The Ultimate Intimacy

Chapter Two

1

Every second Sunday, Daniel takes the service at the preaching station at Myslice, about thirty minutes' drive away. As the service in his own church ends around ten o'clock and the one at Myslice starts at half-past ten, he abandons his own congregation just before the final hymn. He generally has his old Škoda car parked in the nearest free space and he climbs into it without even removing his gown. On this second Sunday in April, he does all the usual things but the car refuses to start. Daniel leaps out and raises the bonnet. Whatever is wrong with the car, there is no time to attempt a repair.

The sound of singing can still be heard from inside the chapel. Daniel stares at the grimy motor and he is thinking less about what might be at fault than about which members of the congregation came by car and could possibly give him a lift. Then, although he heard no one approaching, a voice immediately behind him asks, 'May I be of any assistance, Reverend?'

He knows that soprano voice only from the hymn-singing in church. He looks around. The unknown woman, who has attended his service three times already but has always got up during the last hymn and disappeared before he can ask her anything, is now standing there with her head inclined forward slightly, as if stooping. Daniel notices that her neck is long and slender like his first wife's. She looks exotic in her brightly coloured knitted cardigan, compared to the other women of the congregation at least. 'My car is here if you need to get somewhere in a hurry.'

'I do, but I can hardly impose myself on you. It's a half-hour drive.'

'That doesn't matter, I'm not busy. My husband went off on a trip yesterday and my mother is looking after our little boy.' As they walk to her car, she tells him her name is Barbora Musilová but everyone calls

her Bára. She has been attending his services for several weeks already.

He tells her he noticed her the first time. Then he adds, 'The Sunday you first came was the day my mother died.'

'I'm sorry I brought you misfortune.'

'You? I'm not superstitious, I'm afraid. My mother would have died whether you had come or not.'

'My mother is still alive. But my father died a long time ago.'

She unlocks his door first. 'The car belongs to my husband. He's obliged to show off — he likes to, in fact. So we've got this little Japanese thing with metallic paint. Not that I care about such things.'

'I'm very grateful for the lift, Sister Musilová.'

'But I don't belong to your church,' she says as they drive off.

'Did the word "sister" offend you?'

'No, why should it? There's nothing wrong with having a brother. Or having you as a brother for that matter. I just thought you ought to know.'

'Are you a Catholic?'

'No, I don't belong to any church.' Then she adds, 'My mother's Jewish but she has never attended synagogue. My father believed in communism when he was a young man. Then he stopped believing in anything, like my husband.'

'And did your mother survive the war?'

'She must have done to have me. I was born after the war, almost ten years after, in fact.'

'Of course. What I really meant was, how did she survive it?'

'She married my father before the war, when she was eighteen, a year younger than I was when I married. Fortunately she didn't get divorced, unlike me.'

'You were saying something about your husband, about him going off on a trip somewhere.'

'I remarried. Naturally enough, though God knows why. I'm sorry, I suppose I oughtn't to take the Lord's name in vain. Not in your presence, anyway.'

'Just speak the way you usually do.'

They pass the turn-off to the airport and leave the city limits. A nearby village is surrounded by flowering fruit trees. They are blossoming early this year after the warm winter. Only the past few days have been cold and at this moment clouds heavy with rain or snow are billowing along close to the ground.

'Thank you. I'm not used to talking to people like yourself.'

'But there's nothing particularly special about me.'

'I'm not used to talking to people who have a belief, and actually preach about it,' she said by way of explanation.

'Everyone believes in something.'

'Yes, I know. In a political programme or an association. Or in their career, like my husband. Or in the nation — there's nothing particularly wrong with that, is there?'

'What made you come to our church?'

'That's a good question.'

They now turn off on to a side road. The trees here are also in bloom and Rip Hill suddenly appears in the distance. It reminds him of driving along a highway over a year ago with Rút at the wheel. The road ran from Oregon to Nevada and he had the impression that everything around him was in bloom, including some trees and bushes that were unfamiliar to him. And on the horizon in place of Rip there loomed the massive, snowy volcano of Mount Rainier as if out of a dream. It was his first trip abroad and he strove to take in every single detail of the landscape, as he did every detail of the lives of the people that he met. His sister was extremely interested in how things were in the Republic and how his status had changed, even though she did not believe in Jesus Christ, and most likely didn't even believe that he, her younger brother, could truly believe either.

He really ought to concentrate on his sermon, but the woman at his side distracts him. She is nothing like his sister, more like his first wife. They were born, he realizes, at about the same time. But the image of his first wife has become fixed and unchanging. What would she have looked like if she'd lived to be forty? She'd certainly not have used eye make-up like this one. Or would she? And she would dress more soberly. She was unassuming and even a trifle ascetic. Maybe he was too. What is the point of dressing flamboyantly? Those who care too much for the outer covering are usually trying to conceal emptiness or sterility inside.

'It was most likely fear that brought me,' she eventually answers.

'Fear of what?'

'Of what? I can't really say. One doesn't have to be afraid of anything in particular, just afraid, that's all. Of people. Or of loneliness. Of life or death. Death mostly. Even though there are days when I don't feel like living at all.'

'Fear is human, Mrs Musilová.'

'Do you think so? My husband doesn't accept it. He can't stand it when I'm not in a good mood. He believes he's the only one with any right to have the blues.'

'Have you been married long?'

'Wait a second, I'll have to work it out. It's nearly fifteen years. With Samuel, that is. My husband has a biblical name. But it's the only saintly thing about him.'

'Samuel wasn't a saint. He was a judge and a prophet in ancient Israel.'

'No doubt. I wouldn't know such things. All I meant was that my husband has a character defect. But I expect I shouldn't have said anything, it's not polite to talk about the character defects of someone you don't know and who isn't present.'

A large farm office serves as a prayer room. In front of it there is already a huddle of old women waiting, as well as two men in their Sunday best, looking with some distrust at the luxurious foreign car.

He gets out. 'Thank you very much. And don't wait for me, I'll get home somehow.'

'I'll happily wait for you. I'll come and listen to your sermon, seeing that I'm here. Or are you going to preach the same one as in Prague?'

The room contains four rows of six chairs each, and even these are not filled. He writes the numbers of the hymns on a blackboard while greeting those who are gradually taking their places in the last two rows. There are nine in the congregation, including his companion, who remains standing by the door. Why? Maybe she feels out of place here. She is not dressed for a village service.

He sits down at the harmonium and plays a short improvisation. He concentrates. He has prepared an Easter sermon on a text from the Letter to the Romans. 'If we are united with him because we are involved in his death, we will certainly be involved in his resurrection also.' Quite unconsciously, he ends up speaking to his recent companion about her anxiety.

But he speaks less about resurrection, which has always somewhat disconcerted him, than about love that does not falter at any sacrifice, and about Jesus who, out of love for mankind, was crucified.

We speak of the miracle of resurrection after death, but we ought not to forget that living for love means resurrection during one's life. Several times during the sermon he looks in the direction of the

unknown woman who brought him here. She is standing motionless by the door, cowering slightly, as if trying to protect herself from the cold or from his words.

When they get back into the car and drive off, she asks him: 'Do you truly believe that someone who is dead can rise again and walk? Someone who is long dead, I mean.'

'But it's a. .'

'It's a myth,' she says. 'No, please don't explain anything. Not at the moment, at least. Do you think that the people sitting there understand you. Do they give any thought to what you told them?'

'I don't know. As far as they are concerned it is a ritual. They grew up with it. Besides, faith is not something you think about. You can reflect on God and many people have, but they've still not come up with anything. Even the psalmist complained: "I wondered what to make of it all and it seemed far from easy to me.'"

'And you don't wonder about him?'

He hesitates for a moment, and then says, '1 do, of course.'

'But you know it's impossible to come up with anything. Is it also chiefly a ritual for you too?'

'No, I didn't grow up with it.'

'Your parents weren't believers?'

'My mother was. As for my father, I can't say. One doesn't have the right to judge whether or not another person believes, particularly when it is one's father.'

'My father wasn't a believer. I told you that already. He was a sort of— what the Russians call a "superfluous man". He did just one truly good and useful thing in his life: he married my mother and didn't divorce her, not even during the war. Even though he's bound to have two-timed her on many occasions afterwards.'

'My father was a doctor. But he spent many years in concentration camps. Under the Nazis and the Communists. What he went through in those camps shattered him. It is truly hard to reconcile those experiences with belief in a just and all-powerful God. Father didn't believe there was any higher justice. He didn't believe people have souls either. "Man has a brain," he used to say. "The brain is nature's greatest wonder, but it is terribly impermanent. The soul is the brain. When the brain perishes what remains of the soul?"' He checks himself.

And in spite of that you chose your present career?'

'Maybe not in spite of but because. My father was a tolerant man.

He left it up to me to decide what I believed about the world, about people and their souls.'

