ble-underlined total of standard working hours represented by some joyous objective unknown to me as the highlight of the strivings that gave meaning to his life, probably keeping him awake at night, and I worried at the surprises that the house, the workshops and sheds might yet yield up… And from the little shed Mr Methie rejoiced: “Haha! They think they can advise me what to do, when I’m a professional planner! Me! Advise me!” He laughed until he started to choke and he waved his arm around and drove away all that outrageous advice as he handed me an axe. “I’ve got thirty axes in all, but not buy them when they cost three crowns apiece? And you reckon they’ve been overfired? Well I’ll just have to go easy with them… but what a bargain, eh?” And I sliced open the belly and like taking the innards out of a pendulum clock I removed the wonderful fleshy workings of the sheep’s entrails and laid the pluck out on the table, the throat frill glittered like rings of chalcedony, the liver lay limp in the magnificent colour of a cardinal’s hat and in the fluorescent lighting the lungs had the delicate pink of the fluffy clouds and sky after sundown that foretell rain, the lightly frozen caul fat formed beautiful white clouds floating across the sky of the table, clouds against a winter sky, clouds full of sleet and snow, and the flare fat like molehills on a meadow, like a human brain full of folds and incisions… “We’ll make a spicy goulash with it tomorrow and add the tongue…,” I said, and I cut off the head with its blue eyes and jelly oozing out of the nostrils, jelly as beautiful as royal jelly… and I split the head open, pulled out and cut off the tongue, dispelling the ghastly thought of how they’d cut out Jesenius’ living tongue in the market place, a thought that went away, yet didn’t, hanging on disguised in a nebulous haze… And so as to be rid of the haze too, lock, stock and barrel, I said as an incantation: “Fetch me a little bucket to put the offal in, Mr Mike, we can make a nice paprika goulash and use the brains for thickening!” and I tapped one half, then the other and out fell its thoughts, its last thoughts, its last image of a man with a knife, the man who’d cut the sheep’s throat and swapped it for a little electric motor and fifty crowns, although the sheep had wanted to live, most surely she had wanted to live… And Mr Methie brought — it’s a wonder he didn’t topple over — a whole armful of nested pots, set them down, all in a ring, the pots, and there were twenty or more of them. “Quite something, eh? Not buy ’em? Three crowns apiece, when a pot like these can cost thirty! Who cares if the bottom’s a bit chipped! What a bargain, eh? And they think they can advise me, when I’m a professional planner!” I gently tossed the entrails into a pot with a slightly chipped bottom and then Mr Methie held the sheep by its legs and I cut my way through to the hip joints, dislocated them, broke the hams off like a door from its hinges, then carefully cut the shoulders away, then probed about with the knife to find the last cervical vertebra and with one stroke of the chopper the neck fell away. “That’s the greatest delicacy of all,” I said, shaking the blood-stained scruff, but Mr Methie just made a face like the devil. Then I extricated and broke out the ribs and placed the superb fillet and saddle next to each other on the table. “There we are,” I said, “now I’ll just remove the fat — this sheep was awfully plump — you can render it down, or will you hang it up in chunks for the blue tits?” “For the tits,” said Mr Methie and I listened to the lovely sound made by fat as it’s pulled away using just a finger, a dry sound like when you walk through an oak grove, or oak wood, covered in freshly fallen snow, when your footsteps give a dry squeak and your boots make contact with the snow-covered oak leaves. “Take a break,” Mr Methie said, “we can finish it off later,” and once more he wore that smile of certainty, complacency, about all the things he knew and of which he could never have his full fill, about some grand beauty, some state of dangerous beauty that he wanted to share with me… And he opened the door and my hands glistened with fat, I held my fingers apart, and Mr Methie led me from one heap of things to the next, like a guide in a haunted castle and told me all about everything, his voice jangling with a fervour that had me thinking that Mr Methie had to be a paragon not only to himself, but to the entire world, because Mr Methie had never met such a wonderful, exemplary individual as himself, the professional planner. “So here we’ve got thirty bicycles, never mind the missing handlebars or brakes, but not buy ’em when they cost me a hundred and eighty crowns apiece?… And look at these, hanging here, and I’ll let you have one in a minute, thirty-six waistcoats with little bees all over them, out of fashion now, but they’ll come back in… they’ve got no buttons, or button-holes, because the tailor who was making them got terribly drunk, but not buy ’em when all each one cost me was six crowns fifty?