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and held them up before my eyes and said, I wanted to throw these away, too, but that was out of the question! How could I ever recommend false teeth to a patient if I wasn’t wearing them myself? That would be like Kolář the pharmacist having no hair and constantly trying to fob off his hair tonic on everyone else, his tried and tested hair tonic. The best thing for men with a new set of dentures, their first, was to take money out of the savings bank, or borrow it, or cajole their wives into giving them a thousand crowns so they could take a week off work and then sit in the pub surrounded by other people and drink beer or restorative beverages from morning till night, only then could they forget about those false teeth, that was certain, said Mr. Šlosar, the teeth must stay in your mouth throughout the course of treatment … And I walked across the squarewith my head held high, I had to walk that way, because if I leaned forward even slightly, my head would drop and my teeth would fall out. I felt this, and burst into tears, because I realized I was doomed to be an old woman, from this moment on I’d be an old hag, a toothless old crone, because I couldn’t bear having a thing like this in my mouth, even if I were to take all my savings out of the bank and spend six months drinking champagne and beer, even then, and that’s how well I knew myself, I wouldn’t be able to endure those teeth, my whole body, my soul, everything was telling me those dentures were unwelcome, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d been tricked, that they had stuck a blacksmith’s anvil in my mouth, a big glass ashtray full of cigarette butts and burnt matches, two sharp river shells, on which I’d already cut my tongue, which was completely terrified and wriggling all around that strange thing in my mouth, I couldn’t keep that tongue still, it wasn’t curious, it was deranged, that finicky tongue of mine had gone crazy, it bled and could very easily have destroyed itself, just as hunters claim that if a weasel gets caught in a trap, it’ll be dead before sunset, even if it hasn’t been wounded. And when I arrived home I got the old tool kit out of the Škoda 430, grabbed the metal lever for prying tires off the rim of the wheel, spit the teeth out onto the table, looked aghast at those choppers, which were laughing at me, the gums had fallen openin a wide grin, and with a few blows of the tire iron I smashed those very expensive teeth, the porcelain shattered like a beer bottle, I hammered away at those teeth as if I were the one who’d gone crazy and I kept on hammering until the pink gums had turned to dust and teeth were flying around the kitchen. I swept together the remains and threw them in the stove … At Easter, when I was doing my spring cleaning and moved the table with the washbasin away from the wall, I’d found a few more teeth still lying there … Now I stood in front of the sandstone statue of a naked young woman, every half hour military planes took off from somewhere behind the hill, they rose straight up above the castle with a great roaring and whistling, sometimes a whole squadron, one plane after another, the sound of the engines and wings was like the groaning and wailing at the scene of a natural disaster. I stood and gazed at the calm, radiant face of that woman, wrapped in a mist of love and longing and hope and the assumption of love, her profile was silhouetted against the sky, the sun glided behind an enormous oak, in the blue sky above the statue’s ringleted head a stripe gleamed, somewhere high in the sky, ten kilometers up, an airplane drew its shining trail, it left behind a neon stripe, like the hand of a glazier drawing a diamond across glass, leaving a fragile stripe that, with a light tap, was enough to break the glass in two, the ascending plane disappearedbriefly behind the sandstone head, then reemerged near