I miss Jana. When I’m finished at the surgery, I don’t even feel like going back to the empty flat. Jan called me a few times. I talk to him but I don’t feel like seeing him. Or so I tell him and myself. But then when I hang up I feel so wretched and lonely that I burst into tears.
Sometimes I get together with Lucie, and almost every day I drop in on Mum. I also visit my ex-husband. I get him something from the shops and cook him an evening meal, the way I did years ago. But he eats almost nothing. He is quickly going to seed: he’s already an old man.
Life is sad. Almost everyone ends up on their own. Maybe in the past people still had God with them, but he wasn’t really with them, at most they had him in their mind.
I don’t mind being on my own, what I mind is that I’ve failed in my life and the people around me failed too. I reproach myself for handing my daughter over to the care of strangers, for not being able to cope with her on my own. I’m annoyed with myself that when she needed me most I squandered the little time I had left for her on a vain and conceited love affair.
Maybe I understand teeth, but I’ve never managed to understand the hearts of even those who are closest to me.
The waiting room has been full since morning but I’ve an urge to get away from here and be alone in the forest, the thickest one possible. The trouble is I won’t escape myself anyway.
I work in silence. I don’t even talk to Eva. And it would be just the day when I have one serious case after another. Periostitis and three extractions, and to cap it all the last one was a number eight. And as if out of spite the phone hasn’t stopped ringing.
I even cope with the number eight. I dictate the details to Eva for the patient’s record and the phone is already ringing again. I can hear Eva saying, ‘I’m afraid Mrs Pilná can’t come to the phone now; she is in the middle of an extraction.’ Then she listens for a moment and tells me, ‘Apparently it’s important. It’s to do with Jana.’
‘Rinse out, please.’ I take the receiver and some girl’s voice informs me that Jana is lost. She has run away with Monika. Who’s Monika? Oh, yes, now I remember. The new one who didn’t want to go on living. ‘If she doesn’t return by evening,’ the girl informs me, ‘we’ll have to ask the police to look for her. Should she turn up at home, please call us.’
‘Do you think she’ll come home?’
‘Probably not.’
‘So what am I supposed to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ the voice says. ‘I’m new to this and Radek doesn’t get back until the early evening.’ She promises they’ll call me if Jana turns up.
‘She’s run away?’ Eva cottons on.
I nod.
‘What are you going to do? Shall we call it a day here?’
I call Mum and let her know what has happened and ask her to go over to the flat and stay there until I get home. There’s no point in sending patients away when they have appointments – anyway I don’t know what I could do at home except wait. And being stuck at home would be even more intolerable.
‘She’s bound to turn up.’ Eva tries to cheer me up. ‘They’ll call you soon, you’ll see.’
But nobody calls and so I go on working. My fingers go through the routine motions, inserting the correct drill and using the right pressure. I even talk: asking things and giving orders, and all the while I imagine some dimly lit den full of junkies, a car driven by some pervert or a pimp, all of them taking my little girl away from me.
‘That doesn’t hurt?’
‘No, doctor. You really have a way with your hands.’
I have a way with my hands, but nothing has ever turned out right for me.
‘That’s the lot,’ Eva suddenly announces and leaves the door to the waiting room open. ‘Shall I ring around all the people who have appointments for tomorrow to let them know you won’t be here?’
I shrug. I’ve no idea what I’ll be doing tomorrow or whether they’ll find Jana by then. ‘No, don’t call anyone.’
Back home, Mum wants to hear some details, but I don’t know anything. ‘What if Jana came,’ it strikes me, ‘and instead of coming here went to your place?’
But Mum had already thought of that and pinned a note to her door saying where she was. ‘You shouldn’t have sent her so far away,’ she reproaches me. ‘She’s not used to that way of life.’
‘Was I supposed to let her lead the sort of life she was getting used to?’ I don’t know how I’ll get through the rest of the day. I smoke one cigarette after another. I can’t even stay sitting down. I dash about the flat tidying things. I have to do something. I call Sunnyside again. The girl’s voice tells me they still have no news of the runaways, but the boys of the community have decided to go and look for them.
‘Do you think they’ll find them?’
’They’re the only ones who have any real chance. They already know them and know where they might find them.’
I try calling girlfriends of Jana’s that I know but I get no reply anywhere. No one’s home. Naturally, it’s still the holidays.
I ask Mum to stay in my flat while I go and look for Jana.
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. Everywhere.’
