Get up early. Outside the window the blue ink of a night already fractured into day. It happened just a short while ago. How I’d like to be there again some time to witness our terrestrial floe passing out of the realm of night. Seeing this means not going to bed at all. Sitting by the fireside all night. Occasionally throwing on another log. Occasionally uttering a few words and then just wearily observing the darkness growing thinner among the trees. The grey of the trunks transforming into the first hint of colour, blue smoke from the fire, and then you look around and everything is naked in the first light of day.

Sometimes you can’t sleep. But insomnia isn’t the same as being awake. It is a horizontal neurosis. A torturous kind of hoping. An urgent expectation that at this very second of waiting for sleep, the longed-for sleep will come. That second stretches out into an unbearably long, unbroken period of time. Like the moon tonight. It stole into the window pane from the left-hand side an hour after midnight and slowly made its way across it in a descending, flattish arc until five in the morning, when it disappeared beyond the right-hand window frame. If I had been asleep, I wouldn’t have seen it at all. If I had stayed awake and looked up from my work or my book from time to time, I would have seen its disc at various points along its path. But insomnia drew its entire course out for me like the trail of a silver slug upon dark glass. For an undivided five-hour-long instant it showed me how the world smudges into blurs and the universe into slug trails when a moment cannot come to an end.

Hans thought of his father, who suffered from insomnia during the last few years of his life. The stress of the hospital, of the pale, sickly faces and the fates of people dependent on machines. Later came his own cardiac arrhythmia, prostate and above all anxiety. Whether Kateřina would ever overcome her illness, whether his two boys, Hans and Emil, would make something of themselves or would squander their abilities and drink themselves stupid, as now seemed likely. Whether his wife Marta would be happy one day or would just have to go on and on putting up with things. Whether this whole life that we crawl through like soldiers in the mud under barbed wire was futile. Whether this burning and cramping up would one day pass. And whether we would ever meet our parents and brothers again, whether we would be united, at least through our destiny, at least through the same love at various times, until time ceases to exist. Is there a fellowship of the living and the dead, as children have been told so many times? Or is life just burning and cramping up, just a meaningless blur, the trail of our spiritual and biological decline?

And so Hans got up early. He just threw a sweater over his pyjamas, slipped his bare feet into his shoes, let the dog out and went to take a leak on the field in front of the hut. I’ll go round the corner and I’ll see it among the boughs of the fruit trees, big, much bigger than in the night, and white like a temporal bone. A perfect circle. No, it isn’t perfect, it’s already waning and it’s flattened on one side, which makes it look all the more like the human skull that my brother Emil showed me sticking up out of the ground from a dug-up grave in the town cemetery. At the time Emil was working there as a labourer. If he couldn’t study, he could at least come up with a bizarre manual occupation for himself. Sleep, he said then, contemplating the skull through narrowed eyes, is a landscape of its own. Then he handed the skull over to the gravedigger, who wrapped it in a black rag along with the other remains of the grave’s previous occupant and laid them to one side.

Hans went into the hut. He threw a handful of kindling onto the last glowing coals in the stove. It roared cosily for the first time since evening. He put water on for coffee and went to take another look at the moon in the branches of the fruit trees, at that image which would be so difficult to paint with all the connotations it had now. It was even bigger, closer to the horizon and much paler. It was dissolving in the early morning like a sugar cube.

Am I a sleepwalker? Hans asked himself, gazing in fascination at the temporal bone among the leafless boughs and moving back through the tunnel of time. A few years ago at six o’clock in the morning the same bone had been hanging among the antennae on the roofs of the blocks of flats by the hospital. He had only noticed it when he switched off the car lights in the car park in front of the main entrance. He had come for his dad, who had called his mum to say that he had started to feel unwell while he was on night duty, that she shouldn’t worry, that he would just go for some kind of examination in the morning to rule something out. And his mum had immediately called Hans and asked him to go and collect him, because she often had hunches which were regularly proved right, and so Hans went immediately.

He looked at the moon impaled on an antenna and asked whether it was a good or bad omen. Was he here too early, or had his dad been delayed? He hadn’t. He was walking slowly alongside the wall, with one hand on it for support and the other clutching his stomach. It was really him. Now he had both hands on the wall, as if he was afraid that he would fall, and in this cautious way he proceeded by sidestepping along the length of the wall towards the main entrance. He was on his way back from somewhere, probably from a futile attempt to get somewhere by himself. The early-morning walkers cast disapproving looks at him. They thought he was drunk. Hans ran up to him and supported him.

Dad, what’s going on?

I seem to have got a bit mixed up, lad. I wanted to go home, or to neurology or somewhere, but now I’m wandering around in circles. I imagine I’ve had some kind of episode. Some kind of minor stroke. After that people get confused like this.

Where do you want to go? Should I take you to neurology, or home?

Home? All the future events of his life were contained in the look he gave me. We can’t go home like this. I have to go to the hospital.

But you’ve finished your shift. I’ve come to get you.

I know. You’re a good lad. But you know, son, I need to go to the hospital now, not as a doctor, but as a patient. First I need to go to neurology. It was probably an ictus. Take me to Dr Skála on the second floor. You know him, Petr Skála. He’s got the same first name and surname.

How’s that?

Peter, you are my rock. Skála – rock. That’s what I meant – from the Bible, you know?

Of course I know.

So take me to him and he’ll check me over. And then we’ll go through all the steps until we figure it out. First we have to rule out…

The mournful expression that my father had had in his eyes at the mention of home was gone. Dr Nedoma had begun to matter-of-factly review the case of a patient who happened to be he himself. And, supported by his son, he walked as a patient through the doorway from which he had emerged as a doctor for the last time a short while before.

Someone tugged at Hans’s sleeve. Hans opened his eyes. It was a dog. As if to say: Don’t sleep. The kettle on the stove had almost boiled dry. Dark sky beyond the window, just a light streak above the horizon. Was it evening, or morning? At that moment you couldn’t tell. It would depend on what came next. Then that arrow would appear, that accursed vector of time. The way it did then, in the moment between the doctor and the patient. Not even they could remain standing in that doorway for ever.