Harlequin's Millions

es too were drunk with dancing and alcohol, I realized that all those men and women, when they first came here as pensioners, had stood looking in dismay at the statues along the walls and stairs, and at the ceiling, that they had stood for a moment, as I did, in utter consternation, when they realized that those splendid days of their youth were past and that before they knew it they had grown old … And there was music coming from the speakers, a string orchestra played “Harlequin’s Millions,” the melody swirled around the pensioners and everyone who heard it was entranced, but the music didn’t sound like a reproach, it was more like a melancholy memory of old times … And when I went up to the next floor and looked down those sun-drenched corridors and into the wards, the entire south wall of the castle was like a row of large, illuminated aquaria, with gleaming fish moving among the water plants. But they weren’t fish, they were gleaming eyeglasses, and the lenses in front of the motionless eyes of the pensioners trembled and quivered almost imperceptibly to the beat of their hearts. I noticed that in some of the eyes behind those lenses, tears glistened, not tears of sadness because one was growing older, but the permanent tears of weary eyes, just like in the old days you wore glasses so no one could see you’d been crying. And I noticed immediately that the castle was divided into two sections. The women lived in one wing, the men in the other. And this was obvious at first glance. In the corridors of the women’s section were flowers in every window, the walls of the castle were so thick that at every window in front of the curtains there was an alcove, where you could put a small table and a few chairs, it was a peaceful spot, like a little arbor. And wherever I looked down that long corridor, I saw old women sitting in the sun, some in satin bathrobes, others wearing what had once been their best dresses, even though those dresses hadn’t been in fashion for thirty years or more, the old women sat there with knitting needles and crochet hooks moving between their fingers, the needles moved quickly, wool-wrapped fingers drew more wool from a skein or ball, and the knitting needles and crochet hooks worked quickly, so unbelievably quickly that it was as if the old women were knitting and crocheting beams of light, the whole corridor was filled with the reflections and refractions of silvery needles and flashing eyeglass lenses. And out of some of the windows the nylon curtains flapped and fluttered like flags, with a small hole every inch or two, eaten away by some harsh detergent or mangled by a washing machine that had seen better days. There was half the body of an old woman, whose other half was leaning out the window and peering down at the courtyard, the body of another old woman leaned over a pot of flowers on a pedestal and her fingers broke off withered leaves and loosened the soil with a hairpin. As I stood in the doorway of that long corridor, the old women lifted their eyes, they gazed at me, some through their glasses, others bowed their heads so they could see me with the naked eye, I could tell that some of them recognized me because they knew me from the market and the streets and the fancy balls, but then they lowered their eyes again and went on with their work, I realized that if I were to stay here and watch them, they would go on knitting and crocheting until dusk, just so they wouldn’t have to look at me anymore. And I lifted my eyes and once again I saw above me that great fresco, now illuminated by the reflections of the knitting needles, and when I took a step back to view that radiant ceiling from another angle, I was startled by the sight of several hundred cherubs, naked cupids, flitting across the ceiling, kicking their legs and swimming through the fresco, they kept themselves afloat with the groping soles of their chubby feet, padded with tender flesh like plump pink sausages, with their bare, rounded bellies and raised arms, laden with exotic flowers, oleander blossoms and roses and azaleas, the whole ceiling was adorned with acanthus leaves, with garlands of flowers amidst laurel leaves and ivy that were borne upward by the naked, winged children and scattered down from above onto the old women, who were knitting and crocheting babies’ blankets and sweaters and bibs, the cupids scattered down thousands of flowers, thousands of blossoms, from cornets and cornucopias. And the eyes of those children on the ceiling were filled with joy, even though their genitals were still childlike and at peace and unaware of any connection with the opposite sex, their eyes were filled with amorous joy and longing, eyes that burned with the ecstasy of the love that awaited them or that others were expecting, as if those eyes had accidentally drunk a bit of liqueur or sweet, intoxicating wine, and in order to keep from falling they had to kick their feet, as if they were treading water in a swimming pool, as if the air, too, were meant for them to swim in … Very softly I walked down the corridor, peeked in through the open doors and saw that in each of the three rooms, which were plunged in deep shadow, the window facing north beamed so brightly, was so sharply framed by the sunlit trees on the other side of the castle that it was as if nature itself were beaming those trembling oak and aspen leaves into the shadowy rooms, as if the screen of a color television were flashing on that northern wall. And in each of these rooms I