No Saints or Angels

CHAPTER ONE

1

I killed my husband last night. I used a dental drill to bore a hole in his skull. I waited to see if a dove would fly out but out came a big black crow instead.

I woke up tired, or more exactly without any appetite for life. My will to live diminishes as I get older. Did I ever have a great lust for life? I'm not sure, but I certainly used to have more energy. And expectations too. And you live so long as you have something to expect.

It's Saturday. I have time to dream and grieve.

I crawl off my lonely divan. Jana and I carried its twin down to the cellar ages ago. The cellar is still full of junk belonging to my ex-husband, Karel: bright red skis, a bag of worn-out tennis balls, and a bundle of old school textbooks. I should have thrown it all out long ago, but I couldn't bring myself to. I stood a rubber plant where the other divan used to be. You can't hug a rubber plant and it won't caress you, but it won't two-time you either.

It's half past seven. I ought to spend a bit of time with my teenage daughter. She needs me. Then I must dash off to my Mum's. I promised to help her sort out Dad's things. The things don't matter, but she's all on her own and spends her time fretting. She needs to talk about Dad but has no one to talk about him with. You'd think he was a saint, the way she talks about him, but from what I remember, he only ordered her around or ignored her.

As my friend Lucie says, you even miss tyranny once you're used to it. And that doesn't only apply to private life.

I don't miss tyranny. I killed my ex-husband with a dental drill last night even though I feel no hatred towards him. I'm sorry for him more than anything else. He's lonelier than I am and his body is riddled with a fatal disease. But then, aren't we all being gnawed at inside? Life is sad apart from the odd moments when love turns up.

I always used to ask why I was alive. Mum and Dad would never give me a straight answer. I expect they didn't know themselves. But who does?

You have to live once you've been born. No, that's not true. You can take your life any time, like my grandfather Antonín, or my Aunt Venda, or Virginia Woolf or Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn didn't kill herself, though; they only said she did in order to cover the tracks of her killer. She apparently took fifty pills of some barbiturate or other even though a quarter of that amount would have been enough. Her murderers were thorough. I myself carry a tube of painkillers; not to kill myself with though, but in case I get a migraine. I'd be capable of taking my life, except that I hate corpses. It was always an awful strain for me in the autopsy room, and I preferred not to eat the day before.

Why should I make the people I love deal with my corpse?

They'll have to one day anyway. Who will it be? Janinka, most likely, poor thing.

I oughtn't to call her Janinka, she doesn't like it. It sounds too childish to her ears. I called my ex-husband Kajinek when I visited him recently on the oncology ward. I thought it might be a comfort to him in his pain to hear the name I used to call him years ago. But he objected, saying it was the name of a hired killer who recently got a life sentence.

We've all got life sentences, I didn't say to him.

I can feel my early-morning depression taking hold of me. I had one glass of wine too many yesterday. I won't try to count the

cigarettes. Lucie maintains I don't have depressions — I'm just 'moody'.

Lucie and I got to know each other at medical school, but whereas I passed anatomy at the second attempt, she never mastered it. She dropped out and took up photography and was soon better off than those of us who stayed the course. She and I always hit it off together, most likely because we differ in almost every conceivable way. She's a tiny little thing and her legs are so thin you'd think they'd snap in a breeze. I've never known her to be sad.

What do photographers know about depression? Mind you, she advises me quite rightly to give up smoking and restrict myself to three small glasses of wine a day, though she drinks as much as she likes. I'll give everything up the day I reach fifty. It's awful to think that I'm less than five years away from that fateful day, that dreadful age. That's if I'll still be alive in four years and eleven months' time. Or tomorrow for that matter.

The best cure for depression is activity. At the surgery I have no time to be depressed. I have no time to think about myself. But today's Saturday: an open day for dreams and grief.

I peek into Jana s room and see she is peacefully asleep. Last year she still had long hair, longer than mine, and mine reaches a third of the way down my back. Now she's had it cut short and looks almost like a boy. The stud in her ear twinkles, but on the pillow alongside her head lies a rag doll by the name of Bimba that she's had since she was seven and always carries around with her. After she'd wriggled out of her jeans last night she left them lying on the floor, and her denim jacket lies in a crumpled heap on the armchair, one sleeve inside out. She hangs out with punks of both sexes because she says they don't give a damn about property or careers. The last time we went to the theatre she insisted we take the tram. She wants to do her own thing, but what does it mean to do your own thing in a world of billions of people? In the end you always end up getting attached to something or someone.

There's an open book on the chair by her bed. It's not long since she read fairy stories and she loved to hear all about foreign countries, animals and the stars. She was lovely to talk to. She always seemed to me wise for her age and to have a particular understanding of other people. She'd generally sense when I was feeling sad and why, and do her best to comfort me. Now I get the feeling she hardly notices me or simply regards me as someone who feeds and minds her. I tell myself it's because of her age, but I'm frightened for her all the same. We were watching a TV programme about drugs and I asked her whether she'd been approached by pushers on the street. 'Of course,' she answered, almost in amazement. Naturally she had told them to get lost. I told her that if I ever found out she was taking anything of the sort I'd kill her. 'Of course, Mum, and you'd feed me to the vultures!' We both laughed, although the laughter stuck in my throat.

I close her door and go into the bathroom.

For a moment I look at myself in the hostile mirror. No, the mirror's not hostile, it's dispassionately objective; it's time that's hostile.

My former and so far only husband once tried to explain to me that time is as old as the universe. I told him I didn't understand. Time couldn't be old, could it? For one thing it was a masculine "word.

Time was feminine in German and Latin, and neuter in English, he told me. He was simply trying to explain that time began along with the universe. It hadn't existed before. There had been nothing at all, not even time.

I told him how awfully clever and learned he was, instead of telling him he should get a sense of humour.

I couldn't care less what happened billions of years ago and whether time began or not. I only care about my lifetime, and so far time has taken love away and given me wrinkles. It lies in wait for me on every corner. It rushes ahead and heeds none of my pleas.

It heeds no one's pleas. Time alone is fair and just.

Justice is often cruel.

Still, time has been fairly good to me. So far. My hair is not quite as thick as when I was twenty, and I have to use chemicals to stop the world seeing that I'm going grey. My golden locks — one time I wove them in a braid that reached below my waist. But I still carry myself as well as I did then. My breasts have sagged a bit but they're still large. Not that there is much point in humping them around with me any more — apart from men's enjoyment. Selfish bastards. But nothing will save me from time. They say that injections of subcutaneous fat can get rid of wrinkles round the mouth, but I don't like the idea of it. I don't have too many wrinkles yet. Just around the eyes. My former husband used to call them sky blue, but what colour is the sky? The sky is changeable and its colour depends on the place, the wind and the time of day, whereas my eyes are permanently blue, morning and night, happy or sad.

When I step out of the shower I'm shivering all over and it's not from cold. Even though it is already April, I still have the heating on in the flat. I am shivering from loneliness — what shakes me is the weeping I conceal, weeping over another day when time will simply drain away, a river without water, just a dried riverbed full of sharp stones — and I'm barefoot and naked, my dressing gown lies on the floor and no one looks at my breasts. Abandoned and uncaressed, milk will never flow from them again.

From the bedroom behind me comes a roar of what is now regarded as music and what my little girl idolizes: Nirvana or Alice in Chains or Screaming Trees, heavy metal, hard rock, grunge, I can't keep track of it any more. The time when music like that excited me is past. It's true that when the chair in the surgery happens to fall vacant, Eva dispels the quiet by tuning into some radio station, but I don't notice it. My assistant is scared of silence, like almost everyone these days. But I like peace and quiet, I yearn for a moment of silence within myself, the sort of silence

in which I might hear the rush of my own blood, hear the tears roll down my cheeks, and hear the flames when they suddenly come close.

But that sort of silence is to be found only in the depths of the grave, such as in the wall of the village cemetery on the edge of Rožmitál where they buried Jan Jakub Ryba. He cut his throat when he could no longer support his seven children. His poor wife! But in that sort of silence you don't hear anything because the blood and tears have stopped and Master Ryba was never to hear again from the nearby church the words of his folkish Christmas Mass: 'Master, hey! Rise I say! Look out at the sky — splendour shines on high. .'

For me blood, unlike tears, means life, and when I bleed from a wound in my gum I try to stop it as quickly as possible.

2

I've given my daughter her breakfast and I've reminded her she has homework to do. I'm dashing out to see Mum. Jana wants to know when I'll be home, and when I tell her I'll be back around noon, she seems happy enough.

The street is chock-a-block with cars on weekdays but it's not so hard to cross on a Saturday morning. And there's not such a stench in the air. I actually think I can smell the elderflower from the garden in front of the house.

The houses in our street are sexless, having been built at the end of the thirties. They lack any particular style. It was the time when they started building these rabbit hutches, except that in those days they were built of bricks instead of precast concrete, and most of them had five or six floors instead of thirteen. Mum used to tell me how in summer before the war people would take chairs out in front of the house and sit and chat. In those days this was the city limits and people had more time to talk. Little did

they suspect that one day normal human conversation would be replaced by TV chat shows.

