The next week passed by as a total blur. I had never worked so hard in my life, and at every moment that I raised my head from a desk cluttered with soiled and crumpled papers and the greasy remains of squashed pizza boxes, pausing only to rub my weary eyes with the back of a grubby hand, I devoutly hoped that I would never have to work so hard ever again for the rest of my life. At his meeting with the distinguished academics who headed the various departments and colleges of the University of Truth and Justice, Hell had airily passed on to me the responsibility of coordinating the recruitment of staff and students within one week. And while I grovelled on my knees in my tiny cubicle of an office, scrambling desperately through stacks of files in search of various relevant reports and the minutes and memoranda of many meetings, while I juggled phones with one hand between two ears while trying to send urgent faxes with the other hand to inaccessible locations like Warsaw, Vysegrad, Tirana, and Skopje, Hell sat comfortably in his sumptuous office next door, tip-tapping away at his laptop computer, writing yet another elegant and closely reasoned book destined for rapturous reviews and sales in the millions, pouring out the words straight from his prodigious brain and enormous memory. The man didn't even have to read: he knew everything. Worst of all, Hell whistled as he wrote, tunelessly, merrily.
I think I would have murdered Hell if it hadn't been for Lucy. Besides removing all knives and other sharp objects from our office kitchenette, Lucy persuaded her reluctant boss, Professor Masaryk, to give her a leave of absence for a week. Like a true angel, Lucy used her free week to help me call up the offices of all the various philanthropic foundations set up by Xox, scattered all over the jigsaw puzzle of Central and Eastern Europe. Miraculously, Xox's people were friendly, helpful, and efficient. Within days of our request for their help in recruiting students, we received large parcels sent by overnight courier, boxes which contained hundreds of applications from students. Xox's people had even interviewed the prospective students and ranked them. I suspected that Xox had ordered these lists to be prepared in advance of our request, which after all, emanated directly from his own desire that the university which he was funding should have students. Miracles are nice but, unfortunately, hard to arrange. Even if you work for a billionaire and have an angel by your side.
And after all the tedious work of arranging the transfer of stipends and travel money to the winners in Xox's lottery, after organizing such prosaic chores as buying decaying buildings in the central districts of five different capital cities and renovating them into modern dormitories, after negotiating such humdrum matters as staff salaries and curriculum conferences, after our week of toil was done, Lucy and I stood at the reception desk of the university building in Prague, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the first students.
They came in dribs and drabs, not as a flood, singly, in pairs, in small groups. Some had met at the very outset of their long journeys to Prague, others during their travels, after the usual tearful partings at decrepit train stations, leaning out of the train to accept a last minute salami or a jar of home-made preserves pressed upon them by an apprehensive mother, ostensibly for the trip, but more importantly, as something to clutch onto in the frightening future, a symbol of the certainties of home, a talisman. They came worn out from their journeys, like pilgrims, bent over heavy suitcases battered from years of family holidays, lent out to cousins and uncles, reclaimed now for this ultimate voyage. They came in their wide woollen trousers and badly cut dresses and shapeless winter coats, made at home and worn with reluctance commingled with pleasure, and in these fashions of scarcity I began to understand the reasons for their desire for escape and why they would always miss home. I also thought that I was beginning to understand Xox's philanthropic motives, if he had any. The best things in life are free, with the exception of fashion.
The splendour of the university building was too much for some. I became friends almost instantly with Paulina, a tall Romanian woman with wide grey eyes, pouting red lips, and proud breasts, dressed better than the rest in elegant white shirts, jeans, and well-cut jackets. One day, after a harassing excursion with some students to whom I had offered to show the beauties of Prague, an architectural loveliness in which they took no interest, complaining constantly that they were too cold, that they wanted coffee, that their feet hurt, and that they wanted to go home, on our return to the university building I discovered that Paulina was missing. I went in search of her and found her cowering beneath the washbasin in her bathroom. Some children had let off some fireworks outside her window while she was taking a nap, she explained, and she had instinctively ducked for cover, thinking that they were gunshots, that she was in the main square of Bucharest once again during that fierce and bloody revolution in which she had seen her friends dying. "This is not real," Paulina exclaimed, grabbing the luxuriously soft bathtowel. She got up, turned on her shower and stood fully dressed under the endless flow of hot water. "This is not real!" I could see the tips of her breasts punching out her wet shirt and the gleam of her large grey eyes staring at me. "You are not real." I shrugged in defeat and led her gently out of the shower and dried her hair with the towel. She was still staring at me and around her fine mad eyes and rosebud mouth I could see a fine network of lines, the cruel work of time and deprivation, all too real. Such a crumbling beauty. The next day she left the university and went back to Bucharest.
