e he knows, rides round to the back of the cottage and sniffs the smoky scent of the meat coming from the smokehouse and he and Pavel keep up the shouting until Olina comes out with a chopping board and Lothar, impatient, though warned by Pavel that it’s not ready yet, can’t resist, and he takes a piece out, burning his fingers, then puts the first piece to the test with great relish and Pavel rides off to fetch some beer, riding back into the hallway and there, at the foot of a wall hung with dozens of certificates and awards from regional motorcycle races, there, beneath the faded flowers and blanched ribbons, awards that Pavel had once won as a motorcycle racer, Pavel places some bottles of cold beer on his lap and rides back out into the light, pounding away at his tyres so as to be back with his friend as quickly as possible, and with the bottle-opener that hangs permanently from a string on his wheelchair, he opens a fine lager and offers it to his friend. Meanwhile, Olina gets Lothar’s luggage from the car, takes it upstairs to the little attic room where Lothar will be sleeping, she smiles in silence and she, whatever she does, from whatever side and angle you look at her, is always photogenic and doesn’t need to say anything, just like Audrey Hepburn. And even after Lothar has more or less drunk his fill, he keeps downing beers with such zest as if Lothar plus beer were a bold advertisement for the very beer he happened to be drinking, so that anyone who isn’t thirsty and sees him drinking, develops a thirst, and anyone who doesn’t drink beer rues his abstinence, because no one round here has ever met such a jolly and witty character except for Leli, who is, like Lothar, not only jolly, but also well-read and a mine of information. And Lothar wasted no time in reporting the news from the wider world, whether he’d won or lost playing the stock market, because from the moment Lothar wakes, he listens to the radio all morning and reads all the papers, then he has lunch and goes off to his little workshop, where he tunes in to Saarländischer Rundfunk, which plays music and offers traffic information to drivers and anyone else who’s listening, and meanwhile Lothar makes beautiful things out of metal, repairs things for his neighbours, anything they bring him, he’s got his own welding machine and oxyacetylene torch, every conceivable set of drill bits and a little lathe. On one occasion, Pavel, having come back from Lothar’s, said that not even the company he worked for, which developed racing bikes, had a workshop to compare with his. Lothar rides around his workshop and he sings and slowly drinks his lager, these days his preference is for beverages from the Pschorr brewery, he rides around and works away, because, as in his car, everything in his workshop is within reach, he just raises a hand and whatever tool he wants is there, he looks out of the window into the garden, where his mother’s working, and Lothar never complains, he would, but he never affords himself the time to complain or start cursing, what happened happened and he’s come to terms with it, he’s had to come to terms with what happened to him, and having decided not to kill himself, he has staked everything on a perfectly ordinary life, and wherever he puts in an appearance, jollity breaks out, and Lothar hands out information left, right and centre, everything he’s learned from all the channels that flow his way — books, radio, television and talking to people, and to everything he tacks on his own optimistic view that all that is good must be good, even his wheelchair and broken back, even that’s good, because it’s happened and there’s nothing to be done but come to terms with it. And Lothar also speaks Czech, no surprise there, given that as recently as five years ago he was in the Chomutov weightlifting and wrestling teams, and he used to work as a welder, a Czechoslovak citizen, but of German nationality, he had a family, a son, but one day, as he was down a mine welding something with a friend at a height of six metres, the assembly they were working on crumpled and his friend fell into a pile of soot and Lothar fell on his back on a large lump of coal and cracked his spine so badly that six months later he was transferred as permanently immobilised to an old people’s home, where he just wept and thought of ways to get out of this broken life, the more so after his wife divorced him and he was left all alone. And at that point he remembered his sister, who was a confectioner in Spessart, and his mother, who’d been removed from Czechoslovakia many years before during the postwar expulsions of Germans, then he left for Germany himself to be near his mother and sister, and so having got a pension of two thousand marks he started to live, he healed and steeled himself, and so now he comes to Kersko to see Pavel, who he’d got to know at the Heidelberg Olympic Games, during the paralympic javelin competition. All we know about Pavel is that his dream was to make as big a mark as František Šťastný, he’d raced motorbikes, won one district or regional race after another, as testified by the certificates on the wall in his hallway, but one day after he’d won a race, a friend came along and dragged him out of bed to go hunting for girls out Sázava way, and as they were riding along on the winning bike, Pavel went into a skid and landed so badly in the dark that he was left unconscious, and his friend, the one who’d dragged him out of bed, and that’s probably where things went wrong, hauled him from the middle of the road towards the verge, and that’s probably where things went wrong again, because Pavel says that when Professor Jirásek was operating on him he suddenly felt his legs leaving him, his body was lying there, but the legs were going and going and kept going and he saw his legs walking along as just trousers, he saw them going off beyond the far horizon, and when he shouted out, his legs disappeared beyond the horizon for good. And ever since he pulled himself together, he’s had to trundle aound in his wheelchair, and he’s got everything you work with your feet in the car adapted to his hands, and also, before he came to terms with it, he couldn’t believe it, whenever he woke up in the morning and looked up at the ceiling, he thought it had all been a dream, but when he sat up and wanted to swing his legs out, he couldn’t, so he’d quickly get into his wheelchair, go quickly down in the lift, roll himself quickly into his car and strain to haul the folded wheelchair in after him, and he would drive about, all over the place, all day long, for days on end, until after six months of driving around, with the movement denied to him entrusted to his tyres, he regained his composure, grew more relaxed and finally convinced himself that he had to accept what he had, live as best he could, trust in those things that tallied with his lot, and for the first time he smiled, then he laughed, and laughed long, until he laughed himself into that quiet smile in which he found that a legless man can live in this world, enjoying perhaps a greater sensation of living than all those other folk who can run around. And the two friends each had their own truth, their moral fibre was so awesome that all who knew Lothar and Pavel, however slightly, if ever they were a bit despondent, if ever they began to wonder if life was worth living under such-and-such conditions, they’d all…, me too, when, at moments of such blasphemous thoughts, I think of Pavel and Lothar, I feel ashamed of myself compared to the moral compass that backs Pavel and Lothar’s view of the world. And Olina, Pavel’s fiancée, she’s an angel you could follow about with dustpan and brush, sweeping up the feathers that fall from her wings, she came to know Pavel as a rehabilitation nurse and she fell in love with him, and he with her, and if you were to look for a pair of true lovers, forget Romeo and Juliet, forget Troilus and Cressida, forget even Radúz and Mahulena, just watch as Olina pushes Pavel along, as Olina hauls him up the steps, the six steps to steer him through the open door of the Keeper’s Lodge restaurant, all you need do is watch these two lovers, these betrothed, who have already inherited the earth and are, by the power of their love and moral fibre, a living example to all who grow despondent or demand more of this world and life than is theirs to demand and so get the sulks and fret away in a corner somewhere.