They weren't afraid of each other yet, I didn't tell Mum. During the war they were afraid to speak their minds because it could cost them their lives. But Mum knows that all too well from her own experience. People were afraid during the Communist years too, although Mum wasn't affected so much, thanks to Dad. What happens to people who spend their lives afraid to voice their opinions? They stop thinking, most likely. Or they get used to empty talk.

During the war Mum's life was at risk, even though she was only a little girl. Her mother — Grandma Irena, whom Mum never talked about much — was murdered in a gas chamber by the Germans. So were Grandma's parents, her brothers and sisters and her nieces. Mum didn't tell me about it until I was almost an adult. All I knew before then was that Grandma died in the war. And it was a long time before Mum told me she was Jewish. Mum wasn't sent to the camps but spent the war with her father. Even so, throughout the war she had a little suitcase packed ready with essential things just in case, as one never knew. 'They only gave my mother an hour to pack her things,' she told me.

Mum's father, Grandpa Antonín, had a furniture shop. To avoid being Aryanized, my grandfather made a show of divorcing my grandmother as soon as the Germans invaded. He saved the business — though not for long, because the Communists took it away from him. But by then it was too late to save his wife.

Mum never forgave him that trade-off and left home as soon as she was eighteen. Two years later she got married. She deliberately married a Communist, who wasn't a Jew or a Christian but believed religion was the opium of the people.

Grandpa Antonín also never forgave himself that divorce. When the Communists ordered him to leave the shop they had confiscated from him, he saw no reason to go on living. He went to the storeroom, sat down in a brand-new Thonet armchair and shot himself. But that was long before I was born.

Mum lives not far away and I can walk to her place through streets of villas. On the way I pass the villa where my favourite writer, Karel Čapek, used to live. He was a good man and a wizard with words. I stop by the fence as if hoping that his free spirit might somehow still be hovering here so many years after his death. No sign of a spirit hovering but the trees have grown up here. They must have grown since he died because they were no longer young when I first saw them. When I was born that green-fingered writer was already fifteen years dead. My darling, he wrote to the only real love of his life, please learn to be happy, for God's sake. That's all I wish for you, and apart from your love you can't give me anything more beautiful than your happiness.

That's something Karel would never have written to me, even though he claimed to love me, in the days when perhaps he really did still love me.

Why do good people die so young, while scoundrels manage to keep going for years?

Good people suffer more because they take the sufferings of others to heart. I don't know if I'm a good person, but I've had more than my share of suffering.

I wend my way through the narrow streets until I reach the street that's been known as Ruská for as long as I remember. The name has survived all regimes, unlike many other street names. Here, in a two-bedroomed flat, in an apartment house with a miniature garden in the front and one only slightly bigger at the back, I came into the world. On the other side of the street there are villas, and between them and the street there is a strip of grass with two rows of lime trees. In those days the treetops were full of the chatter of wagtails and the song of flycatchers, warblers and finches — which was drowned from time to time by the insistent blare of a siren as an ambulance sped past on its way to the nearby hospital. There is only cheap furniture in the flat, the sort made since the war, but at least it's real wood. There are no pictures on the walls. Dad used to have a coloured portrait of Lenin above the

table, and Mum had a framed tinted photograph of her mother from the period when Grandma Irena was a student. In that picture Grandma apparently resembles her famous contemporary Mary Pickford, with her pronounced chin and nose. Her hair in the photo is strawberry blonde. I have never asked my mother whether my grandmother really had auburn hair, but I hope so, as I like redheads.

Mum's hair has already lost its red colour. It used to be strawberry blonde like mine, but now it has turned white. She still wears black even though it's six weeks since Dad died. Grieving should last at least a year — that's something I remember from psychology lectures. Do I feel grief? No, no more than usual. It's as if Dad didn't belong to me, as if he were part of another world. No, it was the same world, but a different time. Parents tend to live in a different time — some of them, at least. But there's no reason why they should; after all, what are twenty or thirty years? That's what my one and only husband would say. Just an insignificant moment compared to cosmic time.

'What am I going to do with all those things?' Mum laments. She opens a wardrobe stuffed with old clothes that stink of mothballs and I discover to my horror that the vile grey uniform of the People's Militia is still hanging there. He didn't even throw that away. As if he wanted the shame to survive him. Es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben. That was written by an author Dad never read. I used to read him because he was virtually banned and because he tended to be sad and lonely too. And he was scared of his father and the future. Maybe he was also scared because he was a Jew like my Grandma Irena, who died horribly in the gas chamber ten years before I was born. He would have ended up there too if he hadn't died so young. I wonder whether Grandma was scared of the future too. Was she able to imagine it? Could anyone imagine it, in fact?

'Do you think you could make use of any of it?'

'But, Mum, there's no man living at our place.'

'I know, but maybe you could get it altered.'

'Yes, that one in particular,' I say pointing at the uniform.

'That's all you ever see. Dad was already that way inclined. He didn't alter overnight like a lot of others. . He had that made for our wedding,' she says indicating a black suit whose origins I've heard about a hundred times already.

'I know.'

'It's one hundred per cent wool. Wool was very hard to come by in those days.' Mum sorts through the suits and frets. She can't just throw them out, can she? But she doesn't know anyone who might need them. I sense behind it a reproach that I'm on my own. If only I'd managed to hold on to my man as she had, right up to the last, even if it meant being made a slave, then I could bring him home a caseload of old, worn-out, useless rags.

I tell her I'll help her sort the clothes and what is reusable I'll take to a charity shop or to a homeless shelter.

'And what about the uniform?' she asks. 'Do you think a museum might take it?'

'They're bound to have wagonloads of uniforms like it. And just one would be enough for posterity.' I imagine the display case: 'Uniform of the People's Militia, mailed fist of the working class. Donated from the bequest of Alois Horák.'

'So what shall we do with it?' Mum asks.

'Cut it up for rags. You should have done it long ago.'

I happened to be born at a moment when Alois Horák and others of his ilk had been put on alert. Naturally — it was the day God's little messenger finally rid the world of the Soviet tyrant. Mum told me how, when they were carrying me screaming out of the labour ward, she looked out the window and was amazed to see a black flag slowly being raised on the flagpole. Dad first came to visit Mum three days later. He was wearing his uniform, and now and then he would start crying. He asked my mother as she showed him the baby, in other words me, 'What are we going to do now? How will we live?' His desperate question had nothing

to do with how he'd live now he'd become a father, but how he'd live now the tyrant was dead and he was left an orphan. It was a slight against me and it was only my third day in this world about which I suspected nothing. He was a master at slighting others or making them feel guilty.

'Kristýna! He'd never get over it.'

'Oh, yes he would,' I say, but don't add that he's dead and gone and it's time she stopped deferring to him in slavish fashion. But Mum is only using him as an excuse: she'd never destroy anything while it could still be used. The war had left its mark on her. When she had to buy herself new clothes she always felt it as an offence against her relations who died. I didn't survive it to doll myself up! is something I heard her say on countless occasions, so I always felt guilty any time I indulged in something new.

'They wrote in the papers,' Mum says suddenly, as if she'd just recalled, 'that the skinheads had a rally and were shouting Sieg Heil. And the National Security just let them.' Mum still hasn't got used to the fact that we've had a normal police force for the past nine years — or at least we call them normal.

'Don't worry, nobody's going to resurrect Hitler.'

'It's not myself I'm worried about, but the two of you. Goodness knows what they're up to.'

I stroke her hair. 'Don't worry about us. The world has changed.' Just recently she's talked about feelings of anxiety she must have had since she was small. I never suspected it because she never let on. On the contrary, she was always full of life, and worries never got her down. For years she worked in the municipal housing office in charge of maintenance. It meant she came into contact with lots of workmen and from time to time she would take me along with her. And although I tended to be miserable among strangers I liked the way she was able to have a laugh and a chat with them. And at home, too, particularly when Dad was out at some meeting, which he was almost all the time, she used to laugh at things that would have most likely irritated my father.

She takes me over to a cupboard that is full of books. 'And what about these?'

'There's no need to get rid of the books, is there? The moths aren't going to harm them.'

'His books? I'm never going to read them, am I?'

Yes, of course: books by the Soviet luminaries, their covers as boringly grey as the language they were written in; a red star above the title, symbolizing the blood shed on their account.

'Oh yes, and there are all sorts of letters and things,' Mum remembers. 'I can't bring myself to sort them out. And there are some letters from you.'

I can't recall ever writing to Dad. But I expect I did. Maybe from Pioneer camp. 'They can stay here, can't they?'

'And loads of speeches and notes.'

