The alarm went off at six o’clock, my wife and my son had to get up to go to work. I ought to get up too. Dad died two days ago and I should go and see his pupils at the Academy and get one of those he was fond of to speak at his funeral. And yesterday afternoon I received a package with the drug I’d written off for some time ago for that youngster Štycha, I ought to give it to him as soon as possible. I hadn’t written off for any drug for Dad, there was probably no such thing.
By now it was too late to catch my mates in the changing room anyway. If I had any time left, I’d find them at the tavern during their mid-morning break.
On the final day of Dad’s life Peter and I left for the hospital first thing in the morning. It was a Sunday and there were only two nurses on duty in the department. One of them told me that ‘it could happen’ at any moment.
Dad was lying in his bed, his lips slightly open, breathing heavily. The pauses between breaths seemed to me incredibly long. His eyes were firmly shut. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for two days, his veins were so torn with punctures that they couldn’t feed him artificially any more. I tried to give him a spoonful of sweetened tea but at first he was unable to swallow it. When he finally managed it I could see that it had taken all his strength, and that another drop might make him choke. The last drop of hope had dried up, vanished in the dust. All I could do was to mop Dad’s lips and tongue with a piece of moistened cotton-wool. Then I sat down by his bed and took his hand, as he used to take mine when I was a little boy and he was taking me for a walk to the airfield. My grown-up son was standing in the door, crying.
Then suddenly Dad breathed out, but he didn’t breathe in again. I could see the terrible effort of his lungs, as they strained to catch another breath, his faced closed up in a grimace of such pain that it went right through me. What kind of son was I if I couldn’t even give him a tiny puff of breath?
I got up and in my mind begged: Lord, receive his soul, you know how good it was! Then I walked out in the corridor, deserted on a Sunday, and all around there were walls, and one more wall, quite thin, transparent but nonetheless impermeable, was slipping between that moment and everything that preceded it.
In the room next door my son was listening to the news. In Colombia, on the very day my father died, a volcano erupted. The red-hot lava melted the snow and ice in the neighbourhood of the crater. The water together with the ash produced a flow of mud which rushed downhill into the valley, where it engulfed human habitations. It was estimated that twenty thousand people remained buried under the mudslide.
My wife bent over me and kissed me goodbye. She whispered that I should sleep on, she’d get home early.
I couldn’t fall asleep again. When I closed my eyes Dad’s face returned to me in its final pain-distorted shape, and his chopped breath came to me from all corners.
A bell rang again, this time the front door.
Early morning visits fill me with foreboding. But standing at the door was only the fair-haired young man from Svatá Hora, and in his features there was even more painful anxiety than usual. It was obvious that something serious had happened, or else he wouldn’t have called at this hour.
He asked me to come with him, he wanted to talk to me outside. In the street he informed me that he and his friends had been pulled in for questioning. In his case the interrogation had gone on for half a day and had touched on my reading two years before, my stories, my opinions, as well as the opinions of other authors who’d refused to write in jerkish language in the society that was accomplishing ‘the greatest freedom of man and the human race’. They also asked him why and how often he visited me, and several times in this context they mentioned the destroyed monument.
Life – and hence also death – went on.
I tried to calm him. Surely they wouldn’t accuse either him or me of blowing up a monument. They merely liked bracketing these two offences – the reading of short stories written in a language comprehensible only to humans, and the destruction of a statue of an officially-proclaimed giant. Even they must realise that the latter was more criminal than the former.
But the young man was in the depths of despair. This was the first time he’d been interrogated and had experienced the stubbornly uncompromising and suspicious jerkish spirit. I’ve been aware of it for years, recording how under its influence living voices were falling silent and language was being lost. It pervades everything, it gets into the water and into the air, it mingles with our blood. Mothers give birth to shrunken cripples and the landscape to dead trees, birds drop in mid-flight and children’s bodies are afflicted by malignant tumours.
He was walking beside me, afraid. He’d already handed in his notice at work, he’d found a job as projectionist in a cinema, and he was hoping to be accepted as a correspondence student of jerkish literature. True, he’d learn there that Charlie Chaplin left the United States, that bastion of unfreedom, but he’d have a little time left over to read books and reflect. But suppose they didn’t accept him now. He wanted to know where he’d find a safety net for himself when the one they’d assigned to him as well as the one offered to him at the department store were so large-meshed that a person fell through at once. Of course, everybody should weave his own net, he knew that. But if they burst in, if they stole into his home and tore it up for him? Fight them or begin to weave a finer mesh from scratch? How often could a person start from scratch?
