away from the bricklayer, and from that time onwards my life became an Odyssey. I was clerk to an income-tax collector in a provincial town; assistant to a chemist; I worked in a brewery. I waded through oceans of malt, pounded drugs, listened to the chink of money on the collector’s table. Sometimes I stuck to my job for two months, sometimes for a fortnight. I was unsuccessful in everything, on account of my ineradicable repugnance to work, which was the foundation of my character.
My father, not knowing what to do with me, threatened me with a house of correction. I was spared this humiliation only because my mother, when she heard of it, had a heart attack which very nearly cost her her life.
I was now twenty-one. I loitered about the streets of Prague all day long in shabby clothes and greasy collars. The continual noise of the traffic, the lighted shop windows with their glittering display, all these things were to me what the smell of food is to the starving. With my hands in my pockets, feverishly trying to find a single coin in them, I stood on the pavements, watching the ebb and flow of passers-by. I saw women with magnificent
