t for a certain hour, more than glad to do anything, if only he could be young again, younger than he was, so he could take care of himself when his time had come, when he was bedridden and powerless, and the nurses had to bring him the chamber pot and wipe his bottom the way you do with little children … I saw how, whenever the situation arose that a pensioner wanted to say something truthful to his children, let them know they should appreciate the fact that they were young, each of the relatives, whose responsibility it was to prevent such outpourings of emotion, would glance at his watch and gasp, he’d even clap his hand to his forehead and wail, hurry, we’ve got to get back, and suddenly everything seemed to be over, like a market or a festival or an outdoor picture show hit by a cloudburst, the relatives hurriedly said their good-byes, snatched up their bags, grabbed their children by the hand and pulled them so hard they practically flew through the air, because in less than half an hour the train or bus would be leaving, and if they had come by car, they suddenly all had to be home on time, where an important visitor was waiting for them who would decide whether something could be arranged concerning admission to a high school, or where something important had to be finished, even if it was a nice day the relatives suddenly looked up at the sky, inhaled deeply and could smell that a storm was brewing, that the skies would roar and the rain would pour and the tires on their car were worn and would skid on a wet road … And the pensioners pretended to be even more dismayed by all this, they made a great show of concern, and then the relatives went away, turning back to wave their handkerchiefs and hands until they reached the gate … and when they were standing at the Count’s elaborately forged wrought-iron gate with its doors open like the gigantic wings of the angel Gabriel, they turned back one last time, wept, and then waved slowly, as if this were the very last time they would ever see each other and that they would never, never meet again … And I just wandered around, I pretended to be watching the tips of my shoes as they slid out alternately from under my long skirt, or listening to the sand crunching under my shoe soles, but from the corner of my eye I could clearly see the pensioners standing there in the middle of the courtyard, next to a small table, leaning on the tabletop and waving with their free hand, like someone waving from his sickbed at departing relatives as they back away to the door, for the very last time, because his days and hours are numbered. And when the relatives were gone, the smiles always fell from the pensioners’ faces, they came unstuck like the sole of an old shoe, and there was silence, everything that had taken place on visiting day, the whole show, was played back on the inside of closed eyelids. And late in the afternoon, after the visitors had left, all the vases were filled with flowers, I always had the feeling when I saw those visitors arriving with bouquets of flowers, when I saw them making their festive entrance, that it was as if they were coming to visit a grave on the name day or birthday of the deceased, or at Christmas, I came to the conclusion that these visits were actually a kind of preparation for the funeral, every visiting relative wanted to convince himself of this, but was afraid to look at anyone directly, so instead each visitor stole a searching glance at his or her parent, or grandparent, or uncle, or aunt, whenever they bent over, whenever they turned around, to try to see from the scrawny neck, the shaking hand, whether that relative was ripe for the coffin, whether he was preparing himself for man’s final resting place, the graveyard. The only pensioners who always looked good were the ones who waited faithfully, even though nobody ever came to see them. Every few minutes they walked to the gate, each time they heard the sound of a car their faces lit up with excitement, but each time they realized that the visitor had come for someone else, they went pale, closed their eyes and walked away, only to return moments later, with that same sense of excitement, to the gate, whose doors were open wide to the town, and look from there to the bottom of the road to see if anyone else was coming. And their Sunday lunch was very much like that of the pensioners who hurried through their meal so they could get back to their never-ending game of Mariáš, they even wrapped their dessert in a napkin and went back out into the courtyard or, if it was raining, to the front door, they stood in the doorway and stared out at the rainy courtyard and rubbed their eyes so they could see if anyone came running through the downpour. Those were the pensioners I was most fond of, because early in the evening, when the gate was shut, these pensioners headed straight for bed, not only was their temperature above normal, but with all that waiting they had developed a real fever, because they had been waiting for no one, not really hoping, just waiting for the sake of waiting, so that they had spent their lovely or rainy but always lovely Sunday waiting for the arrival of someone they knew, like