My Prizes: An Accounting Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a particularly beautiful room and he kept repeating the two words
exceptional proportions
and it didn’t bother him in the slightest that at every moment he was putting a foot through one of the rotted floors and had to rescue himself from the depths of the rot with a well-executed jump. The real estate agent led the way. I followed behind him and my aunt behind me. We went through the rooms as if we were walking along planks that we needed to cross some dull fetid pond, sometimes I looked around for my aunt, who turned out however to be very agile, more agile than me and the real estate agent. There were eleven or twelve rooms to inspect, all of them in totally dilapidated condition and the smell of hundreds if not thousands, I thought, of desiccated ancient mice and rats filled the air. All the floors were rotted through, completely punky and most of the window frames had been torn out by the wind or the weather. Down in the kitchen, where there was a large rusting enameled stove encrusted in dirt, the water had not been turned off and water was running onto thefloor and under the floor and the real estate agent said the owners, who’d left the house a year ago, had forgotten to turn off the tap and he went over to the tap and turned it off. He himself, he said, had never inspected the property before this, we were the first he’d shown it to, he was enchanted by the exceptional proportions. My aunt held a handkerchief in front of her mouth to block the stench that pervaded the property, not only the smell of rot, the stalls were full of enormous heaps of manure which the owners had not cleared away. The real estate agent kept saying
exceptional proportions
and the more often he asserted this, the clearer it became to me that he was right, in the end it wasn’t
him
saying the property had exceptional proportions, it was
me
saying it, and saying it at every moment. I kept working myself up to say
exceptional proportions
at briefer and briefer intervals until finally I was convinced that the entire property really did have
exceptional proportions
. From one moment to the next, I had been possessed by the entire property and when we were outside the gate again, to drive to the next one and the real estate agent was now hurrying, for we still had ten or twelve properties ahead of us to be inspected, I said that all these properties no longer interested me, I had already found the property forme; it was this one, for it had truly
exceptional proportions
, they were ideal for me and I wished to conclude the requisite contract with the real estate agent immediately. From the start of our inspection to this statement of mine, no more than fifteen minutes had passed. My aunt was shocked, she said I mustn’t do anything crazy, she found these walls horrible, naturally, and when we were in the car again, driving back to the real estate agent’s house to set up the contract, she kept saying from behind me that I should think the whole thing over carefully,
sleep on it
, she said. But my decision was unbudgeable. I had found my walls. I proposed to the real estate agent that I make a down payment of seventy thousand schillings at the end of January, i.e., after the prize ceremony in Bremen, and settle the remainder of the balance in the course of the year. All the same this remainder amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand schillings, and if I had absolutely no idea yet where this money would come from, I had absolutely no worries about it.
Think it over, sleep on it
, my aunt kept saying while the real estate agent was already drawing up the contract. I liked the real estate agent’s manner, the way he wrote, what he said, his surroundings. I myself behaved as if money played no role, itimpressed the real estate agent while his wife was making a delicious egg dish for us in the kitchen. Half an hour after I had seen Nathal, that was the name of my walls, for the first time, and not even seen them clearly, for as I’ve