more foppish of the two addressed us, ‘a bloody mess?’
‘Not too bad,’ replied the foreman; ‘we didn’t do the housing estate today – that’s where they live like pigs.’
‘Ah, but we had some fun and games around here, believe me,’ the foppish one put a friendly hand on his shoulder. ‘Right next door,’ he pointed towards Vysehrad. ‘What with that pervert about, the one who strangles women, some old hag thought he was after her and yelled for help. Some fuss, I can tell you! We combed the whole park, we had five flying squad cars there, all the way from Vrsovice HQ, and all we got was one bloke. I could see at once that it wasn’t him, because that pervert is no more than twenty and stands 190 tall, and this fellow was getting on for fifty and the size of a garden gnome, but he didn’t have as much as a tram ticket on him, so why did we bother?’
‘He was some sort of editor,’ his colleague added, ‘kind of taking exercise after a heart attack.’
‘Is it true he’s strangled seven women already?’ asked Mrs Venus.
‘And who told you such rubbish, Missus?’ the foppish one said angrily. ‘We have two murders reported and four attempted rapes, and that’s the lot!’
‘And when are you going to catch him?’ asked Mrs Venus.
‘Don’t you worry.’ The foppish one stroked his pistol holster. ‘We know what to do. We’ve already established that he’s fair and nearly two metres tall, thin, and with blue eyes. So there!’ And he looked at his colleague, whom the description fitted surprisingly well. ‘If you see a bloke like that… Get me?’
‘Sure,’ the foreman promised.
The foppish one then turned to the captain. ‘And what about your trousers,’ he joked, ‘when will you grow into long ones?’
‘In my coffin,’ the captain replied. ‘I’ve got them all ready at home.’
The foppish policeman gave a short chuckle, then raised his right hand in the direction of the peak of his service cap. ‘All clear then. More eyes we’ve got the more we see.’
‘We’ll just have to watch out we don’t sweep up your clues,’ Mrs Venus said when he’d turned away. ‘And for that they get more than a miner!’
By twenty past eleven we had finished cleaning up around the Culture Palace. This completed our assignment for the day. We took our equipment back to the former Sokol gym hall, and we now had only one task left: to wait three hours for the end of the working day and then collect our wages. My companions of course had already marked out the tavern they’d go to. I could have gone with them but I didn’t feel like it. Going to a tavern once in a while is enough for me.
The first story of Franz Kafka I ever read was one of the few longer prose pieces he’d finished. It told the story of a traveller to whom an officer on some island wants to demonstrate, with love and dedication, his own bizarre execution machine. During the demonstration, however, the machine breaks down and the officer feels so disgraced by this that he places himself on the execution block. The author coolly and matter-of-factly describes the details of that dreadful machine, as though by doing so he can shroud the mystery and the incomprehensible paradox of the recorded event.
I was thunderstruck and fascinated by the seemingly impenetrable mystery of an event which, at the same time, depressed me. But I was able only to comprehend it at its most superficial level. The officer – cruel, pedantic, enthusiastic about his executioner’s task – seemed to me like a prophetic vision of the officers I had encountered, a pre-image of Hoess at Auschwitz, and I was amazed that literature could not only bring back to life those who had died but also predict the features of those who were not yet born.
Suddenly I found myself back on Vysehrad hill. I walked through the park to the cemetery and to the ancient round church, which was surrounded by scaffolding. I’d never been inside the church although I can see it in the distance from the bluff behind our block and I actually own an old engraving of it:
The building on the print looked different from the one now before me, and not only because it had been
As I walked around the little church I noticed that the door was half open. I glanced inside – there was an untidy heap of builders’ requisites, scaffolding and buckets, and some of the pews were covered with a tarpaulin. On one side of the altar I caught sight of my companion of the morning, the one who reminded me of the specialist who took out my tonsils. Now without his orange vest he was evidently engaged in meditation.
I preferred not to enter. I didn’t want to disturb him, nor to start a conversation with him.
He caught up with me in the park. ‘Such nonsense,’ he complained; ‘the time you mess around waiting for your pay.’
I nodded. He told me his name was Rada. He’d taken note of my name first thing in the morning. He’d shared a room at the Litom er ice seminary with a man of that name forty years ago.
I said that all my relatives had lost their lives during the war, that the only surviving one was my brother who was a good deal younger than me.
He had two younger brothers. The middle one lived in Toronto and the youngest one was a doctor, a radiologist, apparently a good one, but he would have liked to be a traveller, he really came to life only when he saw some foreign scenery. As a matter of fact he was nearly always somewhere abroad, most recently in Kampuchea. ‘Would you believe it, he actually learned to speak Khmer. To him it’s just a bit of fun, he can learn a language in a few weeks!’
We passed through a brick gateway and approached the areas we’d cleaned that morning. I was glad that my shift was behind me and that I could now walk through the quiet little street onto which, by then, more yellowing leaves had dropped from the adjoining gardens, past the dark eyes of the houses which gazed on me wearily but also contentedly.
Suddenly I froze. In one of the windows I caught sight of a hanged man, his face pressed to the window-pane and his long tongue hanging from his open mouth. From below he was flooded by a blood-red glow.
Mr Rada noticed what I was staring at and said: ‘Let’s see what our artist has put on show for us today.’
I realised that the figure in the window was only a skilfully got-up dummy. As I looked more closely I saw another head, half female and half dog, its teeth dug into the hanged man’s thigh.
‘Oh dear,’ my companion was not happy. ‘He must have got out of bed the wrong side. He usually puts something more entertaining in his window. A little while ago he had some colourful acrobats turning somersaults. I sometimes come here specially to see what he’s thought up. My brother, who came along with me once, declared that they’re the work of a lunatic.’ Mr Rada again returned to the subject of his brother, who seemed to play an important part in his life. ‘To him everybody he can’t fit into a pattern is a lunatic. He actually believes that the whole world is crazy, he says the world needs some terrible shaking-up, some great revolution to equalise the differences between the sated and the hungry. We argue a lot. At least until quite recently, when he came back home and told me about such a revolution that even I wouldn’t credit it. Right next to a hospital a well full to the rim of murdered people. Corpses everywhere, he just couldn’t have imagined it. Maybe he simply saw what any revolution always brings to the people.’ Mr Rada stopped and looked about him, but we were alone in the swept street. ‘The Apocalypse! That was the word he used, even though he never decided to believe in the Last Judgement and regarded Revelations as, at most, a poetic vision.’
My wife’s consulting room was not far from where we were.
Luckily her waiting room was empty. I knocked. After a moment a young nurse put her head round the door, choked back the reproof on the tip of her tongue and asked me to come in.