Only nine o’clock. If I hurried I might be able to catch the youngster in the Božena tavern, hand over the drug, and then go and find a funeral speaker.
The tavern was still half-empty at this early hour, and I didn’t have to search through a crowd: my former companions, apart from the youngster and the captain, were sitting at the table next to the bar. Enthroned at the head of the table, to my surprise, was our foreman, moreover in new overalls.
I entered unobserved and managed to overhear the foreman earnestly recounting how someone was a real show-off, always nose-dived right to the ground and pulled out only when all those who were merely standing and staring had plastered their trousers.
‘And what are you doing here?’ Mrs Venus had spotted me. ‘Come to help us?’
The foreman turned his head irritably, he didn’t like anyone spoiling his heroic episodes. I produced the medicine from my pocket and asked about the youngster; did anyone know where I might find him.
‘This is no kindergarten,’ the foreman informed me. ‘If he comes, he’s here, if he don’t, he ain’t. We haven’t seen him,’ he turned to Mrs Venus as his witness, ‘for at least a week.’
‘This isn’t the weather for him, you remember that sick turn he had. Maybe they’ll give you his address at the office,’ Mrs Venus said. ‘Bound to have it there. Why don’t you sit down?’
I ordered tea with rum.
‘Maybe you don’t know yet,’ Mrs Venus continued, ‘that they’ve locked our Mr Pinz up in the loony bin?’
Obviously I hadn’t heard about what had happened to the captain.
‘Wanted to set fire to the place he was living in. Scraped off the heads of matches, tried to make a bomb from them. Had it all ready, God knows what he’d intended it for. But then that Mary of his turned up, just looked in after all those years, and when he asked her if she’d stay with him she told him he was a nut and she’d sooner string herself up. So he decided to set that bomb off outside his own door.’
‘The stupidity of it,’ the foreman said in disgust; ‘scraping off two hundred thousand match-heads, stuffing them into a metal soda siphon, and then using it on a building like that! But if I was you I wouldn’t put my nose in that office, there’s another idiot sitting there!’ And he returned to his airfield, where his friend didn’t manage to pull out of a spin that time and rammed himself with his MIG so deep into the ground that when they’d put out the fire and cut the wreckage up with a blow-torch they were left with a hole big enough for twenty blokes to hide in.
When the rescue teams arrived in the area of the volcanic disaster they found, in addition to the thousands of dead, a few who’d survived on the roofs of houses or in tree-tops, and also some who were stuck in the mud and couldn’t get out by themselves. Of one little girl only the head was showing. Below the surface her legs were firmly clutched by her drowned aunt. The rescuers spent many hours trying to free the girl, and themselves got stuck in the mud in the attempt. All that time a reporter with a television camera was filming them, so he could bring the fate of the little girl closer to those who were contentedly or perhaps sympathetically bored in their own nets and wanted to be witnesses. After sixty hours the little girl’s sufferings were over and the tired reporter was able to return to his television net. By the time they’d cut the clip they needed from the recorded shots, the little girl’s soul had already risen and was lamenting above the dark waters and the mud, above the red-hot crater of the volcano, and also above a million TV screens which were flickering all over the world in order to show the vain struggle of the rescuers and the touching death of the little girl, who’d never rise from the ashes but who became famous for those few exciting seconds. And who heard the calling of her soul, who was shaken by her sobs? Who at least pictured her features at the moment when her lungs were vainly trying to catch that last breath of air?
‘In case you don’t get his address there,’ Mrs Venus returned to the youngster, ‘you could try that Dana of his. He might be there.’ And she described for me the house where the woman Dana lived. I’ve no idea how she knew. The house was in the Little Quarter.