'He died a long time ago?'

'Sixteen years ago. But he lived to see…' He checks himself again. 'A few days before his death he said to me, "What we have here on earth is neither God's nor Satan's creation. Heaven or Hell is what we create ourselves. Most of the time we create Hell."'

'Did you love him?'

'The way that everyone loves their father.'

Why is she asking him? Why does it interest her?

They are nearing Prague. The city is veiled in smoke. Human life veiled in mystery. And God's existence?

'I didn't love mine,' the woman breaks the silence. 'He used to come home, put his feet up on the table and demand to be waited on hand and foot by us. My mother, my sister and me. Mother would come in exhausted from work and had to put up with him. Whatever he earned he used to gamble. He seldom won, and when he did it was just used for more gambling. Mother used to support the lot of us. That's why I married so young. In order to get away from there. His shadow still hangs over me today. But he was tolerant as well, as far as I was concerned, at least. He let me study to be an actress even though I doubt if he'd ever set foot in a theatre in his life. I exaggerate. Apart from that he watched television.'

And you're an actress?'

'No, I didn't finish the course. When I met Sam I switched to study architecture — not at the technical university, though, more the theory than the practical stuff. And these days I work as a kind of high-class secretary in his practice, or I design interiors for his buildings. I must admit, though, that I do act on the odd occasion when one of my former fellow students finds me a bit-part on TV.'

He notices that her shoulders are trembling as if she is on the verge of tears. Are you all right?'

'Yes. It's OK. I'm just cold. I got chilled to the bone there. Feel.' She is now holding the steering wheel with her left hand and stretching out her right to him. He notices a long reddish scar on her wrist. Petr has a similar one. He noticed it the first time he met him in prison. Petr's was redder, being more recent no doubt.

How did it happen?

Life wasn't fun any more.

Life isn't simply fun.

I thought it could be. And what's the point of living if it's not fun?

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

But Petr lived. And this one is still living. He touches her hand. It really is cold.

'You could try warming it up,' she suggests. 'I can manage to drive with my left hand.'

She is clearly used to company of a different kind and doesn't realize that it is inappropriate for him to hold hands with a woman he doesn't really know. But he has no intention of refusing her request and so he holds her hand in his for a moment.

'Maybe I'm stupid,' the woman says, 'and you'll explain to me some time how it is that I will die, that my body will be burned to ashes or chewed to the bone by the larvae of some horrible beedes, but that one day it will be renewed and join with my soul which will never die. Have I got it right?'

'Yes and no.' He lets go of her hand but it is as if he can still feel the touch of her in his hand. 'It's not a question of resurrection of the body in material form. Not even Christ when he appeared to the Apostles had a material form, just a spiritual one.'

'You always manage to come up with some explanation,' she says. 'You preachers, I mean. Perhaps it's because you're wiser than the rest of us.'

'We certainly aren't.' He should never have travelled with this woman, and having accepted the lift should never have touched her at all.

2

Diary excerpts

The money from the house has come. Grandad built the house, Dad inherited it, but they took it away from him. And then when they jailed Dad, we lived in poverty. I remember at the time finding a crown coin in the street and thinking to myself that I could buy myself an ice-cream. It was an awful temptation. I even went as far as the sweet shop, but then I resisted and gave the crown to Mummy. It was enough for three bread rolls.

The interest on the sum in the bank amounts to more than ten times my pay. I've sent 50,000 to the Jerome Fund and Bosnia. I've also sent a contribution towards the children's oncology unit. Cancer took Jitka from me and made Eva lose her mummy. People in my family used to die of heart failure. That's how Grandad and Dad died anyway, they were still young at the time. I scarcely remember my grandfather. He was a master violin-maker. We used to have a violin at home that Dad would play when he had the time and wasn't in prison. I probably have Grandad to thank for my musical ear. They say he also used to play beautifully, but they didn't have tape recorders in those days and gramophone recordings would only be made of the greats: Hubermann, Szigeti or Kubelik.

The voices of the people and the violin sounds of those days have been engulfed by silence. These days everything can be preserved but will be forgotten anyway, like the tracts of the Middle Ages. Only those who have become symbols of their times will escape oblivion. But even they won't survive. And besides, what memory preserves are only gross distortions of reality.

I felt nothing when I sold the house, but I think it meant a lot to Grandad An ordinary craftsman from a little village near Karlovy Vary, he had given his only son an education and left him a house in Prague. What will I leave my children?

From the memoirs of Colonel F. about an interrogation at the beginning of the fifties:

Once they drove me somewhere away from Dejvice. It might have been Ruzyně or somewhere else on the Prague outskirts. They staged a partisan trial' with me. They led me there as a 'spy with a bag over my head and my hands tied. . They put a noose around my neck and told me they'd hang me if I didn't confess. I didn't have anything to confess. They put a revolver to my temple. They'd shoot me if I didn't confess. I had nothing to confess. They fired, but it was only a signal pistol and I survived. It lasted several hours. I could hardly stand and was thirsty and probably had a fever. I asked them for water but they ignored my requests.

Dad almost never talked about what he went through when the Communists jailed him. He used to say it wasn't for the ears of women or children. But they used to jail women too, and they even executed one who was entirely innocent. Maybe Dad didn't want us to regard him as a hero or a victim. Maybe he found it painful to think back on it. And maybe he had other reasons.

Magda's class teacher called me in. Apparently Magda and her pal Zuzana had climbed up on to the window-sill during break and poured water on passers-by. She told me she would never have expected it of Magda as she'd always been such a quiet child and she suggested she ought to find another friend.

I asked Magda what sort of fun she thought it was to pour water over people. She said she hadn't poured water on anyone, that she'd only thrown spiders out of the window, and anyway they didn't fall on anyone as they got caught somewhere on the way down.

But you watched Zuzana tipping water on people.

She didn't tip it on people, just on some old woman who's always swearing at us for making a racket in the street.

And some old woman isn't a human being?

But Daddy, she only poured it from a tiny little tablet bottle.

And she started to giggle as she remembered.

I've realized that I've hardly been paying any attention to the children recently. And the times I'm with them I'm either talking, praying or telling them off. It's more of a routine. I don't share their troubles and joys any more the way I still managed to do when Eva was small. I've taken on too many responsibilities and I've also spent a lot of time with Mummy, but there's no point in looking for external reasons, when it's more likely to be as a result of something happening inside me.

If there ever was any flame burning inside me, and I believe there was, it's going out now. I ought to do something about myself and I definitely ought to pay greater attention to the children.

Not long ago I was reflecting on my capacity for intimacy. I'm incapable of taking even my nearest and dearest into my confidence and then all of a sudden I'm telling some strange woman about my

father. I'm telling her things I wouldn't even tell Hana. Did I talk about them out of gratitude for the lift? Or because she reminded me of Jitka?

There was a moment when I was going to say that Dad lived long enough for me to make Hana's acquaintance at his hospital, but I stopped myself. Out of fear of taking her into my confidence, or because I didn't want to mention my wife?

I feel a need to talk about Dad ever since I found his name on the list. I was astounded when I read his name and date of birth among those of informers. My immediate reaction was that it had to be a mistake. How many people who found their close relatives or friends on it thought the same? What do we know of the private distress even of those who are closest to us? I believe he never consciously did anything dishonourable, not in that respect, at least, but I'm not sure that the others share my conviction. I have this idée fixe that they all know about it, that they read the list, noticed his name and are now looking at me and waiting for some explanation. It's up to me to defend him. But what am I supposed to tell them, when I myself hadn't suspected anything at all?

I also found some members of my congregation on the list. They included Brother Kodet who always used to smile at me so affably — just as he still does.

When I'm home alone

I finish a prayer

and cold wafts from the windows

my stove is old

I open its door

and in the flames I see

those dear faces

I shall see here no more

my first wife Dad

and now Mum as well

I listen to their silence

until the fire goes out

and I'm left alone

in the cold again

Yesterday I shouted at Hana because she wanted me to take out the rubbish when I happened to be writing my sermon. What's the point of preaching about God's love when I'm incapable of showing kindness to those nearest to me? We talk together so seldom nowadays. Maybe it's tiredness or not having enough time. Or my inability to be intimate? We have nothing to conceal from each other, at least as regards our behaviour. But at the same time it's as if we avoid mentioning anything fundamental about our lives. As if we never manage to stumble our way to it.

