Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Louis Armand

future, once the house had been put up for auction, tender, sale, whatever it was the State had in mind for it—she had, she said, no illusions. As for the rest, some distant relatives of Hájek’s wife had somehow got wind of what’d happened and come for the furniture. No‐ one had objected. The only tenants remaining in the house were an architect, who was abroad most of the time, and a half‐Russian shopkeeper who spent four months of every year in Karlsbad (where the bottled water comes from) because Marx and Freud had once visited there and Kafka too, the latter in a sanatorium with a view of the colonnade due to a misdiagnosis in early childhood. As the caretaker guided me around the apartment, I couldn’t help thinking about the letters Hájek’s very ux- orious wife had burned after he died. What had they contained, those letters? What type of intimacies? Glancing through a doorway into one of the garçon- nières, my gaze was automatically drawn towards the gas radiators fixed to the wall beneath the windows. A sickliness emanated from within which caused me to recoil and be glad once the door was locked again. I checked the gas mains, but there was nothing unusu- al. The caretaker, meanwhile, was busy pointing things out to herself—the place where Hájek used to take his breakfast in the winter garden, the corner where his wife kept magnolias in a vase, and so on—reminiscing. I tried to imagine Hájek and the two women seated to-

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