My Golden Trades

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

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.

It was already eleven-thirty. Expecting the worst, I got in beside the surveyor and we drove off. My new boss asked me if I could understand maps.

I did understand maps; in fact, I used to collect them.

He handed me a brand new ordnance survey map, stamped with a warning that it was a secret document. The trigonometric points were marked with orange circles.

We had five maps, with a total of almost two hundred points, each of which we were to locate and re-survey; if necessary, we would also have to relocate or replace the stone or set in a new one and paint the stake. Our first point that morning was number twenty-three outside the hamlet of Tribucha. It wouldn't be easy to find, Kos said. He'd already driven out that way, and the stake was missing and the stone had vanished under the alluvium. Then, having said all there was to say, he fell silent and concentrated on driving.

Although it was early September, the sun was still hot. I studied the countryside, constantly referring back to the map, bringing us nearer to the invisible point number twenty-three.

Evening

WHEN WE RETURNED to our residence that evening, I rinsed myself off and changed my clothes, then connected my lamp to the cable we used to bring in the borrowed current. I had planned to wash at least one of the windows, but I was too tired.

That afternoon we had dug six holes into which we set concrete markers; we had painted nine stakes and cut a twenty-metre sight-line through the vegetation with our machetes. I had helped with the actual surveying, which, compared with the digging, had seemed like a rest. I wasn't used to the pick and, after digging the third hole, I didn't think I could go on. Yet I did, and my young boss took turns with me, doing his share and, as the day progressed, taking on more and and more without making it look as though he were doing me a favour. Now he retired to his room and I saw him sit down at his wretched little table, take out his calculator and start working up the figures we'd gathered that afternoon.

I wasn't surprised to find him working at night. I was used to it from my childhood. Engineering is a monastic discipline to which you must sacrifice everything. To its disciples the only time well spent is time spent working.

Early in life I recognized that while fantasists, prophets and politicians struggle among themselves about how better to organize and articulate the world, it is scientists and engineers who silently and tirelessly put their notions of the world and life into practice. They measure everything they can touch. They calculate the bearing capacity of bridges and causeways; they wrap the world in a network of pathways on water, on land and in the air. They raise buildings higher than the pyramids; they drive tunnels under the Alps. They build factories and hospitals, and are constantly inventing new machines and instruments to use inside them. They draw up plans for rapid-firing weapons, body scanners, explosives, gas-chambers — and assembly-lines to produce them. They invent thousands of new drugs, chemical weapons, herbicides and fungicides. They build rockets, feeder farms, enormous generators and nuclear reactors. And when the world is slowly suffocating under the waste products of these labours, where do we turn for help? To the scientists, of course. They will decide which of the waste products can be easily and cheaply disposed of. They will invent antidotes to the toxins. And antidotes to the antidotes.

The idea of a countable, measurable and precisely expressible world is a seductive one. It has seduced even those who, by the very nature of their activity, ought to resist it. Not only have painters, poets, composers, literary critics and philosophers fallen in love with the dazzle of electric lights and fast cars, they have begun, in their work and research, to adapt to the scientist's world. They paint geometric images, compose concrete music and poetry, transform verse into diagrams and the mystery of Being into mathematical formulae.

When I was still young, I understood that, despite what I was taught in school, the age I lived in was probably called the age of engineering.

I disconnected my lamp and put my immersion heater in a cup of water. While I was waiting for it to boil, I spread a serviette over the chair that had no back, and unwrapped a piece of cake my wife had baked; then, so I wouldn't entirely lose touch with the world, I turned on one of the portable products of the technological age and, from the airwaves, tried to collect news from different corners of the planet.

The night air flowed through the open window, cool and pleasant. Carefully, so as not to get dirty, I approached the window ledge and looked down the square. It was empty. Prime time was just beginning on another revolutionary achievement of our civilization. Two drunks staggered about in front of the pub across from the church. Occasionally a car roared past. There was not a single woman in sight. Before me stretched an evening promising neither joy nor guilt: I didn't have to write or study. I could enjoy my freedom the way a worker does, freshly showered and freshly dressed after work; and moreover, hidden away in a town where no one knows him, expects him, or limits his movements.

I drank my tea and its aroma helped to cover the stench that still lingered in the room. I ate the cake, switched off the radio and walked out of my inhospitable bedroom.

There was light in the hallway of my building and, sitting on a kitchen chair, a rather plump woman of around sixty. She was stretching her short, fat legs in front of her; her hair, crudely bleached, was fluffed up in a messy bouffant. She had been reading an illustrated weekly for young

people. Beside her on a small pile of bricks sat a birdcage with a canary inside.

I greeted her and was about to go on when she called to me, 'Are you the new surveyor?'

I admitted that I was.

She stood up and offered me a chubby hand. 'Welcome to my house. I used to have five tenants,' she said. 'There was Mr Wolf, an army captain, and Dr Tereba — do you know him? He was a great prophet. He knew the stars and could cast people's horoscopes and tell their fortunes, but he'd only give them the rough outlines and keep the bad stuff, and the worse stuff, to himself. Now there's only Julka and me,' she nodded towards the cage. 'I hear they're going to build a railway station on this spot.'

'That can't be true,' I said. 'The line doesn't run anywhere near here.'

'That kind of detail never bothers them.'

Her objection had a logic of its own, and so I merely shrugged my shoulders, meaning that I knew nothing about a new station.

'My great-grandfather built this house, sir. And it was declared an historical building. They used to print diaries, almanacs and poetry here.'

'Was he a printer — your great-grandfather?'

'He was the district and episcopalian printer. He was born in eighteen hundred odd, but this is where he got his start, and when he died he left the building to my grandfather. And you know how long he lived? An even one hundred years. Back then, in Chrudim, there was a woman called Kroupová—she was Turkish. A soldier brought her back from Belgrade when she was just a little girl. He had her christened and he brought her up himself.

Then she lived in the same street as my great-grandfather, and she lived till she was a hundred and six — such are the ways of the Lord. At her funeral, my great-grandfather promised that if the Lord was willing, he'd live to be a hundred as well and enter the new century. If he'd had any idea what this one'd be like, he'd have thought twice about it. Grandfather lived to be ninety-six, but my father was killed in a concentration camp before he'd even turned forty. It was the Lord's will. At least he didn't have to look at this destruction,' and she waved her hands at the wall behind her, where bare brick and the broken windows of empty flats stared back at us. 'He should have had a memorial plaque here but they wouldn't allow it because he was a private businessman and a member of Sokol.'

'Was he a printer too?'

'No, he sold books — and mainly stationery. You should have seen our sign. "Antonín Pokorný," it said, and underneath that, in gold lettering: "Purveyor of Books, Lithographs and Stationery Supplies." Everyone knew my father, and he knew all his customers by name; he'd always give the children a free picture or a decal. You could buy whatever you wanted — even if it was paper with a special snake-grain finish. And if, by some miracle, it wasn't in stock, Dad would try to get it for you, would go all the way to Prague for it if he had to. Today? Just try going into the store now and asking for ordinary writing-paper. The girl will laugh in your face. Have you seen her?' she lowered her voice. 'The little tramp they've got looking after the stationery goods? Just try going in there to buy something and what do you see on the door? She's got a sign up saying: "Deliveries." "Gone to the post office." "Inventory Day." "I'm at the doctor's." And you know where she is all

the time? Back here in the stock-room,' she jerked a fat thumb behind her, where I could see only a barred window with opaque glass in it. 'She brings in soldiers and boys from the cement plant. She makes more on her back than she does standing behind the counter. So you haven't heard about the station?' she said, returning to her main preoccupation. 'Maybe they meant a bus station. The chaplain's been complaining that he can't say mass with the buses making all that noise just outside his door.'

To them, that would have been a reason for leaving the bus station where it was, but I didn't argue with her and, taking advantage of the pause in the flow of talk, I left the courtyard.

Even though he never said as much, I know my father was disappointed that I hadn't become an engineer. I had never known his father — he had died twelve years before I was born — but not long ago, I came across an article he had written. He'd learned that an American colleague of his had discovered a cheap way to produce acetylene. 'The ancient dreams of chemists of creating organic compounds from mineral substances have been resurrected. To get not only kerosene or alcohol, but to create, on the way, purely chemical substances necessary for the nourishment of man. Thus far, such dreams have been vain indeed, but recalling the enormous achievements of chemistry in our time, there is no reason to doubt that they might one day become true.' His article ended with a vision that seemed to him joyous and full of hope.

A few fluorescent lights flickered on the square, and a small group of people had gathered to wait for a late bus in front of the church. The shops were shuttered and dark, and the only light came from a pub called The Blackbird. The

din of many voices floated out through the open window.

I walked as far as the château. The gate was now shut and only a single window in a whole row was lit. An ambulance was parked in front of the gate.

Kafka had lived at the end of an era when a castle was still a good symbol of mystery and inaccessibility. People associated castles with nobility and sophistication. Today, our castle gates are open wide. Some have been turned into tourist attractions, but most have become warehouses for things or people. The fine furniture and valuable porcelain has been stolen or destroyed, rare books have been taken to waste-paper depots, and the princesses who didn't manage to make their escape were asked to work behind counters, on assembly lines or in offices. In our era, party secretariats have replaced the castles. They are the new symbols of inaccessibility, but they don't evoke notions of nobility; no one would associate them with ideas of gentle birth, bravery, wisdom or chivalry.

A hero who tries to pry open the gate of a secretariat will scarcely gain anyone's approval.

Back home I took off my clothes and threw them over the back of a chair. (Tomorrow I would have to hammer a few nails, at least, into the wall to hang them on.) It was only nine-thirty, but I fell asleep at once.

I was awakened by a rumbling clatter. The windows were shaking as though an air-raid was going on. I opened my eyes and looked around a room empty of people and things.

Where had everyone gone?

They'd been transported to Poland. Only I remained behind, forgotten, waiting for the man bearing my death sentence to enter.

The rumbling kept up, and I became fully awake. Through the open window I saw one of the enormous transport trucks disappearing around a corner. A bell in the tower struck twice. It might have been two in the morning, but when I looked at my watch, it was only half-past eleven.

With a sense of relief, I realized that the transportations had long since departed and it was unlikely that someone would come through the door to inform me that my presence was a burden to be removed from the world without delay. Those to whom I was a nuisance at present were certainly satisfied that I was now precisely where I was.

Another truck roared by outside. I got up and closed the window. One of the ancient panes of glass in it cracked with a high, rasping sound. Midnight struck.

I looked into the darkness in front of me. Now that I had closed the window, the air was filled with the room's own foul exhalations. My body felt broken and I was aware of a slight pain near my heart. I desperately wanted to fall asleep again, but instead, I kept hearing the sounds from the street and a silent rumbling in the bowels of the old building.

We all have our own castle whose gates we long to pass through. Most of the time, when we find them closed, we go off in another direction and enter doors that someone else has opened for us or through which we have no wish to pass.

Stone

WE WERE DIGGING a hole for a stone pillar in a clearing near the logging road. From the first blow of the pick, the ground had resisted. It was close to noon and a light breeze made the air tremble in the heat of the sun. After an hour's hard work we had only managed to make a shallow depression in the earth. We had hoped that once we'd made it through the tangle of tree roots in the top layer of soil the work would get easier. Instead, we had hit hardened clay full of chunks of solid rock.

My young boss, understandably, was stronger than I was, and more skillful, so he took the pick out of my hands and, with regular, rhythmic blows, tried to subdue the rock bit by bit. But a dull pick is no substitute for a pneumatic drill.

Do we have to put our stone pillar exactly here? I wondered. Perhaps the ground a little to one side would be softer.

'This is the best place for it.'

My knowledge of the work I was doing was so slight that I couldn't judge whether the location he chose was really the best of several possibilities, or whether he was simply revealing more of the stubbornness he had demonstrated several times over the past few days.

