The Little Town Where Time Stood Still

by Bohumil Hrabal

  Away in the distance a clatter and thunder resounded, that was Francin on his Orion just coming out of the little woods near Zvěřínek, and that din and clamour grew ever stronger and louder, as if Francin were bulldozing all the Orion’s dismantled parts along in front of him. I ran out in front of the office and opened the gates, and Francin rode into the brewery, swaying about on the sidecar was the little lathe which Francin always took with him on longer excursions, and now the motorbike swerved to our front door, and Francin raised his goggles and removed his leather helmet and motioned with his hand for me to go back quick into the house, and I knew he’d brought me another little gift. I ran into the kitchen, and Francin came dragging something in through the back, across the office passage and into the living room, for a while he fiddled with something in there and then he came into the kitchen rubbing his hands and laughing, he patted Uncle Pepin on the shoulder and I threw myself at Francin and as was our custom searched through all his coat pockets and in his trousers, and Francin laughed and was quite charming, till I was altogether tantalised, what could be behind all this? And then I said, “So it’s not a little ring or some earrings, and it’s not a watch or a little brooch, it’s something bigger, isn’t it?” And Francin took off his coat and washed his hands and nodded his head, and as he was drying his hands I pointed to the door into the living room and asked, “Is it in there?” Francin nodded that it was . . . and was purposely slow in getting changed and purposely pretended he had to polish his shoes, till I threatened to burst into the room, because I couldn’t stand it any longer. Francin raised a finger, asked me to close my eyes, and led me off into the room, and there he let me stand a while, and then I heard music, a tenor began to sing most beautifully . . . “For you my heart is cryin’, white flower, my Hawaii . . .” I opened my eyes, turned, and Francin stood holding the burning lamp and shining it on a box gramophone, then he placed the lamp on the table and asked me for a dance, caught me round the waist, squeezing my palm with his other hand, and then Francin paused till the right moment, and finally swam with a long step into . . . “And though he say farewell dear, yet he’ll return to you here . . .” and Francin, I was amazed, because he was a poor dancer, he swam into the steps of the tango so well, that I pressed myself to him, he insinuated his leg altogether quite boldly between mine, we were so nicely dovetailed I drew back to get a better look at Francin, then I laid my head on his shoulder, but there came a turn in the dance and Francin slipped out of rhythm. He waited a moment, and when he tried to continue the tango by gliding backwards, he glided correctly, but out of rhythm, and he lost confidence, but when he let the whole thing slide and paused till those first three steps came round, he picked up the thread and swam beautifully across the carpet and avoided twirling about this time, he didn’t even want to step away from me, but with long strides, as if his shoes were stuck in hot asphalt, he simply danced from one end of the room to the other, turning awkwardly and stepping out again in rhythm, and yet he couldn’t resist trying another turn, he moved away from me and scrutinised his steps on the carpet, I could see those steps were correct, but Francin was lacking one vital thing: the rhythm. He even had a go at flinging me over backwards, it flashed through my head he must have been going to ballroom dancing classes, some private dancing school in Prague, because he even did that trick to perfection, he bent me over backwards till my hair touched the carpet, but when he drew me back towards him, that was correct too, but all the time the thread of the dancing steps was missing the eye of the musical needle . . . and the beautiful tenor stopped singing and the music quietly subsided . . . and Francin stopped smiling and practically collapsed on to a chair, and his inability to get the tango right, his consciousness of failure left him gasping for breath, because at the last masked ball I had danced with young Klečka, a brewster at the brewery, who played the cello beautifully and had four classes of technical school and knew how to dance, and he and I by mutual agreement, when the other dancers had stopped and gathered round us, we two danced together like two true artistes, like two coupled axles, in pure symbiosis, while Francin sat alone behind a pillar and gazed at the floor.

  “When I’m with Miss Vlasta at Havrda’s,” said Uncle Pepin, “we dance too, only a wee bit different, faster than that, Vlasta pours me a Martell and then she says, ‘Well Mr Josef, what can I play for you today?’ And I says, ‘Give us a good belter!’ And Vlasta says, ‘You what? Which one?’ And I says, ‘By the composer Bunda, known as Gobelinek,’ so may I have the pleasure also, sister-in-law? Francin, make it go quite a good bit faster! And get a load of this real dancing!”

