Chapter 1 In which Mrs Milica gains ingress to the Colonel's house ...

slyly. “Wait here, I’ll go and see if he’s home.” He takes two steps, turns round and
asks me: “Who should I say is asking after him?” I froze to the spot! Who was I after
all? What the hell should I tell him? “A man of labour!” says I proudly, but dead with
fright. “A lathe operator,” I added; I thought it sounded more impressive, like a kind of
function. “Damned Moldavian lathe operator you”, grumbled the huge monster
impressively. I think he regretted having laid into me with the drill. He went into his
booth and whispered with some one on the telephone. When he comes out, he says to
me: “You’re in luck, they’re just getting ready to go off to Zimbabwe, but he’ll receive
you, he can’t refuse a lathe operator. Follow me.” He pulls a rag out of his pocket and
blindfolds me. And I’m telling you, marrer, he takes me right and left I don’t know
how many times, so that if he’d left me there on my own after that I’d have starved to
death before I found the exit. When he takes off the blindfold, we’re in an office full of
doctors in white coats, with stethoscopes around their necks, drinking coffee. They put
their coffee down, and one of them makes me stick me tongue out, another takes a
blood sample, another pokes one of those pocket torches in me eyes, another one listens
to me through his stethoscope, and another, begging your pardon, searches up me
bottom. Under the white coats, you could glimpse their epaulettes and medals, I think
they must have been really big generals. I’ve never gone through a medical
examination like that since then and I don’t think I ever will until the day of my
autopsy. He blindfolds me with the rag again and makes me dizzy leading me down all
them corridors; everywhere there was a smell of coffee and schnitzels. After we’d gone
up in two different lifts, he takes off the blindfold and says to me: “That’s the door, you
go in by yourself, he doesn’t like to know he’s being guarded. Say that you’ve come in
off the street and mind what you do after that. Ask after Lena, otherwise he’ll get cross.
Ah, I was about to forget, tell him that he’s the most beloved son of the people, he likes
that best of all.” And then that huge monster gave a smile enough to give me the
shivers, with that scar on his face that made him look like he was laughing with two
gobs. One of the lads though, in his own way. I knock on the door, but I’ve barely had
time to knock when I hear: “Enter!” I take my cap in my hands, as the saying goes,
because I didn’t have a cap, I grip the door handle and turn it. My heart was beating
like a titmouse’s. He was sitting at his desk casting a die: “If it comes up three, I’ll go
to Zimbabwe, if not, I’ll say I’m ill. Six! That’s it, I’m ill! If it comes up three, then
I’m ill with high blood pressure, if not, then I’ve got a catarrh. Three! I guessed it, I’m
ill with high blood pressure!” There wasn’t so much as peep out of me – well, so as not