Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

The Combinations

handrail. ‘As you can see, I don’t come in here very often.’ The door to Hájek’s apartment was nondescript. Inside, the air was heavy with mustification. I sniffed at it ap- prehensively, the smell of detergent, plasterer’s paint, stale cigarette smoke. The walls, I could see, had been repainted and all the furniture removed. There were vague outlines along the edges of the parquet where previously a bookshelf, or a cabinet, or some object or other had been. The rooms stood bare, were barely even rooms, now stripped of the privacies of habitation, they were mere spaces, and yet still I felt a sense of tres- pass, encroaching upon the ghost of something which remained even when no other trace remained. Without furniture, the rooms had an almost religious austerity. They conveyed only the absence of someone, a haunting vacancy. From what I could gather, all of Hájek’s books had been sold to an antique dealer from Schnitzelstadt, to pay the death duties and funeral costs. There were no close relatives that she knew of. There’d been sev- eral acquaintances, men Hájek sometimes met to play chess with, but rarely any visitors other than myself. As for the two women, they hardly went out—neither of them had been in particularly good health. The prop- erty, Mrs Severínová seemed to think, was being held by the State, who’d appointed an executor, but she’d forgotten his name—she speculated about her own

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