Dad acquired the burial plot years ago; it lies in a remote corner of Olšany Cemetery. His forebears remained in the country graveyard at Lipová; they have more light and flowers there, and a bell rings over them every day. They include Auntie Venda who burned to death and Grannie Marie. The ashes of my other grandmother were most likely washed away in the river Vistula or were tipped into some mass grave; her name, at least, is inscribed among thousands of others on a wall of the Pinkas synagogue in Prague. When I first saw it there, I found it strange, even unbelievable that my mother’s mother should have died that way, and I almost felt guilty about my own untroubled existence and the fact that no one was out to kill me.
At the foot of the grave there is a gaping small hole ready to take the urn and next to it a little heap of earth like a fresh molehill.
His nearest relatives have come: Mum, my sister Lída, Jana and I. We are waiting for the undertakers to arrive with the urn. Mum is wiping tears from her eyes, Jana is evidently bored and staring into the distance with a faraway expression. A gypsy funeral is taking place at the other end of the path and we can hear the sound of dance tunes intended to accompany the soul of the deceased to a happier and brighter world.
‘He could have still been here with us; after all he wasn’t all that old,’ Mum laments.
I refrain from pointing out that Dad was just a few weeks short of seventy-six, which is more than the average longevity of men in this country, nor do I say that how a man lives matters more than how long.
My sister can’t restrain herself, however: ‘He’d have had to smoke less and keep off the pork fat, the streaky bacon and the cheap smoked meats. I never saw him touch vegetables, apart from a bit of cabbage if it came with the goose or the roast pork.’
Mum senses a personal reproach, as she is the one who fed Dad all his life, and her sobs grow louder.
But now two fellows in shiny black suits emerge from one of the side paths. They are how I imagine the two court bailiffs in The Trial, whose author lies in the adjacent Jewish cemetery. All that’s missing is the knife. Instead, one of them is cradling in his arms the urn with the ashes while the other carries a garden trowel in place of a knife. They arrive at our grave, bow to us, and for a moment they both stand in feigned solemnity of mourning.
Then the first of them leans over the cavity and places the urn in it. The other man offers us the trowel and we sprinkle a bit of soil into the shallow hole, the pebbles rattling off the lid of the urn.
It is all so brief, there’s no time for even a flicker of God’s eyelid. Nobody sings anything, nobody plays anything; all we can hear are the strains of a passionate csardas from the gypsy burial. Just recently I saw on television some old woman in Moscow defiantly brandishing above her head a portrait of the tyrant who died on the day I was born. Maybe it would gratify Dad if I held a portrait like that now over his grave. But I don’t have one and I’d never take it in my hands anyway. I’d happily play the violin for Dad, even the ‘March of the Fallen Revolutionaries’, if he’d have let me continue learning the instrument.
The two men finish their job and come up to us to express their condolences and wait expectantly for a tip. They get a hundred-crown note each and depart from us at a dignified pace while we remain standing there for a little while longer. I don’t know what’s going through Mum’s head, or my sister’s. Mum has no inkling of Dad’s infidelities and will never learn about them now. Maybe she is recalling some nice moments; there must have been some. Maybe she’s thinking of the loneliness that will accompany her for the rest of her days.
Dad died at home. He was racked with pain during the final days. A doctor visited him from the clinic and gave him some injection that didn’t do much to relieve the pain. I didn’t ask what they gave him; most of the time I wasn’t around. I myself had a few ampoules of morphine that the thieving ward sister had brought me. I’d never used them but I could have injected them into Dad, all of them in one go even, and thus shortened his suffering. I could have done it; he was already under sentence of death anyway, but I didn’t. I couldn’t make up my mind to shorten his life and play Dr Death. I had no right to, had I? Or was I just making excuses? To do something like that you have to feel either great love or bitter hatred – I didn’t feel either. I didn’t have enough compassion for someone who had never shown much pity to others. Subconsciously I told myself that each of us has to put up with our fate right to the end, and that there was even some kind of justice in it, which we oughtn’t to interfere with.
‘Aren’t we going yet?’ Jana asked.
We took Mum home and I let my daughter go off to a girlfriend’s. My dear sister, who once prophesied my death at my own hand, decided to come back to my place for a chat.
Before we climb the stairs to the flat I check my mailbox and take out the only envelope it contains; by the writing I can tell immediately it’s another anonymous letter. I quickly slip it into my handbag before my sister has a chance to ask who’s writing to me.
I make a few open sandwiches but Lída refuses them; she’s found a new belief: healthy eating. She doesn’t touch smoked meats or even cheese. She’s not allowed tomatoes because they are toxic like potatoes and she refuses to eat peppers because they contain too much zinc or some dangerous metal or other, besides which they could be genetically modified. Thanks to her diet she has managed to rid her body of all toxins and noxious fluids; she has got rid of all her pains and lost her excess weight, and her eyes and voice have improved.
I pour myself a glass of wine and she takes out of her handbag a little bottle with some elixir or other.
I have neither wheat berries nor fermented vegetables. All I can offer is some rye bread which at her request I sprinkle with parsley and chives.
‘You ought to adopt a healthier lifestyle too,’ she tells me and heaves a deep sigh. Surprisingly she refrains from saying, as on previous occasions, that my flat is unbearably smoky, but even so she annoys me with her condescending self-assurance: she knows, as our father did, just what is right and healthy – for herself and the rest of humanity.
For a while she tells me all about her successful concerts and then offers to reimburse me all the funeral expenses.
‘We’ll go halves,’ I say. Then for a while we say nothing: two sisters who have nothing to say to each other.
I recall Dad’s diaries. When I was looking through them, I tell her, I discovered that Dad had a mistress.
My sister is not taken aback by the news but simply takes it in her stride. ‘There’s nothing odd in that: all blokes have mistresses. He wasn’t the US President, so he could risk it.’
I tell her that he apparently had a child with his mistress. When I was last looking through his diaries I came across a death notice from ten years ago announcing the death of a certain Veronika Veselá. It was signed by just one person: her son, Václav Alois Veselý, and bore his address.
‘You mean to say that the one who died was Dad’s bit on the side? And this Vaclav bloke is something like our half-brother?’
‘She gave him his second name after Dad.’
‘So what? We didn’t know anything about him – for how many years?’
I tell her he must be about two years older than her.
‘We didn’t know anything about him for forty years,’ she calculates quickly, ‘so why should we bother about him now. There wasn’t any inheritance anyway. We haven’t cheated him out of anything, so he’s got nothing to fight with us over.’
‘But it’s not just a question of the inheritance.’ Doesn’t she find it strange that there’s someone with the same father as ours who has been walking the earth for all this time without our knowing anything about him?
‘That’s typical of Dad. He was well trained in keeping mum about all sorts of highly secret matters. And where does this new relative of ours live?’ she asks, suddenly curious after all.
‘In Karlín. It must be somewhere near the river, to judge by the name of the street.’
‘I might be singing at the theatre in Karlín, if things work out.’
‘Mum has never suspected anything,’ I say, ignoring the important news that she will be singing in Prague.
‘Or perhaps she didn’t want to. It would be better for her that way.’
‘No, more likely she believed all his guff about a new morality.’
For a while we argue about what Mum believed in and what Dad did. And then my sister comments that every woman prefers to shut her eyes rather than see what is really going on. I was the one who had behaved stupidly.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You found out that Karel was betraying you and couldn’t think of anything better to do than divorce him. What good did it do you? You were left on your own.’
I refrain from saying that I was left on my own because I wouldn’t let myself be made a slave. Nor do I tell her that you have to act according to your feelings and do what you feel is right, and not what is most convenient. ‘You’re on your own too.’