‘When will you get back?’
‘I don’t know that either.’
‘But it’s pointless, isn’t it?’
What isn’t pointless? I don’t ask her. Instead I tell her I’d go round the bend just sitting here doing nothing.
‘Have some sense, Kristýna, and stop panicking,’ she urges me. ‘There’s no way you’ll find her. Instead you’ll probably do yourself a mischief. Look how uptight you are.’
‘I’m not a little kid any more, Mummy.’
First I drive to Kampa, but in the place where we found her last time there are just a few dogs running around.
I run over to the old millstream on the edge of the park as if intent on fishing Jana out of the water. There is a couple snogging on one of the benches, but they don’t notice me.
You don’t happen to have seen my Jana – fifteen years old, blue eyes, a high forehead, long legs, a punk hairstyle … ? – I don’t ask them. I dash back to the car and set off in a southerly direction, upstream, out of the city. I push the poor old banger to such limits that it whines. The countryside flashes past me as splashes of colour.
Where are you heading, Kristýna? You haven’t the foggiest idea where you’re going, have you?
I’m going to find my little girl.
How do you think you’re going to find her in this wide world? And what will you do if you don’t find her? How will you go on living?
I turn off the motorway, drive through Příbram and all of a sudden, here it is: the cemetery wall and the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
I pull up and get out of the car. My legs barely support me and there is a flickering in front of my eyes.
It’s still daylight. I don’t know why I stopped here. After all, Jana is hardly going to visit any of her father’s relatives; she doesn’t know them anyway. And even if she came this way, why would she hang around here?
I stopped here because I’m afraid to drive to the place she ran away from. I stopped here on my own account. Because of the grave of Jan Jakub Ryba who wrote the Christmas Mass that always makes me want to weep for joy when I hear it, even though I don’t believe in a God who lay as a baby in a manger. Because of the composer who decided one morning that he couldn’t go on living. He was then only slightly older than I am now, but he was at the end of his tether. And he had a faithful wife and good children.
So he put a razor in his pocket and set off for the wood known as The Crevice. There, they say, he sat down on a boulder, and when there wasn’t even a crevice to let through a ray of hope, he slit his throat. That’s how my ex-husband related it anyway.
I don’t have a razor in my pocket, yet I’m not sure I want to go on living. I have yet to find a faithful man and my only child is on the run.
Women don’t generally use a razor; it’s usually pills or the gas oven. There’s a bottle of analgesics in my handbag that would definitely put an end to my pain and disappointment for good. The wood known as The Crevice still stands, only the trees have changed. They erected a stone monument on the spot where the composer ended his life. My first and only husband took Jana and me to see it while we were still together.
We are not together now; we have fallen apart.
I oughtn’t to waste time. I must drive on in search of my little girl. But now that third one has crept up behind me: the eternal infant, God’s messenger, and she’s whispering to me that she’s my little girl too and I can find her at any moment and she’ll hug me and stay with me for ever and we’ll be happy together and all the fear and pain will disappear.
The little girl promises to lead me to the wood, and she’s so considerate that she even fans me from behind with a little breeze. You’ll sit down on a stone, she coaxes me, swallow what you brought, then lie down on the moss and you’ll feel fine: no one will ever run away from you again, no one will hurt you or let you down; no one will betray you, no one will want anything from you, not even me; I’ll just gently fan you as long as you like, on your journey to that peace that lasts forever.
The little girl has a gentle, enticing voice, and when she waves her hand, mist will surround me and it’ll be easier for us, it strikes me.
All right, I’ll go with her.
At that moment, the organ starts to play in the church behind me and I recognize the familiar notes. Who could be playing a Christmas Mass at the height of summer? Maybe the dead composer himself chose from the thousand works he composed the very one that refreshes the soul most.
‘This is where I was born, on the edge of Rožmitál,’ my ex-husband pointed out to us. ‘And here I went to school. Can you hear that choir? I used to sing in it: Master, hey! Rise I say! Look out at the sky – splendour shines on high. What are you smirking for, Jana?’
‘That you used to go to school too, Daddy. You must have been teensy-weensy.’
My poor little girl, your mother’s a head case; she’s a sad, desperate individual and she’s destroying herself like you. She’s teetering over the pit. When she tumbles howling into it, what will become of you?
I go back to the church and stand listening, recalling the time when we all still lived together in love. The little messenger, that little girl, has lost patience and quietly disappears without hanging around for me.