But most of the others soon came to cling to their new-found comforts. It was hard work to persuade them to go out of the university building even for a short walk. They preferred to stay in their well-appointed rooms and to make strong tea and to chain-smoke foul-smelling cigarettes and to talk endlessly. They sat up all night in the computer rooms and played games. They padded around the building noiselessly, in dressing gowns, pyjamas, and slippers, like inmates of a sanatorium. Lucy flitted among them, dispensing bottles of vitamins and angelic smiles. They seemed better after a while, after their travel fatigue had subsided and they had become accustomed to their new home. Perhaps Lucy's vitamins helped. They even began to complain about the room service. I was thrilled when I heard Fyodor, a balding Bulgarian, boldly declare that Prague was boring.
My work was done and I decided to tell the boss. I found Professor Hell sitting in his office, as usual, writing. With his usual Old World courtesy, he offered me a chair and listened gravely to my account of how the students had finally settled in. "Hmmph," he finally pronounced. "Anything else?"
I hadn't exactly expected Hell to jump up and hug me and declare me his anointed successor, but I was faintly annoyed by his total lack of interest in the sheer amount of work I had done. "Well," I said a little petulantly. "When do you plan to arrive at that conference in Vienna this weekend? The organizers just called. They want to know so that they can receive you properly."
"Damn," Hell growled, painfully twisting his bulky torso around in his canvas deck chair. "I'd forgotten all about that conference. Don't like trains. Oh well. Rent a car and drive me there."
"Uh, actually, I don't have a driving license," I said uncomfortably.
"An Amerikan who doesn't drive," Hell frowned to himself. "They take your license away from you? Drunk driving or what?"
"I wasn't drunk," I said quickly. A tear welled up in my eye. I really did not feel like telling Hell about my deepest trauma, about the most painful episode in my checkered past, about how they had taken my license away from me for life the day after I had finally obtained it, my sixteenth birthday. I wasn't even driving (in fact, I was comatose in the back seat): it was my little friend Barbie's unfortunate habit when she was roaring drunk of rolling her eyes around in her pretty little head while she sang pirate sea-shanties at the top of her voice that led to that ill-fated near-collision with a gigantic truck carrying nuclear wastes which they had planned to reprocess a little further along the Pacific coast. Since Barbie was fourteen years old at the time, they blamed me for irresponsible and reckless behavior, especially my mother. For six consecutive hellish summers, for a total of eighteen sweaty months, I had slaved in the infernal sculleries of my mother's Mongolian fast-food joints scouring dishes in order to pay back a fraction of the cost of her brand new silver-grey Mercedes 560SEL limousine which I had borrowed just for that evening. `It glowed in the dark, anyway,' I had protested, but my mother was, as ever, implacable.
"Doesn't matter," Hell grunted. "I'll drive myself. Chance to see the countryside. Haven't been in South Bohemia since my last escape from Czechoslovakia." A nostalgic light glowed in his eyes. "Thinking of buying a cottage around there." He smiled at me. "Take the weekend off."
"But it's only Wednesday…"
"A long weekend then. Get drunk. Chase girls. Have fun."
I think I would have murdered Hell if it hadn't been for Lucy. Besides removing all knives and other sharp objects from our office kitchenette, Lucy persuaded her reluctant boss, Professor Masaryk, to give her a leave of absence for a week. Like a true angel, Lucy used her free week to help me call up the offices of all the various philanthropic foundations set up by Xox, scattered all over the jigsaw puzzle of Central and Eastern Europe. Miraculously, Xox's people were friendly, helpful, and efficient. Within days of our request for their help in recruiting students, we received large parcels sent by overnight courier, boxes which contained hundreds of applications from students. Xox's people had even interviewed the prospective students and ranked them. I suspected that Xox had ordered these lists to be prepared in advance of our request, which after all, emanated directly from his own desire that the university which he was funding should have students. Miracles are nice but, unfortunately, hard to arrange. Even if you work for a billionaire and have an angel by your side.
And after all the tedious work of arranging the transfer of stipends and travel money to the winners in Xox's lottery, after organizing such prosaic chores as buying decaying buildings in the central districts of five different capital cities and renovating them into modern dormitories, after negotiating such humdrum matters as staff salaries and curriculum conferences, after our week of toil was done, Lucy and I stood at the reception desk of the university building in Prague, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the first students.
They came in dribs and drabs, not as a flood, singly, in pairs, in small groups. Some had met at the very outset of their long journeys to Prague, others during their travels, after the usual tearful partings at decrepit train stations, leaning out of the train to accept a last minute salami or a jar of home-made preserves pressed upon them by an apprehensive mother, ostensibly for the trip, but more importantly, as something to clutch onto in the frightening future, a symbol of the certainties of home, a talisman. They came worn out from their journeys, like pilgrims, bent over heavy suitcases battered from years of family holidays, lent out to cousins and uncles, reclaimed now for this ultimate voyage. They came in their wide woollen trousers and badly cut dresses and shapeless winter coats, made at home and worn with reluctance commingled with pleasure, and in these fashions of scarcity I began to understand the reasons for their desire for escape and why they would always miss home. I also thought that I was beginning to understand Xox's philanthropic motives, if he had any. The best things in life are free, with the exception of fashion.