  Uncle Pepin took me by the hands and the jazzy music started to play so fast, with Francin shifting the speed lever forward, like women rushing about in a speeded-up film. And Uncle Pepin began to bow to me and I bowed to him too. Then he touched me with his forehead, and I him, suddenly Uncle turned to the rhythm of the music, and keeping a hold of each other’s hands, we turned about to stand back to back to each other, and Uncle lifted a foot and twisted and waggled his shoe and calf, then he spread his arms, clapped his palms and revolved his hands as fast as if he were swiftly winding wool, then he crooked his hands at his waist and cut with his feet this way and that, so that I had to do the same, but the opposite way, so as he wouldn’t kick my ankles, then he turned and took me by the waist and tossed me up to the ceiling, till I touched the plaster with my hair, and then Uncle carried me hither and thither to the rhythm of the music, with his nose buried in my navel, then he let me go, turned me round and back to back we touched each other, and Uncle heaved me up on his shoulders like a bundle and I locked myself in his arms too, and we rocked each other to and fro, as if straightening strains in the smalls of our backs, then Uncle let me go, ran round me in a rhythmic trot and started lunging at me, like the Knave of Hearts with his pikestaff, I copied him, and the dance was exact and elusive, but constantly rhythmic, as if the motion filled out the music much more exactly than any other form of dance, then Uncle leapt up and spreadeagled his legs and landed on the carpet and did the splits, and I was afraid I might rupture my groin, so I merely bowed left and right, while Uncle sniffed alternately at his left toecap and his right, then all of a sudden, as if suctioned up to the ceiling, he jumped up, drew his legs together and pulled me so niftily up on to his shoulder, then over his shoulder feet first and down on to the ground again, that I made a stroke mark on the ceiling with the heel of my shoe. Francin watched me smilingly, then he went to the kitchen and came back holding in one hand a mug of warm white coffee and in the other a slice of dry bread, which he nibbled away at, and he watched us, but the speeded-up tango was fading away, the tenor drew to an end . . . “And though he say farewell dear, yet he’ll return to you here . . . white flower, my Hawaii, I dream of you . . .” And as Uncle Pepin led me off the dance floor, he kissed my hand and held my arm and bowed deeply on all sides, bowing to some great ballroom and sending kisses out to all corners of the room . . . And just as I walked past the table, I trod on one of the little sawn-off blocks from the leg and sprained my ankle.

  “Brother,” said Francin, “harmony hibernates within you.”

  And I fell with a shout and couldn’t get up again.

  During that night Mutzek took leave of his senses. In the evening the caretaker had had to chain him up in the shed, and there Mutzek was unable to sort out in his mind the relationship between cream puffs and the pain in his tail, and also he didn’t want to be a handsome young fellow in the latest fashion, and so be began to howl dreadfully and foam appeared at his mouth, the foam of insanity mixed with the foam of cream puffs, and at midnight Francin loaded his Browning pistol and went out into the yard, and after a while I heard firing, one shot after another, I hobbled to the window and saw in the light of an electric torch Mutzek straining at his chain, standing on his hind legs and begging with his paws, agreeing to the shortened tail, reconciled to all, as long as his loving master didn’t shoot, and Francin fired off a whole round
, but Mutzek still did not drop, on the contrary, he was more moving than ever before, he kept standing up on his hind legs and waggling his front paws, and I took it all as a mortal sin which I had inflicted on Mutzek, and I hobbled to the ottoman and burst into tears and jammed up my ears to avoid hearing those shots like accusations . . . And the firing stopped, and I expect Mutzek was dead by now, but surely up to the last moment he had gone on wagging his non-existent tail, because he probably thought someone else was shooting him, since as an animal he surely didn’t and couldn’t have understood how we could cause him this pain, I and his loving master, Francin, who, when he returned with his Browning, rolled dressed as he was into bed and it seemed to me that he was crying too.