‘That’s neither here nor there. I always have some bloke or other and I’m not saddled with a daughter.’
‘You’ve always got to be different. And as for Jana, I’m glad I have her.’
‘By the way, I don’t like the look of that girl of yours,’ she says.
‘Maybe she doesn’t care whether you like the look of her or not.’
‘There’s something strange about her eyes,’ she continues. ‘I noticed it there at the cemetery. People normally have one kind eye and one unkind one, but she doesn’t.’
‘Both your eyes are unkind,’ I tell her, ‘and I don’t think you’re not normal.’
‘My left eye’s kinder than the right one,’ she assures me, ‘but we’re not talking about me. Her eyes aren’t kind or unkind, they’re elsewhere, and that’s something you, as her mother, should notice.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘That girl of yours is on drugs,’ she declares. ‘I’d stake my life on it.’
‘Jana is not on drugs,’ I yell. ‘You’re trying to find a way to harm us!’
‘Kristýna,’ she says, putting her hand on my shoulder, ‘I’ve never wanted to do you any harm. You’re the one who always did yourself harm, by brooding on everything. But that dead expression and the dilated pupils is something I know only too well.’ She checks herself and then explains: ‘Two of the guys in the band were injecting piko and one was on heroin. If you ignore it, it’ll be the worse for your daughter. It’s no skin off my nose.’
‘I know it’s no skin off your nose. You never could give a damn about us.’ I don’t go on to tell her that her diet may have cleared the toxins out of her body, but they stayed in her mind.
When my sister leaves I remember the anonymous letter and take my tormentor’s latest message out of my handbag.
He tells me that he follows my every step and the moment is at hand when the gates of hell will close behind me.
Jan would like us to see each other every day. See each other and make love. He wants me to act his age. But I’m not twenty any more. When I get home from the surgery in the evening I’m aching all over: my legs, my back, my arms and my mind. But even if I felt like going to see him, I’m the mother of an adolescent girl that I’m very worried about.
Even though my sister never wastes an opportunity to tell me something unpleasant, I’m unable to get her warning out of my mind.
I watch Jana’s eyes. Does she have a fixed stare? Are her pupils dilated? Maybe I ought to check her all over each evening and look for track marks, but I’m ashamed to because it would be degrading for both of us.
‘Jana, where have you been all afternoon?’
‘In the park, of course.’
‘What do you go there for, all the time?’
‘Nothing. There are cool people there.’
‘What do you get up to there?’
‘Mum, there’s no point in you interrogating me all the time. You won’t ever understand anyway.’
She acts more and more defiantly, convinced that her life is her own business; it’s nothing to do with me how she spends her time, what she’ll become or how she enjoys herself. Whenever I ask her straight out if she’s shooting up she adopts a hurt expression: how could something so vile occur to me?
Jan called me twice today inviting me to some club or other where they play those hero games.
I didn’t tell him that I’m already of an age when people don’t usually have either the time or the inclination to play at heroes or even cowards. I asked him how long such games go on for and he told me that they often last several weeks.
‘Nonstop?’
‘With breaks,’ he laughed. ‘But they mostly go on till at least midnight.’
I’ll persuade Mum to come and stay the night. Not so long ago I used to ask her to babysit more often but now I get the feeling that it bothers her to leave her flat. But she loves her only grandchild, and surprisingly enough my adolescent is less impudent when she is around.
Mum arrives after seven in the evening when I’m already getting dressed up. ‘Off to the theatre?’ she asks.
I shake my head in reply.
‘Got a date?’
‘Something like that.’
‘It’s about time too,’ Mum says.
‘But Mum, I didn’t say who I have the date with.’
‘I can tell it’s with some bloke. Is it serious?’
‘I always take everything seriously, Mum.’
‘You tell him that, not me,’ Mum says, sticking up for the man whose existence she has deduced.
I’ve no idea what clothes are appropriate to meet people who play at heroes; I’ve never experienced anything of the sort. Jeans, maybe, but I look better in a skirt. I’ll wear the red short-sleeved blouse and a long cotton skirt – as black as my expectations in life. It comes halfway down my calves and at least hides the fact that my legs are already getting thinner. I shouldn’t think jewellery is the thing, but I’ll wear a thin gold chain so that my neck isn’t so bare.
I open the drawer where I hide my valuables; the chain should be lying in a wristwatch box, but it isn’t there. I open the other few jewellery cases I own but the chain isn’t there either. And in the process I discover that the gold ring I inherited from Grannie Marie is missing. I grow agitated. I’m careful with my things and don’t misplace a hankie or a sock, let alone a piece of gold jewellery. Even so I open all the other drawers and rummage in them.
‘Looking for something?’ Mum wants to know.
‘No, not really.’
If a thief had got into the flat, he would definitely have taken something else as well, and we’d certainly have noticed there had been an intruder.
I go into Jana’s room, tell her to turn down the racket and ask her whether she didn’t borrow some of my jewellery.
I sense a momentary hesitation. ‘But Mum, I’d never wear anything like that,’ she says, trying to adopt a disdainful tone.
‘And how about one of your pals?’
‘Mum, what do you take them for?’ She knows nothing about my jewellery. ‘I’ll lend you something if you like,’ she suggests.
But I don’t want any of her chains or rings.
The thought that my daughter might be capable of stealing from me appals me so much that I prefer not to go into it further.
I go to say goodbye to Mum.
‘You’re all in a tizzy,’ she says, and wishes me a good time.
I’ll have a good time, provided I manage to forget that my daughter’s probably stealing from me.
Jan is waiting for me outside the Hradčanská metro station. He kisses me and says my outfit suits me. He’s glad we’ll be together the whole evening. He leads me through the villas of Bubeneč and tries to explain to me the sense of hero games. They are a bit childish, but he thinks that playing games is definitely better than gawking at the television screen, where rival gangs shoot it out, or at the computer screen, where you can make two other gangs shoot at each other. Here you can take part in everything in person; you can encounter dwarves, dragons, vampires, monsters; you can travel wherever you fancy, or go back in time and meet Edison, Jan Žižka or even Napoleon. Most of his friends prefer to be make-believe characters, such as medieval knights or princes, or fight with monsters.
As we’re climbing the stairs in the house he has brought me to, he tells me I don’t have to join in. I can just watch if I like and ask questions as a way of getting to know the rules, of which there aren’t too many anyway.
I don’t understand the game, even after it has started; there are too many distractions. It is a large room and the walls are covered in big pictures from which the faces of monsters from comics leer down at me. Quiet, meditational music is heard from hidden speakers. The light shines through a green filter so that we all look as if we are drowned. Apart from Jan and me there are also two girls, some youngster and a large-bellied young man who is introduced to me as Jirka, whom I possibly know by his voice, as he works for radio news. Unfortunately I only listen to Classic FM. One of the girls, who has a visionary gaze, squirrel teeth and long legs, is called Věra. She can’t be more than twenty. I don’t manage to catch the name of the other girl; recently I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to remember people’s names. But names aren’t important. Anyway nobody here remains the person they are; instead they become someone they possibly want to be. It ought to appeal to me: I’ve always wanted to live a different life from the one I lived. Karel Čapek wrote a novel about it. People live only one of many possible lives and usually it is one that they are least happy with. The trouble is that the lives they offer me here don’t attract me.
Jan recaps the situation that they are all supposed to accept. ‘It’s 1437,’ he says, maybe on my behalf too. ‘Sion Castle is under siege. Jirka – Jan Roháč – has already been resisting the troops of Hynek Ptáček for four months.’ The youngster, who has apparently been reincarnated as the leader of the besiegers, stands and bows. ‘Master Roháč is unaware,’ Jan continues his explanation, ‘that Ptáček’s people are digging an underground passage in order to penetrate the castle. Eliška,’ he says, indicating the long-legged girl, ‘whose brother is in the castle, manages to ingratiate herself with Master Ptáček and discover his plans. Last time she was given the task of finding a way to get into the castle with this important information.’
