Elegante Welt, now they smiled condescendingly at me as they walked past, I saw the way they walked, their heads held high, proud that the brewery now belonged to the workers and that rumor had it we’d be moving soon, that we were being evicted and that only those who did real work would be allowed to live there. And when I got back to the brewery, the brand new chairman of the Council of Workers was standing opposite the assistant brewmaster shouting at him, We don’t have to work for a slave driver anymore, we don’t have to put up with His Lordship Francin anymore with his goddamn castle on the Elbe, no, never again! From now on we’ll divide up the work among ourselves! And the assistant brewmaster snarled at him … I’ve been appointed as your superior, and as long as there’s an Executive Board, you’ll answer to me! I stood riveted to the ground, the master cooper looked serious and stern. He replied … You obviously haven’t been paying attention, from now on the brewery is a national enterprise, from now on we’re in charge and I’m the chairman of the Council of Workers … And the master cooper sliced his hand through the air as if he were chopping the world in two, the assistant brewmaster ran after him wailing … But I’m one of you, I worked here with you in the fermentation room, just an ordinary worker … He grabbed the cooper by the sleeve, but the cooper pulled away and said, raising his voice … You’ve always been against us, you’ve always wanted what the big bosses wanted, and not only that, you’ve always lorded it over us, and that’s something we can never forgive, aren’t even allowed to forgive … the assistant brewmaster tried to defend himself … But you didn’t hire me! The master cooper turned around, raised his hand and roared with laughter … That’s true, the bosses hired you, and now we workers are firing you, incidentally your notice is in the mail, you’d better just stay home and not come back to the brewery … And the assistant brewmaster went away, his eyes filled with tears, I never liked him much, he probably didn’t like me either, still, it didn’t take much effort for me to imagine that his fate was quite closely connected with ours, after all, we belonged to the same class, to the people who had run the brewery, given orders to the workers, not because they wanted to, but because they had to, because that was what the Executive Board of the brewery, a limited liability corporation, paid them to do. At that moment it dawned on me that for a quarter of my life and more I’d been a source of great aggravation to all the women in the little town, the wives who lived in a kitchen and one room, and that I, with my three pigs, had in fact provoked the wives of the station staff and the railroad workers, women who were willing to travel all the way to Prague with their rail pass to buy cheaper lard and bacon, while I had pails full of lard and smoked meat from the pigs I fed with waste from the brewery, with draff and sludge, the only thing we may have had in common was that I never went on vacation, just like the other women, who set out in the summertime with buckets to pluck blackberries and raspberries and blueberries … But the assistant brewmaster was no longer allowed into the brewery. That autumn I’d gone out to pick apples and pears and nuts, my payment in kind, I was standing with two hired pensioners on the ladders, picking the fruit I had earned and dropping it into a basket, when the assistant brewmaster’s wife appeared and climbed up onto my ladder and began picking apples and putting them in her own basket, she was weeping and wailing that this was her tree, it had been her tree for thirty years and the profits from this tree had always been her payment in kind. I was seized with anger, and said to her, yes, it used to be yours, but your husband’s been fired, now all the apples and pears are ours, half the orchard, and this Reinette tree is on our half! And I scraped off my shoes on the rung of the ladder, the mud fell on the face of the assistant brewmaster’s wife, but she furiously scrambled her way up and went on picking the apples within her reach, the ladder tilted and sank farther into the branches under the weight of the two bodies, but the assistant brewmaster’s wife scrambled higher, several piles of apples were already gleaming in the grass under the old trees, but the assistant brewmaster’s wife climbed up another rung, I went down a rung and stepped on the back of her hand, the hand holding on to the rung, and then she grabbed me like a madwoman by the hem of my dress and pulled herself up a few rungs, she leaned sideways to reach the apples, but the branches in the crowns gave way, the apples fell and the ladder slid diagonally down past the branches, pulling down Reinettes in its wake, and we fell slowly to the ground, the assistant brewmaster’s wife fell on top of me, I pushed her off, the baskets of apples tipped over and the apples spilled out, the assistant brewmaster’s wife quickly filled her baskets with apples from my piles and dumped them into her wheelbarrow, I let her take as many as she wanted, but then tore