Everything in my life has seized up somehow. I’ve cancelled my leave and called off the trip to the seaside. My young man has gone off with his pals for a week to the Slovak Ore Mountains – with a tiny bivouac and a big rucksack. I would have gone with him if I could. I used to love Slovakia. We went there every summer in the years following my only wedding: canoeing, skiing or wandering the hills and valleys like Jan is now, listening to a language that was soft and melodious to my ears.
Czechoslovakia fell apart just before my marriage did. I wept for it, but I couldn’t do anything to help it; I couldn’t even do anything to help myself.
My Mickey Mouse speaks a bit of Slovak. He says to me: ‘You have eyes the colour of veronika.’ Veronika is what the Slovaks call speedwell. I ask him whether he loves Kristýna or some Slovak Veronika?
‘I’d love a Slovak Veronika if she had eyes like yours, breasts like yours and a nose like yours. And she’d have to be as wise and gentle and make love as well as you do. But there are none like that in Slovakia or anywhere else in the world.’ He lays it on with a trowel, the liar, but he knows I like it.
He invited me to go with him, but I was afraid to leave while Jana is in hospital. What if something happened to her, or if she escaped, even? He also offered to stay in Prague, but I refused to let him hang around here on my account. Before he went he told me he’d still have two weeks of leave left and asked me to go away with him somewhere.
There is a heatwave and the city is half-deserted, like my waiting room. Even Eva has taken leave. I’ll cope with the few remaining patients perfectly well without her.
Most of the day I sit in the surgery smoking and drinking mineral water with a drop of wine in it. I have nothing on under my smock but my briefs, and even so I’m hot. But I’m glad I have the surgery to go to, because at home I feel uneasy. The flat is empty. I miss Jana’s pandemonium. I miss having someone to care for. I miss Jana’s calculating two-faced chumminess. I miss someone close to talk to.
‘What makes you think, in fact, that you couldn’t have a child?’ Jan asked me out of the blue.
‘Because I’m too old,’ I replied.
‘Is that the only reason?’
‘It’s a good enough reason.’
‘You’re not so old,’ he said. ‘One of Mum’s friends had a baby when she was forty-seven.’
‘I’ve no time to lose then,’ I said, turning away so that he couldn’t see the tears well up.
Maybe I could still have a child. Medical science does wonders. It came up with the test-tube baby, it managed to clone the extinct Tasmanian wolf and it won’t be long before it manages to artificially inseminate an Egyptian mummy. But it’s a matter not just of conceiving and having a baby, but also of rearing it. I don’t know whether I’d still have the strength. Not now, but in five or ten years’ time.
If only I stopped damaging my health the way I do. I hate to think what I’ll be like in ten years. And this boy who claims to love me now, what will happen to him in ten years’ time when my face will be full of wrinkles and I might even be hobbling around with a stick? He’ll vanish; he’ll go and find someone younger and I’ll be left alone with my child in a world where the drug dealers will be hawking their wares from rucksacks in school corridors. And ultraviolet rain will fall through the hole in the ozone layer.
And what if I’m not around at all ten years from now – my tarclogged lungs and the rest of me finally consumed by a tumour. I ought to give up smoking, at least. But if I give up I’ll start to get even fatter and I’ll end up a hideous ball of fat. That’s unless I started to do some exercise as my first and only husband always insisted I should. In those days I used to exercise, but I still had the stamina.
In ten years’ time Jana is fairly sure to have left home. At least there’d be someone waiting for me when I hobble home from the surgery. At least I’d have someone to look forward to.
‘I’m sorry,’ my lover said, when he saw I was about to cry. ‘I just wanted to convince you that you’re not old at all.’
One’s as old as one feels, I didn’t tell him, but tried to make fun of him instead.
Maybe I do him a disservice. I still tend to compare him with my ex-husband, even though I know he’s different. He is gentle and he doesn’t believe in reason alone.
I convince myself that he’s different. But all men have a selfish streak, and a restless one too, which prevents them from staying with one woman. That’s something I oughtn’t to forget.
Father Kostka turns up at the surgery. He needs one of his few remaining teeth extracted. I give him an injection and assure him that it won’t hurt. The tooth is so wobbly, I expect it wouldn’t hurt even without an injection.
‘I’ve no great fear of pain,’ he says. As is his wont, he smiles at me with his eyes, and I feel guilty even though my Communist militiaman father is no longer alive.
He sits in the chair waiting for the injection to work. I make up my mind to tell him about the trouble I’ve been having with my daughter.
’My dear young lady’ – this is how he usually addresses Eva and me – ‘people expect a priest to put everything down to lack of belief. But belief isn’t the only important thing. The apostle Paul spoke about faith, hope and love. And the greatest of the three, he said, was love. It’s not easy to believe in the Bible message in this day and age, but young people don’t just lack a belief – they lack love. I don’t particularly have your daughter in mind, but there are a lot of young people who try to escape from a world in which they don’t find any of those three things. I’d also add that we lack the will or the skill to come to terms with things. We are full of pride and are therefore unable to reconcile ourselves with our fate or the people around us, let alone recognize our Father in Heaven above us.’
By now his gums are numb and I prepare the instruments. Meanwhile he adds that children are simply mirrors of ourselves. We look into them and see their faults and shortcomings, but in reality they are our own faults and shortcomings.
It only takes me a few seconds to extract his wobbly tooth.
He spits out the blood, rinses his mouth and thanks me. ‘But I expect you wanted to hear something quite different from me, young lady. Something specific.’
I tell him that maybe what he said is what I needed to hear. From him, at least. I could find plenty of would-be scientific advice in any old psychology textbook.
When he is gone, it strikes me that I didn’t ask him where one is to find hope and how to care for love so that it lasts, how to support my child without pampering her. But that’s something I have to discover for myself.
I go straight from the surgery to see Jana at the drug treatment clinic.
They bring her to me. She is pale and looks puffy, somehow. ‘Hi, Mum!’
I look at her and feel searing remorse. It’s awful that I feel at fault – more than she does, even. I ask her how she is and she understandably starts to reproach me for leaving her here in this ‘nick’. However she admits that there was some point in it, as the therapy sessions had opened her eyes to a few things. ‘Even though sometimes they’re totally moronic,’ she adds quickly, not wanting to make too many concessions to me.
Then we go for a walk, but it’s not easy to converse on the move, so we sit down on a bench. A short distance from us some schizophrenics or alcoholics are weeding a flowerbed. I unwrap an apricot tart I baked her, and my daughter tucks into it with relish. I ask her about the people she’s now living with and she says dismissively that they’re all loonies and junkies. She doesn’t know what there is to say about them or what she’s doing there with them.
‘Jana, do you remember what I told you about my grandmother?’ I ask her. ‘
‘Which one?’
‘My mother’s mother. The one I didn’t even know.’
‘Oh, yeah. She died in some concentration camp.’
‘They killed her with poison gas.’
‘Yeah, so you told me.’
‘When I told you about it, you said how awful it must have been. And now here you are slowly poisoning yourself
She gives me a pitying look, as if to let me know how little I know about real life. ‘But that’s something totally different.’
I try to explain to her that the only possible difference is that in those days someone held the lives of other people in contempt, while in her case, she held her own life in contempt.
She shakes her head angrily; this doesn’t fit in with the performance she had been preparing for me. She starts trying to persuade me that what I said might be true if she’d ever committed anything like that, but she had never taken any poisons, and I wasn’t to leave her there any more, that the conditions were dreadful and they wouldn’t cure her anyway, as there was nothing to cure.
’Oh, but there is, Jana. Don’t forget I know what they found in your blood.’
‘That was a total one-off.’
‘You can try that one on someone who knows nothing about it, but it won’t wash with me.’
‘It was a one-off and I’ll never try it again. I’ve realized it was stupid.’
‘Am I supposed to believe you?’
She promises me she’ll never do anything of the sort again. She even swears it.
I say nothing. I don’t want to make light of her pledge, but I know how little store I can set by her determination.
‘Mummy, you can’t leave me here! I’ll go out of my mind.’
‘You’re more likely to go out of your mind from what you’ve pumped into yourself. You’ll stay here until you’re cured. And that takes more than two or three weeks, I’m afraid.’