‘I’ve one question,’ the fat one says. ‘What’s the water situation in the castle? Could I fill the moat?’
Jan declares that something like that is out of the question. There is scarcely enough water to drink. But the moat is deep and steep enough to offer sufficient protection, he assures his tubby companion.
From what I can see, it’s clear that my lover is the game’s director or whatever, whose job is to set the scene for the other participants and describe the period they are about to enter. He offers them roles and skilfully asks them questions about how they’d behave in certain situations, and on the basis of that he determines how well they have fared. That’s most likely the reason he brought me here, so that I should see how he holds sway and so that he can demonstrate his knowledge. I’m touched. But the game is very slow to get off the ground, and while the leggy creature tries to think up ways of getting into the besieged castle, my mind wanders back to our flat and I try to work out whether my own daughter stole from me or whether she simply enabled some of her pals to do it.
They offer me some refreshments but I decline; I don’t feel like food. I let them pour me some wine although just lately wine tends to depress me. The fact is I’m out of place here. All the people here are very young, so young, in fact, that I’m scarcely aware of anything but my age and not belonging here. They are all young enough to be my children, including my lover. They enjoy playing games. They can take delight in being part of an imaginary world; so far nothing in real life is a real burden on them, and even if it is, they still have strength enough to put up with it.
I watch the long-legged visionary, who is supposed to deliver the important message. I’m not interested in what she’ll do, I’m noticing how adoringly she gazes at my lover, while looking at me out of the corner of her eye. I don’t appeal to her, I don’t belong here; I don’t even belong to the one who brought me here. She is more likely to belong to him than I am, of course. And most likely on the way out she tries to ingratiate herself with him, to nestle up to him in the gloomy passageway and thrust herself into his arms. And why shouldn’t he take her in his arms and kiss her, when she lets him, when she asks for it?
If anything, my life is now headed for the finishing line whereas his is only just picking up speed. I fight for breath when I’m climbing stairs, he just soars through the air, waving invisible wings as he hovers above me. Other times he just leaps ahead and in a single leap covers ten miles.
These are unwarranted imaginings. He loves me; he wouldn’t have brought me here if he were interested in some lanky she-wolf, either here or anywhere else. After all he’s surrounded by loads of girls that I know nothing about, such as the secretaries he’s bound to have at hand. I’ve noticed that he almost never mentions his work, as if wanting or having to conceal it from me.
He tells me I’m precious to him. Maybe I’m precious precisely because I’m not a little girl any more.
Johannes Brahms’s mother was seventeen years older than her husband. And the same number of years separated Isadora Duncan from Yesenin. When they first met, she was forty-three and he was twenty-six. They actually got married. According to their biographies, she married him. She asked for his hand. After all, she was older and more famous. She died at fifty, while he killed himself aged thirty. Before he hanged himself in that Petrograd hotel he wrote his last poem in the blood from his severed veins. I can remember the lines because they seemed to me plaintively wise:
Goodbye: no handshake to endure.
Let’s have no sadness – furrowed brow.
There’s nothing new in dying now
Though living is no newer.
They say he went mad. Or had he arrived at the truth? If he hadn’t killed himself he’d have been killed by the murderer who ruled his country and who died the day I was born.
But I’m no Isadora Duncan. I’m not famous, I’m simply as old as she was and know how to fix people’s teeth. My lover is no poet and I’m sure he won’t kill himself; he enjoys life and enjoys playing games. For him life is still a game in which he has accepted me as a fellow player for a while until one day he lets me go again.
The hopeless inevitability of it all and my future loneliness bear down on me. I ought to have stayed home with my little girl: she is in danger and therefore needs me. I’ve neglected her. At the very moment when I should be there with her, I’m sitting here fretting among strangers, whilst she could be drowning, vainly trying to stay afloat, feet groping for the bottom, calling and waving her arms. Nobody hears her, except for some fiend sitting in a boat who hauls her out and has a syringe with poison waiting in his pocket.
I can see her little arm groping for my breast that is full of milk; her fingers that are like a doll’s, except that they are warm, gently touch my skin.
Suddenly I see it, that hand encroaching on my jewellery drawer and taking the chain and the ring away to the one in the boat who pretends he’s saving her.
What if my sister is right about me living in fear but refusing to see what she saw at first glance?
I can’t bear to be here any longer; I get up and tell Jan I have to go home.
He interrupts the game for a moment and goes out with me to the front hall. ‘I expect you found it boring.’
I tell him I wasn’t bored but that I’m worried about Jana. I ask him not to be cross with me for leaving.
As if he could be cross with me, he says. I am not to be cross with him for not leaving with me; he doesn’t want to spoil the game for the others. He accompanies me out to the stairway, switches on the light, leans towards me and whispers that he’d sooner be with me.
Mum is still up and impatiently asks me how I’ve enjoyed myself.
I tell her that it was interesting.
‘And where have you been exactly?’
Mum feels like a chat. So I go and fetch a bottle of Frankovka and pour us some before trying somehow to describe what I’ve just experienced, although I know it’s not what matters. So I tell her who I was there with. And that maybe he’s in love with me. I also tell her how much younger he is and that he’s an ideal young man: he doesn’t smoke or drink apart from sipping a drop of wine from a glass as a favour to me, he doesn’t swear and he brings me flowers. I don’t tell her that he investigates the crimes of the people that Dad served.
My mother acts as if she hasn’t registered the information about his age; she wants to know if I’m love with him.
I feel silly saying yes like a little girl, but I’m not able to disown my young man, so I say, ‘But I’m over forty-five, Mum!’
‘So am I,’ my mother declares, ‘and I have been for a long time.’
‘But you’ve had Dad.’ I try to remember the time when Mum was forty-five. I was twenty-three. I had two siblings, one of whom was unknown to us: Mum, my sister and me. I was at university, lounging around in pubs, occasionally getting drunk and not caring a damn about home. I can’t picture what Mum looked like then. I can’t imagine her falling in love with someone, even if Dad hadn’t been there. Forty-five, I used to think in those days, was the age when you wake up in the morning and you can already hear the death knell in the distance.
‘How’s Jana,’ I ask, in order to change the subject.
‘She’s asleep. But she seems odd to me,’ Mum says, accepting the new topic. ‘Is she ill?’
‘Did she complain of anything?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘So why do you think she might be ill?’
‘She told me she was cold,’ my mother said. ‘She put on a sweater and huddled as if she had a fever. That’s not normal in this heat, is it?’
‘Did you ask her why she felt cold?’
‘She just said, I’m cold. She sat in the armchair and stared in front of her. As if she could see someone who wasn’t there. She even mumbled something to herself. Maybe she’s exhausted.’
‘What from, for heaven’s sake?’
‘They make awful demands on them now at school. I heard about it on the radio.’
‘They may well make demands but that doesn’t bother her in the least.’
‘It’s just as well it’ll be the holidays soon,’ Mum says, harping on the same note, ‘and she’ll get a bit of rest. You both need some rest.’
Yes, it will be the holidays. I’ve saved up for them. We’ll go to the seaside. I’ve already booked a holiday in Croatia. I’ll take my little girl a long way from here. I’ll take her across the sea to a desert island where no dealer will find her, and if one did find us I’d throttle him and throw him in the sea, even if it meant a life sentence.
