No Saints or Angels, page 10
‘What about your poison-penfriend?’ Lucie recalls.
‘Mr Anonymous is about the only one who is at all faithful to me.’
Lucie wants to know if I suspect anyone in particular. I ought to be careful, she warns me, and report the letters to the police. And I should definitely carry Mace.
I don’t intend to report it to the police. They’d just waste my time with typing up some statement. There’s no chance they’ll go looking for an unknown person who hasn’t even attacked me yet. And I don’t think I’d be likely to spray poison in someone’s eyes.
I ask her whether she was on her own all the time. This is the question my friend has been waiting for. She pulls out a few photos showing her in a luxury convertible with some swarthy fellow with black curly hair, a Latin mostly likely. He’s holding her round the waist, flashing his pearl-white teeth and displaying his biceps. He must be at least two divine blinks younger than her. But I’m sure that that didn’t bother her. She has lots of other photos in the box. These don’t feature the dark Romeo; instead they show skeletons with dark skin stretched over them, children with large eyes and swollen bellies who reach out for a hand holding a bowl with some kind of soup.
‘Those are from Rwanda. They must have got mixed up with these,’ she explains. She takes back the photos and stuffs them back in her bag. ‘And how about you?’ she asks.
In my mind’s eye I immediately see a small book-filled room, a young man who brings me roses running naked and barefoot for an ashtray after making tender love to me. I could mention him. I’d enjoy talking about him; but Lucie would certainly want to hear all the juicy details, of course. That was what we always used to talk about, and we’d make fun of the fellows who play the he-man and when it comes to displaying their virility they wilt, and all that’s left of their pride is a little worm. But I don’t feel like going into details; I’m ashamed that I succumbed and that my feelings are still getting the better of me.
I say nothing and she says, ‘You wait, when that Indian-summer romance hits you.’ And she goes on to tell me about the young dark fellow’s sensuality. I listen to her and think of my own young man, who doesn’t have biceps or curly black hair, but who loves me perhaps more than for just a short stay. He promised he’d be waiting for me tomorrow. Where will we go? I can hardly invite him home. Most likely we’ll find a wine bar somewhere. And then what? We could go somewhere to a park – Petřín or Šarka, if it’s fine. Twenty years ago I thought nothing of making love in the parks and woods around Prague. In those days I didn’t stop to think whether it would be fine or not, but made love in the rain and even the snow. Interestingly enough, the snow didn’t feel cold; my back was scorching, in fact. These days I’d be worried about my ovaries and kidneys. And I no longer feel like making love somewhere on grass covered in dog shit or having the feeling that someone’s getting turned on by peeping at us from the bushes. We could go to my surgery, of course, and make love in the dentist’s chair or on the bench in the waiting room.
The wine we are drinking is nice and heavy. It goes to my head and drives out all my worries.
I notice a man gesturing at me from the far corner of the restaurant. A familiar face that I’m unable to place – he’s almost entirely bald, with just a bit of greying stubble at the sides. It could be one of my patients. Then the fellow stands up and walks tipsily over to our table. ‘Hello, Kristýna! You haven’t changed in the least.’
I can’t address him by name or tell him he hasn’t changed either, as I don’t recognize him. I simply say hello.
‘I won’t disturb you,’ he promises. ‘I simply wanted to say hello to my great love of long ago.’
‘It’s impolite to tell a lady that something was long ago,’ Lucie chides him.
‘No, it really was long ago,’ I say, remembering now the man who first forced me to have an abortion. He’s lost his black pigtail, as well as the rest of his hair, but on the other hand he’s made a career for himself. I occasionally read something about him. He’s a drugs specialist dealing with young people. But since the time he drove me to take an innocent life I’ve lost all interest in him.
He tells me once more that I’m still beautiful, even more beautiful than then, in fact. He moves a chair over to our table and, as was his wont, starts to undress me with his eyes, while announcing that he works at the ministry and lectures on the new anti-drugs legislation. He is against making drug possession a criminal offence; he’s a liberal and wants to influence the young through education. As he blabbers on, my ‘educationalist’ strips me bare with his eyes.
