The Union Jack Read Online Free PDF Page A

fetched and carried manuscripts and galley-proofs and performed trivial but indispensable errands as zealously as he was ready to act as a lender of last resort for cash loans (at low interest), if the worst came to the worst; a person who only later on turned into an all-powerful, implacable, unapproachable Office Assistant, wrapped in the pelt of his arrogance, of the sort familiar to us solely from Kafka’s novels and, to be sure, so-called
socialist reality
. On one such early-autumn morning, no, it was more likely forenoon already, most probably around the time of the gradual decrescendo from the clamorous chords of going to press, the “deadline,” in those languid moments of slackness deriving from a certain sense of what could be called satisfaction, it happened that one of the stenographers in the editorial office raised with me the question of which theatre I wanted free tickets for. The stenographer—I still remember him today: his name was Schaeffer, andalthough he was at least fifty years older than I was, I, like everyone else, called him Wee Schaeffer, since he was a diminutive, exquisitely dapper little chap, with his neat suits, fastidious neckties, French-style footwear, one of those cast-off
parliamentary stenographers
consigned to oblivion in an era when Parliament had long ceased to be a parliament, and stenography was no longer stenography in an era of ready-made texts, off-the-peg texts, prefabricated, pre-digested and meticulously censored disaster texts—this stenographer, then, with his rounded little eunuch’s paunch, his bald egg-head, his face reminiscent of carefully ripened soft cheeses, his little eyes shifting anxiously in their narrow slits, therefore required especially tactful handling, all the more so as he was hard of hearing, something of a paradox, to put it mildly, for a stenographer, and as such—when in prisons and diverse penal institutions in the selfsame city, indeed just a few blocks away, the numbers of people standing in corridors, hands behind their backs, faces turned to the wall, were already starting to multiply rapidly, when summary courts were churning out their sentences at full blast, when everybody outside prison walls, everybody indiscriminately, could be regarded only as a prisoner released on indefinite parole—hecontinually fretted that his deafness, which everyone knew about, might accidentally be exposed and he might be sent into retirement: this stenographer, then, was the one who used to keep a record of the claims and entitlements to free tickets of the so-called colleagues in that editorial office. I can still remember the ambivalent surprise that caught the young man, whom, as I say, I sustained and felt myself to be at the time, in the wake of the stenographer’s accosting me at all, for on the one hand, he (I) had no heart for going to the theatre, simply on account of the disheartening plays that were being performed in the theatres, while on the other hand, he was entitled to regard the mere fact of being accosted as marking the end of his apprenticeship, his coming of age as a journalist, so to speak, since free tickets were earmarked exclusively for fully qualified and paid-up so-called colleagues. I remember that we perused the miserable options for a while with honest, one might say fellow-suffering scepticism—he, an old man simplified to his trivial practical fears, and I, a young man with more complex and more general anxieties—during which our gazes, so foreign and yet so intimate, communed for a few seconds. There was one other choice: the Opera House. “
Die Walküre
is on,” he said.At that time I did not know the opera. I knew nothing at all about Richard Wagner. All in all, I knew nothing about any operas, had no liking for opera at all, though as to why not, that would be worth reflecting on, but not here, not now, when I really ought to be telling the story of the Union Jack. Suffice it to say that my family liked opera, which