I searched the entire flat but I couldn’t find my jewellery anywhere. For a week now I’ve checked my purse morning and evening. This morning I discovered that three hundred crowns had disappeared from it. Overnight.
Jana comes home only slightly late. She tosses her bag under the coat hanger and is making her way to her bedroom to kick up her usual racket.
‘Jana!’
My tone of voice arouses her vigilance. ‘Yes, Mum?’
‘I need to talk to you seriously.’
‘But you always talk to me seriously.’
‘Stop playing the fool. You play truant …’
‘But we had that out ages ago. I’ve stopped playing truant now.’
‘And you steal.’
There is a moment of consternation and then she says, ‘That’s not true.’
‘It is true and you know it.’
‘I’ve never stolen anything from anyone.’
‘I don’t know about anyone else, but from me you have. You seem to think what’s mine is yours.’ ‘I don’t think anything of the sort.’ ‘And what about my jewellery?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I expect you mislaid it somewhere.’
‘Jana, you know full well what happened to them.’
‘Your jewellery is no concern of mine, or any fucking jewellery,’ she shouts. She acts so hurt, that I almost waver.
‘Last night three hundred crowns disappeared from my purse.’
‘I didn’t take them.’
‘So can you tell me who did, then?’
‘You lost them somewhere. Your money’s no concern of mine.’
‘You forgot to say, your fucking money. It’s no concern of yours, you just take it.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘And you lie into the bargain.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘It’s obvious to me what you need the money for.’
‘I didn’t take any money.’
‘So I’ll take you to the drop-in clinic to have them do a blood test and get some advice about what to do with you.’
‘I’m not going to any clinic.’
‘You’ll go with me where I tell you.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Jana, you don’t realize what you’re doing. Once you get into it, you’ll never get out of it and you’ll ruin your life. For good.’
‘I haven’t got into anything.’
‘So what did you need the money for?’
‘I didn’t take any money. Or anything else.’
‘I already know you stole from me. I’ll have to find out about the rest.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘And you really think I’ll just sit back and watch you ruin yourself?’
‘You ruin yourself too.’
‘Jana, I won’t put up with that sort of impudence.’
‘Dad always used to say …’
‘I don’t want to hear a single word about your father.’
‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’
‘So I’ll have you taken there.’
‘I’ll run away instead.’ Suddenly she starts to yell hysterically: ‘You’re vile. You play the cop with me. You phone the fucking school to find out whether I’ve bunked off. Now you accuse me of taking money. And you’re always telling me what I ought to be like and what’ll happen if I’m not. It’s my life, not yours. You’ve fucked yours up anyway, so what’s mine got to do with you?’
My hackles rise and I go to strike her even though she’s already bigger and stronger than I am. But at that moment my knees give way and my hand, which remains firm even when I’m wrestling with a crooked root during tooth extraction, starts to shake like a leaf.
My daughter takes advantage of my momentary weakness, slips past me and a moment later the front door bangs.
I turn and run after her. I just manage to catch sight of her as she disappears round the corner of our street. I know I won’t catch up with her, but I keep on running. I tear along the street with cars rushing by me, past people I don’t know, who don’t know me and don’t care that I’m in distress, who don’t care that I exist.
But I do exist. And I’m all alone. There’s no one I can turn to for advice or help. If I ran to that boy who tells me over and over again that he loves me and plays at preventing the destruction of Castle Sion, he’d most likely be scared that I’m trying to burden him with something that’s none of his business. He didn’t father the child, and the person who did is the one who’ll help me least of all.
I could try calling my pal Lucie; she’d most likely try to cheer me up somehow. But I don’t need cheering up, I need to take action.
Tomorrow morning I’ll cancel the surgery and take Jana to the drop-in clinic.
That’s if she comes home this evening and if I manage to drag her there.
My darling daughter came home after the television news. She was in her room with the door locked before I had a chance to say anything. The next morning she emerged and announced curtly that she was going to school. I could fight with her but I’d probably lose. Anyway I can’t decide whether or not to drag her to the addiction advice clinic. There is no point in her meeting real drug addicts and coming to the conclusion that compared to them she is as pure as the driven snow. I ought to seek some advice first.
There’s only one person I know who might advise me. I didn’t talk to him for twenty years and when we happened to meet in that restaurant the other day I wasn’t particularly nice to him.
I don’t relish the thought of talking to him, but I call him from the surgery none the less.
Surprisingly enough, I get straight through and over the phone it sounds as if he’d be pleased to meet me; he’ll readily see me in his office at the Ministry of Health if I like.
It’s only a short distance from home to the ministry, but like most of my colleagues I loathe that particular institution and have no yearning to step inside it, so I agree to meet in a pub.
We meet early in the evening. He’s bound to think I’ve been missing him since the day I saw him again. Perhaps he’s got wind of how things turned out for me and, knowing I’m on my own, sees an opportunity to worm his way into my favour for a while without committing himself. He once more tells me I’m more beautiful than I was those years ago. And he assures me that out of all the girls he ever knew, I was the most beautiful – in the same way he assured all the others. But I haven’t come for flattery, that’s another thing I don’t miss; I’m here for him to advise me what to do about my daughter.
He listens to me with feigned interest; everything I tell him is as banal as when someone tells me about their aching teeth.
He feels I need reassuring. He recalls our younger days: were we any better? Didn’t we rebel against our parents too? It needs calm and patience, he tells me, using the formula he uses to allay the fears of frightened parents.
Then he advises me to find out what my daughter is taking. If it is something really hard we’ll have to take immediate action. However, if she is only smoking grass on the odd occasion, he would advise me to go easy. The main thing is for me to find out who she is mixing with. If it’s a bad crowd I should try to get her away from them, although that tends to be the most difficult thing of all. Fortunately term ends in a week’s time and he would advise me to take Jana off to somewhere a long way away, where I can keep an eye on her all the time.
He also asks how Jana feels at home. Without realizing it, parents often do something that pushes their child in a direction they don’t want them to take. Sometimes it is excessive strictness, sometimes it is excessive pampering. He reels off a list of recommendations that he has prepared for the occasion: I must try not to play the schoolmistress with my daughter or harangue her; I must make sure she doesn’t spend nights away from home but not make her feel she’s in prison. Instead I should give her the feeling of being loved.
While he speaks, his gaze invades my body as it did years ago; maybe it’s all that interests him. He couldn’t care less about my daughter, naturally. Why should he, seeing that he also rejected the child he conceived with me that time.
Maybe he’d like to hear that I’m sad, neglected and lonely, that I’m unable to cope on my own with what life has in store for me, and my daughter suffers as a result. Then he could offer me his help, which would consist of adding his worries to mine.
He continues for a while longer with his ready-made recommendations. I could probably make them up myself; nevertheless the realization that Jana’s case is nothing out of the ordinary is a slight comfort.
I thank him. He invites me to call him and let him know how things work out, and any other time I might need his advice. ‘I’m flying to London next week,’ he tells me, as we make for the exit. ‘Do you fancy coming with me? I’d take care of your ticket.’
I wouldn’t go with you even if they paid me, I don’t tell him. ‘But you know I’ve got my daughter here.’
‘And how about this evening?’
‘I have her this evening too.’
I walk home and my anxiety grows as I approach our building.
But my daughter is at home sitting in the armchair with a damp cloth on her head.
‘Headache?’
‘A little bit. But it’ll be OK.’
She seems pale to me. ‘Did you have some supper?’
‘I wasn’t hungry. Because of my head.’
‘What about school?’
‘The teachers have packed up. We just loaf around now.’
Silence. I mustn’t give her cause to feel she’s in prison. Give her cause to feel like a queen.