I make for the church door, intending to go in and thank the organist, but the door is locked. Goodness knows how long it is since someone passed through it. The organ has fallen silent too.
Only now do I notice that there is a telephone box not far from the church.
Yes, my Jana and Monika have already been found. The girls ran away and got drunk. They will be penalized, unless the others decide to expel them altogether.
‘Do you think I could drive over? I’m not far away.’
It is dusk when I reach Sunnyside.
They won’t allow me to be alone with Jana.
‘Heavens, Mum! What are you doing here?’ she exclaims when they bring her. ‘It’s great you came. I’m bound to be banned visitors. And maybe they’ll shave my head too.’
My little girl only thinks about herself. It won’t occur to her to ask what I felt when they told me she’d run away, or what I’ve been going through all the time she has been torturing me like this.
‘What came over you to run away like that?’
‘We didn’t run away, we just went for a bit of a walk.’
‘And so you took rucksacks with you,’ comments one of the boys who is apparently also here as a client.
‘We took things in case it rained, you dumbo,’ Jana explained.
‘A lot of things in case of rain,’ Radek chimes in. ‘And anyway you weren’t supposed to be going for walks, as well you know.’
‘Well OK,’ Jana concedes, ‘but we really did have second thoughts. It will be up to the community,’ she continues, turning back to me, ‘whether they shave my head, expel me or just make me muck out for a month.’
The psychotherapist adopts a conciliatory expression. ‘They won’t expel you, you’ll see,’ he says. ‘You’re good at making soup and playing the guitar. We’d miss you.’
I’d like to ask her whether she realizes that if she doesn’t make the grade here, there’s nowhere she’ll find help, but Radek sends her away. ‘We’ll sort it all out with her,’ he explains and leads me to his office.
He sits me down directly opposite the portrait of the great Freud. Only now do I realize that I almost succumbed to the temptation of eternal peace because I felt that life by now had nothing good to offer me anyway. I can feel the tears running from my eyes and I can’t stop them.
‘Don’t upset yourself,’ the psychotherapist says, coming over to me and stroking my hair. ‘They almost all try to escape and we always let them off the first time. Some of them abscond for a month, for instance, and then come and ask us to take them back. There are some, of course, who run away and we never see them again.’
I nod to show I understand. I’d like to ask him how satisfied he is with Jana otherwise, but what could he say, seeing that she tried to escape this very day. ‘I’m really sorry that Jana has added to your worries,’ is all I say.
‘Not at all. That’s what we’re here for. You see, everybody thinks there should be something to show after a week or two, but mostly it takes months. We’ve no right to be impatient. None of us are saints or angels.’
‘I know.’
‘Your sister and Jana herself told me you suffer from depressions.’
I nod and say that I can’t see the importance.
‘Oh, but it is important for Jana.’
‘I’ve always tried to conceal it from her.’
‘She sensed it anyway. Maybe she couldn’t identify it or explain it. But when a mother isn’t sure whether she’s happy to be alive, the child’s world loses one of its mainstays and the child then tries to escape it. What we want here is for them to learn to identify and understand what they feel and why they feel it. That’s the first step before they eventually stop looking for false means of escape.’
I nod. I realize that this is an indictment of me and I try to stop the tears streaming from my eyes.
‘I’m not blaming you for anything,’ he says, as if reading my thoughts. ‘That insecurity is something deeper and more generalized and involves us all. They,’ he adds, pointing to the figures I can glimpse moving about outside the window, ‘had no security. They had no idea what direction to take when everything around them seemed to lack any direction. They could have all sorts of possessions but possessions only increased that feeling of emptiness. They are aware of it. They aren’t riffraff as those who have learnt to conform and put up with everything think. They are simply sensitive to that emptiness which we close our eyes to. Unless we are able to fill that emptiness we won’t cure them.’
I am aware that his words apply to me too. I am also surrounded by an emptiness that I try in vain to fill.
‘Of course we engage in therapy,’ Radek adds, ‘but there is also an effort to ensure that each of them learns to realize their responsibility: to themselves and to life in general. The fact that they look after a goat, pigs and chickens is not in order to save a bit on the food bill but in order to incorporate them into some natural order. It’s to remind them that the purpose of what they do is not gratification but the benefit that accrues from the preservation of life. – But most of all we teach them patience. Sometimes you discover in a single lucid moment what you could have been looking for in vain for years. The point is not to destroy ourselves before that moment arrives.’