  10

  Now Francin had me the way he wanted me to be, a nice decent woman sitting at home, he knew where this woman was, and where she would be tomorrow, somewhere he would like to make her stay for always, not too ill, but sort of ailing, a woman who would hobble to the stove, to the chair, to the table, but above all a woman who would be some kind of a burden, because for Francin it was the height of matrimonial bliss when I was grateful to him for making me my breakfast in the morning, and going on the motorbike at midday to fetch lunch from the restaurant, but above all it meant he could show me how much he loved me, with what joy he was prepared to care for me, and somehow, just as he took care of me, so ought I to be taking care of him, that was Francin’s dream, that every year I might catch angina and flu, and occasionally even get pneumonia. That always made him blissfully happy, nobody else knew how to look after a person like Francin did, that was his religion, his heaven on earth, when he could wrap me in sheets dampened in cold water, when he ran round me with the sheet and wound it on to me as if he were embalming me alive, but then he took me in his arms and laid me carefully in my bed, like little girls do with their dolls. And once an hour he dashed out of the office to take my temperature, every two hours he changed my compresses, praying no doubt in his heart, not that he would wish it, but if Fate would not decree otherwise, that I should never get up from my bed, so that I could be his little child, who needed him just as much as he needed me. And when I was convalescing and starting to get about, when I began inwardly to laugh again, and again that indecent woman in me started to get the upper hand, Francin withdrew into himself and dreamt again about me being paralysed and him pushing me in a wheelchair, in the evening he would read to me from the National Politics daily or a novel, and this would assuage his complex about my rude state of health, which loved chance and the unexpected happening and the marvellous encounter, whereas Francin loved order and regularity, repetition indicated to him the right path in life, everything that could be predicted and fixed, that was Francin’s existence, a world he believed in and without which he could not have lived.

  And now he had me in bed with my ankle bandaged in glowing plaster, immobile for a long time to come, and if and when, at first on crutches and then with a walking stick, now, while Josephine Baker dances the Charleston.