counted eight beds, these had once actually been the Count’s private quarters, in the semi-darkness I looked up at the ceilings and on each of them I could make out the Count’s frescoes, and in all those frescoes, from one room to the next, like episodes of a television series, I saw groups of young lovers, fauns abducting nymphs, and satyrs, with the lower half of their bodies like goats, making love to defenseless Bacchantes who were completely drunk on the young men’s lust, on one of the beds I saw an old woman looking up at the fresco with her arm bent against her forehead. I staggered back out into the lit corridor and found myself at the staircase, my heart was pounding, and when my eyes had grown used to the light, I saw that I was standing in front of the statue of a nude Greek god, leaning against a tree and thinking about nothing, longing for nothing, just leaning there and gazing at me absently, he was indifferent to me, wanted nothing from me, at that moment he was simply caught in the act, you might say, of doing nothing. He had no interest in me and his eyes seemed to close the moment I turned my back … At the other end of the corridor, in the opposite wing, on all three floors, lived the men. Their corridor was full of cigarette smoke, which glowed in the sunlight like a blue neon tube. The old men were restless, couldn’t sit still, they walked back and forth, though it wasn’t really walking, but a kind of shuffling, as if they were cross-country skiing, they’d stop and stand in groups, the smoke from a cigar or cigarette trickled through their fingers, their faces were as brown as tobacco and full of wrinkles, then all at once they’d set out again energetically, as if they had suddenly remembered they had someplace to go where someone was waiting for them with an important message, but after a while they slowed down again and plodded along as if their legs were shackled, as if they were searching the floor for wild mushrooms or a missing set of car keys or as if they were wading barefoot against the current of a rushing stream. Some of them stood lost in thought, hands behind their backs, following in their mind’s eye some event that must have once been important to them, an incident they assumed concerned them and them alone, suddenly they awoke and opened their eyes and stretched out their arms and were about to confide in the other old men, but when they saw that the others were in the same state they themselves had just been in, or were thinking about nothing at all, that they were no longer capable of thinking back or thinking ahead, that they were absent even in the present, the old men who moments before had seen everything so clearly, whose entire fateful incident had been floodlit and illuminated, even elucidated, well, their outstretched arms seemed to suddenly cast off both their hands, the old men made a gesture of dismissal and shuffled bitterly to the window and stared through the nylon curtains at the courtyard, they listened closely to the sounds of the castle, they heard their own irregular pulse and just like all the other pensioners they listened closely to their liver, spleen, kidneys, heart. One of the pensioners, who wore a jaunty cap, the kind the Prague dandies used to wear, who always seemed to me to be a very pleasant fellow because he knew how to knot a scarf like the kind the painters wore in the old days, a colorful scarf around his neck with an elegant bow at his throat, this man now no longer wanted to see anyone. He stood by the wall with his forehead against the plaster, sulking, he didn’t want to see any more people, or trees, or sky, or Greek statues and tableaux, he only wanted to see what he saw: plaster, tabula rasa, nothing. And I noticed that all the old men were continually turning to look at each other, face-to-face, and when one of them left the group he always looked back once or twice to see whether the others were looking at him, suspiciously, scrutinizingly, because they could always tell from behind, by the way someone walked, how he was feeling, whether he was limping more than usual, whether stabs of pain in the kidneys and liver were distorting his shoulders, or even just to see his trousers flapping around his skinny legs, which were attached to his hip joints like wooden slats. But just then in the castle courtyard there was the shrill sound of a car horn, like when the police arrive wailing and spitting purple fire at the scene of a traffic accident, like an ambulance with a fatally injured passenger racing through the streets or pulling up in front of a house where a man has been struck down by a heart attack. And all the old men crowded around the window, it took a while before the hands and fingernails that were caught in the curtains could be disentangled, the old man with the colorful scarf went on staring at the wall, because he didn’t want to see any more accidents, either. And I walked into the corridor and looked up at the ceiling, at a sprawling fresco that showed a young man sitting on the ground, leaning back on one muscular arm with the other wrapped around his knee, he was draped in a thin veil, barefoot, and had his head turned in the direction in which I, too, was slowly walking, his eyes were filled with desire, the whites of his eyes gleamed and his pupils seemed sewn to the upper lids, he had full lips, and never in my life had I seen such a beautiful man, his hair was strewn with flowers and blossoms, they tumbled like ringlets over his forehead, the flowers were gold and blue, then