Our stone pillar was still lying on the floor of the station wagon. Perhaps anticipating the bedrock, the surveyor had selected the smallest of the stone makers we had, but even so it was just a little under three-quarters of a metre long. And we had to lay the mark-stone tablet underneath it. And between the mark-stone and the stone pillar there had to be a layer of soil at least twenty centimetres thick. Though it lay buried under a metre of earth, the mark-stone was the most important part of the trigonometrical station. While the stone pillar above it was often damaged, the mark-stone usually remained unmoved. There were crosses on both the mark-stone and the pillar, and they had to be aligned. Thus the position of the pillar could always be reset with reference to the mark-stone beneath it.

In the past, they used to build tall wooden constructions over the stone pillar. I remember towers so high it made me dizzy to look up at them. They don't build those towers any more; there aren't the carpenters to make them. Adjacent to the stone pillar, at a distance indicated by a notch on the handle of my pick, a concrete base had to be set in the ground to which a pole was fixed; at the trigonometrical point, the pole was red and white; at the intermediate points, black and white. Wherever there was a threat of damage, we put up two poles. There was always the threat of damage, even though it was an offence to tamper with the poles. In woods, seldom had surveyors bothered to erect markers; they would simply paint arrows on the nearest tree, one pointing left, the other right. And because over the years the stone pillar would become buried in earth or overgrown with grass or bushes, we would have to poke around in the undergrowth with a metal probe until we found it. When we had uncovered the

top of it, Kos would pull out the spirit-level while I would anxiously try to determine if the pillar had been moved.

If the bubble deviated from its circular centre-point so much as a millimetre in any direction, the pillar would have to be dug up, realigned with the mark-stone, and relaid.

Once, when the stone was out to a barely perceptible degree, I suggested we might simply dig around it to make it level. From the expression on the surveyor's face, however, I realized that my idea was sacrilegious.

It was my turn to take the pick again. Trying to emulate the surveyor's technique I threw myself at the rock as though deranged, but I managed only to chip away a few tiny fragments. Drops of my sweat fell on the ground and were quickly soaked up by the dry dust.

I crawled out of the trench and went to the car, where I had left some warmish water in a bottle. I took a drink and then pulled a hammer and chisel from under the car seat.

If only we had decent tools.

The surveyor now took his turn. The rock sang like a stone bell.

I sat down on the fresh pile of broken rock. I didn't have the energy to walk the short distance into the shade.

The bell rang insistently, summoning the prisoners.

I had tried to position myself in one of the back ranks, but the others had pushed me into the front row. From the right, where they were ringing the bell, a group of supervisors and overseers in yellowish uniforms and red arm-bands approached. The officer leading the group, turned to me. Don't like the look of this one, he said. Two weeks of special treatment.

They grabbed me and led back to the wooden barracks. I was not surprised; not even frightened. I knew that,

eventually, I would meet everyone I loved in those special treatment barracks. They were merely leading me off to meet my fate, my story. I even looked forward to new encounters.

The surveyor jumped out of the trench, peeled off the rust-coloured sweater which he almost never removed, and measured the results of our work so far with a folding ruler. We were two-thirds finished. He handed me the hammer and the chisel: it was my turn to make the bell ring. When I had prised away an especially large chunk of rock and tossed it out of the pit, I discovered nothing underneath it but a layer of earth mixed with small stones.

After half an hour, we had set the mark-stone in the bottom of the hole and jockeyed it into position so that the bubble stood motionless in the centre of the level. The surveyor set up a tripod over the pit and dropped a plumb-line from it. Then he balanced himself over the hole like an acrobat and I helped him shift the tripod until the plumb-line pointed to the centre of the crossed lines. We measured the depth of the mark-stone below ground level and then very carefully, so as not to knock over the tripod, we filled earth in over the plate, packed it down and measured the height again. Only now could the stone pillar be set over it.

The upper part of the stone had been properly shaped, while the lower part looked like an undignified, ridiculous leg. We carried it from the car and carefully lowered it into the hole. Kos then sat on the edge of the hole, held the stone in place with his knees and, armed only with the spirit-level, the plumb-line and his patience, he began his duel with a piece of rock that I could scarcely lift.

I was now sitting a little way off, watching him work

with the precision of a clock-maker on a 150 pound chunk of granite. Just when it seemed that the plumb-line was properly centred at last, the surveyor would set his level and the stone, with its ridiculous, misshapen leg, would refuse to sit true. He would then try to straighten it with gentle, almost invisible movements, but now the plumb-line was off-centre and the whole annoying operation would start all over again.

Finally, in a whisper, as though he were afraid his breath might unbalance the stone, he said: 'That's it!' The stone stood true in all its axes. So I took some earth, and carefully, so as not to move either the tripod or the stone, which Kos was still holding firmly clamped between his knees, I tipped it into the hole. At the same time, I felt a sense of relief, even satisfaction, as though I had just placed a word in a sentence so firmly and precisely that no one could question it, and the sentence would sound exactly as I had meant it to.

MrK

Director

The Office of Social Security

Prague

Dear Mr K.

By casting doubt on the nature of my work, an activity that, until now, I and several other people considered artistic, you have played a role in my becoming for a time at least, a surveyor's assistant. I consider it proper, therefore, to report to you on my progress so that, among other reasons, you may lack no opportunity to cast doubt on this work also.

In evidence of my work as a surveyor's assistant, may I provide you with the following information: during the month of September, I have cleaned and painted seventy-nine stakes, dug out approximately eight cubic metres of earth, set thirty concrete bases and five mark-stones in the ground. In various walls, mostly church and cemetery walls, I have chiselled holes for five bolts. I have also assisted in most of the surveying and related work.

I am aware that it is only with the approval of your office or rather of those who have been summoned to its head (I am employing the Russian turn of phrase favoured in your circles) that reality becomes genuine reality and work becomes genuine work, and I am not succumbing to any false or inflated notions about what I have accomplished in the field of surveying. It is entirely possible that I am living in a state of complete and utter illusion. I am truly curious about what conclusions you will come to.

Yours sincerely

K. (Surveyor's Assistant)

Home

ON FRIDAYS WE would return to town around noon and, having removed the tools from the car and swept out the week's debris so that the car looked almost clean, I'd hurry inside to change in time to catch the afternoon train.

The station was neat and full of flowers, and I was usually the only passenger there. The train stopped here, it seemed, out of nostalgia, as a gesture to the old days, which I could scarcely remember, days when there had been farmers' markets, fairs and isolated farm cottages in the countryside with women who would take the train into town to do the shopping.

When the train arrived — a single, red locomotive with a driver and perhaps three or four passengers, usually Vietnamese men — I would get on, dust off a seat, and sit down. Then I would look out of the window and watch as autumn settled on the now familiar countryside, as the last fields of sugar beet were harvested, as the reeds in the marshlands turned ochre and grey, as the tamaracks yellowed and the dogwood and sumacs burned an ever more brilliant red.

I have a home, of course, but have always lived in a city. So there is no country landscape to which I can properly

return. Yet I've always enjoyed walking in the countryside with my wife. Because I am, by nature, introverted, I liked to absorb silently the multitude of shapes, sounds, colours and odours, the fragments of accidental conversations and scenes. My wife, on the other hand, would always look for analogies to what we saw. Everything was transformed in her mind into a cluster of images mingling dream and reality. That was her way of leaving the narrow pathways which we, like all walkers, had to keep to.

But we didn't have a landscape of our own outside the city, and we never found it.

The local train took me to a station where I would transfer to a train going to Prague. Here, the platform was crowded with people who, like me, were going home from work: men with leather tool-bags hanging on their shoulders, often wearing only dirty overalls; and young factory girls from the gramophone plants, looking as alike as the products they made.

The windows of this train were so filthy that the countryside seemed to have vanished in a fog. I'd find a seat that was free and, if possible, not broken, and fall asleep immediately from exhaustion.

At home, my wife would be expecting me, glad that we were together again, and already annoyed that I had to leave again on Monday. Why didn't I quit? What sense did it make, wasting my time painting dumb stakes, digging rocks out of the ground and straining my heart, my back or whatever it was that hurt that weekend?

I'd tell her I'd stick with it until we finished the work to be done outside. I didn't tell her I actually enjoyed leaving those pathways that, as an ordinary walker, I would have to follow; that I got pleasure from coming into close touch

with the landscape.

My wife would accuse me angrily of being pig-headed. There's so much work to be done here at home. Our son is redecorating his room, and if I was so keen to work with my hands, why didn't I help him out?

So I would change into my blue overalls and go to chip the plaster off a few bricks.

There is a Greek fable about a giant, Antaeus, the son of Poseidon and Gaia, goddess of the earth. Antaeus would challenge anyone at all to a duel because he knew he was invincible, for whenever he sank to the ground, his mother would renew his strength. He never once lost, until one day he encountered Heracles, who held him up in the air and so was able to strangle him to death. The Greeks, of course, were on Heracles's side; he was, I suppose, their favourite hero. Nevertheless, the unconscious wisdom of this myth warns us not to let any contemporary Heracles hold us away from the earth for too long.

When the bricks were clean, I'd take a pile of letters that had come for me during the week and read them.

From her home in Sweden, my translator sent me this letter:

We have had a magnificent hot summer and after a few lean years we can be delighted with the enormous harvest of fruits, vegetables and mushrooms. But how can we enjoy them when there is radioactivity still lurking in the cultivated parts of Sweden, especially in the most fertile lands? People are ignoring the warnings, and I'm terrified of what the results of their indifference might be. We have a good monitoring system for our air, water and land, and that's why we know that the catastrophe is a fact. Thousands of seals

have died from a virus we have not yet been able to identify. Even our water fowl are affected, and it isn't known whether that was caused by the same virus that struck the seals. The fish population is decreasing. Hunters in the north have been shocked to learn that deer contain more than 45,000 bequerelles, despite all the time that has passed since Chernobyl. Every day there's a new warning, or new facts about the catastrophe. They find, for instance, that they've added thirty chemicals that are harmful to human health, especially children's health, to ice cream in order to make it last in storage. Red peppers imported from Spain are treated with a poison, and their skins are as tough as orange peel. Another panic: tampons contain such a high percentage of dioxin that they are carcinogenic. The news about the decay of the ozone layer, especially around the poles, is terrifying. And nothing is being done to lower the number of cars on the road. This spring we had an excellent exhibition on the destruction of nature and historical buildings, which are almost all damaged beyond recovery. When I come to Prague, I'll bring you a catalogue. .

That evening my wife and I put on our best clothes and went to a reception for an American writer at the US embassy. I was invited as a fellow writer, not as a surveyor's assistant. My new job was too fresh and I'd done it for too short a time to be able to make anything more than small talk out of it. What would my life be like now, I wondered, if I'd been driven into this substitute profession twenty or even forty years ago, like so many others? Who remembers any more that those stokers, window-washers, ditch-diggers or warehouse workers, exhausted by hard

work and monotony, once had other callings and professions: they studied Kant, St Augustine or Paret's theory of the élite; they lectured to students and led discussions on the radio.

We are sitting at a well-laid table tended by waiters in white gloves. My American colleague, having been asked about it, talks of his latest novel. It's about the son of a respectable family who falls in with drug addicts, runs away from home and lives on the street, in abandoned garages or drug dens. His mother goes looking for him, but in order to gain credibility in the drug underworld, she allows someone to shoot her up with heroin. She soon ends up like her son.

The American writer's wife was asked to help distribute aid to the starving children of Ethiopia, and she tells horrific stories about the long march those wretched people had to undertake, and how many of them dropped dead of exhaustion before they could ever reach the places where milk — and salvation — awaited them. The world is full of tragic human stories.

What do I write about?

I'm at a loss, for I'm not writing anything at the moment; I'm doing something else. But, I think, I would like to write about Mother Earth. I can see that my answer is neither complete enough, nor very understandable. The theme doesn't seem attractive enough. It would be more appropriate to write about terrorists, coprophilia and necrophilia, homicidal perverts or, even better, female killers or fugitives from justice or, at the very least, about the suffering of prisoners in the gulag; it would be hard to excite audiences, inured to bloodshed by television, with anything else.