‘Your holidays start next week.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m taking my summer break in July. I’ve booked us a chalet at Hvar for the last two weeks.’
Silence. ‘I don’t fancy going to the seaside,’ she announces eventually.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t fancy going anywhere.’
‘You don’t fancy going anywhere or you don’t fancy going with me?’
She hesitates a moment before replying. ‘I prefer being at home.’
‘You feel like being stuck here the whole summer?’
‘Either here or around here.’
‘But I don’t. I spend the whole year looking forward to some rest.’
‘But there’s nothing to stop you going to the seaside.’
Her arrogant replies irritate me but I try to stay cool. ‘And leaving you at home?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t intend to leave you here on your own.’
‘Mum, you have to realize I’m not a little girl any more.’
‘I don’t have to do anything. And you just bear in mind that you’re not entirely grown-up.’
‘I hate lounging around at the seaside. It’s a waste of money.’
‘The money’s not your concern. What would you like to do?’
‘Stay here.’
‘And come home at midnight every night.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Stoned out of your mind.’
‘I want to spend my holidays with people I like being with.’
‘I appreciate that.’
She looks at me in surprise.
‘Everyone prefers to be with people they like being with. Do you think I don’t?’
‘But you’re coming with me because I won’t leave you here to wander around at night with a crowd of punks that you think you like being with. Just because they let you do what you like and because they spend their time lazing around like you.’
‘Mum, this is pointless. I won’t go to the seaside with you anyway.’
‘All right, we won’t go to the seaside.’
‘But I don’t want to go anywhere.’ Her expression is defiant. This is no longer the little girl who used to come and snuggle up with me in bed on a Sunday morning. I know I’m partly to blame. I ignored for too long the fact that things were going wrong with her. I wanted her childhood to be different from mine; I wanted her to have more freedom.
But what is freedom? The gateway to an unknown space that even adults get lost in, and my little girl isn’t sixteen yet. She’s lost in a landscape that lures her, but in fact it’s a swamp that she’ll go on sinking into until one day she’ll disappear altogether.
I’m aware of tears falling from my eyes. I quickly wipe my face, but I can’t stop myself from crying.
And this creature looks at me for a moment and then all of a sudden she shoves her aching head into my lap. ‘Don’t cry, Mummy. I didn’t mean it. We’ll go together if you like.’
I invited Kristýna to take part in a game I had thought up. It wasn’t too crazy, or childish even. It was a game without monsters. I invited her because I wanted her to meet my friends. No, I wanted to prove to myself that she was mine not only in private but also in front of people. I wanted Vera to see her with me.
But I shouldn’t have done it. Kristýna didn’t feel right during the game, or rather she disliked it. I should have realized that she’s down-to-earth and not the playful type. She made an effort to please me, but I could tell she was uncomfortable. I didn’t try to stop her when she decided to leave after two hours.
We went on playing almost the whole night. Vera acted as disdainfully as she was able. When we were saying goodbye she couldn’t control herself any longer and asked, ‘Wherever did you pick up that old relic?’
‘I didn’t pick up her, I discovered her in the archives,’ I riposted. ‘She has royal forebears.’
‘I don’t know about forebears, but she certainly has a large backside.’
I told her she was pathetic and that I pitied her.
She replied that she didn’t know who was more to be pitied, but I was definitely the bigger dupe.
Dawn was breaking when I reached home. I had the feeling something crucial had happened in my life.
When Kristýna left that evening and we went on with the game, I suddenly realized that it no longer gave me any pleasure and I was simply wasting time. As if I saw myself with her eyes: a little boy still playing games instead of completing my studies, for instance.
People can have a passion for gambling, but that’s not my case. In hero games you have no hope of a financial reward that would change your life. Pretending to be surrounded by fairytale creatures naturally required a certain amount of imagination but also a childishness that was inappropriate at my age and in my line of employment.
People often play games to escape the tediousness of their jobs. There was nothing tedious about mine. There was nothing boring about investigating one file after another that reflected nobility of spirit, paltriness and wickedness in varying proportions. Sometimes I felt like a voyeur, like a vulture circling above the desert looking for further carrion. Sometimes I would dream at night of people I’d never set eyes on, although their private lives had been tossed to me, and moreover in a distorted form. Compared to that it was a relief to move around in a make-believe world full of spirits, wizards or even vampires and many-headed dragons. There was something magical about entering an artificial world where you could draw up the rules yourself and influence the course of events. Some of the informers whose files I read plainly did what they had pledged to do for the same reason: a yearning to influence the course of events that the rest had no knowledge of. They believed themselves to possess magical powers to hold sway over human destinies, whereas most of them were just tools, mere puppets in the hands of others who believed the same. And so on ad infinitum.
What was important for me was that I was able to bring the game to an auspicious or at least acceptable conclusion, which was something I never managed to do in my private life or at work. But it was high time I started to bring affairs in my own life to an acceptable conclusion too. But it looks as if I’m not fated to do so.
Mr Rukavička–Hádek, who had the job of suppressing those who espoused the ideas of Scouting, naturally failed to turn up for questioning. He sent his excuses and included a medical certificate saying that his state of health did not allow him to travel. When he was the interrogator, medical certificates like that were of no help. If he needed someone, his henchmen would haul them out of a hospital bed if need be.
So we went to find him ourselves.
The old people’s home at Městec was located in a neo-Gothic mansion surrounded by an extensive English park. A carefree and comfortable place for someone who robbed people of their freedom to finish his days.
The superintendent told us she was happy for us to use her office for a short while for our business. She even made available her ageing typewriter. My superior asked her how satisfied they were with Mr Rukavička, and the superintendent again obligingly replied, saying that he was a pleasant and quiet old man who had brought his canary here with him. The bird was apparently his only pleasure. His wife had already passed away and his children didn’t visit him. He didn’t have too many friends here, but he behaved in a friendly manner to everyone and the nurses spoke well of him.
One of the nurses then led in the man who in the past had used at least two names. He stood there supported by two crutches: an inconspicuous, plump old man with a wrinkled face and a pale skull showing through his remaining grey hairs. He leant his crutches against the wall, sat down in an armchair and asked what he could do for us.
Ondřej introduced us both and said that we had no intention of keeping him long. Ondřej told him he would like to put a number of questions to him as a witness; no doubt he was aware what it was in connection with.
The old man had no idea, or at least he maintained he hadn’t a clue. None the less he lent me his identity card so that I could enter the necessary details in the statement.
‘Mr Rukavička, you worked from 1949 under the name of Hádek as an interrogator for the State Security,’ my superior opened the interrogation.
The old man assumed an injured expression. There must be some absurd mistake.
‘But we have documents to prove it,’ Ondřej said, taking an entire folder out of his briefcase. ‘We’ve brought them with us. Would you care to see them?’
Mr Rukavička–Hádek took his glasses case out of his pocket, but then shook his head. Reading tired him and he had no interest in our documents.
‘I don’t suppose you need me to enlighten you about your rights?’
‘I’m always happy to be enlightened,’ the old man laughed. ‘Especially by such a pleasant pair of young men.’
My superior read out the relevant clauses of the law about witnesses’ rights and then asked, ‘But you don’t deny having been a member of the State Security Corps.’
‘I served in it for a while,’ he admitted, ‘fifty years ago. I trained as a cabinet-maker but they had a recruitment drive when I was in the forces. I thought the work would be more interesting.’
‘And so you worked as an interrogator for the State Security under the name of Hádek?’
He explained that he was sometimes required to use a particular name. He really couldn’t remember what name it was after fifty years.
‘And how about the names of those you interrogated?’ Ondřej asked.
‘I didn’t interrogate anyone.’
‘Would you like to see the statements of those you interrogated?’
