Bankstown Stand C

Although I did not get to see Kafka's grave as I'd planned, since the cemetery was closed on the Wednesday and the Thursday that week in May, I was lucky that the Veolia buses passing through the Žižkov bus station on Israelská just on the other side of the wall from him pulled up at Stand C at the Bankstown bus station in Sydney only five days later, and so, turning back towards where, in the Prague guidebook and from the sign, his body was said to be lying -- which was 250 metres east of the locked iron gates -- I could make something of a man through the bush hazed fence walking several metres below us on a platform towards an approaching train, the figure with elbows at remarkable, exaggerated angles, as every part of a person now appears to me through the palimpsest of the diaries I've been reading, even though they are also overlaid, or should I say pinched in to initials and simple absence, by the prudery (and caution) of Max.

A house for their roost

The pigeons and ibises of Bankstown have chosen a house for their roost and there is no other house in the suburb that will do instead. Today, for example, there were twenty three pigeons on the roof and five or six ibises (one was in flight). Tomorrow I am imagining fifty or sixty pigeons (since tomorrow is Saturday), and on Sunday a wedding of cockatoos or at least a fight. If you don't believe me, catch a bus down MacAuley Avenue and look to other side from the park. I have never seen a bird of colour on that roof, however. No matter that the inhabitants of Bankstown speak many more languages than the whole of Europe, the lorikeets and rosellas keep to the trees.