  And maybe my ankle came along in the nick of time, because while I was running about Francin was incapable of putting together a single advertising slogan, he covered so many quarter slips of paper with his number three lettering pen, and all that advertising for increased turnover of beer ended up in the stove. Now however, with my white leg resting on its cushion, Francin walked up and down the kitchen and living room, drank lukewarm coffee and nibbled at a piece of dry bread, and suddenly he stopped short with the mug in his hand, as though in a dream, assailed even by a vision, which made him squint. He put aside the mug and the bread, sat himself down, and the number three lettering pen wrote out calligraphic notices for the pubs, and when he had finished, he took a drawing pin and fastened each quarter sheet of paper to the wall, so that I could see it, so that I might get the message, that if only I was healthy but behaved as if I was ill, any day now he would be appointed director of the brewery, that limited-liability company, such zest for work and life my paralysed mobility gave him. In a week Francin must have drunk for inspiration at least half a hundred litres of lukewarm white coffee and across the whole wall he hung out the graphically decorative slogans he had created with his lettering pen. — Drink more ale, for fewer aches and woes. — Our fine ale, reinforcement for flagging constitutions. — Without his glass he sighed alas, after his beer he flushed like a lass and made good cheer. — Without my ale in living death I’d wail. — Our fine ale, reinforcement and fortification of flagging constitutions. — Drink more beer, make better cheer. — Hearty, fresh and hale, you’ll find good health in our ale. — If you wish to have good cheer, come along and drink our beer. — They who fraternise the tavern, live a life of double heaven. — Our wholesome beer, the drink for everyone. — Live a life of better cheer, come along and drink more beer. — Who shuns the tavern with his feet, who does not drink and does not eat, his health he surely will defeat. — At home, on your journey, beer is always refreshing. — Beer at every time and tide, beer refreshes your inside. And he was so pleased by his bout of inspiration, he poured himself a full mug of coffee, and put on the gramophone . . . “Far away across the sea, lies a magic land, Hawaii . . .” and he tried with creeping steps to dance the tango, and being so brimful of optimism, and so happy about some event lying in the near future, in the evening he locked himself up in the living room, and played White Flower, My Hawaii, over and over again. Every other while he came out holding a modern dance manual and laughing, and when he’d expressed his delight, he returned again to the room, the key hole shone into the half-darkness just like my leg in plaster, and I knew that Francin must have drawn all the steps with chalk, in footprints, not only the basic steps, but also the steps backward, the turns, a whole itinerary of chalk-marked outlines of shoe soles, which he patiently paced through, in the rhythm and melody of Hawaii. He was so happy that he was managing the steps now that even in the daytime, when I was looking out the window into the yard and Francin was in a hurry to take instructions to the brewing house, suddenly he would slow down and pace out the steps of the tango, then turn around and backwards, with his arms slightly raised, he would continue this modern dancing, I saw him looking at his feet, I saw he was confounded, that if he could, he would chalk out those dance steps on the road . . . but that didn’t put him off, on the contrary, that evening he tried all the more fervently to pinpoint on the chalk-marked carpet that little chink through which he might enter truly into the rhythm of the gramophone, as it performed Hawaii for the hundredth time. Every evening Francin removed the electric battery from his Orion motorcycle, brought it in and switched on the high-frequency currents, the case padded with red velvet gleamed dimly with its glassy instruments, and Francin put sparks in my ankle, fulgurational flashes penetrated the plaster bandaging, then he removed my items of clothing one by one, without my realising I was practically naked, the fulgurational currents made me feel good, the massage roller with its tiny sparklets fortified both my legs and reinforced the nerves in my spine, and Francin whispered to me, “The best method, Mary, of enhancing your beauty, using fulgurational currents to conserve the beauty you have now . . .” I looked forward every evening to these violet massagings, with the scent of thunder and short circuits, across the orchard you could hear again the lovely male voice, Mr Jirout in his little satin suit, firing himself with his voice from a cannon, through the wall I could see him fly over the brewery, hands by his sides and smiling a crinkly smile . . . “the love that was, it is gone, ‘twas for but a short while . . . golden lassie . . .” and now Mr Jirout began to veer towards the ground, he spread his arms and cast roses and kisses to the watchers below, Francin put a metal electrode in my hand and turned on the machine with a black knob and like a hypnotist he hovered with his palm over my body, wherever Francin’s hand moved, there sparks sizzled and crackled from his palm, raining down a shower of purple violet grain, thousands of forget-me-nots and violets from Francin’s palm entered me from this appliance, the scent of oz
one and lightning striking the building hovered over me, even the ankle dipped in plaster glowed with a blueish sheen . . . “her life is o’er . . . to the deep linn by Nymburk town she’s gone . . .” and Mr Jirout landed in the trampoline net and bounced and bowed in his little blue satin suit . . . I felt my body too emitting its own pungent scent of electricity, I was breathing more and more heavily, my whole body radiated its own halo, I looked at myself in the mirror, lying stretched out, the purple violet crackle and sizzle my only camisole, I never had the sense that I was naked, all the time I was encased in a periwinkle coat, and Francin’s gutta-percha collar and white shirt cuffs shone just like my plaster leg, he was breathing just like me, lying on my back with my elbow crooked over my eyes. I used to feel all funny from that high-frequency ritual, Francin and I never used to talk about it, we prepared in silence, as if both of us were striving for something forbidden, and when Francin turned back the black knob, each time we avoided each other’s eyes, so beautiful it was. If someone had suddenly burst into the room bearing a lamp, Francin would certainly have fainted, and so he preferred to lock the door, draw the blinds and curtain, and for safety’s sake he went out and looked in at the windows, to make sure no one could peep in at us and see him unbuttoning my blouse with quivering fingers, drawing the skirt down carefully over the plaster ankle, kneeling down in front of me and reaching out with this cosmetic massage to the cosmos.