Fortunately, no one asks me what I am writing. They want to know what I think about the idea of Central Europe. Do I expect some kind of intellectual and moral renewal to come from this region?

I reply that I didn't know of any place where people are willing to give up the advantages of technology, so what kind of renewal is possible?

Someone hastily corrects my rather gloomy answer by saying that he believes in the purifying power of a reborn Christianity, and he gives persuasive examples, while I— and I am surprised by this myself — find myself returning to an expansive beet field, moving slowly forward with my little box of paints and brushes. From a thicket of enormous leaves, two slender furry bodies emerge, then disappear, emerge and disappear again, two apparitions that seem to be swimming straight for me through the beet field ocean. I can already hear their wheezing, eager breath. Obedient to a long forgotten reflex, I bend down, tear a clump of soil from the earth, and heave it at the creatures.

And what do I think about my own position and the position of my friends?

I don't want to complain: complete favour from the authorities is as dangerous for an artist as complete disfavour. In the former case, the artist's spirit usually perishes; in the latter, the artist himself.

And what would I say about the state we find ourselves in now?

We find ourselves up in the air, lifted high above the head of an invisible hero, on whom we bestow our favours. Intoxicated by the altitude, we think we are approaching the stars; we are conquering the heavens. We

don't even try to disengage ourselves and touch the earth to renew our strength. In any case, the earth is, by our own hand, radioactive.

The dogs run away with swimming leaps and I bend down to pick up a handful of dirt, knead it with my fingers, and feel relief.

The Shop Girl

WHEN I RETURNED to Meštec one Monday morning, I found the door of our residence locked and a note stuck in a crack in the door jamb. The note was from my boss. He'd left the ownership papers for his car at home and had gone to fetch them-. He apologized, and said he'd be back in the afternoon. The keys were in the stationer's shop.

It was exactly eleven o'clock, and the shop was already closed. Recalling what the former owner of the building had told me, I went through the dark passageway to the inner courtyard and knocked on the door of the stockroom. When no one answered, I turned the handle. The door opened and the smell of paper, mould and mustiness greeted me. Looking around, all I could see were a lot of shelves. Through an arched opening in the wall where a door had probably been came the dim glow of artificial light. I waited, and when no one appeared I walked through the opening.

In the next room, sitting on a couch made of empty crates and two or three rugs, was the familiar long-haired, bespectacled creature wearing a white sweater and a denim skirt. A kettle of water was boiling on an electric hot-plate next to the couch.

I said hello.

She looked up in alarm and jumped to her feet. 'Oh, it's you,' she said, obviously relieved. She reached into her pocket and rummaged around in it for a moment before finding the key. 'Will you have a coffee with me?'

I sat down in the only chair in the room.

'He was really steamed up about forgetting his papers,' she said, referring to my boss. Her voice sounded veiled. She took a cup from a shelf containing kitchen utensils. 'This is probably not such a hot place to live,' she said, putting a little ground coffee into the cup, 'but I'd enjoy driving around like you do. I'm stuck inside here all day long.'

I took a piece of cake out of my bag, unwrapped it, and placed it on the small table.

'I won't have to go for lunch,' she said, delighted. 'Actually, it's not so bad here,' she admitted. 'When I was working in the Tesla plant, I was soldering all day long like an idiot, and when I came home at night I was seeing double.'

She took out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I refused, but lit hers for her. Her face was impassive; I had trouble guessing her age. If her features had anything quirky or individual about them, she'd wiped it out with make-up.

'But it can be a drag here sometimes too,' she remarked.

'What would you rather do?'

'Oh, well,' she said, frowning at my simplistic question. 'I'd travel, wouldn't I? Isn't that what everyone wants to do?'

'Where would you go?'

'Who cares? Just get out. But I'd steer clear of the south; they say the men down there are a pain. I'd go north. I hear

they still have nice forests up there, and lakes and rare birds. They showed it on TV a while ago. Did you see it?'

'Do you ever go travelling?'

'Oh, sure! Happen to know where I could get a currency voucher?' She frowned again. 'And even if I did manage to get one, do you think a woman can go anywhere alone? And who'd look after the kid? Granny's only willing to do it during the day; she likes the evening to herself.'

'Are you from Meštec?'

She shook her head. 'Can I have some?' She reached for a piece of cake. Little paper chimney-sweeps, the kind they sold at Christmas for good luck, looked down at us from the opposite shelf. There were also new year's pigs for the same purpose.

'My family's in Pardubice, I mean my mother and brother,' she said. 'Mom's in the hospital now, been there two months already.'

'What's wrong with her?'

'She was working with aniline, right?' she said, as though that explained it. 'I ran away from home the minute I turned fifteen. I married a guy from Usti and now I'm living with my grandma out in the country, two stops away by train. They've built a cement plant right bang on the other side of her fence. It's fabulous. If you leave your coffee on the table, it'll turn white by evening without adding cream.' She gathered up the cups and went to rinse them out.

Her figure was boyish, and she had dark hair on her legs. She didn't seem like the type of woman men go crazy over, and even less did she seem the type to go crazy over men.

'I'm probably quitting my job here soon,' she announced when she came back.

'What then?'

'If I'm going to sell things, I want to get something out of it.' She frowned. 'The father sends four hundred a month for the kid, and the rest is down to me. You know how long I had to save up for this stupid skirt?' She took another piece of cake, remarking on how good it was. 'They'd take me on in the canteen at the cement plant, but I'm through with places where you have to punch a clock. They're also not going to get me working anywhere I have to be with guys. And I shouldn't be having to stand up a lot. My hip joints are a mess and sometimes they hurt so much at night I cry. But maybe I'll find something,' she said with sudden hopefulness. 'Or maybe something will happen.'

'What could happen?' I said, not understanding her remark.

'Oh, I don't know. Maybe some U.F.O.s will land, or something. Like E.T. Did you see that?'

'Yes, I did.' The film hadn't appealed to me much, but I had a faithful representation of the loveable little monster at home. Someone brought it into the country as a present for my children, not realizing that they were too old for dolls.

'I saw it nine times. When they showed it in Prague, I took time off work to go and see it even though it was always sold out. I slipped the woman taking tickets forty crowns and she let me sit on an extra chair for all the showings that day.'

'Would you like to have an E.T. at home?'

My question was so obviously foolish that she decided not to answer it. 'He was kind of — you know, like really from another world.'

'Would you like to go there?'

She sighed, frowned, and then said, 'Even if you could go somewhere like that, they wouldn't take me.'

The Attic

WE RETURNED FROM work earlier than usual today, while it was still light. The surveyor had to deal with damages incurred by the company when several of our stone markers were knocked over by tractors. Before I went into my room, I noticed that the door to the attic was ajar. I couldn't resist and went up the creaking, dusty stairs.

The attic was large and full of old junk. Everything was still except for some flies buzzing under the dormer. The beams were huge and ancient, though the tiles covering the roof seemed almost new. Old dresses were draped among the swallows' nests on the beams. In some doorless cupboards there were stacks of battered shoes, and between a mound of straw and a pile of old handbags I found some rusty stove pipes and several empty boxes and fruit crates.

Clearly nothing of value was left, but I wasn't looking for gold candlesticks. I was always more interested in printed paper — and sure enough, in one of the boxes I found a century-old book, a 'Reader for Schools of Farming and Winter Economies'. Just then I heard something creak behind me. I looked round and saw Mrs Pokorná's head emerging from the stairwell.

Aware that I had been caught trespassing, I greeted her with a guilty look. But she seemed glad to have found me. She started right in by telling me that many interesting things had once been stored up here, before people had carried them all away. The museum had even expressed an interest in the cavalry officer's uniform worn by her greatgrandfather, and her grandfather's drum had been here too, though the skin was broken. Her grandfather had served with Count Haugwitz's infantry regiment. It wasn't nearly as bad in those days: they only had tallow candles for light, of course, but on the other hand there was less lying and no stealing. When her grandfather was transferred to the cavalry, he played on a harp so big they had to transport it on a cart pulled by ponies. In 1866 he had fought in the battle near Hradec, and he had proud memories of it, even though he'd been on the losing end.

'We were occupied then, too,' she winked at me conspiratorially, 'but it was a Prussian occupation. And the Prussians,' she added at once, 'put a notice on the wall here saying they hadn't come as conquerors, and would fully respect our national rights. Sir, this building has memories. During the last war, when they shot Heydrich, the Germans pasted on our wall a list of people they'd executed. Father ordered a special shipment of black-bordered envelopes, but then they locked him up, and six months later my mother was sending them out herself with letters of condolence.

'After that, by God's will, the blows came one after the other. Our building was confiscated by our own people and they were worse than the foreigners, and on top of that there was no one to drive them out. Last thing, right over there,' and she pointed to the corner of the attic

where there was a new mansard, 'Doctor Tereba had his observatory. He didn't have a family, and he'd spend all his nights up here. Venus was his wife, he'd say, and the moon and the planets were his children. You'll understand that, sir, because I know you measure by the stars, too; that young man who drives you around explained it to me. But you just figure out where things are on the earth. Doctor Tereba, he could figure out what would happen on the earth. Even before it happened, he told us about the disaster of the communist take-over in 'forty-eight. He had his telescope right here,' she walked over to the mansard and pointed to a pile of handbags on the floor, 'when the Americans flew to the moon; I invited everyone in the building up here so we could be a little closer to such a momentous event. And would you believe it? With my own eyes I saw how a cloud of dust was raised up there on the moon when that rocket landed. That's when I realized the moon wasn't what it used to be, if people can go walking about on it. Well, Doctor Tereba's gone too, and now they want to tear the place down. I tell you, that'll be the end of me. I don't think I could survive that.' She looked at me imploringly, as though it were within my power to save the building from destruction.

As I looked into her eyes, I could suddenly see, despite the vast distance in time, a line of Hussars in snow-white greatcoats, silvered by the light of the moon. The ominous sound of drumming reached the attic, and among the drummers a lone soldier was riding on a wagon, playing a harp. But no one could hear it over the drumming, not even when the soldier plucked the strings with all his might.

The Surveyor

WE DROVE OUR Romanian car to the top of a hill outside Chrudim and stopped a short distance from the new water tower. A road led up here, made of concrete slabs laid end to end. The point we had to re-survey should have been right beside the road, but someone had moved the marker stake, along with the cement base and the warning plate saying that anyone who moved the state's triangulation point was liable to prosecution.

The surveyor studied his map for a while. We then ran the tape-measure over the ground until we found, right by the edge of one of the concrete slabs, the spot where the triangulation point was supposed to be. I fetched the probe, a long iron bar with a point at one end, and for a few minutes we stabbed it into the earth without result. I expressed doubts that the mark-stone could have survived all the changes that had obviously taken place. The bulldozer, after all, would have hollowed out a roadbed wider than the concrete slabs. The stone must have been dug up.

'But then where is it?' the surveyor asked. 'They could have dug it up and then covered it with fill,' he admitted, 'but maybe they raised the level of the terrain when they

made the road. In that case, the stone would have remained in its proper spot, but buried even deeper.' He took the pick and began to dig. The earth I shovelled out of the hole — mainly gravel — was obviously fill. I couldn't imagine finding our stone underneath it, but the surveyor worked tirelessly and, as though aware of the folly of his effort, refused to let me dissuade him. When the trench he'd dug was deep enough to accommodate a kneeling sniper, he took the iron probe again and rammed it repeatedly into the ground right up to the grip. He struck nothing. 'It's always possible,' he said, 'that we've measured the distances imprecisely, or that some inaccuracies crept into the map we inherited. We ought to measure the position of the point again.'

The next day we brought a theodolite along. The surveyor levelled the instrument, tightened it on its pedestal, and began to focus in on the church tower while I, happy not to have either to dig or paint stakes, wrote down the angles he called out.

That evening the surveyor sat at his crippled table doing his calculations. The precision he worked to astonished me, especially since I know that slapdash work on our part would either never be discovered at all, or found out only after many years had gone by. Undoubtedly the knowledge that our measurements were as accurate as he could make them gave him satisfaction.

