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took them away, of course he does, but he’s not said a word to me about it. But when it’s a question of ten grams … you’re killing me, he mutters, you’re killing me indeed.”
    Melkior thought back: perhaps it was all due to the loss of those seven locks while he was sleeping?
    “And now I have to drop him by over eight hundred grams a month. The man’s dying on my machine, as it were, before my eyes, and I have to keep a record of it day in and day out. I’m having a hard time of it, but what can I do?” The invalid was not lying, he genuinely felt for Dom Kuzma. “I give him anything up to sixty grams of an evening, to set him up nicely for bed, but come morning I bring him down by a hundred and twenty. He hangs his head, there are tears in his eyes, he doesn’t believe me; you’re lying, he says, how could I have possibly lost so much overnight? Your machine’s out of whack, he says, get it fixed! I’m a human being, don’t forget! and he cries with fear. He goes to the blind colleague over there on the corner, who consoles him—by mutual agreement, shall we say—with a couple of grams. But then he won’t believe him either, and comes back to me again, the pest.
    “Your machine’s good, he says, all things considered. On second thought, he says, you
can
lose weight overnight, through the digestive process and so on. … All the same you should keep an eye on it, you should indeed! As for that man on the corner, his contraption’s no good at all. If you ask me, he says, his license should be revoked. Chose a corner position, no less! You think he’s really blind? That’s their cover, no doubt about it. … And I have no choice but to say yes. Now then, he says, let’s have another go in the name of God. So I weigh him again, pressing a wee bit, to reassure him. I’ve driven this here nail into my peg leg for him special, and I press the bottom bar, careful like, as if I am squeezing drops into his eye. But he smells a rat, thinks the measure’s now too good all of a sudden, and he won’t believe me. Go on, he says, press your scale! There will be somebody to press the scale for you, too, when your soul is weighed before God! And off he goes, all angry and unhappy. He was unhappy just now, too, over weighing the same as he did this morning. He’d had the feed of his lifetime, he said … he even showed me his belly. There he is now, over at the other fellow’s, he may yet be back here again. I feel sorry for him, you might say. The man’s wasting away like a leaf in autumn, and all I can do is look on. Not to mention that he still owes me over two kilos.”
    “Oh, you give credit then?” Melkior joked to hide his feeling of shock. The invalid did not like the joke and let it pass with a sigh:
    “Ahh, he’s to be pitied, believe me.”
    “Pitied indeed,” Melkior echoed in all sincerity, but presently hastened to undo it, “and yet conceivably he can retrieve his kilos, while you can’t get your leg back. Your loss is greater than his.”
    “But he’s going to die!” the invalid cried didactically.
    “Meaning you won’t? Haven’t you in fact been at death’s door, weren’t you dying in Galicia when the Russian Emperor’s brotherly shell kissed your leg? And later on, in the field hospital in Káposvár or somewhere, bedbugs eating you as punishment, as if you’d invented war! ‘Wasting away,’ indeed! Come off it, man!”
    Without bothering to collect his ticket, Melkior hurried over to the corner where Dom Kuzma was standing on the blind man’s weighing machine, leveling the arms himself, seeking a balance for them. His fingers were trembling in the prayer wherein he supplicated God to stretch forth his arms and show His mercy by way of the arms of the scale. And, lo and behold, God lent him a hand, Dom Kuzma stepped down, elated, and began hurriedly emptying his pockets, as if preparing to rob himself. He piled his keys, wallet, watch, coin purse, breviary, and