I Have Nine Canaries, while I spent the whole night pacing up and down and reciting the lines from my most famous roles, from the days when I performed at the playhouse in the little town where time stood still … Now I walk around the retirement home, the rediffusion boxes play “Harlequin’s Millions,” the brown speakers, hanging outside in the trees like bird feeders, make me think of beehives with bees flying out in all directions, into the sun, “Harlequin’s Millions” every Sunday and on holidays is more soothing than medicine and injections, I walk down the corridors and before I go to sleep I listen through open doors and behind closed ones to the echoing sighs, the confused conversations, because even long after the visitors have gone home, the pensioners not only continue their conversations with their relatives, they also repeat over and over everything they should’ve said to the relatives while they were still visiting them here at the retirement home … At the door to my own room I put my ear against the white enamel paint, then open the door a crack and in the shadows I see Francin kneeling next to the radio, completely engrossed in the news from around the world, he’s been listening to those reports for more than twenty years, he listens to them like a doctor examining a critically ill patient, now Francin raises his fist and shakes it at someone on the radio, or shouts something encouraging … I close the door and walk on, perhaps because Francin was forever waiting for that one news report that would amaze not only him but the entire world, but I knew he was waiting in vain, he was waiting just like all those pensioners had waited today for their relatives who never showed up, yet I know that next visiting day they’ll be expecting them with even greater hopes … Perhaps it was also because ever since the day we got married Francin was obsessed with the notion that the best was yet to come, that our future would be a bright one and that only in the future, when we were retired, would we truly be happy … that’s why he had taken out two very expensive insurance policies, after that we could never go on vacation, Francin reassured me that everything would be fine once the insurance had been paid out. Every month he paid five hundred crowns for that happy future, six thousand a year … and for that money, as I now know, we could’ve packed up, even brought Uncle Pepin along, and toured the Mediterranean, driven through the Alps and the Pyrenees, taken a cruise to Spitsbergen, traveled to Italy, to Morocco, a different country every year, seen Paris and the beautiful cities of Germany and Austria … But we just sat at home and dreamt that one day we’d be retired and would get to see all those places, Francin even sent away every year for brochures from travel agencies in Hamburg, The Hague and Bremen, from Lloyd’s Travel, brochures with detailed descriptions of all the trips, including the names of every port, all the departure dates, even the names of the ships that would carry us across the seas and oceans. But when the war was over and the time had come for the insurance to be paid out, we received a letter from the insurance agency informing us that we were entitled to half a million crowns, but that we had to give them the name of a bank where they could send our insurance money so it could be deposited in an account we could draw on only for specific purposes, which didn’t include travel. And from that time on Francin lost heart, from that time on he was furious at himself, because before the war he had paid the insurance company six thousand crowns a year, every year another and even more beautiful voyage across the seas, through European cities, mountains and valleys, every year a wonderful vacation for Uncle Pepin, too, in those days that was what it cost to travel for three weeks, for a whole month, but now all those trips were tied up in a limited-access account … The first few years he still hoped that things would get better, that one day we’d be able to travel, that we could withdraw our money to pay for a trip, perhaps even a trip around the world, that’s how much money we’d saved, but every year they told us that money in a limited-access account couldn’t be used for such expenditures. Then Francin would postpone the whole thing till the following year, and then the year after that, we ran our fingers along the maps in