If you walk into the main square and mind your own business, you wouldn’t expect anything to unusual to happen to you. If you’ve never had a brush with the law and never spent a night in the cells with the warm caresses of the secret police, you’d probably think that trouble only comes to those that deserve it. You’d be one of those simple tits that thinks that he’s safe and warm because he’s done all the right things and that there’s no such thing as luck. Well, my smug little mole person, you’d be wrong.
Ivan Otherwitz was thinking all sorts of wrong nonsense like that as he walked into the main square, one sunny spring morning. He thought maybe he’d buy a newspaper with interesting stories in it, and then sit at a cafe and have a healthy, refreshing cup of coffee.
But no, that’s not what happened this morning. All he did was to look too quickly up at the sky. He thought he heard some kind of buzzing way up in the clouds, so Ivan’s gaze swept upwards rather rapidly at the light. He wasn’t to know that a spy plane was passing overhead at that exact moment. All he did was to look up and stare so naturally that it seemed as if he’d been waiting for it all his life, like a birdwatcher spots a tit or a tit-spotter watches a bird. It was just too quick, without a hint of surprise. “Like an eagle hunting a rat!” was how they described it later in the very newspapers he’d been expecting to read. The crime of being apparently too prepared was more than the authorities could forgive because the authorities don’t believe in coincidences.
Yes, he was caught in the middle of the square with a pair of binoculars and a pair of beady eyes and the sharp wits of a trained subversive, so they claimed. Of course, this wasn’t the case at all. Ivan was the kind of man who was so thick that he didn’t realise that such a thing as bad luck actually exists at all, but the authorities were not aware of this. The authorities don’t believe in coincidences either, as we’ve established already. They assumed, as they do, that it was Something Very Clever Indeed.
However, Ivan wasn’t a very clever man. He stooped then to tie his shoe-lace, and it was the last time he was to stoop as a free man. Uniformed guards grabbed him by his shoulders and inserted large gloved hands into each arm-pit. This made him squeak, whch the guards certainly didn’t expect. “Are you sure this is the man?” asked the first guard. “I don’t know” replied the second, “He doesn’t seem like a spy. Spies don’t squeak, do they?” They looked at each and exchanged glances as if to say “Shall we let him go? Yes, let’s. Go on then”.
This moment of confusion and amiable expressions was cut short by the arrival of a very serious and thin looking man with spectacles and a hat that was too big for him. Ivan looked him in the eye and said “That hat’s too big for you”, but this was his biggest mistake after looking quickly at the sky at the wrong moment. He’d always been known for his outrageous honesty and now, instead of doing him credit, it had lead him to the edge of tragedy.
Yet, it was not all done, for the spy plane noted what was going on and a big hand reached out of it and swooped down to grab little Ivan. Off, high into the air went our honest, unlucky chap and he barely had time to take a breath before he was high above the clouds.
Despite this unlikely and dramatic intervention, things were just starting to get bad for Mr Otherwitz. The fickle hand of fate seemed not to care for the intense cold of the upper atmosphere, but the next thing it did was to swoop back down to the square. By the time he was returned to the ground, Ivan had frozen solid and all feeling had gone from his heart.
He wasn’t dead though, said the doctors. So they left him in prison, expecting him to thaw out slowly over the years, but it never happened just like it never happens to any of us. Even now he sits like that in the corner with his gaze fixed and a stupid, irrelevant expression on his face. He’s like a mirror to us all.
