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not my torso, was floating up
     there by the ceiling of the Pardubice tailoring firm, and sometimes I felt as though I
     were floating near the ceiling of the Golden City of Prague restaurant.
    Once, around midnight, I took some mineral water up to the salesman from
     van Berkel’s who sold us that pharmacy scale and the machine that sliced Hungarian
     salami so thin, and I went in without knocking. There he was, sitting on the carpet in
     his pajamas as he always did after eating his fill. He was sitting there on his haunches
     and at first I thought he was playing solitaire or telling his fortune with a deck of
     cards, but he was smiling blissfully like a little child and slowly laying down
     hundred-crown notes side by side on the carpet, and he had half the carpet covered and
     it still wasn’t enough, because he pulled another packet of banknotes from his
     briefcase and laid them out neatly in a row, as precisely as if he’d had lines or
     columns drawn on the carpet. When he finished a row, and the rows were as exact as a
     bee’s honeycomb, he looked gleefully at the money, he even clapped his pudgy hands
     together and stroked his cheeks and held his face in his hands, reveling like a child in
     those banknotes, and he went on dealing them on the floor, and if a note was the wrong
     side up or upside down, he turned it so it was like all the others. I stood still,
     afraid just to cough and leave. He had a fortune there in those notes, like identical
     tiles, and his enormous delight opened my eyes to what was possible.Although I was just as fond of money, I had never thought of this before, and I saw
     a picture of myself putting all the money I earned, not into hundred-crown notes just
     yet, but into twenties, and then laying my twenties out just like that, and I loved
     watching this fat, childish man in his striped pajamas, knowing that one day I too would
     shut myself away like this and lay out on the floor a joyful image of my power and my
     talent. And once I surprised the poet Tonda Jódl that way. He lived in the hotel,
     and fortunately he could also paint, because instead of giving him a bill the boss would
     take a painting. Jódl put out a small book of poems in our town, called
The
     Life of Jesus Christ
, which he published privately. He took the whole edition
     to his room and laid the copies out side by side on the floor, and
The Life of Jesus
     Christ
made him so nervous he kept taking his coat off and putting it on again,
     and he covered the whole room like that with the little white books and still had some
     left over, so he continued along the corridor, laying those volumes down almost to the
     stairway. Then he took his coat off once more and a while later put it on again. Or, if
     he was sweating, he’d just throw it over his shoulders, but when the cold got to
     him he’d put his arms back in the sleeves, and pretty soon he’d be so warm
     that he’d take it off again, and cotton balls kept falling out of his ears, and
     he’d take them out or stick them back in again, depending on how much he wanted to
     hear the world around him. He preached a return to the simple country life and he never
     painted anything but country cottages from the Krkonoše region, and he claimed that
     the role of the poet was to seek the New Man. Our guests didn’t like him, or
     rather they did, but that didn’t stopthem from playing
     practical jokes on him all the time. It wasn’t just that he was always taking his
     coat off and putting it on again in the restaurant, he’d also take off his
     galoshes and put them on, depending on his mood, which would change every five minutes
     because of this search for the New Man, and when he’d taken them off, the guests
     would pour beer or coffee into them, and then they’d all watch the poet out of the
     corner of their eyes, missing their mouths with forks full of food while he put his
     galoshes back on, and the coffee or the beer would slosh out,