Codename Prague Read Online Free PDF Page A

let it pass. “Fine. Now give Beauty a hand, please. It’s one thing to crack a man in the nuts. It’s quite another thing to leave him in your dust.”
    Confused, Truth placed a finger on his chin in an attempt to look contemplative. He maintained this stance as Beauty got up, staggered across the kitchen, and sidled next to him, massaging his groin.
    “Well done, Beauty.” Dr Teufelsdröckh sighed and shook his head. A general air of unsightliness marked Beauty’s character in the form of outsized facial features (big nose, big ears, big cheeks, big Adam’s apple) and a round-shouldered, undernourished physique. Two features, however, stood out and undermined his would-be vocational name. First, a set of chapped lips. They were hard and cracked and seemed to have been overcooked by a desert sun, and when he spoke, the lips rubbed together like little chunks of asphalt. The second feature, his eyebrows—they were even more irksome. Complete opposites, one eyebrow, which resembled an obese caterpillar, appeared to be the doppelgänger of the other, which was pencil-thin. Dr Teufelsdröckh often accused Beauty of manicuring the pencil-thin eyebrow, secretively whittling it down from its originary bulk. But Beauty claimed the eyebrow was a natural formation. Whatever the case, the doktor sent the assistant to physiognomic detox his first day on the job. His entire face was reconstructed in the pristine, well-groomed, utopian image of John Keats himself. The surgery didn’t take, however, and Beauty’s face devolved back to its primal form in a matter of weeks, as if laughing at Dr Teufelsdröckh for trying to do away with it. Beauty himself never smiled, let alone laughed. But his face told another story.
    Dr Teufelsdröckh opened the bag and sniffed the parsnips. They smelled vaguely unripe. Not to their detriment, though. They would do.
    He set the parsnips aside. “Right. Now to the matter at hand. Now, I say, to the matter of carbonated olive oil…”
    Beauty remained silent during the subsequent invective, partly because he focused on nursing his genitals back to health, mostly because he thought he deserved the invective. Truth, on the other hand, butted in. “The thing is,” he kept saying. Every time he said it, Dr Teufelsdröckh waited for him to go on, but he never did. Dr Teufelsdröckh could have brought the issue to light, but that’s precisely what Truth wanted, he suspected, so he permitted the interruptions, clearing his throat and wetting his lips with his tongue whenever they occurred. He would not give in to Truth. Unlike his fellow assistant, looking at him was not a distasteful experience, even though he was equally diminutive, but diminution, as the doktor saw it, whether physical or psychological (usually both), was the cri du coeur of any assistant’s Dasein . Not to say that Truth wasn’t distasteful. Virtually everything he did made his employer want to flog him with an incineration rod. He couldn’t even tolerate being in the same room with Truth. Yet he tolerated Truth. All the time. And that’s another reason why he didn’t fire him. Truth reliably put Dr Teufelsdröckh’s patience to the test, challenging the strength of his social character. It was a challenge he both valued and needed inasmuch as he believed the insignia of a fully developed gentleman, above all else, consisted of an unfaltering ability to negotiate horseshit and assholery at every turn.
    Dr Teufelsdröckh’s voice began to crackle and skip as he continued to reprimand the assistants and cope with Truth’s stoppages. He poured himself a tall glass of table wine and paused to take sips and grease his larynx. It wasn’t long before the sips overtook his dialogue. Soon he had washed down two glasses and was halfway through a third, swishing the wine around his mouth, checking the legs on the bulb of the glass, rubbing his tongue across his hard palate, meditating on the different flavors he detected in the