Dad trained as a locksmith, but he didn't repair many locks in his life. He was in charge of political indoctrination and was also a paid official, so he had to give speeches. I never heard or read any of his speeches but I can well imagine them, having heard plenty of others. They were all the same. Cold grey tedium that nevertheless managed to arouse dread because the spectre of that bloody star hovered above it.

'I've wrapped up these things for you. I thought you might like to find out something about your dad. That he wasn't as awful as you imagine.'

'Mummy, what could I possibly find out? I knew him for forty-five years. Every year on my birthday he'd light a candle in memory of a murderer he never set eyes on. And he'd buy a white carnation to put in front of the bust of him that he had on his desk. He bought me flowers about three times in my life. And of course they had to be carnations because they were sort of comradely.'

'It's ages since he did anything like that.'

'Really?' I won't tell her that it was probably because he begrudged the money for the candle and the carnation. In recent years he didn't even send me a flower. In fact he didn't even visit

on my birthday; he just telephoned to wish me lots of success. I don't know what he had in mind. Whether some dazzling career in dentistry, or a splendid marriage, or first place in the competition for the most beautiful elderly woman. Nothing, most likely. For him success was happiness. There was no love lost between us. There was a time when we used to argue, though we even stopped that. But we didn't start to like each other. Lack of affection for one's father would seem to run in our family. I wouldn't say he was never right. He tried to talk me out of marrying my first and last twice-divorced husband. 'He's a man without ideals,' he warned me.

Better none than yours, I thought.

I've now discovered that people without ideals are like machines. Machines for churning out words, making money and love, degrading others and exalting themselves, machines for supporting their own egos. Dad had ideals, I'll grant him that. Maybe he really did believe that with his Party in power nobody would go hungry and justice would be established in the world. It was such a blind belief that he couldn't see all the injustices being committed around him. He himself tried to lead an honourable and even abstemious life. He had just one suit for weekdays and the famous wedding suit. When it was cold he would wear the same old beret he'd had since I was a child. He was terse with Mum, but he never left her and I don't think he was ever unfaithful to her. I don't remember ever getting a hug from him, but from time to time he would tell me stories about wise Lenin or Young Pioneers who loved their parents and their homeland. Yes, they were the phrases he'd use, but at the time I was just happy that he sat down by me and spared me a bit of his time. It was only later, after the Soviets invaded and he welcomed them as saviours not occupiers, that I became antagonistic towards everything he praised or believed in.

Almost as soon as I got into medical school — partly due, no doubt, to my class background — I started to let my hair down

and sit around in pubs, drinking, smoking and having a succession of boyfriends. I did it to spite Dad, even though he never knew the whole story, and I felt a sense of satisfaction at going my own way.

'You shouldn't talk about him that way, Kristýna,' my mother scolds me. 'He never meant anything badly. Stalin, or rather the Russians, saved his life. If they'd come a day later he'd have been dead.'

'Or so he'd have you believe.'

'No, that was the way it was. He showed me photos of him taken when he got back from the camp. He looked like a skeleton. A skeleton covered in skin.'

'But that didn't stop him helping set up concentration camps here.'

'Your father never set up any concentration camp.'

'Maybe not, but his Party did.'

'Your father fought the Germans,' she said. 'That's something you should respect him for at least, seeing you know what they did to my mother.'

It's inconsiderate of me to torment her with this sort of talk. Even in the days when I tried to spite Dad by my behaviour, she was the only one I hurt. Dad would only have noticed something that affected him personally, or his career.

I sit down by Mum and take her hand. 'You must stop thinking about him all the time.'

'Who am I supposed to think about, then?'

'You've got us, haven't you?'

Us is me and Lida, my songstress sister who lives down at Tábor and only visits Mum four times a year. Of course there's also Jana, her sweet little granddaughter, who has started to grow wild recently. She sang at her grandfather's funeral — not the 'Internationale', as he'd probably have wanted, but the spiritual 'Twelve Gates to the City'. And me — tired, worn-out and empty: a vase without flowers.

I take the box containing Dad's writings and give Mum a hug and a kiss.

The box is wrapped in Christmas paper and tied with a gold ribbon. It weighs at least ten pounds.

3

It's not yet midday and I'm home again. I rushed to be in time to cook my daughter's lunch, although at her age she could and should be making lunch for her mother.

From her small bedroom comes the sound of drumming. She has a set of two drums and practises on them to the distress of the neighbours. She also strums the guitar fairly well, plays the recorder and has a nice singing voice. Since she got into grammar school she has stopped going to Scouts, but instead she sings and plays in a band called Sons of the Devil. Not long ago she invited me to come and hear them play. They were performing at a disco in a pub outside Prague. The pub was horrible and what they played depressed and disgusted me by turns. She asked me afterwards how I liked it. I didn't tell her it was the sick music of lost souls. I just praised her faultless delivery.

Where are the days when she'd skateboard innocently round the paths of the little local park with a crowd of other kids, terrifying peaceful pensioners? They don't say good things about her at school. She failed her mid-year maths exam and just scraped through in chemistry. And yet she inherited a talent for those subjects and not so long ago she was coaching her classmates. But now she's lost interest. She says she wants to concentrate on music. And to her mind all a musician needs to know is music.

I ought to ban her strumming and drumming, and her slacking. But after all I had a yen to play the violin and my teacher said I had talent, and were it not for my lost violin, or rather for Dad and

his pigheadedness, I might have had a different career, instead of standing by a dentist's chair eight hours a day.

I peep into her room. She is sitting in just a nightie on her unmade bed. Her jeans still lie in a heap on the floor amidst a pile of paper — sheet music most likely. The book that was lying on the chair this morning has sincefallen to the floor and on top of it lies a half-eaten slice of bread; my daughter must have gone to the trouble of making a trip to the kitchen. 'Is that all you've been doing while I've been out?'

'So what? It's Saturday, Mum.' She seems to be in a great mood. She puts down the drumsticks and announces that she has a date with Katya and Marta in the afternoon.

'With those punks?'

She nods.

'Jana, I don't like the crowd you hang around with.'

'They're great friends.'

'Great in what way?'

She shrugs and says uncertainly, 'All ways.' She doesn't say how they spend their time convincing each other that it's right to scorn school, work and people who waste their time working, particularly parents. Their parents admittedly maintain them, but apart from that they're an obstacle to them living the way they'd like to.

She prefers to change the subject. 'Do you think lunch will be ready in time?'

'Are you in a big hurry?'

'I'd like to leave by two. Or rather, I have to.'

'And homework?'

'But Mum, it's Saturday.'

'Yes, you've told me already. When do you mean to be back?'

'But I haven't gone out yet!'

And I'd be happier if you didn't go out at all, I don't tell her. Because I'd sooner have you where I can see you. 'You ought to visit your dad.'

'Sure. I'll go and see him some time.'

'You shouldn't put it off. What are you making that face for?'

'I'm amazed that you of all people should care.'

'Dad's in a bad way.'

'Things were never in a good way with him, were they?'

'I'm talking about his health. You do realize he had a difficult operation?'

'OK, I'll look in on him tomorrow maybe. And I'll steal a rose from the park for him.'

I tell her irritably to save her witticisms for something else.

'Yeah, you're right. That was tasteless of me. I'll buy him a rose or maybe I won't buy him anything, but I'll definitely go round to see him tomorrow.' And she starts to strum the guitar.

That's what she's like these days. She sits there like the Queen of Sheba and hasn't lifted a finger since morning. On the other hand she has driven the neighbours crazy with her drumming, taken the rise out of her ill father and is now hassling me to get lunch ready. On account of this selfish creature I'm run off my feet from morning till night. 'Get yourself dressed straightaway! Then after you've tidied up here you can kindly scrape the potatoes.'

She puts on an obliging or even guilty face. 'For you anything, Mummy.'

I know it's just an act, this deference and cordiality. She's just playing the embodiment of filial love so I'll leave at last and stop disturbing her indolence. She deserves a good hiding; from time to time, at least. She needs a father to keep her in line. I won't slap her. I was never able to spank her even when she was small. Now it's too late: for her father, whose only concern these days is his illness, and for her: she'll soon be sixteen and no manner of beating would set her on the right track now.

'I'll come and see to the potatoes right away,' she calls after me.

4

My little girl made tracks precisely at two. I ought to have kept her here and insisted she did her homework before leaving. Of course school isn't important. Let her fail, but at least let her know why. Why she failed or more properly what she's living for. But then which of us knows what we're living for? If I were sure myself I'd try to guide her, though I suspect I wouldn't manage.

Not long ago she was a good, well-behaved little girl with a pigtail. Slim, beautiful and obliging: even my father liked her. Once, when she had only just learnt to walk, she offered to go for a stroll with him; he walked through the park at her side like an obedient dog. It had rained earlier and she led him round the puddles and made sure he didn't get his paws muddy.

She made a terrible job of scraping the potatoes. Half of the peel stayed on and she left the eyes in. I served them to her just as they were. But she doesn't even notice such trivial details.

