Ivan Klima - My Golden Trades

And so this is where we, the living, retreat. We embellish the graves, adorn our asylum, build invisible but impenetrable walls to keep out the flags and banners, the slogans, the loudspeakers, the parades, the television screens.

The surveyor nodded to me. The priest was inviting us to climb the church tower to view the countryside.

I had a last look around. K.'s older brother was standing there alone, as though he himself had emerged from the grave. What was his past, and what lay ahead of him? What can a man who has lived in the grave have to look forward to? What could he be thinking about in his rigid isolation?

And suddenly, in a flash, it occurred to me: he was wondering whom he should report us to.

The Moon

IF WE MANAGED to finish everything in time here, the surveyor wanted me to go with him to Moravia, which was not far from his home. When he'd been there on a surveying trip earlier in the year, he'd needed to measure two points by the North Star, but the nights had not been clear enough for him to do so.

Sometimes, when we would come back from work after dark, Kos Would point to stars in the Little Dipper where the light of Polaris twinkled, and complain that all summer long the nights had never been this clear. Wouldn't this be a perfect time to survey?

If he felt like it, I would suggest, we could go first thing tomorrow. The weather looked stable.

'Do you think so?' I felt he was giving it serious thought, but next morning we would drive off to a field in the neighbourhood and, dripping with perspiration in the glaring sun, dig out a stone that had shifted position.

But as the autumn advanced and the number of underlined circles on the surveyor's map increased, the end of the work was in sight.

'Tomorrow, then,' he decided, 'if you agree, we could go.'

In fact it was a good idea to leave the night-time surveying until the end. Night makes every enterprise special and our work too, it seemed to me, ought to be concluded in a special way, at least. Besides that, I wanted to do something for my young boss when the work was over. I didn't know why, but I thought I might be more likely to find an opportunity on this trip.

There was no need to worry about accommodation, he added. He'd already told his wife I'd be staying over with them.

I was curious about his wife, but I said nothing, I only went to pack the best clothes I had with me.

Next morning we woke to a murky day. Under a cover of thick clouds, the smoke from a nearby chemical factory collected with no means of escape. We put our usual equipment in the car and drove off to a nearby village where there was still some work to do.

We set up our tripods and I sat down on a damp stone and wrote down the numbers the surveyor called out. I was sorry our trip had not materialized. Occasionally I would gaze up into the gloom, looking for signs of a change in the weather. Perhaps I saw a small opening in the clouds, but I suddenly found myself announcing, 'It's going to clear up this afternoon.'

The surveyor looked at me in astonishment. 'How do you know?'

I shrugged my shoulders.

'Do you think we ought to drop what we're doing here and go?'

I felt the way I once had in the woods when we'd lost our way. The responsibility was his; I was attracted by the journey itself. To be cautious, I suggested that we listen to

the weather forecast.

The forecast was Pythian, as it always is when the meterologists don't know what to say. Slightly overcast to cloudy, with occasional showers.

But the sun was beginning to come through the clouds.

'Do you really think it will clear up?'

He wanted to shift at least some of the responsibility to me, so I accepted it.

We gathered up all the instruments, put a few more in the car at home, then changed our clothes and set off.

The road wound into the hills, and we passed through villages I was seeing for the first time in my life. As the sky began to turn blue, I felt it was partly my doing.

'I'm sorry we didn't leave first thing,' Kos said. 'We could have started straight away. You can see the North Star from four o'clock on.'

Eventually we stopped by a farm building that stood at the side of a pond. The surveyor sounded the horn, then jumped out of the car and unlocked the heavy wooden gates. As soon as they were opened wide enough, a black and white Newfoundland bounded out and greeted us noisily, followed by a slight young woman with a large belly, a freckled face and light-coloured hair, who flung herself into his arms. So this was the creature he had found in the park weeping, crushed by a secret grief.

I could tell that the surveyor would have preferred to load up the instruments we needed and leave at once, but his wife insisted that we rest a while and have something to eat. His mother and grandmother appeared as well, and they all tried to persuade us to stay. The surveyor said he would go and tend to the bull, and he left me to the mercies of the women.

Upstairs, where the young couple lived, the rooms smelled of whitewash, new wood and paint. The surveyor's wife set a small table. 'We haven't managed to get a proper dining-table yet,' she said. There wasn't much furniture of any kind, but the parquet flooring was recently laid and the window frames freshly painted. In the corner, by the door, the large lobe-shaped leaves of some foreign plant rose out of a flower-pot.

'It's a monstera,' she said. 'I brought it from home. We had a fig tree as well, and each year it produced a few little figs, at least.'

I felt she wanted to tell me something quite different, or ask about something more important — most probably what I thought of her husband — but she said nothing more, so I remarked on how nice I thought their place looked, and told her that I enjoyed working with her husband. She nodded, blushed and then ran out of the room.

I sat down in an armchair beside a bookshelf and looked at the books. Outside, I could hear the Newfoundland's deep bass bark, and the geese honking. Voices echoed through the house, someone arrived and then left again. There weren't many books, but most of the authors were American, oddly enough the same ones I had admired when I was young. But then as far as publishing went, time had stood still for seventeen years.

We had supper at a table for two. The surveyor's wife gave up her place to me and sat in an armchair. While we ate, she crocheted some tiny item of baby clothing.

I would have liked to have gone on sitting there, for I had suddenly lost interest in night-time surveying, and would have preferred to learn something, at least, about my quiet and gentle hostess. But the surveyor was in a

hurry. What if the clouds were to move in?

So I went to put the instruments in the car, and then I opened the gate. His wife held the dog by the collar, and I realized why, back then in the park, my young boss had turned and gone back to this stranger, this weeping girl whose face he couldn't even see. He was drawn, through her, to the mystery that otherwise had no place in his strict and precisely measurable world.

'You see,' said Kos. 'It'll be dark in a little while.'

I replied that he had a nice home. That was all we said about his wife.

The shadows were lengthening across the countryside, and cool air was beginning to move in from the valley. We left the tripod with the disc by the woods and drove up a steep meadow to the top of a hill where a wooden pyramid stood intact, a relic of times past. There, over the stone pillar, we set up the theodolite. Then I got into the car and spread out sheets of paper with columns printed on them while the surveyor located the North Star in the still-light sky, and we were ready to begin.

So far, in our work I had uncovered nothing new or even exciting. I didn't care whether the surveyor's telescope was pointed at a star or a church steeple.