No Saints or Angels

I'm going to find my little girl.

How do you think you're going to find her in this wide world? And what will you do if you don't find her? How will you go on living?

I turn off the motorway, drive through Příbram and all of a

sudden, here it is: the cemetery wall and the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

I pull up and get out of the car. My legs barely support me and there is a flickering in front of my eyes.

It's still daylight. I don't know why I stopped here. After all, Jana is hardly going to visit any of her father's relatives; she doesn't know them anyway. And even if she came this way, why would she hang around here?

I stopped here because I'm afraid to drive to the place she ran away from. I stopped here on my own account. Because of the grave of Jan Jakub Ryba who wrote the Christmas Mass that always makes me want to weep for joy when I hear it, even though I don't believe in a God who lay as a baby in a manger. Because of the composer who decided one morning that he couldn't go on living. He was then only slightly older than I am now, but he was at the end of his tether. And he had a faithful wife and good children.

So he put a razor in his pocket and set off for the wood known as The Crevice. There, they say, he sat down on a boulder, and when there wasn't even a crevice to let through a ray of hope, he slit his throat. That's how my ex-husband related it anyway.

I don't have a razor in my pocket, yet I'm not sure I want to go on living. I have yet to find a faithful man and my only child is on the run.

Women don't generally use a razor; it's usually pills or the gas oven. There's a bottle of analgesics in my handbag that would definitely put an end to my pain and disappointment for good. The wood known as The Crevice still stands, only the trees have changed. They erected a stone monument on the spot where the composer ended his life. My first and only husband took Jana and me to see it while we were still together.

We are not together now; we have fallen apart.

I oughtn't to waste time. I must drive on in search of my little girl. But now that third one has crept up behind me: the eternal

infant, God's messenger, and she's whispering to me that she's my little girl too and I can find her at any moment and she'll hug me and stay with me for ever and we'll be happy together and all the fear and pain will disappear.

The little girl promises to lead me to the wood, and she's so considerate that she even fans me from behind with a little breeze. You'll sit down on a stone, she coaxes me, swallow what you brought, then lie down on the moss and you'll feel fine: no one will ever run away from you again, no one will hurt you or let you down; no one will betray you, no one will want anything from you, not even me; I'll just gently fan you as long as you like, on your journey to that peace that lasts forever.

The little girl has a gentle, enticing voice, and when she waves her hand, mist will surround me and it'll be easier for us, it strikes me.

All right, I'll go with her.

At that moment, the organ starts to play in the church behind me and I recognize the familiar notes. Who could be playing a Christmas Mass at the height of summer? Maybe the dead composer himself chose from the thousand works he composed the very one that refreshes the soul most.

'This is where I was born, on the edge of Rožmitál,' my ex-husband pointed out to us. 'And here I went to school. Can you hear that choir? I used to sing in it: Master, hey! Rise I say! Look out at the sky — splendour shines on high. What are you smirking for, Jana?'

'That you used to go to school too, Daddy. You must have been teensy-weensy.'

My poor little girl, your mother's a head case; she's a sad, desperate individual and she's destroying herself like you. She's teetering over the pit. When she tumbles howling into it, what will become of you?

I go back to the church and stand listening, recalling the time when we all still lived together in love. The little messenger, that

little girl, has lost patience and quietly disappears without hanging around for me.

I make for the church door, intending to go in and thank the organist, but the door is locked. Goodness knows how long it is since someone passed through it. The organ has fallen silent too.

Only now do I notice that there is a telephone box not far from the church.

Yes, my Jana and Monika have already been found. The girls ran away and got drunk. They will be penalized, unless the others decide to expel them altogether.

'Do you think I could drive over? I'm not far away.'

3

It is dusk when I reach Sunnyside. They won't allow me to be alone with Jana.

'Heavens, Mum! What are you doing here?' she exclaims when they bring her. 'It's great you came. I'm bound to be banned visitors. And maybe they'll shave my head too.'

My little girl only thinks about herself. It won't occur to her to ask what I felt when they told me she'd run away, or what I've been going through all the time she has been torturing me like this.

'What came over you to run away like that?'

We didn't run away, we just went for a bit of a walk.'

'And so you took rucksacks with you,' comments one of the boys who is apparently also here as a client.

'We took things in case it rained, you dumbo,' Jana explained.

'A lot of things in case of rain,' Radek chimes in. 'And anyway you weren't supposed to be going for walks, as well you know.'

'Well OK,' Jana concedes, 'but we really did have second thoughts. It will be up to the community,' she continues, turning

back to me, 'whether they shave my head, expel me or just make me muck out for a month.'

The psychotherapist adopts a conciliatory expression. 'They won't expel you, you'll see,' he says. 'You're good at making soup and playing the guitar. We'd miss you.'

I'd like to ask her whether she realizes that if she doesn't make the grade here, there's nowhere she'll find help, but Radek sends her away. 'We'll sort it all out with her,' he explains and leads me to his office.

He sits me down directly opposite the portrait of the great Freud. Only now do I realize that I almost succumbed to the temptation of eternal peace because I felt that life by now had nothing good to offer me anyway. I can feel the tears running from my eyes and I can't stop them.

'Don't upset yourself,' the psychotherapist says, coming over to me and stroking my hair. 'They almost all try to escape and we always let them off the first time. Some of them abscond for a month, for instance, and then come and ask us to take them back. There are some, of course, who run away and we never see them again.'

I nod to show I understand. I'd like to ask him how satisfied he is with Jana otherwise, but what could he say, seeing that she tried to escape this very day. 'I'm really sorry that Jana has added to your worries,' is all I say.

'Not at all. That's what we're here for. You see, everybody thinks there should be something to show after a week or two, but mostly it takes months. We've no right to be impatient. None of us are saints or angels.'

'I know.'

'Your sister and Jana herself told me you suffer from depressions.'

I nod and say that I can't see the importance.

'Oh, but it is important for Jana.'

'I've always tried to conceal it from her.'

'She sensed it anyway. Maybe she couldn't identify it or explain

it. But when a mother isn't sure whether she's happy to be alive, the child's world loses one of its mainstays and the child then tries to escape it. What we want here is for them to learn to identify and understand what they feel and why they feel it. That's the first step before they eventually stop looking for false means of escape.'