‘People say all sorts of things. I’ve told you what I think about your papers. They don’t interest me.’ The old man looked annoyed and reached out for one of his crutches. Maybe he wanted to scare us off, or let us know he could leave at any time he wanted. ‘I ought to know best what I did or didn’t do.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I sat in an office. What else?’
‘OK. So what did you do in that office?’
‘Lieutenant, do you think you’ll remember what you did today fifty years from now? That you came to see an old fellow in an old people’s home, for instance, and issued some absurd charges against him?’
‘So far we haven’t preferred any charges against you. We’ve simply spoken about your job and the name you used. Do you think that constitutes a charge?’
‘You’d never know, these days.’
‘I’ll read you out a number of names,’ my superior said, ignoring his invective, ‘and then I’d like you to tell me something about them.’ He started to read the names of the Scout officials who were convicted, among them my fathers.
The old man shook his head in denial. No, he couldn’t recall even one of the names. ‘Who are they supposed to be?’ he enquired.
Ondřej explained that they had all been convicted on trumped-up charges. Alleged evidence of their illegal activities had been supplied by a Captain Hádek.
‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’d done something if they were convicted, but I had nothing to do with it. None of those names means anything to me.’
‘And what does the name Rubáš mean to you,’ I intervened.
He looked at me as if to say, You keep out of it – your job is to write down that I don’t remember anything. And then to my surprise he suddenly looked as if he’d remembered. ‘I think that someone of that name used to be a trainer at Bohemians.’
‘It’s interesting that you remember a football coach but you can’t remember the names of the people you interrogated.’
‘I’ve told you already: I didn’t interrogate anyone.’ Then he added, ‘A pity I won’t be around in fifty years’ time to ask if you remember my name after all that time.’
‘It’ll be harder for us,’ I said. ‘You had quite a number of names for one man, Mr Rubáš.’
He grinned as if my comment had pleased him. Then he said: ‘You’re still young. You’ve no idea what fifty years is. Let alone notching up eighty years. So you’ll never understand what went on then. What it was really all about. We wanted to build something, not like today, when people are only after money.’
Ondřej tried to put a few more questions to him, but we both realized that nothing would come of it. The old man hid behind his eighty years and the half-century that had elapsed since the period that interested us; he pretended to remember nothing, no event, none of the names of those he interrogated, not a single name of those who collaborated with him. All he could remember was the name of a football coach. The witnesses who could testify against him were all dead and what we really had against him was long ago covered by the statute of limitations.
There was no point in wasting any more time and giving this man the satisfaction of still managing to win a battle with the class enemy in his eightieth year. The statement I compiled contained not a single fact that might explain anything.
‘A nice quiet old man,’ I said as we drove back to Prague. ‘A pity he didn’t show us his parrot.’
‘Canary,’ Ondřej corrected me. ‘Maybe he’s really fond of it. Under a normal regime he wouldn’t have interrogated anyone or tortured them. He’d have spent his life making tables or coffins. The fact he had no conscience wouldn’t matter to anyone; no one would even notice. What will we do with him now? Just recently a message came through from the ministry saying we waste money. I’m beginning to think they’re right. We squander time and use up petrol. And on the odd occasion that we put a case together, it never comes to anything. The public prosecutor’s office cheerfully returns everything to us, saying that it is insufficient for them to initiate proceedings. They imagine that after fifty years it’s possible to find the same sort of witnesses and evidence as in a case about something that happened a month ago.’
‘They imagine nothing of the sort,’ I objected. ‘It just suits them to use that pretence.’
Then the two of us fell silent. I was overcome with despondency. I thought about the fact that this very man had once wielded power over my father; he’d actually beaten him and tortured him for weeks, as well as dozens of others that we’d never find out about and never finish counting. We are powerless to do anything with him because, unlike him, we recognize the presumption of innocence. Because unlike him, we are decent people.
Maybe I’m a decent person, but at that moment it was more of a hindrance. I had the feeling I’d failed yet again; this was something else I hadn’t managed to bring to a conclusion; in the name of some higher law I had merely looked on as that beast ridiculed his victims. If only I’d told him what I thought of him!
It looks as if Dad will never receive justice anyway. And what about me?
I felt such a void before me that all of a sudden I didn’t even feel like living.
What will I manage to achieve? What am I to set my hopes on?
On the way back I also thought anxiously about Kristýna. I’d lose her too, one day. Love is another area of my life where I’m unable to make the grade.
When I met her the following day I asked her if she knew the precise time of her birth.
‘Do you want to make my horoscope?’ she said in surprise. ‘You’d better not. You might discover something dreadful about me.’
‘I just wanted to see what my chances were.’
She told me the hour of her birth, but like most people, she didn’t know the precise minute, and yet even a four-minute difference could lead to an error. But I compiled her horoscope as responsibly as I could and investigated the prospects of our relationship. Even though our elements, fire and water, seemed irreconcilable, we’d had hopes of setting up home together. According to ancient astrology we were both subject to Jupiter, who rules the household.
Kristýna is almost certainly highborn. She is like an underground lake. There is hidden within her a passion which, if it erupted, could be life-giving but also destructive. Not for those around her but for herself.
She is kind and caring, and her wish is to ease people’s pain, which is why she does what she does, even though life held out many other possibilities to her. She is magnanimous but also anxiety-prone. She longs to marry but fears betrayal. So what hope do I have? I don’t know.
We get on well together. I’ve never experienced with her the sense of emptiness that I’ve felt with other women. It struck me that she experienced everything to the full, including each of our conversations, in a way I’d never encountered before. For her everything took place on the boundary between joy and grief, delight and suffering. She avoided the idle chatter enjoyed by most of the women I’d known.
Sometimes she would talk to me about her patients and the quirks of fate and reversals of fortune they experienced, but mostly we spoke about the quirks of fate and reversals of fortune of the people whose lives I researched.
I was more categorical in my judgements than she was. I told her about Dad. I also mentioned the encounter with the fellow in the old people’s home, who I’m sure was his interrogator. I told her of our powerlessness in the face of criminals who pretended loss of memory. I asserted that nothing had really been done here to evaluate the guilt of those who helped to suppress the freedom of others, and told her I would therefore do everything in my power to ensure that their guilt was still assessed retrospectively and punished if possible.
Kristýna maintained that it would be to nobody’s benefit to do so. Who was to judge, when almost everyone was entangled either willingly or otherwise. And in fact we keep on getting entangled. ‘In the way that you’re maybe getting entangled with me,’ she said.
I didn’t understand what she meant.
‘My dad was a member of the militia and in charge of political screening,’ she explained. ‘He would have considered your father his enemy.’
‘And would you have agreed with him?’ I asked.
‘I couldn’t stand him. I couldn’t stand my father,’ she repeated. ‘As soon as I started to understand anything, I didn’t even want to see him or speak to him.’
‘You see,’ I said. ‘You virtually lost your father while he was still alive. So what do you mean by entanglement.’
‘In your father’s eyes, mine was also unacceptable,’ she said, ‘and now the two of us are lying here together. Neither of them would have approved. Your mother wouldn’t either.’
‘It’s great we’re lying here together, since we love each other,’ I said. ‘And don’t drag our parents into it.’
Later, when I was leaving, I realized that her father was indeed one of those who had persecuted mine. It’s not her fault, just as it’s not my fault that my father was the persecuted one. Even so, I prefer not to think about our different backgrounds. I ignore them and intend to ignore them, just as I ignore Kristýna’s cigarette smoke even though I can even smell it in her hair.
In fact, the only way to exist is by ignoring the things we don’t like and the things about people and the world that could disturb us.
