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woodland animal, begging you with its eyes not to torture it and let it go, to release it from your power.
    The schoolteacher asked me how I was making out. I knew that I had her, like the little animal in the woods, strangely in my power, the way men sometimes capture women without deserving to and without really trying, by the simple inscrutable effect of attraction and submission, but I didn’t understand it the way I had at other times, or as I did with the ordinary, erotic, and uncomplicatedMargit; this time it was as if the invisible nerves that linked us were nourishing some sort of drama, some possible fulfillment that might wipe out the desperate and vicious illusion which had made of that slender body and that lovely face and those delicate dancer’s breasts and that creative force a chimerical existence imprisoned in a vicious circle.
    The schoolteacher frowned, growled, and rolled over in bed so hard that the springs creaked.
    Two days before our week’s vacation was due to end, it rained, and the vacationers played Ping-Pong or cards or sat around in the dining room, chatting about things, trying for a while to find someone to play the piano; the Cultural Guide awoke from the previous day’s drunkenness and tried to bring the group together with some game he called French Mail, but the only ones he could interest were an old married couple: he, paunchy, with baggy knee-breeches, a former owner of a haberdashery, now manager of a state-owned clothing store in Pardubice, and she, fat, benign, at fifty still emitting the naïve peeps of surprise that she used to emit at eighteen on the merry-go-round: she always revived at lunchtime, not out of gluttony but because food was the only thing she understood, otherwise she moved through life in a mist, guided by the light of secure conventions, maternal admonitions, dancing lessons, nice boys carefully picked by her parents,courtship, marriage, two or three births, and Sunday mass (but if anyone were to ask her about even the most basic theological terms, she wouldn’t know what to say, she simply went to mass, sang the hymns in the hymnal, genuflected, beat her breast, made the sign of the cross with the tips of her fingers moistened in holy water, and had requiem masses served in memory of her late mother); her kitchen too was an island of security where she became an artist, a virtuoso with absolute pitch for tastes and odors, like a violinist can tell a quarter tone and even an eighth, not rationally but intuitively, with a sense that others don’t have and can’t have, something that isn’t the result of the five or seven years of apprenticeship in a mother’s kitchen but a gift of grace, a piece of immortality given to a person in addition to the simple ordinary skills and the sleepy brain with its few stunted thoughts, and a heart submerged in lard, capable of no dishonesty or evil, capable only of an animal love for its young, its spouse, its family, for people, for life, and of resignation to death — the last of those beacons of security that border the path from the first moment of awakening in the mists of life. Then the Cultural Guide also found an old seamstress for the game, an old maid, a worker laureate of the state enterprise called Gentlemen’s Linens, who was spending her first vacation away from her home in Prague’s working-classŽižkov district, and who had spent the entire week so far sitting around, standing around, walking around, not knowing what to do, with nothing to talk about because she didn’t know anyone there and in all her life hadn’t known anything but men’s shirts, had never known a man and love, had lived frozen between the prose of shirts and the primitive poetry of the dreams of old maids. He also got hold of a pimply young hot-shot who had tried in vain the first three days to gain the affections of a pig-tailed Slovak girl, who in turn had given preference to a black-haired technician, a former gunner in the