The splendour of the university building was too much for some. I became friends almost instantly with Paulina, a tall Romanian woman with wide grey eyes, pouting red lips, and proud breasts, dressed better than the rest in elegant white shirts, jeans, and well-cut jackets. One day, after a harassing excursion with some students to whom I had offered to show the beauties of Prague, an architectural loveliness in which they took no interest, complaining constantly that they were too cold, that they wanted coffee, that their feet hurt, and that they wanted to go home, on our return to the university building I discovered that Paulina was missing. I went in search of her and found her cowering beneath the washbasin in her bathroom. Some children had let off some fireworks outside her window while she was taking a nap, she explained, and she had instinctively ducked for cover, thinking that they were gunshots, that she was in the main square of Bucharest once again during that fierce and bloody revolution in which she had seen her friends dying. "This is not real," Paulina exclaimed, grabbing the luxuriously soft bathtowel. She got up, turned on her shower and stood fully dressed under the endless flow of hot water. "This is not real!" I could see the tips of her breasts punching out her wet shirt and the gleam of her large grey eyes staring at me. "You are not real." I shrugged in defeat and led her gently out of the shower and dried her hair with the towel. She was still staring at me and around her fine mad eyes and rosebud mouth I could see a fine network of lines, the cruel work of time and deprivation, all too real. Such a crumbling beauty. The next day she left the university and went back to Bucharest.
But most of the others soon came to cling to their new-found comforts. It was hard work to persuade them to go out of the university building even for a short walk. They preferred to stay in their well-appointed rooms and to make strong tea and to chain-smoke foul-smelling cigarettes and to talk endlessly. They sat up all night in the computer rooms and played games. They padded around the building noiselessly, in dressing gowns, pyjamas, and slippers, like inmates of a sanatorium. Lucy flitted among them, dispensing bottles of vitamins and angelic smiles. They seemed better after a while, after their travel fatigue had subsided and they had become accustomed to their new home. Perhaps Lucy's vitamins helped. They even began to complain about the room service. I was thrilled when I heard Fyodor, a balding Bulgarian, boldly declare that Prague was boring.
My work was done and I decided to tell the boss. I found Professor Hell sitting in his office, as usual, writing. With his usual Old World courtesy, he offered me a chair and listened gravely to my account of how the students had finally settled in. "Hmmph," he finally pronounced. "Anything else?"
I hadn't exactly expected Hell to jump up and hug me and declare me his anointed successor, but I was faintly annoyed by his total lack of interest in the sheer amount of work I had done. "Well," I said a little petulantly. "When do you plan to arrive at that conference in Vienna this weekend? The organizers just called. They want to know so that they can receive you properly."
"Damn," Hell growled, painfully twisting his bulky torso around in his canvas deck chair. "I'd forgotten all about that conference. Don't like trains. Oh well. Rent a car and drive me there."
"Uh, actually, I don't have a driving license," I said uncomfortably.
"An Amerikan who doesn't drive," Hell frowned to himself. "They take your license away from you? Drunk driving or what?"
"I wasn't drunk," I said quickly. A tear welled up in my eye. I really did not feel like telling Hell about my deepest trauma, about the most painful episode in my checkered past, about how they had taken my license away from me for life the day after I had finally obtained it, my sixteenth birthday. I wasn't even driving (in fact, I was comatose in the back seat): it was my little friend Barbie's unfortunate habit when she was roaring drunk of rolling her eyes around in her pretty little head while she sang pirate sea-shanties at the top of her voice that led to that ill-fated near-collision with a gigantic truck carrying nuclear wastes which they had planned to reprocess a little further along the Pacific coast. Since Barbie was fourteen years old at the time, they blamed me for irresponsible and reckless behavior, especially my mother. For six consecutive hellish summers, for a total of eighteen sweaty months, I had slaved in the infernal sculleries of my mother's Mongolian fast-food joints scouring dishes in order to pay back a fraction of the cost of her brand new silver-grey Mercedes 560SEL limousine which I had borrowed just for that evening. `It glowed in the dark, anyway,' I had protested, but my mother was, as ever, implacable.
"Doesn't matter," Hell grunted. "I'll drive myself. Chance to see the countryside. Haven't been in South Bohemia since my last escape from Czechoslovakia." A nostalgic light glowed in his eyes. "Thinking of buying a cottage around there." He smiled at me. "Take the weekend off."
"But it's only Wednesday…"
"A long weekend then. Get drunk. Chase girls. Have fun."