… or here? What’s in these boxes, these cases? It’s theodolites… three of them, they might be old, but not buy ’em when one cost eighty crowns?… but if you were to set out to buy one, they cost eight hundred and more, not everyone’s prepared to let me have things cheap, you know, but I can talk them round! One lens might be missing, but I’ve got a whole box of lenses right here, cost me a hundred and twenty crowns the lot, lenses for every purpose, I’ve got a lifetime’s supply here… but now let me show you the shed, my main storehouse,” said Mr Methie, as I hinted by pointing that it might be a good thing if we finished off that bargain-basement sheep… and he opened up the shed and switched on no less than six bulbs, and inside there were things hanging from the ceiling like in a salami shop, boots, tall padded work boots, and Mr Methie walked round, patting their shins and exulting: “With these I surpassed even myself, one boot cost me five crowns, I talked them round, I drowned out their protestations by the imperative torrent of my will until the manager of the seconds shop himself gave in…” “But I can’t help noticing,” I said, “that all your boots are for the left foot…” “Well obviously,” Mr Methie threw up his hands, “they have to be left-footed, otherwise you couldn’t get them so cheap, right? But look!” And to make his point he took his shoes off and pulled two left boots on, those stout boots, and started walking about in them as if he were sort of limping, or as if he’d got badly adjusted headlights, but he made a good fist of walking in them and revelled: “They’re really nice and warm, like you’re standing in warm water! That’s because they’re felted, see, no good for cross-country running, but ideal for standing while you work, in the workshop, and if you’re just standing, it doesn’t matter whether your feet are left or right, if you’re standing, all you’ve got is feet, and the main thing’s what? That they’re warm… here you are, have a pair as a present from me.” And now he was walking past something that looked like hats for water, but at once he explained: “These here are canvas water buckets! They do leak a bit, but I got a load of patches from the military at a knock-down price, so here you have one army canvas bucket and a sticking plaster… Each bucket cost me ninety hellers, that’s nothing…,” and he led me across to four wind-up gramophones and crowed: “They’ve got no spring, but, not buy ’em when one cost a mere sixty crowns? I’ll get hold of some springs and in a few standard working hours… how much will I make? Thousands, many thou! I’ve already mended one. And Mr Methie brought the needle across and started a record, it was a well-known violin piece played by a symphony orchestra, beautiful and so haunting that I marvelled and looked with my mind’s eye in the direction of the violinist’s bow and arm movements, which bewitched both me and even more Mr Methie, whose eyes misted over, stirred perhaps less with emotion and more with the bargain purchase he’d made, and I too was touched… When the record stopped playing… half-way through, I said: “What’s that piece called, Mr Mike, isn’t it a quite typical intermezzo? Could it be Die Mühle im Schwarzwald? Or Silver Fern?” But Mr Methie happily shook his head and picked up the record, which one of his tears dropped on, and passed it to me, I added my own brace of teardrops, and, having blinked away the rest of my tears, I read: Fascination… Which I repeated aloud: “Fascination…?” And Mr Methie said: “Fascination…” And I said: “And the record playing only half-way through like that?” And Mr Methie beamed: “It’s defective, but, given the chance, not buy thirty of ’em at only two crowns apiece? But then I also bought thirty others, equally defective, though that set play from the middle to the end. So rejoice! They’re all of Fascination, so I’ve got a lifetime’s supply of Fascination because now I won’t listen to any other song, nor do I want to know any, this is my song, my life’s song, my life-story… Fascination, so, what are they going to be playing over my coffin before they lower it into the ground?” And I said: “Fascination…” I took the plunge to enter the last structure, but before we could, we had, because of the slope, to lower our heads with our chins on our chests and at the nether end shuffle around on our knees, I saw Mr Methie’s even more and most glorious purchases… so, when we came back out to salt the sheep in the tub to make sure there’d be a two months’ supply of sausages from it, provided there was an extra five kilos of pork shoulder and two kilos of young beef to bind them and give them body… as I bent over the tub, overwhelmed by all the information, I stood up straight and said: “Do you know, Mr Mike, how hard you’re also going to find it to die?”