It took me almost a year before I could bring myself to tell her about finding Dad's name on the list. Whenever I am overcome with doubts about what I'm doing or what I believe, I never mention it to Hana. Maybe things that are fundamental to me she doesn't find important. She wants the children to be healthy and she's always dashing from one doctor to another with Magda on account of her eyes. Marek used to suffer from tonsillitis a lot when he was small and she'd get up and see to him several times a night, and the same thing with Eva whenever she was ill. She'd no doubt get up on account of me if it weren't for the fact I'm rarely ill. She treated my mother as if she were her own, particularly over this past year when Mum had become infirm, helping me to care for her as much as she possibly could. She brings the children up impeccably, to be hard-working, polite, truthful, modest and say their prayers. The children are the most important thing in her life. And I'm the next maybe. She makes sure I've got clean clothes to put on, that I'm never hungry, that I have a healthy diet and that I feel contented. She knows I love music and suggests we go to concerts together, even though she always falls asleep. If she sees me studying some book, she'll ask me what it's about, in the same way that she asks me what we talked about on the ministers' course. When I start to tell her, she hears me out but I get the feeling that she's not taking it in, that she just grasps individual words and sentences. The substance of what I'm saying doesn't interest her, it doesn't concern her, or it concerns her only on account of me. She is pleased when I like something and is distressed when I am distressed, even though she may be unfamiliar with the causes — so I quickly change the subject to something more familiar to her.

Jitka and I were in love with each other, body and soul. I love Hana

and am grateful to her for always having shared the good and bad with me, and there were more bad, or at least difficult, times than good ones. Maybe it's all inside me: maybe I'm incapable of awakening in her what is concealed in every human being… Or maybe I'm incapable of awakening it in myself. Maybe I lack experience of women. Jitka's death took me unawares. It's as if it thrust me into some enclosed space that I couldn't get out of, not even when I met Hana, not even when I was already living with her. Maybe we got married before we had a chance to cross the barrier that separates people from each other, to discover true intimacy.

In the absence of intimacy — the ability to confide one's most secret fears or the thoughts that scare one and that one is reluctant even to admit or put into words for oneself- love wastes away.

It looks as if they'll be releasing Petr on probation next week. So his lawyer tells me, at least. Petr is in a state of agitation about it. The last time I visited him he promised me he would start a completely new life when he came out. Steal? Never again, Reverend. I am a different person since you baptized me. Whoever is in Christ is born anew. . What is old has passed. That's how you told me it, wasn't it? He has a good memory for quotations and the ability to smile like a little boy. He looks the very picture of innocence. I praised him and told him I was pleased with him, and that Jesus was sure to be pleased with him also.

I am aware of being proud of having possibly turned one person aside from the path that led to self-destruction and evil in general. I remind myself that I am at best only the intermediary, but we're not entirely responsible for our feelings. I even mentioned Petr on television when I was invited to do a religious broadcast. I gave him as an example of how one ought not to condemn anyone out of hand. Whenever we reject people on grounds of prejudice, as many reject not only those who have transgressed in some way, but also all Romanies solely because they are different, we banish them to where they can be the butt of our judgement and censure. Conversely, whenever we are able to accept and trust, and support what is good in people, we reduce the level of social evil.

An extremely vivid dream. I saw Dad standing as if in a pillory. He was naked and he had a barrel stuck on his head. The barrel was transparent so I could see that he was bleeding from the temple. Then a uniformed guard appeared and struck the barrel with a long stick. Dad started to sway and then fell down dead on the ground.

When I found his name on the list, I was determined to investigate all the circumstances. To find out whether it was a mistake, a police forgery or Dad's attempt to ease his lot somehow. Only by then he was dead and apparently no one else has the right to check the facts of the case. Maybe I should have done a bit more investigating off my own bat, but it would have taken up too much time and I had so little of it to spare then. I was also afraid of what I might discover. Now it occurs to me that what I feared most was discovering the truth on account of Mum. Could I tell her at all? And could I keep on visiting her and not tell her? But now she's dead it's only myself I'd be sparing. I have asked Dr Wagner to advise me what action I might take in this matter. One is obliged to bury one's relatives with all possible dignity, Antigone knew that a long time ago.

3

Daniel invited Petr to dinner the day after his release. Alois, whom he had also invited, welcomed Petr with a hug, Hana even kissed him. Yet whenever the conversation at table turned to prison she would quickly change the subject. She wanted to protect Magda at least from such talk. After dinner she preferred to take her out of the room.

After they had gone, Alois voiced a thought that he had apparently been mulling over for some time. 'There's a difference. Petr stole and they released him, Jesus was innocent and he was crucified.'

'I'd rather not compare the two,' Daniel interrupted him.

'All the same, what you were saying in your sermon on Sunday about Pilate offering the Jews the release of Jesus, I found that a bit odd.'

'What makes you think so?'

'The way I see it, the kind who rule don't ask people who they should release and who they should hang.'

'Crucify.'

'Whatever. But Pilate was in charge there. If he really did ask, it'd look as if he was frightened of the ones who were shouting.'

'Maybe he was. There was always the threat of an uprising in Judah at that time. But otherwise its an interesting comment.'

Petr said, 'But everything's different these days compared to what it was then. Maybe Pilate suspected that it wasn't a man standing in front of him but the Saviour. These days they try villains and nobody cares about them so why should anyone ask people who they should release. And, besides, they don't hang people any more, they just lock them up until they go off their heads. But if anyone did ask the people, they'd say the best thing to do would be to hang all convicts straight off.'

'You're oversimplifying things a bit there, Petr,' Daniel said, unhappy with the direction the conversation was heading in.

'No way, Reverend. It's very cunningly thought out. Everyone thinks that it's all humane nowadays, but it could well be that things were better when they executed people straight off, than now when they just throw them in a dark hole to rot like old spuds or turnips.'

'But surely where there's life there's hope,' Eva spoke up.

Petr acknowledged that, but began to explain that bars weren't the worst things about prison, and it was even possible to get on with the warders sometimes. What destroyed you was constantly being surrounded by the same nutcases and perverts that there was no escape from. The same cons and the same talk: who had done what before they were sent down; the stupid mistakes they had made to end up inside; where money and pills could be obtained without trouble; where they could get women and how many they had had. Everyone would boast about all the things they would pull off when they eventually got out. But of course they never did those things and anyway they would be back inside before long. 'Thanks to you, my eyes were opened to that horror,' Petr said, turning to Daniel. 'I realized I was living in a world created by Satan.' He got more and more worked up as he spoke. Nobody could imagine what people were capable of. They tied a man, while still alive, to a metal beam and threw him in a lake. They would catch a girl, rape her and then cut off her breasts. And the money that circulated down there where people couldn't see! And when someone wanted to get rid of a guy they owed money to, they would just find a killer who would do him in for a couple of grand.

Petr was waving his hands as if trying to ward off the evil and shouting. His face underwent mild spasms and the scar on his cheek became livid. The lad felt a need to draw attention to himself and for that, like so many people, he needed evil. Either to practise it or to exorcise it. Daniel realized that the faces of his own children were unmarked in comparison — pure and childlike. As if the difference between Petr and Eva was not just a few years. If Petr was going to be coming here, and that would be desirable, there was going to be a new kind of authority in the house — certainly as far as Alois was concerned, and for his own children too, most likely. How could their life experiences compare with Petr's? Darkness was always tempting. The abyss, infidelity and sin were more attractive than the heights of fidelity and good works.

The best thing would be not to talk too much about Petr and let things return to their usual patterns as quickly as possible.

'Have you played yet today?' he asked Marek as soon as Petr left.

'How could I when we had visitors?' Marek said, shaking his head in astonishment at this question until his long blond hair hung over his face.

'Well, go and play now then!'

'Anyway my G string broke yesterday.'

'Paganini was capable of finishing a concerto on a single string.'

'I'm not Paganini, Dad.'

'But you've got three strings left.'

'Dad, we were told in physics today,' Marek said, changing the subject, 'that they recently discovered a quasar that shines like a thousand galaxies. And each of those has a hundred billion stars.'

And you believe that?'

Marek shrugged. 'That's what the principal told us. He believes it. And each time he says "Just try to grasp how tiny we are!"'

And you know what quasars are?'

Marek was very interested in astronomy. Maybe he also liked to be posed questions he couldn't answer. So that he could search in that infinite space for another God in place of the one who assumed human form.

'They are quasi-stellar radio sources,' his son informed him. 'They are moving away from us at almost the speed of light.'

'They must be a long way away already.'

At least twelve billion light years.'

Are you able to imagine that?'

'There are loads of things that people are unable to imagine,' Eva rose to her half-brother s defence.

'Is there anything else you want to know about quasars, Dad?'

'No, thank you. I don't know what use I'd have for the information.' Perhaps Marek was indeed interested in something that seemed unimportant or — more accurately — inconceivable to Daniel, something one simply had to take on faith, and he already had his faith. 'Or maybe some other time,' he added.

'Alois and I are going to make a telescope,' Marek went on to inform him.

'Where will you put it?'

'In the attic, of course!'

'Anyway, we haven't got a mirror,' Alois pointed out. 'We haven't got anything. Just two lenses and a plan of how to put it together.'

