She walked unsteadily to the drawer where she kept the pencils, pulled it out and asked me to choose one. 'They say he takes one look at you and he can tell exactly what's wrong. And he cures you with the power that comes from
his fingers and his eyes.'
'That's what they say,' I admitted. I knew the priest in the village where the healer lived.
'Do you think he'd see me?'
'Certainly. He sees everyone.'
'There must be loads of people who want to see him.'
'Sometimes you have to wait all night.'
'They say he even cured people who couldn't walk. Do you believe that?'
'It depends on what was wrong with them,' I said. 'And what about your mother?' I asked. 'Is she still in hospital?'
'She won't be coming home,' she said matter-of-factly. 'I haven't been able to see her for at least two weeks. I'd go there with my little girl, but she's had an ear-ache. And if I go alone, there's nothing to talk about. All she can do is lie there.'
Her voice seemed unsteady. I paid for the pencil, and as I left I caught sight of her through the glass door sitting down, with some difficulty, to read her magazine.
If he is to check all the points in his network, a surveyor must criss-cross the countryside, not omitting a single field, and there is scarcely a village he will not have walked through many times, or at least driven through. Because his points are located on high land and in other prominent places, he must climb hills and church towers. He surveys a landscape bathed in sunlight and submerged in shadow. He sees its delectability and its distress.
One day, on a gentle slope near the Labe River, we were looking for a stone marker in a cornfield. The field was huge and the corn was so high that the surveyor had to jump on the bonnet of his car to scan the field with binoculars. When he saw the tip of the black and white
stake in the distance, he sent me ahead to find it. I held a staff above my head so that he would not lose sight of me, and pushed my way through the thick corn following his shouted directions.
When I reached the stone, I saw that a third of it was sticking out of the ground. It was easy to dig up; the soil here was soft, viscid and black. You could feel the fecundity of Mother Earth in it. We set the stone back in the ground properly and added several shovels of topsoil to fill the hole.
The water will just erode it again,' the surveyor remarked, speaking of the topsoil. 'You can see how much of it was washed away since the last survey.' This, I learned, had taken place seven years ago.
'Growing corn here,' the surveyor added, 'is a crime.'
A greedy farmer, not really a farmer at all, can destroy in a single seven-year period what it took thousands of years to create. And what he destroyed no one could ever restore.
While we were in the middle of the huge field, we were caught by a vehicle spewing dust from a line of nozzles. We couldn't pack our tools and escape in time, and suddenly found ourselves engulfed in a suffocating cloud. Tears streamed down our cheeks and we coughed, gasping for breath.
What would my wife have seen in this slowly dissipating cloud?
Perhaps from a distance it would have reminded her of a snowstorm, the floating clouds of milkweed seed on an Indian summer day, or mist rising from the bottom of a waterfall. But to me, in the middle of it, it was thick with memories of gas attacks and war.
There were fields that we passed every day. I observed
how the corn tassles turned grey and the kernels yellowed and hardened. When the corn in these fields was harvested, and all that remained of them was stubble, I saw bare patches previously hidden by the corn. Nothing grew there and nothing ever would. The next day tractors were turning over the soil with gigantic ploughs. Some time later, when we passed the same fields again, it was windy, and there were clouds of dust over the fields. The wind carried the earth away for ever. We were no longer looking at a field but at a desert. On these journeys we never saw a pheasant or a quail, or even a rabbit. Only mouse-holes and swarms of flies. These, I realized, were the life forms that would most probably survive.
At noon, depending on where we happened to be, we would either go somewhere for lunch or just sit down on the edge of a field, eat salami and a bun, and drink a bottle of mineral water. Most often we would stop at a roadside pub. Such places practiced strict segregation. A small taproom was set aside for workers, but entry into the dining-room in work clothes was forbidden. But that day, a smiling barwoman wouldn't even let us into the room set aside for us, because a wedding party had taken over the whole restaurant.
We left our quasi-military vehicle beside some colourful little cars decked out in streamers and went to buy something in the store around the corner. From the windows of the restaurant we were not allowed to enter because of our clothes, we could hear the shrieks of the wedding guests. Suddenly the door opened and three young men appeared, dragging the bride between them. She wore a garland of freesias in her hair and offered little resistance, merely holding the lacy hem of her long
wedding gown off the ground and occasionally making a show of trying to escape from her captors. When they pushed her into a decorated car that had squealed to a stop by the main entrance, she began to giggle in a high, joyous, seductive voice. As the car careered out on to the road, she managed to wave out of the window at us and at the other wedding guests who had meanwhile gathered in the doorway.
Before we knew it we were surrounded by a second group of young men in suits who, with the persistence of people who've been drinking, tried to persuade us that we had a duty — we were the only sober men around — to take them with us and give chase to the kidnappers. If we caught up with them we could have all the food we could eat and all the beer we could drink.
As usual, I couldn't read the surveyor's thoughts from the expression on his face, but he moved a bundle of stakes from the seat in the back of the car and nodded to the young man who was obviously the groom, and two other wedding guests, to climb aboard. We got in the front and drove off in pursuit.
In every village we came to, we stopped at the pub, or at least slowed down to look for the car decorated with streamers. We finally caught up with them at the fifth pub. The groom and his two guests jumped out while the car was still moving and I heard the loud laughter when they appeared inside. I saw the bride cautiously sipping from a mug of beer she'd been treated to.
One of the groom's companions quickly paid the bill for the kidnappers, the kidnapped and the rest of the people in the room, and then we got back in the car, this time with the bride. I offered her my seat beside the driver, but she
preferred to squeeze in beside her newly acquired husband.
The surveyor suggested a short cut, and took off across the fields of stubble. I did not look around, but I could hear behind me the whispering of a happy female voice; the air was filled with the fragrance of flowers.
Perhaps the car itself felt the strangeness of the occasion. Certainly the driver must have realized that this was perhaps the last such opportunity in his surveying career. We bounced lightly over the ridge of a hill, and then we were practically flying above the reddish stubble in the fields. The surveyor's whole body was tensed; all he needed was a helmet and he was an aviator, gently and skilfully manoeuvring his machine so close to the ground that the onlookers gasped in wonder.
I glanced briefly over my shoulder into the back of the car. The bride was resting her head on the groom's shoulder. Her eyes were closed and her garland had slipped to one side. She was a country girl with a pert little nose and freckled cheeks. There were a few small beads of perspiration on her upper lip. It occurred to me that her gentleness, her mystery, was precisely what was missing from our work, from the whole age of engineering.