‘Do you have any children?’ I interrupt him.
He nods. ‘Why do you ask?’
The prat. He asks me why I ask. Some other girl didn’t let him force her to go before the board, so he became a father.
‘I’ve got two boys,’ he declares, almost proudly. ‘How about you?’
‘I’ve a daughter,’ I tell him. ‘I could have had two, but the criminal who fathered the first didn’t want me to have her.’
Offended, he gets up, says he had no intention of disturbing us and staggers off. But my mood is ruined anyway.
‘Men, they’re all disgusting,’ Lucie says in a show of solidarity. ‘Spiders and men. Except that spiders are harmless.’
It is almost midnight when I emerge from the metro. I’m dreadful, abandoning my little girl again. I almost break into a run.
At the corner of our street a man emerges from the dim entrance to a block of flats and stands in my path, thrusting an arm towards me as if to throttle me. I freeze. ‘Give us ten crowns, missus. I’ve got nowhere to sleep.’ He is staggering so much he has to hold on to the wall. He’s either drunk or high, but surprisingly I feel a sense of relief. This isn’t my anonymous letter-writer wanting to kill me, but just some homeless bloke. I take out my purse and tip all my loose change into his palm.
He closes his palm and staggers off without a word of thanks.
When I reach the door of our block and try to unlock it, my hands are shaking and I’m unable to get the key into the lock. I fancy I can hear footsteps behind me and even someone breathing wheezily, but when I turn round there is no one there.
The flat is already dark and silent. I lock the door behind me and put on the safety chain, something I never do otherwise.
I open the door of Jana’s room and hear noisy breathing. There’s an odd smell: a mixture of joss sticks, eau de cologne and insect repellent. I don’t know since when my daughter has been a fan of joss sticks, but that sweet, penetrating scent is more likely intended to cover some other smell. I’m familiar with that trick. I used to use it when I smoked a cigarette at home and didn’t have time to ventilate the room and get rid of the smell before Dad got home. I feel like giving my daughter a good shake and asking her what she was up to here and what she was trying to conceal. But she’d only deny everything. There is a sheet of paper with writing on it lying on the table. I read the first sentence: ‘A triangle is the plane figure formed by connecting three points not in a straight line by straight line segments.’ It’s not a message for me. Or maybe it is: see what a lousy mother you are; I sat here working diligently while you were living it up in a pub.
That’s something Dad forgot in that dream of mine. A rotten daughter, a lousy wife and a useless mother.
2
I fell asleep quickly, but my ex-husband wormed his way into my dream again. We were travelling together to some mountains where our accommodation was a wooden chalet. We were still young and had Jana with us, but we left her in the chalet and set off up a narrow track cut out of the rocks. At a certain moment we had to hold on to big loops of rope that hung above our heads in order to cross a ravine. I was afraid as I passed from one loop to another because the ropes were rotten. And then one of the loops broke and I was suspended above the chasm, only holding on by my right hand. I called to my husband for help. I called to him by name, but he had disappeared; he was no longer with me and I watched in horror as the screws that held the end of the rope gradually worked themselves loose from the rock. I kept on screaming, while thinking about Jana and wondering what would happen to her, who would take care of her when I plunged into the abyss.
It’s four in the morning and it’s still dark outside. My nightdress is soaked in sweat and my throat is dry.
I get up and go barefoot into the kitchen. The fridge is humming as I enter; it also judders; I ought to put a wedge under one side. There are lots of things I ought to do – things to repair and see to, but at this moment I just take out a bottle of wine and mix myself a spritzer.
When, at last, will my husband stop deserting me and disappearing just as I’m suspended above a chasm?
I go back to bed and try to think of something positive. Once when I was depressed I asked my husband what was the point of human life.