the relatives or friends who came to visit the others. When Uncle Pepin began to have trouble seeing and walking, in order for him to get more exercise, we used to take him mushroom hunting, the day before, Francin would go to the market and buy three wild mushrooms, he always went to the market because he could tell by the quantity and price of the mushrooms on sale there how many mushrooms were growing in the forest. If they cost twenty crowns per kilo, they were plentiful, if they were forty crowns, they’d be scarce. And he always asked the vendor where he’d gotten them and that’s where we’d go looking for mushrooms. If we set out at dawn for the station in our little town and there were a hundred other mushroomers waiting with their baskets for the morning train to Dymokury, we knew right away there would be plenty of mushrooms, but if there were only five mushroomers, that meant mushrooms would be hard to find. And so sometimes there would be a few hundred mushroomers swarming out of the station in Dymokury and if any of those mushroomers got ahead of us, Francin would run up behind them and hold up one of the three ceps he’d been hiding in his basket and call out to the mushroomers … Are you sure you’re looking hard enough? And he’d show them the cep and cut off the stem and put it back in his basket, and then he’d go up behind the next mushroomer and hold up the second cep and show it to him … Have you ever seen such beauties? and he’d cut off the stem and hand it to Uncle Pepin, who sniffed enthusiastically at the cep and cried … Damn, that’s a fine-looking fungus! And by the time he’d held up the third cep behind the third mushroomer the other mushroomers were in such a state of turmoil that from then on they couldn’t function properly … But there were always a few hundred mushroomers in the forest who lost and couldn’t find each other again, and then the forest was so full of shouting and swearing, whistling and yelling that we said to each other that next time we’d go mushroom hunting in the afternoon, because if there were any mushrooms growing at all, they’d be growing after twelve, too. Unfortunately that’s what all the other mushroomers said to each other, so that at the station waiting to board the afternoon train there would again be a hundred mushroomers, all giving each other dirty looks, even the ones who always greeted each other in the little town didn’t do so now, and just as we’d feared, all those mushroomers who had boarded the train in our little town spilled out again in Dymokury and we all ran to the forest and in the forest we all got in each other’s way, so Francin and Pepin and I gathered our mushrooms at the edge of the forest, we even found a whole basket of boletes in a nearby field, and once again our basket was full, and when all the mushroomers were reassembled on the platform to wait for the evening train, they looked enviously at our basket, which Uncle Pepin was carrying. After that we decided that next time it would be better to go by car or bicycle. So when we arrived in Dymokury at daybreak and the train came chugging around the bend, hardly anyone got off, but the forest clearings and paths were full of cars and bicycles and the forest was full of mushroomers. This time we didn’t hurry, we had decided to pick only suspicious-looking mushrooms, I’d brought along a saucepan and a bit of butter, some bread and a thermos can of hot tea, we were hoping we’d be lucky, and after a nice long nap we went and picked only the mushrooms that the other mushroomers had left behind, using the book Professor Smotlacha had written, we gathered gray-spotted Amanita and clustered woodlover, made a fire and braised and fried the mushrooms in butter, Francin added a panther cap and when the mushrooms were ready, we let Uncle Pepin have the first taste, he thought it was delicious, then we waited half an hour and Francin asked … Pepin, are your ears ringing yet? And when he said he didn’t hear any ringing, we helped ourselves and savored every bite, it was lovely in the forest, we picked only mushrooms that had been uprooted by the boots and shoes of hundreds of mushroom hunters … Another time we had fried up a few slices of common earthball and after eating it our legs went numb, for three hours we couldn’t walk, but then the feeling came back, from then on we avoided the common earthball, we only ever added it to spice up a batch of fried red-foot bolete and sulphur knight, along with some elfin saddle, which according to Professor Smotlacha contained methylhydrazine … Incidentally, elfin saddle is also delicious in vinegar, tarragon vinegar, combined with orange chanterelles, wood hedgehog and young pheasant’s back, in the winter we put this mixture in glass tumblers, sprinkled it with lemon juice and a bit of Worcestershire sauce and it tasted like the most delicate mussels and lobster. And so in the days when we ate and pickled only suspicious-looking mushrooms, we were so full of that delicate poison that once when we found some perfectly edible birch boletes and took them home and braised and fried them, we all suddenly began vomiting and had diarrhea and a terrible thirst, a dull headache, cramps in our