Harlequin's Millions

utstretched 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 they get in through the broken windowpanes, which are so small that only one swallow can fly through at a time. And day and night you can hear coming from the chapel the twittering of the sparrows, the chirping and chattering of the young swallows. When people come to the retirement home for the first time, they can never resist walking up to the door of the castle chapel and trying the handle in the semi-darkness, but the chapel is closed, and when your eyes have grown used to the light you see that there’s even a bolt with a lock on it. So everyone who comes here for the first time kneels down in front of the chapel door and peers through the keyhole. Everyone is amazed to see that the floor is still covered with coal, because in the days when the castle was heated with coal-burning stoves, the coal was stored here in the chapel. But now the chapel is closed and has become a home for birds. The swallows have even built a nest on the head of Christ on the high altar, and when their eggs hatch, the baby swallows twitter and chirp in Christ’s ear, and when they’ve grown and have to leave the nest, they sit contentedly on the arms of the gold cross, sometimes seven little swallows in a row, as the voices of several hundred sparrows and swallows fill the chapel. Whenever a new pensioner arrives at the castle, the first few days he insists on seeing absolutely everything. On my first day I walked all the way to the castle greenhouse, but the windows had been painted blue, and there were no longer any flowers inside, the floor was whitewashed and in the middle stood a bier. When someone dies, he lies here until they come for him, the dead pensioner lies here on a board and waits until they come to take him away, I’ve been told that everyone else sits near him on three benches, the closest friends of the deceased, they hold a wake until the undertaker arrives and members of his family with clothes for him to wear in the coffin. Uncle Pepin will probably be the first of us to end up here, because he’s been in the ward for bedridden patients for three months now, he’s stopped eating, the nurse said I should write a letter to all his friends and relations, anyone who wants to come say their good-byes should hurry, because it won’t be long before Uncle Pepin has beat us to the greenhouse, where the floor is whitewashed and all the windows are painted blue. But pensioners who come to the castle for the first time, well, they want to see everything, even things that might not be so good for them. On the west side, under the mighty branches of the chestnut trees, from the second tier of branches, is the only place from which you can see into the castle, into the room that once belonged to Madame the Countess, that room now has four beds, they look like aviaries for birds of prey. Each one is equipped with a net, like children’s beds covered with a net to keep the child from falling out when he has a fever or a restless dream. From time to time there are patients here, old men and women, who are so crazy that neither sedatives nor injections nor any other medicine can help them. It’s so sad, at my own risk I once climbed into the crown of an old chestnut, the branches were as close together as the rungs of a ladder, it was like climbing up to a deer stand. And there, under a net, I saw an old woman in white holding the cords between her fingers, she was on her knees peering out the window into the darkness, she looked in my direction, her eyes bulged with terror, her hair hung loose and she had no teeth, and when I looked at her again I nearly fell out of the tree, she looked so much like me that I thought she was me. And I climbed down carefully, from one branch to the next, concentrate, old girl, I told myself, don’t slip and break your bones, stay calm, you had a bad scare, easy does it, and when I reached the ground I walked into the darkness, the only light on the second floor came from the windows where Count Špork once had his chambers. I ran into the vestibule and up the stairs, I ignored the statues and the beautiful frescoes, in the corridor of the women’s section I stopped short next to a little table, I raised my head, but there was no one else in the corridor, the night-lights shone dimly through the open doors and someone was snoring and from the corners of the room with the eight beds, from each corner you could hear a loud smacking noise, which went on until the snoring stopped. On the wall was a sign: How do our ladies pass the time? I didn’t understand it, and read the message again. It was framed behind glass. How do our ladies pass the time? And on the little table and the next one and the one after that, I made my way down the corridor from one table to the next, amazed at first, then I reached out and touched the baby clothes, baby bibs, a baby bolero, even some swaddling bands, which you wrap crisscross around a baby’s quilt like a braided Christmas bread, knitted booties embroidered with flowers, blouses and smocks, sunbonnets and caps with earflaps, tiny gloves that brought tears to your eyes, pairs of mittens joined together with colorful string, muffs. Yes, this was the work of the old women who sat here in the sun crocheting and whose knitting needles cast reflections on the ceiling, on the multitude of cherubs and cupids, divine children who scattered down an ever-replenishing stream of flowers from their horns and cornucopias while treading the air with their feet to keep their balance under the weight of the Mediterranean flora. This was no handiwork exhibition, nor was it an answer to the question of how our ladies passed the time, here on these tables lay the things the old women couldn’t give up, here lay the suppressed and for that reason constant and everlasting necessities no woman could live without, not even an old lady, a pensioner in Count Špork’s former castle …