He looked at me in amazement, as if my question was evidence of my inferiority, but then he consented to reply. Fundamentally speaking we don’t actually have any life, because the duration of our lives is so brief in comparison with cosmic time that in fact it is unrecordable. And what can’t be recorded virtually does not exist.
An interesting answer to my question. We live as if we actually didn’t exist. If God did create this Universe, he knows nothing about us, only we think we know about him. We are too small to be measured and so we can do harm. We can also kill – which we do a lot, or at least men all over the world do.
But people want to leave something behind them. When my dad was young I’m sure he believed he was helping to plant a new Garden of Eden, though he forgot that the soil that life grows from is love. But his head gardener preached hatred and so instead of creating a garden Dad helped pave an execution yard. He never admitted it, but towards the end he must have had an inkling of how woefully wrong he had been. And he didn’t build a house or even plant a tree that would yield something; he didn’t have the time and it wasn’t in his nature. But from time to time he would bring home some useless objects; I don’t know where he came by them, most likely during confiscations he took part in. He brought home a box of angling flies even though he never went fishing. He brought books in languages he didn’t understand and gave Mum a box stuffed with reels of grey thread. The thread was still there when he died. There is so much of it that if we tied all the lengths end to end I expect they’d stretch round the Equator.
What will I leave behind? Plenty of bridges, fillings and dentures, of course. And in fact, ever since I’ve been able to order any materials I please, they’ve been top-quality bridges, fillings and dentures. Also a daughter that I’ve not been very good at bringing up. But what can possibly remain after the tenth or even the hundredth blink of God’s eye, when all the words are forgotten and there’s no one left to remember what I looked like? Who then will look at the crumbling photos, if any remain somewhere?
Maybe deeds of love leave some trace behind – or at least their repercussions do. Maybe someone, some higher justice, is counting by how many drops one manages to lower the level of pain in the world. That’s one thing I’ve managed – in people’s mouths, at least. Pain in the soul I can’t do anything about, not even my own.
The darkness outside is disappearing. I glance out of the window. The streets are still empty; the metal bodies of the cars are damp. A lonely drunk staggers along the opposite pavement; it could be the one I gave that handful of change to.
I take out the box with Dad’s notebooks and leaf through them. I’m looking to see if he didn’t leave me some message after all.
But most of the entries are boringly inane: just a mass of words, clichés and references to everyday activities – what he ate, saw to or said in speeches. He bought himself new boots. He went to a football match. He had the wireless repaired. He was at the dentist’s! He chaired a meeting at the Red Glow co-operative. There were only occasional references to people. Just as well, maybe.
But he did meet with his friend, Comrade P., with whom he spent two years in a concentration camp, and they reminisced together. The last days were the worst. There was no more food. They didn’t even issue any bread. But the executions still went on and the SS went on organizing transports. We remembered how during those days we would look up at the sky, which by then was controlled by the Allies, but what good was it to us seeing that the Germans still ruled on the ground. And the hunger was awful. We’d already eaten the last of the bread and apart from water there was nothing to swallow. We no longer had the strength to get up out of our bunks and all we could think about was food and whether the Soviets would reach us before we were wiped out. We could also hear the thud of artillery shells coming nearer. They were already quite close.
I imagine that young man: my dad, in blue-and-white-striped camp clothes lying in some hideous barrack-room, emaciated and hungry, waiting. He knows that the next moments will decide whether he’ll live or die. Like a patient on an operating table. Before he falls asleep a patient has the hope that he has entrusted himself to people who want to save him. Dad was lying on a plank bed and his only source of hope was the thud of shells that would scare me to death.
Then the Soviets arrived, the windscreens of their trucks bearing photographs of Stalin, the Great Leader, and hammers and sickles. They came to the rescue, gave bread, smoked fish, a soup called shchi and vodka. They brought salvation and a vision, and it was as if that determined how things were to be for years to come. For him, for me, for my country and for the whole world.