He was a rural man. He lived in a hamlet somewhere in the borderland between Bohemia and Moravia and he travelled about as far to Meštec as I did. His train arrived on Monday around ten; my bus from Prague got there an hour later. From that moment until Friday afternoon, we couldn't escape from each other; we even sat down to lunch

together. But both of us were silent types, and besides, there wasn't much time for conversation when we were working. I knew he was building an extension to his parents' house, in which he and his wife would live; that he was fattening up a bull he'd been given as a wedding present; that he ran for the fun of it, and played hockey and chess when he had the time.

He was my son's age; they both had finished their studies at the same time. And both had married only a few months before. He reminded me of my son, too, in his closed nature, and his kindly smile. These similarities inspired me to try to communicate with him on more than just a superficial level. But when people have no shared inheritance of work or songs or rituals or holy books or even heroes — when the bridges between us are fewer— what can bring them together?

Both of us were looking for a dining-room table.

Above the furniture store we occasionally drove past, a large red banner with yellow lettering on it declared that the aim of our ruling party was prosperity for all humanity. The surveyor would occasionally drop in to ask if they had a table. They never did. The bombastic claim over the doorway ridiculed us and we knew it, just as everyone who lived under this government of sloganeers knew it. Collectively humiliated, we shared contempt for those who humiliated us. But contempt and humiliation cannot uplift people and therefore cannot bring them closer together.

Sometimes I could see us as others saw us. Two figures of unequal age and position who moved through the countryside, across wet meadows and beet fields, carrying worn-out instruments and coloured stakes.

The older man would like to know what the younger

one thought about the world and whether he perhaps blamed his older companion for the state of the country. The older man has even prepared a defence should the question come up in conversation. He would explain what the war had done to him and his peers, how much anxiety and how many wrong-headed Utopian visions it had inspired in them. And he would explain the blindness that every vision produces.

He is apprehensive about the moment the younger man will begin this conversation, but he is even more apprehensive that the younger man will not start the conversation at all because the questions have never crossed his mind. Perhaps the old lies, the coup d'états, the wrongs, the controversies, the illusions, the torturing, the artifice and the crimes no longer interest him, just like the war, even further in the past. Perhaps the younger man thinks the grey cloud that has hung over his head all his life is the natural colour of the sky, if he ever looks up at it at all.

One day, the two men lose their way in the woods and start walking back down a hill in the wrong direction. The younger man, of course, has his spirit-level and his stopwatch, the older man his wire-brush, his machete and his box of paints and brushes, but none of these is any use in finding their way.

The younger man becomes upset. He is responsible for the work they are doing and for the car they have left in a field. He suggests they retrace their steps, but the older man is not enthusiastic about the idea. He doesn't feel like going back up the hill. Wandering through the woods makes far more sense to him than digging holes in the ground and burying slabs of concrete. He suggests they keep on

walking; they will certainly get somewhere eventually.

But what if that takes us further from the car? the younger man objects.

Don't think about the car.

This answer surprises the younger man, but then he says: I understand, but what do you expect to find?

He has a point. What is there to expect? What surprises? What unsurveyed countryside? What hope?

The younger man is waiting for an answer. He has not met many people in his life from whom he might expect a meaningful answer. He has been educated, of course: they handed him a lot of formulae, practical information and also many superstitions and half-truths about the world he lives in. At home, they raised him to be honest and diligent. One must work to live. But why he should live, that they didn't tell him, or didn't know.

Perhaps the older man has experience or knowledge that he could relate to his young friend — perhaps this is the reason for his being here.

But the younger man does not receive an answer; so he shrugs his shoulders and says, 'Whatever you think.'

So they continue on their way, not knowing where it will lead. The woods thin out, the air begins to smell strangely of cinders, smoke, even of sulphur, as though they were not walking through a wood, but the scene of some conflagration.

It's a good sign that he's come this way with me, the older man thinks. He says: 'Don't you think it's interesting that the act of measuring inevitably leads to a descent?'

The younger man does not understand what he means.

'We are constantly becoming more precise,' the older man explains, 'as we try to describe the Earth or the organization

of matter. We are forever finding smaller particles, but we can't seem to shift in the other direction.'

'But,' the younger man objects. 'We're always discovering new galaxies.'

'I'm not thinking of galaxies, I'm thinking of what's above us, I mean above man.'

The younger man nods.

'I was brought up to believe there was nothing above me,' says the older man. 'When the war came, they locked us up, and they murdered almost everyone in our family. Back then, the killing was going on all over the world. My father saw in that a confirmation of his beliefs: if God existed, he would never have allowed such cruel, unjust and pointless bloodshed. But others saw it as God's punishment for the sins of men. After all, the slaughter of children is presented in the Bible as one of the punishments for denying God.'

They are coming to a crossroads; it's not the right time to get involved in a discussion of abstract ideas. The younger man silently chooses one of the paths and continues walking.

'After the war,' the older man recalls, 'I knew other people who were locked up just as absurdly and arbitrarily as we were. This happened to our landlord's daughter, who was seventeen at the time.' The older man doesn't say out loud that in his imagination he had longed to make love to the girl. He only says that when she came back many years later and told him about her miserable internment in the camp, she mentioned that one thing had become clear to her there: it was simply not possible that man was the highest form of life in the universe.

'That's an interesting idea,' the younger man says.

'Sometimes people really can be worse than animals. Not long ago, I don't know if you read about it, some guy in England murdered a woman, a total stranger, right in front of her kids, then he went home, shot his mother and then went on the rampage and killed fourteen more people — just for fun. '

For a while they talk about insane gunmen, both the kind that wear stocking masks over their faces and the kind that wear a uniform. The younger man, it seems, is interested in this problem of gunmen. He plays chess, and finds it pleasant to talk about distant violence. The older man, for his part, is sorry that their conversation is losing its point.

They finally emerge from the woods. Below them a dirty river winds through the countryside. The bank is riddled with ditches full of stagnant rainbow-tinged water. The earth here is bare; only the steep piles of rubble are overgrown with weeds. There are no murderers lying in wait, but across the river tall, ash-covered smokestacks vomit thick billowy grey smoke into the air. The smoke kills slowly and invisibly.

The younger man asks: 'Don't you think that what you were talking about — some higher wisdom or whatever it was — moves in a completely different space or in different dimensions from ours?'

The older man admits it is possible.

The path leads down to the river. A tug-boat is approaching, drawing a barge loaded with coal. The boat is black, the coal is dark brown, and the clay banks of the river are ochre, like the muddy river water. There is no colour here, except for some bright clothes drying on a rope strung across the stern of the tug.

Both men look at this unexpected display, and as the tug

draws level with them, a girl in a colourful dress emerges from below, her long hair cascading over her bare shoulders. The younger man waves. The girl leans back against the wall of the wheelhouse and she stares at both men, motionless.

The younger man puts his hands to his mouth and calls out: 'Take us with you!'

'Come aboard!' the young woman replies. They can distinguish a smile on her face.

'But what about the water between us?' the younger man shouts. The river is wide here and the boat is almost on the other side.

'So, get a little wet!' The girl disappears below.

'Let's go and meet her when the boat docks. After all, she's invited us,' suggests the younger man. The older man wonders if, hidden in this encounter, in the few words he has heard, there isn't some deeper meaning, or even something like a sign.

As we were driving around, we talked mostly about work, sometimes about sports. I also tried to understand something of what we were doing, and the surveyor willingly gave me lectures on azimuths, geodetic lines and the co-ordinates of terminal points.

To get his degree, he'd had to live away from home since he was fourteen. He had been taught how to adapt to the conditions of the surveyor's life in the field. During the day, his teachers were strict and demanded precision. In the evenings, they played cards, drank beer and told stories from their bachelor days, and thus helped prepare the students for the isolation to come. A real surveyor spends most of his life far from the home he has often had no time to establish.

When he started working, then, there were no surprises. As the youngest in the firm, he was sent to the most desolate places. When there was work to do, time went by quickly, but when it rained, he didn't know how to kill time. He read a little, but the available books could not, for the most part, hold his interest. Sometimes, even when it was raining, he would go out for a run, but he would always end up sitting with strangers in village pubs, drinking with them and having the kind of conversations he'd have had in the same place back home. After his fifth or sixth beer, he no longer needed to drink or talk, or even listen too carefully. The world rolled itself into a cone in which he could exist quite comfortably until the time came to sleep. He would wake up with an aching head, overwhelmed by an emptiness that could not be dispelled.

A year ago, when he was twenty-seven, he had been sent to survey in the south of Moravia. He lived in a hamlet that was 156 metres above sea-level. The highest point of land was seven metres above that. Moaning winds blew across the flat expanses. Sometimes, when he climbed to the top of the church tower and looked across the river, he would catch glimpses of neat houses in Austrian villages and brightly coloured cars that flashed by on Austrian roads. In such moments, he was overcome by strange misgivings. Something was going on outside, in the world, and his time was standing still.

The people in the hamlet seemed nice enough. They drank wine and loved to talk and sing noisily. He drank beer and took no part in the singing. Once, when he was walking back to his dormitory, he left the road. For a while he wandered along in a ditch, until he finally collapsed under a thick blackthorn bush. The cold in the middle of

the night awakened him. Above his head little drops of dew, illuminated by moonlight, glistened on the leaves and branches. He knew that he should get up and go back to the dormitory. His head was clear, clearer then it had ever been during the day, and for that reason he knew that it didn't matter where he was lying, or whether he caught a cold or even died of exposure. He closed his eyes again and fell asleep.

Next morning, he realized that things were beginning to go wrong in his life, and he was astonished at how little it bothered him. Nevertheless, when Friday came around and he was getting ready to go home, he changed into his good clothes as usual, because his parents were proudly expecting their son, the surveyor.

On the train he developed a thirst and when he got out, he stopped for a beer and missed the last bus. It was at least a two-hour walk home, and it was going to rain. Fortunately, he hadn't forgotten how to run. In a small park behind a school he noticed a girl sitting on a bench with her head in her hands. He ran past her, but he came back. The wind whipped up swirls of dust on the path and it began to rain. He didn't know why the girl was crying, or even how he could comfort her. But it didn't seem right to leave her there. He helped her up, and they ran into a kind of passageway for shelter. He know nothing about her, but he tried to cheer her up, or at least to get her mind off her troubles. When the rain slackened, he walked her home. He gave her his address; she wrote to him. But she never told him why she was crying in the park, and they never talked about it afterwards. He spent a whole evening composing a reply. He was unaccustomed to writing letters, particularly this kind, but the letter worked.

When they were married a few months ago, colleagues and school friends gathered from all over the country. Two came on horseback dressed in white and yellow leggings and long, dark blue overcoats, the kind the imperial military engineers used to wear. Afterwards they persuaded him and his bride to mount a horse and ride through a triumphal arch of red and white striped surveying stakes.

They were expecting a child just before Christmas. By the time the child was born, the surveyor would be living at home. This is, in fact, his last surveying job; as of next year, he was changing employers.

Had he found something more interesting?

No, not really. He'd be spending most of his time in an office, but he'd be able to go home every evening. That's the way his wife wanted it, and it would be better for the child as well.

I couldn't imagine my father ever showing any concern for my mother or me while he was working. He never doubted that work took precedence over everything else. My father believed, as his father did before him, in the unambiguous benefits of his work.

I asked the surveyor if he wanted a son or a daughter. He shrugged his shoulders. 'It makes no difference. Women have a hard life — and so do we, in different ways. My wife says she doesn't care either,' he added. 'But she'd prefer a girl. She thinks she'd get along better with a girl, and besides, a girl wouldn't have to do time in the army.'

He never mentioned his wife by name. Perhaps he was trying to preserve his privacy and her mystery.

We were on top of the hill by the water tower, looking for our lost triangulation point again.

By precise calculations, the surveyor had determined that

the point should be the same distance from the edge of the concrete slabs, but slightly above the place we'd first begun to dig. In fact, all we needed to do was lengthen our original hole.

I expressed admiration for a science that, by measuring from a distant church tower, could accurately locate any point on the earth's surface. But I still didn't believe we could find the missing stone.