The tea with rum had warmed me through nicely and I was now able to set out for the office. My way led me through the familiar little street of family homes, and when I got to the artist’s window I gazed in amazement on a vest which, suspended from a cord, shone brilliantly with its orange colour. Set out behind it into the depths of the room were the stems and stalks of exotic plants. They had been arranged by the artist’s hand to suggest human figures. As I stared into the window I could make out individual likenesses, familiar facial features. A woman with a jockey cap on her head undoubtedly represented Mrs Venus, still without her Red-Indian wrinkles, but already with a sorrowful expression around her mouth. At the same time, however, there was something joyous in her attitude, in the gestures of her hands. Perhaps the artist had caught her just at the moment when she was about to mount the filly she’d nursed back to health. A moment later I identified a sculptural likeness of the foreman, carrying a wounded airman out of an imaginary aircraft and, in doing so, very nearly soaring up himself on the wings of his bravery. I also recognised the captain, his stocky, as yet unbowed figure looked good in a naval uniform. Perhaps, after all, there was in him both the eccentric inventor and a great prankster. But at the beginning of his actions probably stood a childlike dream, a mirage of distant voyages. Mr Rada, on the other hand, stood there in ugly brown convict’s garb and was pouring water from a billy-can onto the head of another convict. His face was frozen at the instant of sudden inner illumination, at the touch of bliss. At that moment I heard the notes of Gershwin’s rhapsody. In the youngster’s expression there was so much concentration in his own playing and so much happiness that he seemed transformed. His clarinet was intended to suggest not so much a musical instrument as a conjurer’s wand which caused rocks to part and transported humans into the realm of their own dreams.
I realised then that all these faces were, in their likeness, both real and unreal. They seemed younger and more attractive, as though nothing of the working of time or life had marked them. At the same time I understood that this exhibition had been prepared by a different artist, by a woman artist. The sculptor here had only let her use his exhibition window and she, surmising the direction of my walking, had set out for me her park, a garden where a person might see his own likeness as he himself wished it to appear at moments of grace. Maybe she had done this to remind me of her, or to demonstrate to me her loving and generous vision of what art should represent of life.
I was still looking for myself among the sculptures, but I didn’t see my own face: there was only a tall pillar, as if hewn from stone, but I couldn’t see its top through the window. I remembered, and I wondered if it might have a smile at the top. But I knew that I wouldn’t find a smile – I’d have to be at peace with myself first.
The figures were now slowly beginning to dissolve before my eyes, and I was surprised to find myself in the grip of nostalgia. A person may think that the fate of people who are sufficiently remote does not touch him. Yet all of a sudden he will catch sight of them in an unexpected situation, will recognise their unsuspected likeness to him, whether it be beautiful or terrible, and he realises that not only have they touched him, but they have actually entered into him. This is what happens so long as life isn’t totally extinct in a person. My father, in a dying flash of consciousness, suffered from the thought that a strange woman could be more wicked than he’d thought possible.
Long ago, in my childhood, he had convinced me that paradise was a human invention. And yet he yearned for it, he yearned for human contact and he yearned for eternity. He wanted to cut himself adrift from the earth and to rise to the sky, to get to the edge of the mystery. Did he realise what he was turning down?
Coming along the opposite pavement was the uniformed patrol. The foppish one, however, was accompanied this time by a policeman I hadn’t seen before. I was prepared to pass them without acknowledging them when the fop suddenly changed direction and made straight for me.
I stiffened, as always. Why had my presence in the world annoyed them this time?
The fop carelessly raised his hand to his cap. ‘Day off today?’ he asked.
‘Sort of,’ I answered evasively.
‘What about the one in the high-water trousers then?’
I said I’d heard the captain had been taken to psychiatry.
‘What else could we do, we didn’t really want to,’ the fop explained. ‘We said to him, stop this nonsense, grandad, in the middle of the night. But instead of pissing off he lit that bottle of his. Would have killed him if we hadn’t nabbed him, his fuse was only one metre!’ he added with professional outrage. ‘Anyway, they’ll let him go, everybody’ll testify that he’s screwy, that he walked about in those ridiculous trousers even in the snow – I ask you!’ He turned to his companion, but he had walked on out of earshot. ‘But d’you know that he put on long trousers that evening, real baggy ones, perfect pantaloons, and a tie as well!’ The fop shrugged his shoulders in amazement and raised two fingers to his cap. ‘He was touched all right,’ he said, tapping his forehead, and walked away.
Sitting behind the desk at the office really was the little idiot, and he didn’t know the youngster’s address, or more correctly refused to know it – he might have had to get up from his chair and look up some file. A smile spread over his fleshy lips – the self-assured smile of a man who had been given power. Power over those who swept up garbage, and hence also over the garbage itself, and hence over the world of things. He explained something to me in his jerkish language but I didn’t understand, we lacked an interpreter.
