‘Ah, Ornik!’


‘Good morning, Ornik!’


‘How’s your temperature?’


‘And the phlegm count?’


On the open balcony of the first floor, most of the patients were already reclining on the white iron benches, set side by side along the whole length of the narrow balcony. They lay supine, wrapped in folded blankets up to their noses, to ward off the transparent, searing chill of a winter morning.

Like a huge and heavy machine, Irma Ornik, business-school graduate, propelled his gigantic body slowly, movement after movement, the few paces between his room and the bench. His broad, slightly rounded shoulders slanted obliquely from right to left; and planted in the middle, without any sign of a neck, was a great head as round as a pumpkin.

The gibes of his friends bounced off his big body like rubber bullets. Ornik did not reply, but smiled to himself and muttered something, while his large hairy hands — protruding from the elbows out of the short sleeves of his tattered dressing-gown, which Ornik only used now for lying down — adjusted the setting of the bench with slow, measured movements.

Then, with great care, Ornik deposited his eighty-six kilograms on the bench and wrapped himself thoroughly in the blankets until only his massive head was visible, wearing a stiff woollen hat, mountaineer-style.

Above the mountain ridges to the left, their crags capped with blue snow, a long strip of sky was reddening steadily. In the open expanse of the sky a little white cloud drifted, turning pink on one side. As for the chain of hills to the right, a smidgen of vibrant colour was now infused into the dark bronze of their high diagonal. A larger moon than usual was impaled on the western heights, an alien, superfluous moon, all pallid, reminiscent of a forgotten streetlamp still burning in the morning.

Ornik lay for some time without moving and gazed out at Mendel Ridge, which sealed in the blue distance the aperture of the long Albano Valley. Suddenly he felt a kind of bubble rising from his chest to his throat. Ornik removed his right hand from under the blankets and reached for the flat spittoon on the chair beside the bed, opened the nickel cover with his thumb, raised his head a little, and hawked into it, emitting a muffled sound. When he had finished he looked with one eye, closing the other, inside the spittoon, examining it as if he were an expert, until he noticed filaments of blood in the green gunge, like the veins in the white of an inflamed eye. At once Ornik felt painful exhaustion spreading gradually from his back and extending to his knees, setting them shaking. He closed the receptacle, shook it, studied the contents for a moment through the blue glass, and put it back in its place.

Then Ornik took two thermometers from the chair, one of them in a sheath of nickel and the other in a sheath of red paper; unpacked them from the sheaths, which he left on the blanket; inserted the thermometers, one under his armpit and the other in his mouth, for greater accuracy; and peered at his watch.

‘Again? Didn’t you take your temperature just now?’ said Ornik’s room-mate, Seberg the engineer, lying on the next bench.

After twenty minutes — Ornik did not measure things for ten minutes but for twenty, to avoid the likelihood of error — he took out the thermometers one after the other and compared the results: 37.4 degrees, again! And a sharp pain stabbed at his temples.

When the sun’s rays began to invade the eyes, the four balconies of the ‘sanatorium for the needy’ came to life. Everyone was in good spirits, as lying down became comfortable and even rather pleasant. Conversations began; benches were dragged noisily across the floor. Those who were forbidden the sun lowered the folding curtains attached to the walls and stretched them out to form slanting roofs, and beside these Irma Ornik erected a great grey booth resembling a market stall — no one knew how he had got his hands on it.

From the women’s balconies above, the sharp voice of Trudi Wizel, the little devil from Prague, called to Frau Schnabel, who wasn’t supposed to lie down until the sun came out. ‘Frau Schnabel, she’s still asleep!’

‘Who’s asleep?’ asked a muffled voice.


‘The sun!’


A clever idea occurred to Adolf Ritter, lying in the middle of the balcony. Pointing first to right and left, he gave his instructions while slightly raising the upper part of his body, commanding in a restrained voice and with helpful gestures, like a general in battle already thrown from his horse: ‘One-two-the-ree!’

And all the residents of the first floor shouted in unison, ‘Frau Schna-bel — the su-un!’

From above came a strident gale of laughter from many female mouths.