Closed. Cleaning in progress, though only the day before, when Mr Novák had been in a good mood, it had been all first names as he sat among us, and now he’d shut up shop and his face glowed and grinned horribly over the sign, smirking grotesquely like a white mask with Brylcreemed hair, only to vanish behind the drape. As we stood outside the inn, more customers kept arriving, and so we swore and shouted and called out and cursed, why hadn’t he told us the day before… Or there was another time when we’d turned up, pleased to see one another arriving down all the various rides and tracks, sure of being greeted by a fired-up stove because the inn was all lit up like a lighthouse, like a chandelier, but as each of us tried the door-handle, one after another, we discovered it was closed, and when we tapped on the door, no one heard us, we looked in through the taproom window, the one used to pass beers out into the garden on summer days, and we saw that the tables had been pushed together, with white cloths on them, and Mr Novák, in another world, was laying out spoons and forks round the plates, and the plates were linked together with sprigs of asparagus fern, and when we called out: “Come on, Láďa, let us in, we’ll stick by the stove, quiet as mice,” we called him by his first name because the night before he’d called us by ours, Mr Novák, lost in his other world and as if under a spell, took a step back and looked, from the door and in sheer delight, at all these preparations for the wedding on the coming day, which had been booked by some outsider from far away, the stove grinned with its red-hot coals, and outside it was cold. And Mr Novák condescended to respond and spoke into the drizzle in an alien voice: “Can I help you? Only the outside’s open today, can’t you see?” he said, exasperated, so we stood outside in the drizzling rain, or sat out in it on garden seats and abandoned chairs, drinking beer, we could never get over the swings in the psychological weather of our publican’s mood, he, with great flair, went on setting out wine glass after wine glass, shot glass after shot glass, to go with the wines and liqueurs and aperitifs in the order they would be drunk from the next day… and we put up our empty glasses, gesticulating, shouting, but Mr Novák, miles away, kept stepping back to savour from every angle the table so lavishly spread for the morrow’s wedding feast. And when he did deign to notice us, he pulled our pints with evident distaste and resentment and revulsion, and when none other than Mr Hubka, the engineer, begged him to let him have another one to hold in reserve, Mr Novák came to the serving window, released the catch and slammed it down so hard that Mr Hubka barely got his hands away in time, otherwise he’d have lost his fingers. But I too was shaking with rage, I too, like the other sad and disappointed customers, swore that I’d never come back to this inn, that I was here for the last time, I too was thinking of all the things I’d do to Mr Novák, but as I looked inside the brightly lit restaurant, I had to concede, as anyone else would, that when Mr Novák was in a good mood, he was the most likeable man and publican in the world, that our Mr Novák had arranged the tables for the wedding breakfast with tremendous good taste, and when I saw Lucy and Polly sitting on a chair and turning their little heads in whatever direction Mr Novák went next, and every now and again Mr Novák couldn’t stop himself — if perhaps to show us that the cats meant more to him than we, his outdoor customers, did — from bending down to let Lucy and Polly take turns at kissing his forehead, and then he was back to fetching bunches of flowers or pots of cyclamen, or twisting ever more festoons of asparagus fern for the even fancier cloth that went over all the tables together. And when Mr Novák had satisfied himself for the last time, he bent down and picked Lucy and Polly up, and they seemed to have been waiting for just that, they floated up into his embrace, then with the beloved cats on one arm and his other hand on the light switch, all the customers abandoned any sense of dignity, we on the outside held our glasses up in the drizzling rain, pointing and tapping on the window for him to have pity, for Mr Novák to be so kind as to recall those glorious days past, those times when a pig was slaughtered, those walks together on days off as far as Elegant Antonia and the giant spruce, but Mr Novák, having feasted his eyes on the proffered empty glasses and imploring faces, switched the light off. We’d put every last scrap of earnest, canine devotion into our eyes, every ounce of humility and entreaty, but Mr Novák had spurned us, just as on any of those other days when he went bonkers, when he was overcome with self-pity and sadness and grouchiness, when his patrons became so obnoxious to him that not only did he not want to see them, but he actually wanted to humiliate them, and to that end he would always choose a day when no one would, or could, have expected it even in their wildest dreams. Yet I was fond of Mr Novák, because my own nature was not dissimilar, also apt to vacillate between polar opposites, one day I’d embrace the whole of mankind, another I’d be thinking up the most ghastly genocide for the lot. But I also liked Mr Novák because of his love for Lucy and Polly, and now that he’d put out the lights