'But we're talking about Jana, not me.'
'What you never had, you can't pass on,' Mum instructs me. 'So you just gave her things instead.'
I don't ask her what I was supposed to give her.
'Your grandma still used to go to the synagogue, or so she told me,' Mum starts to recall. In fact she doesn't know whether that murdered grandmother believed in God in accordance with the Jewish faith. But if she did, she can't have been particularly strict because she didn't marry a Jew. Even so, she passed on something she had received from her forebears. But she hadn't finished passing it on before she was killed. All she left was her, my mother; but my mother was no longer able to pass anything on. It seemed to her that everything worth professing, feeling or believing had died in that dreadful war, so she passed nothing on to me.
'But Mum, you gave me the most important thing.'
'And what was that?'
'You loved me.'
'Yes, that's something to be proud of— that I wasn't a heartless mother. But you still lacked something, you know as well as I do.'
'We all lack something. And who goes to the synagogue these days? How many people go to church at all?'
'That's not what I meant.' She explains that she had in mind the chain of continuity that was broken when the Nazis were here and which she didn't try to repair afterwards. Maybe on account of Dad, too. It would have made no sense to him.
She's right on that score. Dad refused to accept things that made no sense to him. And what he didn't accept he considered wrong.
Mum waits for my reaction, but I say nothing. It's true that I lacked something. All I had was defiance. If someone had asked me what I didn't want, I'd have had an answer. But I'd have found it harder to say what I wanted. Not to he and be Hed to, maybe. To be of help to people. To live in love. All fairly trite; no lofty goals.
'I owed it to my mum and all the aunts and uncles and my grandma who all ended the same way,' my mother said with regret.
'What did you owe, Mum?'
'That's what I'm trying to explain to you. I behaved as if what had happened was a terrible misfortune, but what did I do apart from the fact that I stopped talking to my own father?'
She tells me that she failed to maintain the continuity; she broke all ties with everything she ought to have had some connection with. She no longer wanted to have anything in common with those who had come to such a dreadful end. She worked off her life, but otherwise all she did was let things go by on the nod so that my father didn't lose his temper too often. And she let us grow up without any connections either; she didn't want us ever to imagine we had anything in common with the ones that were murdered.
'There's no sense in distressing yourself like this, Mum.'
'I'm not distressing myself. I'm just thinking about you, and Jana above all. Maybe she'd be better off if she knew where she belonged.'
The trouble is, where do we really belong? I say to myself. Among six billion people at the very end of the second millennium. In a globalized world. That's the posh name they give to a situation in which hope is on the wane and the only big achievements are hypermarkets.
We belong to a world fourteen billion years after the Big Bang, my ex-husband would say. A world that will last scarcely more than several blinks of God's eye the way things are going on.
But this is just a way to make excuses for myself, to stop myself thinking about what Mum is trying to tell me, or about why so many things in my life have failed.
'I planted some honeywort on your dad's grave,' Mum says, changing the subject. 'Did you notice? No, I don't expect you've been there.'
I tell her that I have so little time these days that I scarcely manage to get to the cemetery. I prefer to visit Jana or her.
'You ought to go there from time to time, though,' she urges me. 'He was your father, after all.'
I promise I'll go sometime and it occurs to me he wasn't just Lida's father and mine. But fortunately Mum doesn't know that.
I go out into the scorching street, which is totally deserted. Everyone who could has left town. I set off in the direction of the cemetery, but I don't go that far. At Flora, I go down into the metro station, where it's cool, at least.
Besides, subconsciously I know where I'm heading. I get off in Karlín. The address of the man named Václav Alois Veselý and who is possibly my brother is already fixed in my memory. I don't know whether I'll take the plunge and pay him a visit. I don't know what I'd say. I can hardly ring the doorbell and ask some strange man, Excuse me, you don't happen to be my brother by any chance?
He might resemble me. If he did, I could immediately give him a hug. Hello brother! This is me, Kristýna, your half-sister.
But it would most likely give him a fright to have some strange woman suddenly putting her arms round him and hugging him.
I don't even have to go in. I can just take a look where he lives. That's if he still lives there.
I turn into the street whose name betrays the proximity of the river. However by now the river is well and truly concealed by factory buildings, ugly warehouses and a maze of walls and garages. I walk along the opposite pavement past dingy apartment houses with lots of little shops tucked in between them. Gypsy children play at the side of the four-lane carriageway.
The house I seek has just two floors. Patches of stone walling show through where the rendering has come away. A TV bellows from an open window. The battered front door is open. I hesitate a moment, but seeing I've come this far I'm hardly going to wait outside.
The passage stinks of mould and sauerkraut. I can't see any list of tenants but there are letterboxes fixed to the wall in the corner behind the door. On one of them I find the name I've attributed to my unknown brother. It is written in large block capitals. The letters lean to the left and their feet are decoratively rounded. They strike me as familiar. I search my memory in disbelief, or rather I hesitate to believe what I've now realized. I wasn't the only one to set out in search of my lost half-sibling. He had come to find me and chosen to leave me threatening letters that he forgot to sign.
So I've found the one I was looking for, the one who didn't invite me. I could turn round and leave but instead I continue along the passage and look for a door with his name.
It's right on the ground floor. I recognize the lettering before I even read the name. I ring the bell and wait.
For a long time there is no answer. And then suddenly the door opens although I have heard no approaching footsteps. Aghast, I stand facing my father in a wheelchair, my father as I remember him from my childhood. Bushy blond eyebrows, hair already going grey, cold, blue eyes and a large prominent chin. He eyes me, a strange woman, with mistrust.
I introduce myself and say, 'I've found you at long last.'
'How do you mean?'
'I always wished for a brother,' I say. 'But I didn't know about you. And now I found a mention of you in the notebooks that Dad left behind. You know he died, don't you?'
'You'd better come in — Kristýna.' He backs away in the wheelchair and instead of turning tail I enter the flat. The living-room door is wide open, I expect it's the only room in the flat. The furniture is of dark wood that predates chipboard. A TV set stands on a low table and a two-ring electric cooker stands on another table in the corner. The walls are hung with paintings in garish colours full of strangely twisted shapes, the distorted bodies of people and animals, as well as tree stumps. They all
carry inscriptions written in the same backward-leaning script. Various birds sit motionless in two cages hung from hooks fastened in the ceiling. He follows my gaze: 'They're stuffed. Kristýna, Kristýna,' he then says, 'Mum told me about you.' He wheels himself over to the table, picks up some sheets of paper and crumples them into a ball before tossing them into the waste basket. Perhaps they were letters ready for me. 'I'll make some tea,' he suggests.