It’s almost 8 p.m. and Jana isn’t home from school yet.
Today they received their school reports. My daughter made an effort to temper her insolence with appeasement and announced to me yesterday that she would fail maths and expected at least five Ds and a B for conduct. I made up my mind not to shout at her or reproach her in any way. But she didn’t come home.
First I rang Mum, in case she’d gone there, and then Jana’s best friend. I managed to catch her in, but she didn’t know anything about Jana, or so she maintained, at least.
Shortly afterwards Mum called me and told me to do something.
‘I know, but what?’
‘You know how it is,’ she presses me. ‘Children get bad marks and out of bad conscience or fear they run away or even do something to themselves.’
‘Who would Jana be afraid of, Mum?’
‘Jana isn’t a child any more. Maybe she just went somewhere with her pals.’
‘But she’d have phoned you, at least, wouldn’t she? You ought to report it to the police right away.’
‘I’ll wait a little while longer.’ I smoke one cigarette after another. I also call my ex-husband, even though I know it’ll be pointless.
No, he hasn’t seen Jana for at least three weeks. It grieves him because he feels lousy and doesn’t know how much longer he has to live. He starts to give me a lengthy account of his ailments. He’s only interested in himself now. I bring the pointless conversation to an end and light another cigarette. My fingers tremble and I want to cry. I have no one in the whole wide world apart from Mum, and she’s already old. No, there is one person who loves me maybe, but how could he help me? He’d most likely think I’m being hysterical. I’ve told him almost nothing about Jana. I was embarrassed about her being nearer his age than I am.
I’ll wait another half-hour and then go to the police. What we all have in the whole wide world is the police. Helplines and the police, who come and take a statement and that’s that.
At last the phone rings. But it’s only Lucie calling to tell me she’s miserable and missing her swarthy lover. She is about to tell me all about it when I interrupt her with my present problem.
‘But she’ll come home,’ my friend tries to reassure me.
When I hang up I’m convinced that Jana won’t come home. She’s sitting somewhere with her gang drinking – hopefully only drinking – and having a good time. I’m the one shaking with fear; she knows she has nothing to be afraid of. And as for her conscience, it didn’t bother her when she stole my jewellery and that money and when she lied to me. So why would she do something desperate on account of a school report?
I shouldn’t have let things come to this. The moment she comes in I’ll drive her straight to the drug emergency unit at Bohnice mental hospital! They’ll give her a blood test and I’ll finally find out what she’s up to.
But what if she’s had an accident? She could have got drunk or high and run under a car. She could have been attacked.
I really ought to go to the police, but I still hesitate. I don’t want them putting her on some list and searching for her as if she was a prisoner on the run.
Jan, the master of the hero games and also someone who’s had experience of detection, is my last hope. So I finally call him and share my fears with him, while apologizing for dragging him into my worries.
Without waiting for details, he tells me he’ll be right over.
The waiting seems endless, even though he gets here in less than half an hour.
He wants to know what sort of report Jana was expecting, whether she is depressive, whether she drinks, what sort of crowd she hangs out with, and what pubs she goes to.
I dutifully tell him that she hangs out with punks, that I don’t know what pubs she goes to – she told me she mostly sits around in the park.
He asks me if I’ve ever looked for her there.
I never have, because she has always come in earlier than me; three times a week my surgery lasts till six.
My replies surely can’t satisfy him; I expect he thinks I’m a careless and irresponsible mother.
He ponders for a moment and then says that the punks often congregate on Kampa island. ‘Even if we don’t find Jana there, at least we might discover something.’
I’d agree with whatever he suggested, just so long as we’re doing something. I take him down to my car, but ask him to drive because I’m too distraught.
At this time of the evening the streets are half-deserted and soon we’re driving through Smíchov. He manages to park in one of the side streets and we walk down the steps to Kampa. The sound of guitars already reaches our ears; it is getting dark but I can still make out punk haircuts. These are the ones we’re looking for: I recognize my daughter even from behind. I run up to her. ‘Jana!’
She turns to me. ‘Is that you, Mum? What are you doing here?’ She is painted as gaudily as a Papuan beauty queen.
‘What are you doing here?’ But I’m still relieved that I’ve found her and that she’s alive.
‘I’m here, that’s all. School holidays started today, didn’t they?’ She acts arrogantly, not wanting to lose face with her friends. They have noticed me, but most of them look unconcerned.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
‘My card ran out.’
‘Didn’t it occur to you that I’d be worried about you?’ ‘Spare us the scene, Mum.’
‘OK, I won’t say any more. Just get your things, you’re coming with me.’
By way of reply, she turns her back on me.
‘Jana, get up and come with me!’
She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t even budge. However Jan leans over her and says: ‘Didn’t you hear?’
‘Who are you? Did you bring some cop with you, Mum?’
For a moment, my blood runs cold at the thought that the word ‘cop’ will incite the rest of them and they’ll start to attack us.
‘No,’ he says, ‘you’re wrong. I just happen to like your mother and won’t stand by while you torment her.’
‘I don’t torment her,’ she replies; but she is so dumbfounded by what she has heard that she gets up, turns to the others and says, ‘Bye then, see you tomorrow. I have to go with them now.’
‘Where’s your school report?’ I ask, because all she is carrying is a little canvas bag.
‘There,’ she says, pointing towards the river.
‘You threw it away?’
‘Yeah. It was disgusting!’ And she laughs a strange, alien laugh. I say nothing.
Jan seats the two of us in the back of the car and then turns to my daughter. ‘You’re high as a kite, aren’t you?’
She looks at him. ‘It’s none of your business.’ Then she yells, ‘You’re not my dad!’
‘Jana!’
But she’s laughing in that alien voice again. ‘I feel great,’ she informs us. ‘I don’t care what you think about it.’
‘But I do care what’s in your bloodstream and I intend to find out.’
She laughs. Then she starts to yell that she won’t let anyone take her blood. She’s not going anywhere with us and I’m to let her out of the car right away.
I don’t intend to argue with her. I simply tell Jan where he is to drive to.
‘You want me locked up with loonies?’
‘I just want to find out what’s up with you.’
‘I won’t go with you!’ She tries to open the door as we are going along. I grab her, get my arms round her waist and hold her with all my strength. We struggle. She manages to open the window slightly and shout for help. When she realizes no one will hear her she tries to strangle me and lunges at Jan, jolting his seat and yelling that she doesn’t care if we all get killed. ‘I’ll kill you. I hate you. You’re vile! I’ll kill you!’
I manage to drag her back into the seat. I’m lying on top of my daughter; I can smell her breath, which gives off an odd stench. I’m lying on my little girl, who is scratching me, biting my hand and kneeing me in the stomach. She is younger and stronger, and her brain is addled by some poison or other. I know I won’t be able to hold her down, maybe she’ll manage to jump out or throw me out of the car; then she’ll leap on Jan from behind and wrench the wheel out of his hands. She really will kill us all.
Then suddenly she gives in. She is silent. I notice that her face is covered in blood. I have a moment of panic, but it is only blood from the scratches on my hand.
The long wall of the mental hospital looms out of the darkness ahead and Jan pulls up in front of the gates.
‘You want to leave me here?’ Jana asks me. Then she starts to snivel. ‘Mummy, you aren’t going to leave me here, are you?’
But the gates are already opening and I know I have to leave her.
Everything here is white and horrible: the walls, the beds, the lamps and the people. Except for the black bats that hang from the lights from time to time. The head doctor was completely out of his mind when I first saw him, I thought he was a loony in disguise or a junkie. When they dragged me off to the detox unit, which was the name they gave the clink on the first floor, I fought with them as hard as I could but they were well trained and used hypos instead of manacles and whips. They shot something into me and after that I slept for about a month like Sleeping Beauty. When I woke up I was in a foul mood and told them all to piss off. That loony in disguise told me cheerfully that I had classic withdrawal symptoms. He also told me that my blood had been full of all sorts of crap and I ought to be happy that I’m alive.