just behind the youth I saw a blue gown slipping off the edge of an enormous bed with blue cushions tossed against the headboard and covered with a rumpled golden sheet, in the middle of that bed sat a woman in a long white gown, a young girl with the fierce expression of a bird, the bride’s clenched lips were listening intently to some half-naked goddess, who had one arm around the girl’s neck and with the other was tilting her chin upward, so she could look more deeply into her eyes, which were averted from the burning eyes of the youth, who was looking angrily at the bride, who was deep in conversation with the beautiful goddess, whose forehead was adorned with an acanthus leaf and whose flowing gown fell back to expose her naked breasts, belly and mound of Venus … I was captivated by this unusual wedding scene, with the near-divorce right at the very beginning, one by one I looked into the men’s rooms, where just as in the women’s section there were eight beds and a window on the north wall that beamed in the darkness with the trembling, sunlit leaves of aspen and oak trees as tall as the castle itself, the leaves illuminated by the glaring light like an overly bright television screen. And outside you could hear tires grinding to a halt in the sand of the courtyard, you could hear car doors slamming, a stretcher being taken out, when I walked past the old men leaning out the window, several of them instinctively turned around, sure enough, they didn’t want me to see their skinny legs in baggy trousers, they stood there facing me and smiled and hoped I’d leave, go somewhere else, where I wouldn’t be able to look at them, but I reassured them with a wave of my hand, like an orchestra conductor, I looked up, they didn’t trust me, they squinted out at the courtyard but kept their faces toward me, once again the soft melody of “Harlequin’s Millions” began to play, unraveling in a flurry of notes that twirled around a solo by one of the violins in the orchestra, until the concertmaster regained his hold on the compelling refrain, which was in harmony with this wedding somewhere in Greece, somewhere on a southern sea, and even the eyes of the beautiful youth, even the anxiety of the bride, and the kind but urgent words of the goddess, even the palm of her hand lifting the bride’s chin to look her more deeply in the eyes, and the other hand, cradling the back of the girl’s head in such a charming position, they were all in perfect harmony with “Harlequin’s Millions,” even the sounds from the courtyard, where you could hear, in the sun, the sliding of the collapsible bed along the rails in the ambulance, and the four tires churning the sand, even the shrieking of the motor and the gears shifting and Mr. Berka shouting … Hold on! I’ll open the main gate! all of this was in complete harmony, and when I turned around to run quickly back down the corridor on the second floor of the men’s section, all the old men turned too, as if they had each been struck in the back, they rose up from where they had been leaning out the window, one by one they rose up behind the curtains, like people in old church paintings of the Last Judgment rising from their graves. They stood there, completely hidden behind the curtains, and bowed to me slightly, they touched the curtains with their foreheads and their skulls left an impression, one head after another made the nylon curtains bulge, and there in the late morning sun I was suddenly frightened, terrified, stricken with fear, as if I had just seen the Noonday Witch, whom I hadn’t believed in for years. Because not only are all the statues turned to the light of the human eye, not only is the whole castle built so that it points to the sun and the south, as if it were destined, in all its splendor and glory, for all those who enter the gate and cross the courtyard, not only that, even the trees present the best and smoothest side of their trunks to the sun, and people too are always presenting their faces and chests to each other, so they can show off their jewelry, and not only that, everything turns toward the south and the west, and toward the sun, even when the sun moves away from a bench in the park and a shadow falls on the pensioners sitting on that bench, they drag their bench over to where the sun is still shining, because none of the statues looks very good from the back, they’ve been badly neglected, the sight of them from behind can even be somewhat painful for the pensioners, they have the feeling, and rightly so, that they’ve caught someone sitting on the toilet, or deep in thought with a finger up his nose and then wiping off the snot on a tree or a wall, the unexpected sight of the back of a statue is, for every pensioner, like a glance through a keyhole, a curious glance, which catches an old person taking out or putting in his false teeth. There is also a castle chapel at the retirement home, from the outside you can clearly see that the head of the nave is pointing east, the chapel has gothic windows behind wrought-iron grillwork in which sparrows have built their nests, some of the windowpanes have been smashed in, so that now there are several hundred sparrows living inside the chapel, the organ pipes are dotted with their nests, they’ve taken over the gallery, in spring the swallows come and glue their nests to the gothic arches, to the consoles, the swallows raise hundreds of young birds, often the witnesses to old times sit on a bench by the chapel wall and watch the swallows feeding their young, watch how quickly t