I suppose — and he's in a wheelchair because he dived in the river and banged his head on a rock or something. It was a real shock for me. She'd read about it in some old letters of Granddad's; she didn't have a clue about it before then and Gran still hasn't and Mum says I'm not to mention it in front of her. She says the reason she's telling me is so I should realize how marvellous it is that I can run around and that I'm totally fit, and it's up to me what I make of myself and all the tosh about how I mustn't destroy myself. I found that rich coming from her, who is systematically destroying herself, as Dad used to say.
That letter fairly knocked me out. It made me realize that people are vile by nature, as Monika says. I remembered how Dad ran off to live with some fucking beanpole and then she left him and then Mum finds some half-brother of hers in a wheelchair. Maybe one day I'll discover some crippled half-brother that they didn't tell me about, except that I won't find out for another hundred years. And I'm vile too: I didn't tell Mum that I nicked her chain and that ring, or that I was shagging boys.
And I also realized I haven't the foggiest idea what I'll do when I finally get out of here, because I flunked at school and now I'd even fail in the subjects I just squeezed by in because anything that accidentally got stuck in my memory has been well and truly dislodged since I've been here. Life is simply horrendous.
I was suddenly in a crisis and I had this immense urge for a fix or to at least get drunk, even though getting drunk never really appealed to me. I told Radek about it and he said my crisis was natural and was an obvious sign that I wasn't completely cured yet. He said it would be amazing if I didn't have cravings like that from time to time. And he praised me for not being afraid to talk about it even though he doesn't usually praise anyone, at most he makes a little grin. He also told me to be patient; patience was the important thing and also looking around me and discovering the nice things in life. That didn't do much to cheer me up, because when I looked around me I couldn't see anything that was particularly nice.
But then that evening, out of the blue, Radek came to me and told me to come outside with him for a moment. So I went. We just climbed a little way above the farm from where there's a fantastic view of the entire landscape, with Blatná on one side and those hills that are almost mountains above it and on the other side the Temelín nuclear power station. The moon happened to be shining and I imagined that those towers were like space rockets ready to fly to it. But Radek wasn't looking at the scenery, he was looking up at the sky and he said, 'That's a lot of stars, isn't it?'
'Yeah,' I said. 'You can see them fantastically from here.'
Radek said there are billions of billions of them, but most likely they are all without life. Life is the biggest miracle and it doesn't matter whether you believe God created it or whether it just evolved, it's still the biggest miracle that has ever happened. And if you don't have respect for that miracle inside you, you can't have respect for the life around you, and the tragedy is, he said, that people don't have respect for themselves and destroy themselves and everything around them. Our job is to carry that miracle of life forward.
At that moment I remembered Dad showing me Saturn and its rings and telling me about the Big Bang. But Dad talked to me about the stars so that I would learn about them and he looked at me sternly and I was afraid he'd want me to repeat after him how narrow the rings are. I realized that Radek wasn't talking about the stars at all, but about me. It struck me that it was a shame he wasn't my dad, but then he said, 'Your mum called a little while ago to say that your dad died.' And he stroked my hair and told me to be brave.
We stood there a bit longer. I couldn't say anything. Then I ran down the hill but at one point I tripped and fell into the grass. I didn't know what to do and I started to pull the grass up by the roots and stuff it in my mouth until I almost suffocated.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
I am driving Jana home so that she can attend the funeral. She has got over her dad's death and I'm afraid she quite welcomed an excuse to get a break from the centre's military-style discipline for a little while at least. She's so besotted with herself that she hasn't the time to think about anyone else.
In the course of her psychotherapy sessions she has learnt to think and talk about herself without qualms. She tells me how terrible she used to be. She informs me that she first tried smoking cigarettes when she was twelve and grass when she was thirteen, and for almost the whole of last year she was injecting or sniffing everything there was. She also slept with boys and she can't even remember them all because they didn't mean anything to her.
'You really slept with them?'
'Of course, Mum.'
'Since when?'
'I don't recall any more.'
I feel a stab of pain in my head and then the pain spreads to my whole body. Everything ahead of me starts to wobble and the road becomes a blur. There goes my little girl; there she is lying and squirming. Just a little girl, not fourteen yet.
I pull up in front of some country pub in case I ran over my little girl.
We get out.
'Mum, you're white as a sheet. Are you all right?'
'It'll pass,' I say. I feel like screaming and demanding the names of those bastards, then I'd get hold of a pistol and shoot the lot! And I'd save the last bullet for myself for being such a rotten mother.
We are sitting in a bar-room that is already full of smoke at this time of the morning and drinking lousy coffee. I'd like her to give me a moment to get my breath back, but she is unstoppable.
'In the end nothing else mattered to me,' she says about her drug-taking. 'I was even prepared to steal. We systematically stole everything we could: from shops, from the market. I stole stuff from you too, but you know about that. And then I couldn't care less about anything, whether I went to school or whether they caught me and locked me up. I didn't think about anything that was going to happen on a particular day, just about getting my fix.'
I know about it from hearsay and films, and I've read about it, but the thought that my little girl went through all that and that I lived alongside her and suspected nothing and refused to entertain the possibility, that I even left her on her own so that I could be with my lover, hurts me as if someone were driving nails into me. I'm still the same as I always was. I wait here motionless and unprepared until someone places the nail against my chest, raises the hammer and strikes. In exactly the same way I refused to accept that my former — and as of now, late — husband was unfaithful to me. I tried to convince myself that nothing like that could happen to me, that such misfortunes only happen to other people.
My little girl goes on to describe to me the horrors of abstinence and how she was ready to run away the whole time. 'But now I can appreciate,' she says, using a word that is out of character for her, 'that I was only wanting to run away from life and escape everything that was bothering me. At home and at school. Everything. And also I'm beginning to understand Dad and you. I'll tell you both about it some time.'
'You won't be able to tell Dad any more.'
'But I can tell you. I'll analyse you. You're the person who matters most to me. When you appreciate what you're doing wrong and understand your weak points, you can live differently and be happy,' she says, repeating the lecture she has just heard.
When we arrive home she rushes into her bedroom, leaps on to the divan and shouts, 'My old bed, my old Bimba, my old drum kit — I've really missed you!'