He strove to dispel the picture of her face, but instead her voice imposed itself on him: Don't forsake me!
How was it possible not to forsake a person one wasn't with and oughtn't to be with? Or was it the despairing cry of someone who feels forsaken? Forsaken by whom?
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Suddenly the telephone rang on his bedside table. He snatched up the receiver and in spite of the absurdity expected to hear the voice of the woman he had been thinking about.
'Reception here,' said the voice on the telephone. 'I'm sorry to disturb you, but I noticed the stamp of a Protestant church in your identity card and thought you might be a pastor.'
'I am, yes.'
'I thought I'd just ask you: one of our guests, an old gentleman, has had a bad turn. We've already called the doctor but the gentleman also asked for a priest.'
'But I don't give extreme unction.'
'If it wasn't too much trouble to you, I don't understand these things, but seeing that he did ask
'Yes, of course,' he said, and started to get dressed.
4 Matous
Matouš is seized by the demon of activity. He scarcely sleeps and he wrote sixteen articles during the month of September. In fact, though, it was not he who wrote them, but some essentially alien and rather unpleasant being that occasionally worms its way into his mind and, before he can expel it, commits all sorts of indiscretions. He knows by now that when it whispers something into his pen he mustn't sign it with his own name, and so for at least a year now he has been delivering these inventions under the name of Lukáš Slabý.
Matouš brings a feature about schoolchildren smoking pot to one of the tabloids, and pretends he wrote the article himself. He tells the editor that in these times the only successful stories are about drugs, prostitution, contract killings, and billion-crown scams, or so it seems to him. But he has an advantage over the others who write about the same things: he can enrich his stories with his experiences of the hashish dens in Hong Kong or Singapore, although — to be honest — he felt safer there than here. His colleague nods, Matous's articles read well. Then he goes off with Matouš to a cheap wine bar for a drink. After the fourth glass he mentions that Matous's ex-wife Klára spends her time sitting around with foreigners at the Hotel Evropa. Sitting around and lying around, most likely.
Matouš, who makes a practice of referring to Klára as his ex-wife although he is not yet divorced, gives no indication, even now, that this news affects him in any way and simply says, 'She always was a tart.' And he concurs with his colleague that women are tarts by nature, although some lack the courage to be so brazenly open about it.
However, when he gets home he feels to his surprise something akin to grief, disappointment or bitterness. That woman still continues to use his name and can even keep it should she cease to be his wife. When he first met her she had seemed to him innocently girlish and he loved her, trusted her and brought her into his home, from which she soon drove out all peace and tranquillity.
He sits down in the armchair placed in front of the television set. As the news is about to start, he switches on and watches the reports with the professional eye of Lukáš Slabý to whom he owes his living. On the screen, they are just carrying away the corpse of a woman
covered in blood, another woman tears her hair — a Bosnian or a Serb. It doesn't register with him anyway. Countless unknown corpses affect one less than one single betrayal close to home.
Matous watches the flickering colours impassively and he is suddenly seized by torpor. He stares for a moment at the stuffed canary sitting motionless on its perch in the cage. He recalls a park not far from Peking University where the old men would bring their caged birds to give them an airing. Birds flying out of their cages. The scent of jasmine. Bright-coloured kites. Nostalgia. He won't find the energy or resolve to make any more journeys, he is gradually losing the will to live.
Then he makes up a not particularly successful haiku in his head about his not particularly convincing notion about his own death:
Just dream a sweet dream Be awoken by no one Turn into a shade.
He won't even write it down, but with his last ounce of strength he forces himself to get up from the armchair, puts on a white shirt and the silk tie, he brought all the way back from Shanghai years ago, and sets out for the Hotel Evropa.
Klára is indeed sitting there. It is still early, so she is sitting on her own, slowly sipping from a glass containing wine or something purporting to be wine. Her long red nails glitter, her blouse pretends to be embroidered with gold, while from her ears dangle rings that are genuinely gold, like the rings he had given her.
He approaches her and asks if the other chair is free.
Only now does she notice him and gives him a startled look. Then she says, 'Yeah, for the time being. What are you doing here, for heaven's sake?'
'I'm the one who should be asking you that!' Matouš comments.
'You've no right to ask me anything!'
'You're still my wife.'
'That doesn't mean I can't sit where I like. I'm a free person, aren't I?'
'I hope you make a decent living, at least.'
'Don't be disgusting, Volek!'
'You've not shown up in a long while,' he says. 'You've still got
some things at my place and it's about time we went to court at last, so you can feel truly free.'
They argue for a while about their mutual relationship, each blaming the other for breach of faith. Klára maintains that the only reason she is sitting here is because he drove her to it, because of his lack of interest in her, his insensitivity and his meanness. 'Don't you understand you are impossible to live with?' she asks.
He asks her why, and she, whose brain was never disturbed by the slightest interesting or original thought, she, who was capable of listening to inane pop music from morning to night or gawping at even more inane television shows, she who has never once in her whole life read one decent book (and probably not even an indecent one either), says to Matouš, who has always prided himself on the breadth of his knowledge and his ability to entertain people: 'Because you're insuf-lerably boring!'
'Does that mean you have no intention of ever coming back?' he asks pointlessly.
'I couldn't give a toss about you.'
'Or my money?'
'With the money I get from you, I could hardly afford widow's weeds.'
Then a group of foreigners arrives in the dining room and Klára tells Matouš he had better clear off.
Matouš instantly suppresses a fit of helpless rage. Most of all he would like to hit her but it goes against the grain to hit a woman. Besides, here in the restaurant it would probably cause a scandal. So he gets up and whispers, 'Have a good time then, you dirty slut!' And he knocks over her wine glass with his elbow. Klára leaps up out of her chair just in time to stop the wine running into her lap and kicks Matouš in the shin with the imprecation, 'Fuck off, you impotent old bastard!' Matouš does not stop to hear the remaining curses. He limps away across the square as evening falls. He feels dreadful, and is aware of a great number of bizarre-looking individuals and dark faces that look even darker in the night. Whores, pimps, drug dealers and addicts stand around. One of the youngsters loitering in front of the arcade looks familiar, he has the impression that he noticed him at that church he visited not long ago to hear the husband of the motherly looking matron from the hospital. But he was probably mistaken, these people don't look much like churchgoers — unless they were