She promised to be back by midnight. I'll wait up for her and insist she gives me a report on how she spent the rest of the day.

She flees a home of which there's only half left. And half can be worse than none at all.

I've driven myself for the last six years to support her and have tried to compensate for the missing half, to somehow make up for the fact that I wasn't able to hold on to her father. But, even so, she used to complain from time to time and ask me where he had

gone and why he didn't come home any more. She would drown er sorrow in tears until it got into my bloodstream and when those tears reached my hurt they burnt like salt in a wound. When I'd consoled her and put her to bed, her lamentations would go on growing inside me and I would weep late into the night. There was no one to comfort me, no one to stroke me when sleep abandoned me to my suffering.

Only once did I try to start again with another man. Why not? I wasn't forty yet and I was sure I could still escape from the

unfortunate experience of first marriage and tear myself away from the man I'd spent twelve years with. He had the same name as my first husband and I used to call him Charles the Second, which almost had a feudal ring to it. And he had a feudal look to him, a thickset fellow with a gingery beard. Emperor Barbarossa. He struck me as loving and lovable, and I thought he might have been capable of loving Jana too. My assistant Eva introduced him to me. He wasn't of totally sound mind, my emperor, being an epileptic, but as long as he observed a regime and took regular medication he managed to avoid attacks, and I was ready to take care of his routine. We already talked about the possibility of marriage. We booked a seaside holiday — a sort of pre-honeymoon. It was only to the cold Baltic Sea but I looked forward to the sea and being alone with him — I was planning to have Mum take care of Jana. Just before we were due to leave, Eva informed me ruefully that the guy was probably being unfaithful to me. We set out on the trip together but I returned alone.

I fetch myself a bottle of Moravian red and a glass, sit down in the armchair and light a cigarette. I happen to glance up at the ceiling. At the edge, above the wall between the living room and the kitchen, there has been a large dark stain for over a year already, since they had a burst pipe in the flat upstairs. I'll have to get a painter in but I keep putting it off. I have to do everything myself and I'm scarcely able to cope with what is already on my shoulders every day.

I ought to take a look at those writings of Dad's.

I cut through the ribbon and the Christmas wrapping and open the lid. It is full of neat bundles of old exercise books, some blue, some black, one pink, twelve of them in all, a few photographs and old, yellowing newspaper cuttings. The paper gives off a musty smell. I've never seen these exercise books before; he can't have had them at home. Perhaps he kept them in one of his desk drawers. But if he had them in his office, what could he have noted in them? He couldn't have been so naïve as to think that nobody would take a peek at them.

I rummage through the little heap of cuttings. The victorious Red Army welcomed in Prague. 10th May 1945. How old was he? Nineteen. We salute Marshal Stalin. At that time he was still stuck in a German concentration camp. He hadn't yet met Mum and had no inkling that eight years later she would bear him a daughter and insist on giving her the distinctly unrevolutionary name of Kristýna. One thing is for sure. By now you probably won't find a Czech who isn't ready to pay back evil with evil or punish the guilty and innocent alike. In those days Mum didn't yet know how her mother died. Apparently they were expecting her any day.

When, years later, she told me what really happened, I was unable to rid myself of the image of a tiled room with pipes from which came the hiss of gas. I could hear the people gasping. If Mum had been sent with her mother, like many children were, I'd never have been born. It also occurred to me that in a world where enormous shower rooms are built just to poison people, life can never be the same again.

I open one,of the exercise books: Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Eight. The date is written in copperplate, but I don't feel like leafing through it. I put it back in the box.

The time ahead of me puffs up like a dead fish on the surface of a pond. If only I had someone to look forward to, someone who'd ring the doorbell or call me up and say, 'How are you, my little dove?'

'Little dove' was what Psycho, my first boyfriend, called me. How long ago was that? More than two blinks of God's eye.

Twelve years, that's just one blink of God's eye, said my first and only husband. It was when we were bargaining over my first and his third divorce. I had just burst into tears at the thought that he wanted to leave me after twelve years — or actually fourteen, as it took us two years getting round to the wedding — after all the time I had served him, looked up to him and lain alongside him night after night.

'You've started to believe in God?' I asked in amazement.

'No, it was just a figure of speech. What I mean is our time compared to cosmic time. But cosmic time doesn't have eyes.'

God, if he existed, wouldn't have eyes either, I didn't tell him.

It's only half past two. I run some water into a bucket and go to mop the kitchen, taking my glass with me.

When I come back into the living room I switch on the cassette player. The cassette inside is Tchaikovsky's Sixth but it's too mournful for two-thirty in the afternoon so I change it for his violin concerto.

I called him Psycho because he was training to be a psychiatrist. He was very handsome — dark and with what seemed to be a permanent tan. He wore his black hair tied back in a ponytail, which looked very exotic in those days. He used to carry drugs in his pockets and willingly share them with others. He offered me grass, magic mushrooms and mescaline, but I refused them. I was afraid of drugs. I didn't mind doing myself damage, but I didn't like the idea of losing self-awareness and not being myself.

The look in his eyes made me uneasy but it also excited me. It was strange — piercing and lustful; I could be wearing a fur coat and still feel naked beneath his gaze.

Then something happened that was to happen to me several more times. The first time I hesitated — I didn't want to kill my child, but the future psychiatrist didn't want to become a father. He regarded fatherhood as an obstacle to his career, as if a career could mean more than a life. He was willing to marry me but I mustn't become a mother. He made it a condition. He persuaded me to apply for an abortion. Afterwards I didn't want to see him again.

It's odd that I didn't leave my future husband even though the same thing happened with him. I wanted him so much I even put up with that from him, but for a long time afterwards it remained an open wound (not physical — but a mental wound), and it has never really healed over since.

Yehudi is a bit on the old side for me, he must have been eighty when he made this recording, but I was capable of loving

old men too; my first and only husband came into the world almost two blinks of God's eye before I did, but he never learned to play even the mouth organ, whereas this English knight was playing Mendelssohn's concerto in San Francisco at the age of seven.

At first I hated the violin. It consumed the time I could be playing with my doll. The doll was quite ordinary (blue-eyed like me) and seemed to me fairly plump — this was before the leggy Barbies came into the world. The doll was my real sister — not the live one that everybody made a fuss of and was sorry for because she was weak, sickly and short-sighted. Anyway I always wanted a brother, not a sister.

From the age of seven I had to attend violin lessons three times a week, as well as practise at home. My teacher used to praise me and once told me that I was her best pupil. So I started to consider the possibility of becoming a violinist. For a while the idea of it enchanted me as I imagined myself in a concert hall like the ones I'd seen on television. I'd be dressed in a beautiful evening gown of dark blue velvet and playing Beethoven. I'd play so wonderfully that the conductor would bow to me and kiss my hand, while from doors hidden behind curtains they would bring me baskets of flowers.

I started to practise strenuously. Even though all I had was a mediocre violin, Dad still complained it was too expensive for my 'scraping'.

My playing came to a sorry end. I left my instrument at the post office where Mum had sent me with a letter. There was a queue at the counter so I had put my violin down on a ledge by the wall. The lady in front of me — I can still recall it almost forty years on — must have had about a hundred letters to post and I was terrified of being late for school. So when I'd finally handed mine in I just grabbed my school bag and dashed out; I didn't give a thought to my violin. I rushed back about a quarter of an hour later but my violin was already gone and I arrived at school late.

At school my teacher excused me when she heard what had happened to me, but Dad never forgave me, and Mum spoke up for me in vain. He didn't beat me and didn't even scold me particularly, but he was unmoved by my despair at the loss of the violin. I had committed an unforgivable offence: someone with ambitions to be a violinist doesn't leave his instrument at the post office or on the train and on his deathbed he asks for his violin to be brought to him so that he can caress it with his eyes at least. That was the explanation I received from the father who never once caressed me. I never received another violin, and I had no more lessons.

I could have bought myself a new violin ages ago, but what good would it be to me? I've forgotten everything I knew. These days I wield a dental drill instead of a bow, and it could be that I provide as much or more satisfaction with it when I save someone's tooth or rid them of a toothache — even if I don't garner applause. Instead of flowers they tend to bring me a bottle of booze, a home-made strudel or a banknote in an envelope. One of the nurses from the hospital brings me a set of hypodermic syringes and sometimes she actually brings an ampoule of morphine or Dolsin if she needs my services. I'm sure she steals it all at work. I always refuse them but she just leaves the packet on the table in the surgery and walks out.

Yehudi has finished caressing me. I've always yearned to live with a kind and sensitive man who would know how to caress me, listen to me, protect me and not betray me. The banal dreams of TV soap heroines.

I expect such men don't exist.

And if one did, what hope would I have of meeting him? And if I met him what hope that he'd love me?

