pálinka. It made him feel pleasantly woozy: his corpulent body relaxed under the blanket, his head tipped to one side, and his eyes slowly began to close, but his doze did not last long because he couldn’t bear the awful dream he immediately entered for longer than a minute: a horse with bulging eyes was rushing at him and he was clutching a steel rod with which, terrified, he hit the horse’s head with all his power, but having done so, however hard he tried, he couldn’t stop hitting it until he glimpsed within the cracked skull the slopping mass of the brain. . He woke up and took, from the orderly column next to the table, a notebook headed FUTAKI, and continued his observations there, noting “He’s too scared to come out of the engine house. Probably collapsed on his bed, snoring, or staring at the ceiling. Or tapping the bed-head with his crooked stick like a woodpecker, looking for deathwatch beetles. He has no idea that his actions will produce precisely what he most fears. See you at your funeral, you half-wit.” He mixed another drink, threw it dourly back, then took his morning medicine with a gulp of water. In the remaining part of the day he twice — at noon and at dusk — took note of the “light conditions” outside, and made various sketches of the continually changing flow of the field’s drainage, then, when he had just finished — having done the Schmidts and the Halicses — a description of the likely state of the Kráners’ kitchen (‘stuffy’), he suddenly heard a distant bell. He was sure he remembered, just before he went to hospital, in fact the day before he was taken in, hearing similar sounds, and was as sure now as he had been then that his sharp ears were not deceiving him. By the time he had leafed through to the diary notes he had made that day (though he found nothing there referring to it, so it must have slipped his mind or he didn’t think it particularly important) it had all stopped. . This time he immediately recorded the extraordinary incident and carefully considered the various possible explanations for it: there was no church nearby, that much was certain, unless one regarded the long disused, ruined chapel on the Hochmeiss estate as a church, but the distance meant he had to exclude the possibility that the wind might have carried the sound. For a moment it occurred to him that Futaki, or maybe Halics, or Kráner might be playing some kind of joke but he rejected the idea because he couldn’t imagine any of them being able to imitate the sound of a church bell. . But surely, his educated ears couldn’t be wrong! Or could they?. . Was it possible that his highly developed faculties had become so sensitive that he really could hear a distant, slightly muffled ringing behind certain other faint but close sounds?. . He sat puzzled in the silence, lit another cigarette and, nothing having happened in a long time, decided to forget the matter for now until some new sign appeared to point him to the right solution. He opened a can of baked beans, spooned out half of it, then pushed it away because his stomach was incapable of taking more than a few mouthfuls. He decided that he must stay awake because he couldn’t know when the “bells” would start ringing again, and if they were audible for so brief a time as they’d just been, it would be enough to fall asleep for a few moments and he’d miss them. . He made another drink, took his evening medicine, then pushed the suitcase from under the table with his feet and took a long time picking a magazine from among the rest. He filled the time till dawn by leafing through and reading a little here and there but it was a pointless vigil, a hollow triumph over the desire to sleep, because the “bells” refused to ring again. He rose from the armchair and relaxed his stiff limbs by walking about a bit, then sat back again, and by the time the blue light of dawn surged through the window he had fallen fast asleep. He woke at noon, drenched in sweat and angry, as he always after a long sleep, cursing, turning his head this way and that, furious at the wasted time. He quickly put on his glasses, reread the last sentence in his journal then leaned back in the chair and looked through the chink in the curtain at the fields beyond. There was only a faint drip of rain but the sky was the usual dark gray as it glowered over the estate, the bare acacia in front of the Schmidt’s place obediently bending before the strong wind. “They’re dead, the lot of them,” the doctor wrote. “Or they’re sitting at the kitchen table leaning on their elbows. Not even a broken door and window can rouse the headmaster. Come winter he’ll freeze his ass off.” Suddenly he sat up straight in his chair as a new thought dawned on him. He raised his head and stared at the ceiling, gasping for breath, then gripped his pencil. . “Now he is standing up,” he wrote in a deepening reverie, pressing the pencil lightly in case he tore the paper. “He scratches his groin and stretches. He walks round the room and sits down again. He goes out for a piss and returns. Sits down. Stands up.” He scribbled feverishly and was practically seeing everything that was happening over there, and he