‘Do you really mean it?’
I nod. She picks up the rest of the tart and hurls it to the ground. Then she stands up and runs off.
I have an urge to run after her, but I know I mustn’t.
In the evening my sister Lida calls me long-distance to ask for news of Jana. ‘Mum told me you’d put her in the loony bin.’
I reply that she is naturally not locked up with mental patients.
My sister didn’t think she was, but even so I hadn’t chosen the best place for her.
‘It’s not the best place for anyone,’ I say.
‘We won’t argue about that,’ she says. ‘But I heard they don’t get very good results. You can’t risk your daughter falling back into her old ways when she comes out.’ Then she proceeds to tell me about the guitarist in her band who underwent treatment in a community near Blatná. They managed to cure him. She knows the therapist who runs the community. He’s a great guy, she says, and she could persuade him to take Jana.
I’m not sure. I’m not used to my sister helping me, and certainly not of her own accord. ‘But I don’t know anything about the place.’
‘Well naturally you’d go and see it first!’
‘I’ll have to think about it.’
‘Kristýna,’ she says, ‘you can think about it, but you won’t come up with anything better.’ She dictates me the therapist’s name and address and urges me to do something about it straightaway. ‘You can drop by and pick me up,’ she offers. ‘I’m free on Wednesday; I’ll go down there with you.’
Maybe my sister really is sorry for me, or for Jana at least. I’m afraid to believe it, but even so I’m grateful for her concern. I tell her I’ll cancel my Wednesday surgery and drive down.
My boyfriend called from Slovakia. He told me it was beautiful there and that they would like to go on to Velký Sokol and Biela Dolina.
I told him I knew how beautiful it was there and said I was glad he was having a good time. But I didn’t ask him how could he be having a good time without me, if he loved me as he said he did.
He went on to say that he was sorry he couldn’t be with me, but he couldn’t wait to see me again.
He wasn’t looking forward to me enough to come back, but why shouldn’t he climb Velky Sokol just because I’m missing him?
I don’t know what to do on Saturday afternoon.
I’ll visit Mum, at least. Mum’s always been my comforter, not because she says words of comfort but because she’s always managed to put my troubles into a proper perspective. Or at least she’s always heard me out and consoled me with some story from her own life when she hadn’t despaired even when she’d been worse off than me.
She has come to terms with Dad’s death, but visits the nearby cemetery at least twice a month and puts fresh flowers in the vase I bought. She also needlessly cleans the untarnished marble headstone. On the other hand she has started socializing with old pals of hers she didn’t have time for before; she even goes to the theatre with them, something she never did in the past.
I offered to buy her a dog, a cat, or at least a parrot, so that she wouldn’t have to be totally without any living soul in the flat, but she refused. She doesn’t want a live companion; she would find it a burden to have to look after anyone now. On the other hand, she has bought herself loads of indoor plants – cacti and perennials – to fill every empty space in her room.
And she’s laughing again, usually at herself. She even laughs in situations where other people would get annoyed or lose heart. She loves telling me stories about the absent-minded old codgers and grannies that live around there.
But I’m concerned about her physical state. Sometimes she gets nosebleeds that are hard to stop, and recently I had to take her to hospital. She is supposed to take a heart tonic and something for hypertension but she is always ‘forgetting’ to take her daily dose. And when I tell her off, she says she doesn’t need any medicine; she feels fit and I’m making unnecessary fuss about a few drops of blood.
I have scarcely sat down before she is putting the kettle on for coffee and bringing me a piece of marble cake still hot from the oven. Then she shows me some new purple-flowering plant which she expertly describes as a cycad and wants to know the latest news of Jana.
We chat for a while about my naughty daughter and the prospects for a cure, and my mother surprises me by wanting to accept part of the responsibility or even the blame. ‘You never wanted to accept your father’s convictions,’ she tells me, ‘and I had nothing better to offer you.’
‘But we’re talking about Jana, not me.’
‘What you never had, you can’t pass on,’ Mum instructs me. ‘So you just gave her things instead.’
I don’t ask her what I was supposed to give her.
‘Your grandma still used to go to the synagogue, or so she told me,’ Mum starts to recall. In fact she doesn’t know whether that murdered grandmother believed in God in accordance with the Jewish faith. But if she did, she can’t have been particularly strict because she didn’t marry a Jew. Even so, she passed on something she had received from her forebears. But she hadn’t finished passing it on before she was killed. All she left was her, my mother; but my mother was no longer able to pass anything on. It seemed to her that everything worth professing, feeling or believing had died in that dreadful war, so she passed nothing on to me.
‘But Mum, you gave me the most important thing.’
‘And what was that?’
‘You loved me.’
‘Yes, that’s something to be proud of – that I wasn’t a heartless mother. But you still lacked something, you know as well as I do.’
‘We all lack something. And who goes to the synagogue these days? How many people go to church at all?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ She explains that she had in mind the chain of continuity that was broken when the Nazis were here and which she didn’t try to repair afterwards. Maybe on account of Dad, too. It would have made no sense to him.
She’s right on that score. Dad refused to accept things that made no sense to him. And what he didn’t accept he considered wrong.
Mum waits for my reaction, but I say nothing. It’s true that I lacked something. All I had was defiance. If someone had asked me what I didn’t want, I’d have had an answer. But I’d have found it harder to say what I wanted. Not to lie and be lied to, maybe. To be of help to people. To live in love. All fairly trite; no lofty goals.
‘I owed it to my mum and all the aunts and uncles and my grandma who all ended the same way,’ my mother said with regret.
‘What did you owe, Mum?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. I behaved as if what had happened was a terrible misfortune, but what did I do apart from the fact that I stopped talking to my own father?’
She tells me that she failed to maintain the continuity; she broke all ties with everything she ought to have had some connection with. She no longer wanted to have anything in common with those who had come to such a dreadful end. She worked off her life, but otherwise all she did was let things go by on the nod so that my father didn’t lose his temper too often. And she let us grow up without any connections either; she didn’t want us ever to imagine we had anything in common with the ones that were murdered.
‘There’s no sense in distressing yourself like this, Mum.’
‘I’m not distressing myself. I’m just thinking about you, and Jana above all. Maybe she’d be better off if she knew where she belonged.’
The trouble is, where do we really belong? I say to myself. Among six billion people at the very end of the second millennium. In a globalized world. That’s the posh name they give to a situation in which hope is on the wane and the only big achievements are hypermarkets.
We belong to a world fourteen billion years after the Big Bang, my ex-husband would say. A world that will last scarcely more than several blinks of God’s eye the way things are going on.
But this is just a way to make excuses for myself, to stop myself thinking about what Mum is trying to tell me, or about why so many things in my life have failed.
‘I planted some honey wort on your dad’s grave,’ Mum says, changing the subject. ‘Did you notice? No, I don’t expect you’ve been there.’
I tell her that I have so little time these days that I scarcely manage to get to the cemetery. I prefer to visit Jana or her.
‘You ought to go there from time to time, though,’ she urges me. ‘He was your father, after all.’
I promise I’ll go sometime and it occurs to me he wasn’t just Lída’s father and mine. But fortunately Mum doesn’t know that.
I go out into the scorching street, which is totally deserted. Everyone who could has left town. I set off in the direction of the cemetery, but I don’t go that far. At Flora, I go down into the metro station, where it’s cool, at least.
Besides, subconsciously I know where I’m heading. I get off in Karlín. The address of the man named Václav Alois Veselý and who is possibly my brother is already fixed in my memory. I don’t know whether I’ll take the plunge and pay him a visit. I don’t know what I’d say. I can hardly ring the doorbell and ask some strange man, Excuse me, you don’t happen to be my brother by any chance?
He might resemble me. If he did, I could immediately give him a hug. Hello brother! This is me, Kristýna, your half-sister.
But it would most likely give him a fright to have some strange woman suddenly putting her arms round him and hugging him.
I don’t even have to go in. I can just take a look where he lives. That’s if he still lives there.
I turn into the street whose name betrays the proximity of the river. However by now the river is well and truly concealed by factory buildings, ugly warehouses and a maze of walls and garages. I walk along the opposite pavement past dingy apartment houses with lots of little shops tucked in between them. Gypsy children play at the side of the four-lane carriageway.