I can still hear the music inside me: the main theme from the opening Allegro. I once read about Tchaikovsky somewhere that he tried to overcome all sadness by willpower. As if it were possible to drive the sadness from one's soul. My feeling is that

he increasingly expressed the despair that he tried in vain to suppress. The Pathétique was simply his final cry. I have an affinity for Tchaikovsky. He loved his mother, although he lost her at an early age, and had little praise for his father. He was definitely a sensitive man, and kind too, but being a woman I wouldn't stand a chance with him. Of all the various stories about his sudden death, the one I find most convincing is that he took poison.

My assistant Eva and I call suicide self-extraction, though she herself would never consider such a thing. Pulling oneself out of life. Or casting oneself out?

I married a man who was neither sensitive nor kind. At first he used to caress me but he never listened to me or protected me. And in the end he betrayed me.

I might have suspected it, or ought to have. He betrayed me exactly the same way as he betrayed his first two wives. How many women he betrayed in total I don't know and don't care any more. But I ought to have given it a thought when I first got to know him.

When someone gets used to lying it's hard for them to learn to tell the truth. And someone who manages to desert another will find it easier the second time. It's sheer vanity to think that one has the power to transform one's partner and drive out all the demons from his soul. Why should he desert me, I used to say to myself, seeing that he is old and greying and I am young and beautiful?

Because it's in man's nature. It seemed, wrote Virginia Woolf, that he ruled all, apart from the fog. And yet he raged.

Unhappy Virginia considered that if a woman wanted to be equal to men she would have to go mad or kill herself. She did both. In her fits of madness she apparently used to hear the starlings chattering in Greek. She tried to kill herself by jumping out the window; she also swallowed a hundred veronal tablets, but she was always saved. In the end she had to turn to water for help. And yet she had a fairly easy life as well as, by all reports, a kind and

loving husband. People who have never known soul-rending misery can have no understanding of her grief.

I sip wine and puff away at a cigarette. Maybe I'm still beautiful. Mr Holý, one of my patients, told me I have beautiful hands and said it was a shame they had to hold a drill.

I asked him what he'd have them hold.

'Me, preferably.' He's old, as old as my ex-husband when I first met him. Except that my husband didn't have a paunch; he was a sportsman. Thanks to skiing and tennis he had the physique of a Rodin statue. When he first held me in his arms I felt a thrill I'd never before felt from a mere embrace.

He managed to live with me for twelve years, during two of which he was unfaithful to me, as far as I discovered. Maybe he was unfaithful to me for longer than that but I didn't try to find out. I was always good at netting men, but not at holding on to them; it always seemed to me that I didn't deserve their love. I was never unfaithful to him. I wanted to live in truth. And I wanted our daughter to be able to live in love.

I know that men are like that: they need to conquer. And when they do, they lose interest. But maybe I could have done with a bit more humility. I wanted to live freely even though I was married. From time to time I would dig in my heels and refuse to serve in the manner expected of me. I refused to listen to orders or good advice; I didn't do any shopping or cooking and regaled my husband with sandwiches. I was no worse then he was. What right had he to demand that I take care of him on top of all my other activities? Why couldn't I spend the evening with someone without his supervision? He was incapable of understanding this or accepting it.

The woman he left me for was expected to look after him like a mother, but she ran away from him anyway. Since they discharged him from hospital, he sits in his living room waiting to see how his body will cope now that they've removed almost his entire stomach and he has no one to stroke him or make him a cup of tea.

When I shut my eyes I can see in front of me snow-covered trees, standing like angels with their hands linked above the path. Every year we would make a trip to the mountains. I felt good there. I could breathe freely and I felt it was a joy to be alive.

I was just slightly wary of skiing. He was much better at it than I was.

'Wait for me, don't leave me behind!'

'Life doesn't wait either,' he told me when we reached the bottom. He was well developed and had beautiful arms and legs, but sometimes he was terribly ordinary: a secondary-school teacher and tennis coach who would astound his students with his bons mots and graceful movements.

Bach wasn't ordinary. Nor was Tchaikovsky: he was just sad when he ordered swans to dance on the shore of a lake of human tears.

Finally the phone rings. I jump up from the armchair and almost knock over a chair. A familiar female voice introduces itself and complains about a sudden toothache.

'But I have no surgery today. Have you tried taking something for the pain?'

'I did. I took two in fact and my head was all muzzy but even so I didn't get a wink of sleep last night.'

It was my husband who first sent this woman to see me. He used to recommend me to his relatives, his colleagues and his acquaintances. Maybe to his mistresses too. He left but they stayed. People leave their partners but stay faithful to their dentists. 'You should have come yesterday.'

'I hoped it would go away on its own.'

'It never goes away on its own. You'll have to go to the emergency clinic.'

'But I don't know anyone there.'

'I can't help you here. All I've got is a pair of pliers and a hand drill.'

'And would it be possible at the surgery?'

I explain that I live on the other side of Prague from my surgery, but she begs me to have pity on her because at the clinic they'd extract the tooth.

It's four o'clock in the afternoon. It's hot outside. I glance at the bottle: I've drunk half of it already. I oughtn't to drive and I don't feel like dragging myself there by metro and tram. But if I stayed here I'd just sit and feel sorry for myself.

An hour later I had treated the Saturday patient. She offered to drive me home and buy me a drink, but I didn't feel like spending any more time in her company. I told her that one of my friends lived nearby and I fancied a bit of a walk. In fact no friends of mine live around here, but if I were to take a half-hour walk in the direction of Zlichov I would arrive at the house where my former and thus far only husband lives and is possibly convalescing.

For years after the divorce I avoided him. If he wanted to see Jana he had to come for her. We would greet each other and I would tell him when he was to bring her home. There was nothing else I needed to tell him and nothing I needed to hear from him.

But now I've nearly forgotten my pain, and what remains of it looks as if it has been outweighed by the pain that gnaws his insides.

I decided to take the riverside path. The wall on the opposite bank has been sprayed with garish graffiti. In front of me a flock of ducks rises out of the undergrowth. Several rowing eights speed by out in the current, as well as a few double kayaks.

When we first got married we used to go canoeing, mostly on the River Lužnice, but also on the Dunajec in Slovakia. We played tennis and I occasionally managed to win a set, although never a match; but I fought bravely, as if I really wanted to win. I knew that for him that was something that counted. Winning against everyone, and everything. In some ways he resembled my father, and not just because his hair was grey.

My one and only — and last — husband revered the victor. He played the hard man, but he wasn't one, for all his muscles. He was plagued with anxiety. He feared his pupils because they could denounce him; he feared the school principal who could ruin his career; but most of all he feared death. A stomach upset, a sore throat or a mole on his arm and his first thought would be the onset of cancer. Whenever he'd ask me about such symptoms there was always a note of anxiety in his voice that he was unable to hide. He expected me to brush aside his fears and reassure him — which is exactly what I did: I'd prescribe him tablets, bring him food and tea to his bedside, help him into his pyjamas. . And no sooner was he well again than he'd be out two-timing me; me and his little girl. I don't know which of us he hurt more, but I for one lost any shred of self-confidence that I had — that's if I had any in the first place.

I really shouldn't think about him. I wasted so much time waiting on him hand and foot, and now I am free of him I waste time remembering him and thinking about him.

The house where he lives was built around the time I was born. It has five storeys; Karel has an attic flat. I took the steps up to it several times when fetching Jana. I never entered the flat, but could see through the open door a wall covered in the diplomas and pathetic medals that he had won at various second-rate tennis tournaments. They had hung in our front hall when we were still living together. He gave me up but hung on to the medals.

I stop at the street corner. I am not sure whether I want to enter. There is a phone booth around the corner. It would be enough to phone him and ask him how he is getting on and whether he needs anything.

The last time I visited him in hospital there happened to be another visitor there. It was some young man: thin and pale and with a mane of reddish hair, but with dark eyes behind small spectacles. His teeth were very white, and his lower jaw jutted slightly. He had beautiful hands with slender fingers — I noticed

them right away. My ex-husband introduced him to me as one of his former pupils. I remembered his name, since it's like my daughter's. He addressed me as 'doctor' and offered to leave straightaway in order not to disturb us, but I reassured him there was nothing to disturb. So we eventually left together, and as soon as we were out of the ward he asked me whether I thought things looked bad for his old teacher. I told him truthfully that the tumour was large and had been neglected, which is always bad.

'That's awful,' he said in alarm. 'I'm terribly sorry. He went on to add that he remembered me from the odd occasions when I'd wait for my husband with our little girl. 'We all used to envy him,' he added, and I had the impression that there was a slight rush of blood to his pale cheeks.

I didn't ask him who they 'all' were, or why they envied my husband his wife, who at the time was playing second fiddle to some slut; instead I quickly took my leave.

Oddly enough what he told me stuck in my memory and I fondly recalled it that evening before I went to sleep. And I even remember his words now, almost three weeks later, and the thought occurs to me that the young man just might happen to be visiting him now.

It's hardly likely, though.

