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THE PENSIONERS LIVING IN THE OLD CASTLE ARE actually in a permanent state of half-sleep, the doctor sees to it that they get enough sleep and anything even resembling consciousness is nipped in the bud. The nurses generously replenish this half-sleep with pills and injections, they’re constantly on the alert to make sure that no one is ever entirely awake. Everyone wears diapers in bed, like babies, and the nurses who have to change those diapers are like young mothers, every time you turn around they’re hurrying off to throw the stinking diapers into plastic pails, there’s always the sound of running water somewhere as the nurses wash their hands, and every morning the sheets are changed, whole piles of wrinkled sheets with yellow stains, stinking piles, which are thrown out the open window into the truck in the courtyard and then brought to the laundry room in the former library of the monastery, where the Augustinians once studied everything that had ever been written, separating the books that were of use to them from the dangerous ones, the library, which is now a laundry and boiler room … And the rooms are filled with the smells of a maternity clinic, the smell of diapers and babies, of expectant mothers working their way toward birth, but here in the castle under the pall of those smells everyone is slowly but surely working their way toward death. And the nurses hand out pills and give injections to make the pensioners’ journey toward death more bearable, to make sure they aren’t too aware of it all, if an old woman happens to wake up and raise herself on her elbows and look around and realize her situation, she immediately calls for the nurse to come give her a medicinal drink and some pills to dispel reality, and then the old lady sinks back into her dreams, her half-sleep … Outside, too, on sunny days when the pensioners stroll through the park and across the courtyard, most of them are half asleep, and because they have no place to go, many of them will simply stand around looking at the open gate, they could go anywhere they wanted, but it’s just like with songbirds, when you forget to shut the wire door of their wire cage, the old folks wander in and out, sometimes they even set out for the little town, but halfway down the avenue of trees, time suddenly stands still for them, they’ve lost their goal, there’s no reason to go any farther, so they turn around, suddenly they no longer feel like going for a beer, or a cup of coffee, no longer feel like seeing the pigeon market, or the tea room, or any young folk, the pensioners turn around and head back home, the huge castle gate with its splendid ironwork, like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, is open wide, but one mighty sweep of its wings and the pensioners turn back, because an old person really has no place to go, and when they do go anywhere, it’s back to the memories, to the heart of the life that was once as much of a reality as … as what? I was always glad to run into two particular pensioners, who walked along together at the same pace, so cheerfully, both had canes, which they swung in time to their footsteps like the windshield wipers of a car, they themselves were perfectly aware that they had turned into two windshield wipers moving in tandem, they strutted along in that whimsical way, laughing, joking, making funny faces and cheering up the other pensioners, who sat on benches scribbling mysterious symbols in the sand with their canes, their nonsensical scribbling was a rhythmical accompaniment to their rudderless thoughts … I was especially fond of one pensioner who was so sensitive to the cold that he wore a winter coat even in summer, he’d stand at the castle gate staring down the avenue, all the way to the church, where there was always light, sunshine, where the dense crowns of the chestnuts ended, he wore a winter coat and two mittens joined by a cord that ran along the inside of his coat across his shoulders and through his sleeves, so he wouldn’t lose them, the way mothers do with their young children, the way his wife had done when she brought him here … I had lost my heart to one of the old ladies who, one night when a storm rose and gusts of wind shook the castle and rattled the shutters off their hinges, packed up her most valuable possessions and came downstairs dressed and ready to go, with her umbrella tied to her suitcase and her identity card clutched in her hand, she was an elderly Sudeten-German woman who had lived somewhere near Pecer before the war, and after the war, she said, when they began transporting us, I was nearly thirty and still unmarried, at a certain hour on a certain day, the old crone in charge of our colony, where only six families lived, that old crone ordered us to scrub all six tables and cover them with tablecloths, on those tablecloths we had to place fresh bread and a knife and a dish with a lump of fresh butter, and then the old hag, who was in charge of our colony deep in the forest near Pecer, ordered all six families to stand outside in front of their six houses, each mother had to tie up her most valuable possessions in a tablecloth and hold her identity card and other documents in her hand, the German woman told me without emotion, she too had had to obey that old Baba, just like everyone else in the colony she had to hand over all her money and Baba distributed it among the families, giving them each as much as she felt they needed … And so at noon on that day in nineteen-hundred-and-forty-five, six families sat outside their farmhouses, where they’d let the stoves go out, Baba suddenly changed her mind and walked into each farmhouse and stopped all the clocks and then came back out again, the police arrived and without shedding a tear Baba got into the car to have herself thrown out of the country like all the rest, and never again would they see the colony here in the Sudeten Mountains where they had been born, and their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers … said the little old German woman, but I escaped from the wagon and spent the rest of my days working as a weaver in a factory in Broumov and now I’m retired and every so often I go back to have a look at the sunken road near Pecer, our farms are now weekend cottages, I was sitting there one day on the hillside and a young man invited me to come closer, I had nothing to be afraid of, because he’d guessed, seeing me sitting there from morning till noon, that I wanted to come inside and take whatever was left of what may still have been mine, but I blushed with shame and fled into the forest, because I would’ve died on the spot if I’d seen the place where I’d once lived. Said the German woman, who, whenever there was a loud noise from somewhere, a chimney falling, an old oak felled by a storm, hitting the ground with a mighty crash that shook the castle walls, when that happened she wrapped her most valuable possessions in an old tablecloth and went running down the stairs into the vestibule, sat down under the old pendulum clock, clutching her identity card, and waited for something terrible to happen. She would even rise fearfully, turn and open the door of the glass case and stop the clock … I understand her, that German woman, because when the war was over, they nationalized the brewery where Francin was manager, the stocks were all sold to the workers, even Uncle Pepin had three shares and he shouted day and night at me and Francin that he was now a millionaire and that all the workers were now millionaires, he had stood in the doorway bellowing out everything he had against us, how he and the workers were now in charge, now nobody could exploit him ever again, now he could even fire Francin, now he, maltster and former shoemaker, was a millionaire, now it was for him to decide whether Francin would pitch barrels and haul ice in the winter, now he’d have us evicted and we could damn well go live in the servants’ quarters and he’d move into our four rooms, now they had a Council of Workers here and that council was what used to be the Executive Board, now the workers themselves would sit here once a month in the conference room at the long table, which was covered with green worsted like a billiard table … I’d turned pale and Uncle kept on shouting and roaring with laughter and waving around his shares from the nationalized brewery, and later, when I walked through the little town, I knew how despondent I must have looked, while the women in the little town, all those women who for twenty-five years I had tormented with my condescending smile and my dresses straight out of