The house I seek has just two floors. Patches of stone walling show through where the rendering has come away. A TV bellows from an open window. The battered front door is open. I hesitate a moment, but seeing I’ve come this far I’m hardly going to wait outside.
The passage stinks of mould and sauerkraut. I can’t see any list of tenants but there are letterboxes fixed to the wall in the corner behind the door. On one of them I find the name I’ve attributed to my unknown brother. It is written in large block capitals. The letters lean to the left and their feet are decoratively rounded. They strike me as familiar. I search my memory in disbelief, or rather I hesitate to believe what I’ve now realized. I wasn’t the only one to set out in search of my lost half-sibling. He had come to find me and chosen to leave me threatening letters that he forgot to sign.
So I’ve found the one I was looking for, the one who didn’t invite me. I could turn round and leave but instead I continue along the passage and look for a door with his name.
It’s right on the ground floor. I recognize the lettering before I even read the name. I ring the bell and wait.
For a long time there is no answer. And then suddenly the door opens although I have heard no approaching footsteps. Aghast, I stand facing my father in a wheelchair, my father as I remember him from my childhood. Bushy blond eyebrows, hair already going grey, cold, blue eyes and a large prominent chin. He eyes me, a strange woman, with mistrust.
I introduce myself and say, ‘I’ve found you at long last.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I always wished for a brother,’ I say. ‘But I didn’t know about you. And now I found a mention of you in the notebooks that Dad left behind. You know he died, don’t you?’
‘You’d better come in – Kristýna.’ He backs away in the wheelchair and instead of turning tail I enter the flat. The living-room door is wide open, I expect it’s the only room in the flat. The furniture is of dark wood that predates chipboard. A TV set stands on a low table and a two-ring electric cooker stands on another table in the corner. The walls are hung with paintings in garish colours full of strangely twisted shapes, the distorted bodies of people and animals, as well as tree stumps. They all carry inscriptions written in the same backward-leaning script. Various birds sit motionless in two cages hung from hooks fastened in the ceiling. He follows my gaze: ‘They’re stuffed. Kristýna, Kristýna,’ he then says, ‘Mum told me about you.’ He wheels himself over to the table, picks up some sheets of paper and crumples them into a ball before tossing them into the waste basket. Perhaps they were letters ready for me. ‘I’ll make some tea,’ he suggests.
I offer to put the kettle on.
‘No, no, I’m used to doing everything for myself. But you could fetch some water. The tap’s in the passage.
He hands me a kettle and I go out into the passage for the water. I don’t know what I’m still doing here or what I can talk to him about.
‘What did Dad die of?’ he wants to know on my return.
‘He had a tumour.’
‘And you’re a doctor!’
‘Only half a one,’ I say, as I usually do when my profession is mentioned.
‘I know, Mum told me. I never saw my father,’ he adds. ‘So don’t be offended that I’m not sad about his death. I expect you spent more time with him.’
That’s for sure. But it wasn’t quite the way he probably imagines. Even so I suddenly feel a sense of guilt towards him.
‘I wanted to be a doctor too,’ he says, ‘but this happened to me.’ He indicates the wheelchair. ‘So I gave up the idea.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘I dived into the river and hit a rock.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve started painting.’ He points at the pictures. ‘They’re all my work.’
‘I recognized they were by you. They’re … they’re interesting.’
‘I used to design toys for a craft workshop, and textiles too, but I can’t get any work these days. It’s a shitty awful world. They’d sooner send cripples to the gas chamber! They’d save money and could give the able-bodied a tax cut.’
The kettle whistles. He wheels himself over to it, tips some tea into a strainer and pours the water over it. The mugs he fetches are large and don’t look too clean, but why should he have clean mugs here?
‘Sugar or rum?’
‘I don’t take sugar.’
He heads for the dresser and brings out a bottle of rum. He pours some into my tea and then into his own. He treats himself to more rum than tea.
‘I’m sorry it happened to you,’ I say ‘Do you have anyone to look after you?’
‘I look after myself I detect in his voice Dad’s grim determination. ‘Mum used to take care of me before she died. That’s a picture of her over there.’ He points towards the table, on which a small photograph stands in a frame.
I get up and go over to look at it. The woman in the photo could be about my age, maybe a little younger; the portrait is obviously old, some time from the end of the sixties, to judge by the hairstyle. I stare at the face but find nothing interesting in it. I don’t know what I’d say about the woman that Dad secretly loved.
‘My girlfriend used to visit me too,’ my half-brother tells me. ‘But she got married and now she has children. I’ve got other friends,’ he quickly adds, ‘they just look in on me and do me the odd favour, but they don’t have time to look after me. Dad never came, not even after my accident. He ruined Mum’s life and mine. I dived in that water just to show I was somebody, even if I didn’t have a dad. Sometimes a single stupid act can decide your whole future.’ He has drunk his tea and now pours just rum in his mug.
He depresses me. I sip my tea and think about the fact that this man is my brother. I ought to feel something towards him, but I doubt that I can.
‘I imagined you differently,’ he suddenly says.
‘Uglier, I should think,’ he says with unexpected bluntness. ‘So you have a daughter?’
‘Yes.’ But I won’t tell him anything about her. I don’t intend to let him in on my suffering, or my joys, for that matter.
‘Bring her to see me some time.’
I remain silent.
‘That’s if you ever fancy visiting your crippled brother.’
‘That’s not important – the wheelchair,’ I say. ‘I’ll come any time you want, or if you need anything.’
He doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t refuse either. ‘How’s your work? Plenty of patients?’ he asks.
I tell him I have as many as I can cope with.
‘And you’re earning!’
I tell him it’s no great shakes, but enough for us to live on.
‘I needed a bridge,’ he says, opening his mouth slightly and pointing at it, as if intending to display someone else’s dental work, ‘and my dentist wanted fifteen thousand to do the job. For a few minutes’ work! And I had to save two years to pay for it.’
I tell him I never charge as much as that. If he came to me I’d do him his bridge for free. What I don’t tell him is that it would certainly do him a lot more good than writing me threatening letters.
‘I didn’t know how you’d take me,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t part of your family, was I?’
‘We didn’t know about you.’
‘Listen,’ he then says, ‘I ought to warn you about me. I’m strange sometimes. I imagine strange things. Such as I’m a powerful dictator. Or a concentration camp commandant. A concentration camp for women. There are loads of women in front of me and I can do what I like with them. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely anything I like: I can tell them to take their clothes off or I can torture them to make them admit to some crime, and then I imagine it.’
’You’re saying it to put the wind up me,’ I say, and I really do have a feeling of uneasiness, although it’s more like revulsion.
‘No, they’re just things I imagine. I’ve never hurt a fly. Maybe when I hit my head on the rock that time something happened inside me, like brain damage. For heaven’s sake, a concentration camp commandant in a wheelchair, it doesn’t make sense.’ He laughs briefly. ‘But it would make a great gag in some horror serial. Can you imagine it? The commandant in a wheelchair with a red-hot poker in his hand and he comes up to these women who are standing there naked in a great long line and …’
‘Don’t go into any more details,’ I request him. ‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘You think I’m crazy or a pervert, don’t you?’
I remember Dad’s sister Venda. ‘Maybe you inherited something,’ I say, ‘something genetic. It ran in Dad’s family.’
‘I didn’t know that. I thought Dad was normal. Or at least not crazy.’
‘No, he wasn’t crazy. But he knew how to hurt people. After all, you discovered that for yourself.’
‘Yes, I certainly did. Would you like some more tea? Or a drop of this?’ He raises the bottle.
‘No, no more, thanks. I just wanted to find out if it was really you. There was nothing definite in Dad’s diaries.’
‘I apparently look like him.’
‘You do. A lot.’
‘I was afraid I might.’
‘I understand.’ I get up.
He accompanies me to the door and when I offer him my hand I have the impression that he has tears in his eyes. Maybe he is moved at finding his half-sister after all these years. But he knew about me before; he found me long ago. More likely he regrets losing the image he had of his enemy.
