On the shelves in the butcher's storeroom lie pieces of beef, pork and lamb, and you could find fish and salami there, and even part of a horse somebody once tossed away. A fine vapour hovers above the pork.. Strange, when there's nothing going on above the other pieces of meat.
The third-year apprentice is standing with his legs slightly apart, an axe in his hand. Frowning a little, he studies Pardek's face. Do its fine features intrigue him? Or has he noticed the mischievous rays of sunlight flashing through the broken blinds on the shop window and playing tag on Pardek's face. (What a popular target it has become!)
Not at all. The third-year apprentice is carefully studying the future target of the axe, which in his opinion has been idle in the meat store-room for far too long.
Impelled by a mixture of compassion for Pardek's lot, and a long repressed longing to find a manly use for the axe, he raises his arm to accomplish the final solution to the biologist's problem.
The vapour hovering above the pork is Rosie. Kicked out of Heaven and into a new career as a guardian angel (she still has to pick someone she wants to guard), she has been drifting through human settlements and looking for a future protégé.
The biologist has half-closed his eyes, and his face has acquired an expression of martyrdom. The time has come for the beginning of a new form of Pardek.
The apprentice slashes at the wen before you can say Jack Robin... But he misses, unfortunately, and chops off Pardek's ear. "Ouch! Ouch!" screams Pardek, and the customers by the counter beyond the half-closed doors wince neurotically.
"Sorry," whispers the third-year apprentice and tries again. But the wen has already worked out its intended fate, and although this time the apprentice hits the spot he was aiming for, it's already somewhere else. Pardek's neck. Another piece of biologist lands on the floor. Distasteful...
"There's a better way," says the third-year apprentice. He catches the wen on Pardek's neck between two fingers, takes a knife from his pocket and slices it out. "Ouch, ouch, ouch!" screams Pardek, understandably. Meanwhile sales in the shop have gone up a hundred percent. "Just bang that carp on the head hard as you can!" says a pensioner in a greatcoat. "Well, I know it's cruel but how else would we get a good meal?, his wife adds merrily and opens a scruffy plastic bag to put the carp in.
Pardek is holding his head. "It hurts but the wen's gone, „ says the apprentice, „It ran off somewhere. It was just a little pouch of pus," says the apprentice.
He takes a piece of beef from a shelf. He cuts small pieces out of it, more or less in the shape of the missing bits of the biologist. „Don't cry, Sir. Let's try and patch it up with beef. At least for the moment, until it grows back."
He moulds a new face for the biologist, who stops crying, half-closes his eyes and holds up his miserable head. The two of them stand in the store-room in the sun striped by the binds, and the apprentice's first work of sculpture sees the light of day...For a moment a strange feeling of harmony, even intimacy, flashes between the artist and his opus, but it scares both of them off.
"It looks good, " says the apprentice and steps back. "It even looks better than before."
"Thank you for your help. I'm very much obliged to you. Goodbye."
With a clatter, the greasy door swings back behind the biologist.
„Unfortunately they've run out of carp," he tells the pensioners at the entrance.