THE FIFTH
From then on, Martin met up with Tonda Gona only as a grown man. But they talked together only once. It was in the Stalingrad Restaurant — to which the local hooligans referred only as At Hitler’s, and despite the fact that the history teachers of the time did their level best to hide from their charges all parallels between the two colossal figures, as much as possible. This was perhaps intuition — or just one of those sarcastic reversals, which sometimes contain more truth than one knows at the moment. In short, Martin Vrána and Tonda Gona drank their beer in At Hitler’s, and nowhere else. Tonda turned out to be a big fellow — a whole head taller than Martin, broad-shouldered, with hands like shovels, and black miner’s glasses framing his eyes. These days, that human wrecking
