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ARTISAN REVIEW
money and promised me an
aldomas,
a feast. When I told him the money
wasn't his and had to go back to the bank where it came from, he was
so crushed he burst into tears. So I ran over to Moshke's for a bottle to
cheer him up. He drank it all by himself: the stuff that Jew brewed was
too much for our stomachs.
All I wish to do, Mr. President, is give
YOIl
an idea oj what a civil servant
must Jace whel1 dealing with a backward people.
Bears, for example. I was walking through the woods one day,
thinking about the constable I was going to check up on, when all at
once I heard a great din. I turned to see a bear whacking trees with a
big branch. Each time it whacked a tree, it would put its ear against it and
listen.
So that's it, I said to myself, a honey bear.
I kept an eye on it as it went about its business, and as it paid me no
heed, I went on about my own. When I got to the station, I found a
forest warden going on about having been attacked by a bear and having
to shoot it. He said that they'd skinned the beast on the spot and found
a bayonet in one leg.
Odd, I thought. So we went through the files for something that fit,
and sure enough we came up with a Hungarian soldier who had brought
in a gypsy two years before. We matched up the number of the Hungar–
ian's bayonet with ours. What had become of him? No one knew. And
of the gypsy? He'd been thrown in the local jail for killing the soldier.
He was a gypsy after all. I took him out to the place where I had seen
the bear. I was right: by some miracle my eye happened on a pile of
rocks at the edge of the forest, where it began turning into a meadow. I
don't know why, but I told the gypsy to start digging. And there, under
the rocks, was the soldier - or his rags and rifle and shiny buttons.
A
bear
buries what it doesn't eat.
We set the gypsy free. You can imagine how thrilled he was. Besides,
he got ten crowns in damages for every day he'd spent in jail. If I'd
asked him to bring me the last needle off that spruce over there, he'd
have done it. He was as loyal as a dog.
It was hard work, Mr. President, but the rewards were good.
My
last salary
was eight thousand pre-war crowns a month. Milk cost half a crown, ham five
crowns a kilo.
My
wife and I saved up a hUl1dred thousand three times over and
were living high off the hog
-
until the autumn of
'39.
One night I came home
Jrom emergency duty to find the wife and children gone: they had been evacuated
at two a'clock that morning by our soldiers. We were taken to Romania, then
Yugoslavia, then Austria, and finally via Bmo to Prague. We lift everything
behind. It was the last we saw oj it. They promised us thirty-three thousand in
reparations, but all we got was a letter saying they had reached an agreement
with the Hungarians and there would be nothing.
