I oughtn't to be angry with him. He has inherited Dad's malevolent soul and on top of that, misfortune has consigned him to a wheelchair.
At last a gap in the fence: a prefabricated concrete road promises to lead me to some cash-and-carry. I set off along it and immediately find myself in a different — silent — world. The road winds between walls, whose decrepitude is masked by ivy. Enormous vehicle tyres, plastic sacks and rusting barrels are scattered over the verges. I'm the only person going this way. The glorified warehouse of a shop is closed, maybe because it's Saturday afternoon, but more likely it's never been open, because no one is likely to wander in here. I press onwards: not a living soul. But in the distance I can hear a riverboat siren; perhaps I'll find a way through to the river, after all. I ought to be scared, but I feel intoxicated, as if I was walking in a dismal dream; I don't get scared in dreams, only when I'm wide awake. The road bends sharply round some tall corrugated-iron hangars and I'm suddenly confronted by something very peculiar. In the middle of a
scrapheap, where the road comes to an end, there stands a bizarre structure: two towers that look as if they have been skilfully gnawed away at the top; two towers like two fossilized dinosaurs with intermingled heads. It strikes me that it might be an old fairground tent that was inflated with hot air, or more likely an abandoned film set. But when I come closer I see that it is a concrete ruin with massive walls, most likely the remains of a military bunker built before the war that I don't remember.
The scrapheap stinks and a swarm of flies buzzes above it. I walk round it and finally catch sight of a branch of the Vltava, with its lazy stream of dirty water. I lean against the trunk of an old, half-dead willow and try to light a cigarette. My fingers tremble. Not a soul to be seen. If someone did appear, maybe he'd kill me; death hovers here above the earth and the waters and there isn't a single redeeming feature. I imagine Jana stumbling on this place. I suddenly realize that I understand her; I can understand how she took a fancy to drugs that make the world look different and most likely better or at least more acceptable than it really is.
3
It's Sunday. I could sleep in, but I woke up at five and realized I wouldn't fall asleep again. That meeting with my brother/non-brother is like a weight on my chest. And it's as if I've only now fully realized the awful thing that happened to Jana. I think about her and go back over the past searching for the moment when my little girl started to fall. If such a moment existed.
Maybe my sister is right in believing that I acted foolishly when I decided to terminate the marriage to my unfaithful husband. If I'd managed to control myself and pretended I saw nothing, or that I saw it but was prepared to wait patiently until his highness, my husband, came to his senses and returned to me, things would have been better for my little girl. Or worse, because he started to
be rude to me even in front of her, and sometimes I was unable to bear it and started to cry or row with him.
When love goes, contentment goes too. And so does understanding. But why wasn't I able to hold on to that love?
And yet my little girl needed love. When Karel left me, I tried to give her that love, but it's impossible just to go on giving; well I wasn't able to, at least. There were moments when my loneliness weighed heavily on me; the sand scrunched beneath my feet and I thirsted. I yearned for a loving man; I yearned for him so much that lovers would come to me in my dreams and whisper tender words to me, kiss my breasts and enter me, and in my dreams I would shiver in ecstasy. But I only managed to treat myself to one real lover and it ended tragically. After that I was afraid of another disappointment; what else can I expect from men?
And yet I've yielded to temptation yet again; I know I won't escape disappointment but I try not to think about it, not to think about the future.
Before I fell asleep last night I imagined the one who tempted me wandering somewhere in the mountains. He told me it was a group of men and maybe he was telling the truth. Be mine, my darling, I begged him. Be mine. Don't abandon me, even if you stay only to the end of this summer, only a fraction of a divine blink, don't abandon me.
As Mum said, there is something I lack. A dimension I'm unable to see into. I'm unable to open the door to it. Dad locked it against me and my one and only husband added a padlock. What is behind that door? God? Some love that won't come to nothing, like love between people? Is it peace in one's heart, the peace of life, instead of the peace of death that I most often think of as release when I am feeling low? Is it nobility of spirit that is capable of rising above all the daily distractions? Is it emptiness that would enable me to focus on myself and my soul, something I usually never have the time or the place to do? Or is there the sound of music? Playing music was what used to help me look
beyond all my suffering and anxieties and fill me with a longing for reconciliation. But I didn't stick with it. I let myself be banished from it and the most I do now is occasionally sing something to myself or listen passively to what others have composed and performed.
What if I went to visit my little girl? She is not guilty for trying to make up for what she's missing in her own way. The trouble is, by pointing at myself, I reassure her she was in the right. She is the one injecting poison into her veins; I'm the one holding the syringe.
Instead, first thing in the morning I set out to visit her father. What I have in mind is reconciliation.
When he opens the door, he shows no surprise at my turning up. 'I dreamt about you last night,' he informs me, after seating me in the armchair.
'How do you feel?'
'A bit better, maybe,' he says. 'I've even put on a little weight.'
'That's gopd.' I unwrap the rest of the apricot tart and put it on a plate that is unfamiliar to me. Our old plates stayed with me even if he didn't. What was in the dream about me?'
'I dreamt that you caught me in the act.'
'Doing what?' As if I didn't know.
'I was with some girl. We were lying in a hotel room with red curtains and a Persian carpet. The hotel lift was out of order and the staircase was blocked off. I thought that if the stairs were blocked off and the lift was out of order you wouldn't be able to reach us. But you climbed the scaffolding.'
'I'm sorry I disturbed you.'
'It's strange how, after all these years, I'm still afraid of you finding me out.'
I don't tell him that there are certain sins that stay with one to the end, but I do inform him that Jana is in therapy.
That takes him aback. The thought of having a daughter undergoing therapy for drug addiction is too much for him, the
athlete and pedagogue, who has always been a shining example of moderation and opponent of all vices, bar infidelity. 'Was it necessary?'
'You don't really think I'd have shoved her in there just for the fun of it, do you? Anyway I don't intend to leave her there. I'm taking her away from Prague.'
'You take major decisions like that and it doesn't occur to you to discuss it with me,' he says reproachfully.
I try to explain that I had to act fast. And anyway it's been a long time since we discussed her together. He lost interest in her; he had other worries. Besides, I didn't want to upset him just after his operation.
He gets up and starts to pace up and down the room. It's what he always used to do when he was getting ready to give me a telling-off. 'That's just excuses and prejudice against me. Of course you should have consulted me,' he says. 'I'm still her father, after all. And I have some understanding of such matters.'
I feel that old sense of uncertainty and fear returning: I've done something wrong, I've botched something, I'm guilty of something in his stern eyes.