The mornings are already cool and misty and the air stinks. People become more prone to illness – and to toothache. The waiting room is packed all day and Eva and I don’t even have time to grab a meal. It’s tiring, but at least it’s better than being alone at home.
I am unable to put my mind to anything. I don’t open a book; I do put on music, but after a while I realize that I’m not listening to it. It feels as if I’m lost in a maze and don’t have the strength to find my way out.
I visit my ex-husband almost every other day. He is on his own too and he’s a lot lonelier than I am. And he knows he’s slowly dying. Now that he knows, he has stopped asking me anxious questions, but I can tell that he is being overtaken by fear. Who wouldn’t be afraid? I’m afraid too, although death often seems to me like redemption.
I do his shopping and cook him some tasteless diet meals of which he only eats a few mouthfuls. I peel him an orange and divide it into segments as if he were a child. I make sure he takes his tablets. When I can see that he is totally seized by anxiety, I take his skeletal hand and talk to him. I tell him about the senate elections that he couldn’t care less about any more, or about the floods in eastern Bohemia that he will never visit again, or I read him out loud a letter from Jana that he doesn’t even take in.
‘It’s odd to think,’ he said last time, ‘that the world will continue but I won’t see it any more. But where will it continue to?’
I didn’t know what to reply. I just looked into his sunken eyes and said nothing.
He remained silent too. Then after a few moments he said that he found it impossible to think that people would still be around in a thousand years, let alone a hundred thousand years. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was reaching the end and that the world would mean nothing to him any more. It seemed to him that people would be unable to survive the tempo they had set. They would destroy either the earth or themselves. Time would move forward and so would the universe but there would be no one here to perceive it, and that seemed sad to him.
He closed his eyes. He’d exhausted himself with that speech. He apologized for those pointless reflections of a dying man.
When I got home I felt a weariness unlike the weariness I used to feel from time to time. It was as if all the burdens I’d ever borne, all the disappointments I’d suffered, all the wine I’d ever drunk, all the cigarettes I’d ever smoked and all the sleepless nights all fused together. I woke up in the night feeling so tense that I couldn’t get back to sleep. I got up and went to the window. I stood there smoking as I stared into the empty street. I tried to think of something pleasant, but instead all I saw were skeletal children begging for food on the pavement; I saw fellows with my father’s face roaming the city in wheelchairs brandishing red-hot pokers. In the darkness the red-hot metal shone like a torch. I saw my grandmother standing in some enormous tiled room under a shower from which came the hiss of gas. Grandmother cried out and collapsed. There were people all around her. They cried out and collapsed. I saw a ghostly car and someone inside was throwing tiny white bags and syringes out of its window. I could see my recent boyfriend lying naked in the arms of that leggy whore and hear their cries of ecstasy. I saw thieves leaping walls and quietly scaling the walls of houses. I recalled how my own daughter had stolen jewellery and money from me. The images crowded in on me and I started to suffocate. I could hear the tramp of militiamen and see my father gripping the butt of his rifle and staring at me as if I were an enemy.
Maybe I do him an injustice; we simply had an awkward relationship.
In the last of his diaries I read how he made Jana a present for her fifth birthday.
I made her a little turbine. When you run water on it, it turns a bike dynamo and makes a little bulb light up. It took me more than a month to make it but I didn’t get the impression that Jana was very pleased with it and Kristýna even said crossly, That’s not very sensible is it, Dad? It’s a toy for a little boy, not for a girl. In the eyes of my educated daughter I will always be a fool, and she’s bringing up Jana to think it too. It made me feel miserable.
Dad wanted to give my little girl some pleasure, and maybe me too. He made a toy himself instead of buying one and I scorned him.
I wasn’t good at being humble. I didn’t know how to make peace with Dad or with my husband after he betrayed me, in the same way that I can’t come to terms with my lover’s peccadillo. I didn’t manage to make it up with Dad even when he was dying. I couldn’t make it up with him, just as I couldn’t see my heavenly Father above me.
My head aches and I feel sick. I have a migraine on the way. I take a tablet but immediately throw it up.
The next day I had a date with Lucie. It was an effort to reach out for a friend: give me your hand; speak to me!
