The JOKE Read Free Page B

mirror—it seemed to me that I knew her.
    She was holding my earlobe with one hand and carefully scraping the soap off my face with the other; I watched her, and the likeness that had so astonished me a minute before began slowly to dissolve and disappear. She leaned down over the basin, slid two fingers along the razor to remove the foam, straightened up again, and gave the chair a gentle turn; again our eyes met for an instant, and again it seemed to me that it was she! True, the face was somewhat different, an older sister's face: grayed, faded, slightly sunken; but then, I hadn't seen her for fifteen years! During that period, time had superimposed a mask on her true face, but fortunately the mask came with two holes that allowed her real eyes, her true eyes, to shine through, and they were just as I had known them.
    Then the trail became muddied again: a new customer came in and sat down behind me to wait his turn; he struck up a conversation with my barber, going on about the fine summer we were having and the swimming pool they were building outside of town; when she responded (I paid more attention to her intonation than to her words, which were of no significance), I was certain that I didn't recognize the voice; it sounded detached, devoid of anxiety, almost coarse; it was the voice of a stranger.
    By that time she was washing off my face, pressing it between her palms, and (in spite of the voice) I began to believe once more that this was she, that after fifteen years I was once more feeling her hands on my face caressing me with long gentle strokes (I had completely forgotten she was washing, not caressing me). Her stranger's voice babbled away to the talkative customer, but I refused to believe it; I wanted to believe her hands, to recognize her by her hands; I wanted the degree of kindness in her touch to determine whether it was she and whether she recognized me.
    She took a towel and dried my face. The talkative customer was laughing loudly at one of his own jokes, and I noticed that my barber was not laughing, that she probably hadn't been listening to what he'd said. That disturbed me because I took it as proof that she had recognized me and was secretly shaken. I decided to speak to her as soon as I got out of the chair. She pulled the cloth from my neck. I stood up. I dug into my breast pocket for a five-crown note. I waited for our eyes to meet so I could call her by her name (the customer was still going on about something), but she kept her head turned indifferently away from me, taking the money so briskly and impersonally that I suddenly felt like a madman fallen prey to his own hallucinations and could not find the courage to say anything to her.
    I left the barbershop feeling oddly frustrated; all I knew was that I knew nothing and that it was a great callousness to be uncertain of recognizing a face I had once so dearly loved.
    I hurried back to the hotel (on the way I caught a glimpse of an old friend, Jaroslav, first fiddle of a local cimbalom band, but avoided his eyes as if fleeing his loud, insistent music) and phoned Kostka; he was still at the hospital.
    "That barber you got to shave me—is her name Lucie Sebetka?" "She goes under a different name now, but that's who she is. Where
    do you know her from?" asked Kostka. "Oh, it's been a very long time," I answered, and not even thinking
    about dinner, I left the hotel again (it was getting dark) and set off to wander through the town.

PART TWO
    Helena
    1
    Tonight I'm going to bed early, I may not fall asleep, but I'm going to bed early, Pavel left for Bratislava this afternoon, I'll fly to Brno early tomorrow morning and go the rest of the way by bus, little Zdena will have to be on her own for two days, she won't mind, she doesn't care much for our company anyway, at least not mine, she worships Pavel, Pavel is the first man in her life, he knows how to handle her, he knows how to handle all women, knew how to handle me, still does, this