  11

  Today Doctor Gruntorád came, he asked me to make him some strong tea, saying he’d caught a chill in the night from attending mothers in labour, he drew his scissors out of his bag, and while he was cutting my plaster bandage he sneezed a couple of times, then fell asleep in the middle of cutting, with the scissors still in his fingers, and he was so deeply asleep, I couldn’t resist, I pulled out his gold watch from his waistcoat pocket, looked to see what time it was, and quietly slipped the watch back in its place, so carefully and so thrilled by the precision of my movements, and in that pickpocketing escapade I was once more my old self, the clock on the wall showed me what time it was, but I just wanted to test myself, to see if I hadn’t lost my pluck, to see if I was still capable of doing whatever I fancied, and yes, things weren’t too bad after all. I used to go to Mr Pollak’s drapery shop to buy buttons just because in the afternoon nobody used to be around in the shop, and as Mr Pollak bent down beneath the counter to fetch a box, I would stretch my hand across the counter and take a child’s fake watch, and when Mr Pollak straightened up, I would look all innocent, and in his eyes I could read that he was quite oblivious of my theft, and when I asked to see some more buttons and Mr Pollak bent down, quickly I hung the watch back, and when Mr Pollak straightened up, I smiled, I grew up taller somehow inside, and with that theft and its immediately ensuing effective repentance I released tension, breathed my relief, and on going out of the shop I felt as if I had sprouted wings so great that I was scraping the door frame with them and feathers were fluttering off me, which Mr Pollak had to sweep up kneeling with a shovel . . . and Doctor Gruntorád sneezed and woke up and finished cutting my bandage, which split open like a white casing, then the doctor felt my ankle over, declaring, “Now you can get up to your mischief again . . .” and he sneezed and I took my crutches and brought a mug of tea, and when I tried to put my weight on my leg it collapsed under me and I said, “It doesn’t even feel like my own leg!” and Doctor Gruntorád said, “It’s your leg all right, you’ll be right as rain in a week . . . tishoo!” he sneezed with feeling. “Doctor,” I said, “I’m breathing a bit funny too.” “Take off your blouse if you would,” said the doctor, taking a sip of his tea. Then he laid his ear on my back, and as always that ear was cold, as if he were laying a small glass ashtray on me, the warmer the weather, the colder his ear was, he tapped my back, asked me to breathe deeply, and then his index finger tapped on my back, lightly he touched my back with his ear, like boys putting their ears to telegraph poles, I flicked the current of my hair over, and the doctor fell asleep again, buried in my hair, as if asleep on a bench beneath a weeping willow tree. Once I went past Doctor Gruntorád’s villa specially on purpose to see if that willow tree was actually there, overshadowing the whole house, it was such a long time ago I supposed since his wife used to receive visits from a colonel gent who came from Brandejs on horseback, and Doctor Gruntorád, then young and undoubtedly stalwart, unexpectedly returned home in the night, grabbed his gun in passing on the ground floor and went up and kicked open the door to his wife’s bedroom, just in time to glimpse the colonel dashing to the open first-floor window. He managed to take aim, and as the colonel propelled himself from the window sill with a clatter and plunged headlong out into the depths of night and down into the faded lilac bushes and flowering jasmines, Dr Gruntorád managed to scatter buckshot at the colonel’s vanishing topboots and another load merely at the stars of the blue night filling the empty window frame . . . I would often wake in the night with this image, which kept me awake, I could never properly imagine and associate this wonderful incident with the person of Dr Gruntorád, I kept connecting it in my mind with somebody else, but a quite tangible image connected me with the colonel gent, who with his topboot shot through still managed to hop up on his horse, managed to pull a stem of willow out of his boot, lean from his horse right down to the ground and stick that stem in the ground, a stem which today has become such a huge willow tree, that in stormy and windy nights it taps against the window panes of the whole house like a living memorial. And Doctor Gruntorád continued tapping his index finger on my back, maybe he wasn’t even aware he’d previously dropped off, he tapped away like a miner buried in the pit, and when he turned round he took a sip of tea, and while I was dressing, he quietly wrote out his prescription, and again his golden fountain pen suddenly halted, for a few seconds Doctor Gruntorád dropped off, then he woke again and feeling revived finished writing out the prescription of medicine for my chest. I said to him, “Doctor, has my husband boasted to you yet about something he bought for me?” “Show me!” instructed the doctor and sipped his tea. I opened the case lying there on the table. “What kind of junk is that? Where did the fellow buy it?” said the doctor. I said to him, “In Prague, but seeing as you’ve got a cold, here’s a really beautiful attachment, a bit like our national anthem, pines rustle on the rocky slopes.” The doctor said, “And do you know how to operate it?” I said, “Doctor, there’s nothing to it . . . Look!” and I plugged it in and twisted the black knob and fitted on the tube with bristles for the nerves, and purple violet sawdust sizzled from the bristles, and the doctor ran his fingers down his knuckles and smiled naively and said, “It’s poetical, it can’t do anybody any harm, and coming from you, it’ll be a pleasure . . .” And I took the electrode, the