She has a new boyfriend. Apparently he’s a tall young man who is deaf and dumb. When they are sitting together in a wine bar he writes messages to her on a little blackboard saying how happy he is, how he enjoys the wine and how he’d like to kiss her. He’s living at her place now, although she told him to keep on his bedsitter so as to have somewhere to go back to. But so far he’s still with her. She says he makes love with a passion she’s never known and when he cries out you wouldn’t even know he was deaf and dumb.
‘And aren’t you afraid of hurting him?’ I asked her.
‘Him? But he’s happy with me.’
‘And what about when he won’t be with you any more?’
She laughed. She asked about Jan. ‘Why don’t the two of you live together if you love each other? Or is it all over?’
I didn’t know what to reply. Lucie would regard one accidental – and admitted – infidelity as an inconsequential trifle. I just told her I was tired. Jana was at a drug treatment centre, my ex-husband was dying, and my Mum’s health wasn’t good, although she put on a cheerful face.
‘But I was asking about you.’
‘I haven’t enough energy for anything, let alone trying to live with someone.’
She couldn’t understand. When she falls in love she has more energy than before.
I told her everyone was different. Maybe I wasn’t in love any more. I was just disappointed.
‘And what does he want? Does he love you?’
‘I don’t know what he wants. But he’ll leave me one day anyway, even though he says he won’t.’
‘You’re crazy. Why do you think about what might happen one day?’
‘Because it will concern me. It already concerns me.’
‘Kristýna, you need to take things easier. We’re alive now, we don’t know if we’ll still be alive tomorrow.’
I go for a drink of water but I vomit it again.
I don’t know what to do.
I can’t concentrate properly or think about anything apart from how to win Kristýna back. At work I stare at the screen or sit and look at one piece of paper after another without registering what’s written on them.
I cancelled the evening when we were supposed to continue the game. Maybe partly because I didn’t feel like meeting Vera but mostly because games are the last things on my mind at present.
Jirka is the only person I’ve confided in about what happened. He said to me, ‘I never thought you’d do anything so stupid. Why did you blurt out to her something she couldn’t have even an inkling of?’
I explained to him that I was afraid Věra would ring her and spill the beans.
Jirka doubted she’d ever do anything like that. ‘That job of yours is making you paranoid. Everyone’s a potential informer. And even if she did, you could always deny it. After all, that’s what you spend all your day thinking about, and when you’re playing games. You know very well that you should never admit anything, even if they torture you.’
I told him that this wasn’t like any old interrogation. I thought it dishonourable to lie to Kristýna precisely because I love her.
‘There are other ways to demonstrate your love, you idiot.’
So I’m an idiot and I don’t know what to do.
I dreamed one night that I went to Kristýna and begged her to love me again.
She said, ‘But you let me down.’
I promised I’d never let her down again. I’d do anything she asked.
‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Delete both of them then.’
I understood that she wanted me to find the files of her father and her ex-husband and destroy them. Her request gave me a scare, because in the dream we were both very important agents and destruction of my files could have wide-ranging consequences. But I yearned for her so much that I promised to do as she asked. ‘Now can you love me again?’ I asked.
She nodded and started to strip in a brazenly lewd fashion, like a porn star. Then we made frenzied love.
When I awoke I felt sad. As if one could win someone’s love by deleting a few data from a computer’s memory.
That morning I rang Kristýna and asked how she was.
Her answers were curt and cold. Jana was fine, she was feeling tired. She’d been reading an American novel in which a girl took Prozac. For politeness’ sake, she asked how I was. I told her I was missing her. I suggested we might meet but she made excuses, saying she wasn’t in the mood and anyway she’d told me how overworked and tired she was.
Mum has asked me several times about Vera. I don’t like her asking questions about my private life, but in a weak moment I told Mum we’d split up.
‘You’re going out with someone else?’
I nodded. I was ashamed to admit I wasn’t going out with anyone at the moment.
Mum asked me to bring the new one home some time. She’d like to meet her.
I promised nothing. I couldn’t anyway. When Mum tried to get more out of me I started to shout at her that I couldn’t stand it when she interfered in my life.
Mum went into a huff and she’s not talking to me at the moment.
At work there’s a loud rumour going round that they’re either going to close us down altogether or they’ll find a way to make it impossible for us to operate. Only a few dyed-in-the-wool idealists are interested in the exposure of old crimes. And they are at best figures of fun for the rest. Ondřej told me he has decided to quit as our work seems pointless to him. It almost felt to me like betrayal. I don’t know who they could replace him with, but I know I won’t feel like working under someone I don’t know.
