"Is Mister Rertlef still staying here?" Klima asked at the desk, and, receiving an affirmative reply, he ran up the red-carpeted stairs to the second floor and knocked at a door.

Upon entering he saw Bertlef, who came to meet him in his pajamas. Embarrassed, Klima started to apolo-

gize for his unexpected visit, but Bertlef interrupted: "My friend! Don't apologize! You are giving me the greatest pleasure I have ever had here so early in the day."

He gripped Klima's hand and went on: "In this country people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can you tell me what kind of day can follow a beginning of such violence? What happens to people whose alarm clock daily gives them a small electric shock? Each day they become more used to violence and less used to pleasure. Believe me, it is the mornings that determine a man's character."

Bertlef took Klima gently by the shoulder, steered him to an armchair, and went on: "And to think that I so love those morning hours of idleness when, as if over a bridge lined with statues, I slowly go across from night to day, from sleep to awakened life. This is the time of day when I would be so very grateful for a small miracle, for an unexpected encounter that would convince me that my nocturnal dreams are continuing, that no chasm separates the adventures of sleep from the adventures of the day."

As the trumpeter watched Bertlef pacing up and down the room in his pajamas and smoothing his graying hair with his hand, he heard in the sonorous voice an ineradicable American accent and something charmingly outdated about his vocabulary, which was easily explained by Bertlef's never having lived here in