Free Mendelssohn is on the Roof by Jiří Weil Page B

attached themselves to one group or another,always letting someone else pay for their coffee or borrowing twenty crowns they’d never pay back.
    One day somebody introduced him to Jan – he no longer remembered who, but it certainly wasn’t an architect, because architects looked down on Jan Krulis. Krulis didn’t like their machines for living, those houses that looked like crates. Jan was usually silent during the passionate arguments that sometimes broke out at the cafe, and for that reason he was thought to be backward, a stodgy traditionalist, a man of the last century. Nobody could understand why he even came to the cafe at all. Perhaps he just came to read the foreign newspapers. Maybe he went there to keep warm, as many people did who couldn’t afford coal. He might never have become close to Jan, for he himself enjoyed those discussions about new art forms – for him they meant a breath of fresh air after a day at the clinic, where he witnessed so much human suffering, illness and decay. He needed to leave that world for a while and get into the world of colours, words and tones. But one day Jan let slip that he, too, was a canoeist.
     
    Words reached him as if from a great distance. ‘They won’t give us an ambulance for transferring him.’ ‘So how can we move him?’ ‘By handcart.’ The voices grew sharp and angry. ‘That’s outrageous, Doctor. He’ll die on the way.’ ‘But what can we do? We have to follow orders. They won’t let us use an ambulance.’ ‘But he’ll catch cold crossing the entire city in a handcart. He’ll be dead before he gets there.’ ‘We don’t make the rules. There’s nothing we can do, Doctor.’ Then the voices grew silent and once again he was alone. Now he knew that they’d carry him by handcart, and that it would be a long journey. But it didn’t matterto him. On the contrary, he looked forward to seeing the city again. He’d been lying in the hospital for two years now, and during that time he hadn’t been outside once. Now he’d see how the city had changed. He’d see its new subjugated face. He might even meet some of those foreigners now holding sway over the city, the ones who had issued the insane laws that caused him to be thrown out of the hospital and taken away in a handcart.
     
    He loved the river and could listen to tales of it for hours. Perhaps it had something to do with his profession. Sometimes during night service in the emergency room he’d pull out a map of Czech waterways and plan trips along barely navigable rivers. He’d imagine himself paddling from one bank to the other, cautiously avoiding the shallows, keeping the boat from scraping and damaging its canvas bottom on rocks. These were trips he could never manage alone – they called for too much strength and endurance. He thought of buying a kayak. Though it was less comfortable , it would be easier to navigate by himself. But then he arranged to go on the trips together with Jan.
     
    Nobody said goodbye to him when the two men came with stretcher and blankets. Obviously everybody was ashamed to see him thrown out of the hospital. Just as they were carrying him out of the door he caught a glimpse of the nurse taking down the identifying board and wiping off the chalked letters of his name.
    It looked like a funeral procession. The men carried him carefully and he didn’t feel any jolts, perhaps because his body was immobilised. But when they went out into the courtyard where the cart was waiting for him, the cold,sharp air struck him in the nostrils with such force that his head began to spin. Suddenly everything seemed phantom-like , even the trees in the park, bare on this autumn day. Everything seemed unreal, even the squeaking of the ungreased wheels of the cart, even the houses they passed, even the sky covered with clouds.
    Then when they went out into the streets, it seemed to him that the city had become greyer somehow, that it had fallen into decay, that it was