The day before yesterday I was alone all day at work and spent the entire time doing my horoscope on the computer. Surprisingly enough I didn’t turn up anything earth-shattering. As far as work was concerned, it made sense. I feel something similar to Ondřej and know I’m bound to leave sooner or later. But how am I to explain the calm constellation in respect of Kristýna? Either she’ll come back to me and things will continue, or our relationship wasn’t the cataclysmic event I took it to be. It started and came to an end in order to make way for what is yet to come.
Yesterday I bought a large bouquet of red roses and waited for Kristýna outside her surgery.
She was taken aback when she caught sight of me. I had the feeling she’d sooner turn round and find somewhere to hide. But she came up to me and said hello. She refused the flowers and also refused to go and sit somewhere with me. So we walked a little way along the street together, with me holding a bouquet of flowers like a jilted suitor.
I tried to explain that I had had no intention of being unfaithful to her; it had just happened. Vera had come looking for me and I didn’t have the strength at that moment to send her away. I’d never pretended to be a saint or a monk, I had simply succumbed to the moment. I agreed that I’d acted spinelessly; my father would have behaved much better in my place, but I promised I’d never behave that way again.
She told me I was maybe stupid or naïve, but she didn’t like spineless people, even though she knew from her own experience that most men would have acted the same way. And one certainly couldn’t trust the promises of spineless individuals, of most men, in other words. She knew she’d never be able to trust me again, and what was the point of love if it wasn’t based on trust?
I asked her if she would have loved me if I’d denied everything.
‘I’d have been able to tell anyway,’ she said. ‘And then I’d have regarded you as a liar on top of everything else.’
I’m not a liar, I’m a idiot. So now I’m on my own.
Whenever the phone rings I get a stabbing pain next to my heart. I’m frightened to breathe until the caller speaks.
On the way home from surgery I see children running out of school and I try not to think about the fact that my daughter isn’t studying and I don’t even know whether she’ll return to school or whether she’ll even manage to return to normal life. But so far she hasn’t tried to run away again. On the contrary, she wrote me two letters in which she sounded repentant and preached to me about how we did things all wrong in the past. You were terribly impatient with yourself, Mum, so you were unsatisfied with yourself and you couldn’t love yourself. I hear the therapist’s voice in what she writes. But maybe she’s right. Maybe they’re both right. I ought to be more patient with other people and myself.
Towards evening the phone rings and an unfamiliar female voice comes on the line. The name she gives means nothing to me either. But it isn’t someone from the drug treatment centre. It turns out to be my ex-husband’s neighbour. She apologizes and informs me that the postwoman tried unsuccessfully to deliver a registered letter to him. ‘Your husband doesn’t happen to be in hospital again, does he?’
It’s a long time since my husband was my husband, I don’t tell her, and I don’t know whether he might have been taken to hospital. But if he was, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it; nobody would inform me.
‘But someone in the house would have been sure to see an ambulance if they’d taken him away,’ the neighbour assures me. ‘I just wondered if you could take the trouble to come over and unlock the flat in case something has happened to him.’
‘But I don’t have any keys.’
‘You don’t? But I thought …’
‘You should have called his last wife. She’d be more likely than me to have them.’
‘I don’t know her. I’ve never heard about her. He only spoke about you. And I’ve also seen you here.’
So my ex-husband was talking to neighbours about me. Whatever could he have told them?
‘So what am I to do, if you don’t have any keys?’
‘I don’t know whether anyone else has a set. I’ve never asked him.’ I’ve never wanted the keys to his flat, even though he offered me a set a long time ago.
‘Oughtn’t we to call the police? After all, he has been very ill, as you know.’
I promise to call the hospital where he was last treated. And if he’s not there, I’ll let her know.
‘But maybe if you could come over, doctor. You are a doctor and probably the person who is nearest …’
My ex-husband isn’t in the hospital and they have no news of him.
I dropped by to see him three days ago. He was very weak. He drank a little sweetened tea, but refused to eat anything. ‘I won’t be around much longer,’ he announced. ‘I know it, but I don’t have the strength to fight for my life any more. And in fact it’s all the same if one dies now or in a few days’ time.’
I felt sorry for him. I knew how much he liked life and winning. I sat down by him, took his gaunt hand and stroked it.
He burst into tears. Then he said he was sorry for how he’d treated us. ‘I was a selfish fool. I left you both in the lurch, but now I’ve paid for it.’
