The grass around the car was glistening. It could have been moonlight reflected in drops of dew, or perhaps a thin layer of hoarfrost. The temperature was now below freezing. Hard times were coming for birds, animals and outlaws, who had to find a place to hide. I wrapped my coat tightly about me, and at that moment I seemed to hear a muffled whispering that came from the frozen distances. As I looked down into the valley bathed in moonlight, I could see a small church spire beyond the grey of a cemetery wall. Now I could hear the words. It was a question: is the mortuary my whole world, or has the whole world become a mortuary?
It occurred to me, in fact I was certain, that this was probably the last sentence the old farmer hidden away in the mortuary had written in his notebook. The priest who had found him dead had read the sentence and the gloomy question, a question from the present world, not from the gospel of Christ, had not seemed worth taking a risk for, so he had thrown the notebook into the fire.
I would have liked to have heard more of that message, but the surveyor had begun calling out the first set of numbers and I had to concentrate; a mistake would render our efforts useless. I also had to announce the angle at which he should look for the North Star.
We filled in the last column of figures a few minutes before three in the morning. The surveyor, having stood
hunched over his instrument all that time, was numb with cold, but he seemed contented, even moved, by his achievement.
'You once said,' he recalled, 'that you'd like to look at the stars, or the moon,' and he pointed to the almost completely round lunar sphere in the sky.
So I climbed out of the car, stood behind the theodolite, put my eye to the eyepiece and then pointed the lens in the direction I thought the moon would be.
At any time during the fifty years of my life, I undoubtedly could have gone to an observatory and studied the night sky through a telescope far bigger than this theodolite, but I was glad I hadn't. There are things a person should see at the best possible moment — and perhaps I sensed that one day I would stand here freezing on a cold, windy hilltop at three o'clock in the morning on the last day of our survey and be given a view of the moon, not as an opportunity to be grasped but as a reward.
And so I saw it: the moon as I had known it from books, films and television shots — the craters of Tycho, Copernicus, and Theophilos, the Mare Nubium, the Sea of Darkness and the Sea of Tranquillity, and all those other names, and everything I had known only from grey snapshots — was real and glowing and solid.
Surprised as I was at how this sight transported me, it seemed to me that the longer I looked, the more the lunar landscape resembled a face, a knowing face, a face of reconciliation. Suddenly, I recognized it as the face of my father, and he, from the distance of another world, asked me what I thought.
I had to admit that I liked it, that it was a miracle to look
at the Earth's satellite in close-up.
Do you realize that people have already stood here? he asked.
And I agreed that too was miraculous, just as it was miraculous that people could fly above the earth, look into the heart of matter or say: let there be light, and light will indeed appear. The world you created is a miracle, I thought, just as the consequences of what you have created are so threatening. And even though I fear this world and rebel against it, I do so because I still hope that something of that miracle will survive, although I have no grounds for such hope other than the wish that so much of your effort, so much desire, so many fond and magnanimous dreams would not be utterly in vain.
Afterwards, we put the theodolite back in its case, then we carried all our things back to the car and drove down for the tripod, the light on it still twinkling, vainly luring insects that had long since gone to sleep for the winter.
We reached the farm towards four o'clock. Everyone had gone to bed. The surveyor took me to the room his wife had prepared for me and, before he wished me good night, he said, almost ceremonially: 'I want to thank you for your exemplary assistance.'
He didn't say whether he meant by that my diligent recording of his data, my capacity to stay with him to the end despite frequent exhaustion, or my mysterious ability to look into an overcast sky and predict the weather.
Flags
ON OUR FINAL morning in Meštec I was awakened by a tapping sound over my head. Something was falling on the ceiling, as though someone were pouring gravel on to the attic floor.
'Maybe they've started dismantling the roof,' I thought.
The surveyor rejected my suggestion: the stationery store was still open, and he'd seen Mrs Pokorná relaxing with her canary in the courtyard.
While I was having breakfast, the surveyor, in a suit and tie, went off to the National Committee office to announce that we were leaving, to thank them for providing excellent accommodation free of charge, and to beg them for the almost new stove that still brightened my room and which, Kos was convinced, they would scrap anyway.
From my trunk, I took the figure of the hideous extraterrestrial creature, wrapped it in a newspaper, and went out in front of the building.
Through the glass door of the stationery shop, I could see several customers inside, so I decided to wait. Stepping back a little way into the square, I had a good view of the roof of our building. A large hole had appeared in it from which a man was emerging.
The last old lady finally came out of the store and I went in.
'Your friend said you were all done,' the girl said.
'We are.'
'I haven't had a minute to sit down today,' she complained. 'There's been a constant stream of customers all morning.'
'I'm surprised you're still here,' I said. 'They're taking apart the roof over your head.'
'No one told me anything about it,' she said, shrugging.
'We're all packed,' I said. 'And I'd like to leave something for you.'
'Me?' She took the parcel from me. 'Can I look?'
I unwrapped the figure.
'No!' she shouted. 'No!'
'It's a souvenir.'
'No, it's impossible. I mean, why would you give this to me? You can't be serious — giving it to me just like that. Jesus, he's beautiful, he's real! It's him!'
Two young girls and a Vietnamese man with a suitcase came into the store, but she didn't even notice them. 'It must have been terribly expensive. And I — what could I give you for it?'
She began to rummage frantically in one of the drawers, and I. took the opportunity to wish her good health, then left the store.
Even in that brief time, the hole in the roof had grown. The surveyor was walking back from the National Committee building, looking extremely pleased. They'd given him permission to take away the stove, and all we had to do was put the old stove outside the door in its place. 'They also want us to put flags out for the twenty-
eighth of October,' he announced. 'But to hell with that, we're leaving anyway. Do you think the two of us can carry the stove down by ourselves?'
I doubted it. Fortunately, the roofers were in the building. They'd certainly help us. So while the surveyor went up to bargain with them, I unfurled both the flags, something I'd never done in the two months I'd shared my room with them. I was excited by the idea. They were almost brand new; only their edges were covered in cement dust. I rolled them up again and carried them down to the main entrance. Then I brought a ladder from the shed and put the flags in the rusty holders affixed, for that purpose, on either side of the door. Once again, I felt I had chosen the right place and the right time.
We still had to return the things we'd borrowed. The surveyor insisted that even the chair without a back belonged over the road. The last thing we did was take our borrowed beds back to the château.