256
PARTISAN REVIEW
two years before and have just started to look around for a ball of
yarn which has rolled off somewhere. Some of them, on the other
hand, drop a paper bag stuffed with worn socks and stockings,
almost all of them revealing a hole the size of a twenty-five heller
piece.
If
you think how often these feet have crisscrossed the world,
you should not be surprised that they are gnarled and that their
unclipped toenails are so long that for some time now they haven't fit
into their leather shoes . It takes years, however, before they claw
their way out to daylight through the soft plush of their checkered
house slippers which have often lost their ladder-shaped , silver–
colored metal buckles. No wonder they hang off the feet like bags of
sand being dragged along wherever the feet go.
No less successful a character in this scene is the mailman .
Reminiscent of the Pied Piper, with scrawny and pale spider-legs he
staggers around like a beginner on stilts. He always starts his rounds
early in the morning on Lower Square and then heads uphill , plod–
ding his way from building to building until he reaches mine , and
then he distributes what he has left in his satchel. Up here the street
ends, unless he would be able to sprout wings and take off over the
roofs. Every morning it is as if I have brought him closer with mag–
nifying lenses right on the palm of my hand , the piper without his
pipe, rats or spell-bound children trailing after him, while a little bit
of that unearthly paradise protrudes from his jacket. By the butcher
shop he steps over a black-and-white cat, Micka, stretching herself
in the blood-specked dust and looking for a tidbit, a succulent little
mouse . But she is out of luck. Instead, an earnest apprentice is being
given an official envelope with an announcement that once again
there is no meat today, but that tomorrow there might be meat for
both days , we would have to see.
A warning sign forbids entrance into the street to automobiles
of all makes and sizes . Only ambulance drivers are permitted to
cross this demarcation line . They come right up to the door of every
building, even
The Orange Moon
and
The Fair Mayoress,
load in the
sick people and take them to the hospital at Bulovka or, if they are
dead, to the same place for postmortems. An abandoned chair, like a
stage prop kicked aside after the end of a Shakespearean drama, re–
mains unoccupied and unnoticed , regardless of whether a rainbow
shines or snowflakes drift slowly down. And so the days go by , one
after the other, until someone else gets old and becomes the next
shrivelly in the sequence, shuffling along, his legs hurting off and
on . He bows ludicrously to all sides and, leaning on his warped little