Then Eva wanted to know for her part whether Petr would be living with them like Alois, but Daniel said he had already arranged for Petr to stay at his older sister's.

'He'd be better off here,' Eva objected. 'His old gang could find him there.'

'Evička, if he takes it into his head to return to his former associates, nothing will stop him.'

Eva merely shrugged and he registered a kind of subconscious anxiety. No, it would be better not to have that lad in the house.

That evening, Daniel and his wife went for a walk.

The street was deserted. The cars by the kerb shone dully in the light of the street lamps and the clusters of forsythia glowed yellow in people's gardens. Hana linked her arm in his. 'I was dying for some fresh air. I feel I'm constantly indoors somewhere, like that lad who was in prison. And it's one problem after another at the hospital these days. There's no money for medicines, or blood, or even for bandages.' And then, as if she suddenly felt ashamed of complaining, she started to tell him again about the journalist who had a habit of visiting the nurses' station and telling them stories about China and other exotic countries he had lived in. In spite of her years in the city, Hana had remained a country woman. She loved stories. She would watch television sometimes, but she would get upset at the cruelty of almost everything that was broadcast. 'It must be interesting to see so many totally different countries and customs.'

'Would you like to see them too?'

'No, not really. No, it just crossed my mind when I was listening to those stories in the nurses' station.'

'We could take a trip together as a family.'

'Somewhere far away, you mean?'

'Why not? You said yourself that it must be interesting.'

'You're talking about it because now we can afford it?'

'And we've also the freedom to.'

'We'd better not. It wouldn't be deserved.'

'What makes you think you wouldn't have deserved it?'

'I wouldn't have done anything for it.'

'It could be instead of a present, say. Your birthday's coming up. And Eva's sitting her leaving exams in a few days' time. It would be an experience for the children too.'

'But the children don't even know their own country yet.'

'One never gets to know everything. But it's good for young people to get the chance at least once to take a look at their homeland from a distance.'

'Dan, you're crazy. You mean it seriously! Let the children go off when they're old enough to organize it themselves.'

'It needn't be China. I've always wanted to have a look at Jerusalem.'

'All right, Dan, if you think so, if you'd enjoy it, maybe yes, one day. But Eva hasn't yet done her leaving exams and I might never see my fiftieth birthday.'

He realized that he was irritated by her down-to-earth attitude that resisted any dreaming, any deviation from the daily routine. He gave her a hug so as to banish the feeling of annoyance and she held him close to her for a moment before quickly slipping out of his embrace. 'Not here on the street,' she whispered. 'What if someone saw us?'

4

Bára

Bára had gone to the church on the advice of her friend Ivana. She had been suffering from occasional bouts of depression. Although she

had only just turned forty, she put it down to her age, as well as to her less-than-successful second marriage and the feeling that on the whole her life seemed an aimless slog.

The fact was she had suffered from mood swings and sporadic feelings of desperate hopelessness from early adolescence. When she was seventeen she slashed her right wrist in the bathroom at home. She didn't do it because of an unhappy love affair or for any precisely definable reason. Fortunately, her sister Katka found her while she still had a drop of blood in her veins. When they asked her at the mental hospital why she had done it she was unable to reply. She simply could see no reason for living when life led nowhere but to death, and there was no way of attaining the things one believed worthwhile. What do you consider of greatest worth? the psychiatrist had asked her. She had wanted to reply 'love', but the word was so hackneyed, so devalued by pop songs of all kinds, that it no longer corresponded to her conception of it. So she said nothing. But she promised the doctors and her mother that she would never do anything like it again, and she kept her word. Another spell in mental hospital, she maintained, and she definitely would go mad.

She really made the promise only to the doctors and her mother; she promised nqthing to her father. She had no love for her father and in the last years of his life she scarcely talked to him. She considered her father ordinary: he wore grey clothes, worked as an insurance clerk, told silly risqué jokes, and if he read anything at all, it was detective stories. When she was still small, his relationship with her alternated between two extremes: either bringing her chocolate bars and custard puffs, or using death to scare her. Death would come for Bára if she was naughty, if she didn't clean her teeth, if she climbed on the window-sill, if she didn't look both ways before crossing the road, or if she cried because she didn't want to go to nursery.

'What's death?'

'Death is like the darkness,' her father explained. 'When death comes for you, you'll never see the sunrise again, the moon won't shine for you, not even a single star.'

'And can I really die?'

'We must all die,' her father said, visibly pleased that he had managed to frighten her.

'But you'll die before me,' she had told him, 'because you're old.' To her surprise, her prediction made her father laugh.

Apart from a feeling of aimlessness, Bára also suffered from a sense of her own inadequacy, and the paltriness of her pointless existence. There were no real reasons for her feelings: she was an exceptional woman to look at; her tall build and large breasts were the envy of most of her fellow pupils as far back as primary school. She had her father's fine hair which was of a fairly restrained blonde hue, but which, when the light caught it, acquired a deep coppery tint. She had her mother's eyes: set wide apart and the colour of forest honey. She had acting talent, a beautiful soprano voice, wit and a distaste for anything that could be regarded as humdrum and ordinary, whether in conversation, dress or art. She adored whimsical and outlandish pranks, like the time when she and her friends dressed themselves up in winter clothes on a sweltering summer day and, with woollen bobble caps jammed on their heads, they paraded through Prague with skis over their shoulders to the astonishment of passers-by. The very next day they were sunbathing half-naked by the windows of the classroom. She also enjoyed drinking. When she was hard up she made do with beer; as soon as she could afford it she preferred cheap wine, such as Portugal or Kadárka.

She had scarcely reached puberty, which happened around her thirteenth year, when she started to draw the attention of all kinds of men, from her own age group up to men old enough to be her father, but nothing convinced her that she was worthy of genuine interest, let alone love and admiration.

She married when she was nineteen. She tried to persuade herself it was because she was attracted to the man, but more likely it was because she wanted to leave home. Filip, her first husband, was closer to her father's generation, though he was nothing like her father, which was probably what attracted her to him most. He had an interesting and manly job — airline pilot — and spoke several languages, was a good tennis-player and an equally good dancer. Admittedly, he did have one thing in common with her father: he liked to talk about death, not hers but his own — one day his plane might crash. When he first told her this, she clasped him in her arms and begged him to give up flying as she was afraid for him. Her fear evidently excited him, as from then on he would take pleasure in recounting to her the disasters that had cost his colleagues their lives.

At the time of their marriage, she was in love with him and genuinely anxious about him, to the extent of going to meet him at the

airport during the first few weeks. He loved her too and prided himself on having such a young, beautiful and interesting wife. As he flew on overseas routes, he used to bring her expensive (and, to most people in the country, inaccessible) gifts. When in time he noticed that her devotion exceeded the level of affection he was accustomed to, he fell prey to the usual masculine vanity. Bára was his property, a mere accessory to his perfection. He started to treat her with increasing unkindness, constandy stressing all her faults: she wasn't punctual, she lacked purpose and didn't even pass muster either as a wife (she paid too much attention to studying instead of to him) or, later, as a mother. Little Saša screamed (because of her, naturally) often the whole night through, when he needed to sleep so as to be fresh for work the next day. He crushed the last remnants of any self-confidence she had. When she discovered that while she was spending her days and nights (or at least that was how it seemed to her) looking after him and his little boy, he was off making love to some air hostess, he explained to her that it was her fault for not creating a proper home.

She rushed straight back to her mother. Was it possible, she asked her, that men could be so mean, so blind to anything but themselves, so selfish, that they were incapable of seeing a true picture of the world or of their nearest and dearest? But her mother was too devoted to her own husband, who had actually saved her life, to accept such a generalization. She counselled Bára to be more patient, as she too had been patient.

Bára now began to think about doing away with herself after all, of entering the darkness for good and making a thorough job of it this time. The trouble was, things had changed: now she had a son to consider. So instead of killing herself she got a divorce. Shortly afterwards she fell in love with a man with a biblical name, a builder of Towers of Babel, as she used to call him. At that time, Saša was three and Samuel forty-three. He was actually two years older than her first husband, once divorced (he would divorce a second time on her account) and had a daughter from each of his marriages. She married him — she was convinced — out of love; she admired him and for a long time believed she had found the very best of men. She gave up her acting studies for him, and transferred to a course in architecture. Almost every day during the first months and even years after their marriage they would talk about the work that united them, mostly about his projects, which

were surprisingly unconventional and liberal for their time. They would also pore over the specialized foreign journals that he was able to get hold of, and discuss — she with greater tolerance, he mostly with his own particular kind of haughtiness — all the various architectural and building projects around the globe.

