Seven Days to the Funeral (Ukázka, strana 99)

his fault that he was somehow different from the others… He remembered how, at the age of six, when his parents sent him to a summer camp for the first time, the other kids kept hurling insults at him and he even started wetting his bed there… Fortunately he fell ill and was moved to a separate room and no longer had to go out for walks with the others. It had been just like that even before he turned six. He had never been accepted by the others and had always stood outside the circle. And that is why he ended up feeling insecure in the presence of others. He was unable to behave naturally. But alcohol allowed him to shed something, something that was weighing him down and that was what had driven him to drink. And that was why sometimes he really needed a drink. He thought of all the things that would never have happened had it not been for alcohol. Like that time in the little park on the embankment many years ago, when from one moment to the next, he had turned into a man of action, stopped talking all of a sudden and turned to kiss the woman by his side, a woman he in fact respected enormously. He had had a drop too much before, and many times after that, but on that occasion something momentous had happened and he still remembered vividly everything about that day. On that day he had left home at around ten in the morning, as he and Chorváth had been invited to talk about literature with some older students at a gymnázium. In those days such events were organised by the Writers’ Union, whose members would take it in turns to take part. When they got to the school they discovered that the teacher who had requested the discussion had been off sick for about a week, and the school had forgotten all about the talk and assigned someone to substitute for the class who’d set the students a written exam for the day, which could no longer be cancelled. Suddenly some spare time opened up before them and they had to improvise a way of filling it, so they dived into the nearest pub, which happened to be round the corner. It was one of ( 98 )