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And little Hugel Furtwangler, with a barbers'-union flag, leered over the wigged heads in the window. He said, 'He's a lunatic! He wanted me to do it!'
Oh, I'm off, I thought - just because this hair dryer is steaming up this room, unhealthily.
Nitsa Szirtes plucked her robe a bit away from her stuck-together breasts and blew a thin-lipped jet of breath down her cleavage.
Then I asked Orestic, 'Have you been here long - in this country? Or just since the war.'
'Since and before,' said old Nitsa. 'His father, Zoltan, took us back and forth to Hungary - a wretched place, if I ever.'
'My father's gone,' Orestic reminded me.
'He was a cruddy, hairy man,' said Nitsa.
'Mama, please,' Orestic said.
'I should never have left Greece,' said the former girl-Papadatou.
'Oh yes, we've been here a while.' Orestic told me, and lifted Gallen's dried and shrunken head out of the shiny dome. He made her keep her head thrown back while he brushed, furiously. An odd angle, I had, looking over the back of Gallen's tilted chair; I could see no more of her face than the sharp bridge of her nose. Except what I caught misreflected in the hair dryer - her enlarged ear.
Which blushed when it heard me ask Orestic, 'Then were you here when that man broke into the zoo?'
'Ha! He was eaten!' said Nitsa.
'Yes, he was,' I said.
'But we weren't here, Mama,' said Orestic.
'We weren't?' she said.
'We were in Hungary,' Orestic said.
'But you've heard about it, obviously,' I said.
'We were in Hungary,' he said, 'when all those things were going on here.'
'What other sort of things?' I said.
'How do I know?' he said. 'We were in Hungary.'
'Then we must have been wretched,' said Mama Nitsa, 'with that cruddy, hairy man.'
'Hair's done,' Orestic said. Gallen nervously touched the top of her head.
'Well, two-fifty we owe you,' said Mama Nitsa.
'Three hundred,' I said.
'Three hundred,' said Orestic. 'Be fair, Mama.'
'Weak!' She snorted. As weak as the cruddy, hairy man, no doubt. Poor blasphemed Zoltan Szirtes must have rolled in his grave to hear her - if he had a grave or was in it yet; or if those in their graves can roll.
'Anything's possible!' Siggy called, out of the hair dryer's gleaming dome - or out of Keff's box, alongside the Grand Prix racer, 1939.
I checked my watch. Time was a part of my life again. It was nearly lunchtime. Monday 12 June 1967. Which would put us perfectly on schedule, if we left straight away; parked the motorcycle off the Platz, down Maxing Strasse; went to the Balkan waiter's cafe; went into the zoo that afternoon.
We'd be sure to find the same conditions that were written down, one week ago this Monday.
'I like your hair, Gallen,' I said. She was sort of sheepish, but trying to be proud. Her new hair was tufted close to her head, like a bobcat's.
