He also told me he regularly takes part in some kind of complicated parlour games, in which people play historical or imaginary characters: kings, jesters and so on, but also monsters, elves or aliens. As if he was ashamed about still playing games, he explained that he took part in them in order to forget what he encountered every day when reading the reports of police informers.
Then he talked about my ex-husband, who was apparently the one who aroused his interest in history, and why he started to study it at university.
I don't have much interest in history. Descriptions of battles and famous victories horrified me. I used to imagine the soldiers who were left lying dead on foreign fields and the anticipation of those they left behind. Women watching out for men who could never return, children who grew up without hearing a man's voice.
Soldiers mostly didn't have children yet, he pointed out. They used to recruit single men.
Even so, someone was waiting for those who were butchered, I said. And in the most recent major wars they recruited everyone whether they were twenty or fifty. When my beloved Karel Čapek
wrote The Mother before the last world war, he tried to see history through a woman's eyes. In the end he was unsuccessful, because he had her send her fifth and last surviving son to the war. That's something I'd never do. I told Jan I'd refuse to accept the laws of a man's world that demand bloodshed and tears.
He said he understood me and admitted that the world of men is essentially cruel. He couldn't imagine a woman devoting herself to wiping out entire nations, races or social classes as the dictators over the last century had done. Then he started to talk about revolutions, not omitting one of my one and only husband's lessons about the tyrants who changed the fate of Russia and set about changing the fate of the world.
He spoke with passion, but I couldn't concentrate on what he was saying: I was taken by his eyes. It's unusual to find a redhead with large, dark eyes. I don't ever recall loving anyone with eyes like that. I used to be attracted by blue or slate-grey eyes, like my first and only husbands, although his gaze was cold. But that young fellow looked at me almost imploringly.
I sat with him longer than was wise. I allowed him to order me three glasses of wine, even though he himself only drank some of that sweet muck that ruins teeth and health.
I worked out that he was almost fifteen years younger than me.
What lunacy am I being tempted into? It reminds me of some lines of Yesenin's that I once found moving:
Not sorry, not calling, not crying,
All will pass like smoke of white apple trees
Seized with the gold of autumn,
I will no longer be young.
He was twenty-six when he wrote that.
What about me, then? What sort of delusions are these? That lad who looked at me so imploringly could easily go out with my Jana.
Something makes me start. I put the lid back on the box and
quietly go back to the bedroom where my daughter is still lying exacdy as I left her a moment ago, her bare bottom thrust in my direction. I switch on her table lamp and shine the light towards her. I lean over her and like a detective I search that smooth skin, unmarked by time. All I lack is a magnifying glass. And sure enough, I find it, a tiny red spot, maybe left by a syringe. They are past masters at concealing it. That's something they are good at learning and the more they have to conceal the more resourceful they become. Perhaps she was bitten by a midge. Midges sometimes come in the window. Maybe she scratched herself. Best not to think about it. Best not to look. I'll tackle her about it tomorrow.
I go back to bed.
Please God, say it's not true.
I try to think which of my former colleagues might advise me.
It's nonsense. It's that nun in the guise of a Czech teacher who put the idea in my head. My daughter's hardly going to do anything as stupid as that.
That's just the point: she is my daughter. Her forebears include a crazy grandmother and great-grandparents who committed suicide: more cases of suicide in the family than is healthy. On top of that a depressive mother that no man could put up with, even when she knelt before him and hugged his legs.
You're so beautiful, so beautiful, said that fifteen-years-younger ex-pupil of my ex-husband, and gazed at me as if about to declare his love.
I ought to go and see my ex-husband. Tell him that our daughter, the only thing we'll have in common as long as we're alive, smokes cannabis and possibly does worse things than that. Maybe it won't interest him any more. His daughter never did interest him very much. He didn't just leave me, he left her too.
Please God, let all this I'm going through be just a dream.
No, not everything, after all, something has to remain part of my life. But there's so little that I'd like to retain as part of my actual waking life.
4
I oversleep. The alarm clock doesn't even wake me. And then Jana is standing over me, repaying me my nocturnal visit. 'Mummy, aren't you going to the surgery today?'
I leap out of bed. I have a splitting headache. I've no idea when I fell asleep. 'I've made you breakfast, Mum.' And sure enough, there's a cup of coffee on the table and she has even buttered some bread. She plants a kiss on my cheek; she's sprayed herself again with my Chanel, which I save for only very special occasions, and she's eager to be gone.
I delay her. 'Jana, tell me: was it only the grass?'
'Mum, what's got into you again?'
'Answer me. Did you inject anything?'
'Mum, you must have been dreaming — either that or you're paranoid.'
'Yes or no?'
'Of course not! I'm not some stupid junkie, am I?' She swears that she's not lying. She looks the picture of health and full of energy, and I want to believe that she's perfectly all right and I'm just anxiety-prone.
I arrive at the surgery twenty minutes late.
Eva helps me into my white coat. I thank her and ask her to make me a strong coffee.
Eva and I have been together for eleven years already. We understand each other without the need for words. I don't have to tell her what to mix for me. If she's not sure, she asks. We're together every weekday and sometimes we even spend weekends together. When she married she became the owner of a little cabin on a rock above the Vltava just outside Prague. I don't own anything of the sort, and yet whenever I get out of town it's an enormous relief and my cares fall away.
So Jana and I sometimes take her up on her invitation and it strikes me that my daughter gets on better with Eva than with me.
Eva sometimes takes her to Mass at the village church. I don't join them. I only went to church or read the Bible to spite Dad. I didn't care whether the church was Protestant or Catholic. I even wandered into a synagogue once when I was in London; but none of it had any effect on my soul. But I think it does Jana good to make herself kneel before something from time to time.
Thanks to Eva, my patients include Father Kostka, who now sits in the chair waiting for me. At the time my father first donned militia uniform, Father Kostka was sent to Leopoldov Prison, so I feel guilty in front of him. But he doesn't know about it. He addresses me as 'young lady', and when he is unable to speak, he smiles at me with his eyes, at least. I ought to ask him what he would advise a non-Christian mother to do or say in order to help her sixteen-year-old offspring come to terms with life and find some meaning in it. I wonder what he'd say?