calves, we had double vision and a constant ringing in our ears, at the hospital they were amazed that we had been poisoned by edible mushrooms, but the head physician told us that this had also happened to Professor Smotlacha, who had been found deeply unconscious after eating perfectly harmless birch boletes … And from then on we only went into the forest to go walking, and one day Francin stumbled upon a truck in the bushes that had probably been there since the end of the war, it was completely overgrown with small birches and aspens, Francin moved into that truck in the woods, he stayed there all week long and slept in the cab, I brought him his supper and watched as he disassembled the whole truck and put it back together again, and on the last day, when I’d brought him a bag with pans of hot food and a pot of soup, Francin held up his finger, grasped the crank handle, turned it, turned it again and the engine started, Francin pushed down on the accelerator with his hand and laughed, he was happy, then he polished up the weather-beaten emblem on the radiator grille with a piece of cotton waste. The metal emblem was inscribed with the name White. And the following week, with the money in his savings account, he bought the wreck from the local authorities, he bought new tires and took them to the forest, he jacked up the chassis and replaced the flat, moldering tires with the new ones, then he chopped through the young trees overgrowing the White, it was a lovely sight, some of the birch trunks had even sprouted in the driver’s cab and grown right through the broken windshield, toward the sun, perhaps this is what it will look like when there are no more people left here on earth, within ten, twenty years merciful nature will have enveloped all the factories and roads, all the cities, everything people have built on this planet, and then there will be order again on earth and a cruel but righteous peace, said Francin, and sat down behind the wheel and we drove home, Francin was so filled with happiness that he couldn’t eat a thing, every few minutes he went running out to the courtyard to inspect the White, he drank his coffee standing up while keeping an eye on his truck through the window. Then he went back to the local authorities and when he returned, he was waving a document that said that he, Francin, was authorized to use this truck to haul freight. And so every day Francin drove off with Pepin, who went along as his helper, to the fruit and vegetable warehouses, they transported vegetables all the way to Moravia, and the greater the distance the later they came home at night, tired but happy. Uncle Pepin was so old by then that when he and Francin were loading the crates of vegetables onto the pallets, he almost always fell and hit his head, so the warehousemen had to nurse his wounds and the next time they arrived at that warehouse, the men sat Uncle Pepin down on an empty crate and loaded up the truck themselves so they’d be done faster, while Francin just stood there handing them the empty crates that were piled high on the platform of the White … And that was why when both those men of mine returned from their journey, even if Pepin’s head was completely bandaged, he always beamed like a winner. Sometimes they had a flat tire on the road, sometimes two, and once when it was a hot day and they didn’t reach their destination until evening, the consignees wouldn’t accept their wilted vegetables, so Francin instructed Pepin to kneel down beside him, and then the two men put their hands together and begged and pleaded for them to accept the goods, or they’d never deliver any more vegetables to them, after which the men who unloaded the truck signed for the load, but only on condition that Francin take the vegetables to the cowshed, for the cattle, or straight to the dunghill … And all that time I was sitting and waiting, they should’ve been home hours before, but they’d only just left from somewhere along the northern border, I was terrified at the thought that they might have been killed in a crash … I scanned the newspaper for mention of an accident and then went back to listening at the window for the distinctive sound of the White, but although various types of cars and trucks drove past, none of them was my Francin’s, I could always tell the make of a car by its sound, and just when I was convinced they were both stone dead, I heard the cheerful, almost jubilant crackling and sputtering of the White’s engine, which made me laugh, I ran to the gate and opened it in the dark and the White drove slowly onto the premises, Francin tromped on the accelerator to make the engine roar, and then turned the key, which marked the end of their glorious journey. So twice a week my men didn’t get home till about midnight even though I’d expected them early in the evening, I paced up and down, I learned to talk to myself, once they didn’t get back to me until the following day, because all the tires had blown, even the two spares, Francin had to hitchhike home to take out all our money, buy new tires and then bring them all the way back to Broumov, where Uncle Pepin was still sitting in the cab of the truck singing songs from the operetta