The surveyor started digging down towards the hypothetical point. I shovelled the loose dirt out of the hole.

'They must have at least left the marker here somewhere,' he said as he doggedly stabbed the ground with the probe.

But they hadn't. All we could do was install a new one. Why wouldn't he do so? I preferred not to ask.

As usual, we returned as it was getting dark. I couldn't tell whether he felt badly about not finding the stone, or whether he was content to be able to report, with some certainty, that the point had been destroyed.

At home, he retired to his three-legged table, turned on his radio and began to work something out. Later he appeared in my room. 'I've just heard an interesting programme,' he announced. 'Have you heard of the "Big Bang"?'

I had.

'So listen to this,' he said excitedly. 'They apparently calculated the volume of the material from which everything else, the whole universe, was made.'

'Is that possible?'

He shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he took no responsibility for the information. 'They claim the volume can be expressed by the figure ten to the minus fifty cubic metres.'

'That's pretty small.'

'Small? It's less than nothing. The diameter of an atom is something on the order of ten to the minus eight cubic metres. Can you imagine that?'

I had to admit that I couldn't.

The Countryside

I BROUGHT the girl who worked in the stationery shop the plastic figurine representing the hideous-looking E.T., but I couldn't give it to her right away. That morning, we set out before the store opened, and by the time we returned she was already gone. I'd have to wait for a rainy day, when we'd stay at home. That wasn't the only thing I'd reserved for a rainy day. There was also a package of books I hoped to read.

But that autumn turned out to be the driest we'd ever had and I saw the girl only once. I'd lost a pencil that morning, and I went into the store to buy a new one.

There were no customers in the shop. The girl was sitting behind the counter reading. 'It's you?' she said, astonished. 'I thought you'd gone. I never see you around.' She stood up and groaned. 'Everything hurts today,' and she ran her hands over both hips. 'Somewhere over by Hlinsko they say they've found this really fantastic healer who works miracles. Have you heard of him?'

She walked unsteadily to the drawer where she kept the pencils, pulled it out and asked me to choose one. 'They say he takes one look at you and he can tell exactly what's wrong. And he cures you with the power that comes from

his fingers and his eyes.'

'That's what they say,' I admitted. I knew the priest in the village where the healer lived.

'Do you think he'd see me?'

'Certainly. He sees everyone.'

'There must be loads of people who want to see him.'

'Sometimes you have to wait all night.'

'They say he even cured people who couldn't walk. Do you believe that?'

'It depends on what was wrong with them,' I said. 'And what about your mother?' I asked. 'Is she still in hospital?'

'She won't be coming home,' she said matter-of-factly. 'I haven't been able to see her for at least two weeks. I'd go there with my little girl, but she's had an ear-ache. And if I go alone, there's nothing to talk about. All she can do is lie there.'

Her voice seemed unsteady. I paid for the pencil, and as I left I caught sight of her through the glass door sitting down, with some difficulty, to read her magazine.

If he is to check all the points in his network, a surveyor must criss-cross the countryside, not omitting a single field, and there is scarcely a village he will not have walked through many times, or at least driven through. Because his points are located on high land and in other prominent places, he must climb hills and church towers. He surveys a landscape bathed in sunlight and submerged in shadow. He sees its delectability and its distress.

One day, on a gentle slope near the Labe River, we were looking for a stone marker in a cornfield. The field was huge and the corn was so high that the surveyor had to jump on the bonnet of his car to scan the field with binoculars. When he saw the tip of the black and white

stake in the distance, he sent me ahead to find it. I held a staff above my head so that he would not lose sight of me, and pushed my way through the thick corn following his shouted directions.

When I reached the stone, I saw that a third of it was sticking out of the ground. It was easy to dig up; the soil here was soft, viscid and black. You could feel the fecundity of Mother Earth in it. We set the stone back in the ground properly and added several shovels of topsoil to fill the hole.

The water will just erode it again,' the surveyor remarked, speaking of the topsoil. 'You can see how much of it was washed away since the last survey.' This, I learned, had taken place seven years ago.

'Growing corn here,' the surveyor added, 'is a crime.'

A greedy farmer, not really a farmer at all, can destroy in a single seven-year period what it took thousands of years to create. And what he destroyed no one could ever restore.

While we were in the middle of the huge field, we were caught by a vehicle spewing dust from a line of nozzles. We couldn't pack our tools and escape in time, and suddenly found ourselves engulfed in a suffocating cloud. Tears streamed down our cheeks and we coughed, gasping for breath.

What would my wife have seen in this slowly dissipating cloud?

Perhaps from a distance it would have reminded her of a snowstorm, the floating clouds of milkweed seed on an Indian summer day, or mist rising from the bottom of a waterfall. But to me, in the middle of it, it was thick with memories of gas attacks and war.

There were fields that we passed every day. I observed

how the corn tassles turned grey and the kernels yellowed and hardened. When the corn in these fields was harvested, and all that remained of them was stubble, I saw bare patches previously hidden by the corn. Nothing grew there and nothing ever would. The next day tractors were turning over the soil with gigantic ploughs. Some time later, when we passed the same fields again, it was windy, and there were clouds of dust over the fields. The wind carried the earth away for ever. We were no longer looking at a field but at a desert. On these journeys we never saw a pheasant or a quail, or even a rabbit. Only mouse-holes and swarms of flies. These, I realized, were the life forms that would most probably survive.

At noon, depending on where we happened to be, we would either go somewhere for lunch or just sit down on the edge of a field, eat salami and a bun, and drink a bottle of mineral water. Most often we would stop at a roadside pub. Such places practiced strict segregation. A small taproom was set aside for workers, but entry into the dining-room in work clothes was forbidden. But that day, a smiling barwoman wouldn't even let us into the room set aside for us, because a wedding party had taken over the whole restaurant.

We left our quasi-military vehicle beside some colourful little cars decked out in streamers and went to buy something in the store around the corner. From the windows of the restaurant we were not allowed to enter because of our clothes, we could hear the shrieks of the wedding guests. Suddenly the door opened and three young men appeared, dragging the bride between them. She wore a garland of freesias in her hair and offered little resistance, merely holding the lacy hem of her long

wedding gown off the ground and occasionally making a show of trying to escape from her captors. When they pushed her into a decorated car that had squealed to a stop by the main entrance, she began to giggle in a high, joyous, seductive voice. As the car careered out on to the road, she managed to wave out of the window at us and at the other wedding guests who had meanwhile gathered in the doorway.

Before we knew it we were surrounded by a second group of young men in suits who, with the persistence of people who've been drinking, tried to persuade us that we had a duty — we were the only sober men around — to take them with us and give chase to the kidnappers. If we caught up with them we could have all the food we could eat and all the beer we could drink.

As usual, I couldn't read the surveyor's thoughts from the expression on his face, but he moved a bundle of stakes from the seat in the back of the car and nodded to the young man who was obviously the groom, and two other wedding guests, to climb aboard. We got in the front and drove off in pursuit.

In every village we came to, we stopped at the pub, or at least slowed down to look for the car decorated with streamers. We finally caught up with them at the fifth pub. The groom and his two guests jumped out while the car was still moving and I heard the loud laughter when they appeared inside. I saw the bride cautiously sipping from a mug of beer she'd been treated to.

One of the groom's companions quickly paid the bill for the kidnappers, the kidnapped and the rest of the people in the room, and then we got back in the car, this time with the bride. I offered her my seat beside the driver, but she

preferred to squeeze in beside her newly acquired husband.

The surveyor suggested a short cut, and took off across the fields of stubble. I did not look around, but I could hear behind me the whispering of a happy female voice; the air was filled with the fragrance of flowers.

Perhaps the car itself felt the strangeness of the occasion. Certainly the driver must have realized that this was perhaps the last such opportunity in his surveying career. We bounced lightly over the ridge of a hill, and then we were practically flying above the reddish stubble in the fields. The surveyor's whole body was tensed; all he needed was a helmet and he was an aviator, gently and skilfully manoeuvring his machine so close to the ground that the onlookers gasped in wonder.

I glanced briefly over my shoulder into the back of the car. The bride was resting her head on the groom's shoulder. Her eyes were closed and her garland had slipped to one side. She was a country girl with a pert little nose and freckled cheeks. There were a few small beads of perspiration on her upper lip. It occurred to me that her gentleness, her mystery, was precisely what was missing from our work, from the whole age of engineering.

Only on one other occasion did our job bring us into the proximity of women. While we were surveying a narrow strip of meadow beside a stream, there were several young women just across the water, picking flowers from a field of asters that stretched as far as we could see. As we worked, the sound of their voices was constantly in our ears.

I was holding the tape and looking into the shallow brook. I noticed how tranquil the place and the moment

were. Even the distant tower blocks, which usually made me feel crowded, seemed, in the haze of autumn mists and behind a screen of feminine laughter, more like a constructivist painting or a theatrical backdrop.

'When we finish the survey,' Kos suggested, let's go over and pick some flowers.'

Though I knew that the flowers would have wilted by tomorrow I didn't object: the slide from our monotonous routine into a field of flowers inhabited by young women meant more than just a short walk across a bridge.

So that we wouldn't forget which world we belong to and the god we serve, a roll of thunder sounded behind us. The noise grew quickly to a crescendo and became recognizable as the roar of a jet engine at full throttle.

Then we saw them. Not far from us, midway between where we were standing and the mist-shrouded apartment towers, contemptuous of all living things, jet fighters speeding towards an invisible but precisely surveyed concrete runway. I looked regretfully across the stream at the field of flowers, which seemed to tremble in alarm and then flee, fading from our sight like a dream vision.

At regular intervals, this same ceremony was repeated. And each time the languages of birds, animals, people, silence and even our inmost thoughts were sacrificed on enormous funeral pyres.

We finished the survey, got into the car and, adding some noise of our own to the ceremony, drove off to another place to continue our work, preparing fresh data for new and better runways.

The Factory

WE SET OUT in a sticky autumn fog when it was still dark.

There were several triangulation points inside the grounds of a factory, and in the area around it, but the surveyor had put off checking them. We needed several letters of reference and permits from the department of special projects and, anyway, we assumed that the benchmarks inside the factory would be the least likely to be damaged.

The factory lay just off the main road in the most fertile part of the country's Golden Belt of arable land. A high wall surrounded the factory and only the foul odour of the fog warned us that we had arrived. We parked the car and walked over to the main entrance where a fat female guard asked us if we were carrying matches. When we assured her we were not, she let us into the waiting-room where we were to remain until the company surveyor came to get us.

The waiting-room was painted from floor to ceiling in a greyish-brown oil-based paint. The floor was covered with worn and dirty ochre-coloured linoleum. The only décor was a poster warning against the danger of naked flame, and a clumsy-looking metal telephone. Anyone finding himself here could have no illusions about what to expect inside.

All I could see of the interior of the factory was a concrete yard and a few grey buildings. Occasionally the door would open and someone would hurry through importantly. A young woman in a black dress with a sickly pale face ran in. Paying no attention to us, she lifted the receiver on the phone and dialled a three-digit number. She was having trouble getting a line and while she pleaded, nearly in tears, to be connected, to communicate what I had no doubt was some bad news, I could hear the shrieking laughter of women behind me. Turning round, I saw four women in the unattractive dark grey uniforms of the factory guards bent over a magazine which, I surmised from the tone of their laughter, was 'objectionable,' or even 'diversionist,' as our police terminology has it. But perhaps the magazine was not objectionable; perhaps they were only delighted that they had got the better of life, with their pistols on their hips.

Finally, the factory surveyor showed up. He was short, wearing a leather jacket, jeans, and high-heeled shoes to increase his stature. He carried a roll of paper under his arm. He and Kos stared at each other for a while, then realized they'd gone to school together, and at once began trading accounts of their recent lives and comparing incomes.

We returned to our car, where the factory surveyor looked at our letters of recommendation and our permits, cursed the local bureaucracy, then pulled a top-secret map out of his roll. Two of the triangulation points, it seemed, were easily accessible; the third and fourth lay in a highly restricted area. The factory surveyor would inform the guard of our presence to prevent our being shot as spies. He smiled and left us.