the shafts out of her hands and tipped over the wheelbarrow full of apples into my pile, and we stood there face-to-face, our eyes narrowed, and weighed the empty baskets in our hands to see if they were heavy enough to be used as weapons, I was waiting for the perfect moment to launch the attack with a hefty swing of my basket, hoping to win the fight and defend the ten quintal of apples we’d picked in two days’ time, when suddenly three workers from the malt house appeared, led by the master cooper, and marched straight across the autumn grass to the piles of apples, when I looked up at the approaching men the assistant brewmaster’s wife saw her chance and gave me a shove. I fell onto the pile of apples but jumped right back up and threw the assistant brewmaster’s wife down with all my might and raised my basket, but the master cooper took my hand gently and said … From now on there will be no more payment in kind, the orchard and the fruit are ours. The piles of apples, even the ladders and baskets, everything is ours. From this day on we will pick the fruit and nuts, we have children, grandchildren, and even if we didn’t, the orchard now belongs to us and not to the bosses … The assistant brewmaster’s wife got up, leered at the three workers and grinned at me triumphantly, while I suddenly felt sad, the two pensioners whom I’d fed for two days and given bottles of beer, every evening I paid them and gave them each a basket of apples to take home, those two, who only moments ago had been hidden in the crown of an apple tree, now climbed down the ladder with baskets full of apples, went and stood next to the assistant brewmaster’s wife, and even though for the past two days they had addressed me as Madame and smiled at me politely when I gave them beer and bread, now they stood looking at me just like the three workers, their eyes burned with rage at something I had been the cause of, they were indignant, the world would be better off without me, now they were all looking at me and suddenly I couldn’t help thinking that they must have had some sense of shame, or they would’ve started punching me, given me such a beating that the world would have had to do without me after all, it was better that I go straight back to the house I’d been allotted, or better still, that Francin and I go live somewhere else, because a whole new era had begun and the old times, my golden times, were over, they had slipped away right before my eyes, in the brewery orchard as well as in the little town, where I’d been spending less and less time, because ever since the war was over I’d had the uneasy feeling that the people there didn’t like me anymore, that they didn’t see me, as if I had become transparent, they looked right through me, as if I weren’t there … It’s raining now, for the second day in a row it’s raining at the retirement home, I sit by the window, drops of water stream down the windowpane, below me are the little town and the pink ramparts and the pink streets and the pink church in a blue haze of rain. It’s raining, but in the western sky is a patch of pink light, somewhere out there the sun has already broken through the rain, it’s the moment just before a rainbow appears, the air is filled with shreds of beige mist. In the corridors the rediffusion boxes tenderly play “Harlequin’s Millions,” actually, half the old women here at the retirement home come from the little town, I know practically all of them and they know me, they now seem to be in much better shape than I am, they have dentures, they’re more pain-stakingly groomed, comb their hair with great care, while my hair is cropped like a reform-school girl’s. What must they think when they see me here in my cotton dresses, when they see me always on the move, always wandering around the castle, curiously studying the ceilings and walls, standing before that gigantic, elaborate gate, looking up at that gate in a permanent state of amazement … Yet I know perfectly well that even now, just as in the old days when these women couldn’t forgive the fact that I was the wife of the manager and that I liked wearing beautiful clothes … The old women still don’t forgive me, can’t forgive me, for being different from them, for walking around like a slob, they don’t forgive me that they like to watch television, that they find the programs not only entertaining but educational, but that no one ever sees me gazing at a television screen the way I gaze at the tapestries on the former castle walls … I never go to the lectures organized at the castle by cultural officials from the little town, no one has ever even seen me reading a book … and so once again I’m different from the rest, once again I’ve detached myself from their community. And I must say I’m rather proud that I am who I am, two of the old women had even bought jeans and were showing them off in front of me, but I walked past without paying them any attention, indifferently, they purposely ran to catch up with me, said hello, I returned their greeting, but strutted right past them, just as when I was still a lady and wore the kind of clothes you saw in