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leather coat) was throwing sticks, and the dog was retrieving them.
    The third time (the setting was always the same: poplars and river), the man briefly bowed to Mama and then, as the perceptive Jaromil noticed, he turned to look at them after they passed him. Returning from their walk the next day, they saw the black German shepherd sitting at the entrance to the villa. When they entered the foyer they heard voices in the next room and were in no doubt that the masculine one belonged to the dog's master; their curiosity was great enough to keep them standing in the foyer for a while, looking around and chatting until the tall lady, the boarding-house owner, at last appeared.
    Mama pointed at the dog: "Who is that man this dog belongs to? We're always running into him on our walks.'' "He's the art teacher at the high school here." Mama remarked that she would be very delighted to talk to an art teacher because Jaromil liked to draw, and she was eager to have an expert's opinion. The boardinghouse owner introduced the man to Mama, and Jaromil had to run up to the room to get his sketchbook.
    Then the four of them sat down in the small salon— the boardinghouse owner; Jaromil; the dog's master, who was examining the drawings; and Mama, who accompanied his examination with her commentary: she explained that Jaromil always said that what interested him was not drawing landscapes or still lifes but rather action scenes, and, she said, his drawings really did have astonishing vitality and movement, even though she didn't understand why all the people in them had dogs' heads; maybe if Jaromil drew people with real human bodies his modest work might have some value, but the way it was she unfortunately couldn't say whether it made any sense at all.
    The dog's owner examined the drawings with satisfaction; then he declared that it was in fact the combination of animal head and human body that captivated him. For that fantastic combination was no chance idea but, as so many of the child's drawings showed, a haunting image, something rooted in the unfathomable depths of his childhood. Jaromil's mother should be careful of judging her son's talent only by his ability to depict the outer world; anyone could acquire that; what interested him as a painter (letting it be understood that teaching for him was a necessary evil to earn a living) was precisely the original inner world the child was laying out on paper.
    Mama listened with pleasure to the painter's praise, the tall lady stroked Jaromil's hair and asserted that he had a great future ahead of him, and Jaromil looked down, registering in his memory everything he was hearing. The painter said that next year he would be transferred to a Prague high school, and that he would be pleased if Jaromil's mother were to bring him further examples of the boy's work.
    "Inner world!" Those were grand words, and Jaromil heard them with extreme satisfaction. He never forgot that at the age of five he had already been considered an exceptional child, different from others; the behavior of his classmates, who made fun of his schoolbag and shirt, also (at times harshly) confirmed his uniqueness. Until this moment that uniqueness had only been a vague and empty notion; it had been an incomprehensible hope or an incomprehensible rejection; but now it had received a name: "original inner world"; and that designation was immediately given definite content: drawings of people with dogs' heads. Jaromil of course knew very well that he had made this admired discovery of dog-headed humans by chance, purely because he couldn't draw a human face; this gave him the confused idea that the originality of his inner world was not the result of laborious effort but rather the expression of everything that randomly passed through his head; it was given him like a gift.
    From then on he paid great attention to his own thoughts and began to admire them. For example, the idea came to him that when he died the world he