I nod. I realize that this is an indictment of me and I try to stop the tears streaming from my eyes.
'I'm not blaming you for anything,' he says, as if reading my thoughts. 'That insecurity is something deeper and more generalized and involves us all. They,' he adds, pointing to the figures I can glimpse moving about outside the window, 'had no security. They had no idea what direction to take when everything around them seemed to lack any direction. They could have all sorts of possessions but possessions only increased that feeling of emptiness. They are aware of it. They aren't riffraff as those who have learnt to conform and put up with everything think. They are simply sensitive to that emptiness which we close our eyes to. Unless we are able to fill that emptiness we won't cure them.'
I am aware that his words apply to me too. I am also surrounded by an emptiness that I try in vain to fill.
'Of course we engage in therapy,' Radek adds, 'but there is also an effort to ensure that each of them learns to realize their responsibility: to themselves and to life in general. The fact that they look after a goat, pigs and chickens is not in order to save a bit on the food bill but in order to incorporate them into some natural order. It's to remind them that the purpose of what they do is not gratification but the benefit that accrues from the preservation of life. — But most of all we teach them patience. Sometimes you discover in a single lucid moment what you could have been looking for in vain for years. The point is not to destroy ourselves before that moment arrives.'
4
The mornings are already cool and misty and the air stinks. People become more prone to illness — and to toothache. The waiting room is packed all day and Eva and I don't even have time to grab a meal. It's tiring, but at least it's better than being alone at home.
I am unable to put my mind to anything. I don't open a book; I do put on music, but after a while I realize that I'm not listening to it. It feels as if I'm lost in a maze and don't have the strength to find my way out.
I visit my ex-husband almost every other day. He is on his own too and he's a lot lonelier than I am. And he knows he's slowly dying. Now that he knows, he has stopped asking me anxious questions, but I can tell that he is being overtaken by fear. Who wouldn't be afraid? I'm afraid too, although death often seems to me like redemption.
I do his shopping and cook him some tasteless diet meals of which he only eats a few mouthfuls. I peel him an orange and divide it into segments as if he were a child. I make sure he takes his tablets. When I can see that he is totally seized by anxiety, I take his skeletal hand and talk to him. I tell him about the senate elections that he couldn't care less about any more, or about the floods in eastern Bohemia that he will never visit again, or I read him out loud a letter from Jana that he doesn't even take in.
'It's odd to think,' he said last time, 'that the world will continue but I won't see it any more. But where will it continue to?'
I didn't know what to reply. I just looked into his sunken eyes and said nothing.
He remained silent too. Then after a few moments he said that he found it impossible to think that people would still be around in a thousand years, let alone a hundred thousand years. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was reaching the end and that the world would mean nothing to him any more. It seemed to
him that people would be unable to survive the tempo they had set. They would destroy either the earth or themselves. Time would move forward and so would the universe but there would be no one here to perceive it, and that seemed sad to him.
He closed his eyes. He'd exhausted himself with that speech. He apologized for those pointless reflections of a dying man.
When I got home I felt a weariness unlike the weariness I used to feel from time to time. It was as if all the burdens I'd ever borne, all the disappointments I'd suffered, all the wine I'd ever drunk, all the cigarettes I'd ever smoked and all the sleepless nights all fused together. I woke up in the night feeling so tense that I couldn't get back to sleep. I got up and went to the window. I stood there smoking as I stared into the empty street. I tried to think of something pleasant, but instead all I saw were skeletal children begging for food on the pavement; I saw fellows with my father's face roaming the city in wheelchairs brandishing red-hot pokers. In the darkness the red-hot metal shone like a torch. I saw my grandmother standing in some enormous tiled room under a shower from which came the hiss of gas. Grandmother cried out and collapsed. There were people all around her. They cried out and collapsed. I saw a ghostly car and someone inside was throwing tiny white bags and syringes out of its window. I could see my recent boyfriend lying naked in the arms of that leggy whore and hear their cries of ecstasy. I saw thieves leaping walls and quietly scaling the walls of houses. I recalled how my own daughter had stolen jewellery and money from me. The images crowded in on me and I started to suffocate. I could hear the tramp of militiamen and see my father gripping the butt of his rifle and staring at me as if I were an enemy.
Maybe I do him an injustice; we simply had an awkward relationship.
In the last of his diaries I read how he made Jana a present for her fifth birthday.
I made her a little turbine. When you run water on it, it turns a bike dynamo and makes a little bulb light up. It took me more than a month to make it but I didn't get the impression that Jana was very pleased with it and Kristýna even said crossly, That's not very sensible is it, Dad? It's a toy for a little boy, not for a girl. In the eyes of my educated daughter I will always be a fool, and she's bringing up Jana to think it too. It made me feel miserable.
Dad wanted to give my little girl some pleasure, and maybe me too. He made a toy himself instead of buying one and I scorned him.
I wasn't good at being humble. I didn't know how to make peace with Dad or with my husband after he betrayed me, in the same way that I can't come to terms with my lover's peccadillo. I didn't manage to make it up with Dad even when he was dying. I couldn't make it up with him, just as I couldn't see my heavenly Father above me.
My head aches and I feel sick. I have a migraine on the way. I take a tablet but immediately throw it up.
The next day I had a date with Lucie. It was an effort to reach out for a friend: give me your hand; speak to me!
She has a new boyfriend. Apparently he's a tall young man who is deaf and dumb. When they are sitting together in a wine bar he writes messages to her on a little blackboard saying how happy he is, how he enjoys the wine and how he'd like to kiss her. He's living at her place now, although she told him to keep on his bedsitter so as to have somewhere to go back to. But so far he's still with her. She says he makes love with a passion she's never known and when he cries out you wouldn't even know he was deaf and dumb.
'And aren't you afraid of hurting him?' I asked her.
'Him? But he's happy with me.'
'And what about when he won't be with you any more?'
She laughed. She asked about Jan. 'Why don't the two of you live together if you love each other? Or is it all over?'
I didn't know what to reply. Lucie would regard one accidental — and admitted — infidelity as an inconsequential trifle. I just told her I was tired. Jana was at a drug treatment centre, my ex-husband
was dying, and my Mum's health wasn't good, although she put on a cheerful face.
'But I was asking about you.'
'I haven't enough energy for anything, let alone trying to live with someone.'
She couldn't understand. When she falls in love she has more energy than before.
I told her everyone was different. Maybe I wasn't in love any more. I was just disappointed.