'I wish this thing were over with,' my boss said. 'You never know here what you'll get mixed up in. The last time this place blew up, it took about four hundred people with it. Some of them completely vanished, except for maybe a watch that they found two kilometres away.'

When the diminutive factory surveyor returned we asked him about this catastrophe.

"That's bullshit,' he said. 'The gunpowder section blew up two years ago; it happened during the lunch break. Five dead and a couple of wounded. Mostly cuts and bruises. There was glass flying around all over the place,' he said, warming to the memory. 'But no one lost an eye. That's the thing, my friends, when you see a flash of light around here — even if it's only a thunderstorm — cover your eyes.'

While we were waiting for a yard engine to shunt some cisterns out of the way that, as far as we know, might have been filled with dynamite, trinitrotoluene or even nitroglycerine, he explained to us how in the aniline department they only took women over the age of forty and, even then, they had to sign a statement saying they're aware of the dangers.

'What are the dangers?'

'A hundred and eighteen per cent increased chance of cancer of the bladder.'

'And they sign?'

'Of course they do. They get risk money every month — at least four hundred crowns.'

Although they were not marked with stakes, we found the first two points easily. I gave them a fresh coat of paint, and painted red arrows on the surrounding trees.

The third point was on a wooded knoll just inside a high barbed-wire fence. It was a double fence of the kind they

put around prison camps. There was even a watch-tower. The oak and birch trees in the woods had already turned yellow and brown and seemed to be exhaling a chemical stench. The surveyors were poring over the map again, arguing. Eventually they came to the conclusion that one of the stones lay outside the fence.

We set the tripod up over the accessible stone and returned to the car. We turned on to the road, passed a high cooling tower and an assembly of boilers and pipes in which something liquid I didn't want to know about was being created, drove through a side gate and came to a halt at the edge of the woods. We took another tripod out and very carefully, as though it were sacred, the surveyor brought out the case containing the spirit level. Even outside the factory, enormous pipes supported on low trestles snaked through the trees. In several places, a vapour of some sort was escaping from them.

We positioned the level over the stone with great effort and the surveyor tried to get a clear view of the tripod we'd left on the knoll inside the fence. All we could see was a thicket of tree trunks, large and small. Using the machete and the axe, we chopped a trail right to the fence where, with our combined strength, we felled a spruce tree. We returned to the stone pillar and even I could now see the yellow leg of the tripod on the small knoll across the way.

My young boss looked dissatisfied and widened the swathe to the fence with the machete. Then he ordered me to stay with the expensive equipment while he drove back around to the other side of the fence.

Left alone, I could hear the thud of distant explosions and the honking of yard engines, but otherwise it was silent. It was near the end of October and the birds, if any

survived here, weren't singing. A watery sun was beginning to force its way through the mist above the treetops. Occasionally, with a quiet plop, a toxic drop of dew would slip off the edge of a leaf.

Mystery is a direct insult to our self-assurance. If there were no longer any mystery, we imagine that a beautiful and safe sense of certainty would inhabit the world (even though we don't know what it would be certainty about). We have thus become accustomed to celebrating as giants those who have worked hardest to rid us of mystery. After all, they have led us out of darkness where, at any moment, we might have been assaulted by the inexplicable, where pestilence and witches lie in wait. It never occurs to us that they have also set us down here in the middle of a bland superhighway planted with signs. We pass our lives rushing from sign to sign.

One day we will come up against the limit of the tolerable and the possible. It seems to me that this day is already drawing near. Man, it would seem, cannot remain in one place. The moment he finds himself at a border he cannot go beyond, he must give up. But where could he return to now?

In the distance, I caught sight of the surveyor's rust-coloured sweater. For a while, it flitted here and there, then I heard the familiar voice calling to me to throw the tools over the fence. More branches and trunks were felled; I was now able to make out the legs of the tripod. Still, however, my boss could not see the two discs on the ends of the apparatus on my side of the fence.

Again and again, following his instructions, I lopped off branches that seemed to block his view, until he discovered that the real impediment was the trunk of a stately birch.

He came down the hill with his fellow surveyor and, for a while, across the fence, we discussed what we should do. The two of them decided they would have to cut the birch down.

I objected. We couldn't chop down such a magnificent tree simply because we wanted to.

The factory surveyor looked at me with contemptuous astonishment. 'Here?' he said, pointing up at the diseased treetops.

Later, I thought of what I should have said: 'That's exactly why we shouldn't.' Meanwhile, they had thrown me a saw over the barbed wire.

As a student, I had cut down trees infested with bark-beetles, and I even felt proud of being able to do such manly work, bringing down a fifteen-metre spruce right where I wanted it to fall. I tried to remember whether I'd felt any regret for the tree.

I walked over to the birch, which as yet knew nothing of its fate, and looked up into its crown. The sky had cleared, and the yellow leaves seemed to be radiating their own light. I remembered that the captive spirits of innocent maidens lived in birch trees. I could not have put my arms around it. The tree was at least two metres in diameter. I took the axe and drove it into the white bark to make a notch in the side I wanted it to fall towards, then I grasped the saw and began to cut. The saw bit into the wood, the white sawdust spilled out and I breathed in its smell.

As the saw cut deeper into the wood, the trunk resisted more and more. It was its only defence — to squeeze the blade tightly and not let it go. I decided to pull the saw out and start cutting from the opposite side. Sweat was running down my forehead. I took off my jacket and went on

working. The tree groaned and creaked silently. I could hear the terrified, astonished whispering of the leaves in the crown.

I pulled the saw out and rested a while. There were quiet footfalls, and when I looked in the direction they were coming from, I saw a soldier with a gun. He was approaching slowly along a path beside the fence. When he walked past, he looked at me without stopping or even slowing down.

The trunk, now full of desperate determination, was binding the saw blade on both sides.

I hated myself for getting forced into this job. What good is all our surveying? What was the use of us pounding through the corn? Why did I have to take the life of this pure, white tree? Those who obey contemptible orders are themselves contemptible.

But my regret, as often happens in life, had come too late. The tree was already dying.

They called over from the other side of the fence, wanting to know how far through I was, but I didn't answer. I pulled the saw out again, took the axe and began with a fury to widen the cut. Then I pushed against the tree to test its resistance. But the birch was still firm, as though its veins had not yet been cut.

Man has struggled with nature from the beginning, killing animals and clearing forests, but he took life so he himself could survive. We take life so we can erect the works of the age of engineering. We do not kill from an instinct to preserve life, but from an instinct that leads us to extinction.

Gradually, the desperate squeezing of the tree against the blade relaxed, and silently, desperately and for the last

time, the spirit of the tree groaned — then cracked. Its branches clutched at the surrounding trees but could not hang on. The yellowing leaves rained to the ground.

On the opposite slope the surveyors cheered. Now nothing blocked their view. I sat down on my coat while they gathered their measurements.

The soldier returned along the path between the fences. He must have seen the fallen tree, the branches that reached out to the fence, but he was not interested. Like other soldiers, who ignored fallen men and women with arms outstretched to other fences.

When the surveyor reappeared on my side of the fence, it was twenty-five to two. We packed up all the instruments and carried them back to the car. Then the surveyor went to inform the department of special projects of our departure.

He came back, smiling. It seems the factory surveyor had forgotten to tell the guards what we were up to. They wanted to know if there had been any unpleasantness.

I mentioned the soldier pacing up and down inside his wire cage as though drugged, without noticing me, without even registering my existence.

'Can you blame him?' asked the surveyor. 'If I were him, the only thing I'd feel like shooting at would be that fence.'

Mr. K.

Director

Office of Social Security

Prague

Dear Mr K.

In talking to my fellow writers, I have discovered that it is not only my work you have doubted, but theirs as well. I understand that most of them have decided to appeal against your decision and prove that they are artists. In evidence, they are bringing you books, clippings to show that their plays have been presented on various world stages, and even documentation of their literary prizes.

Perhaps you have wondered why I haven't done the same. I could simply declare that such behaviour seems undignified, or proclaim that I would rather accept my fate than rebel against it, and there would undeniably be some truth in that. But I would be lying if I pretended that it is not my wish for people like you to disappear from the positions you occupy in the castles where you ply your contemptible trade. It still remains unclear, however, what to do to make you disappear.

No one, as perhaps even you know, is immortal or invulnerable. Even the most magnificent heroes and demigods, when you take away their impregnable shields, their magic swords and tireless muscles, have their Achilles' heel, their need to touch the earth. Your shield and your sword are your position, raised high not only above the earth, but above all of life, above everything human — not to mention everything just.

Anyone who joins in debate with you — I mean an honest debate — not only cannot win, but also, by acknowledging your arbitrary power, confirms the feeling of superiority that

power brings. What does a book or a play mean to you — or any work, no matter how brilliant? What does an artist who is debating with you mean? You have him exactly where you— and those who have nominated you — want him: at your feet, and you let him stay there as long as possible. You let him tremble, let him squirm, let him grovel, let him write requests which you are only too happy to fill your waste-basket with. You enjoy his humiliation. After all, you are beyond reach.

So where is your vulnerable spot?

Of course, your body, just as your entire being, can be replaced, traded in for another one at any time. But what cannot be traded in and replaced is the world that you and those who appointed you have created for yourselves. It is an artificial world that you declare to be the only real one, for in it the only laws that count are the laws that you have made, and truth is only what you declare it to be. You are vulnerable only to a power which can disrupt the unity of your world, and thus make you visible to people.

That power, Mr K., lies in stories. In stories from the real world. You may throw a hundred appeals for justice out with the garbage and no heart will tremble, but you cannot silence a hundred stories. These stories, no matter what they say, if they are carried by love, by suffering or by tenderness, will always throw into relief your contemptible and empty work. In the end, they will wound you and you will fall from your apparently unconquerable height back into the nothingness from which you emerged. I would only hope that, as you fall, at least you will understand that these stories will outlive you.

With regards

K. (Surveyor's Assistant)

Cemeteries

THE GIRL from the stationers was wearing black.

Her mother's story was a simple one. She worked for twenty years in a factory, mostly in shipping. The work was badly paid, but it seemed safe. Her husband was a warehouse manager. With his job he got a two-room company flat in a housing estate. They had two children.

The girl didn't know what more she could say about her mother. Sometimes on Sundays after lunch, when time allowed, they would go together to visit Grandma. On the train, her mother would unwrap sweet buns or breaded pork cutlets. Sometimes, in the evening, they would watch television together. The television set was so old that the picture was always fading. The father was seldom home; he spent his evenings in bars and would come back drunk, but he was kind, never shouted at anyone, and never beat them.

They didn't go on holidays. The children spent part of their vacation at a young pioneers camp, and part of it with their grandmother near the cement factory.

But the mother had promised that one day they would all go to the seaside together. She reckoned that when she went over to work in the aniline department, she could save up enough in two years to take the whole family to

Bulgaria. The father did not object; he never objected to anything. But several weeks before they were to go, he packed his things and moved in with some slut. The girl in the stationery shop was fourteen when this happened, her brother was ten. Their mother took them to Bulgaria all the same. There was numbing heat on the Golden Sands and crowds of people. Mother didn't know how to swim, so she lay on the beach and the first day got so badly burned that she cried for two nights in pain. On the third day they all got a bowel infection, and when they began to feel better, the weather changed and the sea became so rough no one was allowed to go in.

So the mother went for a walk, at least, along the beach. She saw an enormous white bird she didn't know the name of. It hovered just above the waves, and it even landed on the crest of one wave as though it were the deck of a ship. The mother stared at it transfixed, then ran for the children. But by the time they had come back to the sea, the remarkable bird was gone.

The mother worked in the aniline department for another three years, then went back to shipping. Last year she had begun to pass blood, but she told no one about it, and was afraid to see a doctor. Just ten weeks ago they had taken her to the hospital, and by that time, it was too late for a cure.

