envelope and handed it to me. 'I don't know what this is about. I don't know this person. I don't understand what he wants from me.'
This took me by surprise. 'But he… I mean you… he knows you,' I stammered. 'He sent me here with this note. He's expecting a reply.'
'So I see,' he said. 'My reply is that I don't know him and I don't understand what he wants from me.'
He spoke with such emphasis, with such exaggerated certainty, that it occurred to me he was lying. He was afraid of me. He didn't know me and was therefore afraid that I was part of a trap.
I didn't know what to do. I refused to take the letter back home. I asked him to destroy it. Then I suggested that he come with me because the writer of the letter was waiting at my place and desperately needed to speak to him.
He took the envelope from me and went into the next room. I heard a stove door snap shut. Then silence. Nothing moved; from somewhere high up, a cat miaowed.
If he came with me, what would my mother say? She was already frightened enough without me bringing a stranger into our flat. The neighbours might notice. Or was this a trap to catch both of us? What if all of this had to do with my father's arrest? What if they simply wanted to test me to see how I would behave, and, for some reason, they wanted to test this man as well. Or perhaps he really did not know what any of this was about, and I was behaving like a fool.
He appeared at last, wearing a black, threadbare winter coat. 'Well, let's be off,' he said.
We arrived at our flat just after mid-day. I didn't think anyone had seen us. Most people were at work.
The two of them did know each other. I left them alone
in the next room, but even though they lowered their voices, I could tell that they were arguing. Half an hour later they announced that they were both going. As he was leaving, the old man said, 'God bless you, and forgive me. These days you just don't know who's the good messenger and who's the evil one.'
It wasn't until years later that I fully realized just how oppressive and destructive a state is in which people are afraid to accept messages brought to them by a stranger. I never heard from either man again and so I never found out what the message I delivered said.
Outside it had stopped raining. The Arabs had long ago disappeared somewhere.
The guitarist was on duty in the porter's lodge again, and because his girl-friend wasn't with him today, he was playing. It was a wild Spanish melody, and he played with such passion and concentration that if a gang of masked bandits had carried the director of the institute out bound and gagged he would certainly not have let it interrupt him. I listened for a while, but my sense of duty did not permit me to stay until the piece was over. I had already spent too long in Strašnice because of the rain.
It was noon, and from a small kitchen adjacent to the hall I could smell soup, as Miss Kosinová made lunch for everyone who didn't eat in the works canteen. 'Did you read,' Mr Klíma was saying to the only member of the Party in the institute, Mrs Rybová, 'that they've set up a special prize for scientists in America?'
'What are you trying to tell me? That we have no prizes here?'
'Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars!' said Klíma gleefully.
'You could really do something with that,' remarked Vandas, his good-natured, bearded face radiating contentment. He was expecting his wife home the following week; she was doing well.
'Certainly, if money is what it takes to get some people thinking,' Rybová shot back. She turned to me. 'Are you going to Komořan this afternoon?'
'If you need me to.'
'I'll leave it here,' she said, pointing to the table.
Klíma called me over, and I knew he wanted to torment me with WordPerfect again.
This time I remembered to change diskettes, and when the computer told me it was ready, I began to write:
Ladies and gentlemen,
Permit me to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity to address the representatives of all nations and express some of my concerns at least to you—
In the days when I was still working for a literary magazine, an experienced colleague told me always to cut the first paragraph of any article, regardless of who wrote it. It is always expendable, he said.
I erased my paragraph, and then wrote:
I know that many wise words have been spoken in this forum, and I fear there is not a lot I can add. Yet I know as well as you do that we are rushing headlong towards a catastrophe that we refuse to see, that we are hoping to postpone, though we know too that each day we choose postponement over change, we make the catastrophe all the more inevitable. This assembly is like a boat attempting to rescue the drowning while it itself is sinking. I know you must be
quite deaf to the cries for help, to the voices of the sick, the hungry, the innocently imprisoned, the voices of the tortured and the powerless. I know that when you look at our planet, you see below you a sea of flammable liquid waiting for a spark to ignite it. This is our tragedy: we are on the lookout for sparks, while we keep on filling that flammable sea with rubbish, tanker ships full of crude oil, cubic kilometers of gas, the last living forests. We cannot prevent a spark from flying. We must realize at last that it is not just nations that are in danger, it is not just freedom and rights that are threatened, but life itself, as long as we do not stop our insane, headlong race after the mirage of prosperity, the lazy consumption of. .
I felt excited and agitated, as I always am when I feel the desire to communicate too much at once and, at the same time, realize how fruitless my efforts are. You can't change things with words. With what, then? And besides, the telephone had been ringing for about half a minute and no one was answering it. I got up to do so, though I knew it wouldn't be for me. Miss Kosinová got there first. 'Yes, he is,' she said. 'No — oh, that can't be true!. . But just yesterday. .' She laid the receiver down beside the telephone. 'Peter,' she called. 'Peter — the phone.'
The parcel of print-outs was ready for me beside the telephone.
Vandas emerged from his cubicle.
'It's the hospital,' Miss Kosinová said, as though she were wondering whether or not to give him the receiver. 'But it's not good news.' She looked at me and I saw tears running down her cheeks.
Vandas held the receiver to his ear and listened to what
they were telling him. 'Yes,' he said. 'I'm still here.' Then he hung up. He turned to us and said: 'And they told us it wasn't malignant! It wasn't malignant — that's what they said. Everything is malignant.' He sat down and put his head in his hands. Miss Kosinová stood over him and stroked his hair. Others came up to comfort him, while I stood back; I felt out of place, as though I were a parasite on someone else's pain. I was an outsider here. I went back into Mr Klima's cubicle and destroyed another of my pointless, incomplete and undelivered speeches. Then I took the parcel of print-outs, stuffed them into my bag and slipped out of the hall without anyone noticing.
At the subway station I bought three irises.
The door to Natasha's office opened before I had a chance to knock.
'You've brought something again?' she asked.
'Something for you, too.'
She took the flowers. 'Thank you. They're beautiful. They look like orchids. But you needn't have done that. That's not what I meant last time.' She took the vase from the cupboard, dusted it off and filled it with water. 'I'll make some coffee. Or would you rather have some wine? Yesterday was payday,' she explained. 'Otherwise I couldn't afford it. In any case, I'll be short by the end of the week.'
'Do they pay you badly?'
'When I pay the rent, I have a hundred left from the advance. And when I get the rest at the end of the month, I try to send something to my boy — he's in the army.'
'You have a son that old?'
'I was eighteen when I got married.'
'And your second husband?'
She waved her hand dismissively.