When she had completed her studies, she realized that while they might share the same opinions about new materials and how the building of high-rise, pre-fabricated housing estates was a crime, on the most essential thing they would never agree: for her, the most important thing in life was the man she loved, whereas for him it was his work or rather success in his work — in other words his career. Compared to her first husband he was more cultured and well-mannered, but he increasingly required her to subordinate herself to the routine and lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. What this routine required from her was to minister to his comfort. Its aim was to ensure him peace and quiet for his work. For his wife and his own son there remained little time in his life and even less enthusiasm. For his stepson there was nothing at all; he should be content that he had a place at the table and a bed to sleep in. At first Bára strove to satisfy his requirements in an effort to wring out of him a recognition which she wrongly confused with love. There was never any acknowledgement; her acquiescence merely fed his sense of superiority. She soon realized that her second husband was also selfish and self-centred and she was merely an adjunct to his ego, simply a very young mother caring for an ageing child. Her relative youth just meant it was an even greater sacrifice.

And so, after a few years of marriage, Bára started once more to be troubled by the thought that her life was slowly slipping away and she was achieving none of the things she longed for. The dusk was gradually falling, the night was approaching and she got less and less chance to enjoy the sun.

At that time she started to imagine love with another man; for the time being he was indeterminate, and most likely non-existent and therefore unattainable: a kind, unselfish and wise person who would not genuflect with admiration before his own ego and not regard his wife as a mother to look after him. But these fantasies did little to help her, they were so utterly unattainable that they merely left her dejected and she began to suffer bouts of depression again. She resisted the temptation to be unfaithful not so much out of moral conviction but

more out of fear of her husband killing her if he were to find out. He was jealous by nature and he grew more suspicious with age. Apart from that, she had no wish to harm someone with whom she had had many good times, with whom she had once been deeply in love and who had given her much.

At the onset of depression she would generally consult a tarot reader whose predictions contained much to raise her spirits: unexpected good fortune or a man who would steal her heart. She even predicted her a new marriage. When the depression was at its worst, Bára would lose all interest in life and be terrified of death. She would want to run away somewhere, put an end to something and start something afresh. What was there for her to start afresh, though? And she had nowhere to run to. Besides, she now had two sons and they needed her and she loved them.

In the course of her life she had acquired a number of woman friends. When she was in a good mood and managed to snatch a free evening for herself, she would call on Helena, a fellow student from her second period of study. Helena was the sort of person she could go to a wine bar with to drink wine and chat about nothing in particular. When she needed advice on child-rearing or consolation during desolate periods of marital vexation she would seek out Ivana, whom she had known since the time they were both studying acting at the Academy. Even though Bára abandoned the course after the third year and never returned to the Academy, the friendship remained. Ivana never went into acting but got married and had three children in five years. Her hobby was homoeopathy. Whenever Bara's anxiety states were at their height she would rush off to her friend who would prescribe for her anacardium or pulsatilla, although the remedies would never work. Either Bára didn't take them for long enough, or she didn't dilute them enough, or she and Ivana were simply not capable of determining her fundamental problem.

All the same, Bára was sure she could find a very precise name for her fundamental problem: lack of love.

What if she were to try going to church occasionally, it occurred to her friend at their last meeting. She didn't attend any church, did she?

It had been a long time since Bára had attended church.

Why?

Most of all because she had stopped believing in God, or at any rate

in the one they preached about in church. When she was a little girl she had very much wanted to believe. Even when she was studying she had still tried; in those days to go to church not only meant admitting to one's faith, it was also a sign of opposition to those who forbade belief. And then it struck her that what they preached in churches was too rigid, it hadn't changed for a thousand years. The very symbol of a man or God dying in pain on the cross was an almost perverted emphasis on suffering and death.

On the contrary — her friend explained to her — the cross symbolizes the fact that death has been overcome. Even so, the cross was something like an execution block or the gallows, it would always symbolize for her a cruel and violent ending of life.

Ivana didn't feel well enough versed in theological questions to argue with her. But the minister at the church she attended was an excellent man, both wise and interesting. She always came home from his sermons with a sense of having been cleansed. He was a man of love, she said with unusual fervour. What's more, he had many talents — he sang, played the harmonium, wrote poetry, composed music and could do wood carving. And he had behaved with courage under the old regime; for several years he was banned from preaching at all in Prague. Perhaps he would be able to explain what she found inexplicable.

Bára did indeed attend the church the following Sunday. She didn't make her presence known to Ivana, however, and left during the final hymn. A week later, she did the same. When her friend asked her what she thought about the sermons, Bára replied that she had found them stimulating, but nevertheless she had the feeling she was incapable of believing. What people believed in was simply a dream about God coming down among people in order to conquer death. That was how she saw it anyway. It was a dream purporting to be reality. But death ruled the whole universe, after all. Nothing, no sacrifice, could end its sway.

Ivana thought it was possible that the minister's preaching wasn't up to his usual standard. He was absentminded these days. The first time Bára was there, his mother was dying. Most likely he hadn't got over it quite yet. Ivana also wanted to know why Bára always dashed off before the end.

How could she shake the minister's hand when she wasn't able to believe in what he preached?

But if she were to speak to the minister privately. .

But he was in mourning, after all. She could hardly bother him at this time. Besides she was always in a rush; Sam would take it very hard if she were to neglect him on a Sunday morning. He always wanted her around him.

Did she think she wouldn't come next time then?

Bára said she wasn't sure. She concealed the fact she had already spoken to the minister, that she had given him a lift. She didn't even tell her how he had caught her imagination not only by the urgency with which he preached about the need for love, but also by the tenor of his voice and his gestures, which she suspected concealed some deep sadness or suppressed passion.

5

Daniel had been having disc trouble all that morning. The pain ran from his hip right down to the big toe of his right foot. He had first slipped the disc when he was climbing a rock in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains; he had lost his footing slightly and only realized that something had happened to him the next morning when he found he could not bend to put on his boots. Jitka had helped him to his feet and supported him as they went along in spite of his protests.

It might have been the pain or the weather — a blanket of smog lay over the city more reminiscent of autumn — but he had the impression that everyone he had met that day was either cursing or complaining. First thing that morning Magda had announced to him that she would most likely fail maths because she hadn't the first idea what it was about, 'and nobody,' she added reproachfully, 'is capable of explaining it to me'. Then Masa Soukupová telephoned and wept over her ruined marriage.

He ought to go and lie down. But before he could make up his mind Dr Wagner appeared, ostensibly to borrow some books from the library. It took them only a moment to choose the books, but instead of leaving, his visitor started to complain about society being bogged down in the basest materialism, and how life was dominated by money, brutality and vulgar sex. 'Fewer and fewer people believe in

spiritual values — who has anything to offer now, apart from the church?'

Daniel could have pointed out that even the church was incapable of firing people s imaginations any longer. Only some crazy sect with a new saviour or at least Christ's Delegate at its head was likely to do that. For fanatics like these, people were prepared to give up all their property or even commit mass suicide. Instead, he merely said that the original church had expected Christ's coming and a pitiless judgment on all sinners. And were there so few sinners? But what people have a right to judge them?

Yes, that was his own view entirely, the lawyer agreed, particularly when they themselves were not judges and had simply stolen a list of names and printed them and thought that was enough to prove the guilt of those in question.

'I've been thinking about your father,' and Daniel finally realized the reason for his visit and why he was delaying his departure. 'In your situation I would let the matter rest. You'll never discover the truth after all these years anyway.'

'But there must be some files, some records, preserved still.'

'Not necessarily. And even if there were, what kind of truth do you expect to find in the sort of records they kept?'

'But I'd naturally like to find out something about the circumstances at least.'

'If you say so, Reverend.' In that case, Dr Wagner saw two options. Either to find someone in the Ministry and persuade them to look in the file — if it existed; this would probably not be free of charge. Alternatively, he could try to find some of the scoundrels who interrogated his father and had him on their books.

The idea of bribery was abhorrent to Daniel. And the thought of talking to such individuals even more so. But what he regarded as abhorrent was immaterial at this moment.

Dr Wagner was scarcely out the door when Alois burst into his office, still in his working clothes.

'Has something happened to you?'

'Me? No, not me!' He tried to brush the bits of lime off his overalls on to the carpet. 'But we had an accident at the building site. Fyodor, this young Russian guy, took a header off the scaffolding.'

'Was he killed?'

'No, not outright anyway, but he's in an awful mess.'

'Did you call an ambulance?'

'Of course, but they kicked up a stink about him having no insurance. He was working the way they do nowadays, on the black. A Russian nigger, know what I mean?'

'Which hospital did they take him to?'

'Your one. Where your wife works, I mean.'

'Do you want to phone there?'

Alois shrugged. 'The other fellows said they'll let him stew, seeing he isn't insured and he's a Russian anyway.'

'They wouldn't do that,' although Daniel wasn't entirely sure about this.

'He never spoiled anyone's fun. He didn't know Czech — that's true, apart from the sort of things you'd rather I didn't say here. And a few words he needed for the job. When he'd say words like "beer" or "buddy" it sounded Russian anyway. He said his father was here too, as a soldier.'