and left us outside in the drizzling rain and was savouring the notion of us contemplating the most horrible way of doing away with him, having first tortured him in ways as yet undreamed-of by any Korean executioner, I knew that Mr Novák was in his little room, lying on his back, listening out, with Lucy and Polly lying on his chest and he’d be stroking them and showing them his love. Like me, Mr Novák was an odd character. So it came to pass that those dark days grew in number, and all the more did we appreciate it when Mr Novák lit up and smiled at us, by which moment we would forget to a man all the things he had done to us, because we were glad to be able to meet up at the inn, given that from six o’clock onwards the sole preoccupation of any true man of Kersko and its forests is to spend a pleasant evening over a pint in the pub, and all the banter and chit-chat, the arguments and imbecilities are a brilliant way to unwind from our daily tribulations, so our serenity is fully restored and as we cycle home at night we’re on a par with a newborn child, though that only on the assumption that mine host has been good to us. Then the day came when Mr Novák said what we’d long known, that he was moving in two days’ time, he wished to invite us to his last day at the inn, he would put on a feast and we would part friends. And it came to pass that that evening, after we’d tempered our food intake at home and were looking forward to the last supper, when we entered the pub one by one, Mr Novák was his alien self, there was no fire in the stove, the chairs were up-ended on the tables by the window, and Mr Novák and his good lady were packing their belongings into boxes, Mr Novák served his last beer, already a bit flat, beer with no head on it, like the specimen you take in a beer bottle to Mikolášek, the miracle doctor, for him to guess not only what’s wrong with you, but also what infusion will put it right. And again there was that sorry sight of everyone sitting in their coats, perplexed and disappointed and feeling cheated, and they stared towards the door to see each new arrival’s face burning bright with joy and anticipation, then as each one entered, how they were taken aback, then stunned and lamed, but always with that glowing physiognomy that couldn’t be dimmed. In the end everyone sat down and Mr Novák brought us our headless beers without a word… and when Mr Franc said out loud that the beer had no head on it, the rest turned towards him in horror at his presumption… and Mr Novák went into the kitchen, brought a whisk, the kind you use to whisk flour into a sauce to thicken it, whisked the beer into a froth and set the whisk down on an ashtray, the bubbles of froth popped quietly and silence descended, and we were all so debilitated by the ignominy that no one felt able to rise and leave, because the greatest dishonour and insult to a true beer-drinker is lacklustre, flat beer… And Lucy and Polly had no idea, any more than us, what they were in for, they padded around among the boxes and crates and helped pack the kitchen utensils that were Mr Novák’s own, his butchery knives, a full set of them, with which, on his good days, he would lovingly carve meats and draw up the menu, which on any of those happy days had at least six dishes to chose from, whereas on lean days Mr Novák had no salami, nor would he offer so much as bread and dripping. And it came to pass that Mr Novák stood legs astride and arms akimbo and was about to tell us something terrible, something that he had always held against us and that he would take with him to any other pub in future, since it wasn’t loathing for us and our names, but a grudge against all patrons as such. He raised one finger and we goggled, some rose in terror, but all eyes converged on Mr Novák’s finger, like bicycle spokes on the hub, but he curled it back into his palm and gave a wave of his hand as if it were pointless to say anything by way of a farewell, with that hand he was damning us just as when Christ, in paintings of the Last Judgement, damns those who have lapsed from faith, those who he is consigning to eternal damnation… And Vráťa opened the door and came running in, artless and childlike, nestling up to us and pointing to the half-open door in which a dancing Mílka, the daughter, appeared, now bespectacled and obese, but dancing with a veil, raising only her arms, because she couldn’t lift herself off the ground, hop, yet she danced with so much feeling in her eyes, with such absorption, that she only added to the general confusion and tension, she danced between the tables as if to bid a farewell of which she as yet knew nothing, because the moment she got in from school, she just danced and kept dancing, right through the weekend and on all school-free days, and so she danced us her dance — more an ungainly, if emotive shuffle, with eyes ablaze and cheeks flushed — for the last time, then she danced off out into the darkness, and little Vráťa banged the door behind her so hard that all the glass panes fell out. The tinkling glass helped us pull ourselves together, and one by one we left the farewell feast to take the shortest way home, humiliated, wretched, hungry, to wipe up whatever relics of dinner with a piece of bread or make do with some bread and dripping, since, in anticipation of our last supper at the pub, we’d declined the roast at home.