ozone inhalator and atomiser, and I told him, “Doctor, the best thing would be if you could lie down on the ottoman . . .” The doctor sat down on the settee, I drew the beige curtain, and the sprinkled half-darkness and the little purple violet bush of electric discharges sizzling from that special electrode for the nerves, gave a glow to the doctor’s bald pate, as he lowered himself gently on to the ottoman. Now he lay on his back, holding in his fingers that constantly sputtering and crackling wand, while I prepared the ozone inhalator with its atomiser. Into the wadding of the ozone inhalator I put some drops of eucalyptus oil with menthol essence, screwed into the tube the forked glass attachment, for sticking into your nose, and then I took the little nerve brush away from the doctor and stuck into the cathode that ozone inhalator with its atomiser and turned the wheel, and the hollow tube filled with neon gas, which percolated through the wadding, soaked in eucalyptus oil. I knelt in front of the settee and put the appliance gently close up to the doctor’s nostrils. I told him, “This is bound to cure you, doctor, my husband always inhalates just before he gets a cold, it’s really like when the pines rustle on the rocky slopes, don’t you scent the smell of ozone, of resin? And that blue fiery discharge of neon, it’s a cure in itself, your colour is blue, that
eases away all the hurly-burly of life, quietens the nerves, retards the flow . . .” I ran on, holding in one hand that beautiful appliance full of inhalating oil and in my right hand still squeezing the rubber bulb which drove the air through the ozone and oil chamber of the inhalator . . . and everything I said Doctor Gruntorád repeatedly blissfully after me, smiling blissfully too, and I heard the swing door from the office give a clack, then the key turned in the door and Francin came in, ghastly pale, and he cried out softly, “What are you up to in here!” And I took fright and squeezed the rubber bulb, and the doctor never finished repeating after me, “ . . . pines rustle on the rocky slopes . . .”, he sat bolt upright and yelled out, his whole face was drawn and suddenly he was years younger, he jumped up and jigged his legs about in a funny way and felt for the door-handle and rushed out, and Francin followed after him with clasped hands, “Chairman, forgive me!” But the doctor went on jigging his legs about and ran over to the maltings and into the maltings and down the stairs to the malting floors, there he ploughed through several mounds of barley, the maltsters stood with their shovels astounded, but the chairman left Francin kneeling in the damp malt behind him and ran out still lamenting up the stairs to the lofts, he ran past the dry heaps of malt, but still that pain in his nose drove him on up to the highest floor, there he ran into barley drying on the grids, into that sixty-degree heat, and he ran back down one floor and across the connecting bridge he ran into the brew-house, several times he ran round the vessel and down the stairs he rushed into the fermenting room, Francin still after him, out of the fermenting room Doctor Gruntorád rushed on into the cooling room, the place where the young beer was cooled, he opened the window louvres and ran out on to the roof of the ice room, where the houseleeks were in bloom, Francin knelt down into those beautiful yellow flowers, but Doctor Gruntorád lamented again and ran up the steps back into the brew-house and through the gates he ran into the yard and from the yard he ran over to the stables, the workmen greeted him, “Good day, chairman! Good day, manager!” But the doctor went on jigging his legs up and down on past the orchard, until he ran in again through the open door into our kitchen and back into the living room, where he slumped on to the settee expostulating, “Where did you buy that piece of junk? Show me!” And he inspected carefully the ozone inhalator with its atomiser, then he sniffed it and said, “What did that oil stuff come in, you dratted woman you? Those pines rustling on the rocky slopes and all that?” He put on his pince-nez, I handed him the little flask and when the doctor had read the label he exploded, “You dratted woman you, you forgot to dilute it one in ten! You’ve burnt my mucous membrane . . . atchoo!” Doctor Gruntorád sneezed, and when he saw Francin kneel and stretch out his hands, imploring him, “Can you forgive me?”, the chairman said, “Get up, my good man, I’d much rather be the manager of this brewery than its chairman . . .” and so saying, he glanced at his watch and gave me his hand, then he kissed the top of my hand and said, “My respects.” And he left, re-emerging in the yard in the sunshine, trailing behind him a scent of carbolic and disinfectant and eucalyptus, then he hopped on to the box with feudal lightfootedness, as if all that had happened had only given him added strength, and now I could see it! Now I could believe it, it must have happened just as I heard it, that story, the only relic of which was that weeping willow tree, that enveloped the whole house. The doctor sat on the box, the coachman handed him the reins, the doctor lit a cigarette in his amber holder, cocked his soft light-coloured hat over his brow like no other man could, and grew younger somehow with those reins in his hands, he looked as if he’d just arrived in that carriage from Vienna, he straightened himself and drove out of the brewery with his stallion, whose tail and mane were trimmed, while the doctor’s coachman lolled behind on the plush upholstery of the landau with the guilty smile of a man who will never understand why his master rides on the box with such zest and pleasure, while he, the coachman, sits guiltily behind on the plush seat . . . And Francin paced about the room and jammed his fingers into his brain.