As I say goodbye I cannot bring myself to repeat my invitation for him to call me if he needs anything. He knows my address well enough anyway. If he weren’t in a wheelchair I’d say to him, Don’t send me any more of those letters! To let him know I knew. But I shouldn’t think he’ll send any more anyway. He’ll find another way of exercising his sadistic fantasies.
I don’t go back to the metro, but set off in the opposite direction. I don’t feel like being among people. The river bank can’t be far away, but between me and it they’ve built a four-lane carriageway fringed by a fence. I cross the road and quickly make my way along by the fence, even though there is maybe no end to it. Cars rush past me. Above the fence there are billboards with inane advertising slogans and above them all there hangs a bluish haze of hot smog.
So I’ve found my kid brother, who abused me because I had a dad who never visited him. I expect he imagined me standing naked in his concentration camp while he burnt me with a red-hot poker because I enjoyed his father’s affection.
I oughtn’t to be angry with him. He has inherited Dad’s malevolent soul and on top of that, misfortune has consigned him to a wheelchair.
At last a gap in the fence: a prefabricated concrete road promises to lead me to some cash-and-carry. I set off along it and immediately find myself in a different – silent – world. The road winds between walls, whose decrepitude is masked by ivy. Enormous vehicle tyres, plastic sacks and rusting barrels are scattered over the verges. I’m the only person going this way. The glorified warehouse of a shop is closed, maybe because it’s Saturday afternoon, but more likely it’s never been open, because no one is likely to wander in here. I press onwards: not a living soul. But in the distance I can hear a riverboat siren; perhaps I’ll find a way through to the river, after all. I ought to be scared, but I feel intoxicated, as if I was walking in a dismal dream; I don’t get scared in dreams, only when I’m wide awake. The road bends sharply round some tall corrugated-iron hangars and I’m suddenly confronted by something very peculiar. In the middle of a scrapheap, where the road comes to an end, there stands a bizarre structure: two towers that look as if they have been skilfully gnawed away at the top; two towers like two fossilized dinosaurs with intermingled heads. It strikes me that it might be an old fairground tent that was inflated with hot air, or more likely an abandoned film set. But when I come closer I see that it is a concrete ruin with massive walls, most likely the remains of a military bunker built before the war that I don’t remember.
The scrapheap stinks and a swarm of flies buzzes above it. I walk round it and finally catch sight of a branch of the Vltava, with its lazy stream of dirty water. I lean against the trunk of an old, half-dead willow and try to light a cigarette. My fingers tremble. Not a soul to be seen. If someone did appear, maybe he’d kill me; death hovers here above the earth and the waters and there isn’t a single redeeming feature. I imagine Jana stumbling on this place. I suddenly realize that I understand her; I can understand how she took a fancy to drugs that make the world look different and most likely better or at least more acceptable than it really is.
It’s Sunday. I could sleep in, but I woke up at five and realized I wouldn’t fall asleep again. That meeting with my brother/non-brother is like a weight on my chest. And it’s as if I’ve only now fully realized the awful thing that happened to Jana. I think about her and go back over the past searching for the moment when my little girl started to fall. If such a moment existed.
Maybe my sister is right in believing that I acted foolishly when I decided to terminate the marriage to my unfaithful husband. If I’d managed to control myself and pretended I saw nothing, or that I saw it but was prepared to wait patiently until his highness, my husband, came to his senses and returned to me, things would have been better for my little girl. Or worse, because he started to be rude to me even in front of her, and sometimes I was unable to bear it and started to cry or row with him.
When love goes, contentment goes too. And so does understanding. But why wasn’t I able to hold on to that love?
And yet my little girl needed love. When Karel left me, I tried to give her that love, but it’s impossible just to go on giving; well I wasn’t able to, at least. There were moments when my loneliness weighed heavily on me; the sand scrunched beneath my feet and I thirsted. I yearned for a loving man; I yearned for him so much that lovers would come to me in my dreams and whisper tender words to me, kiss my breasts and enter me, and in my dreams I would shiver in ecstasy. But I only managed to treat myself to one real lover and it ended tragically. After that I was afraid of another disappointment; what else can I expect from men?
And yet I’ve yielded to temptation yet again; I know I won’t escape disappointment but I try not to think about it, not to think about the future.
Before I fell asleep last night I imagined the one who tempted me wandering somewhere in the mountains. He told me it was a group of men and maybe he was telling the truth. Be mine, my darling, I begged him. Be mine. Don’t abandon me, even if you stay only to the end of this summer, only a fraction of a divine blink, don’t abandon me.
As Mum said, there is something I lack. A dimension I’m unable to see into. I’m unable to open the door to it. Dad locked it against me and my one and only husband added a padlock. What is behind that door? God? Some love that won’t come to nothing, like love between people? Is it peace in one’s heart, the peace of life, instead of the peace of death that I most often think of as release when I am feeling low? Is it nobility of spirit that is capable of rising above all the daily distractions? Is it emptiness that would enable me to focus on myself and my soul, something I usually never have the time or the place to do? Or is there the sound of music? Playing music was what used to help me look beyond all my suffering and anxieties and fill me with a longing for reconciliation. But I didn’t stick with it. I let myself be banished from it and the most I do now is occasionally sing something to myself or listen passively to what others have composed and performed.
What if I went to visit my little girl? She is not guilty for trying to make up for what she’s missing in her own way. The trouble is, by pointing at myself, I reassure her she was in the right. She is the one injecting poison into her veins; I’m the one holding the syringe.
Instead, first thing in the morning I set out to visit her father. What I have in mind is reconciliation.
When he opens the door, he shows no surprise at my turning up. ‘I dreamt about you last night,’ he informs me, after seating me in the armchair.
‘How do you feel?’
‘A bit better, maybe,’ he says. ‘I’ve even put on a little weight.’
‘That’s good.’ I unwrap the rest of the apricot tart and put it on a plate that is unfamiliar to me. Our old plates stayed with me even if he didn’t. ‘What was in the dream about me?’
‘I dreamt that you caught me in the act.’
‘Doing what?’ As if I didn’t know.
‘I was with some girl. We were lying in a hotel room with red curtains and a Persian carpet. The hotel lift was out of order and the staircase was blocked off. I thought that if the stairs were blocked off and the lift was out of order you wouldn’t be able to reach us. But you climbed the scaffolding.’
‘I’m sorry I disturbed you.’
‘It’s strange how, after all these years, I’m still afraid of you finding me out.’
I don’t tell him that there are certain sins that stay with one to the end, but I do inform him that Jana is in therapy.
That takes him aback. The thought of having a daughter undergoing therapy for drug addiction is too much for him, the athlete and pedagogue, who has always been a shining example of moderation and opponent of all vices, bar infidelity. ‘Was it necessary?’
‘You don’t really think I’d have shoved her in there just for the fun of it, do you? Anyway I don’t intend to leave her there. I’m taking her away from Prague.’
‘You take major decisions like that and it doesn’t occur to you to discuss it with me,’ he says reproachfully.
I try to explain that I had to act fast. And anyway it’s been a long time since we discussed her together. He lost interest in her; he had other worries. Besides, I didn’t want to upset him just after his operation.
He gets up and starts to pace up and down the room. It’s what he always used to do when he was getting ready to give me a telling-off. ‘That’s just excuses and prejudice against me. Of course you should have consulted me,’ he says. ‘I’m still her father, after all. And I have some understanding of such matters.’
I feel that old sense of uncertainty and fear returning: I’ve done something wrong, I’ve botched something, I’m guilty of something in his stern eyes.
Over recent years, he says, whenever he met Jana he noticed how she was coming to resemble me more and more. She must have inherited my genes rather than his. When he first met me, he recalls, I was just like that. I used to hang around with a crowd in pubs and get drunk; drugs were still a rarity then. But I lacked any sense of order or respectability.
I point out that I’ve changed since then.
But in his view a sense of order is something innate.
‘I made a mistake being born at all, then.’
He asks me not to be sarcastic and then launches into a pedagogical lecture on the proper upbringing of children. Of course he names all my failings, of which I’m perfectly well aware: I didn’t like cooking, I skimped on shopping, I was no good at managing money and spent a lot on clothes for myself, not to mention my smoking or the many times I spent the evening with some girlfriends and came home in high spirits. What was our little girl to think? What sort of example did I set her?
