When I step out of the shower I'm shivering all over and it's not from cold. Even though it is already April, I still have the heating on in the flat. I am shivering from loneliness — what shakes me is the weeping I conceal, weeping over another day when time will simply drain away, a river without water, just a dried riverbed full of sharp stones — and I'm barefoot and naked, my dressing gown lies on the floor and no one looks at my breasts. Abandoned and uncaressed, milk will never flow from them again.
From the bedroom behind me comes a roar of what is now regarded as music and what my little girl idolizes: Nirvana or Alice in Chains or Screaming Trees, heavy metal, hard rock, grunge, I can't keep track of it any more. The time when music like that excited me is past. It's true that when the chair in the surgery happens to fall vacant, Eva dispels the quiet by tuning into some radio station, but I don't notice it. My assistant is scared of silence, like almost everyone these days. But I like peace and quiet, I yearn for a moment of silence within myself, the sort of silence
in which I might hear the rush of my own blood, hear the tears roll down my cheeks, and hear the flames when they suddenly come close.
But that sort of silence is to be found only in the depths of the grave, such as in the wall of the village cemetery on the edge of Rožmitál where they buried Jan Jakub Ryba. He cut his throat when he could no longer support his seven children. His poor wife! But in that sort of silence you don't hear anything because the blood and tears have stopped and Master Ryba was never to hear again from the nearby church the words of his folkish Christmas Mass: 'Master, hey! Rise I say! Look out at the sky — splendour shines on high. .'
For me blood, unlike tears, means life, and when I bleed from a wound in my gum I try to stop it as quickly as possible.
2
I've given my daughter her breakfast and I've reminded her she has homework to do. I'm dashing out to see Mum. Jana wants to know when I'll be home, and when I tell her I'll be back around noon, she seems happy enough.
The street is chock-a-block with cars on weekdays but it's not so hard to cross on a Saturday morning. And there's not such a stench in the air. I actually think I can smell the elderflower from the garden in front of the house.
The houses in our street are sexless, having been built at the end of the thirties. They lack any particular style. It was the time when they started building these rabbit hutches, except that in those days they were built of bricks instead of precast concrete, and most of them had five or six floors instead of thirteen. Mum used to tell me how in summer before the war people would take chairs out in front of the house and sit and chat. In those days this was the city limits and people had more time to talk. Little did
they suspect that one day normal human conversation would be replaced by TV chat shows.
They weren't afraid of each other yet, I didn't tell Mum. During the war they were afraid to speak their minds because it could cost them their lives. But Mum knows that all too well from her own experience. People were afraid during the Communist years too, although Mum wasn't affected so much, thanks to Dad. What happens to people who spend their lives afraid to voice their opinions? They stop thinking, most likely. Or they get used to empty talk.
During the war Mum's life was at risk, even though she was only a little girl. Her mother — Grandma Irena, whom Mum never talked about much — was murdered in a gas chamber by the Germans. So were Grandma's parents, her brothers and sisters and her nieces. Mum didn't tell me about it until I was almost an adult. All I knew before then was that Grandma died in the war. And it was a long time before Mum told me she was Jewish. Mum wasn't sent to the camps but spent the war with her father. Even so, throughout the war she had a little suitcase packed ready with essential things just in case, as one never knew. 'They only gave my mother an hour to pack her things,' she told me.
Mum's father, Grandpa Antonín, had a furniture shop. To avoid being Aryanized, my grandfather made a show of divorcing my grandmother as soon as the Germans invaded. He saved the business — though not for long, because the Communists took it away from him. But by then it was too late to save his wife.
Mum never forgave him that trade-off and left home as soon as she was eighteen. Two years later she got married. She deliberately married a Communist, who wasn't a Jew or a Christian but believed religion was the opium of the people.
Grandpa Antonín also never forgave himself that divorce. When the Communists ordered him to leave the shop they had confiscated from him, he saw no reason to go on living. He went to the storeroom, sat down in a brand-new Thonet armchair and shot himself. But that was long before I was born.
Mum lives not far away and I can walk to her place through streets of villas. On the way I pass the villa where my favourite writer, Karel Čapek, used to live. He was a good man and a wizard with words. I stop by the fence as if hoping that his free spirit might somehow still be hovering here so many years after his death. No sign of a spirit hovering but the trees have grown up here. They must have grown since he died because they were no longer young when I first saw them. When I was born that green-fingered writer was already fifteen years dead. My darling, he wrote to the only real love of his life, please learn to be happy, for God's sake. That's all I wish for you, and apart from your love you can't give me anything more beautiful than your happiness.
That's something Karel would never have written to me, even though he claimed to love me, in the days when perhaps he really did still love me.
Why do good people die so young, while scoundrels manage to keep going for years?
Good people suffer more because they take the sufferings of others to heart. I don't know if I'm a good person, but I've had more than my share of suffering.
I wend my way through the narrow streets until I reach the street that's been known as Ruská for as long as I remember. The name has survived all regimes, unlike many other street names. Here, in a two-bedroomed flat, in an apartment house with a miniature garden in the front and one only slightly bigger at the back, I came into the world. On the other side of the street there are villas, and between them and the street there is a strip of grass with two rows of lime trees. In those days the treetops were full of the chatter of wagtails and the song of flycatchers, warblers and finches — which was drowned from time to time by the insistent blare of a siren as an ambulance sped past on its way to the nearby hospital. There is only cheap furniture in the flat, the sort made since the war, but at least it's real wood. There are no pictures on the walls. Dad used to have a coloured portrait of Lenin above the
table, and Mum had a framed tinted photograph of her mother from the period when Grandma Irena was a student. In that picture Grandma apparently resembles her famous contemporary Mary Pickford, with her pronounced chin and nose. Her hair in the photo is strawberry blonde. I have never asked my mother whether my grandmother really had auburn hair, but I hope so, as I like redheads.
Mum's hair has already lost its red colour. It used to be strawberry blonde like mine, but now it has turned white. She still wears black even though it's six weeks since Dad died. Grieving should last at least a year — that's something I remember from psychology lectures. Do I feel grief? No, no more than usual. It's as if Dad didn't belong to me, as if he were part of another world. No, it was the same world, but a different time. Parents tend to live in a different time — some of them, at least. But there's no reason why they should; after all, what are twenty or thirty years? That's what my one and only husband would say. Just an insignificant moment compared to cosmic time.