Read Online Harlequin's Millions by Bohumil Hrabal - Free Book Online Page A

of the statues looks very good from the back, they’ve been badly neglected, the sight of them from behind can even be somewhat painful for the pensioners, they have the feeling, and rightly so, that they’ve caught someone sitting on the toilet, or deep in thought with a finger up his nose and then wiping off the snot on a tree or a wall, the unexpected sight of the back of a statue is, for every pensioner, like a glance through a keyhole, a curious glance, which catches an old person taking out or putting in his falseteeth. There is also a castle chapel at the retirement home, from the outside you can clearly see that the head of the nave is pointing east, the chapel has gothic windows behind wrought-iron grillwork in which sparrows have built their nests, some of the windowpanes have been smashed in, so that now there are several hundred sparrows living inside the chapel, the organ pipes are dotted with their nests, they’ve taken over the gallery, in spring the swallows come and glue their nests to the gothic arches, to the consoles, the swallows raise hundreds of young birds, often the witnesses to old times sit on a bench by the chapel wall and watch the swallows feeding their young, watch how quickly they get in through the broken windowpanes, which are so small that only one swallow can fly through at a time. And day and night you can hear coming from the chapel the twittering of the sparrows, the chirping and chattering of the young swallows. When people come to the retirement home for the first time, they can never resist walking up to the door of the castle chapel and trying the handle in the semi-darkness, but the chapel is closed, and when your eyes have grown used to the light you see that there’s even a bolt with a lock on it. So everyone who comes here for the first time kneels down in front of the chapel door and peers through the keyhole. Everyone is amazed to see that the floor is still covered with coal, because in the days when thecastle was heated with coal-burning stoves, the coal was stored here in the chapel. But now the chapel is closed and has become a home for birds. The swallows have even built a nest on the head of Christ on the high altar, and when their eggs hatch, the baby swallows twitter and chirp in Christ’s ear, and when they’ve grown and have to leave the nest, they sit contentedly on the arms of the gold cross, sometimes seven little swallows in a row, as the voices of several hundred sparrows and swallows fill the chapel. Whenever a new pensioner arrives at the castle, the first few days he insists on seeing absolutely everything. On my first day I walked all the way to the castle greenhouse, but the windows had been painted blue, and there were no longer any flowers inside, the floor was whitewashed and in the middle stood a bier. When someone dies, he lies here until they come for him, the dead pensioner lies here on a board and waits until they come to take him away, I’ve been told that everyone else sits near him on three benches, the closest friends of the deceased, they hold a wake until the undertaker arrives and members of his family with clothes for him to wear in the coffin. Uncle Pepin will probably be the first of us to end up here, because he’s been in the ward for bedridden patients for three months now, he’s stopped eating, the nurse said I should write a letter to all his friends and relations, anyone who wants to come say their good-byes shouldhurry, because it won’t be long before Uncle Pepin has beat us to the greenhouse, where the floor is whitewashed and all the windows are painted blue. But pensioners who come to the castle for the first time, well, they want to see everything, even things that might not be so good for them. On the west side, under the mighty branches of the chestnut trees, from the second tier of branches, is the only place from which you can see into the castle, into the room that once belonged to