'When?'

'Couldn't tell you.'

'I think I can work it out.'

'I just thought it'd be better if you phoned, they'd just tell me to f—'

He wouldn't get to bed now. The lad wouldn't care about his back pain; he was waiting for him to do something. After all he'd preached to him about loving one's neighbour and the boy was now doing just that. He was showing concern even though he didn't have to.

He sent him to get changed while he limped off to get a painkiller.

They parked in front of the surgical block.

'What are you doing here?' Hana was always pleased when he dropped by unexpectedly. Then she led them to the ward where the injured fellow lay. Alois pulled a chair over to the bed and started to tell him something, more with gestures than words.

He looked at the foreigner whose father must have been one of those he had vainly told to go home twenty-six years before. It was better to come as a labourer than as a soldier; on the other hand the soldier had returned unscathed, whereas this lad lay here pale, covered in bandages, his lips drawn back with the pain, his blond hair soaked in sweat.

Was our fathers' iniquity truly visited on us after all? It certainly was a fact that here on earth we bore the consequences of their actions.

The orthopaedist that Hana took him to see, and that she had

talked to Daniel about previously, asked: 'Do you have some connection with the labourer, Reverend?'

'No. A lad in our congregation is a workmate of his. I promised I'd enquire how he was,' Daniel said. 'Apparently he wasn't insured; does that complicate things for you?'

'Most definitely. I've just had the scoundrel he works for here. He was in a bit of a panic and so he offered to make a contribution but when he heard what an operation would cost he backed down. He'd sooner pay him the plane fare back to Kiev where he came from.'

'So you won't be operating?'

'It would be a fairly complicated operation.'

'And costly?'

'With the post-operative care, Reverend, about a quarter of a million. That's all. Because in this country a doctor still gets paid less than a bricklayer. The Germans would charge you at least three times that.'

'So you don't intend to operate on him?'

'We can't afford to, Reverend. The fellow who hired him as slave-labour should be locked up. But in this country they spend time badgering doctors to keep their costs down while villains like him do what they like. OK, let him pay the air fare, at least. In a couple of days he could be in a hospital in Kiev.'

And can the operation be put off?'

'That's not the point; we've pinned his leg for the time being. It's more a question of what they'll do to him there. Have you any idea what medical care is like over there? Do you think they care whether or not he'll be a cripple for the rest of his days? They'll straighten it up a bit and slap it in plaster. And even then he'll be lucky.'

And here you would operate on him so he could walk normally afterwards?'

'We'd do the maximum.'

And what if someone were to pay for the operation?'

'I doubt that anyone would.'

'What if I were to pay for it, for instance?'

The doctor stared at him in amazement. 'Why would you do that for someone you don't even know?'

'You also help people you don't know.'

'But that's my job, Reverend. All right, I know what you're going to say: it's your job too. But just let me tell you something. Not long ago we had a fellow in here, about your age, with gangrene in his leg.

Abroad they have a drug to treat it that we don't have yet. It's expensive. About three thousand marks a shot. And you have to have a repeat dose every year. Here there are only two options. Amputation or death. That fellow didn't want to believe it and begged me to save his leg. So I told him about that drug and that he'd have to obtain it himself, and fast. He agreed. Then I told him the price and he burst into tears. He could never find that much.'

'So you amputated the leg?'

'There was no other way; he'd have died before he'd managed to get that amount of money together. The only reason I'm telling you this, Reverend, is so you understand that trying to play the good Samaritan in our business would break a Rothschild.'

The doctor was right, of course. It would take no more than a couple of minutes to give away all the money he had received out of the blue. It was enough to take a look round. People were suffering all over the world, all around them. All the same he said: 'I believe the right thing to do is for you to operate on him here, if you'll agree.'

'We always prefer to fix people up rather than kick them out somewhere else.' He added, 'I can't take it from you. Some of it maybe. We'll have to find the rest from somewhere.'

'We'll agree on the details later, but I wouldn't like anyone to know about it. Not even the lad concerned.'

The doctor shrugged. 'That will be no problem. No one would believe it anyway.'

6

Samuel

The architect Samuel Musil regarded himself as a capable and decent man, a good husband and even a good father to the children of his three marriages — or the last two, at least. The majority of people in his field had no doubts about his qualities as a professional, even though a number of his opponents branded his most famous and prestigious projects as crimes perpetrated on the capital. Lately, people had been blaming him for the skilful way he had operated under the old regime, but few had said so to his face and he was convinced that he had

behaved no worse than most people would have done in his position and that he had never produced anything that was in any way at odds with his 'professional or human conscience' — or so he had claimed in a newspaper interview.

He had spent most of his life under the Communist regime. He used to start the biographical appendix to his personnel form with the sentence: 'I was born into the family of a poor peasant factory worker towards the end of the great economic crisis; after the war I joined the Union of Czech Youth and always sympathized with the policy of the Communist Party.' Admittedly, that sentence, covering the first eighteen years of his life, was not untrue, but in an interview with a newspaper on the occasion of his fifty-fifth birthday he did not repeat a single detail of it, but instead he recalled his years as a boy scout and the fact that his family never joined a co-operative and that his uncle was wounded in the battles on the Western Front. Fortunately, when he was setting up a practice after the fall of the old regime, nobody investigated either his origins or his convictions. All that was required was money, and it really didn't matter where it came from.

Samuel had no brothers or sisters. His mother had a tendency to depression and excessive mistrust, and even one child was an inordinate burden for her. There were days when she refused to speak to him, let alone caress or cuddle him. His father spent little time at home. He used to spend a lot of time at work and found little to entice him home; even in his looks, his son resembled too closely the wife who had embittered his life.

Samuel's schools had been terrible; he started primary school under the Protectorate and attended grammar school during the Stalinist years.

He graduated from university several years after Stalin's death, but even at that time the Kreshchatik in Kiev or the Lomonosov University in the Lenin Hills in Moscow were still regarded as notable achievements of progressive architecture. When he looked at them, however, the only thing that struck him was their bumptious ugliness. He wrote his thesis on the pre-war Soviet avant-garde. He emphasized the principles of the post-revolutionary Association of New Architects who had called for large unadorned surfaces and the construction of abstract geometric forms. These requirements, he maintained, had been the inspiration for Le Corbusier's purism.

He was also taken by the notion that whereas for the baroque the essential stylistic feature was the circle, in the case of revolutionary architecture it ought to be the spiral, as a form moving upwards to the Communist future of mankind. In his view, the avant-gardists had created a genuine revolutionary art which could be looked to for inspiration.

At first — like others of his generation — he had sincerely believed in progress and socialism. He had taken part in two youth building projects, and unlike most of the other participants he had managed to draw some benefit from them in career terms: not only was he able to try his hand at most building work but he also became familiar with architectural practice and soon realized the yawning gulf that existed in his profession between the reality on the ground and what was officially proclaimed.

At the second youth project he made the acquaintance of Katarina. She was a medical student from Slovakia. He managed to get her pregnant so soon that they were married four months after their return from the project. They never set up home together. For three years they barely saw each other twice a month except during the holidays, part of which they were able to spend together. When he got his first job with a design office he was assigned a flat and hoped that his wife would finally join him. She refused, having found another man in the meantime.

His second wife was called Kateřina and worked as a draughtsman. They were ill-matched socially. His wife was aware of it and tried to show her gratitude by her almost maternal care of him and unreserved recognition of his male supremacy. This suited him well and led him to regard his second marriage as successful.

As he grew older his tendency towards pedantry became more pronounced. He demanded order — from his employees at work and from his wife and daughter at home. Order in his terms meant punctuality and strict observance of all his instructions. He could not abide carelessly sketched plans, or to find a towel hung up sloppily in the bathroom in the morning — even a speck of cigarette ash on the table would spoil his mood for the remainder of the day. The sorts of things that ran counter to his idea of order were unplanned events, daydreaming, unexpected guests, dawdling and actions with unconsidered or even dangerous consequences.

Preserving this order enabled him to become an excellent organizer.

He could be relied on totally and because of this quality the directors of the design firms where he worked overlooked the fact that from time to time he would act with too much independence, and that he would always refuse jobs that he felt were beneath him.

Unlike many of his colleagues, who soon realized that nothing was required of an architect other than to build cheaply and not be inspired by anything that might come from the decadent West, he did not sit back but got hold of foreign journals and although he could not put any of the things he read into practice, at least he retained an awareness of what was being built around the world. As soon as the political thaw set in in the sixties, he managed to push through a number of interesting designs for exhibition pavilions.

When he met Bára, his first daughter had just married and the daughter from his second marriage was sixteen. By that time he had achieved recognition as a prominent architect who would be commissioned to design arts centres, Communist Party secretariats, experimental schools, and luxury holiday centres, or for the reconstruction of important historical buildings, rather than housing estates. At the age of only forty-three, he had already received a number of awards and even a state prize.