‘Don’t distress yourself. There is nothing that can be done to change it now anyway.’
‘Do you think you could forgive me?’
I told him that the pain had already gone away and that I was grateful to him for all the nice times we had had together. And I was also grateful to him for Jana. And it was not for me to forgive anything. Only God could forgive.
‘God! I’ve been thinking about him,’ he said, ‘these past few days. God isn’t what people thought him to be. God is time, or time is God. He created the sun, the earth and life. He is eternal, infinite and incomprehensible.’
I walk up to his flat and try ringing the bell. But there is no sound from inside. The neighbour who phoned me opens her door. ‘Do you think he’s inside, doctor?’
As if I knew.
‘Maybe he’s just had a turn and isn’t able to come to the door. He’s not been going out at all lately.’
I tell her that the best thing would be to call the police.
‘You’re his neighbour. You know more about him than I do.’
She asks me to accompany her and stay there with her. I am a doctor after all, and the mother of that lovely little girl.
So I sit here in a stranger’s flat while the neighbour calls the police. I sit here and know that it would be wrong to get up and leave now. The woman makes me a coffee and when I ask if I may smoke, she brings me an ashtray. There’s nothing we could have a conversation about so instead she tells me about my ex-husband, how he took care of the grass in front of the building, how he once helped her change a tyre on her car, and while he was still fit, he would always help her upstairs with her shopping.
He never helped me up the stairs with the shopping. He didn’t want to have a spoiled wife.
There is no sign of the police. The neighbour rings again and they tell her they have no one available at the moment because they have had to go and deal with a case of mugging. We are to be patient.
Even the police are asking me to be patient now.
We drink another coffee. The neighbour offers me a pastry, but I’m not hungry. She asks me whether I mind if she puts the television on.
I don’t mind moving pictures, even though I don’t watch them at home.
I’m only half a doctor, as I always say, but even if I didn’t know the first thing about medicine, I’d know that the man in the flat next door will never come to the door again.
Eventually two policemen turn up, and they have a locksmith with them. They want to know who we are and if we’re sure there’s someone inside.
We’re not sure but it is safe to assume there is.
It’s a safety lock, so it will have to be drilled out. The locksmith wants to know who will pay him for the job.
The neighbour looks at me – after all I am his former wife – and I nod.
The older of the policemen has another try at ringing the bell, and lets it ring with bureaucratic perseverance. Then he lets the locksmith take over.
It only takes a few minutes to drill out the lock and then the door opens and I catch sight of the famous certificates hanging on the wall of the front hall. No one feels like going in.
‘Maybe you ought to, doctor,’ the older of the policemen suggests.
I open the sitting-room door and I see him straightaway. He is half-lying, half-sitting, supported by one of the couch cushions. He looks like a wax cast of himself. My first, only and now forever erstwhile husband. His dead eyes seem to look straight at me. I really didn’t think I’d be the one to close his eyelids.
Luckily I didn’t get my head shaved, they only shaved Monika because she led me on. I had to chop a whole wagonload of wood and I could forget any leave passes. And even so they all acted as if they were showing us mercy by letting us go on rotting here. Monika cried over her lovely black hair every evening when she took off her headscarf and saw how they’d turned her into a skinhead.
‘We were stupid cows to have stopped in the stupid pub,’ she kept on saying over and over again. ‘If only we’d gone straight to my aunt’s where we could already be by now.’
‘Or in clink,’ I told her. ‘If the cops had nabbed us God knows where they’d have shoved us.’ And in spite of the wood-chopping it’s quite cool here sometimes.
Anyway the boys didn’t let me do it all, particularly Pavel. When he was going past he gawped at me for a moment and then said, ‘Give it here,’ and he took the axe off me. He had hands like a bear, if a bear had hands, and he chopped more in a minute than I would have in a fortnight. I expect he was a bit in love with me, because he was totally nice to me and when we were doing mutual assessment in the group, he kept saying how great I was ‘cos I was cool and I made fantastic potato soup and ‘cos I was a gas. When I was feeding the sausage dogs in the sty the other day he came up behind me and put his arms round me and wanted to kiss me. But I was scared because sex is strictly banned here, the same as every kind of dope. I would have quite liked him; he’s a quiet sort of guy, not one of those bigmouths that are always rabbiting on, and when he started doing magic tricks he had one of those David Copperfield smiles. He made me take a card and he guessed it was the king of hearts. ‘He deliberately planted it for you, you daft cow,’ Monika said, ‘because the king of hearts means love.’
