Golden Absence

They tell it backward here: first the candles flare like a verdict, then the lilies swell and harden into a barricade no army could breach. That gilt-framed whisper—*Where Vojta?*—looks elegant to the hurried eye, but study the flourish and you hear a clenched jaw in every curve. The fruit plate, round as plotted suns, was not arranged for appetite but as a coded map, or so the elders insist when the curtains breathe like operatic lungs behind them. “Not this room,” someone muttered, tightening their stance before slipping elsewhere. That tension lingers in the carved petals—spring coiled in rococo disguise—hinting at a flight through secret thresholds long erased from view. Scholars recite this vignette as proof of his will to twist beauty into escape: symmetry broken in mirror letters, chronology folding like soft drapery. All that opulence, and still the man who lit these illusions remains unwritten, untouched, unstopped. Vojta is not here, and the inquiry deepens.