Although working within the regime, he never identified with it in spirit. Disillusioned with a government that had fulfilled so little of what it had once promised, he would read with unconcealed satisfaction articles in the foreign press unmasking its deceit and above all criticizing the government's uncreative and mostly hideous architecture. He skilfully contrived to avoid taking any post of political responsibility — not only because he was not sure how long the regime would survive, but also because he was afraid it might take him away from his work.

He was rich but lived abstemiously, not smoking and only taking the occasional drink, always remaining sober, since to get drunk would affect his competence at work the next day. He played tennis, and in the summer he would take a seaside holiday with his wife and daughter — in earlier years with both his daughters. Though of smallish build, he gave the impression of being bulky and even at the age of forty his hair had not started to go grey. His eyes were his most interesting feature: deep-set beneath thick eyebrows, and with golden-brown foxy irises. He had the ability to gaze at an interlocutor fixedly, so that he seemed to be listening intently, even when his mind was

elsewhere. As a result, women who found him attractive, or who wanted to appeal to him, could be given the impression that he found them so captivating that he couldn't take his eyes off them, that his look actually betrayed his feelings for them. In reality nothing of the sort occurred to him.

Whereas he felt himself to be at the peak of his powers, his wife had aged prematurely. She had never shone intellectually, but as time went by she started to lose interest in anything that interested him or the society in which he moved. Whenever she spoke he felt ashamed of her. He preferred not to take her to social occasions where the majority of his colleagues and contemporaries had much younger and more interesting wives. And she genuinely made no objection.

But it was not he who first made a play for Bára. Bára herself was aroused by the thrill of the chase when she first chanced to meet him at the Architects' Club. And as she was interesting, beautiful and young, as well as game for anything, Samuel yielded. He exchanged a wife-mother for a wife-daughter in a move that was so radical it must have been the only significant change in his life that he never managed to come to terms with.

7

Daniel bought Hana a gold bracelet for her fiftieth birthday.

'But there's no way I can wear it,' she said when she opened its case.

'Why not?'

'So much gold. It doesn't suit me and I don't have any occasion to wear it.'

'You can wear it this evening. You know I've booked a table at the Chinese restaurant.'

'So you said, but it wasn't necessary. We could have had a lovely dinner at home.'

'We have dinner at home every evening.'

'Precisely, and restaurants are so expensive now.'

Hana refused to take their new-found wealth into account. He liked that about her, but at the same time he found her reluctance to accept change irritating.

'I'm looking forward to the restaurant,' Marek piped up.

'I don't want to go anywhere,' Magda grumbled. 'I've got to study. We've got a maths test tomorrow.'

'You're stupid. They give you fortune cookies after the meal.'

'Marek, fortune cookies are superstitious and stupid,' he rebuked his son.

'And now on top of everything else we're doing algorithms. If somebody doesn't explain them to me I won't be able to calculate a single row.'

'Algorithms? What are they?' Daniel asked, expressing interest.

'That's just what I'd like to know.'

'An algorithm is a procedure for solving specific problems by carrying out a precisely determined sequence of steps,' Marek quoted the definition. 'It's what computer programs are all based on,' he added. 'And you've got a computer in your office, Dad.'

'Indeed I do have a computer, but I haven't the foggiest idea what goes on inside it.'

'That's your loss.'

In the meantime Magda had rummaged out her textbook. 'That's what I have to calculate: make an algorithm to determine the numerical sum of the given natural number a. In determining each of the numerals you may use only arithmetical operations and whole-number division to determine the share and remainder.'

'I don't understand that at all.'

'You see, Daddy. Not even you understand it.'

'I don't have to, I don't go to school any more. It's curious that Eva never needed anyone to explain things to her. Not even now that she's about to take her final exams.'

'Because Eva's clever. Because Eva's always the best. Because her mother was

'Magda!' he snapped at her.

'I'll work through it with her,' Marek suggested. 'Even someone so utterly thick is bound to grasp it in half an hour.'

Hana had got changed in the meantime. She had put on the black dress she had last worn at his mother's funeral. It was plain and very old. She wore no make-up. She never did wear make-up, not even lipstick. Her shoes were carefully polished, that was true, but there was no hiding the fact that they pre-dated the Velvet Revolution. It struck him that gold genuinely didn't suit what his wife was wearing, maybe it

didn't suit her at all. Hed wanted to please her, but had only disconcerted her.

'Isn't that dress a bit funereal?' he wondered.

'Everyone wears black nowadays,' she said. 'Even very young girls go around in black. Haven't you noticed?'

'No, I expect I don't look at the girls enough.'

He was left alone in the room. He realized that he did not feel at all pleased with himself. He had neglected his children, he didn't know what algorithms were and Magda had the feeling that he favoured Eva. He gave his wife jewellery instead of giving her love. And even his attempt to restore the health of some unknown Russian displeased him. It struck him that the action had not come from the heart, that there had been something ostentatious about it: a gesture intended to convince an unknown doctor about Christian love, or more likely it had been a gesture intended for himself, to prove how he disdained money and how easily he could part with it.

Was it possible for one to uphold order in a world that was so disordered?

The telephone rang. He picked up the receiver reluctantly.

'Good afternoon, Reverend, this is Bára.' The woman's voice was slightly harsher on the phone than in real life. 'I'm not sure whether you'll remember me.'

'My memory's not that bad, even at my age.'

'Age is an awful thing. It horrifies me when I realize which year I was born in and I'm pleased when everyone immediately forgets it. I hope you're not offended that I didn't come last Sunday.'

'Church attendance is not compulsory for anyone. Besides, as you said, you are not of our faith.'

'Did I put it as stupidly as that? I apologize. At this time of year my husband is raring to go down to our country house. I don't know when I'll next manage to escape on a Sunday.'

'Is there no local church near your country place?'

'I've no idea. I've never enquired.' Then she said, 'There are plenty of churches everywhere, but it's your sermons that interest me.'

'Thank you. I'm pleased that you got something out of my sermons.'

'Sundays are not going to be easy from now on,' she said. 'But what I actually called you for was to let you know that I have a small role in a television play tonight. It's being shown on Channel One at ten past eight. But maybe you don't watch television.'

'Not usually, but I would certainly watch you. But I won't be home this evening.'

'Please don't be offended — I don't know what came over me. I just had the feeling I was somehow indebted to you.'

'I'm sure you aren't. On the contrary, I'm the one indebted to you — for that lift. I regret we won't be able to watch it, but we're having a birthday celebration today.'

'It's your birthday today?'

'No, my wife's.'

'So, do please wish her from me lots of love in her life. I expect it's just as well you won't be watching — it might have put you off me. You see, it's not a particularly attractive little role. Anyway, I'm sorry for taking up your time.'

'You haven't. And I look forward to your finding a moment to come and join us some Sunday.'

'Yes,' she said, 'I'll do my best, I truly will!'

8 Letters

Dear Reverend Vedra,

Everyone is asleep here at home, except that you don't know where my home is (where else but Hanspaulka?). I can't get to sleep, I'm down in the dumps. It could be the rotten weather or the fact that Samuel told me that I ruin his life, even though I do everything I can to make him feel contented at home. Samuel is my husband, in case you'd forgotten.

I've decided to write to you because you strike me as wise and kind, and I have the impression that you're someone who is capable of listening sympathetically not because it is in your job description but because you really are someone fired by the love that you preach about so fervently in your sermons. Of course it's possible just to talk about love and most people are capable of jabbering on about it ad nauseam. But one can feel that you mean it, which is why I looked forward to hearing you every Sunday. Now I miss your words and your voice. There are so many things I'd like to ask you about. Such as what one must do to live in love and freedom, when one is

surrounded on every side by something else entirely: the pursuit of money, self-advancement and an awful lot of violence or at least selfishness, as well as male conceit and vanity, and men's craving to assert their own ego at the expense of their closest companions?

Now I'm astonished at my own effrontery, not only in writing to you but in burdening you with these questions, as a result of which I'm actually taking up your time. As if I couldn't make do with hearing you in church.

But if you could spare me a couple of lines I'd be eternally grateful.

Best wishes,

Yours admiringly,

Bára Musilová

Dear Mr Houdek,

Regarding our recent conversation about that young lad Petr Koubek, who has just been released from prison where he was baptized and who, I firmly believe, underwent a profound change of heart. You were so kind as to mention that he might be able to work in your splendid garden centre. He will therefore be coming to see you about a job next Monday. Working outdoors will do him good, after spending almost two years cooped up in prison. I am sure he'll show willingness, but I would entreat you none the less to be patient with him, in the beginning at least. When someone is in prison for such a lengthy period, his personality is bound to be affected, his reactions are often unpredictable and above all unreasonable. It is sometimes hard to take, but it is understandable when we consider the sort of surroundings he has moved in and the sort of people he could not help mixing with.

