That Mad Ache [antikvár]

She opened her eyes. A brisk little breeze had impudently slipped into the bedroom. Already it had turnéd the curtain into a sail and bent the flowers in their tall vase on the floor, and now it had set its sights on her sleep. It was a spring wind, the very first one, and it smelled of thickets, forests, and soil; it had swept unchallenged through the faubourgs of Paris, through their streets choked with traffic fumes, and now it was arriving sofdy but brashly at dawn in her bedroom, intent on reminding her, even before she emerged from her drowsy state, of the pleasure of being alive. She reclosed her eyes, flipped over onto her front, and with her face still buried in her pillow, groped around on the floor for her alarm clock. She must have forgottén it - she always forgot everything. She carefully rose from bed and thrust her head out the window. It was dark, and the windows across the way were shut. This breeze should have known better than to go blowing at such an hour! She lay down again, wrapping herself tightly in her sheets once more, and spent a little while pretending to be asleep. But it was of no use. Now the cocky breeze was strutting about her room, and she sensed its irritation with the limpness of the weak-willed roses and the obsequious swelling-up of the curtains. It was sweeping over her coquettishly, urging her with all the power of its rural fragrances: "Come out, come out - come stroll with me!" Her sleepy body just wouldn't go along, though. Little shards of dreams kept returning to fog up her brain, but ever so slowly a smile started to form on her mouth. Dawn, the countryside at dawn... the four pláne trees on the terrace, their leaves so crisply outlined against the pale sky... the crunch of gravel under somé dog's paws... eternal childhood... Was there anything left in this world that could still imbue childhood with somé charm, after all the sad wailings of novelists, the obscure theorizings of psychoanalysts, and the fatuous outpourings of random souls encouraged to vent themselves on the theme "When I was a child"? Only the nostalgia for those days of utter, absolute irresponsibility, now long gone. But for her (and this she would never have admitted to anyone), those days weren't gone at all. She still felt totally irresponsible. This last thought made her again get out of bed. She scanned the room for her dressing gown but didn't find it. Someone must have stuck it somewhere, but where? She opened the wardrobes with a sigh. There was no way she could ever get used to this