No matter, I thought to myself in an upsurge of spite, I’ll find the youngster without him! I got on a tram which took me to the Little Quarter.
The spot which Mrs Venus had described was well known to me. It was on the other side of the place at the windows of which I used to look from the little attic I’d visited so often.
I’d frequently had to walk round the building but I’d never taken any notice of it. The walls were thick and the staircase dark. I thought I sniffed the familiar smell of gas.
I was lucky at least that the youngster’s lady friend had a split shift and was therefore at home at this hour. She asked me into the hall. I didn’t know if she was on her own, all other sounds were drowned by a noisy military band, and from somewhere came the rattle of a washing machine.
‘But he’s not here,’ she informed me when I’d explained who I was looking for. She was a bulky, powerful woman of mature years. I couldn’t picture her in the youngster’s embrace. ‘And he won’t come again,’ she declared.
I said I’d got him the drug he’d been waiting for. Perhaps I could leave it with her for when he dropped in.
‘But he won’t be dropping in,’ she said with the finality one uses in talking about the dead. ‘I told him not to come again.’
I asked her where I could find him.
‘I’ve no idea where he could be, he never said where he came from.’ Suddenly she remembered: ‘Didn’t he play somewhere? Maybe those musicians of his could tell you.’
I thanked her. I’d got to the door when she added: ‘He was such a poor little thing, if you ever met him. He’d sit down and just look. Couldn’t even eat anything proper, and as for drink only juice. Once he came in from somewhere, all wet through, I made him a grog, he didn’t tell me he wasn’t allowed to, and he nearly died on me.’
The youngster had gone and the waters had closed over him. I didn’t know what to do with his medicine. Maybe the woman who used to sit in the office might help, might at least remember the name of the street or the town he’d come from. But I was in no mood to search for her. I began to suspect that by the time I tracked down the youngster the medicine might have become superfluous.
I left the house. It was midday, the low sun lit up the side of the palace, on the window ledge the pigeons were warming themselves as in the past. They were probably different pigeons, but who can tell them apart?
It suddenly occurred to me that I had nowhere to go, no one to see. Except that I had to arrange for a funeral oration. They’d be having their midday break at the Academy, and what then, what afterwards? Here I was with a medicine I had no use for, all round me people were hurrying whom I had no use for either. My net was suddenly swinging, a few threads snapped, and below me I saw darkness.
My daughter told me about her dream of the end of the world. She was walking through a landscape with her husband, it seemed a vast expanse, bordered only by the horizon. It was clear day. Suddenly the light began to turn yellow, until it was sulphurous, and at that moment the left part of the horizon began to move towards the right part, and as the two parts approached one another the light: faded, it was getting dark, and the earth started trembling. The two of them lay down side by side, closed their eyes and began to pray: Shema Yisrael Adonai elohenu Adonai ekhad. When they opened their eyes again she saw above her the entire universe and in it our sun with its planets, including our earth and the moon. Whoever had seen this, she realised, could no longer be alive. She also realised that no life was left on earth. The horizons collided, the land masses burst and the waters flooded everything. Just then she noticed that among the planets a large fiery-red sharp-edged gambler’s die was orbiting, and also revolving, so she could watch the white dots on its sides, and she wondered who had cast the die, whether it had been the humans themselves or the Eternal Holy One, blessed be his name!
I walked round the palace and entered the little square. I walked over the familiar uneven pavement and pushed the heavy door open. In the hallway I was surrounded by a familiar smell. I climbed the wooden stairs. Waving on a line were nappies, the nappies of some new child. Anyway, I never even saw the child, I had no eyes for her. But the roof of the monastery rose up as before, in so far as it is possible to say that anything can be the same at two different moments in time, and I climbed on towards the attic. The door was adorned on the outside by a poster which used to be there, but the smell of oil and gas still came through all the cracks. The name by the bell-push meant nothing to me.
I didn’t ring. There was no point in it. Even if I’d been able to ring a bell into the past, and she really appeared at the door, what would I say to her? I didn’t have a single sentence prepared, not a single new sentence.