I know that litany off by heart. How many times did I listen to it contritely while we were still living together. I would stand up for myself and defend my right to a bit of privacy, a little bit of space for myself and those I chose to allow in. I never won though, and always ended up feeling like a whipped cur. I did try to cut down on my smoking, but it didn’t last long, maybe because it was one of the few joys I had in life.
And after all, a good example is far more important than any amount of talking, proscriptions or prescriptions, my former husband continues.
I ought to pull myself together. After all I’m in no way subordinate to him any more. I shouldn’t let myself be cowed by a man who abandoned me, who ran away from me and our daughter. Let each of us deal with our problems as best we can.
Even so I don’t contradict him but simply get up in the middle of his tirade and leave the room.
Once I’m outside in the street it strikes me he was right about one thing: I behaved like Jana. But I forgot to pick up the plate with the apricot tart and smash it on the floor.
The building is a farmhouse built of timber, somewhat the worse for wear, which stands alone on the edge of an upland meadow. The track that leads to it is so narrow that if two cars were to meet head on they wouldn’t be able to pass. We pull up just by the front door. A little gypsy girl peeps out of it and then disappears inside again. There is a barn next to the farmhouse, and hens and ducks move here and there in the space between them. We can hear the squeal of hungry pigs from a nearby sty.
’It’s beautiful, don’t you think?’ my sister asks.
‘The countryside is splendid,’ I say cautiously. ‘Now in summer, anyway.’
The head therapist receives us in his office which contains nothing but a table, a chair, a filing cabinet and on the wall a picture of Sigmund Freud alongside a coloured print of some saint or other. Freud, the saint and the therapist all sport beards, but the latter also has a shock of black hair and, unlike the saint and Freud, he wears a T-shirt with the inscription CHRISTIAN YOUTH CLUB. He and Lída are on first-name terms. She addresses him as Radek.
He asks me to tell him in detail about Jana. I make an effort to mention all the details, including those I’m ashamed of, namely, that my daughter seemingly not only lied to me but also stole from me.
Then he wants to know if anyone in my family took drugs or was addicted in any other way.
So I admit my smoking and the fact that I drink wine every day albeit in moderation. When I was young I used to get drunk sometimes, but that’s really a long time ago. Her father, on the other hand, was exemplary in that respect. Compared to him I damage my health and he used to criticize me for it.
He makes notes on a pad, nodding his head from time to time as if to say, Yes, that’s the way it goes. But in fact he says nothing and simply invites me to see over the home.
The house is spacious and austere. Everything looks shabby; the furniture could easily come from some warehouse of dead stock or discarded junk. I notice that some of the windowpanes are smashed or cracked. But otherwise it is clean – the floors are still damp from mopping, and there is no clutter. But I’m less interested in things than in the people Jana would have to mix with. But how much can one tell during a short visit? One lad – he could be twenty – is grinding something in an antique hand-mill, another is wheeling some dung in a wheelbarrow, the little gypsy girl is sawing logs with another young man. For a moment they remind me of target figures in a shooting gallery, except that they all wear jeans and T-shirts.
In the kitchen, two girls are preparing the evening meal. We then visit one of the bedrooms. It contains three beds; on one of them, a young woman with drawn features is sitting smoking; she doesn’t seem to register our presence.
‘What’s up, Monika?’ the therapist asks.
‘I don’t want to go on living,’ she says, without looking at him.
‘You’ll get over it. And we’ll talk about it this evening,’ he promises.
‘She’s only been here two weeks,’ he informs us when we have left the bedroom, as if to apologize for the fact that there is someone here who doesn’t want to go on living. He needn’t apologize to me. I’ve known the feeling so often that sometimes I’m amazed that I’m still alive.
When we return to his office, the therapist tells me that Jana can come here if we like, but the decision must be hers alone. No one will force her to stay here. ‘We have a group therapy session with them every day’ he says, ‘and everyone must work; it’s part of the therapy. When they improve, they can attend school, but it’s a fair distance from here and not easy to get to in winter.’ He warns me that the routine is strict. ‘Drugs are banned, of course, but alcohol and sex aren’t allowed either. If they smoke, they may receive cigarettes. At first they have to stay here; during the first month we don’t allow either letters or visits. Whoever breaks the rules has to leave the home. If anyone finds the regime too harsh, they may leave. If anyone runs away, they have to leave. And conditions tend to be harsh here, particularly in winter,’ he says, once more recalling the winter conditions.
‘Winter is quite far off yet,’ I say, hoping he’ll agree with me.
‘Not as far off as you’d think.’ And he adds, as if to destroy any false hopes I might have, ‘From what you’ve told me about Jana, I wouldn’t think she’d be home before winter. Cured, I mean. You should definitely arrange for her to interrupt her studies.’ He then goes on to say that half of those who manage to complete the entire course of therapy never go back to drugs. Finally he tells me how much I am to contribute each month. There are a lot of other things I’d like to ask about, but he makes his excuses as a group therapy session is due to start in a moment and he cannot invite us to it, unfortunately. But even if I stayed here longer, what else could he tell me? Everything will depend on Jana. I can’t imagine her sawing wood or mucking out the pigs; I’ve spoilt her too much for that.
On the way home, Lida and I stop off at a village pub. She just has bread and cheese, while I have a bowl of goulash soup. I’m famished, not having had anything to eat since morning, but on top of that my stomach is churning at the thought of taking Jana off to some far-flung wilderness where I won’t even be able to visit her.
‘Don’t worry,’ my sister tells me. ‘He’ll help her. He’s excellent. He knows how to find the cause, and that’s the main thing.’ She hesitates a moment before adding, ‘He helped me too.’
‘You?’
‘Are you so surprised?’
‘I didn’t have a clue.’
‘It was eight years ago and I attended him as an outpatient. I didn’t tell you, or the old folks for that matter. It was nothing to do with you: it was my business. Mine above all.’
I’d like to ask her what she’d been taking, but I’d feel I was prying. So I simply ask her, ‘And what cause did he find?’
‘Emptiness. Despondency and emptiness.’
‘I would never have thought it.’
‘Because you always imagined I was so chuffed with myself. But it was only an act I put on for the rest of you. I travelled around with a band and sang on a couple of CDs, but there are thousands of bands like that, and millions more CDs. It makes no difference whether someone buys yours or not, because in a year’s time everyone will have forgotten it anyway. There’s nothing worse than taking part in the sort of artistic activity that people couldn’t give a monkey’s about.’ She adds that she envied me my job because it had some meaning – helping ease people’s pain – whereas all she did was add to the din that surrounds us on all sides. People applauded her, but they applaud anyone who helps them to stop thinking for a moment about the sort of lives they lead.
‘I didn’t have a clue,’ I say. ‘It never occurred to me.’
‘We know so very little about each other; we are both engrossed in our own troubles and put on an act for each other.’
‘And how did he help you?’ it occurs to me to ask.
‘He helped me realize what I really feel. And come to terms with reality. To stop looking over the horizon and overestimating my powers.’
‘And are you all right now?’
‘It depends what you mean. I don’t mainline any more. Once in a while I get drunk with my pals and then there are moments, such as after a concert, when instead of being happy I start to cry. I cry my eyes out and then I start to hiccup. And there are other moments when I go and find a boutique and buy myself a pile of useless clothes and end up giving them all away. But apart from that I’m OK.’
I drive my sister home. As we say goodbye we hug each other, for the first time in years.
We saw a lynx and in the sky a bird of prey that I identified as a buzzard, but Jirka maintained it was an eagle. Vera sided with me; the rest of them supported Jirka because he’s in radio and everyone thinks that radio announcers can’t be wrong, although the opposite is true.
I could have argued because Dad and I often observed buzzards, but I didn’t feel the need to prove my point in respect of feathered predators.
We have been notching up about twenty kilometres a day. We could have managed more but the route was fairly strenuous: through narrow ravines and sometimes up ladders or steep stone steps, andjirka had to lug a hundredweight of excess fat in addition to a rucksack and a tent.
I expect it was sweltering at the peak but down here in the gorges the sun reached us only rarely and the nights were actually cold.
