'No, I want to be with you!'
At home she finds everything as it should be. Magda is chatting with the joiner, who is having a beer. Magda is scarcely aware of her mother as she tells the joiner how two boys in her class lay down in the middle of the street and were almost run over by a lorry. 'The driver leapt out of the cab. .'
'Aren't you even going to ask how Dad is?'
'I can tell he's better,' Magda says.
'How can you tell?'
'You'd be crying otherwise. And what did Dad say?'
'He said he was looking forward to seeing you all.'
'So are we,' she says and gets ready to finish her story.
The joiner is looking for some drawings that he was talking to Daniel about, but Daniel hadn't had a chance to give them to him.
Hana promises to try and find them. She goes to Daniel's office; the desk is locked and there is nothing resembling drawings or plans lying on it or on the shelves. Then it dawns on her that Daniel would probably have taken all his things home, since he had handed the office over to Marie on the very Sunday that it happened.
So Hana goes up to Daniel's room. Here too the desk is locked, but a bunch of his keys remains in the flat. One by one Hana unlocks the drawers in which there are stacked dozens of labelled files. Hana has no idea what the drawings are supposed to look like so she looks for a file with a label saying something like DIACONAL CENTRE, but finds nothing of the sort. The best thing will be to ask Daniel in the afternoon.
In the very bottom drawer, beneath all the files, lies a black notebook without a label. Hana opens it almost involuntarily and recognizes Daniels handwriting, and her eye just happens to fall on her own name. She cannot resist the temptation even though she's in a hurry, and she reads how Daniel could not relate his dreams to her. Then she turns over several pages at random and discovers an unfamiliar woman's name.
Hana sits down at the desk and reads Daniel's diary, all about her husband making love to some unknown female. Hana's heart thumps so hard that she feels she is about to suffocate. She tries to persuade herself that Daniel was writing some sort of story, that he had dreamt up a fictional account to use in some article or other, or in a sermon, but as she reads on there can be no doubt that this is Daniel's record of his own life: an incredible double life led behind her back, behind the backs of their children and everyone who trusted him. Hana closes the notebook and puts it back where she found it. She is at a loss as to what to do next. How is she to go to the hospital, how is she to speak to Daniel knowing something that she obviously wasn't supposed to know: that he lied, even to the children, that he had concealed a whole part of his life, possibly the most important part?
Somehow she couldn't grasp the extent of what had happened, as if what she had seen on paper hadn't yet become reality.
Could it really have happened? Could the man she trusted most of all have deceived her? How could he have done it while preaching to others how they should live? If it really had happened, what or whom would she ever dare believe again? Perhaps it was all just a terrible misunderstanding. She needed to talk to Daniel about it.
Tears run down Hana's face. She feels defiled, the way she did the time when that unknown man raped her not far from Písek.
It occurs to her that she should have heeded her conscience and gone off to Bosnia to help the wounded, perhaps a bullet would have found her and she wouldn't have had to live through this moment.
And she was such a fool that she had actually had qualms of conscience on the few occasions she had nostalgically recalled the lonely journalist who liked telling stories about China.
How is she now to behave towards a man who has deceived her, with whom she has children and who at this moment is balancing between life and death?
And suddenly it strikes her that Daniel's heart gave way precisely
because he was not equipped for a life of duplicity. After all, Daniel was almost childlike — neither disloyal, nor deceitful. He was defenceless, more than anything else, in a world in which everyone was out for himself. Anyone could pull the wool over his eyes with fine words. He had believed Petr and apparently he believed some unscrupulous tart who had muddled his head and then latched on to him the way such women know how, and Daniel was unable to shake her off; he wasn't able to abandon his home or abandon the other one and in his desperation he let himself be dragged along almost to his death.
A feeling of regret and sympathy for Daniel starts to grow in Hana and she might even be ready to forgive him. God forgives our sins, so we humans should be ready all the more to forgive others. But at the same time she can feel a growing anger towards the other woman who wanted to usurp Daniel for herself, ignoring the fact he had a wife and children, heedless of the fact that he was actually suffering, not caring that she was driving him to despair and hounding him to his death.
Hana feels a need to do something, to change something straight away, to find the other woman and tell her what she thinks of her, tell her she's a murderer, a mean, selfish and self-seeking murderess.
Only she doesn't know who the woman is or where to look for her. She had only managed to make out that her mother lives somewhere in the Small Quarter and that she herself lives in some sumptuous villa, apparently in Hanspaulka. Women like that tend to be spoilt, and think they have to possess everything they take a fancy to, from clothes and perfumes to a man they find attractive.
Daniel knows her name, of course, and knows where to find her, except that she can't ask Daniel anything, not now at least. It would agitate him so much, he might die. Although it might be a relief for him to rid himself of the burden of deception.
I have to think of a way, it strikes Hana, to indicate to him that the worst thing for him in his situation is to suffer mentally, to torment himself over the things he has done and the way he has lived.
Hana cannot stay any longer in this confined space with this black notebook, tempting her to open it once more and read it through properly, except that she is terrified to open it again and read the terrible testimony that Daniel has penned in the confusion of his heart.
If only she had someone she could confide in, but she knows that
she has no one like that in the world; the only person she was close to has let her down.
Hana wipes her eyes and goes to the bathroom where she rinses her face with cold water. Then she tells the joiner that she couldn't find the plans but will ask her husband about them at the hospital.
Then she hugs Magda and says, 'Oh, my poor little girl!' And before Magda has a chance to ask why she is supposed to be poor, she leaves the flat and rushes back to the hospital.
5
Daniel had been moved on to the general ward.
He was no longer tormented by physical pain, but only aware of the void into which he would sink again and again. On several occasions, mostly at night, he wept for pity.
Everyone here was kind to him and called him Reverend. 'Should you need anything, Reverend,' the fellow in the next bed offered almost as soon as they had brought him in, you have only to say. I can already walk about normally.' He had obviously been informed in advance.
Daniel needed nothing. He wanted to call Bára and tell her what had happened to him; explain why he hadn't kept their date and why it was unlikely he would ever keep a date again. But nobody could make that call for him. He actually had a telephone at his bedside and all he needed to do was lift the receiver, but the mere thought of doing so set his heart thumping so rapidly that he felt a pain in his chest.
After lunch, Marek and Magda visited him. Magda had cut some daffodils from the garden for him. While she was sticking them in a vase she asked how he was and whether he still had a pain. She made do with a single-word reply and without prompting announced that she had got three As, although, because of a fatal oversight, she got an E for maths. 'I'm going to be an actress, anyway,' she consoled herself and him.