Girl with a Braid

A Solo for Ota Fink. Ota Fink, a factory worker, tramper, and occasional detective, once again has something to ponder. Who is the mysterious girl he met in the fields at midnight, and why are the police asking about someone called Haštal? It's a summer Saturday in 1961. After his afternoon shift at ČKD, Ota Fink sets off on his bike to meet his tramper friends. Around midnight, he's wandering along country roads when he's overtaken by a buxom girl, in Ota's words, a “typical representative of the industrial-agricultural population of the Central Bohemian Region and its surroundings, in the form of a chubby, permed blonde”. She gives him a rough direction to the settlement, but oh dear, in a vast clover field, he comes across another girl – scantily clad, with a heavy red braid. He takes her home on his bike frame in the rain, gives up looking for his friends, and returns to the certainty of his own bed. The next day in the pub, the lads tell him that on their way to the station, the SNB (National Security Corps) officers were asking about someone called Haštal. And on Monday, Lieutenant Honzák calls him to ask if he knows anyone named Haštal. This is a bit too much for the quick-witted Ota, and he sets off back to the places where he got lost. At the station, the men tell him that a chap named Haštal burned to death in a car. Ota remembers a distant fire he saw on Saturday night and wants to meet the girl with the red braid again. But she has vanished into thin air…