It was already eleven-thirty. Expecting the worst, I got in beside the surveyor and we drove off. My new boss asked me if I could understand maps.
I did understand maps; in fact, I used to collect them.
He handed me a brand new ordnance survey map, stamped with a warning that it was a secret document. The trigonometric points were marked with orange circles.
We had five maps, with a total of almost two hundred points, each of which we were to locate and re-survey; if necessary, we would also have to relocate or replace the stone or set in a new one and paint the stake. Our first point that morning was number twenty-three outside the hamlet of Tribucha. It wouldn't be easy to find, Kos said. He'd already driven out that way, and the stake was missing and the stone had vanished under the alluvium. Then, having said all there was to say, he fell silent and concentrated on driving.
Although it was early September, the sun was still hot. I studied the countryside, constantly referring back to the map, bringing us nearer to the invisible point number twenty-three.
Evening
WHEN WE RETURNED to our residence that evening, I rinsed myself off and changed my clothes, then connected my lamp to the cable we used to bring in the borrowed current. I had planned to wash at least one of the windows, but I was too tired.
That afternoon we had dug six holes into which we set concrete markers; we had painted nine stakes and cut a twenty-metre sight-line through the vegetation with our machetes. I had helped with the actual surveying, which, compared with the digging, had seemed like a rest. I wasn't used to the pick and, after digging the third hole, I didn't think I could go on. Yet I did, and my young boss took turns with me, doing his share and, as the day progressed, taking on more and and more without making it look as though he were doing me a favour. Now he retired to his room and I saw him sit down at his wretched little table, take out his calculator and start working up the figures we'd gathered that afternoon.
I wasn't surprised to find him working at night. I was used to it from my childhood. Engineering is a monastic discipline to which you must sacrifice everything. To its disciples the only time well spent is time spent working.
Early in life I recognized that while fantasists, prophets and politicians struggle among themselves about how better to organize and articulate the world, it is scientists and engineers who silently and tirelessly put their notions of the world and life into practice. They measure everything they can touch. They calculate the bearing capacity of bridges and causeways; they wrap the world in a network of pathways on water, on land and in the air. They raise buildings higher than the pyramids; they drive tunnels under the Alps. They build factories and hospitals, and are constantly inventing new machines and instruments to use inside them. They draw up plans for rapid-firing weapons, body scanners, explosives, gas-chambers — and assembly-lines to produce them. They invent thousands of new drugs, chemical weapons, herbicides and fungicides. They build rockets, feeder farms, enormous generators and nuclear reactors. And when the world is slowly suffocating under the waste products of these labours, where do we turn for help? To the scientists, of course. They will decide which of the waste products can be easily and cheaply disposed of. They will invent antidotes to the toxins. And antidotes to the antidotes.
The idea of a countable, measurable and precisely expressible world is a seductive one. It has seduced even those who, by the very nature of their activity, ought to resist it. Not only have painters, poets, composers, literary critics and philosophers fallen in love with the dazzle of electric lights and fast cars, they have begun, in their work and research, to adapt to the scientist's world. They paint geometric images, compose concrete music and poetry, transform verse into diagrams and the mystery of Being into mathematical formulae.
When I was still young, I understood that, despite what I was taught in school, the age I lived in was probably called the age of engineering.
I disconnected my lamp and put my immersion heater in a cup of water. While I was waiting for it to boil, I spread a serviette over the chair that had no back, and unwrapped a piece of cake my wife had baked; then, so I wouldn't entirely lose touch with the world, I turned on one of the portable products of the technological age and, from the airwaves, tried to collect news from different corners of the planet.
The night air flowed through the open window, cool and pleasant. Carefully, so as not to get dirty, I approached the window ledge and looked down the square. It was empty. Prime time was just beginning on another revolutionary achievement of our civilization. Two drunks staggered about in front of the pub across from the church. Occasionally a car roared past. There was not a single woman in sight. Before me stretched an evening promising neither joy nor guilt: I didn't have to write or study. I could enjoy my freedom the way a worker does, freshly showered and freshly dressed after work; and moreover, hidden away in a town where no one knows him, expects him, or limits his movements.
I drank my tea and its aroma helped to cover the stench that still lingered in the room. I ate the cake, switched off the radio and walked out of my inhospitable bedroom.
There was light in the hallway of my building and, sitting on a kitchen chair, a rather plump woman of around sixty. She was stretching her short, fat legs in front of her; her hair, crudely bleached, was fluffed up in a messy bouffant. She had been reading an illustrated weekly for young
people. Beside her on a small pile of bricks sat a birdcage with a canary inside.
I greeted her and was about to go on when she called to me, 'Are you the new surveyor?'
I admitted that I was.
She stood up and offered me a chubby hand. 'Welcome to my house. I used to have five tenants,' she said. 'There was Mr Wolf, an army captain, and Dr Tereba — do you know him? He was a great prophet. He knew the stars and could cast people's horoscopes and tell their fortunes, but he'd only give them the rough outlines and keep the bad stuff, and the worse stuff, to himself. Now there's only Julka and me,' she nodded towards the cage. 'I hear they're going to build a railway station on this spot.'
'That can't be true,' I said. 'The line doesn't run anywhere near here.'
'That kind of detail never bothers them.'
Her objection had a logic of its own, and so I merely shrugged my shoulders, meaning that I knew nothing about a new station.
'My great-grandfather built this house, sir. And it was declared an historical building. They used to print diaries, almanacs and poetry here.'
'Was he a printer — your great-grandfather?'
'He was the district and episcopalian printer. He was born in eighteen hundred odd, but this is where he got his start, and when he died he left the building to my grandfather. And you know how long he lived? An even one hundred years. Back then, in Chrudim, there was a woman called Kroupová—she was Turkish. A soldier brought her back from Belgrade when she was just a little girl. He had her christened and he brought her up himself.
Then she lived in the same street as my great-grandfather, and she lived till she was a hundred and six — such are the ways of the Lord. At her funeral, my great-grandfather promised that if the Lord was willing, he'd live to be a hundred as well and enter the new century. If he'd had any idea what this one'd be like, he'd have thought twice about it. Grandfather lived to be ninety-six, but my father was killed in a concentration camp before he'd even turned forty. It was the Lord's will. At least he didn't have to look at this destruction,' and she waved her hands at the wall behind her, where bare brick and the broken windows of empty flats stared back at us. 'He should have had a memorial plaque here but they wouldn't allow it because he was a private businessman and a member of Sokol.'