I didn’t mix them, it was Ruda.
I’m going to do a bunk anyway.
There were nine of us in the detox – horrendous! There were some winos, too. We told each other about our lives. Renata was already twenty-five but she looked more like fifty, she said she’d been at it for eight years. This was her third time here and she said she’d kill herself anyway. She said she’d already tried to lots of times but someone had always spoilt it. The last time she lay down on the tracks, but the train stopped about half a yard from her. Then the engine driver jumped down and picked her up and because he was in a state of shock he thumped her and yelled at her that he’d kill her. So why did the cretin stop, then?
Renata told me I should be grateful to Mum for dragging me here. ‘Nobody could ever give a fuck about me, and just look at the state I’m in.’
There was also one pro. Her name was Romana and when she told her stories it was great. She said she’d once had eight guys in a night and earned as much as a government minister did in a month. She said she was born in Sicily where half the inhabitants had actually come from India and when she was born, Kali was reincarnated in her. Kali was the fiercest of the Indian goddesses. She even defeated her husband, who was a god too, and then danced a victory dance on his chest. In Sicily, Romana learned witchcraft and how to destroy men.
She said it took her only two weeks to turn any man into a zombie who believed he couldn’t live without her. There was a son of a Catholic priest who wanted to reform her, and in two weeks he had aged a hundred years and not even junk could help him afterwards. Another guy, some businessman, started going round graveyards digging up skeletons and bashing himself on the head with the bones until he clubbed himself to death. Then there was this professor who taught magic at university: after he got to know her he had to climb up to the roof naked every night and sit there in all weathers. She said he sat there until one night he froze to the chimney and firemen had to fetch him down. About a dozen of her lovers jumped out of windows. And she’d beaten up a heavyweight wrestler and tossed him off the balcony straight into an enormous cement mixer.
It was obvious she was bullshitting, either that or had amazing trips, but she was great fun.
The worst thing was that they locked me up with an old bag who was actually the reincarnation of Dad’s beanpole. She looked like a human being but she had turned into a vampire ages ago and she went for me. I expect she went for everyone, but I hated it that she was out for my blood. I told the nurse about it – she’s a bit like Mum’s Eva – and she told me not to be afraid, she’d keep an eye on me when I was asleep. So I could only sleep when she was on duty and even then I was frightened and tied a scarf round my neck when I went to bed.
It was lovely outside – outside the window, I mean, because we weren’t allowed out. That’s what pissed me off most: the fact that outside it was the holidays and the rest of them were lounging on Kampa and I was rotting in here like a squashed tomato.
I’m going to do a bunk anyway.
And we also had therapy all the time. There was this peroxide blonde in a white coat who came and started to go on at us about how it was really stupid to take drugs, even though the rest of us knew it was great. The cow told us that what she was saying was for our own good and she told us to repeat after her, just like Dad, that it’s stupid and we won’t do it again. And she also asked us about our circumstances. She was really chuffed about Mum being a dentist. ‘A mother like that and there you are causing her distress. But you don’t want to distress her any more. So try saying it out loud, or at least to yourself
Really horrendous!
I never supposed that Dad was actually giving me therapy.
Mum really pissed me off shoving me in here. After all, she was always going on about everyone being the engineer of their own fate. That was when Dad used to go spare about her getting stoned on those drugs of hers.
I didn’t begrudge her them. I was sorry for her more than anything else. She almost always had a downer ’cos she only got stoned on the legal drugs. Then she’d have the shakes in the morning, but she couldn’t top it up ’cos she had to go and drill in people’s gobs, as she put it. She couldn’t even imagine what it’s like when you’re totally spaced out on a really great trip. So why didn’t she leave me alone?
And she’s got a bloke. That really knocked me out. Really thin: he looks like a piece of bloated string; I bet he took dope too, but he acted as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Mum’s completely nuts about him, I could see it straightaway, even though I was completely zonked at the time. I really wish her well; maybe she won’t be so pissed off with life all the time and she’ll get me out of here.
She came and visited me for the first time on Sunday, after I was let out of the detox. She brought me a cake, some oranges and a book of stories by Karel Čapek. She baked the cake herself, so it was a bit burnt. If only she’d brought me a box of roofies instead – but I couldn’t expect that of her. She told me I definitely wouldn’t be in for long but I had to make an effort. And she went on in a really inhuman way about having put me here for my own good, ’cos she loves me and doesn’t want me to ruin my life.
I pretended to be taking it all in and promised I’d make a real effort to reform.
I’ll make an effort to do a bunk out of here as soon as I can.
But I don’t know where I’d make for. If I went home Mum would be bound to bring me back here again. Romana told me not to worry; she’d look after me.
But I’m fucked if I go with her; that’s all I’d need: to spend my time sleeping around with some guys I don’t even know!
And Gran came to see me too and told me how Mum is fretting on account of me and how she is too, because she knows what a clever girl I am and how she pins all her hopes on me ’cos I’m her only grandchild. And just afterwards that ginger-haired guy looks in, the one that hijacked me here with Mum. He brought me a flower, something purple. I expect it was an iris. That totally wiped me out. First he hauls me to this loony bin and then he rolls up with a flower. To have someone bring me a flower, that’s something that’s never happened to me before. But otherwise he steered clear of the educational claptrap. For a while he fed me with stories about how he keeps poisonous snakes.
Apparently one was so poisonous that if it had bitten him he’d have been a goner in an hour. I told him I hoped the snake had never bitten anyone. And he laughed so much that his John Lennon specs jumped up and down on his nose. He also told me he’d noticed I’ve got a drum kit at home and said he used to play an American Indian tom-tom. He’d learnt to send signals with drums, flags and smoke. He was always showing off so I told him that I was good at throwing letters into letterboxes and that I could remember all the phone numbers I need – about four, in other words.
Before he got up he started raving about Mum and how she’s totally fantastic, totally nice and unique, and how she loves me.
I didn’t argue with him. I don’t have anything against Mum. I simply told him that if she’s so nice, she ought to take me away from here before the vampire witch sucks me to death. And he laughed again. I like the way he’s always laughing.
Yesterday the therapist went bananas again and we all had to repeat, We never want to take drugs again, we’ll never take drugs again, we’ll never use a syringe again. I said out loud, ‘We don’t want to be daft thickos, we want to be holy. We want wings to grow out of our bums so we can be angels.’ So for a punishment I was booted back upstairs to the detox unit.
It looks as if Romana won’t be taking care of me now; she tried to hang herself yesterday with the shower hose. It was horrendous. We were all in a state of shock. When they were carrying her out, I heard that nurse that looks like Eva mutter to herself: ‘If Renata had done it … But Romana … ?’
But it was obvious to me that Romana didn’t do it. It was that vampire witch. She sucked her to death and then wound the shower hose round her neck to cover her tracks. It’ll be my turn next and if I don’t run away, I’ll die the same way.
They say they’ll manage to save Romana, but if they leave that reincarnated beanpole in here with us she’ll do us all in.
I was too frightened to go to sleep last night. I noticed the old witch creep out and soon two bats flew in and hung from the lamp, and the bigger one was her.
I got out of bed and ran to find the nurse, and she was really kind and came back with me. Took, there aren’t any bats here,’ she told me. ‘Just take a good look.’
I took a good look and they really weren’t hanging there any more – ’cos they’d just flown away, and the lamp was still swaying.