I walk to the telephone booth, but still hesitate. The crowlike soul that flew out of his head last night frightens me. At that moment I catch sight of him: the crow. He is walking, or rather shambling, along the opposite pavement. He stoops slightly and is thin, and even on this warm day is wrapped in an overcoat. The sportsman leans on a stick. But he is still walking. He has been for a lonely walk somewhere. How I cried when he left me. Now I could only cry for him, this abandoned soul.

I don't call out to him or run after him. I watch him shamble back to the house where he lives. What duty do I owe to a man I used to live with and who is unlikely to be among the living much longer?

He occupies my thoughts too much. Somewhere deep down in my soul there is a sense of guilt that cries out that I wasn't a good enough wife to him, which is why he left me, and also maybe why he neglected his illness — he had no one to care for him. I turn away and start walking to the tram stop.

5

I'll be thirty already at the end of November. I was a Prague Spring boy. In other words I was endowed with hope, or false hopes, more likely.

My mother was a primary-school teacher. She was thirty-five when I was born. She married late although she had known Dad since she was very young. But he was jailed before they could marry. Dad had been a Scout leader and wanted to remain one even after the Scouts were banned. Mum waited nine long years for him, for which I admired her. When he came back, Dad apparently told her she was the best woman in the world, but he didn't want children. He said there was no point in bringing new slaves into the world. And then came that brief period of hope that justice would be restored. All such hopes that justice will suddenly drop from heaven are mostly false, as I fairly soon discovered. But I was glad that twenty years later Dad lived to see the end of the regime that ruined his youth. Dad died seven years ago, when enthusiasm still reigned after that long-awaited and yet sudden end of Bolshevism.

In fact the end wasn't so sudden. I remember the second half of the 1980s; they were interesting times. The regime we detested was just about to pass away. It was no longer capable of arousing enough fear, particularly among us younger people. It wasn't able to jail all its opponents or drive them out of the country. It could no longer prevent our demonstrations, even though it sent its truncheon-wielders against us and used water cannon against

people it seemed to regard as worse than fire. For my part I always managed to extricate myself from such situations and I was only arrested once. But even that was an experience for me. When you're standing there defenceless against the wall of a police station with your hands above your head and they're yelling at you and you know that they have you in their power, you start to think the worst. I have to admit that like all people who find themselves in such a situation for the first time, I was afraid. I was afraid even though I knew that — unlike the time when my dad was in prison — they didn't murder people any more and in most cases they didn't even send them to prison. I knew that I risked being kicked out of university, and at the interrogation they shamelessly hinted as much, but they didn't manage to intimidate me that way. I was increasingly losing interest in the study of history — or rather the 'Marxist' version of it we were taught, which tried to formulate some firmly quantifiable and pathetically simplified laws to cover all phenomena.

And the dean actually did summon me a few days later and voiced profound disappointment that I had besmirched the good name of the faculty by my indiscreet behaviour. I was afraid he was going to ask me whether I at least regretted behaving rashly, at which I would either remain silent or say I had done nothing rash, but the dean preferred to avoid any such confrontation and dismissed me, saying that the faculty senate would deal with my case.

I waited for another summons or even a verdict in writing, but nothing happened. The patres minorum gentium who had been imposed on us as professors couldn't make up their minds to chuck me out, and even the regime's most dyed-in-the-wool supporters knew that its time was up. I gave up my course anyway, but I did so of my own free will.

The demonstrations weren't what held my interest most at that time. I couldn't help feeling I was part of a play and everything had already been written by someone else. History has probably

always looked like that. The soldiers move according to the generals' orders, the generals move according to the emperors' or other leaders' orders. And the latter move in accordance to some invisible forces, some Weltgeist.

In those days what interested me most were concerts of protest songs. Some of the protest singers had admittedly been forced to leave the country; but for every singer exiled, two appeared in his place. They used to come and perform for us from all over the republic and we in turn would travel to their concerts, every one of which seemed to me like a ceremony, a promise of future freedom.

It was also a time of debates. Sometimes we'd stay up all night in the hall of residence discussing everything we thought important: politics first, followed closely by sex, but also religion and the prospects of our civilization. These didn't seem very bright, although in our corner of the world news only reached us in mutilated form.

We were all agreed that communism was a perversion, but

there was less consensus on other matters. In fact it worried me that we had no ideals. We were against communism, but not so

much because it was criminal as because we wanted an easier life. Different food, a car and a villa with a swimming pool — or at least a country cabin with a vegetable patch. Except that when they asked me what I proposed instead, I didn't have much idea either. I'd just say something about freedom and a fully independent judiciary, or about how we'd miss the real point of life if we only set our eyes on material goals.

And then a revolution — or what was declared a revolution — descended from on high, and there was no more time for talk about ideals. In those days we'd go from factory to factory as representatives of the striking students and I even travelled as far as Ostrava to meet the coal miners. I went there in trepidation as I'd never been in that part of the world and from what I'd heard, I expected them to arrest us before we even left the station. Goodness knows where or how we'd end up.

We weren't arrested. The city was filthy and the air almost unbreathable, but the people seemed friendly and they listened to us with interest, even applauding our speeches and our promises which, as I later realized, had little in common with reality.

I don't know how those people are doing these days. Maybe they're worse off. Maybe they're sorry they didn't send us packing and instead march in ranks on rebellious Prague.

That was something else I grasped only later: that people almost always long for a change. As soon as the mood for change prevails, they are seized by enthusiasm and the ecstatic conviction that change will suddenly lend their lives some unexpected meaning. But because they expect that change only from outside, they generally end up disillusioned.

There are also moments in history when people strive for a change within themselves, but probably the last time that happened was during the Reformation.

When the period of strikes, demonstrations and speeches came to an end, I was so enthused by politics that I decided to abandon my studies. I was attracted by the idea of becoming part of history, of being a player in the major events that I used to read about with fascination and wonder. I started to write political commentaries for the press because I realized straightaway that the press and above all television were the best places to capture people's attention, and that they were a good stepping stone into politics. My political ambitions didn't please Vlasta, my then girlfriend. She maintained that I wasn't cut out for politics, that I was still a kid who enjoyed playing games. I wasn't hard or determined enough to be a politician, by which she meant I wasn't mature enough. But most of all she was afraid I wouldn't have enough time left for her.

I didn't have anyway. As soon as it appeared it was about time we were married, it suddenly struck me that there were no really strong bonds between us, but instead there stretched an emptiness, a silent void. That began to horrify me, so we split up. I'm a

Sagittarian, so I'm not supposed to be very constant in love, but actually I've always tended to idealize the people I love, and then when I'm confronted by the reality I discover to my horror that I've built my ideal on quicksand.

When I dropped the idea of a career in journalism or politics, I toyed with establishing an agency for promoting my favourite singers. I knew a number of singers and started to make enquiries about obtaining the necessary authorization, but in the end I abandoned the project before I even got into it. I wasn't tough enough for that sort of work either, or rather I lacked an entrepreneurial spirit. But most of all I lacked the capital to get started. Mum also talked me out of going into business. I was beginning to regret dropping out of university. Perhaps I really wasn't cut out for anything better than sitting in some library or archive and rummaging through old manuscripts. What do you do with someone who can't manage to succeed at anything? But then I was offered a job in that well-known but much-maligned commission set up to uncover the crimes of the former regime. They also took into account the seven semesters I had spent doing history at university; at least it was some sort of grounding for the work I was supposed to do. So I haven't escaped my destiny after all. I do research in the archives to lay bare the methods and rules adopted by the former intelligence services and secret police in their activities at home and abroad.

It was interesting and fairly tricky work and my searches were often fruitless. It took me at least a year even to comprehend how the secret brotherhood operated and to learn how to find things that were meant to remain hidden, to locate microfiches that to all appearances had never existed.

Intuition helped me a lot in this. I would sense connections for which no evidence could be found, and occasionally this would lead me to surprising and important discoveries. I am speaking about my work, but it's impossible to divide oneself into homo nascitur ad laborem and homo privatus. I can tell when someone is

concealing their emotions or thoughts, and likewise when they are feigning them. But who, sometimes, doesn't feign emotions in an effort to transcend the void that suddenly looms between them and someone they believed themselves to be on intimate terms with? It looks as if it's only possible to be genuine in a game in which you have more than one life. Or rather it is easier to achieve justice and authenticity in a game than in real life.

My researches into people's recent pasts have taught me distrust. Sometimes, for instance, I come across depressing information about singers who were inciting us to resist while at the same time informing on us. I discover similar things about people who are held in esteem or who are in posts of authority. I pass the information on to my superiors and wait for what will happen. Mostly nothing does. I expect the game being played in those cases is at a higher level and is more complex than I, who regard myself as one of the players, am able to imagine. It is at such a level that it is foolhardy of me to make ripples. One day I'll be garrotted from behind or bumped off one night on the way home. But even though the thought of it sometimes makes me shiver, I still believe I'll find some means of escape; besides I'm doing everything to avoid it happening.

