Ivan Klima - No Saints or Angels

I sat with him longer than was wise. I allowed him to order me three glasses of wine, even though he himself only drank some of that sweet muck that ruins teeth and health.

I worked out that he was almost fifteen years younger than me.

What lunacy am I being tempted into? It reminds me of some lines of Yesenin's that I once found moving:

Not sorry, not calling, not crying,

All will pass like smoke of white apple trees

Seized with the gold of autumn,

I will no longer be young.

He was twenty-six when he wrote that.

What about me, then? What sort of delusions are these? That lad who looked at me so imploringly could easily go out with my Jana.

Something makes me start. I put the lid back on the box and

quietly go back to the bedroom where my daughter is still lying exacdy as I left her a moment ago, her bare bottom thrust in my direction. I switch on her table lamp and shine the light towards her. I lean over her and like a detective I search that smooth skin, unmarked by time. All I lack is a magnifying glass. And sure enough, I find it, a tiny red spot, maybe left by a syringe. They are past masters at concealing it. That's something they are good at learning and the more they have to conceal the more resourceful they become. Perhaps she was bitten by a midge. Midges sometimes come in the window. Maybe she scratched herself. Best not to think about it. Best not to look. I'll tackle her about it tomorrow.

I go back to bed.

Please God, say it's not true.

I try to think which of my former colleagues might advise me.

It's nonsense. It's that nun in the guise of a Czech teacher who put the idea in my head. My daughter's hardly going to do anything as stupid as that.

That's just the point: she is my daughter. Her forebears include a crazy grandmother and great-grandparents who committed suicide: more cases of suicide in the family than is healthy. On top of that a depressive mother that no man could put up with, even when she knelt before him and hugged his legs.

You're so beautiful, so beautiful, said that fifteen-years-younger ex-pupil of my ex-husband, and gazed at me as if about to declare his love.

I ought to go and see my ex-husband. Tell him that our daughter, the only thing we'll have in common as long as we're alive, smokes cannabis and possibly does worse things than that. Maybe it won't interest him any more. His daughter never did interest him very much. He didn't just leave me, he left her too.

Please God, let all this I'm going through be just a dream.

No, not everything, after all, something has to remain part of my life. But there's so little that I'd like to retain as part of my actual waking life.

4

I oversleep. The alarm clock doesn't even wake me. And then Jana is standing over me, repaying me my nocturnal visit. 'Mummy, aren't you going to the surgery today?'

I leap out of bed. I have a splitting headache. I've no idea when I fell asleep. 'I've made you breakfast, Mum.' And sure enough, there's a cup of coffee on the table and she has even buttered some bread. She plants a kiss on my cheek; she's sprayed herself again with my Chanel, which I save for only very special occasions, and she's eager to be gone.

I delay her. 'Jana, tell me: was it only the grass?'

'Mum, what's got into you again?'

'Answer me. Did you inject anything?'

'Mum, you must have been dreaming — either that or you're paranoid.'

'Yes or no?'

'Of course not! I'm not some stupid junkie, am I?' She swears that she's not lying. She looks the picture of health and full of energy, and I want to believe that she's perfectly all right and I'm just anxiety-prone.

I arrive at the surgery twenty minutes late.

Eva helps me into my white coat. I thank her and ask her to make me a strong coffee.

Eva and I have been together for eleven years already. We understand each other without the need for words. I don't have to tell her what to mix for me. If she's not sure, she asks. We're together every weekday and sometimes we even spend weekends together. When she married she became the owner of a little cabin on a rock above the Vltava just outside Prague. I don't own anything of the sort, and yet whenever I get out of town it's an enormous relief and my cares fall away.

So Jana and I sometimes take her up on her invitation and it strikes me that my daughter gets on better with Eva than with me.

Eva sometimes takes her to Mass at the village church. I don't join them. I only went to church or read the Bible to spite Dad. I didn't care whether the church was Protestant or Catholic. I even wandered into a synagogue once when I was in London; but none of it had any effect on my soul. But I think it does Jana good to make herself kneel before something from time to time.

Thanks to Eva, my patients include Father Kostka, who now sits in the chair waiting for me. At the time my father first donned militia uniform, Father Kostka was sent to Leopoldov Prison, so I feel guilty in front of him. But he doesn't know about it. He addresses me as 'young lady', and when he is unable to speak, he smiles at me with his eyes, at least. I ought to ask him what he would advise a non-Christian mother to do or say in order to help her sixteen-year-old offspring come to terms with life and find some meaning in it. I wonder what he'd say?

But at this moment Father Kostka has to clench his jaws and the waiting room is still full of people. I'll ask him next time.

'You're a bit down in the mouth today, Mrs Pilná,' he says as he gets up from the chair.

I don't tell him that I have little reason to be cheerful, but simply say that I slept badly. 'The nurse will fix you a new appointment.' I quickly finish my coffee.

But while she is leafing through the diary, Eva remarks, 'I couldn't make it on Sunday. What was your sermon about, Father?'

'You know me, nurse. I only have one theme.'

'Yes, I know. Love.'

'This time it was more about humility and reconciliation.'

'You really are a bit odd today,' Eva said when we were alone for a second.

'I'll tell you all about it when we get a moment.'

That moment doesn't arrive until lunch time.

'Don't get into a state over a bit of grass,' Eva said after listening to me. 'They almost all try it these days.'

I swallow my greasy goulash soup and would like to nod in agreement that nothing's wrong. She can talk. I bet her boys wouldn't do anything like that. 'And what about her truancy?'

'Did you like going to school?'

'I went, though.'

'Those were different times. Besides, your dad was a tartar.'

They were different times and my father behaved like a tartar. These are better times, or there's more freedom at least; my daughter's father isn't a tartar, he's just missing, he just went elsewhere.

Eva believes in something. There has to be something that transcends mankind, she says, or there'd be no sense to life. And that's how she brings up her boys. The trouble is I haven't managed to give my little girl any belief because I myself am not sure that life has any meaning.

As I'm coming out of the surgery at the end of the afternoon that young man, who is fifteen years my junior and thinks I'm beautiful, is standing there waiting for me. He is holding a bunch of flowers. He can't seriously be intending to offer me five white roses. Who has he mistaken me for?

5

When I was a little boy I had a terrific urge to go to Africa and take part in a snake hunt. I'd read about a snake hunter in South Africa who was bitten by a black mamba. He'd been bitten by lots of snakes before then, but never by a mamba, whose bite is supposed to kill you within five minutes. But that hunter was carrying a syringe with serum. He injected himself and managed to drive to hospital, where he still had the strength to ask them to put him on an artificial lung. Then he became paralysed. He was aware of everything and could hear everything, but was unable to show it. For six days he listened to the doctors talking