I didn’t talk with Vera any more than with the rest. Once I helped her with her rucksack when we were having to scale ladders, and I would offer her my hand when we had to jump across a fast-flowing stream. Each time the touch of her hand thrilled me; when we used to sit in the cinema or the theatre we would always hold hands and also when I’d visit her at the student residence, where we were alone together. We would entwine our fingers and I would be aware of the blood pulsing through hers – it was a nice prelude to lovemaking.
I tried not to think about lovemaking or imagine us in a naked embrace when she retired alone to her tent each evening. Maybe she was expecting me to join her. If I’d have gone there, I expect she wouldn’t have kicked me out. I tried to think about Kristyna, but she seemed so far away. She dwelt in the other world, the world of work and important issues, the world of directors, department heads, police chiefs and subordinates, not to mention files containing denunciations – and where the rotten so-and-sos who wrote them still walk about with impunity.
Here we followed deserted tracks. When we managed to find our way out of the forest we would sunbathe half-naked on the grass, cook on an open fire, sing songs after the meal and, towards evening, pitch our tents; people are bound together when they share something out of the ordinary. I have come to realize that even suffering or persecution binds people together more than a humdrum existence of peaceful inactivity.
That is something I fear – I’d hate to live that way; I’m excited by everything that appears special or even eccentric. That’s why I was attracted to poisonous snakes or the life stories of Hitler and Stalin, for instance. Theirs were destinies like tightened strings. The two of them scaled mountains whose peaks seemed hidden in the clouds, while the foothills were submerged in blood, into which they both eventually plunged.
I don’t yearn for peaks reaching up to the sky; the fall from up there is usually fatal. I wouldn’t want to stay at the summit for even a moment; it’s always a lonely place. They left Stalin lying on the floor in his death agony for hours; they were afraid to climb to the heights where they still saw him, while he was already sprawled on the ground in a pool of his own urine. His greatest rival and also fellow traveller had come a cropper even before he did, falling right into an underground bunker, where in order to escape trial he let himself be shot by his own lackeys. He didn’t even get a funeral that some of the millions who had Sieg Heiled him might have attended. Finis coronat opus.
The only sort of fate I’d want would be one that raised me above mediocrity and the void from which death winks. The trouble is I don’t know what I might do to achieve it. I generally end up indulging in pipe dreams.
Every moment I’m here I feel that I’m getting further and further away from the life I usually lead. These last few days I’ve had the feeling that my head is cleared somehow; at last I’ve been able to see in clear outline everything I’ve ever set eyes on in my life. I’ve even been able to see in clear outline what is yet to come.
I have come to realize that the work I do is poisoning my soul. It forces me to concern myself with the despicable dealings of the past to such an extent that I end up not seeing anything else. Each of us has some connection with them, either personally or via our fathers or mothers. I got the impression that – like in Sodom – there wouldn’t be ten just men to be found in our city.
Before I left Prague I tried to compile the city’s horoscope for the next century. It predicted the city’s downfall in the year 2006. I tried to work out whether this downfall would be due to war or flood, or to something from on high – although water also comes from above. But now it strikes me that it needn’t be the sort of catastrophe that destroys buildings, it could equally be a moral downfall.
When I went to bed in my tent on the fifth day of our wanderings I couldn’t get to sleep. I seemed to be seized by an inexplicable agitation, a foreboding that something inevitable was going to happen.
Suddenly my tent flap was lifted and I caught sight of Vera in the dim light of the moon.
‘Is that you?’ I asked, the way I used to ask her not so long ago when we made love, but now the question took on a new meaning.
‘It’s me,’ she whispered. ‘If Mickey Mouse won’t come to the mountain, the mountain will have to come to Mickey Mouse.’
‘I have plenty of mountains here,’ I said. But she quickly slipped out of her tracksuit and lay down next to me.
The moon was shining, so a ray of pallid light fell on us through the fabric of the tent. I could hear the murmur of the stream, and close by, maybe right above us, a bird shrieked. We made love and she moaned more than she had ever done in the past; I don’t know if it was due to ecstasy, a sense of victory or sadness.
‘Do you love me?’ she wanted to know. ‘Tell me you still love me.’
But I remained silent.
Suddenly she pushed me away and started to get dressed. I went out of the tent with her. Above us the stars shone and seemed to me unusually bright.
’I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But there would be no sense starting again. It wouldn’t go anywhere.’
‘Who told you I wanted to start something?’ she hurled at me. ‘I needed to find out if you’d come crawling if I wanted.’
‘But I didn’t come crawling to you, did I?’
‘Oh no? And you dare to say that to my face after what you’ve just done. You’re a vile, disgusting, lying beast.’
Maybe she was right. It struck me that all the time I’ve been waiting for her to come to me and for us to make love.
At the time when I was striving to become an interpreter of history I once read some medieval legends that dealt with physical abstinence. They decried property, food, drink and also, of course, what is called sexual love – which for their authors was the result of original sin. They went so far in their condemnation of physical desire that the best married couples in their view were those who remained virgins to the end of their days. The hypocrisy of those authors disgusted me. They sneered at the desires of the body without which they themselves would never have been born. But there was one thing I had to grant them: the realization that you have to fix your gaze on something that is above those desires and be responsible for how you behave and the things you do.
I turned away and went back into my tent. I lay down again and tried to think of something nice that had happened to me in the past or something I still looked forward to, but nothing occurred to me.
The next morning we stopped in the town of Rožňava. Soon we split up and we each set off as the fancy took us. I wandered through the sweltering streets and alleyways, where there was little sign of life in the heat of the late morning, apart from the occasional half-naked child running past or a dog with its tongue lolling out. An out-of-the-way sweet shop offered Italian icecream but I was more attracted by a nearby shop sign that advertised the services of a fortune-teller.
As I opened the door, I set several bells ringing at once, but the only living creature to appear was a cinnamon-coloured Persian cat. It jumped up on the counter and gazed at me with its yellow, fiendish eyes. A posy of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling filled the shop with a spicy scent.
At last a door at the back of the shop creaked and a smiling woman in a long purple dressing gown appeared. Even if it hadn’t been written above the shop, I’d have suspected her of engaging in some kind of witchcraft. ‘You wish to have your fortune told, young sir?’ she asked.
She had long unkempt black hair and dark Indian eyes, and around her neck she wore a heavy chain that seemed to be gold, as did the bracelets on her brown wrists.
I asked her what she used to tell fortunes, and she told me it was inspiration from God. She could take a look at my palm but it wasn’t necessary. Anyway she had to look at my aura first before she could raise the blinds that concealed my future. She gestured me to follow her into an alcove where there stood two faded armchairs and a small table with a few scattered dried flowers on it. Amazingly enough the place was pleasantly cool.
She pointed me to one of the armchairs and sat down opposite. She asked me to place my hands on the table palms upwards, to stop thinking about anything else, and to look in her direction. She took my hand for a moment, but she didn’t seem to be concentrating on it. She asked me whether I wanted to know both the good and the bad things about myself and I nodded. She let go of my hand, stared at me and then mumbled something incomprehensible. Then she told me my aura was gradually becoming clearer and I was emerging from it and floating upwards. She could see that I was a good man with many abilities, but I had experienced great pain. She could see me crying over a coffin and snakes winding themselves round my legs, but I wasn’t to be afraid as they didn’t bite.
‘You will have a long life, young sir, and the illnesses you will have won’t be any threat to you. I can see sparks flying from your fingertips; you must have touched lots of people with them. Take care, take great care or the sparks from your hands will burn you.’
The cat quietly crept into the room and jumped on to the woman’s lap, but the fortune-teller didn’t seem to notice, her attention apparently fixed on the images that appeared before her eyes, images that she reported to me. Her concentration impressed me, as well as the fact that she didn’t try to baffle me with external aids such as cards or a crystal ball.
In the near future, she continued, she could see many obstacles in my path: they are solid and powerful, but I wouldn’t vanquish them, I’d go round them. I would climb into a vehicle that would take me to the royal heights, and no enemies that stood in my way would get the better of me. She told me I had lots of friends, and one friend in particular, who was strong and kind, would stand by me. The disaster that was going to overthrow all the cities around me would pass me by.
I wanted to ask her what disaster she was referring to, but I was afraid of interrupting the flow of her visions.