The girl had been to visit her mother three times during that period. On the third visit, her mother didn't recognize her. She'd been given morphine. Her eyes were tightly closed, her breathing slow and laboured. But the girl thought that she was smiling, and perhaps she really was. Perhaps she felt herself slipping away from suffering, or perhaps she had already glimpsed something that none of

us will see in this world. Perhaps it was some extraterrestrial being; perhaps it was that enormous white bird. The mother died that night and the hospital notified the girl by telegram. The funeral was tomorrow, at home and then in the cemetery just past the cement works. The dust doesn't bother the dead, though the flowers turn grey and have to be replaced frequently.

The village with the cement plant did not lie within the area we were surveying. We had, however, often been in cemeteries simply because they were usually next to churches where our benchmarks were.

The surveyor had to call on the priests or the vergers in their crumbling houses, to determine whether anything had been shifted or altered, particularly on the steeple or the dome, since the last survey. Sometimes I would see them in the doorway, old men with white collars, shaking their heads, confirming that no, the church had not been repaired. Sometimes they would invite him inside to complain about just that, that their church was deteriorating.

Meanwhile I would go to the cemetery, which was always open. Immediately I walked through the gate, I found myself in a different world. The graves seemed to be competing to see which could display the greatest variety and number of flowers, and if they were covered with grass, the green was not marred by a single weed. Something of the old values, customs and usages that have been forgotten everywhere else had survived here. Even in the most thinly populated villages, there would almost always be someone with a shovel or a rake or a watering can, tending a grave. And if they were not working, then they would stand in contemplation, or in silent prayer.

Just beyond the wall of one cemetery, there were two stone pillars and we worked on them until dusk. A cluster of children watched us from a distance. The moon came out over the low village roofs and when it appeared, so did the local priest. He had come to ask us if we'd like some refreshment.

He brought us out some coffee, and as we drank it he told us the story of an old farmer who had hidden in the mortuary in the 1950s. His friends had warned him that 'they' were coming to arrest him. The mortuary was locked, having been disused for years. People died in hospitals, after all, or they laid them out at home until the funeral. Only the sexton and the priest had the keys, and they brought the farmer food. The voluntary prisoner was given the third key so that he could leave this house of the dead whenever he had to. Fortunately, the lock worked both from inside and outside, although given the original purpose of the place, that should have been unnecessary. The cemetery was a good place to hide since, as we must have noticed, it was surrounded by a high wall and could only be seen from the steeple. It had its own water supply, and a compost heap in the corner right behind the mortuary.

The man lived there for almost a year. At night, when the moon was out, he did a little of the maintenance work in the churchyard. What did he do during the day? Perhaps he read, and apparently he also wrote something about his own life, but nothing of that survived. Then winter set in and things became more difficult. It was cold inside the mortuary, and outside there was snow, so the farmer left tracks when he went out. Both the priest and the sexton tried to persuade him to hide in their homes, but he

hesitated, perhaps because he didn't want to put them in any danger. In those days everything was treated as high treason or subversion and sabotage. One morning they found him dead inside the mortuary. He was given a quick, but Christian, burial, and they decided to destroy everything he left behind. It was too bad about the notebooks. In such isolation, a person may catch a glimpse of things we are not even aware of.

As I walked among the graves, it occurred to me that our obsession with measuring, counting, drawing and inventing comes not just from trying to expel mystery from the world, but also from the need to hold life itself at a distance, since otherwise it would terrify us by its brevity and its transience. In a digitalized world, not only does life vanish, death disappears as well. What remains, at the most, are citizens, populations, property and land registries.

One day, at another cemetery, I saw, bent over a grave, an oddly familiar angular head with prominent ears. For a moment I couldn't remember where I'd seen that head before, until the old man looked around and asked, 'Looking for someone's grave, comrade?' The word 'comrade' took me back to the corridor in the château that first day of my career as a surveyor's assistant. I answered as I had then: 'No, I'm not.'

'I have to come here once in a while,' he told me, as though apologizing, 'to look after my late wife's grave, to keep it from going to seed.'

The grave looked more neglected than the rest. The date on the stone indicated that his wife had passed away five years before. The grave had no cross and there were no flowers around it, only some desiccated heather.

'No one's even bothered to lay so much as a dry stick at

her grave,' he complained, 'and it's so close. And when she was alive they all greeted her, and whenever they needed something they came to her, even in the night.'

'Was your wife in the health service?' I asked, guessing.

'My wife made it further in life than I did. She was working for the district office,' he said proudly. 'And back in 1970, when we had to purge the party and society of anti-socialist elements, she was chairman of the screening committee — higher than me again.'

I understood that I was standing face to face with the older brother of K., the director, the addressee of my letters.

'Why, she could still be with us,' the old man complained. 'She wasn't yet sixty.' His voice quavered. He pulled a large wallet from his breast pocket and fished around in it for something. As he did so, several photographs spilled out to the ground. I bent down to pick them up. I'd have done the same for K., the director, if he were so despondent, so surrounded by emptiness. In one of the photographs I saw a young man with an obviously angular head, in another a girl with thick long hair. I handed back the photographs and he quickly stuck them into his pocket. 'There she is,' he said, having found the snapshot he was looking for. 'Who would have thought it?'

The face of the older sister of that family of which Mr K., the director, was also a member, revealed nothing. The thin, tight, unsmiling lips perhaps spoke of rigidity or intolerance.

'And now I'm in the home,' he sobbed suddenly. And do you think anyone will talk to me there? I hear them talking to each other, but whenever I approach them, they stand up as though they were just going.'

'Were these your children in the snapshots?'

'Don't talk to me about them! I feel closer to children who aren't my own. The girl stayed in Austria, and I arranged for her to go on that trip myself. She didn't even come back for her mother's funeral. What did she want that she couldn't have had here? And I don't talk to the boy either. You know what he did?' He waved his hands as though trying to drive away a terrible vision. 'He joined up with the Adventists. He even tried to convert me. "Dad," he says, "the end of the world is coming. Repent while there's still time." So I said to him: "Repent yourself. I haven't betrayed my ideals, I don't need to repent!" And I told him not to even bother writing to me. Life, comrade, has taught me how to be tough.' And the cheeks of this wretched man burned with flames of rage.

The surveyor came through the gate, walking beside a priest. The man saw them as well, and suddenly became alert and guarded: 'Who are you anyway? What are you doing here?'

'We're surveying.'

'Surveying? What?'

The earth.'

'Have you got a permit?'

For surveying, yes, but for simply walking upon the earth, we don't have the proper stamp. I walked away.

It is possible that this anxious stewardship of the cemeteries that sets them aside from the decay and neglect around them can be explained by something more than simple respect for past values. We avoid thinking about death, but death is all around us and impinges on us everywhere except here. In the cemetery lies lose their meaning, and without lies all the artificial world falls away.

And so this is where we, the living, retreat. We embellish the graves, adorn our asylum, build invisible but impenetrable walls to keep out the flags and banners, the slogans, the loudspeakers, the parades, the television screens.

The surveyor nodded to me. The priest was inviting us to climb the church tower to view the countryside.

I had a last look around. K.'s older brother was standing there alone, as though he himself had emerged from the grave. What was his past, and what lay ahead of him? What can a man who has lived in the grave have to look forward to? What could he be thinking about in his rigid isolation?

And suddenly, in a flash, it occurred to me: he was wondering whom he should report us to.

The Moon

IF WE MANAGED to finish everything in time here, the surveyor wanted me to go with him to Moravia, which was not far from his home. When he'd been there on a surveying trip earlier in the year, he'd needed to measure two points by the North Star, but the nights had not been clear enough for him to do so.

Sometimes, when we would come back from work after dark, Kos Would point to stars in the Little Dipper where the light of Polaris twinkled, and complain that all summer long the nights had never been this clear. Wouldn't this be a perfect time to survey?

If he felt like it, I would suggest, we could go first thing tomorrow. The weather looked stable.

'Do you think so?' I felt he was giving it serious thought, but next morning we would drive off to a field in the neighbourhood and, dripping with perspiration in the glaring sun, dig out a stone that had shifted position.

But as the autumn advanced and the number of underlined circles on the surveyor's map increased, the end of the work was in sight.

'Tomorrow, then,' he decided, 'if you agree, we could go.'

In fact it was a good idea to leave the night-time surveying until the end. Night makes every enterprise special and our work too, it seemed to me, ought to be concluded in a special way, at least. Besides that, I wanted to do something for my young boss when the work was over. I didn't know why, but I thought I might be more likely to find an opportunity on this trip.

There was no need to worry about accommodation, he added. He'd already told his wife I'd be staying over with them.

I was curious about his wife, but I said nothing, I only went to pack the best clothes I had with me.

Next morning we woke to a murky day. Under a cover of thick clouds, the smoke from a nearby chemical factory collected with no means of escape. We put our usual equipment in the car and drove off to a nearby village where there was still some work to do.

We set up our tripods and I sat down on a damp stone and wrote down the numbers the surveyor called out. I was sorry our trip had not materialized. Occasionally I would gaze up into the gloom, looking for signs of a change in the weather. Perhaps I saw a small opening in the clouds, but I suddenly found myself announcing, 'It's going to clear up this afternoon.'

The surveyor looked at me in astonishment. 'How do you know?'

I shrugged my shoulders.

'Do you think we ought to drop what we're doing here and go?'

I felt the way I once had in the woods when we'd lost our way. The responsibility was his; I was attracted by the journey itself. To be cautious, I suggested that we listen to

the weather forecast.

The forecast was Pythian, as it always is when the meterologists don't know what to say. Slightly overcast to cloudy, with occasional showers.

But the sun was beginning to come through the clouds.

'Do you really think it will clear up?'

He wanted to shift at least some of the responsibility to me, so I accepted it.

We gathered up all the instruments, put a few more in the car at home, then changed our clothes and set off.

The road wound into the hills, and we passed through villages I was seeing for the first time in my life. As the sky began to turn blue, I felt it was partly my doing.

'I'm sorry we didn't leave first thing,' Kos said. 'We could have started straight away. You can see the North Star from four o'clock on.'

Eventually we stopped by a farm building that stood at the side of a pond. The surveyor sounded the horn, then jumped out of the car and unlocked the heavy wooden gates. As soon as they were opened wide enough, a black and white Newfoundland bounded out and greeted us noisily, followed by a slight young woman with a large belly, a freckled face and light-coloured hair, who flung herself into his arms. So this was the creature he had found in the park weeping, crushed by a secret grief.

I could tell that the surveyor would have preferred to load up the instruments we needed and leave at once, but his wife insisted that we rest a while and have something to eat. His mother and grandmother appeared as well, and they all tried to persuade us to stay. The surveyor said he would go and tend to the bull, and he left me to the mercies of the women.

Upstairs, where the young couple lived, the rooms smelled of whitewash, new wood and paint. The surveyor's wife set a small table. 'We haven't managed to get a proper dining-table yet,' she said. There wasn't much furniture of any kind, but the parquet flooring was recently laid and the window frames freshly painted. In the corner, by the door, the large lobe-shaped leaves of some foreign plant rose out of a flower-pot.

'It's a monstera,' she said. 'I brought it from home. We had a fig tree as well, and each year it produced a few little figs, at least.'

I felt she wanted to tell me something quite different, or ask about something more important — most probably what I thought of her husband — but she said nothing more, so I remarked on how nice I thought their place looked, and told her that I enjoyed working with her husband. She nodded, blushed and then ran out of the room.

I sat down in an armchair beside a bookshelf and looked at the books. Outside, I could hear the Newfoundland's deep bass bark, and the geese honking. Voices echoed through the house, someone arrived and then left again. There weren't many books, but most of the authors were American, oddly enough the same ones I had admired when I was young. But then as far as publishing went, time had stood still for seventeen years.

We had supper at a table for two. The surveyor's wife gave up her place to me and sat in an armchair. While we ate, she crocheted some tiny item of baby clothing.

I would have liked to have gone on sitting there, for I had suddenly lost interest in night-time surveying, and would have preferred to learn something, at least, about my quiet and gentle hostess. But the surveyor was in a

hurry. What if the clouds were to move in?

