We chatted for a while like close friends who don't see each other often enough. I told her about Eva's drug-taking. She reassured me that it was commonplace nowadays and didn't mean anything. When she was eighteen she must have tried everything they forbade her, and in fact there was very little they did forbid her. She had felt such a need to set herself apart from the world she was forced to live in that in the end she had slashed her wrists.
The telephone on her bedside table rang several times and she talked to people I didn't know.
At one moment she asked me to pass her a large black folder from the desk. It contained her latest set designs and several interiors. It was her first chance to display her work to me. She showed me her design for the interior of a country manse — a Catholic one, naturally. She explained that she had tried to make use of the old furniture that remained in the house, simply adding a number of small armchairs that could be built according to photographs of Schinkel's armchairs from the beginning of the last century. I hadn't a clue who Schinkel was, but I didn't ask. I don't understand furniture, and the furniture we have at home simply assembled over the years as we acquired it. Some things we bought, some we inherited, some were given to us. I was always of the view that the objects didn't matter. They serve a purpose and they should not attract attention either by being in bad taste or enticingly unusual. But I realized she was waiting to hear what I'd say about her work, so I said I liked it, and also that I liked her desk and her idea for the lamp.
Then the phone rang once more and she suddenly changed and became wary. 'Is that you, my love? It's nice of you to call.' And she glanced at me in mute appeal.
I realized it was her husband calling and I crept out of the room. I drifted around the spacious house until I ended up in the kitchen. I located a saucepan and found ketchup and milk in the fridge. Salt, sugar, rice and flour were in containers on the shelves. It was gone noon and it occurred to me that I might make some soup while she was on the phone.
'Why are you so kind to me?' she asked when I brought the bowls. 'You are putting me to shame, for heavens sake. We could have easily had a sandwich. ' Then she said that her husband had called to say he'd finished his work and would be returning that same afternoon.
I was about to get up and leave.
'But it'll take Musil at least two hours to get here. ' Then she asked reproachfully, 'You would actually leave without making love to me?'
I had a dream. Two men were leading me down a long passage. At the end of the passage was a hole, so narrow that a cat could scarcely have squeezed through it. Nevertheless the men stopped in front of the hole: this way!
I stood nonplussed in front of the opening, until one of the men made it bigger with his heel while the other pushed me forward. I was falling through the opening. I don't know how long I was falling but at last I found myself in a dismal office where no one was sitting; there was just an enormous mastiff lying in front of the door.
'Take a seat, ' I was instructed by a voice from some unknown source. 'You realize why you're here?'
I sat down in the seat opposite the desk and said I didn't know. The mastiff raised its head and snarled.
'A lying pastor. '
'I don't know why I'm here, ' I repeated.
'What about the scandal then?'
'I don't know what you're talking about. '
'You preach scandal. And in addition you went into the pulpit naked. '
'That's not true. '
'But you had yourself photographed doing it. '
I banged my fist on the desk. 'That's not true. '
'And what about the little girls in Sunday school? What do you teach them?'
'I teach them the word of God. '
No, you tell dirty stories. I have a pile of complaints here. In children's handwriting. '
All of a sudden a pile of envelopes appeared on the desk in front of me. 'Read that one there, for instance. '
I found in my hand a piece of paper that was indeed covered in children's handwriting but I couldn't decipher a single letter. But I knew that there could be nothing against me in the letters so long as they were genuine. Except that these were definitely not genuine.
'So what do you say to that? Great, isn't it? What do you think your missus will say when it's published?'
'What missus?'
'You've got more than one?'
I became uneasy. There was something out of order here, something bad had happened. After all, my wife was ill and dying. 'You can't do that,' I shouted.
'That depends on you. '
'What do you want of me?'
'You know full well! Take a leaf out of your father's book. He understood the right way to behave. '
All of a sudden the room was full of big fellows in grey clothes, each one identical, the same unfamiliar faces, but they seemed to be smiling in a friendly way and actually offering me a glass of wine. 'We'll reach a deal, though,' said the one offering me the wine.
'You scratch our backs, and we'll scratch yours,' said a fat, grey-haired man as he entered the room. He seemed to be their leader — I recognized him in fact. It was Berger, my old Secretary for Church Affairs.
But there aren't any Secretaries for Church Affairs any more, I remembered to my relief. We're free again, it's just that these chaps don't know it and are threatening me and trying to bribe me with a glass of wine.
I took the glass and smashed it on the ground. The wine spread all over the floor, blood red. And at that moment I realized that Jitka, my good, gentle wife, had died long ago, and I had been left alone, and it made me sad.
3
Daniel generally took a holiday in the second half of August. Sometimes he would stay in Prague but usually he would set off with Hana and the children for a manse in the country run by one of his friends or a former fellow student.
This year, for the first time, they could afford a holiday that would depart from the normal routine.
When he suggested to Hana that they might go abroad it occurred to him that it wasn't so much foreign travel that appealed to him as the possibility of escaping somewhere a long way away. Escaping from the other woman? No, from himself, more likely. Except that there is no escaping oneself.
Hana agreed that he should take a rest. It was necessary to renew one's strength or one day it would run out. But why go on a foreign holiday and leave the children here? What if something happened to them?
The children would be at Grandma's and we don't need to travel far. Just to the Alps, say.
The Alps held no appeal for Hana. The Šumava Mountains seemed more feasible to her, besides which she could make herself understood there.