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SUNDAYS AT THE RETIREMENT HOME ALWAYS BEGAN on Thursday and Friday. The residents would start preparing to look forward to someone coming to visit, someone from the family, usually children who had children of their own, and so the pensioners would spend what little money they had on boxes of chocolates and truffles. On those days some of the pensioners seemed to perk up a bit, as if they had awakened from a deep melancholy, and were feeling better again. But the ones who made the most preparations for those Sunday visits were those who never had any visitors. And so on Sunday morning, bright and early, small groups of pensioners would be gathered here and there in the courtyard, when it rained they sat in the Count’s great vestibule, but some couldn’t bear it and kept going out in the rain to see if anyone was driving up the avenue of old chestnuts that starts at the chapel and goes uphill, they’d peer all the way down to the bottom of the road, and sooner or later a car always came driving up the hill toward the gate, and the pensioners would hurry back to the vestibule, settle themselves into an armchair and put on their best smile, they watched the door, but those same pensioners who had run outside so impatiently to await the arrival of their beloved family were the ones whom hardly anyone ever came to see. More likely, someone would come whom no one had expected, or had even had time to expect, this was often the case with the five little groups of pensioners who sat and played cards all day, and when the nurses came to tell them that their relatives had arrived, that they had visitors, they had to quickly finish up their game of Mariáš and then, sulking, they left the card table and went downstairs to the reception hall, if it was a nice day they took their relatives to a bench in the park or in the courtyard, and still sulking, told them to have a seat, and then the relatives, when they saw that they hadn’t been expected the way one expects to be expected, actually felt better, they were glad to see that their father or father-in-law was much too busy with other things, they were glad that the pensioner was making their visit easier, that he was still a person who didn’t sit around waiting for members of his family to rescue him, to brighten up his Sunday, but who without even trying to hide his impatience kept looking at his watch, continually pushing back his sleeve to keep an eye on the time, which passed inexorably, while upstairs his friends sat waiting for him to return so they could resume their game of Mariáš, that eternally moveable feast, that perennial Sunday that was always marked in red on the calendar, because playing cards is much more fun than telling all those pointless stories that had been told and retold in the family while there still was time. I never expected anyone, and if someone did stop by I made it clear that I was happy to see them, but that I’d be even happier when they left, because I’ve come to realize that there is a time for everything, I’ve even discovered, here in the retirement home, that this is the first time I’ve ever been able to take a good look at what is going on around me, and on the faces of all these people I could see and read their fate, I could write a book about it, I saw their fate like those old gypsy women who can read palms or see human destiny in a cup of coffee grounds, I saw in each of them that everything was written not just on their faces, but also in the way they walked, on their whole body. That’s why all I did was walk and look around, I tried to assess the relationships between people, and that wasn’t too hard, because all people, even though they may try to pretend, are easy to read, easy to assess. So on sunny Sunday mornings when the visitors poured in and sat down next to the pensioners on chairs and benches and brought cakes and gifts and flowers, I saw that most of them looked rather gloomy, as if life outside the retirement home was almost unbearable, when I walked around and listened to snatches of conversation, all I could hear was people complaining, about how they’d had to stand in line for vegetables and meat, and that if they wanted to buy fresh rolls and bread in the morning, very often the baked goods weren’t delivered till noon, or even later in the day, I heard them complaining that the streets were all dug up, that their houses had to be torn down, that it was no longer safe to walk through Prague after dark because you might fall into a trench, some visitors claimed, even though it was a beautiful day, that they’d been caught in a terrible storm along the way, a hurricane, there had been several accidents, which meant they’d had to take a roundabout route through the countryside in order to get here, to say hello to their mama or papa, and that they’d also had to order the cake ahead of time, because if they didn’t buy it on Friday, by Saturday there wouldn’t be so much as a cream puff left on the bakery shelves. And so I walked around and saw all the relatives trying to suggest that here, in the retirement home, in this castle, while it wasn’t exactly paradise, it was certainly a haven of tranquility, some took a tour of the place, they walked around looking at the corridors full of flowers, they peeked into the dining hall, where that enormous fresco raged across the ceiling, and when they returned, they were bursting with enthusiasm and said that if they could, they’d retire tomorrow, there was no place they’d rather live than here, in Count Špork’s castle. And the pensioners smiled quietly, most of the women had spruced themselves up, they had put on their very best dresses, they smiled, and when they tried to explain that things weren’t quite the way the relatives said they were, that being here on your own and condemned to live in a room with eight others, while those who had money and could afford it, like me, were allowed to live in twos, when they tried to explain all that, the relatives would throw up their hands and implore them not to speak such blasphemy, and once again they described to them in abundant detail those lovely walks around the castle grounds, those lovely roads to the little town, which was the loveliest little town they’d ever seen, once again they grabbed their mothers and fathers under the arm, and while the grandchildren stuffed themselves with cake, they took them for a stroll through the castle park, where the rows of Baroque sandstone statues stood along the footpaths among the pruned old beeches, the visitors pretended to take great interest in the statues, which they surely never would have noticed if these statues of the months carved from sandstone by Braun and his pupils hadn’t given them the perfect opportunity to point out to the pensioners certain details, the lovely heads and breasts, and when the pensioner now tried to tell them that things weren’t nearly as lovely inside, that when night came and everyone wanted to sleep, they kept each other awake with all their coughing, with their tossing and turning and digestive troubles, that even though they never lacked for company here, well, that was terrible too, because they could never be alone anymore, alone in their own home, the way they used to be, the way the young people who came to visit still could. But as soon as a pensioner indicated that he wanted to let them know there was another side to these splendid surroundings, the relatives quickly got down on their knees and tried to make out the German inscriptions on the plinth, they took great pains to decipher and read out syllable by syllable the names of the months carved into the stone and weather-beaten and blurred by moss, because the statues had stood there for more than two hundred years … And then all of a sudden those who had come to visit, and this was always at the very moment the pensioner was about to pour out his heart, not so much because he had to live here with all those others, but because old age was terrible, there was nothing one could do about it, of course, but young people should be grateful they were still young, because every pensioner would be more than glad to stand in line for vegetables, or bread, he’d be more than glad to walk through the broken-up streets of Prague and other cities, more than glad to go to his butcher and order mea