In front of the building stood a small group of tourists, gazing with appropriate interest at the wall of the palace. What can they see there, what can they feel? These walls do not speak to them, they don’t remind them of a single breath, of a single cry or a shed tear. After all, I had something that they didn’t.
Slowly I drifted along the little streets, roughly by the same route that the author I am writing about at the moment would take to the Castle.
What used to fascinate me most about literature at one time was that fantasy knows no frontiers, that it is as infinite as the universe into which we may fall. I used to think that this was what fascinated and attracted me in Kafka. For him a human would be transformed into an animal and an animal into a human, dream seemed to be reality for him and, simultaneously, reality was a dream. From his books there spoke a mystery which excited me.
Later I was to understand that there is nothing more mysterious, nothing more fantastic, than life itself. Whoever exalts himself above it, whoever isn’t content with horrors already reached and passions already experienced, must sooner or later reveal himself as a false diver who, out of fear of what he might discover in the depths, descends no further than into a solidly built basement.
Kafka, too, did not portray anything but the reality of his own life. He presented himself as an animal, or he lay down on his bed in his cleverly constructed murdering machine to punish himself for his guilt. He felt guilty about his inability to love, or at least to love the way he wanted to. He was unable to get close to his father or to come together with a woman. He knew that in his longing for honesty he resembled a flier and his life a flight under an infinite sky, where a flier is always lonely and longs in vain for human contact. The longer he flies the more his soul is weighed down by guilt and forced down towards the ground. The flier can jettison his soul and continue his flight without it – or crash. He crashed, but for a moment at least he managed to rise from the ashes in order, second by second, movement by movement, to describe his fall.
Like everyone who hangs on for a moment above the abyss, or who has risen from the ashes and realises how tenuous his net is, Kafka was purged of anger and hate just as his language was of superfluous words. The author is already standing on the edge of the black hole, yet he still longs to look into another’s eyes in truth and in love, to speak to him in a language which his fall has cleansed of all hatreds and of all vanity.
Anyone longing to become a writer, for even a few moments of his life, will vainly weave fantastic events unless he has experienced that fall during which he doesn’t know where or whether it will come to an end, and unless his longing for human contact awakens in him the strength to rise, purged, from the ashes.
A tension was growing in me, tearing up my thoughts. I needed to do something – to talk, to shout, to cry, to write something, at least to chalk up on the wall the names of those I shall never see again.
I was passing a baker’s shop from which the smell of sweet rolls wafted out. These rolls were baked only at this bakery, a little way from the stone bridge, a little way from our palace. The last time I was in there to buy some was the day before I started street-sweeping. Then, as I entered the bakery, I was racked by longing, I was afraid that the time when I was granted the grace of human contact was coming to an end, and I saw only the edge of the precipice before me. My greatest fear was that I had dragged her to that abyss with me.
At the news stand I bought a jerkish evening paper to see if they’d noticed Dad’s death. I pushed the paper into my pocket and leaned against the stone parapet. Below me, above a little ornamental balcony, was the picture of the Virgin Mary which was said to have been carried here on the waves of a great flood. By my side stood Brokoff’s Turk, with his many-buttoned doublet and with a dog guarding his Christian prisoners, above him the three founders of the Order of the Holy Trinity. Observe, darling, how most of the life is in the dog and in the Turk; animals and heathens have no prescribed gestures, they’re alive, they aren’t saints. Saintliness doesn’t belong to life, it was invented by various cripples who were unable, or afraid, to live and therefore wanted to torture those who knew how to live.
The sun was bright on the roofs of the houses and the almost bare branches of the horse-chestnuts cast a filigree of shadows on the ground. From the bridge came the discontinuous click of footfalls. I thought I could even hear the hum of the weir.
I tore myself away from the parapet. Time was moving on and I had to find a funeral speaker. I cast one last glance down into the neighbourhood where we had sometimes walked together to the nearby park, and just then I saw her. I couldn’t, from my height, make out her face clearly, but I recognised her hurried, life-hungry way of walking. I looked after her, I followed her with my eyes as she passed under the arch of the bridge. I could have let her lose herself again in the distance from which she’d appeared, but I ran down the stairs, caught up with her and uttered her name.
She stopped. For a while she stared at me as if I were an apparition. ‘Where have you sprung from?’ she asked, the blood rushing into her face.
