he muttered something to himself and softly uttered some figures. Perhaps some new and revolutionary invention, or the number of days he’d spent on his own. Or the number of tricks he’d scored in the round of cards he’d just finished. There was sadness in his features, maybe in his poetic mind some clear vision, perhaps his last one, was just then fading and disintegrating. Again I experienced a sense of shame at sitting there studying him. High time for me to get up and get away from all that street-sweeping. I looked around at the others, as if expecting that they’d read my thoughts, but they were all engrossed in their own troubles.
From the billiard table they were calling the captain again. For a moment he pretended not to hear them, then he rose, firmly gripped his chair, then the back of my chair, then he held on to the table and, moving along the wall, made it to the billiards. He picked up a cue with his hook and concentrated for a moment before imparting the right speed to his ball. I watched the red ball move over the green baize, passing the other balls without coming anywhere near them.
‘You’d better not drink any more,’ I said to him when he got back.
He turned his clouded eyes on me. ‘And why not?’ His question reminded me of my daughter’s classmate who’d put an end to his own life at the northern tip of Zofin island years ago.
By then the foreman was returning from the telephone. His face purple, as if he were near a stroke, he sat down heavily, picked up his glass, raised it to his lips and put it down again. ‘Well folks, we’ve got a new dispatcher!’
‘Would it be you?’ Mrs Venus guessed.
‘Don’t try to be funny with me, Zoulova, I’m not in the mood!’ He fell silent to give us time to go on guessing, then he announced: ‘It’s that fucking bastard!’
‘Franta? But he’s an idiot,’ Mrs Venus expressed surprise.
‘That’s just why,’ Mr Rada explained while the captain began to laugh, laughing softly and contentedly, as if something about that piece of news gave him particular pleasure. Maybe at that moment he gained a clearer understanding of that radiation which turns us all into sheep.
The foreman finally swallowed his first gulp of beer, then drained his glass, and finally announced: ‘If they think I’ll let that shit make out my work schedule for me they’ve got another think coming! This is the end of my work for his organisation!’
‘Don’t take on so,’ Mrs Venus tried to comfort him. ‘He isn’t going to stink up his office for long! He’ll grass on them too, and he’ll be kicked upstairs again!’
They were calling the captain again from the billiards, but he had difficulty getting up, he turned towards the corner of the room, waved his hand and sat down again.
‘No,’ said the foreman, ‘I’ve had it!’
‘It’s getting cold now anyway,’ the youngster piped up. ‘I think that’s what was behind my funny turn.’ This was evidently his way of announcing that he too intended to leave. I ought to join them as well, but I was still too much of a stranger to think it appropriate to emphasise my departure. As I got up a moment later I merely said to the foreman; ‘All the best, I’m sure we’ll meet again.’ But he got to his feet, ceremoniously shook hands with me, addressed me by my name, and said: ‘Thank you for your work!’
It was a long time since any superior of mine had thanked me for my work.
Mr Rada joined me as usual. ‘You see, the things they’ll fight over!’
He seemed dejected today. To cheer him up I enquired about his brother, whether he was about to go off to any foreign parts again.
‘Don’t talk to me about him,’ he said. ‘it’s all I can think about anyway. Just imagine, he’s joined the Party! So they can make him a chief surgeon. Would you believe it? A man who speaks twelve languages, and after all he’s seen in the world, after what he himself told me not so long ago!’
I suggested that perhaps it was a good thing that just such men should be chief surgeons. It wasn’t his fault that the post required a Party card.
‘A man isn’t responsible for the situation into which he is born,’ he proclaimed, ‘but he is responsible for his decisions and actions. When my mother heard about it she nearly had a stroke. Have you any idea what she’s already been through in her life because of those people? And I… I used to be proud of him, I thought that the Lord had endowed him with special grace… even if he didn’t acknowledge it, even if he acted as if he didn’t acknowledge Him… I believed that one day he’d see the truth.’
In his depression he began to reminisce about the years he’d spent in the forced labour camp. Among the prisoners there’d been so many unforgettable characters, who, even in those conditions, were aiming at higher things. Some of them had there, in the camp, received the sacrament of baptism, he himself had secretly baptised a few of them. Thinking back to those days it was clear to him that, in spite of all he’d been through, God’s love had not abandoned mankind. He believed, for just that reason, that he’d spent the best or at least the most meaningful years of his life there.
We’d reached the little street where our unknown artist lived and exhibited. I looked up curiously to his window, but this time it contained no artefact; instead a live person, presumably the artist himself, was standing in the window-frame, clad only in a narrow strip of sack-cloth. On his head was a fool’s cap with little bells, on top of this cap he’d placed a laurel wreath, and in his right hand he held a large bell-shaped blossom, I’d say of deadly nightshade.
Thus he stood, motionless, his forehead almost pressed to the glass, as if awaiting our arrival. I was surprised to find that he was still young, his hair, where it peeped out from beneath his fool’s cap, was dark and his skin was swarthy. We looked at him and he looked at us without giving any sign of seeing us, of taking any notice of us.
‘Well really!’ Mr Rada was outraged. ‘That’s a bit much!’
But I was aware of sympathy for the unknown young man who offered himself up to our gaze, who had no hesitation in exhibiting his misery, longings and hope. Hope of what? Of fame, of being understood, or at least of getting somebody to stop, look, and see. Standing there with my orange fool’s vest – in what way did I differ from him? In my misery, my longings, or perhaps in my hope?
So I waited for my lover at the small railway station in the foothills. All round me half-drunk gypsies were noisily conversing. A total stranger, smelling of dirt and liquor, invited me to have a drink with him.
I escaped to the very end of the platform and stood waiting there for the train.
Was I waiting for it with hope or with fear, out of longing or out of a sense of duty? What was there left for me to wait for, what to hope for?
At the most for some conditional postponement that would briefly prolong our torment and our bliss.
The train pulled in, I caught sight of her getting off the last carriage, a bulging rucksack on her back. She saw me, waved to me, and even at that distance I could see that she’d come in love.
I was suddenly flooded with gratitude; undeservedly rewarded, I embraced her.
It was getting dark. The station had emptied, and the lights of some train were approaching in the distance.
I wished it would be a special train, a train just for the two of us. We’d board it, we’d draw the curtains across the windows, we’d lock the door, the train would move off, speed along through the day and the night, over bridges and through valleys, it would carry us beyond seven frontiers, away from our past lives, it would take us into the ancient garden where one might live without sin.
Along the track clanked a tanker train, filling the air with the stench of crude oil. I picked up her pack and we walked out of the station.
That evening I phoned my wife from the hotel where we’d taken a room. In her voice too I was aware of love and of her pleasure at hearing me. She told me she’d been invited to an ethological conference somewhere near where I was staying. No, not just yet, in a week’s time, but we might meet then, that would be nice, I must be feeling rather blue being on my own for so long, besides, we’d been to the place she was going to before, surely I remembered, on our honeymoon…
I was in a panic. I wasn’t sure. How could I tell, a week from now. And she too seemed taken aback; of course, she said, if it didn’t suit me I needn’t come to see her. She just thought that I might like to, but she didn’t want to push me or make things difficult for me.
I promised to phone her to let her know, and hung up.
I was finally trapped. My mind, trained on those lines, was still concocting excuses, but I suspected that I wouldn’t escape this time, nor did I wish to.
Why hadn’t she asked straight out? Why hadn’t she objected? The strange humility of her voice still rang in my