So I went to put the instruments in the car, and then I opened the gate. His wife held the dog by the collar, and I realized why, back then in the park, my young boss had turned and gone back to this stranger, this weeping girl whose face he couldn't even see. He was drawn, through her, to the mystery that otherwise had no place in his strict and precisely measurable world.

'You see,' said Kos. 'It'll be dark in a little while.'

I replied that he had a nice home. That was all we said about his wife.

The shadows were lengthening across the countryside, and cool air was beginning to move in from the valley. We left the tripod with the disc by the woods and drove up a steep meadow to the top of a hill where a wooden pyramid stood intact, a relic of times past. There, over the stone pillar, we set up the theodolite. Then I got into the car and spread out sheets of paper with columns printed on them while the surveyor located the North Star in the still-light sky, and we were ready to begin.

So far, in our work I had uncovered nothing new or even exciting. I didn't care whether the surveyor's telescope was pointed at a star or a church steeple.

'Now we'll move to another hilltop,' said Kos when we had finished our measuring in the last bit of daylight. 'Then we'll have to use our flashlights.' As soon as he said it, he rushed over to the car and rummaged around in it furiously for a while until he was quite certain that he actually had forgotten the flashlights necessary to illuminate his instruments. So we packed everything into the car again and as we drove back as fast as our four-wheel drive could take us, he muttered over and over again: it had to happen

just now, it's bound to cloud over while we waste valuable time because of his carelessness. It occurred to me that he had deliberately saved this bit of surveying until the last because he too wanted to end the job on a special note.

As far as the clouds were concerned, his worst fears were realized.

At nine-thirty that evening, when we were climbing through a ploughed field with a set of flashlights to the dark hilltop, opaque ridges of altocumulus were reaching out across the sky.

We still had to go down into the valley to place our levelling staff with its lamps. By the time everything was set up, it was close to ten o'clock and not a star was visible in the sky. We both got into the car to wait. It was becoming cold.

At eleven o'clock, the surveyor got out of the car again and scanned the heavens with his binoculars But once more, he could see nothing but cloud cover. He suggested we leave.

I got out of the car too, and felt a light, cool breeze on my face. 'I think it's going to clear up,' I said.

'Do you really think so? Take a look for yourself.' He handed me the binoculars.

Down in the valley, I could see a few lights in a distant village. Then I found an isolated point of light, our will o' the wisp, which we had set up on an abandoned track through the fields. Yet above us, all was darkness, and a dank coldness descended on us from the sky.

'Well, if you say so,' said the surveyor. We returned to the car and listened to some cheerless music on the radio.

At eleven-thirty the surveyor got out of the car, then shouted: 'I must be dreaming!'

The clouds had been swept away and the autumn stars shone so clearly that they almost seemed within reach.

We had to wait until midnight, when the surveyor set his stopwatch to the exact time. Meanwhile, I stuck a candle to the dashboard and prepared the sheets so that I could see them as clearly as possible.

The grass around the car was glistening. It could have been moonlight reflected in drops of dew, or perhaps a thin layer of hoarfrost. The temperature was now below freezing. Hard times were coming for birds, animals and outlaws, who had to find a place to hide. I wrapped my coat tightly about me, and at that moment I seemed to hear a muffled whispering that came from the frozen distances. As I looked down into the valley bathed in moonlight, I could see a small church spire beyond the grey of a cemetery wall. Now I could hear the words. It was a question: is the mortuary my whole world, or has the whole world become a mortuary?

It occurred to me, in fact I was certain, that this was probably the last sentence the old farmer hidden away in the mortuary had written in his notebook. The priest who had found him dead had read the sentence and the gloomy question, a question from the present world, not from the gospel of Christ, had not seemed worth taking a risk for, so he had thrown the notebook into the fire.

I would have liked to have heard more of that message, but the surveyor had begun calling out the first set of numbers and I had to concentrate; a mistake would render our efforts useless. I also had to announce the angle at which he should look for the North Star.

We filled in the last column of figures a few minutes before three in the morning. The surveyor, having stood

hunched over his instrument all that time, was numb with cold, but he seemed contented, even moved, by his achievement.

'You once said,' he recalled, 'that you'd like to look at the stars, or the moon,' and he pointed to the almost completely round lunar sphere in the sky.

So I climbed out of the car, stood behind the theodolite, put my eye to the eyepiece and then pointed the lens in the direction I thought the moon would be.

At any time during the fifty years of my life, I undoubtedly could have gone to an observatory and studied the night sky through a telescope far bigger than this theodolite, but I was glad I hadn't. There are things a person should see at the best possible moment — and perhaps I sensed that one day I would stand here freezing on a cold, windy hilltop at three o'clock in the morning on the last day of our survey and be given a view of the moon, not as an opportunity to be grasped but as a reward.

And so I saw it: the moon as I had known it from books, films and television shots — the craters of Tycho, Copernicus, and Theophilos, the Mare Nubium, the Sea of Darkness and the Sea of Tranquillity, and all those other names, and everything I had known only from grey snapshots — was real and glowing and solid.

Surprised as I was at how this sight transported me, it seemed to me that the longer I looked, the more the lunar landscape resembled a face, a knowing face, a face of reconciliation. Suddenly, I recognized it as the face of my father, and he, from the distance of another world, asked me what I thought.

I had to admit that I liked it, that it was a miracle to look

at the Earth's satellite in close-up.

Do you realize that people have already stood here? he asked.

And I agreed that too was miraculous, just as it was miraculous that people could fly above the earth, look into the heart of matter or say: let there be light, and light will indeed appear. The world you created is a miracle, I thought, just as the consequences of what you have created are so threatening. And even though I fear this world and rebel against it, I do so because I still hope that something of that miracle will survive, although I have no grounds for such hope other than the wish that so much of your effort, so much desire, so many fond and magnanimous dreams would not be utterly in vain.

Afterwards, we put the theodolite back in its case, then we carried all our things back to the car and drove down for the tripod, the light on it still twinkling, vainly luring insects that had long since gone to sleep for the winter.

We reached the farm towards four o'clock. Everyone had gone to bed. The surveyor took me to the room his wife had prepared for me and, before he wished me good night, he said, almost ceremonially: 'I want to thank you for your exemplary assistance.'

He didn't say whether he meant by that my diligent recording of his data, my capacity to stay with him to the end despite frequent exhaustion, or my mysterious ability to look into an overcast sky and predict the weather.

Flags

ON OUR FINAL morning in Meštec I was awakened by a tapping sound over my head. Something was falling on the ceiling, as though someone were pouring gravel on to the attic floor.

'Maybe they've started dismantling the roof,' I thought.

The surveyor rejected my suggestion: the stationery store was still open, and he'd seen Mrs Pokorná relaxing with her canary in the courtyard.

While I was having breakfast, the surveyor, in a suit and tie, went off to the National Committee office to announce that we were leaving, to thank them for providing excellent accommodation free of charge, and to beg them for the almost new stove that still brightened my room and which, Kos was convinced, they would scrap anyway.

From my trunk, I took the figure of the hideous extraterrestrial creature, wrapped it in a newspaper, and went out in front of the building.

Through the glass door of the stationery shop, I could see several customers inside, so I decided to wait. Stepping back a little way into the square, I had a good view of the roof of our building. A large hole had appeared in it from which a man was emerging.

The last old lady finally came out of the store and I went in.

'Your friend said you were all done,' the girl said.

'We are.'

'I haven't had a minute to sit down today,' she complained. 'There's been a constant stream of customers all morning.'

'I'm surprised you're still here,' I said. 'They're taking apart the roof over your head.'

'No one told me anything about it,' she said, shrugging.

'We're all packed,' I said. 'And I'd like to leave something for you.'

'Me?' She took the parcel from me. 'Can I look?'

I unwrapped the figure.

'No!' she shouted. 'No!'

'It's a souvenir.'

'No, it's impossible. I mean, why would you give this to me? You can't be serious — giving it to me just like that. Jesus, he's beautiful, he's real! It's him!'

Two young girls and a Vietnamese man with a suitcase came into the store, but she didn't even notice them. 'It must have been terribly expensive. And I — what could I give you for it?'

She began to rummage frantically in one of the drawers, and I. took the opportunity to wish her good health, then left the store.

Even in that brief time, the hole in the roof had grown. The surveyor was walking back from the National Committee building, looking extremely pleased. They'd given him permission to take away the stove, and all we had to do was put the old stove outside the door in its place. 'They also want us to put flags out for the twenty-

eighth of October,' he announced. 'But to hell with that, we're leaving anyway. Do you think the two of us can carry the stove down by ourselves?'

I doubted it. Fortunately, the roofers were in the building. They'd certainly help us. So while the surveyor went up to bargain with them, I unfurled both the flags, something I'd never done in the two months I'd shared my room with them. I was excited by the idea. They were almost brand new; only their edges were covered in cement dust. I rolled them up again and carried them down to the main entrance. Then I brought a ladder from the shed and put the flags in the rusty holders affixed, for that purpose, on either side of the door. Once again, I felt I had chosen the right place and the right time.

We still had to return the things we'd borrowed. The surveyor insisted that even the chair without a back belonged over the road. The last thing we did was take our borrowed beds back to the château.

I waited in the same corridor I'd waited in the first day, while the surveyor went to the office to get the formalities over with. Now, as then, I leaned against the parapet. The roses in the flowerbed had flowered, then faded, and only a few dried blooms remained on the bushes. The lawn was hidden under fallen leaves. The courtyard was full of shadows, but on a bench by the wall several old women were still trying to capture some of the sun's warmth, while in front of them a tall old man with thick, completely white hair was sketching something in the sand. I could make out circles and ellipses, and it suddenly occurred to me that the old man was telling the women's fortunes. Was he trying to tell them about the future that seems mysterious until the very last minute, or was he revealing the future that

stretches beyond that last minute?

One of the women seemed familiar and indeed when I looked around I saw, sitting on a low stone wall, the cage with a canary inside.

My first impulse was to go down and say goodbye to Mrs Pokorná and her memories, but then I thought she might not approve, might perhaps feel ashamed at having abandoned her ancient family seat after swearing to remain to the end. And anyway, all the old women suddenly got up and started walking away, the white-haired seer rubbed out his circles with a foot shod in a checkered slipper and, by the time another old man, whose angular head I already knew well, arrived, they had all vanished.

My acquaintance came right up to the vacated bench and, examining the ground intently, he tried to discern meaning among what was left of the diagram. Finding nothing that might offer understanding, he continued in his wandering. When he came within earshot of me, he called out, 'I've already found out who you are. It's all right.' Then he frowned and said bitterly, 'Did you see them, comrade? That's how they treat a person here. Is this what we've worked so hard to achieve?'

Yes, that's what we've worked so hard to achieve. And we, who with all our strength have worked to achieve it, should not be scandalized. My dear sir, you see that I'm not placing myself above you, but I agree with your prodigal son. We should complain less and repent more.

We carried the beds into the store-room and returned to our quarters. With the help of the two roofers, we carried out the new stove and put it in the back of the car. Then we gradually filled the rest of the car up with all the surveying gear: the theodolite and the broom, the tapes and

measuring chains and the buckets, the bags of unused coal and the brushes, the shovels, the briefcase full of forms, the axes, the machete and the half-empty cans of paint.

The surveyor and I said goodbye. I asked him to give my regards to his wife and wished them both a healthy daughter. Then, as I had done every day, I opened the iron gate, and the surveyor drove out. I followed in my car. Then I stopped and got out to close the gates for the last time. I looked up at the two flags snapping above the entrance in the autumn wind, and then a little higher to where the roof used to be, where I caught a glimpse of the roofers.

I got into my car again; the shop girl ran out of the stationery store with the doll in her arms to wave goodbye.

I drove off, but looked around a last time. The girl was still standing there, squeezing the ugly little rubber extraterrestrial in one arm, and in her other hand she waved a coloured handkerchief, as if I too were some extraterrestrial departing her desolate planet for ever.