‘I also see a woman,’ she went on. ‘She is older than you. She is far away and she is waiting for you. But it isn’t your mother. Yes, she is looking for you because she is in danger. A great danger that you can save her from. You will be richly rewarded.’ She fell silent and raised her hands as if about to give me a blessing. Then she stood up.
I gave her two hundred crowns and went back out into the hot day whose brightness blinded me.
In sudden anxiety I tried to phone Kristýna from the post office but I couldn’t get through. When I met up with the others I told them I had to return to Prague by the next train. Vera no doubt thought I was running away from her, but I didn’t care what she thought.
In the train my anxiety grew. I knew that someone had been sending Kristýna anonymous threats. Another possibility was that someone who was afraid to attack me directly might attack her as a way of intimidating me. I thought of how delicate Kristýna was, or not delicate so much as vulnerable. Anyone could hurt her. There were people who, as soon as they detected someone’s vulnerability, couldn’t wait to hurt them.
There was a time when victims were revered as martyrs, these days it is the torturer who tends to be revered.
In Prague I called her immediately from the first call box in front of the station and asked her if everything was OK.
She said it was and was glad I hadn’t forgotten about her yet. She would like to see me but she and Jana were just on their way out. She was driving her to another treatment centre a long distance from Prague. She wasn’t sure whether she would manage to get back by evening. But she would definitely be home the following day. I could come there and stay with her now that she was on her own.
I asked her if I oughtn’t to travel with her. She hesitated for a moment and then said it wouldn’t be necessary.
I ought to have made it more obvious that she was in danger and demand that she take me with her. But I don’t know whether the danger is immediate or not. As the celebrated Nostradamus put it: Quod de futuris non est determinata omnio veritas.
I felt regret that I had come back from my holiday on her account while she seemed in no great hurry to see me, and I told her that I probably wouldn’t be able to make it the next day, but that I’d definitely call her.
Summer is slowly drawing to a close; the lime trees in the street in front of Mum’s house have already finished flowering, and autumnal melancholy has descended on me prematurely, as well as weariness. I drove Jana to that distant spot where I am not to visit her for a whole month and it wouldn’t even be a good idea to write to her.
Now I could take a holiday but suddenly I don’t feel like going anywhere on my own. Jan talked about us going somewhere together, but we’ve never even been out for the day. I have the feeling there’s something on his mind; he’s less communicative. He says he has lots of work on; he wants to go through as many files as possible before they kick him out of his job or he is refused access to top-secret materials. I don’t try to talk him round: I’m a bit afraid of us being together all the time; he is full of vigour and I’m a tired middle-aged woman. And besides I’ve got used to not having a man around full time.
And yet one night it occurs to me to ask him who were the people who went to Slovakia with him and why he has told me so little about them. I ask him in exactly the same way I ask him how he spent the day, what he has read of interest lately or if he knows any new jokes. But I notice that my question doesn’t please him. He wants to know why I ask.
‘Because I’m interested in you, of course.’
He says he was there with the crowd I’d met at the game he invited me to that time. And he hasn’t told me about the trip because he didn’t think it made any sense to talk about travelling. It’s impossible to describe nature, except in poems, and he is no poet. There is also little point in talking about people I don’t know. Where something interesting happened, such as the prophecy at the fortune-teller’s, he’s told me everything she foretold, and since he’s been back the unimportant things have already slipped out of his memory. I recall him once describing to me how people with bad consciences behave when questioned by his colleagues. How they go into lengthy explanations about why they can’t remember anything.
I feel a sudden anxiety. ‘So that leggy girl – the one you used to go out with – she was there too then?’
He hesitates a moment before replying, as if considering what answer to give me, or even whether I know or suspect something.
Then he replies that she was there too.
It’s late and time we were asleep. A little while ago we made love; he was tender to me. I ought to keep quiet and not keep asking questions. But I’m unable to dispel the anxiety that has seized me.
‘She didn’t even try to seduce you?’ I ask.
He remains silent and then replies with a question: ‘Why would she try to seduce me? We’d broken it off, hadn’t we?’ He sits up and gets out of bed.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m thirsty.’
He goes off to the kitchen. I can’t bear to wait. I put on my dressing gown and follow him. He is pouring wine into two glasses.
‘Are you going to have some wine with me?’
‘Yes, I feel like some.’
‘But you still haven’t answered my question.’
‘I don’t understand why you want to know now, all of a sudden.’
‘Now or some other time.’
‘But I asked you at the time whether you’d like to come with me,’ he reminds me.
‘But I wasn’t able to. You wanted me to go with you to protect you from your ex-girlfriend?’ It dawns on me.
‘I don’t need protecting. I love you, don’t I. That’s why I wanted you to come with me.’
He is still avoiding the question.
‘But it was night, everyone around was asleep, and she crept into your tent,’ I answer for him.
I can see I have rattled him. ‘If she’s called you and put ideas in your head, don’t believe her.’
‘She hasn’t called me,’ I say. ‘Nobody has put ideas in my head. It’s how I imagine it. If it didn’t happen, you’d have told me long ago that she went with you too.’
He says nothing; he doesn’t try to contradict me. He admits nothing and denies nothing. He’s not a liar and he doesn’t know how to be faithful, just like every other man.
‘There you are,’ I say. ‘I don’t need a fortune-teller to tell me what happened and what danger I’m in.’
‘I love you,’ he tells me. ‘I didn’t stop loving you for a moment.’
‘Not even when the other one was in your arms?’
He says nothing. Then he tries to explain it to me: they were going out for almost two years. He didn’t want to hurt her. And anyway he hurt her because he told her he didn’t want to have anything to do with her any more.
‘Because now you’ve got me.’ I complete his thought. ‘You don’t need to explain anything to me. I’m glad you have consideration for your old girlfriend. It means I can hope you’ll show me the same consideration.’
He repeats that he loves me and has never loved anyone else. He tries to explain to me that there are situations when you do something you didn’t intend to, and you are immediately sorry. He asks me to understand that.
I tell him I am able to have understanding for anything – life had taught me that. But that doesn’t mean I can accept everything and come to terms with it. I hate betrayal. I once got divorced on account of it and deprived Jana of a home with a father.
He asks me in umbrage whether he ought to kneel down and ask my forgiveness.
I tell him that I don’t like fellows who kneel, and I like even less those who ask if they ought to.
I have the feeling my little boy is at a loss – whether to be offended or to burst into tears. He’s not a liar and he doesn’t know how to be faithful. Most likely he is regretting that he didn’t lie. But he’ll soon learn how. Maybe I should be pleased that he doesn’t yet know how to lie, but at this moment all I feel is disappointment – and weariness.
’Kristýna,’ he begs, ‘nothing happened, nothing of any importance. Surely you’ll forgive me.’
‘I don’t know what you expect,’ I tell him. ‘That I’ll advise you? Or that I’ll go back to bed with you?’
He hesitates. Then he asks if he ought to go.
I tell him I’d appreciate it if he did.
My new nick was called Sunnyside and it immediately struck me that Graveside might be a better name, because the nearest thing was an old abandoned graveyard. Though I have to admit that the sun really did beat down all the time – I got quite a tan during the first few days of my nonenforced stay. You see I had to declare that I’d chosen that nick voluntarily. I played up a bit at first but I knew I’d go anywhere to get rid of those vampire witches and where I wouldn’t have to listen to the crap from that platinum blonde cow who meant it all for our good. But I said I wasn’t going to any loony bin in the middle of a forest; I’d sooner hang myself. Mum tried to persuade me it was for my own good and told me what a fantastic place it was. Dad was born not far from there and lived there at my age, and apparently some of his great-great-great-aunts still live around there somewhere, though I couldn’t have given a toss. Mum went on to tell me I wouldn’t be there long and it wasn’t the end of the world because they had electricity there. I told her that was really something: electricity – I was trembling all over in anticipation. And I asked Mum if they had any fantastic things such as electric chairs, or whether they gave themselves electric shocks after breakfast for fun. Mum got pissed off and said there was no talking to me and told me if I wanted to stay where I was, I could. I started to panic that she might just leave me in that nuthouse and so I told her OK she could send me by rocket to the moon for my own good if she liked.