The other day this little guy came that Radek had asked to give us a talk – ‘for a change’. The little guy didn’t talk to us about dope but about fertilizers and all the stuff that the rain washes into the rivers and then we drink the toxins or use them to make soup. He was also big into dry latrines and thought they were the future of mankind. I asked him how it was supposed to work in an eighteen-storey tower block, but he didn’t bat an eyelid and said that the tower blocks would all fall down soon and anyway dry latrines can be built anywhere, all it needed was to arrange for our shit to be carted away: he called it ‘excrement’. When he left we were completely gobsmacked the whole evening. We hadn’t had such a gas in ages. Radek was pissed off’cos we didn’t take it serious enough and said that if we realized all the things that go into our water we’d be crying and we ought to give a thought to where we’re all heading.
Mum sent me a letter in which she writes that she and Gran were missing me and she hoped I’d stick at it and not run away again. She also says she’s found out something that she isn’t sure she should even tell me, but she did anyway. Apparently she’s discovered she’s got a half-brother – which makes him my half-uncle, I suppose – and he’s in a wheelchair because he dived in the river and banged his head on a rock or something. It was a real shock for me. She’d read about it in some old letters of Granddad’s; she didn’t have a clue about it before then and Gran still hasn’t and Mum says I’m not to mention it in front of her. She says the reason she’s telling me is so I should realize how marvellous it is that I can run around and that I’m totally fit, and it’s up to me what I make of myself and all the tosh about how I mustn’t destroy myself. I found that rich coming from her, who is systematically destroying herself, as Dad used to say.
That letter fairly knocked me out. It made me realize that people are vile by nature, as Monika says. I remembered how Dad ran off to live with some fucking beanpole and then she left him and then Mum finds some half-brother of hers in a wheelchair. Maybe one day I’ll discover some crippled half-brother that they didn’t tell me about, except that I won’t find out for another hundred years. And I’m vile too: I didn’t tell Mum that I nicked her chain and that ring, or that I was shagging boys.
And I also realized I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’ll do when I finally get out of here, because I flunked at school and now I’d even fail in the subjects I just squeezed by in because anything that accidentally got stuck in my memory has been well and truly dislodged since I’ve been here. Life is simply horrendous.
I was suddenly in a crisis and I had this immense urge for a fix or to at least get drunk, even though getting drunk never really appealed to me. I told Radek about it and he said my crisis was natural and was an obvious sign that I wasn’t completely cured yet. He said it would be amazing if I didn’t have cravings like that from time to time. And he praised me for not being afraid to talk about it even though he doesn’t usually praise anyone, at most he makes a little grin. He also told me to be patient; patience was the important thing and also looking around me and discovering the nice things in life. That didn’t do much to cheer me up, because when I looked around me I couldn’t see anything that was particularly nice.
But then that evening, out of the blue, Radek came to me and told me to come outside with him for a moment. So I went. We just climbed a little way above the farm from where there’s a fantastic view of the entire landscape, with Blatná on one side and those hills that are almost mountains above it and on the other side the Temelín nuclear power station. The moon happened to be shining and I imagined that those towers were like space rockets ready to fly to it. But Radek wasn’t looking at the scenery, he was looking up at the sky and he said, ‘That’s a lot of stars, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You can see them fantastically from here.’
Radek said there are billions of billions of them, but most likely they are all without life. Life is the biggest miracle and it doesn’t matter whether you believe God created it or whether it just evolved, it’s still the biggest miracle that has ever happened. And if you don’t have respect for that miracle inside you, you can’t have respect for the life around you, and the tragedy is, he said, that people don’t have respect for themselves and destroy themselves and everything around them. Our job is to carry that miracle of life forward.
At that moment I remembered Dad showing me Saturn and its rings and telling me about the Big Bang. But Dad talked to me about the stars so that I would learn about them and he looked at me sternly and I was afraid he’d want me to repeat after him how narrow the rings are. I realized that Radek wasn’t talking about the stars at all, but about me. It struck me that it was a shame he wasn’t my dad, but then he said, ‘Your mum called a little while ago to say that your dad died.’ And he stroked my hair and told me to be brave.
We stood there a bit longer. I couldn’t say anything. Then I ran down the hill but at one point I tripped and fell into the grass. I didn’t know what to do and I started to pull the grass up by the roots and stuff it in my mouth until I almost suffocated.