Jan recaps the situation that they are all supposed to accept. 'It's 1437,' he says, maybe on my behalf too. 'Sion Castle is under siege. Jirka — Jan Roháč — has already been resisting the troops of Hynek Ptáček for four months.' The youngster, who has apparently been reincarnated as the leader of the besiegers, stands and bows. 'Master Roháč is unaware,' Jan continues his explanation, 'that Ptácek's people are digging an underground passage in order to penetrate the castle. Eliška,' he says, indicating the long-legged girl, 'whose brother is in the castle, manages to ingratiate herself with Master Ptáček and discover his plans. Last time she was given the task of finding a way to get into the castle with this important information.'
'I've one question,' the fat one says. 'What's the water situation in the castle? Could I fill the moat?'
Jan declares that something like that is out of the question. There is scarcely enough water to drink. But the moat is deep and steep enough to offer sufficient protection, he assures his tubby companion.
From what I can see, it's clear that my lover is the game's director or whatever, whose job is to set the scene for the other participants and describe the period they are about to enter. He offers them roles and skilfully asks them questions about how they'd behave in certain situations, and on the basis of that he determines how well they have fared. That's most likely the reason he brought me here, so that I should see how he holds sway and so that he can demonstrate his knowledge. I'm touched. But the game is very slow to get off the ground, and while the leggy creature tries to think up ways of getting into the besieged castle, my mind wanders back to our flat and I try to work out whether my own daughter stole from me or whether she simply enabled some of her pals to do it.
They offer me some refreshments but I decline; I don't feel like food. I let them pour me some wine although just lately wine tends to depress me. The fact is I'm out of place here. All the people here are very young, so young, in fact, that I'm scarcely aware of anything but my age and not belonging here. They are all young enough to be my children, including my lover. They enjoy playing games. They can take delight in being part of an imaginary world; so far nothing in real life is a real burden on them, and even if it is, they still have strength enough to put up with it.
I watch the long-legged visionary, who is supposed to deliver the important message. I'm not interested in what she'll do, I'm noticing how adoringly she gazes at my lover, while looking at me out of the corner of her eye. I don't appeal to her, I don't belong here; I don't even belong to the one who brought me here. She is more likely to belong to him than I am, of course. And most likely on the way out she tries to ingratiate herself with him, to nesde up
to him in the gloomy passageway and thrust herself into his arms. And why shouldn't he take her in his arms and kiss her, when she lets him, when she asks for it?
If anything, my life is now headed for the finishing line whereas his is only just picking up speed. I fight for breath when I'm climbing stairs, he just soars through the air, waving invisible wings as he hovers above me. Other times he just leaps ahead and in a single leap covers ten miles.
These are unwarranted imaginings. He loves me; he wouldn't have brought me here if he were interested in some lanky she-wolf, either here or anywhere else. After all he's surrounded by loads of girls that I know nothing about, such as the secretaries he's bound to have at hand. I've noticed that he almost never mentions his work, as if wanting or having to conceal it from me.
He tells me I'm precious to him. Maybe I'm precious precisely because I'm not a little girl any more.
Johannes Brahms's mother was seventeen years older than her husband. And the same number of years separated Isadora Duncan from Yesenin. When they first met, she was forty-three and he was twenty-six. They actually got married. According to their biographies, she married him. She asked for his hand. After all, she was older and more famous. She died at fifty, while he killed himself aged thirty. Before he hanged himself in that Petrograd hotel he wrote his last poem in the blood from his severed veins. I can remember the lines because they seemed to me plaintively wise:
Goodbye: no handshake to endure. Let's have no sadness — furrowed brow. There's nothing new in dying now Though living is no newer.
They say he went mad. Or had he arrived at the truth? If he hadn't killed himself he'd have been killed by the murderer who ruled his country and who died the day I was born.
But I'm no Isadora Duncan. I'm not famous, I'm simply as old as she was and know how to fix people's teeth. My lover is no poet and I'm sure he won't kill himself; he enjoys life and enjoys playing games. For him life is still a game in which he has accepted me as a fellow player for a while until one day he lets me go again.
The hopeless inevitability of it all and my future loneliness bear down on me. I ought to have stayed home with my little girclass="underline" she is in danger and therefore needs me. I've neglected her. At the very moment when I should be there with her, I'm sitting here fretting among strangers, whilst she could be drowning, vainly trying to stay afloat, feet groping for the bottom, calling and waving her arms. Nobody hears her, except for some fiend sitting in a boat who hauls her out and has a syringe with poison waiting in his pocket.
I can see her little arm groping for my breast that is full of milk; her fingers that are like a doll's, except that they are warm, gently touch my skin.
Suddenly I see it, that hand encroaching on my jewellery drawer and taking the chain and the ring away to the one in the boat who pretends he's saving her.
What if my sister is right about me living in fear but refusing to see what she saw at first glance?
I can't bear to be here any longer; I get up and tell Jan I have to go home.
He interrupts the game for a moment and goes out with me to the front hall. 'I expect you found it boring.'
I tell him I wasn't bored but that I'm worried about Jana. I ask him not to be cross with me for leaving.
As if he could be cross with me, he says. I am not to be cross with him for not leaving with me; he doesn't want to spoil the game for the others. He accompanies me out to the stairway, switches on the light, leans towards me and whispers that he'd sooner be with me.
Mum is still up and impatiently asks me how I've enjoyed myself.
I tell her that it was interesting.
'And where have you been exactly?'
Mum feels like a chat. So I go and fetch a bottle of Frankovka and pour us some before trying somehow to describe what I've just experienced, although I know it's not what matters. So I tell her who I was there with. And that maybe he's in love with me. I also tell her how much younger he is and that he's an ideal young man: he doesn't smoke or drink apart from sipping a drop of wine from a glass as a favour to me, he doesn't swear and he brings me flowers. I don't tell her that he investigates the crimes of the people that Dad served.
My mother acts as if she hasn't registered the information about his age; she wants to know if I'm love with him.