I know it's just an act, this deference and cordiality. She's just playing the embodiment of filial love so I'll leave at last and stop disturbing her indolence. She deserves a good hiding; from time to time, at least. She needs a father to keep her in line. I won't slap her. I was never able to spank her even when she was small. Now it's too late: for her father, whose only concern these days is his illness, and for her: she'll soon be sixteen and no manner of beating would set her on the right track now.
'I'll come and see to the potatoes right away,' she calls after me.
4
My little girl made tracks precisely at two. I ought to have kept her here and insisted she did her homework before leaving. Of course school isn't important. Let her fail, but at least let her know why. Why she failed or more properly what she's living for. But then which of us knows what we're living for? If I were sure myself I'd try to guide her, though I suspect I wouldn't manage.
Not long ago she was a good, well-behaved little girl with a pigtail. Slim, beautiful and obliging: even my father liked her. Once, when she had only just learnt to walk, she offered to go for a stroll with him; he walked through the park at her side like an obedient dog. It had rained earlier and she led him round the puddles and made sure he didn't get his paws muddy.
She made a terrible job of scraping the potatoes. Half of the peel stayed on and she left the eyes in. I served them to her just as they were. But she doesn't even notice such trivial details.
She promised to be back by midnight. I'll wait up for her and insist she gives me a report on how she spent the rest of the day.
She flees a home of which there's only half left. And half can be worse than none at all.
I've driven myself for the last six years to support her and have tried to compensate for the missing half, to somehow make up for the fact that I wasn't able to hold on to her father. But, even so, she used to complain from time to time and ask me where he had
gone and why he didn't come home any more. She would drown er sorrow in tears until it got into my bloodstream and when those tears reached my hurt they burnt like salt in a wound. When I'd consoled her and put her to bed, her lamentations would go on growing inside me and I would weep late into the night. There was no one to comfort me, no one to stroke me when sleep abandoned me to my suffering.
Only once did I try to start again with another man. Why not? I wasn't forty yet and I was sure I could still escape from the
unfortunate experience of first marriage and tear myself away from the man I'd spent twelve years with. He had the same name as my first husband and I used to call him Charles the Second, which almost had a feudal ring to it. And he had a feudal look to him, a thickset fellow with a gingery beard. Emperor Barbarossa. He struck me as loving and lovable, and I thought he might have been capable of loving Jana too. My assistant Eva introduced him to me. He wasn't of totally sound mind, my emperor, being an epileptic, but as long as he observed a regime and took regular medication he managed to avoid attacks, and I was ready to take care of his routine. We already talked about the possibility of marriage. We booked a seaside holiday — a sort of pre-honeymoon. It was only to the cold Baltic Sea but I looked forward to the sea and being alone with him — I was planning to have Mum take care of Jana. Just before we were due to leave, Eva informed me ruefully that the guy was probably being unfaithful to me. We set out on the trip together but I returned alone.
I fetch myself a bottle of Moravian red and a glass, sit down in the armchair and light a cigarette. I happen to glance up at the ceiling. At the edge, above the wall between the living room and the kitchen, there has been a large dark stain for over a year already, since they had a burst pipe in the flat upstairs. I'll have to get a painter in but I keep putting it off. I have to do everything myself and I'm scarcely able to cope with what is already on my shoulders every day.
I ought to take a look at those writings of Dad's.
I cut through the ribbon and the Christmas wrapping and open the lid. It is full of neat bundles of old exercise books, some blue, some black, one pink, twelve of them in all, a few photographs and old, yellowing newspaper cuttings. The paper gives off a musty smell. I've never seen these exercise books before; he can't have had them at home. Perhaps he kept them in one of his desk drawers. But if he had them in his office, what could he have noted in them? He couldn't have been so naïve as to think that nobody would take a peek at them.
I rummage through the little heap of cuttings. The victorious Red Army welcomed in Prague. 10th May 1945. How old was he? Nineteen. We salute Marshal Stalin. At that time he was still stuck in a German concentration camp. He hadn't yet met Mum and had no inkling that eight years later she would bear him a daughter and insist on giving her the distinctly unrevolutionary name of Kristýna. One thing is for sure. By now you probably won't find a Czech who isn't ready to pay back evil with evil or punish the guilty and innocent alike. In those days Mum didn't yet know how her mother died. Apparently they were expecting her any day.
When, years later, she told me what really happened, I was unable to rid myself of the image of a tiled room with pipes from which came the hiss of gas. I could hear the people gasping. If Mum had been sent with her mother, like many children were, I'd never have been born. It also occurred to me that in a world where enormous shower rooms are built just to poison people, life can never be the same again.
I open one,of the exercise books: Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Eight. The date is written in copperplate, but I don't feel like leafing through it. I put it back in the box.
The time ahead of me puffs up like a dead fish on the surface of a pond. If only I had someone to look forward to, someone who'd ring the doorbell or call me up and say, 'How are you, my little dove?'
'Little dove' was what Psycho, my first boyfriend, called me. How long ago was that? More than two blinks of God's eye.
Twelve years, that's just one blink of God's eye, said my first and only husband. It was when we were bargaining over my first and his third divorce. I had just burst into tears at the thought that he wanted to leave me after twelve years — or actually fourteen, as it took us two years getting round to the wedding — after all the time I had served him, looked up to him and lain alongside him night after night.
'You've started to believe in God?' I asked in amazement.
'No, it was just a figure of speech. What I mean is our time compared to cosmic time. But cosmic time doesn't have eyes.'
God, if he existed, wouldn't have eyes either, I didn't tell him.
It's only half past two. I run some water into a bucket and go to mop the kitchen, taking my glass with me.
When I come back into the living room I switch on the cassette player. The cassette inside is Tchaikovsky's Sixth but it's too mournful for two-thirty in the afternoon so I change it for his violin concerto.
I called him Psycho because he was training to be a psychiatrist. He was very handsome — dark and with what seemed to be a permanent tan. He wore his black hair tied back in a ponytail, which looked very exotic in those days. He used to carry drugs in his pockets and willingly share them with others. He offered me grass, magic mushrooms and mescaline, but I refused them. I was afraid of drugs. I didn't mind doing myself damage, but I didn't like the idea of losing self-awareness and not being myself.
The look in his eyes made me uneasy but it also excited me. It was strange — piercing and lustful; I could be wearing a fur coat and still feel naked beneath his gaze.
Then something happened that was to happen to me several more times. The first time I hesitated — I didn't want to kill my child, but the future psychiatrist didn't want to become a father. He regarded fatherhood as an obstacle to his career, as if a career could mean more than a life. He was willing to marry me but I mustn't become a mother. He made it a condition. He persuaded me to apply for an abortion. Afterwards I didn't want to see him again.