I informed Comrade P. that Ilse Koch, that SS monster, has died. The fiend of Buchenwald, who collected gloves and book covers made from the skin of our comrades who were tortured to death, and who even had lampshades made of it, had hanged herself with her bedclothes a few days ago in her prison cell. A small satisfaction, at least, for all those she tortured. You see, a moment ago I was doing men an injustice: women commit murder too.
I recall Dad telling me about that pervert. In his eyes she was an SS monster. But the monster was only able to behave the way she did because a monstrous system had divided people into humans and subhumans. Subhumans could be jailed, tortured and poisoned – without trial and without mercy. How many monsters did similar things here in later years with Dad’s approval or at least his tacit consent. How many people were tortured to death? They didn’t make lampshades out of human skin, but lampshades weren’t the essential issue.
What went through Ilse’s mind when she was making a noose out of her bedclothes? Had she understood something about herself or did she simply have a sense of emptiness and of the hopelessness of her fate?
We all have a sense of hopelessness from time to time but we are not strong-minded enough.
I get up and look in on Jana. She’s asleep, of course. I return to my own bedroom and Dad’s notebooks. It crosses my mind to see whether he noted how I had broken what he considered a valuable vase. How old was I then? I wasn’t going to school yet, so I could have been five, or at most six years old.
It was a big vase and I found it beautiful. It was indigo blue and there was the figure of a nymph etched into the side of it. I never saw a single flower in the vase. It stood on the dresser and the nymph smiled at me from above and lured me to her. I stood a chair up against the dresser and looked at the room through the glass of the vase and saw how it turned dark like the evening sky.
Once, when I was alone at home, I got the idea of putting some water in the vase and seeing whether the water would be blue too.
I took down that beautiful glass object and held it firmly in my arms, the way Mummy held me when I cried or when a strange dog pestered me in the street. It was odd how the glass didn’t feel cold, but instead gave out a warmth – a blue warmth, most likely.
I reached the kitchen and turned on the hot tap. The vase slowly filled and the water in it really was blue and gave off steam. Then there was an odd sound that I’d never heard before: the sound of glass cracking. The vase broke in two in my arms. I can still recall the terror I felt as I tried – in vain, of course – to put the vase back together again.
First Dad interrogated me. Why had I taken the vase down? What was I intending to do with it? Why had I put hot water in it? Was I aware of the damage I’d done?
Then he gave me a good hiding. I screamed and promised to buy him a new vase when I was big; I’d buy him two beautiful vases.
When I started to earn money of my own I actually did do the rounds of a few antique shops until I eventually found a vase of a similar colour, at least, to the one I’d broken long before. But it had the image of a flying bird etched into its side, instead of a nymph.
I gave Dad the vase as a Christmas present. I got a ticking off. ‘You’re crazy. What am I supposed to do with a vase? Have you ever seen me buying flowers?’ He’d long ago forgotten about the broken vase. It hadn’t interested him and he hadn’t regretted it; he had just thought it right to let me know what a dreadful thing I’d done.
I leaf through the notebooks from the end of the fifties and am unable to find any reference to the vase. Either there isn’t one, or I missed it. On the other hand I notice that some female Comrade V.V. crops up repeatedly in his notes. It’s probably the same person who is later referred to as W. Saw V. Talked to V. about flowers for International Women’s Day … We went to see Ballad of a Soldier. W. cried … Repaired W.’s sewing machine. No more details. He was careful. He was well aware that what he wrote down could be used against him. Even so, I feel as if I’m prying as I read it. I ought to put the notebooks back in the box. Dad’s dead; why do I need to know about his secrets and his sins?
Eventually I drop off to sleep for a while.
3
Outside, it’s a fine May morning; it looks as if everything has burst into bloom. I rejoice in the scents that waft into my room from the nearby gardens. But I expect hayfever sufferers are desperate; my daughter also was complaining of sore eyes when she woke up this morning.