As I go through the old reports of secret police agents I'm amazed how much of them is taken up by accounts of infidelities and deceptions. It's as if they were all being unfaithful to each other.

Only here did I come to realize the logic of the regime I was born into. Very soon only a few people were subjected to real violence, just enough to ensure that everyone else lived in fear and submitted to control and humiliation as the only possible form of existence.

My dad resisted and ended up in prison, where he was beaten and tortured with thirst, hunger and cold. They'd kept him in an underground bunker and didn't give him even a blanket to cover himself with, just a piece of mouldy rag. It's true that Mum defiantly

waited for him, writing him letters and buoying up his spirits with her love, but at the same time she tried not to step out of line, teaching what she had to teach and voting in the sham elections. When I started to understand these things, it rankled with me. She used to say, 'You don't know the way things are in real life.' I didn't. I had no notion. It is only here that I've discovered how they were. Although Mum was an ordinary primary-school teacher, she was under the surveillance of usually two of her colleagues, and one of the neighbours used to inform on her and Dad. I discovered it in the files, in pathetic and humiliating reports in which the informers and fellow teachers shamelessly made use of what Mum's pupils unwittingly said about her.

That was how it was. So now I can understand Mum's caution.

But even though I understand it, I still cannot accept it as the only option available to people. I'm sure that like Dad I'd find the strength to resist if the worst came to the worst.

Vlasta was right in saying I wasn't cut out for politics. I'm not even cut out for the job I'm doing right now, because I can't reconcile myself to the fact that people are the way they are. I'd like to live in a different world — one in which respect is achieved by deeds and actions completely unlike the ones recognized in today s world. And so I occasionally imagine myself in impossible situations; I suddenly think I can hear distant tom-toms; I rush towards them and find myself in a hail of arrows and bullets, but I dodge my way through. I also imagine myself stretching a rope between two peaks and walking across a valley as deep as the Grand Canyon. I've only ever seen it in pictures, of course. In reality I get dizzy just looking down from a bridge.

The stars also entice me. Not that I have any longing to fly to them, but I try to understand the message they send us about our possibilities and destinies. Mum says I'm nuts and that if she didn't keep an eye on me I'd definitely come to a sorry end.

Last week, when I had a moment to spare at work, I had a look at my horoscope on the computer and discovered that I'm about

to experience something that will change my life. So I've started to perceive things around me in sharper focus.

A few days later, I went to visit my old history teacher in hospital. I think he was the person who most influenced me in my life, apart from Dad. When he explained history to us he would often go to the very limits of what was still permitted at the time. I could tell. Revolutions, which were always talked about in our textbooks with wild enthusiasm, were described by him as a bloody conflict followed by terror. And the terror was either the vengeance of those who managed to suppress the revolution or the revenge of those who achieved victory thereby. That remarkable teacher managed to draw my attention not only to history but also to the stars, although not in the sense he intended. I don't know what I did to draw his attention but he showed me favour and occasionally would invite me to his study and discuss with me problems that no one else talked to me about. I had the impression that his thoughts inhabited infinite space and endless time, in other words, stellar time, which was different from the time that history described. In that way he scaled humanity and himself down to a real dimension, i.e., an infinitely tiny dimension. That struck me as wise. He maintained that this new perception of the inconceivable duration of time and the inconceivable extent of the cosmos was the most important discovery of our times. I felt he had revealed to me something fundamental about life. Most likely someone denounced him for his views, because he stopped teaching history and instead was assigned to physics and PE classes. But I don't want to talk about him. His ex-wife also came to visit him in hospital. I immediately noticed that she radiated some sad, unreconciled pain and it touched me. I wanted to console her in some way and told her how years earlier, when I had seen her waiting with her child for her husband, I had envied him her. She blushed. I think the child was a little girl. She must be at least fifteen by now. The woman's name was Kristýna, as I recall. I have a good memory for faces, quotations and dates. I couldn't estimate her age, but she seemed to me just as strikingly beautiful as she had back then.

6

It's gone ten already. The street outside the window is falling silent and the breeze coming through the open window is starting to be almost cool. I've put on some Bach, but I can't pay attention to it. I'm waiting for Jana, although I know she won't be back before midnight. I wait for the doorbell to ring but it doesn't, the phone to ring but it doesn't, a messenger to arrive with good news, but he can't arrive because he hasn't even set out yet.

I open the box of Dad's letters but then close it again. I ought to sort out my own papers first. I always chuck all my letters, including the ones from that anonymous lunatic — of which there have been more and more recently — into the big cardboard box which the vacuum cleaner came in. If I turned it upside down, I'd find right on top letters from my old flames. I had plenty of the latter and even more letters. I'd always look at the greeting first and then at the last sentence. Darling…, I love you, Your. . What came in between seemed to me of secondary importance.

There are so many letters I haven't the strength to sort them all out. I've taken to putting only the latest ones in the box: invitations, greetings cards, death notices, letters from women friends, threats, holiday postcards and New Year cards. There are fewer love letters. Their number almost equals the contents of an empty mathematical set, as my one and only husband would define it. When I die Jana, or whoever accompanies me on my last journey, can chuck that box into the coffin and it can be cremated along with me.

I get up and go into the junkroom where the box stands under all the shelves. I pick up the uppermost letter. It's one of the poison-pen letters, of course. It's written in block capitals, which lean to the left pathologically and are decoratively rounded at the bottom. The greeting is not very flattering, which is appropriate, I suppose, for this kind of correspondence:

YOU DAUGHTER OF A RED SWINE,

YOU BLOODY RED CURRANT, YOU POISONOUS HOGWEED, i'm COMING TO WEED YOU OUT SOON. YOU'LL BE BROUGHT TO BOOK AT LAST.YOU'LL WEEP AS I WEEP,YOu'lL HOWL AS I've HOWLED EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE. YOU WON'T FIND A BUCKET BIG ENOUGH TO HOLD ALL YOUR TEARS.

There are a few more lines of abuse. I drop it back in the box instead of flushing it down the toilet. I have no idea who has been sending me these rather rude messages regularly for the past six months. Maybe it's some mad naturalist; he enjoys regaling me with the names of plants and animals. Maybe it's a spirit letter from Charles the Second. Maybe it's not a spirit letter, maybe he's still alive. Maybe he just went somewhere where nobody knows him. I quickly reach for another letter. It's a brief note from Father Kostka thanking me for treating him.

My dear young lady,

The new teeth are better than the ones I chewed with all my life, of which only a few remain. I'll say nothing about how beautiful they are, as it would be inappropriate (particularly at my age). .

I think I hear the phone ring. I drop the letter and run to catch the good news before the telephone grows tired.

'Hi, love.' I recognize my sister's voice. 'I've been phoning you all afternoon there and at the surgery, but you've been nowhere around.'

'I must have told you a hundred times already that I don't work on Saturdays.'

'Really? I must have forgotten. Or maybe I didn't notice it was Saturday. Things are in total chaos here.'

They always are, or at least any time she thinks I might want something from her. But I don't want anything from her.

'Mum wrote to me. She seems. . doesn't she strike you as a bit strange?'

'We're all a bit strange.'

'OK. But some are a bit more than others. She said she's got backache and can't cut the grass. She hasn't got any grass to cut, has she?'

'No.'

'See what I mean?'

'Maybe she wanted to cut the grass in front of the flats. She needs to be doing something to keep her mind off things. Her husband died.'

'Dad, do you mean?'

'Do you know of any other one?'

'Don't you think we should get the doctor to see her?'

'A doctor won't tell us any more than I know already. And I also happen to know her. She's my mum. And she's yours too, though you wouldn't really know to listen to you.'

'My love, you're picking a quarrel again.'

'You could have spent a couple of days with her when Dad died.'

'But I explained why I couldn't. I had a tour of Austria already arranged. It'd taken a year to set up. And it was a success.'

'And what if you were to die?'

'Me?'

'You think it couldn't happen?'

'I don't see the connection.'

'I was wondering whether you'd have had to go on the tour if you happened to have died.'

'There's only one answer I can give to your impertinent questions, my love: kindly get stuffed.'

'Was there anything else you wanted, Lida, love?'

'I was wanting to know how Mum is.'

'Mum's fine — if you bear in mind what she's been through. If you want to know any more, then come and see her. That's unless

there's some enormous, successful tour you simply have to take part in.'

It's nearly midnight; I'm tired. When I was young I used to be able to sit around in pubs and even make love until morning, and sometimes I'd go for a week at a stretch before collapsing and sleeping sixteen hours; and there was no waking me up. It was during one of those sessions that I was discovered by my former — then still future — husband. That's how he first saw me: drunk, dishevelled and dog-tired. He was on his way back from some tennis tournament and was thirsty. He sat down at a table where I happened to be finishing off a bottle. Who was I with, in fact? It's not important. The pub was packed and the only free seat was at our table.

He was a good-looker, that future husband of mine, that's one thing I managed to register and also that he seemed to fancy me. He looked at me and asked, 'Are you all right?'

