'Do you have any children?' I interrupt him.
He nods. 'Why do you ask?'
The prat. He asks me why I ask. Some other girl didn't let him force her to go before the board, so he became a father.
'I've got two boys,' he declares, almost proudly. 'How about you?'
'I've a daughter,' I tell him. 'I could have had two, but the criminal who fathered the first didn't want me to have her.'
Offended, he gets up, says he had no intention of disturbing us and staggers off. But my mood is ruined anyway
'Men, they're all disgusting,' Lucie says in a show of solidarity. 'Spiders and men. Except that spiders are harmless.'
It is almost midnight when I emerge from the metro. I'm dreadful, abandoning my little girl again. I almost break into a run.
At the corner of our street a man emerges from the dim entrance to a block of flats and stands in my path, thrusting an arm towards me as if to throttle me. I freeze. 'Give us ten crowns, missus. I've got nowhere to sleep.' He is staggering so much he has to hold on to the wall. He's either drunk or high, but surprisingly I feel a sense of relief. This isn't my anonymous letter-writer wanting to kill me, but just some homeless bloke. I take out my purse and tip all my loose change into his palm.
He closes his palm and staggers off without a word of thanks.
When I reach the door of our block and try to unlock it, my hands are shaking and I'm unable to get the key into the lock. I fancy I can hear footsteps behind me and even someone breathing wheezily, but when I turn round there is no one there.
The flat is already dark and silent. I lock the door behind me and put on the safety chain, something I never do otherwise.
I open the door of Jana's room and hear noisy breathing. There's an odd smelclass="underline" a mixture of joss sticks, eau de cologne and insect repellent. I don't know since when my daughter has been a fan of joss sticks, but that sweet, penetrating scent is more likely intended to cover some other smell. I'm familiar with that trick. I used to use it when I smoked a cigarette at home and didn't have time to ventilate the room and get rid of the smell before Dad got home. I feel like giving my daughter a good shake and asking her what she was up to here and what she was trying to conceal. But she'd only deny everything. There is a sheet of paper with writing on it lying on the table. I read the first sentence: 'A triangle is the plane figure formed by connecting three points not in a straight line by straight line segments.' It's not a message for me. Or maybe it is: see what a lousy mother you are; I sat here working diligently while you were living it up in a pub.
That's something Dad forgot in that dream of mine. A rotten daughter, a lousy wife and a useless mother.
2
I fell asleep quickly, but my ex-husband wormed his way into my dream again. We were travelling together to some mountains where our accommodation was a wooden chalet. We were still young and had Jana with us, but we left her in the chalet and set off up a narrow track cut out of the rocks. At a certain moment we had to hold on to big loops of rope that hung above our heads in order to cross a ravine. I was afraid as I passed from one loop to another because the ropes were rotten. And then one of the loops broke and I was suspended above the chasm, only holding on by my right hand. I called to my husband for help. I called to him by name, but he had disappeared; he was no longer with me and I watched in horror as the screws that held the end of the rope gradually worked themselves loose from the rock. I kept on screaming, while thinking about Jana and wondering what would happen to her, who would take care of her when I plunged into the abyss.
It's four in the morning and it's still dark outside. My nightdress is soaked in sweat and my throat is dry.
I get up and go barefoot into the kitchen. The fridge is humming as I enter; it also judders; I ought to put a wedge under one side. There are lots of things I ought to do — things to repair and see to, but at this moment I just take out a bottle of wine and mix myself a spritzer.
When, at last, will my husband stop deserting me and disappearing just as I'm suspended above a chasm?
I go back to bed and try to think of something positive. Once when I was depressed I asked my husband what was the point of human life.
He looked at me in amazement, as if my question was evidence of my inferiority, but then he consented to reply. Fundamentally speaking we don't actually have any life, because the duration of our lives is so brief in comparison with cosmic time that in fact it
is unrecordable. And what can't be recorded virtually does not exist.
An interesting answer to my question. We live as if we actually didn't exist. If God did create this Universe, he knows nothing about us, only we think we know about him. We are too small to be measured and so we can do harm. We can also kill — which we do a lot, or at least men all over the world do.
But people want to leave something behind them. When my dad was young I'm sure he believed he was helping to plant a new Garden of Eden, though he forgot that the soil that life grows from is love. But his head gardener preached hatred and so instead of creating a garden Dad helped pave an execution yard. He never admitted it, but towards the end he must have had an inkling of how woefully wrong he had been. And he didn't build a house or even plant a tree that would yield something; he didn't have the time and it wasn't in his nature. But from time to time he would bring home some useless objects; I don't know where he came by them, most likely during confiscations he took part in. He brought home a box of angling flies even though he never went fishing. He brought books in languages he didn't understand and gave Mum a box stuffed with reels of grey thread. The thread was still there when he died. There is so much of it that if we tied all the lengths end to end I expect they'd stretch round the Equator.
What will I leave behind? Plenty of bridges, fillings and dentures, of course. And in fact, ever since I've been able to order any materials I please, they've been top-quality bridges, fillings and dentures. Also a daughter that I've not been very good at bringing up. But what can possibly remain after the tenth or even the hundredth blink of God's eye, when all the words are forgotten and there's no one left to remember what I looked like? Who then will look at the crumbling photos, if any remain somewhere?
Maybe deeds of love leave some trace behind — or at least their repercussions do. Maybe someone, some higher justice, is counting by how many drops one manages to lower the level of
pain in the world. That's one thing I've managed — in people's mouths, at least. Pain in the soul I can't do anything about, not even my own.
The darkness outside is disappearing. I glance out of the window. The streets are still empty; the metal bodies of the cars are damp. A lonely drunk staggers along the opposite pavement; it could be the one I gave that handful of change to.
I take out the box with Dad's notebooks and leaf through them. I'm looking to see if he didn't leave me some message after all.
But most of the entries are boringly inane: just a mass of words, clichés and references to everyday activities — what he ate, saw to or said in speeches. He bought himself new boots. He went to a football match. He had the wireless repaired. He was at the dentist's! He chaired a meeting at the Red Glow co-operative. There were only occasional references to people. Just as well, maybe.
But he did meet with his friend, Comrade P., with whom he spent two years in a concentration camp, and they reminisced together. The last days were the worst. There was no more food. They didn't even issue any bread. But the executions still went on and the SS went on organizing transports. We remembered how during those days we would look up at the sky, which by then was controlled by the Allies, but what good was it to us seeing that the Germans still ruled on the ground. And the hunger was awful. We'd already eaten the last of the bread and apart from water there was nothing to swallow. We no longer had the strength to get up out of our bunks and all we could think about was food and whether the Soviets would reach us before we were wiped out. We could also hear the thud of artillery shells coming nearer. They were already quite close.