O sole mio, something our boorish cauliflower brains weren’t up to… and Mr Jaruška took the horns from our reluctant players and handed them over, one brass instrument after the other, to the Přerovites, they took up position, stood astride on the stage and the conifer-frond-bedecked room indeed began to ring to O sole mio, even the chef trotted in and stood there abstracted, in his apron, and finally we sensed that at least in this regard and by this device the Přerovites could match us, and that there would be a truce, a grand truce, because O sole mio, we could manage it as well, but their delivery… but all of a sudden, as they were blowing away with such feeling, a black cloud burst in a shower all round them, and the more they blew more and more delicate soot from their instruments, the less they meant to be outsmarted, so they trumpeted on, but then the first flugelhorn player started to splutter, he dashed down from the stage, the other players behind him, all black with soot, and we roared with laughter fit to split our sides, but for the Přerovites it was the insult to end all insults, a desecration of the host, it was a terrible thing that we’d failed to give a timely pause for thought, timely consideration to this thing that Mr Jaruška had contrived with the whistle, and now with the brass instruments. He had sown the same contention between us as between the Vršovec and Přemyslid clans, as before that between Prague and Libice… and now the hunters from Přerov grabbed their guns from the wall and the waiter and the chef fled into the kitchen, and now we too grabbed our guns and so we stood facing each other, implacable and with rifles at the ready and safety catches off, and one false move was enough for it all to have ended with a grand exchange of good old Bohemian gunfire, when the door opened quietly and someone’s hand reached in for the light switch and the lights went out… and now someone came in and suddenly we saw a brightly lit chest covered in decorations, the apparition left us startled and the medals marched to the middle of the room and they were still all lit up and glinting like a prophecy and its signs, a hand writing on the wall, mene tekel… and suddenly the medals withdrew towards the wall and the lights went back on and I saw the figure turn and there stood the police commandant, debonair, and still shining his torch upwards on the medals ‘for merit’ bestowed upon him by the state, and he was smiling and said: “Do sit down, my chickabiddies, and let the feast go on, with me!” He’d turned up, as ever, at just the right moment… and he sat down and signalled to the kitchen to bring him the food he’d had set aside for himself, and not only for himself, but for his entire squad, his own selection from both courses, and he went and sat with the Přerovites, thus intimating that the victors would be they, and their chairman, black from the soot, cried out at once: “Commandant, you’ve saved us, I don’t know what would have become of us if your medals hadn’t appeared, you’ve restored order and peace… but you!” And he pointed at Jaruška, “you, call yourself an artist, you’ll pay for this one day, and how! Because you’re the intellectual begetter of our ignominy, our humiliation…” And before anyone knew it, the commandant, wreathed in smiles, smug and self-assured, picked up the whistle, which was still lying there, and blew it, and enough soot whooshed out of the whistle to soil not only the commandant’s face, but also his uniform, and above all it covered the medals that embellished his chest… “See that?” the chairman of the Přerovites shouted, “look at me, not that we matter, but now you’ve gone and sullied the commandant here!” But the commandant had someone fetch the mirror from the wall in the lobby, he tweaked his slicked and perfumed quiff and all blackened as he was, he said: “Serve me right, my fault for having a blow!” And with relish he set about the gamey rosehip sauce and asked if they’d bring him the roast boar with sauerkraut next, the classic version, since he thought of the former as just a starter… And there was more music and Mr Kopřiva from Vykáň sang and the drum kit supplemented the base line, and given that the commandant was sitting there, we pushed the tables together and within an hour we’d all changed places and were all mixed together and we all sang our favourite songs at the top of our voices, and we sang with the commandant who, black as the ace of spades, had pointed the way to our reconciliation, exhibiting a rare command of diplomacy, so we started calling him Governor of Kersko. Like I said, you’ve never seen, nor could you have seen, the things I saw, we saw, the things that came to pass that time when a boar, a wild boar, got shot by us folk from Velenka inside the school at Přerov… When news of the glorious feast reached the teacher, the one who happened to be in the classroom when the boar ran in and our gamekeeper Janeček felled the beast right by the desk so that for the benefit of the children she was able point with her pointer and describe all the parts of a wild pig and their names, she was sorry that she couldn’t have fetched the children so that she and they might have watched the feast, if for only a short while and through the window, whereat she would have pointed with her pointer and demonstrated and explained what the ‘Bohemian question’ was, a question of nearly a thousand years’ standing in our neck of the woods…