260
PARTISAN REVIEW
and of me looking at myself. Ultimately, it could have been any man
of about my age with rather long, somewhat graying hair, but of
course I have kept the picture as a souvenir anyway.
Around midnight I wound up placing a candle in front of my–
self because of the darkness, and I waited to see if! would hear some
hurrying footsteps which would remind me of her at least a little.
The gas lights flickered as usual, the thick air broke up their glare in–
to uneven rays, and if it hadn't been for the forsaken chairs and the
late hour, I would have been hard put to tell sleep from reality. In a
short time, as if at the snap of one's fingers, down on Lower Square
where it merged with Uphill Street, a delivery truck stopped, a rusty
jalopy covered with a canvas protecting its load against unpredic–
table weather and highway dust. Two sturdy butchers' helpers
jumped out. I recognized them from their blood-splotched aprons.
One tossed a huge joint of meat onto the other's shoulder and they
were soon horsing it toward the shop, which was somewhat set back
in the arcade. They hung the meat up on a hook in the display win–
dow and disappeared . Their movements had military precision, as if
practiced for a long time, with each maneuver calculated to within
inches. It all happened so fast that for a while my eyes kept wander–
ing from one place to the other, from where the jalopy had stood a
moment before to the store window with the meat hanging from the
hook, which from the cross-cut of its muscle structure and fat was
undoubtedly beef.
Time in these noctural hours knew no bounds. It flowed
everywhere you looked along the roofs, and it crawled like dough out
of every garret window, when suddenly a streetcar stopped in Lower
Square. I stood up on tiptoe and saw only a trolley wheel and sparks
from the overhead wire. Later it dawned on me who could be com–
ing to visit me or anybody else at this hour, and I nearly fell into the
street when I heard her steps. After a while she appeared, but I
couldn't fathom whom that spotted face belonged to, a harbinger of
the pregnancy of an undeveloped thirteen-year-old. In one hand she
held a folder with sheet music for Schumann's "Butterflies" with
the initials M.W. on it, in the other she waved ajump rope over her
head and skipped rope a bit whenever she couldn't resist the urge.
The girl's breathless exertion-but also her roguish laugh–
ter-reached all the way here, and who knows how it all would have
turned out if on the Vltava by the Manes Bridge a steamer called
The
Eternal Wanderer
hadn't woke me up with a sharp whistle and unex–
pectedly I found myself lying in the bed. My father was still alive
