Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Louis Armand

Hájek. The library assistants, the coat check attendant, the guard, the waitress in the cafeteria. Others, too. At- tendants, neighbours, former students, colleagues from the university. Hadn’t Volta himself given the impres- sion that he knew something about him? Or did Hájek exist the way a rumour exists, a name and nothing else? As I considered these questions, I was reminded of the story about Edward K in the pillory, about his failed es- capes and his death. The image of a man falling from a windowledge flashed through my mind in a series of montage: a pair of boots on the ledge, mortar sifting be- tween stone blocks, dark shapes moving in the wind, a pupil dilating, mouth anguish‐stricken, a birdseye view spiralling into vertigo, the flicker of candlelight through an empty window, the emptiness itself. Did it represent a type of punishment, or a form of atonement? What did it imply? The slow dawning of the fact, too, that it was none other than Jan Mydlář, Rudolf II’s willing exe- cutioner, who’d been sent to interrogate K at Křivoklát Castle, to learn the secret of the long‐promised elixir and of—but did anyone believe in this nonsense?* — the transmutation of gold. I sat on the floor with the Black Book open on my lap. The nonsense on its pages stared back at me ’til I began, slowly and evenly, to tear the pages out and fold them, one at a time, into paper spaceships, aeroplanes— the Nakamura Lock, the Spy Plane, the Swashbuckler, the Headhunter, the Hammer, the Pteroplane, the Fly-

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