UNINTERLINGUA 2015

U N I N T E R L I N G U A 105 twists and turns. The reader must also pay close attention to all the flashbacks in the puzzling lives of these two lovers. It takes almost until the end of the novel to put all the pieces together. Mijail was the son of a maid in Pra- gue. When his mother became pregnant by the lord of the palace where she worked, she was kicked out and had to go live in the tunnels of the city. There she gave birth to twins, but Mijail’s brother was born with phy- sical defects and was prone to illness. He died at age seven, and their mother died the following year. Soon after, a doctor by the name of Antonin Kolvenik adopted Mi- jail and taught him medicine when he was a teenager. Mijail excelled in this field, but his adoptive father died before he turned 20. Ten days after the doctor had died, the nei- ghbors called the police when they detec- ted a bad smell and heard Mijail’s screams. When help arrived, the police found Mijail covered in blood. They discovered that Mijail had tried to make an artificial heart for his fa- ther. He was crazy with grief and had to be placed in a mental institution from which he escaped two years later by faking his death. After his escape, Mijail left Prague and went to Barcelona. He barely had any money, and sought shelter in the porch of an old building. There he found a little boy about five years of age. Mijail did not speak Spa- nish, but he could tell the boy was just as cold and hungry as he was, so he offered the boy all the coins he had and signaled him to buy something to eat. The little boy went to buy some bread, and when he retur- ned to the porch to share the loaf with Mi- jail, he saw the police taking him away. In jail the inmates beat Mijail badly. During his two weeks in the hospital, the little boy wai- ted for him outside in the street. When Mijail finally came out, the little boy became his guide and swore he would never abandon the man who had given him everything he had during the worst night of his life. That Love and horror in the earlier...