There were eight of us detoxers at the Graveside by my reckoning – that’s including me. Some of them had already been stuck there for six months. Monika was the only one who was just starting her second month and she was planning to split. She told me that before she came there, she’d worked in a hospital. It had been heaven, she said: there were drugs everywhere you looked. They used to nick Rohypnol, for instance, and give the sick old ladies a placebo instead, and then they’d have great trips. From time to time they even managed to get hold of morphine; that was super because then they didn’t have to buy expensive muck from Arab dealers. She was screwing some married doctor that she was in love with, but when it got out, the nerd packed her in and all she had left was the dope. She’s come to realize that life without drugs has no point anyway and that people are vile by nature.
So I expect we’ll do a bunk together.
Pavel, who has already done his military service and astounded us with card tricks and by making tea disappear from a cup in front of our very eyes, says this place is just like the sort of hassle they got in the army: fatigue duty, kitchen rota, pigs and goats. And the punishments are the same: most often being confined to barracks. I wasn’t allowed a leave pass yet anyway, so they couldn’t take it away from me. Whenever our dear Radek, who was helping us to be normal people again, found that the floor wasn’t completely clean, it had to be washed again. In the first week alone I had to scrub our bedroom floor three times. I was also put in charge of our four hens and a duck with some ducklings. They were always running away from me, especially the little ones, and last week a pine marten got one of them. Radek said it was fate and told me not to be too upset; pine martens were God’s creatures too. I wasn’t upset at all: I was glad I had one little bugger less to keep an eye on. I called the pigs ‘sausage dogs’ ’cos they were so tiny, and when they were hungry, which was all the time, they squealed and set all the dogs around barking.
Apart from that, Radek is great, and he’s cool in a way. He’s got about eighteen children of his own and he still finds time to visit us in the evening. Sometimes he tells us about his life. He wasn’t allowed to study ’cos he went to church – he was in a secret church or something, so he had to work for a living and has done almost every possible kind of job: roofing, laying pavements, doing deliveries, and working in a dry-cleaner’s where they used to boil up clothes in some acid; when it evaporated it was more narcotic than regular dope. Sometimes his life was a bit like in an action movie ’cos he was always doing stuff with that church. Once, the Communist cops picked him up and tried to make out he’d got drunk and run over some kid. He told them he couldn’t have run anyone over ’cos he didn’t have a car and had never driven and those creeps said that was even more suspicious so they were arresting him. They told him they were taking him to the nick for interrogation and on the way they talked about how they’d say he’d been shot trying to escape. He didn’t really believe them, ’cos if they’d been meaning to shoot him they wouldn’t talk about it in front of him, but even so when they got there he refused to get out and they had to carry him. And that really happened: they carried him out and chucked him in some cell and left him there all night in the total cold without food and then they let him go the next evening. And he told us as well that he never even lost his rag over those cops ’cos according to him they didn’t know what they were doing, and they were just totally demented due to the training they’d been given and also because of TV.
The thing is that Radek really knows how to take people apart. That allows them to form an attitude about themselves. He doesn’t rabbit on about drug-taking being dreadful, he just helps us to think positively and realize why we needed to take dope and others didn’t. I’ve already realized that I took dope to spite Dad because he thought that after they discovered the Big Bang it was all right to do your own thing and not give a damn about others. And that’s what he did. Radek had the feeling that what I’d wanted to be was different from him, and different from Mum too.
I get the feeling that I now know almost everything there is to know about me, as well as about Mum and Dad. It’s really crucial to have an attitude to yourself and to people around you.
I really enjoy it when we sit and talk about each of us. Pavel, for instance, told us seriously that once when he was on a trip he wanted to bonk his own mum, and she was in such a state of shock she kept saying, Pavel, you must have mistaken me for someone; it’s me, your mum – simply horrendous.
Last week when I was on kitchen rota I forgot to order the spaghetti that was supposed to be for lunch and as a punishment I was put on kitchen rota again the next day and in the evening I had to muck out the animals. I felt like dumping the shit under Radek’s window, but it wouldn’t have done me any good ’cos I’d have had to clear it up and then wash the lawn with a rag. So at least I broke two plates instead and then pretended to be all upset and said they’d slipped out of my hands by accident because they were wet.
The boys here are fairly ace and I think they fancy me. The other day Pavel picked me some daisies and swept the kitchen for me. And Lojza, who’s due to go home soon, offered to help me with maths. But I told him I hadn’t yet reached the stage where I could do any swotting. For the time being I have to concentrate my efforts on fighting with myself and beating my bad habits. Another time he told me he was sure I’d get over it; he told me I needed to believe in myself. I don’t know whether I’ll get over it; what I want is to get out of here. But apart from that I believe in myself.
One little crud who came here right after me did a runner two weeks later. I was curious what Radek would say about it, but all he said was if someone didn’t want to stay here he was welcome to go.
The day before yesterday I got my first letter from Mum. She says she’s missing me and has talked to Radek on the phone; he says he’s fairly pleased with me. Would you believe it: after me forgetting to order the spaghetti and smashing those plates. He knew very well they didn’t just slip out of my fingers and that I was putting it all on. Mum also sent me two hundred crowns for when I get a leave pass, and she said she’d drive down and was looking forward to seeing me. Not a word about that ginger bloke of hers; she didn’t even give him the letter to sign. Maybe he’s already chucked her over like Dad; I’d be really sorry for her if he did. And I’ve started to miss her a lot too and Ruda – I remembered what a great time we had, but most of all I miss my little room where no one came poking their nose in and no one yelled ‘Wakey wakey!’ at me at six in the morning.
Yesterday when Monika went shopping she swigged a bottle of beer in the supermarket and one of the cows that works there grassed on her to Radek. So Monika was immediately ‘confined to barracks’ and on top of that she had to wipe all the passages and stairs. Horrendous! She told me in the evening that she’d had enough of being hassled. She was going to do a runner and asked me if I wanted to come too. I told her I’d been thinking about it since the first day and if she was going I’d go with her, except I didn’t know where I’d make for.
She suggested an aunt of hers near Pisek. She wouldn’t kick us out and we could even help her on the farm until we decide what next. I’ve got an aunt in Tábor, but she knows Radek so I expect she’d tell us to get lost.
Radek happened to be at some therapists’ meeting or something so the only person in charge was Madia, a girl not much older than us who was only starting her training. She used to prat around with us in the evenings and sing songs and play the guitar. Then we’d have to wake her up in the morning. I was a bit sorry for her that she’d be in the shit on account of us, but Radek wasn’t that sort. He’ll say it was fate and if someone doesn’t want to stay in his heavenly Sunny Graveside they are welcome to leave.
So in the afternoon when we were all supposed to go somewhere to the forest for firewood I pretended I had a terrible headache. Monika was on kitchen rota and had to do the washing-up. As soon as the rest of them were gone we packed our rucksacks and left too, but in the opposite direction.
It was a glorious day and neither of us could understand how we’d managed to put up with it for so long: feeding the goat, mucking out, licking the lino and having to rabbit on about ourselves. When we got out of the forest we managed to thumb down a Trabant with some local dumbo at the wheel who was taking his wife to the dentist’s in Blatná.
That’s a coincidence, I said, my mum’s a dentist too, but in Prague.
They were tickled pink that my mum was a dentist too and wanted to know whether we were going back to Prague and where from. I told them we were on a tour because it’s so beautiful round here we can hardly get over it.
They were really chuffed and told us to help ourselves to the apples they were bringing with them.
I started on about Sunnyside, saying I’d heard there was some farm up in the woods where there were junkies. Had they heard about it? They said they had and that it was really dreadful how many young people have got hooked on that stuff and the ones up there are the worst of all: they nick things, get drunk and they were all shacked up there together.
‘That really must be awful for all the people round there,’ I said. ‘Luckily we didn’t go anywhere near there, otherwise we’d have spoilt all the happy memories we have from the rest of our trip.’
They dropped us in Blatná in front of the castle and even told us how happy they were to have met such nice young girls and how nice it was that there were still some young people who appreciated natural beauty.
Afterwards Monika told me I was a gas. As she knew about the money I got from Mum she dragged me into the nearest supermarket and we bought a bottle of vodka, though I’m not much into booze. But we didn’t have enough money for anything we could really trip out on.