I tried to explain that I’d got a drug for someone but that that person had vanished from the surface of the earth, in fact not even his former woman friend knew where I might find him.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘one instant a person’s here, and the next instant it’s as if he’d never existed!’ She looked at me. How many reproaches did she have prepared for this moment? Or was she, on the contrary, about to persuade me that I’d made a mistake, that I’d betrayed myself?
‘What about your Dad?’ she asked instead. ‘I prayed for him,’ she said when I told her, and simultaneously her eyes embraced and gently kissed me.
Suddenly I felt the touch of time, the time on the far side of the thin wall. She was sitting with me in the hospital waiting room, then we walked out, snow was falling.
I quickly asked about her daughter and about her work.
Just like me, she said, I was more interested in her work than in her. But she wasn’t doing anything at the moment. She’d discovered the joys of laziness. Sometimes she’d read the cards for friends or she’d botch up some figure from her dreams. Some of them still bore my likeness.
We walked along the little streets where we used to walk so often, and as always she talked to me as we walked. In the summer she’d made the acquaintance of an old woman herbalist and had got a lot of recipes from her. For days on end she’d collected and dried herbs – besides, what was she to do with her time when I hadn’t been in touch even once? If I was ever in pain or if my soul felt heavy I might phone her: she could mix me a tisane – I obviously wasn’t: interested in anything else.
We stopped at the edge of the park. I still had to find a funeral speaker. ‘You’ve never ceased to exist for me!’
She could have asked, as she’d done before, what good that was to her, or what use, or she could have complained about the sorrow I’d caused her, about how I’d hurt her. But she didn’t wish to torment me at that moment. She only said: ‘That’s good!’ And she added: ‘Maybe our souls will meet somewhere. We’ll meet in some future life. Provided you don’t find an excuse at the last moment.’ We briefly embraced and kissed goodbye, and she walked away at her hurried pace.
I couldn’t move. I didn’t even tell her that I’d never intended to hurt her, nor did I ask her if she understood that I hadn’t done anything against her, that it was just that I was unable to return to her in this halfway manner, to be a little and to not be a little, I can only honestly be or honestly not be – like herself.
She stopped at the corner. She looked back, and when she saw me at the spot where she’d left me her hand rose up like the wing of a featherless little bird and from the distance touched my forehead.
At last I moved.
On the path that went to the bank of the Č ertovka stream a few figures were busying themselves in their familiar orange vests. With slow, seemingly weary movements, the movements I knew so well, they were sweeping the withered leaves into small heaps.
Down there we stood and kissed in a long embrace.
A fine thing! A fine thing!
It occurred to me that I put on that orange vest for a time because I was longing for a cleansing. Man longs for a cleansing but instead he starts cleaning up his surroundings. But until man cleanses himself he’s wasting his time cleaning up the world around him.
In the middle of the swept path lay the brownish lobed leaf of a horse-chestnut. Perhaps they’d overlooked it or perhaps it had just sailed down from above. I picked it up and for a while studied its wrinkled veins. The leaf trembled in my fingers as if it were alive.
I was still full of that unexpected meeting.
People search for images of paradise and cannot find anything other than objects from this world.
But paradise cannot be fixed in an image, for paradise is the state of meeting. With God, and also with humans. What matters, of course, is that the meeting should take place in cleanliness.
Paradise is, above all else, the state in which the soul feels clean.
I sat down on a bench and took the evening paper from my pocket. I scanned the big headlines, which repeated hundred-year-old untruths, and the lesser headlines, which dealt with yesterday. Needless to say, there was no mention of Dad.
Gently I took the pages apart, and with precise movements, which seemed to come to me automatically, I pleated them into an elaborate aeroplane.
I walked to the river, spread my legs, and aimed the nose of my paper flying machine obliquely at the sky. It rose up, perhaps assisted by the updraught from the water or perhaps just because, thanks to Dad’s instruction, I had made it particularly well, but it was quite a while before it abandoned its upward course, and I, following it with my eyes, saw the blue of the sky and a few seagulls and above them a white cloud gilded by the sun. Then my glider began to lose height and circling down it settled on the water. I watched it slowly and irretrievably floating away into the distance.
Remember that a man never cries, unexpectedly came my father’s voice in the silence around me.
I’m not crying, I said, and from somewhere deep down within me unexpectedly came a sound of laughter like that which, in my childhood, used to make me happy.
1983-1986