Harlequin's Millions by Bohumil Hrabal Page A

because just like somany others he couldn’t endure the persistent breeze … The old witness Karel Výborný now spoke … This same wind carries fine sand from the Libyan deserts to this region, the wind is most active in areas with a predominance of limestone in the ground. Munich, for example, is all limestone, it lies in an enormous limestone basin, and this wind blows in May, then in October, and again in February, the whole city and in fact the whole region is driven to drink, in May all the breweries tap casks of Maibock, in October the Bavarians defend themselves against the foehn by guzzling beer and dancing till dawn, for an entire week, and in February they stoke up huge stoves in tents and thousands of people celebrate Fasching, but actually they’re only filling themselves with beer so they don’t stick their head in the oven. The only real defense against the foehn is to flee to an area with granite mountains and hills. Regensburg … Mr. Výborný finished telling his story, and Mr. Kořínek smoothed his unruly hair with both hands and said … That foehn will be the death of me yet! It makes me feel miserable, like I’ve been out night after night drinking boilermakers and smoking Old Virginia cheroots. And not only does your whole body hurt after a foehn, but your soul too. My heart pounds in my throat and I’m never sure I’ll make it through the night. By now I know that if I check the barometer every morning, I can tell by the air pressure how I’m goingto feel that day. But the worst is when it rains and the barometer shows good weather. When two frontal systems collide … I know that on that day all the hospitals in Prague, and throughout the country, will have, or maybe already do have, a high mortality rate. And the next day you read the obituaries. In Catalonia they call this wind, which in that part of the world blows from the Balearic Islands, the Llevant, it blows across the land for a whole week and even young people living on secluded farms can’t stand the pressure on their souls and go crazy or hang themselves from a tree. It’s customary there to chop them down tree and all. Last year I got a letter, a friend of mine had gone to inspect the body of a young girl who had hanged herself, he arrived to find a grieving mother, whom he tried to comfort … You’ve still got two other daughters! But the rest of the family, who had just chopped down the big tree, which had crashed to the ground with the dead girl still hanging from its branches, all those relatives wailed, along with the mother … Did she have to go and hang herself from our very best apple tree, which gave us twenty baskets of Reinettes a year?… Said Mr. Kořínek, and his hair stood straight up with disgust, just like the clothes on the little table under the sign on the wall, How do our ladies pass the time?, where all the lovingly displayed baby clothes sprang up and bristled with disgust at the sultry breeze wafting through Count Špork’s castle, the warm, dry gusts that blew across the Alps all the way fromLibya. In the kitchen a loud gong sounded, bong, bong, bong, bong. It was dinnertime, but along the corridors you could see that more than half the pensioners had stayed in bed, because usually most of them would be standing outside the door of the Count’s former banquet hall half an hour before dinner, the pensioners would read the menu over and over again, all that reading made them hungrier and hungrier, they tortured themselves with the thought that they might only get a very small portion, or that their meat would be tough, for half an hour they stood outside the closed doors of the dining hall debating hotly and telling each other about their favorite dishes, which their mothers had prepared for them long ago, dishes they could never forget, they told each other about the banquets