'I don't do anything bad, do I?'
'No, you do nothing at all.'
'School's boring.'
'And what isn't?'
'I dunno. Sitting in the park with the girls.'
'But you can't spend all your time sitting in the park.'
'I don't know, really'
'Each of us has certain duties. And you're supposed to be studying. Enough to scrape through, at least.'
She shakes her head. 'But there's just no point in it.'
'In what?'
'In anything,' she says. 'But you know, anyway.'
'What do I know?'
'Grandpa died and look at the state Dad's in. What's the point of it?'
'Grandpa was old and your dad neglected a tumour.'
'I don't want to be old. And I don't want to get a tumour.'
'Nor do any of us. Well, how do you see your life, then?' I ask her — I who, at her age, had no wish to live at all.
3
I wake up feeling that I must have shouted something. But the dream wasn't about my daughter. It was my father who appeared to me. He was clinging on to my ex-husband and yelling at me: What have you done? You've driven him out. You're a rotten daughter and a lousy wife.
I got a fright because he'd no business to be there; he was dead; he'd died, was burnt in a furnace, descended into hell and on the third day he didn't rise from the dead; but now he stood
before me, untouched by the flames, my accuser, and meanwhile that hypocrite my ex-husband had a smirk on his face. I reached out as if to push my accuser back into the flames and started to scream in horror.
I stare into the darkness and shiver all over. I shudder again and again from fear. I get up and go into the kitchen, where I pour myself half a glass of wine. I fill the rest of the glass with water and return to the bedroom. I leave the light on. I'm afraid of the dark.
When I was a little girl — how old could I have been? scarcely five or six — my parents used to send me to Lipová to spend the summer at Grannie Marie's. Usually I'd spend the whole of September there too. I adored my grandmother. She rode horses and sang me songs. On Saturdays she baked kolaches and bread. She made her own noodles too. And she also liked a smoke.
At that time Aunt Venda still occupied a little room in the cottage. She had long, unkempt grey hair. She spent the whole time sewing away pn a Minerva treadle sewing machine. She wasn't allowed to smoke, because she couldn't be trusted with matches. She used to make up for it by drinking beer from first thing in the morning. It seemed to me that my aunt never left her room; Grannie would bring her beer and food. When I visited Auntie, she'd smile at me, displaying her crooked yellowy incisors, and say something I usually couldn't make out. But I did manage to understand that she couldn't go outside because she was just a receptacle, a vessel in which a fire was constantly smouldering. All it needed was a slight breeze or for the sun to shine on her, and she would burst into flame. It would happen anyway one day.
And doesn't the fire burn you, Auntie? I would ask her.
Oh it does, sweetheart. It gives me a terrible pain here, she'd say, indicating her breasts, neck and head.
And then one day it really did happen. I was playing out in the yard when the door of Auntie's room suddenly burst open unexpectedly and in the door frame there appeared a flaming figure
that started to run towards me. For a moment I couldn't understand anything and had the feeling that a fairytale apparition was coming to get me, but then I recognized my aunt.
'I'm burning,' she shouted. 'I set myself alight!'
Her clothes were on fire and it seemed to me that smoke was coming out of her head. Terror rooted me to the spot as I watched the approach of that fiery vision. Then Auntie started to scream horribly and cry for help, and I ran away. Grannie rushed out of the house and when she saw what was happening, she snatched a sack that was hanging from a beam by the door and dashed over to Auntie with it.
She managed to douse the flames, but she couldn't save my aunt. They took her to hospital, where she died a few days later. I wanted to go and visit her, but they told me I couldn't any more because Auntie was gone. She was gone because she didn't want to be here any more. Auntie had burnt up and was gone and I cried.
That was my first encounter with death, and it was a haunting experience. That image of a burning figure has never left my memory, even though I have seen lots of other frightful pictures and photos of famine, murders and wars — there have been so many of them since then that I can hardly keep count, and apparently one soldier in five was still a child.
I've noticed that almost everyone I know was marked by at least one such shocking experience in their childhood. My husband's best friend froze to death in the mountains. When Lida was small, two cars crashed in front of her eyes and they had to cut the dead out of the wreckage with oxyacetylene torches. Not to mention Mum. Admittedly she didn't see what happened to her mother and her aunts and cousins, but the thought of what was done to them must have marked her for life.
While I was still at Lipová that time I started to wonder about the strange phenomenon that one moment someone could be there and the very next they could be gone, and it seemed to me
so sad that everything, absolutely everything, had to come to an end, including me. There was no escape. Death was the supreme ruler, and if he called you, you had to go and you never came back.
It was odd that they depicted that ruler as an old woman or a skeleton with a scythe.
But Grannie consoled me and sang me a song about death, from which I understood that death wasn't wicked. It wasn't a skeleton or even an old woman, it was a little girl like me. I can still recall the words of that song, though I don't sing it any more:
There once was an old woman And she had just one son. And he lay sick and dying For cool water he was crying. There was no one to go to the well So his old mother she went herself. On the way she met a young child A messenger from God so mild. I'm coming to fetch his dear soul To Paradise, his heavenly home.
From that I understood that death wasn't a stranger who comes between two people. A little girl or a little boy was sent by someone to carry the soul up to heaven, where life was more beautiful than on earth.
I didn't know what a soul was — I'd only heard of the sole of a shoe. When I asked them, they couldn't explain it.
When I was at Grannie's I could run around outside with the children, but quite often something would get into me and I wouldn't feel like seeing anyone. Behind the cottage in the far corner of the garden by the fence there grew an enormous walnut tree with a hollow trunk. There was just enough room for someone my size. I'd find refuge there in my own little house, where
I'd spend hours on end. What did I do there? I can't remember. I used to take my rag doll — my sister — along with me and a teddy bear. He was actually my first husband, though I don't count him any more. He was utterly reliable and had big, brown glass eyes. We'd all crouch down in that little cave full of the scent of wood and resin. Mist ahead of us, mist behind us. I would draw it like a curtain. No one could see us or hear us, only we could hear the horse whinnying in the stable and the ducks quacking in the yard.
One day after lunch they took the horse off to the slaughterhouse, the ducks had their throats slit, the doctor banned Grannie from smoking, we ate shop-bought noodles and the walnut tree breathed its last, falling asleep from old age. What happened to my teddy-bear husband? He disappeared somewhere. He's not here any more. That's the way it is with husbands: the day comes when they disappear and they're not around any more.