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they saw that they'd been fooled by the Sunday peacefulness; the way was barricaded; they came up against an abandoned construction site: machines, tractors, mounds of earth and sand; on the far side of the river, trees lay felled; and the villa whose beauty had drawn them when they saw it from above now revealed broken windowpanes and a huge hole in place of a front door; behind the house jutted a building project ten stories high; yet the cityscape's beauty that had struck them with wonder was not an optical illusion; trampled, humiliated, mocked, it still showed through its own ruin. Irena looked again at the far bank and she saw that the great felled trees were in flower! Felled and laid out flat, they were alive! Just then music suddenly exploded from a loudspeaker, fortissimo. At that bludgeoning Irena clapped her hands over her ears and burst into sobs. Sobs for the world that was vanishing before her eyes. Her husband, who
    was to die in a few months, took her by the hand and led her away.
    The gigantic invisible broom that transforms, disfigures, erases landscapes has been at the job for millennia now, but its movements, which used to be slow, just barely perceptible, have sped up so much that I wonder: Would an Odyssey even be conceivable today? Is the epic of the return still pertinent to our time? When Odysseus woke on Ithaca's shore that morning, could he have listened in ecstasy to the music of the Great Return if the old olive tree had been felled and he recognized nothing around him?
    Near the hotel a tall building exposed its bare side, a blind wall decorated with a gigantic picture. In the twilight the caption was unreadable, and all Josef could make out was two hands clasping, enormous hands, between sky and earth. Had they always been there? He couldn't recall.
    He was dining alone at the hotel restaurant and all around him he heard the sound of conversations. It was the music of some unknown language. What had happened to Czech during those two sorry decades? Was it the stresses that had
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    changed? Apparently. Hitherto set firmly on the first syllable, they had grown weaker; the intonation seemed boneless. The melody sounded more monotone than before—drawling. And the timbre! It had turned nasal, which gave the speech an unpleasantly blase quality. Over the centuries the music of any language probably does change imperceptibly, but to a person returning after an absence it can be disconcerting: bent over his plate, Josef was listening to an unknown language whose every word he understood.
    Then, in his room, he picked up the telephone and dialed his brother's number. He heard a joyful voice inviting him to come over right away.
    "I just wanted to tell you I'm here," said Josef. "Do excuse me for today, though. I don't want you to see me like this after all these years. I'm knocked out. Are you free tomorrow?"
    He wasn't even sure his brother still worked at the hospital.
    "I'll get free," was the answer.
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    He rings, and his brother, five years older than he, opens the door. They grip hands and gaze at each other. These are gazes of enormous intensity, and both men know very well what is going on: they are registering—swiftly, discreetly, brother about brother—the hair, the wrinkles, the teeth; each knows what he is looking for in the face before him, and each knows that the other is looking for the same thing in his. They are ashamed of doing so, because what they're looking for is the probable distance between the other man and death or, to say it more bluntly, each is looking in the other man's face for death beginning to show through. To put a quick end to that morbid scrutiny, they cast about for some phrase to make them forget those few grievous seconds, some exclamation or question, or if possible (it would be a gift from heaven) a joke (but nothing comes to their rescue).
    "Come," the brother finally says and, taking Josef by the shoulders, leads him into the living