I do hope that Petr won't create any difficulties for you, but should any arise, don't hesitate to call me and I will try to intervene.

Please convey my best wishes to your wife and accept once again my thanks for your singular readiness to assist someone in need.

Yours sincerely, Daniel Vedra

Dear Mrs Musilová,

I do not merit the praise you heap on me. When I speak about love I do no more than pass on the most important thing about Christ's message.

The aim of what we do is to find real love. This was said most beautifully by St Paul: love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.'

What is one to do, you ask, in order to live in love and freedom, when there is so little of it around one? Do not expect me to speak as one possessed of understanding or capable of handing out prescriptions for how to live.

A life of love is, I suppose, the desire of anyone whose heart is in the right place. What was so terrible about the old regime was that hatred and struggle were regarded as so fundamental to life. To many this seemed to make sense because at first glance a life of love seems virtually unattainable. It is enough to turn on the television or read the newspaper headlines: terrorism, robbery, fraud, and all those killed in Bosnia or the Caucasus. And that is leaving aside our everyday life. Could we really hurt each other and quarrel the way we do every day if we lived in love? Could we hate people just because they have a different faith, or look different?

Our desires and expectations are often disappointed, however. Instead of striving once again to find love and put it into practice we invent all sorts of alternative goals. We build careers for ourselves and compete with each other, or on the contrary we waste time and fail to fill it with something that reaches out beyond ourselves. We often look for someone to blame for our dissatisfaction with our lives, not looking inside ourselves, but outside ourselves. We fetter our hearts with many injunctions, taboos and prejudices. Often they are so choked with these things that when an opportunity arises to fulfil something we've yearned for, we don't even notice it. So we just live, become cold, and replace love with apathy or even rancour.

You write about a world that is full of selfishness, money-grubbing, violence;ind male arrogance. That's what the world looks like to me sometimes. I've noticed that when people start a conversation with me it is in order to express some bitterness, not to say something kind. If I offer to carry a woman's shopping bag she becomes alarmed. She thinks that I want to rob

her not lend a hand. But these are only superficial observations. Sometimes we can become outraged with those who are actually suffering.

I have no illusions about how difficult it is to live in today's world. Life has never been easy for those who expect it to fulfil their desires. Therefore every morning I try to reflect on what is really important for my life. If it continues to be a life of love then I will have to act and behave accordingly. It is not easy to enter the hearts of others. But wanting to love and to live in love means trying to do precisely that. Whether or not we try is solely a matter of our own determination, and this is precisely where our inalienable freedom lies: our inner freedom to determine our own actions.

I see I've gone on a bit — it's a preacher's failing, and yet I doubt whether I've said anything you didn't know already. I ought to add that real love should reach out somewhere. To Jesus, as I believe. That splendid theologian Karl Barth once wrote that "human life has no meaning without belief in transcendental truth, justice and love which mankind is incapable of creating alone…'

My wish is that you will manage to live the way you would wish.

With best regards, Daniel Vedra

Dear Reverend Vedra,

You can't know how pleased I was to receive your letter and how much it helped me. For me, love has always been the most important thing in my life even though I have seldom received much of it from others. No, that's unjust. My mother has always been marvellous and maybe the others would have treated me better if I hadn't messed things up myself.

I married my husband, who is successful and highly respected, out of love. I so earnestly wanted that love to last for ever, and still do, and want to remain true to this wish, true to my husband. And yet I watch with horror as that love fades and is replaced by recriminations, quarrels or cold silence. All that remains is a fixed routine: breakfast, shopping, cooking, housework and visiting people together, or even receptions with feigned smiles and bonhomie. I have two sons. Because of my own irresponsibility I deprived Saša of a father when he was very small. And I now know I must not deprive my little Aleš of his father.

Sometimes I wake up at night with a feeling of anxiety that I have difficulty in describing to you. It is a sense of wasting my life, my only life, my days, each of which is unrepeatable. Yet I spend them emptily, engaged in some duty or other which I mostly don't recognize as such, in a life without love and without devotion, even though I have long conversations about them at home with my husband.

There are times when I'd just like to take myself off somewhere or cuddle up to my husband and beg him to be with me, be mine, do something, save me. But he is asleep and if I did wake him he would tick me off for bothering him. I only interest him as a component. A component of the home where he takes refuge, where he needs me to look after and listen to him, as well as tidy and cook for him. But am I directing my request to the right person at this moment? You are happy because you have prayer and someone who listens to you, or at least so you believe. That's a comfort. That is hope.

There is also hope in what you wrote to me and the advice you gave, although I get the feeling that to live according to your advice one definitely needs enormous strength, patience and perseverance.

You have been so kind to me that I take the liberty to ask whether I might be able to come and talk to you about these things some time — whether I'm allowed to if I'm not a member of your church. I know that time is the most precious commodity that we have and were you to spare me a few minutes I would be eternally grateful.

Yours, Bára M.

Penned just before midnight on Wednesday in our fair, royal city which neither the Communists nor my husband have managed to disfigure.

Vedra, you gypsy mouthpiece,

I watched your antics on television and it made me want to throw up. You literally called on us to be kind to 'poor' criminals and even gypsies! But do you share a house with them? I do. No sooner do you meet them than they're reaching for their knives. They get drunk and yell beneath your window. If it wasn't for the skinheads they'd have cut the throats of the lot of us. They will one day, anyway, when they outnumber us, and that won't

be long. The only reason they haven't done it so far is because someone has to feed and clothe them. Have you already forgotten what you Christians have on your consciences? How many people did you burn at the stake just for saying the world was round, for instance? And what about when you used to bless weapons? Take your bloody love and stick it up your arse and don't come spreading it on the television where nobody could give a damn about you.

A viewer from Usti

Dear Rút,

You know how terrible I am about writing letters. You're so far away that it seems inappropriate to let you know all the little details of our lives. And that leaves only the major events. One important event that affects both of us I've been keeping from you. Some time ago — it must be about two years already — a magazine here published a list of secret police informers. The list was obtained illegally and published without any official authentication. It contained over a hundred thousand names of people living and dead, some who signed to advance their careers and others who were forced to in prison. I found our father's name on the list: his real name, his code name and his date of birth. That's all. 1 have no other information and only the people on the list have the right to have it checked. If they died in the meantime, it can't be helped. You can imagine my feelings when I discovered Dad's name on the list. I wanted to spare you them. Besides, I've heard all sorts of conflicting reports about the matter over the past two years that I really don't know what to think. There is talk about people who found themselves mistakenly on the list because they happened to sign a bit of paper which they didn't think important and subsequently did nothing dishonourable. Now it seems to me that we ought to try to clear Dad's name if he was innocent, and knowing him and remembering him as I do, I just can't bring myself to believe he was capable of harming anyone in order to gain some advantage for himself or to spare himself some hardship. It struck me that you, as the older one, might know a bit more about him in those years when he returned from prison, that you might have noticed something that I was oblivious to, or even have heard something from him that he didn't feel he could tell me. This is the reason why I'm writing to you about it so belatedly.

I'm thinking of you. It's a pity we had to meet in the shadow of death and there was no opportunity for us really to spend some time together.

Love, Dan

Dear Mrs Bára Musilová,

Thank you for your frank letter. I welcome anyone who feels a need to talk to me about 'such things'. I enclose a card with the times you can catch me in my office — it is situated in the same building as the chapel.

And please don't speak in advance about gratitude before knowing what you'll receive.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Vedra

Dear Reverend,

I thought I'd make it to church, but you know what we pagans are like — in the end we would rather do something else than help our souls. So I'm writing to you instead. I expect you can guess it is to do with that young man Petr Koubek that I hired on your recommendation and gave the job of driving the garden tractor. I've no complaints about the young man, it's just that he worries me a bit. To put it in a nutshell, he tries to do the job properly but his heart isn't in it. He has other ambitions. I suppose you might call them spiritual, but they seem to me inappropriate. As you know, he's a good-looking young fellow with an interesting face and a murky past. I mostly employ women, some of whom are still very young. Don't get the idea that he is tempting them to do anything wrong, anyway it would be quite normal if he happened to fancy some of them. No, he preaches to them, while they're hard at work and you can imagine that we have more than enough to do in the gardens at this time of year. He turns off the motor and, job or no job, he starts to tell them all about the life of the Holy Spirit in love and fellowship, saying that all people should be transformed. He feels that he is called on to start that transformation. The girls listen to him transfixed, and he enjoys that. But in the meantime the borders are overgrown with weeds and the carnations go unwatered. Maybe it would be

a good idea for you to have a word with him, Reverend, and explain to him that he's in the garden to work and not to preach to the girls about the Holy Spirit.

Wishing you all the best,

Yours truly, Břetislav Houdek