Magda is already home, Marek has a practical class in the afternoon. Suddenly Magda's voice comes down the line: 'Mummy, I've got some great news for you. I got an A for my essay on Hus.'
'That's good.'
'I knew what he said about truth. Seek the truth, listen to the truth, learn the truth, cleave to the truth, defend the truth and that.'
'I'm pleased to hear it.'
'But there's something you won't be pleased to hear.'
'What did you do?'
'I wrote "I done". I knew the right answer, but I just goofed because I was nervous.'
'OK, Magda. But I have to hang up now. The doctor's waiting for me.'
'Bye then, Mum. And come home soon.'
Hana goes about her work with a vague sense of disappointment and dejection that no longer has anything to do with what the director told them that morning. Something unpleasant has happened that she can't exactly put her finger on, or she is reluctant to contemplate. It clearly has something to do with her home and with Daniel. When did it last happen that Daniel gave anything precedence over a concert? Besides which, they were supposed to be playing Bach. And why hadn't he phoned her — why had he only left her a message? After all, he knows she is at the hospital all day.
It strikes her that there is something wrong with almost everyone these days — people are changing. She notices it all around her, at the hospital and in the congregation. Maybe Daniel is changing too. Now he has more work, more money and more freedom. After years of crouching in the shadows, he has come out into the light and it has blinded him.
Perhaps she's doing him an injustice. Maybe he simply had to rush off somewhere and couldn't get through to her on the phone. The hospital line is often engaged. Or maybe there was no one at the nurses' station.
Hana checks the medicines that a young lad on civilian military service has brought up from the pharmacy, but she ponders on the fact that Daniel has changed: he is less affable and definitely does not behave like someone who longs for her company. Sometimes she even gets the impression he's avoiding her and evading conversation about anything but the most mundane matters.
It occurs to Hana that every love tires in time. Perhaps their love has grown tired too, and the two of them remain together only for the children, and because it is right that people should stay together when they have promised to.
The medicines are in order. The young lad on civilian military service asks her if she has any jobs for him and she tells him she has nothing for the moment and that he may take a rest.
That evening Hana sits with Eva at the concert. They are playing Bach's violin concertos. On their way there Eva seemed to her pale and out of sorts and said virtually nothing. And now she is sitting here all slumped and Hana wonders if she has been taking drugs again, although it is possible she is just not feeling well.
Then she stops thinking about Eva and pays attention to the music. Hana doesn't have perfect pitch like Daniel or her step-daughter but when she listens to powerful music she falls into a strange trance in which pictures and live scenes pass in front of her eyes. She closes her eyes, so that Daniel often thinks she has gone to sleep, while on the contrary she is experiencing something so powerful that she is suffused with an ecstasy that she has never experienced even during love-making.
The dejection of the morning quickly leaves her and she screws up her eyes. While she is still aware of the violinists face, it is gradually transformed into the pimply face of the journalist who invited her to his home and served her tea and talked to her about a river that melts. He had said: You're an angel. You're completely different from other women. You're better. Those words now blend with the music and together they caress and fondle her until she quivers beneath their touch. Ther, she notices that the journalist's face is growing handsome; he is now wearing a Geneva gown with a white band, and the other members of the orchestra have donned gowns too and are no longer playing on the concert platform but on a beach by a pond. A big pond with lots of water — it may be the sea. Hana suddenly realizes that the conductor is now looking straight at her and giving her a sort of sign with his baton, inviting her to join him. At that moment she becomes aware of her heart thumping, like in the old days, like the time when Daniel first invited her for a date and she realized that she could love him. Something she thought would never happen to her again could actually happen. Maybe if she accepted that invitation… But at that moment something starts to surface from the water: a long, dark object — it's a coffin — and it rises higher and higher. Alongside it, four pale girlish faces also emerge, they are bridesmaids in dazzling white dresses from which the water gushes in streams; they are bearing the coffin. They pass in front of the orchestra and come to a
halt in the open space just in front of Hana. They carefully put the box down on the sand.
The music is still playing. The violinist, whose face is no longer visible, steps over to the coffin and leans towards it, as if playing solely for the one who is inside. And the one inside can hear because the lid slowly rises and Hana beholds a female figure. Oh, how well she knows that face from the photographs as well as from Daniel's carvings, even though he imagines she has never noticed: it is his first wife. The face is as white as the bridesmaids' dresses, the wax-like ghastly face of the dead. But she is alive and approaching Hana with her hands stretched in front of her. Get back, you accursed creature, Hana whispers, you're the one who still steals his love from me, you always stole his love from me, and yet there's nothing for you here among the living. The white, accursed thing starts to stagger and then collapses lifelessly on the ground. At that moment Hana becomes aware of a painful sympathy for the poor creature; after all Jitka has a daughter here, whom she hasn't seen for eighteen years. It must be awful for a mother not to see her own daughter for eighteen years and not to be able to hold her even once. People are sorry for the orphan but don't spare a thought for the mother. Tears of pity gush from Hana's eyes over that wasted, unfulfilled maternal love.
The orchestra are coming to the end of the finale. The violinist has his own face back again and he and the conductor are bowing and shaking hands.
Hana glances at Eva; the girl is as white as that apparition a moment ago.
'Is there something wrong with you? They didn't play badly, surely?'
'It's nothing, Mummy.'
'Would you like to go home?'
'No, Mummy. It's just… I just need to pop out for a moment.'
After the concert Daniel is waiting for them on the steps. He wants to know how the concert was. Eva says it was lovely. It occurs to Hana that she ought to tell him about her vision, but suddenly it strikes her that it had been not just unreal, but also ungracious: it had been nasty to Daniel, in that she had thought tenderly about another man; nasty towards Jitka who is long dead and it is therefore unbecoming to be jealous of her. It shows Daniel in a good light that he didn't completely forget Jitka, that he tried to capture in his carvings the memory of that face which, after all, will never come alive again on this earth. In the
afterlife only God knows what face we will be endowed with, if any at all.
They walk side by side across the bridge, ahead of them the illuminated castle buildings, below them the water whose odour is indiscernible, smothered by the smell of the city. Hana notices that Daniel stoops slighdy as he walks, as if sagging beneath some load. She also notices that his shirt collar is badly turned down and the striped shirt he is wearing doesn't go with his checked jacket.