Saturday, May the 22nd, 2004
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He was beleaguered and curt, and had been ever since he was appointed to survey every single concrete post in the town of Obergruwwel. Witold Lutoslawski, the Polish composer who had worked with Panufnik as a cafe pianist, was on record as saying “Those concrete posts needed a surveyor, but why this hatless, lantern-jawed man of disrepute was chosen is nothing less than a civic disgrace”. Uncharitable, perhaps, for the surveyor had himself once been a cafe pianist, in The Dismal Bat, that haven for baffled people with persistent coughs. Ah, but that had been so long ago. Most of the customers were now in their graves; the cafe itself had been bulldozed to make way for a space-age bird sanctuary; and the pianist, poor curt Kurt, roamed the streets with pad and pencil, jotting down notes about the concrete posts. There were more than seven hundred such posts in Obergruwwel, and no one had thought to survey them until the Town Balaclava Guild sat in special session in the converted gym on that grim, teeming, winter Thursday, behind locked doors, its members clad in coats of many hues, just like Joseph, the papa of Jesus Christ. Later, when the bright moon shimmered among stars, the Guild Vizier made a proclamation from the Town Hall balcony. “We seek someone to survey the concrete posts,” he said, “Someone beleaguered and curt and hatless and lantern-jawed and disreputable.” Thus did Kurt meet his destiny in this world.