That was the first sentence he said to me: 'Are you all right?'

I told him I was OK, but it wasn't true. I had a heavy head, puffy eyes and an upset stomach.

'I'll see you home.' That was his second sentence. It wasn't a question or a request, it was a statement, and I meekly got up and left. And for the next twelve years I would meekly get up and go in whichever direction he pointed. It wasn't always a bad direction to take. He obeyed some kind of rules that required him to take care of himself, perform all his duties, do morning exercises, have a good breakfast and go to bed early. The rules even included reading some books so as to keep abreast of the times. I had no rules, although I did read books and listen to music, but he forced me to adopt his. He forced me to exchange my life of freedom for what he called a decent life. I owed that to him. I owed it to him that I didn't burn myself out. We loved each other. Why do I speak for him? I loved him. For the first time in ages I was crazy about someone. I longed to be with him and I was even jealous of his wife, that poor soul he betrayed on my account; except that he

would go back to her and most likely lay alongside her, although he told me they hadn't slept together for ages.

How pathetic our stories are when we look back on them half a blink of God's eye later. No, they're also full of avalanches, lions and lionesses in full pursuit, us swaying along suspended bars, scaling rocks and bungee-jumping from a bridge, all to the accompaniment of the organ of the little Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

'This is Rožmitál, the place where I was born. It was also the birthplace of Jan Jakub Ryba. 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. .

'Look, Jana, that's the house where I was born! And this is where I went to school. What are you smirking for?'

'Because you went to school too, Daddy! You must have been teensy-weensy!'

The sky is bare. There are stars above the avenue of oak trees and so much music that it drowns out everything and for a while I can't hear the rush of my blood or the murmur of my tears.

The phone again.

Twelve-fifteen.

'It's me, Mum.'

'Jana, you should have been home long ago. Where are you calling from?'

'Mum, there aren't any more trams, or rather there are only night trams.'

'I expect so. But that's why you were supposed to be home by midnight.'

'But I didn't notice the time. .'

'That's your fault. And you haven't told me where you're calling from.'

'From Katya's, of course.'

'Take the next night tram and come home.'

'Mum, there's loads of horrible drunks outside, and junkies

too. Katya says I should sleep here. It'll be easier to get home in the morning.'

'Jana, you're coming home right now.'

'There's no point, Mummy, really. It'll take me two hours if I go now. In the morning I'll be home in a jiffy.'

I can hear voices in the background. The voices of some men or other come down the phone line.

'OK, I'll come and fetch you.'

'I couldn't let you do that, Mum. And anyway I bet you've had something to drink.'

'Don't concern yourself about me. Tell me Katya's exact address.'

'No, really, Mum. The cops'll stop you and breathalyse you.'

'Tell me Katya's address right away! Or do I have to look it up in the phone book?'

'I'll come home then, if you're going to make such a fuss.' And that's it. She's hung up. She'll graciously come home. She's still on her way, though goodness knows from where.

7

There wasn't a tram for half an hour. Mum was going to leap up and down and yell at me again, but me and Ruda couldn't afford a taxi; we were completely broke. Anyway we wouldn't have taken one even if we had some money left. We'd sooner try to get a joint. But I didn't want any more today. I'm spaced out enough as it is. When Mum eventually cottons on, there's going to be hell to pay. But that's her fault. She still hasn't realized that I'm not her little girl any more running around like a trained monkey.

Ruda made me go up to the park because he wanted a bit more snogging, but I'd had enough and made faces until he lost the urge. As we were walking past some parked cars he bent over and pulled the valve out of the tyre on some Ford. The tyre hissed and

went flat. We laughed. I know he did it for me, 'cos I can't stand cars, even though I ride in Mum's banger sometimes. I have to.

Ruda isn't much of a talker, he prefers action. That's what's great about him. Once, about a year ago, we were flat broke like now and he says, 'If we want to shoot, we'll have to find some loot.' And he takes us down to some old flats in Vršovice, saying he knows of a flat where the people are always away. I was really scared and told him I'd sooner stay outside. But he says, 'Don't be daft. You're not even fifteen. They can't do anything to you.' So we go right to the top of the building and there's this big wide door. Ruda had a piece of rusty old iron under his coat and used it to break open the door. Katya had to stay in the passage and keep watch. We went inside and Ruda blocked the door with the iron bar. I was still really scared about being in someone else's flat and afraid I'd get nabbed and sent to approved school. Ruda yells at me that I'm paranoid but I couldn't really hear him, and I couldn't see anything around me either, except for two stupid angels hanging on the wall with golden wings growing right out of their heads. Ruda pulled them off the wall and stuffed one of them in his rucksack. He wrapped the other one in some rag or other and shoved it in my arms for me to carry. But I just couldn't because my arms and legs were shaking like a jelly and I started to cry. So Ruda grabbed the other one too and shoved me out the door. It wouldn't close any more so we rushed down the stairs and I could hear the door creaking and banging. It was so loud they must have heard it in the street. It was horrendous.

Ruda didn't talk to me for eighty years after that.

Two cops had just got out of their tank.

Ruda spotted them first and beat it. I don't blame him. He's done approved school and a year inside; you never know what they'll do when they nab someone who's done time. They didn't look more than twenty. 'Another virgin in chains,' one of them says to me and asks for my ID.

I pretended I couldn't find it and asked him to explain what I'd

done. I told them that while they were wasting time with me, someone round the corner was pinching a car or knocking off some old lady.

'Shut your trap!' said the one who had stood and watched so far. 'Or you'll be sorry!'

So at last I pulled out my ID and the one of them who could possibly read thumbed through it and then looked in some list or other. 'You're not even fifteen.' He couldn't even do his sums. 'How come you're not at home?'

'I'm a year older,' I pointed out to him, 'and I'm outside because we've got a flood at home.'

'What have you got?'

'No, really. The bedroom's flooded. It's only just drying out.'

The only reply he could think of was to tell me to shut my trap again. They handed back my ID but they didn't say thank you. They just told me to clear off.

'I'm waiting for a tram,' I said. 'That's allowed, isn't it?'

They didn't give a fuck about the fact that some old wino was throwing his guts up just behind me and they moved off with the refined gait of two thoroughbred stallions. What a laugh! Dumbos. Horrendous. But at least they helped pass the time and I was still really spaced out, high as a kite. But I knew I'd start to come down, and then I usually feel bad. Mum will have to notice it one day. I bet she's waiting for me. She couldn't do me a favour and spare me her carping. I'll have to pretend I hung around at Katya's. If she only knew! If ever she suspected where I'm sleeping when I say I'm at Katya's. If ever she found out about Ruda she'd be in shock for at least a year.

'I'll end up killing you one of these days,' she's told me at least a thousand times. But she won't kill me. She's more likely to do herself harm, from what I know of her. She suffers from downers and she's always pissed off or tired because she spends all her time drilling in people's gobs and she's got no real enjoyment in the world. Sometimes she goes spare and yells at me and when she

gets over it she tells me I'm all she has. I'm sorry for her, but it's not my fault that Dad did a runner on her and now I'm all she's got. Anyway there's no reason for her to stay on her own. Any time we go out somewhere together, such as to the theatre, there are guys eyeing her all the time. Actually she's quite pretty, particularly when she's smiling or when she's singing.

A fifty-seven at last. The wino behind me had another quick spew and we climbed aboard. In the tram I caught sight of Foxie and her Fox. They were totally smashed. Foxie was sitting on his lap and wobbling her green-tinted head around like a resuscitated mummy. I had something going with the Fox last year too, but only about three times, because I found him boring. Now he just nodded to me and invited me to some bender they were on their way to.

'Now?'

'Yeah. No sweat. There's this guy there that's really big and shares it round.'

'That's great, really great.'

'Coming with us, then?'

'I'm not sure. How far is it?'

'It's no problem, we'll take you there.'

'I'm not sure. I promised Mum. .'

'Don't be a lemon; she's asleep long ago.'

'No she isn't. Really, she's waiting for me.'

'So what? She'll get over it.'

'Yeah, I know.' I can't stand it when people talk like that about my mum. I was coming down and I started to get a headache. I was heading for a downer and really needed a top-up. 'It's a fact. She's really dependent on me,' I say finally.

But I don't think they even noticed me. They were now totally smashed. Foxie's head just wobbled around as if it was badly wired on.

I shut my eyes for a moment too and it felt as if I was flying. It was really great because I didn't need any wings. I'd just launch myself, spread my arms and soar up like a balloon. There were

clouds below me like whipped cream. Really, it was just fantastic, floating and flying wherever I liked.

Then I had to open my eyes again and change trams. I said ciao to those two, but they weren't going to let anyone disturb their trip.

When I got off the tram here it was half past one. I started to feel really cold and a bit scared. Actually I was really scared that I'd meet some devil or werewolf, or see some vampire swaying from a lamppost.

I've often seen them hanging there, though I knew I was only imagining it.