‘There’s nothing lacking, unfortunately; on the contrary, there’s altogether too much of her.’
‘That’s just a bit of puppy fat, youthful sturdiness.’
‘Sturdiness could be the source of her future unhappiness. Unfortunately, we live in a time when even a little excess weight determines our life’s course.’
It could not be said that Mr Shaker was not concerned about his daughter. But his concern was for the product, and, in Mr Shaker’s eyes, although of course he would never have admitted it, Rosie was a kind of reject.
‘What about your wife?’
‘My late wife… She was perfect. Like you,’ said Mr Shaker.
She was perfect until she broke down. Of course Mr Shaker did not use the expression ‘broke down’, he said ‘fell ill’, but he meant ‘broke down’. The mechanism stopped working properly, and Mr Shaker had done everything in his power to get the mechanism mended. But, unfortunately, there was nothing to be done.
‘Strange,’ said Mr Shaker.
‘What’s strange?’
‘Well… When I’m with you I feel as though I were beside a fan,’ he said.
Mr Shaker became exceptionally animated when they reached the golf course, evidently because the role of teacher appealed to his vanity. Kukla didn’t have a clue about golf and Mr Shaker endeavoured to explain the rules. What had always seemed to her pointless – strolling around a grassy expanse with a stick in one’s hand and knocking a little ball into a hole – did after all have some point: being outside in the fresh air.
They were an incompatible couple. The tall, bony woman with large feet and a golf club in her hand strode across the sun-drenched grassy expanse like a kind of female knight. Her partner, a short, breathless man, rushed energetically over the grass like a lawn mower. Kukla watched him: he was saying something, waving his club, gesticulating, demonstrating movements, making her imitate them, waving his arms and hitting the ball energetically with his club.
While Mr Shaker was preoccupied with the idea that all incompatible bodies must be transformed into compatible ones, Kukla had always thought that there was too much noise in this world and amused herself imagining how nice it would be to be able to control that noise, to turn off talkative people like radios, to put silencers on sharp sounds, to turn down the shrill din of ambulance sirens and amplify birdsong. As she waited for the green light at crossings, she imagined stopping the traffic completely for a moment and serenely crossing the road. These were childish imaginings, daydreams, her mental exit lights. Sometimes those daydreams were so strong that they seemed quite real. When she was a little girl, the sheer force of her intentions had sometimes made things happen: something would shift, scrape, collapse, fall onto the floor. With time she learned to walk cautiously through the world, as though on eggshells, quiet and silent as a shadow, accompanied by currents of air whose origin she could never fathom.
Come on, gesticulated Mr Shaker, hit the ball. Kukla thought he was far further away than he really was. For God’s sake, come on, the man on the green horizon waved his arms, and Kukla finally swung her club, hit the ball, the ball spun in the air and took flight. The man jumped up and down with delight, bravo, a perfect shot, he made a fist with his thumb pointing up and waved it at Kukla, congratulating her. The little ball hovered for a moment in the air, or at least so it seemed to Kukla, and then with all its force it plummeted and lodged in the man’s wide-open mouth. The man dropped to the ground, as though felled.
When Kukla reached him, Mr Shaker was lying motionless on the grass. The little ball had trickled out of his mouth like saliva and was now calmly settled by his head, like a miniature gravestone. Mr Shaker’s death had been crouching inside an innocent golf ball.
Kukla rushed to the hotel to find Dr Topolanek. They went back together to where Mr Shaker’s body was lying. It seemed to Kukla that in the meantime his body had shrunk. In the course of those ten minutes it had taken her to go and fetch Dr Topolanek, Mr Shaker’s body had condensed and, if it was true that there was a soul which parted from the body after death, then Mr Shaker’s soul weighed as much as ten golf balls.
‘Heart attack!’ announced Dr Topolanek.
And then, smoothing his hair, ruffled by an invisible fan, he turned to Kukla and added:
‘I do hope that this disagreeable incident will not have put you off golf forever. Golf is an exceptionally fine sport.’
And what about us? We carry on without hesitation. While we may all be targeted by a drawn bow, the tale speeds like Hermes and is never slow.
5.
While everything in a story goes quickly and easily, it’s not usually like that in real life. This time, however, real life surpassed the story in speed and ease. Here’s what happened. Before she set off on this trip, Beba had taken out her pension and meagre savings, and changed it all into euros. The bank gave her a five-hundred-euro note and some change. Beba took the note without thinking. How could she possibly have known all the problems that she would encounter in an EU country, when she tried to change that cursed euro note?
At the hotel reception they told her to try the hotel bureau de change, while the hotel bureau de change directed her to the local banks. She tried two or three banks, and they all gave her the same answer: why didn’t she change the note at a branch of her own bank?
‘But my bank’s in Zagreb!’
‘So why didn’t you change it in Zagreb?’
‘That’s where they gave it to me.’
‘Why don’t you use a credit card?’
‘I haven’t got one.’
‘You’re travelling abroad and you don’t have a credit card!’
‘Not everyone has a credit card, you know!’
‘It’s just as well you told us, because otherwise we might have changed that note, but only if you had shown us a credit card.’
‘I’ve got a passport.’
‘A passport isn’t a relevant document any more. You know how it is with passports, anyone can get an illegal one nowadays for just a few hundred euros!’
‘So, what should I do?’
‘Try an exchange bureau.’
Beba tried several. They told her that five-hundred-euro notes were notorious.
‘Why?’
‘They’ve been forged.’
‘Well, you presumably have those machines that verify notes.’
‘Yes, but they’re no use, since the North Korean forgeries came on the scene.’
Beba was going to ask what on earth North Korea had to do with it all, but she decided against it. Obviously, nothing was going to help.
And it had all started with Beba wanting to buy some hair dye, to fix those grey hairs of hers which had flashed that morning in the Wellness Centre mirror after her chocolate soak. She really could not have asked Pupa for something so trivial. But, apart from that, Beba wanted to have a bit of money of her own, for little needs, for coffee and fruit juice, or hair dye.
In short, when she reached the hotel having got nowhere, Beba found herself breezing into the casino, more by chance than design. At the entrance, she was met by a wave of clamouring voices mingled with the metallic sounds of the roulette wheel, so that for a moment she felt as though she had wandered into a monkey house. But since Beba considered herself a person for whom nothing human is strange, she stopped at the first roulette table, right by the entrance, to see what something she had only ever seen in films looked like in real life.