Of course, ask away, Michal, ask away, darling.
In which house is your Uranus, Jane?
In the house of death. And yours?
Mine is too, Jane. So how come you risked taking this flight?
Because there's no escaping your fate. Only foolish people think they will manage to. The foolish are always on the run. Or on the attack. Or building towers. They think they are building towers when in point of fact they are building labyrinths in which they will die anyway.
You're not afraid of dying?
Why should I be, seeing that we are going to die together? But darling, this is me, didn't you recognize me? I disguised myself so that I could be with you. Far better to end it for good in the ocean waves than spend a holiday just outside Prague. Your house of death will be mine too!
Leona!
At that moment a deafening explosion shot him into the air and then there began a long, terrifying final descent into the depths. He saw the rapidly approaching surface of the water and in paralysing terror he opened his eyes. The young woman alongside him was asleep. The lights in the plane were dimmed. On the screen in front of him the dark spot of the aircraft moved across the Indian Ocean.
When at last he disembarked at Sydney airport and found out how many dollars a three-minute phone call to Prague cost, he decided to call Leona. He announced triumphantly that he had landed in the antipodes in spite of her astrologer s forecast.
'I know you landed safely,' she said.
'You know?' he marvelled. 'But you prophesied. .'
'I miscalculated,' she quickly interrupted him. 'I was counting September as the tenth month, when in fact it's the ninth, of course. I gave my astrologer faulty information. I only realized my mistake after you'd taken off. You're a Virgo, of course, not a Libra. I don't know how I could have made that mistake. Your Uranus wasn't in the house of death, but in the house of love instead.'
'I don't believe this. Just imagine what would have happened if I'd let myself be dissuaded and stayed at home!'
'What would have happened? You'd be with me,' she said. 'You ought to be with me now anyway, seeing you've got Uranus in your house of love.'
(1994)
IT'S RAINING OUT
It was true that Judge Martin Vacek had dealt with a number of political cases under the old regime, but as he was only five years off retirement age, it was suggested to him that from now on he should deal exclusively with divorce cases (which, anyway, is what he used to do when he first came to the bench). He considered this to be an acceptable, even sensible proposal. He could, of course, have left the bench altogether, as several of his colleagues had done, and set up privately as a barrister, which was far more lucrative. But he was conservative by nature and had no wish to alter his daily routine and his regular journey to work, let alone have to start looking for and equipping private chambers. None the less, he consulted his wife about what he should do.
He had been married for thirty years and had stopped loving his wife Marie long ago; in fact he could no longer remember a time when he did actually love her. Nevertheless they got on fairly well together and he had been accustomed to consult her about career decisions, and even about some of the more
complicated cases he had to try. His wife, who was a year older, came from the country and had no more than elementary schooling; she had spent her life working at the post office for paltry wages. She did, however, have a natural wisdom, which was fortunately unspoilt by a legal training. Marie had plainly stopped loving him years ago too, but she looked after him almost like a mother, cooking him good meals and making sure not only that his shirts were ironed but also that he had a suitable tie to wear with them. In the course of their life together she was bound to have influenced if not his character then at least his appearance, and since they both favoured the colour grey, their very features gradually began to take on a grey hue too. In recent years they had come to regard each other as an indispensable part of the household, particularly now that their two sons had grown up and moved away and the apartment felt empty, although crammed with all sorts of essentially useless objects and knick-knacks. They barely spoke any more, although there was a time when they used to go out together to the cinema or a concert (it was the done thing for someone in his position to have a season ticket for the philharmonic concerts), or Marie would relate to him the plots of novels she had read as he didn't have the time to. Nowadays, though, they didn't go to the cinema and simply exchanged a few words about food, shopping, their sons or the weather, or they simply watched the television together in silence. Marie no longer told him anything about what she read, if she read anything at all these days. It therefore came as a surprise to her when he asked her whether he should remain on the bench or start something completely fresh. It was not her custom to contradict her husband and when in the past he had asked her opinion on something, she had always tried to guess the reply
he was wanting to hear. 'Divorce suits —' she now said, '- that could be fairly interesting work. You'll get to hear lots of stories.'
It had never occurred to him to view his possible future employment from such an angle. He had heard so many stories in his lifetime that they had long since ceased to interest him. None the less he took his wife's opinion into account and remained on the bench.
As it turned out, the cases tended to be more banal than interesting. In most of them, immature men had married young women who yearned for something that their husbands could not provide, so in time there appeared a third person who disrupted what had never been firmly established in the first place. Even so, his summing up was often met with tears. He would divorce couples on grounds of infidelity or mutual incompatibility. Some of them were husbands and wives who had stopped living together long ago, but in spite of that, he could never rid himself of the conviction that most of the divorces were unnecessary, that people were attempting to escape the inescapable: their own emptiness, their own incapacity to share their lives with another person. At least to the extent he had managed to himself.
There were so many cases that they soon became indistinguishable and even the people's faces slipped quickly from his memory — which was beginning to decline with age anyway. Now and then, however, a more interesting case would crop up, and a face, a name or an occupation would stick in his mind.
After one such a sitting, he emerged from the courtroom to discover the woman he had just divorced sitting opposite him on a bench in the corridor, crying.
The woman's name was Lída Vachková, a name that had immediately caught his eye because of its resemblance to his own, quite apart from the fact that the woman's distinctive, delicate beauty and her timid replies to his questions had held his attention in court. He attributed her delicacy to her profession; she was a violinist. Although it was uncharacteristic of him, he stopped in front of her and said, 'Don't cry, Mrs Vachková, no pain lasts for ever.'
She glanced up at him in surprise and quickly wiped away her tears. 'Thank you.' As she got up she started to sway and he was obliged to catch hold of her. 'Are you feeling unwell?'
'Do forgive me,' she said, 'I took some tablets this morning. To calm my nerves.'
He invited her into his chambers and fetched her a glass of water. He knew not only her name and occupation but also her age. She was twenty years his junior, very young, in his eyes, at least. He also knew the man who until a short while ago had been her husband. He too was older than she was (although at this moment he couldn't exactly recall how much older) and ran some recently established entertainment agency. A vulgar, unpleasant-looking fellow, he had apparently subjected his wife to rough and domineering treatment and had sought to curb all her interests. There were no children. They had had no problem agreeing on the division of their property — there wasn't very much anyway. The man had left the flat to his wife and moved in with his mistress.